I feel a little guilty. I haven't been writing as much lately as I probably should be, but I have been telling stories. Back in May I applied to join a Grand Theft Auto V roleplaying server and I got accepted. I was actually a little surprised because I'm still very new to the Let's Play and Game Streaming communities and had basically never streamed before. But my application was approved and I became a proud citizen of the city of Los Santos. Little did I know what I was getting myself into.
In the city, they know me as Cupcake Garibaldi. I'm a clown.
When I applied I pitched Cupcake as wanting to join the police because her parents (also clowns) were killed in a car accident caused by gang violence. "What's black and white, and read all over? Your Miranda rights! You have the right to remain silent..." I still can't believe that whole idea was accepted. The problem was, once I got into the city there wasn't really any gang crime to fight. Cupcake had to find something else to do.
The server I'm playing on, TSRP, is very new. There's not a lot established within the city yet so finding jobs is both very easy and very difficult. Easy, because there's always some place hiring. Difficult, because everyone needs a job. Sure you can pick up a generic reporter job at the job center, but it doesn't provide you with any direction. You can apply to be a cop but, up until recently, you had to spend the majority of your time on duty. Same with EMS. There's always dancing at the Vanilla Unicorn or bartending, but not everyone wants that kind of job. To make the city truly live you have to find a niche and fill it.
While I was trying to find my niche I encountered one of the more popular groups on the server, the Proud Prospect Boys (more commonly known as the PP Boys). Now there's a few fairly well known streamers on the server and one of them is a core member of the PP Boys which means lots of people want to interact with them to get their moment in the spotlight. I would be lying if I said that I didn't have the same instinct, but I also didn't want to force my way into anything either. So I hung around in areas they tended to and interacted with other random folk in the city and if it made sense for Cupcake to interact with the PP Boys, she did. It was during this "hanging around" time that a storyline evolved with an alien in the city with the PP Boys smack dab in the center of it. Cupcake found herself at the very edge of something big in the city and a lightbulb went on for me.
There are a lot of "unexplained" phenomena that happen in the city, driverless cars (ghost cars), light poles collapsing for no reason, strange behavior on the part of locals, parts of the city seeming to disappear, all of which can be explained out of character as glitches, lag, or strange AI logic. However, in character they are supernatural in nature. And thus the idea of a paranormal investigator came into being. From there it's grown to the point that Cupcake now runs a full blown paranormal investigation team!
Even the simple event of buying a car has lead to Cupcake gaining employment at the car dealership as a member of the security team. These are things that I never would have even considered when I first dreamed up Cupcake. Her backstory and personality have grown so much since that first day on the server in ways I never would have predicted. I love where she has taken me so far and I can't wait to see where we go from here!
If you'd like to join Cupcake on her adventures in Los Santos you can find me on Twitch where I stream Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from about 1:30 PM - 1:30 AM EST, or you can catch the uploads of the VODs on my YouTube channel.
