Story Idea 1: King of the Junkyard (Patreon)

WARNING! POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD!

A while ago I said I had four ideas for the next story I intended to write, and that I would eventually ask my patrons what thoughts they had on each. Well, I’ve made an outline for each of the four ideas. Here is one of them. If you have time, please take a look and tell me what you think. Does this look interesting to you? Do you have any ideas or concerns you wish to raise? This isn’t a popularity vote, and I reserve the right to do whatever I want regardless of the reception each idea gets, but I do care what you think. That’s why I’m asking.

Oh yeah, just to reiterate the warning at the top of the post and clarify it – the following is a fairly detailed look at the story idea I may eventually write. If I do, some of the information may constitute mild spoilers for that story. There is nothing really crucial here, but obviously I cannot discuss the story without revealing some surface-level details about it. You have been warned.

Story Idea 1: King of the Junkyard

The basic premise is that the story is following a guy with healing/repairing powers as he lives his life in an urban fantasy world that has everything from aliens, supernatural martial artists, government conspiracies, underground magical communities, etc. The protagonist is already a capable person and in his twenties by the time plot starts, so the story doesn't slowly ramp up so much as immediately jump into action. The story structure is episodic, with self-contained little arcs connected by a loose meta-plot and some recurring support characters.

The Setting: 

The world is Earth, but not our Earth. Twenty years before the plot begins, two alien gods fought above the Earth and one of them ended up being killed and torn apart. Pieces of the dead gods (sparks of divinity) sought out compatible children and bonded to their souls, giving them superpowers. Unfortunately for them, said superpowers start very weak, come with serious downsides, and are very specialized in how they work. Sparks, as they call themselves, wield broken powers with significant downsides against established supernatural forces that consider them a nuisance at best and a resource to exploit at worst. Like newborn turtles making a run for the sea, these ‘sparks’ were mostly hunted down to extinction, both by their own fallen kind and by the other supernaturals.

But that’s old news by the time of the story itself. The godfall had more far-reaching consequences that a bunch of people getting weak, limited magic powers. By now, they have mostly been forgotten. Life goes on, and the majority of supernatural attention these days is directed at the rapidly developing crisis: the masquerade keeping the mundane ignorant of the supernatural is rapidly starting to fray…

The Protagonist: 

Jack Vinsky (working name) is a 23-year-old spark with a healing/repairing power. His non-combat power is the main tool he uses to take on the various supernatural elements that surround him, but that’s okay because he has become pretty good at it. At the start of the story he is just moving to another city hoping to start a new life for himself, far from his old enemies and problems.

Yeah. We all know how that is going to end…

Anyway, Jack is meant to be somewhat paradoxical in behavior. He deliberately pokes his head into anomalous things he encounters as he goes about living his life, tacking dangerous and incomprehensible issues with his own limited powers and mundane resourcefulness… yet at the same time he is very laid-back and often appears apathetic to what is happening around him. He tries to pass it off as ‘been there, done that’ kind of attitude, a product of a great deal of experience with Weird Things™ he has under his belt, but anyone who hangs out around him for a while will realize there is something subtly off about his attitude and responses… 

For those interested in more information and unfraid of spoilers, here’s the document detailing the exact mechanics of his power. Since this is Jack’s main way tackling problems and remaining relevant, I’ve gone into considerable detail how his powers work.

Other Notes:

One of the reasons I like the idea is the episodic format of the plot, combined with the somewhat lighthearted urban fantasy setting. It lightens the planning load on me by a considerable margin and should make the chapters way easier to write than MoL, which had story threads running from beginning to the end and lots of details to keep track of. If I want to have the protagonist deal with genetically engineered cyborgs, I can just have them arrive into town one day, fleeing from a shadowy government agency that created them. No need to worry too much about how they fit into the wider setting or plot.

I was thinking of perhaps writing this story as basically a side-project while I mainly focus on something else. The idea occurred to me mainly because writing a story like MoL can be really exhausting at times, because it's not very spontaneous and requires endless second-guessing and revisions. I do write a lot of snippets and concept chapters all the time, but their short nature makes them rather unsatisfying. Sometimes I really find myself wishing to write something simpler that isn't a snippet or a beginning of a new story that will never go anywhere. 

Example of mini-arcs/episodes:
>The first arc is pretty much decided in my mind, and involves Jack moving to another city only to realize that the house he bought for cheap has a ghost infestation he didn't know about.
>He's contected by crash-landed aliens that need his help in order to fix their spaceship.
>A group of magical girls mistakes Jack for a a civilian identity of the villain they had been fighting.
>A mad scientist dumps a broken android girl at the junkyard next to Jack’s house.
>Jack is accidentally summoned to a fantasy world to defeat the demon world, but he wants nothing to do with it and instead seeks out the quickest way back home.

As you can see, the plots are meant to be a little humorous and tongue-in-cheek... but I don't intend to make the story into an absurdist comedy. There is supposed to be a humorous aspect to the story, but the plot takes itself relatively seriously. Ridiculous things happen to Jack, but he doesn’t treat them as a joke. Not entirely, in any case.