Free story idea – The Chronicles of Alif

I have a lot of ideas for stories.  Like, if I wrote a novel’s worth of them every month, I’d still most likely die before getting through them all.  I will admit that some of the ideas probably suck, but I think there are some that a good writer could make something of them.  I’ll just never get a chance to.  So, I give them to the world.  If you can make something of these, go right ahead.  And if these are the ideas I’m giving away, maybe check out the ones I keep.

This idea began when I read some Conan the Barbarian stories.  And the original idea was for a, sort of biblical Conan I named Alif.  By that I mean a holy book collecting the stories of this hero fighting monsters and whatnot who eventually forms a kingdom and is declared a living god.  But as I thought of it, that seemed a bit much, so I toned it down a bit.  The current idea was when this monster fighting hero eventually reclaims the throne that was stolen from him, some flunkies take all the stories told about him and collect them together into two or three books, split into various parts of his life.  Some stories faithfully depict what happened, some bend over backwards to show the glory of the new king and the evilness of the usurpers, and many of them are contradictory. 

Part 1 of the collection tells the tale of how Alif’s father the King was killed and his throne stolen.  The idea was that his first wife and son died in childbirth.  His second wife was four months pregnant but died of some fever.  His third wife bore a daughter, but they both drowned a few months later when their boat capsized.  So the people start thinking that the King and his bloodline are cursed, and some generals and ministers start moving to make a claim to the throne. 

Shortly after the King was born, another boy was born in the palace and the two were raised together and became friends.  The King trusted his Friend completely, and with his help they defeated those that were making moves on the throne.  Now this Friend had triplet sons, and he wanted the throne, but he was being slow and cautious about doing it.

Now at some point, the King took a concubine who became pregnant.  Perhaps he had gone to some oracle (or maybe a Witch) that said no son of his born in the palace would become King, so the King sent the concubine off somewhere to give birth in secret.  To satisfy the oracle, as well as to hide her from the usurpers the King was sure were still in the palace.  She gives birth to Alif, and comes back to the palace to let everyone know the King does have an heir. 

The Friend isn’t happy about this, so he and his sons start massacring everyone in the palace.  The King is killed, all his faithful servants, etc.  The concubine hands Alif off to a wetnurse who has another baby with her, and tells them to go through the secret passage to the river.  The concubine will try to hold the men off.  But before the wetnurse can get away, one of the sons shoots her with an arrow.  The arrow goes through her body and kills the other baby, but she manages to get to the river and sets Alif off in a barrel, or something.  And then she dies.  The concubine has also been killed, and the sons recover the dead baby and assume it is Alif. 

How much of that actually happened, we don’t know.  There aren’t that many survivors from the palace to tell the story, and if you’re collecting stories of the rightful King reclaiming their throne, you want to make sure the usurpers are bad, as in they’ll betray their king and kill unarmed women and babies.  In the later parts with stories of Alif growing up and heroing, we can find out that the three brothers first turned on their father, and then on each other.  Until the brother that killed the baby, ends up as the last usurper king that Alif eventually kills.  Possibly with the help of that king’s daughter, who Alif marries. 

But before all that, Part 2 deals with a young Alif living on a raft with a Witch.  There is a big river flowing by the palace, and there is a lot of cargo going up and down it.  The Witch’s raft is unique because it goes upriver by magic.  She is an interesting character because there is a prophecy that she can only be killed by someone who knows her name.  So she killed off everyone she could find who knew her name, and it has been like 200 years, so she might be immortal.  Other parts of the prophecy might be that she can only be killed on land – which is why she’s stayed in boats for the past century – and something like she’ll lose her magic if she doesn’t have a pet, so she has a couple dozen cats, and dogs, and birds, and whatever.  Alif is just the latest in a long line of orphans she brings onboard to look after them all. 

I think the story is just that she found this baby in a barrel, or whatever, and took them in without thinking much about it.  But one day she notices something odd about him and reads his fortune and is blown away by what she sees.  She doesn’t tell him what she suspects, but she does send him to some school to learn how to fight.  Not as a gladiator, but more as hired muscle.  This is a tad confusing, because she rarely needs hired muscle.  She won’t turn down shady work, but most of her business is just transporting cargo up and down the river.

Part 3 deals with Alif at the fighter school.  Of course, to our modern views, the school is terrible.  The teachers are cruel and all the older, bigger students are expected to bully the younger, smaller ones.  And Alif is small for his age.  But Alif is quick witted, and starts outsmarting the bullies and teachers.  He may even form a band of some of the smaller students.  He quickly learns fighting and weapons, and adds muscle, but not much.  I’d say he’s more John Wick than Conan. 

Part 4 is when he’s learned all he can from the school and returns to the Witch.  This is when she explains who she suspects he is.  Knowing that he can’t just go to the palace and reclaim his throne, Alif decides it’s best for him to start making a name for himself.  So he sets out to fight monsters and outlaws.  Along the way he rejoins with some of the friends from the school, and he makes new friends. 

I imagine these stories would be the bulk of the collection.  Like, Part 4 can be all the early stories, but then Part 5 will be his adventures in the neighboring kingdom to the north, while Part 6 will be the adventures in the kingdom to the south.  I also imagine most of these stories won’t be accurate to what really happened.  Like, maybe there was an eclipse, and it shows up in two or three stories which are all set hundreds of miles apart.  Or, a lot of these stories are of the type where Alif just shows up in a village – for some reason leaving behind his band of ten guys he always travels with – and defeats the minor monster terrorizing the village, then leaves.  Did it actually happen, or did some enterprising town whip together a monster story and how the great hero Alif defeated it to part some coins from any gullible travelers?  And was the story just gathered in a big sweep of Alif stories for the collection without checking any details?

