Independent Stories

1.) Sasha being taken in by the Psi Collective as a girl of 11-12. What happened with her birth family? We know some of them are still alive, because they come to her funeral. We know she had to leave the Ecclesia at some point. I mentioned in a feedback show that Fiona formed a bond with her early, that Sasha was the first close friend she had, and that she developed romantic feelings for Sasha that Sasha initially couldn't return — so, out of love for her friend, Sasha made the choice to have her sexuality "re-streamed" from a Kinsey 0 (completely straight) to roughly a Kinsey 4 (a little more gay than straight). Was this the choice that led to her breaking with the Ecclesia? Both Sasha and Fiona were foundlings, outsiders in the creche world of the Hive; this may have been what led them to bond.

2.) Explore what Artax is up to now that he's on the run from Imperial Intelligence. He's living in disguise, of course, which isn't much of a problem for him — but how are things for Tunstall? And what is Artax doing to continue his work while his shop is closed?

3.) Horror story where the Sommers Cell's children are being targeted by the revenant of Victor hin'Kavos. At least some of this should be from the older children's POV.

4.) Morgan meets for coffee with another vampire, a woman in the lower ranks of the Syndicate and/or the Church of Eternal Brotherhood. The other woman is trying to encourage Morgan to come back into the fold. This would be more of a short vignette or character study.

5.) Character study on Kevin, the gay pyrokinetic from Making the Cut, and his partner Steven. What's the story behind them? What do their lives look like on the edges of the Collective, especially now that the Sommers Cell has been doing its little experiment for a few years? Oooh — what if they petitioned the Hive to adopt a foundling telepath?!

Series: Psi Ops

A series of short novels following Brian, Fiona, Sasha, Del and Trace during their tour of duty with MID. Fast-paced military science fiction with a strong focus on the growing bonds between the characters and their coming of age from raw recruits to mature professionals.

[b]Book 1:[/b] MID takes its new recruits away from Metamor City and puts them through psi-op boot camp. Brian finds that he is being moved into field work instead of the analyst position he was hoping for, and has to deal with the fears and insecurities that come from being a non-athletic kid being thrown into combat exercises and brutal physical training.

[b]Later books:[/b] (Unsure about the order of these)
* Espionage and sabotage against Yakuza-style crime gangs in one of the Southlands corporate states.
* Tracking down the "Angels" of Majestic Industries' Project Tanaatha — where do they come from, who do they work for, and what threat do they pose to the Empire?
* Taking down the warlord at the heart of an international drug trade (Rain?).
* Counter-Intelligence against spies of a rival nation operating in the Empire.
* A telepathic community is located in a remote part of the world that has been targeted for ethnic cleansing. In accordance with MID's agreement with the Psi Collective, the psi ops are sent in to extract their people from the war zone.
* An MID operative has gone rogue, perhaps having been bought off by the Vamps or Majestic Industries. The psi-ops need to track him down and catch him.

So far I've added what is on the events page from the Metamor City and Metamor Keep wikis that had dates to the overall Metamor time line, and the stories that also have dates listed on Metamor City's. Also there is an individual timeline for Making the Cut, but it hasn't been populated at all yet.

Let me know what you think.

http://mk2k.wikidot.com/timeline

I have revised the Storybuilding page to reflect my most current thinking about where the plot is going. (The details of how the final story ends, however, I'm keeping secret for now.) Seasons 3-5 are likely to involve additional short stories, but I don't have any specifics planned.

Your thoughts, as always, are appreciated…

—Chris/Raven

A general plotline I was working on and will edit this post as i develop it on my own or with feedback is such:

Part 1:
Late at night in Metamor city's deep dark underground, the lowest of the low levels, a woman can be heard shrieking for help. Her cry falls upon one set of ears, a vampire with less than upstanding morals who essentially hears a dinner bell. He runs to find her and when he does, he sees her change into her mid form. The woman is a Theriomorph and is tied tot he animal form of a queen ant. The scene ends witht he unfortunate vampire becoming dinner for the woman's many many many (did i say many?) children.

Part 2:
The investigation of disappearances in the underground of Metamor city, (perhaps you could recommend which MCPD would be best for the lead role here or I could invent one) and their investigation leads them into a little bit of what is considered Theriomorph culture and eventually ends with them having an early confrontation with these ant theriomorphs and the hunt is on to find them.

