Not that it matters, but who is that in the photos?

 

Her name is Sofia Valentine. Now this may come as a shock, but she is a (former) adult film star and fetish model. Your guess is as good as mine, but for reasons that will become apparent, I think it's a stage name.

 

 

What's the attraction?

 

Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But to be honest, Sofia Valentine hails from the Netherlands, and I think it would be neat to see another character who shares Pieter's own presumed bloodlines. There is a shortage of ladies out there who can say they are lekker with any conviction, much less say it correctly. 

 

Don't worry about not speaking Dutch; I don't speak Afrikaans. The beauty of it is that Dutch and Afrikaans have a quality known as mutual intelligibility. In a nutshell, this means speakers of one of the languages can understand speakers of the other without any significant shift in vocabulary or grammar. In this case, the intelligibility is only partial, but this shouldn't stop us from pretending that any conversation is as private as the rest of the room's language barrier makes it, with all of the hijinks that might ensue. 

 

Believe it or not, I also dig the tattoo . . .

 

 

What's the angle?

 

Actually, it's not too far from the truth, with a twist. We have a starlet and model making it big on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. (Sound familiar?) Of course, no one has to know our girl has been making it big for the past three or four hundred years on the back of a contract that wasn't made with some smut factory or fetish photographer, but was instead inked out in blood with some demon or devil holding steady in the middle-management of Hell's bureaucracy. There is a certain attraction to having the body of an attractive 25-year old woman "forever" – however long that lasts. Obviously, one of them is owning a lot of wigs. That, or discovering the modern phenomenon that is hair coloring.

 

 

Where are the stories going?

 

Humor: Mild slapstick: sarcastic, sexual, or otherwise. Try telling a bossy, petulant, and pouty woman who has gotten almost everything she has wanted for the past couple of centuries (because she is beautiful) that she can't have something right away, and see what happens.

 

Conflict: Someone has to come and collect on that contract at some point. What happens when they do? Alternately, the contract has some term that keeps collection in abeyance, but only as long as it is periodically performed. Perhaps this is something that has become more difficult to do as time has passed. (What? Costco doesn't have virgin goat's blood on special this week? Damn. I wonder if my "recipe" allows substitutions . . .)

 

Casual: Ennui is forced to give way through a cell phone call that leads to a meet-up. Humor follows along when the desired meet-up is at an inconvenient/unconventional place or time.