I am in the process of writing the second book in my series and would like to ask this community for some character ideas. Here is some info to help you get a taste for what it is about. The series takes place in a land stretched beyond infinity. There is no main character so the book is mostly a bunch of short stories set in the universe and the characters are all either made by my friends and I that we create in our spare time. The world is ruled by independentent kingdoms because it would be near impossible for a central government to rule . Credit will be given to the people who made the characters that are accepted. Discuss !
Any inanimate object given a significant role in local government. Bonus points if it's something silly like a chamber pot. It could be worshiped as a local god, with a priesthood designed around interpreting its will. Or it could be a powerful political figurehead with a solid counselor behind the scenes.
That sounds interesting. I had an idea like that awhile ago where the object was the spoon one of the corrupt business man choked on accidentally and freed the citizens of a small town.
I, too, like this idea. Attached to this (in case the object is seen as a local god) I'd also like to see a character who is a young, very firm believer who dreams of being able to understand the orders of the holy chamber pot, or whatever it turns out to be, just as well as the high clerics and studies all kinds of absurd religious scriptures written about it to finally find out how to communicate with it.
Okay. I have it typed but will not post it yet.... Just a snippet of backstory on this part. A tyrannical dictator ruled over a small kingdom with an iron fist. He executed all dissidents and people over the age of 60. The people needed change or something drastic would happen. On the day before announcing some ambitions to expand his tyrannical powers within the government , the dictator decided to sit down and revise. As he was rewriting his new law to include citizens who suffered from mental illnesses , he felt a small ***** on his lower buttocks. This would be from a thumbtack his aides had left there a day before while working on the design for their country's new flag. He saw it as a minor annoyance. Death saw it as an opportunity. The thumbtack was covered in bacteria. He came up with a minor fever which transgressed into full blown organ failure. The heroic thumbtack now has a cult surrounding it. This has led the kingdom to adopt a thumbtack based philosophy in all aspects of government and life. That's all for now.
An infinite place would be able to contain infinite subsets. This gives rise to the truly absurd, since in an infinite world, infinitesimal chances become certainties. So you can have the story of a spoon's rise to godhood via a series of coincidences with cosmic odds like causing the dictator to choke, curing ailments, predicting the weather and providing dead-on accurate answers to any question. The priesthood would work similar to the oracle of Delphi, where you have someone interact with the spoon and a bunch of people that try to interpret the spoon's messages.
It's not really a specific character but recently I've been thinking that if/when humanity comes into contact with a sentient alien species they'll find some extremely mundane part of our life extremely fascinating because it simply doesn't exist in their society. Like...Bedding, or something. I dunno. Now you know why I don't write.
Nah, that's a decent premise for a number of extraterrestrial contact short stories I've read. Including a really depressing one where we end up murdering the living crap out of them because they mistakenly go to war with us without realising our weapons tech is years ahead of anyone elses' in the galaxy. Like, the thought doesn't even cross their minds. Everyone should write It's cathartic, if nothing else!
It's probably quite famous, at least I think it was said to me that it was? Anyhow, memory fuzzy, but a truly inspiring slash god-awfully-scary story. Basically, the premise is such. Earth is Earth. No changes, nothing. However, there is this alien species that initiates contact, because they're discovered hypergates or <insert magic teleportation device here>. They dominated every alien race they came across. War is bred into their genes. They have a very martial leaning, etc. Honour and pride, etc. They get to Earth, and the contact scenario goes perhaps as well as you'd expect. Aliens posture, humans start shooting and blow the aliens to literally kingdom come. A couple are captured, and the rest of the story is an amazing tale of wonder and fear as the aliens come to understand what accomplishments humanity has made instead of the hypergate technology. Things like translators freak them out. The notion you can heal wounds instead of just living with the scars frightens them. And so on, and so on. It ends with the alien basically thinking "holy mother of alien deities, the humans achieved all of this . . . if they ever took off from their planet, they would be a scourge on space". Rather bleak, not at all as humourous as I've paraphrased it tl;dr: humans didn't develop spacegates, and instead evolved upwards (on one planet). Aliens developed spacegates, evolved outwards (across a lot of planets). Humans ended up scarier.
