Tap-outs

Man, it was a bad month for writing.  I was doing well enough when I wrote, but there were certain demoralizing circumstances that have been messing with me for a few years and were worse than average this month.  So.  Road Rage goes on indefinite hiatus.

I might fuck around and turn in random Josefina+Blasfemia chapters occasionally.  I know that’s no kind of way to read a story, so if you’re so inclined, wait until I end it, then go back to the beginning and read the whole thing.  That story is probably my magnum opus of being weird as fuck.  Centennial Hills, The Septagram, etc, they’re intelligible enough, I think.

Anyway, happy crammed in roman asswipe month part Two.  Maybe shitler will get a month before he’s done, whaddyathink?  A thirteen month year?  It’s time.

Oh, and if it’s time to vote for you, vote!  I’ll be doing that tomorrow.

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Road Rage II

Content Warnings:  It’s horror.  Whatever.

EDIT to ADD:  jeezis i have a lot of repeated words phrases in this.  they call those “echoes” and they are ill-favored in english language writing.  it was written in tiny snips at the end of my night over weeks.  c’est le travail.

 

CHUNK DEUCE__

_
A cradle of medical machinery quietly breathed and hummed to life.  The nurse picked up her head.  Either this was someone new, or one of the tough guys had been killed.  She checked her clipboard.  Hard John and Thurston were out.  It could also have been Ralph, but he hadn’t died in ages.  Even he had to run out of returns eventually…

Susan didn’t have to be there.  Really, no one did.  It was just a personal interest, and a way to spend her time.  Her services were just useful enough that nobody busted her chops for hogging the light draft.  She looked on in concern equal parts genuine sympathy and morbid curiosity.

Of course she couldn’t see anything yet.  When the cradle came to life, you knew it was working on a body, but it would just be a sliver of bone and muscle, deep in the dark fluid.  Nobody even knew what that stuff was, but it smelled something between medical adhesives, alcohol, and sweat.

That sliver of muscle had a nerve, and that nerve had awareness, however slight.  Very quickly more nerves and muscle fibers joined it.  Other organs began to form from nothing in the fluid around it, and within a few minutes they were growing together.  The senses multiplied and compounded into greater and greater awareness, verging on cognizance.

By this time the body was large enough to see, and the nurse could see the yellow of extra fat cells over the chest.  Ralph, Thurston, and Hard John did not have breasts like that.  It was definitely someone new.  Again, part of her felt a gentle affection for this person, being born into this terrible life, but part of her was darkly amused at the prospect of seeing someone have to deal with that all over again.  Susan wore a strange smile.

The lights over the cradle swelled and glared.  The thing was shaped somewhat like a large bed with elevated back, but surrounded by so many tubes, wires, straps, pumps, and beige plastic with beige bolts that it formed something like a nest, trailing away into the unknown territory beneath the floor.

You’re in the hospital, the new arrival thought.  By then she could tell her body was incomplete, which could only mean that she had been horrifically mutilated in an accident, and would spend the rest of her life an object of revulsion and pity.  The realization would have been more shocking if the parts of her body responsible for those feelings were more developed.  Instead she was just consumed by a vast sorrow.

Susan noted the writhing.  Not as intense as it sometimes can be.  In her experience, people were either born in terror or sadness, and she had an idea how this one was coming in.  She leaned on the foot of the cradle and looked deeply into the biological mess.

Dejah remembered her name.  Nothing of life, just that one name.  Somebody could be calling to her, but she could not quite hear.  Somebody crying, probably just in her growing imagination.  Such phantasms receded as the cradle became more clear – the lights most of all, but the tubes as well.  She was in a spider’s web of the things, writhing until she noticed the futility of it.

Why could she sense more of her body now than when she’d first awakened?  Maybe the mutilation wasn’t so severe.  Maybe she was just coming out of some very strange anesthesia.  Her long black hair swirled around her view now, like she was underwater in the bathtub.

Underwater.  Time to come up for air.  She groped wildly for the sides of this tub, and had to settle for pulling herself out by gripping fistfulls of wire and plastic.  She vomited a fountain of the uncanny water, and bobbed there in the fluid, violently coughing until her lungs were fully clear.

Susan was surprised by how dark the new girl’s skin was.  It would surely be very pretty, when the slime was washed away.  Long black curly hair clung and clumped all around her like seaweed.  “Don’t try to speak until you are able, OK dear?”

Dejah couldn’t make sense of it.  Was she hallucinating?  Medical machinery should have sense.  Electrodes attached to key areas, intravenous injection sites, tubes for breathing or to drain infections.  The things around her were just so much bondage, in the colors and shapes of hospital equipment.  “Can we turn down the light?”

The light dimmed itself, relaxing as the birth reached its conclusion.  Susan said, “I guess we can,” and laughed softly.  “What’s your name, baby?”

“Dejah.  I’m an adult.  The hell is this?”

Susan pursed her lips.  “Hon, you should just try to relax and get cleaned up.  I can take you to a shower, get you some clothes.”

Dejah almost forced the issue, every waking moment increasing her sense of alarm, but bit it back.  No sense getting in a fight when you’re naked and covered in slime.  She could see the nurse putting on some kind of black rubber apron with long, gloved sleeves.  She looked down at her naked body, barely able to see anything of it through the reflections on the fluid surface.

Susan helped her out of the cradle.  “I’m Nurse Susan.  Pleased to meet you, Dejah.”

She couldn’t think of anything to say to that, learning new disconcerting things every second.  She was naked and covered in warm slime, though that quickly turned cold in the stale air.  This hospital room was covered floor to ceiling in cracked blue-white tile, like the showers at a public swimming pool – after a bombing.

Besides the creepy device she had come from, the only feature in the room was pipes near the ceiling, emerging, snaking, and sinking back into the walls at random angles.  Nurse Susan didn’t take her to a regular shower stall with anything like privacy.  She just walked her to a place where multiple pipes crossed, several feet behind the cradle.

Susan said, “Stay right here,” then went back to the foot of the cradle to sort herself out.  She quickly doffed the apron and picked up a bundle of cloth – a towel? a robe? – then, instead of returning to Dejah, she reached up to turn a valve handle on the nearest pipes.

Lukewarm water spilled out of tiny holes in the pipes above Dejah, and she miserably began to paw the slime off of her body, while the nurse watched and waited.  “There’s something very wrong with this hospital.  Is my insurance really that bad?”  Susan was charmed by her subtle accent, which made the word sound more like “insurants.”

“Yes, this isn’t exactly a hospital.  I don’t know from insurance, but I doubt it has anything to do with why you’re here.  Just try to relax.  You’re safe.  As safe as anyone can be in this life.”  In a sunnier life, Susan might have been half as dark as Dejah, but still clearly of African descent.  Age also had a paling effect on her, but most of the time, the kindness of her expression made up for it.

Dejah didn’t feel too self-conscious about her nudity.  Whether or not it was a hospital, it was a medical circumstance, and Susan seemed like a medical professional.  She let her hair fill with water and wrung it out a few times, her lean young body gleaming in full view of the mature woman.  But she wasn’t eager to continue feeling so exposed in general, so as soon as she felt sufficiently less disgusting, she said, “Turn this off, please.  Thank you.”

Susan turned off the water and met Dejah halfway with a big towel.  It was more coarse than Dejah would have expected, less white, but at least it was clean.  She followed it up with a thin terrycloth bathrobe in faded turquoise with white polka dots.

“This is the first I’ve seen of you all cleaned up.  You’re so beautiful, Dejah.  I really am pleased to meet you.  Was not a lie.”  She shook her hand.

“Um, thanks.  You look nice too.”

Susan laughed and shook her head.  “I’ll take you to the clothes.”

Dejah looked again at the strange object from which she’d just emerged.  Its structure just made no sense.  Even without understanding the engineering of a hospital bed, you could usually guess at the purpose of a join or a hydraulic component.  This was a profusion of technological nonsense, surrounding an abyss of mysterious dark fluid.  It should look like a shallow tub in there.  Why was it so deep and dark?  Sensory deprivation?

“What is that?”

“A cradle for babes like you and I.”  Susan led her through the only obvious way out of the room – an opening in the wall with no door – and through a similar opening on the other side of the hall.

The hall itself also caught Dejah’s attention.  It looked like something between a hospital basement and a subway corridor.  Why so poorly lit?  Where the hell was it?  And then they were in the room with the clothes – a laundry room, with several ancient machines chugging away in scuffed white enamel.

“I’m called Nurse Susan, but I should really be called Laundry Susan, because it’s most of what I do.  Sometimes I get help in here.  Have a look.  It’s mostly women’s clothes, so no point having a separate section for the boys.  Just how things shook out.  We do have men.”

The room was, again, poorly lit.  Nothing like a window.  Almost certainly underground.  Racks were sorted by size but otherwise chaotic as a thrift store.  Were those jeggings dark grey, dark blue, or black?  No way to be sure.  She put them on, with sparkle embroidered lavender socks, green adidas with yellow stripes, a red babydoll tee, and a close-fit black windbreaker with some cracking around the shoulderblades.  The only thing to tie her hair back was a selection of bandanas.  She chose a dark blue one, wondering why she didn’t remember her own tastes in clothing, reaching for mostly dark clothing from that rising sense of fear.  No, don’t run and hide.  That would be silly, whatever was going on.

“Alright, Laundry Susan.  Can you please tell me where the hell I am?”

“You keep saying ironic things like that and I’m gonna have to bite.”

Dejah threw her hands up and bugged out her eyes.  “What is it?  What?”

“Maybe I should give you the tour, y’know.  By way of explanation.”  The nurse cast a glance back toward the medical room, considering if she should stay there to watch the machine.

The tour will get me a better idea of how to get out.  Still, she couldn’t resist pressing the point.  She stepped closer to Susan, who suddenly snapped to attention.  Dejah wasn’t threatening violence yet, but wasn’t above an implication.  “Answer first.”

“We don’t exactly know, but as near as we can tell?  We’re in Hell, Dejah.  It doesn’t mean we did anything wrong or have to be here forever, but the most honest, straight answer I can give you?  Like the rest of us, you died and went to Hell.”

Dejah almost slapped her but stopped short, pointing one angry finger.  “No more jokes and bullshit, Susan!  What is this shit?”

“Please don’t hit me.  I get hit sometimes; don’t love it.”

Dejah shoved her aside and stormed the door.  She walked away quickly, to the left was as good a guess as any.  She could hear Susan walking after her.

“Be careful, baby girl!  It’s dangerous!”  The nurse stopped short and watched her go.  She didn’t want to get too far from the cradle.

Dejah broke into a run.  Her stomach was empty, her energy weak, but she had to find out.  The hall had random doors and openings that just went off into darkness or rooms with racks of whatever.  At last it came to stairs up.  That’s all you need; get where the sun is.

The stairwell still looked fully subterranean.  There was no hint of daylight from windows far above.  The lights were dim to dead, just enough illumination to see you were nowhere good.  She didn’t bother checking the halls at the first three floors she came to, then started whipping the doors open just long enough to glance.  The fourth and fifth floors were even more dark than the stairwell.  At least the stairs didn’t go on forever, even though they spent more of their depth underground than seemed reasonable.  The sixth floor she came to was the highest.

The hall there was at least as well lit as the floor she had come from, and the interior design suggested a different kind of space – tiles were broad and closely connected, waxed over in a way often used in older schools or hospitals.  Just a ghetto hospital is all.  The doors to some rooms were locked or otherwise too tight for a quick look.  The easiest to open were those swinging doors used for quick two-way access to operating rooms or walk-in refrigerators.

Again, they just looked like rooms of miscellaneous storage – deeply miscellaneous.  Gardening and mechanical tools, umbrellas, children’s clothing, boxes in cardboard pine and metal, spools of hose and wire and rope, toys, magazines, and household appliances.  The most brightly lit had two mature white men in it, kissing each other, close enough to be frotting through their clothes.  The younger of the two said, “Do you mind?,” and she kept running.

Everyone she met had been dressed in second-hand garments.  Nurse Susan’s scrubs, the gay couple’s flannel and jeans, they just looked faded and frayed.  The air was stale save for musty drafts, some ill miasmas pooling in every corner those drafts didn’t touch.  Like the air itself was growing different biota of bacteria in every still corner, disrupted and unified into a faint sewer ambience by the invisible current.

“Nasty ass…”  What?  She couldn’t complete the thought.

The hall was long, but not as much as that first hall had been.  She could imagine that one trailing away into an abyss.  On this floor, the end was in sight.  As she approached, she began to sense a change in air pressure, a shift in the white noise at the periphery of her awareness, that there was some larger area of the building coming, an open area?  Sure enough, the hall bent sharply at the end to floppy double doors, and beyond that, daylight.

It was an open courtyard interior to a tall building, each mezzanine with a stain-streaked concrete balcony, strung with drying laundry and planters of dandelions and other weeds.  The mezzanine she was on had no light but the day, and small braziers and lamps among the various tarp tents and kiosks and utility areas.  The homeless were everywhere; it was a squatter shantytown.  Had she just been in the care of a garden variety kidney thief with a weird sense of humor?

The gang wasn’t so organized that they immediately jumped on her, but she did catch a lot of attention as she briskly walked through, trying not to look suspicious.  A few cat-calls, but more of people wondering who she was, if she was new, if she was OK.  Haven’t you heard?  We’re in Hell.

There were pigeon coops and rats in cages, and enough people cooking or eating to make it clear those were being bred for food.  She whipped her head around, darting to avoid people’s eyes while she also looked for an exit.  That’s how she became aware of a growing group trailing her, trying to get her to stop.

“You should slow down!”  “Stick around, pretty girl!”  “Where are you going so fast?”

Dejah broke into a run again, ducking and weaving past anyone who tried to block her path.  She tried doors whenever she got a chance, but they were mostly locked, or clearly didn’t lead to halls.  Suddenly, she found herself cornered against double doors that seemed stuck or locked.  As they closed in, she yelled, “Leave me alone!,” but it came out so quiet and weak.

Then the doors opened from the other side, and she was able to slip past some confused teenagers to get into that hall.  It seemed so dark after being exposed to a little sun, even as filtered as it had been in the mezzanine.  Then sunlight again – an outer hall with doors to the right and windows to the left.  They were so milky from accumulated milky filth that she couldn’t tell what was out there.  The dimness of that light suggested a very narrow alley.

At the far end of the hall, some children were playing dominoes.  Close enough now, she could see that was a dead end.  Turning back, the crowd was coming in after her.

“Hey, kids.  I’ll give you fifty bucks if you block them for me.”

“Make it fifty thousand each and we might think about it,” said a girl.

She shook her head in confusion, then just started kicking out the glass of the nearest window.  The crowd quickened their pace, and their shouts.  The glass gave way easily enough, though it was run through with wire mesh that held it together in a mass of fractured layers – two panes of glass, the rime on the outside like peeling exterior paint.

No, no, no!  Dejah refused to deal with another moment of this hobo kingdom.  She leapt into the window frame, bracing herself in place and leaning out until the mesh gave.  For a moment she was freefalling, but someone grabbed her by the jacket, and she crashed back against the building.

“Don’t be crazy!  Come on, girl!”

At first she could barely see, but then she got the lay of the land – as much as she could.  Yes, the hobo who grabbed her jacket might have saved her life.  She could not see the bottom of the alley from her vantage.  But being in their grip like that was intolerable to her.  Why was she so afraid of losing her freedom?

The alley was narrow enough she could kick off the squatters’ building and reach the chain link on the other side.  She did it, almost yarding her savior out of the frame and into the pit.  People cursed and yelled after her, but she didn’t listen, hanging onto the brutal wires for dear life.

Down would be the sensible direction to move, but the darkness was also terrifying.  She crawled along the fence toward the left.  There was an end there, perhaps wrapping around a corner to somewhere else?

The fence was nearly flush against another building – just an endless wall of brick, dead ivy, ancient tar, and pigeon shit.  She couldn’t see anything worth trying to breach the fence for – no window that might lead to a more sensible way out to a street.  Or a less grabby bunch of homeless people.  She kept on, around the corner.  Luckily, the fence kept going.

Now she could see a bottom to the alley.  It was a very, very deep ramp.  Did it go all the way down to the floor which she’d started from?  A white guy drove a motorcycle down there, returning to his people, perhaps.  She might run into more traffic at the bottom, but she couldn’t resist climbing down – her fingers were in agony from climbing that nasty old metal.

Dejah was on the concrete of the alley again.  She glanced back toward the building, where the white man had driven the motorcycle.  There was no door; he must have driven straight into a dark crack in the wall.  She could almost imagine he had made the crack by crashing through it.

No more nonsense.  She jogged up the ramp as fast as he could, gasping raggedly.  So steep.  Whatever trepidation she held about the city beyond, it was overwhelmed by relief from reaching level ground.  She leaned against a wall to catch her breath.

The alley didn’t open onto the street, but onto another intersection of alleys.  They were so long she could only see the street distantly, but the traffic noise and honking was intense.  Exhaust defined the air, like to live in this city must be carcinogenic.  Had to be rush hour, and in the darker half of the year.  Dusk was falling so quickly that she wondered if she was moving in slow motion.  Her hands still felt raw from climbing on the fence – evidence that not so much time had passed.

The streets would be the perfect place to blend in, to disappear until she could figure out what had happened.  Whatever it was, it had hit her memories like a sledgehammer.  She still couldn’t remember her own last name!  She picked the shortest alley and walked briskly.

This is it.  This is the real world.  What had that fake nurse even said?  Nothing.  Nonsense.  Somebody laid this concrete down, to allow access between the buildings for trash collection of back door delivery, or egress for emergency exits.  There are doors on these brick walls that should go into businesses or apartments or even vacant buildings, waiting for new tenants or to be demolished and replaced.  Normal things.  Occasional splashes of graffiti, bits of paste left from posters that had deteriorated in the weather.  Bits of garbage here and there, a single rat scurrying in the distance.

But something was off.  Certainly, Dejah had never been in a city with this bad of air pollution.  She hated knowing that she was losing a little life with every breath she drew.  At dusk, aren’t shadows usually blue or purple, maybe grey?  The shadows here were dark rust, reflecting a sky above that was fully discolored with smog.  Vile.

Yet she didn’t choke.  It was almost as if she was used to it.  Must not have any asthma she’d forgotten along with her identity.  The traffic ahead looked so terrible.  Nobody crossed the view on foot, no pedestrians here.  The street was a slow moving wall of steel and glass and tires.

The closer she came, the more alarming that became.  They were in each other’s bumpers, all scratched up like a demolition derby.  By the time she reached the mouth of the alley, she could hear screams and cursing under the din, see sparks thrown by random low-speed collisions.  Instinctively, she flattened against the alley wall and observed them.  The hell was going on here?

Every driver was in the grip of an unreasoning fury, angling and jamming and scraping against each other to the extent every car was scratched.  Some were so damaged they were surely totaled, but could still limp along with bent frames and shredded tires.  A car burst loose from the gridlock and the ones behind it rushed into the void so fast they shoved it into a spin.  It smashed through a storefront and was stuck there, spinning wheels in place.

Dejah turned to go back into the alley, when suddenly she saw a black man coming out of there in a ragged sweaty flannel shirt and blue jeans.  She backpedaled away from him farther away from the alley, even though he wasn’t looking at her.  Intensity in the set of his frame mirrored the madness on the street – every muscle taut with adrenaline and yet slouched with the fatigue of an unbearable existence.  He reached the curb and looked at the shredded remains of a piece of car frame.

“Oh my fucking GOD!”  His bellow was loud enough to clear the ruckus.  “I fucking knew it!  Street parking.  Street parking!  FUCK!”

She fell down and quickly scrambled to her feet, now hearing bloody mutterings from the traffic that seemed pointed at her.  In the moment she glanced that way to see those jeering contorted faces, the man pulled out a heavy semi-automatic handgun.  The glint drew her attention his way again, just in time to see him pull the trigger.  His skull abruptly slackened like a paper bag, contents blown out the back and top, and he fell.  Dejah didn’t wait to see him hit the ground, before she fled in a blind panic.

