Sacred High (Book One: Freshman Year)

Chapter 2.1: Author Notes

There was a lot of stuff we could do for this week's chapter considering it was a war, and this is what we decided to reveal for now.

~Anansi information~

We chose Anansi because he was a pretty vague character. It's fun to use less popular deities as well so we can keep things fresh for the readers. He's the african trickster god and well known to the natives. Anansi is depicted in many different ways. Sometimes he looks like an ordinary spider, sometimes he is a spider wearing clothes or with a human face and sometimes he looks much more like a human with spider elements, such as eight legs.

As well as being sneaky, tricky, sly and crafty, he's also a Creator God who made the sun and moon and hit upon the novel idea of day and night.

There is an Anansi story that explains the phenomenon of how his name became attached to the whole corpus of tales:

"Once there were no stories in the world. The Sky-God, Nyame, had them all. Anansi went to Nyame and asked how much they would cost to buy.

Nyame set a high price: Anansi must bring back Onini the Python, Osebo the Leopard, and the Mboro Hornets.

Anansi set about capturing these. First he went to where Python lived and debated out loud whether Python was really longer than the palm branch or not as his wife Aso says. Python overheard and, when Anansi explained the debate, agreed to lie along the palm branch. Because he cannot easily make himself completely straight a true impression of his actual length is difficult to obtain, so Python agreed to be tied to the branch. When he was completely tied, Anansi took him to Nyame.

To catch the leopard, Anansi dug a deep hole in the ground. When the leopard fell in the hole Anansi offered to help him out with his webs. Once the leopard was out of the hole he was bound in Anansi's webs and was carried away.

To catch the hornets, Anansi filled a calabash with water and poured some over a banana leaf he held over his head and some over the nest, calling out that it was raining. He suggested the bees get into the empty calabash, and when they obliged, he quickly sealed the opening.

Anansi handed his captives over to Nyame. Nyame rewarded him by making him the god of all stories."

With this information we chose to give Anansi two things: One, as he is considered to be a trickster, is the ability to transform his appearance and to adapt to his situations. Second is the power to manipulate webs / strings, as he is a spider-based deity. Together these two powers gave birth to the character 'Shin', also known as the Student Council's undercover agent Anansi.

He served as a great character to develop the plot, making a beautiful plot twist at that that we do not regret using.

~Morpheus information~

"Morpheus also known as "the Greek Dream God", "The drowsy deity of dreams" or simply "The Sandman" is a pretty famous deity from various tales and cultures.

Morpheus (/ˈmɔrfiəs/ or /ˈmɔrfjuːs/) is a god of dreams who appears in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Morpheus has the ability to mimic any human form and appear in dreams. His true semblance is that of a winged daemon, imagery shared with many of his siblings. Starting in the medieval period, the name Morpheus began to stand generally for the god of dreams or of sleep.