Nick does a worldbuilding

i need someplace to ramble about my weird stories and this is going to be that place i guess
also i'm super tired so this is going to be Very Rambley

please ask me questions about everything

Romison:

Spoiler: magic etc

i wrote a whole big thing about this once but i can't find it so it looks like it have to do the entire thing again. ah, well.

magic is inherent in this world, and very very illegal during this time period. therefore, witch hunts! because those always end well. anyhow, humans can technically smell magic, but this doesn't usually work in practice. that's because there are too many things to distract the senses. so what is the solution to this, the witch hunters' problem? sensory deprivation.

i'm not sure how many people they ended up using for this, and i'm not sure where they got them. i only ever knew about one of them, jacques. he's very broken.

when the old rulers fell out of power and the new rulers disbanded the witch hunters, jacques was freed. the witch hunters were put to death. the more bitter of the mages blamed people like jacques, people that had been used more as hounds than anything else, for their fear and the loss of many of their kind. jacques refused to fight back against them; he blamed himself just as much.

chester, who is not a mage but a thief, rescued him when he was being particularly dumb and pacifistic. chester takes care of him now, making sure he doesn't get killed from being dumb and pacifistic. they keep candles lit all the time; jacques panics when he can't see. that's also why he paid a truly ridiculous amount of money for eyeglasses; he has shitty vision and he needs to be able to see.

Spoiler: Red

I don't know Red's real name. he doesn't give it out to anyone, and i haven't made too much of an effort to try and get it from him. he was unfortunate enough to end up traveling with a fairy, and dumb enough to make it a promise.

it was a promise strong enough to hold him in place as it drained the blood from his body. "stay still," it whispered as it carved his heart out, and he collapsed to the ground changed forever.

iika:

Spoiler: the weeping god

there's a set of people who believe that the world is broken, because the god that made it was broken. they're a solitary people, focused on memory and kindness. no one else cares, see - the god that made the world is still mourning its own loss.

no one pays them much notice. they don't get in anyone's way, and they're not particularly vocal. it's rude to cause problems and expect that someone will pick them up. everyone should be given their time to mourn, even gods. especially gods. mind your own business, and don't cause any more harm.

these people just happen to be right.

more later probably whenever i remember this exists

 

Sounds really interesting and I might have some questions later (when not in phone)!

 

between making this thread and waking up this morning i forgot this existed so uh thank you very much for the alert.

Spoiler: more about Red

i still need to do a lot more to figure out the technology of his world, but it varies depending on who you are. like, the royal family? they've got seven princesses. one is real. six are fakes, somewhere between clones and siblings. Red was one of the fakes. there was a kidnapping attempt, but the kidnappers got him instead of the real princess. when he got free, he started heading back towards the castle - and then realized that he didnt have to do that. he turned and ran to the nearest town instead, and the story unfolds from there.

 

between making this thread and waking up this morning i forgot this existed so uh thank you very much for the alert.

Spoiler: more about Red

i still need to do a lot more to figure out the technology of his world, but it varies depending on who you are. like, the royal family? they've got seven princesses. one is real. six are fakes, somewhere between clones and siblings. Red was one of the fakes. there was a kidnapping attempt, but the kidnappers got him instead of the real princess. when he got free, he started heading back towards the castle - and then realized that he didnt have to do that. he turned and ran to the nearest town instead, and the story unfolds from there.

 

iika:

Spoiler: alden and phiona

to be completely honest, these two are one of only two reasons that i regret shifting the timeline of iika. and also like. the only heterosexual couple i care about in any of my stories.

i've described phiona as "so full of life that it's killing her" and i think that's the closest i've ever gotten to describing her. like, flowers don't spring up where she walks, but i wouldn't be surprised. she's sweet, but she could murder the fuck out of you if she wanted to. but mostly she doesn't want to.

everything alden touches, dies. he's been on his own for as long as he can remember, and he dislikes killing but he does what he has to to survive. he ended up in charge of a fairly large and widespread gang, and after that he mostly just had to threaten people in order to stay in power. at some point, someone called him "The Magician" and it stuck. he wears many layers of clothing, including a mask over his face, so he can't accidentally touch anyone. he was thrilled when the city burned down and everyone fled.

the Forest:

Spoiler: Tesser and January (and Aki and Lise)

January went missing and came back some 40 days later sans one hand. it's just gone cleanly at the wrist, more healed than should be possible given how long he'd been missing. he won't say a word about where he's been or what happened, except to Tesser.

