Story Notes 1

Brainstorm

• Alistair is in love with Lee, his history teacher
• Galatea is the one to send Orithia off on her mission in the first place - to find the long lost Vode Crista and destroy it once and for all, thus ending the dark plague that took the Empress's life and cursed Orithia with her power. However, Galatea is lying; she wants the Vode Crista alive and well, so darkness can rule the land
• As the adventurers quest, they all discover the resentment toward the empire from the various countries; they discover more about the Umbraltan Diaspora and colonization.
• Chryseia, the final queen of Umbralta, trapped herself in the Void to hide from the people who sought to kill her. Orithia at first avoids the Void, believing she wants to turn her to the bad side, but then realizes Chryseia was trying to tell her the truth about Lucidia; once Orithia realizes the error of her country's ways, she agrees to assist Chryseia in taking down/changing the Empire by revealing the truth. It is then revealed by Chryseia that Galatea is plotting to take over the throne, taking advantage of the Empress's death. Chryseia, when her palace was being sieged, shielded the Vode Crista from sight with her shadow power; only a shadow wielder can break through it and restore the crystal.
• Empire
• Potential Prophecy from the Generator: According to a vision, in late autumn when the sun goes down, a priestess will betray a funeral.

Thoughts - Stream of Consciousness
1) What are the reasons why Orithia needs to travel to all of the separate queendoms? Perhaps to gather information from ancient texts about the Vode Crista, and sacred items to find it?
2) What are these sacred items?

• They are the sacred items of Treyen, dispersed throughout the continent by the Umbraltan Diaspora; thus, the team needs to retrieve each of the items, which will unlock the map to finding the Vode Crista, which was a sacred location known only by the Voidine royalty. A scroll, a stone, and paint; the scroll has a symbol on it, with which Orithia must paint the stone with the paint with her shadow, and it will lead them in the direction of the Vode Crista.
• Additionally: The items are pieces of each crystal and each wielder (five total). However, since the Vode Crista is in the Void, it must also be found first, so the sacred items must be found.

3) Who can wield the magic?

• option 1: power can only be bestowed by the crystal and is restricted to the royal bloodline; but then regular people started gaining power from the land itself once the curse happened
• anarchy and uprising may ensue if the royal classes were suddenly not the only ones with power

• option 2: everyone has access to the power; some people are born with the affinity for it and others are not
• power is still drawn from the crystals themselves, acting as a conduit to the godly magic of the land; the royals hold the most strength because they draw their power from their crystals directly in the palace and go through intense training; anyone who is recruited for the royal army has access to this stronger power
• when any of the crystals are damaged/overtaken/cut off, then the powers fade from all people
• if power comes from the land itself and proximity to crystals, then people will only reflect the power of the land they are born in if it's within the radius of the crystal itself
• the closer you are to the crystal, the more likely it is you will gain the power and the stronger your power will be otherwise, it's a 50/50 chance. This keeps the powers as regionally manifested

• option 3: power is NOT restricted to regions, though is still powered by each of the crystals of the land; anyone anywhere can be born with any power, except shadow because the Vode Crista is "lost"

• option 4: people are born with the power but it's related to proximity to the crystals, and the power can also be bestowed to anyone (but primarily women).
• When Orithia is born "plain," it's an anomaly because of her proximity to the crystal - no royal has been born without powers for centuries. Then they have the special ceremony where she is to touch the light crystal and have the power bestowed upon her, and everything goes horribly wrong as it's revealed she has shadow power - the first born with shadow power since the fall of Umbralta, fulfilling a curse/prophecy.

• option 5: people are born with the power, related to the crystal "choosing" them; however, when things go out of whack, all of the sudden people who HAD power, no longer have it, or their power is transferred to others, creating mayhem and changed power dynamics.
• Actually, it's a result of the crystals protecting themselves or being asynchronous because of the imbalance of power; when the dark crystal is in the presence of the others, the other crystals turn off
• The crystal itself chooses who to bestow the power upon. Typically for the last thousands of years, the crystal's power stays with those it originally bestowed it upon. Now, the crystal's magic is haywire and switching between different people.
• The only way to reverse the dark power from neutralizing something is if all the other crystals come together in unison; that's how the Lumines got rid of the dark crystal in the first place; but then once the crystals are disunited again, then the dark crystal can come back and be the neutralizer again
• the dark power wants to be balanced by everyone coming together; that's why it neutralizes them all when they are individual, so they will come together instead to balance everything. Only, they came together and then destroyed the darkness, which threw them out of balance (now the darkness is back to being a neutralizer, swallowing everything up)

