Past couple days I've been back on a Chaos kick. In case no one remembers or I never told you, there's this bit I had going forever ago called the Blacktop Kids that took place in a world where chaos was an actual physical substance. Basically it just fucks around for the hell of it, altering people with dramatic transformations, sweeping across countries in giant "storms", hanging around in puddles and oceans, and some people, "mediums" are given the power to manipulate chaos--and thus ANYTHING EVER--how they choose, according to what chaos wants them to do(or doesn't care.)
The whole idea behind chaos is that people just can't pin it down. They don't know whether it is sentient or is a collection of sentient consciousnesses, or completely mindless in its random actions, or if it has an agenda or just genuinely wants to fuck around because it can.
You can probably skip this next part, it's ADHD rambling
"Your Favourite Drug" by Porcelain and the Tramps is not a bad song. Ooooh, "Fuck Like A Star." That sounds Julian-esque, even if he's not a rockstar anymore. Let's check that one out.
Yeah that was an interesting beginning of the song, interesting in the sense it's rather in poor taste and I'd skip over it if I added this song to my collection. Censored or not.
Where was I. Oh yeah, why is some chick losing weight in a video in the related videos list for this band? I have news for you--THE VAST MAJORITY OF AMERICA IS OBSESSED WITH LOSING WEIGHT. NO ONE FINDS IT SPECIAL THAT YOU MADE A VIDEO ABOUT IT.
Anyway.
Oh for--can this woman not just leave me alone for half an hour?
...the hell is even going on in this. This is not a time lapse of her losing weight, which is what I was expecting. She's fucking jiggling her thighs and ass. Get off the internet, there's enough of this pointless shit around already.
"King of the World" by the same band is a good one.
Yeah. Hello my name is ADHD, I'll be your pilot for today. If we suddenly careen off-route don't be alarmed, it's totally normal. Expect extreme turbulence and random detours.
Okay seriously it is impossible to resolve a conversation with this woman. Just. Let it. Go. When someone takes over five minutes to respond to you, THEY ARE BUSY OR JUST DON'T WANT TO TALK. EITHER WAY. TAKE THE HINT.
End ADHD rambling--SERIOUSLY? WAY TO NOT TAKE THE HINT. ALL I SAID WAS HAHA THANKS, HOW ARE YOU STILL--YOU ARE BEATING A DEAD HORSE. IT'S BEYOND DEAD. IT'S FUCKING BONES AND MAGGOTS. JUST BURY IT ALREADY.
Anyway. There is a slightly more certain idea around that chaos, regardless of whether it's sentient or not, will actually LIKE certain people. People it deems interesting or useful, people that can utilize its properties in ways that entertain it.
The thing about chaos is that it seems to just be pretty damn infinite and its sense of humour is similar to that of a small, easily amused child and a schizophrenic serial killer. Mediums that are pretty close to it will describe it as being the "ultimate innocence"--it has no grasp of right and wrong or humanity. If its "entertainment" hurts people, it doesn't understand that that's bad or anything. Chaos, in essence, just wants to have a good time, regardless of everything and everyone else ever.
The thing about Chaos is that it will experiment. You know evolution? It's fun stuff. Now imagine evolution on acid with a side of opiates and several bottles of whiskey--you know, that stage of drunk where the craziest shit seems like total genius?
The outcome of that sort of mindset is often what happens to humans that are exposed to chaos that AREN'T meant to be mediums. Mediums can channel and manipulate chaos without being altered, and they CAN alter themselves IF they want and HOW they want. Others, aptly named the "Altered", have no control over their transformations and it will always be random every time.
Hence one of my favourites: I'm calling him Brett at the moment, but eh(makes me think of a frat boy.) You know centaurs? Body of a man on a body of a horse, connected at the torso and neck? He's like that. Except instead of him being a horse from the waist down, he's MORE HUMAN. His lower body is a second human body, attacked at the neck, inhumanly large and proportioned to function on hands and feet. It's kind of hard to describe and I don't know why I'm bothering, I have a sketch I'm going to post with this.
Buckle in folks, looks like we've got some ADHD turbulence up ahead.
Oh look at that another journal baww from a teenager about how much her life sucks and her friend's life sucks. OH NO HE SAID HE'S GOING TO KILL HIMSELF. 'Scuse me for being a dick but I've heard that too many times as an attention whore-out to believe it if I can't judge the person's suicidalness for myself.
Plus I like how she writes GUYS HELP MY FRIEND IS GOING TO KILL HIMSELF and then immediately after I'M NEVER GOING TO FIND TRUE LOVE BECAUSE LIFE HATES ME.