Tesser is the one recording all of this, and his friend group is him, January, Lise, and Aki. They were the standard "two boys, two girls, paired off heterosexually" except that January is trans, and Tesser is gay, and Aki isn't particularly interested in anyone (aro), and Lise is, for all intents and purposes, gay. Aki and Lise are less important to the story, but mostly because January shuts them out after he comes back. He thinks that Tesser will understand. Tesser does not. So January leaves.

And Tesser goes after him, because like hell is he going to let his friend go back into the evil hell dimension alone.

 

people should definitely ask me questions about anything and everything in this thread

Romison:

Spoiler: Lady April

Chester works for her; she's sort of a queen of thieves. she's also sixth in succession to the actual throne. she doesn't actually have a flower in her eye, but she did lose her eye in some sort of accident when she was very small, and the eyepatch she wears has a massive flower on it. so that's sort of the same thing. she also didn't kill her husband. or did she? she's still very young; i think she was a child bride.

she likes to pretend that she's mad, because it makes most of the people working for her respect her on a level that is easier to deal with than genuine respect. it's more like - don't piss off the crazy lady? and humoring her? i don't think I'm phrasing this right. they do appreciate that she keeps the law from getting to them, since they're all criminals of some sort or other.

chester doesn't appreciate the crazy lady act, and she appreciates that. they have some very frank and intense conversations sometimes.

there are a bunch of weird children's rhymes about her:

...Lady April dressed in blood
Oh, her dress it drips with mud
See the flower in her eye
If you pluck it she will die...

they get really gruesome after the first couple verses. as children's rhymes do.

Spoiler: Howell

Howell was named after a stuffed animal I stole from my sister that I named Howl after Howl from Howl's Moving Castle. he's some sort of soldier or guard, not very important. he's the one who tells chester that everyone thinks he was the one who killed the king. chester did not in fact kill the king; he was stealing pearls from some duchess or other. but he can't really defend himself, since he is a criminal. howell buys him some time.

chester is a bit of a dick to howell, but only enough to keep howell from actually being able to do his job. at least once, he kissed howell on the nose and ran away with the stolen goods. this worked as planned; howell stopped chasing after him so he could process what just happened.

Spoiler: The Widdershins

I'm not actually entirely sure they exist in this story anymore, but they definitely used to. they're also a thief, but of a different kind than chester. the legends say that they carry their own death sentence in their pocket, that the ink wasn't even dry before they stole it.

 

the Forest:

for reference, pretty much all of the characters following were transferred in from my zombie story i started freshman year and then abandoned

Spoiler: the wandering group

Violet (Vitta) Eston - when she was little, everyone called her Vil because she was a little villain. in middle and part of high school, everyone called her Volli because she was best friends with a guy named Ollie and they were always together. Ollie died at some point; I'm not sure exactly how, but it had something to do with the Forest. Now she goes by Vitta, because it almost rhymes with bitter. She's just a little bit 2edgy4u. She's an arsonist, and would probably be in infinite trouble if anyone could prove it was her. Now, it doesn't matter because she's in the Forest and survival sometimes means burning shit down

Katrina (Catch) [lastname] - she's a writer, and she originally went into the Forest for research. she can't get out now, but it's okay because she's not alone anymore.

Susanna (Zenna) [lastname] - she's a singer who won't say why or how she's in the Forest.

Jette [lastname] - she'll wreck your shit and look fantastic doing it. She's kind of a more forceful version of Vitta, but without the fire.

Nora [lastname] - She's suspicious of people. A lot of people are annoyed with her because she doesn't trust them.

Lya [lastname] - Nora's sister. She reads lots of books; no one knows where she finds them. It's really the least of their problems, and they don't pay much attention.

Kaita [lastname] - She has an innocent smile and a quiet voice. She does sympathetic magic and she's not to be fucked with.

Kesiah - He's really femme. He used to run a lot of scams, that were varying degrees of successful; now he gambles with life and he should MAYBE stop doing dangerous shit all the time in the crazy murder death Forest.

Spoiler: the seekers

Kozete (Koza|Zee) [lastname] - Some people call her Koza. Some people call her Zee. She knows things, and it's only a little bit terrifying. Definitely only a little bit. Don't let her know you're on to her.

