The Seasons Change (medieval fantasy setting)

[MadamMina]

oh...no they don't.

Plot: In this medieval universe, four highly segregated kingdoms represent each season; Spring/Summer/Winter/Autumn. Besides imports and exports of food and goods between sectors, no other travel or communication is allowed. Those who grow up in the Winter Kingdom, a pale-skinned, dark-haired and icy-eyed people, know despairingly little of the other seasons. So too, the Springs know nothing but Spring and the Summers/Autumns nothing but their own people. Each kingdom has, more or less, a specific ethnicity and culture. Think of this like four completely different countries. Ancient dragon clans, each respective to a season and its territory, keep their realm within a single climate. When upset, the dragons unleash disasters such as floods, blizzards, droughts, etc. that ravage the lands. When kept content by animal (and sometimes human) sacrifice, the kingdom resides in relative peace. Seeking better fortune, my character of the Spring Kingdom, breaks code and infiltrates the kingdom (you choose!) of your main character.

Typical physical features of each Kingdom
(This, -save for the Springs- can be altered.)

Key: Hair color/eye color/skin tone

Spring: blonde/green/fair to olive
Summer: gold/gold/copper to chocolate
Autumn: brown to auburn/crimson/freckled and fair
Winter: black to black-blue/blue/ivory

That's the basic premise. My allocated partner for this plot never...responded to my intro post, so I'm trying again. :/ There's a lot of socio-economic unrest to play with here, some magic (although I'd like to keep any magic to the highest social classes and be fairly simple like potions/charms/herbs), and...possible romance.

Details:

-I'm expecting you to add much to the plot, keep throwing me twists--challenging me.

-I play ANY gender and ANY pairing, but for this plot, my main will be female. As I AM a woman, I probably write best as a woman.

-I WILL be asking for a sample post. Yeah, I'm really snooty and I want my partner to have a writing skill to match my own. I've taken a few years' hiatus from this site, and while my skills may be a bit rusty, I need someone to push me to write at my best. I DO care about spelling/grammar/syntax. I'm expecting 3+ solid paragraphs. Or if it's a tiny novel...hey, that's ok too.

-You've best be OK with 18+ themes. We'll most likely use PMs instead of a thread.

I'm happy to answer any questions. As I have an intro ready to go, we could start this pronto and that would give you a good deal of information about this setting/universe.

It this idea intrigues you, please post HERE a sample of your writing!

sample

Since 2001, when the United States panicked over an aggressive terrorist attack, our ancestors knew that America had fallen from its place as a world power. The shift was occurring. Plans had to be changed. Strategies devised. It began with four people determined to forage their own frontier; a place they could govern at will and see to it that peace prevailed for their children. But it would be over a century of meticulous planning and generation-raising before this journey came to fruition. Some left the group, some joined. Funds were raised through the years but so was doubt. America did suffer war. Many of the group retired to other countries. It was more immediate. Not all were crazy enough to wait until a ship was built, until a plan for colonization was made, until a planet was sought. But many did wait. Peace and quiet. It was all they wanted. In 2152 we could finally raise homage to those four for what they set up for us-- a planet, a people, a government and a life to our own.

But we began greedily, ignoring the strict rules of abandoning all contact with Earth and building for ourselves great palaces. Imported and ornate ceilings, fixtures, furniture, and art littered the precarious wood and drywall foundations of our kingdom. Only thirty-one days into completion and the largest sandstorm imaginable tore it all to shreds; fodder for the unruly sands. Before this disaster, we had ignored what was around us. Ignored the extremely hot and arid climate, ignored the patterns of wind, ignored the strange, native beasts of this land. We had tried, like the ravenous humans before us, to mold everything to our will. Another mind-shift. Careful planning told us where to build, stones replaced drywall, thick reed-like plants provided sturdy, thatched doors, and diligent observation of the natives taught us how to survive. Our ship had arrived with 180 persons. We had but 103 left. Most suffered dehydration and heat-stroke. Some gave up and returned to their dissected Earth lives. But as our naivety of this land lessened, the more insistent we were on conquering it.

