Yep. A short horror story written by a 14-year old. If you want to subject yourself to it and pass judgment,
The old car rattled down the barren dirt road. Its headlights were the only pinpricks of light for miles; the farmhouses didn't start until the next county over. The moon was non-existant. The two occupants of the car constantly looked over their shoulders, searching for other pinpricks in the sea behind them. They were a few miles away from the county lines. Then their pursuers couldn't follow.
Philip Garret sat in the back, watching over the old potato sacks now holding his retirement.
He was short and stocky, almost bald despite his youth. Philip clenched his sub-machine gun tighter. He had seen something in the window.
?Timothy? Tim! I think I there are bats out there. This road is unmapped... right? There might be a... cave or... something nearby. It almost sounds like claws on the windows.?
?Quit,? Philip's taller brother snapped. ?Those country sheriffs can't cross the state lines. Soon, we'll...? The car begin to swerve. ?Son of a...?
As he was speaking, Timothy had hit a pothole. Not surprising. This road was even more rocky then most, almost like riding a horse.
The car coughed and spluttered, then finally died. A boat with no oars. Timothy scrambled from the car, knelt, and checked the tire. Somehow, the pothole managed to tear out the entire axle. Time to walk.
As he looked around, Timothy saw something worse. The car sat in the middle of a prairie dog town. Tim could have sworn they were flying down the road a minute ago. Now they were waist-deep in desert shrubs.
Philip peeked out the window with a flickering flashlight. He was almost crying. ?Well what now? We're sunk, sunk, sunk! The sheriff will find us, drag us in for those two bodies, then we're really done for! You said we were gonna be kings after this job. We sure will be sitting on thrones, but these will be lighting up!?
?Quiet...? Timothy muttered. ?If we're anywhere near the road, a stopped car could hear you. Turn off the headlights and grab the bags. We're hoofing it. Find a place to hide, then wait for morning.?
Philip was still sniveling, but did as Tim asked. Philip passed the heavier one to his brother before setting off with him. Behind them, the car crackled as the engine cooled in the moonless night.
Nothing existed but the brothers and the guns they carried. They were totally alone. The night pressed around them on all sides. Dead cold pierced their bones. No light, as their flashlights had been dropped like the sacks were after what seemed like the first day of walking.
The pair marched silently and like machines , never pausing except for the occasional stumble over the skulls that replaced rocks just before their flashlights had been abandoned. Philip and Timothy marched on their bleeding, sore feet. They walked in hope of feeling light on their faces again, though dawn never came. Most of all, though, Philip and Timothy Garret walked to keep ahead of whatever they heard skittering just behind them.
?Philip? Hear that?? Timothy rasped. ?I hear... tom-toms. Musta' found a reservation. I can hear em' singing. And look, a fire! Don't you see them dancing??
Philip heard and saw. He heard the tom-toms over the screaming. He saw the dancing figures twist into ovals, circles, and into shapes he couldn't even describe. He heard the skittering grow louder then ever as they plodded closer to the fire. He saw something else terrifying, more terrifying then anything else. The dancers going to all fours, sixes, and eights, and crawling off into the blackness.
Philip shuddered. ?No. Nonononono! I'm not going there!?
Timothy did not stop.
?Did you hear me, Tim? I'm not going!?
Still no stop.
?I will not go, damn you Timothy!? Philip was vaugly aware of his Thompson gun being raised, the weapon he has half forgotten. Philip did not feel himself pulling the trigger and firing wildly in the direction of his brother. He only realized what had happened when the clip was empty and his brother was slumped against his legs. Lifeless. He most definitely registered the blind terror as he saw the dancers freeze and the fire go out. No more skittering. Only total darkness, total silence. A wall around him.
The horrible sound returned. But now it was a wave, a wave rushing to swallow him.
Philip let out a single, choked cry. Even that was stolen and devoured by the things that massed just beyond the reaches of light.
It's a horrible ripoff of Lovecraft, I think. Also, my font is acting up. Commas may be replaced by question marks.
I've been drawing a webcomic [http://www.webcomicsnation.com/davie/sorrelandartichoke/series.php] for the past few months. It's a sort of mashup of fantasy and steampunk and it's populated with really whatever nonsense pops into my head.
The protagonist is named Sorrel, a laid-back and very inept wizard who works in a tavern (which is mounted on a jet engine with a pair of wings and flies about--quite the tourist attraction) due to his complete lack of skill at sorcery. One day he's kidnapped by a sociopathic, scarred-up mercenary woman who sees him light a cigar with magic and concludes that he must be a powerful spellcaster. Sorrel is very unwillingly conscripted into helping the mercenary, Artichoke, track down some sort of artifact for a client.
I intend it to be a sort of semi-humorous, semi-serious deconstruction of fantasy tropes as well as an outlet for all the weird shit that I come up with. So there will be robots styled after London gangsters, nuclear potato farmers, saxophone-playing dragons, and scholarly zombies, among other things. I'm terrible at keeping a schedule, so it's progressing rather slowly, but I usually manage a page or two a month. When I get up to a hundred pages or so I'm going to bind it into a book and peddle it at the local comics convention...
Besides doing this in D&D and every video game I play...
I write Star Wars and Warhammer 40,000 short stories. And they are always very well received, which encourages me to write even more! In fact, I have decided that if art doesn't work out for me, I'm going to try writing.
Also, I've won more than a few poetry contests, and even have some of my stuff published in actual books you can get at some bookstores. Look for Poetry Collections.
Nah, I'm not really frustrated with your story at all. If the characters or a few of them are somewhat likable (and given the size of the cast, you should be able to pull that off) and the writing style itself is solid[footnote]Heh, made you look[/footnote], it should be an interesting read. Nothing I'd mark as the coming of Jesus (yet), but hey, Eragon bored the shit out me with such effectiveness I couldn't bring myself to read through it and it got its own movie.
I hereby remind you to write a paragraph about each of your characters tho.
Charisma said:
I think in terms of Metallica if James Hetfield were a badass archmage commanding enormous powers.
I can't help but think this is Author Appeal [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AuthorAppeal] at its finest. Maybe I keep connecting the idea with negative stuff because the last time I read about a magic band, it was in My Immortal [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/FanFic/MyImmortal?from=Main.MyImmortal]. A horrible, horrible Fanfic.
Charisma said:
They]
Sorry, but this almost made me laugh. I keep thinking of Lordi [http://archiv.backstage.eu/presse_files/24/Lordi.jpg]-Levels of Narm [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Narm]. But Your Mileage May Vary [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YourMileageMayVary]. Christ [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/Christianity] I'm using [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MyGodWhatHaveIDone?from=Main.WhatHaveIDone] a lot of TV Tropes links [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TVTropesWillRuinYourLife] today. [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AllBlueEntry]
I don't think introducing Mundane Magic is going to rise the immersion factor. If anything I think it could crate an Uncanny Valley of some sorts, at least I had such moments when I read through the Weasley's House and even more so when I saw it in the movie. On the other hand I abandoned Harry Potter around Book 5 because I found it flat-out boring and repetitive, so yeah, if you set that as a goal I might not be the perfect person to exchange ideas with concerning this specific part of the story.
I think people are already much more used to seeing wizards throwing fireballs around. It's gotten as standard as about everything Tolkien brought us. It's actually sad, in a way. People took lots of pages from Tolkien, especially from his race definitions, so much that BioWare attempted on revising the fantasy genre in a dark horror game called "Dragon Age: Origins". What we got in the end was just another fantasy game, everything still the same. But I digress. BioWare isn't exactly my choice when it comes to interactive storytelling anyway.
Lack of Charisma said:
Magehammer impresses their crowds with magic. They are unique among musicians because they were the first to do it.
Most people are vaguely aware that magic is bigger and more significant than just powering the devices of convenience and entertainment scattered around their homes, but besides various comic books and movies and such, there's no evidence of it being that big a deal.
Come to think of it, why did the "awesome" part of magic just cease to exist? Is the nation the story takes place cursed with peace [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CursedWithAwesome] so wizards couldn't engage in lightshow battles?
The power of enhancing inanimate objects? Awesome. The Superstone 500.
"The electric dialect of pyromancy" will certainly make the necks of some physicists snap as heat and electricity are two very different things, haha.
If art was a mirror, it would be pretty bland in my opinion, it would only show us what we already know and can see. Art shows us the unseen, explores the aspects of human nature and also shows us something about the author. So yeah, art is nothing like a mirror for me, sorry, lol.
Historically, I want it to have been a fairly new and scary concept that there was a device which allowed anyone, with or without training, to pick it up and kill someone at high range. That way, it's a very easy transition to partially blaming the cataclysm on the gun.
Again, I believe it's more complicated than that. The safety measures alone are pretty complicated both for user and manufacturer. Also take in mind that you probably won't come around ammo shops that often if guns are both new and not accepted in Tome. If we're talking about old technology, we're probably also talking about black powder and projectile as two different things. Cleaning as an issue in ye olden times, too, you were actually capable of breaking your gun or at least jam in if you didn't clean in properly. That was when people were still experimenting how much black powder was the right amount, too. It's tough to fill in the right amount of black powder in battle, too.
Guns today have high range and good accuracy, guns in the old days not so much. But like I said, reloading was probably the biggest issue. I think Napoleon's armies used to fire once and then send in infantry because reloading took a veeery long time. In addition, old guns were very loud, didn't have any silencers and ejected big amounts of smoke, too, so you can't be stealthy with them, either.
Karive is definitely the type to leave things vague by utilizing language and an absence of visual orientation. In fact the first time he makes an appearance it's in a dream-like state, everything in darkness, his presence being marked by a chilling coldness and an inhuman voice neither male no female. As he later shapes a body and name specifically to "fit" Kharseth/the first protagonist, I'll probably let him shape anew for Talitha, starting out as vague and increasingly becoming an embodiment of fear as he gets to know her and her fears better.
For some reason I'm itching to write this now, it sounds so cool in my head, haha.
I wonder how much I should reveal to the reader. I always want to hint a bit so when something is revealed they can look back and say "Oh, right, I almost forgot about that. Wow, neat!". My first thought was to make the readers witness how Karive implements the memory into Talitha so that she becomes a ticking timebomb and the readers are already awaiting a breakdown with tension.
But I think it would actually be better to just write about Karive doing *something* to her. It could still make for some tension and curiosity as to what exactly happening/he did to her, knowing Karive being the bastard he is it probably won't be anything good. Later on as I think I'll start letting him break down Talitha, she'll show the readers through Kharseth's perspective that she's experiencing certain "symptoms" like you already described them. Shaking, nervousness, insomnia, red face, nausea, increasing body temperature, attack of sweating, circulatory shock, I don't know how far I'll go, but I'm wiling to go far. Just not stuff like groaning or screaming, that would go against her inclusive type and probably has a lot of narm potential, too. Psyche is capable of doing some serious shit[footnote]Funny note: When I wrote the scene where Kharseth's right arm is torn to pieces, I actually experienced pain in my right shoulder and it didn't cease for a week or so. Extra creepiness points as Kharseth is an attempt on writing a serious Author Avatar (hybrid) which makes for some nice identity crises, among other things.[/footnote].
I'm afraid of reaching the blandness level of soaps with it, but I'm actually thinking about giving her a heart attack to top things off. Not lethal, but a big exclamation mark. Either through Kharseth's perspective so the readers worry alongside with him and can only see the symptoms, they don't know what's going on inside of Talitha, which would underline how she keeps everything a secret from others, or maybe through her perspective to make the moment more climactic and maybe more dramatic as I can combine it with her feelings and hallucinations.
After that, eventually, there would be a hospital scene where she can't deny anymore that something's wrong with her and she can't exactly evade questions either by walking out of the room.
I'm also thinking about after effects. Not any more heart attacks tho, that would rob the scene of its unique value. Like I mentioned before in a paragraph on deviantART (I think), Talitha has weak eyes, which is however due to genetic malfunction, not because of intense book-reading. Making her go blind when exposed to serious mental stress again (not permanently - her eyes are too pretty for that ) could serve for a number of interesting things:
- Humanoids rely a lot on eyesight. Going blind is a serious handicap that can weaken somebody a great deal. It could force Talitha to start relying on others, which would be a big step in her character development.
- on the other hand, if you see eight swordsmen before you that want to kick your ass, you just know the blind one is going to be the biggest badass. He'll probably fight you with just a wooden sword, too, but finish you off before the others have finishing drawing their swords. In a similar vein, losing eyesight can actually be a great way for mages to improve their abilities. I kid you not. Exactly because humanoids rely a lot on eyesight, it's hard to concentrate on other senses while you can still see. That's why meditation and concentration almost always includes closing one's eyes. If you're told to imagine something, you'll be asked to close your eyes. You're not asked to seal your ears or something. Imagination and magic actually has a lot in common, so it's even closer to the examples I just told you. Concentrating on and sharpening one's "sixth sense" to deal with magic will actually be a lot easier if you can't see. It'll also eventually allow you to do actions without relying on eyesight, like lots of badass real life people can go through a day and mainly find orientation with their ears. With the magic sense of course you don't need to exclusively rely on ears, but you get the idea. As Talitha is also the trio's strong point of magic, so any further development in that regard would fit.
- Eyes glowing through a blindfold has got to be awesome. Ain't I right, Illidan? Yes, I am. Stop complaining. You got badass tattoos that time, too. No, I don't care if you got looted by adventurers. No, you can't be whiny AND a prodigy nightelf/demon hybrid. Rule of Cool forbids it.
Well, as long as you don't take the BioWare route of implementing backstory (sorry, I'm ripping a lot on them today), i.e. stuffing it into a book and just writing an archeologist's report for 4 pages or so, you should be fine. If you're eager to tell the story surrounding the Celestials, maybe you can show the characters a ruin they explore or maybe when talking to a priest he'll mention them in a sentence and because the characters are curious they'll ask a bit more about it. Then the priest could either give them a brief explanation or give them a brief explanation followed by the attempt on going into detail, but he's interrupted by one of the characters that stops him either politely or with the words "shuddup old man, my time's precious". That could hint that there's more to the Celestials, but also that it's irrelevant to the story.
Charisma said:
Wizards aren't granted their powers by the Spectacled One. She created a system, then taught that system to wizards so they could cut out Gods completely.
Well okay, so she didn't make a screwdriver, but she told them the blueprint on how to make screwdrivers. It leads to the same thing, without her we wouldn't have screwdrivers and they still indirectly come from her.
Charisma said:
A God can't be killed by any normal means because their knowledge of magic is such that their very soul can create a new body from stray atoms almost instantly.
