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About Geist

My main project right now is a novel titled Geist. It's an anti-superhero novel, running in
the veins of V for Vendetta & The Boys. Exploring themes of anarcho-socialism and
rebelling against fascism.

It takes place in the unknown future, hundreds of years after a meteor nearly wipes out
the United States. In the wake of the disaster, a powerful American Oligarch forms a
coalition of his uber wealthy peers known as The Collective. They gain great power
within the new American political system & build a great city with material harvested
from the meteor within the crater that nearly destroyed the country: the City of Alastor.

The city is built in many floors on top of one another with access to the best schools,
transportation, jobs, hospitals, etc. restricted to certain floors and denied to others.
The higher the floor, the more services and opportunities and assistance you can obtain.
Public services (buses, libraries, welfare, postal service, etc.) have all but disappeared
thanks to deregulated privatization and neutered federal protections. They've been
replaced by private institutions that are only available on certain floors. Access to higher
floors is restricted to those who have VISAs to either work or live on them, and the
regulations in place to obtain a VISA are deliberately structured to keep certain
demographics out through casting preference to those who are wealthy, property
owners, business owners, or those who've obtained success or notoriety from schooling.

Naturally, since the lower floors are denied access to good schools, jobs, and services
needed to lift them out of poverty, very few meet these criteria, leading to a corrupt,
bigoted social hierarchy that primarily favors those who are white, straight, cisgendered,
able-bodied, "healthy" (a term used to exclude those with mental illnesses or disabilities),
Christian, and of conservative political views (despite the fact that the majority of the city
is not conservative).

Additionally, proximity to the impact zone and the meteor material itself causes a great
many strange things to begin happening to Alastor's people over time. Unexplained
illnesses, mutations, and deaths plague the city and all around, the supernatural seems
to be lurking just around the corner.

The story follows protagonist Abel (middle), the son of the city's first "Superheroes", as he
attempts to navigate life within the fascist hellscape that is Alastor. He's an orphan, having
lost his parents to a violent end that resulted from their attempts to challenge the power
structures of the city. Having witnessed this event first-hand, Abel struggles with the
desire to continue his parent's work, having been left a fortune after their deaths, and
the fear of the potential consequences of going up against the Oligarchs of Alastor. He
also struggles with his own mutations: he's developed psychic abilities from exposure
to the meteor material and is able to re-live the last memories (and deaths) of those
who have recently passed, a power that haunts him in his waking life. He's also able to
turn invisible, but the ability is tied to his depression.

Although he has a VISA to access the higher floors of Alastor, Abel chooses to live on
the ground floor and pours all of his trust fund wealth into trying to help the poorest
communities. He teams up with like-minded people to find ways to fill in for the lack
of community assistance on the lower levels. This includes funding and volunteering
on an urban farm that provides fresh food for free to those who need it (SNAP is
practically nonexistent), volunteering as a fire fighter and emergency responder,
engaging with the homeless, mentally ill, and disabled, and generally struggling
to keep the people from eating each other. However, there's only so much one
small group can do and Abel often loses hope for the future.

When the Oligarchs manage to pass legislation to approve a privatized militant
police force with shockingly little oversight or accountability (inspired by Alastor's
first "superheroes". Think the Bat Family, but legal and controlled by fascists), Abel
finds himself forced into his parent's former profession. Spearheaded by Lux (Left),
a violent and sociopathic man, the police force wreaks havoc when it's unleashed
upon the lower levels due to the violence that always plagues the chronically
impoverished.

Utilizing his powers, Abel begins the struggle to unveil the identities and schemes of
the Oligarchs, as well as the crimes of Lux and his goons, to the public in the desperate
hope that truth will finally lead the city to revolution and change.

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History:

Geist began at Batman 2020, a Batman AU I worked on back in 2020 during the Pandemic,
but the story was extremely canon-divergent, to the point where I wondered why I
even bothered making it a Batman story at all. I'd changed up so much of the characters'
demographics, including gender, sexuality, race, origins, etc. that even if I did continue it
as a Batman story, I'd have to deal with all of the backlash from DC's dumpster fire fans,
so I decided to just double down and make it all original. It's an entirely different story
once again though, having grown quite a lot from it's origins.

Batman 2020 can still be read on AO3 [HERE]
The story itself is finished, but I never finished writing it because I didn't want to reveal
my whole hand before turning it into an original story.