Hello! First time poster here (kinda super nervous to post on this platform), but I’m DESPERATELY in the search of a Joshler RP partner. I normally main Tyler. I am semi literate - literate. I’ve been a fan for over a decade and I’ve role-played for 10+ years now. I request that you be 18+, and can write more than a few lines in response to my replies. I have really no triggers at all.
If you’re interested you can DM me on here I have a discord!
I do have a starter ready to go, I’ll include that as well. We can change whatever you see fit! We do not have to do that though I’m up for ANYTHING
(This starter is apart of a fanfic I am working on. If you want to read it it’s included) https://docs.google.com/document/d/12ToNvmuQEdAeKYgLaUt1fy3CXb-u0zc-XosxFFae3YI/edit?usp=drivesdk
The air in Dema always smelled faintly of concrete dust and forgotten rain. Each morning, the city stirred like a machine forced into motion
The air in Dema always smelled faintly of concrete dust and forgotten rain.
Each morning, the city stirred like a machine forced into motion grey towers casting long, oppressive shadows over narrow streets lined with identical buildings. The walls never crumbled, but they never breathed either. The sky above Dema had no color. Not blue, not black. Just... blank. As though even the sun was unwelcome.
No laughter echoed here, no music hummed from open windows. Only the static hum of the Intercom System, ever-present, ever-watchful.
At the heart of it all were the Nine Bishops, the silent architects of order. Clad in dark ceremonial robes, each bore a name whispered with reverence and fear: Andre, Lisden, Nills, Listo, Keons, Reisdro, Vetomo, Sacarver, and the most feared - Nico. Each oversaw a district. Each claimed devotion to stability, purity, obedience, and ruled a certain district within Dema.
But beneath the immaculate grid of Dema’s streets and the polished sermons of its rulers, something simmered. Quietly. Desperately.
On the outer edge of District Keons, near the border walls where the Watchers rarely passed, a child drew a yellow circle on the concrete. Then a line. Then another. A symbol.
The Bishop of Five would call it vandalism. But to the ones who remembered the legends—to the ones who still felt it was a signal.
Clancy woke up to the sound of the Intercom crackling to life, the voice of Bishop Nico bleeding through the static like oil on water.
"Rise in purpose. Wake in gratitude. The Glorious Gone watches with favor."
Clancy stared at the ceiling, unmoved.
The grey above him looked exactly the same as it had every morning of his nineteen years. He could trace every crack in the concrete from memory. But something about the cracks had always felt wrong. Too deliberate. Too symmetrical. Like they weren’t fractures at all just part of the design.
He sat up slowly, not out of reverence, but routine. He slid on his standard-issue jacket, the hem stitched with his district’s insignia Keons, under Bishop Keons. A pale symbol over his heart that had never meant anything to him. Not really.
They called it Vialism the path to purity through obedience and submission. They preached of The Glorious Gone, a promised state of elevation where the soul is released from burden, delivered by the Bishops through loyal servitude. But Clancy couldn’t help but notice that no one ever returned from being “delivered.” They just... disappeared.
He never questioned it aloud. Not here. Not with the Watchers on every street corner, with their emotionless masks and the faint yellow light that blinked from behind their visors.
But in his dreams, the world cracked open.
Vibrant colors bled through the grey. Fields that breathed, skies that moved, music that echoed through trees he’d never seen in real life. In those dreams, Clancy ran barefoot through soil instead of concrete. He heard voices strange and free and felt something he didn’t have a word for. Maybe hope.
Sometimes he woke up crying, but he didn’t know why.
Something inside him whispered that he wasn’t supposed to be here. That the city, with all its rigid symmetry and obedient silence, was a lie.
Last night’s dream lingered like smoke: a symbol drawn in yellow chalk, smeared by a rushing footstep. A voice real this time, he was certain had whispered two words:
Clancy didn’t know where the words came from. But he knew he would follow them.
By day, Clancy worked as a Neon Grave Digger. It was a title that sounded more poetic than it was.
There were no songs in Dema.
Music was considered a relic of the Before, a dangerous indulgence that fed emotion, unruly thought, and disobedience. Vialism taught that melody was noise, and noise was chaos and chaos was the seed of rebellion.
Only in his room, and only when the Intercom had gone dead for the night when the walls of Dema fell into their uneasy hush, and the Watchers retreated to their black towers to recharge their yellow eyes.
That was when Clancy would sit on the floor beside his cot, press his back to the cold wall, and let the sound leave his throat like smoke from a smothered fire.
The songs had no name. He didn’t even remember where they came from, just scattered notes that wove themselves into lullabies of resistance, pieces of melody born in dreams, buried in his chest all day and exhaled in trembling whispers at night.
Sometimes they were sad. Sometimes they were angry. But they were his, and that alone was rebellion.
He never sang loud. The walls had ears. And the Bishops punished music with reeducation, a word that never meant what it sounded like. Clancy had seen what came back from those chambers, when something came back at all.
But still he sang. Because the silence hurt more.
