Dulls vs. Extras

Remember when I talked about how my world building was basically trash in Crossed Souls? I’ve had to do a lot of exploring of the world in my head to figure out all sorts of little details of Willa and the guys’ environment to change while I’m doing rewrites.

One of the things that kept coming up was the question do the humans know supernaturals exist?

I went back and forth, but ultimately I wanted them to know of each others’ existence, at least on a basic level. The humans don’t know about all supernaturals or all powers, but they know people who have powers that mere mortals don’t exist.

But then this created a whole other issue. What do I call each side? Humans? Mortals? Supernaturals?

So many things had been done before, and I had a discussion with my 11-year-old because they read a lot of fantasy which was helpful in fleshing out what I didn’t want to call them.

Ultimately, I decided on Dulls and Extras. Dulls for the non-magic/non-supernatural humans because the Supes find them horribly “dull.” They don’t have powers and they’re not really worth interacting with because of it.

For the supernaturals, they go by “Extras” because they’ve got all the human pieces but with all sorts of extras sprinkled in. They’re “extraordinary,” hence “extras.”

So, if you re-read the updated Crossed Souls, or skip it but end up reading Bound Souls, you’ll see these terms quite a bit throughout the series, and now you know what they mean.