Infinite Earths: Zone Zero

I just signed up for NaNoWriMo.

I first heard about it five years ago, but this is the first time I'm actually going to try to write a novel(la)-length story. So, by the end of November, I hope to have something 50,000 words long.

This means I'm going back to my childhood. In junior high school, when Power Rangers was on TV and when I thought watching it was cool, I imagined a science fiction world resembling a cross between Sliders and Timecop. Where interdimensional travel was possible and deeply regulated by society for the preservation of existence. At its core, a band of teenage heroes (that's why I mentioned Power Rangers) called the Reality Jumpers were responsible of protecting the interdimensional continuum. This flagship team of the Federal Reality Commission was led by one Jake Tyler, my fictional alter-ego who had better hair but had just as much bad luck with girls as I did. Together, they travel to parallel universes to fight evil and do other heroic things, then go home to try to live very normal lives.

It sounds very nerdy and fanboyish at this point, so over the years I've written and rewritten the canon in my head, and the story universe has grown somewhat dark. The only realistic scenario where minors serve as interdimensional crime fighters is one where, well, most of the elder generation has been obliterated. The Continuum War, then, wiped out most of the society in which the Commission was founded. They sent all the men to fight against extinction. When they started to run out of men, they sent all the women. When they started to run out of women, they (reluctantly) sent the children. Fighting the war was, in essence, a family activity. But with most of the parents gone by the end of the war, how does society rebuild? And how do the children cope?

So on, so forth. There's more of this up on infiniteDeferral, so feel free to look there. I want to write a series of stories in the run up to NaNoWriMo, so look out for those too.