I figure all of these parts will contain a few short stories loosely connected.  But I think the penultimate Part will be one long story, which will be where he and his band set off on some grand quest.  Maybe stories of his deeds have spread and a king in some far-off land has called him to slay a dragon, or something. 

The final Part, is him returning home and deciding that now is the time to retake his throne.  So he goes and challenges the final usurper king, who probably cheats, maybe with a poisoned blade.  But instead of killing Alif, the king chains him up in a dungeon.  The reason is he is a huge fan of this hero Alif, and he wants to hear all of the stories.  Also, having this defeated, legendary hero chained up in the basement is a bit of a status symbol of badass villainy.  But once he hears all the stories, and the people have forgotten about Alif, the King will just kill him.  During all of this the usurper king’s daughter falls for Alif, and helps him regain his strength.  Maybe she supplies him with the antidote to whatever poison her father uses.  He breaks free, kills the usurper, regains his throne, and marries the daughter. 

And I guess there could be more story collections of what happens with King Alif, but I haven’t thought of anything.  But I suspect he’d be a king more concerned with fighting monsters than dealing with a budget, so I imagine there’d be a few palace coup attempts.  Of course, all of that requires someone to write all the stories leading up to his becoming King.  So if you like this idea, get to work on it.  Or, better yet, get a group of people to write all the stories.  That way all the stories will have different voices, which will help sell the idea it’s not just one person making up everything.

Fourth of July Sale!

I think for every Fourth of July since I published Political Pies – my collection of short stories of a political nature – I’ve had a free sale for it.  On one hand, it’s hard to make money if you give your books away for free, but on the other hand the point of Political Pies was to get people to start thinking about politics in the hope we could start working on some of the problems we face to make a better world.  I’ll sacrifice a few sales for that.  At first, I only offered Political Pies by itself, but in the last few years I’ve started having bigger sales with four or five of my books for free.  This year, I think I’m having my biggest Fourth of July Sale with eight of my Kindle books available for free.  That’s 188 short stories all for the price of eight clicks. 

But before you go and snag some free books to read, I have a favor to ask.  If you are an American citizen who will be over eighteen by Election Day, November 8th of this year, all I ask is that in the next few days you either double check your voter registration or register to vote, your state’s website should have all the necessary details.  Democracy only works if the people participate and the first step of participation is to be registered to vote.  So if you do that, I’m happy to let you have several of my books for free.  And if you aren’t an American citizen, then I’ll ask you to get involved in your nation’s politics in whatever way you can.

The following ebooks will be free to download on Kindle between Friday July 1st, and Tuesday July 5th.

 

Relics

This work contains some profanity and sexual situations. It is intended for mature audiences only.

A plague that kills men has devastated the world’s population. Only a few thousand boys and men were able to be quarantined. But Mike Shay is the only man known to have a natural immunity to the plague. Therefore, he is practically the only man in a world of women. He spends his days reading, playing video games, and making the occasional sperm donation. Then Dr. Veronica Barrett shows up, disrupting what passes for his life. She says she’s there to investigate his “mental wellbeing,” but is there more to her visit?

Instead of the normal, adolescent, heterosexual male fantasy of being the only guy on a planet of women, “Relics” tries to give a more realistic view of Mike’s life.

Duty

For reasons of safety and avoiding paradoxes, Time Travel Incorporated assigns a Guardian to all its travelers. So when there is an accident during political historian Roj Hasol’s trip back to 1968, it’s his Guardian Susan who sets out on the arduous task of cleaning up the mess.

Political Pies

Everybody complains about politics, but does anyone do anything about it? My attempt to do something about it is to collect forty of my short stories with a political element into my Political Pies anthology. The stories are either politically neutral or equally condemning of the national parties. Instead of trying to sway you to one ideology or another, my goal is to just get people thinking about politics in the hopes a rose might grow out of all the political manure.

A Man of Few Words

A Man of Few Words is a collection of fifty of my flash fiction stories. What would really happen if a “T-Rex on steroids” attacked a city? Why do science fiction writers make the best lovers? How does a company get to Second Base with VIPs? I explore these questions and more using less than 1,000 words and in various genres from humor to horror and general fiction to science fiction.

The majority of the stories were previously published (most on my website) but all were revised for this collection. In addition, each piece is accompanied by some background information on the origin of the story or a funny tale about the writing of it to give a fuller experience.

Useless Cogs

Useless Cogs is a collection of forty, of my science fiction stories. They range from only a few dozen words to a few thousand and are filled with time travelers, AIs, clones, aliens, even sexbots, although not often as you would imagine. As example, there’s a time traveler that’s always a step behind, an AI that’s late on rent, and a sexbot with bad software. Some of the stories are humorous, some horrifying, and some … depend on your point of view.

The Only Certainty

On The Day, for reasons unknown, people began changing. They went to sleep as their old selves and woke in their beds in different bodies: bodies that had belonged to other people. And each time they fall asleep, they wake in a new body. Set months later, “The Only Certainty” follows Derrick Gorton on an average day in this new world as he deals with food shortages, the semi-collapse of society, and how to finish his latest novel.

Seventh Story Stockpile

Over the years, I’ve posted several short stories on websites that later – for one reason or another – died. While the corpses of some of these sites are still around where you can read the stories, many have vanished from the internet. And since there are few sites that will publish such previously published works, the only way you could read them was if I self-published them in a collection.

In addition to such “lost” stories, I’ve included some new stories that – for one reason or another – I felt I’d have a hard time finding someone to publish them. So Seventh Story Stockpile basically contains stories I didn’t know what else to do with.