Becky Abney - She's convinced that tarot cards hold the answer to how the Forest works. She's also into numerology, despite/because of being really really good at math. It annoys some seekers, but others follow her theories religiously. She wants to find the Forest more than anything, but no one knows why.

Dante [lastname] - Childhood friends with Kozete. He's a poet, and is only here because Kozete dragged him into this mess.

Georgia [lastname] - she wants to find the Forest because her sister disappeared into it.

Newton Jones - They like science! and they won't shut up about it.

Jaide [lastname] - They had latent mind control in the story they were from, but I haven't decided yet if they still do.

Romero [lastname] - hates zombie movies. memes with Jaide and confuses the heck out of everyone else.

Asile [lastname] - she's a jerk and mostly just trolls the seekers, at first.

 

i am nowhere near coherent enough to write anything proper right now, so this will have to suffice as the post for today. sorry.

 

TELL ME MORE ABOUT HOW MAGIC WORKS IN ROMISON

Why is it illegal? Do mages always smell of magic or does the smell only exist when a magic is cast/while the magic is active/after the magic is cast?

Why do Chester and Jacques stick together?

 

: D

Well, first I should say that Red's world and Jacques' world are not the same, even though they're from the same story.

Spoiler: how magic works in Jacques' world

there's actually a LOT of things happening with magic in that world. Mages always smell of magic, and a lot of them are actually more easily found without even using someone like Jacques.

born mages have what look like tattoos. the design and the placement vary from person to person; the first mage i designed (Victoria) has little semicircles running up her neck and left cheek. but you can't just strip someone and search for a tattoo without first properly accusing them - well, you can, but when someone is innocent there's a huge mess to deal with PRwise. And anyhow, the witch hunt groups are pretty certain that they only want to kill mages, and not just random weirdos. so, when someone has an obvious tattoo they don't last very long, and when they don't, they need to be sniffed out.

it's illegal partly because the king at the time is batshit and is scared of magic and partly because a bunch of people were like "hey let's do witch hunts" and the laws were quietly changed to make it legal to do witch hunts. it's usually not illegal, because magic is really useful and mages generally keep each other from going mad with power (because they don't want something like this mess to happen ever).

and then there are people like Maye! there's a group of assholes who go around kidnapping rich people's children and threatening to make them into mages. it's a good way to make money i guess. this group is actually capable of doing that, for a given value of "mage", and they keep the method very secret (they literally just fill the person with magic until the person can't hold it in anymore; the person starts having bursts of uncontrollable magic). the fun part is (and by fun i mean this is why they're assholes and not just kidnappers) they sometimes do this even if the rich person gives them the money. and then the rich person has to hide their magic child or lose them to the witch hunts. Maye was one of these kidnappees, and one of the very few that survived past the downfall of the witch hunters. She is pretty much out of magic at this point, but she still smells of it. If enough magic is done on you, it becomes part of you.

Red's world on the other hand is a nice little fucked up scifi fairytale world, and there's a third world i haven't talked about yet. plus maybe a fourth. i haven't decided if i'm including it or not.

Spoiler: why chester and jacques stick together

the first time chester saw jacques, jacques was being beaten half to death by some survivors of the witch hunts and not fighting back at all! so chester intervened, and now fights angry mages so that jacques doesn't get hurt. jacques makes sure that chester remembers to eat and chester makes sure jacques stays safe and sane. they sleep in shifts most nights; someone has to make sure the candles don't burn down the house.

it's mutually beneficial mostly because chester likes fighting people who pick on people who can't defend themselves. chester is also technically a mage, though he has very little in the way of raw power, and so he figures it's okay. the magic smell make jacques nervous but he understands that having chester around is much better than nothing.

 

*_*
That's amazing

 

Tell me about Red's fairy! And what are fairies like in that world in general?

How did having his heart carved out change him? ((I mean, apparently it didn't have the obvious effect))

 

Red's fairy has changed a bunch, I'm going to try and make sure all this is up to date but frankly I'm not sure about some parts.

Spoiler: fairies

in that world, fairy is a generic word for anything that flies around and tries to manipulate people. they're not at all one species, but they might as well be from a human perspective. there's no such thing as a 'fairy godmother' or 'good fairy' or anything like that. You can trap one, but it takes a lot of effort and really isn't worth it unless you're just showing off. but this means that fairies mostly don't show up in any self-respecting town, because the townsfolk will try to kill it rather than be tricked into anything.

red's fairy is actually pretty smart, and one of the first things it tells red to do is to make it seem like he's trapped it. by the way, the reason anything the fairy does works on red is that red was raised in a fancy, heavily defended castle where you wouldn't have to worry about something like fairies. it was left out in royal education and this was unambiguously a mistake.

anyhow, it's not that red isn't smart. it's that he's ignorant.

