Your support makes Blue Moon possible (Patreon)
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2014
- Location
- Central US
Oh hi, thanks for checking in, I'm still a piece of garbage~ ♫
The partner I'm looking for, to write this with, will be ready for a long-term story full of adventure and mystery and self-discovery. They will understand the idea of Plato's Cave, and the effect of long term social isolation. They will have a yearning to write a handful of characters, with a focus on a main couple, and the swirling tale of a world that they did not now existed. They will be ready for a very smut-lite, if any smut at all, story. I am not looking for every post to be a 5 paragraph monster (in fact, I would prefer they be more digestible, when appropriate), but we're going to be describing what the imaginations of these characters bring to life in real-time, so detail is a must. They will be ready for music and musical ideas to play a big role in the way we write this story.
If you have not seen Porter Robinson's Shelter, it is required reading for this thread! And also, what are you doing, it's 6 minutes of pure art that you have been missing out on, go fix that immediately.
I've always held this particular production in fairly high regard, but I went back and listened to it recently, and the synapses all fired at once and the idea for an actual story based around this concept flared to life. The video follows Rin, a young girl who was sent up in a space pod to avoid some unspecified global disaster. That pod contains a virtual universe where she controls everything via her tablet, drawing environments, weather, and her entire world in a rush of ideas.
The video hints at, but does not outright show, the parts that are not music-video-worthy. The days where Rin didn't feel like getting out of bed, just checking that mail notification every ten minutes in hope that something would change. The days where her ideas didn't go quite right and she found herself desperately trying to draw her way out of a tight situation. The days where her muse just wasn't firing, and she walked around the environments aimlessly searching for inspiration that could not be there because she had not drawn it in.
And it doesn't talk about the other kids.
And that is where our story starts. My logical jump is that if Mr. Rin's Dad knew about this disaster, probably others did as well. And for those with the resources to do so, they started a little group chat of people from around the world with instructions on how to build these pods, with the aim of sending children up to survive the disaster and then eventually come back to find whatever was left of the world.
Our characters are living their virtual lives, but the pods are getting older, now. The software is bugging up, the hardware is degrading. What was once a brand new computer was no longer firing on all cylinders, and the tablets aren't always as responsive as they once were. One day, out in the world, you catch sight of something, a structure that you didn't draw. And on top of that... another person.
The last command programmed into the pods by the creators fired, and the pods' networks connected. Now, they are all in the same shared space, almost like an MMO, but still separated by vast swaths of land that, after time, has become degraded, glitchy, and dangerous. Two characters meet, and they start to receive messages, something that hasn't happened in a decade or more. The messages are telling them that they all have to find each other, and meet at the core of the simulation, and from there they will start the sequence of returning their pods to the surface.
The story would follow, initially, two characters that meet another person for the first time ever. They both have tablets, so they can freely create their worlds just as they had, but with another admin around, they have double the creative power. But the world starts to almost fight back against them, rampant chunks of bugged-out code forming malicious digital entities that form rogue creatures and apparitions that threaten them. Over time, they slowly meet the other admins, and then make their way to the core of the simulation. From there, they return to Earth to find... whatever is left. Their tablets lead them to a place, perhaps a bunker or a city or the like, and within they find the seeds to sow a new world.
I have the bullet points of the story pretty well fleshed out. The first meeting, the exploration, the meeting of new admins, journeying to the core, then returning to earth to find what was left for them. We'll learn about the other pods, the ones that went dark too early, their occupants lost to drift through the blind eternities forever. We'll learn about the parents of these children, how they came by the resources and money to build these pods and the underground effort to launch pockets of humanity into the stars to come back down after the event. We'll learn about the event itself, what disaster befell the planet and where we can find cracks in the crust to plant new seeds of life.
The details thereof are where we collaborate. Fill in those characters, fill in the adventure, make our digital glitch-space and propel these people through its challenges. In some ways a lot of this will sort of function like an MMO, where we have this digital space and a party adventuring their way across it. I want to incorporate music into the ideas of these stories. Lyrics, phrases, titles, and more, mostly from a meta-narrative perspective rather than anything that the characters themselves actuate on. I want environments inspired by titles, creatures inspired by lyrics, action sequences inspired by music videos, and more, all to keep with the theme and the idea that Shelter was, at its core, a music video.
