Vengeful Elegance
My work in progress was put on hold for several years. I'm just getting around to brainstorming again...
Story of my friggin life.
Mine's about...
Well, um...
Well, there's boys and space and... planets... and zombies a little bit, and more boys, and a girl and... a desert... space... space ships...
OKAY I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT ITS ABOUT *sob* But I really love my characters.
Pffttt, well maybe I have a little more plot than that, but I'm never satisfied with it, and my strong natural tendency to drive characters into alcoholic isolation generally gets in the way of having any kind of unified plot. The only characters of the five I had that were spared such treatment were the two who had already been isolated alcoholics for years and years before the plot began. >.> But Yamako and Chef love each other (they're cute) and they enjoy their alcoholism and seclusion because they're embittered and jaded! Yaaay.
Zealot is the youngest, and I legitimately considered selling him into some kind of drugged prostitution. His whole family was murdered in front of him by his brother after they were infected by the zombie virus, and he went into massive PTSD and maybe a little bit of MPD until the rest of my characters found and collected him, only to leave him stranded with the character that gets along with the worst.
Conor, who can't deal with legitimate feelings of affection, familial or otherwise, decided that a clingy 17 year old wasn't what he wanted and he kind of just left Ze stranded on Chaska after Henri went off to avenge his father's murder or something (idk, it's supposed to be the main plot but I really don't care about Henri or his family that much yet.) Of course since Ze's whole family is dead and their assets, being that of war-destroyed and AP-occupied satellite of the AP planet Atum, pretty much don't exist anymore, Ze has no money and nobody to help him, especially considering that he's a illegal refugee, brought to another AP occupied satellite (Chaska) against his will-- due to incredibly unfortunate circumstance. So naturally I only considered having him kidnapped and sold into slavery.
Conor feels bad about this later.
Oh, and while I'm going on about the horrible things I've done to all my darlings, Chef, whose name is actually Robert, was born on Atum, with ambitions to become the owner of an eating establishment. Both his parents were military, and his mother was killed when he was still rather young. He's dad's kind of a huge jerk, and as a result Chef wants absolutely less than nothing to do with the military. He achieves his ambitious dreams at a very young age and falls in love with a waitress (Yamako) working a local Hathorian subculture bar called the Lucky Dragon. Yamako is from Hathor and has traveled to Atum with a working visa in order to send money home to her family.
Of course, not long after they fall in love war breaks out between the planet and the moon, and while Yamako returns to her home to join the rebellion, Chef is drafted into the military to fight against her and her family.
He defects, of course, to be with her, but now is never able to return to his hard-won dream, or any of his friends or family.
Henri, supposedly the main character, was raised on a tiny little farming satellite, terraformed specifically to grow and raise shippable produce for all the other over crowded planets in the system. Because the satellite consists entirely of simple farmers, the government isn't terribly extensive, and a sovereign has been placed in charge-- though, he's more like a CEO/Mayor or something. The planet isn't governed under the AP, but it is allied with them, and Henri is the sovereign prince. His mother, who was married to his father in one of those awkward arranged marriages, lives off world in relative splendor; though Henri's father is in charge, he lives modestly, and it does not suit his decadent wife's tastes.
Henri was raised under his father to eventually rule in his place, and has always been rather even-tempered and academic, where as Conor, his best friend (not by his choice, trust me) is anything but. Conor is the oldest of seven siblings, and has always felt that he never got the attention he deserved. Utterly dissatisfied with being a farm hand and generally responsible for the actions of his younger siblings, Conor spends most of his time getting into trouble, and by the time he was five, he'd broken into the "palace" grounds and accosted Henri, basically bullying him into bestfriendship. Of course, Conor was probably the most interesting thing that had ever happened to Henri-- until his father was murdered.
The details are complicated and political and as of yet they are still rough and kind of boring, so I'll skip them. Henri, of course, was also a target, but was saved by one of Conor's schemes, which removed him from where he was supposed to be (with his father) when the murder occurred. The two of them just managed to get away in the middle of what was quickly turning into utter political tumult (unheard of until then) and onto a ship...
They meet Chef and then Ze and Yamako, and terrible things just keep happening from that point on. It's great.
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