Five_X

...LeopardBear and Spinach still actually wrote things and didn't just post ironic, fully-lowercase comments. It was the best of times, and it was the-

Well, actually no, it really was the best of times. People actually paid attention to IRC back then and that's when people actually had ideas for cool things. They had ideas, I mean; IRC was just so distracting most of the time that honestly people never really wrote anything they came up with. It was a great hive-mind of ideas from all sorts of people, all collaborating together to make something truly weird. Usually, these ideas came in the form of little idea hooks posted in IRC conversations, which would be picked up by someone or another and written for maybe a chapter or two before fizzling out, inevitably.

Eventually, it all culminated in one, great document known henceforth as...

"On a Misfortune"

The idea behind this, which managed to get the great and legendary Spinach to write things for maybe the second time in his Beast's Lair life, was as a Beast's Lair visual novel, with all the cool and popular people of Beast's Lair - you know, just the ones that matter - in a school as characters. Plenty of them were genderbent and had their names changed, obviously, which led to plenty of interesting speculation as to who was who.

The story was written, for the most part, by Spinach and LeopardBear, working in tandem, and at the end of each chapter they provided a number of choices. Some people just ignored the choices and wrote their own suggestions for what should happen, and from all appearances there was a lively and healthy story to be found here in this Google document, and that it would continue on for a good while and come to a satisfying conclusion. That is what we all hoped, but we forgot that this was a story authored and originating from Spinach and LeopardBear.

We should have known better.

After a few strong updates, the story died, never to be revived or remembered in any way, and it drifted, as many things do, into those forgotten pages of history.

Perhaps this is for the best, as now it can exist in time, a slice of an era that is now gone, when On a Misfortune was a reality, and we could look forward to updates. It was a time of solidarity, and of community, and of lazy people actually getting down and writing something creative and interesting. It marked the high-water point of #notes and Beast's Lair's IRC community, when activity was at its highest. Since then, new members have come in, others have, sadly, left; the atmosphere is different, and even the people who remain have changed in their outlooks and ideas.

However, we can at least, in reading this, look back at a sliver of time in which there was a story, a unifying story for all of us; but we must recognize, also, that its time has passed.

Here is the story in its unfinished entirety: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...IvlDhXINk/edit

And here is a copy of the story for voting purposes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...nZBwOjeCg/edit

Lastly, here is the document with our preserved speculation: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...ucVB1OGc#gid=0

Given time, Leo may read this and he might remember the story as it was; with luck, we could return to the story, and have Leo (and Spin, maybe) finally, actually commit to something he's written or collaborated on, so that a story like this can finally have both a beginning and an end, instead of hanging loose and bare.