Prelude
As is recent tradition, the LC has a silly (read: inane) story stringing everything together involving the host maintaining the illusion of control over the participants. I’ll tuck it behind spoilers to spare those who don’t like reading drivel.
[spoiler]The hypnagogia moves behind your eyelids seemingly at random as you wait for the dream to start. It swirls around for a while before finally beginning to form coherent imagery. A street begins to form in front of your eyes and then branches out into a gridded network of them. Buildings start to form between the streets; the nearby ones appear to be residences and shops while the far-off ones are massive skyscrapers. A beautiful blue sky with a few clouds forms above all of this.
You become aware of other people gradually forming around you. They appear with the same sort of fascination with the new environment as you have, with many of them looking around at the environment with a sense of wonder. Before anybody speaks to the group, a voice comes from behind you all.
“Welcome to Elcedia, the setting for the 50th LD4all Lucidity Challenge.”
You turn around and are met with a surprising, yet recognizable sight. A small, bipedal creature with turquoise fur, large feathered wings, and several protruding spikes looks at you with a smile on its face.
Everybody stares on in silence until the creature speaks again. “Nothing? Shoot, I thought you LD4all people liked puns. Elcedia, L-C-dia? No? Not even a giggle? Fine, whatever. Anyway, welcome to LC 50! I’m Thorn, your Task Master for the next seven weeks, and—”
A group member suddenly busts out laughing. “I’m sorry, but I can’t take you seriously right now. You look like a stupid Sonic fan character and you’re making stupid puns too?” Thorn looks visibly irritated. He pulls his gloves and shoes off, retracts some spikes on his hands, and suddenly swells into what seems to be some sort of black-furred, turquoise-chested dragon-man that easily has a foot on your height before speaking in an annoyed tone.
"Satisfied? Geez, I try to represent a typical LD4all member without using a dragon for once, and this is what I get… LD4all never changes.
“Anyway, back on topic. I’m your Task Master for the next seven weeks. I’m happy that everybody got here safely. We’ll be spending the entire challenge in this lovely dreamscape, so please make yourselves at home. In fact, the first week’s tasks will be about doing just that! Look around you at all of the city’s residents; what do you notice?”
You look around and notice that dream characters outside of your group have appeared in the dream world. They come in all shapes and sizes, although they are largely bipedal. You see bird people, other dragon-men, catfolk, wolf-men, walking sharks… you quickly come to a realization that you utter aloud.
“Everyone’s half-animal. There aren’t any normal people.”
“Exactly,” says Thorn, “which means you all stick out like a sore thumb. We need to get you to blend in. Why bring your waking life skin into a dream world? Luckily, I have a friend who is perfectly capable of helping out with fixing that little problem. Before we meet him, though, you need to decide what you’d like to be. Yes, you get to choose!” he appends upon seeing some astonished faces. "Just keep it within reason and keep it clean.
“Oh, and if there’s any more laughter at people’s chosen shapes, I will not be a happy TM,” Thorn finishes with a stern gaze.[/spoiler]
Along with your sign-up, you should have a description (or a picture, if you’re an artsy type) of a bipedal, anthropomorphic (or highly specific human) form you’d like to use throughout the LC. While you’re not required to use it for almost anything, you’ll earn 5 bonus points for each task you finish as your chosen form. For other transformation tasks, you’ll earn this bonus by keeping morphic resonance; that is, your transformation is clearly just your character reshaped. For example, I used the following avatars in recent LCs to fit their transformation-based tasks, and all of them contain aspects of the form from the previous pictures—namely, the large horn, prehensile tail, and turquoise coloration.
The idea is to do something a bit more immersive by having you ditch your waking life body for fantastic feats, which should truly separate you from any preconceptions of dream control limitations brought on by being, well, you! You’ll need to provide the following:* Name (if different from your LD4all screen name).
- Species. What are you? It can be a real species that is humanized or a made-up species (in which case, describe it). If it’s just you as another person, I need defined characteristics that clearly separate it from your waking-life self. Make it dreamlike!
- Gender. I know some of you gamers out there play as members of the opposite gender. It’s allowed here too.
- Appearance. Do you have a certain color scheme? Do you have any unique markings?
- Height. I need a height between 3 feet (91 cm) and 7 feet (213 cm). I give these bounds not to restrict your creativity but to make sure that you can actually interact with things during the LC. If you really want a ridiculously short or tall character, we can always look into making a fitting task for it, but let’s keep it simple for now. I don’t need you bonking your head on doorframes or struggling to reach things at a person’s head level.
- Picture (optional). If you have artistic talent or find a character creator online, show us what you want to be instead of just describing it!
- Mindset (optional). Is there anything you’d care to tell us about your lucid interests? Perhaps your character already reflects some of them!
Whatever you decide to be, I hope you have fun with it, as the next seven weeks will have extra points for using your creation! If this isn’t your idea of fun, don’t sweat it! It’s only worth 5 points per task, so you can definitely work around it!
EDIT: A note on this…
[spoiler]To talk a little bit about the whole “character” thing, the intent was to to be a follow-up to LC 47, in which Mew151 had everybody take a title to symbolize his/her dream actions. I originally planned to have everybody come up with a blank slate that would get developed with a few dream powers, some DC friends, and other things over the course of the LC. While I largely got that, I also got creatures from Alien vs. Predator and Anna from Frozen. I’m not complaining about this and it’s not wrong to have these characters! I just find it amusing, and my goal now is to just screw with everybody who used something that already exists (e.g., I look forward to making Anna shoot fireballs or something).
Knowing this, if anybody wants to create something different he/she than already made to fit the LC’s aims, then go ahead. If you like what you have, then keep it! Just expect that I’m going to mess with you. [/spoiler]