Below is the rough outline for a short story that is in queue for this year’s June Camp NaNoWriMo. You can see a list of all of the stories here, or you can just click on the Camp NaNoWriMo tag and get all the planning goodness.

Verse: Listener’verse

Working Title: Last Requests

Blurb: Nahyl is used to ghost that are much quieter and much less violent, but Yavy is damned if she won’t to Listen to him.

Rough Outline

1. Nahyl stumbles over Yavy on the way to another town, she almost leaves him because he’s annoying but Old Man tells her to take him.
2. He then spends most of the time in the next town interfering and harassing her to take him home.
3. She finishes the job there and runs into another Listener. She tries to give Yavy to him, but all of her ghosts go silent.
4. So she heads off to his home, confused and annoyed.
5. About a day out Old Man speaks up again, warning her about something vague. Which really only annoys her more since it was his idea to pick up Yavy to start with. She’s tempted to just ditch him, but he threatens her.
6. She heads into the home, but it’s a crumbled ruin, burnt and overgrown and there should be ghosts but none of them are talking. Nahyl is freaked, her own ghosts are silent except for Yavy.
7. She finally finds Yavy and goes to bundle him, but she realises his skeleton was dismembered and many of the bone pieces are worn differently. He has been scattered and that’s normally only done to really evil people. The fact that he’s been reassembled means there were other Listeners at work here too– and they should have buried him.
8. Yavy figures out that she’s caught on and tries to use magic to force her to finish bringing him back together, but with the help of the Old Man who Yavy didn’t realize he was there.
9. She grinds the bones to dust, and put them in a scatter bag that will slowly leak them onto the trail behind her as she walks– thus ensuring he can never harm anyone again. She puts to rest the rest of the people in the home that he had coerced there and killed. Some want to go home and she bundles them up and adds them to her pack.
10. She has a few choice words with the Old Man about the fact that it’s not her job to play Buffy and heads out on the road again.

Cast
Nahyl
Yavy
Old Man

Scenes/Sets
Trail, Town #1, Old Homestead

Challenges
Sort of a monster of the week story, but it’s going to be a lot more character focused than plot focused since there isn’t a lot of action. Will be interesting to see how this turns out since Nahyl is from a Novel_in_90 story Patterns in Stone that never really went anywhere. Gotta love Muse-ADD. :p