You, the queen of a fairy tale kingdom, got cursed to give birth to a princess who’s going to live her life isolated in a tower the first 20 years of her life. Narrate how you avoid your daughter’s fate.
She laughed, when she placed the curse on me. Laughed and laughed. She called me a fool for coming to her, for wanting children who would sap my strength and steal my power.
One child to take my kingdom, she promised me. Well, I’d wanted an heir. It didn’t have to be a curse.
One child the sea would steal. There was room in that. They didn’t have to die, only to love the sea. I would buy the finest ships.
And the third would suffer my grandmother’s fate.
The tower.
Grandmother told me stories about that tower, shuddering. About the isolation almost driving her mad. About the desperate longing for escape. I know what that escape cost her, and my grandfather as well, with his scarred face and limping gait.
That was going to be difficult.
The sorceress’s curse worked. Within the year, I held my first babe in my arms, a sturdy boy who kicked and cried and cuddled against his mother as if he hadn’t been made only to bring me grief. Well, all mothers grieve.
You know those anime meta posts along the lines of “I was born with pink hair. The doctors told my parents I was a Main Character and ever since my life has not known peace from demons/spirits/sports competitions/harems who find me”
Well I see that, and I raise you this:
An anime boy whose appearance is, by absolutely anyone’s account, completely and utterly average. Mundane hair. Mundane eyes. Not even glasses to set him the tiniest bit apart. A simple, unmemorable, unrecognizable civilian among a backdrop of millions.
And he has a lot of passions, and a lot of ambitions, which he hones every chance he gets. He’s dabbled in sports and archery and cooking and just about anything you could wrap a competition around. And he’s competed in many of these. Every chance he gets. With all of his passion and all of his might.
He’s crushed by the competition every single time.
Until one day–one day something clicks for him. Something that should have seemed obvious from the start and yet never was–as though everyone, including himself, was unwittingly blind to it. It clicks, when he realizes every kid who’s beaten him in competition, every kid who’s gone on to fame and glory and acclaim, has been some candy-haired gel-spiked ridiculously-dressed fucker.
There’s some trend there that this Main Character boy can’t explain and can’t understand but he decides, this one time, fuck it. He’ll play along too. He’s got a model train competition in four days, and he’s got nothing more to lose. He hits up the department store, buys the pinkest, noxious-est, fruitiest hair dye he can find, the spikiest hair gel available, and the gaudiest clothes on the thrift rack. He enters the model train competition looking like a bubble gum gijinka.
And he wins.
Suddenly, the other candy-haired contestants notice him. They talk to him. They pledge rivalries. Girls notice him. Judges applaud him. Acclaimed model train aficionados offer him internships across the world. He’s hit on something.
The main cast expands to cover just about every candy-hair cliche in the book: from the mostly-normal-looking demure school girl with the blue hair to the Naruto-est, yelling-est boy with the red-and-green spiked hair. The cool megane senpais, the purple haired tsunderes, suddenly everyone is interested in him. They’re prodigies and upstarts and underdogs and they truly believe that this main character boy is one of them.
So the main character boy maintains his ruse. He touches up his roots at dawn every morning and carefully attends to his gelled spikes and tells absolutely no one about this great, uncanny, unfathomable secret he’s stumbled upon. He wins his competitions left and right. He racks up the acclaim. He’s hailed as a prodigy of all trades, just now bursting onto the scene, and boils to the top of all his candy-haired peers.
He’s rising up, his every dream within his grasp. Until one day he gets a note under his door, taped to an old picture of his Normal Boring self from middle school, that says “You don’t belong”
There’s an international competition, and Main Character-kun and all his candy-haired rivals/peers/nakama/friends are being housed in the same hotel.
The night before the competition, some ungodly scream sounds from the Naruto-kid’s room. The rest of the cast rush in, flick on the lights, and find Naruto-kid sitting up in bed, his hair completely flat and utterly black, a pair of DIY salon gloves discarded next to his bed. He races to the mirror across the room, hands hovering in shock around his straightened hair, as though unable to recognize the boy staring back at him.
It’s… an unsettling act of personal vandalism, but Naruto-kid seems unhurt. After verifying he’s okay and reporting it to hotel security, most of the kids are content to go back to their own rooms and just double-check their own locks.
Most seem content…. Not all…
The next day, Naruto-kid is eliminated from the competition nigh-instantly. He’s given no chance to monologue about his ambitions, his friends, his hometown. Not even a second spared for a flashback to the bullying that became the formative motivator of his childhood.
No. He’s summarily eliminated by another candy-haired contestant. Naruto-kid, with his suddenly unassuming black hair, is dismissed from the arena. And Main Character-kun is distressed.
