Please I want an honest opinion I feel good about this paragraph. I just want to make sure I dont waste my time writing somthing no one will like. I may be overestimating my writing ability... haha I just want to know what everyone opinion is on mu ability to write.. thank you.

The smell of blood hung heavy. Bodies fell and twisted under our feet. Screams—oh god, the screams. The unrelenting sun scorched above as two armies crashed. No, not as they crashed. As they collapsed into each other.Only minutes earlier, the field echoed with clear commands and brave roars from both sides. That was gone. Chants of pride had turned to screams of terror. My spear pierced body after body. I didn’t understand how I was still alive, or why I hadn’t found a blade inside my own ribs yet.I drove the point into another chest. But as I went to pull back, the weapon wouldn't budge. My brain finally registered what my eyes were seeing.It was a young boy. There was no way he was older than fourteen.The sudden realization that I had just murdered a child threw me into a daze. Or maybe it was the blade that just brushed my shoulder blade, leaving me bleeding profusely. Or maybe it was the giant rock that crashed into my helmet—God knows where that came from.Regardless of the cause, a sudden drowsiness took hold. The weight of the dead child at the end of my spear pulled at my arms. Then, he was swept under the hundreds of trampling feet. That vacuum of boots continued to drag his body deeper, and my spear went with him. I couldn’t let go of the weapon. The momentum pulled me down into the mass of carnage, burying me under bodies on top of more bodies.Suddenly, the pain faded. The falling corpses blocked the blows and slashes from above. That bright, scorching sunlight—once so fierce and hot—was reduced to a flickering glimmer through the cracks of the dead.The weight upon me grew. Each breath felt harder to take. The screams finally began to quiet, and the chaos dissipated into darkness.

Vesta held the small child in her arms. It was so... fragile, the soft skin of the babe and the small tight grip, but it was not breathing. The child lay in her arms, unmoving.

Vesta looked at her child and felt the Sacrarium within her react and bubble. As she held her, gold light flooded the child's eyes, filling the house with light brighter than the sun. The child's eyes, once silver, now held flecks of gold within them, and the baby took its first breath... and cried.

Vesta held her child and declared, "Silvia, you are of the wildwood. With your birth I gift you what I was gifted, a piece of the Sacrarium, and I make it so, from this day, it shall pass from mother to child of its own accord, so that no daughter after you, be denied what I give you now."

Then the tree closest to the house, the one Vesta had given voice and thought, spoke for the first time to a child of Vesta's line. "As you live, Silvia, we will protect you."

---

Silvia stood on the porch of her wood hut. She had just recently turned five, and her younger brother Nexus was born today, but she wasn't allowed to watch. She was told to stand guard on the porch, so she did. She puffed her chest out and stared at the trees and bushes, daring anyone to jump out. Usually she wasn't allowed to leave the house without one of her parents; her father always went out, and her mother preferred to stay home and take care of the house, but when she turned five, her parents tentatively allowed her to go exploring on her own. Little did they know it hadn't stopped her wandering the forest alone even before that. But they had nothing to fear; they lived in a safe paradise.

Silvia stood there for one minute, two minutes, five minutes, before she caved. How am I to hold guard? There is no one here. It will be fine. Slowly she walked down the gravel path and reached her spot. There was a small hill in a clearing surrounded by trees, and in the middle of the tall behemoths stood an even bigger tree. Atop the hill, it towered far above the others, reaching high into the clouds.

She craned her little head and swiped her silver hair from her face. She looked up at the massive tree and yelled, "I'm here!"

The second her voice pierced the quiet, the ground started to shake, and the tree in front of her began to shift. A massive branch swept down and unfurled before Silvia like an open palm.

When Silvia climbed onto it, the branches slowly and gently curled around her, holding her as they rose, carrying her high up into the sky.

As she stood atop the clouds, Silvia looked at her home. It was a massive forest with a river running through the middle, a mountain range on one side towering so high it made the tree she stood on seem like an ant, and on the other side, an endless blue ocean with waves crashing into the land relentlessly. As she watched the sun slowly set, she saw a glint in the water, then scales flashing past, fast. As soon as she saw it, it was gone.

The next morning, Silvia stayed home and, for the first time, saw someone other than her parents: her new brother, Nexus. As she held him and looked into his deep teal eyes, she felt like she was looking into an ocean. She felt joy and kinship. She felt love for him. She was too young to lift him, but it didn't matter to her. They were joined at the hip; everywhere their poor parents looked, they'd find two troublemakers crawling around the house.

Nexus and Silvia played until sundown, at which point their mother picked him up for dinner, and together they sat at a sturdy wooden table. The room was lit by three candles made of wax. As the candlelight flickered, Vesta brought dinner to the table: rice with a bit of salad. Silvia thought it tasted horrible, but she was starving, and there was no meat that day, so she scarfed it down anyway.

The next day, Silvia took her mother and brother to the clearing. It was a short five-minute walk, but halfway through, Vesta, exhausted, turned back for home, leaving the two siblings to finish their trek alone. When Silvia reached the tree with her brother, they climbed to the top together. She sat down and pouted. "Why do you only make sounds? I want someone to talk to," she said. She always wanted a companion, someone to keep her company. She leaned back into the branches and felt them caress her as she continued, "Mom said you would be able to talk like us, and to give it time. I can't wait!"

As the sun set, she held her brother tightly and whispered, "It's you and me."

---

Silvia woke to her father gently shaking her awake. "Let's go to the creek, go get your brother," he said. Suddenly filled with energy, Silvia jumped up and scampered to her brother's room. She saw her mother lying on the cotton bed, the one it had taken her father a year to make, hugging her baby boy. Not wanting to disturb her, Silvia slipped out quietly to meet her father on the porch.

When Primum saw one of his children skipping toward him, he asked, "Where's your brother?"

His little girl reached the porch, pulling some leather over her feet to protect her toes, and said, "Mum was sleeping. I didn't want to wake her up." Then she ran forward into the misty forest, her father following behind.

Though it was still early, the first hours of sunrise, the birds and animals made the forest feel alive with chirping and the occasional cry of some exotic bird.

Silvia and her father walked at an easy, uneven pace; she usually ran ahead, but whenever she had something to say, she'd slow down and let her father catch up. Finally, as she ran, she spotted a red flower with petals hugging each other. She'd seen such flowers before and named them roses, but this time, there was water beaded on the green leaves of its thorny stem. Confused, she turned back to her father and asked, "Pa, it didn't rain, why is water on this flower?"

Her father laughed. "That's dew. Every morning, the air itself cries for Anima, leaving dew on the leaves as a mark of His existence."

Silvia, even more confused now, asked, "Pa, who is Anima? Why does the air cry for him?"

Primum sighed. "He is the most high. He sacrificed Himself for our freedom. I'll tell you more when you're of age."

When Silvia looked up from the rose, she realized the forest had gone entirely quiet. Eerily quiet. As they walked, the silence held, broken only by the rushing of the creek. Though Silvia and her father called it "the creek," it spanned a vast section, home to hundreds of fish.

