Janice is a tough, punked-out girl, who won’t take crap from anyone. Her hair is thick, black, and sticks out in all directions, and her face is white from the makeup she wears. She has always been interested in witches, black magic and anything supernatural. Whatever the situation, being an outsider herself, she identifies with other outsiders. She is an only child.
Janice is not an ungifted child, in fact she is very sharp, but she is frustrated by the fact that little of what she learns in school seems to have any use in real life. There are far more important things to do than sit with your nose buried in schoolbooks.
Consequently, Janice has been expelled from seven different schools. The first few times it was mainly just bad luck, but later on this stubborn, feisty girl began to enjoy seeing how quickly she could get thrown out of each new school she attended. Janice is engaged in a never-ending war against school and the adult world in general. At her last school the chemistry lab burned down after she decided to conduct her own experiment instead of the one in the book. In fact, it was the Principal of her last school who first suggested that she be sent to boarding school.
Janice’s parents have never really understood her, and have always mistaken her energetic individualism and bold curiosity for insolence and lack of respect. They tried to discipline her, but soon found that the more they attempted to control her, the more unruly she became, until they had to admit they had no idea how to handle her and sent her off to boarding school.
On the way to Creepschool, Janice is determined to get thrown out as fast as possible, but Creepschool isn’t like other schools. Pretty soon she realizes that aspects of Creepschool’s world are more to her taste than the world outside. She’s eager to try her hand at witchery whenever she gets the chance, and even when she doesn’t, she goes ahead anyway. But at Creepschool magic is no game...
Janice is stubborn and has a virtually inexhaustible supply of energy. If she is seized by an idea or has a goal she wants to achieve, nothing will stop her until she’s done what she set out to do. But she has no time to waste being sly and manipulative – you’re either with her, or you can go to hell. She hates to be dependent on others as trust is not something that comes easily to her. On the other hand, if she ever makes you a promise, she’ll never break it, and you better watch out if you ever break a promise you made to her. Though Janice is not someone who is quick to let people get close to her, she quickly finds a friend in Tony, the school cook.
Victoria was sent off to boarding school for the simple reason that her career-obsessed parents needed to get her out of the way when they moved to Singapore on a job. Victoria’s father is a business lawyer and her mother is a television journalist for CMM, currently covering Southeast Asia. Victoria is used to being in the company of rich, influential people. She knows a lot about formal stuff like etiquette, e.g. what all the various knives and forks are for at dinner party; the difference between a cocktail dress and an evening gown; when you can or cannot wear white shoes etc, none of which are of much use at Creepschool. But that doesn’t stop her scoffing in disbelief at the fact that her friends don’t know any better.
Victoria has always gotten anything she wants, mainly because her parents wanted to keep her out of the way. Consequently, her need for attention from her parents is always met with yet another expensive toy she doesn’t need. If anything has been missing in Victoria’s life it has been parents who have the time to take her to the movies or an ice cream parlour, or simply to play silly board games with her at home while munching on chips.
Victoria is lazy and whiny and can’t really fend for herself. It’s not that she’s stupid exactly, more that she’s just never had to deal with practical matters and isn’t particularly interested in learning new things. She’s used to getting what she wants when she wants it and being treated with deference and respect - even though there’s very little about her that would elicit much respect. In short, she is a spoiled, upper-class whiner: self-centered, vain, with little empathy. What is important, however, is that this not be interpreted as her being predominantly a bitchy character. She’s more of a complainer than a bitch.
Josh is good-looking and is the most agile and coordinated of the kids. However, he can sometimes appear clumsy, but that is simply because he can get so excited and caught up in what he’s doing at that moment that he doesn’t think things through and becomes oblivious to whatever is going on around him. His unflappable enthusiasm also means that he has a tendency to exaggerate, which can sometimes get out of hand, e.g. he may fib to cover an exaggeration, and then end up lying to cover the fib, until the problem becomes much bigger than it was at the start. As a result, Josh often inadvertently gets himself into deep trouble over what starts out as a relatively harmless blunder. This has caused endless grief to his father, a policeman, who has always felt this to be an indication of his son’s budding delinquency. It was following a particularly embarrassing incident that his parents finally decided to send him to boarding school. His mother is a nurse and he has three older sisters (triplets).
