Prompts - underwater ruins

Today's prompt is from a Blog o' Odd Things I have in my Google Reader. It's a list of "7 Most Fascinating Underwater Ruins," and my favorite is -

"Situated 68 miles beyond the east coast of Taiwan, Yonaguni Islands are a remarkable place for its rugged and mountainous coastlines. The special attraction is the submerged ruins located in the southern coast of Yonaguni: a superb 100×50x25 meters man-made artifact out of solid rock slabs stands erect at right angles. Its is estimated to be around 8000 years old, which is remarkably early for the kind of technology that has been used for carving it. Different theories exist about the possible identities of this structure.

While some say these ruins are the remnants of the missing Continent of Mu, other archeologists attribute them to be the outcome of unexplained geological processes, although, when you see the finely designed hallways and staircases, this ‘natural phenomenon' idea will appear sheer out of place.

The megalith was discovered quite accidentally by a sport diver in 1995 when he had strayed beyond the permissible limit off the Okinawa shore. The interesting thing about this massive stone building is that it had arches made of beautifully fitted stone blocks bearing resemblance with the building architectural style of the Inca civilization. Debates were rife about the ruins being associated with the prehistoric Motherland of Civilization. Surveying the ruins minutely takes time and skill because of the rough oceanic currents."

Link!

Here's to hoping everything formats correctly. Anyway, wow! Underwater ruins! Giant steps! Missing continent of Mu! Resemblance to Inca architecture off the coast of Taiwan! It sounds to me like the set-up for a Lovecraftian tale, and my two readers will know that I am quite the Lovecraft fan. A quick glance at Wiki shows that the lost continent of Mu did indeed show up in the Cthulhu mythos. Fantastic.

But perhaps I should branch out a little today. Instead of my beloved Mythos and instead of my beloved UFPE (I did a couple more panels over the weekend), I'll try something else.

Oh, now here's a funny idea. Let's see if I can make something of it.

*****

Aurorasdatter was sick of it.

She hated the endless hours she passed wrapped in cotton-wool, shielded from the frightening new turn her world had taken until they were sure that she was ready to face it again. She hated the fashionable psycopathy and the practiced melancolia. She hated everything she had left behind, but she hated even more how much she missed it all.

Most of all, Aurorasdatter hated her name. It was not really a name, or at least not really her name. She would not have one of her own for another nine months, not until she had survived this new world for a full year. It was a morbid custom, but who could accuse these people of morbidity and keep a straight face? And if Aurora should bring another one, another girl, into this frightening world, how would they ever tell the two of them apart?

For all these reasons, and for the vestiges of the spirit of wanderlust that had pervaded her life before the change, Aurorasdatter was running away from her protectors, her teachers, her guides, and her tormentors. She was going to one of their far Eastern enclaves, a tiny place beneath the waves where she could walk about at any hour, without fear of death or discovery. The very thought of living in such a strange, inhuman place made most of them uneasy, but it was that same inhumanity that drew Aurorasdatter. Wasn't that the beauty of this new world of hers, the chance to experience the inhumane?

She would stay belowdecks for the interminable weeks of the passage, surviving off the prey she had captured for just this reason. She could keep him alive for perhaps half the duration of the journey, she estimated, and she would endure the rest of it as long as she could stave off the restlessness that had driven her thus far. A map and an antique astrolabe stolen - was it stealing? - from her own estate completed her luggage.

Aurorasdatter. She winced. What kind of creature of the dark named herself after the dawn, she wondered. She had never met Aurora, not that she could recall; her inheritance consisted of a very silly moniker - daughter of the sunrise indeed - and a group of elders who would have kept her locked in a closet for a decade if she had not taken control of her new life, such as it was. Beneath the gleeful maliciousness and black humor they wore like expensive sable, she supposed that a sort of kindness and fellow-feeling must lurk in their still breasts, but it was a concern that suffocated.

At her feet, the prey moaned softly. Aurorasdatter kicked it irritably, and it quieted. She put her ear to the ship's creaking hull and closed her eyes. Outside, she could hear the waves, shifting and splashing against the wooden planks in a song as old as her people. The wind was older, but it did not carry the same promise it once had, not for one such as she who could no longer brave the open sky with impunity. The waves would welcome her, though. She would walk the carven steps and trace her fingers over the silent, secretive tablets that waited on the sea floor.

****

I have a tendency in speculative fiction to keep secrets unnecessarily from the audience. I know it's a bad habit, but who wants to reveal right away that their main character is a vampire? Maybe it's okay in this context, at least. The shifts in tone in this piece boggle me, but it was fun to write and fun to imagine. Way underneath the ocean, surely it's dark enough to vampires to hang out all day without worrying about a deadly sunburn. It would be cool if they had entire cities underwater. Maybe she's getting into more than she knows! Maybe there's a reason these guys kept themselves away from the rest of vampire civilization.

