...'Cause you know that I can.

The Night Before The Carnival

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...'Cause you know that I can.
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Blast Babies RPG

The Night Before The Carnival

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God, but I hate the evening shift.

Bored at the moment, so I'm composing this on ye olde PDA, to be posted via Semagic once I get home. Figure it'll be good practice for Nanowrimo next month tomorrow today OMG. Typing on this thing generates enough PITA to open a Greek restaurant, but I figure the ability to carry and use it literally anywhere offsets it. I hope.

Also, the fact that it can play music as well as run Word Mobile is a big help. Or maybe not. First song in the shuffle queue? "Calm Before The Storm" off the FF X soundtrack. An omen, perhaps?

In case anyone is wondering if this is taking time and energy away from BB (as if), fear not. My novel is set in the same alternate timeline, and will actually help me flesh out things might have turned out in the US, which I've mostly neglected to this point. Besides, I've always wanted to see how my beloved New Orleans would fare in my Timeline From Hell.

I've not yet given it an official title, but I'm leaning towards either A Gauntlet Thrown or The Boy Who Could See Forever. It's set in early 1960, a few months before the US general election (and roughly a year before the game starts). Having escaped destruction during the US/German atomic exchange of November 1944, New Orleans has become one of the most important cities in the eastern United States, thriving while most of the country has struggled. In the wake of the strikes on Washington D.C., New York and many other targets on the East Coast, President Thomas Dewey pushes throgh an Emergency Local Powers Act, giving broad powers to surviving state and local governments to carry on as they see fit, allowing the Federal government to focus its efforts on the regions where local order has collapsed. With recovery now well underway, however, the Feds are now seeking to reassert control; Senator Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. (D-Mass) has made doing so the centerpiece of his presidential campaign, and the Republicans are under pressure to do likewise, leaving the "state's rights" arms of both parties out in the cold. As a result, people in the South are talking about seceeding while they still have the chance.

My lead character is Cecil Bertrand, the 15-year-old son of a white Creole family trying to break into local politics. To that end Cecil finds himself pushed into the "right" social circles, and apprenticed to a powerful City Councilman many consider destined for the Governor's Mansion, and who is one of the most strident voices in favor of Local Powers. Cecil is eager for the opportunity...but the first time he shakes his mentor's hands, he senses something that he doesn't understand, but which shakes him to his core.

Turns out Cecil is a Blast Baby, one of many children born with psychic abilities as a result of the war. His powers allow him to glimpse into the past (retrocognition), the present (clairvoyance), and even into possible futures (precognition). And his would-be mentor? A German sleeper agent, an American-born volksdeutch infiltrated into the country years before, with the mission of sewing further unrest in the US. The psychic backwash from the suffering the man would cause if unchecked triggered Cecil's powers.

Now our hero must realize what he's sensing, master his abilities, gather evidence and find someone who'll listen, all while trying to keep both his powers and the other secret he discovers (that his "respectable white family" is in fact neither white nor respectable) secret. But others have sensed his powers, and are closing in...abd they have talents of their own...

And now that I'm both home I'm free to start on the novel...between work amd typing this, I'm too wiped out to start typing out of the gate. Not an auspicious start.

I'll start in the morning, I swears it.
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