8FOLD/ACRA: Jolt City # 23, "...Their Last Adventure!", NOTES

[Tom Russell]

On Friday, September 11, 2015 at 6:24:24 PM UTC-4, Andrew Perron wrote:
> On 9/7/2015 8:59 PM, Tom Russell wrote:

>  >     "Through dummy companies and sympathetic philanthropists, the Order
>  > of the Aedifex has been pumping money into Jolt City for decades,"
>  > continues Riddle. "Over half of the Kistler Building's budget comes
>  > from the Church. To give you any tools you might need. And this church
>  > here in Jolt City was built to house all of our research, all of our
>  > findings, so that it would be on hand when the time came.
> 
> This is the kind of retcon that superhero universes can easily become too full 
> of, but with you in charge, Tom, I feel pretty safe in investing in this history.

Thanks, Andrew. Yes, it's definitely a "use sparingly" kind of thing.

>  >     "Or a million Dereks. Each being thrown back to a random place and
>  > time. Alternate timelines, alternate pasts, all converging and echoing
>  > and mixing up with each other because time is breaking.
> 
> How Moffat Who. <3
> 
> (These comparisons, by the by, are not criticisms. These are really fun and 
> useful story elements and I really like 'em in this story; they deserve to be used.)

Hey, I've no problem with it. More of a Moffat man myself, for the record.

>  >     "So, I'm the Bethany," she says. "Not because of destiny or it was
>  > foretold or blah-blah-blah, because even if that stuff was real, you
>  > could have it wrong, I could be a red herring. And it's not because of
>  > something special I have to do, just me, everything on my shoulders.
>  > It's because Derek's my friend, and he trusts me. Which means I don't
>  > have to save the world all on my own. I don't even have to be the
>  > person to do the heavy-lifting."
> 
> Awwwwwwwwww! <3 That's an AMAZING way for the time-travel prophecy trope to go. 
> Sweet and original. I love it.

Thank you. I'm not a big prophecy guy generally, because it inherently robs living things of their agency.

>  > "And yes," continues Bethany, "the Fitzwalter crowd has shut up for
>  > the time being. I'm..." She blushes again, terribly happy. "I'm out,
>  > Derek. Out in the open. They know." She holds up her Singularity
>  > Gauntlet. "They all know. I've had to lie about it for so long, always
>  > worried that someone would find me out, always holding everything in,
>  > and now it's like I can breathe again."
> 
> Yesssss. <3 (Also, now I'm thinking of her as Garnet.)

Who?

>  > She sends the email. He hears her take in a deep breath, holding it
>  > pensively. She releases it. "Derek, I don't really know you, and I
>  > didn't really know Martin. But it seems to me that if he did that for
>  > you, that he thought you were worth it."
>  > He doesn't know what to say to that. After a while, he thanks her
>  > and hangs up.
> 
> Awwwwwwww... This scene is expressing these emotions really well.

Thank you. I was worried there was too much crying, and choking up, and nodding in several of the scenes, but at the same time, if ever it's going to wear everything on its sleeve, the finale would be it. Hopefully overall it didn't end up being too much Crying Hobbits.

>  > "It concerns Pamela Bierce."
>  > "Pam? Is she okay?"
>  > She bites her lip. "No. I'm afraid she was in Las Vegas."
> 
> ...oh :<

I've felt bad for a solid year now, ever since I set this up in the previous ish.

>  > He stares at her, wondering if she meant it the way it sounded. He
>  > decides it doesn't matter. "I'm sorry for the way I acted, too. After
>  > my dad died, I kinda went off the biscuits. I was angry at the time,
>  > and I took it out on everybody. But you especially. You were just
>  > trying to help me and I treated you like crap for it." He looks at the
>  > floor. "I'm sorry."
> 
> DEREK YOU ARE A GOOD PERSON.

