After some due consideration and weighing several options for this year’s encroaching NaNoWriMo project, I have settled on one — and it will be familiar to anyone who was around last year.
That’s right. I’m going to pick up the project I abandoned when Girl from a Brigadoon began to consume my thoughts last October.
As of this moment, it’s tentatively titled UNSETIC Files: Universe, though that’s definitely subject to change and I am very open to suggestions (UNSETIC Files: Neverland is also an option I’m toying with).
I’ll be posting prep and notes here throughout the month, so stay tuned! For today, everyone gets a treat, though: my gathered notes from last year before I switched gears. Enjoy.
The Characters
Peter Ezecaius Grey
Elaine Cavanaugh
Jason Grey
Joslyn Ballard
Marissa Grey
Brannon Marsden
Hadrian Bridger (not sure how expansive his role will be)
Ezecaius Koerpel-Schliemann
Initial notes
- Story set in 2015, about a year after a successful crowdfunding campaign brought GreySoft’s Universe game to the masses. Virtual reality integration is an offering of the game starting in December 2014. The company starts testing full-immersion options starting in September 2015, with a few “gaming cafes” set up in test markets.
- Peter and Jason Grey are largely estranged from their parents. Marissa has a somewhat better relationship with them at this time, though she respects her brothers’ reasons for distance.
- Marissa and her husband, Brannon, have a young daughter at the outset of the story (Wynter Marie, born in 2012).
- Marissa is several years older than the boys and met Brannon while studying abroad in the UK. She half raised the boys, especially Jason, who their parents never seemed to have time for (focusing most of their attention on Peter, who resents them for it).
- Peter has been in and out of hospitals since childhood. He has a rare neurological disorder that in part inspired the full-immersion technology he developed with Jason and Brannon.
- Jason and Peter were legally emancipated from their parents when Jason turned sixteen and Peter was seventeen.
- The work that went into the Universe game is part of Peter’s doctoral work, supplemented by Brannon and Jason’s expertise.
- Jason did a brief stint in the Navy before he went back to college. He was finishing his undergraduate work when Universe launched.
- Elaine and Joslyn are roommates and friends from their days as undergraduates. Joslyn is just finishing up at temping gig (getting ready to start another) and Elaine is doing graduate work.
- One of Elaine’s classmates is Hadrian Bridger, who is starting his graduate work as well. They have a few classes together and while Elaine doesn’t know much about him, they’re becoming friends.
- Peter’s middle name comes from Ezecaius Koerpel-Schliemann, the head of UNSETIC. Ezecaius is an uncle of the Grey children and—in the view of Peter, at least—has been there more for them than their parents.
- The company that Joslyn was temping at helped set up the gaming café where GreySoft is going to test its full-immersion gaming experience. She was also a donor to the crowdfunding campaign that helped launch the game, so she got passes to come in and try the experience. Both she and Elaine have dabbled in the game before and she brings Elaine along with her to try it out.
- The Grey siblings have a sizable trust that they inherited from their mother’s late parents. This trust was partially depleted in the name of Peter’s care when he was a teenager. The siblings successfully sued their parents as a result (which played a role in both their estrangement from their parents and the legal emancipation of Jason and Peter when they were teenagers).
- The three siblings have a mutual agreement between the three of them that they will only tap the remaining money in trust for things that all three of them agree on.
- The Universe game world offers options for all kinds of play styles and genres. The most popular settings are the space and fantasy settings. Most settings are segregated on particular “worlds,” (ie, servers), but there is some crossover between genres and settings with game balance restrictions built into the game to prevent abuses.
- Players who helped fund the game through the crowdfunding campaign were allotted special in-game positions of power (nobility with actual power, fleet captains, town mayors, etc.). Through particular sets of game mechanics and roleplay, these individuals may be unseated, but it is a difficult task.
- Peter (as one of the creators of the game) is the Lord of a particular world (a largely fantasy world with science fiction elements and a few full-blown science fiction enclaves). Jason and Joslyn are actually both subordinate nobles on his world and Elaine was recruited by Joslyn as one of her subordinate nobles.
- Elaine and Peter meet through Joslyn and Jason in the game. Elaine is fairly certain that Peter doesn’t think much of her, which isn’t the case at all, but continues to believe this until Jason sets her straight.
- Peter’s condition flares up again—badly enough to warrant drastic action—after two years of relative quiet, right before the launch of their full-immersion gaming experiment. In a phone conversation with his brother Jason, he tells him to go on with everything as planned as if nothing is wrong.
- As far as Peter’s concerned, their work on the Universe game is more important than his survival—the game and the technology they’ve developed to supplement it is their legacy for Jason’s someday family and for their niece, Wynter (and any additional children Marissa and Brannon may have).
- Jason calls Marissa to let her know what’s going on. She’s torn between letting their parents know and keeping quiet about what’s happening. At the outset, she decides not to tell them. She does, however, call their Uncle Ezecaius.
- Peter’s condition eventually deteriorates to the point where he’s placed in a medically induced coma as the doctors charged with his care work to scrape together what’s needed to treat him.
- With the help of their uncle and Brannon, Marissa and Jason manage to get Peter into full immersion in the game during this period of time so he doesn’t suffer cognitive deterioration, a possibility that concerns some of his doctors—and his family.
- They face some legal, moral, ethical, and medical challenges before they’re allowed to do it, including arranging for Peter to be transferred to a private facility and a change to some of his medical team.
- Peter’s family faces challenges from various quarters regarding the game itself—and the VR technology they’ve developed, as well as the predictive AI that Peter and Brannon programmed together.
- The family faces some pressure to use the technology to help law enforcement and the Department of Defense in ways that they find morally questionable.
- Marissa, Peter, and Jason’s mother was exposed to something while she was pregnant with Peter which may have been the source for his disorder.
- This fact has been largely and quietly covered up to the point where even Peter doesn’t know. Ezecaius eventually finds out and is the one to tell the kids.
- That ends up part of being the key to fixing what’s going wrong with Peter.
- What Ezecaius learns about Peter’s prenatal exposure to whatever caused his illness is passed along to Elaine, setting her on a private mission to find out everything she can in the hopes of helping to find a cure for him. That results in her tangled up in a web of things she probably shouldn’t know (supernatural, conspiracy).
- The exposure was on purpose.
- Linked to Ephraim Sterling’s early experiments? An effort to create a child with abilities. The result may have been Peter’s genius level intelligence, but the side effect was the neurological malfunctions he’s suffered since childhood, the ones that have been trying to kill him.
- Marissa, Peter, and Jason’s parents broke with the Agapeistic Institute long before things got to their very worst.
- Knowing that his parents did this to him only makes Peter more angry with them.
- When Marissa finds out about what their parents did, she cuts off contact with them as well.
- Elaine doesn’t know that there’s anything wrong with Peter at first. Jason later mentions something off-handedly and she confronts Peter about it later and he admits that it’s true. He confides everything eventually, though only in bits and pieces at first.
- Peter is torn between wanting to push Elaine away and needing someone he can talk to, someone who will understand.
