After seemingly infinite days of marketing / coding / suit brain, I've finally gotten to doing something actually creative!
Here's a little backstory snippet, some world / character building for Dysmaton. (Don't worry, no spoilers!)
Micro-homesteading on the edge of the Floodlands, Wolf wasn't in the best of spots. Auto-trucks, autoplanes, there weren't shit-all left to do. Some deep-seated sense of libertarianism, installed by his Alex-Jones-loving lunatic of a father wouldn't allow himself to kick his last-season lumberjack-hipster boots up and collect UBI. "Drip-fed existence was another slower death. Once we're all lobotomized by their media, games, drugs, then the next step is the Fema Camps. Like herding cattle, mark my words."
Wolf had been some kind of hot shit on the game circuit, before game development itself was automated and schools and universities were a cross between a social media flamewar and an MMORPG where your 'grades' were 'in-game achievements'. Subscribers in the five-figures, almost scraping by on pop-tart ad revenue and unbox-whoring the latest triple-A game. Last one he did was, "Democracy!" - a roguelike politics-sim where you played a citizen of your own country, and got to rage online over which candidate was more asinine, fascist, or in cahoots with evil countries. The results of "Democracy!" counted as actual votes, as voter turnout both to physical booths and mail-in had plummeted to less than 5%.
"A Games Journalist", if there ever was a definition of a non-job, nine-to-ten odds you could find that in urban dictionary. A fan of the 'antediluvian' (pre-2000) classics, Wolf had worked the beat on Atari, went to every Apple II Lovers convention, had met and took gratuitous selfies with the very first zx-81 programmer. Then enter robo-journalism, and bye-bye mortgage qualification and adult-ish independent existence.
Sitting in the boarded-up recesses of a mall that piped in a noxious mixture of stale Kalvin Klein scent, CNN, and fifty-year-old Michael Jackson tunes. Nearly abandoned, save a few 70-year-olds with alzheimers and countless grandchildren, abandoned by their millennial parents for more globe-trotting and "career-dabbling".
A Glamagle drone found him, even with his phone off, and GPS disabled. Wolf glanced at the octo-copter's glaring eye, the camera phones of an Asian tourist taking selfies with a Trump statue, and Wolf in the frame.
I better not decide to go back into actual investigative journalism, or I'll be assassinated in seconds.
He shouldered his way past a rack of "Russian Hacker" t-shirts in an empty Hot Topic and headed for the exit.