More gunshots.  Helicopter drone from above.  Distant machinegun fire, like something from a war movie.  She found the only way to keep the drivers from paying disturbing attention to her was moving past them too fast to track.  That only worked as long as she could continue in a straight line on congested streets.  Any time she came to an intersection or other loosening of the gridlock, cars jerked her way, crashing into each other or crashing into walls.  She kept hoping for another alley or an open business to duck into but everything was walled off or blasted out, or had rage cases coming and going through them.

When Dejah did find an alley, a few cars tried to chase her inside and crashed into each other, jamming that entrance.  She heard gunshots but didn’t hesitate, running into darkness.  She felt like she was floating but moving too slow to escape, like in a funhouse corridor, imagining the bullet impacts as she went, half wanting it to happen.

A perpendicular side alley opened up and she nearly fell into it, crashing against the brick wall.  No way she could keep running.  She fought down rising gorge just because she was afraid it would pin her down long enough for someone to catch up, and then dared to look back the way she had fled.  Nobody pursued her.  Perhaps they had killed each other.

Dejah slumped to the concrete and gripped herself, shaking violently.  That’s why the hobos stayed in that building.  It was impossible out in the open.  There were only three ways to go in that alley, and every one led back to the streets.  Maybe she could break into a building, but would it also be full of maniacs?  Would it have running water and food, or would she die of thirst, too afraid to brave the streets again?

Something skittered into view at the end of her alley and careened off the wall, then ran toward her.  A hidden reservoir of energy shook her free of the ground and she backed up against the wall at the intersection of the alleys, trying to comprehend this new development.

A dog.  A small black dog, too large to be a chihuahua but too small to be a french bulldog.  It had slender legs but was covered in moppish curls like Benji.  Still, it was charcoal grey, face nearly black in the dark of the alley as it approached her tentatively.

“The stillborn motorrad cannot shake its caul,” the dog said, in the rich and powerful voice of a woman.

Dejah’s eyes widened and her body tensed again.  The dog stepped closer, into a weak shaft of light, revealing a face like a hideous ewok, and continued, “My lord, the Least of the Damned, would have you live.  Ha!  You’ve only just died!”

Terror moved her body and one vanished moment later her mind raced to recover itself.  Where were you?  Running from the horrible, unthinkable thing that scurried behind, howling for its master?  The street is light, it should be safety, but there’s something wrong with it.  What was it again?  Too late, she’d emerged from the alley again, and flattened against a wall.  The sluggish river of grunting steel reminded her.

One of the road ragers broke the line, leapt the curb, and plowed toward her.  Paralyzed, sure to die, she was shoved out of the way by a flying jump kick.  Metal exploded behind her, and she staggered and twirled across the sidewalk.  Racial slurs, swearing, crunching bodies, but seconds later, gunshots, loud and fast, drew her attention.

The beautiful gunman and his ugly dog turned to face her.

–

Roaderial Raginosis

Ruh-roh, Raggy.  I may have gone too far that title.  Stop me before I kill again.
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Time to do that plot work I put off until it was too late.  This should be the last meta article on Road Rage, the rest all writing.  If you don’t want to be spoiled on plot, don’t read this one.  Proceeding thusly…

Life of a road rage demon establishes what life is like for the main run of the damned.  But he gets punked out by someone who is not angry, pedestrian self defense.  Starts regenerating in his bed before chapter ends.

Establishing the life of road hell pedestrians, with Dejah being born.  Maybe this hellmouth is themed off medical bondage, besides the obvious yonic imagery.  After all, I’m picturing the good guys as originating from the innocent victims of road ragers, and many of them would end their mortal life surrounded by medical equipment.

Dejah runs away, over people’s protests.  Thurston shows up and some kind heart convinces him to go after her, while others seem callous.  Save that life – some hint here that lives are numbered.  Later it will be revealed that callousness was not so serious – they consider losing one life to be nbd if you play it safe after that.

Dejah is about to be killed by the road rage demon from chapter one, when Thurston action heroes in, and they kill him.  On the way back to safety, Thurston and Dejah survive lots of violence – establishing that action in this world is a little unrealistic – and meet Ralph.  Ralph reveals to Thurston that Hard John has become a cop.  Dejah can tell he’s upset but he doesn’t say why…

There should be a reason for them to meet Ralph.  An obvious video gamey reason is a need for healing items.  This gets me back to a question I’ve been putting off.  I know I want this world to have limited extra lives, but what about hit points?  What about health potions?  I look back over my notes…

Off that topic but just thought of a cool scene.  I have the idea extra lives / one ups come from seeing yourself in a pure mirror, perfectly clean, but nobody can seem to make that happen outside chance, magical type circumstances.  At some point a character dying their last death, face on the ground next to an oily puddle over a piece of sheet metal, and blows the oil away from their face enough to get that life.

Back on it, dang, what’s a good way to decide this?  What would it mean for there to be health potions / items, in a literary sense?  Everyone remembers Aerith dying in FFVII and nobody chucking a phoenix down on her.  It’s a thing that must be accounted for.  In practical terms, one could end up having to choose between tracking down a potion and heading home with a higher risk of losing a life.  Another random idea, they’re like crystal pepsi – some shit that becomes a sort of hot commodity after ceasing production, found only in increasingly fucked up rare circumstances and sheisty condition.  Could I just make it crystal pepsi?  No, fuck those guys.  Hm.

i do think the specific pop brand idea is amusing enuf to run with.  This could be a service Ralph provides – knowing where the caches are because he gets around the city much more than the enclave people.  But in a big city, how does anyone find him?  Seems like there should be some kind of inferno telecom tech.  What would be reasonable hell-flavored cellphonage?  Neh, I dunno.  Maybe none.  Like Thurston could just have an idea of Ralph’s routines.  No magic action movie earpieces.

But a name for the pop.  Turbo cola.  Nope, taken.  Turbo Fizz.  Nope, taken.  Blue Drink.  Not taken, but not great.  Mythological sources of water, like the Lethe and the Styx…  After research which uncovered the existence of a rich people beverage costing forty bucks an ounce, I have decided the product is “Quicksilver Crisp™ Energy Water.”

Back to plot.  On the way back, Dejah gets killed.  Maybe that’s why he was trying for an energy drink, to save her from a wound?  Thurston says sorry, see you soon.  She wakes up in the underground village again and gets this explained to her.  Then she has to feel guilty and worry about Thurston wasting a life on the way home.

Thurston and Ralph scheme on a hot score, maybe while playing a minigame of some kind? and Thurston asks about buying an extra life for Dejah at the merchant, establishing tha merchant.  It’s too expensive.  I need to decide what the hot score is.  Just hell money?  If it can buy extra lives, it may be worth it.  Armored car heist feels too boring.  Bank robbery too.  How can you rob heavily armed demons who do not value their own lives?  Gun threat means nothing.

…was thinking about it being extra lives themselves, but i had an idea those come from mirrors, and it would be too easy to break them.  that does give an element of tension, like nitroglycerin plots in westerns, but it’s not a fun type of tension, to me anyway.  i did like the movie vertical limit.

Maybe it is money.  Like that could lead to a question to help lampshade the horseshit of buying things in hell, like why doesn’t Ralph help out more?  Why does the merchant require money and what does she even do with it?  So let’s say it’s a cash heist.  No casinos in a road rage hell, banking is some kind of abstraction, just a charade to make people madder.  Who do they rob?  Gas station?

Naaaay.  Shit.  I dunno.  I guess armored car makes the most sense.  Maybe…  Armored car is actually a type of demon, like it transforms into a monster when attacked.  That would be some shit you would not see in 10 Fast 10 Furious.

Anyway, on the way home, Thurston is glimpsed by Hard John, before losing the tail.  Maybe when Thurston gets back to the enclave he asks someone why an innocent-turned-demon doesn’t just come back to the enclave and kill everyone, some old poke says they forget that.  Or maybe the enclave has some kind of magic property that makes it invisible to demons?

Dejah says she wants to learn to be tough.  Thurston agrees bravery is a big deal in hell and they recently lost a guy, so may as well try.  Training scene establishes how hell stuff works, including guns, lives, health items, money, etc.  The plan is to have no violence, just stealth, but of course it doesn’t work out.  They do great, beat a sub boss, but in the end Hard John costs Thurston a life.  Dejah barely escapes, discovering she knows how to skateboard.

The survivor enclave gets to be low on meat and pure water, because too many demons are on the streets.  But if heroes just kill them, they’ll come back.  The plan?  They’re immortal so just detain them indefinitely.  Out on the streets, heroes lure them to the reservoirs and nonlethal crashing.  It’s a laff riot, until it isn’t.  This could be another mini game scene.

Meanwhile Glossy goes on a mini game and saves the village with a ton of rat meat.

Rematch between Thurston and Hard John.  Thurston scores big money and buys the brakeboots and more magic items from the Merchant.  Extra lifes still too expensive.

Murderous monsters make the streets more dangerous.  It’s a speed trap.  Ralph wakes up underground – he was killed, explains why/how.  Time to fuck up the precinct.  But why is the usually sneaky Ralph being so brave?  We have to wonder.

Epic action leads to penultimate confrontation with Hard John.  Dejah gets damsel’d.  Personal hells are a thing and Thurston is pulled into one.

Thurston has weirder convos with Ralph and the merchant, starts to figure things out.  Along way out of hell he has a homoerotic scene with Ralph.  He rescues Dejah during final fight.  Romance with her?  Undecided.

Final fight some major thing happens.  Not decided yet.  Matrix ending?  Hell destroyed?  Option to ascend rejected for love? . . . . . . . . . . ..  …..  HUnngggghhh i needs to sort this shit all out.  Bullets.
–

ACT ONE

  • Road Rage Demons (RRDs) established.  Immortal, damned to repeat hell commute.
  • Innocent People are born in hell, live underground eating rats and pigeons, Dejah established.
  • Thurston out to rescue Dejah.  Action hero element established.  She gets hurt bad enough he goes on a health drink quest where they meet Ralph, and they find out Hard John – Thurston’s mentor – has metamorphosed into a police demon.  Not fully explained to Dejah and the reader. –Glossy should be here too.
  • More danger, don’t get the drink in time, and Dejah dies.  “See you later.”  She wakes in cradle and, having the three lives explained to her, feels bad Thurston might lose one because he tried to save her.
  • Thurston wants to make up for her lost life and others in the enclave, raising the issue of hell money and the merchant.  Why does Ralph live like he does?  Why isn’t he more helpful?  What’s the merchant’s deal?  Ralph says we can get a lot of money with an armored car heist, and they scheme it up a bit.  During this time Ralph hints that he knows some demons – like cops – operate by different rules from the RRDs/commuters.
  • On the way home, Glossy and Thurston are almost caught by Hard John.

–
ACT TWO

  • Dejah says she wants to be brave hero like Thurston and he begins her training, establishing more of the setting.
  • They do the armored car raid.  Thurston loses a life and Dejah learns she can radically gleam the cube.
  • The enclave is running out of food and water because the roads are too dangerous with Hard John having turned.
  • Trying to get their cut of the money back from Ralph leads to road duel with Hard John and this time Thurston wins.  Uses his money to buy magic items that help in next biz.
  • They scheme to dump all RRDs in the reservoir without killing them.  They are slowly killing each other, but still, generally, it worked.
  • Glossy mini-game.
  • While checking out the situation, Ralph sees Hard John and cops bomb the trapped RRDs to kill them and start them back to commuting again.  He loses a life.
  • Waking up in the yoni, Ralph is pissed, and shares that he thinks there may be a way to perma-kill cops, making something like the reservoir trick a sure thing.  Also that he has money for an extra life.  Maybe hints/lies it’s enough for more than just him?
  • They go get his stash, then badger the merchant into selling the secret of how to perma-kill cops.

_
ACT THREE

  • Raid the Precinct.  Ralph captured and Dejah and Thurston lose their second lives, but discover where actual place to go for victory is.  Back in enclave, Thurston says he’s going out even though he only has one life left, nominates Dejah and some other people as possible replacements.  Nobody likes any of it.  After he leaves, Dejah caves to temptation and runs after him.
  • Raid the … Prison, maybe?  Office building like where Dan Kowal works?  This devolves into a sort of personal hell / gauntlet toward enlightment / transcendance.  Ralph, Thurston, and the Merchant are involved, Dejah is still in “real world” hell and trying to save them, or at least kill Hard John.  EDIT TO ADD:  Hard John’s phylactery should be in his spawn point – his home.  I was thinking cops make too much money and probly all have mcmansions or big-ass houses, and then I thought of the idea I had he was a cop from the 70s, and that made me think of the hideous interior design of the IRL shit what inspired the Amityville Horror, and I’m like, wouldn’t that be a funny location?
  • Thurston has moments with Ralph and the Merchant, before being returned to his body.  I think he’s dying but not quite dead and blows on a puddle, regaining his last life.
  • Maybe Dejah is actually the one who defeats the cops, while Thurston is on the edge of death.  I know you’re supposed to defeat your mentor, but maybe Thurston is too peaceful at heart for that.
  • Thurston goes Neo-mode and in conversation with an angel opts not to leave hell, negotiating for a miracle.  The sky turns into a giant mirror that refreshes all the lives of the innocent in hell, and the status quo is restored.
    –

Alright.  I tries it some more…

–

Road Rage I

Content Warnings:  It’s horror.  Whatever.

CHUNK ONE__

_
Dan Kowal had once been a reasonable man – of this he was certain, though he could not remember that time and never noticed that he could not remember it.  The world was unreasonable, so fuck the world, he’d give it back what it had given him, every day in every way.  He emerged from sleep like a poison womb, immediately forgetting sleep, immediately remembering waking life, and howling obscenities at the air he was cursed to breathe.

Thrashing limbs burst from the pool of grey grease, gripped the frame of rotting cotton and wire, jerked him upright.  Slimy pale feet on the corroded hardwood, its texture nearly as weak and pliant as cork.  He knew that he had a bitch of a wife and snot-nosed kids, but they must have left him.  The bed could not hold two people.  Probably he was paying alimony, but he couldn’t remember the details, just that everything in his life was a complete fuckjob.  No sense of working toward a future when that would end – when his dues would be paid – he was only aware of the raw present.  Gotta fucking go.

The TV crackled and hummed and nattered with solicitous tones and hammering irregular beats.  Dan didn’t pay it any attention, didn’t regard it as part of his daily torment, although it was.

In the rusty bathroom mirror, time to shave.  He looked like he hadn’t shaved in a month, but he must have shaved yesterday.  Whatever.  A more pressing issue was the broken cheekbone, the unmoored segment twisted to create a flat stretch below his eye – a depression into which that eye sagged, leaving his vision blurry.  Fuck that shit!  He couldn’t afford to take time off for medical care.  Not now.  He felt for the outer edge of it and tried to get a grip, so he could shove it back into place.  Damn slippery skin.

Was there a little hole in that skin?  Yes, there was.  Like an entry wound from a bullet.  But that would mean a huge hole in the back of his skull, and that wasn’t possible.  He did dimly recall being shot by some asswipe.  See if that happens again, you rat fuck.

The muscles and tendons of his face had a preferred shape, and when he managed to wedge the bone fragment back into its original position, they finished the work, propping his eyeball – but goddamn it hurt.  He steadied himself with a palm splayed on the wall, clenching and unclenching the other hand in a fist.  When his focus returned, shaving.

He couldn’t remember shopping but he always had a little cream left.  Some kind of shitty gel type, probably his wife’s fault.  Blue slime joined the grey slime in his beard and frothed into something like the shit that comes out of slugs when you pick them up.  The razor was shitty but who has the time to replace them?  It ripped out hairs as much as it cut them.  The mess it left in the drain looked like somebody had punched a rodent to death and emptied a grease trap over the remains.  The heat in the shower could close the nicks, right?

The shower was just a standing stall hemmed in with soap-stained textured plexiglass.  It took all his self-control not to shatter the glass, just for the satisfaction of breaking something.  The water had to be hot as hell to cut the oil of his shitty life, doing more of the work than the thin suds from his bar of soap and threadbare rag.  He wanted to pull all of his skin off, but resisted.  Again, he had to get to work.  Self-destruction now would just mean having to talk to his boss about shit.

Back in the living room, just long enough to put on his clothes.  The TV was always on, day and night, and always alternating between advertisements and traffic reports.  Rush hour never really begins or ends, does it?  Because some fuck is always trying to be smart and skip the rush by going in early, or was working some other bizarre shift, so the report was always relevant.  He lucked out that the tube was between commercials so he could get the bad news.

“Highways 51 and 96, and Interstate 183 are all congested with multiple ongoing collisions.”  Xaviera Holland was the ethnically ambiguous peroxide blonde rattling off the details like a machine churning out ticker tape of meaningless codes.  “Tensions have erupted into gun violence by the Nelson Street Turnpike with four policemen and twenty commuters dead.  Most of the gas stations on the Third Avenue Corridor are in flames.  Authorities advise caution on all roads within city limits, and in the suburbs except for Diamond, Horace, Ballinger, and Cypress Row.  In those areas traffic is sluggish but there are presently no collisions.  Correction, a truck has spilled burning chemicals in the northeast corner of Horace, where they have broken through the retaining wall and are currently flooding the blocks between 144th and Flagston.”

Whenever she mentioned something that was inconvenient to Dan, he pictured her body being ripped apart.  Or was it his imagination?  Was she actually split open like a biology class frog, organs all spread out on t-pins, and then immediately not?  The screen was full of digital artifacts and blotches of LCD bleed.  Maybe he had no imagination left and the TV was just obliging his rage, like the way it was always so easy to find bullets in a pinch.

It meant little to him, just one more thing adding to the anger he felt every moment of his life.  As the TV cut to commercials, he headed to the kitchen for breakfast.  He’d skip it if he could, but the commute could take every last thing out of you, if you weren’t ready for it.  In the background, the voice-over was so meaningless, easy to ignore except as a mounting static inside his body.

Again, Dan didn’t remember getting groceries, but the usual shit was in the cupboards and the fridge.  Maybe his bitch wife had just left a few days ago.  Who cares?  Throw a bowl on the table.  Pour cereal out of a cardboard box.  It was all plastic, glass, and wire these days.  Probably meant to be toys for fucking kids, so much that it didn’t leave room for flakes and freeze-dried fruit and marshmallows.  He poured the milk into the bowl, and it was all sludgy motor oil.  Probably just a scheme to adulterate the milk with something cheaper that got out of hand, but hey, not like he had anything else.  Something wasn’t going down.  Steel wool?  He yarded it out of his throat with angry fingers, and got to work on the rest.

No garage.  Can’t afford it because of the alimony, maybe.  He slammed the door behind him and it sagged from the hinges.  No need to lock it.  He had nothing anyone wanted, and if he found someone in there, he’d probably just kill them.  The cops didn’t care.  Nobody cared.

Another day in paradise.  Smog kept the sky a permanent rust haze, a low ceiling for the world that helped keep the idea of heaven at bay.  There could be nothing above that bloody miasma.  Helicopters sluggishly cut wakes in the lower reaches of it, doing who knows what for hell knows why.  All grass was dead, all wood blistered, all concrete stained.  Cars, trucks, SUVs, hatchbacks, station wagons, minivans, and commercial vehicles rolled by in a stuttering parade, five to ten miles per hour – the best they could hope for, without shit getting violent.  Not that anyone had any hesitation about that, but they had to save it for later, if they were going to have any shot of getting to work.

All the cars on the curb were crammed together so tight their bumpers were flattened.  The first person to get their car out would loosen the squeeze for the others, but it was a lot of effort, and nobody wanted to be it.  Dan was mad enough to just plow ahead, kicking at his car until it bulged free enough to try the wheels.  The car in front of him lost a tail light in the commotion.

