Created Peeps
So what am I talking about... "created peeps". Well I'm talking about some of my characters. Angela in particular. Over the years the biggest question I get is what the heck is astral travel and why is it important to this character.
Here is a little bit about the character from this novel...
Angela Mystique
Angela was born with a very special natural ability to slip into her "astral" self. What the heck is the astral self? Well, if you haven't googled the word already, "astral travel" is very similar to an out of body experience. Out of body experience usually happens when someone is so incredibly relaxed that an exact duplicate of their own selves, we'll call it a spiritual self, lifts up out of the physical body which is carbon based. In other words, your consciousness leaves your body. Now, my character is obviously ficticious and I have taken liberties for the sake of my story with what most think about it. However, if you are curious to learn more about the different ideas surrounding astral projection, here are a couple of links to check out.
More information on crystal links.
I'll let you create your own opinion on what is reality and what isn't. ;) I just enjoy writing the stories.
Scroll down for a sneak peek into The Astral Avenger!
Angela was born with the ability to do this, at will. When she decides. Now here is where I ask you, "who would you kill, if you KNEW you could get away with it." The in herent problem with that is why would you kill even if you knew you could get away with it.
The answer to this question, espescially for Angela, is if you felt a strong need for justice. The law is limited by what it can do, and many times, innocent people who have obviously had terrible things happen to them aside from their death, slip threw the cracks. No one ever knows these innocent people let alone what happened to them. Sometimes bodies are lost forever, sometimes people disappear.
Angela feels a serious need to help those people, these innocents that have no one and now, no life to live. Plus, she has another gift. She can actually psychically read, and feel what the dead feel. Because of this gift, innocents that have been murdered and lost can easily find her amongst the throngs of people and plead their case for her help. Hence the answer to the question. Angela would kill bad guys because they are really terrible people.
She does this by utilizing her natural gift of slipping into her astral or spirit self, which can not be seen, most of the time, and traveling to where that bad guy is. How does she know where the bad guys are? By using her gift to read the dead which happens to be a form of empathy. She can feel the innocensts murder and follow the energies that were left behind in their wake.
Angela is a warrior for justice who uses her gifts to avenge the innocent.
The Astral Avenger
An everyday woman with extraordinary powers astrally travels and speaks with the dead in The Astral Avenger.
Angela Mystique, paranormal assassin extraordinaire, delivers justice for innocents the world has forgotten. With an unnatural ability for astral travel, and the uncanny ability to psychically read and interact with the dead, Angela’s clients find her after their deaths and ask her to kill the people who led to their demise.
Now Angela's best friend has been murdered, and it’s up to her to find them and deliver vengeance for the one person she loved most in the world.
The Astral Avenger
THE ASTRAL AVENGER
Hello, my name is Angela Mystique, and I’ll be your killer for the evening’s festivities. No really, for those of you who don’t already know, those who must trust the words of an admitted killer; you’ll be listening to the musings of a half human, half soulless creature. (I’d have to be right?) I hunt evil and kill it. I have an unnatural talent for astral travel. Unnatural because when I let my consciousness drift out of my carbon body, I am drawn to evil like flies to fruit. Like lodestone to iron. If you listen closely, I’ll tell you how it’s done.
I also have another talent. I don’t have to look for work. Work comes to me. Often, as of late, it has been after their death, and the need for revenge and justice has built to a degree that the being, human usually, can’t pass over. So they come to me. They have ever since I was little.
Growing up a red headed, green eyed, little trumpet of life, I wasn‘t a killer. This was the time I developed the ability to listen to these poor victims, who’d been molested, sodomized, and after those and other horrors, murdered. I felt for them immediately, quite literally. They would come to me at night, at school, even in church, pleading for my help, as I stood there wracked with the pain of their last few moments. They would make their case, and I would act as a living polygraph test for if they weren’t telling me the truth, I wouldn’t feel any pain.
