We can rebuild you. We have the technology.
A good question, I’ll let the rebels explain in due course. Maybe I’ll knock together a little teaser scene?
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I could picture Flash coming from a noble family and Radjack working for them when their teenagers then one day Mr.Finn or someone who knows Lady Calinas kills her parents. But she escapes with Radjack and so Lady was on the hunt for her.
Interesting theory… Anyone else care to weigh in? What do you guys think Flash’s backstory is?
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I always assumed Flash was a bit of a guttersnipe in his youth and that’s probably how he and Radjack met. It’s that kind of background that makes me think he’d side with the rebels, yeah? I’ve never been too big of a fan of nobles turned rebel. It’s such a trope. 
Give me a disillusioned man who grew up living on the streets over a pampered noble who decides that they need to have a little fun so they go out and join the rebels to ‘live a little’.
Plus, c’mon, with a nickname like Flash, he had to have been a pickpocket.
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God no. I hate the rich kid turned rebel trope, it always makes people with points & ideas look like people who just have daddy issues. Yeah, I really prefer @Lithophene’s backstory here.
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The moment I saw that the main character’s name was Flash before he got that machine I was thinking he was a speeder or a ninja
I’m inclined to agree, making someone a secret noble is both too easy and kind of reinforces the notion that the protagonist is a special child of destiny, which isn’t really the point of the character.
A backstory is forming in my mind, some bits I already had, but now its starting to come together.
I don’t precisely know what you mean, but I’m glad the name was evocative enough that it gave you an impression of the character’s nature.
I think @Terrell_Williams meant a speedster? Not gonna lie, I kinda imagined a speeder from Star Wars for a solid five seconds. 
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I haven’t read the entirety of this thread so I don’t know if something has been said that proves otherwise, but I thought that maybe the name Flash came from the abilities the MC has. They have to “flash” to use them properly, after all. Is there anything that states that those powers are from the MC themself, or the original Flash? There has to be a reason why it was Flash that was used and not some random, won’t-be-missed servant.
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Interesting counterpoint.
The original Flash a Myrmidon in disguise? That would be an interesting third-act plot twist and a half.
Strangely enough this comment about Engel, (who I am so ready to love as their name is basically how all drunken sots pronounce mine), made me go all tingly as I had first envisioned Flash as an integral part of a commedia dell’arte-esque troupe who informed the most wretched through entertainment. The Yeoman caught a particularly biting, yet bawdy satire, Radjack got hearts for eyes, the nobles became ever so curious and Flash’s group became sought after, in more ways than one…
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First of all, I always imagined Flash to be a talented pickpocket (not their main occupation, just good at it). Known for their deft hands (no not like that 
) and ability to get out of trouble/escape quickly, if necessary => therefore named Flash. I would think they would be working class as a maximum, probably lower than that. In general being so poor that they had to find work to help contributing to their family. And when there isn’t any legal work left you have to do the illegal kind.
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This conversation got some gears turning in my mind and I knocked up a quick and dirty teaser scene, let me know what you think.
The last sodden barflies are slumped at their tables as the night rounds off, and you help Momo finish the day’s chores before closing up for the evening.
You shuffle the last of the drunks out, empty the ashtrays and sweep the floor, scrubbing the tables to fruitlessly try and remove the lingering cheroot smell. You remember Momo’s Golden Closing Time Rule and check the toilet for corpses before locking the door.
Momo is sitting in one of the two threadbare wing chairs by the ebbing fire, a small brandy hanging in one hand. She beckons you over with a curling finger and you politely take a seat in the other, letting the fire unwind your surprisingly tired muscles. Momo’s eyes are staring into the ashes, ringed with dark circles of tiredness. After a moment she yawns and you watch her expressive face go through a whole range of emotions before returning to happily tired.
“How’d we do tonight?” She brings her lips to the glass and takes a measured sip of brandy, looking over at you for an answer.
“I think it went well, everyone seemed… well… not happy, but…”
She smiles tiredly and goes for another sip of her brandy, she puts the glass on a little side table between your chairs.
“I think happy is too much to ask, we can settle for drunk and slightly poorer for now.”
She runs her finger around the edge of her glass, which causes it to make a pleasant sound, almost like a flute. She looks at it pensively for a moment then scoops it up, holding it out to you.
“Would you like a sip?”
You look at the glass offered and tentatively take it, raising it quickly to your lips. Unfortunately your sense of taste must be somewhat over sensitive, because it feels like your tongue and throat are being torn out by angry wasps.