There’s a murderer on the loose. Just in no traditional sense. Another kid is shaved bald in the middle of the night, and eliminated from the competition the next day. Colored contact lenses go missing, and suddenly the red-eyed yandere girl doesn’t have a leg to stand on. She’s sent home without the slightest bit of fanfare. Someone funnels bleach into the sprinkler line, and a triggering of the fire alarm leaves a whole arena of contestants doused in the ruinous fluid. Their candy colors melt into brittle, tacky, bleachy off-orange. Not a single one survives that night’s round of eliminations.
Main Character-kun is still pink. He’s still gelled. He’s still dressed in fiery robes and platform sandals with a bandana cinched around his forehead. He hoards hair dye in his room and sleeps with one eye open. He can only watch in silence as this gruesome assassination plot unravels, without a doubt in his mind that he is the real target.
One night, there’s a knock on his door. And the twisting of a key. And the squeak of hinges swinging open. Main Character-boy’s breathing halts. His time has come.
He looks. It’s the blue-haired girl, the quiet one with self-confidence issues. Her hair is tied into twin pigtails. She’s carrying something in her right hand. Main Character boy braces for impact.
She flicks on the lights. He looks. They’re wigs, in her hand. Three of them. Purple Green and Orange, each primmed and poofed and curled to extravagant degrees.
“Here,” she offers, hand extended. “Take whichever you like. They’re extra.”
“Wait. Why…? What’s this–what’s happening?”
She takes a step forward, and she shuts the door behind her. With her free hand, she grips the blue hairline at her scalp, and she pulls back gently, revealing netting. She drops the blue hair to the ground, and pulls the netting free from her forehead, and a loose, unassuming bob of perfectly black, perfectly normal hair falls around her shoulders.
She’s unassuming in every possible regard, mundane in every sense, a girl to blend into the backdrop of millions.
“We’re not going home yet,” she says. “Not you, and not me.”
The Main Character girl wraps her hair back up in the netting and fixes her blue wig back in place. She takes a seat in the nearby desk chair and explains why she’s here. She’s suspected for a while that she and MC-kun are the same, both normal-looking people masquerading in this candy haired world. MC-kun had seemed just a bit too distraught during the Naruto-kid incident. That was when Main Character-chan first noticed him, and when she recognized his shade of candy pink hair by its bottle brand.
MC-chan explains that she had lived a very normal and unassuming life. She did Stage Crew in middle school for the drama club, always the unnoticed extra in the background, sweeping in silently, covertly, under darkness to handle the scene changes and wardrobe transformations. She honed her skills making props and costumes for the drama kids, til she was a master of needle and thread, dyes and combs, and props built from paper and plastic.
She thinks it was that attention-to-detail she cultivated in prop-design that let her finally See what MC-kun had seen—the Candy Haired world around her that constantly overshadowed whatever she did.
One day, she put on the wig. And she never looked back.
But she doesn’t know who the hair assassin is either, any more than MC-kun. There’s still strength in numbers. And she figures if they work together, their odds of survival are greater.
MC-kun agrees.
…
The next day is a free day for the kids competing in this International Competition. The morning passes with most of the contestants montaging through a romp in the city, tasting local cuisine and window-shopping around the market area and getting into Kodak-moment worthy shenanigans.
MC-kun and MC-chan steal away to a quiet park, sitting at a picnic table, putting pink- and blue-heads together to talk through all the info they have, and what options are open to them. They don’t get very far. A glasses-wearing girl appears from behind the bushes and stops them cold.
Glasses Girl is small and wiry, mousy in her frame. She has orange hair that poofs around her head, cropped at chin level, in a way that reminds MC-kun vaguely of a roosting chicken. Her glasses are enormous on her freckled face, and they capture the light, obscuring her eyes behind their glare.
“You two… you’re fakes, aren’t you? Both of you.”
MC-kun stops cold. MC-chan spins around in her seat, wide-eyed. “I don’t… I don’t even know what that means! Go away before we—”
Glasses Girl pulls an immaculate, highly stylized laptop from her bag. She flips it open with one hand, propping it on the table and typing furiously, too fast to even see her fingers. Audio begins to play from the laptop speakers.
“We’re not going home yet. Not you, and not me.”
“I hacked into your phone last night,” GG-chan states simply, head tilted toward MC-kun. “I’ve heard the whole conversation.”
“How?!” MC-kun asks. He holds his phone at a distance, like it’s suddenly venomous.
GG-chan shifts. Suddenly the glare of her glasses is no longer obstructing her eyes. Behind the coke-bottle look is an expression of pure brow-knitted confusion. “I don’t…. I don’t actually know. I just could.”
GG-chan was an art student. A not-very-good-at-all art student. And a very-much-below-average competitor in sculpting competitions. She was plain, and unassuming, and inconspicuous, and jealous of the better-established art students around her with their own flashy styles. Her peers wore giant non-prescription glasses; they dyed their hair bright colors and cropped it short to perfect hipster chique.