Dan Carson crossed his lawn with aggressive strides, stopping only to rip a fence picket out of the ground as an improvised weapon.  “The fuck did you just do to my car, neighbor?”

Dan Kowal wheeled around and walked straight up to him, chest puffed.  Carson reflexively lashed out with the picket, smashing it across Kowal’s shoulder.  Blood welled beneath his sleeve, but he didn’t flinch.

Kowal said, “Maybe you shouldna parked so fucking close, neighbor.  Didja think about that?”

“Fuck you, pal.  If my insurance goes up one solitary penny a month, I’ll wipe my ass with your face and use your fuckin’ skull for a mailbox.”

“And fuck you very much as well, Carson.  We’ll see whose fuckin’ mug ends up in the sewer when we get off work, right?  Or am I the only man in this motherfucking city with a goddamned job?”

“If I didn’t have to be at work in a half hour, we’d find out right now.”

“The feeling is mutual, friendo.  Have a nice fucking day.” He saluted him and stomped back to his olive green honda civic, almost ripping the door off the hinges.  It didn’t close all the way, already deformed by his efforts at dislodging the car, but that didn’t matter.  Nothing mattered except the commute.

Dan Carson watched him go, momentarily entranced by the cracks in the back of Kowal’s skull, who knows what kind of connective tissue the only thing holding his brain in place.  Biting back the desire to pull the cracks open, just to see what it looked like.

Kowal started his car, and was shortly ramming it back and forth between Carson’s datsun and Susan Washington’s chevy S-10, each impact getting him closer to the freedom to drive away – such as that freedom was.  Carson fumed and ripped open the door to his car, getting inside just to get to the glove box, and his big revolver.  The jolts from repeated impacts made it hard to get the weapon free, but he finally did, gripping the handle so tight, using the gun in lieu of a free hand to brace himself, to shove himself back out onto the sidewalk.

He walked out into traffic behind Kowal as he started to pull away, only to get jerked to the asphalt by a tire bearing down on his heel.  It was a low-speed vehicular manslaughter, dragging him slowly under an F-150, breaking one bone at a time until Carson stopped moving.  By the time that had happened, he’d emptied his revolver into anything and nothing, just more noise in a city of traffic, gunshots, and screams.
–

You could jockey for side roads, but it was always a crap shoot.  Most days you just joined the line.  People who had to be at work by nine left as early as two, three in the morning.  Timid types with darting movements and heads on swivels.  Cowards.  Most joined the river of metal around five.  Both sides of the highway had motherfuckers driving the same direction, whatever the laws.  Anybody unlucky enough to be coming home from a graveyard shift had to swim against that current.  The only real risk to driving on the wrong side of the road was a police riot, but Dan thought it was worthwhile.  Most days you didn’t get shot.

Highway 96, driving on the left side of the median, jockeying for position, bullying graveyard shift off the busiest lanes.  Powering through drifts of splintered steel, composite fiber, safety glass, bone, blood.  Near the Wasteyards a pileup had been driven over enough times to wear down to a crude metal ramp in the road, too easy to rip a tire on, but what could you do?  Somehow he got over the hump with all tires intact.

At the offramp downtown the cops didn’t even bother moving their vehicles from the traps.  Armored personnel carriers with roof-mounted machinegun turrets had been parked there so long the tires melted.  The armored men in those turrets were as withered as burnt turkey, where their flesh was still visible through the dust and kevlar.  Did arms and legs move the pedals and levers of the turrets, did fingers pull the triggers, or were the machines pushing the dead bones around?  They fired with perfect efficiency, keeping traffic moving by blasting obstructions to passable smithereens.

If moving is what you call that.  Every day every single commuter that passed that gauntlet had to imagine getting out and walking, just leaving the car and walking to work.  Just do it.  Just go.  By christ it would be faster.  So much faster.  But nobody ever caved to that temptation, because of the principle of the thing.  They made their goddamned car payments, they paid for gas, why should they have to walk?  Fuck that shit.  Better to sit there, blood boiling, grinding against each other, staring at the drivers around you in mutual hostility, frustrated bloodlust.  If you can just get there, just get past the turrets, just get around the corner, they’d know.

They would get around that corner.  The first block was demolition derby, with smashed cars and bodies everywhere, the first floor lobbies of every business blasted out and strewn with wreckage.  The sense of freedom from the watchful eye of the law was celebrated with violence.  Dan didn’t reach for his gun because he wanted maximum speed, instead using his honda as a weapon.  He was rewarded with punctuality.  Less than two hours late for work meant less grief from the boss, right?

Nobody was ever to work on time, except management, who seemed to grow out of the walls like mushrooms when no one was looking.  The only reason there was adequate parking was that a good chunk of the employees didn’t survive the commute, but that meant everyone who did show up was doing more than their fair share of work.  And yet it wasn’t really appreciated, was it?  Surviving, showing up, you were still griped at.  But most were over three hours late, barely getting any work in before having to punch out and hit the streets again.

Dan got into the elevator with Rebecca Tranh.  She was holding her side, blood soaking her blouse, but she straightened up when she saw him.  Don’t show weakness, understood.  They didn’t say anything as the elevator lurched through the building.  She was especially tight-lipped, nostril flaring with labored breathing.  He knew the feeling – forcibly holding the nostril open to make the rasp of your suffering quieter.

He didn’t slip in her blood stepping out on their floor.  The day was going exceptionally well.  Yellow mayonnaise light buzzed from the ceilings between drop tiles encrusted with reddish dust.  They punched their time cards at the thick dull metal clock and went straight to their cubicles.  Chipping beige shellacked metal wrapped with cracking beige polyurethane, spongy yellow innards visible through the wounds.  The desks were too covered with continuous feed paper to see the wood, the computers and office machines beige inside beige over beige.

Sticky notes along the top of the CRT should have said where he left off the day before, but looked like they’d bleached invisible in years of sunlight.  There was only enough of a ghost left to tempt one to read, to tease one into frustration.  He ripped one in half from surprise, when the Team Manager Ross Sparinger wrapped its talons around the edge of the cubicle and peered inside.

“Daniel, I see you’re late.”

“I’m earlier than everyone else.”  He tried not to look at the being, focused on the paper scraps in his hands.

“Daniel, Daniel, Daniel.  That is obviously untrue, and you’re already escalating the temperature of this exchange.  It’s the kind of problem that gets people let go, mm?”  Sparinger was an exceptionally clean suit containing something dark red, with sharp black bits at the extremities.  To see its face was to look fully upon one’s self, which was the last thing anyone needed.

“OK, alright.  Please finish your piece so I can get to this work.  I need to…  I need to…”  Something complex enough to verge on meaningless.  Or meaningless in a way that made it look more complex than it was.

“This is for your own benefit.  As much as you need to do that work, you need to know these things as well.  It is really important for every single person in this office to be here when they are supposed to be here.  Staffing is a cost and the company can only remain profitable by reducing costs as much as possible.  We are already operating on a razor’s edge, Daniel.  A razor’s edge.”

Sweat dripped around Daniel’s head, coursed over pounding veins in his neck.  “What can I do to help you with that, Ross?”

A manila folder joined the stack of work covering his desk.  Sparinger said, “These are the reports Benjamin and Thomas were meant to input today.  Get it done by close of business, Daniel.  And your own work as well.  We can’t miss a dot this quarter.”

“I’ll try.”

“And best succeed.”  The thing slipped away, leaving Dan with his usual impossible amount of work.

If he could just remember how to do it.  The notes he’d made to himself were all so faded.  Nothing made sense.  He was going to be fired and end up a bum, like those rat pedestrians.  Until that happened, he had to keep trying.  Better dead than a bum.  A non-driver.

The new printed material helped.  He was able to decipher how it related to the programs on his computer, and start doing the inputs.  But what about his own work?  What had he even been doing?  As soon as he got into a data entry groove enough to free his mind to start wondering, the new work got to be more complicated.  There was no place to enter the data from some columns, and every sixth entry in the BIF column exceeded the character limit.  Rounding would be a problem.  Can’t miss a dot.

Dan tied himself in knots and broke down repeatedly, shuddering and fumbling at nothing, grinding his teeth.  But five o’clock was coming and he couldn’t be late out the door.  You did not want to be that guy, late off the jump, unable to get home before two AM.  His anger at being threatened, and at the possibility he’d get fired for only being the most productive worker in the building that day, finally broke through the stress and convinced him to half-ass the inputs.

At last, he was rushing to the elevator.  He punched the clock and stepped over Rebecca’s corpse, ignoring the way it seemed to be twitching and dissolving into the floor, and descended the shaft.  Work remained in his head and in his hands, just a poison to make him that much more insane on the way home.  He could sense his car, like a dreamer returning to their body.  He ignored the way Rebecca’s car was twitching and disintegrating into the concrete, pieces of frame moving like the legs of a dying spider.

There was no sense of relief in getting behind the wheel, just a sense that motion could resume after a seemingly endless red light.  It wasn’t happiness, and in fact, just set him on a path to a new release of anger.  His feet touched the pedals and he felt the argument with Dan Carson, heard his gunshots, anticipated what he’d do to that face when he saw it again.  He touched the gearshift and thought about everyone who had cut him off, had come too close, had clipped the paint, had dared to shoot at his car along the way in – how much he wanted to make them all pay.  He jammed his key in the ignition and turned, felt the impossible work task, the threat against his livelihood and by extension his life, the impossibility of facing the creatures that kept him in this state, and he wanted to destroy himself for his own cowardice.  He pulled out, knowing he didn’t care if he lived or died on the way home, as long as he could hurt people.
–

Pedestrians were rare on the street.  Something about them was just so killable, it was hard to resist the urge.  And what would it matter?  Taking the time to roll up on the sidewalk and do the deed, you might lose your place in line, might mess up your car, might be seen by a cop who would punish you…  Still, tempting enough to just do it, sometimes.  This was surely why they were so rare.

You could tell the difference between pedestrians and temporarily embarrassed drivers.  They were both full of fear, but the fear was visibly different.  Drivers were miserable, grey, yarded out things, ready to pivot to murderous rage at the drop of a pin.  Pedestrians were like rats and pigeons, just timid animals quivering and darting from shadow to shadow.  Maybe it was the spark of life in them, that you could see they had something left to lose, that fueled the murder impulse.  Dan didn’t care which because he so rarely saw them at a close enough range or opportune moment to act on it.

The cars were bumper to bumper on Ennis, which was the closest thing to a reasonable alternate route to the on-ramp for 96.  The sun was disappearing, though hard to tell through the smog and the buildings which direction.  It was just a gradual draining of natural light, before it would be replaced by equally yellow streetlamps.  The lamps didn’t turn on quite soon enough to make it work, making the dusk a great reminder of how much time you were losing to the jerks in front of you.  Deep charcoal grey shadows and muddier middle tones cut up the sidewalks and alleys.

For the first time in ages, Dan saw one.  Unbelievable!  Her skin was so dark she was nearly invisible in the shadows, and it was only chance that his eyes had fallen upon her.  She leaned against a wall, head darting back and forth, hoping for what?  Racist slurs came to his lips, though the only slur that held any meaning in his heart these days was “pedestrian.”  He’d lose his place in line, but it would be worth it.

He revved the engine for a burst of speed, drawing her attention, but he played it off like he wasn’t paying attention to her.  Important for her to not notice he was targeting her until it was too late to dodge.  Suddenly a car somewhere up the road distracted her, and he didn’t care why.  It was the opening he needed to gun it.

What was that movement out of the corner of his eye, as he jumped the curb, a hubcap rolling free?  Another pedestrian?  A two for one deal?  She was dead meat, at least.  Suddenly, he was robbed!  The woman flew out of the way, and a white man landed on his hood, bouncing around on Dan’s front end as it crunched and ground against the brick wall.  Motherfucker was like popcorn, bouncing away from serious injury at every moment, then falling out of sight.

Dan reversed, his car’s maneuverability as warped as its frame, but came free of the wall.  The man stood as he passed, and a moment later was in front of him again.  No way I can accelerate faster than he can dodge now.  He punched open the glovebox and reached inside for his gun.

Through the jagged frame of the blown out windshield, the young guy looked square at him with the most alien expression –  something he’d only ever seen in advertisements – a smile.  Then he shot Dan twice in the face.
–

Dreaming is the reliving of waking, of practicing the path you walk in the light of day.  Daniel Kowal’s brain began again, each reborn part adding substance to that dream, to the pain and rage that could never end.  His womb was steel springs and rotten tufts of cotton and hay, suspended in a vat of grease – an amniotic substance somewhere between the oil of engines and of human skin, continuous with the wombs of every soul that had not survived the previous day’s damnation.  His flesh was knit from horror and pain, from animal aggression that could never be allowed to stay dead.

He woke again, screaming obscenities, flailing free of the oily mattress.  Sun would not rise for hours but his alarm clock would go off in seconds.  Another day another motherfucking dollar, Danny Boy.

–

Roadrageous Character Contemplations

CRIKEY.  I started this article ages ago.  Anyway, it’s time…  Spoilers if you’re going to read Road Rage, anyway.

Been having an emotionally ruff time meatspacewise, not feeling too inspired.  But stay thy tongues, those who say we must bide our times until all is in readiness, that we must take it easy on ourselves.  There is a time and place for that, and this is not that day.  I am also feeling that press, that vibe that tomorrow is not guaranteed, and I want to have done as much as possible before I go.  (edit to add 😭)

So I force myself to think about the story I’m going to try to write in July.  Even tho the action is more GTA / The Transporter, the most direct inspiration is the Resident Evil IV remake that came out a few years ago.  I didn’t play it.  Frankly I’m no gamer and the play looked wearying to me.  Too many shots to take out those zombies.

But watching other people play it was a good time.  It probably helped that the action hero saving the girl was really nice to her, and their chaste relationship was kinda moving?  I hear tell the original didn’t hit those notes as well.  That’s not what inspired me the most, however.

RE4 Remake made the transition between main game play and segments with the merchant or the shooting gallery minigame seamless, which added a surreal element.  One minute you’re saving the president’s daughter from endless armies of monsters, the next you’re trading loot with an amiable cockney, or shooting at wooden pirates while the first daughter cheers you on.  How the hell did the merchant get to the secret island covered in machine gun turrets and lasers?  Why is Ashley so chill with Leon taking time out to play games when they’re both dying from zombie worm infestation?

And for me, could this be used in a novel?  What if a novel had minigames and cheerful NPCs in the depths of hell?  There have been movies that incorporated video game ideas, the most notable being Hardcore Henry.  Is a novel getting too far removed from the audio-visual media to make this work?

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.  So I’ll be trying to think through this venture in blog posts, like I did with Foothill Project.  Goddamn that one had a lot of work for something without a single draft.  This should be much simpler, but in a sense, more baroque things can get a pass for any one element being weak, so there’s more pressure for this to be tight as fuck, in its finished form.  Right?

I’ll talk about characters here.  It’s easy for me to get a visual of a character and just act out how I’d expect someone to act who looks like that.  Inherently superficial.  Or do one note characters, like almost everyone in Centennial Hills.  There’s an idea characters should change over time, that this is essential for main characters.  Tho I feel that’s not always needed – the maxim is overstated – it would probably make them more interesting to experience.  How can I make my cardboard cutouts feel more deep?  How can they evolve?

Leon Kennedy was fun, but completely unreasonable.  Nobody is built like that without devoting their life to bodybuilding.  That seems gay to me, which is cool, love the shirtless mod, but my mental image of an action hero is a lil more Bruce Willis than Jean-Claude.  My guy has enough muscles to do some parkour and carry some bullets.  Also less of a tool than Kennedy, who had that soldier fetish nonsense going on.

Thurston, no last name, because people remember their first names when they spawn in Hell but not the last.  Doesn’t remember life but did show up with some talent for “extreme” sport, hinting at his carefree and casual former life.  Learned quickly you have to be brave to help the people survive, and learned how to use guns and drive aggressively from his mentor Hard John.  The other risk is getting too angry.  If a heroic type gets genuinely furious during the endless violence, they might transform into a road rage demon.  In this task – staying peaceful at heart – Thurston is a natural.

How can he change over time?  The plot outline I had concludes (big spoiler) with him transcending the video game mechanics neo-style.  Not 100% decided on what that means, but mostly there.  But what about an emotional journey?  Or is a spiritual journey enough?  Nay.  Should be some emotions in it all.  I have him doing bisexual romantical stuff a lil bit…  idk.

Dejah arrives in hell with panic, runs out into traffic.  After respawning where she began that misadventure, she tries to play it cool, and learn how to live with this new circumstance.  Would she have any thoughts on escaping to heaven?  Returning to Earth?  She might not be the main character, but she is the closest to the reader’s life experience.  I should play that up, maybe.

I think in my original outline she only dies once.  (I could double back on previous article to be sure but this is annoying enough to write as is.)  Anyway, it would be more exciting if she gets close to three, but still feels the need to risk losing her last life.  The culmination of a journey from total terror to total courage.

Ralph is my Luis stand-in, but how is he distinguished?  I never watched Midnight Cowboy but clearly I picked up a lot of Ratso Rizzo from cultural osmosis, picturing that a lot.  Young Hoffman and young Pacino had similar vibes going on, but of the two, Pacino was sexier.  He aged worse, boy howdy, but that’s allowed in life.  I’m just thinking about that young guy here…

Irrelevant sidebar here, I saw that Viggo Aragorn Mortensen was in Carlito’s Way, playing a pathetic loser who ends up wearing a wire and melting down in front of our mans.  It’s funny to think, in storytelling conventions, main characters are allowed dignity, and anyone else can end up supremely humiliated.  After he got to play the king, no more humiliations.

Thinking about movie humiliations, the king of that has to be Sean Bean in Ronin.  U kno tf I’m talkin’ about, omg.  In those yt compilations of times Sean Bean died in movies, they should include that one.  He didn’t die, but his character was assassinated.

That got me considering that the embarrassing loser is a fun thing to have in a story.  I don’t remember much of anything after that scene in Ronin.  Jean Reno was acting subtly worshipful of a previous generation’s macho man, Natascha McElhone had some unfortunate make-out session to do, Jonathan Pryce was an unlikable creep.  They wanted to make it look like a car was burning rubber and used an egregious fake smoke effect.  I’m like, bring back Sean Bean, and slap him around some more!

I can’t see Thurston slapping Ralph around.  Gotta be some other ways for him to look charmingly weak…  As for how he can change over the story, still no strong ideas.

Ooh just had an idea.  While Thurston is figuring a path out of hell toward heaven, Ralph is farther down the path of transcendence – but he’s going a different direction with it.  Toward becoming like The Merchant?  When they have their big scene late in the story, Ralph gives Thurston a hint that helps him along his path.

Realizing I’m going to have to drill down the plot more, with crisscrossing arcs of action, to keep the momentum going.  (the first of july is upon me and i still haven’t)

Glossy the Doggo is inspired by video games, anime, etc. having cute animals sidekicks, and by the stock transgressive take on innocent material joke they did in a Venture Brothers episode penned by Ben Edlund – specifically the Shaggy stand-in hallucinating the Scooby stand-in talking to him like the Son of Sam.  “You are the Sword of Michael, Sonny!” -that kinda shit.

So funky little dog hangs out with Thurston and occasionally says stuff like… I’d originally described it as non-sequitur blasphemy, but it would be good to come up with a pattern to it.  Something better than “lolrandom.”  Certainly this could be a static character, so I’ll focus on this for him.  Her?  Sure.

That would be funny if her voice was sultry succubus style, coming out of a homely dog.  She shouldn’t make too much sense.  I wonder…  Asked my husband and he said maybe some legalistic attitude about rules of the road, like Mr. Eddy in Lost Highway, since we’re in vehicular hell.  …Yeah, maybe that could work.  Like, Glossy tells Thurston when he breaks the rules of the road, and the punishments the cops will mete out if he’s captured.  “You crossed the double yellow line, Thurston.  This is punishable by fifty years of evisceration.”