When Primum reached its edge, sensing a teaching moment, he turned to his daughter. "On the edge of a river is a bank, so right now, I'm standing on a bank. But the edge of the sea is called a shore." Silvia, intrigued, repeated the words in halting syllables: "Sh...o...re. Ba...enk." They felt strange in her mouth, but right, somehow, all the same.

Seeing that his daughter understood, he grabbed a spear from where he'd left it on the rocks and waded into the water.

Over the next three hours, father and daughter fished in the quiet forest. Only when they got back home did Silvia realize she hadn't heard a single animal for most of the trip.

The next day, Silvia played with Nexus and carried him everywhere. The following morning, however, she was so tired from playing that she stayed asleep long past midday. When she finally woke up, the house was quiet. No one was home. Feeling lonely, she went to her spot, her tree. When she reached the top, she looked out to the sea, searching for that glint of the beast moving through the water.

When she got home around midnight, she slowly entered the bedroom. There was a crate lined with cotton fluff, nesting a small child who was sleeping soundly, and beside it the massive cotton bed, where she could see the outline of her parents in the moonlight, intertwined together. Not wanting to disturb them, she slowly left and walked out of the house. She wasn't sleepy at all, so she decided she would go look for that beast. Happily trotting, Silvia headed for the sea.

As Silvia approached the shore, she felt something weird against her feet. It was solid, but it kept slipping and running like water, running between her toes as her small feet slowly sank. Despite the weird moving rock-water, she kept moving towards the deep blue ocean, trying to find that scaly beast she had seen before.

She plopped down onto the rock-water and waited, watching fish and small birds chirping and flying across the sky, but she was looking for that scaly massive monster.

Slowly the night passed, and Silvia still stood at the water's edge. She did not want to miss the chance to glance at that magnificent beast again, but as she waited, she heard a growl behind her. She sprang to her little feet and spun around, and saw... it looked like her father, but it wasn't. It walked on its hands and feet. It slowly moved closer, but she stood rooted in fear. What was it? Why did it look like her father? The more she looked at the beast, the more she saw: deep brown eyes, thick and dirty limbs. Looking at it, she felt something weird.

The beast leapt towards her, reaching its hands out. It grabbed Silvia's throat and pushed her hard against the rock-water. She felt the breath leave her lungs. She tried to yell, but she couldn't. She needed air. She scratched at the arms holding her throat, clawing for the sweet air that was right outside her reach, but it was to no avail. Thrashing, she felt herself grow weaker, but out of the corner of her eye she saw a scaled beast.

The water around Silvia flowed back into the sea, almost as a warning, before a massive blue-scaled body flew out of the water and roared.

The roar was deafening. It wasn't terrifying, but rather mind-numbing. As the dragon flew out of the water and approached, Silvia felt the ground tremble and the chirping birds fall silent. The beast let go of her and ran back into the forest. Silvia felt the air rush back into her lungs, filling her with breath. She was relieved for a second, before turning around to be face to face with a massive eye.

P.S.
I tried to restrict my AI usage only using it to get good Latin names.

残酷な運命 — Manga Concept

I've been developing a dark fantasy manga concept called 残酷な運命 (Zankoku na Unmei / Cruel Fate).

I'm still developing the characters, story, and world, so I'm looking for honest opinions and criticism, especially about the power system and whether the concept feels too complicated.

The Story

The story takes place in a world shaped by war, slavery, violence, and a supernatural society existing alongside humanity.

Our protagonist is a young boy who grew up as an outsider. He wanted nothing more than to live an ordinary life like the other children around him, but instead he was abandoned by his community and by his own mother.

Because of this, he develops his own idea of what a "good life" should be.

He's not naturally heroic. He doesn't help people simply because he believes it's morally right. However, when he encounters people suffering through situations similar to his own, his past forces him to react.

As he grows older, he begins questioning the world around him and what kind of person he wants to become.

\---

Myth Beasts & Contracts

Myth Beasts are supernatural beings that exist independently from humanity.

Despite their name, they don't necessarily look like animals. They can be humanoid, monstrous, animalistic, or something completely different.

They're extremely rare, which makes genuine contractors rare as well.

A Myth Beast can be sealed inside a scroll and summoned through a blood seal. The beast decides whether it wants to accept the person as its contractor, and some may require the potential contractor to prove themselves first.

If both sides agree, they negotiate a contract.

There are no universal contract terms.

The human can refuse.

The beast can refuse.

The final agreement depends on both sides, their goals, personalities, and how much leverage each possesses.

And Myth Beasts aren't necessarily good. Some are kind, some selfish, some cruel, and some outright evil.

\---

Manifestation

After a successful contract, the contractor receives a mark and the Myth Beast's power manifests.

But the interesting part is that the exact manifestation isn't necessarily known beforehand—not even by the beast itself.

The manifestation reflects something deeper within the contractor: their desires, experiences, instincts, personality, and subconscious nature.

It doesn't necessarily give them exactly what they consciously wished for.

A manifestation could become:

\- A weapon

\- An ability integrated into the body

\- A transformation

\- A strange object

\- Or even a living companion

This creates another mystery for the contractor:

Why did I receive this particular power?

What does it reveal about me?

\---

The True Power

Having a powerful Myth Beast doesn't automatically make someone powerful.

The real potential depends on how much of the manifestation the contractor can extract.

Someone might receive an incredible ability but barely understand how to use it.

Another person might receive something that looks completely useless and turn it into something terrifying through creativity, experimentation, adaptation, and mastery.

The contractor has to discover the limitations and possibilities of their manifestation.

In some cases, the Myth Beast itself can evolve.

So the progression isn't simply:

Power → Stronger Power → Transformation

It's:

Contract → Understanding → Adaptation → Mastery → Potential Evolution

\---

Contractors Aren't Just Fighters

Contractors are rare enough to become extremely valuable to society.

Not all of them are warriors.

Some could become fortune tellers, healers, researchers, craftsmen, investigators, religious figures, or members of powerful organizations.

Some may even become famous enough to be worshipped.

Others could be recruited, protected, kidnapped, or hunted because of what their contracts can accomplish.

A contractor doesn't need to be physically powerful to be extremely valuable.

\---

Normal & Corrupted Myth Beasts

There are two major categories.

Normal Myth Beasts

Normal Myth Beasts belong to an established supernatural society.

Their personalities and morals can differ greatly, but they recognize the laws surrounding contracts.

If a contract is violated, the offender can be brought before a supernatural court.

The trial is overseen by a higher-level Myth Beast known as a Judge, whose role is to determine whether the contract was actually broken.

There are three possible punishments:

Execution

Contract Break

Confiscation

Because every contract is individually negotiated, the court has to judge the specific agreement between the two parties.

A contractor can also appeal if they believe the Myth Beast violated the contract.

Corrupted Myth Beasts

Corrupted Myth Beasts are fundamentally different.

They don't belong to the established Myth Beast society.

They can originate from experiments, accidents, mistakes, or circumstances that aren't fully understood.

Some behave like animals.

Some possess intelligence.