District Keons specialized in reclamation. He spent hours in the field outside the southern wall—an old sector of Dema long since collapsed under time and neglect. A wasteland of twisted steel and cracked stone, where the ground pulsed faintly with embedded neon veins—remnants of the city’s ancient energy grid.
Clancy and the others were ordered to dig through it, extract the glowing cables like roots from a corpse, and feed them into the city’s refueling chambers. The Bishops said it was sacred work: reclaiming the past to sustain the Present.
But Clancy always felt like he was burying something instead of retrieving it.
The glow would sometimes stick to his skin, staining his gloves with a ghostly hue that reminded him of the yellow chalk from his dreams. He kept one coil, once a small, frayed strand of dying neon blue that hummed when he held it too long. It sat hidden beneath his floorboard, curled like a question mark.
Today, the sky over Dema was a deeper grey than usual. Ominous. Still.
As Clancy shoveled earth and twisted wires, his eyes caught something strange etched into the rusted side of a collapsed pylon. A smear of yellow chalk. A line, a curve, unfinished.
It wasn’t just in his dreams.
Those masked wanderers outside the wall were real. And they were leaving messages.
“Don’t stop.” That same voice rang through his ears once more, seething with that word hope again, but where was it coming from?
Clancy wiped his gloves clean, glancing around. No Watchers. No vultures. Just the wind breathing secrets through broken concrete.
Tonight, he would sing again.
Tomorrow, he might start looking for the way out.
For the next three days, Clancy moved through Dema like a ghost.
He worked his hours, digging neon bones from the earth like nothing had changed. He answered questions with short nods. He avoided eye contact. But inside, his mind was burning.
Every moment off the clock, he ventured into the abandoned edges of District Keons past the decommissioned railways and crumbling walkways that once hummed with life before the Bishops declared them "unfit for Glorious Function." These places were too broken to be useful, and so, like everything deemed obsolete in Dema, they were simply forgotten.
In the shell of an old administrative building, behind a collapsed shelf of rusted data chips and mold-rotted uniforms, Clancy found the library.
It wasn't large, just a few shelves mostly warped by time and weather. But the books were still there. Real paper. Smelling like dust and fire. No catalog system. No Intercom surveillance. Just words. And those words opened something in Clancy that the Bishops never prepared him for.
One book detailed ancient cities with trees taller than buildings and skies that changed color blue, red, violet. Another spoke of "oceans", massive bodies of water so wide they swallowed the horizon. He found journals from people who questioned, who felt things beyond duty and silence. He read about music being a tool of resistance, a weapon against oppression. Songs were once used to unite, to remember, to fight.
The books weren't just archives.
Almost like someone had left them behind on purpose. For someone like him.
On the fourth night, the voice returned.
Clancy had barely fallen asleep, his fingers still stained with dust from the pages he’d poured over. His room was silent, save for the soft hum of the city’s power grid vibrating in the floor below him.
Then the whisper came. Soft. Urgent. Just like before.
Clancy jolted upright, breath caught in his throat.
He sat frozen for a moment, the words echoing in his mind like a chorus. It made no sense. And yet something in his chest recognized it.
The next morning, he pulled out a stolen map of Dema, one he'd found tucked in the back of a book labeled Topography of Order. It was printed in grayscale, with the nine districts laid out in perfect symmetry. The compass rose was marked at the bottom corner: north, south, east, west.
But when he lined it up with the sun what little of it could be seen the map was wrong. Intentionally reversed.
Not just directionally. Elevation.
Clancy thought of the old watchtowers beyond the southern ruins—half-buried by time, but taller than anything else near the border. Forbidden zones, deemed “unstable” and sealed by orders of the Bishops.
And someone—something—wanted him to find it.
Clancy stared at the glowing coil of blue neon beneath his floorboard, pulsing like a heartbeat.
Tomorrow, he would go back to the towers.
And maybe... he wouldn’t come back.
The city was silent when Clancy left.
He waited until the Intercom’s last nightly decree Bishop Andreus’s voice flat and cold, preaching stillness and surrender then counted out one hundred breaths, just like the books suggested. The streets of District Keons grew quiet afterward, as they always did, the Watchers slipping into dormancy mode unless movement was detected.
Clancy moved like a shadow between buildings. He had memorized the blind spots between surveillance nodes, watched for days from rooftops, and timed his path to the second. His boots made no sound on the cracked pavement. Only the wind seemed to follow him, curious.
The southern ruins were different at night. The glow from the neon veins cast strange shadows, pulsing like blood beneath the concrete skin of the earth. He slipped through a breach in the old containment fence and crossed into the Exclusion Zone.
No one was supposed to come here.
The towers loomed in the distance like broken teeth, half-swallowed by time and covered in creeping vines that Dema refused to acknowledge even existed. Their jagged tops scraped the blank sky like accusations.
At first glance, there was no way in—no doors, no ladders, just rusted metal and sealed panels.
But Clancy had learned not to trust appearances.
He circled the base of the tallest tower, eyes scanning every crack, every discolored patch of stone.
A thin yellow chalk line, almost invisible under the layers of grime and age, curled along the wall like a serpent. It dipped beneath a pile of rubble near the foundation an unnatural curve in the otherwise perfect geometry of Dema.
