November is National Novel Writing Month so I'm coming up with characters and ideas for a potential story :)
The world is an alternate reality very much like our own, with mostly the same countries and cultures, but with more fantastical elements such as magic, vampires, robots, gods, a sky with two moons, and sometimes animals who can speak.
In the town of Moberry there's a rusty old steamboat called the Southern Belle which has since been fashioned into traveling river hotel where folks of all walks of life pass through. As a traveling hotel, its residents have been on many strange adventures to all sorts of faraway lands. The hotel is owned by Mr. Bentley, a corny older man who's always willing to help anyone who asks. People come and go, but his doors are always open.
A few people live and work in the hotel full time, though some of the jobs are less important than others. There really isn't much need to employ an acrobat full-time, but still she's on the payroll. Mr. Bentley is not one to ask questions. If someone asks for something, he gives it to them.
Judy "Jude" Strange:
Jude was brought up in only the most dysfunctional of households, having a drunkenly annoying father and a loving but mostly uninvolved mother; she's never quite fit in anywhere and isn't very good at the whole "talking" thing, a skill that everyone else seems to excel at; her life is given a newfound sense of meaning and brotherhood when she befriends the decidedly strange residents of the Southern Belle Hotel and gets the family she never really had
Mr. Bentley:
a very wealthy, extremely kind and generous older gentleman who lets people of all walks of life live in his hotel free of charge, no questions asked; everybody at the hotel respects him and treats him like a father; when it comes to the latest trends he's comically behind the times, but he does his best to be cool; his incredibly outdated slang and apparent lack of any current pop culture knowledge whatsoever makes him come off as kind of a goofball, but charming in his own way
Ricardo Gomez:
a mustachioed, chain-smoking "master of the mystic" and hunter of all manner of strange and demonic forces
Shirley-Card:
a fast-talking morphine addicted actress from New York with the fashion sense and personality of a 1920's flapper girl
Marilyn McCarthy:
a dyslexic but otherwise highly intelligent stage and film director with dreams of being famous; however, he's difficult to work with because he doesn't use scripts, seeing how he can't read them
Angel Valentine:
a sarcastic female ninja who hunts aliens, armed with nothing more than a kitana and a ponytail
Alice from Wonderland:
as an adult she works as a psychiatrist of all things, though, she herself is a little mad
Grief:
the very literal embodiment of grief and sorrow; a supernatural being with the form of a porcupine who wears a wooden mask to hide his face, as just the act of looking into his eyes causes people to kill themselves; he works at the front desk of the hotel to check people in
Azul:
a wise, bearded mandolin player from India who seldom speaks, but always has something meaningful and insightful to say
Chelsea Rhodes:
a depressed acrobat with a love for cats
Jackie Boothe:
a kleptomaniacal female Irish lawyer with an eyepatch
Dr. Ono:
a robotic Japanese MD with the appearance of a little girl, who speaks in fractured English
Ms. Cook:
A very fat anthropomorphic rat who, living up to her name, is in fact a cook
Baaz:
a chubby anthropomorphic fox businessman who sells pomade and other haircare products
Scatman Duckworthy:
a forgetful and dimwitted bartender known for his blatant incompetence, drunken behavior, and utterly inexcusable inability to bartend
Ariel Watts:
a very contented janitor who just happens to be the daughter of the queen and heir to a throne she doesn't want
Greg Thomas:
an abnormally normal middle-aged intellectual and voice of reason who always seems to end up in very strange situations
Marina Moon:
a prickly teenage girl, seamstress and the co-founder of the indie rock group, Marina and the Mischief Makers; she is known for her lazy but rebellious nature, and for her unique fashion sense; she wears a hand-crafted porcupine quill hoodie, various piercings and rings, and sports a set of shiny braces
Cheryl Moon:
a smart, pretty girl who gets good grades and tries her best to avoid trouble, except for when she takes the blame for Marina's wrongdoing; she is a nice, easy going, and caring person who would do anything for her friends, although she can be whimsical at times when she doesn't get things her way
Harold Parr:
a forever single man in his 50s who has spent the last 35 years in bed watching TV
Dot Elliot:
an incredibly sweet man who is admittedly very effeminate and doesn't have much of a masculine side at all; he is a very talented cartoonist, but struggles with emotional issues and has great difficulty socializing with others