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The Bible

Premise:

You are on a decrepit city street, late in the evening. It is deserted, except for a homeless man warming his hands at a brazier in the alley, and a young busker, playing her fiddle on the curb. You can navigate the length of the street by scrolling, and click on certain objects. You can also enter the alley to talk to the homeless man, or, later in the story, enter a strange old bookstore.

 Genre:

Magic Realism/Urban Fantasy

 Setting:

Vaguely London, vaguely modern but set in a vaguely Victorian part of the city. There is some modern technology, but it’s a little warped since most of it runs on magic.

 Redhill street

It’s 12:15 AM on the decrepit corner of Redhill and Oval. Most of the light comes from every third streetlamp, since the city is too frugal to keep all the lights on past midnight. Aside from the odd car passing by in the distance and the patter of rain water down the drainpipes, only the faint and ominous sound of a fiddle in the distance can be heard.

Redhill is old and forgotten. Any livable housing  to be found is left over from the time before the last great war, which was just over two hundred years ago. Housing is tight; the landlords find crafty ways to squeeze every square foot out of townhomes by adding on ramshackle living quarters and storage spaces. A tourist might think that the locals are hoarders, but in reality, there is not enough space inside houses, even for basic living supplies.

In one such apartment lives a wizard by the name of Lugh, although locals know him as Leto. Surprisingly, he owns half of the building known as Hanson Place, while the other half is shared by fourteen families. Closer inspection would reveal why: Lugh’s half lies directly beneath the Regan clocktower, causing the place to shake at noon and midnight. The neighbors can not figure out how he keeps sane, and quite possibly never will, since Lugh never stops to talk to them. Many curious people have tried peeking inside the windows, but the curtains are always pulled tightly shut, and for some strange reason seem to be unaffected by drafts or the shaking clocktower.

 Alley

Most people miss the small alley as Redhill street passes South Landan. The only exception would be the bi-annual garbage disposal unit, and a homeless man named Irvin. Irvin keeps the place in good hands - in the sense that the garbage is organized well enough to know that someone lives there. Even his cigarette butts are neatly sorted in an ash tray labelled, “GARBAGE DISPOSAL: DO NOT REMOVE”. Some planks and a few rusty nails give Irvin a perch where he can observe Redhill without being seen. This structure, along with a flickering light from a metal brazier, give him the self-proclaimed title of, “The Redhill sentinel”.

Bookshop

The oldest building on Redhill is the Brim’s Bookshop. In fact, it’s so old that it was labelled as a “historic site” during the war, which happened 216 years ago, so that both sides would not destroy its contents. The long line of bookkeepers leads down to Delwin Brim, who locks up every day at 5:00PM. Some may wonder why Delwin bothers to keep the shop running, since nobody has the money to buy books anymore.

Like all the other buildings on Redhill, Brim’s is tall and thin. The bookshelves line the walls from floor to ceiling. Some shelves are even wedged between to make the most of the space, creating arches. A ladder system allows Delwin to scale the shelves.

On the off-chance that a visitor does come in, they would be surprised that Delwin still uses scrolls instead of a computer to document the location of each book. Not only do the scrolls document books, but Delwin keeps an expanding collection of trinkets, ancient artifacts and antiques in a section labelled, “not for borrowing”.

 Characters:

 Wendy Peel

Wendy grew up in a rich household with a stern mother and an absent father. Her mother started her on music lessons when she was very young, to teach her self-discipline and to imbue her with knowledge of the arts. But when Wendy took a shining to the violin, her mother thrust her into a prestigious program for concert violinists, knowing that a famously gifted daughter would do well for her husband’s business.

However, passing a busking fiddle player on the street one day, Wendy discovered the wild abandon of fiddle music, and sought to learn it for herself. She began to visit the busker for fiddle lessons in between her classes at the music school, and in return for his time and his music, she listened to his stories of life on the streets. She gained not only a vast repertoire of traditional fiddle tunes, but a new perspective on what life is like for the homeless.

When the old busker died, she found that the streets were too quiet, and took up her fiddle in his stead. To her surprise, passers-by left coins for her just as they had for him. Wendy had no great need for spare change, and so she took to dispersing her earnings to the homeless she passed on her way home every day. It became routine for her: to play fiddle every evening on the old busker’s empty street corner, and to give out her earnings at the end of every night. She did so for months, until one day, a ribbon landed in her case.

And now she just plays, with no end in sight.

Missing posters dot the streets, but nobody recognizes the wealthy girl that stares out from the photograph.

AGE: 18

APPEARANCE: Dark brown hair, pale english skin, blue eyes. Average weight & build, wearing nondescript street clothes.

 Lugh Ribbon-Bound (Leto)

Lugh was once a king, a god. But that was hundreds of years ago, back when people knew him as just and skilled, back when they called him “The Bright One.” Now, he is a reject, a mere street-wizard. All because of one mistake-- a mortal, killed in what to him had been a game. He had been stripped of his title and bound head-to-toe with ribbons. And the only way he is allowed to return to his home and high status is if he rids himself of each and every ribbon through acts of good magic.

And so he spends his days stalking the streets, looking for petty crimes to punish, injustices to rectify. One day, he spies a wealthy young woman dressing as an urchin in order to win money for her busking, and he is incensed. He pulls a ribbon from his wrist, weaves it through his fingers as though searching for words in its fabric, and drops it into her case.

AGE: Hundreds of years old

APPEARANCE: Aged, but with a face that had clearly once been handsome. Has a wild, faded red beard and long hair with braids woven randomly into it. Wears a robe-like overcoat, made of a thick, rich fabric but much the worse for wear. Ribbons peak out from beneath his clothing, wind through his hair, round his fingers, in his beard.

 Irvin

Irvin had never been anything but kind. Too kind for the rough ways of his family, who worked in crime. And so he had chosen the life of a wanderer, depending upon the generosity of others, and paying them back in simple favours. But his decades on the street had given him a tough outer shell, a worn visage, and a grumpy countenance. Underneath it all, though, he is still kind old Irvin.

Which is why, when he spies the old wizard Leto putting a spell upon the kind young woman who is always so generous to him, he can’t help but feel he owes it to her to try and help. But when he tries to stop the wizard, tries to convince him that what he is doing is wrong, he is silenced with the wizard’s magic. “Speak only when you are spoken to!” Said the wizard. “And speak never of this!” And so Irvin can only reply to direct questions, and only within the scope of the question. And he can never speak overtly about what he had seen the wizard doing that night.

AGE: 60

APPEARANCE: Vaguely Asian in appearance, with unkempt whiskers and black hair streaked with white. Wears the worn, patched layers of years on the street.

 Magic:

Magic is somewhat commonplace in this world. It isn’t terribly rare to meet a wizard or a sorceress on the streets, selling enchanted wares. And the light that pours through streetlamps and out of the windows of buildings is not electric or gas.

That said, the sort of magic that Lugh Ribbon-Bound uses is older, something deeper and more powerful, something that the common magicians have never seen before. And because of the curse set upon him, he can use it only by weaving it into ribbons, and letting the ribbons do their work. His enchantments can be as simple as good luck charms or protective wards, such as those he cast upon his favourite bookshop as one of his acts of good magic. Or they can be punitive, just so long as they are aimed at somebody who Lugh perceives as truly guilty. His ribbons can be found scattered throughout the city, some doing good, and others punishing those who Lugh has witnessed committing an amoral act.