In this prompt by J. C. Cauthon something spooky is going on. At least two girls have gone missing and the main character doesn’t appear to know what to do about it.
We see in the prompt that there are three people mentioned. The first is the point of view character. We know very little about this character. The character may be male or female as no gender is mentioned. They may be an adult or a child, since we don’t know if the character was older or younger than their sister and we don’t even know if they were alive when their sister went missing.
We also don’t know what kind of relationship they had with their sister if there was any relationship at all. They may have been extremely close. Maybe they were best friends and did everything together. Maybe they were twins who had done everything together since the womb. Maybe the mai character was an adult away at college when their little sister went missing and the age gap had kept them from having much in common. The main character could have been a toddler who looked up to their older sister or barely noticed she existed. One of the two might have been a favorite child and spoiled beyond reason. Or the main character might not have been born yet, maybe even born as a replacement child after their sister’s disappearance. We also don’t if they had other siblings or if it was just the two of them.
As for the other two characters, we do know both are female. One was twelve-years-old eighteen years ago. If she is alive, that should make her thirty, though it doesn’t have to. She could be in an alternate dimension were time passes faster or slower or otherwise somehow frozen in time. She could also be dead. She disappeared and nobody was found. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a body.
The final character is a second girl. We could infer that she is also twelve-years-old, but we don’t know that. She could be a small child, maybe even under a year, though it seems more likely she is at least old enough to walk on her own. She could be almost an adult, maybe someone who was already in her mother’s womb when the first girl went missing.
Beyond this we only know one more thing about these two girls, they both went to the same local fair. We don’t know if this fair happens every year and only these two years did someone go missing, though it seems to infer that it did not happen for all those years in between maybe even because of the first girl going missing. We also don’t know if it is always local or if it is a fair that travels and it just so happened that those were the years it came to this town. Perhaps someone goes missing in every town, but because of the time between visits most people don’t notice. We do know that the fair was not some place far from where the main character lives. Most likely it was in the town where they lived, though a county fair is possible if the cities and towns are close to each other.
The prompt seems ripe for a horror or suspense story, mystery at the minimum, but depending on how you handle it, you could make it a comedy. Maybe the main character has never looked before and it is comically easy to find the missing sister and the other girl once they do and when they do the girls both love where they are.
Or maybe everything was absolutely horrible for the first girl and someone took her away to protect her because no one else would. Maybe she even ran off on her own to escape a bad situation one her sibling never experienced, but she saw the same signs in this other girl so she’s the one who made the second girl go missing, too. What do you think happened eighteen years ago?
