WIP The Yabanverse

Discussion in 'Works in Progress' started by Yuli Ban, Sep 15, 2022.

  1. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    I realized I hadn't infected the LitRPG forum with the Yabanverse yet, so I immediately hopped over here to spread the Bad News to more very unwilling audiences.

    About 5 years ago now, I decided to rip off Dragon Ball, stealing Saiyans for my own purposes. I christened my Saiyan ripoffs "Yabans" after the Japanese word for "Savage/barbarian."*

    Similar to Dragon Ball, some parts of the Yabanverse as I called it were to be martial arts fantasy of the xuanhuan genre. I could be pedantic and say "No, shōnen is not a genre, it's a demographic" before someone brings it up, but I do feel it's worth mentioning that the Yabanverse is aimed at a higher age bracket and thus you ought not wonder "Why is my kung fu space monkey story getting all political and real?"

    But the main story I'm focusing on is Little Miss Savage, which is more of a slice of life dramedy.

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    This is Sol Yulaan. She has to live on Earth and deal with our mundane and supernatural happenings. This was essentially the "first" Yabanverse story because the whole verse arose out of me asking way back in 2016 "What would happen if a Saiyan or any ultra-powerful entity ACTUALLY came to Earth?" And I realized quickly that, if that actually happened, things would get weird very quickly while also realizing that no one ever really did it "right." Most of those stories quickly became bogstandard superhero/shōnen action tales where, out of nowhere, villains arose to present high-octane obstacles for the characters involved. And to be fair, something like that does happen in LMS. But it's not really a major arc because there's no possible way for it to be. Yulaan is a "Thermonuclear Klingon" essentially; virtually nothing humans throw at her is going to hurt unless she wants it to or if she loses her qi abilities for whatever reason. Instead I punished myself by forcing myself to come up with alternative storylines.


    Still, it'd be a shame if I have these Legally-Not-Saiyans lying around and didn't use them properly, so over time, the Yabanverse became "Baby's First Warhammer 40k" as well. There's loads of different stories planned. And I don't intend on writing all of them.

    From the very beginning, the Yabanverse developed around my epiphany about synthetic media and generative AI. I don't know the exact day I decided to "make my own Saiyans, with blackjack and hookers" but it was something like a week or two after my media synthesis epiphany in early December 2017, and I very quickly realized "I could use AI to make this story real."

    And I've been realizing that dream ever since 2020 when I used Artbreeder to create portraits of Yulaan, and eventually then came Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2, and Craiyon which I've continued exploiting. It's only a matter of time before I buckle up and create a comic with these tools, or when the world hears these characters' voices.

    I've even created an animation with AI! Here's Yulaan picking a radish, animated with CogVideo:
    [​IMG]

    I do plan on realizing some of these stories in the near future. I've tried bringing Little Miss Savage to life twice, and neither time it took. The first time was better but I gave up because the second chapter of it was boring and I tried sticking way too close to a Kishōtenketsu story structure, which worked for the first chapter but failed the second.

    I also want to skip to some later stories in the verse, including one that was the real reason why I came here in the first place:
    [​IMG]

    This one, I realized, works incredibly well as a GameLit story. I just have to tell everyone about it.

    So yeah, that's the story so far.

    I might have mentioned this project before as "Enekai of Kollidor" somewhere on this forum, but that was so long ago and so much has changed.

    *Fun fact! Around half a year later at a point when the Yabanverse was at its furthest point from its xuanhuan roots, I decided I didn't want to be a weeaboo and instead searched for a new name for Yabans. Because of the Turkish/Turkic/Mongolic influences that were present at the time, I decided to go with Turkish and typed in "Savage" into Google Translate.

    What was the Turkish word for "savage/barbarian?"
    [​IMG]

    What the f—
    When the universe is trying to tell you something, you listen.
     
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  2. Mister Bill

    Mister Bill Level 16 (Paladin) Exiles Beta Reader Citizen

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    Huh!
     
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  3. Paul Bellow

    Paul Bellow Forum Game Master Staff Member LitRPG Author Shop Owner Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    How's the writing going?
     
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  4. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    Mostly (read: entirely) just pure worldbuilding right now
    But thanks to the power of AI, the worldbuilding's taken off.

    The most complete arc thus far is that of Planet Suiza's history
     
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  5. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    Let me show you what I mean

    Let me introduce to you Planet Suiza. It has a pretty small amount of fictional history (because again, this is pretty much a small indie worldbuilding project I do in my spare time), but I like the tragedy of its civilization.