GG-chan tried to imitate that. But as a truly-not-fantastic artist, she couldn’t even pull that off. She dyed her hair, picked out glasses, overshot “hipster”, and landed firmly in “geek”.
She landed so firmly in “geek” that internationally-acclaimed hacker abilities spawned with her makeover. Suddenly she could break into anything, override anything, hack or fix or erase anything over a permanent wifi connection that followed her as its hotspot.
Her laptop never loses charge. Her bash scripts never fail. Her glasses always glint in the slightest bit of light and slide down her nose so that she has to keep her middle finger pressed firmly to the bridge at all times.
She’s afraid of being sent home in ruin, sent back to her life as a mediocre art student.
GG-chan wants to join the effort to not be eliminated.
…
A day passes. GG-chan has hacked all the email accounts of the registered contestants and has found nothing suspicious. MC-chan has spent her time crafting shorter-cut wigs to give to MC-kun and GG-chan as backups. MC-kun has been trying his best to understand what he’s gotten into. He bought a few extra obnoxious bandanas to bolster his obnoxious outfit, as if that might help.
They’re sitting quietly at lunch, eating in silence, with no new information to share and no desire to attract unwanted attention from the contestants around them.
“Ohhhhh my what is this? Has this pathetic posse of plebeians formed a little club oh how quaint!”
MC-chan chokes on her noodles. GG-chan startles. MC-kun groans.
The voice belongs to a platinum-blond boy, dressed to the nines, who’s sidled up to the table unannounced. He reeks of ambition and money and arrogance and a very particular high-end cologne, and he laughs heartily at his own joke. He flicks a lock of blond hair from his face, which all but sparkles.
MC-kun recognizes this kid. He was one of the first Candy Haired kids to declare an eternal rivalry with him.
“What’s it to you?” MC-kun challenges, already ticked off.
And the Rich Blond Rival Boy deflates. Comically. Pale and hollow-cheeked and exhausted, suddenly leaning against their lunch table, speaking in a rasp. “Please let me join you. I’ve been wearing this Gucci suit for two weeks straight I don’t have any others.”
No one answers immediately. No one has anything resembling an answer.
“Then buy another suit!” MC-kun says.
“Do I look like I’m made of m o n e y to you?!”
“YES.”
“Ah ha! Yes that is the point, well you see–” and RBR-kun pulls out a soggy PB&J from his bag, slumps into an open seat at the table, his eyes dull and matte, solemnly chewing his lunch. “Can one of you spot me like $1.50 for the bus ride to the competition arena tomorrow? I spent the last of my money on this bread.”
MC-kun: “What?”
RBR-kun: “I don’t have money!”
MC-kun: “Why are you ACTING like a rich boy if you DONT HAVE MONEY”
RBR-kun: “LOOK IT JUST KIND OF HAPPENED OKAY.”
MC-kun: “WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT JUST KIND OF HAPPENED.”
And well, it just kind of happened. Rich Blond Rival Boy is as fake as they come. He grew up in a modest household, making money over the summer by doing yard work for neighbors. He was fairly frugal and quiet and unassuming, until his grandma bought him a nice tux for the school dance, and he dyed his hair platinum blond on a dare, and suddenly the world was in his pocket.
Suddenly he had connections in high places. Suddenly he could have wait staff doting on him at a moment’s notice. Suddenly he could summon helicopters at the snap of his fingers, and have any product imaginable, legal or not, air-lifted to him on a whim. Everyone was his pawn. Everything bent to his will. Ever since then he’s been unstoppable in his ambitions.
He just doesn’t have any of the actual money to maintain this. All his cards are overdrafted. His credit is in the toilet. Several different loan sharks technically own the rights to his immortal soul.
Rich Blond Rival Boy wants in on the League Of Background Characters, because he is utterly afraid of the ruin he faces if he is exposed. If the others get assassinated, they get sent home. If RBR-kun gets assassinated, the debtors will drag him out by his toes.
A scuffle erupts over by the lunch line before anyone can give RBR-kun an answer. It’s over in an instant. A shriek, a clatter, a tray and knife hitting the ground. The biker ruffian boy with the blue mohawk lies on the floor. His shorn-off mohawk spikes lie on the platter, as if being served to the cafeteria at large.
Worried murmurs break out in the crowd.
No one had seen the knife-yielder.
No one had seen anything.
As if the act were committed by someone impossible to even notice.
And the one thing worth noting: MC-chan is now MG-chan, as in Main Girl-chan, to avoid mixing up her name with MC-kun.
Enjoy.
