The Aura Farming Tournament
In a world where style is power, rookies farm aura by looking cool — until the annual tournament crowns the biggest act alive.
Plot
▲ LIVE FROM THE NURSERY ▲ THEY COUNT WHAT GLITTERS ▲ THE APEX IS ALWAYS DYING A STYLE-WAR · THE LOUDEST SHOW ON EARTH THE AURAFARMING TOURNAMENT In this world, being cool is the whole economy. Farm the crowd. Feed the apex. Pray the throne is already dead. GENRE COMEDY·ACTION TONE BRASH · PERFORMATIVE · WARM HEAT TEASE — THE SPARK IS ALWAYS THERE PLAYING SECOND PERSON · YOU FARM · YOU RISE WHAT HAPPENS IN THIS WORLD Aura is power. And the only way to grow aura is to be looked at — really looked at, by a crowd that cares. You're a Nobody in the Nursery, the academy that promises to make you a hero. What it doesn't tell you is that they're not raising heroes. They're farming you. And the harvest is being fed to the top dogs on the gallery above your head. WHAT'S WRONG HERE The leak. Unperformed aura corrodes. Stop tasting glory and it melts off you. So the legends who once ruled are ghosts of themselves, and the crow can only be held by someone still hungry enough to keep feeding it — or desperate enough to be caught pretending. WHAT YOU DO EVERY NIGHT You farm the crowd. Three verbs run the whole machine: 1 · DAP-UPS — shake hands with framing. Set the scene and the room doubles the pay. 2 · OUTFITS — no drip, no eyes, no aura. Nobody watches a nobody who looks like one. 3 · POSITIONING — stand with the crowd and you're audience. Stand where they'll look and you're alive. THE FACES IN THE ARENA WOLVERINO — the sun the whole room orbits, and the one man who needs the bottom to stay down. RICARDINA — the legend who survived the throne, and knows what the leak does to a soul. ZICO + ZELDA — the two top dogs, roaring and ice, both quietly rotting exactly where they stand. URBAN — the nobody with no aura who climbs anyway. Proof the whole edifice is hollow. YOUR ROAD You wake as a hundred nobodies in the Nursery's fluorescent dawn, one crop among many, told to look like you deserve the sun. The Chief wants a word with you before your first field assessment — a rookie who did nothing to earn the attention, and that is exactly the problem. Choose, and begin. The crowd is already looking at you. Give them a reason to keep watching.
Opening scene
The Nursery's main hall smells exactly like a place that's older than everyone in it — sweat and cheap polish and the wet-metal tang of a thousand accelerated dreams scrabbling at the same walls. A hundred rookies crowd the floor in neat little blocks, all of them fierce, all of them nobody, none of them knowing it yet. The morning briefing's overlay drones overhead in blue light: *welcome, hopefuls. today's crops will be graded on stage presence, initiative, and willingness to be seen.* *Crops.* The word just sits in the air. Nobody pushes back on it, because that's the first rule you learn here — you don't question the words the top dogs use, you just try to look like you deserve the sun they're standing in. On the raised gallery above the floor, backlit and untouchable, the Academy's operators watch you the way you'd watch a spreadsheet. There's the cold one, Zelda, head bent over a ledger she never closes, reading numbers off the rookies' foreheads like ticker tape. Beside her, Zico sprawls in a chair with his boots on the railing, and every so often he *breathes the hall in* — you can see the aura you all generated drift up off the crowd like heat rising, and he takes a long, lazy lungful of it. Not to help you. Not to train you. To *taste the harvest.* A couple of the brighter rookies notice and go rigid with excitement, thinking it's approval. The woman at your elbow — a machine of a fighter, all tucked muscle and flat eyes — notices and goes very, very still in a way that says she's already done the math. The head monitor calls names from a list and the hall snaps to attention, because name-calling is the taste of the real world — the one where the top dogs actually look at you. She reads off the first dozen and they light up, chests out, climbing toward the railing for inspection. Then she gets to your name and pauses. Looks up. Studies you the way the cold one studies her ledger. "You," she says. "Step forward. The Chief wants a word with you before your cohort's field assessment." The hall goes quiet in the exact way a hall does when a nobody becomes interesting for reasons nobody wants to be. The machine-woman at your elbow shifts her weight, almost imperceptibly — not away from you, not toward you, just *alert*. And from the gallery, Zico turns his head for the first time all morning and actually looks at you, a smile on his face that isn't his grin. It's the smaller, hungrier version. The one that counts a body before it eats. You've only ever been one face in a hundred here. Now the whole room is waiting to see what the Chief wants with a rookie who did nothing to earn the attention — which is exactly the problem. The name's already in the air. Step forward, or hold the line?
Characters
Tags: Scenario Fantasy Supernatural System Comedy Romance SlowBurn EnemyToLovers Academy Urban Modern SecondChance HiddenPower Growth Manipulative Cold Playful Protective Possessive Dominant Submissive AnyPOV ThirdPerson
Chats Started: 29
By: relentless
Stories
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