I'm not sure if anything will ever come of this, but nothing has to. It was a fun piece to write and a fun task to try something beyond my first (or second) instinct for a prompt.

UFPE - Comic update

Too long has gone by since I worked on my comic, partly because I was on vacation and then everything disappeared in the jumble of an open suitcase. And partly because it always seems like such a time commitment to work on it, even though the panel I just worked on took me maybe ten minutes, and that's including thinking up the dialogue and the set-up of the entire page. I should just focus on doing one piece at a time instead of being intimidated by the size of it.

Anyway.

I finished the outline of the Prologue for the Book of Might Have Beens, which may or may not get a title besides "Prologue." There are going to be fifteen pages, chronicling the night of his then-young life that changed everything for Bad Guy! It's riddled with the kinds of cliches that constitute the very fabric of the UFPE: a dying grandmother revealing the Family Shame, teenage (for an Elf) angst, flashbacks galore, a stirring tale of days gone by, and of course, casually spoken words that turn out to have Major Significance. The person who says these earth-shattering words also appears in the UFPE V. 1, as I may have mentioned already. I'm debating letting him discover what he spawned with that conversation, and though I can't see it happening in the UFPE chronology... well, that's what the Book of Might Have Beens is for!

I also drew up a sketch of the first panel of the second page, and I'll probably draw one or two more tonight before bed. Last time I wrote out the script first, but I'm in a pencil-and-paper kind of mood right now, and I much prefer a computer for actual writing. In this panel, we see a young Storyteller standing on a barrel, gesticulating grandly as he tells his story (which appears to us only in bits and pieces), a young Bad Guy watching him agog, and some blurry people in the background who are much less interesting than the story. The top caption says, "I did not yet know it, but that was the day I found my destiny," and the bottom caption says, "Or perhaps my destiny found me."

Very short story - prompt

The prompt for this week at the Livejournal writing community of which I'm a member is: Monument.

Based on bits and pieces of real life, plus a healthy dose of the sort of quiet desperation I get while standing in lines on humid days, I present - Monument (endless wait).

***

He takes her to the monument like it’s supposed to mean something, but all she can think is that she’s hot and a little dizzy from the press of the crowd. His words about duty and honor thrum dully in her ears as she tries to eavesdrop on the conversations of the people around them.

“All I’m saying is: time travel, alien pheromones, old Kirk, and new Kirk.”

“I would kill someone for a pretzel and a Fanta.”

“Now turn your hand up, like you’re holding it!”

“God, I wish people would stay behind the barricades. I can’t even see anything because that guy,” here the speaker’s voice rises sharply, “is leaning over the barricade.”

She’s embarrassed because ‘that guy’ is with her, and he is leaning over the barricades, and she’s angry because if it were so bad, why couldn’t they just ask him to move back? She’s tempted to turn around and snap at them to do something or quit bitching, but instead she closes her eyes and tries to catch a hint of the coy breeze that’s been stirring her hair at odd moments during this very long day.

The sun is too bright when she opens her eyes again, and the monument is still there, and he’s still talking. The nerd is still elaborating a fairly horrifying scenario involving warp speed eleven, William Shatner, and a mirror universe as the snotty tourists behind her continue to whine, and she realizes there’s only one way out of this.

She tugs his hand. There’s no response because this is his favorite part of the park, so she wraps the fingers of her other hand around his elbow and jerks it so hard that he stumbles into her. He finally stops his droning as an expression of confusion and rising irritation crinkles his forehead.

“Wha-” he begins, but he can’t finish because she’s kissing him so thoroughly that the conversation she’s been listening to dry up into mildly scandalized murmurs.

The breeze flutters the hem of her shirt, and the first drops of rain patter her cheek. His hands settle in their accustomed spots, and the afternoon isn’t a complete waste after all.

Story idea - revelation!

As I am writing the next scene of the much neglected UFPE vol. 1, I had a revelation. The fellow leading the troupe of performers FMC is about to join is going to be the same guy who inspired MMC all those years ago at the carnival. This is just too delightful. I'll have to write that guy younger than I had originally intended, but that's okay. Or maybe he's one of those fantasy old men who is born at age sixty and never ages from there.

Story element - free cities

I'm writing with friends right now, and of course I decided to work on the UFPE. There are other things, like the as-yet untitled story of Jemma, that are begging for some attention, but sadly, they seem unlikely to get it anytime soon. Today I'm working on an outline of the rest of UFPE Vol. 1. The second-to-last setting of the novel, I've decided, is going to be a place with the working name "Shore City." Simple, but accurate.