The All-You-Can-Read Buffet

The All-You-Can-Read Buffet is a collection of forty stories covering various genres and themes ranging from six to over 4,200 words in length. Some of these stories I wrote a decade ago, while others were written especially for this collection. All together, they are a buffet of my writing. As such, I encourage you to read as much as you want. Go back for seconds, thirds, fourths even. I won’t even mind if you skip over the stuff you don’t like, but, to quote your mother, “How do you know you don’t like it? Have you tried it?”

Voter registration drive and book sale

It seems every other year here in the US we face an election that WILL DETERMINE THE VERY SURVIVAL OF THE NATION.  And after going through this for the last five or six never-ending election cycles, there is a strong desire to just listen to music and play video games.  But to be a buzzkill, elections are important in that they will determine the intensity of the dumpster fire we end up in.  So I’ve come up with a deal: if you take a few minutes to register to vote, or confirm your voter registration, you can grab any – or all – of these six ebooks on Kindle for free.  Admittedly, there’s no way for me to know if you register or not, so we’re just working on the honor system.

How do you register to vote or check your registration?  You can either do it through your state’s website, or on a site like Vote411.  I don’t know how long it takes to actually register to vote since it’s something I haven’t dealt with since the last time I moved over ten years ago.  But checking your registration only takes a couple minutes.  The reason you should check your registration is that the lists of voters needs constant updating as people register, move, and die.  And even without nefarious voter purges, it’s possible for mistakes to happen.  If a mistake is caught early, it can be fixed early, and things can go smoother on Election Day.  You don’t want to find out you’re not registered after waiting in line for eight hours. 

If you’re reading this but don’t live in the US, then you can still grab my ebooks for free, I’ll just ask that you do whatever is necessary for you to participate in your political system.  If you live in a dictatorship where you can’t participate in your political system, I won’t ask how you managed to get online.

The following six ebooks will be free from Monday February 21st, through Friday February 25th.  But you can register to vote or check your registration anytime.

Political Pies

Everybody complains about politics, but does anyone do anything about it? Stephen L. Thompson’s attempt to do something about it is to collect forty of his short stories with a political element into his Political Pies anthology. His stories are either politically neutral or equally condemning of the national parties. Instead of trying to sway you to one ideology or another, his goal is to just get people thinking about politics in the hopes a rose might grow out of all the political manure.

Duty

For reasons of safety and avoiding paradoxes, Time Travel Incorporated assigns a Guardian to all its travelers. So when there is an accident during political historian Roj Hasol’s trip back to 1968, it’s his Guardian Susan who sets out on the arduous task of cleaning up the mess.

A Man of Few Words

A Man of Few Words is a collection of fifty flash fiction stories by Stephen L. Thompson. What would really happen if a “T-Rex on steroids” attacked a city? Why do science fiction writers make the best lovers? How does a company get to Second Base with VIPs? These questions and more are explored by Stephen using less than 1000 words and in various genres from humor to horror and general fiction to science fiction.

The majority of the stories were previously published (most by Stephen himself on his website) but all were revised for this collection. In addition, each piece is accompanied by some background information on the origin of the story or a funny tale about the writing of it to give a fuller experience.

Brain for Rent and other stories

Brain for Rent and other stories is a collection of five of my short scifi stories to give a sampling of my writing. The collection includes: “Brain for Rent” about a ne’re-do-well failed writer with a conceptual implant who discusses his work with a young woman thinking of getting an implant herself. “The Demonstration” is about a different young woman wanting to show off her latest body modification. “Self Imprisonment” offers one solution of safe keeping the backup copy of yourself. “The Best Job Ever” is about a necessary – yet unpleasant – human/alien interaction. And the collection ends with “Why Stay?” which explains why, after years of fighting the humans, the robots just deactivate.

An Ounce of Prevention

Like most people, Jason Fisher wanted to make the world a better place, but he doubted he would ever have the chance to make much of a mark. Then a “woman” came to him, asking his help to save humanity by threatening it.

The Most Powerful Man in the World and other stories

The Most Powerful Man in the World and other stories is a collection of five, short, scifi stories to provide a sample of my writing.

A being from the distant future with almost unlimited powers comes back to help Ian Steele make the world a better place in “The Most Powerful Man in the World.” One bookstore customer has an entirely different reason for wanting books in “Black Market Books.” “Motherhood” tells the story of Thomas Gillespie, the surrogate mother for a baby AI. “Storyteller” is about an author thinking his book into existence. And “Deadworld” is about the alien world humans are reborn on – in alien bodies – after we die.

Free story idea – Four quick ideas for TV series

I have a lot of ideas for stories.  Like, if I wrote a novel’s worth of them every month, I’d still most likely die before getting through them all.  I will admit that some of the ideas probably suck, but I think there are some that a good writer could make something of them.  I’ll just never get a chance to.  So, I give them to the world.  If you can make something of these, go right ahead.  And if these are the ideas I’m giving away, maybe check out the ones I keep.

These are just some quick ideas that could be turned into TV shows.

First Idea – Fantasy cop show

I believe I was watching a not so great movie when this cliché scene happened.  Basically, the bad guy killed the good cop’s wife, or kid, I can’t remember, and the good cop catches up to them and starts beating the crap out of them.  Then his partner shows up and stops them saying something along the lines of, “Killing them won’t bring her back.” But then I thought, what if it could?

The idea is that in a present day world with magic, if someone is murdered they don’t bury the body right away.  They put some special two-part bracelet, or something, on the body and then store it.  If they catch the murderer, they put one of the bracelet parts on them and then execute them with a special spell.  The murderer dies, but their lifeforce resurrects their victim.  And in a world with such magic, they also have truth serum, so they know for certain who all this person murdered and they can bring all their victims back.  If the murderer dies before they can be found, the bracelets disintegrate and they bury the body like normal.