In the interest of full disclosure, I attempted to start this story once before. That person disappeared without ever responding to my introduction post, so I do, in fact, have the entire first scene for you to read and judge if you're interested.
Inbox
Another morning broke with Orion still laid amongst the duvet and mountain of pillows that constituted a bed. Some days he rebuilt his room as he had found it, with the four-poster, black-lacquered bedroom that he had come to know. Some days he came back so exhausted from a run that he barely had the wherewithal to load the save file before collapsing into the puddle of plush. This was one of those latter mornings.
He hauled himself upright with a titanic groan, shaking his head to toss his blonde locks back away from his face. With a jaw-cracking yawn, he fished around the pile of covers for his tablet, eventually finding it half-tucked into the pillow case that had become his hug-pillow.
Tapping open the display, he could not help but glance at the envelope in the top right. It had been a long time since he had seen an exclamation point in that corner. The early days had seen an influx of files, containing a myriad of maps, imagery, almanacs, and more: Everything he needed to build himself the landscapes he now traversed every day. Why the device had stopped giving him any new prompts, he could not tell, but he was no less sour for not knowing. New inspiration would have been nice, once in a while.
It had been a few weeks since the snows had passed, and with the green beginning to show in the trees again, Orion's mind's eye flickered to life an image that he had been working on for days, now. He slumped back into the blankets, but he was alert, now. The pen, slotted into the edge of the tablet, was slipped free of its housing, and Orion got to work.
The room in which he slept disappeared in a dazzle of technicolor cubes that broke apart and fizzled into the Nowhere—what he called the place that things went when he erased them. The walls, the bookcases, the bay window, all of it disassembled itself under the back of his pen on the tablet screen, dissolving until all he was left with was the bed in which he lay and the steel cube that formed the boundaries of his home.
The land came first, rolling fields as far as the eye could see. Orion drew a delicate swirl in the air, a single curly-cue floating above the grasses, to prompt the gentle summer breeze that rolled the grasses in verdant waves. A canvas established, he drew in the forest, sparse enough to walk through, but dense enough to provide shelter from the bright yellow ball of the sun that he had just penciled in. A double tap on the grass populated a drop-down menu, and he tapped the last item on the list: Smart Fill.
In a spiraling wave of iridescent color, the world rippled around him. Cubes digistructed themselves as fast as he could keep track of them, their edges and facets warping as the system distorted their polygons and reshaped them into boulders, rivers, clouds, and more, even building the small wildlife that made the sounds of the forest come alive.
|76%.../
|89%.../
|97%.../
|100% Smart Fill Complete!
A quick glance up and around him told Orion that the environment would do; it was not his focus. With a pinch, he zoomed in on the moss-covered outcropping of rocks that jutted over the river. He lassoed the point of it, and copied it over, opening a second tab and copying the image over. With a dropper and a pencil, he took the colors and textures, reshaping the stone and moss into a new shape. Grinning, he stood from his bed, now sitting inside the metal frame perched in the middle of a field. With a tap, his bed dissolved into the same cubes and flitted off to Nowhere. Still in the white T-shirt and red-striped black pants he had worn to bed, he quickly slipped on his shoes and tied them up tight. A minute of stretching would be required, he had learned; running stiff from bed was never safe.
Orion's excitement had bubbled up and over, and, finally, he snatched back up his tablet. Happy with his creation, he lassoed it up, copied it, and brought it back over to the landscape.
|Option...
|Copy
|Cut
|—>Paste
|Delete
|More...
"Uwoah!"
Orion's voice was stolen and he laughed enthusiastically as the ground beneath his feet lurched forward. The grass gave way to stone that carried him forward, and up, and up, and higher and higher, in a soaring arc over the rolling meadows below. A whale, as if breaching from the surface of the ocean, had crested from under the ground, its body made of white stone covered in a dense, plush layer of moss that Orion had fallen into, hands anchored into the dirt to keep his purchase. His tablet, in the leather shoulder bag that held it to his back, fluttered behind him in the wind.