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    Open to a field of grain stalks. Males are working with scythes, hoes, and plows. The scene is similar to what you'd find in an Amish community.
    This group of Homo sapiens call themselves the Shaeshens, and the Shaeshens are pitifully weak, even by human standards. Their military is small and shrinking. Their capacity for war is, itself, being warred upon. The leaders of this society speak of peace, harmony, pacifism, and total unity with God with all creatures.
    Context: This is Planet Suiza, in a country called Zanzhi that's undergoing social upheaval, led by the Hesxkin (pronounced "Hesex-kin") which is an ultrafundamentalist, neo-medievalist, hyper-reactionary wave of people who believe society as it was over a thousand years ago was the only way it should be. Essentially the Amish and Mennonites if they were terrorists meets the Taliban.
    But how did this happen?
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    Zanzhi society, Year 2550
    A relatively high-tech and magical world in Universe 23, roughly on par with mid-20th century Earth Prime.
    Zanzhi was not the premier superpower of Planet Suiza, instead being in second place not unlike China. Still, it was a relatively open constitutional monarchy and a world with much diversity of thought, seasonal trends, and modernization leading to the world preparing to enter into the space age and join the intergalactic community of worlds. Zanzhi would undoubtedly have benefited tremendously from this new dawning age.
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    In the middle of this century, Zanzhi was a country undergoing great changes, hurdling towards the future while longing for a Romanticized past. While it wasn't the strongest country out there, it was still in a very economically and socially fertile location that its nobles and merchants exploited to grow very wealthy and worldly, giving this industrialized society its marching orders for tomorrow.
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    Not all were fans of this industrial progress. One man— a deeply devout man of God, alchemist, and dragon lover named Alan Hesx— saw the modernization as savage, unholy, and despicable, and instead dreamed of forcing Suiza to return to a preindustrial, humble, and medieval state of being— by any means necessary.
    To him, Suiza in the early 1000s was the ideal state of being. Pious, agrarian, and feudalistic, with religious scripture and the church of their dominant God central to all life and thought, where gender roles were very rigidly defined and a great general 500-year peace allowed for spiritual prosperity.
    He developed and espoused deeply reactionary, ultra-conservative, and ultra-chauvinistic beliefs rooted in a blood and soil ideology that stated that all of modernity's evils stemmed back to industry, greed, war, and women. He offered hyper-agrarianism and masculinist-primitivism as the only way to live, unbesmirched by modernity's evils. As his popularity began to grow, he raised his two children, a son and a daughter, in believing wholeheartedly in his new ideology.
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    The followers of Hesx became known as the Hesxkin, and were increasingly radicalized and devoted to forcing the man's ways upon the world. However, they were long at a disadvantage: due to their disdain for modern technology, the government was always well ahead of them and their capabilities. Plus, their ultra-agrarian ideology coveted poverty and closeness to God over decadence and material comforts, which also proved unpopular with wider society.
    Still, they never quit, and the only thing that could conceivably destroy the Hesxkin movement would be the simple, quiet passage of time. Alan Hesx himself was growing old, and doubts festered as to whether his son was truly capable of living up to his dream standard of a societal patriarch. Movements not unlike the Hesxkin had come and gone before, including the equivalent to Marxism which had been almost totally crushed two generations in Zanzhi but had taken over a smaller, but still powerful regional rival nation and yet proved unable to spread further.
    It seemed as if the Hesxkin were doomed to become a historical footnote, a curio of the 2500s counterculture.
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  6. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    [​IMG]
    Until the Final World War began. Multiple nations ganged up on the sole communist country, which began forming relationships with other nations in a desperate bid to survive. High tech airplanes and magickal dragons alike were used in this brutal war which killed tens of millions in only a few years and led to such total and widespread international devastation that all other major world powers were left completely defunct, their governments collapsed.
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    The war lasted for 9 years, and Zanzhi made the blunder of getting involved when it was not needed, losing five million men and women in only a few years. But the militarization proved to be fateful, as now Zanzhi developed incredibly powerful force projection across the globe. With advanced airplanes and very well-tamed dragons to dominate the skies, the aerial war was quickly won, leaving only a ground war that was Zanzhi's to win. But rival powers, weakened as they were, still proved capable of striking Zanzhi directly, inflicting wartime horrors unto a pacified and spoiled population unused to such frights.
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    The Final World War left only pure destruction, despair, and anger in its wake. How had society gone so wrong? Who was to blame? Who could help them? Zanzhi emerged healthy, but not unscathed. A whole generation had been slaughtered, and the world that the people knew was left a pile of rubble.
    The Zanzhi elite did not care. Instead, they plotted to reorganize the world to fit their own desires, expand their hegemony, and achieve total world domination. Who could possibly stop them?
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    Of course, their own people.
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    The Hesxkin seized the opportunity, exploiting widespread discontent and malaise to boost their numbers to extraordinary proportions, spreading the comforting belief that a return to traditional values of the land would prevent any future wars from erupting. But the Hesxkin were particularly violent at this point in time, declaring that history itself had led to the mindless slaughter of the present and that only through shedding history would they cleanse themselves of the sins of modernity. If they were unable to go through with this great cleansing, the future generations would only be imprinted upon by the past and all the same mistakes would be made. Thus, history itself had to be erased in fire and madness.
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    The Hesxkin Revolution and the Great Cleansing coalesced into one explosive overthrow of Zanzhi, the government and existing elites left running in fear. The Hesxkin did not seek to undo the monarchy— if anything, their desire was to strengthen it to the realm of absolutism and restore traditionalist, noble order to the world. Their only quarrel was with how modernity unfolded and the corruption of the present. The wealth, art, greed, and pleasantries of the existing powers had to be destroyed to make way for a renewed aristocracy of proper Godly values and true spiritual nobility.
    As for the arts and history, there was nothing to be salvaged. Literature had to be burned. Textbooks had to be erased. Any cultural memories of anything besides the glory of the distant, Romantic past was worthless. Worse: it was Satanic and evil.
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    All society was uprooted. All traditions that went against the masculinist-primitivist return to rustic agrarianism were destroyed. If you were not with the Hesxkin, you were of Satan and to be destroyed. At its most radical point, even wearing glasses could mark you as educated and, thus, a potential enemy (only the elderly and genuinely disabled could offer a worthy excuse to escape persecution).
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    Finally, in 2560, the Zanzhi government surrendered even in exile and handed over all power, authority, and ownership to Alan Hesx and his men.
    The Hesxkin had won.
     
