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Title: A Dreamer's Nightmare
Area: Characters

Bio Info:


So you want to know something of my past. I'll tell you, it isn't a pleasant story to tell, but if you ask, I will answer..to the best of my abilities...

My parents never paid a lot of attention to be when I was young. Between my brother Max, the child prodigy, and my sister Rita, aka Miss Perfect Child, I was always quite the outcast. I was the middle child of the three of us, and my parents were very successful and well-to-do. Don't get me wrong...I had everything a child would ever want or need, but I was lacking one important factor in the equation..love. I longed to feel wanted, to feel like they loved me as much as Rita and Max. But they never lived up to their end of the deal, so I had no choice but to run off and find love for myself.

Of course, I always looked in the wrong places. When I was fourteen, I took flight from "home" and hitchiked my way across the country, serving as a prostitue until I was sixteen. Gawd....five abortions and three trips to detox sort of made me realize that the love I was looking for wasn't here. Nights spent in sleazy hotel rooms with greaseballs to prosecuting attorneys, shooting up heroin and snorting cocaine until I felt weightless, feather-like. I always loved the feeling of floating like a balloon...free and above any problem I'd ever encountered. The drugs made me feel powerful...when in reality, I was weaker than I was when I'd left home. At least then, I had my dignity.

My last trip to detox, I met a guy named Jeremy. He was eighteen, I was sixteen, and we hit it off immediately. Often times, when we were supposed to be in bed asleep, he and I would sneak out and sit outside, where he would play his guitar and sing for me. We wrote songs together, talked about our lives in the past and what we wanted to do differently in the future. We even discussed marriage at one point, but I never saw a ring. We were both dismissed in the same week, and ended up buying an apartment together. But a few months into our life together, Jeremy started shooting up again. He hid it from me for quite some time, but eventually things around home started getting tight. Money started "mysteriously" disappearing. He started stealing from my private funds in the bedroom to buy his addiction, and over-drew the bank account five times in two weeks. I was deeply hurt and betrayed, though my love for him never faded. Luckily, I was smart enough (and clean) to realize that he would always be an addict...nothing I could do would ever change him. To this day, I still wonder about him. Last I heard, he'd cleaned up his act again and fooled another girl into thinking he had really changed. I feel sorry for her, whoever she is.

I decided to try going back home at that point. I'd done a lot of growing up, and I thought maybe Mom and Dad would see that I had honestly cleaned up my act and wanted to be the daughter they'd wanted to have all along. I rented a car and drove back home to an empty lot. I learned from an old neighbor that the house had burned down a year ago and taken my entire family with it. It happened in the night...something ignited the gas oven and burst into flames, literally blowing the house up like a time bomb. My neighbor offered me a place to stay, but I refused politely and drove away. I haven't been back since, and I probably never will go back.

That's how I ended up here. Four straight days of driving had worn me out to the point of delerium, so I stopped at a small inn somewhere out in the middle of noplace. I sat and drank myself into a stupor for three consecutive days, renting out a room in the upstairs until I could find a place of my own. In the tavern, I met Bane Aceldama. At first, I thought she was insane. She'd sit and just stare at me for hours and never utter a syllable. One night, she did talk to me. I didn't reveal much of myself to her, but somehow she knew me...almost better than I knew myself. I was entranced by her abilities, awed by how beautiful she was.

She took me in her stride and created in me a spark of a different kind of life. We are called NightMares, and our purpose? We are the makers of dreams, of night terrors. We haunt and invade, like a spirit or a ghost would, but we take human form. We appear ordinary as any other human (save for our pale, perfect skin), and thrive during the night hours. We are capable of twisting and manipulating thoughts, dreams, visions, actions, words...the psyche. I've been known to drive many a man literally insane with desire for me, and many a woman, at that. Not just for me, but for the feelings I can create in them. I'm an artist. I love to paint, to mold, create, and shape.

Helena Giamonte

"Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand.
And the fool--mistook by me--
Pleading for a lover's fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!"