The song that thundered out from the creature's chest rattled his skull, earning another joyous laugh as the creature started to plunge back towards the ground. With a wild grin, Orion released the dirt, getting his balance and taking off at a dead sprint down the whale's head. His arms flailed and his feet skittered as the head arched down, his path becoming a steeper and steeper slope. The ground was rushing up to meet them, barely ten meters below. The nose of the whale punched into the stone, melding with it more than destroying it, as if the stone were water and the beast was simply plunging into the depths. Just before the ground swallowed him, too, Orion leapt forward, nearly level with the ground, hands out to his sides to keep his balance.
The grasses were long and soft, a cushion to soften his fall, and he rolled with the motion, tumbling over one shoulder before kicking forward and landing on his feet. His momentum carried him forward, arms spinning, feet searching for balance. He managed to not fall directly on his face, instead scrabbling into a sprint and—
—off over the edge.
Adrenaline turned to fear in the pit of his stomach. The ground had opened up to a yawning chasm, a mile deep with a sinister red glow at its bottom. I didn't draw this! The thought was as indignant as it was confused. Orion jerked at the straps of his bag, pulling the tablet around to his front and flipping open the cover. His clipboard was still full, and with a frantic paste, he sent the command.
From the wall of the chasm, the whale reemerged. This time, instead of white and moss, it was dark brown brimstone, glowing with chased rivulets of red magma like a furnace burned under its skin. It flew below Orion, who thumped onto its stone back on his side. Instinct told him to push his arms and kick his legs to turn the fall into a roll, but his breath was stolen and he was seeing stars as he struggled to rise to his hands and knees.
Orion barely had time to look up as the whale slammed into the opposite side of the chasm. Throwing himself forward, Orion pressed himself into the stone as close as possible, screaming as he was dragged through solid stone as his makeshift mount burrowed into the world. "Up, up, upupup!" he hollered, pounding on the stone as if jerking the reins of a horse. With another groan, this time shuddering like the roaring fire of a smith's forge, the whale pulled up, moving to once again breach the ground and fly skyward.
The moment he was in open air, Orion rolled. A rock thumped into his side, and a stone bumped against his head, but he felt himself land on solid ground. The brimstone whale floated high above him, moaning its earthen song for some half-mile before it nose-dived into the stone once more.
Orion blinked the blood from his eyes and scrubbed it out of his brows with the back of his hand. Heaving, he hauled himself forward. When his head poked out over the edge of the chasm, he gasped.
Like a crack to the core, the gorge was a hundred meters across and went down further than his vision would extend. The thin orange line at the bottom, he surmised, was likely a river a mile wide, bubbling and pulsing and waiting for something soft and fleshy to fall into it and get cooked. Struggling to regain his breath, the boy rolled onto his back and snapped his tablet up before his eyes. Eyes that threatened to pop out of his head at the sight of the wild gorge carved through his landscape.
I... I never drew that. The image was an entirely different art style, more akin to the stock images that had populated his inbox in the earliest days of his memory. Nearly a photo, it stood out against his rough, penciled-in sketches like a stamp amongst scribbles, veritably laughing at him for the resolution and perfectness that had threatened to kill him.
The world had done this before. It had never been so drastic, but the last months had been rife with bugs and oddities, things he never drew populating into his spaces or things he did draw disappearing or warping from his original vision. The coding manuals in his inbox had been a good source of learning, enough that he knew that code eventually went out of whack if the system files weren't managed. But he could never get to the system files. It was the only locked folder in his entire world, requiring an absurdly long password that he could not have brute-forced in billions of years. It was the only sign of...
!
Orion's breath caught his throat and he sat bolt upright, staring.
Inbox
His hands shook, and a cold sweat had broken out across his forehead, pulling watery rivulets of blood down onto his white shirt. Clicking his tongue, he tabbed over to his inventory, tapping the first aid kit and watching as it constructed next to him. With the tablet set in the grass, he set about patching up the wound on his head, the scratches on his arms, and the bruise on his side. But in the time it took to bandage himself, his eyes never left that flashing point that had not changed in over almost a decade.