I also had an idea she talks about what’s going on in mechanical metaphors, something like, gigerish hell imagery…  Not sure.  Whatever.

Hard John transforms before the story begins.  Guess I’ll have to include flashbacks.  He was the original best hero of the nice hell-people, but raged too much and became a demon – specifically a traffic cop.  All the demons instinctively know their job and place in the infernal hierarchy.  Wake up in your newly assigned home.  Was the home born when he was?  Go to work.  Clock in at the cop shop, then set out on your motorcycle to corral the ragers – guns blazing.

How did it happen?  I think he had a not-quite-correct idea of what turns you into a demon, didn’t realize his anger was the issue, so he was teaching Thurston wrong.  Let’s say John thought the problem was losing control of yourself, but he was allowing himself to be mad as hell on the inside.  Over time Thurston figures out that he can never turn cop because it’s about anger, and he just isn’t an angry guy.

I had an idea that when you become a demon you get your surname back.  John become Officer Suchnsuch.  Maybe Thurston knows this, and when he starts to remember some things about his life, he fears he’s turning into a rage demon.  Turns out this also happens when you’re on a path to transcendence.

The Merchant is some inconsequential trans representation.  Hello.  As an NPC, she’s inherently static.  on the other hand, revelation she’s more than a list of exhaustible dialogue options could be a fun late stage surprise.

What does it mean to be an NPC in hell?  Not a demon, not an angel, just trading hell money for guns and such?  Maybe that’s what transcendence will look like for Ralph.  Is there room for more than one merchant in hell?  Will she get replaced by him?  If anything I might raise the possibility, then pull back and say nvm.  Usually in RPGs there’s more than one vendor, even if there wasn’t in RE.

Anyway, when I get this thing started, it’ll just be a day in a demon’s life.  I have the rough plot outline of that but fucken zero particulars developed.  This might not be pure pantsing, but it’s more close than I’m usually comfortable with.  Excelsior!

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Road Raging

I had this idea for an intense action-horror novel, inspired by video games, that takes place in the hell of people who killed others by driving angry.  To honor the fallen demonic music man James “Gost” Lollar, my husband and I are going to write heavy-duty hellfire-having stories for the July noveling month.  This is the one I have up my sleeve.  The only card I need?

I knew I’d elaborated on the idea more somewhere but forgot where.  Found it.  Lemme copy-paste the notes here for my future reference.  If you think you might read it, don’t read this, if you don’t wanna get spoilt.
–

__Road Rage

Opens with freaky ragecase man in some kind of hell, getting up and going to work.  A full day in his life, which revolves around the commute.  On the way home he tries to kill some pedestrians, and they kill him.

Cut to the birth, earlier that day, one of those pedestrians being born from a pile of gore like Frank Hellraiser.  She is sad and scared, and at some point soon she runs away.  A guy comes in and they send him back out to save her.

She survives some amount of hell but it’s too wild and she’s about to get killed when the guy comes in.  Total action hero.  They survive lots of violence, and meet a guy who mentions he saw hero’s mentor – who has become a cop.  Hero upset but doesn’t say why.

They get into more danger and she’s killed.  He says sorry, see you soon.  She wakes up in the underground village again and gets that explained to her.  Worries about whether hero might die on the way home too.

Hero gets with sheisty guy again and they scheme on a hot score.  Then he goes home, drawing spooky attention, before losing it.

New girl says she wants to learn to be tough.  Hero agrees bravery is a big deal in hell and they recently lost a guy, so may as well try.  The plan is to have no violence, just stealth, but of course it doesn’t work out.  They do great, beat a sub boss, but in the end the hero’s mentor kills him.  She barely escapes, discovering she knows how to skateboard.

The survivor enclave gets to be low on meat and pure water, because too many demons on the streets.  But if heroes just kill them, they’ll come back.  The plan?  They’re immortal so just detain them indefinitely.  Out on the streets, heroes lure them to the reservoirs and nonlethal crashing.  It’s a laff riot, until it isn’t.

Meanwhile hero’s pet dog Glossy the affenpinscher goes on a mini game and saves the village with a ton of rat meat.

Big action leads to another victory, drawing attention of a bigger bad.  Hero wins a minigame of his own and springs for the brakeboots and more magic items.  The brakeboots are boots so strong they can help you brake a car by putting your foot out the door.  This element of things is another thing inspired directly by video games.

Murderous monsters make the streets more dangerous.  It’s a speed trap.  Sheisty guy wakes up underground – he was killed, explains why/how.  Time to fuck up the precinct.  Why so brave?  We have to wonder.

Epic action leads to confrontation with cop.  Damsel gets damsel’d.  Personal hells are a thing and hero is pulled into one.

Hero has weirder convos with the merchant, starts to figure things out.  Along way out of hell he has a homoerotic scene with sheisty friend.  He rescues the girl during final fight.  Romance with her?  Undecided.

Final fight some major thing happens.  Not decided yet.  Matrix ending?  Hell destroyed?  Option to ascend rejected for love?

Names… let’s say hell people remember their own names like they remember english, but they don’t remember their last names.

Hero – Thurston.  Doesn’t recall previous life as rich kid who liked extreme sports.  Already experienced driver / violence boy at start of story.  White white boy with sandy blond hair and grey-blue eyes.  Like a more practical version of Point Break Bodhi.

Girl – Dejah.  Figures out at some point in story she was a skateboarder, whatever that means about her.  Dark-skinned girl.

Sheisty boy – Ralph.  Italian-looking guy, young Pacino energy.  Doesn’t live in the village because he likes fancier dwellings among demon homes.

The dog – Glossy.  Short for Glasya-labolas, Author of Bloodshed, an affenpinscher who speaks in non-sequitur blasphemy.

The Mentor – Hard John, so named because there are multiple johns in the village and no last names to distinguish them.  Formerly an Irish-american cop from the seventies, with a black moustache and light green eyes.  Fortyish, not a big guy, but outsized powers of intimidation.

The Merchant – The Merchant.  Fiftyish trans woman.  Me-ish?

Idea for end – He has option of transcending but wants to stay and help people, or stay for love, and realizes he can’t stay without being limited somehow – or is told by some spiritual intercessor idk, but basically gets cast back into hell with his lives reset.  …Maybe he gets a reset for everybody, back to three lives.

Discussion with an angel, “hey yer part of the problem aren’t you, keeping us down here?”  “Nobody has any choice about anything.  Even god is a slave to himself”

Inspiration note:  Watchin John Wolfe replayin RE games before watching Requiem.  Got up to RE 4 remake, which was the inspiration for Road Rage.  I wanna make my merchant character as charismatic as the one in that game, in a differenty type way, but still.  Kinda me -ish, flirty but not in a pushy way, just silly.  Like Austin Powers by way of the Cryptkeeper but take it down a few notches, mix in a georgia peach?

That video game had realistic enough graphics that the unrealistic elements took on a surreal quality.  Specifically the merchant.  How does he get around?  What is he doing there?  It’s like he’s a recurring hallucination Leon is having, but one that can hand him firearms.

So I came up with an idea for an action adventure novel that will include this kind of stuff.  I’m given to understand some people are already doing this in some fanfic, wouldn’t know for sure.  But if it was done real well, higher quality than the stuff in that space typically is, maybe..?  I dunno.

I actually had more notes than this somewhere but I have no idea where, feel like it got deleted somehow.  Boooo!  I don’t remember much from it, but feel like there’s some kind of healing items?  I know I wanted it to be video gamey but I can kinda imagine getting by without that convention.  …I’ve lost that all.  Bummer.

I’m also realizing an influence for this was Statham movie The Transporter.

Anyway, that’s the early notes.  Gotta beat this into a story in July.  I’m liking posting my first drafts, and think this one just might be exciting enough to get more than one rando to read them.  I wonder…

–

Nostromowrimo

when i say my writing group is doing an unaffiliated writing month, i mean to say only my husband and i are, because the world is lousy with sluggy-ass slugheads.  i like to have consideration but it gets my goat a lil.  i can do some on this hand on that hand -ness…

on one hand, if i can try to write a novel in a month, why can’t the rest of those bums?  i’m workin’ full time in the ugh factory.

on the other hand, i may be creativities georg the outlier who should not have been counted.

on the other other hand, my husband is too, and surely there wouldn’t be two creativities georgs.

on the other other other hand, these people have all succeeded at novel months in the past.  what are the odds they’d all be so enfeebled now?

on the other other other other hand

my own husband is a good example of a person becoming progressively more disabled, which seems to be a recurring theme among like every art person i know, like wtf, is art like a slow-burning cancer.

on the other other other other other hand, my husband is one of the people who is noveling this month, already hit 50k words and is now just aiming for completion of the story with no specified word count goal.

on the other other other other other other hand, i can believe there is a sort of pandemic of distraction, demoralization, or something, that is oppressing the masses, making us less capable than we used to be.

on the other other other other other other other hand, what is it, truly?  it’s real hard for me to imagine there’s a decent excuse for how slugheaded the world has become.  you don’t think i’d rather be vegging out, watching tv shows, sleeping every chance i get?  if i did that, life would pass me by.

anyway, this is detracting from time i can be writing so i’m leaving now.  point is, i know i’m better than most at this, but i shouldn’t be.  come correct, ye sluggardly masses.  you princes of new york.

–

Another Goddamn Tapout

I was working on my lotto ticket this month.  I have a lot of stories to tell, gonna do some up proper eventually.  Self-publish, most likely.  The lotto ticket?  Not like the others.  I was going to omit queerness, make the main characters white, and follow a conventional thriller outline – sell out, maximize appeal to stodgy industry scum.  It was to be the last thing I bother trying to pitch, but I couldn’t hack it this month.  My brother came over for a big visit with his kids.  More than one person in my life is getting pressed by mental illness.  I just don’t have the time right now.

But man, I wanna get this done.  Any of it.  I’m tired of only going part of the way.  And as far as lamestream publishing, I need to try at least once.  I needs loot.  I’m sure the advances ain’t anything like they used to be, when they happen at all, but who knows?  That’s why it’s a lottery ticket.

I gotta pay off this fucken mortgage before the chaotic nature of this dystopia ruins my life, and the lives of the people that depend on me.  If it wasn’t for shitler, I’d feel a lot safer in slow and steady, but it ain’t like that anymore.  The job security I once enjoyed is a distant memory.  The evergreen advice of the Wutang Clan somes to mind again, “You can’t just get by anymore, you gotta get over.”

Man, FtB was dead as hell yesterday.  Wonder what it’s looking like as this post comes up? … …

–

Still at It, Unfortunately

Last November in novel-writing month, I had intended to write a Thriller in the Dan Brown-Tom Clancy-John Grisham mold, and ended up spending the whole month just doing prep work, barely doing any writing.  This looks to be a repeat performance, and that’s really chappin’ my hide.  I’m just too bombed-out mentally, too much wild shit going on in the world, never getting enough sleep.  But I gotta go fast, like the blue hedge mans.

So I got 69 super short scenes (nice) in rough chronological here, some that are wretched little stubs slipped in because I thought a given character could use a checkin at that point in the story, whether they have anything to do or not.  So as I try to elaborate, I’ll try to justify those scenes.  Also, this is another “post in progress” that I’ll edit more content into as I keep thinking about shit.

First thing I’m going to do tho is think about the qualities I most want a given scene to possess – mystery, horror, passion, humor, or a combination.

I feel like there’s still some things I gotta nail down better before I get into more specific ideas for these scenes.  Let’s see…

Tunnel time, tunnel time…  Silent Hill‘s dark world, the building at the climax of Cure, the wall those guys were crawling through in the first Matrix movie, the labyrinth in Hellraiser II…  I’m not explicitly trying to be David Lynch here so it can be more overtly supernatural, but I would much prefer reading as surreal than fantasy, so how to make it feel like that?  It can be like the environments in my dreams with huge amounts of tiny detail, incongruities like corners not meeting the way they’re supposed to, places you can pass through a wall where you really should not be able to…

Surrealism feels strongest when there’s some kind of emotional reality being spoken to by the imagery on display.  What is the emotional reality?  There are places you aren’t allowed to go, where people do things you aren’t allowed to do, or to see.  The Pentagon, the Teacher’s Lounge, the other rooms at the hospital…  What does it mean to get in there?  Life is dangerous.  You might get caught.  It’s wrong and bad.  Get out.  What if you don’t?  Does that mean you become one of them?  The people who know?  The Illuminati?  Does that inherently and inevitably change you, like wealth does in all the Russian folklore?  Where a reasonable main character finds riches and becomes an asshole?

A sense could build over time that it is making him more like them.  How?  I was thinking the emotional nadir for Matthew would be when Hyun-woo calls attention to the unflattering reality of the situation – Matthew is, on a level not even all that deep, using Hyun-woo’s family tragedy to snare him romantically.  That moment leads directly into a scene where the two are invited to the Bacchanal – invited to be where the monster men are.  They see each other across the room and Hyun-woo is looking like a human in a room of beasts, Matthew imagines himself in that stare to be one of the creeps.  I dunno…  Wait, I was talking about the tunnels.

I guess it could move in stages.  Things that are at first hostile to him become welcoming, or deferent.  Like cockroaches moving away from his touch.  Maybe the feeling of mold in his lungs becomes minty fresh.  Better at seeing in the dark?  Certainly just getting used to the layout of some weird in-between places could be symbolically on a grade to becoming a morlock.

Every other floor in the building is a fake floor, part of the tunnels.  If it was architecturally sensible, they’d be full of unused units that have the same layout as the ones above and below – being designed around the same load-bearing elements.  But it ain’t, so what are those rooms like?  They have windows, maybe even balconies.  Maybe on some floors the windows from one side of the building are part of a long thin structure running all the way through the level to  the window on the other side – empty and bright tunnels one can glimpse through cracks but not get inside of, crawling over or under them like a rodent.

I could use the idea of unreal geography to make the interstitial spaces whatever I like, but I kinda lean toward having them be possible.  You need a way to get from one side of the central hall to the other without passing through it, and the in-between floors can help with that.  He first enters the secret tunnels in the basement/first floorish area.  In the “mansion” end where Freddy dwells, the floor was taken out between 1st and basement to allow for taller ceilings.  Those rooms have to be accessed by going down short stairwells.  The design means much of the basement is intruded on by tall-ceiling rooms, and those rooms can in turn intrude on the basement.  Most will have alcoves or closets that reach into basement territory.  But what is left of the basement?  Coming into it from a different angle gives one the expected things – a boiler room, some utility and storage spaces – but those have concealed entrances to the tunnels.

The interstitial space in the basement doesn’t have to be as weirdly shaped as on the first floor…  Eh, this is enough thought on that for now.  What else do I need to put some more thought into..?

I feel like I already began to put in some thought on this but I don’t remember the results, if any.  In thinking about the tools Lynch used to create a sense of mystery or the surreal, I thought about his use of repeated names, and changing identities as a recurring theme in his oeuvre.  I’m not trying to come up with a grand unified thing for my entire output on the fly – possibly that is something that will emerge on its own – but that may be useful within this project.

All that angel guff was meant to be something that goes unexplained to the reader, to create a sense there is something supernatural afoot, but you don’t get to know exactly what it is.  Part of the reason I say these articles are spoilery if you thought you were going to read this shit – I’m giving more away than I intend to in the final product.  But what could be recurring themes that provoke a sense of mystery?  Anything derived from said angel guff?  The animal souls theme?

Again circles me back to my question of what I will actually show on the page.  Vexatious as hell, but maybe I’m a tiny bit closer now.  I’ve decided, I think, that in addition to looking through holes and cracks that are not visible in the “real world,” if you pass into that world by any means besides your original point of entry, you’re in an alternate reality with more symbolic things happening.  Matthew uses this to free an angel from bondage, that helps defeat Dexter and liberate Yolanda.  But what the hell does that look like?

This could connect back to my Rent is Theft universe.  Most of you wouldn’t have read that.  All of you?  It exists in a place, I’m not linking it here right now.  Second draft will have some huge changes, so I’m a lil shy about it.  But that features a modern apartment building that shows allergy symptoms, sneezing somebody’s bed out the window, insect men in trenchcoats that try to evict the characters, and people hiding a secret slowly transforming into yokai.

All that was surreal expression of the central theme of the book.  The world is built for property law and we’re just living in it.  Capitalism is allergic to us and will ultimately zap us with its antibodies.  We don’t belong here.

This world isn’t like that exactly.  The themes aren’t exactly that.  This housing project is a real thing, with an existence greater than the laws that allow low- to no- income people to live in it.  Like, if civilization ended, people would still be allowed to live in it – because they’re the food to the freaky creeps that lurk there.  The box, the trap.

What people do in their waking lives is all just nonsense that justifies the metaphysical reality of being trapped in the box.  So if there’s something related to work or commerce or anything outside the building, it would appear as fake, just toys.  Monopoly money.  Crude drawings a grandma in lieu of photographs – as far as this box is concerned, if she don’t live here, she isn’t real.

It would make sense for the angels to appear in their natural forms in the spirit vision, but that’s giving away the game too much.  What would they look like, and why?  If humans’ appearance betrays their animal soul, then angels could just look like humans – ironically appearing less monstrous than the actual humans, when viewed thru the cracks.  I like that well enough.

Maybe when they die they could assume their angelic form for a moment, before being digested by the building itself.  Dexter becomes a horse-thing, The Disease a giant snake – and then both just sucked up into floors or walls.

Alright, that’s something.  What else haven’t I considered well enough yet?  I need a good maguffin for The Shipment subplot.  Anime porn?  Cuban cigars?  What is this contraband?  Could it connect to Freddy’s secret vice in the Puss in Boots story, whenever I get around to writing that?

Maybe…  I dunno.  I used to work IRL in a place where I’d log deliveries to a shitty billionaire, but never saw the contents of those deliveries – just mid-size unmarked white trucks, destined for a freight elevator.  Were they driving rare animals past me, so he could kill them for sexual pleasure?  Trafficked humans?  Piles of drugs?  Medieval entertainers like jesters, mummers, and tumblers?  I got no idea, but I thought about it sometimes.  Odds are it wasn’t anything too wild because the possibility a security guard would glimpse it on camera, and fink on the robber baron.  But who knows?

It’s gotta be something for sale, to other clients – not something just for the consumption of our mobbish angels.  What would be fun?  Lab-grown jewels with counterfeit certification of blood mine value?  Bootleg disney films?  Hm… I like that, but that’s not how bootlegging works anymore.  Might be funny if the dudes didn’t know that, but find out later on…  I do like that.  It does create the issue that the reader may wonder if I’m a fool, and then feel kinda cheap later on, like really?  That was the big yuk?  I dunno.  I still think it’s kinda funny.  Plus I hate disney.

Alright.  That’s good.  What else…

What is Bonnie’s thing?  How, after losing connect with the mob princess, does she have the ability to score an invite to Bacchanal?  She must have a job for Freddy’s mob.  Dunno what.  A teenage informant isn’t good for much.  I’m not being enough of an edgelord to have child prostitution in this, tho sadly I’m sure it’s not at all unusual in situations most similar to this IRL.  Let’s say Bonnie… sells… stuff… She can be selling stuff to the ravens; that’s what she’ll do in the earlier scene with them.  In terms of the kids in this story, Lupe Bonnie & the Ravens are all about the same age; Yolanda is much younger, if not quite as baby as Eun-ha.

The apple of life!  Something the ravens give to Matthew that helps him get the love of Hyun-woo.  In the original story the snake-eatin’ boy got the apple of life and used it to impress the princess.  The story kinda calls for Hyun-woo to fuck off here, so it explicitly can’t reward him in that way at that point in the plot.  Maybe it just helps save him.

An epi-pen?  Adrenalin?  Does Hyun-woo have allergies?  I think adrenalin.  Might be funny.  I’d need to research if that bullshit from Pulp Fiction was real.  Does it have to go thru the sternum?  If you got stabbed in the heart thru the sternum, wouldn’t removing the needle cause you to bleed out?  Or get a weird infection, or I don’t know.