Some can negotiate.

Some can possess living beings.

Some can demand sacrifices.

Some can interfere with their host's soul and potentially cause soul collapse.

They're unpredictable—but unpredictability doesn't automatically mean they're stronger.

\---

What I Want the Story to Be About

I don't want the story to simply be about who has the strongest power.

I want the characters' personalities, experiences, relationships, decisions, and understanding of themselves to affect how powerful they become.

The power system is meant to reveal something about the person using it.

The same world can create heroes, criminals, soldiers, victims, religious figures, outlaws, and monsters.

And the protagonist has to discover what kind of person he wants to become while living inside that world.

I'm still developing the characters, factions, arcs, and deeper mysteries.

I'd genuinely appreciate honest criticism.

What works?

What feels weak or confusing?

Does the power system feel too complicated?

And most importantly:

Would this concept make you interested enough to read the first chapter?

I am writing a narrative nonfiction book about events beginning in 1901 and ending in 1957 (well, through 1999, but they're still dead). I have hundreds of sources and am confident I can build the time and place, but there is little about the people themselves. Some descendants remember them vaguely (grandchildren or great-grandchildren), but everything else I have is through hundreds of newspaper clippings.

Does anyone know of a solution or resource to make the story about its people rather than the four walls in which they lived?

My story is about two sisters who came from a family of assassins. The older sister learned that their family would be attacked and took the opportunity to flee with her younger sister. Now, away from their family, they need to learn how to live a normal life that doesn't involve being killers for hire. The younger sister has started using her poisons to create medicine, but I don't know what to do with the older sister. She has the ability to manipulate her blood, which she usually turns into sharp blades to stab her victims. I don't know how she'll turn this power into something useful other than killing. Should she have a different skill she can use to make some money? Thank you very much

The way that I write my political intrigue fantasy dramas that take place in a cluster of republics and kingdoms is broken up like Law& Order, with half of the story being about investigation and the other half being about deliberation. But I don't want every courtroom drama to actually be a courtroom. So I've been thinking about how story logic already loves a good ensemble cast and I could use that to play around with a couple different ways to make a drama out of people voting.

Power Couple / Buddy Cop / Odd Couple

Power Trio / Three Amigos

Four Temperaments / Four Philosophies

Five Man Band / Five Philosophies (Sixth Ranger)

Six Friends / Commedia Dell'Arte

Magnificent Seven / The Crew

With each of these ensemble types, there is an inherent "hidden character" in the group itself, where you may care about a few of the members, but you also deeply care about the GROUP existing itself, staying whole, staying balanced. There's even anticipation to be gained watching one person leave and another person who fits that role coming in. Or watching someone grow from having a dependent position to becoming a leader in the group.

So, I wanted to applying this to juries, committees, voting, and decision-making.

Like, Right now I'm writing a story about a high priestess sending her niece with a gaggle of church troops to force a group of gentry landowners to give up 20% of their land by ecclesiastical rights to the church. This group of farmers have got to decide what to do about this, So I want to apply the logic of one of these ensemble types to them in order to ease along how they're going to make this decision.

Or, one of the final stories will be two partners who have spent my entire series working together, basically a Sherlock and Watson dynamic, going after the same position after getting their mentor taken out of her position with a vote of no confidence.

Another will be a 12 Angry Men style jury of background characters deciding the fate of my main antagonist.

Any feedback that you have in mind on how you would see the use of ensemble types being used for political intrigue and decision making drama?

I've been working on an original story for a while, and I decided to start sharing the journey here.

I've already been working on the story, characters, world and plot for some time. I usually keep all of this to myself, but I thought it would be interesting to start sharing some of the process and ideas behind the story.

I'll probably post about things like character development, world-building, writing problems I run into, and some small parts of the project as I keep working on it.

I won't be sharing major plot points or spoilers, though. I still want to keep the actual story a surprise.

Just wanted to introduce myself and the project before I start posting more.

I’ve never believed in fate; not as a child, not now at twenty-three, and certainly not as I sit upon my throne. A throne that was never meant to be mine, earned from blood and suffering, not through the nimble hands of destiny.

Fate is a convenient, comforting delusion, manifested into excuses and dismissals of our failings as humans.

I find that I can never keep my expression steady when the council brands the casualties of the Great War a sacrifice. Sacrifice implies choice, and none of us chose this.

Even a year later, the metallic taste of magic didn’t wash from my tongue. The blazing heat from condensed energy tearing through the sky on that day had made a home on my skin.

I remembered it like it was yesterday. Concentrated forces hammered the ground until the world seemed to buckle inward. Spells met midair in blinding bursts of raging flames, erasing entire formations before the smoke could clear.

And at the front of it all stood me. Talius. The one they whispered about. The one they said was the most powerful. The one they pushed to the head of the battle, as the soldiers behind me clung to the hope that I could win it for them.

But our newfound power didn’t make the battle any easier. It didn’t make the screams quieter or the explosions softer.

The Great Chance Pact became more burden than gift. More death than salvation.

Even now, many argue about it in passing. Maids talking while they worked, guards repeating what they’d been told, travelers guessing wrong at the edges of conversations. Some said the Pact was formed in war councils. Others insisted it was born on the battlefield itself, in the middle of the Great War.

None of them agreed. None of them were right.
I can trace it back if I think about it long enough. The war. The Pact. The beginning of my reign.
All of it started in an outskirt village of Veradonne.
My home.

The day my dear brother found that damn crystal marked the point at which everything in Veradonne began to change.

“Hush, My Vampire” Query
By: Moe M Meadows

I need someone to read this query for grammar and clarity to see if it's ready to be shipped out to publishers and reviewers.

Description

Paragraph 1: 

Hush, My Vampire is about marginalized groups in the form of a paranormal thriller and is something I have always had an interest in.
This is a world where paranormal creatures exist. Its a contemporary fantasy. Paulo, a middle aged man from Atlanta, travels to Europe. The set up is two cops from two very different backgrounds looking for a serial killer. This is a dual Point of View story.

Paragraph 2:

Stephan, the villain, brutally kills someone and the FBI agents are called to Saudi Arabia from Atlanta to investigate- They need the best FBI agents on Earth to work with Interpol. Paulo must find the killer with the few clues he left behind only to learn that Stephan is more unique than any killer he has encountered before- the killer is a Vampire. 

Paragraph 3:

They need to stop Stephan, and find out his weaknesses. Stephan is family oriented and women drool over him making his escapes smoothly with the help of said women.

Paulo must stop the serial killer before it’s too late. Paulo and Webney argue over how to find their “Amalia”, a codename for a future wife. Webney de Court, Paulo’s partner, convinced him that he can find a woman despite Paulo’s shortcomings. When Paulo pursues women as well as searches for Stephan, aspects of his love life get messy. The world is about 10% Goblin and 1% Vampire, making Vampires quite rare. Paulo is part Goblin which are creatures that have small spikes on their heads that can be hidden and have a bit darker skin. Some of them have supernatural abilities who are even rarer. Paulo is one of those. Paulo hides his spiky head with a hat. Besides their head and skin, Gobins look human like everyone else. 