Josh loves anything connected with sports or physical activity and hates to sit still. If he is forced to for very long, e.g. in class, he quickly becomes bored. He is happy, polite and helpful, even if he can be a little self-centered sometimes. He also has a kind of naive self-confidence that is virtually impossible to shake. He is the kind of guy who can march right into a situation he knows nothing about and cheerfully exclaim, ”alright then, let’s get started”, as if everyone was waiting around for him to come along and sort things out. Even if they resent his interference, Josh is completely oblivious.
Whenever Josh finds himself in a discussion of a more intellectual nature, however, he quickly finds that things are moving a little too fast for him, and his attempts to take part can often have comical results. If someone laughs at him, Josh laughs along happily in the belief that he said something clever. The fact is, it’s difficult to dislike Josh, even if his stupidity can sometimes make you cringe. He is far too cheerful and well meaning for anyone to lose their temper with him very often.
Josh is not exactly brave, more like too oblivious and enthusiastic to be afraid. He never hesitates when entering even the darkest passageways at Creepschool, and has no problems taking on most, though by no means all, the alternative creatures that crawl out from the depths of the dungeons at Creepschool. After an initial period of getting used to things, Josh has come to really like Creepschool. He is worried that his parents might get the idea that it’s time to change schools again.
Elliot is a very bright kid. He’s used to getting straight A’s in all subjects - before he came to Creepschool it was not unusual for him to know more than his teachers. He enjoys all kinds of intellectual challenges, even if his main areas of interest are biology and logic. However, he is not a dry, professor type, condescendingly spouting esoteric kernels of knowledge no one else is interested in. Rather he is a sensitive boy who is a real thinker, who considers problems and tackles them using his mind rather than his muscle.
Elliot is very curious about anything new – at least if it qualifies as knowledge. Socially he is not very assertive, but he cannot keep quiet when he hears someone making mistakes or uttering fallacies. He comes from a very average middleclass family. His father has a shop that sells electrical appliances and his mother works in the personnel department at a local government office. Both of them were just as surprised that they ended up with such a gifted son. (Elliot’s two younger sisters show no signs of possessing any remarkable talents at all.)
Being the only gifted member of the family, Elliot has always been under a lot of pressure from his parents to do well at school. They pushed him to scholastic feats without consideration for his personal hopes and desires. It was when his old school could no longer offer him the intensity of instruction his parents wanted for him, that they decided it was time to send him off to boarding school.
Very soon Elliot realized that Creepschool was the place for him – far more challenging than any of his previous schools and free from his parents interfering pressure. If he had any doubts at all about staying at Creepschool, those were swept from his mind the moment he met Janice. Of course, this means that Elliot is hard pressed when he writes home to convince his parents that this school is just what they wanted for him.
Though his friends are not the most knowledgeable group of kids around, Elliot complements them well and they enjoy having him around, even if they do think him a bit of a nerd. Whenever he is faced with monsters or supernatural forces, he tends to try and deal with them logically.
Sometimes he heads off on his own to the graveyard to discuss some philosophical problem with Master, or just to play a game of chess. Master gets Elliot interested in poetry and helps him draw out a more emotional, artistic side to his character and loosen up his natural stiffness.
Elsa is already at Creepschool when our four A-characters arrive. She is a very small, pale and timid creature who is also very generous and warm-hearted. Virtually human in her appearance, she occupies a kind of middle ground, an interface between the monster and the human worlds, and quickly becomes an essential friend to the kids, helping them to understand how life at Creepschool works. Occasionally, however, her long tongue shoots out to snag a fly making it clear that there is much more to Elsa than meets the eye.
Bob the Demon Dog is her constant companion.