There’s a sustained hush, like a breath held too long. It’s a blooming, crawling, clawing wave of realization that takes the cafeteria captive. Heads turn. Voices falls silent. Clueless candy-hair after clueless candy-hair takes in the murder scene, mohawk spikes presented so curiously, so esoterically plattered, as if part of the lunch selection.
The dish itself is a warning; MG-chan understands that much. She feels the bloodlust in the air. And it’s closer now. She edges her chair away from the table. Her nerves are alight.
“Run,” MG-chan says.
“Sorry?” MC-kun replies.
MG-chan kicks her chair back, lighting to her feet.
“Run!”
And at that moment, a sound like a cannon ball fires, the silence breaking. People startle at the noise, but it’s the boy sitting one table over – directly across from MC-kun – who jolts entirely sideways in his seat. He’s the contestant whose hair has been quaffed perfectly into a cartoon whale, pallid blue and deep ocean undertones brimming through his hairline. He stares forward, as if stunned. The girl next to him asks if he’s okay.
He turns to her slowly, and reveals the entire right half of his face has been consumed in a wad of bubblegum. He raises one shaking hand to his whale-tail, now webbed in gum, and he collapses.
And all hell breaks loose.
MG-chan has MC-kun by the shoulder before he can process it. They’re running. Them and GG-chan and RBR-kun. Them and almost everyone else, a breathing screaming mass of panic as people shove and knee and elbow their way through the crowd.
“Where are we going?” MC-kun asks. He’s stumbling to keep pace with MG-chan, one hand pressed protectively to the bandana on his forehead in danger of slipping off.
“Away from here. Outside.” MG-chan throws her weight against the cafeteria door. It slams open. “Wherever we’re not sitting targets.”
Their feet beat against the linoleum below, into the hotel foyer, but it’s no good. The bloodlust presence doesn’t fade. It does not grow weaker. Instead it gains on them, like heat, like a house fire that lashes out at their heels and trips them with each step. Another two kids go down with the sound of razor blades and a puff of shorn hair, like dandelion fluff blown in the wind.
MG-chan, MC-kun, GG-chan, and RBR-kun all burst out the hotel front doors – RBR-kun with a shriek and a graceful leap over a half-shaved unconscious student on the floor.
“How did he go down?! I didn’t even see him go down?!” RBR-kun shouts, pointing to the kid he vaulted. “Invisibility? Is the murderer invisible?!”
“Maybe super-speed. Really any superpower is possible among these people. We can’t rule anything out.” GG-chan has her laptop out, balanced precariously on the crook of her arm. She types one-handed while she runs. “If I can hack into the security cameras maybe I can activate the infra-red sensors and get a reading on—”
There’s a crack. A gasp. MG, MC, and RBR all look back to find GG-chan frozen in place. Her glasses are shattered, pinned to the wall beside her by a single needle-thin arrow.
“My glasses…” GG-chan blinks, and stares at her laptop like it’s something entirely foreign to her. “What is this? What was I–?”
MG-chan grabs her arm too. “Never mind. Run. Just run.”
Necromancer that doesn’t know they’re a necromancer and thinks they’re just a really good emt
That is the funniest thing i have ever read
the thing was, she wasn’t going to be able to pass the recertification exam, and she couldn’t figure out why. annabelle studied. she practiced. she pulled out every trick and shortcut she’d learned during her two years as an EMT and none of it worked. she just – she didn’t get it. it made no sense.
“wake up,” she urged the dummy, pressing her hands to the pulse points on its wrists. “come on. what the fuck.”
“yeah, i don’t think that asking nicely is going to do the trick,” hank said, his eyebrows raised. his helmet, the special one they’d decorated for him with craft supplies from michael’s when he’d gotten promoted to firestation chief, sat askew on his head. “i can see now why they didn’t pass you.”
annabelle rolled her eyes. “it’s a psychological thing,” she said. “it’s like, you give the brain an instruction and it follows naturally. and the pulse-point thing always works. i don’t know why it’s not, like, in any of the books, but i swear to god it’s worked for me every time.”
it was true that annabelle had the best record on low body counts, which was good because she was the smallest person on the team not counting Georgie, who was a corgi. jake and lillian were always making fun of her for having been the shortest of their whole rookie class. but it hadn’t ever been a problem before; annabelle rarely had to carry anybody out, because she was good enough at getting them on their feet.
but none of that would matter if she couldn’t pass her stupid recertification exam, because they’d take her badge and she’d have to go be, like, a doctor or something.
hank blew out a long breath and sunk down to where she was kneeling on the station floor in full fire gear, giving CPR to the practice dummy, whom they called dierdre. there was a little light that went on when you’d saved its life. it had been a dull gray for an hour now.
“look, AB. i know you’re a good firefighter, and i know you know how to deliver CPR. just do it like you do it during an emergency. you’re overthinking it.”