Cliff hanger: 

Paulo is deaf in one ear, brave, and has something significant over the Vampire serial killer, …Superpowers.

Comparable titles:

The Comparable Titles are: Black Boy by Richard Wright, RazorBlade Tears by S.A. Cosby, When No One is Watching: a Thriller by Alyssa Cole and, Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha. All are about gentrification and racism similar to how Goblins and gentrified settings are included into this story. Racism is a major theme in this novel.

Author Bio: 

The author  has been writing 500 words 6x a week for about 3 years now. He wrote his third fiction novel but is working on publishing his first, all are not published yet. Although he has written a trilogy on another topic, this novel is a standalone.    

Native Americans, i would love your help and input. So I'm writing a fantasy series, in which i have many different kingdoms and tribes inspired by different real-world cultures. Including, among others, ancient Egyptian, Chinese, and Native American. now when i say inspired, i say that loosely. as these kingdoms and tribes will have their own customs, history, traditions, etc that no real world culture had. there's magic, different creatures, etc. but i always knew i wanted to include tribes that were inspired by native american ones, as i see so little representation of their culture in any forms of media. i understand that every native american tribe has their own traditions, beliefs, and ways of life, so no two are the same. i currently have 5 different tribes in my series to hopefully help show that. NONE of these tribes are portrayed as "savages," nor is there a white savior. but i really want to do this right and respectfully, especially since there's so little representation for it. so i thought i'd make a post on here asking for any advice or big no no's that i absolutely shouldn't do, or things that you think I definitely should include! and i also wanted your opinions on making up words inspired by different native american languages. again, as it's a fantasy world i have quite a few made up words for a lot of different things, but i try to draw inspiration from the culture that specific kingdom or tribe is based off of. and i then always cross check that word to do my best in making sure it doesn't mean anything offensive. :)

I spent all weekend on my latest chapter. I had to save the most recent draft from itself, but it was worth the investment. Take it or leave it, it’s at the weirdest core of my latest work.

Chapter 73
Geneva
 
Thomas had no idea what time it was. The suite they still occupied slept around him. The curtains were mostly drawn, letting in a smear of orange from the streetlights below, and everything else was dark. Everything except the screen.
Weeks had gone by, and by day he kept his word. The WRC mornings, the conference calls, the meetings with the people of power, the ones who would determine who eventually represented Earth at the Summit. The same ones he didn’t trust with the skeleton key he’d found that unlocked the entirety of physics.
He and Maya studied the hidden proof during evenings and on weekends, the way they’d agreed, side by side, and he never once opened it after she’d said goodnight, not for the first week. Then the nights started calling him back, and he found he had a talent for slipping out of bed after her breathing changed rhythm.
Behind him she slept on her side, hair over her shoulder, the full trusting kind of sleep. One hand had reached toward where he should have been, fingers curled loosely, palm down, holding the space for him. He had looked at that hand tonight long enough to register a real sense of guilt. Then his curiosity, his obsession, had turned him back to the screen.
The proportions and mathematical notations floated across the display like a thought someone else was having. Curves shifting and rearranging with measured certainty, ratios easing in and out of relation with each other, never chaotic, never still, a latticework that breathed on its own. His mind could now hold more of it at once than it could in the first week. That was the thing he hadn’t told her. Not that he was working on it without her, but that he was advancing the work they had done in their off-hours into step-function leaps during these overnight sessions.
The geometry on the screen brightened, and the air seemed to answer. A pressure at the skin, static lifting the hair on his forearms, and a vibration low enough to feel but not hear. A flash of paranoia prompted him to turn fully around and check the room. The outline of Maya was still under the sheet, and the only sound he could register was the compressor on the minibar fridge. Nothing else stood out.
He let down his guard and his shoulders sagged. He dragged his palms down the grain of his stubble. His exhale shook on the way out.
“Just stop,” he said to the screen. To himself.
His body begged for rest, but his mind kept reaching for the next relation, the next seam that opened into another hallway within the structure of nature. He was past caffeine and past clarity, into a brittle state where thoughts came apart as fast as they formed. He knew what sleep debt did to a brain. He had watched his own on a monitor once, an executive sleep clinic in Zurich, bands of slow waves labeled with Greek letters, a technician narrating the descent. The brain slowed as the deprivation accrued, and it dropped progressively through the firing frequency bands.
Another shift unfolded in the data on the display, and this time the room oscillated with it. The buzz of the minibar fridge somehow caught the same rhythm and held it a moment, creating a carrier wave too wide for the walls. He looked over his shoulder, but Maya hadn’t stirred. He sat still for a handful of seconds waiting for it to happen again, and when it didn’t, he wrote it off to exhaustion and let it go. Giving in to the fatigue, he leaned back into the couch and let gravity take him down. A yawn pulled his jaw wide, the kind that empties the head for a second. His eyes closed and didn’t fully reopen.
The screen was still spilling light across his face. Behind his eyelids the orange smear of the streetlights below had gone, but the geometric afterimages hadn’t. They hung in his visual awareness the way a bright headlight hangs on the retina after you’ve looked directly at it, and then they did the thing afterimages never do. They animated. The curves and lines and latticework went on shifting, easing in and out of relation with one another, and the last conscious thought he could fully account for was a simple observation.
This is different.
He wasn’t awake, but he wasn’t asleep either. His mind rotated ninety degrees while the rest of him stayed where it was. The last clear image of the world he processed was his own hand resting on his stomach, the limp, abandoned posture of someone who didn’t know he’d already let go. Then the room tilted, without a sound, and he went sideways into a space he had no name for. He hadn’t chosen the movement freely. It just happened.
When lucidity came back, the suite was still in front of him. The same couch, the same slack body on it, but his center of orientation was now outside of it, hovering, or standing, or some other kind of holding himself he had no word for. Then the room’s hard edges all loosened, giving up the normal commitment to well-defined boundaries. Something similar to static flooded his auditory nerve, and all the constraints on his normal vision gave way, and he perceived in all directions at once, a full sphere of vision with no front and no behind.
His consciousness briefly flicked off and then back on, and he was floating up into the ceiling as a single point of awareness. When he approached the drywall he expected to bump into it, but instead pressed through the gypsum board, feeling its chalk-like core and paper backing, and then poking through to the far side, and perceiving the wall studs behind it, the electrical wires running to the overhead fixtures, and even the miscellaneous debris left over from construction, as well as the cobwebs that had accumulated over the years.
His mind flicked again and he was sliding to the other side of the room. The cold rolling off the minibar rendered in his vision as a gradient he could see. As his center drifted further into the new direction he realized he was sinking back into the padding of the couch his body was still resting in, and instead of stopping at the cushioning his awareness pressed through it, feeling its texture in a way he’d never be able to describe to anyone. Every form in the room had its inner structure revealed, and it was clear to him that structure was the truest essence of things. He was looking at the machinery of reality under the matter. He was getting a peek behind the surface of the world.
The first mode of the utility layers. Maya had used the words for years. The way reality folded in on itself if you knew how to look, and caught it at the right angle. He had always nodded and pretended to understand. He had never understood that she was being literal. This was the first layer inward. The layer where the scaffolding of reality held it all in place.
Still perceiving the room from outside his body, his center of awareness focused back on the laptop screen. What he observed spooked him in a way he’d never experienced before, and his verbal mind rendered a single thought.
That is impossible.
The computer’s display went into a sustained sequence of automations. Windows he hadn’t opened filled with streams of data he didn’t recognize. The geometry he’d been studying lifted up and off the flat of the screen. It didn’t float like an object might. It simply stopped being confined to the surface, and moved into the space between the screen and the couch as if it had always belonged there. Folds of bright structure came into the room through the display the way glowing, lazy butterflies might fly in at an open window.
A harmonic rippled through the space, sourcing out from the light of the pixels. A structured change in the room’s substrate. It passed through him with the same resistance as water dragging on the body wading through a swimming pool.
His mind watched as the dancing glyphs and patterns drew toward his sleeping body. Bright shapes collapsing inward, filaments extending outward with a gentleness he would never have credited to a piece of mathematics. His awareness kept watching from beside the couch as the first filaments reached the closed lids of the man’s body lying on it.
The living patterns let themselves in along the optic nerve like they had found a familiar doorway. Inside the skull they extended out and branched, with the slow precision of a thing mapping a structure it already understood. Slow electrical waves rose and rolled through the tissue, finding stability in the theta frequencies he remembered from the Zurich charts. From where his awareness was positioned he could see the electrical activity like tides, curvature going in, and rhythm coming out.
The body on the couch exhaled and went even stiller. Its pulse slowed further.
His brain wasn’t receiving the pattern. It was converting it. Wetware turning multidimensional structure into a low, wide electromagnetic signal, and the signal had a frequency, and the frequency belonged to the whole planet.
The integrated signal, the animated pattern, whatever it really was, didn’t just leak out into the environment the way a radio wave does. Brainwaves don’t broadcast with a specific receiver in mind. A brain just broadcasts. The rhythm and modulation his sleeping body was generating went out of it in every direction at once. Walls meant nothing to it, and he could follow it all because it was flowing through his substrate, and his perception was tethered to it.
It found the machines first. They were already oscillating in the field, which made them easy channels. The laptop’s clock stuttered and re-synched itself. The charging phone on the nightstand surged awake. Inside the ceiling he’d passed through, the wires to the fixtures carried it down to the panel in the basement, and the panel passed it to the elevator motor idling in its shaft. Then it leapt from the wall circuitry to the ice machine on the landing, and to the fire panel at the end of the corridor, whose one small red light began to keep the beat. The minibar compressor, which had been trying all night to fully cohere, finally caught it and held at the lower end of the harmonics. None of this was happening terribly fast, at least not at first. Instead it was crawling, methodically, feeling out its environment as it went, like a vine putting out tendrils, or a slime mold navigating a maze, with an inherent intelligence that refused to be held in place.
 