The story begins with them executing someone – who confessed with truth serum – but instead of resurrecting the victim the victim’s body explodes because they executed the wrong person.  This causes concern.  In the original version, the magic world was secret and separate from the real world, and a magic detective gets the help of a regular detective to find out how to get around all the magic.  And along the way they discover some dark plot, and probably have a romance. 

But that seemed too … normal.  So the revised version is that the world is all magic, but the cop goes to a “fantasy” writer – which in this world would be someone who wrote stories about worlds where magic doesn’t exist – to help solve the case.

Second Idea – Superhero comedy

This started with a post on Facebook asking how you would explain to the insurance agency if the Hulk smashed your car.  After hammering some ideas out, I came up with this comedy.  In this world, there are two big cities each with their own batches of superheroes and supervillains.  They are a hundred or so miles apart, and practically in-between them is this small town of maybe a hundred people: Main Street is basically just one block.  On this block there is a small law office, an insurance agency, a hair salon, a pizza joint, and a couple other things.  The stories would be about these regular people living in such a strange world, like the roof of the hair salon was damaged by some villains battle drone, but the insurance company is being a pain about getting it fixed.

Every time one of the supervillains tries to expand their territory to the next city, they basically go through, over, or under this town.  And then all the superheroes follow.  Maybe the speedster in this world has an understanding with the pizza joint to keep a pizza on a certain shelf in the refrigerator for them.  When the speedster has to run to the other city – maybe once a week or so – they make a quick stop to grab the pizza and leave a $20.  They then use their “friction power” or whatever to reheat it.

I was thinking one of the storylines would be this “crazy” guy who blames everything on supervillains.  He gets a flat tire and goes into the insurance agency with some outlandish story to try to collect from the fund set up to pay for all the damage done by supervillains.  The twist would be that while 99% of his claims are just delusions, he’s actually right about some. 

Another possible storyline would be a very minor villain would be sent to work undercover at the pizza shop.  Meanwhile, a very minor hero would be sent to work undercover at the law office, or wherever.  The two start dating, not knowing they’re working against each other.  And maybe to do something different, the hero joins the dark side for love.

Third Idea – Fantasy show

The show would begin with a ten year old kid getting out of a city school with his friends.  They start walking along, but then he gets an odd feeling and looks across the street.  There he sees a woman who smiles at him, but then turns and leaves. 

Fifteen or so years later, he’s in a bar when the same woman walks up to him.  But this time he’s too drunk to get any odd feelings.  She asks if he wants to go outside, and he agrees.  They step into an alley and he starts to undo his belt, but she stabs him.  

He dies, but then gets back up, instantly sober.  He asks what the hell, and she starts to explain that he’s an immortal.  Immortals can sense one another, but they are very few.  In olden days, it was likely an immortal would “die” long before they met another.  But nowadays, it’s really easy for an immortal to go around standing before schools to see if any of the kids are immortals.  That’s the woman’s job.  She found him, and just waited until he was an adult to “kill” him.  This stops him from aging, as well as being a very effective way of showing that he is an immortal.

Immortals can really die, but it takes something like being drawn and quartered.  Which was actually a method used by immortals to execute some of their members in the past, but then normal humans found out about it and thought it really cool. 

With the current population, there’s maybe an immortal born every year.  This has led to some issues in the immortal community.  Most immortals are content to amass some wealth and then live comfortably in the shadows, which has worked for centuries.  But as there are more immortals in the world, and it’s becoming harder to live in the shadows, a second faction has emerged that think they should rule over normal humans.  That leader may have been someone who was repeatedly burned at the stake, so they have a dim view of normal humans.  The two groups are more like political parties than warring factions.  The idea would be that neither side is fully correct, but that each have their pros and cons.

The woman works for the first group, and the story would be her bringing the guy into their world.  Part of her job is finding new immortals, but she also works to try to bring immortals from the other side over.  So it’s a world full of spies and secret agents.   

Fourth Idea – A companion show to the third idea

Basically, this show would cover the same time period and many of the same events, but from the POV of the other group of immortals.  Each show would be self-contained, and show their side as the right ones, but you’d get a clearer picture if you watched both. 

The idea I had would be the main character of this show would be an agent who keeps tabs on the woman immortal in the other show.  Like, he was on the roof of the building across the street watching her stab the newbie in the alley.  Maybe they were a couple two hundred years ago, but it didn’t end well. 

Thanksgiving Sale!

So it’s Thanksgiving, if you live in the US.  Which means you only have a few weeks left to spend your hard earned money on mostly useless crap.  I know things have been crazy for the last couple of years, so as an early holiday gift, here are five of my ebooks you can download for free.  And the best thing is, you can get them instantly: you don’t have to wait for them to sail across the ocean and get through a crowded port. 

You can get this all for the price of a click from Wednesday November 24th, through Sunday November 28th.  I hope you all have a safe and happy holiday season, and I hope you enjoy anything of mine you read.

A Man of Few Words

A Man of Few Words is a collection of fifty of my flash fiction stories. What would really happen if a “T-Rex on steroids” attacked a city? Why do science fiction writers make the best lovers? How does a company get to Second Base with VIPs? I explore these questions and more using less than 1000 words and in various genres from humor to horror and general fiction to science fiction.

The majority of the stories were previously published (most on my website) but all were revised for this collection. In addition, each piece is accompanied by some background information on the origin of the story or a funny tale about the writing of it to give a fuller experience.

The Moon Before Mars

Over the last few years a lot of people have caught Mars fever. It seems a week doesn’t go by without a report of some new group wanting to send people to Mars, or some big name in the industry talking about why we have to go to Mars, or articles talking about the glorious future humanity will have on Mars. All of this worries me. In my opinion, a Mars base is currently not sustainable because there’s no way for it to make money. A few missions may fly doing extraordinary science, but if it’s then cancelled for cost the whole Mars Project may just be seen as an expensive stunt.