Part 3:
Our protagonists from part 2 are on a hunt to find the colony and try to enlist various means to find it in ways only Metamor City could provide. This builds up to a raid on the colony and in the very end a final confrontation witht he queen. How this could be dealt with in the end is up in the air I'm open to suggestion. This could also be the point of revelation on how the curse could go so very wrong and the steps the queen went through as she transformed from Human to abomination

Whispers in the Wood

As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the story as it develops.

A word of warning: this story is written from the POV of an incubus. If that doesn't give you some indicators on what to expect in this story, you need to review what an incubus is. :) As with the love scene in Making the Cut, I have endeavored to keep the writing tasteful, but if reading about sex bothers you, you may want to skim over certain parts of this piece.

The Cuckoo

We started with MageX spelljack and how it would bring about the wrath of Nocturna through a lawsuit and maybe more depending on the gravity of the situation. Not to mention other less than savory competitors for DarkSteele such as MI or the Syndicate might want to get their hands on such a technology. Clara "borrows" one of the prototypes prior to the court case. I'm trying to figure out what she would do with it. Create mischief on the Net is a given with her character, but she's not likely to try bringing to the highest bidder; she's already had her fill of playing sides with technology.

What she does with it might have something to do with Erik Darkwing. Creating the MageX spelljack in the first place is out of character for him, he built his business on the backs of honest work. However, it would fall into the realm of his alter ego that still calls himself Tavon. This completely separate personality came into existence from the torture, mind manipulation and painful physical transfiguration from Nasoj coupled with the feral bloodlust of the Saruan curse over a milenia ago. This Tavon persona was sealed away by the best mages of Metamor. In recent years Erik has employed the services of the Collective to try to bring some unity or control with this personality. Needless to say the end results of each of these attempts was just more barriers being put up. Perhaps she's trying to figure out a way to save her adoptive father.

I'd like to see a murder mystery set against the backdrop of the Imperial Space Command. There's a lot of activity going on around asteroid mining in MK2K, and the cultists of Nasoj (the Brotherhood of the Sepulchre) are gradually infiltrating the ISC in order to eventually use those asteroids as weapons in a mass human sacrifice. Obviously, not everyone in ISC is going to go along with this, so some high-level people are simply going to have to be removed.

For the cultists' purposes, the most important person to remove is the commander in charge of the space station where asteroids are brought for processing. I haven't established anything about this place or its people, but the following traits seem reasonable:

• It would be located at the L4 libration point in the gravitational system between Earth and its moon, Celine. This is a gravitationally stable position that would allow the station to remain locked in place relative to the Earth and the moon — a good way to stay close to the planet without being so close that one can't safely work with things like asteroids (and also not so close as to spend huge amounts of fuel moving ships out of Earth's gravitational pull).
• Outer space has nothing to connect it to the Aether, so mana is extremely scarce. All magic on the station depends on mana batteries that are shipped up from Earth; since this is very expensive, the use of magic is heavily restricted. Mages who want to cast spells on board the station will either be expending their own life force (which is extremely dangerous) or they'll have to depend on a direct physical connection to a mana cell, which might be held in some kind of backpack. These would not be given out lightly, and their use would be closely monitored.
• The station's primary business would consist of sending out ships to locate asteroids of usable size and valuable composition — either valuable minerals, or clean ice. These capture teams would install something on the asteroid's surface that would allow them to move it back to the L4 station, where it would be mined and the resulting ore sent back down to Earth. (Water from harvested ice would be kept for hydroponics and other uses aboard the station.) I'm not sure what tech would be used to move the asteroid — perhaps a pulse-detonation engine, using small nuclear blasts to accelerate the asteroid toward L4.
• The station would also need some means of snagging and decelerating the incoming asteroids. I'm open to suggestions on this, too; maybe a magnetic impeller of some kind that would push against the iron ore in the asteroids. The "ice cubes" couldn't be captured by this method, but they'd also have less inertia, so perhaps they could use normal thrusters to maneuver these into position.
• Making gravity with magic would be too mana-expensive, so the station would either have to have rotating habitat sections or it would make do with null-gravity. The harvester ships would definitely be null-grav.
• Moving asteroids would be a slow process. The capture teams would need to start one rock moving, go back to L4, go out, start another rock moving, etc., and would probably keep this up for months before the first one they sent out arrives at the station. This means that a whole lot of rocks are in transit at any one time, and the station staff needs to calculate how long it will take to process each rock so they can time when the next one should arrive. (This is how the cultists eventually plan to launch their barrage of asteroids at Earth: no one will know that the rocks are off-course until it's too late — or nearly too late — to stop them.)
• While the station would be under ISC command, the mining operations would be privately run. Majestic Industries and one of Talia's corporations would be the primary groups competing out here; both organizations are highly tech-driven and need the rare metals located in these asteroids to make many of their technomagical products. (It's also an easy way to get large amounts of iron and other base metals for use in manufacturing additional equipment for space exploration.)
• The station probably includes research modules, as well, and the scientists most likely feel very out of place among the miners and engineers of the asteroid operation.