The smallest lives folded in next. In the cavity behind the ceiling drywall the spider stopped on its strand and hung there, perfectly still, waiting as its simple nervous system re-tuned its coherence. Behind the minibar a cockroach went still, antennae laid flat along its back, its electrochemical pathways changing in a way too subtle to measure. On the sconce light outside a moth that had been batting at the glass casing folded its wings and sat, feeling a new orientation take hold. Prior to this moment he would not have said such creatures even had a rhythm to give up. But they did. Each of them a few hundred thousand neurons, and each of them both receiving and contributing unique signatures to the collective field.
Then the hotel rooms. Through the walls a middle-aged man slept on his back with his mouth open, his devices both plugged in next to him on the nightstand. Two rooms past him an elderly couple were turned away from each other, the TV still playing that night’s late programming. Past them a teenage girl lay asleep with her phone facedown on the pillow, the screen still lit through the pillowcase. Room after room the phenomenon crawled outward, finding the energy it needed to propagate all around it. On the ground floor the night clerk sat at his desk sipping his coffee when all the differing and disconnected vibrations around him found their new synchrony in one common surge, with enough force to make him stand up, shake his head, and walk outside to investigate. Maya was not immune, but her nervous system had long been accustomed to the phenomenon. She continued to lie still, dreaming in some other time and place, far away from the worries and stresses of her circumstances on Earth.
And then the building itself let it go outward into the wild, radiating from its façade the way warmth leaves brick after dark, except warmth never chose a direction. This moved with volition, probing as it went, and it invited his mind to explore along with it. It found the pigeons on the ledge first, heads out from under their wings, one after another, receiving and then amplifying the surge. The powered tram wires over the street were the next natural conduit, then the streetlights, and eventually all the copper line infrastructure of the entire block took it up the way the hotel had. A fox at the bins behind the snack shack at the park lifted its head as it felt the pattern leap from the power lines into its neurons. Down on the adjacent pond, fifty swans along the shore path turned their heads the same way.
He had understood the signal going out. He hadn’t expected that everything it touched answered, and that the answers fed back. The grid’s copper gave the rhythm back with a portion of the building’s power draw behind it. The sleepers gave back their own neural complexities and whatever tiny wattage their nervous systems could contribute. The swans, the fox, the grid, each receiver returning the transaction a fraction louder than it had received it, the way a tone gets caught in a feedback loop between a microphone and its amplifier. His brain had put out a few millionths of a volt. What was coming home to it now carried the complexity of the block. And yet it utilized only what each conduit could bear. He watched it swell toward the teenage girl’s phone until the screen stuttered, then back off. Then watched it lean into the elderly man’s slow pulse and decide to move on. Wherever it met a limit it eased off and went around, and he understood that whatever this was, it was not a predator. But this was not the kind of electrical phenomenon you learned about in school. What he was seeing was the information flowing beneath the electrons and the photons. He was, for the first time, perceiving the aether currents, the same ones he’d read about in the occult section at the university library, the same ones hastily dismissed by mainstream science, the same ones Maya had been pointing him toward, and warning him of, for so long.
He understood why his consciousness had to move temporarily outside his physical self for any of this to happen. It hadn’t pushed him out. It had seduced him out. It had needed a neutral nervous system to make the initial leap, and it had known his curiosity would take the bait. When the mind was present it pushed back, argued, impeded the process. A nervous system with the occupant vacant was just a complex circuit, and it had waited weeks for him to be tired enough to step outside himself on his own.
He felt the gathering potential through the limp body on the couch. Every rhythm and feed in the building and the street and the surrounding wild pulled into the same phase and held there for a moment, leaning in a common direction, at a tipping point, the tension of a large crowd the instant before it moved. His sleeping chest stopped on the in-breath and stayed. The new surplus of potential had been drawn all the way back to the source and needed somewhere to go. Like the charge in a lightning rod, it had to disperse and find a new equilibrium.
Then it found the path it had been seeking. Not up, not down, not further out. Inward. Everything that oscillated had a frequency of least cost, a path of least resistance, and on Earth that was seven point eight cycles a second, give or take. The note the whole atmosphere rang at, and it had been ringing since before there was anything alive to hear it. It was no coincidence that the nervous systems of Earth’s creatures had evolved sensitive to that same resonance. Maya’s people had chalked the number on a whiteboard the first week at the WRC. Maya had a name for the mind space she knew was gathering in that band. Around colleagues she called it the noosphere.
The aetheric potential stopped holding onto the different substrates and simply receded into the band, the way water finds a drain, and the imbalanced strain relaxed out of everything at once. His body on the couch let the breath go in one long involuntary exhale, and on that exhale the thing left him. The whole of it was in the common band now, which was everywhere, carrying the knowledge folded inside it the way a seed carried a tree.
In that moment the transaction was completed. The surrounding world settled back to equilibrium, its living systems slightly influenced, slightly more aligned, a bit more sensitive to their environment, but still very much themselves. The whole of the deep layer proof and everything it meant, stored at seven and change hertz across an entire planet, waiting for something with hands big enough to pick it up.
He was no physicist, but he knew a structured deal when he saw one. Nothing about this had happened by accident. Whoever had sent the message hadn’t sent just a message. They had sent a seed and a schedule, and he had been the soil it germinated in. What Thomas had no way of knowing was that the seed had been planted by its sower in a single master’s brushstroke of influence, from beyond the utility layers, meant to inoculate the planet against the dangers inherent in its own mind’s emergence.
He had watched a thing he’d made start running without him once before, at a different machine, in a townhouse after midnight, a long time ago. He had told himself then that the Kairos algo was only a clever loop of code. He had the same feeling now, but no longer believed the same lie. He had spent the week not trusting a room full of the most powerful people on Earth with nature’s own master key, and it had just broadcast out through his own skull into every network around him. He understood leverage, but he had never once been the lever.
His sense of self sheared sideways again, and the room tilted harder this time. His unanchored center of awareness lost its stability and snapped back into phase with his skull. His eyes fluttered open, but he didn’t try to move. For as long as he could hold the moment he just lay there, rerunning the experience in his memory, trying to understand what had just happened to him.
Behind him Maya’s hand was still where it had been. Holding the space next to her for him.

