Two characters in search of a concept

But first, the plot bunny of the day. There's a bit of optional overheard dialog in Mass Effect 3; "We need to design a gun that shoots Thresher Maws" (a very, very, very large example of that species had just killed a Reaper on the Krogan homeworld). So....what about going with biotech as the best chance to stop the Reapers? After all, the grafted-on endings of the third game reframe the Reaper cycle as being something about the inevitable conflict of "organic" and "synthetic" intelligences. Shepard herself is (after the first twenty minutes of Mass Effect 2) a fusion of both. And there's a tiny, tiny fetch-quest in the third game where you collect the material to Jurassic Park up some dinosaurs...for Krogan warriors to ride into battle.

It would be awesome. It also touches on another theme. The basic themes are cooperation, strength in diversity, and particularly in Shepard's case, indomitable determination. Well, these are similar themes to the original Berserker stories by Fred Saberhagen; short, one-trick stories where the remorselessly logical city-sized killing machines of the title were owned by organic life being messy and complicated but ever so tenacious.

(And it being, you know, a third-person shooter sort of game, a meat-sack with a rifle is exactly the tool needed to take down a hostile base, starship, giant whatever. They might have weapons that can burn cities but get marines inside and their fate is just the same as a 20th century tank that's driven too far ahead of its crunchies.)

Hey, there's even more connection to the game. The big third act on Tuchunka is the effort to reverse the Krogan Genophage. Which was largely thanks to...Mordin Solus, everyone's favorite fast-talking, Gilbert-and-Sullivan singing, Scientist Salarian. So make Mordin the hero of the story, the one who leads the effort to gather all the civilizations of known space together to stop the Reapers. After all, "Someone else might have gotten it wrong."

So on to the topic. The problem I'm continuing to have with the current novel is with the basic underlying concept. How it works. If it works. I was reading the Scalzi-blog yesterday and they were talking about Impostor Syndrome. That is an idea I had for Penny/Athena. She's very much not a real archaeologist. She will end up in situations where she has to try to do the work of, pretend to be, or get mistaken for a real archaeologist.

But actually it is more complicated than that. This core element comes from a lame attempt to do an end-run around the impossibility of the Adventure Archaeologist archetype, and all the associated Lost Cities and Booby-trapped Tombs and Ancient Super-Weapons baggage. But, you see, I'm still on the fence about whether this stuff turns out to be just as much nonsense in the book as it is in the real world, or whether something different but just as implausible ends up actually being true.

On the smaller scale it seems to work. Various people can mistake Penny for her creation Athena, or at least treat her like it. And she can both get into situations that you would think only the fictional Athena would get into, and get out of them with stunts only that same fictional adventurer should be able to pull off. And lampshade it constantly, of course.

But...an actual Atlantis? Or, rather, something just as ridiculous? I don't know if it works.

Which is probably why every time I try to hit the first scene where Penny is (possibly!) mistaken for either a professional archaeologist or for someone who actually goes traipsing around the world addressing people in six languages (when they aren't shooting at her) and digging up the local equivalent of Excalibur (King not necessarily included), I run into problems.

I want her to have a conflicted relationship with the role. To recognize that playing Athena can get her into places...and into trouble. And to recognize that the character archetype and, more broadly, pseudo-archaeology and other misconceptions about archaeology are both wrong and potentially harmful.

So I keep veering back and forth about whether she is fully conscious of what she's trying to pull off as she acts her way through a situation, or whether she immerses in the role. And there's where Impostor Syndrome comes in; she of course recognizes she doesn't have, on one hand, the real-world professional skills she is pretending to, and on the other hand, the Protagonist skills of an Indiana Jones type. But does she think of this as pretending to be Athena and getting away with it, or that when she "dons the mask" of Athena -- lets herself be immersed in the character -- things become possible? I can't decide.

And there's specific issues with the first story. Basically reader trust and the contract with the reader. Played straight, in this key scene in a reception at a classy antiquities gallery we have an average-girl passing herself off as a professional and showing up people who might actually have degrees in the appropriate fields. And various people (herself and others) are speaking confidently and persuasively about a couple of pseudo-archaeological concepts.

At this point the reader doesn't know that these theories are going to be shown up as garbage. They might assume that this version of the Dorian Invasion is my own personal hobbyhorse as well. They also don't know that Penny is going to be very firmly lectured by an actual practicing archaeologist on just how insulting her pretense is.