Gotta figure out the flavor on my Blue Velvety gangster weirdos.  I wrote a lil about them elsewhere.  What are they like in human form?  What can make them feel distinctive?  Freddy is inspired by the emcee from Tales From the Hood, so that’s easy enough.  Armando is in some ways the stereotypical latin villain, so I could reach for Robert Davi.  Probably best to not get too racistical in my depictuals.  The gangsters should be fuckers tho, it just has to be.  This is the loan shark.  Loves folding money.  I just typed monkey before correcting myself, jesus.  Hey, he could fold monkey too.

I could just cast them, for cheap visuals and voices.  Who’s latin?  Jimmy Smits?  Benjamin Bratt?  Cheech Marin?  Freddy Prinze Jr.?  Ricardo Montalban?  That Prince Valiant dude from No Country?  God I’m old.  How about Dario?  Giancarlo Esposito?  And Don?  Maybe Keith David?  Sam Jackson?

Maybe I should rethink these gangsters a lil to get another lady character in there?  …Naw, there’s reasons for that.  Srsly I should put a pin in these guys.  Stick ’em in a butterfly case.  Who’s who?  Need to have some guys who would be funny and/or scary to see interacting.  Would it be too obvious to have guys inspired by the cast of Seinfeld?  Nick Riviera from the Simpsons?  My fuckin imagination is so broken right now i’m dyin’…

They need to be funny and edgy and entertaining, in some kind of order.  Maybe I can think of amusing vices or elements and kinda mash em up.  Like, let’s say… this guy does this kind of drugs and makes those kind of threats and has that kind of demeanor…  It’s all math at the end of the day, and I got dyscalculia’d by exhaustion.  Lemme see…

Freddy:  played by Clarence Williams III, luxuriating in his authority, king of the world, quirks by way of David Lee Roth.
Dario:  played by Giancarlo Esposito, hustling contraband, aggrieved and paranoid, quirks by way of Mentat Dourif.
Armando:  played by Benicio del Toro, scheming all the dollars, loansharking, quirks by way of David Lynch?
Don:  played by Sam Jackson?, bullying people about their appearance, sadism, quirks by way of Kenneth Anger tops?

Freddy has more charisma than Clarence, Dario has less charisma than Giancarlo, Don is more subtle than Sam, but this is some kinda foundation.  Resist the urge to make Armando into the dude from Usual Suspects.  When they’re rocking out at the bacchanal, what is an unimaginable good time to them?  What terrifying nonsense could thrill monster men?

Doing drugs and juggling knives?  Naked crossword puzzles?  Smoking money?  Swallowing small animals whole?  Smoking drugs out of faberge eggs?  Lucha libre?  Weird porn?  Stag reels?  Filming weird porn?  Indoor skateboarding?  Terrorizing normies that were invited specifically to get messed with?  Playing dress-up?  Reading 18th century gothic horror in French?  Fake religious ceremonies?  Bohemian grove shit?  Electrocuting each other?  Taser fights?

Not there yet.  Seriously, so busted tonight, mentally deflated like my tires ran over one of those police spike strips.  Rare alcohol mixed with kiddie beverages like nesquick?  Truth or Dare?  Strip poker?  Nick at Night?  Discourse about children’s cartoons?  Making seventy year old hookers armwrestle?  Fight club?  Not talking about fight club?  Karaoke?  Playing in a punk band?  A goth band?  A pop band?  Like, some NKotB type shit for senior citizens.  They should try to outdo each other singing It’s so Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday by Boyz II Men.

Mumblety-peg.  Bowling.  Ping-pong.  Bible study.  Horse fancy.  Betting on legislation.  Wine tasting.  Blood tasting.  The dozens.  Slam poetry.  Competitive lego.  Candyland.  Trading comics.  Trading baseball cards.  Trading sex partners.  Crypto rug pulls.  Amway.  Dianetics.  Exotic reptile fancy.  Chuchu Rocket.  Monster Rancher.  Ukelele.  Square dancing.  Lambada, the Forbidden Dance™.

Competitive eating.  Daring each other to eat gross stuff.  Art criticism.  Movie heckling.  Inserting their fingers into each other’s eye sockets as a social test.  Sharing needles.  Smoking banana peels.  BDSM.  Fursuits.  Rhythm games.  Crossbow practice.  Potato guns.  That thing where you put dry ice in an empty 2-liter bottle of pop.  Dubious supplements.  Exquisite corpse.  Turing tests.  Voight-Kampff tests.  Pregnancy tests.  Circus geek tricks.  That Mr. Lifto shit.

Quickdraw competition with live ammo.  Scattergories.  Brujeria.  Dominos.  Competitive cooking.  Reenacting scenes from favorite movies.  Getting maudlin and confessing deep dark fears or desires that don’t make sense.  Ghost stories.  Trying to write novels in really short amounts of time.  Buying out corrupt democracies and burning the infrastructure to ash to make themselves nominally richer.  Debating evilutionists on youtube.  Pwning the libs.  Talking in tongues.  I don’t love any of this.  Feel free to add suggestions below.

What’s Matthew’s disability?  Depression with suicidal occurrences seems the easiest, like, getting approved for conditions that don’t involve knives seems less likely to happen.  How realistic then is it to not have him get depressed in a bad way during the story?  Of course the story does include an element of his disability benefits being inconsistent and unreliable, so maybe it isn’t anything that dire.  It is one of the easier ones to imagine / write for, with my dark streak.

There’s social stuff, but the plot hinges on him doing a fuckin’ lot of socially challenging things, and I’d hate to say he has that while representing him having none of those difficulties.  So that’s out.  I don’t think I’d do justice to depicting Tourette’s or OCD.  My husband thinks I might have a touch of the ’tism but no way.  I’m so normal y’all don’t even know.

Depression.  Like the stress is pushing him toward an episode but also keeping him too tense to feel the low come on.  A mixed state?  We all wonder sometimes with invisible disabilities, is this an actual biological impairment, or a situational thing, that a person could overcome with the right advantages or aid?  Like, is he depressed because life is depressing, or because his brain does something specific and sad with the depressingness, chemicologicalocally speakin’.  I do think it’s very well established that neurology is a factor in depression, but that experiential bias is strong.  I’d be depressed too if that was me.  Right?

I was at the doctor recently and now, for some reason, they’re required to do “behavioral screening” on any given visit – do you feel like you can’t stop worrying, like you can’t enjoy things, etc… And I’m like, “within understandable limits given the geopolitical realities of the day?”  It’s a bad joke.  Life during wartime, baby.  Stop making sense.

God, as I’m trying to think right now I just have Unholy by KissSam Smith and Kim Petras in my head so bad.  Bobby don’t know it’s a shoddy bop, get your body rocked, doin’ somethin’ unwholesome…  Life as a creative person.  The drive to create, the vexation of working close to the limits of your cognition.  I guess stemmy kids get that last part too.  The first part only if they’re mad scientists.  Hey that’s ableist.  Let’s say creative scientists.

Remember that cover of Sympathy for the Devil at the end credits of Interview with the Vampire?  That hit me nearly as bad as the Kashmir sampled P Diddy rap at the end of Godzilla (the bad one).  Like, Axl Rose doing spoken word rap, on some Kurtis Blow shit.  Pwease awwow me to intwoduce mysewf.  Unbelievable.  That song might improve before it’s over but I wouldn’t know because I couldn’t get there.  I roflmao’d until daed.

Oh yeah, depression.  Matthew.  Just thinking about it depresses me, haha.  Guess that means I’m doing it right?  To the question, what kind of person is he?, in light of depression the first thing that came to mind was “standup comic.”  But at the moment, burned-out internet funnyman would be more appropriate.  Lessay he ran a twitter called dipshitcycle and had some tweets about the Twilight movies go viral, kept it up for as long as he could, but ran out of funny.  Then another wild child was brung to the ghet-to.

So personality like… Quiet guy, hangs back, but known to drop a sick burn or a quirky observation, changes the subject if you laugh at it.

Back to tunnel time for a moment.  As many such unspecified scenes as I’ve plugged in, I oughtta come up with a list of freaky / creepy things that can happen in there.  It can have things he saw through the peepholes, things he saw through the cracks, things he had to dodge in the tunnels themselves.

Peepholes:  Where you can see the world as it usually appears.
Sex Stuff.  Gotta see people gettin busy or masturbatin’.  Feel weird about it.
…had a specific idea for a masturbator.  A very hirsute person with a big nose in makeup and lingerie.  Not to be mocked by this voice of the universe, but to make Matthew feel some type of way.
Abuse.  Must see people being mistreated, but as a bug on the wall, what can one do about it?
Crime.  Will see people doing illegal things; raises the possibility of ratting them out or blackmail.  But no, he’d never.
Nothing.  Most of the time you look in a random room during the day, there’ll be nothing and nobody in it.  Or if somebody’s there, they will be doing nothing.

Cracks:  If you look back the way you came in, the world looks normal.  If you look out through these cracks in places where you have not come in, they look freaky / spirit vision style.
What does it all mean?  As I said before, the view through these should be a world of visual metaphor for what’s actually happening therein.  So a person who is reading a bunch of trashy romance novels could have every book on their wall feature the same cover, with fancy calligraphic text spelling “(Their Name)’s Genitals.”
Animal Souls.  People will appear as animals or hybrid creatures through the cracks.
Angels.  They appear as people, falsely.
Stranger Activities.  People doing the metaphorical version of what’s going on in their life.  Taking all the coins out of a piggy bank and putting them back in again.
What do things of actual significance and value look like?  Glowing with gold?  Naw, too magic.  Brightly colored?  Clean, in a world where most things are dirty?

The Tunnels:  It’s the spirit world, the bowels of an angel, and where creepy things can happen.
What it seems:  Why secret floors?  Just how much of this building is dedicated to organized crime?  Voyeurism?
Ain’t what it seems:  Why aren’t the peepholes visible from the other side of the wall?  What the hell is going on with the cracks, where the world on the other side doesn’t look right?
Hiding in a corner:  he can’t leave without walking past some weirdos doing a sex act.  Has to wait for their orgasm to escape.
Seeing the mob dudes:  moving merchandise thru the halls, having to duck from them.
Secret rooms:  Rooms that exist on the interstitial floors – what is inside them?  Is that where The Disease’s room is?
Lair of the White Worm:  Yeah, he sees the Disease’s room before he comes to understand its significance.
Animal Encounters:  Eun-ha, the Disease in snake form, the Monkey, roaches.

Those ideas weren’t specific enough, mostly.  Gotta try harder next time.

Off-topic but something I want to remember for future reference:  My husband has been trying to write something in the style of David Lynch, and while this project has been very influenced by that, it’s still very much the sort of bullshit I’ve been doing since I first started writing novels.  We had some discussion on this, and for him the genesis of that project was a few short ideas added together.  One was a portentous sentence from a Lynch film, one was a spooky short sentence he had come up with, and one was a Lynchian thing from IRL he had found out about on the interwebs.  I think, to get a good concept going for that sort of project, that might be a good formula.  One plus one plus one.  See if I ever remember this lol.

Anything else?  No?  Fuck it, let’s do…

THE SCENES

01 Matthew I:  Getting ready for work, sees Eun-ha.  Mystery, Passion.  The passion here should be just a sense of his life feeling overwhelming, maybe an idea about his benefits, something that explains the crime job, but mostly to show it ain’t easy doing nothing for a living.  Of course the mystery of Eun-ha, and maybe some hinting about his day job, something to tickle tha ballz about it.
The hold music plays.  Gets up, goes to window, rests face there, sees girl, does other things, comes back, sees she isn’t there, phone picks up.  I didn’t get the letter.  I don’t have time for this right now.  Got a job?  Gotta go suck my landlord’s dick, if you wanna know.  Considers getting collared shirt on, shaving, gives up.  Goes thru project halls with weird luniz everywhere.
These scenes gotta be capsules that deliver the feeling and the point.  The mysteries – why girl there, what happened to her.  is he really gonna suck the landlord’s dick?  The passion – doesn’t want to do anything but has no choice.  Shit is depressing.  Bring the depression and frustration through description of the environment – not like, this is the environment of a depressed person, a depression nest, just that the environment or other details communicate a feeling that is depressing?  I dunno.  Might be a good place to drop a hint about the cracks later.
What feels like depression, the way the lavish detail in The Bloody Chamber‘s posh environments spoke to lush and sinister decadence, to a end of innocence, to being trapped in cloying darkness on the edge of annihilation?  There was a sense of movement in Carter’s writing, and in mine this could be the movement of pacing around your own mausoleum, aggravated by a world that won’t let you stay dead, won’t let you rest in peace.

02 Matthew II, Freddy I, Armando I, Don I, Dario I, The Disease I, Lupe I:  Scared by mobsters outside their party.  Mystery, Horror, Humor.  Blue Velvet didn’t jump straight to its weirdos but I’m kinda jumping straight to mine.  Establishing the mansion and its inhabitants and guests – almost all angels, all weird as balls.  They should all be saying things that disturb or provoke bad imagination. Maybe Matthew has to go through a series of gates to get to where he can do his job – getting let into the mansion, having to do unexpected jobs along the way, getting free of those guys to get to the office area, where he can debug excel spreadsheets for villainy.  I had the idea all mob stuff is written in a code he can’t decipher, some wacky lingo.
Mystery is plain enough – Matthew doesn’t know why they’re weird or what they’re doing.  Horror should come from menace and maybe social horror – who knows what wild party people are going to do?  Somebody must wave a gun in the air at some point.  Humor – hopefully weird weirdos bring humor on their own.  So… I don’t need to put much thought into how to emphasize these things.
Maybe the humor tho.  That isn’t always easy to write.  A lot of failed attempts in the collective output of hollyweird, that’s fa damn sure.  Gotta have a setup for it.  Situation comedy.  Matthew needs to check in with Freddy every day but Freddy is impossible to get to because he’s being the host with the most.  You’re not allowed in there.  Can’t very well wait until the party is over, you’re on the clock.  But you gotta wait.  But don’t wait.  Move it.  Where do you think you’re going?
He’s hanging loose in some kind of antechamber.  A guard is easily swayed by the underbosses that pass through, which is why he keeps contradicting himself about what Matthew should be doing.  Lupe almost seems like she could bail him out but doesn’t.  The Disease has feathers around his mouth like he ate a bird raw.  At last the boss man lets him go get to the computer.

03 Matthew III:  Tech support turns into Tunnel Time.  Mystery, Horror.   So Matthew has to check out a connection issue and finds his way into one of the cracks?  It’s behind a painting of a white snake.  He sees the cracks and it gives him an awareness, later he can enter from other locations, will end up going in from his room.  I think, honestly, just a simple introduction to the interstices would be wild and weird enough to justify the mystery and horror of the scene.  No need for deeper thought, just establish the layout a little.

04 Hyun-Woo I:  Floating World.  Mystery, Passion.  A scene outside the project, in a nice upper middle class home, tastefully appointed but invaded by cops.  The cops leave and Hyun-woo is talked into looking for Eun-ha.  Hanging out after college where he was a journalism major, now as employable as one would imagine lol.  I really want to play up the extent to which the place doesn’t feel as real as the project, the sense of a vignette of light, of vaseline on the lens.
People should feel as over the top emotional as in the first episode of Twin Peaks.  Might make more sense here.  Might be good to keep the girl’s age a secret here so people don’t immediately pair her with the little girl at the beginning, throw it off in some other way.

05 Matthew IV, Bonnie I, Lupe II:  Tunnel Time ends with witnessing Bonnie crime.  Mystery, Passion.  You broke the unwritten law Bonnie.  You stole from a fellow lesbian.  Then ya friends don’t like you anymore, and your enemies don’t respect ya.  It’s curtains, Bonnie.  Curtains!
So this is where some hint of supernature begins – basically, why are there so many peepholes and why can’t they be seen?  What’s with the cracks?  Doesn’t look thru them much yet, but intro concept.  Passion of course because gaybies are intense and oppressed by society.

06 Freddy II, Dario II:  The Shipment I.  Freddy+Dario discuss the shipment.  Mystery, Humor, Horror.  I need these capsules.  Good for health, bad for education.  I need to encapsulate the feeling of a scene with a strong sense of the movement or other properties, like, the viscosity, how do I say it?
On the banal level, Dario tells Freddy about a hot score, how he just needs help in case things go sideways.  Freddy is like, oh ho?  Don’t tell me.  Let it be a surprise.  They talk in terms of strategies for acquiring and moving product.  Freddy says they simply must involve Armando.  Dario wants to sell it to kids and moms.  wtf?
On the abstract level, it’s the aftermath or a low spot in the party, everyone is strewn about as if dead, or moved along.  Evidence of strange pleasures linger in the air.  The early wolf gets the calf.  Dario and Freddy are half awake half dead, pondering whose entire existence is fodder for their cruel desires.  But in a funny way?

07 Matthew V, Freddy III, Lupe III:  Accused by Freddy.  Help me understand, my little man.  Horror.  It opens with movement, rushing thru halls, inexorable slide into disaster.  Let’s say Matthew saw Bonnie go away, thought it a reasonable interval to avoid trouble, and came into the office.  His phone rings and Lupe hears it, pokes her head in – Jesus, how long you been in here?  He holds up a finger.  Gotta take this.
Goes to see the boss, who talks about the shipment with him – very couched terms.  Lupe rushes in and whispers to him, then the accusation happens.  Why should I believe?  Because it’s true.  I don’t have shit on me.  Wanna see me naked?  Body cav search?  God forbid.  Literally, I’m Dominican.  Mejor muerta que maricón.  Young man, you should have self-respect.  Makes absurd deal – you can leave, but anon the goods must be returned, or you won’t like it.
Abstractly, he never got balance back after returning from unreal world.  In wobbly state he slips, falls into disaster of the sort he must have always feared, in working for mobsters.  Head burning and ringing, Lupe suspecting what Matthew knows, which must also be upsetting.

08 Yolanda I:  Picking through The Forest and finds trace of Eun-ha, ignores it in favor of bugs.  Mystery, Horror.  Maybe the trace can be a pair of patent leather shoes.
Yolanda established.  Weird monster girl, she prowls the vines for interesting entomological finds.  Something strange catches her attention, the movement of a ghost.  She takes in a full and perfect view of the evidence, but unmoved, looks at the next indicated thing – a tiger swallowtail caterpillar perhaps.
The capsule:  The world behind her is the edifice, the tower, the cage in which all the story has been sealed.  Below this little jungle is something like a sublime piece of ill nature, but it’s fake.  It’s all flimsiness served up on an indestructible concrete slab that still belongs to the tower.  The vines have to creep in from elsewhere or grow right out of the moldering junk heap.  Here is a place where little prisoner can scratch the days in her wall, but terrible things threaten to steal what’s left of those days.  Menacing vibes.

09 Matthew VI, Bonnie II:  Confronts Bonnie.  Social Horror, Passion.   How would you appoach somebody to tell them you saw them steal
something?  “What would you do if you saw somebody steal something, kid?  I saw somebody take something that doesn’t belong to them, but I don’t want to see them burned.”  Etc…
The capsule… What does it feel like to have a lot of sympathy for somebody’s suffering / position in life but to also know they’re a thieving little shit?  How do you handle that?  Some things are easier to convert into abstractions.  Like if this was physical objects what would it be?  Some kind of metaphor, what would that be?
When you see an animal suffering but know it would bite you in a second.  People do that, don’t they?  Help a moose out of a ditch that can kick them to death without hesitation.  This feels useful.  Approach the monkey knowing it could do something terrible to you at any moment for monkey kicks.