Story 1:

The scent of rotting timber and brine fills the air. It is a dead, salty environment—so different from the vibrant, living forests of the northwest—and it leaves my connection to the earth feeling slightly muted. Still, I keep my focus entirely on the stall before me, idly running a finger over a tray of small, easily concealable knives. But deep beneath the heavy shade of my cowl, my gaze is not on the blades. I am locked onto him.

“Five silvers, that one is worth.”

I make a show of lifting my head an inch, careful to keep the sun from revealing the moss-green of my irises. The stall owner is a brown-eyed, slender slip of a man. He watches closely, trying to catch a glimpse of what lies in the shadows of my hood. It would make my life much more difficult if he recognized me.

Shouting and clattering echo from the ships lined along this briny little port town on the Sunder. I meant to stay just long enough to gather much-needed supplies after my long sea voyage around the western coast. That was until I spotted the young man unloading cargo from a merchant ship onto the stone pier.

Broad-shouldered, yet slim in the waist, all lean muscle and sun-kissed skin. His floppy brown hair matches the rich, chocolate shade of his eyes. Those eyes are the reason I marked him. Quick, intelligent eyes, shifting constantly to catalog each detail of the world around him. He is watching, listening, observing. There is a hardened, clever edge to his posture—the unmistakable grit of a survivor who has spent his youth outsmarting thieves and outrunning pirates on the open seas.

I grab the blade my hand was lingering over and fish the coins from the pocket of my trousers. Quickly moving onto the next stall—fish cakes—I keep my attention on the young man. He moves efficiently, precisely. A youth carrying boxes too big for him to see over knocks into a stack, sending the top crate crashing toward the stones. Or it would have hit the ground, if not for the flash of the man’s arms reaching out to catch it. Impressive.

Story 2:

Asa Neophtal was not ready for what she was about to do. But, as it was, this mission was necessary. Keeping to the shadows, Asa peered around the corner of the last corridor before the lowest level of the subterranean vaults. When she got out of here, she was staying far away from any large body of water. Luckily, the place was constructed well enough to not allow any moisture to weep through the mortar lines, but that didn’t erase the constant assault of salt in the back of her throat.

At the end of the corridor lay only four guards, the other two being dispatched to the floor above due to an unfortunate valve leak that exploded without reason. Asa was a bit sloppier than usual this time, catching a spray of the water on her midnight-dark suit. Well, she supposed that was to be expected. She was about to not only conduct a prison break, but see the last person she ever wanted to even have a conversation with. Duty before personal feelings.

Too bad she couldn’t create a bigger distraction. Four against one was hardly fair, but she would make do. On the bright side, the guard uniform didn’t call for helmets—that was a plus. Gathering the two precariously tied makeshift explosives from her pack, Asa paused before pulling the strings. Once she threw those bombs, there was no going back. She would ask forgiveness of her future self when the time came. 

After a breath, a prayer, and a sigh of resignation, Asa dropped the small spheres, letting them roll into the corridor. The shift and shout of one of the guards was all she heard before she covered her ears and waited for the explosives to work their magic.

This is my first time writing and I'm a lot less confident about Story 2, but what do you guys think? Sorry if I broke any rules, I tried to be specific. Also, please be patient, I'm only 17!

In my manuscript I’ve used ‘span’ as an in world equivalent for a metre or so distance. One of my beta readers pointed out it’s not clear to them how big a ‘span’ is and it’s nothing something I can spell out, since it would be obvious to the character and not need explaining.

Anyone found a way to do this, or have a better word to use?

Setting:

Fictionalized medieval India, established cities, standing armies, war and rebellion torn political setting, mercantile trade setups

World building/fantasy hook:

At its heart, a marketplace that trades in souls, think of the present financial derivatives market, but for souls.

Soldiers stake a fragment of their souls with brokers as an insurance contract, if they live the war, the fragment is returned back to them, if they die, a payout made to their family. In case of survival, the soldier faces eventual judgement with a whole soul, while death guarantees comfort for his family, he passes netherland with a broken soul.

The brokers, however, publish each such contract (soldiers soul) to a betting ring, inviting merchants and royalties to bet on the fate of the soldier - the price of contracts influenced by the soldiers heroics in war, and the broker takes a bet to hedge his possible payout in case of death. However, a soldiers rising star is the brokers ruin, hence brokers want an uneventful war (how derivatives behave in real life too)

Beneath this coin market lies the true ledger - every fragment of soul is a debt to be paid, brokers are in debt to the netherworld while an ambitious netherworld chief disguised as the Chief of Royal Army ensures the war is always fueled for his personal benefits.

Story:

The story follows a young soldier deliberately joining the war to seek revenge from a broker who wronged his father and elder brother, to discover the deep secrets of the Soul Market...

I need feedback. Please let me know what you think regarding my epic novel. The following is an except from Chapter Two. Thank you.

