Argana Zeit

Trusty Nissan Micra

Ever wondered what Argana drives? Not nerve-wracking for Argana, who had gained her license from the Dunning-Kruger school of driving. Nerve-wracking however for every tractor driver, cyclist, horse rider and occasional prodigal sheep that they startled along the way. – Argana Zeit and the Haunted Busker As a regular reader, you’ll be familiar with Argana’s haphazard driving style. In many ways, her ancient and long-suffering blue Nissan Micra is one of the most imperilled characters in the series! You don’t see a lot of the Mk2s around these days, for obvious reasons, so I was charmed to spot this one…

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Argana’s Flat

I’ve always loved floorplans. It’s an affection that started when I was a kid, running table RPGs for my friends and family. Having a dungeon map behind my GM’s screen, forcing the players to painstakingly replicate it in their own notes. All that squared paper. All those conveniently right-angular tombs. It wasn’t so much that Osthack the Destroyer wanted to rule the world, as they just really wanted to own all the setsquares. And of course there’s castles, because every time you visit one, there’s a poster somewhere with a reconstructed floorplan on it, the hypothetical sections rendered in dashed…

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Patty Scholes

Next in my series of occasional Character Sketches is Patty Scholes. Yeah, she’s the matriarch of the Scholes clan, collecting the waifs and strays of Trotterwell … the question is, are all her brood technically human? We first meet Patty properly in No Fae Back Now, but she was originally a background character in Argana Zeit Collects Snow Toads. Ever since her first mention… “…Patty was well known around Trotterwell, for both better and worse. Patty herself was big-hearted, but whether her family consisted of pesky delinquents or the high-spirited go-getters of the future was largely a question of who…

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Akira Pixels

So, I went off and sketched Akira Pixels for you. But if prefer your headcannon version, you go right ahead and keep that ;) Not that Akira is his birthname. We met his mum in Argana Zeit Rings the Other World, and she spilt the beans. He had the good fortune to appear in the first Argana Zeit story, where we discover that he’s the eccentric, wannabe entrepreneur owner of Brink Hall, a crumbling mansion outside of town. I’ve always enjoyed writing him, because he’s an easy conduit for new problems. That, and I find delusional characters inherently funny. I…

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No Fae Back Now

Who do you call when you find a boy with no face in a magical coma? Well, since government cutbacks mean there’s no occult police division any more, you’re going to end up in the capable* hands of Argana Zeit, amateur paranormal investigator. Sure, she’s flaky, but what she lacks in organisational aptitude she makes up for in attitude and intuition. But when a monster trashes a nearby housing estate and the local entrepreneur spins up his demonic cryptic scam, things are going to get a lot weirder than she and her ghost-sensing dog can imagine. Ah, the Argana Zeit…

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Where is Trotterwell?

With the blatant exception of her hometown of Trotterwell, every location that Argana visits is from the real world. They’re places that I’ve been, and that I love. But you may be less familiar, so I’ve drawn this map to help you out. Although there are more villages and sites of note than shown, this has the broad sweeps. To give you an idea of scale, it’s around 20 miles from Buxton to Bakewell. But the roads are narrow and there's a sheep around every corner, so it takes longer to drive than you'd imagine! Also, I was inspired to…

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Why Argana Zeit?

I wrote a submarine horror novel. It took three years and genuinely gave me nightmares, which was possibly my first clue that I wasn’t cut out for penning terror. I duly sent it off to agents that I admired, or at least had heard of, and waited for the advances and royalties to roll in. As that wait grew unaccountably longer, I figured I’d write something short, as a bit of a pallet cleanser. I’d been watching Columbo* and really wanted to do something with clues in it. I had this paranormal investigator character from a comic I’d half drawn…

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Argana Zeit and the Haunted Busker

This is where it all started! Argana Zeit is a Paranormal Investigator, or at least, wishes she was. She is the closest thing the small town of Trotterwell has, so when a brawl in a shopping centre has occult overtones, constable Fred Berkshire calls her in to help out. Included in Paranormal in the Peaks, available here.

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