Jessie (Carrion) Hope's Questionnaire

“Well I live in Huston, Texas, close to where I grew up, and it is really just too expensive to move anywhere else. I plan on, in about a year, leaving to go live with my partners in the UK. We have a sort of long distance thing going on, but it sure is a pain. So I just live and work in satan’s armpit for the time being. It’s… not good. The apartment I’m in is cracked and kinda neglected, as to be expected from this location. I try to make it nice though. Make my own paintings and hang them over any particularly grievous eyesore. Even try to brighten the place with a couple plants, that, truth be told, I feel are more trouble caring and cleaning for them than they are worth.”

“Well, I do freelance work on indie studio games. It’s… fun, sometimes, but terrible work, sporadic hours, and inconsistent schedules. Which makes it perfect for me I guess. The freedom to do it how I want, when I want it, as long as the project is done on time. It helps with those inconsistent and often sleepless nights. I spend what I don’t put back towards my well-being on things for my occult studies. A lot of checking old bookstores, and online auctions. Trying to figure out ways to defend people against what goes bump in the night. Tools of the trade. And the tapes. I buy lots and lots of tapes.”

“When I was young, I had a dream. Standing under a stormy midnight sky, with something massive and absolutely terrifying on the horizon. Again and again these dreams would come, ripe with new faces, new prophecies, new terror. I had foolishly managed to cast it from my mind, and I wasn’t bothered until my tumor got bad enough the doctors knew it was there. I believe that these dreams are the result of something else, standing on the threshold of our world, communicating through my dreams. And I want to touch it. Just reach out and touch the impossibly dark black of its feathers, and feel it’s will clearly without the room for interpretation that dreams bring.

”Am I willing to die for it? Well, it’s only so long before my cancer starts crushing more important parts of my brain than the part that controls sleep and libido. So the question is, do I want to die for a cause, to see beyond our world, or do I want to die slumped over the program for Celeste 2 in my crumbling apartment. I know what I picked.”

“Like I said in previous statements, I have two defining moments: the period of the first dreams and their banishment, and the return of the nightmares. The first opened my eyes, honestly and truly, to the idea of *real* supernatural. Not some vague ESP experiments or magic tricks, but powerful things that went bump in the night.

”The second was much more profound. Instead of only bare hopes that maybe those dreams long ago meant something, I now actually had something tangible to grasp. A power of my own, and the consequences that came with it. Nightmares, secrets, hopes and dreams, all laid bare. It meant I was different. That I had the capacity to change the world.”

“Three people? That’s… quite hard. I believe I’ve done all but push them all away.

”Melody Hope: my sister, and while she was undoubtedly my parent’s favorite, she was never unkind to me. Snuck in to talk to me when I was in trouble or ill. She was always… so much better that me, despite being my younger sister, she was smarter, better looking, and fitter than me too. But she always loves me, and makes sure to visit me, even when she doesn’t intend to do so to my parents.”

”Tiffany Bouchard: my therapist, and I guess by your specifications, the one I’m closest to. She… does a lot of asking questions like these. And I usually don’t tell her I have much of anyone besides herself and my sister. I tell her almost everything, from my sleep to my family issues to the things that happened to me as a kid.”

”Eliza Reed: the one part of my life I don’t tell my therapist about. She’s… quite a mystery to me, and actually had spoken to me first while rifling through a bookstore. She’s more extroverted than I, and looking through those thick rimmed glasses, I can see an air of curiosity, a watching presence in her eyes, waiting for something. I will dream of her before she pops out of the woodwork when I’m out and about, but I never remember until I see her watching gaze…”

“My parents, well, they’re divorced. My mom ended up with this asshole who never liked me, but at least my stepmother is a kind soul. In fact I left my mom, who had primary custody of  me and my younger sister our whole lives, to go live with my dad and stepmom. Though I did eventually leave them too because of my coming out, I do try my best to keep on good terms with them.”

“My childhood… I won’t lie, I would much rather not relive it. I was so awkward and socially inept, that thinking about my younger years fills me with secondhand embarrassment. Well I guess it would be firsthand embarrassment, but you get my point.”

”As a kid I was a Gifted Child™️. People said I changed since then, which is not true in the way they imply. They simply ignored all of the less useful sides of my mind and personality until it was overwhelming for everyone involved.”

“I’ve had crushes, I’ve dated, but when I was much younger to the point I really wouldn’t count them. I’m not actively looking though, I’m like the last person who should be trying to get involved in someone else’s love life, much to the annoyance of some of my family. Though if there is someone in my social circle dropping hints, I tend to not notice. It’s a… reoccurring issue, where someone will do everything short of telling me outright, and I’ll just refuse to read into it. Even if somehow I do get the feeling that someone is into me, I rationalize that it’s best to just ignore it. Just in case.”

Let me think... fears are hard, depending if you mean concrete fears, fears of physical things that tangibly exist, or more abstract ones, the existential fears that keep you awake in the dead of night. Concrete fears... guns and shootings, that kind of stuff really. I don't think there's much else that I would have more to fear than a lunatic with a killing machine he bought down the road. On the more abstract side of things however... I think... the fear of not knowing. There is so much out in the world that I don't know. Hell, they say the internet is the collective of all knowledge but that is not even true, it is the collection of everything we have learned, remembered, and digitized. Stored away to put forwards the idea, the lie that humans know almost everything there is to know. And yet we really don't. I want to be able to know everything I could possibly want to. And the idea of potentially being blindsided because I didn't know something is paralyzing to me. That's why I take these gods forsaken jobs, I want to know everything, and I want to be able to share that knowledge with people like a modern Prometheus.

I have many prized possessions, most of them made and donated, odd and weird magics flowing through out them. Ones that allow us to do unthinkable things beyond the limits of a human body or mind. And yet, it is none of these that I would say are my most prized. No magic rings or exorcism pistols, no cloaks that make you move like a shade or bracelets made by horse wizards. No, my most prized of all possessions are these, my cassettes. These cassettes, they are my legacy, firsthand accounts of the disturbing and deranged monsters and magics that invade our world. They are so precious because they are one of a kind, each of them telling a different story, each one filled to the brim with nothing bust the rawest of truth and the most direct of fact. If I were to die, I would hope for it to be recorded in this way, so that the person who takes my job may not make my mistakes.

Oh where do I begin? There are the team of serial killers pretending to be crusaders in a holy purge of magic across the world, a recently dead friend, the situation with The Firm and their members that are currently falling apart, and then of course there are the concerns I have about my own organization, attempting to recruit other librarians to assist with managing things while I am not in house. The biggest I guess being the want to be holy knights, who would rather slaughter children than allow the glimmer of the fantastic to exist. It boils my blood, and while we did manage to take one down, we have reason to belive that there are two left in hiding somewhere. It is just a matter of time before we can remove them and the new tech they are pumping themselves full of from the playing field, permanently.

In the morning I wake up, and if I manage to fall asleep after my first alarm, Knight, my service dog, helps to wake me back up. From there it is standard morning routine. Take my meds before I shower, then into the day's clothes, which I go and immediately go and find something to eat. Well of course after I feed Knight and take him outside, then I can go figure out what to eat. And absolutely no caffeine, it absolutely ruins my stomach. After that I brush my teeth and hair, and start to log in to do business for the top floors of the library, checking logs, shelving books, ordering shipments and the like. I couldn't call myself a librarian if I owned two libraries and only did work for the substantially cooler one. So pretty much the same mornings as most people I imagine, just very much earlier.