DarkMatter D20: Drunk Southern Girls with Guns ... UPDATED - 8/18/05!

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It looks like a pretty swet movie to me, and hell what I don't know about science could fill a book, but I'm takin' me and my common-law bride-to-be and her cousin and maybe even her cousin's baby daddy (if he gets out of rehab by then) to the openin' night! We're goin' into the city and maybe even gettin' good and drunk at the tittie bar before we go to the mall, unless my p.o. signs me up for a pee test.

But any movie with 10 people just droppin' dead in Boston without having something to do with KidCthulhu sounds like a whole mess o' horse you-know-what to me. Hollywood just makes stuff up most times.

 

[jonrog1]

I am going to have to speak to you about all that rummaging around in my head, by the way. First I see your Tesla-themed story hour, which of course is a telepathic map of my planned League of Extraordinary Gentleman adventure I will be running in Boston; and here recently I've been catching up on my Jules Verne and now I hear 'bout this Core thing.

Can I go back to having my own ideas again? Not that there's anything wrong with yours, heavens no, it's just starting to disturb me.

Wow, I almost feel bad about Wulf inspiring my dwarven character in the Scarred Lands. Try double-folding the tinfoil on your head, it keeps the space aliens from reading my brain waves, maybe it'll help this ...

originally posted by PirateCat
I'm curious. You always hear horror stories of good scripts getting savaged in actual production. On a scale of 1 to 10 (where 10 is word-for-word), how close is the final movie to the script you wanted to see filmed?

About an 8. I had a great relationship with the director, and what's there is mine, -- it's more a matter of what got cut for time and pacing. Lots of character stuff went by the wayside.

Also, heckuva cast. As soon as I heard Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhardt, Stanley Tucci and Delroy Lindo, my first thought was "Damn, I should have written a much, much better movie."

It's just meant to be nine dollars worth of good old-fashioned sci-fi. I think it lands there. The fun part during the screenings was seeing the audience relax once they were in the groove, assuming they now pretty much had the movie's number ... and bad things kept happening to characters they liked. It got genuinely quiet and tense.

It's amazing how movie savvy everybody is these days. Some test audience members got angry, one guy actually said, "I figured out who'd survive for the sequel and then you killed them off!"

We hate predictable! We hate that which does not match our expectations!

Weird damn business. No matter, the one-two punch of Fellowship and Two Towers has broken my spirit. I'll be opening some sort of small shop soon, maybe tires or auto supplies ...

 

[barsoomcore]

I'll be opening some sort of small shop soon, maybe tires or auto supplies ...

Awesome! Can we expect more frequent updates as a result?

*ducks monkey wrench*

 

[jonrog1]

Gone Missing: PROLOGUE

"One year later ..."

Samuel shifted nervously in his chair. Hoffman Institute Field Agent Director Richardson was legendary for precision and crankiness. Not in that order.

Richardson stared at him. "You're the best they can send for an assignment coordinator? Ahh, well." He tossed files onto his desk. "Not like you can screw up too badly, coordinating these teams in the field. They're all finely oiled machines."

They both stared at a file with a green strip across the top. Green meant "All Access/All Levels of FX-Incidence Cleared." Only one field team at a time had that sticker.

Richardson nodded. "Yes, well, except for them. They're like a well-oiled car crash. But somehow, they keep walking back through that door."

Samuel opened the file. This group was almost legendary in the Hoffman Institute for their cataclysmic investigations. As he laid each ID photo out on the table, Richardson ran down the Agent's status.

"Denis there's the team leader. He's new lad on, but after that debacle in Arizona, he was the one who thought to grab the Russian's notes, and the one who remembered to cram the Russian on the bus in the middle of the firefight. Got a cool head and an eye for tech, terrestrial or otherwise."

"Stephen's the forensic scientist/ evidence tech. He was their medic, but he kept almost killing people, so he switched to patients he can't hurt any worse. Good in an interview. He can look at a month-old corpse fresh out of the river and tell you how it died. Not a bad driver when he has to be, either."