Clancy crouched and pushed the debris aside. Beneath it: a seam.
Old and mechanical, it creaked open with a hiss, revealing a narrow shaft that dropped into the earth. He slipped through, heart pounding in his chest like war drums.
He descended a rusted ladder, every step taking him deeper under the city. The further he went, the less the hum of Dema reached him. Soon, there was only silence and the steady drip of water echoing off stone.
At the bottom, a tunnel opened before him. Not just a pipe or service crawlspace this was deliberate, engineered. Curved walls reinforced with metal, markings along the edges too faded to read. The tunnel was dark but dry, and just ahead, he saw it:
Another yellow chalk line.
Clancy followed it for what felt like hours. The air grew lighter. Warmer. He heard things he had no words for birds, maybe. Wind, real wind, not the filtered breeze of air filtration units. His steps quickened.
He reached the tunnel’s mouth and blinked into the sudden brilliance. The ceiling opened above him like a shattering dome, and the world spilled in.
Rolling hills blanketed in grass, vibrant and wild. Trees, tall and swaying. The sky above was not blank, but endless, painted in warm hues of dawn. A bright and defiant sun rose from the horizon.
He stumbled forward, out of the tunnel and into the open, the grass soft beneath his boots. The scent of earth hit him like a memory he never had.
He dropped to his knees, overcome, and looked back one last time at the tunnel that led from Dema.
A valley stretched before him. Still in awe he studied the map of Dema, once he pulled it free from his pocket. He was in Trench. A place he has dreamed of for so long without actually knowing it was real, almost like the very grass he was kneeling on, was calling out to him.
He had made it to Trench.
Clancy wandered through Trench like a man set loose in a dream—but dreams had no maps.
For nearly a week, he staggered through rolling green hills, slipping between rocky ridges and thick groves of wild trees. The air was warm and soft, but loneliness gnawed at his edges like frost. The songs he used to whisper in his room now echoed aloud across the open fields, unanswered.
He had no direction, only the desperate instinct to get as far from Dema as possible.
Food was scarce. He found rusted cans near an old firepit, ancient and hollow. Rain pooled in bent metal cups scattered near the remnants of what once looked like a Bandito outpost. He drank from them despite the rust, and once, he cut his lip on a jagged edge. The blood tasted real. It reminded him he was still here, still alive, though barely.
But on the fifth day, the wilderness changed.
The air grew tense. The wind quieted. Birds stopped singing.
Then came the sound of hooves.
From the rise of a nearby hill came a blur of blinding white a tall figure astride a pale horse, its mane braided in silver thread. The rider wore ceremonial red robe, polished and cruel, his face hidden beneath a hood, his face pale down to his nose which was black:
Clancy turned to run, but the horse moved too fast gliding over grass like a shadow unbound by weight. Nico reached him within seconds, Clancy couldn’t help but let fear lock him in place. His mind was screaming, no pleading for him to move.. Run.. but all he could do was look Nico in the eyes as the bishop walked to him, reached out and touched his neck.
It burned like shame, like silence, like Dema.
Nicos eyes glistened as a black ink crawled —alive—as if the ink had a will of its own. It curled around his skin like a collar. Clancy gasped, clawing at his throat, but the mark didn’t move.
“You don’t belong here,” Nico whispered, his voice like stone grinding against steel. “None of you do.”
Almost in a trance Clancy followed closely behind Nico and his horse, each step he took the smear of black on his neck darkened, slowly losing hope. He had been captured.
From atop a distant mountain in Trench, a figure appeared—cloaked in green and yellow, face hidden by a tattered bandanna. They stood motionless for a breathless second, then raised a hand.
And tossed something into the wind.
Dozens. Hundreds. They caught the breeze and spiraled down like golden rain. Nico was confused as to why the white horse screamed a shrill, unnatural sound, and bucked violently, forcing Nico to grip the reins.
A fire, that is what Clancy felt swell from within him as he saw the figures, hope began to form again causing the smear and Nico control to fade.
Down the cavern, through thorns and tangled roots, away from the screeching bishop and the cursed ink burning on his skin.
Behind him, Nico cursed in a tongue Clancy didn’t know.
But above him—above him—the yellow petals danced on the wind, leading him deeper into Trench, deeper into freedom.
And somewhere in his mind, a voice returned, softer now, but clear:
"Keep going. You're not alone."
You cannot outrun salvation, Nico’s voice whispered in his skull, a psychic remnant of the vile communion that all citizens of Dema endured. But Clancy didn’t stop. He couldn’t. Not now not when the words had finally meant something.
He could still remember them, etched in red across the stolen scraps of parchment he had hoarded under his cot:
“The torches will guide you. Follow the flicker. Look to the fire.”
Subliminal at first. A lyric on repeat. A symbol drawn in ash on his wall. And then a name whispered through Morse code by a rebel radio frequency Torchbearer.
Clancy stumbled through the last of the forest, and the world exploded into amber: a camp nestled in the valley below, scattered tents and old war-painted freight cars surrounding a massive bonfire. Figures moved like shadows with purpose, their faces obscured but not hidden Banditos. Free souls…
