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A story that's been on my mind - Part 3.
We left off where a Very Bad Thing had just happened - upon getting a bad reaction to what should have been a normal "health update", Boyfriend has been quarantined by force inside of his Smart House. Ominously, the last we see of him is making a heart with his hands on the front window towards Cheerful Princess - then collapsing out of sight.
Cheerful Princess stands there stunned for a moment - then turns and starts running down the street, towards the lab where both Doctors work.
As she goes through sections of the city there's that over-intrusive announcer voice saying over and over again, "There are NO other citizens in the plaza" "There are NO other citizens in the mall" etc. To show, as she keeps going, that actually this is REALLY bad.
Eventually she gets to the lab and goes all the way up to Dr. Golgotha's lab, several floors up. As she enters, one of the windows is open, unusually - she goes over and looks out and down, and recoils in horror. Dr. Golgotha's voice cuts in: "I told them they didn't have to keep trying... they could... end it."
He's partially in shadow but a good deal of his body is already that green-black color. He's got some sort of an IV hooked up to him, which is probably the reason he's still functioning at all. It's clear from inference that his lab assistants all threw themselves out the window to end the pain. He keeps talking "I should have... launched them... but instead... I waited for you... of course... you didn't take it... why?"
Cheerful Princess yells at him some version of "What happened? Why did your update hurt people?!"
Dr. Golgotha says something about how he usually double-checked but there was so much to do... so much... to do. "Robert always... used to tell me... to check again." The inference is that he made a mistake, despite his aura of absolute confidence and control, and it happened to be a REALLY bad one.
I think there's a segment of conversation here where CP accuses him of failing the city and Dr. G firing back that it was his city to fail, ever since Robert had gone away and left him ALL ALONE. He asks again why CP didn't take the shot and she tells him "I'm PREGNANT." Dr. G blinks in shock, then mutters "How useless..." Still, with the last of his strength he takes the red MacGuffin off of his neck and throws it across the floor to CP. "Take it - do whatever you want with it - you're all that's left." The red MacGuffin skids towards CP of its own volition, attracted naturally to the blue one. She hangs it around her neck, and with one last furious/terrified look in his direction, spins on her heel and sprints towards the exit.
The filmography shows now just how alone CP is in the city - she is running across a huge launch pad, appearing as small as a bug. She trips and falls, and hyperventilates in a crouch. Then, she puts a hand on her belly and gains just enough calm to stand back up again. In front of her is Dr. Golgotha's shuttle.
Using Dr. G's key she gets inside it and sits inside the pilot's seat for the very first time. She's obviously about one tick away from total panic. She tells the ship that they have to fly away from the city, through the artificial sky/force-field things that is in a dome overhead (the city had no natural weather; I had an intuition as I was writing this that the city even programmed its own day/night cycles, separate from the actual world outside). The ship reports back "THIS VESSEL CANNOT EXIT THE PERIMETER." CP clearly isn't used to things telling her no - she orders again. Still the ship repeats the same message. CP loses patience and screams that she has to get OUT of the city!! Then, she remembers something else she can order the city to do...
Very deliberately, CP orders every single power plant connected to the artificial sky to overload themselves and explode. "MASTER OVERRIDE REQUIRED," the robot voice replied. CP plugs in both her and Dr. G's MacGuffins, and repeats herself as her face lights up half-red half-blue from below.
Next up is a series of totally cool explosion animations, as each power plant immediately overloads their cores and one by one explode into flames. The sky literally begins to fall - CP, already in the air, has to navigate around falling chunks. Some great animation here as the city descends into a burning hellscape - probably all the other citizens are dead, but awkwardly, if any of them had survived this long... this would have been the end of them. I think there is one larger tower than the rest at the center, and as part of it falls off to crash into the city streets below, finally, the force field blips out - CP navigates the hovercraft right through the hole and blasts into the sky!
There's a moment of relative peace as she is navigating through some fluffy clouds just above the burning city - literally bursting from night into day. And then... the robot voice reports "POWER SOURCE SEVERED. SHUTTING DOWN."
CP screams all the way down as the hovercraft plummets, like Icarus, all the way to the ground. Instead of landing in the ocean, it bounces off the side of a rocky canyon, catapults head over heels and skids to a "landing". After a moment of silence the camera zooms in. We can see through the cracked front portal that CP is still alive, thanks to some really impressive seatbelt technology - though also clearly injured badly, with blood running down the side of her head. She raises her head and looks down towards her legs - there's a lot of blood there, clearly representing a miscarriage due to blunt trauma. As if giving up all hope, she slumps back and closes her eyes. The camera goes dark.