  7. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    [​IMG]
    The movement that started on disparate farmlands and composed of peasants and clergymen had suddenly swept to absolute power over the last superpower on Suiza, and celebrations came quick and were extremely festive. Hearing of their victory, the Hesxkin and their supporters erupted into spontaneous cheering.
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    All across Zanzhi and, indeed, much of the wartorn world, there were cheering crowds and celebrations as Hesx was treated as a great modern revolutionary who offered a genuine alternative way compared to the bloodsoaked existing hierarchy.
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    Within days, the true face of the Hesxkin movement unveiled itself, instead veiling that of girls and women. The Hesxkin were chauvinists and reactionaries who had long made their intentions known but, in the lead up to the Hesxkin Revolution, softened their language to make themselves seem more inclusive so as to not erase the contributions of half the population.
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    But the cold fact is that the female half of Suizan humanity was doomed. If you want a vision of Suiza's future, imagine a boot stamping on a woman's covered face— forever.
    Girls and women who refused to submit to the new draconian laws and restrictions put in place against them quickly found themselves repressed and humiliated and, increasingly often, dead. Even little girls would be tortured or shot in the head for resisting men's orders or even be seen walking the streets without a chaperone, uncovered, or bringing attention to themselves.
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    The elderly Alan Hesx, now the new totalitarian absolutist emperor of Zanzhi, imposed his country's forces on the rest of the world and on Zanzhi itself. In contrast to the quaint Romantic primitivism of Hesxkin ideology, Hesx himself established something of a modern fascist state for many years in order to push his beliefs to their limits and achieve his aims. For a few years after the Revolution, some former Hesxkin believers became disillusioned, seeing that they had only overthrown their corrupt aristocracy with one that was ironically more modern and more corrupt.
    In his advanced age, Hesx also faced another dilemma: that of the lineage of power. He offered his only son as the new prince to rule, but the Hesxkin rumors were soon proven true when his son came out as gay and fled the country.
    Hesx, an ardent believer in the divine right of kings and of the necessity of hereditary rule, faced an impossible choice: either hand over his power to a new man, or hand over his power to his daughter, a woman.
    Due to his megalomaniacal beliefs in his historical importance and understanding that his new government could not achieve full neo-medieval theocracy overnight without exploiting modernity, Hesx bent his own rules again and relented, letting his daughter take control. Once more, the Hesxkin were left disillusioned, feeling as if they had been conned by a populist strongman.
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    This did not stop the Hesxkin from carrying out what they had long set to do: destroy modernity. This included deconstructing industrial centers, razing industrial parks to the ground to be replaced with farmland, and destroying all evidence of modern technology, no matter how useful or beneficial to life and health. Like Luddites on steroids and with totalitarian power, the Hesxkin smashed every industrial center they could find, in Zanzhi and elsewhere.
    Shocked countries that somehow did not see the writing on the wall and who refused to let themselves be forced into poverty attempted to fight back, only to be bltizkrieged or steamrolled by the vastly superior Zanzhi army, not helped by deeply war weary populations who simply wanted the fighting to stop. All people wanted was a world of peace. Whether that world was high tech or low did not matter, so long as the bombs stopped falling, the dragons stopped spewing fire, and the tanks stopped rumbling through their neighborhoods.
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    In the Suiza world war, the other nations had wiped each other out to the same extent the USSR did to Nazi Germany, leaving only scattered and confused fighting left. The nations that could stop Zanzhi were obliterated, and the nations that could still fight back were too puny to matter. Unlike the USA or USSR, Zanzhi under the Hesxkin had absolutely no desire to reconstruct the world. When they occupied these countries, they immediately got to work tearing down industrial centers, destroying television and radio broadcasts, destroying evidence of lasers and magnetic storage, destroying atomic technology, destroying telegraphs, destroying shipyards, destroying music studios, destroying primitive video game research, destroying all records of physics and mathematics, destroying other religious iconography, destroying thousands of years worth of literature and art, and altogether forcing the entire planet back a thousand years. A few stalwarts held out, just to defend their own homeland and prevent their citizens from being thrust into enforced poverty.
    One patriarch remembers when he was a child who would play some electronic card game and dream of these e-card games becoming something even better (what we'd recognize as video games), and he'd cry furiously when the police came into their house and destroyed it all in front of him while calling him evil for playing them. Or watching TV/listening to the radio. He wasn't a little kid, so he was able to understand some of what was going on. He used to dream of a great futuristic age for Suiza and was direly mournful to watch it all go up in smoke. He'd have to start wearing real old-timey clothes, pray at virtually all hours of the day, and basically pretend that old technological hedonism of his earlier life didn't happen. He also had to watch as his beloved sisters became walking shadows, hidden behind burqa-like veils.
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    Boys were the beneficiaries of this new world, but this did not mean they were not also victims. They, too, now had to live up to new standards and gender roles that were extraordinarily restrictive and left them without much room to enjoy life. Men were to be the providers and laborers, forever living in silent struggle with the land. Boys, grown up spoiled and excited over a prospective future age in space, could not stop crying at the thought that it was all gone. Boys and men instead were now to be raised told that they were the shepherds and masters of all society, subservient only unto God.
    As for their mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, and lovers? Never speak of them again!
     