Because the world is full of naivety and people who have nothing to lose. Come on, I bet you've heard at least once in a story that a child begs their parent to join them in battle and that they're not afraid of anything. Naturally the parent refuses and naturally the child sneaks into the mess anyway, probably finding the plot on the way. Not sure if that's even a trope, but I've seen it a lot of times.
Stupid Ashbringer with +60% chance of attracting tragedy to people nearby.
Ah, I wasn't talking about thieves, I was talking about burglars. Maybe I chose the wrong vocable or the equivalent doesn't exist in English (which I don't believe). I'll just stick with two kinds of thieves:
One kind of thief is the sneaky clever bastard that talks with you for a minute and afterwards has an additional purse in his bag. In fiction they're often charming descendants of Robin Hood or Disney's Aladdin and impress the audience because they trick the bad guys.
In real life of course, (most) thieves wait for naive and good-willed prey to come along so they can distract them and steal from them, which can mean the person from which something was stolen can meet a horrible fate. Maybe they worked really hard for those few coins and wanted to buy a small bread that would barely get them through another month... sorry, thinking about this makes me really sad.
The other kind of thief I was actually talking about is the one that wrecks shit, yells at people, takes hostages and most certainly doesn't treat them kindly, then break into the safe with a big explosion. If someone tails him, he'll just shoot them.
The first kind of thief gets what he wants through trickery, the other one is a brute that utilizes violence. Killing or harming people would be against the first thief's "art rules".
The first might make for a nice antihero if he steals from the wealthy or bad - after all that's why people dig "Thief - The Dark Project" - the second not so much except for when you like playing the violent asshole.
James Bond is something different entirely, he has a definite good alignment and saves the world and gets the chick. He's not even a real spy.
If Gods can create things in almost an instant, why not create something like golems or homunculi that follows your will? Or maybe even just mindcontrol a murderer and pretend they killed somebody who knew too much. Or wipe some memory slates. Surely you have to have *some* power as a god. The more I learn about One God the more he looks like a mighty king with magic abilities, but not like a divine being. Doesn't look that much like an antagonist either. BP probably caused more death than him.
I'm interested how you'll manage to make a story of 5 teenagers taking down a God sound *somewhat* believable. I mean, even Harry Potter was excused a lot by saying the bad guy was weakened and allergic to care bear beams and that Harry absorbed some of his powers and bla. In other cases the hero(es) are special in one way or another, often the power is simply "in their blood".
As for his "redemption" part, well, I'm not so sure about that. Entire forgiveness is too much to ask for, but I think he still has some redeemable value. He didn't act selfish, he acted with good intentions. [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WellIntentionedExtremist] BP probably makes for a more "evil" antagonist than him.
About Overgod: No, evolution doesn't work that way. Survival of the fittest is a different philosophy entirely. Evolution means that genetic mutations occur over time and change a species over time. This is because helpful mutations are most likely helping a lineage to grow better/gain more children, but evolution doesn't have a goal in mind or is striving to create something "better". Whatever is "better" survives because of logical reasons. A mutation that leaves you without eyes can be fatal on land, but in underwater depths it can actually save resources and be "better".
Evolution also has nothing to do with leaderships. In fact most species survive by specializing in an area where they don't have to compete with others. Just because lions are frickin strong doesn't mean they're the leader of the frogs. We humans tend to do that sometimes tho.
Evolution doesn't have a goal and evolution doesn't calculate any sudden artificial cataclysms. If it wasn't for the big meteor that crashes into Earth (and shaped the moon if I'm not mistaken), the Dinosaurs would have lived a lot longer. It's not part of evolution to kill what survives to see what other developments could follow.
I think I got a better grasp on Overgod tho. There have been lotsa stories about aliens learning from our mistakes or humans living in a parallel dimension and learning from our mistakes so that they could prosper and live in peace while we experiment for them. It's sorta the same thing, only Overgod appears to be driven by curiosity rather than personal gain.
About the end of the story which I personally feel is a wallbanger [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/DarthWiki/WallBanger?from=Main.Wallbanger][footnote]Silly, if I use weird words, you can probably find them on TV Tropes and not on Google [/footnote], I'm curious if it's realistic to have unity of opinion within in the group at the end if you expect people to debate over it.
Well, the thing with Greek gods is that they couldn't be reached by a group of teenagers, so writers could pretty much go nuts with their abilities for the sake of storytelling or morals and didn't have to think about balancing it at all. I actually don't remember about a Greek divinity ever being killed by a mortal, I don't think even a half-god ever killed another god, but my memory could be lying.
Also, I looked up "power creep" and found out it refers to new stuff being overpowered in comparison to old stuff. "Upgrades instead of sidegrades", so to speak. Not sure if that's what you meant...
Little spiders better flee out of the city or start taking trips to Chernobyl if they want to have a chance.
You get essence by murdering stuff? Huh. Has to be a sophisticated system of nature if it can determined who is the murderer. Who gets what share if somebody commits suicide? Would Jack the Ripper be Superman in that world?
Certainly a mechanic you can play around with a lot.
Waitwhat, a new resource called godsblood? People have to have essence to work magic, okay, I can comprehend with that since essence and magic are linked together closely. But what's the deal with godsblood? Or is it another term for essence?
Hmm with your recent comments about essence I get the image of it being more like a bored "living being" that grants those power who it takes an interest in and the more they entertain it, the more power they're given in exchange, like a reward.
Phew, alright, the plot. This is gonna be messy... short version:
First stuff is awesome and flashy, then stuff gets less flashy and characters get into more trouble, shift from awesome fights to deeper psychology, eventually the good guys become evil and the bad guys become good, all while playing with fantasy and reality. Dat's it.
Alright, real version... I've linked you to another summary, but I'll do another one. Heh, "summary"... I'll actually have to leave a lot in so you get a proper picture of how the story flows I'm afraid. I hope you'll still enjoy it.
I don't vouch for it being consistent tho, the biggest part of it hasn't been written yet. It's refining itself in my head while I'm rewriting the first parts, has its advantages, too.
Story begins with a lot of foreshadowing. I scattered different themes and metaphors throughout the story for those who like to dig through that stuff. Can be a bit like a treasure hunt at times.
Each chapter starts with a quote or a poem. The first poem is latin, I'll post the original and the translation:
Obsidian
sanguis ad vitro
sanguis ad carbo
fusum
in fidem et spe
ex animo et terrore
ad armis et amoribus
pro luce et tenebra
fragmentum solis defectionis
--translates to-->
Obsidian
Blood on the glass
Blood on the carbon (or coal)
forged together
in trust and hope
(born) from courage[footnote]can also be translated as "heart" or "soul" - I think it's similar to your concept of essence, minus the gathering mechanism[/footnote] and fear
into weapons and love[footnote]love is written in plural, which is a Latin stylistic device for making abstract things appear bigger or greater. Immense fear would be written in plural for example.[/footnote]
through light and darkness
a fragment of the solar eclipse (obsidian)
It's basic dualism that will be eventually projected onto the characters. If you read something about blood, glass and carbon you're probably on the right way.
I think I'll have to quote the first three lines from the beginning because they're an unusual beginning (and once again foreshadowing). They're written before the actual scene begins:
Inaudible for him, a voice spoke: Then God said, Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us.
Aurea prima sata est aetas - and his Golden Age can begin
The Latin part translates to "The Golden Age was sown first" and is a reference to Latin mythology in which everything was perfect in the beginning and then everything slowly got worse and worse.
It starts with a young boy in the middle of darkness. No orientation, not even wind, tho it feels a bit chilly. He is barely able to confirm his own existence. He doesn't know what's going on, how long he's been walking around in the void or why. After finding a wall in the middle of nowhere, a first point of orientation, he stops searching for an exit of some sort and instead goes through what he is carrying. It becomes apparent that he doesn't come from a world where carrying a sword for example is normal, so the reader is realizing over time that he is from the modern world (stay with me, I know this has been done to death and beyond the grave), but equipped with stuff he either once imagined he'd like to master an adventure with or just thought it's right-out cool to have. Some of it is generic like "a handgun", a few things can be attributed to specific universes like this thing [http://thmb.inkfrog.com/thumbn/smokespoon72/anneau.jpg].
After he also realizes he want work magic, he's realizing he is dreaming, which makes perfect sense considering what he knows. After managing to start a little light and then quickly stopping the effect out of surprise and fear, he learns he suddenly can simply pass through the wall. Going with what the dream throws before him, he goes through the black nothingness into a warehouse. Unsurprisingly he is not welcome there, but manages to take out one of the two guards with his handgun, which is how he learns how to deal with some of his equipment for the first time. The second guard in order to call reinforcements. No, talking did not work. It's not even clear if the guards can speak the first protagonist's language.
Not long after the guard ran out of the now sealed building, a black portal of some sort shapes on a wall of crates and something emerges from it, but it's as visible as glass in the darkness. Before the boy can realize his enemy, an invisible force presses him against a wall and chokes him until his vision goes blurry and he almost passes out
I use this part of the story mainly to characterize the first protagonist. His life, his opinions and that he'd like to escape his past life that is full of people completely unlike him.
After his vision sharpens and he is shocked by how real the experience is, his belief in the scenario being a dream is reaffirmed when he finds a girl from his world is suddenly also in the room. Of course, coincidence being nonexistent even in a dream, it's the girl he developed feeling for from the distance, but he never actually got close to her and only exchanged few words with. He tries to explain her who he is, but she doesn't believe him as his body is different from the one he used to have. By that I don't mean he was obese and is now Hercules, but he has a "normal body" as opposed to a body drawn by disease.
Cutting the attempt to convince her, he makes up a new name for himself and attempts to leave the warehouse together with her using the same "travel through walls" ability as before. His name is explained to be the one he commonly uses on the internet (hint: the initials are MB), but the author keeps referring to him as "the boy" or "the warrior" depending on which "side" of him emerges. I don't mean he has a split personality, but over time it becomes apparent he behaves differently in battle than otherwise. More of that later.
He travel through the wall leads him to a different fantasy universe he recognized with character he only read about, confirming his belief in the situation being a dream once more. The boy and the girl, both their real names remain unnamed, eventually stay the night with the fictional characters, which, according to the boy, would make for a nice point to end the dream.
What's maybe important about this part is that the boy's view on the world is starting to differ greatly from his original opinion. He loses his fascination realizing who she really is, nothing like she always came off like from the distance, and along with it his fascination of love. He starts viewing it more like infatuation caused by hormones and starts getting a clearer head for his expectations.
After this, he has a dream in which the Lord of Void starts talking to him in a voice without body, gender or origin. It's all very vague. What isn't vague is the sudden situation he's in: Everything is black, but bodies are still illuminated by an abstract source of light[footnote]Medieval art had "self-illuminating" bodies at the very beginning when people didn't work with specific light sources or shadows[/footnote], so he can see he is holding he girl as she's dangling over a great depth - he doesn't see why or any landscape at all, only himself and the girl. The Lord of Void keeps telling him to let go of her because "who lets go has both hands free", he tries to convince him that she is but a burden, but although the boy is disappointed in her, he doesn't let her fall. Viewing it as a metaphor, he doesn't cut the bonds with his old life and doesn't become a new person entirely.
He wakes up inside a cave that is illuminated by glowing blue stone everywhere. Inside the ruins around him, he finds a female magician (called Rei) that explains they're under siege by summoners sent by the Lord of Void. They pursued her squad throughout the cave and she is the last person alive[footnote]Sounds cliché, but you'll soon see why she survived alone[/footnote]. Together they fight off the summoners and the golem giants they created and meet up with the reinforcements the squad of the girl was supposed to meet up with before they were attacked and defeated. Before the summoners die, they wonder why the Lord of Void placed so much interest in such a weak boy or why he spent so much equipment on him. To be fair, Karma isn't exactly a ***** and the boys kills them as a response, but the moment gives Rei an opening and she can take out all summoners in a single strike.
The little (shield and sword) army makes its way out of the cave and while at it, the boy finds a friend in the army called Nemico[footnote]If I remember correctly, that's Italian for "Enemy"[/footnote] and a respectable leader in the general Cartz who is at first opposed to having two magicians fight alongside them, but eventually realizes they're vital to their survival.
Why they're vital and why he is opposed to having them fight alongside them is brought up together with a lot of basic stuff around the world and the happenings outside the cavern. Apparently not long ago the Lord of Void started attacking the land and is flooding the land with monsters part of the "Army of Nightmares" as the defenders call them. The majority of the Western part of the continent is consisting of small towns and villages unable to defend themselves against the hordes. However, there's one place of sanctuary. A metropolis called Apotropé[footnote]translates to something like "to ward off evil"[/footnote]. That's the destiny of everyone who can survive and it is where the last stand will be made. Thankfully the defenses are tight enough to shield the inner city for at least half a year and the supply of food and water is independent, too. The city is located on top of a hill, so it's also a good position to defend from. Etc.
On their way out, the boy has to face 3 big enemies the Lord of Void places in his way. The first one is a mysterious man clad in black cloth. He discards the daggers he was hiding and demands an open and fair fight from the boy, which the latter accepts because it's bugging him that the Lord of Void apparently gave him an advantage with his equipment. He seems to lose the fight tho because the man has telepathic powers he uses to read the boy's moves and thoughts. Nobody from the army intervenes tho as their general Cartz has a high honor codex. Eventually however, the boy snaps and taps an energy potential that makes him almost go crazy and puts both his shoulders out of joined and in general beats up the guy pretty badly. Fulfilling the man's wish without a second thought, the boy honor kills him by stabbing him into the heart with his sword instead of letting him lie in the cave. I might add his discarded sword comes flying out of the sand on demand, we're talking to a hundred percent commitment to the idea of being angry suddenly gives you superpowers.
In the moment the boy stabs him in the chest, the man is using his telepathy once more to tell him alone that his brothers were among the slew summoners (Guess how he suddenly found that out, got into the cave and right to the place which the boy was crossing?).
The next obstacle in their way is a graveyard that was built inside the mountain because it's viewed as a sacred place in multiple cultures. Of course, the graveyard is haunted like every good graveyard in a Fantasy story, and a surprising amount of zombies carry weapons (guess who gave it to them). The only way of actually killing off a zombie for real is to kill it with magic or magical weapons, so the army tells them. That's why they needed to mages. They originally just ran through the damn thing as fast as they could, but now they're being expected. The whole army however is only consisting of non-mages, which leads to a topic of racism.
Basically, there are two kinds of people in that world: Arcane and Anarcane. Arcane can work magic, Anarcane can not. A hypothetical creature that has absolutely no connection to magic whatsoever would be called a Dearcane, but that would also mean it has no soul and every living creature has one by definition.
