1. Birmingham

    Birmingham Active Member

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    I need my protagonist to take over an ambitious project single-handedly.

    Discussion in 'Plot Development' started by Birmingham, Feb 14, 2018.

    My character is a woman obsessed with a long dead public figure (who died over a century before her birth).
    She is also brilliant and works in quantom physics, and I think you get where I'm going with that.

    Her entire life was dedicated to learn of that person on her spare time and also to work on an ambitious project of time travel / parallel universe project. She's not leading it. She's just a kog in the machine, but works her way up to an important position. I need to build a scenario in which she takes the machine over and is undisturbed by any authorities or anything like that. One scenario I had in mind is a disintegration of her country. Chaos and anarchy etc. Stuff that happens unrelated to the rest of the plot, but simply explains why she can sit alone in a bunker (after killing all of her colleagues) without any police or military or government coming to check up on her. If you have any other questions or ideas, feel free to share.

    Oh, and btw, no paradoxes, as this is a reality where the different eras exist parallel to one another. She will never change the past of her own world, but she could do it with other worlds that are experiencing earlier eras.
     
  2. GlitterRain7

    GlitterRain7 Galaxy Girl Contributor

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    You could have something unrelated to the plot happen that would cause her colleagues to have to go work for something of more importance, but she's somehow not qualified. That would leave her alone with the machine without anyone else checking in on her, because, in theory, they wouldn't care because of more pressing matters, and they know she's working on it, which she is qualified for.
     
  3. Kalisto

    Kalisto Senior Member

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    If she lives in a country like Russia, there were very few scientists available and everything was done on the whim of a bureaucracy. So when the bureaucracy says it's time for us to run an unsafe test on the nuclear reactor, then darn it, you run an unsafe test on the nuclear reactor! Scientists who normally run the experiments not there? No! Not acceptable. We want to run this experiment! Now! And suddenly you have Chernobyl meltdown. So it wouldn't be unusual that she might be left with the experiment for long periods of time because bureaucracy wants it done and a million other things done.

    Also, have considered her stealing parts from the lab and assembling a machine on her own?
     
  4. Birmingham

    Birmingham Active Member

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    Heya Kallisto. Thank you for your insight.

    Regarding your last suggestion, yes, I thought of maybe have her do this privately. That takes the whole government thing off her back (and the back of the plot). I even thought of maybe having her using a benefactor who bankrolls her in order to beat the government in that race (if she receives documents and sketches from a double she has in a parallel universe for instance. Sort of like Beef Tannen and the booklets of baseball games in Back To the Future). This way she catapults herself to a key role in the project.
    I don't want her to go fully private and completely on her own because it's not as realistic. A realistic time machine strikes me as something more sophisticated than something you can build in your garage, or put into your car. It strikes me more of something you'd see on Stargate. Wormholes etc. So even though I don't need a government or a benefactor for the main plot, I sort of have to have one or both (and maybe even an accomplice she recruits at work) and of course she ends up stabbing everybody in the back. The ark of my story is what happens after they're all gone.

    Her nationality... I figured either American or ambiguous. And not in the past, but in the future (near, far. Or both. Cos time machine).
    Ironically, my idea of her entire nation destroyed comes not from wanting this story to spread wide and become more colossal, but because I want her story to become small and intimate, about her and the subject of her affection.
    Naturally if I leave the world and the country standing, someone out there would stop her. I mean, if someone took over a Stargate project funded by the US, Russia, Germany, or Richard Branson, they'll have people storming the place in no time.
    I don't want to destroy an entire nation as a setup, but so far it's the only setup that makes sense.
     
  5. Birmingham

    Birmingham Active Member

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    Hi Glitter. Didn't see your comment there. Thanks for replying.
    What I'm aiming at is having her basically live there and research the machine and having months if not years to improve it, and then spending time helping nurse someone else back to health. Later she makes a journey on her own, etc, comes back... I also fear that if a government doesn't notice someone like her doing that, it'll take some of the realism.
     
  6. making tracks

    making tracks Active Member

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    Could she have tampered with something to orchestrate an 'accident' with a few of her other colleagues, leaving her the highest in command? As authorities like the police wouldn't understand how the machines work they would have to take her word for what went wrong and presumably have no reason to doubt her. Depending how she did it she could have subordinates left to help her.
     
  7. Clinkz

    Clinkz Member

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    Maybe the rest of the team got affraid the whole project would attract unwanted attention because perhaps the whole thing was deemed imoral. Then they make her an scape goat. She sees what they are doing, pretends to play along and then uses it to her advantage.
     

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