About A Tower Unseen

I've been playing a game on my Android phone - Ayakashi Ghost Guild - since May last year (sometime during the Ninja's Elegy event). It started off as a card collecting game to play in my off time. Then they introduced Guilds to foster group play. The first Guild I joined in the game was a bust, but soon after a friend introduced me to a welcoming Guild with members from all around the world. Though there have been some bumps along the road, I've had fun with this group of people interacting on LINE chat and in the game itself.

Just recently our Guild held a writing contest, just for kicks. Since it's been such a long time since I wrote anything, I thought I'd give it a try. I'm (slightly) ashamed I didn't write much, and what I ended up submitting was more of a preview than a full (short) story. Nevertheless, the seed has been planted, and I may continue this, if only to satisfy my own curiosity.

NaNoWriMo 2007 – The Lost Emperor

In October 2007, when someone introduced me to NaNoWriMo, I thought it was a cool idea. I also thought it might provide me the impetus to keep at a writing project. That’s why I signed up after a few days thought.

The story I started writing was one that had been bouncing around in my head for some time already. It wasn’t a complete story in my head; just elements of a story. NaNoWriMo gave me the chance to start pulling the disparate parts into a coherent tale. I’m still not certain how it’s going to end up, since I wrote it without an outline. NaNoWriMo is about getting your “writing juices” flowing, and just writing as the ideas hit you, aiming for a 50,000 word target in a month. I didn’t even reach ten percent of the word target though, since I’m too much of a perfectionist to just type without a filter. I still spend too much time considering how to write, instead of writing. Hopefully, with more practice writing, that filter will process faster.

For NaNoWriMo, I didn’t write in chapters. Later, I edited what I had written a bit, and divided it into chapters. It’s still a work in progress, and I would like to finish it someday. What I’ll be posting here are the first five chapters. Chapter five was finished post-NaNoWriMo 2007. The rest will come as and when I write it and am happy enough with it to share.

About Mission: Evacuation, Episode 1

Mission: Evacuation is the first piece of fan fiction of an established universe that I have tried. The setting is the PC game Total Annihilation (TA), which, admittedly, didn’t have a very detailed universe. TA was a revolutionary real-time strategy game that came out in 1997, but I won’t go into the merits of the game here. Even though story was not the strong point for the game, TA was very popular in its time. With that popularity came the fan fiction.

Many people drew on the basic threads established by the game’s creators and wove their own stories, sometimes with only the most tenuous of links to the original story. The premise of the game was simple: two warring factions have waged deadly battle over centuries, spanning galaxies in their conquests. One side, the Arm, and the other side, the Core. Some backstory was provided in the campaign mode of the game, but there were more questions than answers. So when the fans started writing their own stories, there were many different takes on the universe.

I wrote my own fan fiction during Christmas break, 1998. It was my first time writing fan fiction, but it was easy considering I didn’t have much canon to consider. I wanted to bring a more human element to the universe, since too much focus had already been given to the “mechanical” aspects of war. I have fixed some spelling and glaring grammatical errors in this first story, but otherwise it is left intact. I had started on Episode 2, but did not get far, and I’m not sure I will continue this.

About A Beginning in Sight

After a short break from Utopia, I recreated an account. I don’t recall the exact timeline, but I wrote another story around that time and dated it in Age 15 (Q1 2002). I didn’t share the story with my Kingdom-mates for some reason or another, although I did post it to my GeoCities page.

It’s not a coincidence that this story was written around the time of my other two short stories, “A Crazy World” and “The Keys”. I was in the writing mood, and it’s obvious I was projecting myself onto the characters I created.

There’s actually not much in this story, except a reference to game mechanics that dates the tale (Storms negate Droughts, and vice versa, which seems logical enough, but was only just then introduced to the game), and a light-hearted exploration of Dhuergar’s and Qualath’s friendship. In the end, Dhuergar’s practicality tugs the two back into the harsh realities of their world, just as I too learned to let go of what had to end.