Eventually we built new palaces--cool stone castles like this was 1512, complete with wall-sconces for candles and torches. Our engineers crafted dozens of windmills to pump water into cisterns. Our hunters brought in beasts and our scientists, as a last, brilliant return to Earth-knowledge, brought back lab supplies to create for us a race of genetically engineered workers that would be built to withstand the harsh climate. The giant lizards we had studied were intricately spliced with human DNA. We were playing God and no one dared say a word against it. The group waited 16 months to see their new companions of labor. They were ugly, but altogether wondrous. These creatures, called “Sodali” derived from the Latin for “companion” were everything and more. Unfortunately, we had wiped out their ancestral lizards in the process, but we knew the less information they had, the less likely they were to question us. We needed total monarchy.

We taught them English. We built them homes and schools. They worked for us and we treated them well. To ensure their population growth, and our power over them, we emptied them of life-creating organs. Every male and female was sterile. We created them, from test-tube to sand and began to tweak each one to better suit the colony. Some we made congenitally creative, some logical, others with more muscle mass. Each was predestined to be a part of society in their own guild of expertise. It was perfection.

Until they rebelled. We knew it would happen. We had kept them in check for six generations. We kept them in the dark longer than we had imagined possible. For all our hopes and dreams, it seems 'complete peace' and 'forever' will not coexist. War was upon us.

[MadamMina]

Bump

[MadamMina]

Bump

[Hexaflexagon]

Hello Madame. You have managed to catch my interest in your little endeavor. So here are two writing samples for you to examine. I'm no Shakespeare, but I like to think I get the job done

Sample 1

It was like the Father used to say during his sermons: Porque la paga del pecado es muerte. They were right it seemed: For the wages of sin is death.

Jack was only fifty. Yet he felt like an old man, as if he had walked through a dozen lifetimes only to be shit out the other side without a care in the world. His back ached in pain, his shoulders sagged, and his feet dragged against the desert sand which resisted his every move. The bullet lodged somewhere in his back wasn't helping and neither was his companion.

Javier Bermudez was very much dead. People came back from a lot of things but not a .45 round fired point blank into the back of your head by a vengeful whore. You just don’t. It would of been easier if he was alive. At least Jack would've had somebody to talk to, at least he wouldn't of had to drag his bloated corpse through the sand. But it was never that easy. They never take the easy option, they always want to go down in a blaze of glory. Jack had seen a lot of blazes of glory in his life and many more aftermaths when the blaze is just some burning embers. They always ended up like his companion. Dead and starting to smell.

What the hell was he doing? Out in the middle of the goddamn desert with the corpse of a petty drug lord and for what? Money? It wasn't like they were paying him much, maybe a 10000 pesos if he was lucky. No. He certainly wasn’t doing it out of the kindest in his warm fuzzy heart. No. He knew why he was there. He always knew. It was the same reason every “retirement” ended early and why he wasn't back home in Santa Fe. He needed it. The blaring sounds of gunshots, the screams of hatred, the feeling of adrenaline pumping through his body. It made him feel alive like nothing else did. It was the only thing he wanted to do, despite how much he wanted to get away.

Mary was right. He was nothing but a drunk wannabe cowboy with a deathwish. He wondered how Mary was doing, if she was still waiting tables at the Sunrise Diner and still smelled of roses and hard liquor. He wondered how the kids were doing to, Luke would be graduating college this year becoming a real man. He probably should've talked to them more but it was better this way. Better to leave one night with nothing but the duster, rucksack and motorcycle leaving nothing but a note. Hate was easier to deal with than disappointment or grief, Jack knew hate all too well.

He squinted up at the desert sky above as the sun beat down on his windworn face. The desert sky was different than anything else you would ever see. Just a big old expanse of blue stretching out into infinity, the void threatening to swallow you whole. But in the big blue empty he spotted three black shapes high above... circling. He would've laughed if he had the energy left to. He’d seen many a man die in the desert but he would not be one of them. If he was to die, he would do it in a warm bed.