Crystal Proximity

• option 1: Wherever the crystal is, the power goes; meaning, those people who are nearest their crystal have wielding abilities and those who are farthest away from their homeland have weaker abilities.
• Royals can carry talismans that have pieces of their crystal in them so they may practice magic outside of their geographical limitations; however, it's not as strong as if they were in their own land.
• Shadow works everywhere because it draws power from the Void itself, which defies geographic limitations of time and space. Any power used against shadow is absorbed if it is alone (just one power). Orithia doesn't understand why she can use her power anywhere until later, when she finds the Vode Crista.
• What needs to happen: Orithia needs to be in a place where each person can wield their individual power; they are all united?
• option 2: The power is not centralized in crystals at first, but is centralized in crystals by priestesses so the power can be easily moved/used elsewhere; the crystals are grown from the power itself.
• ----> alternatively, the crystals exist in themselves, but priestesses are the only ones who can cut sections of them off. And a priestess making her own crystal is forbidden.
• ----> I like the idea of the Lucidians limiting the other powers' strength by locking away their power within geographic limitations - dispersing the crystals across the land and housing power in them. However, once the shadow is released and these powers go haywire, geographic limits may change.
• ---------> Feels like the shadow being released is like an apocalypse-type situation for the world itself


Crystal Power
How do we know when someone has been "chosen"?
• When brought in proximity of a piece of crystal, a chosen one's eyes illuminate with the color of the stone/power (green for earth, blue for water, red for fire, gray for light, lavender for darkness). This is how children are found to be born with the power within them, and once they are found, they are usually recruited to royal programs or the army so they can train (and so the government can keep a closer eye on them).
• Power cannot be bestowed without the crystal wanting to bestow it (ex. Alistair going blind as a child because his mom made him touch the crystal when he wasn't chosen).
• People immigrate for a variety of reasons; either to escape recruitment, for trade, for love, for anything else, really. Whenever they leave the certain proximity of their land, their power is significantly weakened unless they carry a talisman, which are very rare/hard to come by.
• The localization is actually a sign of the imbalance occurring. Because the crystals were hoisted from their original home at the center of the continent, where everyone had access to the gifts, they are now localized and thus there is the isolated imbalance with the lack of darkness.
• ------> an edit to The myth of Treyen: she and a four other priestesses visited the caves, were bestowed the power, and thus unlocked the power for everyone else (everyone thinks the light person spread it, but really it was the shadow person who spread the power through the void).
How did the magic get distributed?
• The priestesses unlocked the power and suddenly the first Chosen were discovered. They became the leaders of their respective tribes and civilization rapidly developed from there. Everyone had the chance to be chosen by any of the crystals, and whoever was, was seen as holy and became revered.
• Each elemental power has its neutralizer (fire > earth, earth > water, water > fire). Light and darkness worked in tandem as each other's neutralizer.
• The Lumines spoke with the other elemental leaders and decided to come together and eliminate the shadow people, seeing them as a threat to their own power (pre-emptive strike, if you will, before the shadow wielders could overtake them all). Thus, they brought all the leaders together, which weakened the shadow's neutralizing power, and ambushed the shadow wielder leader and murdered her kin. They could not find the crystal because the leader hid it in the Void where they could never destroy it, but the damage was done - balance was thrown, and Light became the most powerful. The Lumines then turned on the other leaders and forced them to bow to their new Empire.
• Each elemental leader took their crystals to their respective regions, and since then only those born within proximity of a certain power crystal could be Chosen for that particular elemental magic. Civilization then started to section itself off into its individual ethnic groupings by region, until trade/travel developed enough where people travel to and from the different regions freely (thanks to the Empire taking over).
• Until the crystals (or pieces of them) can all be united at the center of the world again, the imbalance and haywire-ness of the power will continue to cause trouble and the darkness will continue to swallow up the power instead of be a conduit for it (balance must be restored). Maybe they need to resurrect the Shadow Queen from the Void? Or just take the Vode Crista out of the Void?

What happens when the crystals are all reunited at the end and shadow is restored? When the wielders of the five elements come together with their talismans at the site of the ancient ruins (where the crystals had previously been), they can summon the Vode Crista out of the Void. Once that happens, then the shadow power stops neutralizing and instead is back in balance, acting as a conduit for the other magics.