The Dark Sensual Side of Atlanta Urban Fantasy- Interest Check and Feedback

[Modern Fairy Tale]

I might be interested in taking on a small group of cowriters.  This will be my first such project.  There is a scenario I would like to explore.  There has to be someone else out there interested in this kind of genre.  This is my template world I plan to use in my works in the future.  Its a very mosaic world that I think you might like.



 
First off, why should you trust me with a story like this.  I love to create worlds.  I have done so many times in my games.  Here are a few of which I am the most proud.

Precious Alicorn
This is a high fantasy story about a romance between a unicorn and the princess used to lure him into a trap.  Lots of fun magic and fae and action even though I had to keep the girl a virgin until the end of the story.
https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=30561.0

A Grim Fate
This is a Black Forest Germany Grimns Brothers style fairy tale.  The girl was supposed to learn the monster’s flaws and escape them and her curse.  It also mentions in passing the degradation of certain forms of magic into the Therion which leads into the next story.
https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=69227.0

Threes Are Wyld
This is an in depth modern study of my lycanthropes.  They have their own perspective and mythology and factions, which I didn’t get to completely explore yet.  Have so much further to go with that one.  We gave it a  Southern Gothic setting and tone.
https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=164130.0

Here There Be Dragons
This is about what vampires are like in my modern world.  They are cold blooded… not undead.  They are degenerated and cursed dragon spawn.  Did you know that ‘Dracula’ actually means ‘Son of the Dragon’.  Borrowed heavily from ‘La Blue Girl’ and ‘Resident Evil’.
https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=37245.0




Okay, now what kind of world would I be intereseted in?  Would such interest you as well?  Here are some of the core concepts I am picturing so far.
 
Concept One
The World of Myth and Magic is a World of Shade.
Mundames can barely notice the Arcane.  Most lack The Sight.  With the Sight, which allows the noticing of Music of the Spheres, the very air is charged with magic so that one can see their way through perfect darkness…. If it’s a high resonance area and they have The Sight.

Concept Two
There are Evil Forces wishing to unmake Creation.
Arcane Forces struggle against this Adversary, the Demogorgon.

Concept Three
Certain crossroads and Leyland sources riddle history and must be guarded, one of the largest of these is the subway tunnels beneath Atlanta which form ancient runes.
Magical beings disguised as street urchins battle nightly to secure Creation.
Cosmic beings known as Principals shape the flow of greater magics, but cannot cross into the Prime Realm.

Concept Four
Being Magical makes one Strange.
Technology tends to mess up around the Chosen.  They act as weirdness magnets and have strange, often archaic personalities.  There is little one of Magical thinking can converse with a Mundane about.  They are riddled by Obligation and Mythic Precedence and the workings of Fate.

Concept Five
Im looking for a Golden Age comic book feel, but in the modern age and without spandex and masks.  Magi tend to dress dramatically.  They tend to wear cloaks and daggers, talisman and trenchcoats.  They work their magic secretly and then slip into the mists of the Apieron before being noticed.

Concept Six
We share this world with many elder beings.  Lycanthropes, Fae, and Goblyn all walk with us as well as many other stranger creatures.  Many of these beings are equivalent to Lovecraftian tentacles slipping into our dimension to steal our souls.  A peace of sorts must be found as well as a line drawn against those who trespass upon the Fate of the Inheritors… the mundane for which this world is Created.  They who must find their own Destiny. 

So imagine Highlander or John Constantine.
Imagine the Crow… but with a lot of bad revenants out there to fight.
Imagine Captain Marvel… the boy who says Shazam… empowered by a subway living Magus.  But with less crimson tights and truely Lovecraftian horrors out there to fight against. 




Here is a scene I could see unfolding on this kind of world.

Quick Character List
Dirk Alan Moore
    Gritty Detective Shamanistic Guardian
Roberta Kane
     Young Lounge Singer Mystic Fire Adept who can invoke Persephone
Ozias
     Aged and Powerful Bum Mystic Earth Magus who can invoke Hades

