please, no one has REALLY said the words.

short version for less TL;DR

Sarah Appelbaum is a 22 year old casual Subway Sandwich Artist with theatrical aspirations. The third generation of her family to be born in the great state of New York, she has a fondness for 80s glam rock, Shakespeare, fairy tales (the proper Grimm ones, though Disney has its place), and men who are no good for her (because she knows it will never last. Commitment-phobic, just a little).

Her parents divorced when she was seven. Her mother says she loves her fiercely but she does it from a distance, because before the ink was dry on those papers, she was off to Arizona with her boyfriend. So, Sarah stayed with her father - ostensibly for school, but in reality because her therapist said she had enough to be dealing with that adding new environs and having to make new friends would be a bit much. What that meant was Sarah saw things, things that didn't exist, and would quite happily tell everyone about them. This somewhat limited her social circle, and she was very often the brunt of teasing. Her father and mother both agreed that keeping her family life as stable as possible would be best, and happily shell out money for therapy and drugs that Sarah hates because this is all she got in terms of actual, legitimate parenting.

With her mother not in the house, her father tried very hard to make life "normal" for her, which to him meant replacing her mother as quickly as possible. It helped that his grandmother still lived in the same town; a redoubtable women, Sarah's German Oma did a fantastic job of replacing helping him. At her knee, Sarah listened to countless hours of the fantastic, the unbelievable, the magical... stories of elves, goblins, fairies... all the old Grimm tales. She learnt to cook, to darn socks, to catch things that shouldn't be falling because they were pushed by things no one else could see. Her Oma used to pretend she couldn't see them, but she'd narrow her eyes in the right direction a little too often for Sarah to be really convinced. When her Oma passed away not long after Sarah turned ten, she was utterly devastated, and her emotional upheaval was completed when her father remarried a year later. She wasn't part of the ceremony. Her new step-mother, Karen, is a nice enough woman on her own second marriage, who does a reasonable job trying to relate to Sarah. It's invariably unsuccessful. They're... polite.

But for this to really be A Sarah? There needs to be A Baby.

And A Baby there is!

A happy accident eight years into the new family dynamic, Josh is the cutest bundle of curly hair and blue eyes she's ever seen, even if he does throw the tantrum to end all tantrums on a regular basis. And even if she is always, always the baby-sitter. Because hey, look! Both siblings should be parented by non-parents! She has theatre school, she has a shitty job, she lives in (actually really good) student accommodation - but her father pays for it All, and if she doesn't go to therapy then he will pay for None and so Sarah is helping raise her little brother in between the million things study, classes, rehearsal, her job, and her therapy where she lies her ass off about taking her meds and being totally fine. It's actually... kind of unfair?

Plus - plus. Oh, man, there is a plus here, you guys. Sarah still sees things no one else can see. Goblins! Those little fuckers are everywhere! Seriously. This is not a drill. But does she tell anyone these days? Fuck, no, she does not. No one ever believes her, or they, like her therapists, assume she's attention-seeking, or has an over-active imagination and is projecting abandonment issues because she's too old for imaginary friends. And that makes sense, really. Why would anyone believe that she's found doors to places that don't exist? Or exist thirty years ago but somehow manage to still be now? And that she can talk to people she met there when she's not there? One way ticket to crazy town in her very own luxury padded compartment and a self-hugging jacket.

So, no. She hasn't bothered telling her current therapist about anything, and definitely not the dreams. A huge labyrinth, and a darkly chuckling nameless man, with blond hair and mis-matched eyes, handsome in a way that makes your stomach clench in delight and utter terror? Come on. Her brain lifted that one right out of a childhood full of stories and borrowed the visual from that amazingly camp movie.

Didn't it?

The main character has her name, for crying out loud. Seriously, it's not real.

It's not.






OK, but the goblins are.

There are two with her all the time, these days, tiny little critters. She named them Fred and George, and like every other goblin she's ever met, they have an irrational fear of being turned into chickens, but for the most part, they just hang out with her and wreak casual, irritating destruction on the world around her. She hopes they're not spies, given she was just kidnapped from her home by the fabulously dressed creep from her dreams and dumped in a hellish landscape to do something she didn't quite catch because now she's... somewhere else entirely?