chelsea's thoughts

hello im writing stuff

[meept0pia]

Rust Belt Lullabies — An Interactive Story

It's the spring of your senior year. The weather may not reflect it but that's typical Erie, Pennsylvania for you. It's 2005 and people can't stop referencing the good old days back when industry was booming. You're Brenner, a peripheral character in the majority of your classmates' stories but you know you'll make it out of this shitty town. You and your band are too damn big for this city and you can feel it in your bones. Despite the family fights, the addictions, the shaky band dynamics and so much more. Right now however you're just Brenner stumbling through each day while they blur together like cigarette smoke.

This is a story about growing up in a dire circumstances while being surrounded by the worst type of vices and of course, most important of all becoming fucking famous.

✢ ABOUT ✢

ChoiceScript IF with full MC customisation.

A Comprehensive Statistic System influencing overall storyline.

Branching romances with four ROs (plus a long list of quippy side characters), each with different routes. All ROs are gender customisable.

______ Brenner (you choose the first name, but the cast will normally call you Bren/Brenner/Brenny). A social outcast, lead singer and guitarist of a shitty rock band. You drink, you smoke, you do drugs, you write songs, and occasionally are musically brilliant. Throughout your entire life you've always felt invisible. Then one day you get your cousins beat up guitar and music gave you a voice.

✢ ROMANCE OPTIONS ✢

Luck (Lucretia/Lucretius) Yahui Hoover Your weed dealer, sometimes your savior, sometimes your devil. Morally gray, manipulative, and tragically broken. There are routes where you save each other, where you destroy each other, and most realistically where it’s both.

Gabi (Gabriel/Gabriella) de Martín Vázquez Burgos Childhood friend turned first love turned heartbreak. A reckless skater with a lighter always on hand and a future determined to leave Erie. Loving Gabi means reliving every scar you gave each other, even the ones that never healed and giving each other some new ones along the way.

Orenda (Oren/Orna) Adelman A farm kid carrying the weight of family, siblings, and a dying livelihood. It's easy with Orenda because they look at you with eyes that want you to be better than you are. With Orenda, it’s normal it's right but it's so foreign, brutal and hard.

Ingi (Inge/Inga) Aggi Larson The preacher’s kid, fragile beneath their awkward exterior. Torn between faith, repression, and the obsessive need not to lose you. Loving Ingi is devotion laced with danger, the kind that feels like salvation until it doesn’t. They'll love you forever just don't leave.

✢ THE BAND ✢

Bee (Brent/Breanna) Joel Schaffer The smug, superior always three steps ahead bassist. Bee grew up too smart for Erie and instead of building them up the town kept chopping them down. They've learned to bite first, bury the bruises and retort to every comment with a fury that instils fear in Satan himself. They have an encyclopaedic level of knowledge on niche bands, classic gospel and 60s legends. Half the time you want to kill them the other half you can't imagine life without them. Bee was taught that power and control is everything and while they may hate everyone they hate themselves a tiny bit more.

Sascha (Alexander/Alexandra) Richter Erie's noble rich kid who'd rather sit outside drumming on paint buckets then study up on the booming empire their set to inherit. Their monthly allowance could pay off your family's debt and some. Rather then get shipped off to some spiffy boarding school in New England Sascha chose to go to their shitty local high school and grit it out with you. They don't mean to be condescending when they discuss the Berlin nightclubs or the boats they own in Munich but it still stings. Especially when they make mentions of trying to help your family out. Sascha is somehow the spine of the band and all they desire is to be taken seriously by somebody.

DEMO -> last updated (01/25/2025)

Frequently Asked Questions Bug Report Form

Follow for updates, sneak peeks, and to ask as many questions as your heart desires! Grateful if anyone reblogs and appreciative to anyone interested <3

[meept0pia]

I miss this world! Your writing just absolutely sucks me in! I hope it's still enjoyable for you :3

thank u sm <3 ur kindness means the world for me rbl is still very enjoyable its just there's so much i want to include in chapter one it's a bit overwhelming

[meept0pia]

You've described almost all of the ROs negatively except Orenda do they have a fatal flaw? Ex: You've called Luck a bop and frequently call Ingi a weirdo not sure about Gabi now that I think about it. Anyway do you have mean words about Gabi and Orenda too?

tbf luck's and ingi's flaws are just more glaring at the moment. gabi is also a bop and an egomaniac just in a different way compared to luck. they are an attention whore and kinda a clout demon. orenda is highly sociotropic and they gain pleasure in people telling them things like "how do you put up with that?" "you have it so hard" etc. etc. they act similar to someone w factitious disorder except they aren't lying abt their struggles they do subconsciously make their situation harder tho