“but this is what i do during an emergency!” annabelle cried, throwing her hands up. “i put my hands on their pulse points and i use psychological mumbo-jumbo and they just get up and walk!”
hank blinked. “…really,” he said, voice flat. “people who’ve been inhaling smoke for half an hour just … get up and walk.”
“the brain is an incredibly powerful organ,” said annabelle, shrugging. “look man, i don’t know, okay? but it works. i haven’t had to actually do CPR in like a year and a half.”
he gave her a long, quiet loo and said, “well….huh,” before pushing himself back up onto his feet and frowning off into the distance. “keep practicing,” he said after a minute, and left her there.
–
hank switched her team.
“what the fuck, man,” she said, sliding into the truck next to him as the sirens went on. “i can’t get CPR on one fucking dummy and suddenly you don’t trust me to do my job without supervision?”
carl and bethany very carefully did not meet her eyes in the rearview from the backseat. bethany pulled a magazine from beneath the seat and said loudly, “look, carl, jennifer aniston and brad pitt are getting back together.”
“thank christ,” said carl. “i’ve been really worried about jen.”
hank gave annabelle the flat look that had gotten him promoted to firestation chief in the first place, the one that said i’m your dad and you don’t want to disappoint me. as always, annabelle wilted underneath it, sliding down in her seat and crossing her arms over her chest. it was a difficult feat in full gear but she wanted him to know she was feeling sullen.
“i trust you completely,” hank told her, his voice a light scold. “i want to see you in action so i can help you figure out what’s going wrong with the dummies. sometimes it’s hard for the brain to accurately remember everything that happens during a crisis.”
annabelle rolled her eyes. “i told you,” she said. “it’s just – it’s the same thing every time, I’m not like, blacking out.”
“great, then i’m about to learn a cool new trick,” hank said serenely, and pulled the truck out of the lot. annabelle kept her gaze focused out of the window, watching the city pass as carl and bethany talked loudly about which celebrities were dating which other celebrities and who wore what better. she tried to swallow down the nerves that tightened her throat. maybe the dummy was right. maybe she was doing something else and didn’t remember it. maybe the last two years had been a fluke and she had no business being a firefighter. maybe she was about to get fired.
there wasn’t a fire, though the alarm was going off. instead they found a bag of smoking popcorn and the collapsed heap of a forty-five year old bachelor type, down to just his boxers and a pair of slippers with llamas on them. he had no pulse.
hank held carl and bethany back, directing them to deal with the smoke from the popcorn; annabelle he pointed toward the resident with a jerk of his chin.
she sighed, kneeling by his side. she pressed her hands flat to his heart and then dragged them across his chest and down each arm, to his wrists. with her thumbs on his pulse point, she hissed, “let’s go, man. up and at ’em. you’re not meant to die in your underwear while cooking popcorn, come on.”
she held her breath for a few moments, conscious of hank’s eyes on her, and let out a long sigh of relief when she felt his pulse jump beneath her, watched his eyes flicker. “what the fuck?” he asked, voice a croak. “what happened?”
“you gotta eat more vegetables, bud,” annabelle told him, and looped his arm over her shoulders to help him get to his feet. she was so relieved she could have wept, but instead met hank’s eyes with a challenging glare. see? she thought. i told you. “let’s get you to the ambulance.”
–
“the bad news is that you have a lot of practicing to do if you want to pass your recert,” hank said without preamble, showing up at her apartment. she didn’t think she’d ever seen him in jeans before. it was weird. “the good news is i understand your problem now.”
annabelle stepped aside, beckoning him in. “what problem?” she demanded. “it worked! you saw it work. that’s the opposite of a problem.”
hank shrugged. he handed her a trifold that he’d clearly printed off at home. it said so you think you’re a necromancer. annabelle blinked down at it, and then up at hank, and then down at the trifold again. “i … don’t understand what’s happening here,” she told him honestly.
“i’m not in the community and they’re kind of cagey, so i can’t really tell you a lot,” hank told her, stilted and visibly uncomfortable. “but i have a cousin who is, and um, i just want you to know that this doesn’t change anything. you’re still who you’ve always been and you have my complete support. we’ll figure out how to get around the recert. maybe i’ll – i can put you on admin duty to give you time to study. we’ll say it’s because of an injury.”
“hank,” annabelle said, with some urgency. “hank, this flier says the word necromancer.”
“yes,” agreed hank, looking relieved. “oh, good, you’ve heard of it already. i thought i was going to have to have the whole your body is changing talk.”
annabelle shook her head. “no, i – hank. you know that … um, you know that necromancy isn’t real, right? people can’t bring other people back from the dead. that’s crazy.”
“annabelle, not four hours ago you instructed a dead man to stand up and he did.”
“okay, he wasn’t dead, obviously. he was almost dead, at best.”
“no. he was dead.”
“i felt his pulse! it was very faint!”
