Before I took a risk and wrote something unusual, I re-read a few of the recent posts and tried to formulate the direction everything was headed in the immediate future. I came to the conclusion that it wasn't really headed anywhere immediately - most of them were build-ups or prompts, but there wasn't much cohesion yet. At least that's how it looked - like a story building up over a year rather than a few weeks.

I got the idea from them that quite a few posters were waiting for someone to glue all those tales together and tie up the plot. I wanted to take a shot at it, because with no new posts for a few days, I figured why make Ian do all the work? We've had talks about that before, about you having to determine the direction of each main plot on the board, and you've said you'd like to see other posters take initiative.

I did that, but then I had a problem: I didn't want to dead-end some of the developing character pieces that were out there. So I developed a radically new scenario, the "what if it's too late" one. I figured all that would do is change the distant goal from beating the Moderator to a larger battle for power once he was dead. Later on I called that :"too anime" because of its tendency to take radical turns in direction while classic comics usually won't.

The irony of all of this is, for a story begun with a round-robin, it has some of the most tightly tied-together plots of any story begun here. It's very difficult to find an opening to play with.

Anyway, I guess I was playing it to the wrong audience I'm a little gunshy about taking the lead again, now that I know my style of doing so is absolutely not appropriate for the board (except with World Class, which is entirely mine).



Even some World Class chapters/parts end up tossed out sometimes. It's part of the job.



That's a pretty easy one - the prisoners are probably in cells. Liu Xi can't see them all, so she can't zap them away from the prison unless she knows precisely where they are. Or, for that matter, where they're going to, because if she dropped them off just outside the prison they'd just be caught again or shot. Also, if there are enough of them it would take far less energy to just collect them and lead them out.

I'm still not sure about covering that though, since a couple of subplots suggested that someone else might be putting the death-camp front and center. I wouldn't be messing up someone else's plot again would I?