this should be interesting! let's see how this goes
hi everyone, call me book, my main blog is @theoriginalcrossjumper and you can find me posting all kinds of random stuff and art and such there.
....but if you're interested in any of my writing, this is where you're going to want to be going forward!
(or my ao3, which is also theoriginalcrossjumper)
essentially, this is going to be a blog centering around my writing - this includes the numerous fanfics i'm sort of working on as well as the at least three (3) original stories i'm trying to write. hopefully, making this blog will help incentivize me to actually make progress on them. and if not it gives me somewhere to ramble to the three people who might be interested about the worlds living rent free in my head!
mainly i'll be working through my list of wips after a friend asked about Every Single One Of My Thirty-Plus Dedicated Wips during an ask game on my main blog, but i'll also be using this to store references and other notes and snippets for my original stories. a lot of my art for these associated stories and fics will also be posted here. we'll see how this goes!
list of discussed stories/fics under the cut (links & more wips and such will be added after i actually talk about them):
(note: as far as the names go, anything in Title Case are set titles; anything in undercase hasn't yet been set in stone)
alright, so this wouldn't be an actual writing blog if i didn't start off by talking about the literal oldest world i have ever created on my own.
this thing goes all the way back to when i was like.... eight years old, and playing pretend with my younger brother in our backyard using sticks as swords. we made up stories and went on adventures (i usually played myself and also all the npcs we encountered, though we didn't call them that then because we were eight) in worlds like Camp Half-Blood, Hogwarts, and any other interesting story we'd both read recently, which was a lot because we both read a lot back then. but because we were two homeschooled kids with undiagnosed but heavily suspected ADHD and parents who encouraged Being Outside instead of playing computer games all the time, that was never enough - so we made up our own worlds.
and by we, i mostly mean me.
animelia was one of the very first worlds i ever created. i distinctly remember being maybe, what, twelve? and sitting under the swingset in the backyard, feet in the dirty sandbox below it, with my brother, and drawing out the "map of the world" we were playing in. it got its start there, and then i forgot it for years during high school because i thought it was cringe, and now in recent years i've re-embraced the cringe and started updating this to become an actual story once again.
so here's the deal with my animelia story!
Animelia is essentially a world that runs in a separate but connected dimension to ours, which used to be connected closely to Earth by way of dimensional portals called goldstreaks; however, An Event happened several hundred-plus years ago and the goldstreaks that once were kept open for travel have now been shut down, and only the occasional natural goldstreak portal opens up due to the positioning of the stars and thinning of dimensional walls and such. This means that travel between the two worlds is now practically nonexistent.
(originally, when i was a kid with a pencil and notebook paper drawing this world, it was a galaxy with every fragmented planet its own biome - a jungle planet, a desert planet, and so on, with goldstreak portals between planets. that's long since changed for multiple reasons (including a lot of college courses on ecology haha) but it was a fun start, honestly. we always set the goldstreak transporters by the gate to our backyard when we were playing games, because where else are you going to put it?)
While Earth's sentient/sapient population is primarily made up of humans, Animelia's is made up of a race known as nyms, who are more or less anthropomorphic animals. The specific animal they're an anthro version of is known as a morph, so you can be a mockingbird morph, a deer morph, and so on. Nyms have an inborn amount of magic, and while not everyone is able to do a lot of magic, everyone at least has the ability to shift forms into a "full-animal" version of their morph, which is inevitably significantly larger (and sometimes more unusually colored) than the Earth equivalent. There are big cities, travel, commerce and trade, and all kinds of politics and magic and stuff that I'll elaborate on later (as I figure it out too, haha) but generally it's a pretty standard level of fantasy-world-technology and such. Just...more animals.
Oh, and humans are basically fairytales, that's an important note. It's been so long since the goldstreaks were regularly held open by mages that they're considered legends now, and nobody really thinks that "morphless" (humans) exist anymore in more than old stories.
And this is when we get to the plot of the book(s) here!
(damn, this is gonna be a long post. probably a good/bad sign for how the others are going to be, since this is the very first one, huh?)
The plot follows a trio of teenagers (this will probably be something around YA in age-level) who are in way over their heads, but they're still Doing Their Best. Their best involves running from the law, trying to blunt-force their way through language barriers with questionable success, a lot of hitchhiking, breaking so many laws I'm not even kidding, and a lot of found-family bonding through trying to basically smuggle a unicorn back to Fairyland in a world where unicorns are executed on sight for Not Supposed To Exist crimes.
Lussa is a spiny bush viper nym who's been more or less disowned from his (noble, military-focused, traditional) family for being so obsessed with tracking down "old stories and legends" of goldstreaks and morphless instead of "getting a real job"; he's currently working on trying to predict (and thus prove) the opening of natural goldstreak portals, using calculations based on notes he found in his late mother's journals. He's all intelligence and dexterity; he's very good at fighting because of his family but also hates fighting and avoids it when possible, and gets overly enthusiastic about anything relating to goldstreaks at any time.
