So I've been doing seat of of the pants for 85k words now. And I'm at the point where I need to explain why my MC is the way she is, but I don't know the answer. lol It's a sci fi that takes place on Earth and a fictional planet called Sonella (but it's a lot like Earth). There's a piece of technology the aliens invented called the chronoflex. It allows the user to basically turn into particles and travel at lightning fast speeds. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of people (human and alien alike) that use this piece of technology, and so far, my MC is the only one who uses it differently than everyone else. To specify: 1. When most people travel, they see blackness. They can't steer at all. They just set a destination and the chronoflex takes them there. MC can see static, like snow on a TV, and outlines of shapes around her. She can also move freely. 2. Everyone else who uses it needs coordinates to be able to travel. She can simply picture a place she's been or a person she knows and travel directly to them. 3. She can pass through walls, while no one else can. 4. She's also strong enough to take more than one person with her by feeding on her connection to them, while everyone else can only take one person at a time. Now... I can't decide how I want to handle this. Other than her being part alien (which I'm totally okay with), I can't think of another reason why she'd be able to manipulate the chronoflex in ways no one else can. Her dad isn't in the picture, so I'm okay making him an alien. But is he a different alien than the ones on Sonella? Maybe his species is really good at manipulating tech. Or maybe he's the same as those on Sonella and just his familial line is better at manipulating tech. Maybe there's some secret deity I haven't considered before that gave her the ability. Maybe she's sick and something about the illness make it easier for her to access parts of her that the others can't. I literally don't know! And now it's time to write the scene, and I'm stuck. I'm half tempted to not answer the question at all and leave it for the sequel (if there ever is one). But I have a feeling that would piss the reader off. Any ideas? And again, it's sci fi, so anything goes! Don't hold back!
A mutation She's one of the first of a new evolutionary stage of mankind She has no idea herself, and neither does anyone else "It's magic! I'm astounding you and you don't like it!" (from Kids in the Hall)
Due to an action of her own, she's witnessed horrific arcane knowledge not meant to be seen by anyone. No language can even describe it.
I kinda like that actually. Earlier in the book, MC questions why the aliens look so human. And the aliens respond asking why humans look so much like them. They then talk about how they heard rumors that both species are derived from the same "mother" species, they just evolved differently. So this could be the first stage of the humans evolving. Maybe... Thanks!
If only a few hundred people out of the whole human race have done this, then that seems like a really small sample size from which to say "this is how X always works/is experienced". I think you'd be well within your rights to say your MC had some kind of small, unobtrusive mutation/slight tweak in her brain/could be literally anything about her, which would make her just different enough to manifest this different experience. Since so few people have ever used this technology it seems likely to me there could be many such previously unobserved reactions waiting out there that just haven't been found yet. You could pair this with any other explanation you wanted--the alien dad, the evolving into a new species--but you wouldn't necessarily even have to. There's already enough diversity among humans to explain it IMHO.
Once you phrased it like that, I realized I grossly underestimated how many people have this ability. lol There's actually probably hundreds of hundreds, once I really think about it. I never specify in the novel though. I think I decided to go with the alien dad. I wrote out a few scenes, and that one worked well. Plus as I said before, there was mention of an earlier alien race that birthed the two main species in my story, so the connection was already mentioned. Plus it gives me a good setup for a future sequel. Thank you!
Tens of hundreds is thousands, so hundreds of hundreds would be tens of thousands. Sorry for grammar-policing.
How about she has a brain assistance implant. ? a neural coprosessor. Maybe in an advanced tech world, everyone has implants, but her implant is different. most people have an implant that is like a super-alexis/ceri/cortana, but hers is an off brand implant that no one has heard of, or she got it from a stranger in an alley, or a friend in the militry, cia, nasa, MIT., or someone who got fired from the research lab that made the implant, or was working on a totally new way to configure the implant. maybe the implant worked like any other until she fell asleep under high power wires, had an MRI. got hit by lighning, had a serious car crash, or noticed it wasn't working right and asked a techie friend to tweek it for her.
Does each person have their own personal chronoflex? Could it be that it's her device that has the glitch, not her?
