Don't want clever conversation

Actually, I do.

Rough draft of the second scene is done, where my character almost exits the Propylea in a manner that would leave her in the Odeon if it wasn't a little too far to the South.

And I'm only at 3,000 words. I mean, it works, but it is worrying me a little that I may come up short at the end. I've been trying to decompress, but this is really a plotting mistake. This is a character that is built around interacting with people. With having conversations, with being persuasive, with being clever.

And what's my first three scenes? A clip from a student film in which she's exploring a ruin. Alone. A scene in which she gives a lecture about the Acropolis.  To a camera. And a fill-in-the-backstory scene that's got everything but the convenient mirror.

Essentially no conversations. I'm tempted...and this is very much going to go in the notes...to revise the second scene so it becomes about a conversation between her and a random tourist. Or between her and her camera person.

I mean, I had a long conversation at the Athenian Acropolis with an Australian who travels the world as a professional soccer referee. And similarly interesting conversations, usually started with a "Do you know if the northbound train stops here?"

Because, yeah. I revised the speech about the Acropolis six or seven times but each time it has been as much about leaving out as it has been about putting in. It would be easy to put so much more, so vastly much more. Even within the constraints I've set myself. You don't even need to open a book; I can think of half a dozen myths that would be fun to go into -- I put the one about the olive tree and the spring in the draft, but there's so much more to that one, even. Cecrops is one weird king.

I mean, what. Even staying within the Periclesian Acropolis, it was built as celebration of the end of hostilities with the Persian Empire (mostly), with money from the Delian League, and building went right through the Peleoponesian War. So if nothing else, you've got Sparta all over the story. And fabulous Athenians like Alcibiades. I could probably do twenty minutes myself, without having to open a reference book (as long as you didn't want exact dates or for me to spell anything....)

But that would be a crazy way to open a story. Heck, it would be too much almost anywhere in a book that's supposed to be a light-hearted and just slightly fantastical adventure.

At least the next scene is conversation.