Anarcane are said to "lack the gift of the gods", they're seen as cripples, the damned, even demons sometimes. Whenever something bad happens, they're the first to be blamed for it. Naturally they stick together and are opposed to the Arcane who oppress them. Apotropé in general has a more open view on it as Anarcane helped it grow a lot, but you can't change people that easily. There's always some mistrust between Arcane and Anarcane.
Unsurprisingly, not everything goes as planned and the dead return after being defeated anyway. Pulling out a time stopper from his ass, the boy runs directly into the catacombs while searching for a central source of energy that keeps the dead alive or a lich. He has 30 minutes time for that and eventually finds the Lord of Void, now with a consistent voice and body, waiting for him on top of a giant black four-armed ghoul. He tells them to forget about the army as they're not important, only he is[footnote]Playing a bit with characters who don't even have a name being expendable in fiction etc[/footnote] and he tells him that "his lich is in another castle" just before he vanished.
Now that the boy believes that the Lord of Void is controlling the undead but is out of reach, he runs out as fast as he can while being followed by the giant black ghoul that on the way keeps reaching for other zombies frozen in time in order to eat them and gain strength. At the end of his wit, his time and his strength, the boy begs his powers to magically grant him another wish, namely to open a portal to bring himself and the army into safety. Shortly afterwards a black portal does open beneath the ceiling of the cave and gently elevates the boy and the army, all still frozen in time.
"You didn't honestly believe that this was your doing, did you?"
Suddenly the boy realizes he's in the void again. The transition was practically nonexistent as the timestop ceased almost all the noises to exist and the portal was as black as the void.
He quickly realizes the void is the playground of the Lord of the Void. While you can do what you want unless logic/laws of nature prevents you from doing so in real life and you have a "blacklist" of things you're not allowed to do, in the void and when the Lord of Void is present, you have a whitelist of things he permits you to do. You want to run away, your legs won't move. You want to badmouth him, your mouth won't move. You want to fight him, your heart... you get the idea.
This is also when the Lord of Void demands a name from the boy in order to complete his own birth. After forcing him to shut his mouth after he comes up with a serious consideration, he is called Karive, but doesn't make a big deal out of it. Instead he proceeds telling the boy he is disappointed in his failure to achieve the objective and "punishes" him for it. He doesn't exactly lay it out as punishment, but it certainly comes off as punishment when he first explains to him that he is in fact an Author Avatar and his story is written by his former self elsewhere and then he talks in detail about recent events his "other self" goes through ? all revolving around his lovelife or lack thereof which is of course embarrassing the boy who is around 15 years to almost no end, especially since he keeps those things strictly to himself. It's probably the most exploitable emotional aspect of a young life and Karive knows exactly what he's doing.
Afterwards the boy, still both confused by the explanation of his existence in this world and the emotional torque he just went through, a stranger knowing about his hidden depths and secrets in painful detail, is thrown back into the battlefield in order to repeat his task. The army has returned to a safe distance so it doesn't get into the way, the boy is facing the hordes of undead, next to the entry to the graveyard that's on the other side of the field, there's the ghoul.
As soon as he enters combat tho, the boy forgets about his problems. His runeblade finally awakes from its slumber and starts sucking out the souls of the undead, finally returning them to lifeless matter for good. A race against the ghoul begins who starts devouring the lesser undead in order to strengthen itself, too. At the end, the battlefield is picked clean and it's a one on one battle.
Tho the runeblade's second ability of giving its wielder spare energy it absorbed which helps the boy's stamina a great deal, in the end there's no way he can defeat a giant black ghoul that spews fire and has four greedy arms. It looks like the boy will fail again and is soon to be crushed by one of the giant black hands when the female magician, Rei, finally makes her way to the action and finally displays her hinted white necromantic powers. As with many games, white necromancy counters black one and black necromancy defeats white. Rei doesn't have enough power to take down the monster, it it's enough to make it scream in agony and let the boy go, who then acquires two of her magic scrolls that have saved a spell of white necromancy. It directs the power, but it consumes the power of its user. With one final discharge of the entire energy saved in his runeblade, combined with the bound spell in the scroll, the boy is able to defeat the monster.
The army marches on and there's some comedic relief after the last big encounter. Only few undead still wander around to attack the group and boredom takes control. Cartz sends the boy and Nemico away to scout ahead, but as Nemico explains to the boy after they've left the group, what Cartz actually refers to is looting something that's falling apart sooner than later. During their way, they find the answer why only very few undead attacked their group: They all gathered elsewhere and that's where the two were headed.
Before and in between of all the fighting, the two get to know each other better and the boy even goes so far as to explain how he got into this world and how he can fart out superpowers on demand since it's "his" story, tho recently it didn't work anytime and often it didn't work as expected. He realizes that the author doesn't want to make things easy and he'd find it unexciting if it was easy, too. Nemico is confused and asks if he was a God, which he of course denies. In the end it's not the strangest thing that's happened to the land on that day tho and Nemico is somehow able to cope with it.
The boy also learns that Nemico is in fact an Arcane that is able to create two magical spears from Earth and Water around him. Although he hides that fact, he's sure that Cartz suspects this, but still respects Nemico. The two in general have a pretty equal saying in the army which has only two ranks which are "Cartz" and "everyone but Cartz".
The final chamber in which the two flee from massive hordes of undead gives the reader a small glimpse at the outside world as the ceiling has partially crashed down and reveals a sky covered in dark crimson. As the boy would later hear, it's actually psychological warfare by Karive, a way to rob the divine heavens from its hopeful blue that had always inspired people and made them lighter. As a countermeasure, Apotropé uses a mechanism of mages in order to keep the illusion of a sunny blue sky up for its citizens at all times.
To make it short, in that very chamber, Karive comes again, isolates the boy from Nemico, leaves a quick note on how the boy's original life goes on and throws another monster at him which the boy can defeat by finding out new powers of his body, including tapping bad memories in order to enrage himself and put him into the same frenzy that helped him in the fights before. He tinkers with his own body structure by devouring part of the monster and growing his own fire-breathing organ in order to defeat it. However, these rapid changes to his body cause severe internal bleeding and he barely makes it out alive.
On their way back to the rest of the group, Nemico tells the boy he was impressed with his powers given the time he had to develop since his arrival in this world and that his former master could teach him a think of two. Knowing that this master still lives like a hermit out the country when monsters are running around is all the boy needs to know about the guy's qualifications.
When the two track back the path to the little army tho, the only thing they find is armory and weapons buried beneath rocks from a collapsed ceiling. Everybody is dead. Nemico cries out the name of every single one of his comrades. His tone of voice changes.
Well, or at least he believes everyone is dead. Cartz made it out alive and he swore to himself that he will find and kill that ***** that caused the collapse of rocks: Rei, the female magician from the beginning. She had ordered the undead around in order to defeat the entire army and had probably waited until the boy was out of the way. She was the real lich all along.
But she didn't finish the job properly. Cartz uses part of his clothing and his sheath and sword in order to stabilize his broken leg and takes an alternative route out. He barely makes it to the end of the cave, but he's found by a forester who was guiding a herald through the forest that surrounds the Southern part of Apotropé. The herald is sent out in order to gather remote villages and their survivors, but the forester doesn't think he'll make it far. The forester finds Cartz tho and takes him to Apotropé.
Meanwhile, Nemico and the boy got out of the cave taking a different route. Nemico gives the boy directions and tells him how to get to his master, Sera, but takes a different route because he says he has to do business elsewhere. He does take the time to communicate with Sera through a magic scroll tho so that the boy is expected. Nemico also tells the boy to be ready for a entrance exam as Sera doesn't take just any students under his wing. He even tells him what his own tests were about.
Some time ? and not a single monster encounter ? later, the boy finally reaches the big garden Nemico told him about. By garden however he didn't mean pretty flowers but a thicket full of dangerous predator plants that apparently keep Sera safe from any monster attacks. Eventually the boy makes it through, but when he finally reaches the end of the garden, he's almost completely worn out. He sees an old man watering his "flowers", but he quickly identifies himself as Sera and makes no smalltalk before beginning with the first test, summoning an undead from underground that is to be defeated. Much quicker than Sera expected, the undead is returned to the soil as the boy still had another leftover scroll from the female magician Rei.
After looking a little impressed, but still without much smalltalk, he gives the boy a lance with two poisonous ends. They're the only way to defeat two hellhounds he is about to call. However, once one end of the lance discharges, the complete poison stored inside the chamber of the lance will be consumed, so it looks like it's impossible to defeat both hellhounds with it. However, utilizing the flame-breathing-organ he already used once earlier, the boy is able to heat the lance in the middle including its inner poison chamber. It melts and seperates the lance into two without any poison escaping as the liquid metal covers the ends as the boy carefully seperates the two ends, all while dodging the agile hellhounds. Now armed with two spear halves, he is able to defeat both of them and master the second test.
The third test is against the master himself and no, the boy doesn't even get a bit of rest and already used up a lot of his energy in the tests before, even the potential he can tap by infuriating himself. In the end it looks like Sera has won, but the boy still doesn't give up. The spirit is strong, his body too weak. During the battle against the assassin and the second monster, he had already heard something inside of him, the cry of a bird, first only faintly, then a bit clearer. Now he hears it once more and clearer than before, right before he blacks out.
While he blacks out tho, his body is lifted into the ground like by an alien force, his aura glows again like completely refreshed and flames gather around him. Finally, wings of fire form on his back and light glows from within his eyes. Sera looks serious.
And out.
Next thing the boy remembers, he wakes up inside of Sera's home. It's dawn. Nemico still hasn't returned, but Sera finally shows his new pupil his softer side and shows he's actually a pretty cool old dude. He can also see that the boy is connected to the author and is his Author Avatar. This connection that connects the soul of the author and the soul of the boy is called the silvercord. In an attempt to clear up how the world system works, Sera asks the boy, after he had some rest, to bring the two into the void. There Sera can shape the world easier and demonstrate things to visualize his explanation.
Halfway through however Karive makes another apperance. Quickly a classic black/white scenario is sketched out with Karive on the black/evil side and Sera on the white/good side. He tries to kill Karive in order to return peace to the world, but if he wants to do this, he'll need the potential that lies within the boy.
The situation only gains real momentum when the lifeless body of the girl (the original one from the boy's old life) appears next to Karive and he respectlessly lifts her up by grabbing her hair. Whether she's dead or unconscious is not visible, but the boy does an overheated attempt to rescue her, lets his guard down and is touched by Karive at his forehead. The sound of glass shattering, then darkness. Karive stretches and weakens the silvercord and as a result weakens the influence of the author. The boy loses a lot of his "gifts" like being an Instant Expert (trope) on many fields of magic or simply being able to intuitively fart out superpowers when he really needs them. His abilities degrade. You could say he's brought a step closer to Earth and away from the power fantasy of being able to do crazy awesome things.
The Golden Age has ended. The Silver Age has begun. The big action arc to draw in people is over and so is most of the initial characterization of the first protagonist. Another important thing the audience learns through the fights is that willpower is the first protagonist's strongest weapon.
While all that happened, Cartz got out of hospital ? somehow ? and headed straight to the nearest library in order to get information about his enemy. The only hints he has about the girl is her abnormal hair and eyecolor, respectively blue and red, which in Cartz' opinion is clearly a sign of a demonic race or otherwise abnormal species, so he tries to find a description that matches her.
Talitha is concerned about that. Not his health in the first place, but his research. This becomes apparent fairly quickly, but it takes a while to figure out exactly why. She comes off as nice and helpful while also trying to convince Cartz to get back into hospital, but while she talks she reveals there are more depths to her. For example, she tells Cartz about the lies the government spreads, it calms down what happens outside, "paints" the sky blue, etc. Of course being a doctor she has more access to victim statistics, but since her hospital is in the South and the main attack is coming from the North, she doesn't exactly the whole truth either.
In the following days she's following Cartz around and tells him she's there to make sure he doesn't go nuts with his wounds and when he asks her if she didn't have more important patients to treat, which she just excuses with saying she's primarily cosmetic surgeon and not in high demand at the moment. At some point, Cartz just stops caring and focuses on his revenge. Talitha is still keeping guard on his progress. This even goes so far that she provides him shelter in her home "as long as he isn't fully healed".
One night however, she finally can't keep herself awake in the library and falls asleep while Cartz finds what he should never have found: A book that matches the description, a book written by people from the "Order of Silvernight" who call themselves "Traumkrieger" (German for dream warrior(s)).
The Order of Silvernight is a "home for the homeless", people that left their worlds for one reason or another and found together in one world that is aware of fantasy worlds being as much a reality as one's personal real world. The Traumkrieger are a group of people with special powers whose goal it is to keep the worlds in a state of balance that makes it possible for authors to let their story happen the way it is intended to happen. If an unbalance would create a predictable change in the story, the Traumkrieger will fix it so that the author's "dream" comes true as intended (hence their name "dream warriors"). They act in the background and act as the leaders of the Order of Silvernight. Naturally, they keep their existence a secret. If Cartz finds out about it however, their identity is about to be revealed.
Talitha tells her older sister Shalazh, a Traumkrieger herself, that Cartz stumbled across the book that was left hidden in a library so that agents of the Silvernight or even Traumkrieger themselves could rely on pieces of database while acting independent on a mission. Shalazh sees no other way than extracting Cartz from the world before he spreads the word about the Order of Silvernight and the Traumkrieger in an attempt to find more material during his research.
Before that happens tho, Talitha's father comes for a quick reunion with his younger daughter before he's transferred from the Western South to the North. He is a very accomplished White Necromant (which is also used for healing "normal" people ? undead for example take damage from it like I said), so his abilities are needed in hospitals closer to the heated battles. We learn a bit more about Talitha's family and that her mother probably died when she was still very young as she can't remember her.
To make it quick, Talitha gets a death notice of her father not long after he left. It's not specified why tho and the death notice in general is fairly reluctant with information looks nothing like the death notices she dealth with in the hospital. It's implied that she mourns the loss of her last parent, but she never shows a sad face around. Always keeps up a smile and a tough facade. She wants to investigate the matter, but before she can do that, both Cartz and her are being brought to the Silvernight. It takes some convincing of the Traumkrieger who visits them, but Cartz agrees on coming with him as he is promised more material to study. Not like he had a chance otherwise...
That part of the story is used to explain Talitha in more detail. I'm switching between Talitha and the first protagonist whenever it suits the flow of the story.
