#OWL YOU SAID YES AND I WARNED YALL IT WOULD BE LONG AS FUCK

[shayberri789]

This got more attention than I expected so here it goes. I'll give a brief overview and then stick the rest under a page break

Basically: We have 6 main characters of note, but I'll talk about the other two later:

Dustin (AKA Dusker), who's 10yo in the novel and 17 in the game. He's a side character in the novel and MC of the game.

Kaitlyn, who's Dustin's mom. She's 30 something

Hamish, Dustin's father and Kaitlyn's husband. He's 30 something for a brief amount of time but ages to like 60 over the course of the story (for reasons we'll get to shortly). He adores his family more than anything and is a devoted father and husband. He gets depressed if he goes more than a few days without his beloved family :(

Amelia (AKA Chasm), who is Hamish's adoptive daughter and Dustin's adoptive big-little sister (time is weird okay, she was born after him but she's in her late 20s when she meets him). She's a record holding and Infamous Runner.

Premise:

Dustin, Kaitlyn and Hamish live in the City (which I need to name T-T). One day, Hamish returns from an out of town business trip to find a glowing barrier surrounding the City. No one can get in, and no one seems to be trying to get out. Many years later, People figure out a way to get past the barrier, and they discover that the City has been trapped in a 3 day timeloop for the last like. 2 decades. On the third day, the City resets to Day 1 (Think Majora's Mask, minus the terrifying moon apocalypse). Furthermore, the City inhabitants (Civilians) cannot see or be interacted with by anyone/thing from outside the city. Infiltrators can run straight through them.

After a while, they also figure out a way to smuggle items from inside the city out, where they discover that items taken out exist past the Reset, with a duplicate regenerated in its place at the advent of Day 1. Endless free resources! A system soon develops of people called Runners (or Ghosts, haven't decided which or if I like either of them) who break their way into the city and smuggle out resources using special items called Tokens. A whole outer settlement (and economy) spawns outside the City based on this. This is also when they discover odd drone like things (Like the hybrid child of Eve from Wally and a roomba, but it flies and has arms and lasers and weapons) they dub "Sentries" exist. Sentries will hunt down any anomalies to the City and try destroy them. They also discover that Dying in the City respawns them outside the city, unharmed, minus their tokenised items. Still deciding if people can only enter the city on Day 1, or at anytime. I think I had it that each person could only enter once per loop? Regardless, the longest time spent in the city is 21 hours and 14 minutes, set by Chasm (because its very hard to avoid other runners and Sentries when you're tired, and deep in the city). Everyone who stays in the City after 10pm on Day 3 mysteriously disappears, and is never seen again. No Runner stays in the City later than 9:30pm for this reason

The original title was "City of Produce" because of how people would break into the city for Produce, and because of the renewable nature of the resources, but I no longer think it fits.

Originally, this was going to be one story which followed Dustin - he was the first person from this universe who spawned during a daydream amv of "alarm" by the score, but after I'd figured out his backstory and rambled at a friend about it, he said I could turn that backstory into its own thing, since it had its own coherent story progression. So now I was stuck with two stories: one, a prequel (or book 1) following Amelia (and Hamish), and another (a sequel?) following Dustin and some friends as he tries to rescue his mom. and then @perihelion-crew-lounge said "this kind of sounds like a game" when I told her Dustin's story and I said "oh shit you're right", so now its Amelia's book and Dustin's Game. Both of which I still. need. to. title.

(I told you this was going to be long)

Amelia's story

So anyway Hamish comes back, finds the City is in lockdown, and nothing he can do will get him back in to his family. he's worried sick about them, and cannot bare to be too far in case something changes, so he settles down in the town outside the City and eventually grows to accept that no one is ever getting back in, and who knows if his family is still alive. Queue several years of depression, stress and grief.

After about I think I said a decade, he finds a young 6 year old girl who's just been abandoned on the City's outer limits, not far from the barrier, and because Hamish is a good guy with a bleeding heart and misses a family/loney AF, he decides to take Amelia in. And he raises her like the good dad he is, tries to ensure she gets a good education, does everything he can to ensure the both of them have a good life even though he had to literally start over from nothing. Amelia grows up on stories about Kaitlyn and Dustin, and she sees how much he loves and misses them, and she grows to love them too.