Maneaters

     Walking into the narrowing alley, the trench coated figure easily stepped over the mounds of garbage spread across the opening of the alleyway as he disgarded his cigarette but.  Taking a moment, he turned around, noticing the few pedestrians and their odd echoes seeming to walk by unheeding the oddly angled alleyway plunging at some thirty degree line straight downward at a pretty steep grade.  Dirk had to laugh to himself.  It always struck him funny how ‘normals’ just didn’t seem to notice this shit.  Like water off a duck’s back, they waddle on and continue their day… even at the very steps of a duck soup cannery.
     As he walked on, he turned back toward the task at hand.  Easily he drew out a rather large sword out of the underside of his trench coat a bit too easily for something that size.  It was something Dirk could always do, was keep his sword hidden somehow… and continue to run around and sit in his suit and coat.  Poking with the tip of his blade at some of the garbage, he noticed there was still a foot left in the boot he had found.  This was a hunting ground.  With his gloved hand, he pulled his blade out and twirled it into a figure eight before bringing the crossguard to his forehead as if saluting the darkness.
     “Illuminate,” he called out, his voice a rich clarion… ringing like a brass bell.  His blade shimmered a soft amber light… literally illuminating his immediate area.  He could see the odd way their eyes caught the light of his blade.  The Goblyn were ideally suited to the dark.  They scuttled back from the advancement of the purity of his light. “Hello boyos.  Theres been rumors of there being maneaters about these parts.  You wouldn’t know anything about that?  Now would you?” Dirk asked as he stepped forward.  He knew what maneating did to the Goblyn.
     Several large misshapen forms wrestled about in the semi-darkness the den realm had afforded them.  Literally this space was shared by a sweat shop operating within the building unseen by most, but the effects had seeped into the astral landscape and proven ideal spawning grounds for the Goblyn.  Now fed by hate and a growing addiction to human flesh and filth, the forms roared at each other as they encircled around.  There must have been at least a dozen of them, but it was hard to notice just how many of them there were.
     Seemingly unafraid, Dirk pressed on.  Taking another brave step into their darkened ethereal realm as he continued his questioning.  “ I would like to be able to tell the Magi that  you were cooperative,” he teased them.  He could read their faces… they had degenerated.  His sword glowed in his hand as it read his future multiple times… finding it hard to find one pathway onto which he could keep his life.  Dirk Alan Moore couldn’t help but smile to himself.  He always liked it when the chips are down.  “Most of them are grumpy old men… who don’t like Goblyns creeping around uncontracted in their city.”
     It was then that a shadow waved across the only source of light, other than the sword in his hand, which fell into the twilight world between realms.  A young blonde woman had waundered into the small jagged alleyway, stepping over the ripped bags of garbage in her expensive boots.  “Have you always got to start things without me?” she demanded of the sword wielding man as she made he way into the arpeture.  Most of the Goblyn shifted their standing, adapting, trying to figure out who or what she was. “Well… fine… if that’s how you want to do it.” She seemed more than a little miffed with the apperent adrenaline junkie antics  Dirk could display sometimes.  Shedding off her overcoat, leaving her in a slinky black dress with both her arms and legs wrapped in fine black boots and gloves, she perfectly fit the part of a femme fetal.  Pushing up the nose of her cute, horn rimmed glasses, she then cracked her knuckles by flexing them downward and together like a pianist preparing for an arduous concert.  “Lets light up the darkness,” she said, as Roberta wiggled her fingers through the air and conjured up dozens of fiery orangish butterflies to swarm through the murk… further illuminating the cave-like structure around them.
     That’s when the two Chosen… one a sword wielding Guardian and the other a fire Adept... struck out in unison against the small horde of malformed Goblyn hidden underneath the very heart of the city. 

