The Plot

[Ten]

[the past]

RiverClan lives beside a mighty river in the middle of the desert. Fish are tricky but plentiful; thorny shrubs scatter across the landscape and a few trees offer shade. The sky is clear and a brilliant blue, stretching across the horizon, and when night falls, the vast swath of radiant stars shines like nothing else.

RiverClan is a strict Clan. Everyone follows the rules. Warriors thank StarClan for the lives of their prey; apprentices respect their elders; female leaders and medicine cats remain celibate. Murder is dishonorable. Always. Or so it used to be.

Sick of being at the mercy of the elements after a bad flood, RiverClan's leader told the Clan that they would build a new territory. They didn't realize this meant they would build an edifice. Before they knew what was happening the deputy had set them to work, rolling together boulders and branches and stacking them to encompass a large territory.

Of course the whole structure was riddled with mistakes, even with these creatures' physical advantages over the common cat. The Clan had no blueprints, no plans, no idea of what they were doing, and it was an immense difficulty to lift materials and piece them together; the quality of their work reflected that. With every moon the walls grew, tilting inward like a pyramid. When the walls reached their peak, the leader told everyone to go inside. No one disobeyed.

Then the leader and the deputy sealed off the Clan and ran away together.

Confused, it took time for the Clan to understand that they had been trapped and abandoned. The realization was hard on them all, shaking the foundations of everything they had ever known, and the cats whom they had always turned to and trusted in times of trouble were the exact ones who had done this to them.

As panic rose, some tried to appoint a new leader and deputy, but others shouted them down with inquiries as to their sanity and cries that they could never trust authority again, not after this. Indignation and fear whipped up a frenzied chaos of accusations that pushed the angry and vengeful to lynch the medicine cat, who had given them no warning of their fate. It all went downhill from there, and to say the Clan fell apart would be misleading.

The Clan had shattered.


[the present]

Decades and generations later, every living cat has been raised in the enclosure. Anarchy prevails and the uneasy, lawless status quo has no set method of dealing with violence and theft. Some cats consider this way of life preferable to suffering under a dictator.

The cats who do want to reform the Clan disagree over who should be leader and sometimes whether there should be a leader at all. Some say authority will always be beneficial, while some say authority will always be corrupt. To this day, no one has been able to put the Clan back together, and there are plenty of cats who are dead set against it.

Welcome to the enclosure, where there is no StarClan.
What do you believe?

[supplementary information]

Read more about their lifestyle to fill in the gaps and ask a question if that doesn't help.