[UA] [UA]: A few more random plots

[Matthew Rowan Norwood]

Okay, I'm in.

> A boy and a revered waitress disguise themselves as each other in
virtual reality.

I can't quite figure this one out.  A boy and a waitress ascend as the
Archetype of  "Trading Places"?  You know, like in _Twelfth Night_ --
the woman dresses up as a boy, and the two get mistaken for each other?
The power of the avatar draws on stories like _The Prince and the
Pauper_, _The Man in the Iron Mask_, _Trading Places_ (you know, Dan
Akroyd and Eddie Murphy?)... it'd be a gender-bending,
rich-guy-switches-places-with-poor-guy kind of thing.  Which is maybe
where the "revered" thing comes in -- maybe she's a famous actress who
plays a waitress in the movies... and he's a street kid who looks a lot
like her... she wants to try being a man, he wants to try being rich and
famous... after trading roles, though, they find a strange sexual
dynamic springing up between them, as she gets too much into the
"aggressive man" thing, and he sinks into the "passive female" thing.
Could be kinky.

Okay, I don't know if it really works.

> A life-guard and a team of mellow refugees exchange minds.

Okay, great story.  A bunch of demons haunt a beach, the ghosts of
surfers who died in the crazy waves there.  They possess the lifeguard
there and start him surfing dangerously, finding that "edge" they were
all obsessed with in life.

You could throw in some tragic stuff with someone dying while the
lifeguard is out there surfing, adding another ghost to the mix who
blames the lifeguard... or maybe, the lifeguard dies and joins the list
of dead surfer ghosts.


> Five hot dog sellers get married in a condominium.

A few people know that the hotdog vendors in The City are not just
ordinary food peddlers -- they actually constitute a cult devoted to
tapping into the soul of the city.  They have learned a ritual to create
a monstrosity of human flesh, created by merging five of their bodies in
the condo they use for the ritual.  The fleshy blob, known as The Meat,
is an amalgam of limbs, faces and flab all feeding slowly into a meat
grinder, from which the cultists gather the ingredients for their
sausages.  The special sausages, once sold, travel through the digestive
tracts of the customers while retaining their connection to The Meat.
The Meat can gather information from all its parts about the health,
activities and whereabouts of the customers, and it may even be able to
exert some kind of control over them.  I'm torn over whether to have The
Meat hooked up to sewage pipes, collecting its digested bits back into
itself from the sewers (they come back instinctively to their source)
before it can assimilate the information gathered by that piece of meat.

At any rate, The Meat speaks its findings in disjointed moans,
interpreted by the Oracles of The Meat, senior cultists who spend their
days in the Meat chamber, scribbling down the blob's blatherings.

A few clued-in adepts know something about the cult -- probably just
that if the price is right, you can get just about any random piece of
information about someone in the city if you cut a deal with a hotdog
vendor.

And yeah, I am a vegetarian.


> An effeminate ghost, a surfer, and a jolly student lose themselves to
a passionate affair that dominates their very existences.

The same lifeguard from before -- or maybe a random living surfer on the
same haunted beach -- gets possessed by the ghost of a college student
who drowned while obsessed with one of his fellow students, a girl who
turned him down because he was a "pansy".  In the body of the hunky
beach bum, he seduces the girl, who is overjoyed at the attentions of
this hunk.  Could lead to some funny morning-after "what did I do last
night" scenes after the ghost leaves, and some "it's like you're two
different people" lovers' spats.


> A mean-spirited advertising executive and a deer hunter discover their
true selves.

Namely, the avatars of the Demagogue (preying on people's worst
instincts in marketing products) and the Hunter.


> A violent dance instructor tells his/her life story to the nephew of a
stunt man in prison.

Best story so far.  The nephew of a successful stuntman/entropomancer,
after learning some magical tricks from his uncle, figures out how to
try for a major charge and succeeds, jumping a full bus over a
drawbridge.  He's arrested, but he sits in his cell for a while figuring
out what to do with this dynamo of magical might in his back pocket.
While there, he meets a middle-aged man in prison for assault and
battery, who tells him the saddest story he's ever heard.  The man was
the lover and instructor of a famous ballerina who was killed by a car
weeks before her big gig that would have set them up in the big time.
The man turned to drink, then abuse of his students, then violence.  The
adept is touched by the man's tragic story and decides to give him his
old life back, reversing the tragic accident.  Days later, he escapes
from prison after gathering charges by publicly insulting every powerful
faction in the prison: the guards, the blacks, the white supremacists,
etc.  He makes a break for it and miraculously succeeds by using his
magic.

Now, though, he's on the run from the cops, and he turns to his buddy
from prison.  Of course, the dance instructor doesn't remember him, and
he's upset that this escaped convict knows so much about his life ten
years before.  He's not actually living a happy life, even though he
married the dancer and they made it big.  He's dissatisfied with their
marriage and their kids, with her fame and his money.  The adept, of
course, is pretty mad at himself for wasting the magic and at his buddy
for his lack of appreciation for what he has.  He resolves to teach the
man to love his wife and children and count his blessings, or
something.  Blah blah blah.  It could be quite a lovely story, really.

> A naive folk singer signs up for skiing lessons with a melodramatic
lawyer in someone's mind.

Hmmm... sounds a lot like the "pathetic unrequited love from beyond the
grave" story above.  The singer, dead for several years, possesses the
body of a young woman and cozies up to her (the singer's) ex-husband
while he's staying at a ski lodge.  She is shocked to find out that he
has gone from anti-establishment hippie to smarmy, cheesy corporate
lawyer full of rhetoric about why he's so much more mature than he was
during his hippy days.


> A violent fisherman, a telephone operator, and a mechanical mechanic
try to one up each other in the big city.

How did they know about my campaign idea?  See, two avatars of the King
are fighting for control of the city: a belligerent homeless man who
spends the day fishing in the river (the Fisher King, get it?) and an
information kingpin who sits on top of a bundle of information channels
and processes them all day -- TV, telephone, email, radio, etc.  He is
the "telephone operator" -- the man at the swtichboard, the Watcher, the
Spider in the Web.  When he finds out about the street-level King
challenging his turf, he sics his resident wizard on the guy, a
Clockworker named Adam Kadmon.  Unbeknownst to the Watcher, and to Adam
himself, Adam is actually a major clockwork himself imbued with the
ability to build other clockworks (a mechanical mechanic, get it?) and
built by the man who serves as his assistant, the elderly, senile
Klaus.  Klaus hid Adam's true nature from him, and his mind pretty much
fell apart after building his masterwork, but he still makes little
clockwork surprises for Adam, whose skill does not yet equal that of his
father.  Adam has plans of his own greater than serving the King, and
the two-way struggle for power expands into a three-way struggle, with
Klaus inconspicuously throwing in the occasional surprise.


--

Matthew Rowan Norwood
MIT Media Lab
rowan at media.mit.edu
http://i.am/notwhatiam/



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