> There's a moray eelgirl too. You can click the tabs.
> There's a cat too. You can click the tabs.
About the Webmaster
I'm PJ, and I also go by Saltie or Drac. You found me within the City of Rest, a quiet, calm city where you are always being watched... but let's set down the fantasies, and talk about who I really am.
In terms of personality, I'm... honestly not very nice. I've been poisoned by the Internet. Augh. But most days I'm writing fiction, watching Let's Plays and stream VODs on YouTube, doing artwork, scrolling Tumblr or Twitter, chatting on Discord, playing little pyschological horror visual novels on itch.io, trying to code new features into this website, or daydreaming. I love food! Particularly Tex-Mex, Chinese, and Indian! (Good thing I can easily whip up a ton of the third. Can't promise it'll be good though.) And my favorite drink is black tea. Though I'll drink a mocha too, if I'm someplace I've never been before.
If you were to ask about my skills, I'd say I'm a math major (and I was pretty darn good at it!), a writer, an artist, a programmer with experience in more than 7 different languages, and a huge video game and anime nerd.
I'm a writer and artist in my free time, and an analyst at work. It's like I was born with all my stats in intelligence, so I pretty much grew up super smart, but without many friends and with a lot of childhood trauma. To get over my loneliness, I began making 'imaginary friends', which spiraled into creating original fictional characters. Later on I began writing comics, and as I fell in love with reading, I began plotting out whole novels. I'm yet unpublished, but I have many, many words under my belt, between original work, OC-insert fanfiction, and I'm learning how to write proper fanfiction as well.
I'm not the kind of weirdo who brags about my high school GPA and SAT scores. I mean, I would if you asked- they were pretty good. But it was in high school that I discovered my passion for statistics and learned my first programming language, C++. (Forgive me for the next part, as I will be redacting a good chunk of it- it would be VERY easy to doxx me based on this information alone) I ended up majoring in [redacted] with a minor in Statistics during COVID. My college classes taught me [redacted], Excel, VBA, Python, and MATLAB, while I learned [redacted] on the side. Now I also know Javascript, CSS, and HTML too! So I'm also something of a programmer. Right now, I work in [redacted] for a [redacted], though I'm not fully [redacted] yet. It's hard and stressful work, but it's rewarding. I may not talk in detail about my job, but I really love it.
One of my other huge passions is gaming and anime. I'll play any game that'll run on my laptop and that I can buy (no-commentary youtube playthroughs my beloved), but by far my favorite genre is mysteries! If you visit my Media I Like page, you'll find that I have like 30 entries on different mystery games, mostly murder mysteries and death games. But I also do have a soft spot for RPGs like Persona, Tales, and whatever colorful fun-times catch the peoples' eyes, like Astro Bot and Hi-Fi Rush. I'm not opposed to enjoying gacha games via streamers either- given the chance, I would never shut up about Honkai Star Rail. I don't watch too much anime these days, but it's almost all shonen anime.
I'm South Asian, and my family's from the area known as Rajasthan. The influence has stayed with me my whole life, though I'll need to see what my relationship with India will be in the future. There's a lot of Indian influence in Lost Gods- a lot of that city was based on the neighborhoods where my grandparents lived.
My gender's a bit complicated. I consider myself cisgender- please use she/her for me.
I've been through a lot. It's not something I'll talk about in detail, but I've been through years of trauma and depression, and I was suicidal for a large part of my life. To fight out of it myself, I had to create worlds where that sort of thing could be accomplished in enticing, exciting ways- and I was already a huge fan of shonen battle anime. As I grew up, I became enamored with dystopias old and new. Currently, I almost entirely specialize in stories about abuse and trauma disguised as action-packed dystopic fiction.
But it's okay. The heroes all get there in the end, and so will I someday.
My Creative Work
My novels and worlds generally revolve around fictional cities that feel familiar enough to imagine oneself living there, yet feel different enough to feel otherworldly. While my works almost always discuss dark themes, at the same time I want people to feel at home in my imagination. Using myself as an example...
- In real life, I'm a financial analyst who loves coffee shops. I might spend my day running simulations on claim incidence, order coffee from a nearby store, and scroll r/politics for news.
- In Rubicon City, the setting of SECRET Agents, I might negotiate exposures and commercial policies for monster attack insurance all day and then chill by the boardwalk at night, just barely missing the sunset.
- In Sancoline, the setting of Lost Gods of the Holy City, I might spend my days analyzing the incidence of desert cancer in immigrants coming from Old America, before ordering some overpriced cactus tea in the Rose District on my way home.
- Or in Stronghold Mars, the setting of The City of Hands, I might be asked to put together a statistical report on the restorative effects of certain magical plants, then spend the night watching the apatosauruses from my window.
But these aren't happy worlds. They're just another universe that could be, with all of its ups and downs.
Other common themes are friendship, queer relationships of all kinds, anti-amatonormativity, overcoming childhood trauma, distrust of authority, suicide and depression, the pains of growing up, the cycle of vengeance, and trying to be a better person today than you were yesterday.
Is it any wonder that many of my stories' villains are angels- beings that represent control and oppression and promise paradise in return for our devotion? I'm sure there are some kinder ones out there, but they aren't the ones that wander through this metaphorical city.
For more specific details on my individual works and my OCs, please check out my Original Characters page. And if you want a small repository of my writing, please check out my Writing page.
About this website
I wanted it to look like my Firefox theme. That's why the 2.0 version looks like a bunch of browser windows.
By the way, when you see a deselected tab, you can click on it! I designed the site to do that, because I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Maybe something funny will happen, like... IDK, something a little scary?
Also, if you don't like the default theme, there's a little thing on the top right that'll let you change it. They're themed after my major stories, so give them a shot!
Hello, friend.
Shhhh, don't freak out. Act natural. She doesn't know I'm here.
You want to know the truth, don't you?