10 Matthew VII:  Tunnel Time to find Lupe.  Mystery, Horror.  He sees the cracks from the other side in his apartment and goes in, uses the peepholes to find Bonnie.
Not much time left in his day, knows he’s got to speak with Lupe but she’s likely to be in places he has no access to like the mansion.  While freaking out, sees the cracks in his apartment from the other side, and enters the mess.  More hints of supernature, more of the layout of the mess.  The mystery and horror are real straightforward on this one.

11 Matthew VIII, Lupe IV:  Gets with Lupe.  Social Horror, Passion.  First reveal of him being gay?  Yeah sure, why not?  He felt more inclined to share secret with this gay than the one who picked her pocket, but may regret that feeling, because this one is tougher – and Freddy’s daughter.
I do think he comes at this one with a foolish feeling that it will be easier than dealing with Bonnie and is quickly put in some amount of mortal fear by her paranoid and punchy reactions.  Again with the touchy animal metaphor.

12 Matthew IX:  Scared by Monkey Faces.  Mystery, Horror.  This is when he is going to bed at night and sees the Eun-ha dress fly away, worn by a gibbon.  Doesn’t quite get it’s a monkey yet.
By this point he has talked with Lupe and Bonnie and has the scheme in place, right?  So he should feel able to sleep – if only with an alarm on his phone to make sure he gets up early as hell.  Rest your face on the cold window.  The glare keeps you from getting a full view but it looks like there’s a pink dress down there.  He turns lights off and comes back to see the dress flying… and then nothing.  Were you tripping?  Do you go down there?  What would or could you even find?  I think that’ll work.

13 Freddy IV, Dario III, Armando:  The Shipment II.  Freddy has convinced Dario to get Armando’s help acquiring it.  Mystery, Humor, Horror.  A bigger introduction to Armando.  He’s reasonable but blatantly sus, sus as all hell, and Dario ain’t buyin’ it, but Freddy keeps vouching and he’s the bawss.  Let’s say this one begins with them extracting him from the party and dragging him to a chair where he slowly wakes up.  It ends with Freddy distributing weapons.  Katana?  Tec nine?  Monofilament whip?

14 Yolanda II:  Some kind of early scene to hint she will matter later.  Mystery, Passion.  I think the child abuse here, a lil bit, because setting up injustices does suggest they may be dealt with, ultimately.  This scene doesn’t line up with Matthew’s wall creepin so it must be a Yolanda solo scene.  I guess by merit of us focusing on her at all there is an implication she’ll matter later.  Gotta feel the passion.  She is really enthusiastic about a new bug, makes the mistake of telling mom.  Dexter comes in and kills the bug gnarly style.  When I grow up I’m gonna kill you!  You’re never gonna be big enough, haha.

15 Lupe V, Bonnie III:  Lupe schools Bonnie.  Social Horror, Passion.  Bitch I cut you!  You fuck with me I’ll tell.  It’ll be the last thing you ever do…  Maybe not at that level.  It’s too intense.  This should be intense, but the story is all death threats, gotta ease off some ways sometimes.
Find my capsule.  Why’d you steal from me?  It’s over forever.  I don’t need you.  I really don’t need you.  Who are you gonna be with then, rosy palm and her five sisters?  I loved you, you piece of shit.  We’re all shit here.  C’moon, forgiveness?  How about a switchblade in the ribs instead?  I dunno i dunno…
Get rolled up on by the mack truck you saw coming a mile away.  Know it was inevitable but u still wish you could evit it.  A generally extremely thoughtless and reckless person facing personal consequences for first time in years.  What does it feel like?  This also might affect Bonnie’s day job as a dealer for the mob.  High stakes.  Maybe the relationship was always doomed, like a workplace relationship in a volatile workplace.

16 Hyun-Woo II:  Hyun-woo arrives, begins to investigate.  Mystery, Passion.  Doesn’t need to be too much the horror yet.  He comes into the building by way of the bodega, maybe?  Feels a lil out of his depth in the courtyard and decides to go door to door, as a warm up for approaching strangers.  Passes smokin in the stairwell, other creepiness, and has a few awkward knocks.  A lot of social anxiety, but also concern for Eun-ha, and shame he isn’t being bolder, as a journalism major.

17 Matthew X, Lupe VI, Freddy V:  Lupe helps him get out of mob.  Social Horror, Passion, Humor.  As I mentioned elsewhere, this is her “finding” the “mislaid” items on a bookshelf, with help from Matthew that provokes Freddy’s generosity.
Matthew psyched up for the scheduled “confession,” barely squeaks out his scheme to Freddy – I got a way to ping the missing electronics.  Lemme use the computer.  Lupe is like, tsst, what-everrr – much better at acting than Matthew.  It’ll go on in that way until Matthew gets out the door…
This should be real easy on its own, no deeper analysis necessary.  A scene idea with inherent tension.

18 Hyun-woo III:  Hyun-woo door-to-door, attracting bad attention.  Social Horror, Mystery, Passion.
Hyun-woo actually gets to talk about the case with a sorta sympathetic person or two, but also has somebody get real mad and storm off.  What is her intention?  Order of things – medium sympathy, blowup, more empathy plus gets inside and out of the hall, comes out into hall in time to see somebody he has to duck away from.

19 Matthew XI, Hyun-woo IV:  First meeting with Hyun-Woo.  Mystery, Passion.  Love appears.  So…
Hyun-woo knocks on the door.  Matthew opens up, hoping for a sexy mormon or jehovah’s witness to entertain for a dishonest hour.  Have you seen this girl?  Terminator 2 style.  Maybe I have?  I saw a girl.  I heard about the rumors and it got me thinking, could that have been her?  Points out where in
The Forest she was, what was going on generally.  Expresses discomfort with going down there but interest in helping him with investigation.  Goons are going to walk him out but get talked out of it – tho he’s forbidden from bugging neighbors.
Opens with Matthew having escaped the mob, wondering what the hell to do about money still.  Shortly Hyun-woo arrives.  The passions – Hyun-woo’s concern for Eun-ha, Matthew’s loneliness and money concern.  The mystery – Matthew swept into the story of Eun-ha.

20 Ravens I, Bonnie IV:  They want to buy drugs from her.  Hint they will matter.  Mystery, Humor.  Bonnie pissed and uncertain, wondering if she’ll have to go hetero.  Guys appear all around her and she tries to act sexy.  Maybe one of them buys it but the others don’t.  Comes out they want drugs but have no money.  A lil now for a favor later?  Fuck off you bums!

21 Freddy VI, Dario IV, Armando III:  The Shipment III.  Freddy+Armando+Dario get the shipment.  Mystery, Humor, Horror.  I wanted to have most everything take place inside the building but it’s hard to justify this one.  Maybe it’s more the aftermath, right when they get home?
Yeah, they are getting home with crates and battle damage and oblique references to terrible things that have happened.  Hauling the crates, waiting for dollies and freight elevators.  More disgust and mistrust, but it’s Armando with the best space to stash it, at the end of the day.

22 Matthew XII, Yolanda III:  Tunnel Time to investigate for Hyun-woo, Yolanda hint.  Mystery, Horror.Matthew has Hyun-woo’s number and doesn’t want to call unless he has something to call about.  Resolves to look in every single room with eyeholes in search of the girl or a suitably sus suspect.  A lot of creepiness, and sees Yolanda being abused.  The cracks show more hints of the supernatural.  Maybe shift to Yolanda’s perspective to end the scene.  She’s talking with her doll.  Is there something to that toy?

23 Matthew XIII:  Crushing, scrapbooking?  Passion.  Back from tunnel time, Matthew has to decompress.  Shower?  Think about himself.  Could you have a chance with this guy?  Never.  WTF breh?  How can I communicate this passion?  The capsule.  He has nobody to interact with.  Gotta have a lot of internal monologue.
But if this wasn’t literature and that wasn’t possible, how would I sell the feeling?  Look at himself, roll on the bed, look at himself again.  Go to masturbate but lose interest?  Drink or smoak big weed?  Damned if I know.
Maybe it’ll be more clear when I’ve written him for a few scenes.
Neeeh I gotta try harder.  Altho knowing his interests might be good.  How does he pass his time?  A fallen internet funnyman.  I think… a lot of stopping and starting things.  A lot of anhedonia.  Video games, movies, video, not much actually getting finished.  Some amount of liquor and cigarettes.
What’s going on here is that he just got back from some weird kind of netherworld where he was trying to find a lost possibly dead girl for a hot dude and… what does that feel like?  Oughtta feel intense, unreal, too much.  Look out the window repeatedly on the unlikely chance she wanders by the same spot.  Look out again and again.  Try to play a sim game, a fighting game, give up and just make self daed fom booze.

24 Yolanda IV:  Messing with roach traps, yelled on by Dexter, talks to Dolly.  Passion, Horror, Mystery.  Make no question there’s something up with the doll.  How about the abuse?  I guess this can scale back a bit from how personal it was before.  Give this plot a little breather.

25 Lupe VII:  Lupe Somethin?  Passion?  Feelin bad about Bonnie, feelin alone.  Some kinda lesbian feels, like, forever alone.  Remembers a crush that is too hetero and she’ll never be able to be with.  Burns something?
A chapter of internal monologue is too much.  She should be doing something at the same time.  tfw no gf.  Maybe walking her part of the mansion, to get readers familiar with it..?  I think the mansion has only one room with windows, very high on the wall like in Fall of the House of Usher and a lil dim because they face the alley side in the shadow of the ruined building.  It’s got an altar to Belié Belcan / San Miguel.  Foot up to crush a demon, wearing green with a green turban, holding scimitars, stylized flame around, bells and blades on the altar.  “Miguelito don’t step on me today, I’m a little more holy because I feel like hell.”

26 Matthew XIV, Hyun-woo V:  Bored games.  Hyun-woo still temporarily scared into not investigating alone.  Mystery, Passion.  Matthew and Hyun-woo bond as people.  Hyun-woo and him go over what he knows about the building, within the limits of not telling him dangerous secrets about organized crime.  They have to take mental health breaks, during which they talk about who they are, find out they’re both gay?  or later?  Yeah, just hints – cultural things, interests.
Is established that Matthew is hesitant to tell Hyun-woo about tunnels, for reasons unclear to himself.  Shame about the spying incident?  A feeling that he’s going to be using that to look for Eun-ha?  Also doesn’t want to say he saw her flying in the monkey incident.
“I recently got a favor from the boss of the building, don’t know how close he keeps a tab on who owes what to whom, don’t wanna cash in chips I’ll need for rent, but … will try to keep coverin for you as a guest.  Probably best not to push that luck by poking around…”
OK, the last scene with Matthew before this has him getting blackout drunk … maybe not?  If he was anticipating this meeting…  I dunno.  The capsule:  Getting to know this dude, as well as seal the deal of helping with his investigation.  Matthew’s wall has collage art.  Torn Pulp Fiction poster, Uma has cartoon dicks on her cheeks and a curly moustache.  A cardboard cutout of Britney dressed like a flight attendant with crudely drawn snake wrapped around her and onto the wall in sharpie.  Sports Illustrated calendar for wrong year open to a muscly white dude.  Small sharp objects sunk in the wall like lids from aluminum cans, ballpoint pens, tiny screwdrivers, cheap kitchen knives, plastic knives, coins.  They stick because that wall is painted over sheetrock with no plaster.  He has something like flex-seal painted around all the floorboards to minimize roach incursions and all his food is in plastic bags and bins.  Lives off ramen, eggs, and arizona watermelon tallboys.  His entertainment center is immaculate and includes his PC tower.  He sits at it in a partially structured beanbag with wireless game controller, mouse, and keyboard on the carpet.  His bed is the only other furniture to sit on.  He has no kitchen, keeps his microwave in the bathroom, food all in plastic drawers there.  Only eggs booze and beverages in the mini-fridge, which sits near the window where he saw Eun-ha.  Smoke detectors are disabled and empty chef boyardee ravioli can is ashtray.

27 Freddy VII, Dario V, Armando IV:  The Shipment IV.  Freddy+Armando+Dario talk about what’s next for the stuff, but hint of troubled relationship.  Humor, Mystery, Horror.  Dario insists to see if Armando still has it all.  They talk about sales and cuts.  Holding fee for taking the risk?  Bullshit, I’ll take it myself.  Gentlemen gentlemen…  Freddy takes offense at the conversation getting too blasphemous.  We’re all engaged in a criminal enterprise and should show respect to the Lord Jesus Christ.  Join me in begging his forgiveness once again.

28 Lupe VIII, Don II, Armando V, Freddy VIII:  Weirded out by dad and homies.  Humor, Mystery, Horror.  Again, what do they do that’s so alarming?  Still stumped.  Come into the altar where Lupe is, drunk and singing Boyz II Men.  Freddy gets close to hitting Lupe for some reason?  I don’t know… Maybe not.  Maybe just accidentally almost hurts her while acting the fool.  These guys are all angels, as the beasts before the throne of the Lamb, screaming holy holy holy.  What’s it to her?

29 Matthew XV:  Tunnel Time but decides to stop doing it.  Mystery, Horror, Passion.  Scared by monkey faces?  Yeah, Matthew is picking up where he left off but has a bad feeling, gets scared by the monkey, says fuck this i quit.

30 MONKEY RAMPAGE:  Mystery, Horror.  Humor?  What’s a monkey gonna do?  Run and run and run.  Jump, swing.  Parkour all around the building.  But what’s it doing?  Poltergeist shit?  The green mist part in La Cité des enfants perdus.

31 Matthew XVI, Ravens II, Majel I:  Matthew sees ravens kicked out, helps them.  Mystery, Humor?, Passion.  Have I written my idea for how this plays out?  He sees them abused by Majel and assumes they’re trying to get into apartment for food.  He uses tunnel time to get inside and unlock the door for them.  Maybe when he comes out, he pretends to have picked the lock, to throw off suspicion.  While he was in there, surprised by cat, sees some Majel treasures including her vault.  Sees her cat David… he appears as a cat in spirit vision.  They offer him weed, he declines, sees his face reflected in something, scrubbly.

32 Hyun-woo VI, the Disease II:  By himself v. The Disease.  Hyun-woo braving the halls again.  Mystery, Humor?  The hell is the Disease doin.  Hyun-woo finds out about the roof and meets The Disease on it.  Looking for kids to abduct?  Couldn’t be so simple.  Hey old man, see a lil girl?  You don’t belong in this building little doggy.  Run home.

33 Matthew XVII, Don III:  Haircut to impress, realizes Don was at bacchanal.  Mystery, Passion, Horror?  Lost my nice shag for this?  Naw.  Idk.  White boys all think they’re johnny depp.  Let me cut this shit off of you, or don’t you dare tell ’em you got your faggoty little trim in my shop.  Ends with Matthew knowing he’ll go back into the tunnels the next day.

34 Lupe IX, The Disease III:  Is weird with hoes.  Mystery, Horror?  The hell is he into.  The hell are they into.  She sees him in the mansion maybe?  In the evening.  Coming to pick up the hoes from the party dome.  They talk with each other and is it about what they’re going to do?  Sounds impossibly violent or bizarre.  Let’s say she came into party dome to get some booze and to not get caught with it she sits on a couch with it tucked behind her – has to witness the whole scene.

35 Freddy IX, Armando VI:  The Shipment V.  Freddy+Armando scheme to betray Dario and let Armando sell it with a more generous cut.  Humor, Mystery, Horror?  It goes without saying you were always going to have me sell it.  Without a peep.  Dario doesn’t know what to do with himself.  If it isn’t papayas or pork rinds, he doesn’t know how to sell it.  You have the wisdom of Solomon my friend.  Let’s do cocaine and juggle bowie knives.

36 Matthew XVIII, Yolanda V:  Tunnel Time ends up seeing Yolanda in trouble, weird idea to unleash angel.  Mystery, Horror, Passion.  Figures out somehow that the monster is Yolanda, and the human is an asshole.  I feel like there should be some way already established by now that he can choose to see things supernaturally or not.  Maybe peepholes for supernatural, cracks for not? Vice versa.  Also the ability to go through the cracks and ramifications of that…  I wonder what the angel should look like in supernatural sight, that Matthew should feel like it could be a problem for Dexter?  Dexter defeated, Yolanda victory stomp and fall into the roaches.

37 Hyun-woo VII, Armando VII:  By himself v. Armando.  Mystery, Social Horror.  What’s a loan shop?  Interested in a loan?  How about human knucklebones?

38 Ravens III, Armando VIII, Matthew XIX:  Scratch tickets.  Mystery, Humor?  Ravens try to steal scratch tickets, almost get away with it.  Matthew accidentally covers their escape.  Why does he keep helping these boys get away with crimez?  Armando hints Matthew’s grace from Freddy may run out if he keeps it up.

39 Matthew XX:  Gets a face full of cops.  Horror, Passion.  Mystery?  God I’m dislikin’ cops sometimes.  Articles about ICE gettin’ to me.  I think it’s on his way out of previous scene, the cops miss the other people involved and collar him.

40 Freddy X, Hyun-woo VIII:  By self, vs. Freddy.  Mystery, Horror.  Hyun-woo is going to give one of the main mob guys the business when Freddy intercepts him.  “I’m the landlord and the only reason you ain’t considered trespassing is that lil’ Matthew likes you…”  Scene should start with Hyun-woo talking to some rando in a far-flung part of the building.  Freddy comes in from the fire escape?

41 Lupe X, Bonnie V:  Have mercy, I forgot to be a lover.  Passion, Social Horror.  Bonnie coming to get drugs to sell.  Lupe corners her.  Bonnie sez U wanna get together again?  Maybe just a hookup?  No.  Hell no.  But still…  Lights her fire.

42 Matthew XXI, Hyun-woo VIII:  Getting to know you.  Passion, Mystery.  Matthew and Hyun-woo bond as possible lovers.  Matthew doesn’t have directly relevant things to report but does say how he’s gathering favors, might be able to use them to get closer to more evidence – also that he is getting to know more people in the building, to be able to do the questioning, including a girl of a similar age.  Revelation of gay happens here?  “Focusing on this is necessary, but terrifying.  Gotta balance it out with trying to keep an even head.  Beer me?”  They get closer to maybe doing a thing.

43 Ravens IV, Freddy XI, Armando IX:  The Shipment VI.  Ravens jack the goods from Freddy+Armando.  Humor, Mystery, Horror?  Do it by distracting him and then calling the unattended freight elevator.  How did it move without the gate all the way shut?  Has a magnetic plate stuck over the connection.  Distraction shouldn’t be something that obviously connects to them.  Skateboard rolling down the hall with nobody on it. … Armando gets fingers cut off in elevator.  Him and Freddy are blithe about it.

44 Yolanda VI: Alienation.  Social Horror, Passion.  Maybe show her being bullied by other kids?  Neh.  Let’s see her deal with mom being a piece of shit about Dexter, that she has nobody to turn to in life.

45 The Disease IV:  Is weird with baby chickens.  Horror.  I dunno.  The chicks thing is probably directly inspired by the Jisatsu Circle movie…  Might still keep it because it fits his theme and isn’t too direct, but I gotta wonder here.  What would be the best way to depict this guy as consistently creepy without giving away the game too hard?  What is his gimmick, in non-supernatural situations?  What’s his personality?
He is laid back of course, since he rules a significant subdomain of his environment, has angels flock to his whims.  But he is a being apart, doesn’t see those angels as peers.  The ones he does have such a regard for he doesn’t like.  How does this play out in the way he acts?  What kind of voice might he have?
The problem is he just doesn’t desire anything strongly and that doesn’t make for an interesting character.  He can be an impassive force of nature, but that’s less cool than Dr. Evil wanting one. million. dollars.  Obviously he do want his forbidden nummy nummies, but I don’t see him drooling for it.  Like, especially around Matthew or Hyun-woo, because they are not on the menu.
In a sense he isn’t the actual villain of the story.  The villain is Matthew’s loneliness and desperation.  This monster is just a crucible to pass through on the way to getting love.  He’s built up through mystery, thru the question remaining of who dun it.  Maybe better then for him to be all red herring.  But a scary red herring.
Just not so scary he’s obviously the killer.  So here he is with… juggling eggs?  Swallows one, hatches another.  Witnessed by someone who can be creeped out by it…  Or maybe not.  In the aisle at Dario’s store.  Yeah.  In the Bodega when nobody is looking, he takes out eggs and starts messing with them like a weirdo.  Maybe somebody hears the noise and comes around the corner, to find nothing but a bit of down floating in a whirl.

