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Inspiration Comes at the Strangest Times

 Hello. C J here. Inspiration can come at the strangest of times. I was doing something random earlier today, like reorganizing items on a shelf, and something I owned fell apart. I put it back together but as I did so I looked at it and went, “There’s a story idea in here.” This is the job. I don’t know when ideas will show up. They make me money. They form the basis of products and everything I do. They show up when they want to. Clearly there’s a new set of sentences in the world today that needs someone to take care of them and these sentences picked me.

So I wrote this. It’s a part of what might be a longer story set in Ascala during their annual Summer Solstice celebration. Following the old Thandrian tradition they call it Summermoon. Here we have some of the characters who will appear in the video games having a conversation. This sounds a bit like a BBC radio show doesn’t it? Cool. I don’t get to pick these things. The characters do.

    As they decorated for the third time that day, moving and removing and rearranging little moons on cords and green things and sparkles inside glass balls, it occurred to Blue that these objects, these items they were moving were no longer in their prime. This was an observation he had made every year since he moved in with Ivy and William.
    The moons on cords were mostly missing their cords. The green things were worn down and really were just shapes with some paint on them. The sparkles has adhered to the inside of the glass and didn’t really sparkle anymore. He thought, like he did every year, that maybe he should say something about it. This year, for some reason unknown to both him and his housemates, he decided to actually do so.
    “You know,” he began. “We have had the same decorations since before I moved in. These things look a bit, I don’t know, old. Like we’re decorating with things from before the time of the Three Peoples founding this city. Do you think, maybe, we should get some new ones? Maybe this year?”
    Ivy looked at him for a while. For a long moment he didn’t know if she’d speak or what she would say. Then she opened her mouth and simply said one word.
    “No.”
    “I agree.”
    “Let’s get back to work.”

C J Mcpherson


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