3. The Story Takes Shape

Picking up from last time... The shape of this world starts to take form.

A young character - a young female character! - Will be rejected by her people for something that wasn't her fault. She will be the object of hate, yet she will still need to protect them. She'll need to be a symbol that is opposite of how everyone sees her. So let's give her something to deflect. A Parrying dagger? Should other characters have these as well? Should they all be exactly the same in a single cohesive unit or will this be a stand alone role?

She has to have a team right? I mean if it's going to be realistic it can't just be her against the whole world right? So I gotta give her a team - a mentor even?

Ok... So she's got a team - ooooh what if they all hate her too? That would be an interesting dynamic. She should probably wield a shield right? But what if I gave the parrying dagger to someone else? Hmmm. I'll revisit that later.

Well since she'll be using a shield, she probably needs a sword. What kind of sword?

*furiously researches medieval/Victorian style swordsmanship for a week*

Saber it is! Oh! And what if I mixed things up a little bit. There are three parts of a sword (ok there are a lot more, but let's keep it clean shall we): The blade, the guard, and the pommel.

The blade is the stabby part, the guard is the blocky part, and the pommel is the... dazzling end piece? Figure it out later... Later...

Let's get it organized shall we! What if each team member had a very specific role? The stabby girl does the stabbing, the guarding girl does the guarding, and the pommel girl - I guess hangs out in the back... away from the fight... seeing everything unfold! Because she can be the Strategist! Sweet!

Let's call them what they are: Blades, Guards, and Pommels!

The basics of a squad has been formed. But like, not every squad is the same right? What if there were two blades, or no Guard, or all Pommels? Can that even work? Well, I need something to bind all the roles together. And it doesn't make sense that as soon as you're on a squad, you're a top level fighter right? So we gotta make different ranks that come with lots of training.

*Lightbulb flash of inspiration from my furious week of medieval/Victorian era sword fighting study* *pretend to know what I'm talking about*

Squires - stooges that carried around the golf bags of the big cats in town.

Companions-at-arms - Welcome to training maggot. Strap on this sword and swing it real good.

Knights - I'm gonna beat you up cause I'm so great.

But that sounds too flat. Too cliché. Isn't there something else. Something that shows that they are a master... with the sword... like a master of swords....

Swordmasters!

The raw brilliance just keeps on rolling in.

But will they just be normal warriors? What will make them special? How will they fight the Beasts? That's when the idea from the "Death Well" jumped to mind. What if the characters bound themselves to some energy source that gave them access to some immense power, but at a great cost? Something so real, so tangible, that characters will skirt death not just from fighting the antagonists or the beasts or each other. But rather could encounter death by the very power they wield?

Week after week, the pieces continued to fall in place. Creating the world itself was actually the easy part. Building a plot and a believable story was the real challenge.

Why would my character be hated? How could the antagonist be believable and not just "big bad guy sitting in a dark room on his evil throne"?

It took probably 4 months of just bouncing ideas off of my wife for me to finally get a rough idea of where the story was going to go.

So, I've got my world, my characters (mostly), my magic system (MOSTLY!) and a direction.

Now I just gotta put it all onto paper.