Hephaesteon's Stubborn Stories (M for F)

[Hephaesteon]

Hello! I hope this finds you well!

So the idea here is that these are story ideas that keep creeping into my mind, and it feels like those earworm songs that just keep wiggling back into your mind. Where, until you sing them or listen to the song, it's just going to live rent-free in your mind. These story ideas are like that for me. I can't get them out of my mind. I typically play a lot of historical fiction, so these are a little different from my usual fare, but I'm trying to grow my horizons, which I think means these are likely to be a fun ride.

And one more quick thing. I have an Ons and Offs if you want to take a look, but the basics are: I'm mostly here for story. I'm no prude, but I want things to be mostly story and action, not just sex-fests. Next, I'm a school-teacher, so my time tends to be wildly sporadic. I attempt to get responses out at least every three days or so, but sometimes life happens. Thirdly, I RP almost exclusively on Discord because (a) it is much easier for me to access regularly and (b) I have ADHD and I use the channel feature in Discord to keep track of thoughts, ideas, plans, ambiance, and other things like that. I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, but it's basically necessary for me to cope with my disability, so I try to be open and honest about that up front.

On to the ideas:

Tabula Rasa

Humanity has burned through the Earth, pillaged the Moon, squandered Mars, ravaged Europa, and stripped the asteroid belt bare. Our solar system is barren, and billions are dying daily. An ark was built, and the last few thousand humans packaged up for transport, but there was one problem: we had nowhere to go. And so humanity sat entombed for nearly a thousand years until automated probes finally found a suitable home: dangerous but survivable.

The planet is fairly analogous to earth, but I'm thinking a a fair bit warmer and wetter. So think of it as Florida: pretty nice in the winter, but downright sweltering and humid in the summer. We can play around with ecology, biology, and whatever else we want as well. This is probably a good story for you if you're a world-builder and like a lot of background generating in addition to the actual story. I'll admit it's a bit off pace, and likely to be a fairly slow-moving piece, but I think that what we'll have is something we can be really proud of, and somehting we'll thoroughly enjoy creating as we go.

Our characters are part of an advanced team. The first to wake up and leave the ark, we and a couple dozen of our fellows are tasked with securing the landing site, securing initial resource points, and setting up a few rudimentary facilities. This is the kinda thing I get super into, so describing the day to day survival of a small group of people is likely to be kind of a slow process. Lots of opportunities for action and romance (we're colonizing an alien world after all, and the future of the human race isn't going to make itself). But this one is mostly about exploring how society reacts to this sort of hardship. How starting over might shape the human psyche.

To End All Wars

It's finally happened. Somebody finally fired first. Vast swaths of humanity are incinerated in nuclear fire, with only the rural communities left mostly unscathed. Suddenly, nothing further than a few dozen miles means anything, and humanity's progress is reset overnight to the early industrial era. People are making do with whatever technology they can set to purpose, but the days of electricity are all a distant happy memory, at least for now.

Our characters staff members on a ranch. The ranch itself was a shelter/safe harbor for troubled teens fleeing abusive homes or struggling to find themselves. The ranch provided a safe place for them to get therapy, learn life skills, and unplug from the frenetic pace of life for awhile. The staff come from diverse backgrounds and skill-sets, especially because the core philosophy of the facility is to allow the teens to explore as many different types of labor as possible. There's a smith's shop, carpentry workshops, stables, looms, pottery, and plenty of fishing and agriculture. Basically, trying to give the kids a chance to find something that is creative and hard work as a way of expressing themselves and dealing with pent up negative motions in a healthy way, the whole time surrounded by adults who are willing to help them and professional counselors and therapists in addition to the professional craftsmen and -women.

A side effect of this is that lots of the staff have families of their own, and so the ranch is basically a small village already, which is a convenient place to start the apocalypse. Lots of story potential here to go looking for people's family, establishing contact with neighbors, surviving winter, adapting to life, and coping with the reality that life just got a whole lot simpler, if a fair bit more difficult. Our characters will certainly start on positive terms, but we can work out specifics together. They could be a couple, or just singles helping out around the place when the bombs drop. We can make literally anything work, in all likelihood.



So yeah, if any of these interest you, reply here, send me a PM, or whatever floats your boat!