Amelia has died before. Betrayal comes first – she can't remember what happens second. Impaled, maybe. Decapitated. Split down the center. In the end, the methods don't exactly matter, seeing as they all lead to her innocent little body bleeding out, tossed to the ground like a ripped rag doll. She stands today only because she had a greater destiny in her session, a mythical slab of rock she died upon that granted her life anew, and with her rebirth comes powers anew granted only to the children (un)fortunate enough to play their session of SBURB. She is a Maid of Breath, one of sixty four unique combinations of titles and aspects that define a person's god tier, as well as the powers that they, and only they are bestowed with.

Maids in their sessions are natural creators, both in and outside of their aspect. They are capable of creating their aspect – a maid of hope, for example, is able to instill, or “create” hope in her allies – as well as creating through their aspect – the aforementioned maid of hope able to create physical objects, new paths in the road, and the like by instilling hope in others. They go about this actively, their actions directly causing the creation of or through, and are known to be quite hands on in their work. Breath, the aspect, deals less with the oxygen that floods into the lungs and the carbon dioxide that flows out, but rather the winds and such currents. It also functions as a metaphor of freedom and individuality, both concepts also falling under the manipulation of the title. Breath players are characterized by their ability to manipulate wind from something as small as causing someone to breathe in and out to creating an army of tornadoes to reign windy destruction upon foes. They are also usually the most free-spirited of the group, and while they may not always start as an escaped jailbird, they certainly take up the role by the end of the session.

As a Maid of Breath, Amelia is capable of creating wind where there would not be wind otherwise. This can be used to push a sail on a windless day, spin wind turbines, or craft those aforementioned tornadoes. Others of this aspect are only capable of manipulating what is already there – she, however, can bring it into being when it is not, and add onto preexisting currents. Furthermore, she can “create freedom,” the most likely candidate to break someone free of captivity or pep talk a person out of their mental bounds, whether she's really trying to or not. Perhaps the most useful of her abilities, however – yes, even more so that getting to blast a person away with a sudden gust of air or saving a choking person's life by filling their lungs with her powers – is that she, like, all others who have attained their god tier status, is granted selective immortality. This is not to say that she is eternally young and can never be killed; far from it, in fact! She still ages as a normal human does, and likely will die of old age. However, outside of age, very few things are capable of putting an end to her life, things such as illness and accident leaving her stilled for only a handful of minutes before she's brought back fresh and new. God tiers can only die if their deaths are just or heroic, meaning that, even should she be stabbed one hundred times through the chest, she will only stay dead if her death was necessary for a greater fate, or if it was sacrificial for a righteous cause. If she were to, say, take a more villainous path, or planned to do something that would hurt a great number of people, should she die, the death would be considered just. If she takes a blow to spare another's life, or trades their life for her own, either would be considered heroic. Outside of those boundaries, however, the number of times she is knocked down matters not – she will always come back spik, span, and happy as ever.

Your earliest memories of your mother come in the form of eloquent letters mailed from states away, promises of reunion and confessions of her love for you. Age has not been kind to your past, your life too young to properly recall her gentle face before demanding work dictated that she send you away to someone who could provide for you what she never could. It's difficult to resent her for her absence, as much because you aren't exactly capable of the emotion yet as because you know she tries very hard for you, far away or no. All the letters tell you this, anyway, as does the aunt that has taken over as your legal guardian where her sister simply could not. (Don't ask where Papa's gone off to – don't ask where Papa's gone off to.) So you cling to your letters, letting them pile up in the corner of your otherwise spotless room, and try not to think that your childhood is much different than anyone else's. You have a loving parental figure, after all, a sprawling mansion to serve as your never-ending play palace, and more maids than you can count on your little fingers to keep you in constant company. Still, as the world tells you is normal, you crave the company of those your age, particularly ones that aren't being specifically hired to clean up after your clumsy spills, and where the classmates at your school fail to keep up with your hurricane of energy, your computer quickly proves to pick up on the slack.