Fortunately, there are other places in the solar system besides Mars. While bases on the moon and amongst the asteroids won’t be as “inspirational” as one on Mars, they will have opportunities for businesses to make goods and services as well as profits, meaning less chance of them being outright cancelled. This will make life better on Earth and secure a firm foothold in space for humanity. The essays in The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars allow me to describe my ideas on what can be accomplished on the moon and with the asteroids, and why Mars isn’t the destiny of humanity its cheerleaders make it out to be.

Lonely Phoenix

Partway to a new colony world, board member Geoffrey Ames is woken from hibernation by the caretaking crew of the Lucian. They require him to look into the matter of their fellow crewman Morgan Heller. Morgan’s claims – such as being over 1500 years old – would normally land him in the psychiatric ward, except he can back up some of his other claims.

Brain for Rent and other stories

Brain for Rent and other stories is a collection of five of my short scifi stories to give a sampling of my writing. The collection includes: “Brain for Rent” about a ne’re-do-well failed writer with a conceptual implant who discusses his work with a young woman thinking of getting an implant herself. “The Demonstration” is about a different young woman wanting to show off her latest body modification. “Self Imprisonment” offers one solution of safe keeping the backup copy of yourself. “The Best Job Ever” is about a necessary – yet unpleasant – human/alien interaction. And the collection ends with “Why Stay?” which explains why, after years of fighting the humans, the robots just deactivate.

An Ounce of Prevention

Like most people, Jason Fisher wanted to make the world a better place, but he doubted he would ever have the chance to make much of a mark. Then a “woman” came to him, asking his help to save humanity by threatening it.

Free story idea – Over the Edge

I have a lot of ideas for stories.  Like, if I wrote a novel’s worth of them every month, I’d still most likely die before getting through them all.  I will admit that some of the ideas probably suck, but I think there are some that a good writer could make something of them.  I’ll just never get a chance to.  So, I give them to the world.  If you can make something of these, go right ahead.  And if these are the ideas I’m giving away, maybe check out the ones I keep.

Over the Edge

In an episode of Disenchantment, Bean goes to the Edge of the World and starts to climb down it.  As I watched that, I thought someone climbing over the edge of a flat world could make for an interesting story.  After some thought, I came up with an idea, but it ran into a problem.  So I reworked it, but that version also ran into some problems.  But the third version, has some potential.  And problems.

Version 1

In this reality, Earth is flat.  The sun rises in the east, the whole world has daylight, and it sets in the west and the whole world has night.  There is an ocean around the Edge and water flows over it.  Any ship – this is set in the age of sailing vessels – that gets too close to the Edge are caught up and go over, never to be heard from again.  About five miles from the Edge there is a small island.  Enter this world’s version of the great, Victorian explorer.  I’ll call him Guy.  Guy goes to the island with five miles of rope.  He ties one end to a small rowboat and loads it with rocks and lets it drift towards the Edge.  He is able to pull it back, so takes the place of the rocks.  Guy discovers that the seafloor steadily rises the last mile to the Edge, until the water is only a few inches deep going over.  But, it’s going so fast that it stings your fingers if you reach into it.  Guy goes right to the Edge and looks over, but there is mist and doesn’t see anything.

He tries to send a rowboat over the Edge and pull it back, but it tips and sinks.  So he decides he’ll need a barrel.  He gets one, fills it with rocks, and sends it over the Edge and pulls it back just fine.  So he gets into it, and goes over the Edge.  Then the rope breaks.

A few years later, Guy’s son … um, Dude, decides to go over the Edge, but this time he’ll use chains.  But you can’t really haul five miles of chains with a rowboat, so he builds a series of barges about a mile apart that are each chained back to the island as well as to each other.  The last barge is a hundred yards or so from the Edge.  He does several tests with the barrel filled with lead, so it’s three or four times heavier than Dude.  All come back without issue.  So Dude gets in, and goes over the Edge.

And that’s when we come to the problem.  Because what is under the Earth has to be mind-blowing.  It either has to be so grand that it would make angels weep, or so terrifying it would give Cthulhu nightmares.  Anything less – elephants on a turtle – would be anticlimactic.  And I’m not that good of a writer.

Version 2

Version 2 goes back to Guy, but this time he builds the barges and chains.  But he doesn’t want to be the one that goes over, he has a family to think about.  So he figures the best thing would be to use a convicted prisoner.  Guy sails back to his home in Country A, which has just finished their latest war with their great rival, Country B.  In this war, there was a Captain, um, Bro.  There was a situation where Bro was ordered to charge some fort.  But he knew it was pointless, and would only kill his men.  So he refused.  He was stripped of command and the leaders of A thought about executing him, but then they noticed that a large portion of the men who they had just given weapons and training to liked him because he didn’t waste their lives.  Did they really want to make a martyr of Bro?  So they just threw him in prison. 

When Guy shows up asking for a condemned man he could chuck over the Edge of the world to see if he dies, the leaders of A said they had the perfect candidate.  At first Guy was hesitant, but then he realizes that Bro is literate, meaning he’ll be able to take notes while he’s dangling over the Edge.  So they head back to the island.

I figured the story would start with Bro chained up in the bottom of a ship.  But some of the sailors like him for what he did, so they sneak him food and news, such as their eminent arrival at the island. 

Guy takes Bro out to the last barge, gives him a notebook, shoves him into the barrel, and locks it shut.  Bro goes over the Edge, and there’s a momentary odd sensation, but then it just feels like he’s floating in the normal ocean.  Gravity has just tilted ninety degrees.  The chain lowers him down a hundred or so yards, and he looks around.  Right around him, it just looks like the normal ocean.  A hundred or so yards back the way of the chain – stretching as far as he can see in both directions – is a band of mist marking the Edge.  But about a mile or so in the other direction, there’s another band of mist.