46 Hyun-woo IX:  Hyun-woo vs. Cops.  Horror, Mystery, Passion.  Hyun-woo is hoping they’ll be of some use but they’re just a problem.  Do they know something?  Do they work for Freddy?

47 Matthew XXII:  Tunnel Time but getting exhausted and scared.  Horror, Mystery, Passion.  What’s he been doing?  I’d say going room to room from the top floor on down.  Suggests Yolanda lives on a high floor.  This is kinda like Silent Hill in the dark world but with fewer monsters.  He’s going room to room but try not to be too on the nose with the SH connection, such as it bees.  Maybe this is a good place to imply he’s getting used to it, changing in some way.  What is the air like in the interstices?

48 Matthew XXIII, Hyun-woo X:  Love scene.  Mystery, Passion.  Token sex scene.  Something powerful and magical?  I think Hyun-woo is getting upset, gotta console him.  What could it mean?  Why can’t we just get cops to turn the building upside down?  If they do, they’ll just find her dead, won’t they?  Terrible terribleness lays out before them.  Then sex the pain away lol.
Last thing before this for Hyun-woo was talking to the cops.  If he’s upset maybe he’s outside Matthew’s room on phone.  No reception in dark world.  Matthew’s phone starts ringing when he gets out of there.  Hyun-woo can hear it from outside the apartment and knocks on the door again.
Capsule…  This is exhausting and hopeless but it’s good to have company.  Or is it selfish?  Probably very selfish, but se necesita.  Guilt is the word.

49 EUN-HA ALIVE?  Mystery, Horror.  Showing her walking through the tunnels, alone and scared.  Just to underscore the guilt of the previous scene.  But how as Matthew missed her every time?  What does it mean?

50 Yolanda VII:  Again?  Mystery, Passion.  What’s she still doing in the story, honestly?  Maybe she found out what Matthew was investigating and is trying to investigate on her own?  It’s intuitive, kinda supernatural methods.
Maybe a hint she sensed Eun-ha blow by, and went to find her.  In the halls after dark.  Scared by the freight elevator going down and runs home.

51 Freddy XII, Dario VI, Armando X:  The Shipment VII.  Freddy+Dario+Armando have a Mexican standoff over this anime betrayal.  Mystery, Horror, Humor.
The freight elevator opens with Freddy and Armando, and Dario is waiting for them with two guns?  Yeah sure.
Armando has his arms folded but threatens with nothing but words.  Freddy has to point guns too.  Dario please.  Freddy coerces them into shaking hands and Dario gets blood all over his fingers.  Everybody laughs.

52 Ravens V:  Some kinda hijinks.  Humor.  Loot reveal?  Yeah, they get the disney tapes and are like, jesus what a waste.  Try to sell them to Majel but she overheard.  They get the crates down a hall and into one of their apartments, but know they have to get them out before a mom gets home, so desperate to offload.  Living room piled with tha Shipment, crowbars in the grips of ravens.  They pull the planks off to see generic VHS cases with cheaply color printed inserts that obviously came from bad reproductions, pushed into a clear plastic sleeve around the outside.  The Lian Kink.  The 1ittel Memraid.  Idk.  They ponder throwing them out the window to where they’ll smash down in the courtyard, but too much risk someone will see where they came from.  They call Majel on her cellphone and she shows up too quickly, as if she’s been following them and waiting right outside the door.
Majel, this shit is hot, we gotta flip it!  Somebody lost his fingers and his loot, gonna be pissed.  Did you get the fingers?  Pity, pity.  I can make it disappear for you, but it will cost you.  Awww!

53 Majel II, The Disease V:  Majel vs. The Disease, he knows she steals from Freddy and don’t care.  Mystery, Horror.  These two aren’t even a little bit human, should come off as a very unnatural event, reality boiling away under the surface.  How can I represent that?  I generally don’t want to go inside the heads of angel characters, except half-angel Lupe.  What can they be doing?
See her next dawn pushing a baby cart full of tapes down the hall.  Ain’t no baby in there.  Smells like Freddy’s property.  What’s it to you, the Disease?  Couldn’t care less…
Maybe it’s something in the way they talk to each other.  Do they give each other different names?  I named her Majel Billy because bialy is white in polish or some such.  Like maybe he could be Churney, after czerny / black?  Neh.. ..  Maybe I should come back to this one later…
No, I need to figure it out now.  Maybe they go like they’re going to cast spells against each other before they call it off.  Forky fingers, son.  She should seem a tiny bit afraid of him, I think.

54 Matthew XXIV, Lupe XI, Bonnie VI:  I coulda killed you.  Matthew laments to Bonnie.  Passion, Social Horror.  What’s Matthew doing?  Does he smoke?  Sharing a smoke with Lupe during a random moment in the Courtyard?  Anyway, she feels compelled to tell him this.  He shakes his head.  Little girl, why.  Why, little girl.  She says Understand me, bro.  We are not the same.  He lefts pink-faced and bumps into Bonnie, who lets him talk at her.  He says much more than he intended, but she finds herself feeling things – respect for Lupe, turned on by the idea of her killing somebody, and an unexpected sympathy for Matthew – a feeling she really does owe him something.

55 Matthew XXV:  Tunnel Time more hints at supernature.  Monkey Scare again?  Horror, Mystery.
Surely it could only take so long to work his way through X amount of floors of this shit…  Getting closer to the actual spot.  Let’s say he gets scared out of it this time.  That’s why he’s available for Yolanda’s call later.

56 Freddy XIII, Dario VII:  The Shipment VIII.  Freddy+Dario we’ve lost it all.  Ruined forever.  Who will provide for my mongooses and ocelots?  Then they get a hint about a new shipment of some trivial shit and start scheming again.  Mystery, Horror, Humor.  They should be in the mansion, Freddy making it up to Dario as he can.

57 Yolanda VIII, Don IV:  Don threatens to cut Yolanda’s hair.  Horror.  Maybe he’s having a smoke break in the Courtyard and sees her, gives her the business about that wacky hair.  Carries an aura of menace.  Why am I thinking of der Schneider from Struwwelpeter, choppin’ off thumbs?  Yolanda’s running here becomes Eun-ha’s running.

58 EUN HA v. MONKEY:  Mystery, Horror.  This will go back on the idea she’s alive, some hint she may be a ghost.  Fleeing from and scared of the monkey.  Why am I suddenly remembering something to do with a monkey chasing someone through a place with racks of clothing, tearing the clothes to shreds as they go…  That can’t be anything from a movie can it?  I’m tired.  Memory of a dream probably.  Not like there was a scene in Dunston Checks In where the ape went ape.

59 Matthew XXVI, Yolanda IX, The Disease VI:  Yolanda abducted, saved in Tunnel Time.  Horror, Mystery, Passion.  Matthew gets a call, “I’m in the Forest.”  He rushes to a window and looks out.  Yolanda is hiding from something.  Is it real?  Can he get to her in time?  The scariest thing would be seeing something going to attack a child when you could do nothing to intervene.  Matthew has to get her back somehow, by himself.  He catches her in the tunnels.  But will need more consideration about how to make that as scary as possible without ending the story prematurely.
They escape the snake by going through cracks, but it puts them in spirit world – gotta risk going back out the way you were dragged in.  Where could it have been?  Down near the Forest, of course…

60 Matthew XXVII, Hyun-woo X, Bonnie VII:  The Worst.  Passion, Social Horror, Mystery.  Hyun-woo confronts Matthew on possibility he is stringing him along to get laid.  Messed up, dude!
“Explaining the suspects.  But it’s never enough to go on, always enough to keep me here.  We had sex.  Was that a mistake?  Or was that always what you wanted out of me?  It was!  I can’t believe it.  I need to get out of here.  No way she’s in the building.”  “I know she is!  I can’t tell you why because you’ll think I’m crazy.  I just know she is!”  “Bullshit, Matthew.”
This will get cut off prematurely by Bonnie interrupting them with invite to the bad party, preventing awkwardness from culminating.

61 Ravens VI, Majel III:  Ravens vs. Majel.  Mystery, Humor?  Horror?  Do they get the apple of life here?  I can’t trust you birds in here unattended.  You’re the literal worst.  Cat gets out and she chases after it, leaving them to break into a case they’ve been eyeballing – hinted at when Matthew first gets into room.  It’s the garden of eden.
Since the finger incident, the wise one has been edging toward bailing on these hijinks.  More of that here.

62 Matthew XXVIII, Hyun-woo XI, Freddy XIV, Armando XI, Don V, The Disease VII, Lupe XII:  The Bacchanal.  Passion, Horror, Mystery, Humor.  Again, I need to figure out some good surreal hijinks for the freaks to get up to. Spunk Biscuit?  Chamber Music?  Pinball?  Taking unethical photos of kittens in little costumes?  Pony play?  Make a point of calling attention to Armando’s hands – they have fingers again.
Matthew and Hyun-woo at the worst party, get parted.  Lupe bails out Matthew but Hyun-woo has gone missing.
So, how does this one play out..?  Alarming buildup, some grand invocation, and the Wildness, including a few fake-outs that it’s going to be more tame or much worse than it all superficially is.

63 Matthew XXIX, Hyun-woo XII, The Disease VIII:  Final fight in Tunnel Time.  Horror, Mystery, Passion.  In The Disease’s place, must rescue Hyun-woo and find out about Eun-ha.  Is he locked out?  How does he get in? Definitely unarmed.  Don’t forget to make it surreal horror like Leonora Carrington’s but less funny here.
Gotta walk through the place with trepidation, looking for an improvised weapon as he goes, take in the spooky details.  Chicken coops?  Incubators?  Chicks?  Down twirling in unseen breezes on the floor?  What’s Hyun-woo suffering?  What’s happening to him?  How litcheral is this snake?
A conveyor belt with deformed or dead chicks on it, running in and out of chutes on the walls.  Kinda Existenz I know.  Eggshells like papier mâché.  That gibbon running up and down the aisles, slapping or ripping at you as it goes by.  Eun-ha, how about you?
Vats covered haphazardly with tarp.  Some are askew, showing bodies in varying states, or piles of dusty or goopy bones.  Are they girls turning into giant chicks or vice versa?  How are they being consumed?  Where are the souls?  Something twisting through it all, a great movement in the ground that can’t be discerned.
The pink dress falls off a hanger on a door that is ajar.  Inside, Hyun-woo in bondage.  Liberate the boy.  But a snek must be upon thee.
Maybe Matthew gets Hyun-woo unbound but he’s unconscious.  The Disease catches Matthew and is about to kill him when Hyun-woo saves the day.  Baby Eun-ha shows up and goes to hug Hyun-woo, but vanishes in a puff of down around his legs.  She was a ghost.  The end.  Um…  Let’s say this makes Hyun-woo seem to drop dead.  Don’t touch ghosts yo.

64 Matthew XXX, Ravens VII:  Give Matthew the Apple of Life in Tunnel Time?  Passion?  Horror?  Mystery?  The apple is an adrenaline shot.  Not in tunnel time.  Let’s say Matthew drags Hyun-woo into the hall in regular space, hoping to get cell reception and call 9-11.  The ravens find him there and offer the stuff.  What you gonna do when Hyun-woo turns blue?  Pokey pokey.

65 Matthew XXXI, Hyun-woo XIII:  I just can’t.  Go home.  Passion.  Matthew couldn’t go if he wanted – rent, possessions, entire life in his place, no courage to leave, mental probs – Hyun-woo certainly can’t stay because of traumatic weirdness.  I do think a lot of these scenes have an obvious enough tension in them.  Wish I could get the capsule going a lil more easily, like, how do I make the writing express it perfectly?

66 Matthew XXXII, Ravens VIII: The Years:  Ravens in trouble. Passion, Humor.  I think the Ravens have a bit of a falling out here, prelude to Puss in Boots story.  Should still stand on its own as a natural part of this story tho.

67 Matthew XXXIII, Lupe XIII:  The Years:  Bonnie dies.  Passion, Horror.  I don’t think Lupe is totally broken up because they weren’t together, but has some kinda heavy talk with Matthew because she knows he knows and may have had similar big feelings.  Was it drugs?  Gang violence?  IDK.

68 Matthew XXXIV, Yolanda X:  The Years:  Yolanda much bigger.  Passion.  Good to see the baby surviving, but there’s some kind of edge to it.  Maybe she figures they can’t see each other anymore?  I dunno.  Weird being adult with child in your life who is not a relative or student or patient etc.  Weird things must end.

69 Matthew XXXV, Hyun-woo XIV:  Amelie finale.  Passion, Mystery.  Happily ever after.  Hyun-woo calls Matthew on the phone.  “You want to leave with me?  I’m in the Forest.”  Looks out the window, “I can’t see you.”  “Come down.  Come outside.”  Matthew decides he’ll finally be brave enough to leave the building, but as soon as he opens apartment door, Hyun-woo is there.  They kiss, then “I was serious about leaving.”  They go out together.

–

Sceney Scene Scene

THIS IS A POST IN PROGRESS.  I’m going to do edits on it at some point in the evening maybe?  To add to or elaborate on the scenes.

I want to make a scene-focused outline, which emphasized interesting moments over moment-to-moment storytelling, which I usually do.  To this end, I’m going to try to turn my plot into 70 scenes.  To do that I have no choice but to start with a more conventional outline.  Reiterating and doing a few improvements to the one I previously established…

Matthew is working under the table for the mob as an IT guy when his disability benefits are shut off until question marks.  Sees little girl out his window one morning.  The mobsters are complaining about too many cops sniffing around lately.  At some point he meets the full roster of Bacchantes, including the murderer.  Random circumstances, Matthew finds himself in the tunnels, where he witnesses the Princess Lupe getting her pocket picked by lesbian hustler Bonnie.  He ends up the prime suspect but Godfather Freddy gives him 24 hours to make it right.

Matthew goes into the secret halls again, from the entrance in his apartment.  There is some action to suggest the highest ranked mobsters are the ones who know about and use the passages.  He locates Bonnie and gets her to give up the goods, then has convo with Princess Lupe – I’m gay too, but watch out.  Ain’t always fun and games.  She says I owe you and let’s figure out how to get you off the hook.  He goes home for the night and thinks he’s seeing the girl again, but she flies away in some impossible way.  Or was it monkey wearing her dress?

M & B came up with scheme to “ping” her stolen electronics, which “turn out” to have been mislaid in a bookshelf, and boss Freddy is grateful again for his cool nerd powers.  What do you want in reward?  Let me quit.  Too much for my nerves.  The boss sez he might contract him for short gigs but will let him chill.  On his way out the door, Matthew hears that the cops are pestering people in the projects about a missing person.  Was that the girl he witnessed?

He frets about calling the cops or not – the girl could’ve been imagination?  Hyun-woo appears and asks if anyone has seen the girl.  Matthew makes contact, and is instantly infatuated with Hyun-woo.  What now?  Here is your challenge, weird nerd: Find the girl or find out what happened to her.

Matthew takes to the tunnels, always ducking from supernatural menace and visions of chaos?  In spying on the world, he finds out about people with problems.  A weird child is into insects and outrages violent mom-BF.  From Matthew’s PoV, people take on animal characteristics.  The child is a giant humanoid ant, the patriarch is a bug-eyed horse.  Maybe.  Still trying to figure out how literal I should get or not with that stuff.

Matthew tries to ignore villainy and keep head low, but ends up helping ant king Yolanda get rid of the horse Dexter, and garners another favor.  At this point that’s three favors and a quest – Bonnie, Lupe, Yolanda, and find the girl Ha-eun.  He keeps getting glimpses of some kind of truth about the girl.  Or the monkey?  Something something snakey snakes.

He starts getting some hints and false leads about the mobsters, including The Disease.

He sees three ravens getting their ears boxed by the witch Majel.  No food for you.  He helps the kids get access to food, but it turns out they were really trying to get access to weed.  Don’t smoke weed kids.  They ask if he wants some and no, but another favor owed.

Hyun-woo has doubts, so Matthew has to kick it up a notch to keep him around.  He laments to Bonnie, who does some kind of a favor that helps out.  Was it legit, or foolery?

I think Yolanda is a target of the snake, and thus discovers big hints for Matthew.  One favor repaid.Act Three-ish, Matthew and / or Hyun-woo are close to the mystery, and end up at a Monster Party.  If they don’t leave before midnight, they might get made into monsters or eaten.  Princess Lupe repays favor by getting Matthew out.  But what happened to Hyun-woo?

In despair, Matthew gets a clue from the ravens, last favor repaid, the apple of life.  He finds out where to save Hyun-woo.  They find out, as much as is possible, what happened to Ha-eun.  Hyun-woo leaves, unable to deal with the tragedy, but some time later they reconnect and Matthew escapes the Projects.  The end.

General Principles:  When crafting scenes, amp up emotion, mystery, and horror.  I’m going to intentionally post scenes suggested by the outline out of order below, to try to force myself to not think of them sequentially.

SCENES

YOLANDA ON A HOOK
Yolanda barely escapes The Disease and helps Matthew get info.  Obviously has potential to be one of the scarier moments in the book.  It raises the question, to what extent do I want to write in close third person perspective?  Mystery is greatly helped by constraining one’s pov to one given character.  Particularly where there is a question about what is real or not, moving between characters tells you that at least the main pov character is not likely to be imagining those other guys – they have an existence independent of him.  Whether the scenario and everyone within it is imaginary, this is a good thing to be able to hold onto.  Still…  it may be worthwhile for me to not do that.  So many more possibilities for scenes if I allow other people to feel real to the reader.
Sooo Yolanda real.  She does not get along with other children.  Like Hyun-woo, she can be a character with a life outside the building.  We first saw Eun-ha outside, implying The Disease gets them there, possibly.  What does that mean to be able to leave the Box?  Even a child like Yolanda is larger than Matthew, more powerful.  It takes strength to go fight the battles of the mundane world only to turn around and come home to a supernatural prison at night.
How does she get hold of Matthew?  Does she have his cell number?  Does she have her own cell phone?  Did she inherit Dexter’s when he got taken out?
Matthew gets a call, “I’m in the Forest.”  He rushes to a window and looks out.  Yolanda is hiding from something.  Is it real?  Can he get to her in time?  Probably the scariest thing would be seeing something going to attack a child when you could do nothing to intervene.
Maybe this is all his perspective.  Maybe she doesn’t actually escape The Disease at this point in the story and her gift to Matthew is her cellphone getting dropped in the Forest, with footage of The Killer.  But is that’s true, what would Matthew do?  Would make sense for him to call the cops, tell them about the tunnels, see if they could find her by scouring them.  Why wouldn’t he?  He knows the Killer could already have her dead, has her in the building.  He’d have to feel like doing some last resort type of shit.
Maybe he has Hyun-woo with him and this helps get that guy back on the page of believing Matthew after their relationship is strained.  Maybe they go into the tunnels together and split up to cover more ground, see if they can catch the snake before it gets into its hiding place with her – and succeed?  But lose the monster of course.
But that then raises the question – why wouldn’t brave Hyun-woo either go kicking open doors in the tunnels, or call the cops for that search himself?  Doesn’t work.  Ugh.  I need a short break…
I think it’s gotta be Matthew by himself and he has to get her back somehow, by himself.  He catches her in the tunnels.  But will need more consideration about how to make that as scary as possible without ending the story.

I COULD KILL YOU
Lupe lets Matthew know she’s thought about killing him to keep her secret safe.  I think, he’s trying to press her for info about her dad’s friends and she says it in annoyance.  Then he’s upset by it and she has to try to console him / sort him out.