While Talitha's already in the Silvernight, the first protagonist's way into the Silvernight is way more stoney. He has lost his crazy awesome powers, but is still a quick and determined learner. He's even happy to a degree that he can start relying on his own abilities rather than "stealing" from other worlds or relying on the author. On the other hand, he knows he needs all the power he can get if he wants to stand against Karive and that he can't be so selfish not to accept help in these times of dire need.
Between the training sessions and his overall growth, there are three major events before his next encounter with Karive. First, he finds out about his genetic ability that lets him grow crazy (while instable) organs within minutes actually comes from the BioShock universe and if you know BioShock's version of genetic enhancing, you know the substance that lets you do stuff is highly addictive as it replaces healthy cells with instable ones. It's however also capable of growing cells quickly, but eventually you'll need it to repair the damage it does to your own body ? for a small time anyway.
After visiting the BioShock 'verse for some more of the magical drug (which already hints at the first protagonist's power addiction), some days afterwards there is a heavy storm outside while Nemico and Sera are headed to a different colony that doesn't wish to move to Apotropé in order to trade. You can't really eat the plants in the garden, but there's a lake nearby inhabited by a race of ? sorry, I digress.
During the storm, a number of thieves make their way into the house, apparently they waited for Sera to leave his home. The boy is quickly capable of making them give up, but apparently there is another guy on the roof. There he finds somebody clad in black concealing clothes controlling the wind. The boy is quickly taken down by the person who uses blood magic in order to rip out the addictive substance from the blood stream which makes genetic manipulation impossible, but also frees the boy of the curse of addiction. The person proceeds to spit on the boy's power addiction and injects a small amount of the same addictive substance that allows genetic transformation again ? just so that he could crush the boy's hopes and do both some mental and bodily damage to him.
After a recovery period, Nemico, Sera and the boy set out for a different world in which Sera knows a friend that could seal the substance for genetic manipulations so that the boy only has to activate it when he needs it in order to limit its destructive power. In that world, they find Karive who once again taunts the boy, but this time, he takes it too far. He suffers an emotional breakdown and one thought hunts the other, getting darker and darker until again there is the cry of a bird and he becomes covered in flames and sprouts wings. This time around he actually uses the sudden surge of power flowing through him, but at the same time isn't able to control it and burns away his own skin. In the end, he is able of doing a bit of damage to Karive, but can't defeat him. While he is powering up and shouts curses at the world, Karive also screams at Sera how in the world he put his hands on an Archangel, but Sera just answers he had no idea. At the end of the "fight" Karive summons Shalazh and creates a portal to get the boy into a hospital room ASAP so that his wounds can be treated. It becomes apparant that healing powers run within Shalazh' and Talitha's family. Karive also takes the time to strips the "Archangel" from the boy that formerly granted him the firey powers, which takes away even more power from the boy.
The emotional breakdown of the boy during that fight is actually pretty important as it already foreshadows why his alignment will shift, but I'm too tired to write it down. Let's just say he develops so much hatred for everything that he seeks to obliterate everything ? darkness, light, fantasy, reality, everything and everyone around him, forever.
After his genetic abilities sealed, the boy continues visiting other worlds while searching for power so he can overcome Karive. One night he is training his magical abilities so much his hands start bleeding and shaking from the power that keeps flowing through them. He doesn't want to sleep, but his pure exhaution is forcing him to do so. Just to give you an image just how far he's taking the willpower concept.
He wakes up within the void and is chained against something cold he can't see. Karive makes an apperance and the dialogue that follows is pretty much this:
"What would you sacrifice for a ceasefire with Apotropé for three months?"
"Are you losing already, Karive? Want to regroup and buy yourself some time? There's no way you'd ask me otherwise. You're a bad salesman"
"And a sore loser, too"
After that, he suddenly is back in reality. On the floor. With his right arm being nothing but flesh chunks and blood. The blood loss is severe, he passes out again and almost bleeds to death when his last ace is activated: the drow inside him, the body's original soul, forces a fusion of the souls and tries to take control in order to save the two, but things go horribly wrong:
I don't know if I already mentioned it before, but the boy's body in this world didn't just beam itself into existence. The original host is a drow called Arkenighte who attempted on tapping the powers in the void to power himself up in a weakened state. He wasn't able to control the absorption progress however and by mistake took in a very large portion of a soul, so big that it outweights his weakened one and as a result became the new consciousness of the body. That second soul is the boy. I think I already told you this, so take this as a reminder.
Over the weeks, the old soul of Arkenighte has regained strength and now tries to save the body from dying. To do this however, Arkenighte needs to fuse the two souls closer together in order to get a chance at capturing the consciousness for a small amount of time. However, like I mentioned before (I think), body and soul have a very strong connection. Change the soul and the body will change, change the body and the soul will change. Force a rapid change in the soul and don't give the body time to develop around it and you end up with a fatal error. The magical reserves Arkenighte had in store in order to prevent the worst from happening broke lose in a magical explosion, tearing apart the body even further and burning the skin. If that sounds bad, remember how exhausted body and the new soul already were before meeting Karive.
If it wasn't for Karive's direct intervention, the boy would have died there and then. This way however, he makes a narrow escape once again.
During that time, Talitha is teaching the reader more about the Silvernight and comes an important step closer to knowing what happened to her father. Only now she learns that White Magic isn't just used for healing, but also for damaging lots of nasty stuff such as demons (and Black Magic works agains humans for example, but would heal demons and the like). She also learns about the moral implications of using "healing magic" for war and that most governments try to hide this fact from the rest of the population for obvious reasons.
Can you imagine what happens to you if you find out your father that always came off as almost an "ideal father" was a murderer all along that as been fighting all sorts of nasty monsters? And you find out about all this after his death when you want to keep him in good memory rather than that? Talitha can't even ask him anything. She feels betrayed and even more left alone. As she hasn't gathered the level of trust required for members of Silvernight before you can visit other worlds again, all she can do for now is come up with bigger and bigger nightmares about the true face of her father. She is once again assured that letting people to close to one's heart means nothing but pain in the end.
Meanwhile the boy finds himself in a hospital that is located in his original homeworld (the world with Apotropé), but on the Eastern part of the continent that is technologically more advanced, but is only populated by Anarcane. Since the two parts of the continent have no contact whatsoever due to clima issues drawing a border in the middle, there's also no demon spread in this area. It's "safe".
The aftermath is everything but nice. In addition to losing his right arm (might I add: this is his sword arm), he's also lost his right mechanical eye and the pupil on his left organic eye isn't able to function properly anymore, making the left eye photosensitive. Of course this also means he's lost his depth of field, not ideal in combat. His skin is fully back however, that's always nice to have. *thumbsup*
Sera tries to talk him out of it, but what do you know, shit doesn't flow that way with that boy. He is stubborn, Sera is stubborn, he loses his status as a pupil. The boy says his body might be broken but his will isn't and Nemico, too, says that the only thing you can do with someone like him is to support him and hope for the best, but Sera replies that the will of the world won't help him substitute the healthy body he needs when fighting Karive.
Some time later, Sera sends out Nemico to scout some areas in the South of the Western continent in order to fill the maps with enemy movements. Without letting Sera know, he takes the first protagonist with him. While they're on their journey, Sera and Karive prepare for a plan to "design a climactic finale before the curtains fall". Karive can't hide the boy much longer before the Traumkrieger will notice and take him.
Meanwhile, the first protagonist has his own plans. The original soul of body has gained more access to his consciousness and can communicate with him more and more often. Unlike everything the majority of things in the world however, it doesn't want to kill him, it doesn't even want its original body back. Not only does Arkenighte say that he had his chance with this body, he also tells the boy about the soul fusing that's slowly happening over time and that the two will eventually become a single entity. He also explains that the easy pickup of skills was mainly due to his old skills still being somewhere in his shared brain and the boy just had to pick it up properly. Furthermore he explains how he ended up sucking in another soul in his body.
If I haven't explained to you yet what a Traumkrieger is, here's a quick headsup in addition to what I have written already: Traumkrieger are special people born with one of three abilities that break the very rules of nature. These abilities is redirection of spacial order, flow control of time and manipulation of information. Warping space is the most common ability, which is exactly the ability the first protagonist keeps using for world traveling.
Arkenighte was the original host of the body and so he originally also controlled the Traumkrieger ability. He was part of the head family of a small and powerless drow clan and used his ability to bring wealth to his clan and himself by importing technology from fantasy worlds, making the clan both versatile in technology and magic, hence the equipment the boy found at the beginning of the story being partly magic-related, partly scientific, partly from fantasy worlds the drow apparently knows about, too.
But like I said, the Traumkrieger who keep on watch are not interested in rogue Traumkrieger using their abilities for selfish purposes and end up distorting the balance of worlds. They eventually found out about Arkenighte's doings and destroyed his entire clan. Wounded, he was able to escape to the void which Traumkrieger can only access with objects somehow connected to it. The object that allowed Arkenighte to visit the void is this thing [http://thmb.inkfrog.com/thumbn/smokespoon72/anneau.jpg]. The Traumkrieger would have eventually acquired a "pass" and followed him, but when his weakened soul "signal" was hidden by the dominance of another soul, they assumed he didn't make it and closed the case.
Now Arkenighte guides the boy to the ruins of his clan in order to gather the tools in order to make him a new arm, mechanical eye and support the pupil movement of the damaged organic eye. The replacements are far, far from good substitutes for organic counterparts, but they're better than nothing. The Bronze Age has begun.
That's about how far I've written ahead. Some future plans:
Karive prepares a final monster that the boy cannot defeat on his own, even with the two souls working together like never before. When he spots the monster's summoner lingering in the shadows however, he sees a chance to kill it by killing its energy supply. He succeeds in doing so, but when he looks the summoner in the face, he'll see the unnamed girl from his world, the girl from the beginning of the story. In addition, Karive will jack his mind to tell him that the show is over, that Sera, Nemico, Rei and everything he met and thought was a friend really never was on his side, they were just tools to manipulate him, especially Rei and Nemico who were supposed to watch his every step and help him win a fight when he couldn't do it on his own. Nothing he accomplished was ever his own victory. It was always directed in a way that he could survive, if only barely. It was all show. He was betrayed by everyone he knew and valued. His soul fusion is nearly finished and Arkenighte's voice can't comfort him anymore, he's now a silent part of the identity crisis that makes up a pathetic excuse for a fighter who lost everything for nothing but emptiness.
Then, at the peak of his emotional breakdown, the Traumkrieger come and find him, in the middle of a rainy night. Is that a ray of hope at the horizon?
Silly you. Ages don't go backwards.
The Metal Age begins (yeah, that was quick, but it was also quick in the original mythological text about the Ages).
Can things go worse? Oh yeah. We haven't even touched the top. Things go worse, much worse. How much worse? Well, this [http://fc08.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2010/045/f/0/Demon_of_a_Hundred_Eyes_by_MarikBentusi.png] is a start. And we still haven't reached the Dark Age. The
I had to quote your post to see the plot stuff, and even then I think it cut some off. I got to where you had finished going through what you had already written, and you were saying things get worse and linked the pics of the Demon of a Hundred Eyes as an example, and that's all I saw in the plot spoiler block.
Seems like your story relies pretty heavily on world-specific mechanics, like the idea of shifting from world to world, and I'm not totally clear about the author/avatar concept.
I'm wondering what the point is - is it meant to be pure escapist fantasy that purposely addresses and subverts common tropes? Are you making any kind of statements or exploring interesting concepts, like the dreams becoming reality theme?
It's definitely going to be immersive and entertaining. Who's your target audience, besides fellow tropers? Or is it a very personal work/hobby that you don't really ever intend to publish or anything?
Where does Kharseth come in? Based on what I've seen before this plot runthrough, I thought he was the drow who possessed the body the first protagonist took over, but in the runthrough you called him Arkenighte.
And who's Lilly?
And I'm still just a little weak on who the Traumkrieger are. I get the sense that in the multiverse, there are a number of "authors" who are dreaming up worlds of their own that have actual substance and significance, and the Traumkrieger are beings with spacial powers that allow them to monitor and police those dreamlike realities.
Let's see if I get the Black Phoenix thing right - Black Phoenix is a phrase or idiom in the world that is used to describe a person who doesn't give up and is good at using his anger over his own mistakes to get better?
If that's the case, then why a Black Phoenix? Wouldn't a normal Phoenix be equally accurate imagery to describe that kind of personality? Actually, if you wanted to poetically refer to the anger of self-criticism, it seems more appropriate to evoke the flames and burning of a normal phoenix than to change it up with the color black. Black conjures up images of hate and death and other things far less morally ambiguous than fire, which can much more easily be thought of as representing nobility, righteous anger, and even healing.
Also, I'm super unclear about Kharseth's personality.
For that matter, I'm a little sketchy on the first protagonist's, besides a super strong will. Is he meant to be a little shallow? All he is, is devotion to his goals, which in this case are facing and owning Karive for some revenge. Besides that, I have no idea what he's like.
So (if you even can) let me know what was in the shit that the forum length limit snipped off, and do get around to Karive at some point, cause I don't mind saying he's the character I'm most interested in. Talitha comes in at a close second, but only if her story from birth to death is super tragic and she never gets to be happy except to make the resulting tragedy that much more tragic.
