Tuesday, July 14, 2009

hmm...

I just realized my last post made the whole setting seem more serious than I mean for it to be. Just remember. The Wiccers hit people with broomsticks and throw apples at them. And there's a clan of blue mice that will come floating back into town for spring in a procession on the creek that befits their hard-partying nature. And they speak in a secret code. And their Boss Whirls kicks ass. And the ultimate doomsday weapon is called the Sparkle Engine.

Monday, July 13, 2009

preview/writing exercise for Battle of the Bell

I've been building up the background to a graphic novel I've been meaning to do for the longest time. Here's some expository journaling in the viewpoint of one of the characters. Details are still nebulous, and I still only have an outline of the plot.

Diary of Maline Doke the Wiccer (she's a 17-year old girl)
March 10

Spring's almost fully come, here in Orchard Creek. I can smell it sometimes on the evening breeze. No ice, snow, or any other traces of winter remain, though the clans have been as frosty as ever towards each other.

I hear adult Wiccers blame the Cobes for everything. The Chapel Hill Corporation of Orchard Creek has been proscribed for its private national security and detective agency services. We're growing more and more disharmononious as the months progress. The adults blame Papa Gordon, the paterfame of the Cobes' primary family Cobifer, for the OC corp's failure to stop the Kazookie coup d'etat in August.

Us Wiccers, under Papa Top (paterfame of the Wiccer's primary family Prinker) were surpressing uncivilities at key locations around the capitol, while the Cobes guarded the Palatine. The Kazookie revolutionaries somehow broke through the Cobe line and captured PM Boggin. We had to drop our broomsticks and bullet apples -- the Cobes their stickhorses and smokestars-- and acquiesce to the Kazookies' demands.

And that was the end of the Silver regime. When the Kazookies ratified their new constitution in August, they killed the old machine, and blocked the Big 5 from any involvement with the new government with a pro-plebian decree that required all top government apointees to be approved by an assembly of the nation's local representatives. The Big 5 are the five richest tycoons of Somnia, and they used to pay us by the freighter for our services. But now that creek has run dry, and tensions have been climbing every day between the Wiccers and Cobes.

The Wiccer clan was founded centuries ago, during The Rise of Industry, by a man named Wiccer Adam Arcade, from the island nation of Arcadia. A few nobish families, in addition to several tycoons at the forefront of the Somnian industries then emerging, had realized that their acqusition of blessings from Lady Provenance could be completely secured by the enforcement of Equesters, mighty protectors of Somnia and its social harmony. Yet the Equester tradition had been fading, and only one Equester clan, the Vendejuns remained. They asked the Vendejuns to find and train future Equester clans, and so the Vendejuns found Wiccer Arcade, founder of the Wiccers and progenitor of the Prinker line, and Corbin West, founder of the Cobes and progenitor of the Cobifer line. The Vendejuns passed on the Equester martial discipline of Strong Sticking, and codes of decorum and reverence for Lady Provenance and her blessing of social harmony.

Eventually, several Cobe and Wiccer families moved here to Orchard Creek, a small plebian settlement with lush orchards and a never-drying creek, and started the Chapel Hill Corporation, named after the hill in the center of town which houses the chapel that is at the base of our Equesterish lives. Our proximity to the capitol was crucial to the enforcement of social harmony, whenever plebian discontents threatened the interests of the ruling regimes. Our contracts were always brokered and held by the Vendejuns, who were always there to provide guidance and oversight to the two dofers, co-leaders of Orchard Creek. But along with any future chance for the Equesterish way, our contact with the Vendejuns has been slim.

Both clans have always had their own houses and academies on opposite sides of the town. Collaberation has been mostly limited to missions, and CHC functions. But we have always at least fraternized with each other in the same pleb-run milk houses and lolly-rope presses, and even had marriages between the clans. But this winter, hostilities had been rising to the surface.

I've heard Wiccer adults call the Cobes Kazookie-lovers. A fight had broken out between Dommie Cark and Bodin Arl over a pleb girl in the town over. And the winter social between pre-oather academies was canceled despite the complaints of my fellow students. Oh yes. I've almost forgotten. The oaths are tomorrow.