Of Randomness

When I was younger, for a very short time I played an online trading card game whose name I have long since forgotten. In a similar vein to Magic the Gathering, different cards were based upon varying elements, but it was unique in just how many elements there were. One in particular always struck with me - the element of entropy.

If you're out of the know, and couldn't guess by the title of this post, entropy is the element of randomness - in a sense. It's an actual scientific principal, and it effectively accounts for randomness in variables in mathematical equations. More or less. It's been a while.

I was definitely one of those "lol teh rando" kids, I will freely admit, and there is certainly a lot of that still in my brain. But for whatever reason, the concept of entropy hit me in a very different way - my best guess being because it was the concept of controlling it. Some time later, a friend of mine wanted to write a story with all of her friends as characters, and her better friends being the special main characters. I was fortunate enough to be one of those particular friends.

She asked me to pick an element that I wanted to control. Other friends had chosen theirs first, so more obvious choices were already gone, but I didn't have to think twice. I told her I wanted my character to control entropy. We talked for a long time about what that meant, and what that allowed my character to do, and what the downsides of it were. It wasn't that he could effect chance, so to speak. Rather, he could call upon it.

That character became a favorite of both of us. His power was quick to decide - at the snap of his fingers, a random event occurred. It could happen to him, around him, inside him, or absolutely nowhere near by. It could kill people, bring them back to life, change their appearance or mindset, or turn their head completely around. He couldn't choose what would happen or where or to whom - he just had to pray. It would even be possible to reverse what he had already done, but who knew what kinds of things he would cause in the process.

We all see patterns in nature, created by random chance. So the things that his powers did would follow some sort of pattern. But as soon as he figured out what that pattern was, whether he wanted to or not, the pattern would change.

An incredibly inconvenient power, and yet an incredibly powerful one. One that would lead to a character who was incredibly happy, incredibly funny, but also incredibly sad. All of which would be amplified by his cultural upbringings.

It's such a good character, with such a good balance and so many possibilities, and I can't help but want to take it for myself. Which is kind of ironic to say, given that it's literally based on me. Even events in the character's life, as my friend writes it, are based on events in my own life. It would be hard for me to ever write a character in that style without it coming out very similarly to what she would write.

One day, if she ever finishes that tall tale, I would love to not only read it, but write my own expanded story of it. To write fanfiction of myself. How crazy would that be?