I do so love tragedy!
what i mean by art is a mirror is that you see yourself and your own experiences and personality and beliefs in it. art has to speak to you personally or you won't get much out of it. so some songwriter writes a sad song about losing his four year old son, and some random listener just coming out of a relationship will think he's writing about romantic love, and it'll touch that person and help them through their loss. that's what i mean.
i saw this in action a few months ago when i thought for the longest time that this very mellow dance-floor kinda song was really nihilistic, evoking a feeling of the emptiness of life, how nothing matters, everything is hollow. and i had the very sudden and jarring realization that i was just interpreting it in my own way; i had seen myself in the song. i extracted my own emotions, because at that time my life was empty and meaningless.
that's what i mean by art is a mirror.
don't forget, it's a pretty rare person who knows everything about him or herself. most people aren't very self-aware at all. so part of what makes art a mirror is it allows us to see parts of ourselves we may not have known about or fully understood.
what i mean with power creep is basically the level gain in an rpg game, or the way of constantly getting more and more powerful, to the point where old challenges are meaningless; the goblins that used to be super dangerous and scary, you mow down by the hundreds and then have a snack. and by the end of the story you're charging big fiery demons with your Epic Spear of Godly Flaming Death +20 when you could win just by slapping them around with your dick.
sound shallow? that's why i called it a guilty pleasure. ^^
as an aside, i'm kind of banking on the essence system, combined with fluid storytelling, to make it believable that after only a few years some punk teenagers are taking a stroll up to heaven to punch out God.
they also have the advantage that the One God keeps sending essence powered priest-assassins to kill them, so they don't even have to search for it!
quick clarification about gaining essence
if you think of essence as an actual cloud of energy that you can learn to sense and collect, then it becomes easier. you can't sense it through normal magic, but as a divine being you may learn to become more sensitive to its presence. and when an essence-empowered being dies, its essence hovers, unguarded, around its body for a few minutes, so you can just vacuum it up.
another useful (and fearsome) ability you might be able to learn is to drain essence off living (essence-empowered) beings as well, but that might take concentration.
if this all sounds pretty vague and hard to conceptualize, that's because it is. the mechanic's not very solid at this point; i just know how it functions in the story for now.[/spoiler]
with most of your criticisms that the stuff you have problems with is stuff i don't really have very well planned out, either because it's super distant and not anything i've seriously thought about, or could just use some work.
seems like you like my magic system, which is good because i've put a ton of thought into it.
although i will say i don't think sorcererscrewdriver is the thing you said it was (author appeal i think), because it's actually a very new addition to the world. it fills an interesting niche in the story (a neat outlet for history exposition), and also provides a cool opportunity to present the marriage of magic and modern shit. i just need some cool ideas for how wizardwrench use magic to enhance their live concerts.
actually, i could use ideas how to incorporate magic into peoples' general daily lives, too, other than just having it run appliances and shit. obviously i can't have newspapers and pictures that move, because then my hackery will be complete.
sounds like a sweet brainstorming session i'll have to do in the near future.
godsblood. sorry about that, it's just the public vernacular for "divine spark" which is just the minute amount of essence that allows mages access to magic.
many people (not everyone) know all about how mages are minor gods; that you have to have a "divine spark" to use magic, and that's referred to as godsblood.
one of the more significant historical figures that really demonstrates this concept and educates the public about it is called Zaltais Godson, who was a powerful Pyrolord (remind me to explain magical Lordship some day) from the post-apocalyptic days and was one of the great heroes from that time. His gimmick was he was a direct descendant of one of the Old Gods and that was what gave him the ability to use magic. The comic book series about him, called Heavenfire, gets into this mechanic in depth, so all the Tome teenagers who read about Zalt know all about this godsblood concept.
okay, characters now:
Ember happens to be the only female of the group, a highly skilled swordsman and a lover of challenge and competition. She enjoys the company of those who are equal or better than she is, because through contact with them, whether or not she gets her ass kicked, she can always learn something. Ember's entire theme is self-improvement; she is always striving to become faster, stronger, more quick-witted, more devious in combat.
She's neither naive or obstinate; not necessarily slow to trust, usually relying on her ability to accurately judge character. But once you prove yourself, she is fiercely loyal, defending your honor to the best of her considerable ability.
Her greatest strength is also her primary weakness, as she can sometimes be too bold. Her eagerness to get into dangerous situations so she can adapt and learn quicker has the potential to put her in way over her head. Focusing too much on a particularly interesting opponent might narrow her field of vision, making her vulnerable to flank or backstab attacks. Her other big weakness is her rock-solid trust. Once you obtain it, she literally will not believe you've betrayed it until the evidence is incontrovertible.
Mett is short for Metthame, a slightly mean-spirited wiseass, always quick to condemn or belittle. Mett is the oldest of four kids in his family, and his dad is always away so it's been his job to look after everyone else. It's in his nature to both criticize and care for; sometimes at the same time.
As the pillar of morality and responsibility, he's the one to sigh and agree to help some beleaguered stranger, and he's also the one to remember to be careful and not get too crazy. The rest of the group has it kind of tough on this front, most of them being too reckless (Ember, cough cough) or too passive or whatever to think about where they are and what they're doing. He's the one that brings perspective and keeps everyone in line. He also has the job of putting out the fires of argument and keeping things on track, which is ironic since he's usually the judgmental one, too.
Mett's sense of humor usually revolves around mocking someone or something, including his erstwhile companions. But despite all the bile he projects, he deeply cares for everyone not actively trying to hurt him. He just won't tell anyone.
Desilva's worth is his incredible knowledgeability. He seems to know everything about everything, and is always interested in learning more. He's interesting in that he doesn't seem to have an ego, a sense of humor, or a temper. He observes the world, analyzes the information his senses receive, and stores the data for the future.
Desilva, or Dez as his sister Ember calls him, was born achromatic in both eyes; he has never known the sensation of color, and as a result his eyes are extremely photosensitive. Because of this he must wear a pair of dark sunglasses almost everywhere he goes, because any light brighter than a candle's flame causes him agony. This has had the effect of further isolating him socially, but he doesn't mind. There's no room in his head for hate.
He's not quite devoid of emotion; I can't really come up with any situation off the top of my head that might cause him to become outwardly emotional, but there are a few instances where he might feel very strongly, most likely having to do with those he cares about.
He is fluent in Psychomancy (even though he uses a magical prosthesis called a Focus to use magic, instead of having actual godsblood), and knows some very powerful spells dealing with the mind, so in battle - as long as he isn't threatened - he can be very valuable.
Stover is a good-natured, confident, impulsive risk-taker. He loves telling bad jokes and laughing even while everyone else groans and facepalms. Stover and Ember are both a little reckless, but the difference is intent. Ember charges into battle to hone her skills, but Stover charges because it's fun. He is known to get himself in a ton of trouble, and somehow always comes out unharmed, usually.
The best part about Stover, according to Mett (and Mett is extremely frugal with praise, especially about Stover) is that nothing ever gets him down. He's always cheerful, always having a good time. He's got some of that Peter Pan personality, where he's never taking anything seriously and having a great time of it. Ember and Mett sometimes wish he would grow up, but Desilva believes that might ruin what makes him valuable.
If one were to pick which of the five would be most suitable as a villain, it would be Kyrien. While the other four come from more humble parts of Tome, Kyrien was born and raised on Overmount, a dormant volcano where some of the wealthiest people in the whole metropolis have lived for generations. But that's not what gives him his arrogant personality; it's that he was cast out at ten and still survived on the streets, hunting and being hunted, literally fighting for his life.
He is a very firm believer that power (used in a very broad sense) is the only measure of worth, and that the weak and timid are unworthy of his pity, mercy, or attention, and as a result he is insanely ambitious. He obsessively seeks power in all its forms, from magical knowledge to swordsmanship to tactical information. He's very hard to influence and even harder to control, and because of this it takes a while for the other four to trust him.
A ton of inspiration for Kyrien came from the book White Fang by Jack London, if you've ever read that.
One redeeming quality he has is the way he seeks power, in that he insists on earning his power, feeling that power given can be taken away, and isn't really power at all. In this way, he's a little like Ember, and that's one reason she learns to respect him, and vice versa.
The other redeeming quality is he does have a soul, subdued though it may be. Like Darth Vader, there is a chance for him to learn to trust and value others, and even love and be devoted to. A dormant part of him would have to be awakened for this to happen, but if it does he would be a wonderful, if intense, person. But until that happens, he sees other people as tools to use to obtain his (morally questionable) goals.
and that's about all. hope my characters aren't too cliche.
i think i'd like to exchange actual material, if you have time to translate your first chapter(s). get a feel for the writing style and whatnot. i can see about making an account on DA to post my first chapter. it's only got Mett and Stover in it, but it's pretty awesome.
i havnt rly written them down, i have a problem actually sticking with them, but i have a ton of stories that i have fully thought out. One is a superhero story that i call The Reaper, i have a star wars fan fiction story, alot of Sci-Fi stories (space marines) and one big fantasy saga. I also have an idea for a short story that is fictional, but not fantasy, involving the saying "Knowledge is Power, Ignorance is Bliss"
I once wrote an X-Men fanfic that got good feedback on fanfiction.net - but that's about all. I always thought I'd get back into it, but so far it's just been the one.
Well, I usually stick to short stories. Here's a link to one I wrote over the summer, with a few touch-ups.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.235147-Advice-on-a-Story#8346847
But, I've created a sci-fi world, that focuses on a human empire facing an onslaught from a race of aliens' desire to conquer new worlds, because of a genetic flaw in a previous war which lead the entire populace to devolve into a sterile race of clones. (I know it sounds sucky, but I like it nonetheless. Oh, and it's heavy in ship-to-ship battles)
nope i cant get anything off the ground without getting bored and going to do another story leaving them all disorganized and unfinished
the closest i ever got was at the last chapter of a mass effect fanfic but unfotunatly
IT WAS WRITTEN IN A NOTEBOOK!!!
and i have no patience to transfer it to my computer
Most of the time I think of concepts and never get down to actually writing stories. "man finds space age weaponry in ancient Japan and uses it to fight demons, plans on wiping out all magic, good and bad." " bipeal bird mods weapons, equiptment, vehicles, to be used by another alein race (example fix a vehicle that usually requires 6 hands to be able to be decently controlled by two), gets into hijinks. Interesting fighting technique" " very sercluded nation that is impeding on a large jungle, awakens various demi-gods who survived a cataclysmic event in suspended animation. Capture one of them, expiriments on him and refigure his genes and unlocks the supernatural properties of him, at the cost of his immortality. He escapes them and decides to take the nation down un earthing anceint shit to do so. The expiriments made it so his bones can absorb metal (his skin peels back), and refigure machines to work through telepathy (one of his things he does is kinda wrap his skin around mech suits and skewers the guy inside with his bones, then walks around with whatever power the suit had." " Film noir detective story, only with Dinosaurs as main means of transportation, and katanas instead of guns. Main character is special because he rides a t-rex (least amount of thought has been put into this one)."
Here's something I wrote in my computers class, it's my fake autobiography. It's stupid and I was told to "turn down the crazy" when recording this. Also this is part one and two of ten.
Me and a friend of mine (who can draw) were planning on making a manga (it was a pretty long time ago)
I won't really go into the details (I probably would if I thought the story sucked) but it's set in a fantasy world. Basically it's about a Demigod who has no idea that his father (who was a god) died protecting the world 18 years ago by killing the God of the underworld in an epic battle that lasted over 2 weeks. One day, his fathers most trusted and truest friend descends upon the Earth to tell him that the evil king (who controls about 2/3 of the world) is attempting to resurrect the demon his father sealed in the underworlds. So they team up and set out to try and stop the evil king while gathering people to join their quest.
His fathers friend was supposed to act as his mentor and they would gather a group of 6 other people (A Monk, A martial artist, A summoner/mage, An Archer/Assassin(hadn't decided) a half-demon barbarian, and another demigod which was a very young boy with the most brutal physical strength that carried a big axe that was twice his size).
We had also come up with 3 evil Characters (that is that we had put some work into), The Demon, The King, And the King's most elite general(who later fled from the king's services after suffering a devastating defeat, losing the kings most elite legion in a battle against the good guys and a village of peasants). We had yet to decide if the General would later join the good guys, or just stalk them and try to kill them every once in a while.
Ahaha, sorry about the length. The rest of the text was this:
The story of every single one of his friends betraying him is only the beginning of the emotional torture. Now that his body has been broken pretty well, Karive can move on to things that are really after his taste. He's just getting warmed up.
The Author Avatar concept
The Author Avatar is pretty much self-insertion. Many authors write themselves or an idealized version of themselves into a story because they'd like to be a superhero themselves. It's pretty much what Matrix did. Everyguy loser-type dude suddenly becomes the Chosen One.
Magically it means part of the original author soul is "stretched" so it can connect with two physical bodies. It's technically still one soul as the two parts are connected via the silvercord, but the connection isn't that strong. Maybe you can compare it to the umbilical cord between mother and child, only in this case since we're talking about souls, at least part of the author's memory is also transferred to the author avatar.
Escapist Fantasy
The story undergoes a pretty hard shift of tone in my opinion, which is connected to the different Ages. It's also a bit "meta", "a story about a story" as in the first part in the Golden Age is similar to the power fantasies that make up many first stories and early fanfiction authors come up with, including self-insertions and a simple story about good (Sera) and evil (Karive), but over time it gets more sophisticated and the author avatar gets a unique personality, just like authors when they get better can write more and more freely and at some point don't have to rely on something like self-insertion at all.
Dreams becoming Reality
It's actually pretty much the basis of the existence of worlds if you think about it. I think I didn't write you about the structure inbetween the different worlds yet. I'll compare it to our solar system because there are some parallels:
First of all, imagine a dark empty space. In this story, we call in the void. We know from our universe that it looks empty, but according to calculations there must be a lot of "dark matter" and "dark energy", we just can't sense it with our technology. Imagine this resource being what makes up the "void" in the story. It somehow exists, but we can't confirm its existence with our own senses. That's why we feel it's emptiness or void.
In this void, we got the different worlds like planets. Like in a solar system, they're centered around a single entity. In the story, it is "the heart of magic", the "Mavorcé", something that is believed to be in the middle of the Known Space (the umbrella term for the void and everything in it - like Universe in our world is the umbrella term for planets, stars, the space in between etc). The Mavorcé can actually be compared to a Black Hole in that it drains magical energy, but also ejects it via "jets". This way it creates a magical flow that goes through all the worlds. The closer a world is to the Mavorcé, the more magic it'll get, like planets close to our sun are very hot, more distant worlds get only very little or no magic, just like distant planets in our solar system are very cold. A world without much magic would thus be very distanced from the Mavorcé. Fiction that builds outside the canon of a world doesn't become a completely new world, but mostly a mirror that reflects most parts of the base world and only adds a few own things, like a moon surrounding their planet.
Back to "Dream and Reality"; like I told you, fantasy is capable of creating new worlds that are as much reality as you see your own world. There are many layers of fantasy however, from quick ideas you forget in five minutes to elaborate and complex worlds with its own rules and characters that are so complex you could imagine they could exist as real people.
Even if you just have a quick thought, the void will create it or attempt to create it. The effect isn't instant, so maybe you'll forget an idea and the void won't even have fully created it before the creation process is stopped. If you create something that instable, the magical flow in the void will simply rip it apart. Dreams for example only last a small time in the void before they're forgotten/ripped apart by the current. I'll tell you more about this when we get to Karive.
Kharseth
...is the boy I was talking the whole time about, but he is also not. Oh so mysterious. It's simple actually.
The boy I'm referring to at the very beginning is just an author avatar remotely connected to the soul of Arkenighte (the original soul of the body). That's not a new person that could earn a new name. However, over time, not only does the author avatar part of the soul begin to differ greatly from who he was at the beginning of his journey, by fusing with Arkenighte's soul he also mixes his memories and abilities with that of a different person. As you may know from sex education, mixing two existing things to one new thing is commonly seen as the creation of something unique and new. In this case, think of it as not genetic material mixing, but souls, which sounds pretty abstract, but I'm trying to explain it more in detail in the story. Can't stuff everything into the ""summary"".