One day, she comes home from middle school with exciting news: They'd figured out how to get into the city, and over the course of the next few years, they discovered:

the timeloop nature of the city, and the reset parameters (including vanishing people)

the fact that sentries now exist and are violently hostile to anything from the outside

that they cannot die in the city; they just dissolve when 'killed' and reappear in the nearest available spot outside the barriers

that they cannot take anything out the city

they discover a way to take things out the city: Disposable "tokens" (sticker/label things), which will fizzle out when touching the Barrier while active, allowing the item to move through the breach

they learned, by studying the sentries, how to replicate their unusual weapons, which lead to a boom in technology

A small group of people who would later found the Guild got together and devised ways to abuse the time loop and gain resources, training Runners to go into the city to harvest resources, which they could either keep (they had to buy tokens from the guild), or sell to the guild for new money. The economy began to evolve around this system.

Note that the guild never penalised runners from stealing from each other within the city: afterall, no one was really hurt, and the resources they lost when they died would be picked up from the hostiles anyway. The issue came when people started seeking revenge outside the city; this is where people and teams started going by pseudonyms and masks to keep their identities anonymous, for safety and privacy reasons.

The guild offers/sells tools to Runners, regulating the system and maintaining some level of regulation and civilty amongst them, and streamlined/made getting into the city easier

Hamish, like many exiled residents of the City, was among the first volunteers to explore. There he learned that he could visit his family, but they could not see him, and he would grow old while they remained unchanging forever. it took him a long time to accept this

In high school, Amelia joined the guild as one of the early runners, and she got good. She's fucking smart, inventive/resourceful, and great at parkour. She became the best Runner in the guild, Chasm. She set the longest run ever: Almost a full day, and she won a motorbike for this achievement. She grew to know the city better than anyone else, even some exiled residents, and she did it all with the express purpose of learning enough to steal a person.

Upon graduating high school, she joined the tech company pioneering Runner technology: the people who figured out how to get into the City, who created Tokens, who were the leading Innovators in runner technology and weapons. she learned lots there and continued to Run on the side. Slowly, she built up teh trust and resources to create what she pitched as the first renewable Token, one which could survive the Barrier and even take out larger items, like cars and servers. The real purpose of the device is to take out people. Amelia still plans to rescue Kaitlyn and Dustin.

In the longest run she's ever done (left unrecorded by the guild because of teh fallout) (it was 34 hours and 15 seconds by the way), Amelia finds the pair just in time for Reset.

Her suspicions are confirmed: For the Two hour period between 10pm and midnight, time resumes past the time loop in the city, two countless hours where she does her bestest to convince Kaitlyn that they need to run and go, and to get out the city. Unfortunately, the Sentries are even more vicious during Reset than they are during a loop, and if you die now, you stay dead and your body will vanish upon reset (if you're an outsider and stuck in the city when the loop starts again, all anomalies cease to exist, regardless of if they were alive or not, their presence overwritten).

With ten minutes left, they make it to the barrier, but there's no escaping the Sentries. Because Hamish married a badass woman who is as brave as she is kind, Kaitlyn forces Amelia to take Dustin (who's 10 and afraid) and escape, because she will ensure her son's safety, and this young woman would have been her daughter in another life; is currently her beloved's daughter, and will die if she stays, So Kaitlyn holds off the Sentries, and Amelia escapes, and one of her prototypes is lost forever and the other one works. With major consequences. The Barrier lights up like a light show and absolutely fries everything touching it. The inside of the city is fine; it resets to normal in 10 minutes, the damage undone (and Kaitlyn respawns in her apartment, her son missing, and she doesn't know why, the last three days and two hours removed from her memory), but every guild outpost and half the satellite city is out of power for days. Thousands of tokens are fried. The barrier is volatile and ejects everything that tries to enter it for weeks. The whole economy stalls for like three weeks and Amelia is in so much trouble.

For the incredibly illegal move she pulled (upsetting the city, costing thousands of [currency] in damages, fucking up the city and taking experimental untested technology without permission (even though she built it), threatening the economy via reusable tokens and a case of (technically) kidnapping), Amelia is punished. She's fucking lucky she didn't get thrown in jail. But she's permanently banned from the city and guild, loses her job, is forbidden from working in anything related to the city again, and has to pay an insane fine and give up all technology she'd developed to her company.

She considers it all worth it though, watching the way her father (in his mid to late 60s now) tears up and hugs Dustin, the way their home feels... fuller and happier than before. She'd do it again, if she could, and she'd take Kaitlyn the next time. Except she has no avenues to attempt it.

So that's Amelia's story: it ends with her reuniting Hamish and Dustin.

I think. I will put Dustin's story in another reblog because hooboy this is long.

Gimme suggestions for the things I said above I'm unsure of, and most importantly: title suggestions please

Oh, and a last name for this family.

If I ramble (at length, believe me it would be a lot) about my most recent WIP (the city-in-a-time-loop one), would someone be willing to read it and please help me figure out a title