Spoiler: heart

the fairy needed to use his heart for something. he never found out what, so i never bothered to figure it out. anyway, in a cool scifi fairytale world, you don't need to kill someone to cut out their heart! that's a waste of resources! and a person without a heart is useful; they don't fight back. they can't do it. so red doesn't remember what happened during that time too well; it just sort of passed by and he didn't feel anything about it.

at some point later he falls out of the world and almost dies because the world he falls into runs on different rules. these rules say things like "people can't live if they don't have hearts!" but it takes some time for that to actually set in.

 

Iika:

Spoiler: Jordan

I haven't actually done a lot of work with their character arc - they have an easier time than anyone else with much of their troubles, but they're also being slowly worn down by the rest of the mess they're shoved into. It's delicate, and I'm trying to make it complement a couple of other character arcs.

They're agender and enjoy reading and messing with people. They like history best, and they're incredibly bad at math. They're not loud, but they're a presence. If they're at a party, it seems to last longer than the night could last. The student council at their school is ridiculously thankful that Jordan is on it, because people are just /better/ when they're there. They're also the force behind the school garden - it's one of the ones with all sorts of vegetables grown so the cafeteria can use them.

Spoiler: Aven

Aven has actually been around for far longer than most of her group. She wasn't originally (or ever) a werewolf, but she was very much connected with werewolf folklore and such. She still is, really - I decided to keep it because it gives her character arc the slightest bit more coherency.

She's a small, quiet redhead. People underestimate her, which is how she's basically able to act as a spy at her high school. It's dumb shit, just teens trying to catch their partners cheating, but they're rich teens mostly and she's not going to refuse the money. After that stops being profitable, she picks up other odd jobs under the table. She's a messenger, occasional thief, the person taking the fall when a prank is discovered - she takes in the money and establishes herself as The Person To Go To.

 

Iika:

Spoiler: Ainsel

I haven't actually written anything from her pov yet, which is a shame because she has a really fun arc, even if parts are technically a little cliche.

She's in some ways the most powerful of her group, but she's also the last to use any of her powers. She's a pacifist to her core, and would rather not be involved in this whole apocalypse business.

She ends up distant from the others, aloof - which, ironically, is just what [NAME REDACTED] wanted.

 

Tell me more about the Forest -- you've talked about the characters in it but haven't said much about the setting, but it sounds like it's unusual. What is the Forest?

 

the Forest is actually a bunch of old settings squished together and given sentience : D

Spoiler: The Forest

some of the bits and pieces that led to it:

• hylenas, which were made up creatures that I shamelessly stole from my sisters. I mean, I'm not using the animals themselves anymore, but the setting was great and I wish I'd bothered to play in it more. There was a fantastic trickster god that was in charge of the setting, which meant that the setting itself wasn't sentient, but it was definitely a harsh place. Anyway, I think this was the first thing that was relevant.
• the phrase "walls have ears" followed by some snarky comment about trees being worse
• (oh fuck i just opened my old email account so I could re-check facts and there's stuff going back so many years. so much embarrassing middle school writing.) There was a story that I was writing with one other friend. It only lasted like two pages and we never really did any world building, but I did think a lot about the (incredibly vague) setting and the world was definitely malicious. There was something following the narrator, but that wasn't the real threat.
• something about dryads probably tbh
• the shitty vampire book that i tried to write in seventh grade. this story is important mostly because like 20 people worked on it and so it was The shitty middle school attempt at a novel. the setting in question was a maze - the main character calls it a tangle. that's probably what gave it the sense of being alive. plus it's got the whole "don't look back if you want to get out alive" thing.
• some other stuff i apparently can't find right now! but they mostly just involved cruel settings.
• [edit] HOW THE FUCK DID I FORGET THE HOUSE FROM HOUSE OF LEAVES. that was a major influence.

the actual bit I wrote about it - it's not quite accurate, because it's what Tesser remembers January having told him (and January isn't exactly a reliable source), but it's close enough:

The Forest is something of a mythic construct, or a liminal space, or any number of ten or so terms he used. It’s one of maybe two or three dozen, and they’re all connected in various ways. They’re varying degrees of sentient and cruel.
The Forest is one of the most sentient, and one of the most sadistic. It folded January into itself and made him a part of the story. Now the story is following him. To us.
He explained to me about some of the creatures and species that inhabit the Forest – I don’t remember the specifics but he made sure I understood that there’s a reason to be afraid of them. If they’ve survived in the forest for this long, they’re more dangerous than they seem.
If they’ve survived in the Forest for this long, it’s likely that they’ve made themselves necessary for the continued existence of the Forest. It might actively protect and aid them. It might just find my death amusing, or it might not.
January tried to say something in one of the native languages, but he couldn’t make the sounds and we ended up just laughing until we were out of breath.