Your eyes bulge in shock and you begin coughing violently, desperately trying to expel the liquid from your mouth.
Momo’s face cracks into a cacophony of ecstatic laughter, she grabs her side with one hand and excitedly slaps the arm of the chair with the other, her whole body curled up with laughter. Your body on the other hand is still in shock, your mouth hangs dumbly open, a mixture of brandy and spittle dribbling down your chin.
“Why… just… Why? Why would you purposely put this into your body?”
Momo’s face creases and she laughs again, fishing the bottle from somewhere on the floor near her and topping up the glass. She takes another sip and you get up to go to the pantry. You fetch yourself a glass of milk and return to the chair. Momo’s smile has faded now, replaced with a sort of thousand-yard stare. You take a gulp of milk to soothe your senses.
“Is it meant to be that…burny?”
Her smile returns for a moment, then departs again. She looks at you for a long moment.
“Sometimes when I look at you… I forget… I forget that you’re not Flash, you know? Is that terrible? Am I terrible for thinking that?”
You don’t really know how to respond to her, it’s something that’s been hanging over your head the whole time. Sometimes you notice people looking at you out of the corner of your eyes, clearly waiting for you to do something, and being disappointed when you don’t.
“What was I like before all of this? How did I know all of you guys?”
Momo hesitates for a moment, unsure whether to open this conversation up. After a moment of personal debate, she seems to come to a decision, and takes a bigger swig of brandy to steady herself. She sinks a little deeper into the faded leather of the wing chair and looks at the dying fire.
“We’ve all been running together since we were kids. I mean I probably met you for the first time when I was maybe six? There was a little school over on Tickinny Street that used to take in kids for a penny a day, teach us to how to do sums and a little reading if they had the time.”
She smiles fondly at the memory, running a finger along the rim of her brandy glass, which now has a deeper, more keening tune.
“So we’d go to school for three hours a day, then we’d go and play out in the streets or in the quarry. Of course nobody else cared about how dirty we got, but your ol’ Mum…she would tan your hide something fierce if she caught you with so much as a speck of brick dust on your clothes. She was a proud one, your Mum. She kept that house so clean that if she could’ve afforded a crust of bread you could’ve eaten it off the front step. We all had to take our shoes off at the door, say our pleases and thank-yous, the whole nine-yards.”
She smiles again, looks at you for a moment as if remembering something.
“She was a game old bird, your Mum…”
She seems to catch some wisp of a memory and lets out a quiet little chuckle.
“So, when we went to the quarry to play, you wouldn’t dare get your clothes dirty. You used to stash them in a burlap sack and leave them in a little crevice.”
She starts to crease up with laughter again in her seat, taking another glug of brandy.
“You would run up and down the pits as naked as a jay-bird, for hours! By the end of it you’d be covered in a layer of dirt maybe an inch thick! The miners would run the hose over you if they caught you. That’s why everyone called you Flash.”
Your mouth drops open in shock. You had always assumed that Flash was your birth name. It feels so… unheroic. Momo finds your reaction hilarious, pouts mockingly at you and pats your arm companionably.
“You mean to tell me that you call me Flash not because I’m bright, or fast, or clever or any of that… You call me Flash because I was naked all the time?!”
Momo is now hissing with laughter, and you cannot quite stop yourself from being caught up in her mood. You chuckle at the absurdity of it.
“Believe it! We couldn’t have kept a pair of trousers on you if we’d taped them down! If it’s any comfort, you eventually grew out of it for the most part.”
She drinks some more and pours herself a fresh glass, then pokes the fire with an ancient piece of cast iron that might have once been a fence post.
“Anyway, we all grew up and got jobs and whatnot… Still stayed together, did things together… Started doing little things outside the law, and suddenly we were ‘Yeomen’. Anti-Government agitators… You were a bloody street magician! You’d never hurt a fly. When you were taken, we… Nobody would admit to having you… We checked the Watch houses, asked the locals… We broke into the prison!”
You sense that the conversation is taking a dark turn, and you wait a moment before trying to change the subject.
“You said I was a street magician. What does that mean?”
Momo still looks sad, but she fishes one hand into her pocket, retrieving a shiny penny, turning it over in her fingers.
“You’d do little tricks to amuse people, make things disappear and whatnot… Misdirection you called it. You’d amuse a happy little crowd, and if one of the wealthier patrons noticed that evening that their watch was missing, who was it hurting? You taught me this one trick, here let me show you…”
She drops the coin into your open palm, and some vestige of muscle memory makes your wrist twitch and the coin is instantly gone. Momo’s mouth drops. She locks eyes with you, produces another coin.
“Do that again.”
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awe why did you have to do that!? That makes me want more content.
I like the nickname a lot more now.
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[quote=“Moreau, post:876, topic:15992”]
“You mean to tell me that you call me Flash not because I’m bright, or fast, or clever or any of that… You call me Flash because I was naked all the time?!”[/quote]
And with that my head-canon is validated. (throws roses and Flash’s bloomers at your feet)
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I love how your definition of a “quick and dirty teaser scene” made me both extremely happy (laughing like a fool at Momo’s 'why I keep thinking you’re Flash) and also extremely sad because of how emotionally invested yoy have me in all of these characters.
Also I feel like Momo would make a killer aunt/mom because of how she tells stories and is so kind to MC. I mean that in both the literal and figurative senss, of course. She’s Mom-o.
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Sorry for the late reply, you know how it is…
I’m hoping it will encourage me to make more content, so your suffering may not be in vain.
I do love getting presents…
Reeling you in, Rena… Reeling you in…
RIGHT?!"
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So I had a thought/question: (Boy, how many of my posts here have started out with that opening line? All of them? I’m going with all of them.)
So after the whole Momo is Mom thing, what if Rebel MC was going out to do rebellious things (as rebels do) and Momo just said something along the lines of “Be safe” or “Have fun” or even just “Try not to get killed this time.” (Probably not the latter of those.) And MC just responded with “Okay, Mom.”
How would she react?
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Oh, this is an interesting WIP how did I overlook it all the time?
But I also have a question: How would Radjack and the others deal should MC develop a character that is very similar to Flashs? It’s difficult enough with them looking like them, so how difficult would it be if they would get even more similar to them?
There also was a scenario some time before about MC practically being deleted and overwritten with Flash’s old memories, but what if MC doesn’t get overwritten but somehow would obtain Flash’s memories at some point?
If they get those memories before they did develop a strongly differentiated own personality, wouldn’t those memories eventually lead to a personality similar to Flash’s, in case that MC couldn’t distinguish between those memories and the very few they themselve have? That sounds actually more difficult to deal with as someone who looks the same but acts compleetely different from a now dead beloved…
Or if MC approaches Flash’s memories to begin with as their own? Wouldn’t it be possible for them to look at themselve just as an transition from who Flash used to be to who they are now? Without really making a difference between them, considering it may be difficult for MC to see themselve as their own person… Would that person be Flash or Flash 2.0…does it even matter considering the original Flash is dead by now?
I just really like to what strange pathways this WIP brings my mind.
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Every last one. It’s why you’re getting a character named after you somewhere down the line.
I have no idea but now I must find out and write that scene.
I imagine she would probably already be in Helicopter-Mama mode for the first few weeks anyway while you’re still mentally growing, gently ensuring that you don’t wander into traffic or eat anything poisonous or listen to any of Radjack’s ideas… I imagine if you started treating her like a mother she would be sweet and pleasant until you left the room, then she’d spin-kick her feelings away on the next bar-patron who insists he has a tab.
We’ve always been here, Sammy. We’ve always been here…
Depends on the severity. I would imagine some might begin to kid themselves about having their friend back, and others would get angry and ask you to stop. Some might rekindle their furious attraction to the original character, transposing it onto the new character.
Mixed bag, really…
Not entirely beyond the realms of possibility, but possibly something for the end of the game rather than during.
I suppose the two para-personalities would clash, either leading to multiple personality disorder or a confused amalgamated personality. I don’t know which yet. It wouldn’t necessarily be good for you is what I’m saying…
Its the Star Trek Transporter problem writ large. If Captain Kirk steps into a transporter and beams down to a planet that looks suspiciously like the desert five miles outside of LA, is it still the real Captain Kirk? Logic says no, Captain Kirk was pulled apart at the atomic level and reassembled somewhere else. Even presuming that he was reassembled from the same parts, he ‘died’ on the transporter pad, hoping that his ‘clone’ would get the rest of the job done.
On the other hand, to Kirk the transport seems instantaneous, and he has no cognitive disconnect between the transporter pad and the beam site. To him, he’s as alive as he ever was, and the memories to prove it.
Hmm… It’s a toughie…
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