Self perseveration prevented me from saying anything to anyone, save one person, but that would be later on. It didn’t stop the questions, though, when I was listening to a victim and suffering. To say I was a precocious child would be under stating. That kind of suffering, on a daily basis, will do that to a child. Back then I needed the distraction to learn from. Eventually, I developed ways to listen to the victims, without experiencing their murder quite so physically. It became a gift I could turn on and off thankfully, and I was growing.
Now, so many years later, I keep my meditations daily, some in motion, and some still as stone. I keep myself in shape by jogging as well as practicing karate. (Second degree black belt, thank you very much.) I also practice further silence, for at twenty eight, I can no more prevent who and what I am, than deny it.
The half human part comes the way any other human comes. The half inhuman part comes after the needs of so many, outweighed the needs of the few. Or the one in this case. Spending that much time as an ethereal being, grows on you. It becomes a part of you and helps you adapt. Extraordinary speed, in the astral realm, extra, natural weapons, (my blade could work as it should, even though I was in astral form) and relative natural invisibility. Invisibility because you just can’t see an astral being. Most can’t, I should say.
On rare occasion my activities have been witnessed. But only the oddity and maliciousness of a slitting keeps the witness from speaking of what they’ve seen. What if I decided to pay them a visit? They don’t know the why, only that something they can’t see, is killing a human being before their eyes. How would they explain that to the authorities? I don’t make a habit of leaving evidence behind. No one can identify someone they can‘t see. All in all, I’m really quite careful.
As an adult, I sleep during the day, a resting sleep I should note, during which time I do not astrally travel and kill. I have longer red hair now. I‘ve always loved my deep green eyes, though, now, they hold a haunted look that make up just can‘t hide. I live with a room mate, a dear friend really, of fifteen years, in downtown LA. She knows me well and knows to live her life to it‘s fullest. She had been a client, sort of, because she is still alive to talk about it. Most all my clients are no longer living, it‘s kind of a requirement for my services.
Julie will always keep my secrets. She’d been a child, barely ten years old, raped at knife point. When she came to me for help, all those years ago, I’d thought she’d been killed as well. But she was one of the lucky ones, if living after that kind of event could be considered lucky. She was only raped, but it had been a series of rapes by a gang. Her spirit couldn’t take it, so in her trauma, she, herself, drifted out of her own body, to escape the pain, and found me.
Her terror was great, and I held her, as close as I possibly could, in ethereal form. We waited together. When the deed was finished, I’d taken care of her attackers. Her family didn’t know how, only that I had, and they paid me well for it. A sizable trust for I was still just a child myself at twelve years old. All her parents ever asked is that I continue my work. So this is what I do. I help those that can’t help themselves any longer. Those whom society has failed and left behind, long forgotten.
I won’t fail. I’ll be their Astral Avenger.
copywrite:Kerry Morgan, no part of this may be reproduced in any manner for any reason unless express written permission is granted by the author. Thank you.
A Special Treat
A peek at the sequel!
The Astral Angel
A clear quartz crystal sat on a self with a red alter cloth folded underneath it. The crystal was seven inches long and three inches wide with one extra little crystal jutting out from the side. A perfect twin to its parent with two faces of Isis, or pentagon shaped windows leading deep into the quartz depths.
On top of the crystal a single flame burns constant and bright, without a wick. The presence of fire on this crystal keeps the images it creates inside moving at a rapid pace. The twin causes the flame to create another figure to dance, entwining and releasing in a constant battle between each other.
To the left of the crystal a single puddle of water, like the drip from a huge pitcher of water, settles on the cloth without soaking in. The water reflects without movement, it’s deadly intent, intoxicating as it is potent.
Hugging the liquid in a horse-shoe shape is white sea sand. Surrounding the crystal, the puddle, and the sea sand is a complete circle of sea salt in its roughest form. It sits in the dark waiting, as a single trail of smoke curls around the whole display, journeys above, and swirls into a perfect circle traveling in a counter- clock-wise motion. Almost imperceptible, the smoke also clings below the crystal, moving in a clock wise position.
A malicious hidden jewel, to ambush, capture, and confuse the innocent, the opposite of what quartz was known to do, it set the perfect trap.
It was working.
