Cottagegore: everything outwardly looks the same as cottagecore but here and there things are just a little. bit. off.

The jars of homemade preserves in the pantry include one labeled BLOOD JELLY O+

You wear a white linen dress, a pinafore apron, a hair ribbon, and a modest yet becoming golden neck chain bearing your collection of human molars strung upon it.

There are dried bat's hearts in your desk alongside the antique fountain pens, for the making of inks to write letters to your granny and your sweetheart.

No one knows what the secret ingredient in your special cottage pie is, but all know that it is irresistible even if it sometimes brings strange, suffocating dreams later.

The flowers in your garden are brilliantly colored, vivid and almost unnaturally beautiful. You fertilize them with bone meal, which you don't buy from a gardening shop, even though your supply seems endless.

You enjoy going into the woods to forage for berries and mushrooms, and if someone overhears you murmuring to the trees in a sibilant, unknown tongue, or being answered back, no one thinks twice about it. You're so wholesome, after all.

You hand-mix a special tea for friends who want to improve their singing and speaking voices, and you're coy about its specific components. It tastes delicious so no one minds, or notices that the cicadas' breeding season seemed unusually brief this year.

When you go into the village church for a wedding or christening, you wear a pretty, beribboned bonnet -- out of modesty and respect, you say. This no one sees your sclera go black momentarily when certain holy names are invoked.

Your front parlor is decorated with soft cushions, hand-crocheted afghans, vases of those bright flowers, and a handsome braided rag rug which conveniently hides the trap door which leads down into the tunnels far below the village.

Would-be suitors are gently but firmly rebuffed; the more persistent ones all leave town eventually as one of their relatives after another falls mysteriously sick. Before they go, you kindly furnish them with a hearty sack lunch for the long train ride home.

The fireflies' glow is oddly multi-hued around your dwelling, for reasons that no one understands but has accepted as part of your unique charm.

The village elders sometimes stare off into the distance and recall how your great-aunt once lived in that very same house long ago when they were children. You look quite a bit like her, almost uncannily so, down to the scar on your neck from, they say, a harvesting accident.

When you are away from home, some curious local children sneak into your front room looking for some of your delicious lemon cookies to steal. They find your sewing basket, carelessly left open.

In it are the usual items: pins, needles, spools of colored thread, odd buttons of wood and mother-of-pearl and bone, a seam ripper, tiny crane-handled scissors, larger utility scissors, a threader, a metal thimble, and an older one that's made of...ivory? It's hard to tell.

When you come home and surprise them in the act of rifling in your pantry, you only laugh and supply them with some cookies before shooing them out. Pausing, you find your open sewing basket and absently pick up the old thimble.

You slip it over your index finger, marveling at how well it still fits after all this time. But why shouldn't it? It was made for you by your great-uncle from his own father's second knuckle bone, and you happen to take after the non-troll side of the family.

/end

Muting this thread now because of notifications. I didn't expect anyone to actually like it, heh.