Alicornutopia

Hey all, consider this my intro to Glowfic. If you would be interested in a sandbox/something else with these characters, please feel free to post here! (I can't reply to PMs yet because of my recent delurk.)

Isabella & Scarlet

Isabella & Scarlet, as a template, are a pair of female-default siblings that should be considered together.

Isabella is the younger sister of the pair. She's sharp, commanding, and resolute. She is not naturally ambitious - however, if personally threatened or injured, she's the type to respond vengefully and throughly.

Scarlet is the older sister of the pair. She's compassionate, thoughtful, and trusting.
She is much more of a philanthropist than her sister, and as a result is more likely to look for political power. Her naïveté tends to get in her way, though.

When the pair are together, Scarlet directs and Isabella executes. Where Scarlet would be bossed around, her sister reinforces her: where Isabella would go too far, her sister reins her in.

If the pair are separated after first having grown to know each other, then bad things start to happen.

Isabella loses purpose without her sister's projects, and as a result feels a loss of control- control which she attempts to reassert by imposing her will on others, completely missing the root of the problem. Over time, she accumulates more subordinates than she needs, their living conditions deteriorate, and in the worst of cases she becomes deliberately cruel to her subjects even as she seeks to subjugate everyone she can.

Meanwhile, Scarlet loses confidence. Without her sister to reassure and reinforce her, she becomes depressive and easily led. Since she's both intelligent and ambitious, this often turns her into a tool for those less scrupulous than herself. Over time, her doubts and the ill use others put her to slowly grinds her down, until in the worst of cases she gives up on having any kind of cause at all.

Do these characters have a usual setting in which they are found?

Alicorn wrote:Do these characters have a usual setting in which they are found?

They do, but it's my own original setting. I have a half-written writeup over here to my left. Examining the setting again after a long period away from it, I find myself noticing some plot holes in its history that I missed at the time I wrote it.

Here's a quick summary before I write up more details:

Gap is a fantasy/horror kitchen-sink of a setting. Tech tops out at the beginning of a steampunk-industrial-revolution, with some extra bells and whistles due to local magic. Magic breaks down into two broad categories, either 'book-learned, will-based' or 'animism works, especially if you know how to address things correctly.' Vampires and werewolves exist in-setting and are the respectively the result of unnatural and natural links to the moon god-spirit. Other various biological horrors and/or improvements are possible through the application of magic.

Major locations/civiliations:
Grand Victoria. A mercantile airship empire, drawing inspiration from China, Japan, and England. Government is a polytheistic theocracy with a primary sun-goddess. Ruled by an Imperial Family, though which Family is Imperial tends to change rapidly from time to time.
Mori. A recently-arrived revolutionary republic-in-name, heavily inspired by Napoleonic France with touches of Russia. Led in practice as a dictatorship by the Brothers Mori, a pair of brilliant generals and statesmen who are rarely ever seen apart from each other. The great land power of the age.
Oceania. A faraway place across the sea where, if rumors are to believed, rocks are awake enough to carry on conversations and the sea will get very annoyed if you sail it without offering proper tribute. Mostly dismissed as a myth by sensible people.
Ulvenwald. The New World. Full of deep, trackless forests that few people come back out of. A colonization attempt by Grand Victoria ended in revolution- a revolution that, depending on who you ask, either failed utterly or was wildly successful. The end result was Grand Victoria essentially saying "if they want Ulvenwald, they're welcome to have it. Stop sending supplies and the problem will sort itself out." The colony of Eyesocket was the only major town left after the infighting stopped, left under the rule of a scientific nobility that views ethics as an obstacle. It is by all accounts a terrible place to live. It does, however, manage to continue existing.

Where in this world do Isabella and Scarlet come from? Can anybody learn either or both types of magic with proper instruction? Is Oceania real, and does it have the described properties? Why would anybody name a colony Eyesocket?

DanielH wrote:Where in this world do Isabella and Scarlet come from? Can anybody learn either or both types of magic with proper instruction? Is Oceania real, and does it have the described properties? Why would anybody name a colony Eyesocket?

Isabella & Scarlet, in this world, are originally from Grand Victoria. Then everything went horribly wrong as a result of vampires. Let me answer your other questions first and we'll get back to that.

Eyesocket isn't the official name of the colony or even the city-state, but it was the original name of the small frontier town that eventually grew into the capital, and the capital is de facto the colony now. Nobody uses the official name except during diplomatic talks. (It's partially inspired by the history of Regina, Saskatchewan, which started out as "Pile of Bones.")

Both types of magic are learnable and hackable. The setting is called Gap due to a shaman with more ambition than sense who figured out how to consume spirits, and then proceeded to metaphysically 'eat' the spirit of the local-Dutch-empire-equivalent because they were being imperialist dicks to his country.

It turns out that doing that causes a very through absence of the thing you 'ate.' The not!Dutch vanished overnight- not in the sense of 'inexplicably experienced terrible governance, lost a series of wars, and ceased to be an empire', but rather, they literally /vanished./ Everything that could be considered part of the empire disappeared overnight. Every primary, secondary or tertiary source that could directly prove their existence similarly stopped existing, including memories. They were effectively unpersoned at the empire level.

It is, however, still possible to deduce the non-existence of the missing empire. If the empire itself is a boulder thrown into a pond, then the boulder is gone, and the ripples it created are gone, but you can still tell that something was thrown into the lake, because those ripples made other stones shift and the magic didn't put them back. No individual stone will tell you that something was thrown into the pond, but together...