I'd be inclined to agree. He's certainly a better and more thoughtful person than he was a year ago.
>  > "I know what you're going to say," says Dani. "That I wasn't really
>  > dead, just trapped between dimensions. And that it was a fluke. That
>  > the implant in Martin's neck keyed in to just the right frequency to
>  > prevent me from getting lost. That once he got to the place where I
>  > died, the implant brought me back to a physical body. But that. But
>  > that's not what happened.
>  > "What happened was, Martin loved me so much that he brought me back
>  > from the dead."
> 
> Yesssss. :D I mean, it makes sense - if emotions correlate with physical 
> vibrations, including those for moving between dimensions, then the right 
> emotional vibration can clearly affect someone's dimensional state. It's 
> basically the flipside of the trick pulled earlier in this issue.

::nods::

I'm glad you caught onto this. I was worried it'd be too subtle of a connection.

> Ahhhhhh, that's a pretty nice twist--
> 
> But even that wasn't
>  > especially difficult to pull off. It's a wonder how many problems you
>  > can solve when you throw a few billion dollars at them. No one
>  > suspects that he's been at this for only six months! The six greatest
>  > months of his life. The only time he's felt truly alive since his
>  > father died.
>  > There is a knock at his door. "Mr. Cradle? Your supper is ready, sir."
>  > "Be right down," says Anders.
> 
> ...
> 
> Wait, WHAT?

::shrugs::

> Hrm. I'm not sure how I feel about this twist - Anders was screwed-up, but the 
> worst thing he did before was taking his father's stuff away from Martin; a jerk 
> move, but only that. On the other hand, "discovering who and what he really was" 
> implies things that might explain it... we shall see, I guess. @.@

You also need to put it in the context of what he's been through in the two years after he denied Martin his inheritance. He was kidnapped and tortured for at least a week (Green Knight Annual) shortly after his father's death. Since then there have been multiple kidnapping attempts-- # 12 was one. #18 another. He had reason to believe that the Little League of Doom was after him in #19. All of these could stress out a "normal" person, and might result in a psychotic break.

Anders isn't a "normal" person, though. He doesn't have any kind of emotional safety net whatsoever. No friends to depend on, no family. He isn't loved by anyone, and that's because he doesn't love anyone back-- he doesn't know how. He never really learned how to love anyone-- and that really falls on his parents, especially his father.

If the whole of JOLT CITY is in some way about the importance and power of friendship and forgiveness-- about Martin learning to accept the help of others and to depend on them; about Derek learning that his superpower is being a good friend, and to depended upon; about putting the past behind you-- then Anders has to some degree always been a counterpoint: he has always been what happens when you don't have friendship, and when you can't forgive. Really, it's what makes him a good nemesis for Derek-- he is in many ways his opposite. 

I didn't always know that Anders was going to be Caracalla, but when I looked at what Caracalla would have to be-- a male; wealthy; someone cut off from his emotions; someone who is alone and isolated and angry-- I realized that I had two options. One was to make a new character that had all these traits. The problem with that is that it'd be very difficult to elicit any sympathy for the character as we'll be meeting him *after* we already know about the things he's done. I think the reader would resist any attempts to make that character relateable; at least, I don't think I'd be up to the task.

The other was to use the existing character that already all these traits, for whom at least some readers have at least in theory some kind of emotional connection-- some kind of empathy for how badly his parents screwed him up. Plus he already had reasons to know (1) about Derek and Martin's secret identities, (2) about the underground Cradle Research facility, and (3) about the Dyzen'thari. So to me the advantages of this heel turn greatly outweighed the disadvantages-- it made a kind of cold logical sense, and, as I said, his previous psychology and his history of traumas minus the absence of any stabalizing/loving element could result in the specific psychological profile I had already created for Caracalla.

>  > And then she sees him, standing across the street, soaked
>  > through-and-through. He smiles, that same sheepish cat-got-the-milk
>  > grin he's always had. He stares at her for a moment, and she stares at
>  > him, and then finally he starts to walk across the street.
>  > A truck comes by, barreling down the road and blocking her view,
>  > and Dani wonders if he'll still be there when the truck passes.
>  > He is. Dani lifts her umbrella to let him in. "Hiya, hero." [8]
> 
> Oh my goodness. o.o I REALLY LIKE THIS ENDING AND APPROVE A LOT.