Sample 2

The Moscow Zone lays on the eastern edge of the Expanse. A solemn congregation of dark steel rising to meet grey skies of snow and rain. The “Gateway of the East” was once the dominate force in the technologies of the future fueled by the remnants of Soviet ashes and persistent ingenuity. They rivaled anything coming out of the Pacific Corridor, or the American Consolidations. These days those times of glory and prestige seemed little more than vestiagle motes of dust suspended in time. A crude but effective combination of rising crime, political corruption and lack of care leading to its decline.

Though like any rotting corpse, the maggots and carrion eaters still thrived. Gangs, corporations and anyone looking for a place to just disappear all eventually found their ways to Moscow. These complex and dazzling spider web of backroom dealings, espionage, and murder created a new ecosystem in the wake of the one long since decayed. It was now a city that ran on more simple things than bureaucracy or ideology. It ran on currency; sheafs of old world dollars and rubles, or small intrinsic credit chips for the new age. It didn't matter what you paid in as long as you had the money you could get anything that your heart desired and more. In the Zone you either knew how to play the game or died in some neon saturated alleyway.

The last real resemblance of public authority in the Zone was the Moscow branch of the Public Security Bureau. Located far away from its headquarters in Berlin, the PSB was heavily undermanned and underfunded. Nobody cared about the safety or well being of the wretches and rats living in a black hole when they had other corporate interests they needed to look after. It didn't help that most of the Moscow PSB was already being paid out of pocket by at least five different “reputable sponsors” to look the otherway and basically let a crude mixture of private security forces and street justice deal with the problems that arose. Attention was bad for business after all and the less that PSB HQ heard about problems going on in Moscow the better it was for the rats that lived within.

Of course there were always outliers in these equations of life. Individuals whether through some sort of death wish, self honor, or other odd mental disruption got it into their minds that the PSB still had a job to do. where even though most of their coworkers were corrupt and as bad as the gangsters and criminals they were supposed to bring in, they still felt like they had a duty to the regular people of the Zone stuck in the mess just like them. Detective Mykhaila Krajnik was one such damned soul.

---

“Hey watch it!” A voice yelled after Mykhaila as she shouldered her way through the crowd. She did not move for other individuals as they approached her rather they parted from her as if propelled by some innate deep force. She pulled the heavy black trench coat closer against her body as the wind began to pick back up again buffeting her body as fresh flakes of cold january snow danced around her. She pushed on with persistence, head down against the wind. She moved with purpose down the street towards the old wrought iron gate that marked the entrance of the Gutter.

желоб in the common tongue, the Gutter was a den of bright neon and depravity. It was situated between the squat smog churning factories of the industrial sector and the tall obelisks of glass that the CEOs who ran the show dwelled inside of. As a result you got a mixture of all types with smartly dressed businessman consorting with basic five penny whores all indulging in a sensory overload of uppers, downers, hallucinogens and pulsing neon. It certainly wasn't a place for any tourist or the faint of heart to sally forth through, everybody had an agenda and everybody was packing. You didn't go to the Gutter to find something, you went to get lost in the ritualistic haze to forget about your worries for awhile, to be consumed by the pulsating energy that swirled about.

Of course Mykhaila knew that желоб was as bad as the rest of the city. A lot of bodies get pulled out from behind clubs and from the alleyways when the sun rose up in the sky and the many bars and other “reputable places of business” closed their shutters waiting for the tainted darkness to sweep across the sky once more. It was natural selection really; as soon as you stopped moving, stopped pushing forward, stopped checking behind your back you were eaten alive for being too slow.

Business was the dull roar of a raging current and death the accepted punishment for carelessness, laziness, lack of vigor, or failure to follow intricate and age old procedures of honor and justice. It was no place for a Detective in the PSB. If any of the harvesters, runners or fixers found out who she was they would swarm upon her in an instant and rip her apart until she was nothing more than a faded memory left in the blood soaked ground. She wasn't afraid though, she grew up in streets like these back in Kiev. She knew the rules: never make direct eye contact, head pointed down, hands in pockets, always look like you know where you're going, and shoot first. They had gotten her out of a lot of bad situations back then and now she was only ten times as worse as she was then.

