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So this is kind of an offshoot from the story by authors. The idea of a roleplaying game across the GA community was born somewhere and I personally think it's a great idea! So here we can talk about if this is something we really want to happen. I think there definitely need to be rules (like Persinette has mentioned in the other thread) and there really should be someone like a Game Master to push plots and stuff. Since we're all on a writing community, I have high hopes this won't turn into a mary-sue angst fest. So yea! Feel free to share your thoughts, I really hope we can get this off the ground! https://www.gayauthors.org/forums/topic/37277-a-story-by-authors/#entry427659 <-- link back to where the idea was born! Hope to hear from ya! MYI

I've started on a new story, and I want to know if anybody else thinks it's worth continuing. It's a bit dark (understatement), but it's more about overcoming problems than wallowing in them, so it's uplifting too. I don't have a name for it yet, so if you think of a good one please share XD Just to clarify, no underage readers please! I'll censor the curse words for this post, but it'll still mention touchy subjects. OK, I'll start off with the description. ______________________________ In my world, where everybody can transform into animals and teenagers are thrown into the unknown to fend for themselves, some rise but most fall. There is no guarantee of safety, or even survival. In my world, how can I hope to survive, let alone retain my humanity? Can trust grow in a world where a childhood friend would stab me in the back for a chance at a dollar? Is kindness even worth the risk? In my world, those are dangerous questions. ___________________________ Too dramatic? I'm wavering on keeping this lol. Oh well. Here's the prologue: ______________________________ My name is Hayden. I was sixteen when I was banished by the town I’d always lived in with my family. OK, that sounded pretty dramatic. It’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s a tradition to banish people when they turn sixteen, and they’re not allowed to come back until they’re twenty and have found their animal. It’s called the Hunt, and it’s supposed to be the best part of a person’s life. It’s like a break from normality, and we’re supposed to treat it like a vacation. You can go adventuring and have all the fun you want, all paid for by your parents. It teaches kids the skills they’ll need to be adults, like money management, responsibility, people skills, you know what I mean. It also lets them get all the crazy out of their systems, so when they go back to their homes they’re ready to settle down. It sounds good, right? Wrong. It probably all worked well for a little while, back when it started, but some particularly creative *censored* decided that he’d form a gang and hunt down people who are freshly on their Hunt. As soon as you leave your town, carrying all the money you need to supply you for the next four years, they find you and rob you. You’re left with nothing, and you can’t go back to your home, where most people have spent their entire lives. What do you do when you’re alone in an unfamiliar world with no money? You find a job. Of course, since there’s thousands of other people in situations just like yours, there’s a high supply of workers with a low demand for them, and you end up getting paid next to nothing, if you’re lucky enough to even find a job. If you can’t find one, then your only hope is to join up with a gang just like the one that robbed you, and continue the tradition of being a douche. Because of how some people have done that, now any travelling teenagers are treated with distrust, and people are reluctant to offer jobs, making the influx of robbers even worse. It’s a vicious cycle that’s resulted in your Hunt being a race for survival. Occasionally, groups will assemble and chase off all the robbers, but all it takes is one person who’s already found their animal to start the cycle over again. As a teenager, all on your own for the first time, who would try to fight someone who can shape-shift into an animal? Me, that’s who. I was one of the few idiots who try to resist, and I got beaten savagely for my troubles. I had the misfortune of being robbed by a Jaguar, so I had no chance at all. A Jaguar is someone whose animal is a jaguar, predictably. You’d think that would get confusing, but it’s all in how you pronounce it. When we say ‘Jaguar’, you can hear the capital ‘J’. So the same sentence can have two different meanings, depending on how you stress one syllable. “There’s a bear on our porch,” would be met with “Oh *censored*, where’s the Shaman?” While “There’s a Bear on our porch,” would be followed by “Oh, hello, John!” It’s a simple system, but it works. Unlike the system of the Hunt, of course, to get back on topic. After the Jaguar beat the living shit out of me, leaving me bloody, broken, and broke, I thought about my options. I had a snowman’s chance in hell of ever finding a job while injured, and I’d never be able to afford healing if I couldn’t get a job. I won’t lie and say I never considered trying to rob someone else, but I didn’t consider it for long. I refused to be a part of that, and I still do. Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t make me a pacifist. Not by a long shot. I ended up following the Jaguar, and that night, I killed him while he slept and took my money back. See what I mean? Not a pacifist. I couldn’t have gotten away with just stealing it back, so he had to die. It was him or me, and he’d robbed me and beaten me already. I considered myself lucky that he hadn’t raped me, too. Anyway, when I got the money back, I went into a town. I had to spend most of the money on professional healing, but I managed to save a little bit, and I’ve protected it since, using a mix of good hiding places, excellent lying, and blending in with all the other penniless refugees. You’d think that eventually, somebody somewhere would have the bright idea of stopping the tradition that resulted in many people being killed or maimed, but the idea has never taken hold. We’re a violent people, and the Hunt is such a huge part of our culture that I can’t see it stopping anytime soon. It’s brutal, but it does weed out the weak links. Survival of the fittest and such. Generally, if you want to live to give your own children advice about their Hunt, you have to be either smart, strong, or lucky. I’m a modest person, but