World-building!
'scuse me while I copy and paste world-building information all over your f-lists. D: I just need somewhere to put this where I won't lose it.
Said the Spider-verse world-building with Lizzie, who is officially an awesome awesome GQMF for some of these ideas. (Later when I've dealt with all this school shit I'll get up the stuff Kristen helped me with. <333) Said the Spider was totally just gonna be a short-story for my class but I love this world to pieces right now and am so excited I will either do other things in the world or make it a book. I don't know. I need a plot. Oh god. *flails* Anyway. L = Lizzie, M = me.
Main character in Said the Spider = Aracana (Originally Arachne. Pronounce at will.)
Sister = Nique ("Neek" - came from Dominique)
Son/Nephew = Benjamin
Setting = Future (we have destroyed the world with poison and thusly live in bubbles! :D)
M: Technically it is a big bubble city more than private bubbles.
L: Can people have private bubbles if they want to? ;_;
M: I suppose.
L: How does one get from bubble A to bubble B?
M: There are masks, kind of like gas masks. You have to wear it to breath outside of the bubbles. Take it off and a healthy adult will be dead within an hour tops. A child, as the case is in my story, lasts about twenty minutes, give or take. The air has become quite toxic. Acid rain, yay!
L: .... I am over-analyzing this. >_<
M: Please do. ;_; I don't know how the soil and air stuff works really so I don't know what can and can't hold up.
L: All I can think is "Is it a clear toxicity or a cloudy? Is it blocking out the sunlight? Is it thickening the atmosphere or thinning it. Are things hot or freezing?" XD I don't actually know. I just finished Catching Fire though, and it goes into things like that a bit. How the excessive wastefullness of a futuristic, gleaming, bourgeois Capital affects what is basically a slave class working in the coal mines in far off districts to support them.
M: Interesting D: Is there anything you could suggest that I could incorporate? I figure they're probably living off some form of agriculture since I don't know how many animals they'd save, but they'd have to do it all in like greenhouses of some sort, so, complicated...
L: umm...it's mostly about locking teenagers in a faux Utopian deathtrap, and broadcasting the carnage live. -_- -_-
M: Nice.
M: Also, could plants outside of the bubbles feasibly survive and evolve to tolerate the conditions?
L: You could skip that step altogether. Have them process the meat without ever taking it from a live animal because there's no way to support said animals. You know, the way they are trying to grow individual organs in test tubes.
M: Since I figured water would be pretty precious (most everything is. They've incorporated a China-style system of one-baby only due to limited resources) I thought maybe a throw-back to the old days of washing dishes with sand?
L: Oh! I like that! I love the combination of ancient culture with futuristic technology.
L: But as for surviving life on the outside, has this condition of pollution and bubble living been around for a while? Long enough for new strand and monstrous creatures to adapt and evolve? Cause if so, you can just start making shit up. XD
M: It's been around at least two generations. Probably 4 or 5 generations.. In the beginning they tried to preserve culture a lot, which is why some of the names and all stuck..
M: Hm... That's an idea. If they've managed to create the bubbles, surely they could manage to reproduce meat. But... maybe to keep resources limited it's... idk. I don't quite want to say expensive since that would quickly lead to a one-power-crushing-all system...
L: Well it couldn't be perfect. Perhaps there's enough FOOD to go around, but not enough nutrition.
M: DD: YES. Oh I love you. Yes.
L: Perhaps it's the vitamin supplements they don't have enough for.
M: It's like when in China during the famine, there'd be bodies all in the ditches, fat bodies, but even though they'd be eating whatever they could, it wasn't what they needed to survive.
L: EXACTLY!
M: So while they can replicate the meat, they can't quite get nutrients right and the stuff that DOES have the nutrients is difficult to grow in enough quantity to meet the demand, especially since it'd be a CONSTANT demand whereas it would only grow some of the time. Yes yes yes.
L: You could even work in the parallel somehow. Sci-fi always works better when it's as closely linked to historical fact as possible.
PERFECT. xD
M: <33333 That would work to add more to what I'm already going to establish as a kind of blase reaction to death in the cities, if you'll walk around and find bodies on the side of the road frequently.
