Once upon a time...

Once upon a time, there was a world called Trouf. It existed in the minds of a handful of West Virginian teenagers and on an online message board where said teenagers role played the story for entertainment. It was around 2004 to 2006, or maybe even earlier, and it consumed a large portion of my time. I was a redheaded, freckle-faced kid learning about the world with the exceptional help of the internet, which had all the answers to all of the questions I had. If I knew how to ask the question, I typed it into a search engine. If I didn’t know what question I was supposed to be asking, I role played about it.

Trouf, by the way, should be regarded as a proper noun. It was originally T.R.O.U.F. and that stood for The Realm of Unknown Fantasy, which was an online forum started by a friend of mine. Several of us were good friends because we all went to 4-H camp together and we all went to the same public library, so we all knew that we all liked to read fantasy. My friend who started the forum had role played before but most of us were new to the idea. I remember a moment when I first joined the role play, after I’d written two or three posts, when I felt astonished that such a thing was possible. I could write a book with other people. 14-year-old me could not believe how cool this was.

So, for those of you who don’t know what online role play is, let me explain. Two or more people get together online and write back and forth, in character. The setting, in this case, was a random magical world where anything was possible. In the opening sequence, a human hunter met up with an elf sorceress, a wingless fairy, a cursed wolf and a guide for hire. At which point, the group discovered that they were destined to complete a dangerous quest to overthrow an evil lord.

My character was the guide for hire. She was a Nelfkin, a species of my own creation, who were short and rather like hobbits, but had normal feet and exceptionally large, pointed ears. Her name was Blue Jay Grass, no, I am not kidding. She was a very sensible gal, direct and honest, or so I remember her. At no point did I consider her a representation of myself, although that was fine for other people. Some people did see their role play characters that way, but I thought of Blue as being very separate from myself.

Nelfkin culture was much like Appalachia. They farmed the land, and they all raised dairy goats, and they had big families. Blue had a mother named Flower Grass, and two brothers named Serius Grass and Flewdurr Grass. The reason for this was because in the course of time, our younger siblings joined the role play as well and my brothers were naturally Nelfkins as well. Most of the names were funny like that, because we were so young. There was a fairy named Fae, an elf named Zi, and a guy named Bob. Bob was named Bob because his creator’s name was Bob. Eventually, his name was changed to Gwuryn, which was a name from a random medieval name generator. There was a half-elf named Kniles, a sort of combination of Knight and Niles, I think. The evil lord’s name was Detraf, which was just Farted backwards. He had an assistant named Tish. No relation.

We started meeting up in the real world to hang out and talk about our role play, and I of course always had lofty notions of one day turning it into a novel. I took it very seriously. I was as big of a fan of Trouf as I have ever been for any television show or book series. Frequently, we met at the local library. This sometimes meant that we were all on the library computers role playing. Sometimes we just hung out at a table and goofed off.

We had our very own Christmas party one year at the library, where we brought food and exchanged gifts, just like we were adults who belonged to an organization and were having our annual dinner. I sometimes wonder what the librarians thought of us, too big for our britches, thinking we were so grown up, writing an epic tale together like it was no big deal.

I think we grew up in Trouf, in a way. Even after most of us went our separate ways, it was still important to me. Even while attending university, I would sometimes write a short story about the characters and send it to my friend. Most of the time, she and I traded music playlists, several of which were Trouf themed.

As a modern fangirl, I still look back on those characters and stories with great fondness. If I have a “one true pairing,” a fictional relationship that I love above all others, it is probably the sweet romance between Blue and Alaster, brother to Fae the fairy, which was often the subject of my short stories. Blue fell in love for the first time before I did, so it’s kind of hard to explain the significance of this for me. My friend and I wrote what I can only describe as fan fiction about our own characters, sort of daydreaming about the future through them, I think. We even created alternate universes, with the same characters in different settings. Modern Day Trouf was a favorite, where everything was the same except it was planet earth and everyone worked in coffee shops or libraries and no one went on grand quests.

One thing that was unique about Trouf was that the founding members were all girls. Most of our characters, therefor, were also girls, with the exception of secondary characters like Kniles and Alaster. The characters who became the most important (or main) characters were Zi the elf sorceress, Fae the fairy, Blue the nelfkin, Artemis the huntress, and Shadow, a wolf cursed to live in a human form. After a while, Alaster, Fae’s twin brother, was added to this roster. These were the characters who had magic pendants and were destined to overthrow Lord Detraf and his assistant Tish.

Zi, the elf, had an ongoing relationship with her half-elf boyfriend Kniles, who was overprotective but indulgent of his eccentric girlfriend. Artemis was a loner whose loyalty was sometimes called into question, and who was not certain she was meant to be a hero. Shadow, also known as Taeyel, and her wolf sister Kael were the last of their kind, the D’er Sevlow, another example of how clever we teens thought we were at naming things. Fae and Alaster Gwillemin were fairy twins separated at birth, reunited by destiny. Blue, the sensible guide, fell in love with Alaster, who was kind of a jerk and, for some reason, had a British accent.

We never got to the end of the story in the role play, of course, but the idea was that they had a final battle with Lord Detraf and Tish, and with the help of their magic pendants they saved the world from tyranny. Then they went off and did their own thing. Alaster and Blue had a kid named Arabelle. Kniles and Zi lived happily ever after. Shadow and Kael continued their search for a cure for Shadow’s curse, Fae and Artemis had their own adventures, and all of the other characters that had sprung up around them presumably went back to their lives.

Now I’m an adult, and I still think about Trouf all of the time. I still have private jokes with my old friends that no one who didn’t know about Trouf could understand. It played a key role in my formative years as a writer. Was it cliché and childish? Sure, in a lot of ways. When I remember it now, it’s with fondness and amusement. It’s like looking at pictures of myself as a child. I can’t help but think that we were all quite adorable and clever and yes, sometimes naïve, miniatures of the adults we are now.

Trouf helped me grow as a person and as a writer. To this day, I will sometimes sit down and write a little something about Blue and Alaster, just for my own amusement. They may not make sense to anyone who doesn’t know the story like I do, and I might not ever find a way to adequately tell the whole tale, but these characters will always be with me, friends I still talk to sometimes and stop by to visit from time to time.

It was the realm of unknown fantasy, after all. The possibilities were always endless.

- Rachel