Tuesday 2 December 2003

Pic of the day: "When the sun sets in the west, the lazy works his best" says a Norwegian proverb. You be the judge of that ... I slept all day. (Picture from inspirational anime Bottle Fairy, episode 7.)

Radiant worldbuilding

One of the muses in my head has come up with a very interesting story proposal, which goes into the "build queue" (to use an expression from Alpha Centauri). There will be no serious writing done on that until I have finished DarkEyes. (I am currently writing chapter 22 after a foray to the end of the book. Chapter 22 is "Sleepover". And lest you think the story has progressed too fast, it is a bunch of girls only, desperately trying to study for their finals. I wish I knew more about girls. I just make it up as I go along, obviously. At least it is not autobiographical!)

Anyway, I give the word to my next muse. Thank you for your attention.

***

This world progressed pretty much like our own, until 1930. As the world was still spiraling downward into the Great Depression, the Visitors arrived. That was what they were called, and they seemed to accept that name. They were half a dozen beautiful humanoids from Elsewhere. (For a long time it was thought that they came from other planets in our galaxy, but it is now generally agreed that they are "planeswalkers", beings from a parallel universe and able to move between such universes.) Some described them as elves, most thought of them as "angels without wings". (Not that angels actually have wings. Cherubs and Seraphs have, but not ordinary angels and presumably not archangels. Well, not in their default appearance at least. But that's all beside the point.)

The Visitors, unlike humans, had powerful magic. They did not actually use magic actively, except mind reading (and even that seems to have happened automatically) and their uncanny ability to move from one place to another in an instant. Distance simply did not seem to mean much to them: They could move from one continent to another as easily as we walk through a door.

But the Visitors were also surrounded by a field of miracle energy, or that was what people called it. When a Visitor was near, miracles easily happened. The sick were healed, the blind began to see, and the lonely found love. When two or more Visitors were together, their miracle fields seemed to strengthen each other. The desert began to bloom, angry kings and generals declared peace, and amputated limbs grew back. Only one thing was never seen: No dead ever came back to life. The Visitors claimed that the dead were gone from this world and besides, it was not really them doing anything. They were just enablers. And indeed, even though miracles were possible, sometimes nothing happened, no matter how much people wanted it.

Most of the miracles were good. But sometimes bad things would happen, especially to those who tried to hurt the Visitors. And this happened more than once, as religious extremists set out to expose the "false angels". (The Visitors never claimed to be angels, or gods, or for that matter elves. They claimed to come from another world where all people were like them.) It seemed that fate itself conspired against those who wanted to hurt the Visitors. Things began to go wrong while they were still far away: They lost their plane, their car broke down, their bombs exploded while being prepared and their guns jammed and blew up. The worse the fate they intended for the Visitors, the sooner and the more dramatically it all went wrong.

The Visitors did not just hang around letting miracles happen. They also spoke to people about love, peace and reconciliation. Generally people were a lot less interested in this than in the miracles. Even so, when the Visitors moved on to another world in 1935, they left behind an Earth far more peaceful and prosperous than when they arrived. They – or rather one of them – also left behind a half-Visitor baby girl, Anita.

***

Anita "Antares" Radiant is not the main character of this story. Her son is. But it is important to understand who – or perhaps what – Anita Radiant is. At the time our story begins, she is 65 years old, but looks barely 30, and has done for decades. The Visitors implied that they lived as long as they wanted to, and although Anita is only half Visitor, she seems set to live for centuries at the very least. She also enjoys the same protection as her father: If anyone tries to harm her, the universe trips them up spectacularly. Usually she will not even know they tried, because they are thwarted while still far away.

Anita is not able to jump around the globe (at least not yet), but she has the Visitor "miracle energy field". It is weaker than the original Visitors', but still quite enough to heal anything from cancer to schizophrenia. In fact, Anita spends most of her time touring the hospitals of the world. As with the Visitors, some people simply don't respond to the "miracle energy", but most do. She may also be flown in to a disaster site to improve the rescue efforts. And once she stood up to a tornado, and it changed its path. Anita Radiant is her world's only superhero, and the most famous living person on Earth. She gets heaps of anonymous donations, most of which are distributed to the worthy poor. She is not an ascetic, though. She lives with her family in a nice villa in the woods. Well, when she is at home, that is.

The family consists of her husband and two children. The husband is a human, the hermit philosopher Michael Clovendale, who was born on the same night as her but half a planet away. He became swept up in her loving embrace through a series of unlikely event which would take a book in itself to tell, and has long ago accepted his fate. He is entirely mortal, but as healthy and fit as a 65 year old man can be.

The children are Benjamin "Betelgeuse" Radiant, aged 17, and his sister Rita "Rigel" Radiant, just turning 13. Being the children of the world's most famous person, and presumably having inherited at least some of her powers (certainly much of her beauty), they are famous by default. For their own safety they have been home schooled and generally interacted only with trusted, responsible friends of the family. However, recent events have convinced their parents that at least the oldest now has the same protection by the universe as his mother (it is unclear whether this is a kind of superpower that develops over time, or whether they were born like this). In order to learn to interact with normal people, he is transferred to Sugar Hills High School. This is where our story begins.

Sugar Hills is a peaceful middle-class neighborhood. While technically the closest to the Radiant estate, it sees a lot less tourists than the nearby town which has changed its name to Radiant City (although "city" may be a bit exaggerated). But soon after it becomes known that Ben Radiant is transferring to Sugar High, as it is commonly known, things begin to happen. And not miracle field things, at least not at first. The middle-class inhabitants of Sugar Hills start to get very generous offers if they want to sell their homes. Indeed, so generous that they may quit their job and still afford a better home elsewhere. Rich families from all over the globe set their sight on these homes. More specifically, rich families with high-school age daughters and parents with an eye for good genes...

***

This is the setting in which "Sugar High" begins. It is not a story about boy and girls, at heart, but about boy and boy. Not in any non-Republican way really. But when you know that every girl in school is a spoiled rich brat who daily gets nagged by her parents to get a sample of your genes, you tend to look elsewhere for earnest companionship. (Although as the story progresses, there is a girl too, but ... well, that would be telling.) Drama, miracles, girls, girls, girls, pretty innocent boys and a tale of friendship with the strength of love. Coming 2004 to an Internet provider near you, God willing.

I want to point out the following sources of inspiration, although none of them have been mined to the extent of plagiarism: The anime Maburaho, in which a high school boy is revealed to descend from a number of powerful magicians and suddenly is chased by a number of overly babelicious girls. (The anime is full of less than decent exposure, so only the central story telling concept is preserved.) The comic book Astro City: Family Album for the story which I have already mentioned about Astra, the girl with superpowers and fame, and her quest to learn hopscotch. (Rita Radiant is heavily inspired by Astra, but is a minor character. Literally.) And finally the anime Hikaru no Go for its realistic portrayal of an extremely platonic yet extremely intense relationship between young boys.