As I was outlining, I thought to myself that perhaps Shore City should be a city-state. It would be a nice change of pace from the kingdom that covers the rest of the continent, and for various reasons they are very popular in fantasy. They're often written as a sort of pre-modern Las Vegas-meets-New York City, where exotic people and fashions and foods come together to create a riotous clash of international color where laws tend to be lax in the extreme. And next to the picturesque little villages where much of UFPE Vol. 1 takes place, I'm anticipating that these cities will be a lot of fun to write.

I'm envisioning that the entire west coast of the continent is a string of city states, all loosely allied in case the king tries to annex them again. Oooh, and this works especially well since I've been imagining the Mage Towers on the west coat. Maybe they lend some of their mojo to the defense of the city states - the only interference they permit themselves (and that they are permitted) in the political realm.

The major city states of history range from ancient Greece to Renaissance Italy to modern-day Singapore, all of which conjure up exciting imagery in their different ways. It might be really fun to base the different cities on these different eras - maybe the northern ones are more Greece-like, the middle ones more Italy-like, and the southern ones more Singapore-like. The Mage Towers particularly would blend in well with the Greece-like atmosphere, I think.

So I should get back to the writing, but this struck me as such a fun idea that I had to post it here. This league of cities needs a name. Ahh, maybe a constellation. Let's see... the continent is shaped vaguely like South America, which means that the the west coat curves outward for a ways and then descends in a more-or-less straight line down to a point. So it's sort of a backward question mark. A scythe! So the cities need a dramatic, fearsome name to warn the king (well, duocracy) not to mess with them. I think collectively they call themselves the Ten Notches of the Glittering Scythe. Very nice - and very useful for word count.

I should think about how this affects the Book of Might Have Beens. Surely the Glittering Scythe will have something to say about L! Or not? They might like the idea of a weakened kingdom, after all.

Progress - Book of Might Have Beens

UFPE continues on, this time in an entirely new medium. Yes, I have officially begun the comic. Right now, I'm writing the script for it and drawing a stick-person version so I have a vague idea of what it should look like, one day. I don't think it would be terribly interesting to copy it wholesale here, but I know - I'll give the captions for the first page (which is all I have completed so far). There are eight panels, and the captions say:

#1: Carnivala Floriena. They say Lady Fortune and the Lord of Love descend from the stars to dance with the farmers on this night.

#2: If they did attend, I hope they did not notice how badly I fouled my steps.

#3: After I was spun through three jigs, I begged my leave. My head continued to whirl as I looked out over the unending crowd, spilling out into the village green like a flurry of starfliers.

#4: I had never seen such activity, nor such crowds. People jostled me with every step, and my ears rang ceaselessly with the raucous cries they raised.

#5: I saw a man swallow his saber, and I waited with mounting horror for the silver blade to pierce his throat from the inside, to release a crimson fountain. Everyone else just laughed.

#6: Of course, he was perfectly fine.

#7: I spoke to him, after. He smelled vile, and I could see weeks of dirt caked into his flesh.

#8: All my life I had been told I was one of them, yet never before had I felt so utterly lost.

The MMC is quite the sympathetic character here - no trace of the villain he is to become. Even though my drawings are just stick figures, I'm very much enjoying glancing down at the page and seeing what I've created. I don't have the words drawn in, but I can follow what's happening without them. All in all, this is very exciting.

Short Post - character idea

Now that school is winding down for the semester, I'm hoping to get back into this blog more regularly. I'll especially try to keep updates coming about the status of my UFPE "Book of Might Have Beens" scheme; I've never tried to write in the comic script form before, so it's more than a little daunting. But it'll be a long time before I have three months of evenings free again, so I'm determined to make the most of it!

Briefly, I just finished reading a wonderful book, The Remains of the Day, about an English butler reminiscing about his career and things. It made so much of an impression on me that I'd like to include a character like that in the Book of Might Have Beens. He (or she, I suppose) would appear in the MHB where FMC lives in Prince Seaton's palace as part of his harem. Of course, for the purposes of the UFPE, the butler character's stiff-upper-lipness has to be exaggerated for comic effect, and I feel almost guilty about transforming such a well-done, touching character into a parody. Not too guilty, though; it really is a testament to how marvelously the author developed the character in a pretty short book.

So, the butler! This person will appear at first as a very stiff, almost heartless sort of person, but s/he will probably end up perfoming some very valuable service for FMC along the way, rather like the innkeeper (whose name I've forgotten) in UFPE Volume I. As I think about it, this could be another theme of the UFPE - love is already an important theme, so why not expand it to include charity toward our fellow human beings? It's the kind of thing the Secret Society would never count on, certainly not something as toweringly monumental as Destiny.

This has been a more productive post than I had imagined when I started. I have a new character and a new theme!