It's really the only way it could have ended. It was always Dani and Martin, and always mushy. :-)
 

>  > [6] Kate is Kate Morgan, the second Dr. Metronome, a character I
>  > co-created with Jamie Rosen back in JOURNEY INTO # 1, which takes
>  > place in early 2005.
> 
> And who is also rad.

It took me a while to figure her out. I had planned to write her a lot early on-- that's why she pops up in Speak! and in the Nostalgics-- but never really got a handle on her until now. I think what it was is that I really needed to get older-- tempered by disappointment, weighed down by obligations, etc.-- to understand where she's coming from.


>  > Really, everything big and scary that's happening in the Eightfold
>  > Universe in 2014 gets started with this story. And, in fact, as we
>  > shall see, it gets started long before this...
> 
> WOO!

This will probably be less "WOO!", but what I was referring to, obliquely, with "it gets started long before this", is that the whole Pulse War comes out of FEVER, and that FEVER comes out of Anders-- comes out of Ray Cradle's failures as a husband and father.
 

>  > [6] In November 2007, Canton used Derek, whose father Moses had
>  > recently been murdered, as a sort of poster-child in order to gain
>  > overwhelming popular support for Proposal A, a ballot measure that
>  > mandated higher police staffing levels. On the outside, it looked like
>  > it would put more people on patrol, but in actuality, it required that
>  > administrative positions, previously held by non-police officers at a
>  > lower rate of pay, be held by police. The bill effectively crippled
>  > Jolt City's budget, exacerbating the city's financial troubles.
> 
> And of course the mayor wouldn't, say, raise the corporate tax rate or decrease 
> tax breaks to businesses to pay for it. >:/

Well, the old mayor may have intended to. The new mayor might, but is unlikely to, given both the economical downturn (2008, remember?) and his ties to Proctor, Jolt City's current biggest employer.

The ballot proposal is based on something that happened locally. It was a bad bill, but especially a bad time-- partially because of the aforementioned recession, and partially because of the way municipal finance works in Michigan.

The short version-- there's a law that fixes the maximum taxes for a property at the level they were when you bought your home. The idea is that those on fixed incomes can't be "taxed out of their homes". So, if your home is worth 100K when you buy it and the value goes up to 200K, you're only going to be taxed at the rate for 100K. When you sell your home, then the taxes get reassessed, and the taxable value of the home (hopefully) increases.

But there's *another* law-- basically, when the taxable value of properties in a city increases by a certain amount, then the amount of taxes levied must be reduced to keep the total amount of taxes equal for that year. This is a useful law that keeps the rate of tax increases down. It's been around a long time-- it's part of the state constitution.

The problem was how these two laws interacted with one another. If I buy my home for $100K, its taxable value is fixed at that amount. When I sell my house, and its value is reassessed at $200K, its taxable value goes up-- but THEN the overall millage rate is DECREASED accordingly.

So ADD that into the mix, plus that police bill, and you have a recipe for disaster even before you throw superheroes and Doc-Classers into the mix.

>  > [8] The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act halts foreclosure proceedings
>  > for military personnel on active duty. Glass likely would have
>  > enrolled Derek in some arm of the military.
> 
> At this point you're one off from the note numbers in the story.

D'oh!
 
>  > [3] Glass may have been one of the CIA agents who played "World of
>  > Warcraft" and other MMOs in 2008. The theory was that terror groups
>  > were using MMO chat functions to exchange information in secret,
>  > recruit like-minded individuals, and plot terror attacks. This theory
>  > was problematic for a number of reasons, and according to the NSA, did
>  > not result in any successful counter-terrorism operations, nor any
>  > actionable intelligence.
> 
> Amazing.

Tax dollars at work!

> Also, as a final note: I'm curious about your decision not to show any of the 
> time-travel trip directly, especially as you did so at the end of #22.

I was going to, but since all of the timelines would be equally valid, none of them would be, if you know what I mean. I felt it would also ruin the surprises, such as they were.

> Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, an interesting storytelling technique.

Thanks! Love the commentary, as always.

==Tom