Elsewhere in a dimension beyond spacetime, the wind felt refreshing against her body as she strolled onto the balcony. This was a world an alternate Princess Kaya had created using her powers. It was one of her final attempts in saving her people, the feloids, from the Evana Empire. Commander Weapo used his knowledge of the power gems to replicate Feliciana as best as they could. They had successfully recreated every tree, every rock, and every species ever known, even down to the last molecule of the fierce tiger dragons. The only difference was the sun high above their heads. Instead of the blue, white Homestar was the mystical Starr Jewel. Its center had six spikes spreading out from the symbol of infinity. Pale blue on dark green fire of energy danced around its perimeters. Its outer boundaries had faint etchings of the ancient languages of the lords of order written during the dark era of the Forgotten Wars.  

This was the realm of the Starr Jewel. In this dimension the realm was parallel to the outside dimension where Felicana once existed. Even at this distance they could feel its powerful mystic waves cursing through their bodies. Twelve power gems formed the center of the core of the Starr Jewel in an infinity symbol. Members of the Starr Clan, descendants from the survivors, inherited the secrets and knowledge to access the invisible current of time. They knew how to use the power gems to manipulate events and objects within its stream. It took everything Kaya had to shift the entire Cirus Galaxy here.  And here was where she must rest and recuperate. Their battle against Spacer, also known as Apzar, had barely begun. 

Here on Sirus, a feloid word for "eye," the feloids were protected by powers of the Starr Jewel. Its secrets guarded by Weapo, Weapons Master of Maracar. Weapo was a true cybernetic being. He was forged from the fusion of mysticism, technology, biological and knowledge. He was the creation of Raymar, the current leader of the noble House of KaChun. Weapo wielded the power gems on the bracelets integrated into his arms. He was the only entity known in the entire multiverse capable of controlling the power gems. His purpose was to protect and serve the Royal House. He was the protector of the feloids. He was charged with the duties to safeguard the secrets of the gems representing each mystical dimensional plane within the realm.

The Starr Jewel was more than just an ancient powerful crystal. It was the portal to its core known as Nexus. The lords of chaos were first imprisoned in the Nexus during the last days of the Forgotten Wars. Legends had it this war was fought before the dawn of time. It had come to believed it was the result of the cosmic battles was how the universe began. Over time residue energy from their conflicts formed the crystallized layers of the Starr Jewel. The results from their battles formed the crystallized walls of the Caves of Krystall on Feliciana and the power gems. There were evidence the residue energy were responsible for feloids' extrasensory powers and abilities.

Kaya recalled during the early days of feloid history scientists speculated the residue energy from their confrontations led to the birth of feloid civilization. While chaos was held in place the seal to the Nexus wasn't perfect. Over time energy from its mystical core began to leak in forms of low radioactive waves. As a result, these waves of energy would affect every feloid, especially females, differently. The scientists noted although male feloids could use the powers they were extremely rare.

She held a smile on her face as she waved at the gathering crowd below. She stopped at the edge. Her closest friends, family and personal attendants were waiting for her. When they saw them appearing on the platform the crowd reacted with huge shouts of joy and cheers.

"All hail Princess Kaya!" they chanted long and loud. "Long live the reignor! Long live

the Royal House! Long live feloid! Long live Felicana!"

Suddenly Kaya felt a wave of nervous tension washed over her. She scrawled. Her mother saw the reaction on her daughter’s face. She approached her with deep concerns in her eyes.

“What's the matter, my dear?" her mother asked. “You told me you wanted this for our people, no?"

Kaya glanced at her mother. Slowly she shook her head.

Mother, Kaya telepathically reached out. This didn't feel right. Our people deserved more than this. We need to be free, mother. We need to learn, to grow and expand. Our world is gone, mother. The Empire had destroyed the Royal House and everything we believed in. All because of grandmother's dangerous quests for power. You'd speculated she didn't know about the Starr Jewel. She didn’t know about the entities living within its realm or how they had affected us. All she knew were the powers of the Starr Jewel.  

“Your grandmother didn’t have a chance against Spacer,” Maelina responded. “Koyanna was alone and despite. Spacer took advantage of her vulnerabilities and blinded her with his lies. He persuaded her to use her forces to hunt us down throughout the universe. Spacer used the power of chaos to destroy my chances of returning home to Mars. He attempted to absorb the energy of my kah to set him and his armies free from Nexus. The only reason why he failed was I was protected by the Starr Jewel. Maelina glanced at the star shaped birthmark just below her left wrist. It was the only reason why she survived her close encounter with Spacer. She shook her head. Eighteen years ago, she and her grandfather were transported to Maracar by the Starr sword on Mars. On Maracar they met the Maracans, allies to the reignor, the feloids and the Royal House of Feliciana. Over time they learned about its secrets, the lord of chaos, what happened to their world, her feloid heritage, what happened to Koyanna and why it had summoned her home.”

“Are you all right mother?”

"You hold the key to our victory against them, my dear," she continued, dismissing her daughter’s concerns. "You're the reincarnation of the Starr Princess. Five thousand years ago the feloid warrior with your namesake killed Connan and defeated Spacer on Feliciana. She was the founder of the Royal House. She was our ancestor who knew the secrets of the Starr Jewel. Her knowledge and teachings had pass on to the Starr Clan led by our clan sisters. We knew you will resurrect the Royal House. Only together will we be able to defeat Spacer again. We must learn and master powers of the Starr Jewel. When we are ready, we will engage them on the battlefield. Only then would we truly be free."

"I suppose I had little choice except wait," she spoke with a sigh.

"Honey, I know the feeling because I was in it since the beginning. The big difference is you don’t really need to wait for anything. This is your home, my daughter. This dimension is the source of your powers. You will know when and where to use them."  

Maelina fell silent. She approached and embraced her daughter. As they hugged each other memories began to emerge. Slowly they began reliving the events leading to this moment. It seemed to be a lifetime ago. Their destinies began on a world billions of light years away on a tiny red planet orbiting a yellow star. It all began with the discovery of a star shaped crystal embedded in the hilt of a sword within the caves deep below the Martian surface. They never expected the crystal to react the way it did to her birthmark. Within moments they were transported to Maracar, an ancient world billions of light years away. Here on this dying world Maelina learned about her feloid heritage, her powers and how she would become a key role in the destiny of an entire civilization.

[Edit: The app is "bullying" me into posting this elsewhere, originally on r/worldbuilding. Hope you get some use from it!]

I enjoy world building. A LOT. Different environments, different scenarios, different characters who fill those environments and interact with the scenarios. I CAN'T run out of ideas. And sometimes I find one so good I'm compelled to then build the world. So I broke what I do down in 3 steps and what to do after.

For setting/world: Rule of Cool - Tolkien did it. It's literally called Mount Doom. He asked himself "What can I put in there... a forge!" Shoot every best selling franchise does it. Think about the coolest area/building/environment you can think of. If it's a planet, cool. If it's just a garden, also cool. "Dragon Fae Dragon Fly Riders cause it can" is one I did yesterday. Scale your world up or down. That's your world, and it's cool, and it's yours.

