Ilyana sat at her desk, drumming the stylus against the angled surface. She was using her Wacom Intus Pro she’d gotten to help her draw her web comic, Super Timur. She leaned back in the chair with a heavy sigh. She was stuck, and didn’t know what to work on. It had been a while since there had been a new Super Timur, and her followers has been asking when she was going to create more.
She had started doing Super Timur in high school, as a way to commend or poke fun at her favorite brother, who’d been her hero growing up. Things had changed now, and she didn’t know how to incorporate any of that into the comic. She made a decision – she wrote up a blog post for her site, thanking people for following her and supporting Super Timur, but explaining that she’d hit a wall, and was going to start working on a new project until she could break through her block and produce more Super Timur.
Timur himself might be disappointed, so as a hiatus image she drew Super Timur with his arm around a bear in an ushanka, sitting in front of a campfire; Timur’s other hand holding an open bottle of vodka, and the bear’s other hand was holding one of those over-sized gummy bears, with an ear and small part of the head bitten off.
What did she want to do? She still wasn’t sure…though part of her wanted to take from real life and draw something a bit more serious. She wasn’t sure what to do though, and thought that perhaps instead she should come up with something more original. She pulled up a new image in photoshop and began to doodle, as she so often did when she was stuck or couldn’t think. It began to take form, and soon, as it often did when she subconsciously drew, Sergei’s face appeared. She never finished the sketches – just kept them on the computer in a WIP folder.
Sergei….
She put her head in her left hand. He still filled her thoughts. That one time she’d had with he and Michael had been great – but it had never been mentioned since, and there was no indication that anything had changed in regards to how he felt about her – like a little sister. She deleted the image and decided instead to work on her homework. Anymore she didn’t know why she was going to University when she already held an art degree from Yale. Something to do with myself, I suppose.
Maybe she should just find a job instead of go to school, get her own place. It was hard on her living with Sergei and her brother, she just never let on. It’s not that she minded taking care of the animals or being around them or anything – it was just the drama that could come with it, considering their former occupations. She half expected someone to come hunting them. Sergei could handle himself, she knew – but she worried about her brother.
Sure, Timur had been kind of a thug, but he was still her brother. She had the right to worry. Right now the only thing she had to worry about where he was concerned was if his heart was going to be broken. She couldn’t be mad at Mandy – she knew that her and Blade had a much longer history than she and Timur and for there to still be feelings was natural. But her poor brother – he’d finally found a girl that lasted more than a couple of weeks, and now he faced potential dumpage because an old flame came into the mix.
She grumbled. It wasn’t fair to her to be torn so. For other friends, she really only had Trish, and Trish had her own things to worry about, being pregnant and all. Idly, she wondered what kind of child it would be since it wasn’t fathered by Chance, but by one of the vampires – which technically never should have happened. Everything seemed so messed up. I need someone I can go to and vent or rant and rave and them not care that I do it. I need a guy – or a girl…someone to get involved with so I don’t feel so terribly alone. That was the crux of it all. Even in the midst of her roommates and friends, she felt alone because she had no one.
The phone range, and it was her parents, calling to check up on her, and to ask about Timur. She faked happiness, promising that she was doing fine, and that Timur was doing well too. She purposefully left out the fact that Timur was dating, because then her mother would fly out in a heartbeat to meet the girl and not-so-subtly give hints for grandchildren – not to mention pester Ilyana about getting married and doing the same. It just wasn’t what she or her brother needed right now – especially with his new condition.
When Timur woke up, she was going to have to tell him to call their mother at some point and reiterate the family thing with her, or just finally flat out tell her he didn’t want a family. It would hurt her, but it was better than giving her hope. When the call was finally over, she put her cell on charge, and put more thought into the idea of living on her own. As her thoughts wandered, and idea formed…she’d so a paranormal fantasy comic about herself. As far as anyone was concerned, it would be fiction, and she could avoid using specific terms.
Getting up from the bed, where she’d moved to when the phone rang, she went back to her desk to draw out the central characters in her story, being careful to give them different names, and in some cases, different ethnicities…but still people she knew at the core. She drew herself as the main character in a few different styles, trying to determine which one she liked best – ultimately settling on a style. Style settled, she began drawing character references for everyone else, and thus was occupied for the rest of the day.