lillies
New Member
Welcome to my search thread! If you'd like to start plotting with me, shoot me a PM and tell me a little about yourself! ^^
CURRENTLY CRAVING
A character-driven story centered around a small group of characters and their big dreams; set anywhere between the 90s and today. Found family and/or romance (M/any). Just young adults young adulting and trying to make it big in some industry.
ABOUT ME
- I'm lillies, just a gal in my mid-twenties. I've been roleplaying since I was a kid and live in EET timezone.
- I'm big on character development, world building and collaborating on the plot. How many and what type of characters I'll write depends on what best fits the story.
- If romance is involved, I'm a sucker for mutual pining, slow burn, and anything along the good ol' enemies-to-lovers trope. Any gender pairing will do.
- When it comes to platonic relationships, I love writing dysfunctional teams, forced collaboration and found families.
- I'm able to post frequently, even multiple times a day outside of work, but I'll adapt to whichever posting frequency fits others' schedules best and won't mind taking breaks or putting things on hold if something comes up (life be life).
- I'm very talkative OOC. I will send you memes, gifs, dog pictures and character shit posts. It's half the fun! B)
- Shows that make me laugh like Always Sunny, Archer, Invincible, The Boys, Breaking Bad (well this one also made me cry but I think the laughs outnumber the cries)
- The Witcher (books and games), The Last of Us (the games but also the show is rad too), the whole ASoIaF - GoT - HoTD thing (of course forgetting the last seasons of GoT cause wtf)
- DnD
- dawgs
- Older than 18. My roleplays will most likely include mature topics
- Available for OOC. It's very important for me to get to know the people I'm writing with.
- Communicative. Tell me what you're looking for in the roleplay, what are your cravings and your pet peeves, etc. I want to make sure we're working on a story that both of us enjoy!
WRITING
I don't measure writing quality in post length. How much I write depends on who I'm writing with and what we're writing. Just as an example, I've got one roleplay where paragraphs per post vary between one and thirty, and one where they vary between five and fifteen. I think it's most important that we're on the same page about what we're writing and how, and with that I can be quite flexible and try to adapt to what you prefer. Lazy-lit, novella, matching length, varying length, whatever. Just let me know!
Personally, I like to write quite a lot when introducing characters or building depth to them, but for hectic scenes and dialogue I'll rather keep posts more interactive by writing a little at a time. I feel that this way the characters will react to one another more naturally and I don't feel like I'm looking at a shopping list when writing a response. If we're both online, we can even be collaborating on a shared document at the same time to write a coherent scene, if that's something you'd like to try out.
I've shoved in a writing sample in the spoiler in the bottom of this thread c:
PREFERENCES
Roleplaying over PMs or Google Docs (or anything other than a thread lol)
OOC chatting in Discord
NO-GOS AND PET PEEVES
Unnecessary epithets
Purple prose
Context: A starter post, sci-fi setting. A mercenary has gotten a new gig and enters a shady snake-infested mine in a desert planet.
Over the mine rested the Blankets of Aranhao: a seemingly endless sea of sand dunes overseen by the unyielding desert wind, hot in the day, cold in the night. A passerby might have looked at it and mistaken it as lifeless, but the locals knew better: like an insatiable artist the wind dissolved the dunes it had built and sculpted new ones. Through this process the blankets of sand moved, swallowing year by year more of Aranhao’s surface, cuddling it asleep. Hence the name of the desert.
But it wasn’t the desert that was of his concern. It was what was underneath: a honeypot of minerals. This, of course, meant a mine. And a mine meant work for people like him. Work like this:
Muscle for hire needed. Rawad Mine, Aranhao. Contact for more information. Reward 500 credits + expenses.
It was a good offer. Not too good. That was most important; he rather got payed too little than not at all, and with an offer too good the risk for the latter crept up. On site he always negotiated. Not for credits but for a feel of who was offering them. In this trade one was honed to look for red lights. How else? If one wasn’t, he was not in the trade for long.
One slip up was all it took.
And one slip up took him into the darkness of Rawad Mine: treading mud, dodging bones. It seemed to him that whoever came there before him had done the very opposite: dodged mud, trodden bones. Out of conviction he had no such liberty. He watched his step, thinking to himself: life is sacred, death is sacred. A rare philosophy for someone who offered both for hire to the highest bidder.
It dawned on him no sooner or later what he’d walked into. How many hundreds, thousands credits’ worth of lives had marched into this tunnel? For an hour he kept count. But the deeper he walked the harder it became, the more pieces the bodies turned into and the less there was left of what to count. Before him could have been one mercenary in ten places or ten mercenaries in one. He started counting other things. The marks on the bodies, the time between the meals. The prints on the mud. The droppings.
There were some: slimy, watery, mixed in with the mud. Of a dark color in creamy white gunk. Another perk of the trade: knowing what would kill you by looking at its shit. This shit in particular had in it teeth and bones.