Way to subtlely(haha not really at all)suddenly make a potentially tragic issue about YOU. I mean she gave no indication she had feelings for him like that, so I can really only assume she used another person's serious issue to get you to read on about her own serious insecurities? Good job.
Well that was a bit shakey, but things seem to have calmed down now.
ANYWAY. This thing I've had kicking around in my brainspace. It involves Brett and others like him, though he's not the main--the completely normal human friend that keeps them all sane through their crazy weird shit is the main character.
It's got two possible plots, which may or may not mesh together depending on how well I can work them and whether I can decided or not between them. One is just a vague story beginning and the other is something I may just categorize under Backstory and formulate a real plot for. But if that's the case, why NOT just mesh them? Well the first takes place in a totally different time period of the world, after chaos has brought on an apocalypse jsut to see what would happen. The other happens in the very beginning days of chaos, when Altered are still freaky shit and are still a minority.
The first is after-backstory, after the human kid who got mixed up in a small gang of Altered kids on the run from haters is all growed up and they're all growed up and(this being the post-apocalypse) she's living on her own in a remote part of the country hidden by what's left of the Rocky Mountains. Someone of the freaks' group(now scattered across the country) puts the word out to her that a few
of them have banded together on the east coast to start trying to help rebuild society. Since she's in the far west, they want her to start out across the country and hit up the rest of their scattered members on the way to ask them to come help.
Disregard of HER ability to help is why she finally ditched them like two years before the apocalypse. In the earlier days(this being when the Altered ARE somewhat commonplace)she was stuck in a walled city, separated from her family with no idea what city THEY were in, after the world is convinced it's developed technology capable of sealing out chaos. The walled cities were built for people to gradually move into in an orderly fashion, but chaos was curious about what would happen if people panicked, so it dropped a bigass piece of itself in the middle of America. The government rushed people into underground bunkers, and in the confusion thousands were separated from the loved ones, and when they came out the government assigned them cities based on age groups and level of contamination of chaos(they were still trying to "cure" Altered back then, though only the lesser altered were being considered for treatment. People like Brett had no shot in hell at any help like that.)
So there was basically a city of mostly kids with one adult supervisor to about every ten kids to keep things running. The cities were meant to be self-sufficient to avoid contact with the outside world as much as possible to lower chances of chaos contamination.
After about year of trying and trying and trying to get in touch with her parents and people in charge to help her find them, the main character, Sage, got pissed. Like to the point she just wasn't going to take it anymore.
The cities were built to keep stuff OUT, not keep people IN, because who would WANT to leave? Oh sure, there were curfews and everything, but just a year after the huge scare things still aren't totally organized and airtight. It wasn't easy for Sage to get out, but she did it with the help of an Altered--a guy called Jace, who actually looked totally normal except for his eyes, which supposedly made people insane if they looked into them for too long(they were supposedly the colour of chaos itself or something idk.) Jace's eyes let him see chaos THROUGH things, basically X-ray vision especially tuned to pick up chaos, but they also saw whatever chaos touched, or just whatever chaos felt like letting him see at the moment. Chaos apparently was curious about what would happen if Sage escaped, so Jace was able to see their escape route without even planning it.
Sage DID have something of a plan, though. She knew there were still plenty of Altered outside the cities and because of Jace's abilities, he could pick them out via "trails" of chaos they left behind them. Together they track down Brett, who's pretty much violently reclusive at this point because even the Altered don't like him--his lower half, somehow human and yet weirdly distorted, really freaks even THEM out.
Violently reclusive is when someone will shoot you for being on their property but doesn't put up signs warning you that they will shoot you. Or even showing you were their property begins.
Brett's pretty much that, but he doesn't have a gun or anything. For the most part he just avoids people when he sees them, but Jace and Sage are actually tracking him, and when they corner him in his little hidey hole(an abandoned mall, specifically the basement)he attacks them.
Jace can do some shit with his eyes, like he can freeze people like a snake can freeze its prey. So he tries that but for whatever reason it doesn't work on Brett(possibly doesn't affect Altered as much as humans) and Brett, assuming(reasonably enough) that Sage is also Altered, he goes after her after he's pinned Jace. Jace manages to yell out that Sage is only human, though, before Brett actually kills her.
Brett feels pretty bad about what he DOES to her though, which is throw her a dozen feet where she slammed into a concrete wall and snapped a rib with enough force that it busted out of her skin. And Jace manages to explain they want him to help them find their families--Jace was also separated, hence his motivation for helping Sage.
