The Characters

Julie is a student teacher who works with second graders and lives somewhere cold. I don't really know that much about her yet.

Elementals are sort of crosses between Platonic ideals and Shinto kami (to the extent that I think I understand either concept). They just sort of hang out across time incarnating whatever it is that they are, as long as their species exists. They have the power to alter the fabric of existence, but they generally don't use it for anything except forging IDs and such. They have various abilities and traits associated with their species, but when talking to Julie they always take on the appearances of humans, for obvious reasons of convenience.

Tim, the Hamster, is the elemental Syrian hamster. He generally finds humans intriguing; having spent millennia as a random Middle-Eastern desert rodent, he's still adjusting to his new identity as worldwide household pet. This curiosity led him to sell himself to a pet shop and see where he ended up, but he discovered that he didn't like being the focus of endless attention by second graders, and ran away. He has a hamster's strong affinity and tolerance for alcohol (if you don't believe me, look it up!), and infinite-capacity pockets. Syrian hamsters are also widely used for laboratory research -- in fact, that's what they were first bred for -- and this probably has some sort of effect on his personality, since he's the sum of world hamsterness. But it's not immediately clear what.

Greg, the Ferret of Inconvenience, is a trickster figure and good friend of the Hamster; they like to play chess and go drinking. (Since ferrets have almost no alcohol tolerance and hamsters have forty times that of a person, I have no idea how this works, but that's their problem.) He generates inconvenience by instinct, and has to make a deliberate effort not to sow confusion wherever he goes. He is quite benevolent, and more sensible in some ways than the hamster, but he instinctively delights in chaos. He tries to keep a rein on it for the sake of those around him, but it takes a lot of effort.

Eveline is an elemental Middle-Eastern snake and natural predator of the hamster in his native environment. She is still quite local, and is somewhat put-out that after all these millennia he's now so hard to get a hold of. Occasionally she ventures out from Syria to stalk him globally -- he owes her a variety of meals as a result of her beating him at a series of board games, and is trying to avoid having to pay up because he doesn't want to admit to losing. She is extremely fond of French culture and amused by human mythological ideas about snakes, and cultivates a human persona built around these two factors. She enjoys being casually menacing in a femme-fatale sort of way, but she knows it's impossible to actually hurt another elemental and is thus too smart to try. Besides, she's really quite fond of Tim, for all that she enjoys watching him squirm.