There's an unconnected thread as well. This is the origin story, and large parts of the first half are Penny learning how to actually be the world traveler she pretends to be when she plays Athena. So the first chapters will show her visiting the typical tourist spots and acting like a typical tourist and seemingly not realizing all that she's getting wrong. Which is to say; I'll be looking like I only looked up the typical tourist places and if I visited, acted like the Ugly American.

Oh, and did I mention that she is making mistakes, mistakes about history, mistakes about dates, mistakes about people that she's not going to realize she made until many chapters later? First person she has dialog with, she describes as an Eritrean immigrant. Actually, he's a resident and his family has been in Greece for generations.

So, yeah. I want to keep the reader long enough to get to where Penny re-visits Athens. And gets out of the big Western-style hotel to live a little closer to street level. And where she questions the Return of the Heracleidae story she was told earlier. And where all the everyman-hero and Chosen One garbage is taken and thoroughly shaken out.

And here's another thing I'm on the fence about. There's a real tendency for the First-Person Sarcastic character to drop pop culture references everywhere and I'm trying to avoid that. There's enough to deal with (and enough wealth in potential historical references) that I don't want the narrator to be constantly comparing what is happening to something from a recent movie or, worse yet, a video game.

Trouble is, this is a legit part of her backstory. Her YouTube channel paid for the trip. Some of the conflict comes specifically from the way social media can leap on and amplify something (like the stupid Dorian theory someone in the story just dragged out). And, heck, if I'm talking about the reality of travel, talking about travel in the world of Google Street View and e-tickets and selfies is, well, part of the story.

Thing is, it would make sense with her character and background and within the larger plot -- all the way out to the meta-plot about public perception of what an archaeologist is, etc. -- for her to be media savvy, image conscious, social-media active, etc. And for various key plot points to unfold via the new technologies.

Here's some specific examples. I already have in my notes that the bad guys are tracking her across Europe because her too-helpful business manager has been updating her Facebook status for her. And a key moment in her shift to immersion in Athens is when her phone is damaged during her unplanned swim in the Adriatic and she's forced to interact more, actually ask for directions and attempt to read street signs and so on. (And it also figures in the plot where the bad guys lose track of her and thus it isn't until she returns to the gallery that...) Heck, I even had a thought about someone thinking the evidence was destroyed until she tells them she uses cloud storage for all the pictures she took (and the incriminating picture had its flag set, alas, to public).

Some of this, heck, most or even perhaps all of this, can be solved with sufficient skill. For instance, the same reception where the Dorian nonsense is trotted out, someone else is going on about Atlantis. All that might be necessary is to carefully frame it so both stories are presented in the same way, thus planting that necessary doubt even as the narrator takes the former at face value. Heck, Biro, the Athenian student whose dad cooks a mean tsebhi, could be shown rolling his eyes as Penny hails yet another taxi.

But this still doesn't answer my basic questions.

What do you get if you feed the bunnies?

Answer? More bunnies. (Apologies to "The Trouble with Tribbles.")


The "Athena Fox" story is stuck on the outline. I'm doing a narrative outline for this one. The other thing that's new is I'm determined to solve most of my problems in the outline and before committing to more development. And right now the outline is stalling at the end of Act I. There's thematic directions I haven't nailed down yet.

So perfect opportunity for other plot bunnies to announce themselves (that, and I've been reading analysis at Kotoku about what went wrong with the Mass Effect series, particularly Andromeda, and fanfiction set in that universe).

The fanfiction I went looking for and found a couple interesting examples of is stuff that takes the basic elements (the core conflict, large parts of the world-building) but starts the story in a different place. Often, in a much earlier place. I'm reading one now where Earth was destroyed hundreds of years before the story began, with the most thriving part of Humanity's survivors being a client race of the Turians. In another, Wrex crash-lands on Earth before we even get to Mars, and takes it on himself to prepare Humanity to defend itself against being taken advantage of by the more advanced species who will be along eventually.



Okay, so here's one plot bunny. First, the Reapers are acting as they are described in almost everything but the massed assault they launch in Mass Effect 3 (even in that game, they continue their old games of working behind the scenes, manipulating, creating divisions, making their enemies fight amongst themselves and turning their own hierarchies and command structures against them by indoctrinating key figures). In any case; they wiped out Earth some hundreds of years ago, just as humanity was discovering their first Mass Effect Relay and was about to move out among the stars.