Brett takes them to another Altered, a strange guy, also a kid, who's kind of indescribable at the moment cause my attention span for this is running out. Basically he's glowy, yellowish, semi-transparent, and has something like a jellyfish for hair whose tentacles float on their own(doesn't sting you though, totally harmless.) He's good at knitting skin back together, which makes him very useful, which means a lot of Altered know about him and are in contact with him(his alteration actually makes him very pretty to look at, like those light-up jellyfish, and Sage crushes a little on him, though it doesn't go anywhere.) Through him, Jace and Sage gather a group of other people--kids like them--who want to find their families.
Anyway, they do that, and then years later they've dispersed and whatnot and that's when that plot starts.
The other plot was the group of the freak kids had already gathered together, and then when a couple of them got caught stealing clothes in a mall and were surrounded by mall cops, with Chaos Response on the way to lock them up, they randomly grabbed Sage out of the onlookers and held her hostage until they got out and away to their hideout at the time.
Sage at the time is convinced like most people that Altered totally hate humans(though it's mostly in reciprocation to humans hating on THEM first) so, convinced they're going to kill her or leave her in their cave and let her starve or something she offers to trade her knowledge of uncommon trails in the surrounding woods to help them get out of the area.
However, during their journey through the woods they run into a Chaos storm, which severely distorts time and reality around them, transporting them to they don't know where--another part of the world, or another WORLD altogether. There's monsters and everything. During this time Sage realizes they don't really hate her, they're just a bunch of scared, desperate, lonely kids. So when they get out, she offers to stick with them and help them--like go in stores and buy clothes and fast food places and buy food, which she can get away with cause she's just a normal human kid and all.
She does this for a couple years until after some heroics people are liking this ragtag band of monster kids. The kids are able to settle down and are left alone after they save the son of the country's leading presidential candidate from kidnappers. She's not elected, but she still has a lot of pull and people leave them alone.
Then Sage starts to realize she's really not needed anymore, and because the kids get busy with more heroics, heroics she can't help with, she gets pretty much left at "home" all the time and when they get back they're exhausted and have no time to be kids. So she's feeling neglected and all and no one has time for her anymore.
So Sage nuts up and just leaves. She goes home to South Carolina, finishes highschool, gets into college, gets out with a writing degree and joins a New York City newspaper to write in the defense of Altered.(She emailed her parents regularly during the two years she spent with the Altered kids, and after they started putting the updates on a blog when people found out about Sage and the kids, Sage took over the blog herself to try and give people the facts about the Altered kids and her relationship with them.)
Sage also helps co-found some efforts for Altered kids and people in general, and donates a good chunk of her yearly salary to them. She's actually pretty detached from her old friends and doesn't talk to them much--they feel really bad about neglecting her to the point she left, but they also know it's for the best, and they're still pretty busy as they become adults and people start wanting more responsibilities out of them. Like even though these Altered kids(now adults) can't get jobs, they're still living in a city sort of working as on-call heroes to deal with the more violent Altereds, so people expect them to pay taxes, even though they have to spend the bounties they bring in on Altereds entirely on food and clothing for themselves. They also don't get healthcare or any sort of insurance or anything from the government since they aren't considered human or have human rights.
But like I said. Taxes and whatnot. Which they have no way of actually paying, since the government doesn't recognize them as citizens or anything.
So it's complicated.
Anyway. I feel like the first one has more potential for plot right now, and I don't know if Backstory one does. I need to think on it some more but now it's finally out of my head I can think about other stuff.
SO I HAD THIS OTHER IDEA after I wrote all this where the world is chaotic(hahaha) and the country is sort of falling apart. It's at the stage where central government is all but dissolved, martial law is imposed, and while big cities live in tension with soldiers in the street, smaller towns have to deal with vandalizing, bandits, gangs, etc.
During this time a larger town sets up a sort of refugee camp for people fleeing smaller towns where order has completely dissolved. This camp also takes in Altered, less to help them than because helping them means they may stay and help back--and the town is kept safe largely by reputation of them being there. That reputation is not unfounded, though, which any gangs that attack will soon find out.
Sage is in college and wants to get back in to the city to see her family. But she's attacked on the road by a gang while in the country and they drag her out of her car. She manages to escape and run into the woods nearby. A gunshot clips her side and she barely makes it to the town, which her family used to visit from the city when she was young.
When she makes it to the town she finds out the city is in total lockdown and she can't get in. Sage decides to stay in the town and help out in the refugee camp until she can find a way to get to her family.
While there she ends up befriending the gang of Altered kids who stick around to help keep the town safe.
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