With the outbreak of the demon, the souls within the body also undergo a rapid development and finally fuse together to one single new soul that makes up a new, unique mind and a unique character that may have aspects from his two original souls, but now with the mix and his own experiences in this world makes up a new character. Thus, after the battle when he is accepted into the ranks of Silvernight and the Traumkrieger, he makes up a new name (this is offered to everyone who enters the Silvernight as they're now beginning a new life in a completely new world and should be given the opportunity to start from zero in every regard) and that's Kharseth and also the point of time when the author finally calls him by his own name.
To summarize:
- Author Avatar + Arkenighte = Kharseth
- Arkenighte is the drow who originally inhabited the body
- the Author Avatar is the "new soul" that takes control of the body for most of the time
- the two souls slowly fuse together to a single one, but since they're still separated, both souls still have a mind of their own. There's only little exchange of information.
- the Author Avatar calls himself "Marik Bentusi" as he thinks he now has the chance to lead a completely new life
- After the two souls fuse completely together and after the Author Avatar has had enough experiences to make up a new personality, the author accepts them as a new unique person with the name Kharseth
Lilly (or Lilliath in the full name nobody calls her with) is a character introduced a bit later in the story. The Silvernight is clever and eventually finds out that Kharseth is under the control of the author, enabling the author to write from his perspective. They cut this connection (the silver cord) completely off and do a check with all the other characters in the Silvernight Kharseth had contact with, including Talitha. Thus it is now impossible for the author to control their actions and make them run through a script he writes. They're "safe" in the Silvernight. Not even Karive can touch them anymore, so they're told. And really, the daily nightmares he sends them stop.
Now shit goes meta as the author has the task to get back into the Silvernight somehow.
The only person left that the author can control or influence is Karive. It is never explicitly stated, but in order to bring a person under the control of the avatar, they have to had some interaction with another character the author can control, like a disease that's spreading. That's also why he used Cartz in order to get into Apotropé and write from Talitha's perspective.
It's enough for Karive to send Lilly a nightmare in order to "infect" her and make her the third protagonist (Kharseth and Talitha being #1 and #2). Lilly is a slave of a drow clan who was sold at a very young age, she can barely remember her family. Waking up due to the nightmare is actually lucky for her as this way she grasps an opportunity to escape. I haven't written these parts yet, so there's only ideas roaming around. She makes a narrow escape, but living underground for her whole life she eventually is overwhelmed by the morning sun. The drow warriors that go after her however are explicitly trained to resist the sunlight and can thus hunt her down "normally". Due to "luck" however - don't think Karive is innocent - Kharseth and Talitha find her while on the way to a quick mission.
Just as planned. *trollface*
If you think it's all fitting a bit too well together, here's a bit of reason why:
Lilly is Arkenighte's twin sister. Her existence was quickly cleared from the records however when the family found out she's a very strong Anarcane. Arcanes are about treated as well as Jews in the early days of Hitler, they're not (all) killed, but they're definitely at the very bottom of society. Her luck however. When the Traumkrieger destroyed the whole clan associated with Arkenighte so the illegally imported technology would be destroyed along with everyone that knows how to use it, they didn't find her in the records and thus she was able to survive. She's not the sole survivor, but one of few.
Thus she's living in the same world as Apotropé is located it, the one with the Army of Nightmares, etc, so it was easy to find a reason why Kharseth and Talitha would be around. I imagine Kharseth wanted to go down to the laboratories again where Arkenighte once restored parts of his body. I'll find a reason.
Lilly is exactly as old as Arkenighte, but her body looks much younger than his, which is due to slave keepers controlling their slaves so they couldn't outgrow them in any aspects. Luckily her master isn't a woman (and not a rapist either) so she wouldn't have been able to keep her pretty face either. Her master isn't half bad by comparison, which is however mainly due to him being more interested in fighting than women and the two spent a lot of time together. Lilly was sold as a slave early on and since her future master's parents wanted their son to be able to direct salves very early on, they got him a slave when he was still very young, too. It's like European parents these days wanting their children to learn English as soon as possible because they'll need it later on.
So yeah, he isn't exactly so nice that Lilly wants to stay a slave for her whole life, but he isn't a complete asshole to her either.
Traumkrieger
Traumkrieger as they're seen now are a group of people with a certain set of abilities that make sure stories play out the way they're intended to. Authors - and by authors I really mean anyone who thinks up a story or character - are shaping worlds, but worlds are also shaping them back in the same way. I haven't explained the connection in detail yet, so you'll just have to swallow that there's "a connection" between the author and his/her creation.
If however in this world for some reason there are for example 14 horse riders appearing instead of 13, the author's very idea will change and he or she will write about 14 instead of 13 horse riders. That's how both the author shapes the world and the world shapes the author. That's just one example. Traumkrieger are most commonly world travelers, so they feel they have to carry responsibility for breaking the isolation of worlds and unbalancing them. If you believe in chaos theory or the butterfly effect, even small actions can develop big effects over time. That's how many worlds get fucked up over time and as people just keep joining Silvernight, the problems don't get less.
However, the Traumkrieger have also developed technology in order to monitor chaotic differences that "weren't supposed to happen". After all they can gather scientists from the most advanced worlds that exist. Sometimes entire worlds are about to collapse and the entire population is about to be torn apart by the magic current in the void and so the Traumkrieger come in and pick up whatever looks like an interesting addition to them. Technology, memory, people, whatever helps the Silvernight.
Traumkrieger are also able to identify people with Traumkrieger abilities fairly quickly... if you didn't jam their system, Karive. It doesn't always work so early you can see a small child is a Traumkrieger, but they're getting there.
Now, the special abilities of Traumkrieger that make up the very definition if you're one of them or not. You're born with it, but they have yet to find the sample of a still unborn Traumkrieger in development that could show them exactly why they have these abilities.
There are three abilities that divide the Traumkrieger into three types. Type 1, warping space, Type 2, warping time, Type 3, warping "information". The division alone is a big "fuck you" to nature as we all know since Einstein that you can't separate space and time when we have spacetime. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime]
Traumkrieger are breaking the very rules of logic and nature. Really. To simplify, if you have a chess piece on A1 and put it forward by one chess field, it should end up on A2, correct?
With the Traumkrieger ability of manipulating space, you can just change the very logic and make the chess piece appear on E5 or something. It's a bit like in game menus where you move the selection of options with the arrow keys and you use the "down" key at the bottom of the list of options and suddenly you're selecting the very top entry of the menu. Only with this ability you dictate from where and to where you jump. You make the rules.
Time manipulation of course makes you fuck with the flow of time like you've seen in many times before in fiction. Of course this again fucks with logic and Einstein as time is linear and you can't go back in time. Once again, Traumkrieger abilities fuck that up.
Manipulating "information", Type 3, is the rarest type discovered and thus not much is known about it. It is believed however that it can change for example that gold's "color information" suddenly become green without manipulating anything else. It's also very easy to manipulate memory with that even tho you don't know anything about chemistry, biology or electrons.
Maybe now you know why the Traumkrieger try to gather other people with these abilities no matter the cost. It's too risky to let people with such abilities simply experiment or do what they want. Since Type 1, space manipulation, is the most common ability, and Type 3 is the most rare ability, there isn't much progress in research in this regard, either. Type 2... well...
Like I said, most of the Traumkrieger are Type 1 and manipulate space. Type 3 looks like it's something interesting, but nothing that could (yet) lead to FUBAR everything. Type 2 however... time travel can be very, very dangerous. Travel back in time and kill your parents? Normally just a hypothetical mind game as you can't ever travel back in time, logic forbid. Type 2 Traumkriegers however can and the council consisting mostly of Type 1 grows to fear their abilities. At some point in time, the debate between them and Type 2s concerning the issue grows more and more heated until the Type 1 Traumkrieger decide to annihilate all the Type 2 Traumkrieger and proceed to doing so with any confirmed Type 2s they'll encounter in the future. Of course Type 2s are only as capable of fucking up everything as Type 1s, only if they really try, but Type 1s weren't able to understand them or their abilities and they were in the majority, so... yeah, it's sorta tragic.
Black Phoenix is a term that is used to describe certain characters that fit the categories, but it's not used nearly as frequently as "I breathed fire" for example.
Hate is definitely an important factor in all of this, sorry if I wasn't clear yesterday, but like I said, it was getting late and .
See, you can be motivated or have the strong will to do something out of different reasons. "Black" specifies this motivation while "Phoenix" refers to the character trait not to give up and press on especially when almost defeated.
The will of a Black Phoenix is born from hate and the desire to destroy. In this story, Karive is creating Black Phoenixes who are eaten up by the desire to destroy him and focus their entire existence around this. "Black" also refers to ash and coal, what's left after something has burned out, similar to how the passion burning within the characters will eventually burn their lives and anything but the sole desire to kill Karive, no matter what's in the way. Eventually it'll develop into the desire to utterly obliterate anything in their way, which can quickly evolve into hate for the complete world. Now we're getting closer to heroes becoming the villains, right?
I didn't go much into detail about Kharseth's character during the plot summary.
It's hard to nail down his character at the beginning at all, but it gets easier over time as the souls fuse together and create one consistent being rather than two different beings in one body. I could explain something about the character of the Author Avatar and Arkenighte separately, but I'll fast forward to "Kharseth" himself, after he gets accepted into the Silvernight and after the soul fusion is complete.
First of all, you have to get he is drawn by Karive. For almost his entire "original" life - during the time the story takes place - he is oppressed by the Lord of Void and I think I've given him plenty of motivation to hate him. Like, a lot. Kharseth is a quick learner and picks up magic with a great interest. His desire to gain more and more power is making him overuse his body frequently, to the point where he'll jokingly say at some point he'd probably be the happiest person alive if only the author had made him a masochist. Personality-wise, he isn't unfriendly at the core, but the events he's been through have made him conceal his "soft core" with a rougher outer shell. He isn't a jerk, but he will for example leave out smalltalk before going to business, he'll be direct and blunt and often have little patience as he doesn't get a lot of sleep. He doesn't work in a team, he always feels like he has to do everything on his own because others either can't be trusted with big responsibility or they lack the ability to carry their weight, he feels like he is the only one who can fulfill his own high standards.
His "softer" parts he doesn't show often include him swallowing a lot of anger and trying to take complete responsibility for the author's destruction. In other words: If it wasn't for him and his story, Apotropé's world would never have been under attack, Karive wouldn't have existed, many characters like Talitha wouldn't have suffered this much if it wasn't for the author and himself. He knows he isn't the author, but he still blames himself for all of it, building up even more hate.
He is however also quite intelligent and tries to defeat the author's creations by predicting what cliché he'll fall into next - which is of course one of the big reasons I try to subvert tropes whenever I can - and he also has a lot of interior monologues and thoughts, only a fraction of it he tells others. He may be a lone wolf type, but he's actually caring a lot about others. At the same time however he wants to hold himself back so he doesn't fall into a trap like when he trusted his friends that in reality only worked for Karive. He knows this world the author created is full of traps, hence he tries to keep to himself and solve it all on his own. Everything else he would treat as an escort mission.
He is similar to Talitha in that regard as he doesn't want to trust others because of bad experiences, but he is more open than her in comparison. He's most definitely not your drinking buddy tho.
I have a hard time categorizing him with tropes, but I hope you have a better picture of him now. He's spiky, but only to defend himself. Dig too deep and you'll find a lot of unresolved hate towards many, many however. This is partly because of the outsider life the Author Avatar and Arkenighte went through in their original lives, partly because he became an outsider because everyone wants to get rid of the one possessed by the demon. I think he'd like to live a normal life, but he's resigned to the fact that will never happen.
There's good as no room to explore his character under "normal" circumstances. Much like Karive is created to make him suffer, Kharseth is created to destroy Karive. He'll get some more "human" interaction when he forms a group with Talitha and Lilliath, but that's till a long way ahead and I haven't planned that much. I hope I'll get a better grasp for him once that time comes around. I'm currently rewriting the part where he fights the second big monster in the graveyard, if you're wondering how much I'm behind, lol.
None of the characters is ever supposed to get a happy end, at least as far as I've thought ahead. Not even friendship or love would bring you happiness. Karive makes sure you won't experience peace of mind or happiness. In fact, if Karive wasn't there, especially Kharseth would lose his entire ground. He's only focused on becoming a machine of destruction and war, he neglects abilities that would help him for leading a normal life.
There are two reasons why I'll definitely keep at least friendship among the three protagonists.
First of all, just seeing people fall into darkness makes for good material of a short story like Lucifer's fall, but it's not suited for a bigger story with multiple small climaxes. You need valleys of tension in order to built up again or your readers will not be able to combat fatigue forever. It'll eventually become boring. Oh look, the heroes suck again and Karive wins, woot, big surprise.
The story is also supposed to be way more than just a trip to darkness. I want it to be about many things while going downhill. I want laughter, I want tears, I want it sometimes to be silly and goofy and then be able to make it heartwarming and heart-wrenching, making it all in all a beautiful mix. I think highly of Neon Genesis Evangelion. While the characters all fall into a pit of great darkness while time progresses, the mood never simply gets darker. All the things I listed come up sometimes more, sometimes less and it is especially because you know what the characters have to lose that you're hating the villain yourself. Similarly, light never shines as brightly as it does against the darkness and I think until the Metal Age I've already created a very nice dark background. Seen Darker Than Black? Some parts are really cheesy, but nonetheless it's also the story that makes lines like "ow." completely heartwarming, simply because everything is so dark and frustrating that the slightest smile can fill you and the other characters with light and hope. The contrast is what makes it interesting and the contrast it what builds the potential that makes the fall more intense.
Talitha's inner struggle is "accepting both love and death" or in other words "accepting pain". She tries to shield herself from both good and bad things (Hedgehog's dilemma). She's not simply going through lots of shit and dying as a result, that would be flat-out boring and in that case she wouldn't be worth the spot of a main character for me. She'll become a Black Phoenix. She will not go down without a fight, that doesn't suit her. Talitha has enough courage and selflessness to be a hero and in a way being a doctor is already being a hero. She's also clever enough to realize when a way of life as utterly failed and she has to force herself to do stuff she doesn't want. That's how she made it so far. She didn't want to go asexual and abandon a whole world of youth. She also worked a lot for getting the high position she is now. She's a fighter. She's tough. She won't go silent into the night.