The Charon Relay is still encased in ice, making it costly to explore the system. Eventually, of course, someone does. Perhaps elements of the Migrant Fleet, still looking for a new homeworld after the Geth kicked them off Rannoch (and, yes, in this story that is explicitly a result of Reaper intervention. It was the Reapers that made possible the chain of unlikely events that sabotaged any ability of the Quarians to stop the Geth problem before it even arose.

They find enough in the ruins of Earth to marvel at the variety of cultures that had once thrived there. They also find the Prothean ruins on Mars...and, if that exists within the continuity of this story, the plans for the Crucible.



For the second Plot Bunny we are on Mars again. This time, humanity is thriving. As in the game, though, they aren't considered competent enough to explore Prothean ruins on their own. That, and again as in the game the Asari had pushed through Council agreements for equal sharing of all finds (despite keeping one of the best ones secret on their homeworld and using what they'd learned from it to become one of the three most powerful races).

And...it falls together all too neatly. Ruined Prothean base full of secrets, and a young and unsure human archaeologist. And in the Doctor Whitman role, an arrogant but naive Asari researcher (sort of a tautology there.) Throw in Batarians or Vorcha or even Cerberus seekers after the same buried secrets as cannon fodder, and you've even got the Prothean Beacon effect for your possessed-by-ancient queen angle. But, hell, I've worked with that plot before. I'm tired of it.



I prefer the third bunny, which is actually just a slightly older version of a bunny that's appeared before. Humanity is new on the scene, grudgingly allowed to visit the Citadel but of even lower status than Volus and Elcor (but not Vorcha...nothing's lower than Vorcha). Their universities have sort of devolved into "read everything the Elder Races deign to share with us" rather than original research.

Our Shepard stand-in might be an engineer, or an academic interested in the Protheans, or who knows. Anything but military. She hooks up with a Quarian on his or her Pilgrimage, a Quarian who is also way too fond of asking the kinds of questions nobody else wants asked. This isn't -- mostly -- a desperate tale of survival like the above, or a lot of gun-play in the corridors. Even if a better setting might be Omega, the sprawling, aging space station version of Mos Eisley. This is in fact heir to the other half of game play in the Mass Effect series, that is, conversations. Lots and lots of conversations. Exploring, asking questions, proposing ideas, trying stuff that hasn't been tried before. It is two young people with a surprising and strong between-species friendship who with humor and intelligence proceed to shake up everything.

And, yeah. In all these ideas the true nature of the Crucible and the Reapers is totally up for grabs, because if you are already going to change the timeline, why stick with something so stupid that so lacks integration with the rest of the trilogy anyhow?

Massive Bunnies

Just finished a replay of Mass Effect 3, with the "Leviathan" and "From the Ashes" DLCs installed.



I’ve enjoyed many games, and many game moments (often, surprisingly small moments — like crafting at the forge in the rain in an early play-through of Skyrim). A smaller number have games have left an emotional impact. Bioshock, for instance — a strong, emotional and worthy ending (that was brutally undercut when instead of leaving you on a credit page to complete your catharsis, it quit and dropped you to the desktop.)

Tomb Raider 2013 stayed with me only in the intense frustration over so many missed opportunities and how badly the game sabotaged itself.

And then there's Mass Effect 3. An intense, emotional ending for a three-game series; no wonder it engendered such strong feelings among players, even after the too-brief, too-uninformative original was replaced with the Extended Cut DLC.

The other thing Bioware patched in after massive (heh) player complaints was a "third option" — also a source of heated discussion among fans, as some (like I) believe it is the “best” ending for certain ways of approaching the protean Commander Shepard.

The revised endings don't change the nature of what happens. It still remains three unpalatable choices foisted on you by an uncaring AI, three choices that seem to fly against much else that has been presented in the game to that point. The Extended Cut does, however, have sufficient gravitas to be a proper ending of a game (the original was practically a slide show with three optional color filters).

Thing is, the continuity that makes these endings even possible is new. It was created after the original writer left. And there are many places where the seams are visible. Worse, the two DLCs I mentioned above open up more of the back story and in some ways contradict even more what is forced upon you in the canon endings.

