Fic Prompts Post

[aftanith]

 A dumping ground for various fic prompts. Should any of these receive actual writing installments, they'll be deleted from here and reposted to the WIP Fic Post.

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The Disappearance

[aftanith]

A young woman wakes up one day to find the world seemingly empty. Her family is gone (except for her dog), and so, it seems at first, is the rest of humanity. After realizing that her parents aren't coming back and she's completely on her own, MFC has to find a way to survive in an empty world.

The ultimate goal is to start a new society that remembers but doesn't replicate the old one. The nature of the Apocalypse may be unraveled as a mystery subplot, but I think I might prefer everyone to have their own individual, unconfirmed theories. (The rapture, the Matrix, aliens running some experiment, etc.)

In any case, the sudden and unexplained disappearance of humanity is going to dredge up a lot of issues, obviously. There's no immediate threat of outlaws or beasts, but that'll be coming eventually. Time, though, is not on MFC's side. Food will start rotting as soon as the power goes out, and she wastes a day waiting on her parents, scared and confused.

The next biggest hurdle is weight. She'll be on the move, but she'll want to pack things. Whatever she takes, she'll have to carry herself (at least at first). She can (probably) carry at absolute maximum around seventy pounds, and it would be exhausting. So she'll likely be aiming for a max of thirty or so, and each pound will have to count. She can only take the essentials. (Some amusement should be made of how she insists on keeping her Harry Potter paperbacks with her and dry.)

Then there's the issue of transportation. MFC leaves her house to investigate the world's disappearance, but she never learned to drive. (Not to mention the looming scarcity of gas.) So she walks into town, where she has to face the reality of her predicament. She begins to prepare for a hard and potentially horrible life--not to mention short if she runs into bad luck--but is still anxious about the idea of driving (though empty roads sure take the pressure off). She may use her parent's SUV for storage, though?

Her goals at first are simple: find food and don't get caught outside after dark. At first, she uses her house as a home base, if only for the refrigerator (so she can keep fruits, vegetables, and meat until the power goes out). She raids the grocery store(s) for everything she can keep at first: clean water, precooked meats, produce, canned goods, cereals, candy, and anything else that doesn't require cooking and has a distant expiration date (not to mention dog food). She steals a shopping cart to help carry things back and forth. And once the grocery store(s) is/are used up, she starts in on the neighbor's houses.

But there are other necessities. (Let's not forget that she still has to go to the bathroom, and she's bleeding once a month.) She raids the Walmart for clothes, soap, medicine, toilet paper, and other essentials... and she runs into another human for the first time. (She might keep a journal at this point?) I think the first thing she needs is someone who can pick locks. I'm thinking a scared, mostly stereotypical middle class white girl with a subversive bad girl streak and a willingness to defer leadership to anyone who acts like they know what they're doing. She joins the MFC, and so the new world begins.

From here they start moving from house to house, taking resources and finding shelter as they go, but looking for other "survivors" all the while. They keep storing things in MFC's house, though, and still consider that "home" (until eventually forced to decide otherwise?). Or maybe they move into the second girl's much nicer house a few miles away?

Once the power goes out, though, things suddenly seem more dire. The loss of the modern world suddenly seems more real. The girls have the last fresh fruit and farm meat they'll have for a while, and the toilets no longer flush. At this point, MFC heads to the library; she's looking for anything that can help her survive: books about camping, books about safely edible plants in the area, and things like that.

Re: The Disappearance

[aftanith]

I'm toying with the idea of having them find a child that first week--a little boy of about seven or eight who's hiding in one of the houses, still waiting for his parents to come home. But I also have the idea of the girls taking to rescuing cats and dogs that are trapped inside. They let the dogs go (except for puppies) and bring all the cats back to the cul de sac where the girls are living.