Stage Story

Largely inspired by my upbringing in Bali, this is a 'miniature' world of drama and mysticism that is set on the back of a cliché giant turtle island, with some (hopefully) interesting twists.   The magic in this world is driven by art, music and performance. The island, as previously mentioned, is a giant turtle, made of stone and earth, simultaneously animate and inanimate.   The culture and imagination of the inhabitants 'feed' the turtle on which they live. Most of the time, magic is a subtle background noise to daily life on the turtle, however, during auspicious holidays and ceremonies the 'veil' thins and reality becomes more suggestible or pliant.   The culture of the people is largely based off of traditional balinese culture, in a low-tech agrarian society, whose religion follows tenets of balance and harmony with nature, one another, and within oneself. Additionally, I also want to include a plot element of foreign colonialist powers affecting the local way of life.   I like the idea of playing with scale a little, in that the flora and fauna of the island are primarily things like giant insects and mosses, and the 'human' inhabitants are of a scale relative to them where, for example, a cricket would be dog-sized and a carpet of moss grass-sized. However I don't want to have to think through things like weird water droplet physics at smaller scales and all that, so I'd rather leave it ambiguous whether the bugs and stuff are scaled up or the humans are scaled down.   The plot of the story will begin with a ceremony that goes awry. The play that is being enacted becomes stuck in an unfinished state, and reality begins playing by the rules of the fiction. The protagonists will have to manipulate the entranced actors by collecting various masks to play the parts of characters in their rich religious stories, in order to restore the upset balance of their island home.