Young Writers Society

When you open your eyes, you find yourself in an unfamiliar world. It may similar to your own, but there are little things that aren't the same - the songbirds sing different tunes, the trees and grass are a slightly different shade of green, and the clouds in the sky above are lighter and fluffier than those of your own.

But this isn't the only thing that is wrong. Some things have...changed. Your clothes, at least, are different. But other details may have also changed - you've gained features that weren't previously present, and abilities that you could have only dreamed of. It doesn't make any sense in the slightest.

You don't have much time to process your confusion, however. There are other people around. And, though you can't put your finger on why, you feel that the woods are filled with others as well. Whether they will turn out to be a threat or not is to be decided, but the most you can do right now is acquaint yourself with the ones you've ended up around. Something tells you that they'll be important.

And, maybe, they'll help you find a way home.

Rules

1. Please include a description of your character in your first post - you can throw it into a spoiler using the code down below and put it at the top of your post. As a quick aside: your character is going to look like some kind of D&D character. Tiefling, dragonborn, elf, etc - anything is fair game.

Code: Select all

[spoiler]Put your description here![/spoiler]

2. Feel free to pick characters from whatever you want. They can be from another roleplay, a storybook, a novel or even a fanfiction of yours. The world, time and plot they're from ultimately just impacts how they interact with this roleplay.

3. You can have as many characters as you want, but there'll come a point where you can no longer add new ones because it would alter the plot too much. I'll make sure to say something when that happens, so don't worry about it for now.

4. Please don't write for anyone else's characters. It's hard to predict what someone else might have their characters do, and it takes away some of the fun for the other writers.

5. You're free to have your character guess what the plot is, but don't make any plot-altering decisions with talking about with me first. You can PM me or chat in the spoilers of our posts if you have an idea - I love scheming! I just want to make sure your schemes can be incorporated into what I'm already scheming.

6. Don't post multiple times in a row, and make sure everyone has a chance to get a response in. There's going to be times where it makes more sense to post back-and-forth between two people, but try avoiding it unless you absolutely have to - it prevents the other writers from getting too behind and feeling like they aren't involved with the story.

7. Have fun!

When he opened his eyes, it was to the sound of screaming.

Everything was wrong. He should have been laying in a comfortable bed in the Black Dragon Inn, and shouldn't have been sitting perched in a tree in the middle of a forest.

(At least, he guessed it was a forest. It was a little hard to see with the leaves in front of his face.)

His hood began to slip back as he craned his head; he absentmindedly went to pull it down. It was only when he had completed the action that he realized that he hadn't been wearing a hood before, and that was when the screaming started back up again.

Okay, he really needed to see what was going on.

It was hard shifting his weight without breaking the branch, but he somehow managed to pull it off. Now he had a bird's eye view of the spectacle down below - even he, who had seen many, many things, couldn't help but stare.

There was a guy down below him. The guy looked relatively on par with everything else he had seen lately - he was wearing the same kind of outfit, and had the same kind of panicked look you'd expect from someone in the wilderness. But the twist was what he was facing off with. Because while wolves were common and made sense, one that big and that bloody definitely didn't.

He dropped down from his perch.

The guy gave a yelp in surprise - did he ever stop panicking - and scrambled back as he approached the wolf with a swish of his coat. The wolf gave a low, angry growl, but the growl quickly turned to a whine when it looked him in the eyes. Which was weird, considering that he didn't look nearly as terrifying as he could have right now, but he wasn't going to kick a gift wolf in the mouth. Especially when the wolf darted off with its tail between its legs.

He turned back to the guy on the ground.

"Hi," he said.

The guy stared.

He resisted the urge to sigh, and instead gave a much needed introduction.

"The name's Dresden," he said, giving a little theatrical bow. "I'm your friendly neighborhood magician and necromancer."

The guy gave him a long, hard look before darting off into the woods.

Now he let himself sigh; it looked like he was going to have to do this the hard way.

He went chasing after the still unnamed man.

