Every time I open up my dashboard I see this and it haunts me. I doubt I will ever finish and post as is. If I wanted to, I could maybe just throw in the chapters I have from the first draft (which are wildly different), but maybe that'd be fun for you guys if anyone actually likes this story enough. Or if you were just curious about it after reading Power Initialization.

Either way, I want to plop down my outline plans for this story.

Theodran is a derivative of my first ever finished novel. That original book was called The Lone Huntsman and was basically litrpg before I knew the genre existed and the MC's name was also Theo. A lot of stuff happened that I'm not sure ever got a chance to happen in this draft? I honestly don't remember. But that original idea was fun and I still love a lot of things about it even though it is hideously bad.

I feel like an AI wrote it for how bad 15-16 year old me did with TLR. But he had illusion powers in draft one and then it changed to gravity powers. Both were cool, but both were missing something vital that this story had. Which brought me to a series of ideas for Theodran.

First of all, the character's name being the title. I love this name so much and the name Theo (yes, Theo from PI was adapted from here) and healer characters in general.

Old Draft:

I wanted to take the hero's journey without all the grand stakes and make them be proactive for a simple goal to try and prove himself so he can propose. Every event that happened afterward would boil down to that decision. The prior draft was also connected to six different worlds with their own magic systems, Uneira (the first) being talents only. Then so on and so forth.

That combined to create a lot of the general overarching events of the story, but Modran never existed. She was created to replace another character who was basically a walking inventory system for another character who had bought her. Anyway, after he failed to win the Pageship Race and was stranded in bed after his team's betrayal he manifested his healing powers then instead of earlier. But after he woke up, his talent status was made public and he defaulted on a loan he'd taken out with Alanna's (yes, also adapted, but differently) father to do the race in the first place. Another character bought his debt and forced him to go along to Numeira (world between worlds) because in that world time sort of stops. So any injuries would be permanent.

Also, Alanna forced her way in after fighting her dad in a duel and kicking his ass.

There was some faction stuff going on in this other world and all of this other stuff. I ended it kind of badly just so it'd be over at the time back in 2020.

Current Draft Plans:

So for this I wanted to cut the other world stuff out entirely and focus more on the pressures of having a literal country trapped in a walled city surrounded by a hostile wasteland full of horrifying monsters. Theo lost his pageship trial, but figured out how to manifest his powers externally. Modran would win her pageship trial by selling secrets/information, making a partnership with someone who had a talent for languages and could basically speak to objects, animals, and even command them (spells). Alanna would win her duel too and would get swept up in a whirlwind of new politics, duels, and responsibilities including acting as executioner to fight criminals to the death who wanted a trial by combat. Plus being basically the National Guard if the Order needed assistance with wasteborn or other internal matters.

Meanwhile, Theo would work for his grandfather and hone his healing talent. He'd learn how control biomatter and make augmentations to himself and how thin the line between healing and hurting was. (accidentally trying heal someone's broken bone and making their whole arm grow slightly longer so the fingerbones broke the skin, stuff like that) And then he and Modran would reach their milestone birthday (20, 21? I don't remember) and be able to create skills.

This would be a whole section of the book where they basically learn that they need to repeat an action with intent multiple times until they can basically do the action with a mental exertion of their will. So start a fire enough times, you'll be able to start a fire magically. Grind that part of the skill, you can control fire. Another example would be like when Alanna sort of teleports in her spat with Modran. Skip enough that it becomes a sort of skill and you'll be able to skip through space (writing this scene gave me the idea for Eli's initial teleportation power descriptions!)

While this happened we'd really dive deep into Theo with only a couple of glimpses of Modran and Alanna as they did things. But tension continues to brew higher. Also, Theo may or may not have seeked revenge against his party who literally abandoned him to wasteborn. It would've been pretty bad if it happened. Theo's morality really flip flops as a character, so I couldn't decide plotwise. But while this happened, there'd be a lot of healing sessions of guards and people robbed, assaulted, or otherwise harassed by bandits.

The end of the first book would've been a whole thing about raiding the bandit camp and killing their leader Griff who was actually kind of right, but also not really. Aethel had massive food shortages in general, the ringed city walls were starting to fail and the waste's influence was messing up crops and farmland for the most part (Theo's family's farm was saved by his and Modran's presence) and so on and so forth. The walls would've broken either at this point or at the end of book two.

Speaking of book two, I didn't really know what I wanted to do for this. I was leaning toward Theo and Alanna reconciling a bit more since they'd have drifted apart a bit and they'd join a caravan to one of the other ringed countries. Do some stuff with that. Dive more into what was going on with all that. Not sure what would've happened, but I had loose ideas of Modran tying her whole resurrection stuff into restoring the land and all of that, but I could never decide if I liked it or not. Felt too corny to me as an idea, but it would've depended on execution.

Anyway, that's what I had for this story more or less with this draft. I had a bit more with the previous draft, but not too much more. Which is partially why I jumped over to Power Initialization and the other main story idea I have in mind that I'll want to work on when PI is finished. Thanks for reading if you checked this out!