Vessel's plot draft

Disclaimer

In this post you will find major spoilers. Up to the date the project narrative has changed a little bit. I will explain in another post why and how it has changed, but in order to give full transparency on the creative process I want to share this first draft. Bear in mind that we are still in very early stages of development so things can change quite a lot, even though this will probably still be the main plot of Lucas' part.

Lucas' story

After receiving an invitation to attend an unknown aunt inheritance reading, Lucas travels to a small end of road town. He crashes the car at the entrance of the town and loses his senses. Alex finds him and walks him to the town. Soon he realizes that his plans are not going to happen. A cult has taken over the town and the situation is extremely dangerous. Only a few persons haven't been murdered, converted, or evacuated: Alex, Carlo, Lucia, Jerome, and Eva, who is missing. This survivor group is trying to find the missing child before leaving.

Lucas learns to shoot and gets some weapons from Jerome. Once equipped, he and Alex head over the forest to look for Eva. Alex guides him to a chapel in the forest hoping to find Eva sheltering inside. In there, Lucas steals the ritual knife hoping to sell it and get some money, now that it is clear he won't get anything from his inheritance. They decide to return to town without finding Eva hoping to get to safety before the fog and darkness makes the forest more dangerous than it is.

On their way back, a monster blocks their path. While fighting him, they break the entrance to the catacombs of the town where Alex falls into. Lucas decides to jump in and help her. While looking for an exit, they find Lucia locked in a room. She explains that Carlo was a cultist all along and that he transformed into the monster to kill them. Lucia also explains that Eva is kidnaped at the mansion, waiting to be sacrificed. After helping her to recover, the group heads out of the catacombs. Right after the exit, Carlo appears.

After fighting, Lucas kills him. The price of the fight is quite heavy, Alex gets badly injured. Since Lucia and Alex are quite slow and the situation is pressing, Lucas heads out to the manor to rescue Eva. He finds her surrounded by cultists worshiping her. While fighting them to rescue the girl, Alex and Lucia arrive. Gladly taking some help from them, Lucas uses a beverage to treat some of his injuries and blacks out.

When Lucas wakes up, he is tied to the altar. The three girls reveal themselves to be priestesses of the cult all along and sacrifice him to give C'Lna'l a vessel to walk around this world once again.

The Priestesses

Alex was born to be the highest priestess. Her life served a purpose since the beginning: bringing back C'Lna'l to Earth. In order to fulfill it, she learned all the rituals and magic from her mother. Once his daughter is ready, Alex’s mom sacrifices his life to gain the knowledge for bringing that entity back to earth. Using the corpse of her mother as a vessel, C'Lna'l leaves the next steps to follow the walls of the cave with blood. The ritual requires three witches and a ritual knife.

Alex had no idea on how to prepare the ritual artifact, but she knew she needed two more priestesses to help her. After that finding, Alex selected two of the most powerful families in the town and guided them to birth two acceptable witches to raise as a priestess. One of the families succeeded pretty soon and Lucia was born. The other family wasn't given C'Lna'l favor, so the Cult spent 10 years finding the right candidates to be the parents. After conceiving the child, the father was sacrificed to ensure that Eva's would be the most powerful of the three. 

Each priestess received a C'Lna'l commandment during her consolidation as a cult leader. Alex has to set up the town and the sacrifice, Lucia will find and prepare the ancient tool and, finally, Eva will command the cultists, as she is the only one of the three with enough power for that.

The Academics

Carlo and Lucia met in college. Carlo was an anthropology student in Milano and Lucia  was an exchange student from Spain. They started to share more time together since Lucia's thesis about C'Lna'l and its cult caught the eye of Carlo. During those two years, they started a relationship. 

Carlo's father was kidnapped and murdered by a cult member when he was 12 years old and, since then, he has been investigating them. Lucia told him a similar story, but the truth is that she is trying to find a good researcher that can help her prepare the ritual knife. Lucia knew that Carlo's father was a former cult member that found the knife and set up an intricate protection to prevent its use. To her eyes, he or his son don't deserve anything since they betrayed the cult, but at the same time it is her best chance to remove the ritual knife’s protection.

A year after finishing their studies, Carlo and Lucia obtain some funding to launch a formal investigation of the Cult of C'Lna'l. Those funds were secretly given by the cult itself to finance the investigation of the ritual knife. During the research Lucia helps Carlo to identify one of the Cult hometowns in Spain. 

Carlo identifies one of the oldest and richest families of the town as the main probable tenors of the ritual artifact. Unfortunately for Lucia, Carlo discovers her true identity.After that, Carlo restores the protections around the ritual knife to make it impossible for any cult member to reach it. 

Then he goes to confront her. At that moment, Lucia snaps out of character and kidnaps him with the help of some cultists. Lucia tortures him in order to know how to destroy the protections. Once she understands that Carlo won't tell her anything, she transforms him into a monster.

And that's it for now!

What are your thoughts on the plots? Those were defined mostly to shape the experience that I want to build to present it to potential partners, but were still vague enough to give us creative freedom depending on the team's final configuration. Now that the team starts to be defined, the story has iterated into something more specific. But those are words for another post! 

Share your thoughts in the comments, or join me on Discord to get the most up to date information and help shape this project. Thanks for reading!