#temporarysentences

[windwardstar]

For Fren: which of the birds is your favourite?

“Which one is my favorite?” he repeats the question, then turns to his brother and Ri and everyone else in the room, and the birds scattered about it, each getting attention from a different person.

“Favorite?” he repeats again, then turns back to you. “Why would I have a favorite?” he pauses long enough to give the bird pecking his arm scritches, then turns back. “I love them all.”

[windwardstar]

@temporarysentences replied to your post “Time Travel Tag”

Haha, that was fun to read! Poor Den though, wonder what he did... must've been pretty bad

Well... I guess you could decide for yourself. Have a part of a scene.

In front of Den a portion of the bright fog darkened, morphing into a shadow. The spear in his hand disappeared and reappeared in the shadow’s. Its gaze, its hollow eyes, sent shivers down his spine and forced him to a stop.

While he stood immobile, the fog around him gave way to a familiar room with smooth walls and golden light. Emboldened by the sight, Den straightened his back and met the shadow’s gaze. There was nothing for him to fear. He knew what they wanted.

“You have already been judged,” it said, half understandable in old Solar, its voice like paper in the wind.

Den tightened his grip on the shield and sword that came to his hands. The smooth walls and the golden dome were the backdrop for a conversation and a test he had gone through years before. A flash of light and a child version of Den stood in front of a shadow, young and naive, ignorant of everything his words would mean. He knew what they meant now.

“My answers are the same.”

In response, the second shadow reached out with a single, inky black finger and touched his younger self’s chest depositing the armor of the Sun Knights in a shower of light that enveloped both figures.

When the burst of light faded, the desert sands replaced the mist and the empty space was filled with a faceless crowd. The shadows coalesced into Fren as more led him through the crowd. As he passed Den, his face face softened away from the hard stare he had given everyone else, to something that almost said, “I am sorry, Den.”

Den’s jaw was clamped shut by the memory. The silence he had kept then was forced on him in the Void. He wanted to scream.

Shadows tore Fren’s shirt, dug the knives into his skin and dragged them along it. Beside Den, the shadows took the shape of his siblings who held him back. Others ground sand into Fren’s wounds and traced the red cuts with fire. Fren fell to the ground.

Only then was Den finally allowed to scream his brother’s name, but nothing more. The shadows pulled him back, away from Fren, away from what he failed to do as everything spiraled into darkness.

“I promised him.” Guilt piled stones on his chest and blackened the fog into smoke. “I promised him I would do nothing. I should have stopped it.” Den looked up to stare into the shadow’s eyes. “That was a mistake. I will not make it again.”

The shadow smiled. It pointed the spear at him, and touched the tip to the sun on his chest. It glowed faintly, and when the metals connected, the light flared. Den squinted. The sun shone brighter, the light spread, dissolving the inky shadow and overpowering the white of the Void. It washed over his consciousness and left him in bright oblivion.

[dragonscanbeplantstoo]

Last Line Tag

I was tagged by @starlitesymphony and @temporarysentences to post the last line I wrote (this was more than a day ago for both). Thanks guys, I needed to get typing again, and this was a great boost!

Greyson thinks he feels it, the heat of fire in his belly, conducted all the way out to the very edges of his skin.

And there we have it! Greyson tryna do dragon magic! I’m going to tag anyone whose feeling a little stuck right now. Just type, you’ll find the thread again.

[firewritten]

Hey! We share the lamp aesthetic in our opening blog thingy-doos, and you recently followed my art blog so I came to see what's up. New writeblr? Same here. Still getting used to this whole 'interaction' thing. Anyway, I was reading through some of your writing and I wondered if you could tell me about your current project? Your style's great 🙂

Yep, just made this writeblr a couple of days ago. Everyone’s been awesome and friendly so far, and I like interacting. :)

So, about Surreal Darkness. That link goes to the chronological tag, but when I get more of it up I’ll put up a chapter index.

