Thursday, February 23, 2006 Previous List Next
Story Idea: the multistory

  I don't write stories anymore, really, but I do still come up with ideas for them.  I'll probably be featuring some of the story ideas in future blog entries as well.  They're basically just summaries of the stories, and I offer them because I really want the ideas to take some form, even if it is not a fully written story.  I also want to share them with people.

  For this one, I want to talk about one I had very high hopes for on my website.  Have you ever seen any of those stories (most likely a kid's book) where you get to choose from two or three options of which direction the story goes next?  Well, I was going to write one of those, only more interesting, more serious, and more complex.

  It starts with two friends, a male and a female, who work as servers at a restaurant.  It's about 10 PM, and they get off work at the same time, and then leave for their respective homes.  At this point, you get to choose which person you want to "follow".

  If you follow the female, then she goes to her house where, unbeknownst to her, a male kid about 19 (don't recall the exact age I chose) broke into her house and was in her bedroom hiding.  She goes to take a shower, and then the boy sneaks into the bathroom carrying a gun.

  I'm a little deceptive as I tell how she notices someone in the room, on the other side of the shower curtain.  I talk about her heart beating faster, and generally suggest that she's scared stiff, but then she punches the guy out, drags him to her livingroom, and ties him up.

  She finishes her shower, gets dressed, then fixes herself something to eat, and while she does that, he wakes up.  They talk, she finds out that he didn't actually mean any harm, and is kind of scared of her now.  There's a lot I don't recall about her scenarios, because they were of the least interest to me.  I can say that in some eventuality, she also takes a baseball bat to the head of a man who wanted to kill the kid.


  For me, it's the male's stories that were of the greatest interest.  Near his apartment building, there is a particular trafic light through which he must drive.  The light is yellow, and you have to decide whether he stops at the light or speeds up to go through.

  If he stops at the light, then while waiting, a girl in her late teens, running very quickly, collides with the side of his car and falls to the ground, unconscious.  He gets out to see what it was and finds her muddy and wearing only a very simple cloth shirt that goes to mid-thigh.  He quickly puts her into his front passenger seat and drives her the one block to his apartment.

  He lays her on the bed and tries to wake her.  I never actually wrote any of this scenario, and it was some years ago, so I don't recall exactly when certain things occured, but she tells him about how she had been raised from birth in a fascility where they kept her in a constant state of some kind of pain, but she escaped.

  She was allowed no exposure to the outside world, nor any casual contact with any living thing.  She was meant to be an experiment regarding endurance, pain tolerance and coping skills.  They scientist wanted to raise a person who would be so used to experiencing pain, that it would not actually bother them.

  Because she was so muddy, he would want to get her cleaned up, so he runs her a bath, and she removes her shirt without him even saying anything.  She feels no embarassment what-so-ever.  She has no concept of sex or physical pleasure.

  Even though he finds her nudity stimulating, he remains respectful.  In the bath, he gently washes her, discovering scars and bruising all over her body, where they had cut and whipped and beat her, but since she knew nothing but pain, anyway, she did not actually "suffer" much.  And as he carefully moved the wash cloth over her body, she experienced pleasure for the first time.  It's meant to be a very senuous, yet innocent-ish scene.

  The men who were chasing her are eventually heard outside his window, and she decides to leave in order to protect him.  He gives her some of his clothes to wear.  There would be one or two other splits, but nothing too serious.


  Back at the traffic light, if he speeds up to go on through, it means that he was out of the way when she run up, so she missed him, went behind his car, and he never saw her.  He goes on home and goes to bed.  Here, you are faced with two options.  This character has an interest in dreams and the idea of astral projection.  You can either have him go to sleep or have him practice astral projection.

  If you have him sleep, then he will be, for lack of a better description, a dream walker on the dream plane.  He and a dream-skilled Jamacan will meet each other in a dream.  The Jamacan has had experience entering the dreams of others and manipulating them.  He's slightly mischeivious, but he's not malicious.

  The dream setting is in a large, run-down house, and the Jamacan sort of challenges the man to see who has the best dream control.  The Jamacan issues test, and teaches the man some things, and eventually, the man discovers that he is very powerful.


  If, however, you choose to have him practice astral projection, it goes a very differnt way.  His theory is that all he has to do is focus on a collection of qualities, and if something with those qualities exists, then his astral self will be drawn to it, even if it is something he does not know actually exists.

  He has astral projected before, but only with about 50 miles of his body.  On this night, he's feeling a bit lonely, so he decides to focus on the qualities that he wants in a female.  He wants to see if he can find his perfect mate.

  After a while, he projects and finds himself in a desert with some standing stones in front of him.  He does not know where he is and sees no signs of life anywhere... until a girl walks passed, on the other side of the stones.

  She's got short black hair, is wearing black work boots, very baggy pants tied with a rope, and black electrical tape X's over her nipples.  She has a pick axe resting on her shoulder and is sweating and dirty.  Needless to say, he finds this very curious and her extremely attractive.

  He follows her around to discover she is working in a mine, alone.  When she gets done for the day, she walks to a building, pushes a button on a box, and then the door opens for her a few seconds later.  Inside is a room that looks like utility closet.  There are tools and shelves, a cement floor, but also a large sink, a shower, and a cot.

  Her story is that she was visiting Australia when she was kidnapped and forced to work in an opal mine.  The person who ran the mine made a practice of kidnapping people to use as slave labor, but had previously only taken men, so he felt no need to provide them with shirts, and did not allow them to keep any of their own clothing.  She was, incidentally, also wearing men's underwear.

  While she was in the shower, which steamed up the mirror, he concentrated on being able to physically manipulate things, and with great effort, mananges to write "hello" in the foggy mirror.  After her shower, she notices it, and so begins her communication with what she thinks is a ghost.  Granted, she's giving more than she's getting, since it's so very difficult for him, but she explains her situation to him, and he explores the area to see about helping her escape.

  The whole huge area is surrounded by an electric fence, most of which extends beyond the horizon.  On the other side of her room is a small kitchen where her meals are prepared and then passed to her through a small opening.  A few hundred feet away is a guard house where three guards sit and watch monitors.  Near the guard house is a fence that can be opened only electrically from the guard house.

  There are some different courses of action to follow, but either eventually ends with the girl escaping and promising to eventually come find him.


  These are just the main events that I'd come up with.  I would have definitely devised more, especially for the main female character, and sprinkled among the different options would be evidence of the other goings on that occured despite what options you chose.  And I had planned on all courses eventually leading back to a single ending, which was the two friends going to see a movie the next day.

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