Thursday, April 6, 2023

Enter The House Between: Theresa



Less than a week until the launch of our new audio drama, Enter The House Between!  

Today, I want to introduce you to one of its many remarkable characters, or "denizens" in THB lingo: Theresa Melita.

THERESA MELITA (DATA FILE)

Theresa Melita was born into a large family in scenic Cape Cod. When she was a young adult, Theresa was hit by a speeding car and fell into a coma that lasted for days. When she awoke, Theresa was changed forever.  She had experienced an NDE (Near Death Experience).  This vision also awoke a series of other psychic abilities in her, a fact that frightened her parents. After a short time, they disowned Theresa, afraid that she had become a monster.

 

Professor A. Vincenzo, a specialist in Death and After-Death Studies, encountered Theresa at this point and began to help the young woman shape and understand her strange new abilities. Under Dr. Vincenzo’s tutelage, Theresa enrolled in a psychic astronaut program, one that would teach her to harness and control her psychic powers, which include psychometry (understanding facts about an object by touch), bilocation (briefly appearing in two places simultaneously), and mental telepathy

 

Vincenzo’s philosophy and curricula of study revolves around the notion of individuals rigorously controlling (some might say suppressing…) strong emotions. 


Like the Japanese samurai of long ago, Vincenzo’s psychic astronauts eschew close personal attachments and intense emotions and focus on rigorous control of their bodies and minds. 


Theresa mastered these lessons tenaciously, some might even say easily, but did not make many friends in the program. She came to remember the experience as lonely.

 

When psychic warnings -- including a shift in the NDE – began to forecast a kind of imminent future holocaust, Theresa was selected to be the “first person on the moon,” the first psychic astronaut to astral project inside the vision of this upcoming disaster.  


Instead, something went wrong, and Theresa became trapped in that location physically; inside a malfunctioning smart house known colloquially as “the house at the end of the universe.”

 

There, Theresa befriended the other trapped denizens, including Astrid and Arlo, while becoming a sparring partner for scientist Bill Clark, since he dismissed psychic powers and rigidly adhered to his rational principles. In the smart house, Theresa was able to communicate telepathically with the house’s advanced, but enigmatic AI -- the household lar -- named Vitality. 

 

When dark matter consumed the house at the end of the universe, Theresa helped the other denizens find a new home, this time “The Dark Place,” an ancient smart house located inside the event horizon of a five-dimensional black hole. 

 

Theresa attempted to communicate with the ancient lar there, Cronus, but he did not recognize humans as life-forms and had gone mad from loneliness. Curious about Theresa and all human life, Cronus manifested his progeny -- a baby -- to gestate inside Theresa.

 

At 26 years old, Theresa walks an uneasy path between rigid emotional control, and her desire to connect meaningfully to others. 


As Enter The House Between commences, she must also contend with impending motherhood.





The role of Theresa is essayed in Enter The House Between by the multi-talented Alicia Martin (Ravenclaw), Operations Manager for a corporation by day, slinger of indoor plants on nights and weekends, mother to three little boys (Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw) and wife to one adult male (Slytherin). She is also the provider of food and occasional snuggles to three cats and a dog. She enjoys watching Star Wars and anime, and dreams of one day playing a Disney villain or a professor at Hogwarts.


And now, here is a top-secret, classified stream from the T.R.A. about Theresa:


 

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