See, because of the toxic-ness of the outside, they used to have an alarm to warn the city if someone wandered out. When it went off, your family gathered, you counted heads. If you were missing one, you gathered up people and you went to save your wayward family member (frequently children under dares).
Back then they'd had enough time to save the person, most of the time.
But it got really annoying when it happened because of a visitor, or someone just wanted to go out for business to another bubble or just to go out. So they silenced the alarm. Now it still goes off, but no one will check for hours so unless the person on the outside without a mask is very lucky, almost all the time they find their corpse.
Also, now it's your family's business only if you go missing. No one else will help look for you, because they don't really care. And your family will love, love, love you while you're there, but when you're dead they're not that heartbroken. Kind of like in that Anthropology story about the women not trying to save their children if they get sick, and not caring if they die?
L: I ACTUALLY READ THAT ONE.
L: You could even throw in a few new diseases from the artificial elements and wonky hormones in the food. I wouldn't start with the "new class/mutation" thing, but you know when people don't have much longer. If you ever need to continue it, or just make it longer, you could work in the whole gradually weakening species/ must find a deus ex machina fast. xD
<333
Me: I have so much world-building going on in my head, and not that much will go into the story, so I very well may play in this world a few more times or try for a series. I really like tying it in with things I've learned.
L: You could have your gov't system trying to keep track of the people who leave the bubbles for a legit reason. If the business guys who, say, filled out a day pass for bubble B don't return within a specified time, Bubble A is sort of obligated to go look for them. But the passes are hard to get, so most people don't bother, and the gov't just thinks "well, we warned them"
Me: Oh yeah. <3<3 Like, my short story doesn't have a ton of it involved beyond the alarm (my prompt was actually "A woman walking in the woods comes across a child's body. Using any means at your disposal except for flashback, use her reactions to tell me about her childhood." and the old use for the alarm plays into that) and obviously the outside and the child-limited plays in heavily...
But beyond that, not so much. And now I'm excited to get into the other stuff which... doesn't happen in this story. So. Other stories and plots needed, I guess.
Said the Spider-verse world-building with Lizzie, who is officially an awesome awesome GQMF for some of these ideas. (Later when I've dealt with all this school shit I'll get up the stuff Kristen helped me with. <333) Said the Spider was totally just gonna be a short-story for my class but I love this world to pieces right now and am so excited I will either do other things in the world or make it a book. I don't know. I need a plot. Oh god. *flails* Anyway. L = Lizzie, M = me.
Main character in Said the Spider = Aracana (Originally Arachne. Pronounce at will.)
Sister = Nique ("Neek" - came from Dominique)
Son/Nephew = Benjamin
Setting = Future (we have destroyed the world with poison and thusly live in bubbles! :D)
M: Technically it is a big bubble city more than private bubbles.
L: Can people have private bubbles if they want to? ;_;
M: I suppose.
L: How does one get from bubble A to bubble B?
M: There are masks, kind of like gas masks. You have to wear it to breath outside of the bubbles. Take it off and a healthy adult will be dead within an hour tops. A child, as the case is in my story, lasts about twenty minutes, give or take. The air has become quite toxic. Acid rain, yay!
L: .... I am over-analyzing this. >_<
M: Please do. ;_; I don't know how the soil and air stuff works really so I don't know what can and can't hold up.
L: All I can think is "Is it a clear toxicity or a cloudy? Is it blocking out the sunlight? Is it thickening the atmosphere or thinning it. Are things hot or freezing?" XD I don't actually know. I just finished Catching Fire though, and it goes into things like that a bit. How the excessive wastefullness of a futuristic, gleaming, bourgeois Capital affects what is basically a slave class working in the coal mines in far off districts to support them.
M: Interesting D: Is there anything you could suggest that I could incorporate? I figure they're probably living off some form of agriculture since I don't know how many animals they'd save, but they'd have to do it all in like greenhouses of some sort, so, complicated...
L: umm...it's mostly about locking teenagers in a faux Utopian deathtrap, and broadcasting the carnage live. -_- -_-
M: Nice.
