REPOST: RAC Challenge! #10

[Andrew Perron]

On 10/7/2015 7:04 PM, Arthur Spitzer wrote:
<snip>
>     "Paragon, wake up," a female voice is heard by Paragon. Then with
>     realization, the identity of the voice enters his head.
>
>     "Myrna," Paragon struggles to say, "Then it was all a dream"
>
>     "You've been laying here next to the stadium since Spurgo nailed you
>     with a backhand. We're all looking for you. Luckily, I found you
>     first."

Ah, this is bringing back the things that were retconned into being a dream as 
"the real reality". Is this where the twists and turns of RACChallenge retcons 
finally and fatally become too much!?

>     Paragon goes on, "Earlier today, Dr. Malevo had me trapped in a
>     building set with explosives. He chose to let me out rather than blow
>     me up along with the Jaz Rswert. The reason being that when he let
>     that 700 foot monster loose, the Jaz Rswert had a fail-safe chip in
>     it that would neutralize Spurgo in case he couldn't be controlled.
>     When you two showed up, Malevo was trying to take the chip from me.
>     You two stopped him yet he was forced to let the robot loose now
>     during the press conference even though he wasn't sure if it was
>     controllable."

At the very least, there's an effort to build a consistent reality out of the 
retcons.

>     "We had to kill him." Tina says. "We also have to kill the head of a
>     company that first created that drug." Tito and Tina simply look at
>     Dirk. Dirk drops his coffee.
>
>     "You're saying that my company invented the enhancer?"
<snip>
>     Paragon grabs the edge of his seat. He now realizes that these two
>     are not joking with him. "And do you really expect me to take this
>     pill?"
>
>     Tina covers her face as if to cry. Tito looks down at Dirk's coffee
>     and says in a hurt voice, "You already did."

You know, it's incredibly frustrating to have characters that jump to killing as 
a solution, rather than "tell the person who has obvious good intentions and 
will believe you not to do the obviously bad thing", and the narrative supports 
the idea that this was a Tough Decision That They Had To Make. >:/

>     Message to all authors: I'm sorry if anyone is bothered that I turned
>     the last bunch of chapters into a big dream. I felt that what was
>     left to me was a lot of different ideas going in a lot of different
>     directions and this seemed like the best way to clear it all up.

Yeeeeeeeeah, disposing of the efforts of your fellow creators and saying they 
didn't really matter is *basically* one of the worst things you can do in a 
shared story like this - for said creators, and also for all of the readers who 
were invested in those things. "Cleaning things up" definitely isn't worth it - 
learn from comics, kids, and their repeated attempts to dismiss things that 
don't fit a certain idea of How Things Should Be.

Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, plus it's just kinda boring.