The only thing that probably bores me more than a hero succeeding without bigger problems is a villain succeeding without bigger problems. It always makes me wish the heroes weren't so weak. After all, equal fights to the death are the most intense ones. Karive controls the characters now with an iron, but his control will slip. And it's interesting to find out how the fuck the characters are going to do that in their position when the Lord of Void is obviously so much more powerful than they are.
Target Audience
I'm just writing it for my own amusement. That's why I chose a setting that lets me enter any setting I want, whether it's the zombie apocalypse or adventures IN SPACE.
Oh boy, where to start...
Like I said, Traumkrieger are gathering other people with Traumkrieger abilities and they're getting better and better at it. Karive is found as a young age and he's believed to be a Type 3 (manipulation of information - excellent for mindfucks). Instead of going all "mad scientist" and experimenting with this rare breed, the Traumkrieger treat him with a lot of respect so that he'll show them whatever secrets are buried within his abilities, all willingly. Of course, knowing Karive, he's not the real puppet.
It was around this time when the council was about to decide to eliminate all Type 2 Traumkrieger. Karive knew something like this would come up eventually if the debate went on and he watched the discussions with a worried heart as one of his friends, brought to the Silvernight only recently, was about to have his Type 2 confirmed. That friend was Sera.
Karive took action and used his Type 3 in an attempt to change Sera's type before his type could be confirmed as #2 and he'd be put in danger. It didn't exactly go as planned as there aren't really good way to study Type 3 abilities when it's as rare as it is, so instead Sera became a Type 2/Type 1 hybrid, which was however enough to fool the tests.
During this time, Karive tried to help whoever could still be helped, put most of the Type 2 Traumkrieger fell victim to the annihilation.
Karive climbed in ranks and trust and was eventually given a very important task. He'd be in charge of the void in between worlds, which usually isn't that much work as the real action is going on *on* the worlds, and he was also frequently used to do "evil" stuff in order to balance things out. For example, through a mistake of any kind, a village doesn't burn to the ground as it should do in the opening cinematic. Who has to finish the job? Yep. He does the necessary evil. Not all Traumkrieger are suited for this as many don't get that "justice" is neither taking the position of "good" nor "evil". They're neutral. They just do everything so it goes as the author wanted it to play out.
Karive does his job well and he isn't really monitored anymore. That gives him the space to experiment with jamming the means by which the Traumkrieger can monitor his activities in the void and thus he creates his own place in the void. Like I said, the void has enough resource to build entire worlds, so he used that to shape a place following his imagination. Guess where he smuggled Type 2 Traumkrieger to? He proceeded to helping new Type 2 Traumkrieger, either by granting them a very limited home himself or more commonly by donating them new Types which are more commonly accepted within the Silvernight. Shalazh for example is originally a Type 2 Traumkrieger that is seen as a common Type 1 by the Traumkrieger of Silvernight. His keeps rescuing people, which forges strong bonds of loyalty. In addition, he does something else...
Like I already mentioned, dreams are very instable types of fictions. You come up with them in a moment and the next day you've forgotten it. In the void, the creature comes into existence for a brief moment and then it dies as quickly as it was born. Karive took those falling dreams - most commonly nightmares - and gave them a common outer appearance, something they could call a community or race, family. The dreams falling apart still had a hint of own personality, so Karive tried to create something that unified them as a race, but also fit their character, thus most of them looked like monsters (to us). Not that they cared. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all. The reason why Karive did this? Simply because he wanted to let them live. Maybe it was to make up for the slaughters he committed in the name of justice, to ease his consciousness.
However, the situation grew worse and worse. Traumkrieger start getting suspicious as to where the fuck all that void material is going to and Karive's jamming mechanisms would soon not be enough to withstand the deeper and more accurate probes. He can't create his own secret world for hiding everything either. "Reviving" nightmares that should have died is a direct violation of everything the Traumkrieger try to do. Everything Karive has worked for seems like it's about to go to waste, when Deus Ex Machina arrives.
Boy, this is gonna get more complicated...
you see, the Traumkrieger believe that the Known Space is reality, right? They think they've discovered the world outside the worlds, but we know this can't be quite true if I'm the one who came up with the idea of Traumkrieger. It becomes apparent that there are more layers to the world than the Known Space with all its worlds and the void etc. The higher the layers, the more abstract everything gets. One a very high plane, probably close to the top, there are the Archangels. Like gods, they're designed to fit one attribute or a couple of attributes closely. Very little to nothing is actually known about them, but once you get to know them, you'll instantly recognize another Archangel again. It's like a completely new color to your color spectrum added by the presence of a Archangel alone. Archangels seem to originate in the very depths of human psyche - or rather, the author's psyche. Think about it. My characters will never be able to visit a fantasy world I don't know or at least they'll never visit places I don't know about. Any yet the Known Space is supposed to contain the entirety of fantasy worlds? No. But the Traumkrieger do believe so and thus they make it sound like it's THE truth. In reality, it's all just different worlds the author knows about. I hope you're still with me, this is rather complicated and nested, so it's not easy to understand. It does blur the bounds between reality and fantasy once again after all.
What's important is that Karive gets a visit from the Archangel of Terror sent by the author. The Archangel offers Karive a deal: The author will create a world to which he can transfer his creatures and since it'll be part of a script, the Traumkrieger will let it pass. He'll even be able to transfer the Type 2 Traumkrieger to that world in secret, the author will protect the travel. Karive will be able to save everything he holds dear in exchange for... himself.
In exchange, Karive must become the antagonist that will make the life of the characters a living hell. The Archangel will become part of his soul and both guide him in the beginning and supply him with the strength he needs.
Karive agrees.
For this purpose, he gets rid of his old self entirely. He uses his Type 3 to make himself a multitype 1/2/3 and a shapeshifter. He discards his name and tells his plans about what he decided to do. They say they will support him in order to lessen his burden as much as possible. Karive discards his body and changes his very personality so that he could become the embodiment of evil the Archangel wants him to become. Only the arriving first protagonist then gives him a new face and name, like I already explained.
It looks like Karive who comes off as a chess player is just a pawn for the author in the end. But like with the Traumkrieger, he actually has other plans. He doesn't want to live this life forever. He wants to return to his normal self eventually and find a loophole. For that very purpose he left part of his old self with him, so that he could return to his old eventually. He plans on returning to being a good guy eventually.
Which is of course playing straight into the author's plans as you know.
So in the end, I want to ask the question: Whose fault is it that all this shit happened? Is it Karive's fault? The author's fault? The reader's fault, because nobody likes to read boring stories? Or is it human nature and we have nothing to blame but ourselves and who we are?
To answer your questions how he talks with people:
1. with a victim
He's making sure his victim knows that it is a victim and that he is the boss, but not through violence. He is fearless, he isn't impressed by your powers and he uses his abilities to make you helpless. You're his toy, you're nowhere near his class. He's talking in an arrogant, yet sweet tone, will belittle you if he sees fit, he won't take you seriously and will remain completely relaxed most of the time. All while grinning of course.
2. with an equal
He comes off as a serious and thoughtful guy "behinds the scenes" when he talks with the people he bounded together like Sera or Shalazh. Since during these times he isn't part of the play anymore, he shows a greater amount of emotions, from being nervous and insecure to getting heated up and losing his temper. All in all he is a strategist and a thoughtful guy however, always planning two steps ahead and with multiple backup plans in reserve. The actual creation of these plots is more fun to him that to actually execute the plans and destroying something.
He'll open up to those he trusts and support them. For example, he has no problem with brainwashing a girl Nemico likes so that she falls in love with him by using his Type 3 powers. He can dictate what's "true love" for her after all, that's his ability. This both shows he hardly cares for those "unimportant" people, but he is concerned about those which who he bonded and meets them with respect and honesty.
3. a superior
Karive doesn't think of people as a superior. Ever. If he takes a lower place in hierarchy, he'll simply use all his abilities to become the secret puppeteer and trick people into following his wishes in the end. It's like that both with the Traumkrieger and the author. During that time however, he'll swallow whatever the superior throws at him. He's a patient predator and keeps up a mask of loyalty. He never accepts anyone higher than him tho, he'll overcome them one way or another. Restricting him a lot in his ways is probably a bad idea, but you'll never know until it's too late.
It's starting to get late today (and tomorrow's Monday... yuck), so I'll try to be brief:
19
I like playing with existing symbolism, but I also like making up my own like with the Black Phoenix. The number 19 consists of both 1 and 9 which is the highest and lowest positive single digit. It's combining the lowest and the greatest in many shapes. The Ace is another way of pointing that out. Depending on what card game you play, the Ace can be the most valuable card or just have a value of 1. In the story, it's about the combination of Arkenighte and the Author Avatar, King and Pawn on the chess field, in one body. Arkenighte as you may know or not was only capable of studying the Arcane and swordsmanship properly because he was of the head family of his clan, low royalty you could say. The Author Avatar on the other hand is just a normal guy with no special heritage and aside from his will and ability to learn quickly, has no actual power that's useful in this world himself, thus he's a pawn.
19 is the combination of great differences, which can even extend to light and darkness. It can also stand for a person that likes to think greatly of himself, but is actually a horrible person deep down - a 9 outside, a 1 inside.
I think it would be actually correct to think of 0 as the lowest number, but "09" doesn't make for a good symbolic number and also can't be expressed with Latin numbers.
I actually have a few uses of mundane magic, but it's mostly just cosmetic stuff or playthings like writing on a (magic) piece of paper when you want to Google. I might share some stuff later, but these messages are becoming so long I'm spending almost a whole day reading/writing them, lol.
I also remind thee to explain magical Lordship someday.
Writing comic books around the Pyrolord sounds strange. Surely it won't teach the kids correct history?
I like em all, very colorful personalities. My favorites are probably Ember and Stover. He's a cheerful Blood Knight [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BloodKnight]. What's not to like?
As for Kyrien - being ambitious and seeking power doesn't make someone evil that easily. I mean, that's how I'm trying to make Kharseth slip from the path, but I've learned that it's all about what you want to do with your power. If you use it for your own selfish desires, you'll come off as a villain. If you want power in order to defeat the darkness (in Kharseth's case to defeat Karive), the character is becoming more of a Well-Intentioned Extremist and is more easily forgiven by the audience.
I think you don't have to worry about cliché. I'm curious how the characters interact with each other when all together in a group or even better, in battle.
I'd really like to read actual material from you! I'll try to translate my chapter to the best of the ability if I find the time. It probably won't contain a lot tho, let's see... until the first protagonist finds himself in the cave. 15 pages. But there's an early appearance of Karive at the end, so that should make you happy.
Maybe making her end in a straight tragedy would be an interesting thing to do, but to be completely honest with you, I quickly grew attached to her and I feel like making her end like this would be a waste of a good character. I think after multiple rewrites I actually learned a lot about forging characters and that's why she may be a new character, but also one I'm a bit proud of. I don't want her to just live happily ever after, but I want somebody to reach her a candle in the pitch-black that the dusk has become.
Maybe it's author appeal for finding a small hope in an otherwise dark place. For example, there's this one situation in an anime called To Aru Majutsu Index. You can think about it what you want (it actually subverts and averts a few tropes, so that made it interesting for me), but this made my heart very fuzzy:
(I probably won't be able to mirror the story well, but I'll try anyway)
The setting is a highly advanced city for teenagers developing "esper powers". All you need to know is that it's scientifically explained magic under a different name. I have no idea what the government is actually thinking about it, but apparently the administrators of the city just care about finding really strong espers they can use for whatever purpose.
Enter a guy named Accelerator who is supposed to develop his abilities past the current maximum Power Level 5 by killing a calculated amount of Level 5 clones. And by that I mean he's supposed to kill ten thousands of little girls [http://www.retroserrate.com/mikoto/mikoto-misaka-4.jpg] whose sole purpose of creation is to be killed in battle and make Accelerator stronger. They're all connected to a single "hive mind", but even that doesn't mean they have an advantage against the guy just because they have the experience of battles that happened before. They come off as void of emotion and content with their destiny, but some scenes show that they simple didn't have much time on this planet to deal with their situation and develop real emotions at all.
Anyway, the hero of the story is a Level 0. His ability is not to throw fireballs so some shit but to negate ANY magic just by touching it with his right hand. Still, he's categorized as a Level 0. When he defeats Accelerator, the research project around him is stopped because nobody has an interest in developing a dude that can be beaten by a frikkin Level 0.
Let me clarify that Accelerator is a power-hungry jerk, at least on the outside, and he's a Blood Knight to boot.
After being kicked from the project, Accelerator doesn't seem to really care about anything in his life anymore. People think he's now a powerless idiot, so they don't respect him even a bit anymore. He can still beat them up, sure, but he's lost the pure energy and fun behind it. People break in his room and wreck everything, he doesn't care a bit.
That day he finds another one of the girls he was supposed to kill, although they were to be brought outside the city or something. For some reason she is very clingy and tho part of the hive mind and knowing exactly what Accelerator did to them, she's very cheerful and actually believes in him being a good person. He is slightly annoyed by her, but overall just ignores her or doesn't mind her.
Later on he finds out she's the last of the sisters to be produced and has a crucial position in the hive-mind. Should it go rogue, the hive-mind could still be accessed through this girl that acts as a sort of fail-safe. You get the idea. Before Accelerator can get back to the waiting girl after finding this out however, she's kidnapped by a scientist whose investments into the Accelerator project have been ruined due to the cancellation. Seeking revenge, he wants to install a virus into the girl that will make all remaining clones attack the humans around him. Them being on a high level and still around 10k of them existing, you can imagine it would be a slaughter.
Now Accelerator has two choices: Either find and kill Last Order or attempt to delete the virus. When he finally finds the abductor and renders him unconscious, he actually tries to delete the virus instead of just killing another one of the girls. Just before time runs out and he is just about to delete the last crucial parts of the virus, the abductor scientist gets up again, draws a handgun and points it at Accelerator. Rushing to complete his task in time, he proceeds to delete the code and takes a bullet to the head for it. However, the code is deleted and the scientist gets arrested by another colleague who has been supporting Accelerator the whole time.
Accelerator can be saved in hospital (it's actually not that impossible to survive a bullet to the head), but parts of his brain are irreparably damaged, including parts of his linguistic center and the parts he calculates his powers with. He'll remain crippled for life.
Or so he would. There is a way to replace the missing parts of the brain by linking him to a giant network of approximately ten-thousand clones that do the calculations for him.