“you called his pulse. no one else would have felt it, because it wasn’t there except in response to you.”
“hank, what the fuck.”
he shrugged. “read the flier,” he instructed. “and bring dierdre home with you. you’re going to have to practice a lot if you want to get recertified, considering you haven’t one time had to use any of the skills you learned the first go around.”
he bussed her temple as he went by, letting himself out of her apartment with a friendly wave. annabelle looked down at the flier in her hand with a frown. when she unfolded it, the first page said, everyone’s necromancy journey is different, but most people discover their gift by accident. have you ever brought a pet back to life? touched an elderly relatives hand and seen some of the color flood back into their face? or perhaps, more subtly, been able to keep cut flowers alive long past their purchase date?
annabelle looked at her kitchen table. she’d had the same vase of tulips on it since she moved in, three years ago. it was true they periodically started to wilt, but she usually just changed their water and they were fine, popping back up one after the other as she slid them into the fresh vase.
“well shit,” annabelle said, letting the flier fall from her hands.
#storytime #medical cw #conspiracy theories #vaccines #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
So, in the teleportation apocalypse world, the magic system involves performing a sequence of mental actions which correspond with, essentially, characters in a magical alphabet which can be chained together into magical programs. Magic is all about instantaneous effects before and after which mundane physics apply as usual; it can’t do things like “make this item magical” or “alert me any time someone enters this room”, but it can do things like “transform this item into a different substance” or “create a tripwire at the entrance to this room”.
The magic system was originally created with the assumption that users would have access to the documentation. The original users all died off millions of years before humans existed, though, and so nobody has access to the documentation. As such, while humans had access to magic, their access was essentially just a matter of noticing by trial and error that particular sequences of mental actions produced weird effects. Notably, since dangerous spells vastly outnumber safe ones, trying to invent new spells was an activity far likelier to end with the inventor dying in a dramatic fashion, and as such, while spell development happened, it was very slow.
For a long time, different societies each had their own distinct collections of the few spells they knew that were (a) safe to use and (b) did things which were useful rather than things like “produce a weird smell briefly”. But over time some travelers started writing compilations of spells from different places, and it eventually became possible to pull together a pretty robust library of the different spells which had been discovered. Still, since spells were generally put together on the basis of more-or-less random combinations of inputs rather than any genuine understanding of the system, while they were sometimes useful (e.g. for setting things on fire, or for creating otherwise-hard-to-acquire materials, or the like), they weren’t generally well-optimized for usefulness.
They were all told to not share their spells around further, and most of them followed that, but the teleportation spell’s recipient nonetheless started sharing the spell around. She gave it to a few friends of hers; they passed it along further; and eventually the spell was more-or-less uncontainably leaked. Its creator tried to hunt down everyone who had it, but gave up once they started wising up to her being after them and scattering to all sorts of different countries, because with the magic system being instantaneous in the way it was there wasn’t really a good way to track them at that point.
And so, all around the world, there started being people with access to an untraceable easy-to-cast long-distance teleportation spell. Word about how to cast it kept spreading throughout populations, with no easy way to curb the spread; and things started breaking. Armies with the spell could pop into enemy rulers’ homes, bypassing all city walls and opposing armies and other defenses, and kill them in their sleep before installing themselves as the new rulers; thieves with the spell could grab piles of valuables and then vanish off into other countries to sell them off and be rich; bandits could steal farmers’ grain out of storage and get away cleanly and untraceably; et cetera. It became generally very easy to engage in and get away with large quantities of antisocial behavior which would otherwise be more difficult and be likely to get one killed. And so, globally, societies started destabilizing and collapsing.
It’s been about two centuries since then, and while society is now more-or-less functional again, it’s very much rebuilt in a manner shaped by the spell. Governments are secretive about their members’ identities and about where they spend their time, for fear of assassins; people are generally very secretive about where they keep their valuables, with any items kept in public assumed to be communal goods that anyone can grab and put wherever is most useful; various organizations attempt to run international law-enforcement firms which keep lists of known criminals and kill them on sight, in order to disincentivize the “act antisocially and then teleport a few countries away”; et cetera.
This last part, the details of what the world is like post-teleportation-apocalypse, is the part I’ve been stuck on for the past several years and which is holding me back from writing stories set in the world. I’ve got a decent big-picture sense of things at this point, but I need to draw in a lot more detail than I currently have before I can really envision the setting in sufficient detail to write in it. But once I’ve got that detail I feel like it’s going to make for a very fun setting for espionage-focused stories of some sort.
Then the magical girls world. This one actually has a whole big multiverse, and the rules of the multiverse-in-general inform the rules of the individual sub-parts thereof, so I’m going to start with that.