She broke off from the main crowd of people turning down one of many narrow and winding side streets. She passed stall vendors yelling in a variety of languages some Russian, Ukrainian, English and Chechen among others, They were selling everything from knock off watches, to exotict animals barking and bawling in cages, and every kind of illicit substance one could ever wish to flush through their body. Navigating these crowded side streets, she pushed her way forward avoiding the occasional wide eyed vagrant or stinking human deification left preserved in the cold January evening. She continued in this looping pattern going from brightly illuminated expanses with prostitutes dancing in the window, to dimly lit alleyways where harvasters looked upon her for any sign of weakness ready to pounce.

Eventually she found her way to her destination tucked away in the heart of the Gutter. Behind a long abandoned meat packing factory sat a small building with a crowd of people gathered outside indulging in cigarettes as the soft drum of music came from beyond the door. The name etched into the glass was simple. Darkwire. Looking around one last time she made her way across the street and making her way through the crowd outside she entered the threshold.

The sounds of a heavy industrial beat surrounded her as her black boots meet solid wood rather than a mixture of ice and snow. Upon entering Darkwire the dwellers inside turned their heads to look at her for a moment but upon seeing the Enforcer strapped to her leg they decided it would probably be best to just leave her alone. The Darkwire was a simple dive with the dominant space in the center being a pulsating neon dance floor lighting up the darkness around them as a series of booths and tables lined the perimeter with the bar on the far side. Skirting the perimeter of the dance floor she made her way to the bar and took a seat. A tall african with broad shoulders and a muscular build on the other side of the bar walked over his entire lower jaw replaced with a metal prosthesis.

Nobody knew his real name but most people just called him Niz. One time long ago he was special forces working with Hawkins Security Solutions, now he was the sole proprietor and barkeep of the Darkwire. Niz prided himself on his clean record and sense of peace that he was able to keep in the Darkwire. Last group of gangers that tried to extort him and harass his customers ended up across the street hanging from the light fixtures for all to see with a whole lot of bullet holes in them. Niz didn't even have a scratch on him. As a result the Darkwire had become a meeting place for many different individuals where exchanges of information and deals could be brokered without the fear of rivals coming in and shooting them dead.

“And what will you be having little lady?” Niz asked sounding almost bored as he polished a stout glass in his hand with an old and beaten rag that made Mykhaila question the actual effectiveness of the cleaning.

“What’s the strongest you got?” She asked looking up from the woodwork of the bar a metallic flicker in the circuitry beyond her eyes. She wasn't asking because she was particularly fond of hard liquor or even because she was trying to play tough. No, it was the only stuff that actually had an effect anymore everything else was just diluted through the implants in her body. Sure it was great at dealing with poisons and toxins but it made getting drunk a pain in the ass.

“Hmm I’ll see if we have any of the Svyatogor Special left.” He told her as he turned around shuffling through the shelves of bottles behind him before he pulled out an old square bottle from the top most shelf. Taking a fresh glass he popped the bottle and filled the glass with a murky almost black liquid and slid it down the countertop. Mykhaila caught it and in one swift motion brought it up to her mouth as she produced a handful of old world bills from her pocket and shoved them on the table. The shit was bitter and burned as it went down her throat... it tasted like home.

“So if you don’t mind me asking little lady. I remember every face that comes in here and your new. What brings you to the Darkwire on such a terrible evening?” Niz asked the woman sitting at the bar with a mild curiosity as he took the bills from the table and put them away for safekeeping.

“I’m waiting for a friend of sorts.” She quipped as she took another drag from her glass. It wasn't a total lie of course but calling “her” a friend was like calling an abstinence supporter a perfect match for a brewmaster. No, she was here because reputable sources had informed her that the anarchist she had been hunting down for the last half a year was coming into the Darkwire tonight for some sort of deal. The source was reputable enough and Mykhaila made sure that no word of her questioning would get out. So now she just had to wait until her target arrived.

Looking down at the swirling liquid in her glass she absentmindedly brought up the target’s folder in the PSB database, the display appearing in her vision being projected on her retina. They had little information except for a name and a grainy picture taking by a security camera. Irina Zherdeva. Well tonight was finally going to be the night that she got her. Mykhaila was not going to fail after all these months. But for now even as she watched the door in the reflection of the bottles behind the bar, she could only wait and drink.

It was going to be a long night.