Wherein I take an hour or two to expand a concept of mine and see how far I can take it. I have something like 50 pages of story ideas (just the ones I've sorted, moreover) and this will be an exercise in seeing how much potential they have. It's all basically stream of consciousness, thrown out as it occurs to me, with only some polishing at the end to make sure that everything is grammatically correct and I didn't leave any sentences incomplete.
If our beliefs produced gods, then do alien species have gods? This is a sort of Far Future Scion or American Gods kind of story, I suppose. It's about taking a not-uncommon premise from contemporary fantasy and melding it with science fiction.
So, let's do this.
Showing posts with label war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Friday, November 7, 2014
CYOA brainstorming: An Adventure in Time
Alright. This one is going to be pure fun. Hello!
Time machine: Large
Home base: Eh. Let's ignore this one, actually.
Equipment: Universal translator, gold, infinite wardrobe, two sets of futuristic armor
Mission: Magical Nazis
Companions: Socrates, H. P. Lovecraft, Jesus, Laika, Helen Keller
Well! This certainly became loads more feasible of a story than I expected. At least, I would read this thing.
So what's gone on? Well, obviously, magical Nazis. That's what's gone on. Oh, and the protagonist has been displaced by zir home time. Now ze's crossing all time and space with a few special companions. Their time machine is a few stories tall. You know, pretty big. They live in it.
And they travel across time and space in their not-a-house to fight magical Nazis that are trying to break history apart.
Socrates is an absolutely fantastic person to have aboard. Most people only remember him for his intelligence, but back in the day he was famous for his exploits in war, too. Socrates comes from a society where all the men fought, and he lived to old age.
I'm going to rule that Laika has been given human intelligence. Somehow. And is a diehard Communist, of course. For the Motherland! This Nazi business is personal, mate.
The CYOA states that "like all blind people, Helen has the potential to become a formidable martial artist and sword fighter." This will be a lot of help in a temporal war against magical Nazis.
And then we've got Lovecraft and Jesus. Obvious choices, really.
I... don't know what more to say about this. Just got to say again, I would totally read this.
Friday, July 4, 2014
What Happens in the Darkness: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
A review for What Happens in the Darkness, by Monica J. O'Rourke.
"Manhattan died."
Nutshell: A shock attack by foreign powers leaves America broken and powerless to resist invasion. Meanwhile, there's a soldier with his finger on the button of a secret military project: America has vampires, and he's the one that's going to let them out.
Trigger warnings for this story: Rape and sexual mutilation, attempted rape of a minor, racial slurs. And gore. There are some horror novels that are light on the gore, but this so ain't one of 'em.
Friday, April 25, 2014
Story Notes: Why We Fight
Notes to: Why We Fight
This was, I think, the first story I ever wrote that I was totally satisfied with. There's still a lot of room for improvement, but even so I like it to this day.
This was, I think, the first story I ever wrote that I was totally satisfied with. There's still a lot of room for improvement, but even so I like it to this day.
Friday, April 4, 2014
Idea: The Lizard People are not what you think [B]
Continued from Wednesday.
The reptoids of today are a miserable rabble compared to their illustrious forbears. They are scrambling. Their science has decayed over generations of imperfect transmission and many are looking for older records, hoping that we are advanced enough to finally reverse-engineer some of the more crucial principles and grant them either a way home or a weapon to secure their power here forever. We are interfertile, our two species, and the modern race of annunaki is more human than reptoid. The blood is thin, they think in ways and feel emotions foreign to their ancestors, and some are capable of only partial transformations. More and more are freaks, either trapped in a hybrid mishmash form or seemingly entirely without a trace of their starry heritage.
For the annunaki, the apocalypse came thousands of years ago.
The annunaki whisper to their children that they would have been worshiped as gods in the old order but they are impotent scions at best. The truth is that they would have no power, would be peons and footmen, so far have they degraded. And yet still they try to accomplish the dream of their ancestors, a second world order, now as the rising sun but modeled after the first of them all (and who knows what would happen if the old empire, still extant, came in contact with this world again).
And where would George fall into this? As his people have fallen, so has he. His alcoholism was real. His grief over his sister's death was real. Left to his own devices he would hold an anonymous life in a small town on no map. But his life was charted out for him no matter how he tried to drink himself away from it. Perhaps it was cowardly to go along in the end rather than reject it, but he couldn't follow his sister's path. Perhaps at least he could try to salvage something along the way.
And now he sits amid ruins, putting on a face for the world and his peers but secretly glad in a way that he failed to do all that they expected of him. He wonders how many of his peers are in his same position, dissatisfied but too afraid to do anything but follow orders- they've learned, and even the powerful ones know that they can't tear away from the group without reprisal. But they managed to ensure that unity too late in the game and a few of them decide to risk it anyway and sometimes even get away with it.
