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Story a Day May 3 - Navigating to a Time Machine (and rankings!)

Happy Saturday, friends! As we discussed yesterday, Saturdays are dealer's choice in terms of the writing prompt, and ranking the story prompt devices that have been used that week. You can see the video where I reveal the rankings for the Story Engine right here!



I'm ranking things across three axes, and I have different things that I use as benchmarks for each ranking:

Complexity:
This is how difficult I find it to use. I'm using board games here for the benchmarks, with 1 being the most simple and 5 the most complex:
2 - Uno
3 - Catan
4 - Chess

Shiny:
This is basically the cost and aesthetics of the device - is it pretty, and do the components seem worth the money? I'm using chocolate for the benchmarks here, with 1 being both the least pretty and least worth the money and 5 being the prettiest and most worth the money:
1 - Carob
2 - White chocolate
5 - Small batch (artisanal, fair trade)

Fun:
Finally, how much fun is it to use? This is, frankly, the most important ranking, and I'm using bookstores here, with 1 being the one I enjoy spending time in the least and 5 the one I enjoy spending time in the most (and that I most want to go back to):
1 - Grocery store
2 - College bookstore
4 - Local indie bookstore
5 - Powell's 

For The Story Engine, I ranked it between a 3 and 4 in complexity, a 4 in shiny, and between a 4 and 5 in fun. Awfully good for the first outing!

And, because it's still a story a day, here's the first part of today's story and an outline of what comes next. It's all based on a story prompt from the Story Engine:

Story Engine 3: A navigator wants to navigate a maze at the heart of which sits a fairy-touched time machine, but it will mean getting involved in someone else’s fight.

Captain Mabel Barman didn’t sign up for this when she first started working at Dream Kingdom. She had done well on all the tests for maps and navigation, which had shocked everyone who’d ever known her to be the first person to get lost and the last person to remember where she’d parked her car. Somehow, the maps they’d given her made sense in a way the rest of the world never did, and she’d been one of the only people in her training class to score highly enough to be given additional training as a Pathfinder. It was a silly name for a tour guide, but the additional pay was nothing to sneeze at, and Mabel couldn’t help but smile at being called “Captain” by all of her coworkers. The uniform fit her better than anything she’d ever worn before, and the next two weeks had been some of the most fulfilling of her life.

None of that had prepared her for the current situation. In the middle of the second tour of the day, a young boy went running off the track into a closed area of the park. Not only was it closed, but Mabel remembered it was one of the parts of the internal map that had been marked in red stripes, indicating that only people with the highest ranks should even try to get in there. She’d acted before thinking fully, telling the rest of the group to stay there while she chased the boy down and not letting herself worry about what might happen if she was found in a red-striped zone. Surely it was more important that she get a guest out of there than that she was trespassing herself, right?

A few steps off the path, the artificial light of the park disappeared and Mabel was left with just a sliver of natural light from some of the skylights above. Dream Kingdom was the world’s largest fully-enclosed amusement park (“Rain never shuts down the fun!”), and the lighting was used to create an appropriate atmosphere. The atmosphere in this section appeared to be “run-down backlot from an abandoned movie studio.”

Mabel fought to keep the boy in sight, but he was much faster than she expected him to be. Fortunately, she remembered the way the paths in Dream Kingdom were laid out, and she was able to use that logic to get ahead of him and cut him off. She grabbed him as he was about to pass her and pulled him in a bear hug. “Hey, buddy!” she said in what she hoped was a reassuring tone. “You can’t run off like that, OK? We need to get back to the rest of the group. I bet your parents are worried sick!” The boy stared her in the eyes for a second, then threw back his head and howled in fear.

Mabel knew she wasn’t good with children, but even so, she’d never elicited this kind of response before, even with her own younger cousins. “Hey!” she shouted, all pretense at customer service flying away with the force of the child’s scream. “Stop that! What are you doing?”

  • Kid tries to break free, Mabel holds on and starts back to where she came in
  • Kid is terrified, thinks something is coming to get them, that’s why he ran and is screaming
  • Paths move in front of her, she can see it, kid can’t, Mabel is Concerned
    • Sees someone from her past (dead bestie?) in front of her, gives her choice - this way leads to a way to fix the past and let the bestie live again, that way takes the kid back to his now-frantic parents and her current job and life
    • If she goes to fix the past, she sacrifices the current life, maybe the kid? Ambiguous
  • Before Mabel decides, kid break free and runs off again, Mabel gives chase
  • She convinces him she won’t let him die, no matter what, explains what happened with bestie
    • Friend died due to doing something stupid alone, had invited Mabel but Mabel turned her down, misplaced guilt all these years
  • Mabel and kid manage to get back to path to the rest of the park, encounter ghost of bestie again, Mabel makes the choice to go back to now
  • Bestie tries to take kid by force, Mabel defeats her (somehow)
  • Back on path, little time has passed, parents didn’t even notice kid was missing, Mabel continues the tour


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