Been getting some Writer's Block recently and don't know how to continue this story. Let me give you a little bit of background information on what this story is about and where I am stuck: Basically, it's about three thirteen year old boys working as spies. Their assigned mission was to infiltrate gather intel from a villain's lair. However, in the process they are captured by the villain and tied up to chairs. Now, this is the problem. I have no idea how to continue the story and how our heroes can escape the villain. What I am trying to avoid is that they are rescued by another person. What I could do is restructure the plot, but I do prefer to avoid that if possible. Any of you got any ideas?
One suggestion is to consider saving their capture for the climax, so you would find a point, earlier in the story, and take a different route, ultimately ending up with their capture. Or, you could set something up from the beginning. Give them a way out, just make sure that way out isn't a surprise out of left field for the reader. Lay the ground work. Also, you could lose the capture scene entirely. I'm the biggest fan of this option. Captured main characters tied to chairs is a bit cliche, right? How many times have we seen that? If I were you, I'd challenge myself to come up with something more clever, and see if I even need the capture. A villain can "capture" someone in more ways than one.
Maybe it is best to lose the capture scene entirely or change it so that the MC's are still in the villain's hands but in a different way. I'm thinking that they could be thrown into a reinforced glass cylinder, since this story is near futuristic.
What you have to do is give them the tools to escape at some earlier point without making it too obvious to the reader what you just did. We were using Lethal Weapon 2 as an example in a different thread today, so it came to my mind as a good example for this as well. Early in this movie we're shown the main character dislocating his shoulder for a bet. Later, when this characters is chained and thrown into the sea to drown, he dislocates his shoulder to escape. A not very subtle, different example is how James Bond is given a set of quirky spy tools early in every movie. Just when you've forgotten all about them, they save him in some critical moment. The random character showing up to for a rescue is in fact just another variant of this as you have to set up this possibility properly for it not to be a cheat. I remember really admiring the extremely subtle way the Brienne rescue of Sansa and Theon in the beginning of the last season of Game of Thrones was set up.
Well in order to make a possibly good suggestion, I have to ask, why are the boys tied up by the villain. Do they have into the villains wants? This 'why' might be able to relate to their escape in some way, once we know that maybe.
The villain plans to use them as test subjects as he is attempting to develop a new substance that would be able to, well put simply, mind control people and force them to act against their own will. This is also the subject of the intel that the boys were trying to retrieve.
Somehow during the test, something goes wrong and one of the spies ends up controlling the mind of the villain? Edit: typo
You would have to be careful how the young teens escape. Unless they have some sort of outside assistance, or some special ability/skills, it will make the villain appear less than competent. I guess if it is one of his henchmen that does something wrong or out of procedure that enables the escape, that would not reflect as poorly on the main bad guy.
It'd be cool if there was something about them being young that turned out to be a strength rather than a weakness. The obvious one would be physical size - could they be small enough to fit in somewhere a full-sized adult couldn't? Or if you're willing to introduce a bit of humanity on the part of your villains, maybe one of them is reluctant to hurt children, and they're able to take advantage of that to escape. Or the villain is trying to use them as bait/human shields/ransom/something because they're young and innocent, so he holds them alive instead of killing them and they use the extra time to figure something out. Whatever. The idea is to kind of turn @TWErvin2's totally valid concern around, and make their youth a feature instead of a flaw.
The idea of keeping them alive is one that I could work with. I could also combine this idea with that of @TWErvin2 in which that one of the henchmen could do something wrong and this provides an escape. I'll update and see if I run into anything. Thanks.
I'd say go with this then, and maybe the teens end up mind controlling the villain, but not voluntarily... more accidentally, and they manage to accidentally incapacitate the villain and his henchman long enough to escape, if that works for your story.
How about this: The villain decides to wait two hours before testing them and decides to use the boys as bait for the rest of the agency. The villain unties them and throws them in a ten metre deep pit. One of the spies have a tool that acts as a trampoline that expans when used, to turn into an actual trampoline. They make use of this "trampoline" and escape the pit. Although the henchmen and the villain spot them and the henchmen grab the boys, the villain attempts to test the substance now (which is a gas) however, the substance has more energy than first thought and first affects the villain, giving the spies the opportunity to attack the henchmen. The cloud of gas manages to reach the henchmen, affecting them also. One of the spies control them to stay completely still, even though the boys know that they wouldn't be affected for long.
They could have a backup plan for when they get caught. There could be a robot that is small enough not to be seen and help them get away, a voice activated transmitter to alert the HQ or something that they got caught. One of the villain's workers was forced to work for him because the person is extremely skilled in this sort of expertise and was blackmailed with something big so they couldn't refuse so the smart person that they are decided to help the kids passive aggressively and pass them a flash drive or the plans. This person could create a distraction to avoid any unwanted attention.