If this does something for you, message me. Let's chat.
The partner I'm looking for, to write this with, will be ready for a long-term story full of adventure and mystery and self-discovery. They will understand the idea of Plato's Cave, and the effect of long term social isolation. They will have a yearning to write a handful of characters, with a focus on a main couple, and the swirling tale of a world that they did not now existed. They will be ready for a very smut-lite, if any smut at all, story. I am not looking for every post to be a 5 paragraph monster (in fact, I would prefer they be more digestible, when appropriate), but we're going to be describing what the imaginations of these characters bring to life in real-time, so detail is a must. They will be ready for music and musical ideas to play a big role in the way we write this story.
If you have not seen Porter Robinson's Shelter, it is required reading for this thread! And also, what are you doing, it's 6 minutes of pure art that you have been missing out on, go fix that immediately.
I've always held this particular production in fairly high regard, but I went back and listened to it recently, and the synapses all fired at once and the idea for an actual story based around this concept flared to life. The video follows Rin, a young girl who was sent up in a space pod to avoid some unspecified global disaster. That pod contains a virtual universe where she controls everything via her tablet, drawing environments, weather, and her entire world in a rush of ideas.
The video hints at, but does not outright show, the parts that are not music-video-worthy. The days where Rin didn't feel like getting out of bed, just checking that mail notification every ten minutes in hope that something would change. The days where her ideas didn't go quite right and she found herself desperately trying to draw her way out of a tight situation. The days where her muse just wasn't firing, and she walked around the environments aimlessly searching for inspiration that could not be there because she had not drawn it in.
And it doesn't talk about the other kids.
And that is where our story starts. My logical jump is that if Mr. Rin's Dad knew about this disaster, probably others did as well. And for those with the resources to do so, they started a little group chat of people from around the world with instructions on how to build these pods, with the aim of sending children up to survive the disaster and then eventually come back to find whatever was left of the world.
Our characters are living their virtual lives, but the pods are getting older, now. The software is bugging up, the hardware is degrading. What was once a brand new computer was no longer firing on all cylinders, and the tablets aren't always as responsive as they once were. One day, out in the world, you catch sight of something, a structure that you didn't draw. And on top of that... another person.
The last command programmed into the pods by the creators fired, and the pods' networks connected. Now, they are all in the same shared space, almost like an MMO, but still separated by vast swaths of land that, after time, has become degraded, glitchy, and dangerous. Two characters meet, and they start to receive messages, something that hasn't happened in a decade or more. The messages are telling them that they all have to find each other, and meet at the core of the simulation, and from there they will start the sequence of returning their pods to the surface.
The story would follow, initially, two characters that meet another person for the first time ever. They both have tablets, so they can freely create their worlds just as they had, but with another admin around, they have double the creative power. But the world starts to almost fight back against them, rampant chunks of bugged-out code forming malicious digital entities that form rogue creatures and apparitions that threaten them. Over time, they slowly meet the other admins, and then make their way to the core of the simulation. From there, they return to Earth to find... whatever is left. Their tablets lead them to a place, perhaps a bunker or a city or the like, and within they find the seeds to sow a new world.
I have the bullet points of the story pretty well fleshed out. The first meeting, the exploration, the meeting of new admins, journeying to the core, then returning to earth to find what was left for them. We'll learn about the other pods, the ones that went dark too early, their occupants lost to drift through the blind eternities forever. We'll learn about the parents of these children, how they came by the resources and money to build these pods and the underground effort to launch pockets of humanity into the stars to come back down after the event. We'll learn about the event itself, what disaster befell the planet and where we can find cracks in the crust to plant new seeds of life.
The details thereof are where we collaborate. Fill in those characters, fill in the adventure, make our digital glitch-space and propel these people through its challenges. In some ways a lot of this will sort of function like an MMO, where we have this digital space and a party adventuring their way across it. I want to incorporate music into the ideas of these stories. Lyrics, phrases, titles, and more, mostly from a meta-narrative perspective rather than anything that the characters themselves actuate on. I want environments inspired by titles, creatures inspired by lyrics, action sequences inspired by music videos, and more, all to keep with the theme and the idea that Shelter was, at its core, a music video.