  8. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    [​IMG]
    And so as the troubles quieted and the Hesxkin rulers finally began living up to old promises, society began becoming more and more like a living Rockwell painting, a rural folk utopia where well-dressed, honest, and simple men living earnest and religious lives in a theocratic, humble, and traditional world.
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    This was to be a society of toilers, working with struggle and hard labor, living true, Godly lives cultivating the soil. Only what your own hands could make, you could take pride in.
    The nature of Zanzhian masculinist-primitivism was different from that of the Earthling equivalent. Whereas Earthling primitivists and traditionalists exalted war and conflict as the height of masculinity, Zanzhians led by the Hesxkins came to view war as an evil caused by a dominance of femininity. True masculinity was strong, but pacifistic and stringently opposed war and large-scale conflict.
    Men would rather use their muscles and minds towards the Four Divine Professions: Farmer, Fisherman, Merchant, and Clergyman. Though other Professions may exist, including that of warrior, only these were to be heralded as true and Godly.
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    For males, life was innocent and relatively free. Boys would grow up in small, close-knit communities, catching frogs in streams, rough housing and exploring with their friends, learning how to become men and patriarchs, and learning to love God and appreciate all He had created. For males, especially those born and raised after the Revolution and Great Cleansing, life was good. They knew their place and role in society as those chosen by God to lead and to master, the light and good of the world, those destined to be and to become.
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    For females, however, life was one of constant suffering and repression. Early on in the post-revolutionary world, those women who understood the threat of the Hesxkin despaired and often took their lives, understanding the sheer impossibility of lives lived ahead of them.
    The traditional women bowed their heads and accepted their coming inferiority and subjugation. But for those women who dreamed of anything better, all that was left was ashes mixed with broken gadgets and a future predetermined to hate them and their very existence.
    Women who believed that the Hesxkin might prove moderate or not so bad quickly faced reality. There was no slow burn or gradual deterioration— as soon as the Hesxkin was able to express authority, women lost all rights and freedoms. They were physically removed from all workplaces. They were barred from being able to carry money, buy or sell goods and services, owning any object or property, and soon worse— much worse.
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    Boys needn't worry about these restrictions. Many from before the Great Cleansing resisted the destruction of their loved ones and female strangers alike, and for their efforts they suffered the worst abuses, treated as traitors to their sex, and cast as wicked and lost. For those born after or in full agreement of the Cleansing, there was no need to worry about anything but what each new day brought.
    In boys, you found innocence and curiosity fostered and exalted. Boys could be anything, so long as God willed it.
    The fun, wholesome experienced found in boyhood were yours to enjoy.
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    But as for the Other Kinds of People, there was nothing.
    The Other Kinds of People, formerly known as women, were no longer free to exist. By 2570, the Hesxkin made it illegal to even depict female characters in fiction. This world was to be completely devoid of any female impact.
    The Other Kinds of People were hidden away in homes, unable to walk without male chaperones— and subject to constant humiliation and abuse even when they dared. There were no longer any references to their existence in society beyond fleeting mentions of the King Mother and the Virgin Mother. Those who dared to hint their existence would be taken to the Rooms for forgiveness, a terrifically painful punishment.
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    The Other Kinds of People eke out a miserable life, their only hope for any sort of pleasure being to give into what society expects of them: a pious, invisible domesticity living only as slaves and maids for their male relatives. To those who excel at modesty, cooking, cleaning, and making babies, as well as reacting to your male relative's harshness and strictness with feminine submission and humble acceptance of your worthlessness, life is about as good as it will ever be for you.
    Any who attempt to resist this way of life will be sent to Judgment. Any man who pities the Other Kinds of People will be sent to the Rooms, or to Judgment himself. Kindness towards the Other Kinds of People can make you suspect, and if a fellow brother in God sees you acting with too much mercy and sympathy towards one, he may declare you a heretic, taken by Satanic seduction. So the Other Kinds of People cannot rely on boys and men to care for them except in the darkest, most closed-off parts of their own homes. And sure, once it reaches that point, the societal imprinting has become so extreme that it's unlikely those men truly care.
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    The Other Kinds of People may beg and plead for a better lot in life when they are pushed too far into despair, but there is no hope for them. Even making themselves known to the public will bring violent retribution unto them.
    To be a girl or woman on Suiza after the Cleansing is to be a being damned. And because of the total erasure of history the world over, because of the wide decline into religious fervor and absolution, there is no hope for a thousand years more. Surely the Hesxkin will fall, for they have spread themselves far too wide and thin with a regime that cannot possibly stand world domination. But there is nowhere that can act as the foundation for modernity to return. When the religiosity fades, it will be into a world that is essentially unchanged from a thousand years prior.
     
