Re: [Troll] Re: Dust of Time

[James Taintor <jtaintor@juno.com>]

On Mon, 20 Sep 1999 20:38:37 -0400 (EDT) Dennis Payne
<dulsi@identicalsoftware.com> writes:
> As for meet the legendary hero, can't happen.  The legend is that a 
> hero
> will acquire the amulet and free the land from an evil oppressor.  
> The
> operative term here being "will".  The hero has never come and the 
> legend
> is older than any living troll.

no, but you could meet a hero who began campaigning in the distant past,
a troll who stayed clear of the watchful eye of authority long enough to
acquire weaponry and find the/a vital key to defeating the evil of the
kingdom (say, for the sake of brevity, an amulet without which one cannot
reach the final boss.)  (not the amulet, by the way.  just some bauble.) 
(although you COULD make it THE amulet, which would give you an
interesting final plot twist.)  and you meet him and you think "strange:
he found out the secret but i was still born, which means that the evil
troll king was never defeated, which means that he must have failed in
the end."

but, and here's where it all gets tricky, the thing is that he has to die
in your quest.  he tells you that the two of you have to quest into a
dank dungeon in search of the amulet, not telling you that he's going to
have to die at the end.  because when you're really starting to like this
guy, and you reach the final room, there's a final simple deadly guardian
placed around the amulet, an anti-life force strong enough to snuff out
exactly one pure of heart hero.  and it's an imbalance in the fabric of
reality, and since reality desires closure, as soon as a living being
touches the field, the two forces cancel each other out, there's a shift
and a crackle of static, and our noble friend and hero is gone as though
he never existed.  in fact, we realize, nature has righted itself-- the
time distortions are all gone, sucked into the vortex.  so trolldude's
own time is restored, but now he has the amulet.  and he realizes that
just as he couldn't have gotten the amulet alone, the old hero couldn't. 
there needed to be two, coexisting at one time, to achieve the goal.

and here's the part that i like, that makes it interesting.  for the past
millenium, evil warlorddude has been searching for the amulet, because it
disappeared shortly after the archaic hero quested for it in the deep
dark dungeon-- the hero and the amulet, both gone, with the trap
discharged.  and what the warlord didn't know a thousand years ago was
that the amulet had been grabbed out of his own time, so to speak-- it
didn't exist during that millenium of darkness.  and suddenly it's
showing up on his magical radar again, so he knows that he's in danger. 
trolldude returns to the surface, and even though the monsters from the
past are gone and evaporated, his fight's even harder, because the entire
army of the evil warlord is searching for him, combing the world.

i've been reading a lot of grant morrison and philip dick lately.  time
can be fun.

the above is a public service announcement:  don't drink and write
plotlines.

james taintor
jtaintor@juno.com

"I’ll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not
crazy about.  I’m pretty much anti-death.  God looks by all accounts to
be pro-death.  I’m not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he
and I, Boo."
 -- David Foster Wallace

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