Cyberpunk had a bit of a moment recently. Dudes with chromed out arms, cyber ninjas, girls with cables coming out their necks, larpers with enough metal in their faces to feel like akshual revolutionaries, LOW REZ C Y B E R S P A C E.
It combines the best and worst excesses of the 80s, 90s, and now!
Your character grew up in the crawlspaces and walled off compartments of a megabuilding. By the time she was 8 her parents fucked off. Maybe they ODed, maybe they were gang victims, maybe they entered the penal system and never came out the other side. It was an open question because you were busy dodging janitorial live fire exercises and police anti squatter raids.
When you were 10 a new, foreign NGO cropped up in your area to help revitalize these poor Americans who fell on hard times. Part of one of those child sponsorship schemes, you were given group housing, shoes, one meal a day, and basic literacy and hygiene education.
When you were 12 you and the rest of your cohort were shuttled off to a big tent three megablocks over and turned over to some nice men and women who didn't look you in the eyes. After a battery of tests you were separated from the rest of the herd and, with a dozen other children, offered a Scholarship.
A Scholarship was a one way ticket to a middle class with the corpoes. Not that it was anything more than a nicety, since the NGO sold you to the corpoes for ongoing donations. You entered a world of 16 hour days focused on physical, psychosocial, and technical education where the cost of failure was your life.
After completing a bachelor's degree in your early twenties, you were given an internship in corporate counter intelligence with Morrison-Ibrahim Lunar Dynamics (MILD) Tech. Now you share a corporate apartment with three other interns. On the plus side, one of them is a boy you grew up with. On the downside, one of them is actively trying to sabotage you.
The only steadfast rule in your world is up or out, and you have one year to move up or get booted out with a bullet in the back of the head to enforce your non-disclosure agreement.
One more thing.
Your new boss asked for you personally.
He's your dad.
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Your character has never been free. She's still not free, but now she has choices, and she's being pulled in multiple directions.
Does she find out why her father and mother abandoned her? Do you lash out at your rival? Do you protect the boy you grew up with?
Are you willing you to dangle a snitch out to dry when you run an op on rival corp? Can you successfully kidnap an engineer looking to defect from their corp?
Like all of my other plots this is intentionally open ended. We have multiple conflicts in play.
Shoot me a PM.Out of time, out of options and out of luck.
Last you knew, it was 2007.
Now it's fifteen years later, you're the same age you were then, and it's like you never existed at all. None of your friends or family recognized you if you could find them, and sometimes when you see your reflection in water you don't look quite human.
It gets worse when you break a promise. Then it's your reflection in windows, and if you do it enough the illusion is shattered and you're confronted with your own perfectly beautiful inhumanity.
Conversely, when you fulfill your promises you grow stronger, your senses become sharper, and you can even create illusions.
Unfortunately, that becomes difficult. Sometimes you see people and you know them by their reflections: twisted monsters with branches growing out of their sleeves and bloody wounds where their eyes should be. When you see them you instinctively know that it's fight to the death or run to live another day, and they will stop at nothing to get you.
You have only the fuzziest memories of your time away: a great masquerade ball where dancers wore real faces over fake ones, a heart pounding gamble with a terrible price, a duel that was one part lust to one part fear, and a great sense of urgency around something that has always evaded you.
Now you work for an unscrupulous crime boss who knows more than he's letting on, and you're accidentally indebted to the little boy who lives down the street. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold--can you handle it? Can you figure your way out from beneath the thumb of your boss, protect that lonely boy, and figure out what happened to you 15 years ago and if you were ever even human?
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Noir thriller meets fairy tale. YC is going to be put front and center as her literal being is tested between warring obligations while she's also being hunted by fairy monsters, and even the law. The extent to which others know about her weakness will be for us to figure out. I have some ideas about specific conflicts, and I'm very excited to hear your ideas and suggestions.
Be a sexy badass.
Shoot me a PM.
Go new places, they said.
Meet new people, they said.
Getting outside helps with depression, they said.
That’s how you ended up volunteering at an archaeological dig site in Egypt near one of the lesser pyramids and learned that being depressed in rural Egypt was like being depressed at home, but hotter and with more sand. In an unusual twist—or, on a bad day, just another one of those gut punches life likes to hand out—you became possessed by a dark power.
On the plus side, this devil cannot control you. It usually only speaks to you when you start the conversation. And it seems very invested in your success. So much so that it’s bestowed certain incredible powers on you.
