What Inspired Reality's Crossroads
I have actually quite a bit to say about Reality's Crossroads, even though I haven't written much of it and it's not on the forums yet. It's really interesting, and I think it'll get you interested in reading it. Wow, I think I might have more to say than Serpent Syra...So I suppose I'll start now.
The very, very, very first thing that sparked even a bit of an idea for the story was from way back when Burnt Flower's story, Two of a Kind, hadn't been posted yet. In fact, it was several months before it was posted, and I was reading the preview here in the Author's Cafe. It was, of course, the scene where Haruka was torturing Kasumi. Even though I've never been a huge fan of horror (although I don't neccesarily HATE it), I was inspired by this scene to write on of my own involving Kasumi and fire. Thus a random scene was written. Hokage replaced Haruka, and Kasumi was actually inside a room in the Team Magma base, chained to the wall by her wrists, ankles and neck. That was actually a scene which, when the story gets to that point, a very important idea will be conveyed. But I'm not going to tell you what it is yet.
Next up was my reading, rereading and rereading again that excerpt I wrote. I had written a few more random scenes, all from different plotlines, and I planned to choose one of them to build a story around them once I had filled up a section of my writing notebook with little clippets. Well, I hadn't even filled up a fifth, but I became so obsessed with the scene involving Kasumi and Hokage that I just HAD to write the story around that. So every day I would go over that scene in my mind, trying to come up with ideas that I could build a story around. After about one or two months of doing this, I came across a manga that inspired another scene that would end up to become another part of the story: xxxHolic.
The scene in that manga that inspired me was in the very first chapter of the first volume, when Yuuko was defining the word hitsuzen to Watanuki. It took quite a while, about another month, but I eventually reread that volume and something sparked in my mind. It was another scene involving Hokage, but it was actually quite true to the scene in the aforementioned manga. Kagari was speaking to Hokage of the concept of hitsuzen, and for some reason I also got the idea of insence burning. Simply because I wanted to. Anyhow, I sort of meddled with this scene a bit and poof! It became intertwined with the scene involving Kasumi. Of course, there was a lot more to come after that, and it would be a while until Reality's Crossroads started being written.
After that happened, I started thinking of Kagari as some a person intertwined with worlds outside our own...A medium, if you will. However, she was much different than that in my mind. I toyed with her a bit, and after more intertwining between scenes and long periods of sitting and thinking, a strange sort of love triangle formed within the story: Kagari, Hokage and Izumi. Hokage is actually in love with Izumi, but something happens to her at one point in the story. Over time he begins to get over it, although never completley, and a relationship begins to form with him and Kagari. However, Kagari dosen't know that Hokage still loves Izumi. Actually she never knew in the first place. Hokage, on the other hand, just wants to keep their relationship as it is...A sort of sibling-like relationship. I swear, something I saw once inspired this, but I can't remember what.
I wrote a lot of scenes, some of which I can't remember, and most of them never really flew. I worked my ideas and, just when I thoght I had exactly what I needed to start working, something happened. Whisper, a person on the forums, is a very good friend of mine in real life, and we were talking one day. We have a sort of an RPG thing that we sometimes do, and she said something to me. It's only one sentence - four words, in fact - but it had a collossal effect on the story.
"Fear the Shadow-touched."
Later Whisper told me that it was just a random sentence she came up with, but it triggered coutless things in our wild imaginations. What we came up with was this: Seventy-six years before the anime took place, all Pokemon dissappeared from the face of the earth. Nobody knew what happened; some thought that the gods were angry for the humans' mistreatment of the creatures, others placed the blame on science. Either way, strange things began to happen. People began to find that they had their own special powers, like those that the Pokemon had. There were fifteen different varieties of these powers, which were dubbed 'touches', as follows: the Fire-touched, Water-touched, Earth-touched (plants and such), Air, Storm, Spark, Shaow, Light, Mind, Spirit, Scale (allows you to turn into a dragon-like creature), Steel, Poison, Stone and Shifter. For two years, people used these powers for generally good purposes, and they became a part of daily life. However, as should be expected, some people began to despise such a peaceful life, and two organizations were formed: Team Magma of the Fire-toched and Team Aqua of the Water-touched. The Teams were hugely powerful with both these new abilities called Touches and weapon use, and they quickly gained control over the Echo Crossorads, a large desert that connected the reigons. Death and bloodshed became common, and for seventy-four years the Teams were passed through the hands of three Leaders. The third leaders, Aogiri and Matsubusa, now rule the Teams. In the story, though, something is different: Pokemon do still exist. They're just extremely rare; it's as if every species of Pokemon is endagnered. If this dosen't make sense, more will be explained in the first chapter of the story, don't worry.
I don't know when this happened, so I'll put it in last. In the Pokemon Manga, Hokage always wears his hair over one eye. This struck me as odd, because wouldn't Hokage need to use that eye? But then a very strange idea struck me: what if Hokage couldn't use that eye anyhow? So the idea of Hokage being blind in one eye was created. I wrote a scene over how he had lost his eye (which was in a freak training accident, to make a long story short), and thus I began to write more about Hokage's past. I decided that he would have lived, as a child, in a house in the middle of nowhere that was eventually destoryed in a battle between his parents (who were members of Team Magma) and Team Aqua. The ruins of the house are actually the setting for the prolouge. Once I decided that, I began to write the story, and voila! There you have it; the extremley long-winded story of how Reality's Crossroads came to be!
