Archive | March 18, 2019

Hidden Mall 60: A Hero Dies But Once?

Abby took a step backwards, and another, until ‘Via caught her. “Easy,” ‘Via murmured in her ear.  “It’s okay.”

She forced herself to look at – at herself.  Except dripping wet and dripping blood from what remained of a leg, leaning on a Liv who was dripping both water and blood, too.

“The – the sharks.”  She worked her throat.  “Remember? And before that, the fire.  This is – this is all the deaths we could have died.  It can’t be.  We can’t have died this many times.”

“We could have.” ‘Via shifted a little.  “I mean. It’s not I mean.  We don’t know how many malls there are.  We don’t know how many of them anyone came through.  We don’t know if the mall just generated new versions.”

“Some of the malls were fake.  Who told us that?” Liv frowned. Continue reading

The Origins of… Science!

Originally posted on Patreon in March 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.

Eseme suggested that I write up how a setting was born, so I started thinking about it.

Most of my settings come from one or a few stories that are written around the same time, which start coalescing themselves into a world.  Fae Apoc and Tír na Cali are exceptions to this, as is Foedus Planatarum, sort of, but today I’m starting with Science!

It turns out the first story of Science!, which included Cara, Alex, and Liam, the three who show up in the lion’s share of these tales, came from a “Wine and/or Roses” prompt call- prompts of Lilfluff’s and wyld_dandelyon’s coming together to create a story about roses with retractable thorns.

Then Shutsumon added “What’s in it?” “Blood of grape and juice of girl,” and we had another story in the same timeline.

And then the next Giraffe Call was “Origins and Creation” and we ended up going on further in the same setting.

By that point, the setting was “set” – there were scientists who did bad things or very good ones (sometimes which was which depended on your point of view); there was the Boss and the tower where all this happened, there was an island, and there were Cara and Alex, whose roles are never, or possibly just rarely, defined but who seem to see everything and be along for everything.

That pretty much sums up my world creation method: Start from scratch and see what happens.

This donation slider from the wine and/or roses call was just too good not to share.
I made it myself!

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