OverconfidentMagi
Laugh Like You've Won Always
The story, or your piece of it, begins with your character falling, in free fall away from a point of white light shining alone in a pitch black sky. After a terribly long time your fall comes to a surprisingly gentle end with you lying on a pale white disk. Welcome to the Dark City, is what a welcoming party might say to you, if one existed. But no, you're alone. You're wearing a white robe, and lying beside you on the slab is a simple stone dagger. You don't remember anything, not even if you have a name. It's the same story as every other lost soul that appeared exactly where you are now.
- still interested?
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If there is a benefit to having no memories, it's that you don't know just how odd of a place it is you've found yourself in. The Dark City, often just called the City by it inhabitants as there is no other city, has no sky. The walls of the city just stretch up and up and up forever forming a perfect dome over the city. The only outside light streams down from the point of light you and every other person here fell from, and all that light illuminates in the white disk below where the new arrivals land. That's not to say there's no light in the city. High up above the city, but still far below that singular opening, sits a fiery sphere, a tiny star burning brightly in miniature to provide light for all of the city's many inhabitants. Few within the city know quite how it works, just that they have the Red King to thank for their reliable-enough light source. It moves in a wide circular orbit around the center of the city, more or less constant enough for the city's inhabitants to use its position to tell time. The Red King isn't perfect, and the sun occasionally wobbles off track a bit when he isn't paying attention, and other times it'll go out completely when he's distracted by something else, but it's the best they've got, so it works good enough.
A Basic Map of Each King's District in the City (Red, Green, Yellow, Orange, and Black)
The Dark City is where this story takes place. It is a vast city, stretching for miles and miles in every direction, full of simple stone buildings. Most of these buildings are as simple and basic as a building can be and still be called a building; four walls, a rectangular hole for a door, empty squares for windows, bare stairs up to the next floor if there is one, which for the most part there isn't. The walls and ground of the city is indestructible, at least by anything its inhabitants have tried so far, which amounts to an impressively lengthy list of increasingly odd ways of digging through a material. At first glance the buildings appear to be made of the same material, but it turns out they're actually made of something much weaker. It's surprisingly easy to break apart the structures within the city, and people do so quite often. The real surprising thing is how the buildings magically repair themselves the second no one's looking.
The Dark City is far from a safe place. You don't arrive with a weapon in hand for no reason. Everyone in the city seems to be trying to kill everyone else. Murder is treated like a sport, and new arrivals are the bottom of the food chain. They're the minnows, who are eaten by smaller predator fish, who are in turn eaten by larger and larger fish, ending with the kings, sharks who can't be bothered with minnows. If you want to live long you join a family. No one in the city is related of course, family is just one of the many words with no equivalent within the Dark City, so it's been repurposed to something close enough. Family is just a term for people who protect one another and don't try to kill each other. There's countless small families within the city, and most of the kings have a family they protect as well. Being a member of a king's family is almost a guarantee of safety.
So as you can see, I've prepared the whole world and everything in it, up until the moment your character falls into the story. Your role? Why, you're the main character of course. You're just another lost soul dropped into the city, same as all of the countless others before. This story falls into three main categories: action, survival, mystery. Action is, ironically, the most boring. It's a necessity for the second one to work. Survival. You're character is going to try and survive, but I can guarantee it won't be enough. They will die. And when that happens you'll make a new character and try again. Now no progress at all would be made if every time you died you started at stage 0, so suffice it to say each new character is less its own story and more simply a next chapter of one ongoing story. It'll make more sense when it happens I assure you. Third is Mystery. Well, that's for you and your characters. I already know the story. It's your role to figure out the different mysteries of the Dark City. Even across many characters and lives I doubt you'll solve every mystery I've hidden around, but it only takes so many before things start to pull you towards the main mystery that is the Dark City itself.
So as for what you'd be doing in this story, it'll be a lot of running and fighting, possibly some killing, and other general survive day one in the Dark City. The biggest decision your character makes right away in the story is which direction to wander in once they step off the arrival platform. Every direction, even within the same section's borders, starts a different story, and even then your character is free to make decisions that can throw everything off one track to fall into a different one.
As for my expectations and rules and whatnot, I'm looking for someone capable of writing high-quality posts of course, but more than that I'm looking for someone who will be interested in the story enough to continue even after their precious characters are brutalized by its setting. I've had a problem of people getting discouraged and losing interest because their first few characters die quickly. I don't want that. I want someone who treats each new life s a chance to do better, get further, learn more, to try and overcome or avoid their past failures that led to their character's death. As for post length... I couldn't care less. So long as you write enough to convey what you wish to, that's all I need. That said, there's really no excuse for one-liners. Even with very little to work with a short paragraph really isn't that hard to put together. Hmm... what else is there? Oh right. Violence. It will happen. If you wish to censor it in your posts that is fine, but I will not. Unless specifically asked not to describe something, expect a certain level of description covering violence and at least mild gore if it comes to that. Swearing is the same. You're free to censor it in your writing if you want, but I will not. Sex would follow the same pattern, but to comply with site rules anything too explicit please do a fade to black.
I've run this before as a group RP, so I've got plenty of more info about the setting and a lot of the existing inhabitants of the city fully fleshed out. If you have any questions you want to ask, please do ask them before saying you want to do this. I'd much rather take the time to make sure you know what you're joining now instead of surprising you later. Whoever decides to join me in this, know I look forward to working with you to shape your story within this world I've prepared for you.
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