Mewsyngs of an Upstart Feline Miscreant

Just a heads-up... I never did get around to finishing up with the rewrite on Alien Tastes, it is probably just waiting for me to have cleaned it out and be ready to start over, but I did start working on a *new* story, On the Wrong Side of the Mirror, a Battle Angel Alita fanfic with the serial numbers filed off-- an original universe, in other words, but inspired by the manga Last Order.

Some notes:

* This is a pretty violent story with blood and gore. Ask mew to be removed from the readers list if you're on it and you aren't up for that.
* If you're interested and you weren't on the readers list, ask mew to be added!
* My outline has 8 acts, and at this time I've completed the 1st, weighing in at almost 70k words. This is something of a heckin' chonker of a story.

Back cover blurb would read something like this:

A woman wakes up without memories in a familiar-seeming world, the lower end of a space elevator over a raucous city in the midst of a waste-strewn sea. She is confident of only a few things: this isn't her body, this man is not her husband, and looking down at the monsters ravaging the city, she needs to abandon the life of a nurse and help fight them.

At the other end of the elevator, a detective comes across a brutal murder scene in a utopian city where crime has been extinct for centuries. They already caught the killer-- so who did this?

Every now and then I get possessed by the odd urge to write something totally unsuitable. Around July 2014, after watching Star Trek: Enterprise, the Augment episodes specifically, I was annoyed that the writers had taken yet another short cut and turned supposedly "super-intelligent" humans into might-makes-right barbarians. "Surely, actually intelligent humans, even if slightly psychotic, would have evolved *some* kind of society that doesn't rely on caveman principles," I thought.

That fanfic (Star Trek with the serial numbers filed off) ran about 20 installments and petered out. The characters just weren't coming together for me, and with 16+ characters, I felt the readers were just getting lost in all the names as well. So I put it back on the backburner for a while.

Well, it's been three years but my unconscious is nagging at me to try it again. Even though I'm not really that keen on trying to write smart-but-evil characters, given the state of the world...

(though maybe I want to prove to myself that evil, once again, DOES NOT HAVE TO BE STUPID.)

For this rewrite, I'm making a prequel before the original fanfic attempt-- and I'm cutting the cast way down. Leave a comment here if you want to read about an idealistic mad scientist trying to raise eight super-intelligent and slightly (not drooling) evil children in a small colony on a barely habitable world well out of the Federation-analogue's borders.

There will probably not be a starship involved in this story, at least not until novella #3. There will certainly be an effort to try and master writing decent characters. I have a plot outline and notes!

A bit silly maybe but why not. -_- I foresee that I'm going to have a need for this.

( Cut for length! )

Okay, found the perfect title for this RPGfic I have in mind. I'd had in mind soliciting superhero suggestions but it occurred to me that I should lay out the world first.

As I alluded to in my previous post, I wanted to tap into the Marvel X-men vibe rather than the DC 'oh hey, we have random superheroes running around the world with all kinds of different origin stories, boy, our universe is such a mess that we need to have multiple Earths to explain them all.' So, think 'mutants vs humans.'

( Cut for length! )

Maybe I've posted about this before... But Steal the Dragon is too good a title for the book it's on.

Seriously, what's up with that?

A. Nothing gets stolen in the book description.
B. No dragon is involved.

Every time I see this book title, I imagine the book it should have been.

Point the first. Something has to get stolen... I don't mean breaking in to free captive or enslaved dragons. That's 'Free the Dragon', still a good idea but very different. I mean that it should fit the 'caper' model: a thief or other scruffian is presented with a problem, we as the readers are informed of the various difficulties, the thief assembles his or her resources, and proceeds with the heist. Nothing ever goes entirely as planned of course...

Point the second. There has to be a dragon. Don't just nickname an aircraft or spaceship 'Dragon'. It doesn't have to be an intelligent dragon; in fact making it intelligent raises completely legitimate questions of ethics and morality, legal status of monsters notwithstanding. It does have to be big, winged, scaled, and possessed of enormous destructive force and a temperament to suit. In other words, not the most cooperative thing in the world to steal.

I can even imagine the opening line of the book.

"I don't do livestock," the greatest thief in the world said. She ignored the aide's nervous tittering. "Artwork, bullion, documents, artifacts historical, magical, and religious, if it's portable and worth something to someone, I'll steal it. But I don't do people and I don't do beasts."

This has been irking me a bit lately, as I read various superhero 'fics' -- serials and the like. Whenever people write about most heroes, they have clear-cut powers. This is part of what makes Worm so interesting; not only do they have specific powers with known effects and ranges/strengths, they are often inadequate to the task, so they can only win the fight by outsmarting their enemies.

Then when it comes to inventors-- often referred to as 'tinkers', sometimes as 'contrivers' for those who exert magical power in technological guise-- all that goes out the window. Inventors can do anything, given some time in a lab and access to materials.

I've mused about this before but that was about why inventors don't seem to have more impact on the world. This time I want to talk about why inventors' abilities are so poorly defined.