There’s a multiverse. It’s arranged in a star structure, with each of about 200 worlds being connected to a single central world but not connected to each other. Each of those 200 worlds, but not the central world, has a gigantic native reservoir of magic, which expresses itself in a fashion that varies on a per-world basis; some have magical creatures like dragons, some have magic be innate to humans, some have magic be external to humans but controllable via appropriate rituals, some have their magic totally inert, et cetera. Magic isn’t consumed on use; it’s just, while being used, unavailable for other uses. So there’s no decay-over-time in worlds with dragons or whatever, there’s just a cap on how many dragons could in theory exist. The per-world magic reservoir is huge enough that that limitation is rarely relevant to anything. Crucially, while the magic’s capabilities are nearly limitless given a sufficient quantity of it thrown at a task, one absolute limit is that it’s impossible for magic to interact with any worlds to which its own housing world isn’t connected; and, furthermore, impossible for it to do anything between worlds except for bridging the spatial disconnect. So transportation between the central world and a noncentral world is possible, as is creation of a stable portal therebetween, but (for example) remotely using magic to bomb out a world is not possible; you’d need to step into the target world for that.
These limitations make the central world a natural chokepoint. Whoever can block it up and make it unsafe to travel through can, in so doing, control every bit of multiversal transportation to go on. So, several millennia ago, an evil queen who stole all the previously-free-floating magic from her homeworld in order to make herself inherently magical to a ridiculously overpowered degree walked into the central world, displaced the trade consortium which had previously been using the place, and turned the world into a hub from which to systematically conquer the multiverse, eventually with the help of her descendants, who she imbued with a small echo of her own magical power. At first, the conquests were performed chiefly through her own overpowered magic; but eventually she started needing to stay in the central world full-time to keep it secure from counter-invasion by anyone in the multiverse who she’d made an enemy of, and so the conquests started falling to her magically-empowered descendants and the dozens of worlds’ resources they could bring to bear against each individual world they attacked.
So this faction, ruled by the evil queen, started invading another world. This particular world’s local magic took two forms: various magical creatures and materials around the place, and humans being able to magically bind things together, keeping the basic shape of one but with significant influence leaking through from the other. This could be used, for example, to merge oneself with a magical creature (gaining access to that creature’s abilities, at the cost of mental scrambling and value drift since one’s mind will be merged with its as well), or to merge a sword with a magical stone to imbue the sword with the stone’s magical properties, or the like. And they used this to fight back against the invading forces, but they were pretty horribly outmatched, and within a few years practically the whole planet had been conquered.
There was a particular kind of magical creature, local to a relatively small region of the world, which could emit a magical effect which, would, if other creatures were exposed to it for an extended time, hijack control of their bodies and minds, as well as magically altering their forms for greater usefulness to tasks such as “help build hives” and “grab and immobilize further creatures for me to turn into my minions”. These creatures weren’t too dangerous to humans generally, since they needed days of blasting magic at something before they got control of it and that required reasonably direct line of effect, but once in a while there would be an incident of one sneaking into somebody’s house, hiding there for a few weeks slowly building up control, and eventually turning them into a warped monster before getting discovered and killed off by the rest of the locals; so it was known that they were capable of dangerousness to humans.
So one particular group in that region decided, in a last-ditch effort to toss the invaders out, to attempt the following scheme: first, one of their members would bind a creature of this sort to themselves. Second, they would bind themselves to the sun, keeping its physical form but retaining their newly-gained magical powers “convert creatures towards which I’ve got reasonably direct line of effect into my minions”. Third, they would grab control of all the invaders they could and force them to either leave or kill each other.
It was a well-intentioned plan, and they even made token efforts towards ensuring that the value-drift issue wouldn’t get in the way (picking the most genuinely altruistic person they could find, and spending a day talking to her after she’d bound herself to the controls-other-creatures creature to make sure she was still herself before she bound herself to the sun), but they weren’t nearly as safety-conscious as they should have been (because their area was in the process of being invaded and they were afraid that, if they took any more time, they’d be caught themselves), and things went wrong as a result. In fact the merger had shifted her priorities, and while she still in some sense was altruistic, her priority had shifted from “help everyone attain happiness and flourishing” to specifically helping creatures she’d taken control of, and even there the goal was less anything resembling the sort of flourishing valued by humans and more about building gigantic elaborate hives to live in and acquiring more creatures for her to take control of.
So, about a week after that, people all over the world (especially in the sunny parts of it) started turning into monsters, grabbing other people, dragging them into sunny regions, and generally rapidly spreading into an out-of-control monstrous force. This successfully repelled the invaders, but it also turned the vast majority of the world’s population into puppets of the sun who were hostile to all life on the planet which didn’t want to become puppets of the sun. Societal collapse ensued.
