Story notes

Ordos City: a "ghost town" in China also called "the empty city."

"A City with No People": Chii's picture book in Chobits.

Lyrics from "The Town with No People": from Chobits.

I'm taking the title for "The Empty City" from this phrase from Chobits. Ophelia, Scarlet, and Coral are not "natural-born." Ophelia was brought to life by a scientist named Shelley. Her body and spirit are a composite from those of a woman, Cambriel, who killed herself to escape the man who brings Ophelia to life, and those of another woman he exhumed (randomly) from a graveyard, a trapeze artist who had an equally tragic end. 

Scarlet is a clone made partially from Cambriel's DNA by Jude, another scientist who stole some of Shelley's research materials in order to save the life of a woman who had been ravaged by a vampire, Jade. Unlike Ophelia, Scarlet doesn't have memories from two different women's lives. Ophelia is the only woman who remembers Cambriel's life. Scarlet remembers the past life of Amelia, and the events leading up to Amelia's death at the hands of Jade.

Coral was cloned by Cristalle's government from Cambriel's DNA after the government placed Jude in prison and confiscated his research materials. She was placed in foster care and is miserable in her life as a teenager. She awakens to her own past life memories. She is the reincarnation of Marjorie, a woman who yearned to become a vampire so that she could be united forever with Jade, with whom she was in love. When Coral's past-life memories are reawakened, she accepts the calling of the goddess Lilith and becomes a succubus. Like a vampire, she preys on mortals, but she has never been converted by anyone. 

Dresden is driven to uncover the abandoned mansion where Jade and his brother grew up as a child. She yearns to resurrect the memories of the past and re-live the lives of Ophelia and Shelley. She becomes a vampire by drinking blood she finds in the mansion, and her childhood playmate, Jude, a relative of the scientist, Jude, becomes her victim. 

Dresden is the only one of the women who was not cloned from Cambriel's DNA. 

Cambriel was the granddaughter of an angel, meaning she has a quarter of angel's blood. Her mother, Annelise, was a half-angel, and her father, Stephen, was a vampire. Cambriel's supernatural origins made it possible for the use of her DNA to bring the bodies and spirits of other dead women to life, as Shelley discovered. Cambriel herself lived as a normal human, as did her brother, Johnny. When her brother Johnny was killed by Shelley, an event which spurred Cambriel to suicide, Johnny also never truly died. His spirit lingered near Ophelia, until Ophelia left the building where the tragedy took place. Now, no one knows where Johnny is, if he still lingers, or if he has passed on. 

I did some free-writing on Wednesday about Dresden. The writing is in a rather wandering style, but I considered more about Dresden as a displaced figure between the human and vampire worlds. Dresden appears in the third novella of my trilogy, and I considered writing a fourth novella or short story about Dresden specifically. Because Dresden was born of a vampire's pact with the earth, she has many qualities of a vampire, but doesn't drink blood. She also is intimately tied to the earth: the sun, soil, and water, and so she can't survive in the underground where humans live. Dresden is deeply lonely but doesn't derive satisfaction from either vampires or humans. I see her story as reflecting back to Ophelia's story because I plan for Johnny, Ophelia's younger brother, to make an appearance in this story. 

I fell asleep puzzling over the first story in the Cristalle series. While I have a fairly clear feeling for the other stories, I don't have a cohesive vision for this one. Yet, somehow, I have other stories preceding and following this one that are dependent on it. I have a prequel short story called "White Roses" that centers around an angel. Then, in my original first novella, which has been called The Awakening or The Sleeping Bride, the main character of the story is an automaton who takes on the qualities and memories of her likeness, Cambriel, who is other-than-human as the daughter of a half-angel and vampire. Her name was originally Ophelia. I have also considered calling her Michaela. The most distinct parts of the story are when she uncovers memories she has blocked that give her clues as to why she thinks and feels as she does and then, when she follows after Shelley, the maker of her automaton form, to save him from his captor, who seeks to expose him for revenge. 

One of the issues I have puzzled over most with regard to this story is the fact that Shelley and Jeremy, Shelley's captor, both her love interests, are obsessed with her because of their obsessions with Cambriel and Valentine (another woman whose likenesses Ophelia has developed). In scenes with these characters, Ophelia is never really appreciated as herself, and I never went far in developing her as herself. The point of the story is that she isn't Cambriel, and it makes it hard for me to see a happy ending for her with either man. 

The second novella, Red Rose, is in many ways different plot-wise, but similar scenario: the main character's love interests are Jude, her scientist/creator, and Jade, a vampire who takes her to a vampire coven to shield her identity from the government. However, Jade had unconscious motives in doing so. Scarlet, the main character, is an automaton formed after Amelia, with whom both Jude and Jade have a close tie. Amelia was Jade's caretaker, being about eight years older than himself, and Jude finds her injured in the woods, and transforms parts of her into this automaton. Both men have semi-romantic feelings for her. In the end, Scarlet finds love with Robert, another vampire, and leaves both men behind.

In my re-imagining of the first novella, I felt that Ophelia, too, eventually finds love with Jude, Scarlet's scientist creator, but they don't end up getting together until the end of the third novella, The Book of Faery, which centers around Coral, an automaton who transforms into a succubus through a magical ritual, and Jade, the vampire from Red Rose. I had originally wanted all three novellas to stand alone as complete romances, but as it is, the first one ends in an open manner. I feel that given Ophelia's circumstances, however, it's hard to imagine a happy ending for her as already married off, because the motivation behind her striving throughout the novella is to discover her own identity and in the end, that seems enough. With all that happens in the story, it's hard to develop a cohesive romantic plot with a male character. 

I have also considered that, instead of Jude as a future love interest, that Ophelia and Jeremy move toward a romance at the end of the story. 

I am still struggling with a title for the novella. The Sleeping Bride no longer seems appropriate, because Ophelia does not end up being Shelley's bride, as he intended for her to be. The title is doubly confining and indicates Ophelia's problem, but not the overall trajectory of her experiences in the story. The Awakening is too generic. Isn't that the name of a Kate Chopin short story? It says Victorian-realist to me, not fantasy-romance. I also tried Cameo of Porcelain because it also expressed a sense of duplication or crafting from nonliving material, but the title seems a bit unwieldy. However, it goes better with Rose and Book along the lines of physical objects.