Raleigh didn't remember falling asleep in the dirt, but here they were, face-down in a very uncomfortable patch of it. They let out a small groan. Ugh, they could have sworn that they'd kicked their sleepwalking habit. Apparently not.

Lifting their head, Raleigh sleeping checked their surroundings for any immediate threats. Despite the unfamiliarity of their surroundings, they didn't see anything horribly dangerous -- but they could hear footsteps off in the distance. The footsteps kept getting louder and louder. It sounded like someone was running in their direction.

Raleigh listened for a moment before lowering their head back into the dirt. They were lying in a bush, presumably unseen, and they figured that it was probably best to remain hidden.

The snow fell like ash upon the earth. It stretched as far as the eye could see, into the distant horizon, and Cornyx's eyes wandered towards the horizon. It was stained a faint, floral pink by the setting sun, the silhouette's of Hell's twin moons cresting the jagged mountains.

Hell was not supposed to be a beautiful place in the stories. And, indeed, it was harsh, frigid, brutal, the sort of place where the strong prevailed over the weak and only the most intelligent and the fittest survived. But so, too, was it absolutely exquisite, even in its savagery. The pristine white that shimmered under silver moonlight; the silhouettes of the sparse trees; the tracks of beasts that traversed no other world. His breath clouded in the air like smoke from a dragon's lungs, and he lowered his hand to rest it on the crown of the hellhound at his heel.

Moments like these, and it was silent. Completely silent. Perfectly so. When none dared speak lest they break the fragile-yet-powerful thrum of the world. He closed his eyes, tasting the cold air--

--and it no longer tasted like winter.

His eyes shot open and he stepped back in shock. His foot caught on something--someone?--and he hit the ground, barely catching himself with his clawed arms before regaining his footing. It was a relatively open space with some trees, oaks, on the edge of some woodland. The sky was blue and the air was calm. There was a bush, which was what he'd just stumbled over, but in the bush was the actual source of his tripping. A tiefling, laying face-down in the dirt.

A tiefling?

His brow furrowed and he glanced down at himself, then towards Arys, trying to figure out of she'd come here with him. He was wearing battle robes out of 5e, but they were blue, and his talons were half-unveiled, somewhere between his human form and his beast one. Then he saw his hound.

She was the size of a horse, white-furred, blue-eyed, with frost dropping from her jaws with every exhalation and ice in her fur. A winter wolf. A winter wolf, and he looked half-dragonborn, and that was a tiefling, and these were definitely 5e robes, which meant...

...this was D&D?

Besides being generally good at tracking, and being generally close to where the guy was, he was fairly sure he was on the right track with his chase. It was the scream that made him so certain - he unsurprisingly had given another one up ahead. When Dresden finally reached Screaming Guy, he found him standing stiff and terrified as he stared at the three before him.

The three being a wolf even weirder than the first one, a guy who looked like he was a mix between a dragon and a human, and someone with really weird skin.

Weird Skin was laying on the ground in some bushes, Dragon Dude was looking at the wolf, and the wolf was breathing ice. That was ringing some kind of bell, but Dresden really couldn't figure out what that bell was. Something familiar...like...

"Who-Who are you?" Screaming Guy said; it was hard to tell if his teeth were chattering from being so close to the wolf, or because he was genuinely terrified of the group before him.

"So you can do something other than scream," Dresden observed.

Screaming Guy's skin, though currently leaning towards a very terrified pale, turned a shade notably similar to a ripe tomato in response. "I-I was just startled."

Dresden raised an eyebrow in disbelief, but he didn't press it further.

Instead, he gave a little theatrical bow again.

"The name's Dresden," he said. "Resident magician and necromancer. Just like I told you earlier. But you never gave me your name - who are you, Screaming Guy?"

He somehow turned an even brighter shade of red.

"Adrian," he said. "My name's Adrian-"

He paused, blinked, and then raised a hand up to point at Weird Skin.

"That's a tiefling," he said, an incredulous tone to his voice.

