[Conductor] Backstory Through Environment Show a character in a room of his house; introduce us to small, specific details that will reveal what this character’s past is. Try to place the character in action.
“I hope you’ll excuse the mess,” Sticks says, bracing the door with his left knee and hanging his full weight upon the knob as he wrestles with the lock. “I’m only ever here to eat or sleep. Ah!” With a painful-looking wrench, the door surrenders. Sticks doffs his cap politely as if Ash were a bird and holds the door in nervous imitation of a gentleman. “Sit where you can and try not to trip on anything.”
His warning is appropriate; the place is a sty. Ash doesn’t know what he’d expected – dope, maybe, from the way the kid’s smile tends to float in place – but it certainly hadn’t been books. But here they are, columns knee-high and so wreathed with dust that he suddenly doesn’t doubt that Sticks only sleeps here, which raises interesting questions. For the moment, he ignores them.
As Ash stands trying to pick his next footstep, Sticks makes a long arm to set his cap on the mantel’s only clean patch. Without it, his head seems to lack definition; his hair, which had looked like straw in the yellow light of the platform, now resembles lightweight fishing line, and blends with the wall behind him. Sticks’ hands rise to the breast of the jacket, but he aborts the movement with a flicker of bony fingers and turns to face Ash again, incautious of the clothbound mesas at his feet.
“Tea?”
“Please.” Ash watches Sticks cross the room to awkwardly fill the abused kettle at a tiny rust-stained basin on the wall. There is a long oar in the corner. He sees another by the window and the pole-end of what must be a third hung like a curtain rod alongside the narrow camp bed, protruding in a sharp line from behind a brightly coloured blanket. Now that he has noticed them, it is impossible not to look down and identify the books as boating manuals; impossible, too, to ignore the yellowed clippings on the walls, which start with ferries and barges and merge slowly into ships and then jump all at once to trains, with schedules pinned beside them. Ash turns to the nearest wall and touches the clippings there gingerly. The paper is brittle, and its edges flake away beneath his fingers.
“Milk and sugar, detective?”
Sticks’ inquiry jerks his hand away from the wall. He turns too quickly and upsets a book tower with the toe of his boot, then watches in awkward horror as it cascades into two more. “—bugger. Sorry, mate. As it is, is fine.” He crouches to try to right the books again, and blinks at a log book that’s older than both of them by a hundred years or so. “You a collector, Mister Sticks, or is this a family business?”
Sticks’ head floats closer, pale and ethereal atop the straight, clean lines of his conductor’s uniform. “You could say that,” he says, without clarifying which statement is the accurate one, and folds himself oddly to hand Ash his tea in a chipped cup with no saucer. “The trade is immortal, Detective Vaughn. No matter where you are, there’s always someone needs to be somewhere else, and personally, the line’s a nice bit of reassurance. No storm’s going to blow a train off-course.” He gestures to the shipping wall and sips, eyes slipping closed. Then the cup is set aside, and he regards Ash with more gravity. “I suppose you’d like to ask me about Miss Haydee.”
Damn right I would, thinks Ash, but he takes a mouthful of tea – pale, fruity stuff – and nods along quite amicably as he sets it down, extracts his notebook and a leaky cartridge pen from his breast pocket and flips the notebook open with his thumb. “When did you see her last?”
Chaz doesn't feel quite in-character yet, but since this is... maybe three chapters into the novel, Ash is at an appropriate level of fascination, I think. I still have no timeframe for this. XD; I fail at everything. (Now that I have picked this icon, Scuttle seems like a good choice for Chaz, which is terrifying. XD)
...it is kind of amazing how calm and happy zoning out and writing for the last hour has made me. The world is a good place again. Why don't I do this all the time?