About Homeward Bound

My second Utopia-based fiction was written as an introduction piece to a new Kingdom. It was Age 11 (Q1 2001, soon after I left Canada) and I had actually done the unthinkable. I had traded into an existing Kingdom, taking over someone else’s province. This is expressly forbidden by the rules of the game, though many people did it. The main motivation was either to move into SK’s (Super Kingdoms), or to join people you knew. For me, it was the latter reason. My own Kingdom was dying a natural death, and my then-girlfriend had an opening in her Kingdom due to someone announcing his intention to leave. Hers was a good Kingdom, with a good track record, and a group of players who had proven their ability to play together as a team. So I traded in, despite my earlier conviction that trading wasn’t good for the game.

I made reference to my trading in the story, with the notion that Dhuergar rules the province by proxy, since in-game, I was not playing Dhuergar Warhammer. I can’t remember the name of the province or its ruler. All I remember is that it was a dwarf province, which is lucky for me, because I know how to play a dwarf province.

In the story I also gave an indication of my game-playing experience, by mentioning all the different races I had experience with (Dwarf, Elf, Avian, Faery, Human, Halfling). In fact, I’ve tried all the different races in Utopia, including Undead and the “newer” Gnome (replacing Halfling) and Dark Elf (replacing Faery), except for Orc. The mechanics of the Orc race don’t suit my play style very well, so they’re the only race I’ve never played on any of the Utopia servers. Besides, I could never imagine Dhuergar Warhammer as ruler of an Orcish province!

Incidentally, I didn’t stay in that Kingdom for too long. A few Ages later, my province was deleted, most likely for being a traded account. I can’t confirm that of course, but I suspect that, since a few of us from the Kingdom were deleted in one purge. It was quite common for Swirve to purge the servers of multi accounts or other cheaters every once in a while. By the time I was deleted, I didn’t mind it. My ex had already stopped playing, and I had no particular attachment to the Kingdom, so I took a hiatus from the game when it happened. It was a break I needed.

About The Dawn of Sylvan Hold

I started playing Utopia in the Second Age, early 1999. The Third Age, however, was my first full Age playing the game. In my first experience with Utopia I had selected dwarf for race, and named my province Mithrils Hold (no punctuation, since Utopia doesn’t allow for punctuation in names). By the time the Third Age was going to start, I had already grasped some of the basics of the game. Since I had faced difficulties with a dwarf province, I selected the elf race for the Third Age.

My ruler name for the Second Age was Dhuergar Warhammer, a reference to AD&D gray dwarves (duergar) and the Warhammer fantasy world. Plus, the warhammer was often associated with dwarven characters, so that seemed to fit. My province name was just a quick nod to the mythical metal mithril, from Tolkien’s LoTR universe.

When I created my account for the Third Age, I was a little stumped for a ruler name. Then I decided to maintain the one I had used previously, for continuity sake, as well as for role-playing reasons. To this day, I have not changed my ruler name in Utopia. For my province name I just changed the reference from a dwarven reference to an elven (forest) reference.

As an introduction to my Kingdom, I wrote a short story to explain how an elven province came to have a dwarven ruler. I posted the story in the Kingdom’s forum at the beginning of the Age. I can’t remember the reception it received, except that it didn’t start a flurry of role-playing in the Kingdom. Somewhat discouraged, I realized that people played Utopia more for the strategy than anything else, so my role-playing took a backseat. In those early days though I made all my forums posts IC (in character), rarely posting OOC (out of character).

As a bit of Utopia history, in the Third Age, Mehul (the game’s creator) did away with ruler titles. Players were free to prefix their names however they saw fit. The standard titles made their reappearance in a later Age. That bit of history fit well with my story, as I explained how Dhuergar Warhammer would carry no title, having earned none in the eyes of the elves.

About Utopia stories

Utopia is one of the oldest browser-based multiplayer games, coming online in January 1999. In its heyday it could claim to be “massively” multiplayer, drawing over 100,000 players (more or less, depending on who you ask). It won the Webby Gaming Site of the Year Award twice, in 2002 and 2003. Being a text-based game, with an interface that hasn’t changed much since its first days, Utopia may not appeal to the gaming masses who are more graphically-inclined and for whom World of Warcraft and its ilk are true representations of massively multiplayer online games. Nevertheless, Utopia has its following.