  9. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    [​IMG]
    As the Hesxkin spread their fervor across the globe, all things native to Zanzhi will become native to other nations as well. There is no possibility of escape. The planet had not developed any means of jumping across space or dimensions, and they war against the Demon World that sometimes makes attempts to harass them and their desire to raise glory to God.
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    In 2566, only six years after the success of the Great Cleansing, Alan Hesx passed away and gave over control of the world to his daughter, who became known as the King Mother. She would rule for the better part of a century more over Zanzhi and their vassals.
    The few women who hoped that she might prove to be sympathetic to them were soon let down and betrayed, for the King Mother was a true believer in her father's ideology. She did not believe in her own right to rule, instead casting it as a bizarre act as mercy and transition by God. She would be the last female to ever rule Zanzhi, surely, until Final Judgment. And what's more, she felt herself to be a proper role model for the Other Kinds of People, one whose devotion to God and her submissive place in society would shine a holy light to guide the world into an even more moral state.
    Her brother, the gay man who rejected his divine right to rule as a man and rejected the heteronormative ways of Zanzhi, was soon crucified as an agent of Satan and treated as the Cain of the new world.
    The King Mother refused to make the same mistakes the decadent noble women of old had done. She vowed that she would provide a true maypole of female morality to be followed for time immemorial.
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    As time passed, the quaint 1950s Americana that blossomed in the immediate aftermath of the Great Cleansing was soon replaced by something far more traditional, a sort of return to truly Biblical and medieval times even in dressing and action.
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    All liberalism dead, Shaeshen humans were now to be considered flawed and insignificant sinners in the hands of an angry God, whose only hope for salvation was constant penance and prayer.
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    This neo-Biblical world was everything Alan Hesx wanted to see, a world of shepheds and farmhands toiling, cultivating the land, living solely for the glory of God. And despite a few continuing pockets of resistance across the world, there was no one able to stop or reverse this reaction into the past.
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    Inevitably, a few cults arose following different splintering religious factions, but there was no chance of any sort of secularism spreading again. The world of the 2590s onwards would be hard to distinguish from one found in pseudo-medieval fantasy, or perhaps even pseudo-Antiquity fantasy. Jeans and Church clothes were soon replaced by robes and head dresses, and as the next generation came of age, even more radicalized and religious men realized that they could go even further, casting off as much organized society as they possibly could and living a truly primitivistic lifestyle.
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    Masculinist-primitivism on Suiza and in Zanzhi reached its apex in the early 2600s, when horticulturalism and even some forms of hunter-gather lifestyles were popular and dominant. But as these things do, the trends turned, and men began once again looking for some sort of change to their lifestyles. This is not to say they once again became obsessed with modernity— by this point in time, it was well known that modernity was a false, seductive mistress misleading Shaeshen humanity. For all its progress and wealth, it was a godless and hopeless world far from what the Shaeshen humans truly needed. Though people now lived in want and some form of material squalor, was this new society not a better one? Now we had hard-handed men whose attachment to the soil brought them unto closeness with God and nature.
    Even the dragons seemed happier, no longer chained and tamed against their better nature, exploited for purposes of war. The mystical and magical aspects of Suiza were hidden away now, largely seen as mysterious breaths of God Himself, things that were better suited to remain in the realm of magicke and the preternatural.
    As the 2600s turned into the 2610s and 2620s, society again seemed to move towards seeking prosperity and pleasure, but it was understood that never again was Zanzhi ever going to reach the heights of decadence it had a century prior.
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    A few men continued to resist, such as this one who did not agree that his 4-year-old daughter deserved to be whipped just because she stepped outside into the public eye to pet a stray cat. No matter his protests and concerns, he would be forced to stay in the Rooms for extended forgiveness, told for days that he had been seduced by his own daughter's Satanic nature, and that he was a failure of a man.
    All this for a man who, himself, was perfectly fine with the ways of the world and would have had no qualms about telling the morality police of another man's daughter doing what his had done.
    Such logical thought had no place on Suiza. This was to be a world ruled by God and thoughtless devotion, and nothing else.
    [​IMG]
    And it would remain this way for hundreds of years. Surely.
    This was Planet Suiza. Now a world of pious agrarian peasants, females turned into walking objects, in societies that are now and forever will be medieval & quaint. The only future allowed is the inevitable armageddon and final judgment. Any hope for a sci-fi or democratic future are forever gone, wiped out by dogma. History has been destroyed. Beliefs and philosophies that could have allowed for a great restarting of society after the most extreme dogma have passed have been systematically exterminated. When rationality returns, it will be to a world that might as well have been unchanged and continuous from a time a thousand years prior.
    All society is now reverent and masochistic, desperate to be worthless and powerless before an almighty god.
    Until one day, in 2650, when a mysterious object streaked across the Zanzhi sky...
     
  10. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
    It crashlanded with a mighty explosion in a corn field, the shockwaves causing panic and terror in the small community and nearby city.
    [​IMG]
    The explosion and dust cloud could be seen for miles, and yet nothing seemed to immediately happen. Had it been a star from heaven? A fallen angel? Was this God's punishment for immorality?
    [​IMG]
    Men, militia men and farmers, came from all around to see just what had crashed.
    [​IMG]
    To their shock and horror, it was one of the Other Kinds of People!
    A woman had crashed from heaven, emerging from a shiny chrome orb in the burning cornfield. Though she seemed injured and in some need of medical assistance, her very appearance angered the men who watched. She's out without any covering or a veil. What's more, she has these hideous muscles and battle-scars and the hardest looking expression as if she were trying to pass herself off as a stern man. They then take note of her lashing tail, wild hair, deathly pallor, bizarre eyes, and a general aura of utter strangeness around her. It is not another kind of person: it is a demon!
    [​IMG]
    The morality police and men watching debated on how to proceed. They could not insult their God by letting one of the Other Kinds of People walk around in such unmodest clothing, looking so unfeminine! They approached, desiring to remind this heaven-sent woman of her place. Even if she was an angel from above or a demon from below, she could not show affront to God with her immodesty.
    [​IMG]
    They spoke of Drugatsko
    She was a warrior from the Yaban race (Saiyanthropus ferus), and was an experienced low-level vitakoze (Deathkommando) who had been injured in battle in space, which had pressured her to crash land on the nearest suitable world in order to recover and set off to her home planet of Kollidor.
    By chance, Drugatsko landed on Suiza, in a farmer's field in one of the most conservative regions of Zanzhi. And now some humans were crowding around her, telling her to discard her armor, spandex, and musculature, get down on her knees, and repent.
    She laughed at the sight and was having none of it. The men aimed their muskets and fired. They unsheathed their swords and threatened to cut her down.
    Nothing affected her.
    [​IMG]
    Instead, Drugatsko let bioelectricity dance around her body, sending the men running in fear as this horrible power and incredible qi began to expand.
    [​IMG]
    Soon, the power she put out was so intense that she caused a lightning storm that destroyed the very field she landed in, electrocuting many passersby and causing the heavens themselves to tremble.
    And yet this was just the warm-up.
    [​IMG]
    As an orb of qi enveloped Drugastko's body, her qi then erupted in a mighty, fantastic explosion that erased the landscape and destroyed mountains. And yet the fireball continued to grow until soon, nothing was left. The explosion ran through the farmland, the town, then nearby cities.
    Men and women, creatures of all kinds, mountains and clouds succumbed to the horrible explosion.
    And at the center stood Drugatsko, triumphant and bloodlusted.
     