Guy is ecstatic.  There were several camps concerning what was over the Edge, and he had been in the “silly” underworld camp.  The way this would work is that instead of the upper and underworlds being like the faces of a coin, they are more like shields.  That way the Edge is only a mile thick, but a hundred miles from the Edge it could be twenty miles thick.  That’s why canyons or mines don’t break on through to the other side.  I suppose if you wanted to be crazy, you could even make the world spherical, just with this one mile thick Edge right in the middle.  But the two shields idea is probably better.

So Bro goes over again with a mile of chain, and doesn’t quite reach the mist.  So they put a mile-and-a-half of chain and send him over.  Bro reaches the second band of mist, and again feels the odd sensation, and ends up in normal looking ocean, just with water rushing up over the Edge.  A mile or so from this Edge, there are some islands.  So Bro starts writing about them.  But he also takes a rock out of his pocket.  He reaches out and breaks the lock and he gets out.  He starts writing about these monstrous creatures that are swimming towards him and how they start attacking the barrel.  He quickly scribbles their version of God Save the King, and stashes the notebook.  Outside the barrel, he bashes it with the rock and manages to cut his hand so he smears some blood around.  He then swims towards the nearest island.

Bro has become sick of people, and sees this as a chance to get away from all of them.  His hope is that by the time they work up the courage to try again to come to the underworld, he’ll have built a boat and sailed far away in this new world, never to be found again. 

Unfortunately, for him, there are people on the island.  They are the decedents of all the shipwrecked crews from the last few centuries.  Some still feel themselves to be citizens of Country A, or B, or C, while others feel they belong to no country.  They all have their own little kingdoms, and they still go to war.  Although they are stuck just using knives and spears. 

This is where Version 2 started having problems.  Because it didn’t seem like the right fit for a story about an underworld.  You could just have an antisocial prisoner somehow manage to be the only survivor of a shipwreck who ends up on some uncharted island with earlier survivors who have formed some twisted society and he learns some lesson.  You could do that without leaving our world.  I needed something … more.

Version 3

Version 3 starts by combining the first two.  Guy goes over in a barrel with a rope, but it breaks.  Dude builds barges and goes over in a barrel with chains, only to discover the underworld.  Dude goes back to the upperworld, and builds a bigger barrel so he can carry about a mile of rope.  Back in the underworld, he lets the current carry the rope towards the island.  The current is still strong near the Edge where the barrel is, and he didn’t think he could swim against it.  He goes down the rope, and at the end the current is more manageable.  He swims to the island and looks around.  Dude eventually finds a camp.  Guy survived his barrel crashing on the island, and he had explored some of it, but then he broke his leg or something and he died.  Dude only finds a skeleton.

Dude swims back to the rope and manages to fight the current and climb back to the barrel.  There had been some pre-arranged time and they haul the barrel back to the upperworld.

There is excitement over this discovery, and expeditions are sent over to look for riches.  They do find some shipwreck survivors.  But the big discovery is some plant.  My idea was that rubber trees are only found in the underworld.  And quickly industrializing Country A could really use this rubber stuff.

But the people of County B – expecting a Great War to start between them and Country A any day now – would like this rubber stuff as well, but if they can’t have it they’ll settle for Country A not getting it.  So they sail as close to the upper Edge as they can, and they throw some barrels of saboteurs and equipment overboard, letting them wash up on the islands in the underworld. 

While this isn’t perfect, I do like the idea that for the saboteurs it’s basically a one-way trip: the only way back to the upperworld is the ferry like service that Dude starts.  And since this rubber stuff is militarily important, the island has been fortified against attacks from both the upper and underworld. 

So that’s the setup.  The actual details of a story I’ll leave to others.  But I will leave you with some of the random ideas I had.  There is an idea to dig a tunnel from the upperworld island to one of the underworld islands.  They may think about it, but are worried that if their calculations are off they could miss and open a tunnel into the ocean and flood the tunnel.  Or, whatever bedrock this world is made of is too tough to tunnel through.  Also, Dude with his ferry service for this precious material will probably become rather rich.  So maybe Dude Jr. has the money to play around with these newfangled aeroplanes.  He could be the first person to fly from the upperworld to the underworld and back again.  This could have a major disruption to the rubber industry.  Maybe Country B has an island that’s a hundred miles from the Edge, so they could never build a barge system, but they could fly that far.  Perhaps all this aeroplane development comes about because of a Great War and control of the Edge is a small, but important front in that war.  Or maybe there is plentiful food in the underworld and the shipwrecked crews quickly put aside their differences and the underworld society grows into a power rivaling the upperworld ones. 

I think this world with an Edge leads to unique situations that could lead to unique problems with interesting solutions.  If nothing else, anyone who wrote stories of such a world would annoy both physicists and flat Earthers.  That has to be worth something.

Free story idea – Elf Cop

I have a lot of ideas for stories.  Like, if I wrote a novel’s worth of them every month, I’d still most likely die before getting through them all.  I will admit that some of the ideas probably suck, but I think there are some that a good writer could make something of them.  I’ll just never get a chance to.  So, I give them to the world.  If you can make something of these, go right ahead.  And if these are the ideas I’m giving away, maybe check out the ones I keep.

Elf Cop

This began with Lindsay Ellis’s video essay Bright: The Apotheosis of Lazy Worldbuilding.  It wasn’t she said something and I immediately had an idea, but more she said something I thought was interesting, and over the next couple of days it took five random turns in my brain and became the nucleus of this story.  I’ve rewatched the video, but I can’t remember what point she made which began the rock rolling on this idea.  This has absolutely nothing to do with Bright, although, to be perfectly honest, for the longest time I referred to this project as “Dim.”

