The first chapter of my old WIP (Patreon)

When Dorley first twisted under my grip (it's changed direction a couple of times since then) and Melissa became who she is now, I started planning to give her a chapter to herself, and she absorbed an awful lot of the life story of Mary, a character from my abandoned WIP. She and Mary are still pretty different, but Shahida, Amy and Rachel all came over from the WIP more or less unchanged (except for Rachel's name; she was Rebecca, which is taken). It's been nice to revive parts of that story, since it's what started me writing again back in 2019.

So! For anyone interested in fiction that will never be finished, I've attached the first chapter from one of the many versions of the story, and screenshots from Consensus chats from later on. Consensus also originated here, along with many of the Consensus-only characters, like Penny; I wanted something that was like Discord, but older, so I didn't have to bother replicating Discord's formatting precisely, and so I didn't have to have characters constantly switching up the messaging app they used, like we all had to, over and over and over and over. This is also where Gemma, the trans lesbian vampire from Glow, Worm, originated, although she was seventeen here, not forty.

I'll probably never do anything with this story — I've already pulled most of what I want from it, including the short story Running Away From Summer (AO3, Scribblehub) — but I'm still fond of it.

Forgive typos; this is all first-draft stuff, and will remain that way forever (sniff).