Young Writers Society

When you wake up, everything is big.

Your first thought is that the world has grown slightly larger, or that you've grown slightly smaller. That second guess is the correct one - you've become smaller. So small, in fact, that you're the size of a child. It isn't until you glance down or look in your reflection that you realize you are a child - specifically, your childhood self. Your age doesn't matter; you're either ten or younger, but what's important is that you're a kid.

You look around at the place you're in.

You're in some kind of playroom. The room is filled with faux buildings and mini-buildings that are glorified closets; they have labels that make the room look like a little town. When you turn away from the buildings, you found yourself looking at a group of now too-large cushioned chairs surrounding a fake tree.

All doors leading to other rooms are closed. The only place you can explore right now is the play room - and the only other people present are children. You don't know it yet, but the children are all in the same boat as you - each are at least thirteen years old normally, all are now under ten, and not a single one of them know how they got there.

If you want to get back home, you'll have to do some exploring - and trust the group of strangers you're now with.

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.

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, so it's really up to you.

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.

(I also have a discord server for roleplay scheming! If you don't use discord or don't want to join, don't worry about it. But if you want to join in on the shenanigans, here's the invite link.)

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 Aquarius opened his eyes, everything felt wrong.

His clothes felt strange yet familiar, and his hair was down - even though he remembered putting it up when he got up that morning. His change in outfit wasn’t the only problem. He was standing in front of some miniature town, but it was bigger than it should have been compared to how big he actually was.

Aquarius frowned.

“H-Hello?” he stammered. He was shocked - and horrified - to realize that his voice was muffled and higher than it should have been. He raised a hand up to touch his cheek, only to immediately withdraw it when his worst suspicion was confirmed.

He was wearing his mask again.

“No, no, no-” he whispered, shaking his head as he backed up into the nearest building. He was a little kid again. That was why he was wearing his mask. And if he was a kid again, didn’t that mean that Eras was somewhere here? He didn’t remember the playscape at all, but he didn’t remember everything from when he was a kid.

A second later, a hand shot out from inside the dark bakery.

Aquarius screamed.

The hand was trying to pull him in. Even though Aquarius was smaller than normal now, that wasn’t going to stop him from trying to get free. He wasn’t really making any progress. No matter how hard he struggled, the hand only gripped him harder.

“Rius, calm down - it’s me,” a boy said from inside the bakery. When Aquarius turned, he saw himself looking at a boy with a mask and eyes almost identical to his own - and all too familiar white hair.

“Zeph?” Aquarius whispered.

The boy nodded.

A second later, Aquarius was pulling him into an embrace - grateful that he wasn’t here alone, and grateful that it was his brother who had been inside the building.

“I almost didn’t recognize you,” Aquarius whispered. “I forgot you looked like you when you were little.”

He had a feeling Zeph was smiling underneath his mask. “Well, I did.”

A few moments later, the two finally broke apart.

The former sixteen year olds looked around the room, trying to see if anything looked familiar. Aquarius moved a little closer to his brother once he stepped outside of the bakery; there wasn’t any immediate threat right now, but he wanted to be as close to Zeph as he could in case one showed up.

Cordelia unlocked the door to her apartment. It had been a long and tiring day. She and her three other friends had just returned from a fantastical journey which included faeries and monsters and such.

Rubbing her eyes, she pushed the door open. Smokey - her cat - bounded into her open hands. Rory chuckled, scratching Smokey under the chin. The cat purred. Smokey felt lighter for some reason. Smaller, too. Rory furrowed her brows.

That's when she noticed her surroundings. A playroom. With fake buildings. And there was a circular table with different colored chairs around it. A chill ran down her spine. Everything was hauntingly colorful and very big.

Maybe she had entered someone else's apartment. But why would Smokey be in someone else's apartment? Just in case, she turned around to check for the door. It wasn't there. "Thmokey, where are we?" she whispered.

Rory froze. "Thhhh..." Her eyes widened. She looked down at herself. Her eyes widened even more. She was half the size of her nineteen year old self and she had no front teeth!

Smokey jumped down from her arms and trotted around. When he reached a window, he looked at his reflection. He let out a hiss.

"Thmokey, come here," Rory said. "Thay quiet."

Right then, she noticed the two boys standing in front of a building. They looked pretty much the same. She raised her hand, giving the tiniest wave and a crooked smile.

Someone else had shown up.

Aquarius immediately ducked behind his brother, only to feel silly when he realized the girl was the same age Zeph and him currently were. She was probably supposed to be scared of them since they were both wearing their masks.

...A mask that Aquarius had been trying to wear less, but was too terrified to take off now that he was so young and small.

