Hi.
My name is Leslie_1@flatts (lez-lee-underscore-one-at-flatts). I'm writing this for posterity. I hope that, sometime in the future, we'll have risen above this futile squabbling of clans and name wars and backstabbing and blood, but right now, I'm living through it, and if the time I dream of ever comes, I want the people living in it to read these words and know their history. So, everything you read here is exactly what happened to me. This is my life.
I belong to the Flatts clan, hence the @flatts portion of my name. We aren't a very large group compared to some, but there are around thirty of us, including my biological brother BJ_23 (bee-jay-underscore-twenty-three) and my best friend Viola0419 (vee-oh-la-zero-four-one-nine). I assume one of the men is my biological father, but no one's stepping forward to admit it. They're a bit busy planning to make Viola0419 just Viola, elevating her status to Original, to have time to act fatherly, even if they did admit they have kids. No one wants the responsibility of naming, so it always falls solely on the mother, who turns to the clan as a whole for help. Viola0419 thinks that it would make just as much sense for a man and a woman to stay together and ask the clan for help together, but I think it's about honor. Anyway, I'm equally close to all of them in different ways, so I think it works out.
Viola0419 has a lot of strange ideas like that. Some of them I've warmed up to and hope will happen one day, even if I can't imagine it – like the idea that, instead of obeying the List, we could make up a few names. Right now, with around 6 billion people in the world, we only have sixty names for boys and sixty names for girls on the list, and twenty gender-neutrals. But then she started suggesting names, and the idea started to sound worse. For example, Alyssa. That's not a name! She made up a few others: Elizabella, Sydney, Jennifer. At least Jennifer sounds a bit like Jenny. (There's a girl named Jen_ny5 in our clan.) She wants to skip the Original Viola plan and start calling herself Beatrice. I can't imagine anyone ever really doing something like that, but if it happened, and you're reading this – well, I probably sound pretty strange to you. But personally, I think you're a freak.
Another of Viola0419TM's idea is sharing names. Like, I could be named Leslie, and she could be named Leslie and anyone else who wanted to could be named Leslie, even if all the girls in the world ended up with that name. That doesn't work. All names should be original, like they are now. She did suggest a limit, like maybe only 1 person with each name per city. I think we should broaden that to county, but the idea would still work.
She also suggested names over the fifteen character limit. That idea is horrifying. Can you imagine? "Hi, I'm Leslie." "Nice to meet you Leslie, I'm Sesquipedalianloquacious." (Ses-kwi-ped-al-ee-in-low-kway-shus).
In any case, we aren't going to be the cause of a naming revolution any time soon. As I said, our current big plans are to make Viola0419 an Original. If that works out, maybe she can use her status boost to spread her ideas to the world.
The plan to elevate Viola0419 started with BJ_23. He found out that the world's Just Plain Viola, the Original, was living in the high rise building on Seacrest Avenue. That isn't too far from where our clan lives. See, the Originals locations are all highly secretive. Their social media presence is almost nonexistant. Other than the blue star that says they are an Original with all the rights and priviledges that go with the name, an Original social media page is useless to tell you anything about them. They're the only ones with the coveted "private" setting. But you can still see their avatar, and just like everyone else in the world, it is mandatory that this be a recent photograph of them. BJ_23 was the one who noticed a local landmark in the background of it. She was in our city for sure. He paid an Unnamed man to find her, and did some scouting himself, and two weeks later, our clan knew where to look
I should tell you about the Unnamed – the identy less. The unfortunate souls who couldn't register a name before they turned 12, either born at a time when no names were available, or simply with a mother too slow or lazy to get them named. Unable to get a social media account, their existances are unrecognized by the state. For all intents and purposes, they don't exist. That means no doctors, no houses, no jobs, no credit cards, no cars – the list goes on. They live and beg on the streets. Kind souls will give them a few dollars or some food. Sometimes they can be seen attempting to earn this kindness by practicing some of the useless, obscure arts that don't count as jobs and aren't restricted or regulated, like playing instuments, singing, or dancing. They can always be hired by a clan to do some menial tasks like painting a wall or BJ_23's scouting mission.
A/N - Is this finished? NOPE! Has it been sitting in my drafts for a year, and only got three paragraphs added to it today? YEP! Did I post it anyway? YEP!