You find Pesterchum through chance, and then your friends through greater chance still. (Time will inform you that nothing in your life is chance – this application, these meetings were all the beginning of a greater destiny. Now, though, chance is a large enough concept for your tiny little mind.) Each of them is so different, few of them your age, but they become your escape, and you become their panda-loving companion from miles and miles away. Perhaps you liken them a bit to Mama in that sense; so much distance, yet so much love. Few are the number of things you would not do for them, so when Kimiko (the sweetest, the smartest, your undeniable favorite from the beginning) tells you that they all plan to play the newest game together, despite your incompetence in regards to the gaming world, you beg and plea until the disc arrives in your mailbox some weeks later.

If any of you had known what that game would have brought upon the world, none of you would be so cruel as to pick it up at all.


They call you the maid, but that's wrong, because the maids wear aprons and clean the home, and you're much to young to do anything of the sort yet. With trusty frying pan in hand, you trek across the strange new world your game has taken you to – subtle, quiet, filled with friendly blue turtles who like to name you funny things – and duck for cover each time its “Denizen,” the fearsome Atlas, swoops down overhead to pluck one of your many new amphibious friends from the ground, leaving nothing but a flurry of massive feathers in his wake. Kimiko tells you that it's part of your quest, and that you, like the eleven others, must complete it if you ever want to see Earth again. Atlas if awfully big, though, and your frying pan is only as useful as the omelets it makes are delicious, so rather than toiling over the task of slaying the giant and saving the planet, you dawdle and play, amassing enough of the game's wealth to rival – exceed – that which your mother and aunt had had in a world that now seems so far away. (A world that has perished because of you and your friend's collective ignorance.)

Echeladders, sprites, and Genesis Frogs. The others consult their Kernelsprites and their bizarre powers, mere whispers of what they may one day hope to achieve through game constructs, and slowly but surely do they learn of the path they must take to topple the virtual world turned reality and make it back to a home like the one they have left behind. Imps, basilisks, giclopses; from one day to the next, it feels, your cooking utensil has become a weapon of mass destruction, and its on shoes as light and swift as the wind that you tears through your planet and her enemies. Your bird, too, proves to be little of a threat: nothing but a misunderstood monster who needs nothing but a lively voice to free him from a terribly stubborn bout of insanity. A voice that belongs to you and to you alone. He preaches to you The Choice, but you shrug it off with all of the childish ignorance that defines you as a unique player of the game, and off to scamper, Land of Feathers and Peace long forgotten as you rendezvous with the other members of your party of a dozen. There are monsters to battle and challenges to conquer – none of which any of you can do alone – and it is with only the best of friends by your side that you, along with all the others, begin preparation for putting an end to this colorful nightmare.

(You will see Mama soon.)


Liam is your friend. You've spoken to him thousands of times, shared so many stories with him, consoled him with the reminder of pandas and sugar sweet candies more times than a girl of your age and mindset should ever be spoken to about such things – and he is your friend. The only problem that is posed is that all of the others don't quite seem to think so, particularly when another one of your dearest friends is found dead on his planet, the murderer supposedly clear. Such is a Prince of Life: the destroyer of like. He takes one more soul, and then another before they finally catch up with him, but it is not without a fight that he goes down. One, two – no, three more corpses before he falls to join them, and in the wake of the battle, you all find that half of your original number still remains. Six of you left to face your demons alone; worst, still, is that one of the handful that fell in the end was your space player, and while you, yourself, are consoled a bit by the fact that Kimiko was not one of the fallen, the others mourn the loss of their friend... and, by extension, your session. SBURB needs a space player in order to reach its conclusion, players of the time and space aspects critical to the ultimate goal of creating a new universe in a sort of universal recycling process. Kimiko serves as time, but without the latter, it suddenly becomes impossible to win. Somewhere out there in paradox space, strangers with the same names, faces, personalities, and histories as you and your allies are off fighting their own battles, destined to win their session and see it through to completion. You, however, have found yourself in a doomed timeline.

