Sunday 9 December 2007

Pic of the day: Invisible friend from City of Heroes. This entry isn't about games, though.

Invisible friend worldbuilding

I already have written the beginning of a couple stories about an invisible girlfriend, a couple years ago. The story that has now presented itself for my creation is similar, but different. The working title is "Like an Angel". Once again a young man (around 20, I think) is assigned a presence from beyond, but this one is unabashedly alien, a companion but not a lover.

Like in the previous round, the Other is invisible to everyone else. But this time it is not the result of some protocol error on the young man's behalf. Rather, this is the natural state of the Others. The strange thing is that someone can see it at all. I have not quite decided on why, and probably will never explain how. Suffice it to know that the Others come and go as they please without being noticed. Their reality is higher than ours, as in, it contains our reality but not the other way around. They have four space dimensions and two time dimensions; our three space dimensions and one more, and our time dimension and one more. (There may be other universes that simultaneously intersect ours, I probably won't elaborate on that though.)

The Other is able to change its form in every conceivable way, including size and virtual mass. It first appears as a vaguely humanoid shining shape, but mostly spends its time looking as a child, sometimes a grown man, sometimes as a woman, sometimes a dog or some random creature or object it finds interesting. Its preferred form is that of a childhood friend who died while still a child. (I have not yet decided if this was a boy or a girl.) It routinely performs miracles which it insists are perfectly rational and normal, like passing through walls (using the fourth space dimension) or doing a lot of things in the blink of an eye (using the second time dimension). "I am normal. You all are retarded. It's OK, you can't help it. This whole universe is retarded."

The main thrust of the story is how things that seemed important at the start – school grades, money, girls – become incidental. With the help of the Other, our protagonist could presumably achieve pretty much whatever a human could think of. But those things are no longer interesting. Instead, our hero starts to notice small strange things: The Otherness is seeping into his own life. He starts to notice things that should not be possible: Glimpsing things on the other side of a wall when he is not thinking about it (it doesn't work when he concentrates on it). Being invisible in plain sight (again, only when not thinking about it). Sudden influx of extra time, but without his control. He is getting so used to ignoring common sense and the boundaries of reality, that he hardly notices when really strange things happen in plain sight. After all, none of it is weird compared to his everyday life.

I think this would make for a great story. I also think it is pretty obvious to my regular readers what I'm really thinking of. ^_^