I spent way too fucking long looking for the stories that led to the Forest and now I'm not sure what I have the brainpower to actually say.

If you go into the Forest, you're going to lose something, one way or another. January was actually really lucky that he got something concrete in return. Tesser was....still very lucky that he made it out alive. Most people don't. Basically the Forest is a very powerful asshole. It wants food and entertainment and people are the easiest way to get both at the same time.

There's also a Highway Rest Stop and a Sketchy Hotel Room, by the way. They just aren't at all relevant to the story.

this isn't nearly what i was trying to say but i'm tired, so i'll have to remember to do a part 2 when it is not 2 am

 

barely relevant but i have to put it somewhere

the Forest:

Spoiler

January has a cat called Tick, short for Tikola Nesla. when he disappeared, Aki went over to make sure it would be safe and fed, but it got out and no one was able to find it. i'm not 100% sure yet what happened to it but there's a chance that January is going to get a cat to the head at some point. Tick was not happy that he disappeared.

Spoiler: hopefully coherent

let's try this again

there are a bunch of liminal spaces that have existed for as long as anyone can remember. a few are newer, because they're from newer concepts, and the Forest is one of the oldest of them all. almost everyone's scared of the woods at night, and the Forest feeds on that kind of fear. it's very easy to take a wrong turn and end up deeper than you ever wanted to go....it's just as easy to take a wrong turn and step out of this world entirely.

the Forest wants people to entertain it and nourish it; it wants people to feed the creatures that live inside it. it is no forest and it is every forest. it is the woods in your nightmares. it is not patient. it takes anyone that ventures too far into the woods, or even not that far at all.

it was still probably created by something akin to a trickster god - it's something like a minor god itself, depending on how you look at it. it's an absolute hell of a place.

the creatures that live inside it are almost sentient enough to be on par with humans, but look more like twisted mockeries of various animals. they cannot exist outside of the Forest, and the Forest cannot survive without them anymore.

Some people have managed to survive inside the Forest for a long time, but it's a stressful life at best and most don't last more than a couple years, even if they make it through the first couple of days. January is the only person to have made it out alive in some thirty or forty years.

 

Now I want to know more about January!

 

: D January is a fun character to write

Spoiler: January

January was the artist of the group (Aki and Tesser being writers and Lise being Lise). He doodled, he sketched, he illustrated. The school newspaper kept trying to get him to do a comic section, but he didn't want to. (He loses his dominant hand in the Forest, and loses all of this with it. He never quite gets the hang of drawing with his other hand, and won't show his attempts to anyone.)

It's been the four of them since pretty much the first day of kindergarten, and they've had their fair share of drama before settling into a comfortable balance. January doesn't share a class with anyone but Lise the year he disappears, and Lise ended up in a different lunch than everyone else. This means that they don't all talk as much as they'd like to, but that doesn't mean that any of them are less important to each other. This is important because of what it means when January comes back.

Before, he was a loud and energetic guy, friendly with everyone he talked to. When he came back, he wouldn't talk to anyone. He shut out Lise and Aki, thinking that they wouldn't understand, and focuses on Tesser. He became intense, quiet, and off-putting. Lise and Aki wanted their friend back, but they understood that this wasn't quite the January they'd known anymore, and they were uncomfortable trying to talk to him if he didn't want to talk to them. Tesser just didn't want to acknowledge any of this, and thus was unable to do anything of use.

January isn't a different person, but he's on edge and terrified and doesn't understand how to make things better. I think he'd have been okay if he'd been more willing to talk to Aki and Lise, since they're less...hmmm...biased? than Tesser is. When Tesser finds him again in the Forest, he's more relaxed and less quiet. Once he's not (as far as he knows) putting the people he loves in danger, he feels better. Who would have guessed? (not Tesser)