Blood & Chlorophyll Ch. 07 - Reflection

It was honestly quite refreshing to write this chapter. The last few chapters were a bit tense, and quite busy, so it was great to have a chance to slow things down again. I've often said I love depicting downtime, and boy am I doing that here. I still laugh at the fact that, essentially, this first scene with Alicia boils down to "She surfs the net for a bit and then masturbates". I thought it was important to check in with Alicia after last night, with how chaotic everything was at the Dungeon Camp.

On the technical side of things, it was also nice to see Alicia starting to reach out to online communities about her Race and Class. This is a fantastic, wonderfully unique feature about the Becoming Monsters setting, and I'm excited to finally get into it here. I always love seeing the internet work together to be a massive, chaotic living computer that's able to do almost anything, and watching random forum posters try to figure out the System is always a blast. What will Alicia learn? Well, if she can ever stop masturbating for long enough to check the forums again, we just might find out!

(I kid, I kid. This is her first time in years, clearly she's got it under control.)

This chapter also gets to host one of my favorite lines I've ever written.

"She’s so excited for this, I get to give her real delving experience! Maybe, as thanks, she’ll delve underneath my desk and— No! Bad Alicia! Why am I like this?!"

I crack up every time I read it, because apparently I'm a horribly immature gremlin with the humorous tastes of a particularly horny sponge.

Anyways, on to the next scene! This one was another breath of fresh air, as I got to introduce a bunch of colorful characters! You might all recall that I asked for character ideas a while back, and now you know why. I established last time that Katrina had a small list of potential delvers, and was preparing to convince them to join. Now, on my side of things, I know who's going to end up in the party, and it was important to show that recruiting delvers isn't an easy experience.

Often, when I look at a fictional world, I tend to gravitate towards certain things. Fantasy worlds often have specific details they're built around; maybe everyone can ride dragons, or there's magic but using it is risky, stuff like that. Personally, whenever I hear about these details, I prefer to look at the mundane side of things. Okay, everyone rides dragons, but someone still needs to tend the livestock. Do dragons eat cows? Are there wild dragons that need to be contained? Fought off?

As a great example, let me take a small detour and tell you about my current DnD campaign. It's set in a world where magic has been criminalized, and practicing it can lead to imprisonment, banishment, or even death. Past abuses of magic have scarred the land, and everyone lives in the shadow of these magical disturbances. My character? A forty-year-old divorced housewife.

I'm not trying to brag or anything, I just think it's a great example of the types of stories I find interesting. I love mundanity, how it reveals who people are, and how it can be used to highlight tiny, interesting details about a world.

I bring this up because, in the world of Becoming Monsters, there are Class Levels, Monsters, and Dungeons crawling all over the place. It's so easy to write stories about people trying to fight, conquer, and overcome Monsters while trying to shoot for fame and fortune. But, much like my previous dragon rider example, people still need to be plumbers. We still need nurses, we still need marine biologists. So, in a world filled with opportunities to be a heroic monster slayer, why do people still work mundane jobs?

Well, Burl has anger issues. Elias is stuck in the water. Emilia likes being a nurse. If nothing else, I hope it was neat to see a side of the Becoming Monsters world that often gets overlooked, its denizens reduced to being NPCs in the background of an exciting fight scene.

Plus, a HUGE shoutout to everyone that contributed character ideas. I got a lot of great submissions, and I'll likely pull from that list in the future when I need more characters. Honestly, I got more ideas than I expected, which was a really nice surprise.

With three possible delvers crossed off the list, it's time for Kat and Alicia to try their luck with the elusive Mage Knight. How will it go? Well, I've already written that chapter, so I know the answer already. Still, I think you're all really going to enjoy where the story takes us next.

Nyx <3