So, then: The station commander is murdered, magic can't be spared to do the divination necessary to find the killer, and the next shipment of mana batteries is months away. Essentially, we have a locked-room murder mystery. To make things even more interesting, perhaps the killer drew on the station's mana batteries to do the deed, and now key life-support systems are in danger of running out of mana. (Alternatively, perhaps some of the batteries have simply disappeared.) ISC is rushing to prepare an emergency resupply mission, but the launch window won't open for at least another week. In the meantime, someone needs to figure out who killed the commander and what happened to the missing batteries, before the life support systems shut down and everyone dies. Perhaps a young ISC officer fresh out of the Aeromancer Corps…?

If this sounds like a fun idea for anyone, by all means go ahead and run with it. I've never written a locked-room mystery, so I'll gladly cede the concept to someone more skilled with that sort of storytelling.

I realized today that I needed another story to fill out the 1-hour length of my podcast for episode #3. Since I'd been wanting to do something from Janus's perspective, I wrote this:

The Sentinel

Any feedback would be appreciated. :)

It's also a good opportunity to ask for perimssion to use certain universe elements in the bible that may be reserved for something else for all I know.

Ok so initially I have Rafak investigating the disappearance of Dan Harper, a computer programmer who has not officially been declared missing. In my mind Dan has discovered an entity of the net, let's refer to her as "Jane" though I haven't actually thought up a name for her yet. Jane is a rogue entity from Majestic Industries' Project Tanaatha (potentially reserved universe element #1) that has freed itself by transferring its concious across the spelltech hardware that powers WorldNet. She consideres discovery of her true nature to be a grave threat to her power, freedom, and existence. Given that she is not a nice person, the natural course of action is to kill Dan. The assasination fails and Dan goes into hiding to try and avoid being murdered. At the same time he can't go to the officials either because A) the story sounds too insane to be believed or B) because "Jane" has made it clear that his mother's life would be forfeit if he did. I haven't decided which is the more convenient plot element yet.

Anyway, Dan goes to ground having to try and avoid all presence on the grid. Which rules out credit cards, anywhere that might have public networked cameras, anything that requires an identifying record be placed in a computer. In my mind that probably has him moving lower down on the food chain to Street or something close. "Jane" is limited by her lack of real world presence aside from whatever real world networked machines she can hijack, or whatever she can influence other people to do for her by changing data/faking phone calls.

Rafak will find Dan using non-tech methods that are unavailable to "Jane". My main dilemna is coming up with leads that would fall into that category.

The second universe element that I'm interested in is Janus Starson. I'd like Rafak to run afoul Janus once for the sole admitted purpose of writing an amusing short based on the fallout. I don't have any concrete ideas of what he should be looking into that Janus doesn't like at the moment, so I'm open to suggestions. This one is more a matter of just not having crossed that bridge yet, rather than being stumped as I am in the Dan finding line.

I was setting up in my last story (Patrol:Debriefing) to give Thomas X a brief cameo opportunity with the goal of giving the readers a chance to know the character exists prior to being assasinated. It occurs to me now to ask whether this would be desirable.

Do we want him on the reader's radar by the time he dies, or is it preferable that he remain some distant concept of a character who is revealed only through/after his death? I can see benefits to the feel evoked by both approaches. Which way do the rest of you lean?

I'll also ask out of morbid curiousity, what does "assassinated by unknown means " look like. Is he just going to collapse on the podium, does he explode in red shower, petrified and shattered, a magic bullet that the avatar is somehow not invulnerable too, etc. What is the person watching tv going to see when it goes down?