Meanwhile the bottle still calls to George, and he himself calls out at night to a God that he fervently wishes is real but knows could easily be just the persona of one of his own ancestors. It isn't a pretty life, but he never lied and told himself that he was strong enough to make it anything else.
Perhaps his grandchildren will live long enough to see the blood run out at last, and in that generation his bones will find rest as the plots of the annunaki finally crumble to a halt.
The reptoids of today are a miserable rabble compared to their illustrious forbears. They are scrambling. Their science has decayed over generations of imperfect transmission and many are looking for older records, hoping that we are advanced enough to finally reverse-engineer some of the more crucial principles and grant them either a way home or a weapon to secure their power here forever. We are interfertile, our two species, and the modern race of annunaki is more human than reptoid. The blood is thin, they think in ways and feel emotions foreign to their ancestors, and some are capable of only partial transformations. More and more are freaks, either trapped in a hybrid mishmash form or seemingly entirely without a trace of their starry heritage.
For the annunaki, the apocalypse came thousands of years ago.
The annunaki whisper to their children that they would have been worshiped as gods in the old order but they are impotent scions at best. The truth is that they would have no power, would be peons and footmen, so far have they degraded. And yet still they try to accomplish the dream of their ancestors, a second world order, now as the rising sun but modeled after the first of them all (and who knows what would happen if the old empire, still extant, came in contact with this world again).
And where would George fall into this? As his people have fallen, so has he. His alcoholism was real. His grief over his sister's death was real. Left to his own devices he would hold an anonymous life in a small town on no map. But his life was charted out for him no matter how he tried to drink himself away from it. Perhaps it was cowardly to go along in the end rather than reject it, but he couldn't follow his sister's path. Perhaps at least he could try to salvage something along the way.
And now he sits amid ruins, putting on a face for the world and his peers but secretly glad in a way that he failed to do all that they expected of him. He wonders how many of his peers are in his same position, dissatisfied but too afraid to do anything but follow orders- they've learned, and even the powerful ones know that they can't tear away from the group without reprisal. But they managed to ensure that unity too late in the game and a few of them decide to risk it anyway and sometimes even get away with it.
Meanwhile the bottle still calls to George, and he himself calls out at night to a God that he fervently wishes is real but knows could easily be just the persona of one of his own ancestors. It isn't a pretty life, but he never lied and told himself that he was strong enough to make it anything else.
Perhaps his grandchildren will live long enough to see the blood run out at last, and in that generation his bones will find rest as the plots of the annunaki finally crumble to a halt.
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
Idea: The Lizard People are not what you think [A]
I think that many men that have done bad things are men that were good men whose flaws overcame them. I don't think that every person that has done bad things would have gone down that road had they been able to foresee its end. Certainly, they at least don`t usually consider themselves bad men. Most people don't think themselves villains.
When I think of George W. Bush I think of a man who wanted to do the right thing (at least as he understood it) but failed, partly because he lost control over the situation (if you could say that he even had control once) and partly because his flaws got the better of him. Most people do end up that way, in that situation. Then you have David Icke, who thinks that Bush is descended from a lineage of shapeshifting blood-drinking reptilian aliens.
A part of me wonders: What if we`re both right? What if Dubya is a reptoid- but has lost control in a way that none of us hairless apes can imagine?
The reptilians know barely more than we do. There was a time when both of us were different from what we are now, but there was war in Heaven and we were the ones who lost. We found ourselves imprisoned, and then we forgot about everything. The reptoids were prison warders once, victors of the usurpation, but they either were betrayed by power-hungry underlings or were those rebellious underlings. Either way, they lost the second war and found themselves in the same prison that they had fashioned. And then their ancestors ran into a mad accident and were left, Robinson Crusoe-style, on this world, isolated from the galaxy-spanning empire that their fellows had created. Once usurpers in Heaven, they were now twice-fallen.
They don't have the industrial base to maintain or reproduce their technology, nor the numbers to maintain a stable breeding population, but they were able to act quickly enough to take control of the earliest city-states and install themselves as god-kings. They called themselves the annunaki. But a small cadre of castaway alien-demons does not a permanent occupying force make, and when they lost control they couldn't get it back. They've been trying for thousands of years to do so, and have occasionally gotten temporary footholds, but the job gets harder with every passing generation. Even when they were monarchs in Europe they couldn't take full advantage of the situation- they hide their nature and plans out of self-preservation rather than brotherhood and whenever they grow powerful enough some turn on the rest and progress is lost again.
Continued on Friday.