I guess this could be a novel, but I see it better as a movie.  Admittedly, a large part of that is a training montage at the beginning, but I’m sure a talented writer could work their way around the issue.

This is set in a fantasy world with humans, centaurs, elves, dwarfs, goblins, etc.  There used to be dragons, but they were hunted to extinction centuries ago.  It’s a completely different world than ours, but it is comparable to the 80’s or 90’s technology wise.  This world is split into various nations.  Some of them are a single species, while others are maybe a mix of two or three.  There are also a few cities where all are welcomed.  The reason these cities exist is mainly for trade.  Centaurs may like goblin coffee, but they don’t want to deal directly with goblins, so they go to dwarf coffee shops to get their goblin coffee.  (Because everything we do in the real world makes perfect sense.)  Odd little quirks like this started in small trading ports, and over the centuries these grew into city states.  The story is set in one of these, which will need some name, but for now we’ll just call it the City.  There is an Elf Kingdom, but they are very closed off.  They do allow ambassadors from the other nations in, but the elves themselves rarely leave.  As a result, in this world elves are almost mythic.

So the movie starts with the camera sweeping over the City late at night.  We see normal cars on the roads, but there are also these van things that are centaur cars.  We go from the “good” part to the “bad” part of town.  Like maybe we see a group of prostitutes, there’s a human, dwarf, and centaur.  The camera ends up in the ally next to a dingy bar – possibly called The Hexed – and we see a portal open.  On the other side of the portal is a day lit forest meadow, and a hooded figure.  The figure looks behind them, then steps through.  The portal closes.  The figure looks around, then starts walking. 

They eventually arrive at a police station.  I was thinking that these police have a motto that’s some variation of “To Protect and Serve.” Whatever that variation is, I was thinking that might be the title of the movie.  Anyway, the figure goes in and the desk sergeant asks what they want.  The figure lifts up the hood revealing an elf woman, who says she wishes to become a police officer.  In this world, elves have a glowing glamour that more or less stuns anyone looking at them for ten seconds or so, especially if you’re attracted to whatever gender the elf is.  So this desk sergeant just stares at her with his mouth open for like ten seconds, and then he does a little shake of his head and asks, “What?”

Then the montage.  It starts with our elf – Shay – in a small room sitting before some mirrors.  She has some things of makeup before her.  She puts foundation for white skin on one cheek, and black skin on the other.  She looks back and forth between them.  We then see that she just mixes the two, which cuts back on the glamour and if you don’t noticed her pointed ears, she’d just looks like an extremely attractive human woman.  For her hands she just wears gloves.  She then flips through a book on the laws of the City.  She reads as fast as she flips the pages.  We then see her rapidly filling in answers on a test in a classroom with other cadets.  Then begins physical training.  There’s a track and when the instructor fires off the pistol she goes right around, like she’d easily “On your left” Captain America.  When she gets back to the starting position, she stops and the instructor just looks at her for a second or two before clicking the stopwatch.  The cadets also run to a tower with cargo nets that she goes up in no time.  Then instead of climbing down, she just jumps and does a superhero landing.  She then runs towards the rope to swing over the thirty foot wide stretch of mud, but she just jumps over that.  In hand to hand training, she easily overpowers everyone and we see her casually flipping a centaur.  In gun training, she fires off ten rounds as fast as the gun allows, and the gun doesn’t move.  As she’s bringing the target to her, we see the next trainee – maybe a centaur – is shooting slower because the gun recoils, like in real life.  In Shay’s target, there is only one, perfectly centered hole.  She smiles at the instructor next to her, who looks at her for a few seconds, then makes a mark on a clipboard.  (Also, my idea is that this is the only time in the movie she fires her gun.)  Up to now there’s probably been some fun, montage music, but now it turns mournful as we see Shay getting lunch.  She sits alone and eats, while the other cadets give her occasional glances.

We next meet … someone I’ll just call Partner.  She is a loud mouthed, somewhat crude cop who is not thrilled to learn she is being partnered with the Elf Cop.  She thought Gay Cop was going to be partnered with her, but the LT says Gay Cop thinks he might be bi-curious, and even though Shay is wearing makeup to hide her glamour, they don’t want to partner her with anyone who is attracted to women.  Partner has a lengthy, profanity laced comment to all that.

The next scene I have is them in a car, with Partner driving.  Partner says she finds it odd her name is Shay, because “I thought elves were all named after flowers, or whatever.” Shay says that Shay isn’t her real name.  Partner asks what her real name is, and Shay replies with this long, (not Tolkien) Elvish name which does not contain Shay in any part.  Partner asks how she gets Shay from that, at which Shay replies with an even longer string of Elvish, and then she laughs.  She then explains that it’s an elvish joke that doesn’t really translate.  Partner isn’t sure what to do with that.

Possibly their first call is for some deranged guy with a knife yelling in front of a store.  They show up, and Partner starts talking about how to make sure everyone is at a safe distance, only to turn around and see Shay walking right up to the guy.  She talks with him for a bit, he’s a little stunned by her, but he eventually hands over the knife and she walks him over to the crowd and says something like he just needed his medication. 

They call an ambulance and get the guy some help.  Partner and Shay drive off, and Partner starts by saying, “If you do anything like that again, I promise I will shoot you myself.” Shay raises an eyebrow.  Partner then starts about how there’s a ton of paperwork if your partner is killed.  She can’t imagine how much there’d be if they died on their first day.  “And if it’s the first goddamned elf cop, killed on her first goddamned day, I’ll be filling out paperwork for twenty years after I’m dead!” To which Shay asks, “Will the paperwork be less if you shoot me yourself?” “Don’t tempt me to find out.”