A bunch of the invaders were caught in the initial wave of people-turning-into-sun-monsters, but overall as a force they were relatively unaffected, because unlike the rest of the world they had access to good global-scale communications and were able to respond to the first few incidents with a general call to retreat from the planet back to the central world. So most of them withdrew at that point. However, a sizable sub-fraction instead went “actually, no, we may have been invading this world but that doesn’t mean we’re okay just leaving all these people to suffer a literal planet-scale apocalypse, we’re going to stay and help”. And so they did. They helped hordes of refugees pile into caves, closed the caves off so that the sun-monsters couldn’t get in, and generally did a lot to help people make it through the disaster. Other bunches of humans did similar things on their own, without assistance from the ex-invaders, albeit with more difficulty.
Over the next few hundred years, most of the entirely-non-magic-assisted groups of humans belowground died off, because getting food without safe access to sunlight turns out to be really hard. But many groups had help from the ex-invader magical girls and their descendants, and many others managed to bind themselves to some variety of magical underground life in order to increase their chances of survival, and things more-or-less stabilized.
Cut to a few thousand years later. The magical girl who was leading of one of the underground civilizations decided to make an attempt at returning to the surface, as various civilizations occasionally did. Historically, those efforts tended to fail within a few weeks, with the sun-monsters coming down, dismantling whatever sun-protective architecture the aboveground group was using, and proceeding to do their best to get into the underground region the people had come from and grab everyone from there as well. But this one went differently, for two reasons. First, this particular civilization had an exceptionally high population of magical girls, and so was particularly well-equipped to drive off sun-monster incursions. Second, their leader, in specific, had magical power over clouds, and so was able to, instead of relying on protective architecture, set up a layer of eternally-present protective cloud-cover overhead.
So they were able to return aboveground. Once they were stably established there, their leader proceeded to start slowly expanding the layer of cloud cover, using an array of artifacts to bolster her ability to do so since her personal magical ability wasn’t enough to keep things up at that scale. She systematically made contact with every underground civilization whose cave she’d cloud-covered over and told them “hey, it’s safe to come back aboveground now”, and built her small civilization up into a full-on kingdom.
Such is the state of things in the current era. She’s been ruling for about seventy years now, during which the cloud cover has continually expanded, albeit increasingly slowly. As the borders have expanded, it’s become increasingly difficult to keep the place thoroughly defended from sun-monster incursions, but it’s nonetheless done well enough that they only do significant damage once in a while, not regularly. Additionally, sometimes the underground civilizations they discover have had sufficient binding-induced value drift over the course of their survival efforts that their populations aren’t able to get along well with the less-value-drifted humans; they tend to get magically sealed into their caves to continue living in isolation from the aboveground kingdom, but sometimes that fails for one reason or another and a crisis results. This is the status quo when the plot begins.
For this world, unlike the teleportation one, I’ve got a pretty robust plot worked out; I just need to figure out enough character details to be able to write it. To briefly summarize its premise, the plot involves the princess of one of the sealed-for-excessive-value-drift dungeons sneaking out, meeting up with the princess of the aboveground kingdom (daughter of the person who does the cloud-cover stuff), and going “hey, actually we’d be totally able to peacefully be part of human society, sure we devour people’s emotions but we don’t do it in an antisocial way”, and the two of them becoming friends (and eventually girlfriends), fixing the various broken parts of the world both within and outside of the cloud kingdom, and generally having adventures together. I plan them to start out going up against relatively small-scale antagonists, like other local magic-users, but eventually needing to go up against larger-scale threats, including the sun and its forces and, past even that, the multiversal empire whose attempted conquest kicked off this whole sequence of events.
Tags:
#storytime #story ideas I will never write #(kind of on the border between those category tags) #apocalypse cw #long post
apparently my boss who is a professor at my school doesn’t have a cell phone and his coworkers were upset by this so they bought him a childs toy phone and labeled it “David’s jitterbug” (for those of you that don’t know jitterbugs are phones made for old people that have like massive buttons and shit) so the other day I walked into his office to ask him a question and he pressed a button on it which made it start loudly playing the ABCs and he said “excuse me I have to take this” and then started singing along to the ABCs while shooing me out of his office
this is the phone. he apparently was in the middle of a meeting with the department the other day and got annoyed so he pressed a button, said “I have to take this” and left
David’s co-workers probably: “This is a valid tactic to embarrass him into buying a mobile phone, right?”
David: “Bold of you to assume that I get embarrassed.”
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(”and then started singing along to the ABCs”) #storytime
#storytime #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #(I’m not saying I *believe* this but it *is* funny) #((it’s times like these I’m glad my tagging system does not make a distinction between non-fiction and origfic))
“If you’re watching this video, I’m already dead. Not because I left it to be viewed in the event of my demise, but because that’s the only rational explanation for why somebody would be fucking with my laptop.”
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #death tw #storytime
Brinens and Things 