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Carnie's Story Workshop (Current: Inverse of Science Is Bad)

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CarnivorousMoogle Carnie M. from In Your Fridge Since: Sep, 2009
Carnie M.
#1: Apr 15th 2011 at 1:34:41 PM

Hi there, and welcome to my story workshop! Basically, this is where I bounce off various different story ideas and possibly get ideas back from interested folks who happen to drop by. Make yourself at home!

My current project is this: I came up with an idea for a fantasy world where, instead of Nature Heroes who fight against the evil tech-wizards who are twisting the poor wittle animals into monsters and screwing up the environment, the heroes are the machinists and whatnot who don't want to be a part of the now-horrifically-evil-and-corrupt religion that currently rules the world. Basically, the deal with the Old Religion— or whatever it's called— is that the spirit of the earth (who, in a burst of astounding unoriginality, will for now be called Gaia) is an empathic god of sorts who keeps the planet together and running, and has a sort of link with the inhabitants, humanoid or otherwise. So the people basically built most of their society around this religion, and have been worshipping Gaia and doing pretty much whatever it tells them to do.

This would all be fine and dandy, except that eventually the latent negative tendencies of human(oids?) (from arseular to just plain evil) corrodes and corrupts Gaia, who in return starts laying down more and more twisted doctrine and laws, which gives the evil people more leeway to do what they want, which corrupts Gaia even more, in a vicious circle that ends in a horrific, bloodthirsty population who serve a God of Evil.

Now, since Gaia is the spirit of the planet and all, it's had a thing against technology right from the beginning, even before everything went to crap. So for all this time, people have mostly learned to make do with the magical technology provided to them by Gaia, which is fine by them since it's pretty easy to operate and they aren't even in charge of maintaining it. However, as Gaia slowly goes insane, the people who dislike the society that they're stuck in eventually begin to flee out into the wilderness and making smaller pocket societies of their own. Since, of course, they don't have Gaia's permission to use the magic stuff, they start learning how to build their own damn technology, and over time it gets pretty advanced.

Obviously, Gaia's Church ain't too happy with this, so they're pretty much ingrained from birth to torture/kill/etc. any machinist that they find. At some point, a huge attack is carried out which wipes out the main capital of the machinists, which drives the shattered remnants of machinist society to fight back. Of course, the spirit of the freaking planet is against them, so they're waaaay outgunned. Wild animals seek them out with particular vengeance, weapons such as swords and lances can easily beat out guns because they're part of the highly symbolic magic system of Gaia, not to mention that Gaia itself is on the sword-wielders' sides; the list goes on.

In the end, though, a small army of machinists manage to find a passage to the center of the planet, where Gaia is. In what is essentially the final boss battle, if it ends up being a videogame, Gaia is defeated and killed. Cue mass Oh, Crap! when everyone realizes that, now that the spirit of the earth is dead, the world is going to fall apart. At this point, the resident chick-who-obviously-has-some-sort-of-massive-destiny steps in and takes Gaia's place, becoming the new (non-crazy) spirit of the world.

However, she's much weaker than Gaia was, coming from a normal human soul and all, so the machinists begin construction on a machine that will stretch throughout the earth, amplifying the new spirit's power so that she can keep the world together.

Eventually, the machinists all pretty much move to the center of the planet, and are forgotten by the surface-dwellers. They're only remembered in legend, and in the doctrine of the New Religion that follows the new spirit (with, I might add, much better results than the old one). With their god dead, the followers of the old, bloodthirsty religion flee to parts unknown, passing down generation after generation their hatred of the machinists and the New Religion, and the need for revenge.

Then I have the bare-bones of the next chapter of the story, which involves the Old Religion finally making a move to dispatch the new spirit and bring back the old one (or so they think— Gaia is gone beyond all recovery, and only a select few know that their leader is the one who wants to become the new god); as they begin to make expeditions to try and reach the center of the earth, the machinists are alerted to their activity. Since most are scornful, however, of the possibility of there actually being people living on the surface, only a few machinists— and mostly young, naive ones at that— elect to make the journey to request help from the followers of the New Religion, who have been having a hard time of it the last couple centuries because even with the machinist's machine, the goddess is having a hard time communicating with her followers on the surface.

In the end, the leader of the Old Religion makes it to the center of the earth and tries to boot the goddess; however, the heroes manage to beat him down enough for the goddess to trap him in the center of the earth. This would be all fine and dandy, except that now that he's functionally a god and pretty dang powerful, she has to devote all of her attention and power to keeping him stuck there. Now all communication to the surface is cut off, and she can only send very short, confusing, vague messages to certain receptive people who are close to the center of the earth. Or as close as they can get, anyway, since the center is now incredibly dangerous due to the dueling deities, and everyone has to work from the surface. The Old Religion followers are moving forward, finally calling an all-out war for the planet, and ready to silence the machinists and the New Religion once and for all.

Anyway, what do you guys think? Suggestions, critique, lavish praise?

edited 15th Apr '11 1:58:23 PM by CarnivorousMoogle

Still working on Good Style, so bear with me.
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