Dresden crossed his arms. "I doubt-"

He took a step closer and got a better look at the seemingly unconscious figure peeking out of the bush. The skin color was a little odd, and they did look like a tiefling-

"That's a tiefling," Dresden managed to get out, gaping as he glanced between Adrian and Skin-Guy-and-or-Tiefling-Person.

Megara woke up with a pounding headache and very little will to live. But that was normal. What wasn't normal was everything else.

For one, this wasn't her room.

She sat bolt upright and looked around. Eddie?!

She didn't call for him aloud, but she wanted to. He wasn't anywhere nearby and she could feel panic rising in her chest. She took a deep breath. Another.

In.

Out.

She searched her surroundings, looking for more than just Eddie this time, and found a group of people. Well, heard them. They were behind a gathering of trees, so she couldn't catch more than a glimpse, and she heard more people than she saw.

She got to her feet, debating the possibility that they would be hostile before deciding that even the slightest possibility that they knew where Eddie was made any worry she had obsolete. So she slipped through the trees, discovering the armor she was wearing - by the same magic that brought her here, no doubt - was impossible to move quietly in. She bit back her frustration at that and surveyed the group as soon as she was through the trees.

They were an odd group, to put it lightly. She cast a wary glance at the wolf, if it was a wolf, and stood a little straighter, if that was possible with the posture this armor was forcing her body into.

She took another breath, ignoring...whatever it was these people were doing, and said, "Have any of you seen a young boy, dark hair, freckles, answers to 'Eddie'?" she glanced around at them, "Human," she added. Probably, she added mentally. She had no way of knowing if he was still a human boy. He could be a teenager, come to think of it. She didn't complicate her question, though, by adding to it.

Pretending to be unconscious had lost its appeal. Raleigh could feel several pairs of eyes on them, and they didn't like it. Being from a demonic bloodline, Raleigh was used to stares. But the two men before them -- Dresden and Adrian, they'd called themselves -- were starting to piss Raleigh off.

Raleigh was used to stares, they were used to judgement. But that didn't mean they were going to take it lying down.

They sat up abruptly, and fixed Dresden with a glare. "You know," They growled. "It's rude to stare."

Adrian gave a yelp when Elf Lady appeared, which was probably a somewhat justified reaction given the situation. He also immediately scooted over to Dresden's side, which was also justified, but significantly more annoying. Dresden easily sidestepped the attempted move and looked Elf Lady over.

If the sight of a tiefling, a dragonborn and a winter wolf hadn't convinced him that he was somehow in an entirely different game than before, Elf Lady was definitely the final push he needed.

So he was in D&D. That was just great. He went with the necromancer thing earlier because it matched the aesthetic, but he was starting to suspect that he actually was one right now. Which was also just great. Because if he was a necromancer, then anything that possessed him would be-

He resisted the urge to groan. More metaphorical salt to the metaphorical wound, then.

"I haven't," he said.

Adrian gave a hesitant nod in agreement.

"I've...I've only seen the people here," he stammered, his face returning to that all-too-familiar red as his gaze dropped down to the ground. Dresden, in response, raised an eyebrow. What was that about? "I...I can keep an eye out for him, though..."

It was the sight of Adrian fiddling with his belt that finally clued Dresden in.

Oh.

Dresden looked back at Tiefling Person, seeing that he wasn't remotely prepared to deal with something like that right now. "It hasn't stopped me before," he said, "and I'm not exactly used to seeing a tiefling."

"I'm sorry for staring," Adrian said, whispering. He was still blushing, but Dresden was pretty sure Elf Lady was responsible for that - Tiefling Person was barely getting Adrian's attention. Adrian hadn't even turned to look at them yet. "...I was just surprised, too..."

Well, this was going terribly. These people had no sense of apathy or discipline except for One-leg there who just popped in to ask about a lost kid. This was not the first time that Cornyx had awoken somewhere...bizarre. There was the time in the ruins, with Apophis and the caterpillar person; the time in Grimmore; that one other time with Runi; and that was just the start of it.

Arys stepped forward with a low snarl as the others approached, moving between her master and the newcomers, but he raised his hand and she quieted down. She still watched with a wary gaze. It was her job to; a guard dog guarded, after all.

