[UA] Early Edition

[DocHopt at aol.com]

There's an American television show, "Early Edition," with definite UA 
capability. The main character, who lives in Chicago, has beeng getting the 
daily morning newspaper, for tomorrow-- ever since he moved to his new 
apartment. Apparently the old guy who lived there before was a typesetter for 
the newspaper in its early years, and stories circulate about his coworkers 
coming to him with a story to find that he'd already had it all laid out, 
ready for print, before even hearing about it.

After discovering the possibilities of this paper, he's become obsessed with 
searching the paper for the tragedy stories and changing all the ones he can 
for the better. (He's able to do this full-time because he can also use the 
newspaper to see where horse races, stock prices, etc. are going to go, and 
make a living off of that.) His best friends are another guy, kind of a 
dirtbag, but nice at heart, played by Fisher Stevens, and a blind woman who 
was his coworker at the financial company he used to work at.

The episodes admittedly follow a kind of predictable routine. The guy sees 
some awful thing in the paper, finds something strange that wasn't mentioned 
in the story, goes to change it by trying to convince one of the people 
involved to do something different, ends up making it worse, and finally 
hightails it to the scene of the second version of said awful event, 
interfering dramatically and making it all better again. (For instance, in a 
recent episode, he read a story about an innocent woman getting killed by a 
mob boss. He then finds out that she's the mob boss's girlfriend, and the 
death was accidental. He tries to convince the mob boss not to resolve 
conflicts with guns and violence so often, since he knows if he pulls out a 
gun later that night, the boss's girlfriend will get killed. He goes back to 
his apartment or the bar or wherever and pulls out his newspaper again, only 
to find that she still gets killed, only by a rival mafioso, who offed the 
girl because the first one wouldn't fight back. The protagonist zooms off to 
some bridge just in time to stop the conflict.)

UA significance: the typesetter who lived in the apartment previously was 
obviously a Cliomancer or Infomancer or something-- the protagonist now just 
happens to be in the right apartment at the right time. Word will of course 
spread through the underground about a plain guy in Chicago who knows what 
will happen tomorrow. One could meddle with things a bit and have the guy run 
into your players once they find a threat in a certain city (it doesn't have 
to be Chicago after all), trying to convince them not to go after the threat. 
Maybe he's been seeing more and more weird occult things going on in recent 
years.

A good red herring, all in all, or possibly an ally-- after all, he doesn't 
have any hidden agenda, he just wants to make this little corner of the world 
a better place.

Hopt
--
"Insert witty quote here."

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