"Ross there went through our military training rotation. He's now familiar with all standard law enforcement and military firearms and armor. He's made himself responsible for keeping the rest of them alive when the weirdness hits. We keep docking his pay, but he insists on carrying a cut-down 10-guage under his coat." Samuel stared at pictures of a burned-out neighborhood of apartment buildings. "Ah, that. They went chasing some extradimensional nonsene in Paris, got pinned down by militia cultists. Ross solved the problem by severing multiple gas lines and turning the entire neighborhood into one big fuel-air explosive. Not subtle, but he takes his job seriously."

Samuel stared at the next picture. "I thought partial blindness would disqualify an Agent from fieldwork."

"The eyepatch?" Richardson shrugged. "Something magic and undead in Chicago clawed Andy's eye out. Big damn hole there. Helluva thing." Richardson hesitated. "More of a helluva thing is he can still see out of it."

"I'm ... not following ..."

"He can see out of the socket. Cover his remaining eye, he can see through the eyepatch. 20/20. Better vision than mine. "

"But ... there's no eye there ..."

"Son, exactly who do you think you work for?"

Samuel gulped, moved on. The last photo showed a young woman with a white streak cutting through dark, shoulder-length hair. Richardson chuckled. "Ahh, her."

"She can't be as crazy as they say."

"Well, she was a handful enough, and that was before Seattle. Team went up against some psi-freak who'd cobbled together an empathic feedback coil. She got caught in a psi-wave. A loop." Richardson paused. "Traps you in your worse nightmare for six months of subjective time. Six months. In that microsecond she lived half a year in a waist-high pool of corpse soup fighting off flesh-eating toddlers trying to rip her throat out."

Samuel looked at the long, long, looonnnng list of Jo's prescribed medications. "She must be completely, dangerously unhinged!"

"She just got out of the clinic a week ago." Samuel noticed Richardson didn;t answer the question directly ... "They say she's right as rain as long as she takes all her pills and doesn't drink too much." Richardson sighed. "Only problem is, she doesn't take her pills and she drinks too much."

The Director leaned forward. "Okay, rookie. There's your team." He pointed to more files. "There's today's caseload. Make the call. Who you sending where?"

Samuel looked at the breakdown of his crisis team (mentally noting "breakdown's the right word ..."). "Something easy, change of pace after this many tough investigations." He slid one folder across the desk. "This one. They don't even need cover ID's."

Richardson glanced at the folder title, nodded. "Not a bad call." He hit his intercom. "Lucy, get First Team in here. They're going to Oregon ..."

 

[fenzer]

"Well, she was a handful enough, and that was before Seattle. Team went up against some psi-freak who'd cobbled together an empathic feedback coil. She got caught in a psi-wave. A loop." Richardson paused. "Traps you in your worse nightmare for six months of subjective time. Six months. In that microsecond she lived half a year in a waist-high pool of corpse soup fighting off flesh-eating toddlers trying to rip her throat out."

You are one mean bastard. And I wouldn't have you any other way . I can't wait to see First Team in action again.

 

[Breakstone]

Heh heh heh... What did the players think of all these changes to themselves?

 

[jonrog1]

Heh heh heh... What did the players think of all these changes to themselves?

They dug the idea, seemed a cool way to jump a couple levels off-screen.

Poor Jo, though. I almost feel bad about ... well, you'll see.

 

[dreadnought]

Hey bud,
You ever gonna get to that freaky session all that time ago when vodka flowed like water and a large Texan made threatening gestures toward me? It still burns in memory like a syphilitic patient's first morning .... well, you get the drift. I never do look at hockey sticks the same anymore. You know, they never did rebuild that neighborhood. Weird things kept happening, construction workers going mad, gas mains that could never be shut off. And I get these strange rashes after the periodic blackouts...

 

[jonrog1]

I believe their Canadian adventures occur right after this little jaunt. Just stretching things out, as we haven't played in a while. Pulp Spycraft took over the one-off slot last time.

As for the blackouts -- have you had the dreams about the bad clown yet? If not, then you're one of the lucky ones ...

And Insanta came to the house. Still repainting the doors.

 

[dreadnought]

I'm not worried about the bad clown so much as the KITTEN HEAD that keeps EATING the clown.
Long live Rael!