Short Story - Hero's Journey - The Others, Pt. 1

In my senior year of high school, I took a creative writing class, which I used to work out some ideas I had for stories that either were never put to paper or barely did.

Our first assignment was a short story to practice the steps of the hero's journey, and for this, I used an idea I currently titled The Others.

I'd first written a draft of The Others in a script format for a previous theatre class, which is what I'll go over today.

This is a warning that this summary does include implied off-screen torture and one death.

The Others was a science fiction dystopia that took place in the year 2167 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A group of extradimensional aliens called "the Others" came to Earth and completely took over the planet and leaving Earth a wasteland. The story followed a group of rebels who fought the aliens and attempted to find a way to get them to leave.

Our protagonist was named Jason Grayson (rhyme intentional), who was a member of the rebellion. One day, a young woman named Sadie Miller successfully managed to hack into the Others' computer system, but was captured by the Others and he brain was scrambled so she wouldn't reveal what she found. Despite this, the rebels bring her in, hoping they can help her and salvage the information. Jason is horrified by this, wanting to protect Sadie.

Eventually, the rebels manage to capture one of the Others, and they realize Sadie is able to communicate with it, which reveals that her brain was rewired to think like them. She can easily speak and read their language, but when she talks in English, she can essentially only communicate in code. Eventually, Jason manages to decipher that Sadie was trying to warm them that the leader of the rebels, William Starling, was actually the leader of the Others.

At one point, Jason reveals that his overprotective nature of Sadie was because something similar happened to his younger sister, Jessie. She worked on hacking the Others' system, but ended up being captured by the Others. Sadie ends up being able to hack into the Others' system again and pulls up a file on Jessie Grayson, where it's revealed that Starling was an Other who received brain tissue from Jessie in order to pass as a human.

The rebels end up breaking into a checkpoint base run by the Others to set off a computer virus Sadie made to destroy their systems, where Jason runs into Jessie, who was experimented on to become the voice of the Others, to act as median to the Others and humans. Jason holds off Jessie while Sadie sets off the virus, and unfortunately, Jason has to kill Jessie, saying that she isn't his sister--his sister has been gone a long time.

Sadie successfully set off the virus, which ended up forcing the Others to leave because their technology was the only thing able to keep them alive and tethered to reality.

I honestly really like this story, and I really want to revisit it again to see if I can turn it into a novel-length book, but we will see. Maybe a novella is all it needs to be, as both short stories are just a little too short to get the story I want.

Regardless of what it becomes, I really like the concept of The Others, and I can't wait to eventually dive back into it in more depth. Tomorrow, we will go over my second draft that I wrote during my creative writing class.