Not the greatest so far at going from 8:30-9:30 AM for one hour straight, am I? A lot of it is self-propagating; I'm up all night getting a post done for an hour because I had slept in in the morning, which was caused by staying up all night the previous night to get my post done, because I had slept in in the morning... And this morning, of course, I actually did get it done in the morning, or at least fifteen minutes of post (which was more 9:32 to 9:47...) so I've got a 45-minute piece of writing here to accumulate in an hour total today. Hopefully I'll be able to get to bed at a reasonable hour tonight...
A couple of promises I made earlier: that I had even more for you post-wise in things I've already written (which, you know, shouldn't be too tall an order,) and that I'd consider on exactly how an escape scenario would go down. I'll prep the other posts after I get this one up, but for now, I'll have to do some serious brainstorming about the other thing. (You can watch along if you want to!)
I guess I'll tell you what's going on in my mind as I'm approaching this: well, first of all, I'm kind of panicking right now a little bit, because I think you might expect me to have a full-fledged "level" outlined for you by the end of this half hour remaining, and I don't even know how Michael's powers work or anything. What I do know is a fact that's fortunate for me: it's a whole lot easier to have characters be clever in your fictional world than it is to be clever in real life. In a novel or whatever, you can just write that a character picks up on a certain detail, and have that be that- and soon you can have them navigating through complex situations like a breeze. So I've got that on my side, working for me.
What is "escape?" I hadn't really considered the question before. In my mind, I'd imagined "escape from danger" like the climax of an Alcatraz novel, where all the pieces that had been leading up till then snap into place, and Alcatraz does something really clever with the magic system that solves all the problems in the world and looking back you realize you should have seen coming. Like that, only two or three times a chapter: get into a scrape, get out of it cleverly; get into a scrape, get out of it cleverly; get into a scrape, get out of it cleverly. Blowing your mind as the reader each time. There's nothing wrong with such a mechanic, of course (save the fact that it doesn't leave much room for interesting narrative devices,) but it still doesn't do much in the way of defining "getting out of it."
With that in mind, I'm on-the-fly improvising a set of measurements that would qualify as "escape," so that I actually have something for you. (Note to self: research gambits; that would be really helpful.) And I'm going to need to do the same with dangers as well. For example, physical danger-- maybe the danger comes from a character, maybe from the environment. Physical danger of course necessitates the need for a physical escape, or-- or, the chutzpah to shimmy and alter the nature of the conflict (see, I knew all that time I spent researching Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game would pay off!... okay, I actually didn't...)
For example, if your ex girlfriend wants you dead, you can either escape or you can try to talk reason into her. As long as you're Michael and your ex is like a harpy or someone (though really most of Michael's exes are succubi, of course,) you can get out of it, one way or the other. Though the way you choose might not necessarily be the correct one-- this only creates a new situation for you to escape from, and, see, some dangers would be more difficult to escape from, especially if your first steps you took to extricate yourself turned out to be really stupid ones.
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