Then you might have a montage of boring, mundane cop stuff to show the passing of a few days or weeks. 

Then there’s an incident which makes the other cops not too fond of Shay.  The end result is she arrests another cop.  Why, is a bit complicated.  The first idea I had was some cop arrested someone and had them handcuffed, but then – while members of the public watched – they punch them a couple of times.  So Shay immediately arrests the cop for assault.  For the department, Shay stopped the PR nightmare of them being lax on police brutality, but for the other cops it rubs them the wrong way that she’s watching over them.  Partner points out that this idiot did it in front of people, so what else could Shay have done?  The reason I’m not fond of that idea is that it might seem too … topical.  The other idea I had was she arrests a cop for stealing evidence, which, just seems somewhat bland.  This is a free idea, but there is some work you’ll have to do if you actually complete this project.

So Partner takes Shay to a bar, where a lot of guys hit on her, but she turns them all down.  Partner asks if there’s an elf waiting for her back home, but Shay doesn’t answer.  We then find out that elves can’t handle their liquor.  Well, one shot leaves Shay plastered for about a minute, until she completely sobers up.  Partner finds this amusing.  At some point she had asked Shay why she wanted to be a cop, but Shay doesn’t answer, and maybe she asks Partner the same question and we get some of her backstory.  But at the bar, Partner gives Shay a second drink and then asks why she wants to be a cop.  To which Shay slurs something about stopping a prophecy.  When she sobers up and sees Partner just starting at her, she says, “Fuck,” which I think is the one time she swears in the movie.

Shay then explains that in this world elves have a thing for prophecy which they don’t let the rest of the world know about.  And prophecy isn’t a certainty that something will happen, instead it’s more like a 98% chance something will happen.  The prophecy that she got was that one of her bloodline would destroy the City.  So she left the Elf Kingdom to come here and hopefully do some good before then.  Also, if she gets killed in the line of duty, that would end her bloodline.  Partner is rather unhappy with all of this.

We then go back to The Hexed the next day, where another portal opens.  This time an elf man steps through.  He sneers at the surroundings, then starts walking.  Partner and Shay get the call for an elf causing trouble, basically just slapping away people trying to get close to him, so they go to the location.  They pull up and as soon as Partner sees him in his full glamour, she’s dumbstruck.  Shay gets out and the two start speaking in Elvish.  In the subtitles, we learn that they were engaged, but she broke it off when she left the Kingdom.  They found out where she went when one of the ambassadors to the Kingdom told them about this elf who became a cop.  He sneers about the human filth and her wearing makeup, and orders her to come back with him.  She says no.  He doesn’t take this well, and she orders him to go back or she’ll arrest him.  He says she’s crazy, but he eventually goes.

Partner asks who that was, and Shay explains how she left him just so she wouldn’t have a bloodline.  Partner offers to marry him instead, but Shay says he would probably rather die than marry a human. 

Some other stuff happens, and then we see the portal open again.  This time an older elf man steps through.  This is Shay’s father.  I’m not sure of the exact steps for this, but her father is so upset at what Shay is doing, that he wants to do some blood magic – requiring him to sacrifice Shay – that would destroy the City.  When Shay realizes that it was her coming to the City to prevent the prophecy that made her father – part of her bloodline – want to destroy the City, she lets out an elvish curse – the one time she yells in the movie – that blows the parked car she’s standing next to back like ten feet and sets it on fire.  Partner sees that, but is like, “I don’t want to know.”

There’s a part where the other cops come to their aid.  They protect and serve, that’s what they do, even if they are still unsure about Shay.  So while the other cops are evacuating people, Shay and Partner try to stop her dad.  Somehow, her father gets a knife to Shay’s throat.  Shay sees Partner and tells her, “Do what you promised to do.” Partner hesitates for a second, but Shay nods.  So Partner draws her gun and shoots Shay. 

But, in this world elves are so badass that they’re bulletproof.  The bullet falls to the floor and her father starts to say something about foolish humans, but that was the distraction Shay needed to disarm her father (perhaps with a move we saw her do in the training montage?).  I don’t want her to kill her father just because, but also it leaves room for him to come back in a sequel.  Perhaps Shay adjusts whatever spell he was using to tie him to the City.  Like, if the City is destroyed he’ll die, or something.  How it all works, I don’t know.  I leave hammering out the finer details to you.

Shay does explain to Partner that the last time humans and elves fought a war was before the invention of guns.  To kill an elf required either an enchanted human blade, or a captured elf blade.  She suspected that she would be bulletproof, but wasn’t sure how to test the theory.  If she wasn’t, then she would die which would have prevented the blood magic from working, thus saving the City.

So that’s my idea for Elf Cop.  A big question is why Shay is different from the other elves.  By being stronger, smarter, faster, etc., they feel they are better.  They’re basically Elf Supremacists.  So why does Shay show compassion to others?  One possibility, is that Shay got this prophecy like ten years ago.  At first she wonders why she should care some city she’s never heard of will be destroyed.  But she’s curious, and starts looking into it.  One idea, since this is like 80’s level technology, is that the elves have a space program, which they might not have told the rest of the world about.  Do they have spy satellites watching the rest of the world?  Are there, think all echoey, Elves … In … Space?  (I don’t know why I found that so funny.)  By taking an interest in the City, did she come to question some of what she had been taught?  I don’t know.  Part of the reason I’m doing these Free Story Ideas is to stop thinking about projects I’ll never do so I can focus on ones I can do.

Anyway, I did have an idea for a sequel.  The idea is that elf blood is like super glamour.  If you put a drop of elf blood in someone’s drink, they become your slave for like a day.  And if you do this every day for a month or so, they just become a mindless zombie.  Perhaps a way for her father to not destroy the City, but cause a lot of havoc.  Something to think about.