One of the survivors takes their own life in a mixture of fear for all of your ultimate demise and agony over so much death in so little time. Another falls to the hands of a hoard of enemies too great to take on alone, and your numbers have dwindled to a tiny four before the swarm of imps and their crueler masters fall to your high tier weapons. Up until this point, everything had all gone so fast out here in the Medium, but without any idea or method to create the Genesis Frog, the rest of you are left to wander aimlessly across the planets, knowing painfully well that one of them will serve to be your grave. Your coping method is to pretend that none of this has ever really happened, and its easy once you get into the habit of pretending that the planet hoping is a massive game of hide-and-seek. They're out there somewhere just waiting to jump out shouting “Surprise!” - you just know it. (Deeper down, you know that you don't.)

There is no release from a doomed time line; no freedom to be had. (But that never stopped you.)


They call you an orphan in Sanctum City, shuffling you and Kimiko to the place where all children without parents go (as you quickly come to learn, there are many, many others in the same situation), and for the first time since you began your game and just barely dodged the meteor hurdling toward Earth in time, it dawns on you that your parents, your aunt, and every single maid back home are gone. Forever, now. There had been hope that a new universe would bring with it a new mother, the sort who would have time to be around, or a new father, the sort who made himself out to be less of an enigma. No universe was created in your session, though, and you and your closest friend have once again split your party in two by being sucked away from the doomed time line and spat out in a world where the dangerous SBURB never even existed. You have no living parents now, and you never will. Your friends, too, are all dead, or will be soon. You've abandoned them.

Not if you tell yourself otherwise.

Migrants like you, the administration say, come from all sorts of times and places; some from the past, some from the future, some from other worlds, some who can't remember where they are at all like poor Overseer Godfrey. Some from different copies of the same place. Kimiko had once said that there were hundreds and hundreds of failed realities like their own, mirror images of the alpha time line that could never bear fruit like it did. It's certainly possible that copies of the ten remaining friends that you had known and love will arrive in the city from one of those many offshoots, just as you have. Perhaps, even, they already have! The city is a massive place, especially in the eyes of a small girl, and you ground yourself to the idea that, if only you just keep searching, you'll find them again. It's only, as they say, a matter of time.

She, at one time, had amassed a collection of pricey stuffed animals that covered a good portion of her room back at home – which, mind you, as a bedroom in what could easily be classified as a bedroom, was quite the spacious room. Seeing as all of them were lost upon her meteor's collision with Earth, however, she's had to start from scratch; as of now, the only plush she has to her name is a white bird, alchemized shortly after befriending her planet's denizen and appropriately named Atlas after him. It isn't nearly as accurate in size as it is to... well, everything else appearance wise, but it's doubtful that they would let a stuffed animal of that size into the orphanage.

She constantly uses her ability to create and manipulate the wind to play tiny, harmless pranks on others. At the same time, she knows who will and will not take it good naturedly, and tries very hard not to blast air at someone who will be upset because of it.

She's got a knack for disappearing from her room and wandering the halls at night passed curfew, if not finding herself outside of the bounds altogether. They attribute it to her manipulation of freedom – she calls it sleep walking.

Pandas are the best, and she will fight you to the death over that.

Beaches and the ocean are the worst, and she would fight you to the death over that, too, but all you'd need to win is to put her near one. An unexplained phobia of her's, really – no one, not even herself, can explain why she gets the chills every time she seas the ocean waves lapping up against the shore. Not that the jellyfish the shallow waters sometimes carry help much at all.

Amelia is a naturally artistic person. While part of this is simply because she's more fond of the arts than academics or physical activity, her role as a creator has greatly influenced her need to create things outside of the wind and the ideas that come hand in hand with it. She's incredibly gifted at it, as well; not a master painter yet by any means, but had things played out a little differently (no SBURB, for example, and no Sanctum), she likely would have been an artist upon growing up.

Kimiko Mikami is the bomb.com. 'Nough said.

LAST APP: sammy

ACCOUNT: @amelia

CLAIMS: "Mei/Rosa" from "Pokemon"

ART CREDIT: namie on tumblr