Synopsis: The Scribblers

Smell the dust rising from the old parchment, hear the crack of the ancient leather binding, feeling the quill under your clever fingers begin to scratch out the first forbidden lines of your story and know that you could be publicly executed for what you're doing, or even worse...

What if every time you wrote a story you had to steal something from the real world? What if there was a city where writing was a crime worse than murder, and blank pages were prisons for the most heinous offenders? What if a secret band of writers called the Scribblers wielded pen and ink to great and terrible things?

Such a world is this, where pen, pencil, quill and paper have been outlawed for the common people, to protect them from the evil such things can (and have) unleash. The only books are government sanctioned Press Books, devoid of handwritten language, and certain words have been deemed unsafe even to be spoken. Subversive groups like the primitive Coal Fingers, Alexander Rime's Scribblers, and Tamberlain's reverse print shops keep the outlawed art alive. New and magical inks are being invented, inks to create beauty, quills to make war.

Our Dramatis Personae live together in the hidden underground house of Alexander Rime, a powerful Illumiator with nearly unlimited wealth and influence and a deep seeded obsession with one mythical book, The Genesis Codex, which is said to be God's own reference from when He wrote the world into existence. To find this book, and to play his elusive and dangerous game of avoiding the detectives carefully combing the city for those who write in secret, he has collected a set off the best writers in he city.

Odysseus, called simply Od, is a darkly brooding misanthrope. He doesn't speak of his past, he prefers to live in his salvaged books, or in his head, or sit silently in his study and mix experimental inks, and deciphering ancient texts. He possesses no special skills, and wallows in self-pity for the fact. What he wouldn't give for a gift, the tiniest affinity with ink and paper, to be able to alter one jot or tittle of this world that stood over him laughing. He would give anything.

Imogen Rime is Alexander's adopted daughter. She remembers nothing from before she was six and came to live with him in his great house, but it doesn't trouble her. She's happy to do any little service for her adoptive father, who saved her from the torture and pain, so he's told her, of imprisonment by the Writer Catchers. Her only trouble is her ability, the ability to write down the future in prose, in excruciating detail. But why can she only see bad things happening, fire, murder, death? This gift is too strong for her, she can't control it. Whatever story occurs to her she must write or become violently ill. Isn't there some way she could stop these things from happening? Sometimes she can't help but entertain the thought that she's not recording the future, she's making it.

Finally the newest addition has just joined the troupe, a young boy named Benjamin Plot with the gift of description. With the right words and a flick of the wrist he can take colors, sounds, sentiments out of the real world and transfer them to paper. This is a rare gift, and dangerous. In the hands of a boy, almost a young man, who wants nothing but to write a dear friend back to life, what misery might come of all this if young Master Plot decides use his talent for his own ends?