twoflower

Made a minor (well, in terms of immediate scope) change to anachronauts 02 today.

In the Scout/Graves scene, Graves now says he's encountered Scout's "kind" before. This plays into something upcoming in a03.

Assembling a03's outline has been tricky. The problem is I have two locations, two largely unrelated situations I want to use -- a hospital dispensing unusually miraculous cures, and a zombie-esque siege upon the Mall of America.

Linking the two has been a chore. You can't chase the cast from one location to the other, not with zombies, even the runnyrunny ones like in 21 Days Later. They're 14 miles apart. You need the cast at the Mall already for some purpose, and THEN the zombies show up... and even then you need a way to get them there that makes some damn sense.

I toyed with various ideas, notably with the Winter Fae, who will have a stronger presence in this one since we're visiting Minneapolis-St. Paul. I pondered some government Men in Black type group that secures Fae artifacts. I even pondered some crazy teenage melodrama breakup revenge.

In the end, it was a simple solution that made it click -- and one that solved another problem, one of the cast vehemently objecting to something happening at the hospital on ethical grounds. By changing the nature of the threat and the origin of it, everything simply worked.

I'm being vague. You'll have to find out more when I write it. The outline's not done, but the backstory for a03... the doctor, the deal, hypertech in the hands of Quicksilver Security, and even the nature of the smuggler and his relationship to the Orbitals... it all makes some sense now. I just need to work a plot around this.

Oh, and add more fan service. Because you can't have a horror movie threat without having those naughty, naughty teenagers going off and having naughty fun and being eaten alive for it.

EDIT: I seem to have written myself into a corner. Maybe you can help. Spoilers will follow, but I would appreciate assistance. ( ZOMG SPOILERS )

EDIT #2: Thanks to tudhalias for using the topographical layout of the place to create a Crazy Scheme That Just Might Work. (I really should've mentioned this was at the Mall of America; I've talked about it before on twitter and such and forgot to detail it here.) I'll be going with that since it'll play into a terrific character moment afterwards.

Depending on how the day goes, I may have some a03 written for y'all tonight. I have the middle and the finale outlined, and a flashback. It's very piecemeal, and I need to do a beginning, and somehow fit Una In Exciting Underwear in there for strictly legitimate and serious character development related purposes, and not at all because she's hot, honest.

EDIT #3: That is, assuming that this'll work the way I want it to. Gonna discuss with Jen tonight (she knows aquariums) and research online. Egh. I hate realism in my stories. A lot of authors will do months of painstaking research to ensure that what happens in their books is physically possible and sociologically probable and so on... I just wanna write fun stuff.