It took me nearly 9 years to start uploading this one. It was originally supposed to be an ongoing, episodic slice-of-life story but I ended up focusing on writing a prequel of it first, which got posted as Runaway with Faye. So this is a sort of sequel to it that can also be read as a stand alone.
Oliver works an ordinary job in an office. But two new mysterious hires, Jyri and Faye, turn his average life upside down. Three, if you count his crude, new boss. With the encouragement of his best friend, they try to find out what the deal is with Jyri and Faye. Are they time travelers? Aliens? Time traveling aliens? Meanwhile, Jyri and Faye struggle to fit into a universe much different than their own. Things only get more complicated when creatures, and people, from their fantasy world find their way into modern day America. And it gets worse when Jyri can't find Oliver.
Expect...
You can read it here! Or you can view the table of contents if you left off somewhere.
This was the second novel I started working on, despite the being the fourth story I've posted online.
Much of it was inspired by my time working an office job for a shitty company. Oliver's experiences with purchasing mirrored my own at the time- right down to unpaid invoices! (And boy, were there many!)
I was also the driver for that same company, and many of my ideas for this story came to me while, well, driving for them.
I was thrown around all over the place, much like Jyri...
Basically, a lot of the office/work aspects of this story came straight from my personal experience working for that crazy place.
Jessica's name was originally Christina but then my (current) workplace hired a sales person with the same name and it became so awkward writing her so I ended up changing her name to Jessica cuz I was listening to Mambo Number 5.
Jessica and Jyri were originally going to get together. But at one point, I realized how cliche that is, and decided it would be more unique for the story to have a man and woman as strictly friends. Needs more rep.
I actually had a lot of trouble making Jessica's character interesting- for the longest time she was flat and boring as hell. Then I found out I was autistic and decided to make her autistic as well. Would explain some things about her I'd already written.
Shawn was accidentally autistic from the start I did not even realize he totally came across as such until later, then decided to lean into it.
I guess Jyri also passes as autistic but that was 100% unintentional.
I wrote this story on three different laptops. That's how long it took me to finish this!
Through it all, the sequence of events in the first chapter stayed the same. The first few lines never changed from the very first start. (Also taken from personal experience.)
The amount of deleted scenes is crazy though. I don't think I've ever written anything with as many deleted scenes as this one.
Like, there was gonna be a whole bit where Ran gets into the internet and gets into furry art, and his favorite artist was gonna turn out to be Shawn.
Or Ran was gonna bump into Jasper in a gaming server and shit was gonna go down.
But then I cut it all out in an attempt to get this trainwreck of a novel on an actual track.
This one isn't edited as well as I would have liked, but I was so sick of this one being unfinished for so long, that I just, threw it out there so I'd be done with it.
Wow I had a lot to say about this one!