Fate's Fabric

[BeelieveinBees]

My current creative project is called Fate's Fabric. I've been working on it loosely for five years, although the first two I wasn't focusing on it very hard. It's going to be a three part web story, made using Twine (well, Twee specifically), with few if any true branches. I'm currently planning on just using Twine to get easy access to interactive elements, like cycling links, and for formatting sugar. It would be very symbolically potent for part three to have branching, but this bitch is already gonna be Long, so I'm hesitant to commit to that.

That said, I'm only around 10% of the way through writing the first draft of part one right now, so there's plenty of time for that to change.

The three parts are going to be called Fatebound, Fateless, and Fatefall.

Fatebound is about a group of people united by their desire to not be where they started going on an interstellar "road" trip through a galactic community that, although it has problems, doesn't really have capitalism. I'm doing a lot of things with it, but one of my big goals is to just... develop ways that people could be that don't fucking suck like this does. Sustainable communities that care about the people that live in them, both currently and the generations to come. It's both very cathartic and very sad to worldbuild, but I'm excited to tell this story.

There's also a B plot about some kid who's on an epic quest to save the universe, which gets brought into focus in the later two parts.

Fateless is a story about going on a "road" trip outside of reality. I'm excited about the world building I have ready, a land full of sapient places and the sapient relationships between them, specially and temporally redefining itself based on how those relationships grow and develop, but it's gonna be a long time until I get there, so I'm trying not to focus on it too much.

Fatefall is a story about dealing with the terraforming problem - even if where you started is pretty badly fucked, it's still much easier to fix it then in is to start from scratch somewhere that has never had life. It's about taking the hand you've been dealt and making it work the best you can. You're not above cheating though. Frankly, with so much on the line, it'd be foolish to play by the rules.

I have a lot I want to say about this story, and I will certainly babble more about them here, but that's the very high level overview. If you're interested, I welcome questions at any point in my talking about this.

[hatkirby]

This sounds really cool! I know you've mentioned it in the chat but I dunno if you've laid out the details like this before. If it would help you to post updates and status in here, I'd love to see it! Otherwise I'm just excited to see what you make. ^_^

Question: Are the characters gonna talk like they're from Homestuck

[BeelieveinBees]

I'm planning on posting more stuff here, I don't like posting too much in the chat because it feels like it just gets buried and is gone forever, so if it's not related to the current convo I just don't say it.

One (1) of the characters talks like they're from Homestuck. At least, that's the only one who I'm making do that on purpose.

So I guess I'm going to talk about Jess now, cause why not.

Although first I will touch on how Fatebound is being told.

The POV character of Fatebound is Rye, a human who has visions of other times and places, centering around the group of people they eventually would be sharing a spaceship with. In their visions, they are whoever the vision is about, Rye looses all sense of self and is just there in the person's head for the ride. Because of this, the POV of the story can functionally jump around, both to different characters and different times, but the reader and Rye remain on the same footing.

Jess is an OC I've had since middle school, possibly a little longer? They've changed a lot over the years, most notably when I got into Homestuck in high school and revamped them as a fan kid. And I had a lot of theories about homestuck, especially the cosmology aspect, that I made and eventually were proven non-canon but were very important to Jess' story so I kept them in my little daydream world.

And then I started developing Fate's Fabric, and I still didn't have much of a plot, but I was picking away at it.

And then my partner and I developed this starwars/fae au thing, and we did a little roleplay where I threw Jess in there, and that took on a life of it's own and became a pretty notable obsession for me for a bit. My partner eventually lost interest, and I decided I could fold some of the juicy bits into Fate's Fabric and keep working on it.

But Jess' background was just. They were a Sburb player. And I didn't want that in my original work, so I set about creating a backstory that could get them to a similar place, which ended up being vital for fleshing out the world.

Jess was a kid in a shitty household, they had dreams of a strange land and a massive war, but they didn't think anything of it because dreams are supposed to be weird. When they were 12 they ended up falling through a mirror into a different Universe, the same world they had dreamed about, that was in a massive war that had lasted millennia, and they had this whole chosen one hero thing and were magic. The empire they were in worshiped a god, the Arbiter, who maintained reality and the great cycle of creation and destruction and ensured fate went as it should. The god had three aspects, Distance, Substance, and Absence, and Jess learned that they were blessed with the gift of Distance, which allowed them to manipulate time.

Only, after a few years, they discovered that there was another them, a mirror clone, who was living in the other empire and also the chosen hero of distance, and could manipulate space. The two of them ended up talking and discovered that the leaders of the two warring empires were in cahoots, and together working on creating a great weapon that could destroy whole universes.

They got in contact with a rebellion, and learned that there were records of magical artifacts crafted by great mages, and that if they found them they might be able to stop the weapon, but the quickly ran out of time to find them and ended up trying to sneak into where the weapon was being crafted and sabotage its construction. They failed, and barely escaped the universe before it's destruction.

The weapon couldn't reach the other universes yet (there were three universes in total, and two remained), but they were unsure how much that would last, so started looking for those artifacts with their all hoping that they weren't in the destroyed universe, and one of them, Lefty, entered the universe that the story takes place in, on what would end up being a 15 year journey to find this fucking magic sword.

It's at this point that I should specify that literally none of this is in Fate's Fabric proper until Lefty actual enters the universe, it's literally just this kids backstory. And unlike the other characters backstories, which are explored through Rye's visions, Jess' is only discussed when it comes up, because Rye's visions cannot reach outside their Universe.

[hatkirby]

[munches on this excitedly]

The whole "being in ppls heads through time" thing immediately reminded me of A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeline L'Engle, so that's dope.

[BeelieveinBees]

I've never read the wrinkle in time series. Maybe I should! What I've head of it has sounded pretty interesting.

[hatkirby]

A Wrinkle In Time, A Wind In The Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet were pretty influential to me. L'Engle has a lot of interesting thoughts about science and religion, and there's some really neat constructs in her works like tessering, kything, Naming, and farandolae.