"Is this going to be a regular thing with you?"
“Hi there, my name’s Nerissa. What’s your name?”
The petite brunette, sitting on a park bench, had been engrossed in a novel before being rudely interrupted. Irritated, she frowned, fully intending to glare at the intruder with all the scorn and derision a child could muster. But when she looked up, the frown disappeared, struck from her face.
Another small girl with rippling brown hair, dressed in a bright pink jumper, stood in front of her, a smile on her face as she swayed back and forth aimlessly.
“I-I-I…” Her mind had gone blank. This girl in front of her was almost her clone, exactly like her in appearance. It was kind of freaky.
“You don’t have a name, do you?”
Peering up at the girl, she furrowed her brow. “What?”
“Well, ’cause I told you ‘my name’s Nerissa’, and I asked you what your name was, but you didn’t say anything.”
Nerissa. The girl’s name was Nerissa. “No, I have a name.”
“Oh. I thought you were one of those people who had amneeza.”
“Amneeza?”
Nerissa laughed. It was a tinkling laugh, ringing out happily like a wind chime in a light autumn breeze. “Yeah, amneeza. You know, where you forget who you are and stuff.”
“Oh, amnesia.” Comprehension dawned on her face.
“Yeah, that’s it!”
“Yeah, no, I don’t have that.”
“Well, what’s your name, then?”
For a moment, she hesitated. She could adopt any persona with Nerissa; she could be an Anne, or an Emily, if she really wanted to. A new identity; a new beginning. But her name was all she had in the world; she had to be true to it.
“Dorris,” she said. “My name’s Dorris.”
And, strangely, her new friend seemed pleased with that. “Dorris.” She said the word with a mixture of contemplation and interest, as if tentatively tasting it before she made a final judgment. Then a smile crossed her face in a wide grin. “I like that name.”
Nodding, Dorris replied, “Yeah. You would.”
“...wanna play cops and robbers?”
“Okay!”
I'm not starting with the original prologue, as you can clearly tell; I'm starting by building up a more consistent backstory. Let's call it a Chapter 0. It's coming along nicely in the brainstorming department right now, and I've really started to write it. It's starting to go somewhere interesting into explaining who Nerissa and Dorris are, the illogicality of how Nerissa and Manfred could possibly have fallen in love (lust?) in the first place, why Eraina is such a stick-in-the-mud, why Nellie is so conveniently pale and has smaller ears than an elf, modernist elves versus traditionalist elves, what the heck the geography of my world is, how Majik is actually supposed to work...
Yeah, I know, it's a lot. But I think that it's worth it. Having more of an idea in my brain about how the world works helps the story considerably later when I want to add threads of it to the story. Seriously, this is what you get from writing a sci-fi for NaNo: world-building comes first, character-building can wait. Characters often grow from strange occurances in your world-building, I've decided. For example, I hated how I wrote the Sim-Creator conversations in the first chapter; it seemed so cliche, like I was doing a regular commentary legacy. I needed a way to show that Nellie was special in that for it to be able to work. How I've decided to resolve this...I won't say. ;)
I've also found even better ways to use some of the original canon from the original Halfblood series, where I do get my names and *SPOILER* several of the upcoming plot threads for gen3. It's very satisfying, because it makes me feel like I'm taking something existing and making it my own, you know?
Anyway, I'm rambling (and procrastinating for English homework). I wish I could have had access to my Simming computer over break so I could play around more with some of my Pleasantview sims. They're a nice break from just focusing on Mirusas all the time. But, as it is, I've spent too much time on this post-that-no-one-is-going-to-read-but-me, and I think I'm going to go back to Oedipus and J.B. now. Ciao!