Unfortunately, as in all things in life, there are certain strings attached.
First, the demon controls when the powers go on and off. Every time it activates the powers, it makes an ask. You might have to steal something: your social worker’s favorite pen, a stranger’s notebook, a book from the library. You might have to whisper something into someone’s ear. Even if it makes little sense to you, it seems to make sense to them. You may even have to put the fear into someone.
But the big asks? Those are saved for life and death.
Second, the demon is painfully consistent, uniquely knowledgeable, and totally saccharine. Its memory is like a steel trap and you know, for a fact, that it sees through your eyes and hears through your ears. For better and usually worse you haven’t had a moment of privacy since the incident at the dig site.
Oh.
And thirdly.
You’re a superhero! Yay, good job! The incident at the dig site? Javelin (not!Iron Man) came with the speed of a thunderbolt and the precision of a missile, chasing down some speedster with a decidedly Soviet theme. In the brief struggle Javelin—aka the Steel Man, the American Dream, Justice for All—killed a third of the people on the worksite. When your fingers curled around an old talisman you had instinctively picked up off the table, the entity poured itself into you and you transformed into something else.
Something with enough power to make the armor clad hero stumble and take off rather than fight you one on one. But now you’re marked, and with all the debt you went into from all the psychiatric holds when you were seriously trying to tell people a demon possessed you, you need to make some money. No one’s going to hire you with the increasing gap you have in your work history anyway.
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The premise here is that YC is a heroine with a demon possessing her. She has to figure out how to get rid of the demon, or get successful enough to get out of the hole with the demon, and maybe even repair strained relationships with friends and family. She has to maintain a job and keep her social convinced that she's like totally, 100% sane. She also has to manage the relationship with the demon inside of her.
Oh, and to top it off, the demon’s beginning to take a lewd turn.
This plot is open-ended. I’m interested in whatever ideas you bring to the table as well and am flexible with this story idea.
What do you think would be fun? What do you think would be interesting?
Shoot me a PM.
You hear someone scream, huddled beneath a study carrel while something half summoned and half precipitated and entirely focused on eating young flesh hovers above them. The old book shelves shudder, shake, and double stacked books drop to reveal an old wand with a flowing tag trailing Urdu from the handle. The library only gives when it takes: can you handle the backlash if you use the wand to save your classmate, or do you take the wand and use it for your next exam?
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Doctora Netzhualcoyotl had looked down her long nose and haughtily promised that a child would be able to pass this exam. On reflection, that was likely because a slim child would have been able to dart out of the box before it began shrinking. Instead, you have to solve a Henderson's Hypercube written in flowing Quecha--and here you decided to skimp on the Andean language to focus on Nahuatl summoning incantations. Oh, and suddenly you're not sure if you got around to finishing the packet for next period's alchemy lab.
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They said don't open the doors that beg to remain shut. As you turned the lion headed nob it took a chunk out of your thumb, but you need extra credit in Profesor Reichenbach's Odylic Dialegesthai, and fortune favors the bold. The stairs are slick and sloped down the middle, giving the lie to the crazy rumor that the doors had never been opened. As you descend you feel the walls hum with slick energy, and can't help the uneasy thought that you are walking into some being's lung. But if you're lucky you'll be able to bring back something that will impress even the old madman.
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Unfriendly Rivals: YC is an intense, high strung straight Gemmel student (like an A+, but magical academy) with a star studded future ahead of her. She has 99 problems, and 98 of them are in her head. The one that isn't is MC, an intense, high strung straight Gemmel student with a star studded future ahead of him.
The problem: only one of them can be valedictorian.
In a string of high stakes exams, contests, and gauntlets our characters will face off in a display of amoral brinksmanship, contriving baroque plans to topple the other.
Also inevitable hatefucking. And dark academia aesthetic.
Send me a message.
This plot is certainly open ended. The goal would be to use this as a jumping off point and construct something specific to you and I. Those snippets above were just that, opportunities to cause frission along your neurons, to send neurotransmitter gushing into synapses and recall or reinvent something from your imagination.
It's been intimated to me that I should talk about myself a little bit.
I'm in my early thirties. I've been on here a long time, more off than on now that I think about it.
I don't have a million rules, or expectations. That is unreasonable. We will treat each other with dignity, respect, and assume good intent.
If you have any questions, ask. I welcome clarifying questions and your ideas.
