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The Interactive Interactive

I've got a new chapter up in BoM!

Interactive: "The Paranoid Roommate" 
Public: "The Paranoid Roommate" 

It's a sequel to Masktrix's chapter "Making Your Mark," and if you are a reader of the public pages, you can now catch up with Masktrix's work here:

"Dragons Vs. Wildcats"  -->> "Making Your Mark" 

The story? After being captured by some of the students at the St. Francis Xavier School, Will was rescued by the two golems he left back in Saratoga Falls. In his desperation to retrieve the Libra and stop the "Mutants" from using its magic, he has released Abigail Steiner from her golem prison and partnered with her. Abi has re-infiltrated the school, secretly resuming her old identity, and has brought Will back in by disguising him as a senior named Mark Pederson, who is Abi's boyfriend's roommate. Now, right under the noses of their adversaries, Abi and Will have to find the Libra, seems to have been stolen from the Xavier students by parties unknown.

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This branch is the result of some intensely cooperative work between me and Masktrix. In a forum post—"Re: Re: Re: Back to the drama"  —Masktrix described how we war-gamed out earlier chapters that were posted through last week, but the writing still proved extremely difficult, what with all the competing characters, each one capable of double-crossing the others. It was too much for one person (for either of us) to write, and too difficult even for both of us to plot out cooperatively.

We finally cracked it by gaming out a simple set of constraints—which character wanted what, and how they were planning to get it—and then made the interactive, er, "interactive" behind the scenes. Masktrix would write a chapter, aiming toward a cliffhanger or a plot twist, then hand it off to me. I would improvise a sequel, also aiming for a cliffhanger or plot twist, and hand it back to him. Instead of outlining the development, we maneuvered in this way and let the characters improvise just as we were improvising. We alternated in this way until we reached a point where something like a satisfying conclusion hoved into view.

At least, I hope it will be a satisfying conclusion. That's for you to judge.

Now, it may seem like this procedure would quickly bog down in confusion and cross-purposes, and I admit that maybe we got lucky. But by dividing the task this way, and by tackling it in bite-sized chunks, we were finally able to fight our way through what had been a very recalcitrant situation. I don't know that there's a moral to this. But it was a tremendous amount of fun. I hope you guys have half the fun that I for one had while helping to write it.