Zeph waved. Aquarius peeked out from behind him and gave a nervous wave, too, suddenly not all that sure how he was supposed to act around a seven year old.

Kate stretched out in her hammock, ignoring the twig that had somehow wormed its way between her shirt and her skin as it dug into her back. The effort to remove it refused to gather in her mind and muscles, and she was already just so tired of today.

She closed her eyes and gave a frustrated sigh, but the sound that came out was...wrong.

Her eyes opened, expecting to be squinting up at the crooked branches of the trees. Instead, there was a ceiling. Dramatically sloped and clearly made out of some kind of hollow plastic, lit from the outside, it was like a cartoon imitation of a house.

She groaned, the sound again wrong but she cared less about that than the fact that this whole trashy-sci-fi-soap-opera garbage was happening again.

"What part of 'leave me the hell alone' don't you get?" a pitchy, lisping imitation of her voice growled at no one in particular. Some cruel god, probably. A sadistic, heavenly dispenser of torture and probably the inventor of Christmas music.

She shoved herself off of the fake bed with its crinkly plastic mattress and stomped her way out of the playhouse.

It was then that she noticed it. The ground was too close, too...green. Everything was...wrong. The wrong color. The wrong distance away.

She looked down at her hands. Her...oh.

Whatever sadistic sonofa-

Her train of thought was cut off as her eyes - her brown, perfectly normal, eyes - landed on a group of kids. Other kids. Non-kids?

"Hey!" she shouted, and cringed at the annoyingness of her own voice as she toddled over to them, and it was toddling. No one with as uneven a stride as the one her stubby little legs provided could possibly do anything else. If only she'd been aged down to a time after she'd gone through at least one of her growth spurts. Then she'd be able to walk at a half-decent pace.

She did make it over to them, though, and a scowl - not entirely with her consent - had shaped her features.

"Let's get the pointless sh- stuff out of the way," she said, grumbling in a cartoonish anime-voice, "I'm not usually a six-year-old gnome-sized brat, and I'm assuming none of you are either."

Aquarius gave Zeph a nervous look, but relaxed when he saw that Zeph didn't seem to share his anxiety about this whole thing. Then again, Zeph was good about dealing with the unknown. He would probably even take his mask off soon; Aquarius definitely couldn't bring himself to do that yet.

"We're not," Zeph confirmed. After a moment of hesitation, Aquarius stepped out from behind him. "My brother and I are supposed to be sixteen."

Rory bit the inside of her cheek to check if she was living a dream. Apparently not. She muttered a curse under her breath, looking down then looked up, cracking a smile. She looked curiously at the two brothers with the mask, about to ask about it but she replied to the other girl's question instead.

"I'm supposed to be nineteen and Romeo here -" she patted her cat - kitten? and continued, "is supposed to be a fully grown cat."

"Great," Kate muttered, mostly to herself. There was a fun little mystery to solve here, and whoever decided to put them here apparently thought they needed to be pint-sized to solve it. Not even in mind, just body. Not that that was anything new.

Kate's thoughts briefly turned to what this might be like if they'd been aged up instead of down. What would she look like if she looked her age?

She shook her head. If she had a therapist, she imagined she'd get shot with a NERF gun or something for that kind of thinking. She didn't know how therapists worked. Most vamps got one, though.

"Let's figure out what we were brought here for," she grumbled. Back to the task at hand.

Aquarius gave a nod. Zeph studied the other two - and the kitten - for a moment, eyes narrowing as his gaze landed on the girl who had spoken last. Sensing that his brother was trying to figure out who was the most likely to be dangerous, Aquarius gave Zeph a little tug on his sleeve. Now wasn't the time to be making enemies.

Zeph met his gaze for a second, faltered, and then looked away from the girl.

"I'm Zephryus," he said, crossing his arms. "God of ice."

"And I'm Aquarius," Aquarius quietly added.

"He's the god of water," Zeph finished.

Aquarius gave a nod in agreement.

For a second Ray wanted to question how little kids could be gods. But then she realized that she probably didn't look like at all like a university student, and everyone here was a child.

Ray bit the inside of her cheek again before she spoke. "Has this -" she waved around with one hand, gesturing everything, "- ever happened before to any of you?"

Rius gave a tiny nod just as Zephyrus shook his head.

"Not like this," he admitted, "but I've been taken to a strange place and changed into something...different before."

Zephyrus gave his brother a worried look. Rius and him shared everything with each other these days, but that was the one thing he hadn't been able to get Rius - or their older brother Télos - to budge on. Rius refused to talk about what had happened when he had suddenly been whisked away in the middle of a conversation in a flash of magic and light; Zephyrus had given up asking.

Whatever had happened back then, neither one of them wanted to talk about it.