Basically, all of this makes the missed opportunities more obvious. And hence my Plot Bunnies for the day.



#1 Reignite. Start with the canon “third option” ending. Shepard rejects the stupid choices and shoots the catalyst in the face. The Crucible is destroyed. Earth falls and with it the last hope of stopping the Reapers from cleansing the galaxy of advanced life.

Except that, canonically, the Protheans lasted for another thousand years past this point in their own cycle, holding off the Reapers until their final bastion — and the Protheans fought alone. They hadn't managed an alliance of every major race. They hadn’t even built the Crucible.

Not only that, but the Leviathan have survived in hiding since the first Cycle. Of course now the Reapers know they are still around. On the other hand, these original creators of the Catalyst, the original model for and the race responsible for the Reapers, has reached an end of hiding. They are powerful enough to kill a Reaper...and they know the Reaper's secrets.

Shepard was left alone and gravely injured in the burning wreckage of the Crucible at the end of the game. Thing of it is, Shepard’s been in tight spots before....

So this is an “after we lost” story, a story of resistance, with all the heartache and loss that entails. A rather grim story, all told, which is why I also have another:



#2 Indoctrination. A leading fan theory is that all the events on the Citadel after Shepard rides the London Beam are illusion, brought on by Reaper Indoctrination (mind control). The three choices are at best a side game, trying to distract Shepard (at worst, they are trying to mislead him into either accepting Indoctrination fully, or helping the Reapers to destroy the Crucible.)

Shepard figures it out which is why he shoots the Catalyst (in true Hollywood fashion, breaking the illusion). Not so strange, this; both Saren and The Illusive Man were able to temporarily shake their Indoctrination, and Shepard's got Prothean downloads in his skull from two damaged Prothean beacons and mind-melds with...well, not just several Asari, but Leviathan and a living Prothean.

So Shepard breaks free and stands at the controls of the Crucible finally free of any illusion or control. To understand what is really going on and to pull the kind of solution that only Shepard Magic could make possible. After all, he brokered peace between the Quorrians and the Geth...

But that's a bit short, really a one-shot. So there's also...



#3 Shepard Fixes It. Roll the clock back, back to just after the Turian War, when Humans are the new guys on the block, only grudgingly allowed access to the glorious Citadel. Humanity is supposed to be learning how, not why. Absorbing the reluctantly shared knowledge of the Elder Races, not trying to strike out on their own.

Enter Andrea Shepard, a young civilian engineer constantly in trouble for asking questions. That being, any question that starts with “why..?”

But there are an awful lot of questions someone should really be asking. That someone — that is, someone from a younger race, someone that has her canonical descendent’s uncanny ability to Get Things Done, someone that finds herself not just asking but getting the often surprising (and scary!) answers to questions like “Who built the Citadel and what do these Keeper creatures actually do?” Questions like “How did the Asari get so damned advanced?” and “Could these myths and rumors about Leviathan actually have a basis in fact?” And “We found the first Mass Relay on Mars. I wonder if there’s anything else there?”

And even, "Whose bright idea was it to make weapons eject their own heat sinks?"

This is before Cerebus becomes the giant secret-hiding stumbling-block it would be in later years. Before humanity has had a chance to really meet Krogan and Quorrian and learn from them without the Elder Races building their own prejudices in.

For me, part of the joke is my playing as an Engineer Shepard (tech specialist over biotic powers or strict combat abilities) and finding out just how much of a cakewalk the game can be when you get enough points sunk in it. By the end of the game I'd just toss an automated turret on to the field and hunker down behind a wall until it was finished.

Canonical Shepard could unravel the conspiracies of a rogue Spectre, track the Collectors to their hidden base and destroy it, uncover the secrets of the Citadel, find the last Prothean bastion and the hidden Prothean AI on the Asari homeworld, confirm the Reapers and fight three of them on foot, and even locate the Leviathan who have been hiding for millions of years.

And, yes, civilians starship tinkerer Tali vas Normandy and archaeology geek Liara T'soni could mop the floor with elite Blue Suns mercenaries in the canon game (it does help being a daughter of one of the greatest Asari Matriarchs). A fast-thinking civilian Shepard who has a cool hand with a soldering gun could very well accomplish, well, miracles....