[meept0pia]

who's the sweetest ro and who's the meanest? like how mean can the ro get? also how are you?

who's the sweetest ro and who's the meanest?

i mean sweet and mean in what context?? to mc? to the general public? like this changes the answer. i would say to the gp gabi is the nicest they have very good manners! a semi-strict puerto rican family instilled that in them. but the kindest to mc is probably ingi bc they are a push over. but ingi is also too kind and so it comes across as creepy (at least to me some of yall OVERLY want that)

the meanest ro is easier bc the answer is always luck they are a douchebag <3 luck is a sadist and enjoys seeing ppl suffer including brenner.

like how mean can the ro get?

maybe ill post a very mean drabble btwn luck and mc that i wrote a while back since its been a while since i've shown anything.

also how are you?

im good thank u! just slowly chipping away at chapter one and travelling. i've also been reading quite a bit due to my friend getting me kobo plus! highly reccommend strangers by belle burden which i just finished.

[meept0pia]

Can’t wait for Brenner to be able to flex on Gabi

brenner havng more confidence would turn gabi on :$ unless that's ur plan all along anon.... brenner flexes and now gabi suddenly wants to sleep w u again...

[meept0pia]

How old are Brenner and their friends at the start of the story so far in 2005?

brenner is 18 and everyone is 18+ except gabi and sascha who are both summer babies and just made their grade cut off but they turn 18 by the end of the summer. sascha's bday is something that will be celebrated in the story everyone's birthday is on their character profile

[meept0pia]

update bc i faded

sorry guys i've been a ghost school has just been pummelling me im ngl. i want to let everyone know im still working on rbl i've been seeing some asks abt whether or not im still working on it so here's my update! *jazz hands* gabi and brenner's build up to their breakup/breakup scene has taken much longer than i anticipated its currently 5k+ words and im still not finished LMFAOOOO so i have no clue when ill update but ill try to remember to do the biweekly progress posts if i can

[meept0pia]

I can totally see my Brenner making music like Paramore " It Ain't Fun" 😏

do u mean aint it fun?? if so yes! pop-punk brenner would def make a song like it! can u believe it came out in 2014 tho?!?!? like thats crazy sonically paramore is/was sososo good but yes paramore is an inspiration for the band. maybe ill make playlist for the vibe of the band for each genre idk. i will say this tho the band's vibe is a bit more riot! than the self-titled album.

[meept0pia]

How would Gabi have reacted if after the breakup, instwad of cutting them off Brenner immedtaely regretted it and started following them around like a wet cat apologizing profusely and begging them to take Brenner back?

seeing as gabi dumped brenner they'd feel bad for them but definitely wouldn't be reconsidering getting back together. if anything brenner would just be boosting their ego. it also kinda reinforces partially why they broke up in gabi's head. it would also ick them out. gabi might not even want brenner back now if thats how they originally reacted.

[meept0pia]

Since this is the 2000s. Is there a possibility that we could recognition from like MTV shows like Total Request Live (TRL), MTV Unplugged, MTV Live and MTV2 $2 Bill. 🤣🤣.

Jokes aside I always loved how the 2000s MTV era for the music and chaos it brought into people's lives, I mean just imagine Brenner giving a MTV house tour of not just their place but the whole town and just outright talking shit about their town.

did u peek into my notes anon?!?!? mtv will have a moment in rbl how can we talk 2000s w no mtv. i would talk more but its spoilers

[meept0pia]

You probably play your own IF right. What would you say is your favourite genre to use when playing as Brenner?

hmmm just bc ppl hate on it ill go w post grunge being a contrarian is fun lolol but based off my music taste it would probably make more sense for me to pick indie rock or pop punk but i like all of them. folk punk is rlly cool imo but emo and metal are just classics ahhhh idk

[meept0pia]

That poly anon copy pasted that exact same message to at least one other author. Wouldn't be surprised at all if there's more. I feel like I would add a poly route purely out of spite.

yeah that's what i thought... its vvv weird for ppl to try and dictate what ppl choose to write about. if u have disdain then write the type of story u want to see. its just weird and entitled. ALSO u dont have to choose the poly option??? like as a reader they know they have choice?!??! lowk pisses me off and a part of me wants to write poly in spite but its makes 0 sense in the context of the story. it does kinda work in the other idea i have brewing but idk if i want to attempt balancing 2 ifs. it would be fun tho no?

