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Bag of Pandora

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Quickie I did. Here is the idea:

I assume you're all familiar with a bit of mythology. In Greek mythology Pandora was the first woman on Earth, but like all women in ancient religion and mythology, she's known for how much she sucks. In one way or another.
In this case, Pandora's box, which was opened and everything bad and evil came from it and spread over the world.
A tid-bit that's often forgotten, a bit of a double meaning for "Pandora's box", is that it also contained hope, but during the first time was closed before hope could escape it as well. It needed to be opened by Pandora a second time until hope could spread and make the world a bit less of a crapsack world.

What's this got to do with Aitia? Here's the idea.

I'll repeat it for those I haven't had a long and boring comment conversation yet: Aitia (the story all of this here revolves around) starts with a lot of cliché and aims to break it down. Basically. Look up "Deconstruction" on TV Tropes if you want to lose an evening.
Anyway, part of the cliché is to let the first real common adversary encounter of the hero to be hordes of the undead. Armies of zombies. They're cheap, always evil, human enough to be familiar, ugly enough to make the hero heroic, and faceless enough to push away any moral chains. If you had the knowledge, skills and tools, you'd shoot zombies during an apocalypse, too, am I right?

That's where the deconstruction kicks in.

The idea (just an idea, don't know if I'll actually implement it) is that after having some fun slaughtering zombies, the protagonist finds this back. The mood was already darkened shortly before because a troop of allies, the first real allies he encountered throughout waves of enemies, were crushed beneath rocks and while the protagonist wasn't hit as hard as his new-found friend that was originally part of this troop and practically lost part of his family within seconds, the mood is still darkened. They part ways and the protagonist is originally supposed to head straight to another location without interruptions.

Here is where the idea comes in (finally).

The protagonist spots a nearby undead carrying the bag. In an attempt to both rid the land of another walking corpse and make sure his path is clear and he isn't ambushed later, he takes the initiate strike and slays the zombie.
After that, he opens the bag.
It contains letters. Letters sent from family and friends to the people that were turned into zombies. Letters turning every faceless zombie into a fleshed-out person with a social circle waiting for them to come back. Bonus points if there's a secret piece of paper sewn into the bag from the postman him-/herself begging the finder of the letter to give it to his family and the following lines are addressed to those. Extra super bonus points if that letter starts with "Dear X, if you read this, I'm dead".

What's the point?
Doubts and regret. Guilt.

In order to defeat the hordes of the undead, the protagonist sucked out the souls of the zombies so they couldn't be resurrected and converted them to a form of energy that he could use to continue fighting. It should also be noted that he attacked them first, assuming they're zombies and because they're zombies, they're evil, without even having to say it. The scene of encounter was even displayed as cartoony including skeletons playing a game of cards because at this point the story is still supposed to be light and non-serious.

And then it all rains down.

The protagonist and his allies attacked first, they attacked without warning and without reason except for thinking they know the cliché and know what to do. And with his soul-sucking technique the hero also made a new resurrection of the victims impossible despite the necromancy at work implying that this is not an impossible task - if they still have a soul.

Of course he can't be sure about anything of this. He can't be sure the undead were friendly. But that's what doubt does. It's what regret does. It's what guilt does. It spreads and it hollows you out from the inside. And it's supposed to be the first hurtful deconstruction. The beginning of all evil, in a certain sense. Hence the working title Bag of Pandora.

If I go with this idea, I want the protagonist to keep the bag and keep reading the letters, sometimes maybe even weaving them into what he says or into the narrative. It's a constant reminder of what he did and that he won't do it again and he feels he is obliged to do at least this much for the people he murdered and their families that fell victim to the demonic invasion. It's supposed to be a burden and a source of hollowing guilt.

On a lighter note, and that's where the second part of the Pandora mythology comes in, at some point, the protagonist is supposed to mature and outgrow the event. He will keep the bag as a reminder, but will keep it with the knowledge of having grown because of the past and its hardships, with the thanks for all those that had to give their lives for this lesson, with the pride of overcoming the nagging depression and with the motivation to do the right thing in the future.
The way of getting there is supposed to be the interesting bit however.


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So yeah, "little" idea I had. Any thoughts?
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Devu7's avatar

This started with "Quickie I did.".


And then I got into the comment section... Holy smokes. That's a long quickie.


Ps.: I like the bag though. It's a neat bag.