Recce Rangers

Well, it's officially March now. Nice things is, March in Carolina de Norte is a lot warmer than in good ol' Vermont or Pennsylvania. Huh, it hit 83 degrees F on Sunday - and then a scorching 87 on Monday. It's already about as hot as I can handle - and it's March.

The school year's cooking right along, tho'. I managed to push forward in physics - YAY! - and I've got a death grip on that 'A' in Spanish...I hope. We'll see where that goes. And English is going well. There's something liberating about an English course where all you do is discuss Shakespeare. And that I can definitely handle.

As for the stories, it's been...interesting. Got another two chapters of LotS - that's Lands of the Sun to you - done, and I'm plugging right along at chapter 10. Hopefully I'll get it done by the end of this week. If not...oh well. I'm also working on Ranger Cadet, the first of my Rangers series. It was interesting, 'cause I finally got a chance to talk about it with someone - my older sister, in fact. I told her - and I'll tell you - about the main theme of Rangers.

You have the Pathways - a dark, barren plain with portals all over it. Then there's Ranger Fortress - base/headquarters for the Recce Rangers. Add in Guardian Fortress - base/headquarters for the Guardians - and the Elemental Guardians, and you have an interesting starting point, right?

Well, Rangers is meant to be an informed commentary on all types of modern fantasy/science fiction stories. All the big ones are there - Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Star Wars...you get the idea. Well, there is one that is conspicuously absent: Rowling's Harry Potter. I'm not going to use that one.

So the portals all over the Pathways are portals to all these worlds - every fantasy/sci-fi ever created. There's also one big portal to Earth. Now, all of these portals are dynamic - meaning they shift locations at random times - except for Earth, which is completely static.

There are problems, though. Every story has a certain measure of evil in it - evil as measured by a standard different from the author's. I'm not a proponent of moral relativism - in fact, I take the opposite view. But that's another discussion entirely.

This evil spills over from the world in which it was first 'spawned', into the Pathways - once there, it congeals into creatures named after an Irish legend of a creature whose terrifying wail was said to herald a death. The name - you might've heard of it - is called a banshee. Both banshees - the legends and my own - have two things in common. One is the cry - I like to think of it as worse than one of the infamous 'Nazgul screams' - and the other is that they herald death. Banshees (mine) are, after all, pure evil.

That's where the Rangers come in. They patrol the Pathways, controlling the evil, destroying banshees whereever they can. In essence, then, they are protecting Earth from the evil that she herself created. This is important, because if the banshees make it to Earth, they will begin to destroy her. And the Rangers have no power on Earth, so they cannot destroy the banshees there.

What I'm getting at is that fictional stories - both good and bad - have a massive influence on Earth. A story with good morals, philosophy, and theology will have a beneficial influence - no 'banshees'. Those with the opposite - destructive morals, theology, and philosophy - will have a detrimental effect on Earth, possibly even to the point of sending us into a war, creating a pervasive thought that lasts for generations - I can think of a few, namely 'abortion' and 'evolution' - destroying Earth's morals and lifestyle.

You may not necessarily agree with me on those, but the point of the books is to teach you to think, not how to think. I don't hold with brainwashing people - I'll leave that to the public schools (which I approve of getting rid of, by the way. What a drain on resources those are!).

So now that I've gotten out my rant for the day, I'll be seeing you all later!