  11. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    [​IMG]
    The destruction was intense, the mushroom cloud rising high, and the sense of despair already growing.
    But Drugatsko did not do this as a demonstration to make everyone submit. Rather, she saw Suiza as a planet where she could have fun.
    [​IMG]
    As the ruins and rubble of society already began to collapse, Drugatsko began her worldwide rampage.
    [​IMG]
    Her power was so preposterous that nothing the people used could so much as scratch her. She was truly otherworldly. She would walk through gunfire and crush men's skulls with a flex of the fingers, and would leave behind mountains of dead bodies and lakes of blood.
    [​IMG]
    Old, dormant weapons of war were salvaged and brought out to stop the demonoid's rampage. Bombs, napalm, and more. Heavy machine guns, magickal spells, war dragons, grenades, and early atomic weaponry alike.
    Drugatsko shrugged.
    [​IMG]
    And then she struck back, firing waves of qi from her hands that obliterated whole cities, even countries.
    Quickly, the sentiment shifted from shock and awe over the current events to despair and even revelation that this was it.
    [​IMG]
    This was Final Judgment.
    [​IMG]
    And Drugatsko deemed them worthless.
     
  12. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    [​IMG]
    Now that Drugatsko was alone with this disarmed race of weak humans, even in her own damaged state, she managed to effortlessly crush those who attempted to impose their religious restrictions on her and get her to submit. So enraged was she by the Suizans' turn towards religious pacifism that she took her sweet time making sure the end of Shaeshen civilization was as slow, drawn out, and painful as she could make it.
    How pathetic! To disarm yourself! To give up war! To turn away from combat! These weaklings were so pathetic that finishing them off would be too kind.
    She didn't collapse the last standing nation until almost five years after she landed, all because she craved to soak in the raw despair and despondency of the Shaeshens. Oh how lovely it was to see these old grandfathers and their black-clad crones weep in despair over fallen icons and burning churches. How laugh-inducing it was to watch communities tear themselves apart over bread, starved by the collapse of agriculture, only to run in fear and horror at her very visage. Observe as political leaders and high-priests fall unto their knees, begging her for mercy forgiveness. HER. Not their god. Oh their God has forsaken them.
    She walks their God like a dog.
    [​IMG]
    Drugatsko was left horribly disappointed at how easily the Shaeshens capitulated to her might.
    Her Yaban blood screamed for combat. She felt an intrinsic desire to put her strength against the mightiest possible Shaeshen just to know the answer that their battle would give, but unfortunately, even the strongest Shaeshen man proved to be little more than helpless meat compared to even the tiniest fraction of her true power.
    And so, instead of eradicating the species, she instead pondered.
    What if she imposed her will on the planet? What if she transformed this planet of weaklings into one of power?
    [​IMG]
    Drugatsko, a bolloi, a fellow female in this cosmic sorority, could have been the fem-Messiah for Suizan women and overthrow this wretched patriarchy. How could their star-sister not take pity on them? Could she not see how horribly her kind were suffering under the yoke of male supremacy? The women did nothing wrong except be born without dicks and with human emotions, and for that, they were abused so horribly, treated as defective property and not even allowed to have their own word. They weren't women— they were "the other kinds of people," a deliberately cumbersome moniker.
    She, the space warrior, is just a wife and mother to be. She could be a competent warrioress who has laid waste to all planets in any number of galaxies, conquered trillions of civilizations, and defeated any great number of proud warriors, and the only thing they'll care about is her answer to the question, "But can you cook and clean?"
    These women, most of whom were brainwashed by a medievalist regime and very poorly educated, were not asking for equality. The term didn't even exist in Shaeshen society anymore, replaced by beliefs of a godly hierarchy that cannot be rebelled against. All they were asking for was to be seen as people. Second-class people even. They didn't mind being subservient to the men, so long as they were not disrespected and doubted to even be humans but rather man-footed things lesser than bovine shit. And Drugatsko seemed to be their only hope, for all hope of society realizing its folly of unpersoning an entire gender was lost for at least a thousand years, and even when society progressed again and learned from its mistakes, the scars of this ultra-misogyny were sure to be inflicted upon every girl for a thousand years more in more indirect ways. Even two thousand years from now, girls will be born with the scars of the horrors inflicted in these dark days. They will be spoken of as sluts and whores who destroy societies and exist only to satisfy men's cocks, where any agency they take will be viciously repressed and any aspirations will be torn down and then blamed upon themselves for dreaming low. And that's in the best case scenario. So much worse could happen.
    Please, the Other Kinds of people begged, save them.
    And Drugatsko replied, "No."
    The women were betrayed.
    [​IMG]
    Drugatsko didn't sympathize with them at all. In fact, she felt the Suizan leaders were far, far too liberal. The bastards of pacifism restrained women as a means of thwarting war out of a belief that it was the passions invoked by femininity and sensuality that drove war and conflict. But they were traditionalists of the classical sense ultimately and desired to control feminine sexuality. They wanted women to be breeding stock and homemakers only. There was masculinity and there was femininity as ordained by God, and it was up to women to keep holy and pure femininity. These women, the other kinds of people, all had a duty to be pleasant, out-of-sight housewives, cooks, and maids for their husbands. They had to live up to the standards of femininity: sensual, emotional, delicate, gentle, godly, and demure, but also had to admit those elements of poison that needed to be repressed, those temptresses of the Devil. This is why society had to be the way it was.
    On the contrary, Drugatsko felt that their feminizing presence was holding back the raw warrior potential of the race. That among humans, men are the aggressors. Men are the warriors. Men are the fighters. Men are the kings of the will. Women have their place in human society as the soft defenders of civilization and the mothers of the future. But for what Drugatsko has planned, women are nothing but trash. And there's only one thing you do with trash.
    Thus, Drugatsko had every woman on the planet murdered.
    As for the men, there was only thing a Yaban could ever think to do with them:
    War.
    As Drugatsko recovered from her earlier battle, she realized she had a perfect opportunity to craft a world of ultra-warriors, desperate not for worshipping God but for worshipping death, combat, bloodshed, and battle. Her conqeror tendencies ignited as she sought to destroy who the Shaeshens were and remold them into what she wanted them to be.
    [​IMG]
    The world that had once been, the world Alan Hesx had dreamed of being an agrarian, masculinist-primitivist utopia, the world that would render unto God all good things, was now destroyed and burned. Only the elders had any memory of a world before, and they experienced now the dawn of a new, even darker world under one whose reign would be so cold, chilling, and deathly that they could only wish their God had not betrayed them and left them in the hands of a Yaban.
     