Meanwhile…

     In the desolation of the unnaturally large urban cavern that the Scion of Hades had claimed as his throne room, the powerful though elder  figure sat on his throne carved out of onyx and peered into time and space.  It was he who kept the multitude of Arcane beings hidden within his vaults under the city while the world of the Inheritors ticked on above their heads like a great, inescabable clock.  They say ‘Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown’.  This motto perfectly described Ozias as he awaited on his perfectly carved black throne.  Right now, though, his
     Using the Mysteries, the Magus lord of the Undercity shifted his aged gaze toward his beloved.  From the Lineage of Persephone had descended the smouldering and so very young Roberta Kane.  Like every young woman of such passion and power, she had insisted in being included in the patrols.  With the fulfillment of magic as part of one’s destiny, the Seeker always heard the Calling.  A vision vividly depicting Creation as a work in progress needing protection from the consuming darkness of the Demogorgon.  Still, such activities were very distracting to Ozias.  He had chased this Scion through oceans of time.  There were many centuries when his  daemon had passed on this realm without hers to accompany him.  So when he finally found her again, she was his heart… his greatest weakness as well as his greatest passion rolled up in one.  Among the Magi, passion oftentimes equaled power.
     Leaning forward on his black throne, Ozias’ gaze glowing brighter as he focused more of his conciderable Nous through his Sight, chanting Greek syllables of power just underneath his breath.  He watched the battle unfold as Roberta built walls of fire to help defend the bladed detective who used his supernatural affinities for the blade to good effect on the nearly mindless maneaters.  Roberta never knew how beautiful she looked in the semidarkness… with her own fires lighting up her figure so perfectly  with nearly literal rose toned hues.  Her golden hair dancing around the crown of her noble posture.  Her fingertips sparking off vividly multicolored flames she controlled as easily as she breathed.  She was even… smiling.
     This led Ozias to smile as well.  She was doing well, mastering her craft under the tutelage of that bore Dirk the detective as he lived his double life… defending Creation as all Arcane must… and running a liscensed office in the mundane world.  This made the brief smile to fade as he considered.  The very concept chaffed the ancient figure.  He had passed decades among the mundane and found them contemptuous and empty.  That the Creator favored them… created all of the Cosmos for them… didn’t quit sit well with the elder Magus.  The Magi had the power… the Music of the Spheres… wielding the final dying embers of Creation.  Why would the bulk of humanity… who seemed to shamble on and trip in the dark like a lost toddler over and over… be given ownership of this the Axis Mundi, the very world  pillar which heald together this world?   This was something he had had to muse oftentimes.
     For now, things were okay.  His Beloved fought on with her inner strength and together her and the detective stood their ground and defeated the blighted nest of Goblyn.  Though Ozias was about to relax, he kept his gaze sharp on his rift as he kept watch.  It was then that a much larger set of eyes burned through the darkness… focusing on the small arpeture through which the smaller kin had been hunting.  Then two more sets of huge eyes peered through the widening darkness.  Almost as quickly as Ozias had noticed the baleful attention, so did Dirk and Roberta.  “Looks like our new kobold buddies… made a few troll friends,” the trench coated detective couldn’t help but comment as he was observed.
     Dirk willed more light through his blade even as the Scion of Persephone whipped her arms over her head and open… the dozens of tiny burning butterflies widened their flight pattern to show more of the murk bleeding in from the dream lands of the Goblyn.  Three hulking figures squatted down, their hide hard to make out from the caverns drab surface, if the three figures weren’t moving… and they closed the shimmering lanterns of their eyes.  One of the trolls turned and began roaring at the other two.  Reaching up, he ripped down a stalactite as thick as a man but in his hands it seemed a perfect bludgeoning tool.
     The detective couldn’t help but snear. “It seems we haven’t made a very good first impression.” As he said this, he stepped forward.  His sword laid over his shoulder still held lightly by its handle.  The way someone might lay a bat back on their own shoulder as they considered the next pitcher coming up to bat.  “That’s less than two to one… I still like those odds.”  It was then that he was blindsided… another troll attacked from the flank.  One as of yet unseen who lashed out with his powerful strength.  Reacting with unnatural grace, Dirk easily turned to deflect most of the blow with his magic sword.  Though he didn’t take any damage, Dirk slid back ten feet or so as he adjusted to the force of the surprise attack.  “Oh… I stand corrected.”
     Ozias could only shake his head and steeple his hands in the darkness and solitude of his throne room.  He could help intervene, but such would only vex Roberta.  If she noticed his rift even now, he knew she would have words for him, but he couldn’t help himself.  It had been too long since she had been a part of his life once more… and as she always said… Roberta brought light into darkness.  Even if it was His darkness.
     Deciding it was worth the trouble she would doubtless give him, Ozias began mumbling his arcane syllables once again.  This time he began channeling some of his power into Roberta… influsing her magics with a much larger thread of Aether to help power her manifestations.  He would help turn the tide of this battle, before things got too out of control.  Then he would have to have words with Mr. Moore about his courting danger while patrolling with Roberta.  If he wanted to flirt with death, he should do so on his own time… alone so as not to endanger others.  Hell, Ozias would be happy to oblige him, if that was what he wanted.
     Through his Sight, the old yet powerful figure watched as Roberta used the increased power to help even the odds Dirk was calling out by conjuring two flaming lion-shaped elementals.  She was such a powerful Artist.  Ozias could watch her forever… and never tire of her conjuring or even her walking and breathing.

The End?

     What do you think?  Does this seem like a story you would want to continue?  Who would you want to be in such a world of shade and metaphore?




I welcome comment on this thread if you are interested.  I would only accept people in small groups of two or three characters... each knowing each other.  This will give you someone else to 'tag' with.  Ill portray the world and main characters you might cross paths with.  I can use a system, if such is interesting to my cowriters.  I dont like d20 or anything else so detail oriented, I will be using the ICONS system, which I find simplistic and lending itself to storytelling even better than the WoD Storyteller system... if you believe that.

I look forward to hearing back from you.  I hope there is good interest in my story.  I will need to know what kinds of concepts you would like to embody or portray in my world.  As I come up with more background and such I will post it up here as a tease until we can get this project off the ground.  Thank you for your interest in reading this rather longer than I expected interest check thread.

Peace.




For Convenience:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta,_GA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_mountains