In the interest of full disclosure, I attempted to start this story once before. That person disappeared without ever responding to my introduction post, so I do, in fact, have the entire first scene for you to read and judge if you're interested.
Maybe I forgot... how to think at all?
No new messages for 3159 days
Another morning broke with Orion still laid amongst the duvet and mountain of pillows that constituted a bed. Some days he rebuilt his room as he had found it, with the four-poster, black-lacquered bedroom that he had come to know. Some days he came back so exhausted from a run that he barely had the wherewithal to load the save file before collapsing into the puddle of plush. This was one of those latter mornings.
He hauled himself upright with a titanic groan, shaking his head to toss his blonde locks back away from his face. With a jaw-cracking yawn, he fished around the pile of covers for his tablet, eventually finding it half-tucked into the pillow case that had become his hug-pillow.
Tapping open the display, he could not help but glance at the envelope in the top right. It had been a long time since he had seen an exclamation point in that corner. The early days had seen an influx of files, containing a myriad of maps, imagery, almanacs, and more: Everything he needed to build himself the landscapes he now traversed every day. Why the device had stopped giving him any new prompts, he could not tell, but he was no less sour for not knowing. New inspiration would have been nice, once in a while.
It had been a few weeks since the snows had passed, and with the green beginning to show in the trees again, Orion's mind's eye flickered to life an image that he had been working on for days, now. He slumped back into the blankets, but he was alert, now. The pen, slotted into the edge of the tablet, was slipped free of its housing, and Orion got to work.
The room in which he slept disappeared in a dazzle of technicolor cubes that broke apart and fizzled into the Nowhere—what he called the place that things went when he erased them. The walls, the bookcases, the bay window, all of it disassembled itself under the back of his pen on the tablet screen, dissolving until all he was left with was the bed in which he lay and the steel cube that formed the boundaries of his home.
The land came first, rolling fields as far as the eye could see. Orion drew a delicate swirl in the air, a single curly-cue floating above the grasses, to prompt the gentle summer breeze that rolled the grasses in verdant waves. A canvas established, he drew in the forest, sparse enough to walk through, but dense enough to provide shelter from the bright yellow ball of the sun that he had just penciled in. A double tap on the grass populated a drop-down menu, and he tapped the last item on the list: Smart Fill.
In a spiraling wave of iridescent color, the world rippled around him. Cubes digistructed themselves as fast as he could keep track of them, their edges and facets warping as the system distorted their polygons and reshaped them into boulders, rivers, clouds, and more, even building the small wildlife that made the sounds of the forest come alive.
|76%.../
|89%.../
|97%.../
|100% Smart Fill Complete!
A quick glance up and around him told Orion that the environment would do; it was not his focus. With a pinch, he zoomed in on the moss-covered outcropping of rocks that jutted over the river. He lassoed the point of it, and copied it over, opening a second tab and copying the image over. With a dropper and a pencil, he took the colors and textures, reshaping the stone and moss into a new shape. Grinning, he stood from his bed, now sitting inside the metal frame perched in the middle of a field. With a tap, his bed dissolved into the same cubes and flitted off to Nowhere. Still in the white T-shirt and red-striped black pants he had worn to bed, he quickly slipped on his shoes and tied them up tight. A minute of stretching would be required, he had learned; running stiff from bed was never safe.
Orion's excitement had bubbled up and over, and, finally, he snatched back up his tablet. Happy with his creation, he lassoed it up, copied it, and brought it back over to the landscape.
|Option...
|Copy
|Cut
|—>Paste
|Delete
|More...
"Uwoah!"
Orion's voice was stolen and he laughed enthusiastically as the ground beneath his feet lurched forward. The grass gave way to stone that carried him forward, and up, and up, and higher and higher, in a soaring arc over the rolling meadows below. A whale, as if breaching from the surface of the ocean, had crested from under the ground, its body made of white stone covered in a dense, plush layer of moss that Orion had fallen into, hands anchored into the dirt to keep his purchase. His tablet, in the leather shoulder bag that held it to his back, fluttered behind him in the wind.
