I feel compelled to post something while I'm working on the thing I'm going to have ready on Sunday.
This was just a random reply I made to a forum topic, but y'know if you feel the need to judge my write skills based off it then go ahead and have fun with that.
The context is, the world the forum discusses and theorizes about has a race which is called Believers. They're wandering, completely undetectable spirits which possess books and take on the physical traits and personality of the character featured in that book. The main difference between Believers and ordinary people are that Believers lack the ability of self-awareness, and they are unable to hold the belief that they themselves are a spirit that has taken the form of a book character.
The only way to truly find out that someone is a Believer is to kill them, expelling the spirit and leaving behind the very book that was inhabited. Flip to the last pages and it'll show the events leading up to the death of the character, causing an end to their story.
When it was introduced I thought it was pretty cool, because of how it could dramatically affect characters and the adventures they were involved in. It's possible that when your best friend fell to wounds or old age, they would turn into a book and you'd realize "holy crap my best bud was a book!?!?" There are other scenarios as well but this is the only one I can think of at the moment.
This story represents a rough idea of something that could possibly happen in a world with Believers, just so I could possibly gather some thoughts from other forumers and see how interesting the story seemed. Most likely it would probably be something one of my characters would tell in a roleplay.
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Can you imagine living in a world where you were the only ordinary person in existence and everyone else in the world was suddenly replaced by a Believer one day? Just like, your old man passes and at his funeral all you see in the coffin is a book. When you look on the news every day you see a book in every crime scene (which, by the way, makes crime scenes much harder to analyse).
One day you go to the cemetery, which is no longer a cemetery but actually a huge library full of biographies about random people's lives. But what happened to the actual bodies of your ancestors?
As your life goes by, one by one your friends and family die while you grow older and not really that much wiser. And they all turn into those damn books. Every time. You thought your family was safe from this crap? Guess again!
Finally, you reach the point you know there's no recovering from. You're on your deathbed, the and your living relatives and friends are at your side. The doctor is telling you about how it's all going to be okay and how they'll preserve your memories in the library after you close your eyes. But while all this is happening, the words are echoing in your thoughts, which become overt speech and frantic eye movements as your friends watch in horror. I'm not a book. I'm not a book. I'M NOT A BOOK, GOD DAMN IT, I'M NOT A _ING BOOK!
After that, just think about what would happen when you died. The Believers would look at your corpse, your very real corpse, and they'd see you as an anomaly of some sort, perhaps a rare specimen. They'd have to relearn how to preserve your corpse, but they'd probably throw you in some museum or government testing lab or something, who knows?
Alright, I'm finished casting Storyteller. What's the easiest way to burn down that library over there? |