Story Idea: Judas

(Note: The character Judas is not named after Judas Iscariot. I just happened to like the name.)

There is a city made of white stone and ruled over by an immortal king. The city seems endless, outside areas are ever mentioned. Everyone lives happily. An orphan boy named Judas is taken care of in a government-run house for orphans. He has a good life, but like all healthy boys who grow up in the government's care, he enters the military academy to become a City Guard. His teachers quickly realise that he is a prodigy and at the age of 15 he is transferred to a special group. There he is trained in infiltration and disguise and stands out amongst the most skilled of the elite.

He is assigned to infiltrate a group of suspected assassins, foil their plans just before their completion and help arrest them during the ensuing confusion. Once inside the organisation he meets a girl with whom he becomes close. The goal of the organisation is to kill the king, who they believe is not immortal, but simply replaced every time he dies. They plan to have one of their men set as a guard in the palace the night before the king's 880th birthday, the morning of which he will address the populace from the balcony of his room. The spy is to work their way to the king's bedroom and kill him as he is making his speech so that the people will see the truth.

Judas succeeds in getting posted as the palace guard, but when he reaches the king's chamber and discovers that what the assassins said was true, he has second thoughts about whether or not he should uncover the plot of regicide and turn in the assassins. He is faced with a delema: should he kill the king and uncover the lie simply because it is a lie? Or should he allow the lie to persist simply for the sake of peace?

This Feeling

For several days now I've had this terrible feeling. I feel that there are certain things that I simply must do and that I do not have the time to do. This list includes (but is not limited to) learning Arabic, Japanese, Latin and German (as well as other languages); writing The East, Winter and my various other disjointed pieces and ideas I've got laying around; and reading Dune, the rest of the Ender's series, Paradise Lost, The Silmarillion, et cetera.

I am going to stop wasting so much of my time and start working harder.

Numbers Station Story Idea

Twelve years after a Zombie Apocalypse, the world is mostly de-populated. People living on islands are presumed to be safe, assuming that no one from the outside has entered since the outbreak. A fast-acting virus that is transfered by biting kills people within minutes and re-animates their bodies. The zombies are slow, but will attack until their bodies break down and disintegrate from strain.

The main action (probably) takes place in France where a group of survivors live underground. The hero is a young orphan who spends his time helping find food for the village. In his spare time he fiddles with old machines. After getting an old radio working, he soon finds a signal being broadcast, even though they are the only group for miles. The leader of the settlement tells him that that signal has been broadcasting for many years and was once a beacon of hope for the survivors. Rumour has it that the Transmission began on the day of the outbreak (December 24, 1998). It has repeated the same message over and over again in Russian Morse Code. It is assumed to be coming from an abandoned station somewhere. The story fascinates the Hero and he decides to look into it on his own time. While looking for food, he sneaks off to a library to look for books to help him decipher the message.

He translates the message as "Turn Back, Turn Back. The sun is setting. 2-3-3-0-4-5. Endless. Turn Back. Repeat." and later finds the journal of a man who lived in their settlement and studied the signal before giving up when they were forced to move underground. During the four years that he recorded and studied the broadcast, it never changed. The Hero begins to dismiss the broadcast as just being an old station with a repeating machine, but he still listens to it at night.

One night, the message changes. It stops for several seconds and a voice comes on and states the current date, time, weather, moon phase and other things (wind speed, barometric pressure, et cetera). As the voice is saying these (all in Russian) another, garbled and distorted voice (sounding something like it is being played backwards) grows louder and louder until the first voice can no longer be heard. The second voice eventually stops, and the morse code resumes. The whole thing lasts 117 seconds.

The Hero concludes that there must be someone living in the broadcast station and petitions the Chief to let him take a party to find the survivor(s) and perhaps salvation (if a broadcast can be sustained for that long, there must be civilisation or at least resources) but his request is declined. After many tries, he is given leave to go find the source of the broadcast, but he can not take any of the village's men with him and no married women may go. His childhood friend decides to go with him and they take what weapons that they are allowed.

They meet up with other survivors, get a vespa and fight zombies and such.

Another note...

Word to remember: Iprion

On Weather and Other Things

I came up with the idea for Winter back in May (possibly the 23rd, depending on how long I waited to blog about it) and if it was like most May's, it was warm. But now it is January and I am reminded of just how bitterly cold the wintertime can be. I will definitely be mentioning the wind more next time that I write.

I've really gotten into the .hack series lately. I've been playing the ps2 games as well as reading .hack//ai_buster. I'm currently using an ALTIMIT wallpaper.

I got a Japanese Bible, finally! It's got side-by-side Japanese and English text which is cool, but I'm not too crazy about it being Today's English Version, bits of it don't exactly jive with standard Christian Beliefs.