  13. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    [​IMG]
    Drugatsko declared herself the Iron Khan, the new brutalitarian ruler of all Suiza.
    Her first decree: the technological regression was brutally reversed, utilizing her own space ship and transmitted technological schemas from the Gosamyrs to forcibly re-industrialize the plane. In a single generation, the Shaeshens were able to build breeding chambers and artificial wombs that Drugatsko further pruned to help engineer even more warrior-ready Shaeshens. Before, society was quaint, very much similar to the Amish or Mennonites in a Taliban-like society.
    Now it was to be something like a gladiatorial Airstrip One, except headed by a war-sick Yaban. Making things more processed, she had slaves and goblins from other worlds brought in to do the dirty work of running society so that the Shaeshen men would not be distracted from their duties of infinite war.
    Meanwhile, she utilized Yabans' human factory farming practices to engineer the Shaeshens into creatures dedicated to combat and destruction: muscular, bellicose, and awful.
    And Drugatsko herself rechristened them with the delightfully boyish moniker "Devastators."
    [​IMG]
    As Drugatsko would say, Suiza is now a planet of war. It is a planet based centrally and completely around the triumph of the will over the forces of weakness, of the celebration of bellicose violence and manly pride. There is no longer any place on this blood-stenched planet for weaklings and the effeminate! The Devastators shall be warriors of power and might!
    [​IMG]
    Under the psychotic reign of the Iron Khan, all memories of Zanzhi, of Hesx, of the world that once was, was now forever lost into a singularity of brutalitarian madness.
    [​IMG]
    The age of the Shaeshans had passed. Now was the age of the Devastators.
    [​IMG]
    (Drawn by Ishida1694)
     
  14. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    Hundreds of years have passed since Drugatsko's arrival.
    Drugatsko, being a Yaban, is biologically immortal, cycling through youth and maturity rather than reaching old age. Thus, she maintained herself as the Iron Khan, slowly developing her new playthings into the most extreme human warriors imaginable.
    Despite being bit players at most, the Devastators are one of my favorite creations for the Yabanverse.
    [​IMG][​IMG]
    Suiza under the Devastators is every hypermasculine impulse of 80s post-apocalyptic B-movies come to life and amplified to absurd levels
    It is a Death World, only by the will of the Devastators themselves who eagerly seek to destroy their own world just to make it more inhospitable and, thus, more exciting to live on.
    Their particular style of choice is a Gladiatorial Airstrip One, a planet-wide fusion of Greco-Roman gladiator and 80s Road Warrior aesthetics, essentially a never-ending Thunderdome, if also in a state of constant ruin and dilapidation due to the scrunts and helots never truly being able to repair what the Devastators destroy because it is destroyed again.
    [​IMG]
    They are essentially human orcs, living solely for war and battle, driven to infinite warfare by their war-sick leader, the Iron Khan Drugatsko, a Yaban who took their original Gilead/Taliban-like fundamentalist dystopia, destroyed it, and remade their species according to her own whims. So masculine that they're unisexual, since Drugatsko exterminated all women of their species hundreds of years ago and replaced them with cold re-breeding chambers and conjuration rituals.
    During the events of Rage of Angels on Planet Gorta, they're all death-worshipping bloodfreaks who do holy battle against Yulaan, the only female some of them have ever seen besides Drugatsko. It sometimes feels like only Yabans can possibly understand them and their need to fight. But they know better than to believe this, as there are a multitude of races driven to vengeance war 'til death.
    Otherwise, the Devastator empire is forever expanding outwards throughout the cosmos in search of more battle, because in battle, there is no law!
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
    Devastators are a loveletter to that style of glammy, homoerotic 80s ultramasculinity of big men with big muscles, often clad in new wave/glam rock duds, airbrushed chrome silver and leather armor, and face paint with punk or metal hair, road warrior fashion, and military worship, essentially Rambo and Arnie filtered through Bruce Lee, Kenshiro, Max Rockatansky, and every badass 80s arcade character.
    Pure Manowar-style male fantasy BS.
    [​IMG]
    Pictured: Warmaster Kombaticus
    And they all live under the brutalitarian rule of the Iron Khan, Drugatsko
    [​IMG]
    Drugatsko, being a Yaban, is the strongest person on Suiza at any particular time
    Being a Yaban also means she's arguably the most brutal person on Suiza at any particular time as well
    But not for a lack of trying, as she seeks to cultivate Devastators to become the ultimate warriors of chaos
     
  15. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    For Rage of Angels, this is where it starts getting a bit GameLit:

    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
    For when the average Devastator isn't devastating enough for you.
    Mutoid Man is a misnomer; this is actually one of many Mutoid Men. These are examples of what the Devastators can be when they're genetically engineered beyond normal measures. For a species that's already essentially nothing but Adeptus Astartes/Catachan Jungle Fighters/Warriors of Chaos and demon-men road warriors, the Mutoid Men are possibly even stronger than the average Yaban and this means nothing but ultra-war and devastation. These mutant Sapiens bear little to no resemblance to us wild populations of the species, being ultra-hulking masses of muscle and nexcidious warlust.
    There's multiple kinds of Mutoid Men, meant to make Rage of Angels into more of a GameLit story.
    At the bottom, you have the Green Mutoid Men, aka pseudo-Hulks. These mutants are probably around 10 times stronger than the average human. I say probably because I haven't thought out the details yet, but that sounds about right, and it'd put them on par with secular Yabans (which is what I set out for them to be). They look like the mutants they are, and their power is extraordinary.
    [​IMG]
    Then you have Red Mutoid Men, which are a bit stronger and much more aggressive, with thicker skin and hardier organs to protect from damage, making them into true "mini-bosses"
    [​IMG]
    Then you have Blue Mutoid Men, which are getting close to 25 times stronger than the average human, with vastly enhanced physiology that makes them all but immune to anything humans could throw at them.
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
    Finally, you have the Onyx Mutoid Men, who are something like 100 times stronger than the average human.
    An Onyx Mutoid Man is a mutant Sapiens of atrocious power
    These are the rarest kinds of Devastator for a reason. That level of power requires extreme resources and top of the line engineering. But every Onyx Mutoid Man is a walking atom bomb of power, able to fight off even a small army of Blue Mutoid Men singlehandedly. Their power is so absurd, and it's hard to fathom that they're humans just like you or me pushed to their absolute possible limit.
    These numbers might disappoint those who wanted them to be planet busters, but again, I've been thinking of nerfing relevant characters so as to make the stories more interesting. But don't feel bad: that's all liable to change.
    The Onyx Mutoid Men are outrageously powerful Sapiens, with raw physical strength, psychokinetic abilities, and suffering from naturally-produced cocktails of nexcidium-flavored drugs that keep them perpetually in a psychotic nexcidious berserker rage whenever they're awake.
    Like the other Mutoid Men, Onyx Mutoid Men don't "sleep" per se as much as they are forced into stassis and deployed only when necessary. The few Mutoid Men in the wild are usually killed soon because they go around engaging in cannibalism to sustain their absurd energy requirements, and even the Devastators have self-preservation instincts.
    Yulaan, Skullcrusher, and Yoshua manage to fight precisely two Onyx Mutoid Men while on Gorta, though at what intervals, I won't say. The first is essentially a practice round that they have to overcome with alternate means, and the second is the real deal.
    Onyx Mutoid Men are real horrorshow bastards. A single Onyx Mutoid Man could crush every military on Earth, barring the use of nuclear or biological weaponry. Drugatsko had Mutoid Men created mostly to showcase to the grunts that even the most average of fighters can overcome overwhelming odds, but sometimes those odds are just too overwhelming and too good to not use for better purposes.
    The sheer raw power of Onyx Mutoid Men is so great that, like Yabans, they often crackle with bioelectricity and command lightning storms to strike their bodies spontaneously. These mutants push biology to its absolute limit.
    [​IMG]
    The sheer plus-plus might of an Onyx Mutoid Man excites Yulaan's lust for battle, as well as gives Skullcrusher a thrill to show his own skills off. Yoshua, too, feels nothing but pleasure at the thought of slaying a worthy opponent. And who's more worthy on Gorta than a freakazoid Mutoid Man, an ultra-berserker of frankly dumb power.
    One thing that separates Mutoid Men from other ultra-high voltage creatures is their lack of qi cultivation abilities. A single Onyx Mutoid Man could crush every military on Earth, barring deployment of nuclear weaponry, and his raw bioelectric and psychokinetic powers can certainly cause cultivators to turn heads. However, Mutoid Men fatally lack that ability to cultivate qi or mana due to some fluke of their mutation, so their power is purely secular and purely disgustingly stupid.
     
  16. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    Phew! That's Suiza in a nutshell. It's not that important in the larger Yabanverse, a fairly minor planet if anything, but I love the story arc of the planet.
     
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  17. Paul Bellow

    Paul Bellow Forum Game Master Staff Member LitRPG Author Shop Owner Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    Hah! The powers of AI + human imagination! Thanks for sharing. Good stuff.
     
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  18. Yuli Ban

    Yuli Ban Level 18 (Magician) LitRPG Author Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    Indeed, that's the promise of synthetic media. Imagine just how many more projects like this exist in people's minds that are locked behind a creative paywall that AI will help unleash.
     
  19. Mister Bill

    Mister Bill Level 16 (Paladin) Exiles Beta Reader Citizen

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    Maybe put it up on RR as is. Do a chapter for each comment or so.
     
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