New Challenger Approaching: INGREDIENTS 1 - SAGASHIMONO

Made a joint decision with inx to create a new kind of post.

• Ingredients - Small explanations on what kinds of things went into the making of a MIX. They will be sort of similar to REMNANTS, only they'll be focused solely on what inspired a certain MIX. There may be spoilers, but hopefully I can make those available upon button-click.

Anyway, as I said in REMNANTS 1, MIX 2 was originally written to go with the prompt "looking for something lost." The first thing I thought of when I heard that prompt was a very short girl wearing a large coat and a backpack with tiny wings, running around a city in the afternoon, holding a paper bag filled with red-bean-paste-filled pastries that she accidentally didn't pay for, and attacking hugging childhood friends that she hasn't seen in seven years.

...No, seriously. Go watch Kanon.

Anyway, the word that naturally came to mind after thinking that was "sagashimono," Japanese for "looked-for thing" (yay for faaabulous translations). Being the weird person that I am, I MIX'd that word into "oh, I am a s-song," and then found out that my next story would (apparently) be about a song. A song that was looking for something. Therefore, I began imagining how I might be able to personify a song, and how I could build some portion of the world from that song's point of view. And here are the basic concepts that I came up with:

• When I think of a song as a person, I think of a female. Not sure why, but I do, so I decided the song would be female. I imagined the title of this story as something she would say upon the sudden discovery of who/what she was, so I left her without a name.
• In accordance with the digital age, the song is a digital music file. As implied in the story, she was thrown onto an illegal music downloading site, from which she was downloaded and put onto an iPod (the first box mentioned) through the standard 30-pin connector.
• As I'm sure most people do, I think of meta tags on music files when someone talks about a song that's missing information about itself. Although this isn't explicitly stated in the story, I tried to come up with real-life equivalences to music tags:
  
  

  Name	Title
  Name of Creators	Artist(s)
  Pictures of Home	Album Art
  When Born	Year
  Order of birth	Track Number
  Kind of Person	Genre

  
  
• The second box mentioned in the story was a typical hard disc drive with multiple platters. In my head I had imagined something similar to OZ from the movie Summer Wars:
  
  
  
  My description of the box was certainly not as vivid as this image, but then again, my mental image of the hard drive was limited by images of real hard drives:
  
  
  
  ...Yeeeaaah...not terribly exciting, unless you're REALLY into electronics.

Anyway, that's that. Hope this post has given you a little bit of insight into how my mind works ('cause you totally want to know).

[ thus concludes this list of ingredients for the latest mix. the first collection of many to come. ]