And, of course, there are the more immediate ramifications for the other countries of suddenly having all your interactions with an empire vanish overnight, with nobody knowing what the hell happened. Global upheaval, famine, wars... A real mess overall. Additionally, the actual land that the not!dutch were occupying was not!Dutch enough to count as part of the empire, thus resulting in a big metaphysical hole in that area, which the local non-empire spirits then proceeded to fill with gusto. That area is now known as Oceania, and it is actually almost as alive as the rumours claim. Even small spirits like rocks are much more aware due to the additional metaphysical living space.

Meanwhile, the idiot shaman who did this was experiencing the problems with consuming an energy field bigger than your head - namely, being more Dutch Empire than human. Perhaps this was the reason why he then attempted to do the same thing to the spirit of the moon- he was trying to grab the biggest power source available in order to counterbalance. Or perhaps it was the ambition of an entire empire distilled down, or he simply was testing the limits of his newfound power. In any case, he tried to eat the moon.

Fortunately for the entire planet, it turns out that the spirit of a single large piece of rock in space is much less fractious than the spirit of an empire, and therefore harder to tear bites from. At this point, other major spirits intervened, and managed to dislodge the shaman from the moon before he could do more than nibble.

Unfortunately, 'moon' as a spiritual energy is incredibly potent, enough so that even a small shard of the raw stuff is sufficient to work massive magic. (Werecreatures harness tiny amounts of reflected moonlight, and even that much is enough to perform the incredibly complex magic of forming a new body on the fly.) Using that stolen power, the shaman went on to found an entire society outside regular space, anchoring the a chunk of the metaphysically untethered land and buildings of the former empire in a sub-dimension, then doling out thin slivers of his power to anyone he found useful and inviting them into his plane. Thus was vampire society brought into the world: as a tool to produce agents for that shaman -let's call him Dracula from now on, it's traditional- to act within Gap without drawing the attention of the Great Spirits, which are now eager and waiting to squash him as soon as they manage to find him.

Time passes, things settle after the wars and spiritual upheaval, Dracula fades into memory and vanishes from vampire society. Scarlet & Isabella are born to an educated, relatively wealthy family in Grand Victoria, daughters of an airship engineer from Mark, where the naval yards are hosted. A local vampire takes an interest in the precocious pair, and at the ages of twelve and fourteen they're both kidnapped and forcibly turned.

After about a month, the vampire who turned them without consent has been very thoroughly killed. This means that Isabella and Scarlet have inherited his creepy magic inter-dimensional castle and the position of minor nobles in vampire society, as his 'adopted children.' Scarlet takes up his position as best she can, learning on the fly, while Isabella begins research into an escape plan.

Then, after a few months of /that/, Scarlet doesn't come back from a meeting. Missing, presumed dead or worse. Isabella searches for her, of course, but the elder vampires have centuries of experience on her, as well as more raw power due to being closer to Dracula. After quite some time, she has to concede at least that finding her sister will be a Hard Problem and she needs to establish herself more before she can do so.

At this point, Isabella's downwards spiral begins, born of isolation, loss, and the absolutely terrible ethical environment of vampire society. Her need for control in the wake of so many traumas develops into full-blown megalomania, and her desire to protect others becomes her most dangerous trait - she knows better than you what the decision you should make is, and if you try to fight her, she will enforce it on you. And if you keep fighting her, well... Some people can't be saved.

So, I'm intrigued (I was sold as of "In any case, he tried to eat the moon"). Do any of the Standard Generic Glowfic Openings appeal here? (Elcenia, Demon Cam, Promise, Holly & Crystal, Lost Pen)? If not, anybody your pups want to meet in Milliways?

Alicorn wrote:So, I'm intrigued (I was sold as of "In any case, he tried to eat the moon"). Do any of the Standard Generic Glowfic Openings appeal here? (Elcenia, Demon Cam, Promise, Holly & Crystal, Lost Pen)? If not, anybody your pups want to meet in Milliways?

Elcenia, Demon Cam, or Promise could all work, though I'd probably have to do a bit more reading for OOC background on Promise. How much would you like to play in Gap compared to having characters from it wander in elsewhere?

(You should be aware that the creepy castle is a possibility as well. It has a Milliways-like ability to open doors wherever it likes; however, unlike Milliways, it's much more invasive about the whole thing. It manifests an entire castle in plausible locations, with an attendant magical effect that makes everyone in the area remember the castle as always having been there. This limits where it can show up, but it's generally reasonably accurate about general requests so long as you give it lots of nice tapestries and furniture. There's no established canon on wether it can go between worldsheaves, though.)

I definitely can't play any characters from Gap on this amount/kind of information, but I'm willing to send somebody a-wandering in there as long as we can do lots of IM-channel communication about details that don't make it into narration yet might affect things. Lost Pen boxes are "Pen wanders into a world", but you didn't list that one; did you have another wanderingperson in mind?

Cam's a 'summoned into a world' kind of guy. I of course don't expect you to play any of my characters, that would be very difficult; if a character from Gap turned up elsewhere (Elcenia, Fae) I would be running the Gap character. I'm just wondering if you have a preference for writing in Gap vs. out of Gap.

No strong preference. Out of Gap requires less backchannel but backchannel is not onerous for me.