1 post tagged “story ideas”

We join a conversation about Thanksgiving already in progress

Her: My grandmother made the best cranberry sauce.
Me: I never liked cranberry sauce. Of course, we had the canned kind that holds the shape of the can when it plops out.
Her: Oh, no, if you're going to have the canned kind, you have to have the kind with the real berries in it.
Me: Hmm, that makes me think of something.
Her: What?
Me: Well, I was reading this article on Good Math, Bad Math introducing Topology. He was talking about open and closed sets. An open set doesn't contain its boundary, while a closed set does. The difference is whether a point p is "less than" or "less than or equal to" radius r. So the sauce in the shape of the can is an open set representing the space inside the can.
Her: Talking about math before 8AM. You're lucky I love you.

later

Me: I dreamt I was in a medieval role playing setting, only all the people in my party had comic book type superpowers. [we'd just watched Heroes for the second time the previous night]
Her: Like what?
Me: Well, one guy could control gusts of wind. It was kind of like telekinesis in effect but wind-based.
Her: Oh, that's really neat!
Me: Yeah. You don't see many wind-controlling superheroes. There's Storm, but she's generalized weather control. Or if there is someone with wind powers, it's always tornadoes. This was much more subtle. Like, there was this woman who was singing, only her song was like hypnotic or mind-controlling or whatever, so to find her, he was blowing open the shutters on all these windows one at a time. And the girl in the party... I forget what her power was.
Her: Was it super cuddle power?
Me: No... I think it was more like invulnerability.
Her: Oh.... What was your power?
Me: I was trying to figure that out in the dream. Then I came up with the idea of like a small zone of random chance [sort of like how Scarlet Witch affects probabilities, but completely random. I didn't explain it that way to her because she has no ken of who the S.W. is. In the dream, I also thought of it as "cantrip" meaning a minor spell in D&D or like a tiny Nahal's Reckless Dweomer]. So like, if bad guys are chasing you, you can turn around and point your finger at the ground in front of them and maybe it will turn to ice. Or maybe it will grow flowers. Or turn purple. Or explode.
Her: That sounds like a frustrating power to have.
Me: Well, it's one of those that forces you to rely on your wits a lot, and use it only as a last resort. But then I was thinking about if there were these guys who were guardians of the multiverse. I mean, supposedly (according to the popular version of the many worlds theory), somewhere every universe that has ever possibly existed is happening. So there might be a universe where you're a penguin. But of course, that's not entirely correct. Because first of all, it's talking about the quantum level; and secondly, it's more like everything that's finitely probable happens, not everything that's conceivable. I mean, I've been thinking about this in terms of Cantor's diagonal argument [no mean feat for a dreaming mind!] and along the same lines as his argument, you know [I'd already explained it to her], how you take the first digit of the first number, second of the second, etc. and subtract 1 from each how you create a number that's not on the list, no matter how infinite. So even with infinite probable worlds being created, you'll likewise never have every single conceivable world. Except in the case of my character's power. Because where normally it's like an orderly tree with infinite branches, because his power affects just what's probable, the branches blend together, like webbed toes or like a big smudge where it used to be clean lines. Which would really piss off these multiverse guardians. All from one stupid, nearly useless talent.

I kind of like this idea, because it takes a superhero team, and makes the least powerful member the most important. Double points if the "guardians" turn out to be BS artists. Something like it turns out they're just interdimensional speculators whose careful calculations of profit are being ruined by this guy's power. And the Foo Fighters have inspired me with a super-name for the character: Monkey Wrench. Is steampunk still cool? I could see a steampunk setting (lots of wrenches in that setting) rather than a medieval one.

And in my dream the night before, I was Jamie Foxx in that movie where he was Tom Cruise's taxi driver. Only I went Ving Rhames on the bitch and we got some hard, pipe hittin' niggas to dismantle him.