[meept0pia]

I switch between grunge and casual for my Brenner's style because I imagine his wardrobe, as a transguy, to be full of thrift store items and old ratty stuff Rafe left behind. Like, he ain't rich and his family certainly won't fork over the money for him.

Which also means that the producer guy looked at this tiny malnourished guy with a homemade haircut and baggy clothes held together by duct tape and a prayer who plays folk punk (two historically anti-establishment genres) on a beat-up guitar and said "lol your style doesn't match your genre" like buddy, I'mma need you to be real here and use your brain a bit. I laughed so hard at this scene.

cruz doesnt care for brenner's life problems. he cares abt marketing and money. cruz wants a good product. but yes lol brenner has better fish to fry lmfao

[meept0pia]

Hello. Are all ROs mono? I hope there are no poly routes in your game?

idk anon if ur apart of some of the discourse regarding polyamory and cheating that i’ve been seeing around but if that’s the case the phrasing of this could be a smidge kinder but i don’t want to make any assumptions. there’s no planned polyamory within rbl but that doesn’t mean it isn’t something i’d be willing to explore. there might be a threesome if u hit certain criteria tho.

[meept0pia]

Hey I'm looking for some inspiration for my IF I'm planning, can I ask you which tropes you'd be interested in seeing/what kind of ROs do you like the most? (I want to get as many opinions as possible)

hmmm i like characters who feel very odd despite being realistic. that make me go hmmm what circumstances made u be this type of person. what formed those thoughts. i kinda am being intentionally vague bc the most important thing imo to doing any creative thing is to come up with smth of ur own. while i think its important to consider others opinion it's even more important that u as an author are driven enough and like the project enough to finish it. tangent aside tropes i like as a reader: enemies to lovers (imp that they actually are enemies), affairs, messy family life, power imbalances, people who are selfish for a reason, evil in a fun way i could go on and on

[meept0pia]

When doing the music part of the IF, will we be able to do more than one type of genre or will we stick to one that we choose? Also could we like... Make our own type of genre like music like what if Brenner and the band could make music that in some way would probably influence artists we know today like Billie Eilish or Måneskin or Artic monkeys and more like what would influence the 2010 music scene?( I think I made a mistake with some of the examples as I believe some of the bands started in the 2000s so they would be during the times of Brenner) By the way, I love that from what I've played so far we aren't stuck with just one set of clothing like grunge for the whole game and that we could choose at different times of the story.

Good luck and have a great 2026.

thank u anon <33

im not really considering making the band sonically flexible. while the idea is very cool in theory coding it would be very hard. also cruz and stranded peninsula as a whole want something that is profitable and safe. genre defining music for a recently signed band is too risky. i think some readers may have noticed that cruz makes a comment about brenner's style not being congruent with the music the band makes. this is how the industry thinks as a whole.

stranded peninsula is vaguely inspired by fueled by ramen (subsidiary of atlantic records) and epitaph records and while fbr and epitaph ran the rock scene and allowed artist a degree of creative freedom they still at the end of the day prioritised profitability and congruency so that it is digestible for mass appeal. this is an aside but fbr didn't even rlly start to pop off until the early to mid 2010s. some of the most influential modern rock albums like loveless by my bloody valentine are created by independent artist. also i would say that some of the genres brenner can choose from don't really pop off until the early 2010s.

the band not being independent later in the story these components will become far more relevant. cruz is a very calculated person and while he supports creativity he demands profitable outcomes.

also, yeah the arctic monkeys are very much so a product of the mid 2000s they just peaked during the mid 2010s with am via the tumblr era. also i would say that all 3 of those artist make very different music i feel like rbl would lose a lot of focus if i allowed people to just choose any genre. rbl started as an if focused on midwest emo and i expanded it more to give ppl more flexibility.

[meept0pia]

brenner who is terrified of spiders — how do the RO's handle a spider sighting situation?

and who gives brenner a hard time over it, teasing etc.

luck: just won't help. they like to see brenner squirm. that spider is not moving lmaooo

orenda: catches the spider and lets it go outside. they think brenner is being dramatic. spiders are good for keeping more annoying bugs away like flies

gabi: ur cooked!!! gabi does not fw bugs. they are hiding behind brenner equally terrified. when they're in puerto rico they intentionally avoid bugs.

ingi: will actually kill the bug if that's what brenner wants but they like to play with animals so they'll feel kinda bad abt this