Kyrren is his best friend, a snow leopard nym from a largely migratory tribe in the mountains, and while she's also very interested in the goldstreaks and morphless thanks to the oral stories that her tribe has passed down, she's currently more concerned with keeping her incredibly intelligent idiot of a best friend alive while he's slithering all over the continent chasing portals. She's more of a common-sense person, well used to traveling and dealing with bandits and weather and how they're going to get all this sensor equipment up the cliff when neither of them can fly, and she's a bit more deadpan but also does get excited about the goldstreak stuff.
Alina, on the other hand, is a human who trips and falls through a goldstreak in the forest behind her house, winds up at the peak of a snowy mountain, gets rescued by a snow leopard walking on two legs and a half-snake guy with glasses who's way too excited about everything, and then has to deal with the fact that she's now in a world where humans don't exist, she doesn't speak any of the local languages, and her only hope to get back home is to rely on these two fellow teenagers to get her all the way across the continent to a place where they think another portal might open up in a month's time.
It's basically a Road Trip From Hell sort of story, with extra language barriers, cultural shock, magical loopholes, found family, and figuring out that hey maybe those manufactured goldstreak portals hadn't actually been closed due to a completely natural disaster like everyone thought in the first place.
I have a ton of thoughts swirling on the matter of local cultural traditions, etiquette and honorifics, the magic system, and the geography, but this post is already long enough so we'll stop it here!
After a snippet of the pieces I do actually have, of course ;)
----------
Luckily, the morphless doesn’t get a chance to sneak away or attack them while they’re asleep.
Unluckily, it doesn’t get a chance because it wakes them up with a bloodcurling howl.
Kyrren leaps out of the makeshift nest with a yowl of her own half-caught in her throat, scrambling blindly for her collapsed spear with one hand and unsheathing claws with the other. Even before she’s fully awake she’s crouched in front of Lussa, who’s thrashing in a trap of his own making underneath all ten layers of blankets and hissing in a sleepy panic.
The morphless is moving—away from them?
Kyrren blinks sleep out of her eyes hard, even as she puffs herself up to make herself a bigger, more threatening opponent. But no, she hadn’t seen that wrong. It’s....moving away. Backing itself into a corner, actually, leaving all of the blankets behind and pressing its back into the cold stone wall. It stares at her with big, round eyes set high in its flat face, like an owl, but more focused on her and less through her.
Kyrren hesitates when it doesn’t attack. It also seems to stop once it’s there. Its chest heaves, moving rapidly for something that big, and its heartbeat seems to be even faster than her own.
Is it....scared? Surely not. It's not like it's the one being faced with a monster out of fireside stories and old dusty legends.
Lussa manages to slither his way out from the blanket pile and into a mostly upright position while they’re staring at each other. The morphless’s eyes flick down to him and it jerks back again, letting out another whimpering sound. It clutches at its belt as if looking for a weapon and finding none.
It does look scared. Of Lussa, of all nyms.
Kyrren had thought it was a predator, but maybe it’s more prey-oriented instead—Lussa is the exact opposite of intimidating. As evidenced by his sleepy squint at the morphless. “Whasssssit?”
“It’s awake,” Kyrren mutters.
“It’ssss... Oh. Oh!” Lussa jolts, then dives back into the blanket nest—making the morphless jump—before scrambling back upright with his glasses. “Oh!” he repeats, enthusiasm spiking. “You’re awake! Hello!”
He goes to move past Kyrren and she grabs his arm, stopping him. “We don’t know if it’s dangerous-”
“It’s not going to attack me!” Lussa protests, waving one hand at it. “Look at it, it’s terrified!”
It—does still look scared, frankly. Pressed as far back into the corner as it can get, its skin gone an even grayer shade of brown, and eyes wide behind its unruly long hair.
Kyrren pins her ears back, uneasy. She doesn’t really... like scaring people. Not people smaller and not threatening to her, at least. But. They don’t know how dangerous this thing is. “Cornered animals are the most dangerous,” she reminds him.
“But not cold ones,” Lussa argues. “Look, it’s shivering. Are you cold? You look cold,” he adds to it directly.
The morphless stares mutely at him.
Lussa deflates a bit. “Fine, you don’t have to...oh, let me just...” He pulls away, and this time Kyrren reluctantly lets him go.
She stands up straighter, then when the morphless only shrinks back, she sinks back down onto her haunches. It doesn’t look any less terrified, but it seems to relax again when she’s not towering over it. Really, it’s not any taller than Lussa when he’s pulling himself upright, and that’s barely the height of Kyrren’s chest. No wonder it’s scared, if it’s that small.
She flicks her tail out, balancing her weight, and wonders at the way the morphless’s eyes catch on it and widen before snapping back to Lussa.
