Anyone else have one of those stories you feel got lost when originally posted? You put a bunch of work in and no one ever posted to it? For me that story is F-Field. I wrote it to be something we didn't have much of: Sexual things HAPPENING to people, with and without their knowledge, but with no one in control. The Field is a force for sex; it is not controlled by anyone nor is it sentient or intelligent. We have plenty of stories where people get control (Amulet, Absolute Power, my own John Almighty), but almost none where there isn't any protagonist, per se, nor anyone in control. So I was very disappointed when I saw it being ignored in favor of John Almighty (not that I am unhappy that people added to that one, just that they ONLY added to that one), which I posted at about the same time.
Perhaps the shift to an alternate-future Roman Empire was somewhat confusing? I can definitely see why people would prefer a story with an actual protagonist, rather than a story where things just happen. Nevertheless, I'll bookmark F-Field to possibly add threads to in the future -- yet another place for me to write some reality alterations.
That bit was supposed to be me playing with sci-fi trope 118: time loops. The field left CERN, went back in time and turned Caligula from a brilliant leader into the one we know, thus causing the experiment that caused it. But the time travel bit wasn't the main thing, it was showing off a variety of things the field can do. I see what you mean about the lack of protagonist, but just because I didn't in that bit different mean there won't be. I just meant to avoid having the protagonist or the antagonist in charge, since that's Bern done a lot.
I think I know what your trying to say. Still it is confusing jumping around like that. It would probably work better if you have multiple shorts stories center around the Bern. If you ever read World War Z (the book not the Brad Pitt movie). There is no central protagonist. It is just a collection of articles and interviews about the human/zombie rise and fail. It is effective in that there are several stories following different people. But overall it creates a history of what happened.
I didn't mean for this to turn into a long discussion about that particular story but whatever. If you want to compare it to WWZ that's fine. We are following around the field to where it goes, just like they did in that book. I was more 3rd person than first like that book but the idea is the same. It's just not as unified a theme, because I didn't want to restrict people (also, I have never been to CERN or Europe, so I have no ability to write much more in those locales than I did).