It already warmed my heart when he went so far as to take a bullet to the head in order to save the sisters, but for some reason the last part warmed it even more. He still believes he is beyond redemption (but doesn't make a big fuzz out of it - he just tries to accept it), but the specific girl he protect, the fail-safe mechanism that's the only cheerful one of the lot of clones, keeps telling him he's a good person inside.
I really don't know if I should hate the guy or not, but when I saw him smiling like a Blood Knight again in the opening in the new second season, although he's walking with a crutch and I think something like a choker with some wires attached to it around his neck (probably for the connection to the hive mind), I couldn't help but feel it's good to see he's back in action. That his formerly black shit with white stripes [http://screenshots.fansub.tv/1311/19/29.jpg] has been replaced with a white shirt with black stripes probably hints at further character development, but I don't think they'll change him around completely, his Slasher Smile [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SlasherSmile] looked like he's a fighter as ruthless towards his enemies as always.
Toaru Majutsu no Index can be full of pointless fanservice and has a few utterly annoying characters that try too hard to be cute, but the action is nice and it somehow always manages to warm up my heart. Especially with Heel Face Turn [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HeelFaceTurn]s done right.
TL;DR I have a thing for characters being actually nice on the inside and for few good actions in an otherwise corrupted world.
Maybe it's also partly the wish to know more about Talitha before making her destiny that final. I usually get my characters to know better by going with them through a lot, which puts them into different situations that make them reaction differently from one another. For example, I have no idea what actually makes her smile although I have the concept of her having a fake "social" smile when he shows her teeth and a real smile when she doesn't show her teeth. I concentrated so much on making her a useful tool and integrated part of the story that I don't know what she likes, what her hobbies are (or would be considering her time schedule), what good childhood memories are (I got the bad ones sorted), what is capable of amazing her, what kind of person she'd like to hang out with, what kind of life she'd like to lead, what the value of different things is to her, etc, etc, there's still a lot of unanswered questions and I think I'll have to rewrite her character a lot in order to give the reader a character as complex and multi-layered as possible.
There are always multiple layers to every good character and alternate interpretation possibilities and I feel especially when focusing on psychological issues, the reader has got to know about the character depths in greater detail and only then you can fully exploit them, too.
Even if I ditch any romance, I think I'll rather send her to a therapist (I avert thee [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThereAreNoTherapists]) than just making her die from bullying (when you put it like this, Karive actually loses a lot of his dramatic momentum). I'm not comfortable with that decision however as 1) I don't really think she's comfortable with the idea of talking about her problems for someone who just listens because he's payed for it and 2) the reputation system would probably bite her back for it in some way and currently she's trying everything possible to get as much rep and trust among the Traumkrieger as possible so she can get back to her homeworld ASAP and investigate about her father's role in the war.
A friend of mine told me she[footnote]I don't fully trust her on this as she's always there for some nice romance.[/footnote] actually liked the hospital idea of Talitha waking up after her heart attack in the middle of the night and Kharseth having fallen asleep on the side of the back while laying his hand on top of hers. Without actually overthinking her action she grabs his hand in return and falls asleep again, no words, no explanation, just the gesture - and then depending on whether it comes off as narm or not, she'll still be holding his hand the next morning.
I'm confuzzled, but I like playing with such ideas as long as nothing is yet solid. Kharseth wasn't even betrayed by Nemico and the others yet in the version of the story that's the most developed and the current rewrite is just before the fight against Karive's second big nasty monster starts.
Sorry for spamming you with stuff about her, but like I said I find her quite interesting and you seem to like her, too.
Ironically, the whole purpose behind making her asexual and distanced from romance in general was to make a cliché romance between her and the first protagonist impossible, but now that I think about it, making her completely normal in that regard and simply interested in someone else than the main character would have probably worked muuuch better. I don't regret doing it tho, Talitha just wouldn't be the same without all this.
I have a novel that's completely planned out... and has a chapter and a half written. But an AWESOME prologue.
Several short stories, including one I placed second with in a Sci-Fi contest called 'Summer'. And then I have things like this:
[SPOILER: A Different Kind of Apocalypse]
In the year 2040, the United States elected a highly controversial woman to the Presidency. Ms. Afdenson was controversial for many reasons, beyond being the first woman elected, she also had, what her supporters called an unorthodox, and her detractors called 'frighteningly unstable' method of dealing with opposition. It was this controversial style that put her into a landslide win against Mr. PhD, or President Doctor, as he came to be known during his campaign.
In the year 2044, she successfully defended her Presidency, spending an unprecedentedly small amount of money on her campaign: A mere ten thousand dollars. Her platform was simple, and effective: "World peace, one bomb at a time.".
After reviewing the only time a nuclear weapon had been used in war, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan at the end of World War II, Ms. Afdenson hit upon a novel new idea. With the right PR spin, you could nuke your enemies and turn them into allies in just a few short years. She started her plan with the biggest threat they had: North Korea.
This obviously made China nervous, but Ms. Afdenson didn't gain the presidency without the best PR in the world, and soon Korea was just as friendly as Japan. China was next. Russia, sensing something was amiss, reacted too slowly to prevent the Nuclear Friendship. The Middle East tried to fire first, but failed, thanks to America's Space Laser Initiative. They too fell.
Afdenson's insane tactics and absolutely perfect level of success led to the abolishment of the two-term limit, and thirty years after the Nuclear Friendship Initiative, the world knows only peace, under President Afdenson.
Sure, there's clouds of radiation that leave a lot of death in their wake (Af Storms, to most people), sure the ice caps have melted and subsequently reformed thanks to the combination of Global Warming and Nuclear Winter, but everyone was complaining about the heat before, so they're enjoying this new cold.
Sure, in 2077, when Afdenson is assassinated (A depleted uranium bullet to the heart. The assassin had a sense of humor), the whole thing fell apart and a nuclear war started.
But hey, thirty years of true, dyed in the wool peace. Who knew it was as easy as a nuke?
I don't write much anymore, though I'm do RP on a friend's forum every once in awhile. I have a bad habit of killing my characters in horrific fashions... One of my current characters got shot through a bullet proof window (Most aren't going to stand up to a .50BMG inside of 100 feet), and then fell six stories to the ground. I'm not entirely sure she lived through it.
yeah these posts are becoming really long and time-consuming; it's cool to back off if you like. i'm on my weekend so i have the time but once my week starts tomorrow i won't have as much.
so just to make doubly sure i understand, the author idea is basically the concept of self-insertion made into an actual world mechanic? and author avatars are the self-inserted characters of the authors?
also, i must have missed the explanation for the silvernight - still fuzzy on what this is. is it another term for the organization of the traumkrieger?
have you considered the possibilities of having a world continuity where all dreams and all fantasy worlds are given form? it seems like a no-brainer, so i'm sure you have, but if i were writing it i would have some great plans for exploring that concept - some for intended comic effect, some to ponder about the sheer interesting possibilities. people dream up and imagine places and things that are wildly, profoundly different from their actual realities, different socially, different physically (like physics i mean), and everything else. and their fantasies always reflect their own feelings and desires and fears.
here are just a few examples off the top of my head. i'll do the best one first; i have actual reactions for your characters (that may or may not be accurate, but i find funny nonetheless)
the three characters somehow find themselves in a dreamscape (or whatever you call the transient world created from a dream) that's actually a sunny outdoor pool where all the women are naked and drop dead gorgeous, playing and splashing and some of them actually making out. so it's apparent that they've stumbled into a wet dream (hence the pool imagery, derp derp). kharseth might smirk, hold the bridge of his nose in his fingers, and shake his head. talitha might shut her eyes with her hand over her face with a sigh. and i'm not actually sure who the third character is - lilly? i dunno. Anyway, for some reason they might need to find the author avatar, and it'll be obvious who that is; the only male, who at that moment might be lounging on a cushiony pool chair with a drink and naked ladies all over him.
another dreamscape might be suspiciously devoid of fantastical elements completely; a boring office building where nothing interesting is happening. just an infinite sea of cubicles, copy machines, with the flat empty light of computer screens washing gloomily across the faces of bored people. the author avatar in this world might also be easy to identify - she's the only person people treat differently, and in this case it's to abuse her. not physically, but emotionally, demanding this or that of her, putting her down, brushing past her aggressively.
another person might have dreams about making out with his sister, who'd be totally willing and eager in the dream.
and how's this: i read a fiction story one time with the interesting distinction that it was literally the worst thing i have ever seen in my entire fucking life. the protagonist is this 13 or 14 year old dude whose dad is cast as a cruel, heartless, pitiless monster for kicking him out of the house. and literally the entire fucking story is a loosely connected string of instances where the kid finds himself in various social situations telling someone all about his dad and how awful he is, and despite how awkward and weird that would be in reality, the person spends a lot of time and energy sympathizing with the kid, reassuring him that he's the victim of terrible injustices and that his dad is a real asswipe. i mean, we're talking totally insane; the kid somehow finds himself in prison, and his hardened, tattoo'd, prison-shanking criminal cellmate blithely follows the exact same formula. it's so bad i think i must have had to swallow my dinner three or four times during the reading of it.
but under the rules of your universe, this world exists, right? so why not explore it, or other poorly written universes like it that so pitifully obviously exist only to satisfy some selfish, short-sighted ego?
in this way you can explore the way people see and experience the world, delving deeply into their subconsciouses. if i were running your world, this would be a huge reason why i would be doing it.
i'm still not terribly impressed with kharseth, but it's the kind of not being terribly impressed that exists with every single fiction work i've ever read. i'm also not terribly impressed with harry potter, luke skywalker, batman, and at least one character in just about everything else. it sounds like kharseth is an easy sell for you, being a guy with a soft gooshy core wrapped in a hard shell, but the things that impress me about characters is just different is all.
talitha is an easy sell for me; she is great. i'm not sure what sets her apart from kharseth because at the core they seem to be pretty similar, which is how they'd form a romance in the first place. but while i love talitha, kharseth just doesn't do it for me. not that i think he's bad or poorly written; i acknowledge his worth and validity in the story. he just doesn't excite me like talitha and karive do. and i'm not actually sure why.
by the way, do yourself a favor and don't trust your friend. she sounds like the kind of bubble-nosed mass-produced puppet who squeals every time inuyasha smiles at kagome, and thinks disney's beauty and the beast was the best thing evarr.
i do this thing sometimes where i think i know all about a person based on the most minute details. disregard that completely, i'm going to need to have that checked out some day. might be a symptom of some kind of horrible brain disease, like intelligence. or just misanthropy, that works too.
but seriously, don't do that hand holding thing. that's garbage. that's the kind of shit i'd expect to see in a slice-of-life romance anime, the same kind your friend probably loves and regurgitates and calls her creativity.
you seem to have a lot of anime references, so i thought i'd mention that i like anime too, in case you were wondering. i'm not a massive mouthbreathing fan, but i've watched a few and enjoyed them quite a bit. i like the storytelling structure and the often complicated narrative devices.
haven't seen bleach, NGE, or any of the mainstream 100+ episode behemoths (naruto, inuyasha, one piece, dbz, pokemon). i've seen cowboy bebop, gurren lagan, samurai champloo, higurashi seasons 1 and 2, baccano, and a few more i think. i saw a few episodes of darker than black but lost interest for some reason. and i've seen akira, princess mononoke, the four samurai x movies (thought those were unbelievably sad and beautiful, then again i was like 16 and very emotional).
also avatar, but i don't really consider that pure anime. man i love avatar.
so if i ever lol @ anime, which i do often, it's at least partly out of love. so for example, you talked a little about an anime called To Aru Majutsu Index. while reading your synopsis i was thinking, these 10k little girls probably wear schoolgirl outfits, the main character guy probably has spiky hair, and there's gonna be some imposing male character wearing a long robe. so first thing i do after i finish the plot synopsis is google it and lol.
so lol @ anime and jap culture in general. is there like a law that every anime must have at least one young hottie in a schoolgirl uniform?
but i don't lol heartlessly from a pedestal. i lol at one of the odd quirks of something i enjoy. it's the same with people; either i like a person or i don't, and if i do like a person, i like all of them, including the oddities i might not fully understand. so don't take it the wrong way when i make fun of anime. i like it just fine; i've been told i should watch NGE, and i plan to, someday.
i need to be wrapping this up pretty soon as i have homework to quit procrastinating.
at some point today i'll try to get my first chapter up on DA and edit the link into this post.
about your reaction to my dudes, i dunno if i'd call Stover the thing you linked. combat and fighting isn't really his primary interest; rather, he's interested in stuff that's fun. combat is quite often fun for him (mostly because he doesn't take it as seriously as maybe he should, lol stover), but so is teasing girls, making jokes about mett being a fatass (he's not, but he has a gut; mett's not a very physically capable fellow), and generally getting himself in trouble. he's definitely cheerful, though, and that makes him fun to be around.
i wasn't really implying kyrien IS a villain, because he's not. at worst he would be antagonistic. he's had a rough time in life and that's made him rough, but he's still human. he still values company, however much he might try to hide it. this makes him the "dark, moody, intense" character of the group. among the others there isn't much real darkness. not much at all. the closest they come is mett's sarcasm. so that's kyrien's niche; he's the zuko to their aang/katara/sokka (if you've seen avatar). he, more than anyone else, takes himself and life very seriously.
but yes, kyrien wants power for himself, not for any lofty purpose. he wants to be the best and most powerful and significant and influential he can be, not for revenge, not for love, not to save or protect anyone or defeat some menace, but for the sheer glorious accomplishment of it. he wants to stand at the peak of the very greatest mountain and scream his mastery so that every man, woman, and child, knows his name, and to fear and respect it.
kyrien more than anyone else in the story represents the glorious old days of wizardry, when magic-users sought power for the sake of power, tinkered with the languages for no other reason than to explore what was possible. kyrien wants to know what he is capable of, and he is more than willing to die in his mad pursuit, for he has nothing else to live for.
unless he learns the value of friendship, that is. *whistles nonchalantly*
okay, i am now going to go do some studying. when i am finished i will jump on the task of getting my first chapter up and linking it here.
Well let me give you the layout of the story before i tell you of the protagonist.
The story takes place on a earth where super powers run rampant, now to keep these "supers" under control there is a (very fascist) international organization that keeps the "supers" under control. And the main character is an officer in said organization. But the problem is that he him self has latent abilities that allow him to see into the past and the future.
Now the character himself isn't necessarily a good person at the start of the book, he's like very much like a Nazi. But as the story progresses he begins to understand the "supers".
I've run through many different takes on this story because i love the idea so much, and i haven't really gotten passed five chapters before i think of a better way of writing it.
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) could serve for a number of interesting things:
