Electra City character timelines

Emilena and Flora are my two main characters of the cyberpunk Electra City franchise, appearing in significantly more stories and eras than any other character. Since there are so many different sources of content, and most of them were written out of chronological order, it’s basically impossible for new readers (or heck, even old) to follow their journeys coherently. This blog post aims to change that by providing a personal timeline for each character, letting interested readers follow their history from start to finish.

Note: I must admit that these timelines are going to be a bit fractured and hicuppy no matter what, simply due to how long I’ve been writing all this. Also after so many years of stories, lots of them (especially any involving flashbacks to a character’s past) will have plot holes and retcons simply due to personality tweaks and writing evolution. I’ll do my best to leave notes explaining anything unusual. A red asterisk* indicates the piece contains explicit sexual content.

Emilena Echo

Emilena was born in 2030, the second child of moss farmers Emile and Lena Shipper. Her parents named her after themselves and put her up for adoption in Electra’s unpleasant Nature’s Heart orphanage. At the age of 7, she volunteered herself for the Accelerated Growth Program, a controversial government initiative involving using rapid-aging chambers to boost orphans up to “taxable age” (the test subjects were named with the military alphabet, where she got the surname ‘Echo’). She served as a junior officer for the Electra Police Department for three years before burning down her former orphanage and losing her badge. She’s still on probation when the events of Electra City begin.

  • Officer Echo – A series of 11 stories set during her police years. “Orphanage” and “Harpridge Manor” include extensive flashbacks to her childhood before she was artificially grown into an adult.
  • Redacted Echo Case Files*Several old stories I’ve removed from the series. They relied too much on violence, shock value, and R-rated situations. Honestly recommend skipping them, I wasn’t a great writer back then
  • Electra City* – A full-length novel. Officer Echo races to apprehend a psionic fugitive, a terrified amnesiac named Lily who’s also being pursued by the Purifiers, a radical anti-technology terrorist group. This was the first thing I ever wrote with Emilena, so she’s pretty severely out of character.
  • Tabula Rasa – The sequel to Electra City. Emilena and other survivors attempt to rebuild their lives in the neighboring city of Cornova, but the Purifiers have other plans.
  • The Hemlock Gang – Emilena and the survivors of Tabula Rasa are now running drugs in the alleyways of Cornova. There’s a tone shift to more lighthearted and “zany antics” plots.
  • Electra City Chronicles* – Despite the name, most of these vignettes take place during the gang’s drug-running years in Cornova. Emilena herself stars in “Bare-athon” and appears briefly in “An Aquamarine Phase”.
  • AntechoirA full-length novel covering the Hemlock Gang’s final ill-fated heist, and Emilena’s followup adventure as a runaway criminal in Argentina.

Flora Harpridge

Eric Harpridge was born in 2019 to a rich family in Electra. He attended Ywens Boarding School and transitioned to female after developing very weak changeling powers that turned her skin fuchsia. Fearing her family’s reaction, Flora fled to Cornova of her own volition and first meets Emilena during the events of Tabula Rasa, becoming the designated driver of the newly-formed gang. And buckle up, because her backstory has gone through so many changes over the years that’s about all that stays consistent…

  • Lucid Dreaming” from Echo Chambers features extensive flashbacks to Flora’s childhood at Harpridge Manor.
  • A Shiny Red Revelle*” from Electra City Chronicles is the only story starring Eric before he transitions to Flora. He’s also in high school instead of boarding school for some reason. I don’t know, this vignette’s really old.
  • Harpridge Manor“, though told from Emilena’s point of view, includes Flora’s family members and the mansion she grows up in. Flora herself is relevant to the plot but doesn’t appear.
  • Dances With Clowns” from The Hemlock Gang contains repeated flashbacks set during Flora’s journey from Electra to Cornova, though it was written far earlier than almost all these others and she’s way too young to fit the rest of the timeline.
  • Tabula Rasa – Flora encounters the Purifiers and joins Emilena’s team. Also she somehow begins the plot still in school, despite being in Cornova. Maybe she went to college and it was never mentioned again?
  • The Hemlock Gang – Flora appears in every story as the designated driver of Emilena’s drug-running crew.
  • Electra City Chronicles* – Flora appears in every vignette and is the protagonist of “Flora++”, “A Shiny Red Revelle”, and “An Aquamarine Phase”.
  • Antechoir – Flora appears in the first half as a member of Emilena’s gang during their final ill-fated heist.
  • Echo Chambers* – A series of 13 stories starring Flora as a test subject in an Egyptian psionic research facility, where apparently she fled after the law caught up to her in America. Despite the setup, it’s mostly slice-of-life and romance plots among the staff/subjects who live within the facility.

Also, gotta mention a few stories that don’t fit in the timeline since I never ported them to star humans (most of the early drafts for above stories were anthropomorphic animals because these characters originated from role-plays on the Gang of Five forum.) The below stories were left furry because, honestly, they were just flimsy excuses to string sex scenes together:

  • Breakfast at Yiffany’s* – Flora visits Emilena’s parents on their moss farm. Emilena only appears in the introduction.
  • Weekend at Jessica’s* – Flora visits her sister at a nudist colony. Emilena only appears during the epilogue and Flora’s flashback dream on Saturday night.
  • The Psionic Olympics* – A standalone novella set during Echo Chambers. Flora joins two other test subjects in representing Sartonic Labs at the quadrennial Olympic Games for psions.
  • What Happens in Legal…”* – Set during Echo Chambers. Flora’s surprise party for a new test subject is interrupted by a psion with ulterior motives.
  • The Approaching Light” – This one’s safe-for-work and not really like the others, written as a non-canon crossover between several different franchises. Young Emilena appears, but the time-travel plot causes her to grow up in 20th-century Spain without ever undergoing the Accelerated Growth procedure.

Video Games

Emilena has appeared in two non-canon video games. (She can also appear in yours, she’s part of the sprite pack I released into the public domain!)

  • Electra City – As one of the four playable fighters in a 1v1 pixel brawler.
  • Echo of the Undead – A little in-browser game where she fights a horde of zombies until she dies. Hence the title, geddit?
  • You can also play as her in Minecraft, if you really want to.

RP Continuity

Last but not least, since I’m trying to be thorough here, I should catalog the role-plays Emilena and Flora appeared in when they were still a fox and a folf. This should essentially be considered a completely different iteration of the characters from their human counterparts, not the least of which because those role-plays got pretty bizarre and don’t have much in the way of coherency:

  • Scorched Earth – An ancient role-play I didn’t even participate in, but during Into the Black‘s character creation I decided to make Emilena the daughter of StarfallRaptor’s characters.
  • Into the Black* – The first role-play, mostly tells the same story as Electra City. Emilena was my main character, and also such a dick most of the other authors admitted they were really hoping I’d kill her off and bring in a new character.
  • Racing the Storm* – A weird sci-fi romp where the main characters are traveling the world trying to stop a fleet of psionic gecko warmongers from taking over the planet. Emilena and her gangmates (including Flora in her first-ever appearance) are actually recurring antagonists who make life harder for the heroes. I was originally planning on killing them off one-by-one, but positive reception led to Flora getting an epilogue where she survives the warship’s destruction.
  •  Around the Folf* – Flora, having crash-landed her escape pod in the Sahara, makes her way to a psionic research facility. The original furry version of Echo Chambers was set during this.
    • Bathroom scene* – Halfway through Around the Folf, the Gang of Five updated their rules to ban sex scenes in forum posts. All subsequent ones were RPed in private via Google Docs. This one was between Flora and a test subject named Yurei.
    • Bedroom scene* – This one was between Flora and a nurse named Emma.
    • Folf in a Hot Tin Pool* – This one starred four characters (including Flora) in a jacuzzi.
    • Taming of the Revenue – This one was completely off the Gang of Five, and starred Flora and ‘Life’, the fursona of someone who paid me real money to RP it. More details here.
  • After the Storm – Apparently, Emilena survived the warship destruction too. She’s now rich and famous due to her role in saving the world, but pretty gray around the muzzle, having aged faster than normal due to unexpected side effects of the Growth Acceleration Program. I wanted to try writing her as a more physically-crippled character who had to rely on her wit and smarts to survive the dangerous situations that keep finding her.
  • Blanking the Slate – Some authors weren’t happy with how bizarre Racing the Storm got. They created a separate timeline, set immediately after Into the Black and ignoring all other RPs, which returned to the initial city and told another story starring the Purifiers. I completely reworked Flora’s character for the reboot, now she’s a pop star who keeps mouthing off to everyone and I quickly got sick of her new interpretation. She’s lucky the RP died out before I killed her off. Plot was adapted into Tabula Rasa.
    • Enter Bianca* – A sex scene between pop star Flora and a young woman named Bianca, who’s actually Nick’s character Rose in disguise.
    • Epilogue – Like Racing the Storm, I wrote an epilogue after the RP petered out. Flora and Emilena are both present, and the latter dies because I traditionally kill my main character at the end of an RP series.
  • Ask the Characters– An out-of-universe thread where people could ask questions to characters from the various RPs. Emilena and Flora have answered a huge amount of questions over the years.

(If any of these links ever die, I have archived copies of all these RPs in this blog post.)

RIP Gang of Five

Good thing I archived all the Darwin’s Soldiers RPs in Google Drive, because their home forum has bitten the dust as of 10pm tonight. The admins are working on resurrecting all the forum content on a new host, and best of luck to them, but when I have to trawl through the Darwin’s Soldiers Wiki and TV Tropes pages and fix all the hotlinks, I’m making these Google Docs the primary links. At least those (hopefully) aren’t going anywhere.

I took the opportunity to create one with the three posted chapters of f-22’s story “the Disease“. If he ever posts more chapters I’ll have to go paste them here, but it’s been months so I’m not holding my breath

Darwin’s Soldiers Disruptive Selection and Into the Black RPs archived

A long-ass fucking time ago I saved all the Darwin’s Soldiers content for safekeeping, but I didn’t do Disruptive Selection because it was too large and I didn’t know how to get it off the site. Well I finally went ahead and asked for help and this dude on reddit has me covered. Using his program I can effortlessly save copies of any GoF roleplay for posterity, and so I’m now doing so for Into the Black, the other franchise I’ve invested considerable hours writing content for.

into-the-black, racing-the-storm, around-the-folf, blanking-the-slate-unfinished-2-16-2017, scorched-earth

Also here’s a link to Dead End Job, another Serris story that he’s never going to finish.

Into the Black Codex

I need to get a new post up so that goddamn picture of sourballs stops appearing every time I open this blog.

I have done a lot of writing in the Into the Black universe, which up till now has not really appeared in this blog in any fashion, which is more focused on Darwin’s Soldiers. By and large Into the Black has been my universe of focus, as I really see the Darwin’s Soldiers story as mostly completed.  I told the tales that needed to be told and almost every character has had their history completed to my satisfaction. So in case you’ve been wondering what I’ve been writing all these days, here’s a one-page codex containing links to all the fiction I’ve written starring Emilena, Flora, and the other characters in this second flagship franchise of mine.

Happy 5th of July!

As these holiday greetings grow ever further from the actual day it happened, I thought I’d just jump in and do some archiving. Truth be told I got scared when The Catacombs, the greatest Team Fortress Classic forum on the internet, got deleted and its data sold to some anonymous ad mining company. What if that were to happen to the majority of the Darwin’s Soldiers stories on the web? Well, to belay that tragedy I’ve uploaded every original document containing stories, role-plays, and other people’s stories I saved for further reading. Just go check out all these attached documents if you so fancy.

Ship of State · Darwin’s Soldiers v.2 in full · Card of Ten · pavlov’s checkmate · nietzsche’s soldiers · nietzsche’s soldiers 3; super men · Nietzsche’s Soldiers 2 · Darwin’s Soldiers (complete) · darwin’s soldiers;Zero hour · Darwin’s Soldiers;Schroedinger’s Prisoners · darwin’s soldiers;aftermath · darwin’s soldiers; fools gold · Darwin’s Soldiers; Gamer · Geneses · darwin’s soldiers; ground one darwin’s soldiers; new divide Darwin’s Soldiers; Survival of the Fittestdarwins-soldiers-disruptive-selection · the Disease · Next of Kin

Note that I didn’t go through these with a fine-toothed comb; they’re full of typos and things I changed later, so they aren’t exactly correct. The ones currently readable on the Gang of Five are better, cleaner and considered the canonical versions of what went down. But in case those ever go down, we’ll always have these. And if you’re absolutely insane you could even glean a bit of whatever creative processes I went through in writing them, they’ve still got notes and everything wherever those go.

The only documents currently missing are Kinsey’s Mimic (because Serris is still writing it) and Disruptive Selection, because it’s so %$#@%^&%#@ing long. Some day in the future I’ll go ahead and finish archiving that doorstopper, at the moment my younger self reached Aimee receiving a phone call in a Platanna hotel, and I’m not even sure where that took place in the thread.

Update 2/16/2017: I finally did it! Some guy on reddit made a thing for me that let me download Disruptive Selection in all twelve-hundred pages of its glory! Learn more on the blogpost from that day.

Update 4/17/2019: Since this is the only blog post whose name I ever remember when looking for these old copies, gonna keep archive copies of the Into the Black RPs and The Approaching Light here. Most of these RPs are incomplete, since the franchise hasn’t had nearly as consistent a history as Darwin’s Soldiers, but it’s better than nothing if the GoF ever goes down permanently.

Scorched Earth · Into the Black · Racing the Storm (epilogue) · After the Storm · Around the Folf · Blanking the Slate (epilogue)