Writing Assignment 1

Two hundred and fifty years ago, there lived a powerful witch who gave birth to three daughters, one fair, one dark, and one ginger. This came as something of a surprise to her as she had only been anticipating one baby. And she was never wrong about these things. Still, their father was probably a god, so a surprise or two was to be expected.

Because she had only been expecting one daughter, she had only picked out one name, "Alice". Still it was a good name, and she reckoned it could stretch a bit, so she proceeded to give it to them all. She was a bit on the single minded side, that witch, and not one to change her mind easily once it was set.

And so the Alice sisters came into the world.

Very quickly the siblings found that sharing the same name, while convenient in some ways, was more than a tad irritating in others. After some internal discussions, they agreed upon a plan, and thus when they finally burst upon the World, the World came to know them as Red Alice, White Alice, and Black Alice. And know them it did, for they proved to be the most powerful witches of their age. The nicknames had been White Alice's idea, she was always the most organized of the three, and highly practical in nature. The names the sisters chose well reflected not just their complexion, but their temperament, as The World came to know, sometimes to it's discomfort.

Scattered across Mythras and beyond are literally hundreds of folk tales of the exploits of the Alice triplets, to the point where studying them all is considered a difficult to impossible task, even for the Valorian bards of the The Ensemble. Many of these stories are contradictory, sometimes even having different opinions on which Alice is the protagonist. Some members of the Ensemble even think there is only one Alice (probably the crazy Red one they agree), that the others are figments of her imagination, or suppressed personalities or “some other weird ass magical shit” as Rufus the Well Travelled says.

Their stories are legion. This is not one of those stories though. Or not exactly,

For one day Black Alice went missing. For quite some time ( a century or two) her sisters didn't even notice. There had been a falling out you see, as families sometimes experience, some say over a man, some say for other reasons, and none of the sisters were exactly on speaking terms with one another any more. But nonetheless, when Red Alice noticed strange things happening, magical things, worrying things, she went looking for Black Alice to get some answers. Those things were more up her sisters alley then her own, and they were quite concerning.  But no matter the magic she used, whether of Finding, or Seeing, or even Naming, Red Alice couldn't find her sister anywhere.

So this is not exactly a story of Red Alice, or Black Alice, or any Alice, but rather the story of the poor sods who were drafted to find the Alice that went missing. 

And their journey on a haunted ship over strange seas, to seek her out.