I was introduced to the game by my cousin, and was first attracted by the traditional fantasy RPG background. So much so that I wrote a story as an introduction to my in-game avatar. Of course, my naiveté was met with complete silence on the Forums for my Kingdom. Good thing I took an interest in the strategy of the game, otherwise I would probably have abandoned the game.

The story-writing was actually inspired by a collaborative-writing-cum-role-playing experience I had back in 1995, at The Dragon’s Inn. The Dragon’s Inn was a newsgroup on Usenet (alt.dragons-inn or alt.pub.dragons-inn) for role-players who would maneuver their own characters through collaborative adventures. I mostly just read the various entries posted to that listserv, but I did de-lurk to introduce my own character. The Dragon’s Inn was the birthplace of Lothaq, which became my alter-ego on the net, and also used as my nom de plume.

I’ve only written three Utopia-related stories, and they were all beginning of Age stories. The first two were shared with my kingdom-mates, while the last was written just for my own amusement, although it was also published at my GeoCities site. None had titles previously, and I even recorded them with just the Age number. I’ve given them titles for posting here, and will reveal the timeline in my backstories.

About “The Keys”

“The Keys” is a much more autobiographical story compared to “A Crazy World”. The protagonist and I share many similarities, both in personality and circumstance. For example, both of us are sentimental people. That’s about all that I will confirm publicly though.

There is a link between “The Keys” and “A Crazy World”, as they both deal with a disappointment in my life. “The Keys”, however, deals directly with my sense of loss, instead of skirting the issue. At the time I wrote the story in early 2002, I was acutely aware that some part of me still felt a longing for the way things were in the past. Writing the story let me express that feeling.

It should be noted that though there are many parallels to real life, this is still a piece of fiction. Events and circumstances described are not exact parallels of what happened to me, but instead are meant to capture the essence of what transpired in real life. Similarly, there are embellishments to characterizations, meant only to make “The Keys” work as a better story.

Having said that, I do believe that one should write about what one knows. There must be something in the story that you can relate to closely, so that the writing is sincere. That’s what I did with “The Keys”; I wrote to capture my sense of loss and longing.

I’ve made one edit to the original version. In the third paragraph, I replaced “sad” with “cheerless”, since the original was redundant. It now reads:

… I’ve never seen my own sad smile. I can’t bear to look in a mirror when I think of her for fear I might see her standing next to me. A friend of mine described it for me: cheerless, nostalgic. I guess I’m a sentimental kind of guy.

I think it reads better with this slight edit.

To the person this story is about, you may have read the story now. It is history now, and I’m glad we can move past it.

About “A Crazy World”

I wrote this story in late 2001, after a long hiatus from writing of any kind. Not just creative writing, but any sort of writing. Of course, there was a catalyst that pushed me to write again. I was going through an emotional crisis due to changes in my personal situation. I sought some sort of catharsis in writing. It was a way to make some sense of how I was feeling. Writing it down allowed me to step back from myself.

“A Crazy World” is about disillusionment, mainly about “doing the right thing” or “being good”. I’ve had an atypical childhood, having experienced many different surroundings and mixed with a good range of people. I’ve had many kinds of influences, with few constants. One thing that stuck with me throughout, however, was a desire to “be a good person”. That was the only unvarying standard that I held myself to, while everything shifted around me.

Sometimes, I admit, it can become “tiring”. “Nice guys finish last” didn’t enter the lexicon for no reason; there is some truth to it. Still, I would not like to live my life to that maxim alone.

I wrote “A Crazy World” just to put down that sense of frustration and confusion. Sometimes you want to shout out loud; give in to baser instincts; look out for your own interests only, the rest of the world be damned. Sometimes you want to cry in frustration.

The story reads as quite a disjointed piece. It is frustrating, and not altogether captivating, but it was never meant to be anything other than the ramblings of an inner voice. The protagonist fills in for an aspect of me, a facet of me that was reeling from the “unfairness of life”.

I did not find positive affirmation for my beliefs. I did not heal easily. But I did learn to recognize that frustration in me. And I could look at it with some detachment, without letting it consume me, as it had begun to.