Rules: Because we have to have some operating principles
- Neither the protagonist or the antagonist can die (at least until the very end – we’ll see
- Have fun! Add more sci-fi elements, or not.
- We’ll have a sign up sheet and try to keep the sections no more than 2 weeks apart
- 1000-2000 words per post
- I’ll write the ending (or designate someone else to do that)
- When you create a character, please add them to our list with a brief description of them and their role, plus the date of introduction
- Same as 6 for plot. That’s just so we can keep track of the story
- You cannot break the time travel constraints. No kidnapping of children who became famous or ran armies (ex. Hitler).
Genre: Speculative adventure with time travel
Story type: Quest, loosely based upon the Mythic Tarot, in which the “fool,” i. e. the protagonist, goes through a series of tests, both internal and external, in order to grow and become more of a defined and wise individual. Some of these tests could include (but this is up to the writers):
- gaining and losing a lot of money
- being imprisoned
- fighting battles
- going into the underworld
- falling in love and losing the loved one
- becoming king/queen/some other type of ruler and having to learn to rule wisely
- being betrayed
- discovering the loved one is not who you think they are
Some of the stages of growth could be:
- starting out innocent
- learning to rely upon others, or a guide/mentor
- breaking loose from parents – becoming oneself somewhat – rebellion
- machoism
- realization that being macho doesn’t work
- going deep inside, perhaps becoming a hermit
- significant and painful realization that the old self must go and a new self be reborn, perhaps
- becoming more just
- learning some inner peace and harmony
- gaining a different type of strength than pure machoism
Theme: interpersonal growth through hardship and adventures
Characters-
Our protagonist is Melina Penrose, a fifteen-year-old girl at the start of our adventure. Melina is the brilliant child of a physicist father and psychologist mother. Melina means honey. Melina may be sweet (and innocent to start), but she is persistent. Melina is 5’6″ and slender, not the sort to take on evil beings, except that she’s studied mixed martial arts. She has curly light brown hair, hazel eyes, and wears thick black-rimmed glasses. Sort of a nondescript pretty face, although intelligence and kindness shines out of her eyes.
Our antagonist is Daeva, a woman from the future who wants to take over the world (Daeva means evil spirit). Her father was deposed and murdered in a coup. Daeva resents this, and wishes to take back their crown. She has tried recruiting adults, but they always betray her. So now she wants children to raise herself, children who will remember no other life. But she must be careful not to upset those who live in her own time by taking their children, so she obtains a time/space machine, studies history, and goes for children with incredible promise who never affected history in any appreciable manner. She has piercing dark brown eyes, thick straight long black hair, and beautiful brown skin. 5’10” and well-built. She’s thirty-nine.
Tinsley – Daeva’s brother. He’s a techie sort. He isn’t interested in leading the troops, or going into battle, but he helps Daeva any way he can. He’s built like their mother – slender, blond, and only 5’8″.
Karen Penrose – Melina’s mother, a psychologist and a university professor. Thick, wavy, blond hair, thin physique. 35 when Melina is born.
Larry Penrose – Melina’s father. He’s a physicist at NASA, working on warp-drive travel through space.
Zoltran – Daeva’s father – ruler of earth before being deposed
Jeffrey Jamison – Two years old at the time of abduction. Straight black hair, round, large brown eyes.
Eran Jamison – Jeffrey’s four-year old sister. Straight black hair, almond-shaped brown eyes.
Mr. & Mrs. Jamison – Astronomers who work with Melina’s father. Mrs. Jamison is black, Mr. Jamison is part Chinese, part Irish. Both have black hair and brown eyes.
Camille Winton- the president’s daughter who is abducted. Curly blond hair, blue eyes.
Bruna – Daeva and Tinsley’s faithful nanny
Alma – caregiver and educator who helps raise Daeva’s abductees
Setting – varied –
Melina is born in 2045.
Daeva is born in 2160, when the world is very different and space and time travel is a reality. Also people live to be 250 on average.
Gardotion-56: the planet where Daeva and her family and escorts went. Daeva and Tinsley grew up here. It’s the 56th planet named after Frank Gardotion, who discovered 97 planets with climates, oceans and gravity similar to earth in latter part of the 21st century. Gardotion-56 is further from its sun than earth is from its sun, and has three moons, each 1/3 rd the size of earth’s moon. When explorers arrived they found single-celled life in the oceans, both oxygen-producing and oxygen-using, but nothing else. They brought plants and animals from Earth. Despite the planet’s relatively mild climate, most humans have preferred planets closer to earth, and Gardotion-56 has few inhabitants, all of whom are sympathetic to Daeva and her family.
Time travel constraints: Daeva may be evil, but even she knows that she can’t do anything to upset the established order and prevent her own birth. She can thus only take children who will perhaps be missed, but who would not have done anything important.
Sci-fi elements:
In 2060 – computers and cell phones have merged into one device, called a Smartscroll, which is a very thin sheet which rolls up into the size of a pencil.
Time machines – Daeva has two machines. The smaller one is just big enough for her and one child. It’s spherical at the front, has windows, and has a conical tail with three perpendicular rings around it and a base which comes down for landing.. Painted white. It’s small enough to fit inside a room. The bigger one is black, can hold ten people, and is shaped the same as the small one. About 20′ in diameter, she uses it in war zones and other places where size is not such a big issue.
Plot synopsis:
15 year old Melina is baby-sitting one night when her youngest charge, a two-year old boy, disappears. Melina swears up and down that, when she heard the child scream, she ran into his room and saw him in the arms of a woman sitting in a machine and then they disappeared. No one, except her father, believes her, but eight years later the three-year-old daughter of the first female president of the United States vanishes, right out of the White House, and the woman babysitting her also claims she saw the woman in the machine. By now, Melina is a physics graduate student, and she is convinced the machine is for time/space travel. Daeva, meanwhile, is building her army, capturing young children of special promise and bringing them into the future to turn them into her faithful soldiers. What follows is a romp through time and space as Melina decides she must find the abductor and both clear her name from the suspicion which still hangs over her head, free these children, and gain the large reward which the president has promised to anyone who can return her beloved Camille safe to her arms.