But suddenly we hear a voice - "Hey! Someone's in here! Are you alive?" CP opens her eyes and squints up into the light - we see a young dark-haired man, with a metal forearm protector, reaching towards her. "Grab my hand!"
I think at this point we start hearing Sad Grandma's voice again as the direct narrator, telling MB that she found out soon after that you could get pregnant multiple times - we see an image of her, looking a bit mussed but lovingly down at her newborn son - and that the reason for getting pregnant multiple times was that people outside of the city died easily. The new mother looks up from her baby just as someone whose face is offscreen comes in and hands her the metal forearm protector, as her face goes blank. So we're at four generations, more or less, of fathers who died before they could meet their own children.
Finally, we're back in the present day with MB, who is clearly struggling to take this all in. I think he asks "But... if this was your home... why didn't you ever come back?" I think the real answer is a huuuuuuge dose of survivor's guilt plus trauma, but I think SG says something like "What's the point? It's all burned and broken and infested with GOATS!!" And then MB asks, "Why did you leave your hut, then, to come after me?" And SG retorts something like "I realized that if I lost both my father's key, and you, then I would have really lost everything!" And bursts into tears.
Brief character commentary before I turn in: I feel like Sad Grandma comes across as extremely childish in these scenes - both before and after the timeskip, frankly - but I think that's correct for who the character is and what she's gone through. She never grew up, not really, during her ~20 years in the city - she was indulged, spoiled, and kept far away from any real responsibility. Dr. Golgotha was a TERRIBLE substitute father. Then all of a sudden everything in the world she'd ever counted on was ripped away from her in a single day, leaving her completely alone in a world she didn't understand. Only her "useless hobby" of music could really bridge the divide between her and the tribe. She loved her son but had no idea how dangerous giving him one of the "keys" could be, because the city had always been perfectly safe for her. Faced with a world that had killed all the men she'd ever loved for reasons she couldn't understand, she'd withdrawn into agoraphobia. This scene is her childish self, who had basically stopped cold at the moment of trauma, finally moving forward the next step and acknowledging that in that moment of crisis, she had lost everything. I'm pretty sure at this point she physically collapses.
Climax of the story to be written tomorrow.
Cheerful Princess stands there stunned for a moment - then turns and starts running down the street, towards the lab where both Doctors work.
As she goes through sections of the city there's that over-intrusive announcer voice saying over and over again, "There are NO other citizens in the plaza" "There are NO other citizens in the mall" etc. To show, as she keeps going, that actually this is REALLY bad.
Eventually she gets to the lab and goes all the way up to Dr. Golgotha's lab, several floors up. As she enters, one of the windows is open, unusually - she goes over and looks out and down, and recoils in horror. Dr. Golgotha's voice cuts in: "I told them they didn't have to keep trying... they could... end it."
He's partially in shadow but a good deal of his body is already that green-black color. He's got some sort of an IV hooked up to him, which is probably the reason he's still functioning at all. It's clear from inference that his lab assistants all threw themselves out the window to end the pain. He keeps talking "I should have... launched them... but instead... I waited for you... of course... you didn't take it... why?"
Cheerful Princess yells at him some version of "What happened? Why did your update hurt people?!"
Dr. Golgotha says something about how he usually double-checked but there was so much to do... so much... to do. "Robert always... used to tell me... to check again." The inference is that he made a mistake, despite his aura of absolute confidence and control, and it happened to be a REALLY bad one.
I think there's a segment of conversation here where CP accuses him of failing the city and Dr. G firing back that it was his city to fail, ever since Robert had gone away and left him ALL ALONE. He asks again why CP didn't take the shot and she tells him "I'm PREGNANT." Dr. G blinks in shock, then mutters "How useless..." Still, with the last of his strength he takes the red MacGuffin off of his neck and throws it across the floor to CP. "Take it - do whatever you want with it - you're all that's left." The red MacGuffin skids towards CP of its own volition, attracted naturally to the blue one. She hangs it around her neck, and with one last furious/terrified look in his direction, spins on her heel and sprints towards the exit.
The filmography shows now just how alone CP is in the city - she is running across a huge launch pad, appearing as small as a bug. She trips and falls, and hyperventilates in a crouch. Then, she puts a hand on her belly and gains just enough calm to stand back up again. In front of her is Dr. Golgotha's shuttle.
