The Book of Masks Homepage

Reanimating the Past

Today's chapter—

Interactive: "Why You Should Never Dig Up Your Mistakes" 
Public: "Why You Should Never Dig Up Your Mistakes" 

—brings a temporary halt to this branch. It also brings a slight change in my publishing plans. So if you've commissioned a storyline from me, and I gave you a schedule in a recent email, well, consider this a public update.

The chapters I've published so far have been intended to set up two separate commissions which happen to take place in the same general area. Both of them are pretty extensive, and I'm leery about publishing two long commissions, dealing with similar situations, back to back. I think people get a little wearied of it. So I'm going to be mixing things up.

So now, having completed the set-up for the commissions, I will be haring off into quite a different patch of ground for ~5 chapters. After that, I will return to this branch with a 9-chapter sequel to today's chapter. That will take the first commission to the halfway point.

After that I will take another break for a 5-7 chapter run in some other part of the interactive (exactly where, I've not decided yet) and then I will turn to the second commission. Only after I've published the second commission and also done an unrelated and distant run of chapters will I return to finish the first commission. This way, I hope, readers will get some variety instead of a block of ~40 chapters of two stories that are rather similar to each other.

* * *

Okay, so, where will tomorrow's brief storyline commence? It begins with "Too Many Dumbasses" . The background?

Will's life is a mess. Thanks to a series of unfortunate improvisations, he is now impersonating Gary Chen, a drug-dealing lowlife at Westside High. Who else is an imposter? Well, Chelsea Cooper is now having to impersonate the drug-addled Dane Matthias; Dane is inhabiting Gordon Black's body; and Gordon is pretending to be Will. (None of these people know how the body-switch occurred, and none of them have the memories of the people they are impersonating.) Meanwhile, the real Gary Chen, who figured out what was going on, has blackmailed Will into putting him into the body of Chelsea Cooper. And, thanks to upheavals on the basketball squad, which have threatened to undermine Chelsea's social position, Will has had to swap his friend Caleb into Seth Javits's body (putting Javits into a memory-less copy of Caleb's body) so that the fake Chelsea can have the socially prominent Seth as a boyfriend.

This summary doesn't even touch on the drug ring that Will has been forced to run, or on the other body swaps (Tanner Evans <-> Eastman's Chris Trantham; George Mendoza <-> football junior Kevin Hall; Joe Thomason <-> swimmer Andrea Varnsworth) that Will has had to make in order to ramp up his sales under pressure from Chen.

In "Too Many Dumbasses" , Will (whose disguise as Chen is becoming more and more permanent, it seems) is meeting with his disguised minions to discuss business. After that, he goes off to talk with some other lowlifes. One of them jokes about selling whores instead of weed, and that sets Will (his brain now almost perfectly merged with Chen's) thinking about how to make money off of fembots ...

* * *

What follows, starting tomorrow, is a revision of this entire branch. I warned a couple of weeks ago that, for continuity reasons, a huge chunk of this branch was going to have get moved to the NC-BoM interactive. After some reviewing and revision, I've determined that this chapter would be the best divergence point. (It's about fifteen chapters further in than the divergence point I'd originally settled on.) Sometime tonight all of the sequel chapters to "Too Many Dumbasses"  will get moved to the NC-BoM installation, and "Too Many Dumbasses"  already includes a link to where NC-BoM will pick the story up. Tomorrow's storyline will start a 5-chapter replacement branch in the new continuity.

NOTE: I'm afraid I won't be adding the coming 5-chapter run to the Archives. There are 40+ chapters I would have to add in first, and I'm not sure it's worth it for what is, basically, only a housekeeping exercise for the interactive.