above that I’m practical. Modesty is a luxury I can’t afford right now. I have to be honest with myself to survive. Keeping that in mind, I’m smarter than most other people, and I’m fairly strong. I’m almost six feet tall, and if I ever had any fat on me it’s been worn away by the last six months. My muscles are defined, and I’m careful to eat just enough to keep them that way. There’s a fine line between being too weak to defend myself and looking well fed, which is like putting an “I have money” sign on. You’d think that being smart, strong, and practical is enough, but I have plenty of disadvantages as well. I’m good looking, for one, so I’m more memorable and I’m more likely to be raped. My luck, for another. Sometimes, it seems like my luck alone is determined to negate every advantage I’m lucky enough to have. If a road forks, I’ll always pick the path with the bear traps all along it. That’s not just me being pessimistic. That’s me being realistic. I’ve been Hunting for six months now, and I’ve encountered as much danger as some people see in their whole four years. Of course, some of it I bring on myself, like trying to resist when I was mugged, but there’s only so much I can tolerate. I won’t let the Hunt beat me down. After four years have passed, I still want to be someone I can respect. To make sure that happens, I made rules for myself before I ever started my Hunt, and they’ve kept me sane. It doesn’t matter what life throws at me, I will not break those rules. They’re my fundamental beliefs, and they keep me away from what most people do in their Hunts. If I break one of these rules then life will have broken me, and I’ll die before I let that happen. My rules are simple. I will not harm innocents. I will not join a gang. I will not rape anyone, ever. As you can see, non-innocents have almost no moral protection from me. If I need money to survive, I’ll rob a robber. To save an innocent, I’d kill a murderer. Hell, I have killed murderers, and for less reason. Of course, the ones I really hate are the gang members. They’re the cause of everything bad about the Hunt, and I’d happily kill one just for being what they are, if I could get away with it. I’m not a saint. I’m a survivor. One less gang member living is one less to deal with later. Now that you know more about me, I’ll explain my current situation. I’ve managed to keep most of the money I had left from healing, so I have twenty-seven dollars. That’s not much, but it’s more than most other people have, so I need to be even more careful. If I didn’t have it, then getting stopped by gang members would mean I’d probably only be raped, and I’d have a decent chance at getting away with my life. Since I do have it, if I’m caught by a gang, I’ll probably be mugged, raped, and killed. They’d assume I was a rival gang member, because who else would have that kind of money? I’ve thought about hiding it somewhere and only using it when I need it, but staying in one area would be pointless, since I need to be searching for my animal. Also, if people start to remember me, they might notice that I’m not getting malnourished. I can pull off the ‘penniless refugee’ disguise if I keep moving, because I look like I just started my Hunt and only recently lost all my money, but if people notice that I’m not getting any hungrier they’ll realize I have money. Because of that, I don’t stick around anywhere, but I always check all the animals in the area before I leave. I’ve checked almost all the usual animals already, but I haven’t found mine. When I do, I’ll supposedly feel a connection to it. The animals will recognize that I’m a kindred spirit, and they won’t attack me, so I’ll just have to live with them, as they do, until I’ve unlocked all my powers. It sounds easy, but I’ve already checked all the forest creatures, all the desert creatures, and I’m travelling through the forest to the tundra now, trying to find all the animals. Hopefully mine will be somewhere around here, and hopefully it’ll be something useful. I’ve seen too many cases of people who’ve found their animal, only to have it be a squirrel or something. The ability to climb faster is cool, but trying to survive the rest of their Hunt would suck. I’m currently looking for a snow leopard, because that would be a really good animal to be. The resistance to cold would mean I could live in freezing places where most other people couldn’t go, and it would be really good for fighting off any robbers who found me anyway. Oh well. I can’t allow myself to imagine it past listing the advantages and disadvantages, because that will lead to hope, and hope ends in disappointment. I have to be realistic to survive. I’ll have time for hope when I’m safe in my village again. Until then, I can’t be human. Humans let emotions cloud their judgment. I have to be a machine, emotionless but infallible. That’s why I have my rules. I can’t have morals, so I have to maintain a set of rules instead. I won’t break those rules, and I will survive. I hope. ______________________________ So yeah. Chapter one is an average day for Hayden, and then it switches to Matt's perspective (I'm using this story to work on writing different personalities and views, so there'll be plenty of different perspectives) and you learn a bit about him, and how he thinks. I'll add in more characters as the story goes, because I want to practice writing supporting characters, and I'm not going to be shy about killing them off, too. I'm not going to turn into George RR Martin or anything, but I'm definitely experimenting with the whole 'main characters aren't necessarily safe' idea. My other stories so far have been pretty lighthearted, so I'm looking forward to writing a darker, more real story. That's not to say there won't be happy moments, though. I'm a sucker for romance, and I couldn't keep love out of my stories if I tried. To explain more about the magic system (I kept it vague in the prologue and in what I've written of chapter one so far), everybody has an animal. They can transform fully into this animal, but even in human form they still have some of the animal's traits. For example, a Chameleon would be able to camouflage themselves as a human, a Bear would be stronger than they look, any aquatic Animals could breathe underwater, etc. Later in the story, Shamans will play a bigger role, and they'll have a magic of their own, more in line with what you'd expect when I say 'magic' XD. I'll stop now, before I give away too much. I can't wait to see what you guys think!