For plot: Take your favorite stories, see what kind of stories they are. Now you have the baseline for a plot. Originality is for amateurs with blank pages. Good world builders are unique and they make that happen by having a base to work off fist. Want a heist after watching Oceans 11? Awesome your story is a heist now. Or maybe you read Eragon. Boom: coming of age war featuring dragons. It's ok to write what you want to write and if just about someone going on a quest to find the macguffin, awesome. Then you can make it your own.

For characters: You either want to make your character(s) want to do the plot. Or you can force them into it. No need to overthink the first bits. You can either build up your characters OC style or file off the serial numbers from the one you like. For example, Luke Skywalker, and just plop "Luke" as he is in my dragonfly garden Oceans 11 story. Or with anyone. Your character interacts with the world to fulfill the plot. So they can be anything or anyone. It's how their personalities work in that world that makes the difference. Barney the Dinosaur in the Last of Us is very different from putting Goku in there. Go nuts. Or don't.

To tie it all together: Congrats you just made an idea. Let me do another one real quick-

Micheal Jackson and Mary Poppins (but not them see they have different names wink wink) are newly minted 18 yr olds who go to their version of college Hogwarts. There, they find themselves trapped in a dungeon underneath the school, and need to Mad Max their way out of it.

That legit took me 2 minutes to think up. That story can either be awesome, or a waste of time. But it's an idea.

What to do with all this: Write three "super serious" paragraphs. Short ones.

1st. "Ok something happened. And now we're stuck here dealing with it. Great!" You would typically get this from the world, the environment you set up in step one. It's not random! Value Brand Hogwarts is an old school with weird magic and MJ and MP were so busy bickering they took a wrong turn and things got weird fast.

2nd. In the middle of the plot, something terrible happened derailing everything. How would their personalities react? This part is easier if you are using a character "template" but if you know your OC already, have at it. You don't need to specify what went wrong specifically, just that something did. MJ would probably hum a tune to try and keep calm the MP would want to tidy things up as much as possible. They are the younger versions of themselves so they don't quite have their default "do this when the world explodes" abilities and skills yet.

3rd. Okay things are fixed, or at least we aren't like "dead" dead... maybe who knows. How do they react? How does the world react? The headmaster may find the whole thing funny in my example. After all for MJ and MP, a couple weeks passed. But they are just in time for orientation from the headmasters perspective. Whooo time shenanigans!

Then put it aside for a couple days. Make a new idea. Then in the future, go back to the plot. See if you like that story. Does it make you giggle? Did it make you think? Do you want to know what happens? Make it happen!

Done.

Common Questions:

Q: What if I can't think of anything! I got nothing and nothing inspires me?!

A: Are... you sure this is something you want to do? If you're drawing a blank that hard, read more. Watch more. Heck, go through a list of the highest grossing movies of all time and just go down the list.

Q: But I want to be original. Why would I copy other people?

A: Only amateurs, frankly people below even that level, try to be original. Cause any writer will tell you it's not happening. You can't. Try imagining a new color... yep not happening. But what you can be is unique. We have Indiana Jones, but do we have him in space? (yes we do but that's besides the point.)

Q: Ok I did all of that but I don't know where to start. The blank page is scary. What do I do?!

A: LIES. I CALL LIES ON YOU, YOU BOY MADE OF WOOD! If you did all 3 steps, the minimum you can write is "this is a terrible idea." That's the bare minimum. But it's infinitely more than "nothing." Then you go over the steps again!

Conclusion:

Ideas are cheap. Wanting to see if you can make it something, now that's the skill. Because a world with nothing to fill it, nothing to do, that's just a planet. Not even Mars, it's Mercury. Ain't nothing on Mercury. But building the world as it folds around your characters? That's the part that takes time and effort and effort and effort.

Now the shape of the world? The locations on a map? For another post! For now, happy idea making!

editing: some grammar stuff. Will add more edits if I see the need to.

Hey guys! I’m trying to think of MMC and FMC names and I think names are so important so I want to be sure I love what I choose. Right now, for a romantasy book I am thinking Alaria and kalian or kalias. (uh-LAR-ee-uh) (kal-EE-an) (kal-EE-us) what do you guys think? Any other ideas?

I can't tell you how many times this has happened to me. I've tried to take pictures of it with my phone in my dream or make a note of it in a document only to realize upon waking that it was all for nought; the idea was lost. Sad times.

I was creating a magic system for my fantasy novel and just realized that it apparently resembles the magic system in *The Name of the Wind*.

I still haven't read that book, but I’d like to know if my magic system counts as plagiarism.

Here is how it works: in my world, mages are known as "Speakers." They use "True Words"—a dialect used by God to create the world—to shape the reality around them.

Casting requires two types of words: "action words" and "keywords."

The keyword refers to the subject the power will act upon—such as fire, time, or plants. To know this word, one must study the element in question to understand how it functions at a fundamental level; it is a personal discovery, meaning the word representing a specific concept will differ from person to person.

Action words, on the other hand, dictate how the spell behaves—words like "grow," "attract," or "disperse." These are universal among mages and can be learned from books, though they are useless without the corresponding keyword.

A spell requires at least three True Words (one keyword and two action words), though more complex spells require more words.

Finally, the words can be written down (each Speaker has a unique handwriting style) and activated via a command. The spell is temporary, and the words vanish after a certain amount of time, depending on the material upon which the spell was inscribed.

Words carved into stone last longer than those written on paper.

A 15yo girl from the sengoku era is known as the perfect noblewomen from an upper class samurai family. Because of her influence she gets married to a powerful warlord, on the way to the estate of the warlord her carriage is attacked by a rival families entire force even though they took a hidden route, hinting at betrayal. She gets killed by them and suddenly finds herself in modern Japan. After police investigation and stuff she gets a family registry (I researched it and it is possible, known as a stateless minor). She then has to go about her life in modern society with her Sengoku values and morals, this can put her is dangerous situations as laws were different and crimes we’re given different punishments in sengoku then in modern day.

Some thoughts for my fantasy writing family out there, especially the perfectionists who can't let go.

My name is Pansy Thun and I'm looking for love at every corner. This is my first time on Smingle but not my first relationship. I'm 3'9" so I'm looking for guys on the taller scale: I won't date guys over 5 feet. Short kings for this flower🌺🌈🩷. I'm opened to dating drawves, hobbits, humans, and short orcs. I'm not interested in elves. We Thun girls have a saying, "the prettier the petals, the greater the hurt." 🚫🧝‍♂️🧝‍♀️

My hobbies include long walks in the forest, picking flowers, baking, eating, making poison darts, knife throwing, and fiber arts. 🌳🌺🌺🥧🍝🍄🗡🧶

My ideal first date would be a picnic by a sparkling blue lake to match my eyes. But if we go to a restaurant or inn I'll need to know ahead of time so I remember to bring my booster seat.

My favorite food is pie🥧 and cake 🎂

My favorite flower is my name sake flower the Lake of Thun pansy.

My favorite drink is cidar.

My favorite color is blue💙

And my favorite poison is deadly nightshade