The song that thundered out from the creature's chest rattled his skull, earning another joyous laugh as the creature started to plunge back towards the ground. With a wild grin, Orion released the dirt, getting his balance and taking off at a dead sprint down the whale's head. His arms flailed and his feet skittered as the head arched down, his path becoming a steeper and steeper slope. The ground was rushing up to meet them, barely ten meters below. The nose of the whale punched into the stone, melding with it more than destroying it, as if the stone were water and the beast was simply plunging into the depths. Just before the ground swallowed him, too, Orion leapt forward, nearly level with the ground, hands out to his sides to keep his balance.
The grasses were long and soft, a cushion to soften his fall, and he rolled with the motion, tumbling over one shoulder before kicking forward and landing on his feet. His momentum carried him forward, arms spinning, feet searching for balance. He managed to not fall directly on his face, instead scrabbling into a sprint and—
—off over the edge.
Adrenaline turned to fear in the pit of his stomach. The ground had opened up to a yawning chasm, a mile deep with a sinister red glow at its bottom. I didn't draw this! The thought was as indignant as it was confused. Orion jerked at the straps of his bag, pulling the tablet around to his front and flipping open the cover. His clipboard was still full, and with a frantic paste, he sent the command.
From the wall of the chasm, the whale reemerged. This time, instead of white and moss, it was dark brown brimstone, glowing with chased rivulets of red magma like a furnace burned under its skin. It flew below Orion, who thumped onto its stone back on his side. Instinct told him to push his arms and kick his legs to turn the fall into a roll, but his breath was stolen and he was seeing stars as he struggled to rise to his hands and knees.
Orion barely had time to look up as the whale slammed into the opposite side of the chasm. Throwing himself forward, Orion pressed himself into the stone as close as possible, screaming as he was dragged through solid stone as his makeshift mount burrowed into the world. "Up, up, upupup!" he hollered, pounding on the stone as if jerking the reins of a horse. With another groan, this time shuddering like the roaring fire of a smith's forge, the whale pulled up, moving to once again breach the ground and fly skyward.
The moment he was in open air, Orion rolled. A rock thumped into his side, and a stone bumped against his head, but he felt himself land on solid ground. The brimstone whale floated high above him, moaning its earthen song for some half-mile before it nose-dived into the stone once more.
Orion blinked the blood from his eyes and scrubbed it out of his brows with the back of his hand. Heaving, he hauled himself forward. When his head poked out over the edge of the chasm, he gasped.
Like a crack to the core, the gorge was a hundred meters across and went down further than his vision would extend. The thin orange line at the bottom, he surmised, was likely a river a mile wide, bubbling and pulsing and waiting for something soft and fleshy to fall into it and get cooked. Struggling to regain his breath, the boy rolled onto his back and snapped his tablet up before his eyes. Eyes that threatened to pop out of his head at the sight of the wild gorge carved through his landscape.
I... I never drew that. The image was an entirely different art style, more akin to the stock images that had populated his inbox in the earliest days of his memory. Nearly a photo, it stood out against his rough, penciled-in sketches like a stamp amongst scribbles, veritably laughing at him for the resolution and perfectness that had threatened to kill him.
The world had done this before. It had never been so drastic, but the last months had been rife with bugs and oddities, things he never drew populating into his spaces or things he did draw disappearing or warping from his original vision. The coding manuals in his inbox had been a good source of learning, enough that he knew that code eventually went out of whack if the system files weren't managed. But he could never get to the system files. It was the only locked folder in his entire world, requiring an absurdly long password that he could not have brute-forced in billions of years. It was the only sign of...
!
Orion's breath caught his throat and he sat bolt upright, staring.
1 new message
His hands shook, and a cold sweat had broken out across his forehead, pulling watery rivulets of blood down onto his white shirt. Clicking his tongue, he tabbed over to his inventory, tapping the first aid kit and watching as it constructed next to him. With the tablet set in the grass, he set about patching up the wound on his head, the scratches on his arms, and the bruise on his side. But in the time it took to bandage himself, his eyes never left that flashing point that had not changed in over almost a decade.
If this does something for you, message me. Let's chat.