It features scenery shots from the Sims PC game, and I write it to fit with the pictures. I’ll copy and paste this thing I wrote about it a while ago. It goes into how it works as a Sims story, but really I think that there’s a lot of possible interpretations. This was just the one I was thinking about at the time I wrote this. :)

I started it when the world Midnight Hollow came out for Sims 3 and everyone complained about how dark the world was. I took some scenery shots of Midnight Hollow and edited them, and I thought they were gorgeous. So I posted them, and I started personalizing the darkness that everyone was complaining about. Just fun silly little short things about the darkness to go with the scenery pics.

I ended up really enjoying it and getting attached to the narrator and the darkness, and I branched out to other Sims 3 worlds and took scenery shots there. When Sims 4 came out the story went with it, and the narrator and the darkness ventured into new and much brighter lands.

I worked the transition into the story. It does only use scenery shots, but it is still set in the Sims game. So when the narrator talks about having a different skin and body, it’s true - they’re in Sims 4 now instead of Sims 3. ;)

I’m not really sure how to tell you what the darkness is, or what’s going on. Because honestly words just kind of appear when my fingers hit the keyboard. Sometimes I have to edit them until they’re pretty. Sometimes they come out pretty the first time. Sometimes they come instantly, and other times they take a few hours.

But as more and more words have showed up and the narrator and the darkness have developed, I think that the main point of the story is their relationship. They start out antagonistic, but as time goes on they start to bond. For all that the darkness likes to pick on the narrator, you start to see that it does actually care about the narrator. The narrator is actually the first person it’s ever cared about, which may explain some things. It doesn’t know how the social interaction/friendship thing works. ;)  Actually it doesn’t have any idea how humans (or Sims, if you prefer) work at all.

But it’s learning. Slowly.

More under the cut! 

The various “universes” are just the different towns and areas in the Sims game. I don’t think the darkness made all of them. It can travel between all of them, but I think there are other entities out there who can make universes too. Like, say, EA, and also Sims players. ;) But it did make the hermitage area of Granite Falls and all of Magnolia Promenade. Perhaps with the small hermitage one, it was trying to make a home for the narrator. With Magnolia Promenade, I think it’s just trying to keep itself embodied. And failing.

As for what the darkness itself is? Maybe it’s a conscious bit of the creative ground of all things. Like there’s the void, and the void can be formed into things that exist for a while, but then they fall back into the void. Nothing is real or solid to the void. It’s all just skins that the void wears for a time.

So…maybe you could say that EA and Sims players formed the universes that make up Sims 3 and Sims 4 out of the void, and peopled them with Sims. And then one day in Midnight Hollow, a Sim who was lonely and sad and imaginative looked at those dark brooding trees and wondered what lay behind them. A bit of the void felt the mind of the curious Sim, and stirred. It took on the appearance of the shadows that the Sim daydreamed about, and it followed the Sim home.

The void is very curious about itself, you know.

I think…maybe it had never encountered consciousness before. After all, Sims aren’t conscious. Not most of them. The narrator though - the narrator is becoming conscious and self-aware.

Perhaps that’s part of why just using scenery pics works. It must be very lonely to be the only conscious Sim, don’t you think? So the lack of Sims in the pics shows that loneliness.

The darkness has only ever been formed into skins that disappear - players shut down the game, or move their Sims to another town, or delete the premade worlds and put in user-created ones that they might delete later. All the universes are made out of it, so it knows all of them, but they disappear and reappear all the time, and sometimes the ones that disappear never come back. And it’s all silent unawareness. Which was okay because the darkness didn’t know any better. Until it met the narrator, who had thoughts and feelings and self-awareness and curiosity. Who could see the darkness and think about it and experience it, and the darkness found that it could hear what the narrator thought. It could see the universes inside the narrator’s head.

So it takes the narrator on a journey through all the universes, because it doesn’t want the narrator to disappear when the Midnight Hollow skin falls back into the void. It wants to keep the narrator. It wants to hear and think and feel and see and learn about itself. It also wants to learn about this Sim who can survive the transitions between universes, who persists and remains a solid self.

But then once they make the jump to Sims 4, it’s not likely that the Midnight Hollow skin will exist again. Sometimes a Sims 3 skin exists, but not for long. And the narrator begins to tire of the journey through all the universes, and wants to go home.

But there is no more home.

Gonna stop it there because that’s enough spoilers as it is. :) But I hope that gives you a general idea, and that it seems interesting.