All bunnies free to go to a good home. I have other things I need to write...as much as the bunnies might bite.

Hello, I'll be your bunny for today

Two more (related) fanfic bunnies:

2013 Lara Croft looks for Atlantis instead of Yamatai.  This is not the story you'd think at first glance. The 2013 reboot is somewhat more realistic but certainly more gritty than the original (or Anniversary remake) story. More so, the character and arc presented in the 2013 reboot is far from the person Natla would have hired.

So take it that one step further. The thing I've loved about the reboot Lara -- as much as the actual games largely fail to deliver -- is that she is an actual academic. She's a professionally trained archaeologist, not a treasure hunter. Plus of course she has (as she discovers in the game) remarkable depths of endurance and determination.

So change the entire Atlantis setup until it becomes something that a college student could reasonably be sucked into. Discover it not as a great adventure by a skilled adventuress, but as a completely unexpected and world-changing discovery made during an ordinary excavation.



2013 Croft (yes, that's the theme of this pair of bunnies. Sorry.) discovers the Stargate. Sorta. You have to change the Stargate universe significantly, not just to make it a story the, again, college student just starting out and unsure of her strengths Lara would fall into, but because having the whole Stargate Command thing already happening is to me not as interesting a story. So it's a rewrite there, too. The Stargate is still buried in Giza.

Or is in a warehouse outside of DC, because once you've changed one canon that far, why not change the other...that Lara's dad played the Ernest Littlefield role, the circumstances of his disappearance were covered up by the government, and, yeah, Ra is still out there.




Sigh. That's one of the downsides of learning to write. You start seeing story elements as little gears and pulleys you can re-arrange. And some pieces are like that block in the Tetris world; just so easy to fit into anything you want to keep reaching for it -- even as everyone else has already done the same. That's how well-used furniture and worn-out tropes and stock characters keep coming back and back. It is too easy to think in mechanics, not in the complexities of life. Too easy to go "Say, why don't I just add a spoiled princess here; she could tell them about the magic sword then...."

Associated with that is the urge to tinker. To take a work that someone else has produced and try to fix it. Or just shake it up and see what happens differently. What if Paris had taken Athena's bribe instead? (I bet it still would have worked out badly for Troy). What if the Ten Thousand hadn't stood down when they got word that Cyrus was dead (still probably in a world of hurt after the heirs of Artaxerxes got their shit together.

From such exercises comes alternate histories, sequels...and fanfic.

Bunny of the Day

Had another idea for a story I'm not going to write.

Yes, I do think of lots of ideas outside of the already-created worlds of others. Fanfiction ideas are, however, easier to explain.

(For instance...there was a real moment in history when Lenin tried out the experimental musical instrument of a certain Leon Theremin. According to onlookers he was "surprisingly good." Now put a fictional concert violinist in that audience and let him hear the uncanny music from this electronic violin and catch a glimpse of the future racing in all streamlined and chromed -- and realizing that even the dangerously intelligent Lenin is of nothing to a man who's very name means "steel"... I'm not going to write it, because first I'd have to sit down for ten years with histories of Russia).

So here's today's bunny.

Harry Potter universe, 1946. I've started to hate Sorting Hat scenes because I really dislike the entire idea of the Houses. I love challenging the rules. I love out-of-context problems -- crossovers provide these in spades -- even if they tend to break the original universe.

1946 and off the Hogwart's Express come four first-year students -- siblings -- who refuse to be broken up. Who don't even adhere to normalcy in their timing, as they are of different ages. They work as a well-honed team and are surprisingly talented with the sword and other unusual skills and can draw upon a poise and gravitas that should only come with full adulthood in a position of power.

Because once a king in Narnia, always a king in Narnia.

And that's pretty much it. Tweaking the HP universe. But this is also deconstruction of CS Lewis and The Problem With Susan and all and as uncomfortable as the situation may be to the Pevensies -- yet more reminders of a full and well-lived life yanked away from them by the caprices of gods and fate -- they make everyone else even more uncomfortable.

Because, really, four Narnian kings -- even without The Lion backing them up -- are damned scary. They break everything about Hogwarts just by being there. Not by magic, not by some sort of extra-narrative rule, just by being in character.

Especially if you follow through (if you are more honest than Lewis was willing to be with his creation).