SCRATCH TICKETS
The ravens involved?  Matthew sees Loan Shop dude being sus.  Maybe he has to get a payday loan himself…  Naw.  I dunno.  He pays rent to Freddy, and I imagine would be less fearful of eviction after getting in his good graces.

LUPE FIASCO
Lupe and Matthew carry out scheme to find her stolen goods in front of Freddy.  She stashes the gizmo and he pings it via computer trick, eliciting mobbish gratitude..

BONNIE BEDELIA
Bonnie coerced into giving up the goods, sez thx for not telling.

KILL THESE ROACHES
Matthew witnesses Dexter abusing Yolanda.

HE WENT THATTAWAY
Ravens give Matthew the big clue to get back into The Disease’s place and rescue Hyun-woo.

BAD FAVOR
Bonnie tries to repay Matthew with a favor, but something about this one just sucks.  Is it the invite to the monster party, or something that can lead to it?

KILL YOUR HORSE
Matthew defeats Dexter and wins Yolanda’s favor.  I wonder how… Maybe this can be an angel vs angel thing.  I like all the negative things of the building to be angel-influenced, and maybe the angel of Yolanda’s roaches is angry at Dexter.
I gotta commit to how this supernatural element is going to play out.  I think the main thing, as far as Matthew can tell, is that looking at things through the secret passages reveals something about them, shows them looking different.
Maybe he finds here that coming into an apartment through certain kinds of portals makes that appearance into reality, and uses this to unbind one of Yolanda’s dolls, who is the angel of the roaches.  Unbound she goes to war with Dexter and wins in some way.
Maybe it’s that if you leave by any passage other than the one you cam in by, the “vision” world is real in that environment.  To get back to the real world you have to go out how you came in.  Hang on, making a note on another section…

REAR WINDOW
Matthew’s first instance of spying from walls, sees Lesbian Drama.  What do you do when you see something you’re not supposed to be seeing?  What did Jeffrey do in Blue Velvet?  Not that.  Let’s say he sees that there’s something wrong fast enough he feels obligated to watch it play out – sees the pickpocket happen almost immediately.  Bonnie is evoking fish for him but not yet clear why.

NIGHT MONKEY
First glimpse of the monkey with the dress.

KICKED OUT OF NEST
Majel locks ravens out of her apartment.  Matthew fooled into thinking it’s abuse of some adopted children, sympathizes.  He uses tunnels to open her apartment and let in the ravens, who just go to smoke her weed.  They offer some but also say “we owe you one.”  Maybe has moment of cat jump scare from “David.”

BACCHANAL PROPER
Matthew and Hyun-woo at the worst party, get parted.  Lupe bails out Matthew but Hyun-woo has gone missing.
So, how does this one play out..?  Alarming buildup, some grand invocation, and the Wildness, including a few fake-outs that it’s going to be more tame or much worse than it all superficially is.

ALMOST THE WORST
Hyun-woo confronts Matthew on possibility he is stringing him along to get laid.  Messed up, dude!
Explaining the suspects.  But it’s never enough to go on, always enough to keep me here.  We had sex.  Was that a mistake?  Or was that always what you wanted out of me?  It was!  I can’t believe it.  I need to get out of here.  No way she’s in the building.  I know she is!  I can’t tell you why because you’ll think I’m crazy.  I just know she is!  Bullshit, Matthew.
I think this will get cut off prematurely by the plot revelation that gets them to go to the bad party, preventing awkwardness from culminating.

BORED GAMES
Matthew and Hyun-woo bond as people.  Hyun-woo and him go over what he knows about the building, within the limits of not telling him dangerous secrets about organized crime.  They have to take mental health breaks, during which they talk about who they are, find out they’re both gay?  or later?  Yeah, just hints – cultural things, interests.  Is established that Matthew is hesitant to tell Hyun-woo about tunnels, for reasons unclear to himself.  Shame about the spying incident?  A feeling that he’s going to be using that to look for Eun-ha?  Also doesn’t want to say he saw her flying in the monkey incident.

HAIRCUT
Gets haircut and contact lenses to impress Hyun-woo.  Finds out one of the creeps from the Bacchanal was the barber.

GETTING TO KNOW ALL ABOUT YOU
Matthew and Hyun-woo bond as possible lovers.  Matthew doesn’t have directly relevant things to report but does say how he’s gathering favors, might be able to use them to get closer to more evidence – also that he is getting to know more people in the building, to be able to do the questioning, including a girl of a similar age.
OK, revelation of gay happens here.  “Focusing on this is necessary, but terrifying.  Gotta balance it out with trying to keep an even head.  Beer me?”  They get closer to maybe doing a thing.

GLIMPSE MONKEY
Monkey jump scare in the secret passages.

LOVE SCENE
Token sex scene.  Lynch had something to say about sex scenes, about how movies shying away from them is not allowing themselves access to something powerful and magical?  Something like that.  Fools gotta get it on.
I think Hyun-woo is getting upset, gotta console him.  What could it mean?  Why can’t we just get cops to turn the building upside down?  If they do, they’ll just find her dead, won’t they?  Terrible terribleness lays out before them.

HYUN-WOO INTRO
Love appears.  Would he be going door to door in apartments?  Maybe he would, but at some point he’d get rousted as a trespasser if he did.  Maybe that’s how this scene ends.  So…
Hyun-woo knocks on the door.  Matthew opens up, hoping for a sexy mormon or jehovah’s witness to entertain for a dishonest hour.  Have you seen this girl?  Terminator 2 style.  Maybe I have?  I saw a girl.  I heard about the rumors and it got me thinking, could that have been her?  Points out where in The Forest she was, what was going on generally.  Expresses discomfort with going down there but interest in helping him with investigation.  Goons are going to walk him out but get talked out of it – tho he’s forbidden from bugging neighbors.

HE CAME BACK
Happily ever after.  Calls him on the phone.  “You want to leave with me?  I’m in the Forest.”  Looks out the window, “I can’t see you.”  “Come down.  Come outside.”  Matthew decides he’ll finally be brave enough to leave the building, but as soon as he opens apartment door, Hyun-woo is there.  They kiss, then “I was serious about leaving.”  They go out together.

HALL PASS
Finds out the prime suspects / Bacchantes all use the secret passages.

DISEASE PIMPIN
Sees The Disease with his hoes.  Where?  The courtyard?  The bodega?  The halls?  Old ladies are on the old monster’s jock.  Maybe he gets those kinda kicks with lady angels and just uses kids for food.  Less edgy honestly.

IN DA CLOSET
Finds the tunnel, involves a white snake.  ON MY OWN.  Finds out where they lead, including to his own apartment.

BACCHANAL ONE:  FROM THE OUTSIDE
While working for the mob, Matthew meets all the prime suspects when they attend a party at Freddy’s.  This is a very early scene and a very important one.  Establishing the mansion and its inhabitants and guests – almost all angels, all weird as balls.  They should all be saying things that disturb or provoke bad imagination.

MORNING GIRL
First time Eun-ha is witnessed.

COME BACK TO ME
I can’t.  Hyun-woo leaves because the investigation is over and he needs to get away.  Matthew can’t just drop everything and follow him, can he?  Senses it wouldn’t be welcome, that he would remind Hyun-woo of tragedy.  Plus he has all his stuff to consider, giving notice if he moved out, where he could possibly afford to live elsewhere…  The box is a trap.

HALLS OR WALLS?
Matthew can’t decide if he should investigate inside or outside the secret passages.  How is this a scene?  Let’s say he’s starting to experience to supernatural, and a moment of that has him swear off spending time in there.  The monkey scare?  … Nein.  It’s the thing where he finds out the visions have a reality of your own, and for a bit he’s worried that he’ll get stuck forever in there, because he hasn’t worked out with certainty yet that you can get out by going back the way you came in.

THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM
Matthew’s first glimpse of The Disease’s place.  I don’t know.  Should it not initially come off as being the one?  Are there other places just as spooky, therefore he doesn’t know for sure which is it?  Why doesn’t he wrap things up here?

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST
In The Disease’s place, must rescue Hyun-woo and find out about Eun-ha.  Is he locked out?  How does he get in?  Would he bring something with him?  A weapon?  What could he even use?  Get a roscoe from the ravens?  From somebody else?  Going in unarmed is braver.  More foolish, but that’s how we get our horror story feeling.
Trying to get a handle on the surreal horror thing.  Leonora Carrington’s *The Debutante* is pretty good for that.  Very snappy, vulgar, punchy.  I think the bat near the end was an interesting touch.
Gotta walk through the place with trepidation, weapon at the ready or looking for an improvised weapon as he goes, take in the spooky details.  Chicken coops?  Incubators?  Chicks?  Down twirling in unseen breezes on the floor?  I don’t know.
What’s Hyun-woo suffering?  What’s happening to him?  How litcheral is this snake?  I can’t even decide.  Losing my marbles.  Last couple of days have been comparatively chill but I still don’t feel like I have the sauce for this.  But I can’t fucking admit defeat.  I can’t!  It’d be letting the fascists win.
A conveyor belt with deformed or dead chicks on it, running in and out of chutes on the walls.  Kinda *Existenz* I know.  Eggshells like papier mâché.  That gibbon running up and down the aisles, slapping or ripping at you as it goes by.  Eun-ha, how about you?
Vats covered haphazardly with tarp.  Some are askew, showing bodies in varying states, or piles of dusty or goopy bones.  Are they girls turning into giant chicks or vice versa?  How are they being consumed?  Where are the souls?  Something twisting through it all, a great movement in the ground that can’t be discerned.
I dunno i dunno.  The pink dress falls off a hanger on a door that is ajar.  Inside, Hyun-woo in bondage.  Liberate the boy.  But a snek must be upon thee.
Maybe Matthew gets Hyun-woo unbound but he’s unconscious.  The Disease catches Matthew and is about to kill him when Hyun-woo saves the day.  Baby Eun-ha shows up and goes to hug Hyun-woo, but vanishes in a puff of down around his legs.  She was a ghost.  The end.
I dunno I dunno I dunno.

ALRIGHT, time for another angle.  If this is gonna have 70 scenes, and if it’s gonna be third person, I can come up with scenes specifically for other characters when they are not being observed or interacted with by Matthew.  The private lives of NPCs oh my…  Gotta decide who should be shown and who should not.  If you humanize a character you remove an element of mystery from them.  Would be better not to show much of the more monstrous characters…  Or maybe not!  I’m thinking about *Wild at Heart* when evil mom was siccing Harry Dean Stanton on our main mans, freaking out on the telephone.  That’s a scene showing a monster alone…  but that is cinema and this is prose.  Hm…  Call these ideas, and if they don’t work they don’t work.

Hyun-woo.  What can he do with no Matthew in the scene?  What might he do alone?  Maybe his arrival at the building, like when the cowpoke rolls into town at high noon and a tumbleweed blows past.  That does feel like a sequential scene, an interstitial scene – not a time in the story when anything exciting or interesting is happening.  On the other hand, it does show the building as mysterious in a way it would not be to Matthew, since he lives there.  Getting the outside perspective could be good.  Also could be the first part of the story to switch perspective, and thereby establish the significance of the other guy at the same time as establishing that’s going to be a method to use.
So I’ll go with it.  How can it feel mysterious?  Hyun-woo dodges cops on the way into the building, showing he’s not with them, has his own agenda.  He has some kind of weird encounter in the bodega maybe, leads him to want a closer look at the building and its inhabitants.  He can sneak in by the hall that goes back into the building.
He should have some other scene.  A phone call to one of the relatives that put him up to this task, perhaps.  What else?  Other times of coming into the building, showing the people Matthew knows from a different perspective and state of mind.  Again, this ain’t feeling exciting or worth elevating.  I’ll look at it again later.
Maybe at the party once he’s separated from Matthew, gets snaked?

I feel like Yolanda could be a more significant character, get some writing from her perspective.  It’ll also help offset the way all the black people in this story are turning out to be outrageous weirdos, by humanizing her.  She sees Dexter’s death traps for roaches and tries to carve little ways out for them.  She interacts with her doll that will later turn out to be a shackled angel.  Both in the same scene?  I feel like there should be a scene where she’s showing her alienation from other kids.  Maybe it would be good to try to make scenes with more than one character, like, two birds some.

Lupe is a significant one.  Her combo of fragility and menace is compelling.  After Matthew gets dismissed from the mob, she could be a human’s eye perspective on them.  Scenes of her being weirded out by the weirdos.  Getting victimized by her baby boo feels like it needs a resolution of some kind.  Bust them puppies?  So: Revenge, Mercy, Weird-outs.

Them ravens.  In this story they should always be together.  Three teenage boys take up a lot of physical and social space, but these guys are made to feel small and fly away.  Before the kicked-out scene, some other scene to intro the idea of them.  After that, some more evidence of them doing hijinks.  Then their last favor.

Bonnie’s scenes should all be with Matthew or Lupe, so no more for her.

Prime Suspects should have one apiece – Freddy, Armando, Don, The Disease.  Don makes like he wants to cut Yolanda’s hair.  Armando menaces the ravens.  Freddy weirds out his daughter.  The Disease does something weird with baby chickens, if that ain’t too obvious.

All told, that could be another ten to fifteen, depending on how I slice it.

Matthew I:  Getting ready for work, sees Eun-ha.
Matthew II, Freddy I, Armando I, Don I, Dario I, The Disease I, Lupe I:  Scared by mobsters outside their party.
Matthew III:  Tech support turns into Tunnel Time.
Hyun-Woo I:  Floating World.
Matthew IV, Bonnie I, Lupe II:  Tunnel Time ends with witnessing Bonnie crime.
Freddy II, Dario II:  The Shipment I.  Freddy+Dario discuss the shipment.
Matthew V, Freddy III:  Accused by Freddy.
Yolanda I:  Anything.
Matthew VI, Bonnie II:  Confronts Bonnie.
Matthew VII:  Tunnel Time to find Lupe.
Matthew VIII, Lupe III:  Gets with Lupe.
Matthew IX:  Scared by Monkey Faces.
Freddy IV, Dario III:  The Shipment II.  Freddy convinces Dario to get Armando’s help acquiring it.
Yolanda II:  Some kind of early scene to hint she will matter later.
Lupe IV, Bonnie III:  Lupe schools Bonnie.
Hyun-Woo II:  Hyun-woo arrives, begins to investigate.
Matthew X, Lupe V, Freddy V:  Lupe helps him get out of mob.
Hyun-woo III:  Hyun-woo door-to-door, attracting bad attention.
Matthew XI, Hyun-woo IV:  First meeting with Hyun-Woo.
Ravens I, Bonnie IV:  Hint they will matter.
Freddy VI, Dario IV, Armando II:  The Shipment III.  Freddy+Armando+Dario get the shipment.
Matthew XII, Yolanda III:  Tunnel Time to investigate for Hyun-woo, Yolanda hint.
Matthew XIII:  Crushing, scrapbooking?
Yolanda IV:  Messing with roach traps, yelled on by Dexter, talks to Dolly.
Lupe VI:  Lupe Somethin?
Matthew XIV, Hyun-woo V:  Bored games.  Hyun-woo still temporarily scared to not investigate.
Freddy VII, Dario V, Armando III:  The Shipment IV.  Freddy+Armando+Dario get the stuff put away, but hint of troubled relationship.
Lupe V, Don II, Armando IV, Freddy VIII:  Weirded out by dad and homies.
Matthew XV:  Tunnel Time but decides to stop doing it.
MONKEY RAMPAGE
Matthew XVI, Ravens II, Majel I:  Matthew sees ravens kicked out, helps them.
Hyun-woo VI, the Disease II:  By himself v. The Disease.  Hyun-woo braving the halls again.
Matthew XVII, Don III:  Haircut to impress, realizes Don was at bacchanal.
Lupe VI, The Disease III:  Is weird with hoes.
Freddy IX, Armando V:  The Shipment V.  Freddy+Armando scheme to betray Dario and let Armando sell it with a more generous cut.
Matthew XVIII, Yolanda V:  Tunnel Time ends up seeing Yolanda in trouble, weird idea to unleash angel.
Matthew XIX, Yolanda VI:  Dexter defeated, Yolanda victory stomp and fall into the roaches.
Hyun-woo VII, Armando VI:  By himself v. Armando.
Ravens III, Armando VII, Matthew XX:  Scratch tickets.
Matthew XXI:  Gets a face full of cops.
Freddy X, Hyun-woo VIII:  By self, vs. Freddy.
Lupe VII, Bonnie V:  Have mercy, I forgot to be a lover.
Matthew XVIII, Hyun-woo VIII:  Getting to know you.
Ravens IV, Freddy XI, Armando VIII:  The Shipment VI.  Ravens jack the goods from Freddy+Armando.
Yolanda VII:  Alienation.
The Disease IV:  Is weird with baby chickens.
Hyun-woo IX:  Hyun-woo vs. Cops.
Matthew XIX:  Tunnel Time but getting exhausted and scared.
Matthew XX, Hyun-woo X:  Love scene.
EUN-HA ALIVE?
Yolanda VIII:  Again?
Freddy XII, Dario VI, Armando IX:  The Shipment VII.  Freddy+Dario+Armando have a Mexican standoff over this anime betrayal.
Ravens V:  Some kinda hijinks.
Majel II, The Disease V:  Majel vs. The Disease, he knows she steals from Freddy and don’t care.
Matthew XXI, Lupe VIII, Bonnie VI:  I coulda killed you.  Matthew laments to Bonnie.
Matthew XXII:  Tunnel Time more hints at supernature.  Monkey Scare again?
Freddy XIII, Dario VII:  The Shipment VIII.  Freddy+Dario we’ve lost it all.  Ruined forever.  Who will provide for my mongooses and ocelots?  Then they get a hint about a new shipment of some trivial shit and start scheming again.
Yolanda IX, Don IV:  Don threatens to cut Yolanda’s hair.
EUN HA v. MONKEY
Matthew XXIII, Yolanda VI, The Disease VI:  Yolanda abducted, saved in TUNNEL TIME.
Matthew XXIV, Hyun-woo X, Bonnie VII:  The Worst.  Bonnie interrupts with party invite.
Ravens VI, Majel III: Ravens vs. Majel.
Matthew XXV, Hyun-woo XI, Freddy XIV, Armando X, Don V, The Disease VII, Lupe IX:  The Bacchanal.
Matthew XXVI, Hyun-woo XII, The Disease VIII:  Final fight in Tunnel Time.
Matthew XXVII, Ravens VII:  Give Matthew the Apple of Life in Tunnel Time?
Matthew XXVIII, Hyun-woo XIII:  I just can’t.  Go home.
Matthew XXIX, Ravens VIII:  The Years:  Ravens in trouble.
Matthew XXX, Lupe X:  The Years:  Bonnie dies.
Matthew XXX, Yolanda VII:  The Years:  Yolanda much bigger.
Matthew XXXI, Hyun-woo XIV:  Amelie finale.

Got some ideas for subplots to add foolery and length.  Eun-ha will get a few scenes.  At some point a glimpse of her doing something will imply to the reader she may still be alive.  At some point the monkey will be implied to be her, while it rages out and does some kind of preternatural vandalism.  At last, there will be a scene where it is made clear Eun-ha is not the monkey because she will be in a struggle against it, during which it may be hinted again that she is not alive.  This leads into Yolanda’s biggest scene of getting menaced.

Majel will also get a lil more screen time, showing her power over the ravens, another hint about her cat, and that she is connected with foolery in the building – including The Disease.

But the main thing is “The Delivery.”  I feel like the mobsters should get more time, and some kind of mobbish plot can help with that, plus demonstrate that their crime is kinda unimportant to who they are.  Theirs is a world of metaphor and spirit, not earthly goods.  At first it will seem like the intrigue over a mysterious delivery of presumed contraband is something real, but by the end it will be clear this is not conventional material goods or criminality – these guys are something else…  (edited into outline above)

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