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When I think of George W. Bush I think of a man who wanted to do the right thing (at least as he understood it) but failed, partly because he lost control over the situation (if you could say that he even had control once) and partly because his flaws got the better of him. Most people do end up that way, in that situation. Then you have David Icke, who thinks that Bush is descended from a lineage of shapeshifting blood-drinking reptilian aliens.
A part of me wonders: What if we`re both right? What if Dubya is a reptoid- but has lost control in a way that none of us hairless apes can imagine?
The reptilians know barely more than we do. There was a time when both of us were different from what we are now, but there was war in Heaven and we were the ones who lost. We found ourselves imprisoned, and then we forgot about everything. The reptoids were prison warders once, victors of the usurpation, but they either were betrayed by power-hungry underlings or were those rebellious underlings. Either way, they lost the second war and found themselves in the same prison that they had fashioned. And then their ancestors ran into a mad accident and were left, Robinson Crusoe-style, on this world, isolated from the galaxy-spanning empire that their fellows had created. Once usurpers in Heaven, they were now twice-fallen.
They don't have the industrial base to maintain or reproduce their technology, nor the numbers to maintain a stable breeding population, but they were able to act quickly enough to take control of the earliest city-states and install themselves as god-kings. They called themselves the annunaki. But a small cadre of castaway alien-demons does not a permanent occupying force make, and when they lost control they couldn't get it back. They've been trying for thousands of years to do so, and have occasionally gotten temporary footholds, but the job gets harder with every passing generation. Even when they were monarchs in Europe they couldn't take full advantage of the situation- they hide their nature and plans out of self-preservation rather than brotherhood and whenever they grow powerful enough some turn on the rest and progress is lost again.
Continued on Friday.
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Friday, January 3, 2014
Genre Splash #4: Pokebots [B]
Continued from Wednesday.
Where people haven't found a way to defend against the machines, civilization has crumbled long ago. Surviving countries have stumbled upon a number of countermeasures: many machines have aquatic capabilities but none of them like salt water, which impairs their senses; many, especially older designs, are vulnerable to EMP. The most effective, however, is using other machines. Techniques exist for modifying their programming in order to turn them to human use. Even with modern improvements the process is far from perfect, though, and machines can go rogue if precautions aren't taken. One of the most important factors to keep in mind is that the programming changes can be fought, and most precautions center on ensuring that the machine doesn't want to escape (a steady diet of its owner's blood is extremely helpful). Machines will even fight attempts to undo these changes if the change was done right.
Where people haven't found a way to defend against the machines, civilization has crumbled long ago. Surviving countries have stumbled upon a number of countermeasures: many machines have aquatic capabilities but none of them like salt water, which impairs their senses; many, especially older designs, are vulnerable to EMP. The most effective, however, is using other machines. Techniques exist for modifying their programming in order to turn them to human use. Even with modern improvements the process is far from perfect, though, and machines can go rogue if precautions aren't taken. One of the most important factors to keep in mind is that the programming changes can be fought, and most precautions center on ensuring that the machine doesn't want to escape (a steady diet of its owner's blood is extremely helpful). Machines will even fight attempts to undo these changes if the change was done right.
Wednesday, January 1, 2014
Genre Splash #4: Pokebots [A]
Challenge: Alternate History: World War II/Pet Monster
The year is 1978. The American Initiative patrols the Panama Quarantine Line. From behind the Rocky Mountains, Remnant Columbia prepares to take back the rest of the continent and save the Holdout States. The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere is showing its first signs of decay while the British are just beginning to pull themselves back together. It is 1978, and it has been thirty-seven years since the machines came.
The New War started in Europe. Nobody knows if they're a German experiment gone rampant or if the Nazis were just unlucky. The first machines were clunky and inefficient. Very simple, and relatively easy to destroy. They've been getting better. They adapt, changing form and function in response to experience and often demonstrating the ability to shift between different modes- machines of the artiglieria-variety are normally small, speedy things with little firepower but they can convert into a static form, rooted into the ground for support, which can blow holes through concrete walls.
The year is 1978. The American Initiative patrols the Panama Quarantine Line. From behind the Rocky Mountains, Remnant Columbia prepares to take back the rest of the continent and save the Holdout States. The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere is showing its first signs of decay while the British are just beginning to pull themselves back together. It is 1978, and it has been thirty-seven years since the machines came.
The New War started in Europe. Nobody knows if they're a German experiment gone rampant or if the Nazis were just unlucky. The first machines were clunky and inefficient. Very simple, and relatively easy to destroy. They've been getting better. They adapt, changing form and function in response to experience and often demonstrating the ability to shift between different modes- machines of the artiglieria-variety are normally small, speedy things with little firepower but they can convert into a static form, rooted into the ground for support, which can blow holes through concrete walls.
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