A serpent, he supposed. Or rather: serpents, plural. Not all marks matched in size. No matter: he’d prepared for reptilians. What else lived there, under the Blankets of Aranhao?
To be fair, he was prepared for a lot of things. Wrapped around his body were two layers of fabric underneath a waterproof jacket and a tactical vest. On the vest—what was not on the vest? A handgun with freshly filled magazines, a heavy bushcraft knife, an alcohol spray and a gas bottle with a tube leading onto his back.
There, on his back, a rucksack, and in the rucksack: a five-liter hydration pack with a tube, a first aid kit, a tool kit, some rope, a blanket. Even a bottle of sunscreen waiting for him to come back onto the surface. If he got hungry, he could indulge in half a kilo of dried meat, a dozen energy bars and four meal replacement nutrition drinks.
Most importantly, though—returning to the gas bottle on the pocket of his vest—the tube lead from it onto a half-a-meter beauty tied over the rucksack like a sleeping bag.
What would be better company in a snake-infested mine than a flamethrower?
The slip up?
He huffed. It wasn’t his—it was the manager’s. The grave slip up of mistaking him for a free of charge pet meal.
He walked on. Picked up clues. Through his night goggles he followed a path of fresh-looking, heavy footprints, the very same that had so shamelessly stumped over the dead bodies lying closer to the shaft. He assumed the mercenary before him was a big, heavy fella. Had he been eaten already? The foot prints did not look too old. If so, it must not have been long ago.
When the path came to a fork his eyes were drawn to a small cylinder on the ground. He squatted next to it, picked it up. A can of Triple-C, fresh smell. Time to make a call.
He went for the tunnel without a fresh trace and walked until it welcomed him with a growl: low and crude, echoing from the soil below his feet and the walls arching around him. From his back he grabbed the flamethrower, and now holding it ready to fire—literally—he marched onward.
Between his spot there and the dead end of the tunnel, a dozen snakelets of varying sizes—some twice his height, others but half a meter—found their end in three thousand degrees. Once the tunnel was emptied he wiped sweat off his face and polished the lenses of his vapor-covered goggles. Then, he returned to the fork and proceeded to the tunnel next to it—the one marked with an empty can of Triple-C.
And apparently: a peculiar-looking baseball bat with spikes, some crushed snake skulls, an arm. Yes, an arm. A very rude arm: flipping him off. He set aside the flamethrower to pick it up, as heavy as it was, and inspected it closer, ran his fingers down its cool surface.
Mesmerized, he lifted off the lenses of his night goggles and instead shifted on a bright light. He wanted to study this beauty not through color-distorting goggles but on the naked eye.
And what a beauty it was! Bulky, sturdy, of a solid metal shell, and stuck in an offensive gesture to read the riot act to whoever found it, but a beauty nonetheless. Its owner must have been quite a hulk. Was it all that was left of them? A shame. But, Iro was a practical man: he could sell it for more than he was offered for the gig.
It was a good time for a lunch break, he decided. He clicked open the ties around his waist—those keeping the rucksack tight in its place—and stripped off the gear he was carrying. Even the night goggles he put down from his head to let his skin breathe, trusting the flashlight on its side to aid his vision in the pitch black of the mine. From his bag he dug up the blanket and lay it on the ground before him. Sat on it comfortably, crossed his legs, drank some water and snacked on an energy bar.
Around him the tunnel was quiet. No more roaring. Perhaps the flame show earlier had scared the beasts into silence. For a while, at least. A while was all he needed.
He cleaned the arm of dirt and—with the tool kit set beside him—began to study it more thoroughly.
When he was eighteen, he was supposed to become an engineer. People were supposed to become a lot of things when they were eighteen, weren’t they? He was accepted to a program, too. But it was before the war. After the war? No more program to attend to.
Now, playing with the tools, he fiddled with the arm until it stopped giving him the finger. Now if only it had been the last of its fingers. He squinted his eyes at the Y’s of its screws, and they stared back at him. Mocking him.
He rolled his eyes and groaned. Who the hell used tri-wings in 12033?
Then, the journey continued. Now a bit more sluggish than before—the extra weight of a tungsten arm tied onto the rucksack—but nonetheless, it continued. He walked past more dead snakelets, a half-eaten bloodied sneaker, a brightly colored cap and a comically poorly equipped backpack, each of them earning a frown deeper—and more judgemental—than the one before.
At last he arrived at the culprit. Or on it: climbing up a pile of stone he looked down and spotted a human-like shape on the ground, half buried underneath the collapsed structure. The shape, he noticed, was missing an arm.
He lifted the lenses from his eyes and turned on the flashlight. He saw the body better now. Why was it so small? Could it really be the one leaving behind it footprints so deep—and an arm that agonized his back to carry?
More importantly: was it alive?
Iro cleared his voice. Best to ask it.
“Need a hand?”
Damn it. The arm on his back felt even heavier.
Last edited:
