Previously

It’s been so long that I had to remember what was going on in the main story.  Here’s a recap for anyone else following along.  Actually this first page is a recap of the blog, I’ll get to the story recap.

One time there was a blog called Dave the Commoner.  It was a solo Pathfinder game of sorts.  My weekly TTRPG group enjoyed it.  Once at the gaming table as a hilarious joke I said we should all start blogs for the other 4 non-PC Pathfinder classes besides commoner.  Two of us actually did it, Kels the Warrior and Ela the Expert (I win the alliteration battle).  The guy doing Kels quit after a few weeks, maybe because I made an oblique reference to how stupid I think dream sequences are right after he wrote a dream sequence.  But probably not, it was likely a coincidence.

Eventually the Dave the Commoner blog wrapped up, at the end I think Dave was level 55, had his own Spelljamer, a pet gold dragon and was the personal assassin of Zeus.  I kept going with Ela the Expert for roughly 70 years after that I seem to recall.  Then she died in a random encounter.  I had the domain name Elatheexpert but I liked writing the blog and wanted to keep going so clearly I had no choice but to start a new story with the same character in a different setting.  Clearly. 

After a couple more dead Elas I was all set to start a new Ela Cyberpunk story.  Then at the game table that week we were playing a game called The Strange, which is not the worst RPG title ever but it’s pretty bad.  Here’s how it’s described “It’s an RPG set on Earth, in the modern day. But a few people—a very few people—have discovered how to travel to other places. They call them recursions, and they’re like limited pocket dimensions with their own laws of reality, connected to Earth via a dark energy network beneath the normal matter of the universe.”

So, Sliders, or some other newer show that I haven’t seen.   One of the alternate dimensions, sorry I mean recursions, our characters went to was a Mad Max/Gorkamorka desert scrapland deal and I loved it.  When I sat down to start writing Cyber-Ela instead at the very last minute I decided to do Ela-pocalypse instead. 

I don’t remember why I decided to throw in cryogenics too.  I think I wanted to not write about the apocalypse happening but wanted a “modern” day character is why.  I had this Ela be frozen in the early 2000s so she could still be young and sexy and also have the same references as me.  It’s very important in a non-visual medium to make sure that your female protagonist is young and sexy.  Got to get that 18-49 demo.

So Ela, non-world renowned singer/actress, and her former stunt double/personal assistant/best friend she’s not very nice to/Gal Friday Martialla go to visit a cryogenics facility to research a movie role.  Then something happens.  An earthquake?  Civil disorder of some kind?  An EMP attack?  Whatever happened they get stuck at the facility and everyone outside in California is going all Lord of the Flies.  With food scarce and violence abundant the cryo people decide to put Ela and Martialla on ice for a little bit until things cool out.  Pun! 

When they wake up it’s the FUTURE and everything is all Mad Max/Gorkamorka desert scraplanded out.  They wander around for a while and I try to establish that everyone is mutated and ugly and doesn’t speak modern English.  I think some of those early posts are pretty good.  Later on the people not speaking modern English gets annoying and I kind of stop caring about it.  Continuity is hard.

Ela and Martialla get an awesome super-car that they name J-Lo for hilarious reasons.  Driving around in their automobile they see a village being attacked by raiders.  They learn the raiders are called the Invincible because names are also hard.  I have misspelled Invincible thousands of times now.  It’s probably the word I’ve misspelled the most in my life at this point.

They learn that the leader of the Invincible is Duke Eagle, called the Vain, because that’s the gimmick – Ela is always trying to get revenge on Duke Eaglevane.  Although this time she decides to try and kill him kind of for no reason.  I don’t remember why I did that.  Laziness probably.  It would have been fine not to have her motivation be revenge again this time but I should have come up with something better than “Eh, he sounds bad let’s get him”.  Or maybe that works for a post-apocalyptic wasteland?  Kind of a Man with No Name deal on the happy side of nihilism? 

Somewhere around her is when my GF stopped reading.  It’s just too much stuff you know.  I post all the time.  It’s absurd.  Also she was annoyed that in the story they hardly ever want to places on the map she drew, which is why I find maps annoying, I don’t want everything to be charted out, like the manatees that write Family Guy I need freedom.

Ela and Martialla go around forming an alliance of people to fight the Invincible.  I shoehorn in Lucien from the Super-Ela story because I thought it would be neat.  He was frozen in the 70s because I wanted to do a thing like that because cryogenics were also impossible in the 2000s.  What happened?  Did “they” figure out cryogenics in the 30s and keep it secret?

I don’t remember why I introduced Paul, I think it was just so I could have a “love scene” with Martialla that would be hilarious.  Everyone knows I’m being sarcastic when I say “hilarious” right?  He was frozen in the 2030s rather than being a natural born apocalyopser as well.

There’s a big fight, the alliance against the invincible, which I tried really hard to make interesting because action scenes are usually boring to read.  I think I did okay.  A map of some kind of battlefield schematic thing to go along with that post like you see in articles about war would have been really nice there but who’s going to draw it?  Not me. 

The idea was supposed to be that Ela and Martialla think they really did something by winning that battle but it turns out there’s WAY more of the Invincible and losing that battle was no big deal to Duke.  I don’t think I did a good job conveying that at all.  I think because if you make that statement clearly then there’s an issue of, well if the Invincible are so much more powerful than them how can they ever win?  Blow up the Death Star?  They just built another Death Star.  And another.  And another. 

Sort of, yeah.  I had Ela and Martialla fly off in search of the secret source of the Invincible weapons and armor since they have some modern day shit instead of spears and dune buggies like everyone else.  They crash their plane of course, and then wander around in the high plains before they find another super-car. 

At this point I was tired of writing that story and was going to unceremoniously end it and start something else.  But then a blog I read posted a thing about how some guy said that it’s important to finish stories so I was like “I should do that”.  I took a break from the main story and did some stuff about clones because I decided if I’m going to keep writing this I want to do what I want TV writers to do when their show is crappy – go nuts.  Throw in whatever.  Clones, robots, aliens, vampires, whatever man.

So that’s where we are.  Ela, Martialla, Lucien & Paul just got a new car and are out in the plains looking for an Invincible secret weapon manufacturing facility or something.