When you look at stories like Legion of Nothing and Brennus in both cases, there's never a clear definition of what they can do. In fact, in Brennus, many people remark on the protagonist's unheard of ability to improvise deadly weapons from ordinary components in the heat of battle. In Worm, Taylor often remarks that tinkers are cheating, since they can quickly devise solutions that render her insects powerless. The only thing that restrains them is authorial intent: does the author want them to win or not?

This isn't true for superhero RPGs, of course. In Champions or Savage Worlds, you don't get to invent new powers on the fly; invention is just the 'special effect'. New inventions represent the character developing new technology. Points are how you balance the characters against each other.

But in fiction... How do you balance it? How do you make readers feel that the inventor superhero has limits on his or her power?

Sometimes you let it go; it's all about wish fulfillment. Tony Stark's "Iron Man" is liberal in the use of 'hey, look, new technology!' -- very often it turns out that Tony Stark had anticipated needing a certain technology, and is then able to summon it and put it into use quickly. On the one hand, it makes Tony Stark look smart. On the other, when it's not foreshadowed (as it so often isn't), it looks like "deus ex machina".

But if I were writing superhero fic... I'd want to hew toward power balance somehow. Maybe "story" inventing needs rules. Note that I'm specifically excluding 'contriving' here: this is specifically about inventors whose devices work by real (story universe) laws.

So what would those rules look like?

* Power. All inventions require power equivalent to the effect they cause. You can't just build a tank-cutting laser with a flashlight and two D-cells. You need a truck-sized power generator.
* Miniaturizing isn't free. Each order of magnitude you reduce a device increases the cost by about that much. For example, if you want powered armor with the speed and strength of a car, but you want its power pack to be backpack-sized, you'd better plan on the materials costing $100k.
* The farther in the future your technology is, the more expensive it becomes. We live in an age of internal combustion and fission nuclear reactors. Let's say you want to claim your power source uses antimatter. Total annihilation of matter should be fiendishly efficient, allowing you to make a really tiny power source, right? Well, first you have to build an antimatter-generating cyclotron; apply the miniaturizing rule as above if you want to use less than a football sized plant. Then apply the 'futuristic technology' multiplier. Hope you also made a money press!
* You can repurpose your inventions if you need to, as long as they share technologies. That tank-cutting laser? You can totally turn it into a wide-area flash to blind people or a battleship-sized welding torch. What you can't do is to turn it into a teleporter or a sonic stunner.
* Specialize. Inventors should have some easily defined focus-- maybe they like lasers, sound-based machines, or gravitics. Outside that focus, they'd be limited to 'state of the art' or worse. If they can do everything, the story becomes boring.
* Beg, borrow, steal, or buy. Inventors need materials. They can't just go to the city dump and get materials or spare parts. (this actually happens quite a few times in the superhero fics I've read) Real-world materials yield real-world results. Super results require super materials and devices. I picture inventors negotiating with other inventors, or forming a company and working together.

Which naturally leads toward the second half of things: what should the inventor-based superhero be doing?...

... honestly? Probably not 'going out there and fighting crime'. Sorry, Tony Stark, but that's a waste of valuable inventing time and an endangerment of a nationally critical resource, the inventor.

They can make inventions and go out using the inventions themselves, of course. But these inventions can be mass produced. Instead of having one man in an Iron Man suit, they could be equipping a team of responsible agents and sending them out. Going out alone is kind of a sign that one doesn't trust anyone else with such amazing powers.

That does go against the whole mystique of being an inventor. It seems like the real reason people want inventor superheroes is so they can have awesome powered armor suits.

Well. It's not like Sylia Stingray of the Knight Sabers didn't have her own 'hardsuit'...

Edit to add: I guess the upshot of this ruleset is, I don't think it's as interesting when inventors can bang together junk and make super-futuristic gadgets that do anything. Think of the inventor as MacGyver. The reader can have more fun trying to guess what the hero inventor is going to do with an old car engine, scuba tanks, spare parts and electronics, and her trustworthy sonic screwdriver if she knows the inventor isn't going to somehow improvise a spaceship.

I read a really impressive original-universe superheroes webfic series earlier this year, Worm. (warning, some triggery- stuff, very dark, epic in length) Wanting more, I eventually found a link from Harry Potter: Methods of Rationality to Cenotaph, a fanfic series that explores a large chunk of the series told by changing just one thing and extrapolating how that might have affected the story as it goes on. And then I noticed it was just one of a number of fanfics by various people all centered on this superheroes thing.

So, I read some more of them. Some I liked, some I didn't. In general, I really appreciate how Worm places so much emphasis on thinking, working out both new and better ways to use powers and when and where to use them for best effect. Worm also does a great job at capturing reader interest through a gradual but always intense escalation of power levels and conflicts. With that as a basis for comparison, ( cut for length! )

Just picked up one of these story bundles. The bundle is closing in a few days (August 28) so if you're interested. I have no idea who any of these authors are, but I saw mention of it on Smashword's blog, about this one author who is starting to take off on Smashwords.

Wonder if these story bundles will take off? (encourages author friends to take a look)