Plot Bunny of the Day

So in the Stargate, SG1 episode "Watergate" (no relation) it is revealed that the Soviets have their own DHD, which they grabbed off the Germans in 1945.

It is a bit of a weakness of the series that the US sat on their stargate until Catherine finally got them to restart it. Especially after the episode "Tantalus" revealed that Ernest Littlefield's group had successfully opened it in 1945. (And this without the ten years and four supercomputers Samantha Carter claimed had been necessary in 1998).

So...instead of a Manhattan Project, a crash project to open the Stargate. Because the Germans got theirs opened first (maybe they got the entire Giza gate -- and never you mind that outside of Indiana Jones movies they don't get to do what they like in Cairo in the 30's). Which means the US might have had to somehow discover the Antarctica gate...

But anyhow. The fun is having that same polyglot group of crazies, Feynman and Fermi and so forth, only working on wormhole physics. And Werner von Braun's group getting to explore the universe like they wanted, but without rockets. Of course the physics of the gate means that Tantalus and Abydos are the most likely successful contacts anyhow. Which ends up with one side joining forces with Ra and then things really get crazy.

But let's shake it up a little. Instead of the usual suspects for heroes and villains, have the US play Ra like an analog of Stalin, handling him with what they think is a long enough spoon at least until the Germans are out of the picture. Except they don't know about the Goa'uld parasite. And it is left up to a third party to try to save more than one world from the madness.

Some really motivated Italians, perhaps? Why is it that the role of being the only heroes who can fight well enough always goes to the ones who, historically, had the kick-ass armies in the first place? But, alas, that's too much research. As is the obvious Bear in the room (Soviet Russia, that is.) Or even further afield, China (who had enough on their plates already, and besides, let's keep this to the Western Front). Ah, but given the fun of pitting the Manhattan Project against von Braun's rocket group, who else but to throw in the mix are those doughty and reliable underdog heroes, Bletchly Park and Alan Turing and so forth...I speak of course of the Brits.




The other bunny of the day is even odder. So when the reboot Tomb Raider 2013 was made Crystal Dynamics re-used some assets. The rusty, tramp-steamer-looking Endurance which Whitman's archaeological expedition charters re-uses the model of the two big fancy cargo ships Amanda has in the final game of the previous canon (aka Tomb Raider: Underworld).

But...what if it is the same ship? Ten years, rough seas and a few more changes of ownership (plus Lara did a number on one of the ships anyhow. Sunk it, actually, but who's counting).

And once again let's skip the stupid island so conveniently filled with soft targets and spare clips for the various machine guns lying around like a cheap first-person shooter. Instead, assume the previous canon is true. At least as far as Amanda and Natla (though, pretty obviously, Natla didn't actually destroy the world in this chronology). Lara might or might not be real; it would be interesting to have her as a reclusive countess with stories about her past that sound downright mythic.

But she's not our protagonist. Our protagonist is stumbling across, on that same ship, evidence of a story that already happened.

Which is not to say it isn't a story that's been concluded! Lara might not be holed up in Abbingdon and not talking to anyone, but Natla is still out there and dangerous as ever. One might reach at this point for "Young" Lara, the inexperienced college student of the reboot. But that ship has already been around the world a few times. Instead, try someone else for the starring role. But keep the other characters.

I think this is actually more interesting. Stephanie, say, might be discovering there's a darker side to archaeology. And she has to reach out to people who have the skills she needs now, but people who don't have that existing relationship to her. Like Conrad Roth, who in this chronology is friends only with Angus Grim and isn't already staged as a mentor and trainer and dead father figure to the protagonist de jour.

(Actually, in a way it is even more hilarious to make Roth the hero. He'd very much fit the archetype of a certain kind of masculine adventure fiction; he's practically an early Alister MacClean protagonist. So he'd be retired, going to seed, his only contact with military adventure being the stories he shares with his mate Grim. Content to captain this ship around even if the current charter are a bunch of idiots. Until they discover more than they can handle and he has to step up to the plate.)

(And there's everything such a character could want. A young man -- or young woman -- to take on as protege, at least a couple options for romance, an abrasive academic who thinks he should be in charge, a gentle giant and a tough cop as solid right hands and a geek for tech support.)




These are wild plot bunnies, of course. I'm not petting them. I'm pretty much done with those two silly universes anyhow (at least, I will be in another four to six chapters).