Prologue
My name is Angela Mystique. Yes that’s my real name. Odd, isn’t it, with the work I do. I am called an “Astral Angel“ and I’ve just received my title. Never knew the work I did had a title in the first place, but apparently it does and the work is known. Who knows it? Well I’m trying to figure that out myself. They call themselves “The Order“ and they are a spiritual or other-worldly organization that keeps track of my kills. I have also recently met my guide from The Order. Her name is Dee. She helps me, I think, and observes my work, reporting back to The Order. I’m not to sure about The Order just yet, but I’m working on it.
I help innocents who have been victimized and then murdered. Twenty nine year old healthy woman, with long red hair and extreme green eyes, that kills people for a living. Can you say YIKES? If eyes are truly the windows to the soul, and my own eyes change from a deep green to a light grayish blue, what does that say about my soul?
My gift for astral travel, or out of body experience at will, has become my livelihood. It helps that I can interact with and psychically read the dead as well. In order to avenge innocents, I need to know if they are telling the truth when they arrive to see me. Just how they find me, I haven’t figured out yet, but they do on a regular basis. Thanks to my B.F.F’s parents I have no problems financially. Especially since Julie left everything to me too, I am doing all right.
After Julie had earned her PhD, she gave me my very own doctor‘s bag. It was so cute. It looked just like the one Doctor Baker used on the old television program Little House on the Prairie. She knew I would love it because I always made her watch the show with me. She put all the things I use inside in little “ready-to-use” packets. My sea salt, some herbs, the menthol crystals for masking the smell of burning hair. I don’t put my actual weapon inside the bag, as good as the Italian leather is, I keep “The Phoenix” on my altar in my bedroom. I didn’t use to keep it there, but I recently changed the habit due to some, unexpected visitors. Yes, my blade has it’s own name, and I think that is just way too cool.
I have one other tool at my disposal which I am learning about as well. Dee has informed me that I can use compassion, as a weapon. I’ve only killed with it once, and it was extremely tough to go there. As I mentioned, I’m still figuring that one out, because if someone is so bad off that you feel death to be a compassionate action, then the world was really changing.
My best friend forever, Julie, is my partner in vengeance. In life, she had been the bell of anyone’s ball. Short like me, she stood five foot three and had the perfect complexion. Other women walking in packs, visiting about fashion and make up, would walk past her and whisper “we hate her” because she was just that beautiful.
Crystal blue eyes, with curly blond hair she’d just dyed into a deep black. Not the gothic fake looking black, but a lush shiny beautiful almost natural looking black. Julie had just had her incredible hair cut into a bob and she hated it. I‘d held her while she cried and soothed that she wouldn‘t have to live with it forever, it would grow back. Hmm, yeah, let‘s hope she won‘t hate it forever, because that‘s how long she‘ll have that bob as well as the color now.
It‘s a strange life when you are saving little children with a blade one moment, then learning how to kill people with one the next. We’d been best friends for as long as I could remember, before she was brutally dismembered right in her own bed. Why don’t I sound more broken up about it? Because I can interact with the dead, so death isn’t stopping us from hanging out together. Julie is using my old blade, the blade that killed her in fact. (No I didn’t do it.) So she is now an Astral Avenger and apparently I am an Astral Angel. I’m not sure why The Order changed our titles. It might have something to do with the fact that I am to train Julie, but I never had a trainer, so I think Dee has some more explaining to do for me. Add it to the list of questions I have for Dee.
We took care of the man that murdered Julie, and it had not been pretty. He was an Astral Killer, something I just found out existed. Yes, I’m an astral killer, but I kill bad guys, this guy killed whoever he was paid to kill. He won’t be doing that anymore, thanks to Julie and myself. Maybe Astral Mercenary is the better word for what that guy had been.
When we’d gotten home from our job, I withdrew the killer’s hair from my pocket, and burned it with the salts and menthol. Just making sure Julie didn’t head off into the Light, like all my other client’s had, when I’d burned their killer’s hair. The fact that she stayed put, put a smile on my face. I’d get to have a partner after all.