M: Also, could plants outside of the bubbles feasibly survive and evolve to tolerate the conditions?
L: You could skip that step altogether. Have them process the meat without ever taking it from a live animal because there's no way to support said animals. You know, the way they are trying to grow individual organs in test tubes.
M: Since I figured water would be pretty precious (most everything is. They've incorporated a China-style system of one-baby only due to limited resources) I thought maybe a throw-back to the old days of washing dishes with sand?
L: Oh! I like that! I love the combination of ancient culture with futuristic technology.
L: But as for surviving life on the outside, has this condition of pollution and bubble living been around for a while? Long enough for new strand and monstrous creatures to adapt and evolve? Cause if so, you can just start making shit up. XD
M: It's been around at least two generations. Probably 4 or 5 generations.. In the beginning they tried to preserve culture a lot, which is why some of the names and all stuck..
M: Hm... That's an idea. If they've managed to create the bubbles, surely they could manage to reproduce meat. But... maybe to keep resources limited it's... idk. I don't quite want to say expensive since that would quickly lead to a one-power-crushing-all system...
L: Well it couldn't be perfect. Perhaps there's enough FOOD to go around, but not enough nutrition.
M: DD: YES. Oh I love you. Yes.
L: Perhaps it's the vitamin supplements they don't have enough for.
M: It's like when in China during the famine, there'd be bodies all in the ditches, fat bodies, but even though they'd be eating whatever they could, it wasn't what they needed to survive.
L: EXACTLY!
M: So while they can replicate the meat, they can't quite get nutrients right and the stuff that DOES have the nutrients is difficult to grow in enough quantity to meet the demand, especially since it'd be a CONSTANT demand whereas it would only grow some of the time. Yes yes yes.
L: You could even work in the parallel somehow. Sci-fi always works better when it's as closely linked to historical fact as possible.
PERFECT. xD
M: <33333 That would work to add more to what I'm already going to establish as a kind of blase reaction to death in the cities, if you'll walk around and find bodies on the side of the road frequently.
See, because of the toxic-ness of the outside, they used to have an alarm to warn the city if someone wandered out. When it went off, your family gathered, you counted heads. If you were missing one, you gathered up people and you went to save your wayward family member (frequently children under dares).
Back then they'd had enough time to save the person, most of the time.
But it got really annoying when it happened because of a visitor, or someone just wanted to go out for business to another bubble or just to go out. So they silenced the alarm. Now it still goes off, but no one will check for hours so unless the person on the outside without a mask is very lucky, almost all the time they find their corpse.
Also, now it's your family's business only if you go missing. No one else will help look for you, because they don't really care. And your family will love, love, love you while you're there, but when you're dead they're not that heartbroken. Kind of like in that Anthropology story about the women not trying to save their children if they get sick, and not caring if they die?
L: I ACTUALLY READ THAT ONE.
L: You could even throw in a few new diseases from the artificial elements and wonky hormones in the food. I wouldn't start with the "new class/mutation" thing, but you know when people don't have much longer. If you ever need to continue it, or just make it longer, you could work in the whole gradually weakening species/ must find a deus ex machina fast. xD
<333
Me: I have so much world-building going on in my head, and not that much will go into the story, so I very well may play in this world a few more times or try for a series. I really like tying it in with things I've learned.
L: You could have your gov't system trying to keep track of the people who leave the bubbles for a legit reason. If the business guys who, say, filled out a day pass for bubble B don't return within a specified time, Bubble A is sort of obligated to go look for them. But the passes are hard to get, so most people don't bother, and the gov't just thinks "well, we warned them"
Me: Oh yeah. <3<3 Like, my short story doesn't have a ton of it involved beyond the alarm (my prompt was actually "A woman walking in the woods comes across a child's body. Using any means at your disposal except for flashback, use her reactions to tell me about her childhood." and the old use for the alarm plays into that) and obviously the outside and the child-limited plays in heavily...
But beyond that, not so much. And now I'm excited to get into the other stuff which... doesn't happen in this story. So. Other stories and plots needed, I guess.