Elven paladin, human druid, human necromancer, and what he guessed was a tiefling rogue. And there was him, which he was pretty quick to assume was some kind of magic user, and probably a cyromancer if the ice was anything to go by.

"Now, now," he all but purred, stepping forward, "let's try to keep it civil in spite of tensions, shall we? It helps none of us to fight or scream or growl at one another. I don't believe any of us opened our eyes in the proper place. I assume that I am correct in that we are all from different worlds, a different place than this, accustomed to different forms, but now we are here--though feel free to correct me if I am wrong. My name is Cornyx Blackthorne, the Winter King and currently half-dragonborn cyromancer, and this is Arys, my winter wolf familiar."

Dresden's eyebrow twitched.

Cornyx Blackthorne was exactly the kind of person he hated. He felt like he was standing near another Raptor, but Cornyx was somehow even worse. Maybe it was the whole ruler thing getting to his head. That would explain some of it. Even the winter part explained some of the attitude - names had power, and a name like that meant he had an attitude to match his current ice powers.

"I'll give my introduction again, for those who didn't hear it the first two times," Dresden said, giving a little theatrical bow. It was his thing at this point, and he wasn't too fond of changing it up despite already doing it two times. "I'm Dresden - magician and necromancer extraordinaire. I doubt you've heard of my exploits before, as this is a strange and foreign land, but I can assure you that I'm very powerful-"

There was a noise from beside him.

He turned to see Adrian covering his mouth with his hands, eyes widening in horror when he saw that he had been caught. Dresden wasn't really sure what the noise was at first, but the amusement dancing across his face quickly gave it away.

Adrian thought it was funny.

Shoot. Now Dresden was trying his best not to smile, because neither Raptor or that djinni of his had caught onto how theatrical his whole act was. And while that was probably a good thing, it felt nice getting some recognition for his little show.

When Adrian finally fought back what was definitely a giggle, he turned away from Dresden and looked at Cornyx. "It's, um, nice to meet you, your highness. Am I supposed to bow, or kneel in front of you? Is that something people do where you're from? I know it's what people did where I live, but I don't know where you live..."

Adrian gave a hopeless look in Dresden's direction, but Dresden just shrugged in response.

So Adrian settled for clearing his throat and looking at the others in the group - only to go back to staring at the ground when he looked at Elf Lady for a bit too long.

"I'm...I'm Adrian," he offered. "Adrian Black. I, um, don't have any fancy titles, but I think I'm a druid?"

Megara shook her head. This again. She opened her mouth to say that she was going to leave, that she had to find Eddie, but stopped. What if Eddie hadn't been brought here with her?

Her stomach sank and dread took its place, inching up her throat like a thick coating of tar.

She set her jaw. Eddie would be fine. He knew to go to Ciel, he knew to avoid mentioning her name. He knew. He would be okay.

She wasn't convinced. But she couldn't do a thing about it.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Let it out. "I'm Megara," she said to the group, opening her eyes to look them all over, "If any of you know how to return us to our own worlds, I really, really have to get back, as exciting as this may be." That last bit was said with a hint of sarcasm. She was so many kinds of done with this 'other world' nonsense.

Out of curiosity, she felt out the emotions of those around her as a whole. She didn't want to devote the focus to figuring out who was feeling what individually, so she took it all in as a group.

Confusion seemed to be the general consensus. Nerves. No one seemed completely certain of anything, which was to be expected. At least one person was flustered, she couldn't figure out who or why, and there was some level of frustration.

She shut it off before she could gather anything else, not wanting to overwhelm herself with the emotions of others so soon after meeting them.

Dresden crossed his arms at Megara's impatience. He was still trying to figure out how to get back from the last world he had been on. How was he supposed to know how to get back from this one?

Adrian studied the ground for a moment. They were still waiting for the tiefling's introduction, but it seemed like he was grasped by a sudden idea.

"...Maybe we have to complete a quest?" Adrian quietly suggested. "I...I don't know what, but a quest would make sense..."