Using Dr. G's key she gets inside it and sits inside the pilot's seat for the very first time. She's obviously about one tick away from total panic. She tells the ship that they have to fly away from the city, through the artificial sky/force-field things that is in a dome overhead (the city had no natural weather; I had an intuition as I was writing this that the city even programmed its own day/night cycles, separate from the actual world outside). The ship reports back "THIS VESSEL CANNOT EXIT THE PERIMETER." CP clearly isn't used to things telling her no - she orders again. Still the ship repeats the same message. CP loses patience and screams that she has to get OUT of the city!! Then, she remembers something else she can order the city to do...
Very deliberately, CP orders every single power plant connected to the artificial sky to overload themselves and explode. "MASTER OVERRIDE REQUIRED," the robot voice replied. CP plugs in both her and Dr. G's MacGuffins, and repeats herself as her face lights up half-red half-blue from below.
Next up is a series of totally cool explosion animations, as each power plant immediately overloads their cores and one by one explode into flames. The sky literally begins to fall - CP, already in the air, has to navigate around falling chunks. Some great animation here as the city descends into a burning hellscape - probably all the other citizens are dead, but awkwardly, if any of them had survived this long... this would have been the end of them. I think there is one larger tower than the rest at the center, and as part of it falls off to crash into the city streets below, finally, the force field blips out - CP navigates the hovercraft right through the hole and blasts into the sky!
There's a moment of relative peace as she is navigating through some fluffy clouds just above the burning city - literally bursting from night into day. And then... the robot voice reports "POWER SOURCE SEVERED. SHUTTING DOWN."
CP screams all the way down as the hovercraft plummets, like Icarus, all the way to the ground. Instead of landing in the ocean, it bounces off the side of a rocky canyon, catapults head over heels and skids to a "landing". After a moment of silence the camera zooms in. We can see through the cracked front portal that CP is still alive, thanks to some really impressive seatbelt technology - though also clearly injured badly, with blood running down the side of her head. She raises her head and looks down towards her legs - there's a lot of blood there, clearly representing a miscarriage due to blunt trauma. As if giving up all hope, she slumps back and closes her eyes. The camera goes dark.
But suddenly we hear a voice - "Hey! Someone's in here! Are you alive?" CP opens her eyes and squints up into the light - we see a young dark-haired man, with a metal forearm protector, reaching towards her. "Grab my hand!"
I think at this point we start hearing Sad Grandma's voice again as the direct narrator, telling MB that she found out soon after that you could get pregnant multiple times - we see an image of her, looking a bit mussed but lovingly down at her newborn son - and that the reason for getting pregnant multiple times was that people outside of the city died easily. The new mother looks up from her baby just as someone whose face is offscreen comes in and hands her the metal forearm protector, as her face goes blank. So we're at four generations, more or less, of fathers who died before they could meet their own children.
Finally, we're back in the present day with MB, who is clearly struggling to take this all in. I think he asks "But... if this was your home... why didn't you ever come back?" I think the real answer is a huuuuuuge dose of survivor's guilt plus trauma, but I think SG says something like "What's the point? It's all burned and broken and infested with GOATS!!" And then MB asks, "Why did you leave your hut, then, to come after me?" And SG retorts something like "I realized that if I lost both my father's key, and you, then I would have really lost everything!" And bursts into tears.
Brief character commentary before I turn in: I feel like Sad Grandma comes across as extremely childish in these scenes - both before and after the timeskip, frankly - but I think that's correct for who the character is and what she's gone through. She never grew up, not really, during her ~20 years in the city - she was indulged, spoiled, and kept far away from any real responsibility. Dr. Golgotha was a TERRIBLE substitute father. Then all of a sudden everything in the world she'd ever counted on was ripped away from her in a single day, leaving her completely alone in a world she didn't understand. Only her "useless hobby" of music could really bridge the divide between her and the tribe. She loved her son but had no idea how dangerous giving him one of the "keys" could be, because the city had always been perfectly safe for her. Faced with a world that had killed all the men she'd ever loved for reasons she couldn't understand, she'd withdrawn into agoraphobia. This scene is her childish self, who had basically stopped cold at the moment of trauma, finally moving forward the next step and acknowledging that in that moment of crisis, she had lost everything. I'm pretty sure at this point she physically collapses.
Climax of the story to be written tomorrow.