In Darkness

I’m sure at least one person will be surprised that I still have this text. It’s a result of a rare collaborative effort, this one combining the talents of myself and a name you might be familiar with if you’re a regular visitor at the Asylum Walls.

At its most basic level, it’s the story of a refugee from another dimension.

The previous sentence is so much of an understatement that if there was a machine that could measure understatements, it would be in smoking fragments by now. The sheer SCOPE of this project was something that transcends anything you’ve seen any amateurs and MOST professionals even think about. A Game. A series of short stories. Artwork. A novel. Sequels to all of the above. Repeat until somebody notices and makes us rich. I think that was the plan, anyway. Oddly enough, the mega-project was never officially abandoned, and the fantasy world upon which it was based (which does not appear in this fragment, btw) is still under development to this day… many, many years later.

But let’s leave the big picture alone and zoom in on this tiny part of it. What follows is the first chapter-and-a-half of a serial action/adventure that I was going to write. It would have been a monster hit. I still have the complete twelve-chapter outline for what would have certainly turned into a novel-length tale. The characters (except one) and plot are my work. The concepts and backstory are collaborative efforts. I can’t remember why this particular aspect of the project was abandoned… probably one of the usual reasons.

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The cool thing about Flash is that you can hide a lot of hidden buttons and links to create some nice Easter Eggs. I can’t remember if I ever posted the links to these two hidden pages on the BoDP website, but there are links to both of them in the existing BoDP stories:

The Book of Dark Places
The Maidens.

Both items have some hidden functionality of their own. One is fairly obvious, the other will take some head-scratching and/or luck.

By now, you’ve probably figured out that I have a LOT of unfinished work sitting around. How’d you guess? Well, you’ve seen absolutely NOTHING. Trust me… what I’ve posted so far isn’t even a quarter of my postable archives. By “postable” I mean stories that have left the planning stages and that I actually started to write. Maybe a paragraph. Maybe a chapter. Maybe half a damned novel. I’ve boasted a few times to a few different people that I’ve got plot outlines and character studies for a good half-dozen novels just sitting around on my hard drive. The only thing left to do was to sit my ass down and start writing.

But I never did.

Why is that, exactly?

Three main reasons:
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There was a text file titled “Mythos”, and inside was a list of titles and short descriptions of stories I was going to write. It was going to be an anthology. All of the stories were tied in with my Lovecraft-style mythos. “Sign of the Usurper” was part of it, although that idea and story fragment was several years old by that time. Along with the list of story ideas, there was a complete outline for a longer work that may have turned into a novella, and the beginning of the text for one of the short stories. I’m posting the story fragment here, because, unlike the other stuff I’ve posted, I think this one would have turned out to be really good. I honestly don’t know why I stopped working on it. It’s too bad that the Book of Dark Places was a bust; this would have been a great story for that project.

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I wandered across the “Which Supervillian Are You?” quiz and decided to give it a whirl.

My result:

Apocalypse

You believe in survival of the fittest and you believe that you are the fittest.

Click here to take the “Which Super Villain am I?” quiz…