My next task: Chapter 14! It has a new name, "City in Flight", replacing the Revision 2 title ("When the Cat's Away", now the title of 14.4) and the R4 working title "Plots and Plans" (now 14.6). After finishing Chapter 13 and Interlude 9, then scheduling the posts, I took a day off to rest my brain. That's because Chapter 14 R4 will have the most complex structure of any chapter in Book 1. I'm combining an anime-inspired mid-season "clip show", a flashback episode (with the flashbacks embedded in the "clips"), and straight exposition. One major character will appear a chapter earlier than she did in the Second Revision. And though Irina Lanskaya is one of the earliest Team Spanner core characters I created (as early as 1993), she's far more important than she was in earlier revisions, for now she's a major figure in Jennifer's backstory...
Yesterday morning I dreamed an entire story. Shortly after the Conservative Revolution of 2012 that overthrew American democracy, America goes to war. On the southern European front in the war against the Caliphate, we focus on a band of child soldiers, all female, all 12 to 15 years old, all naked starving and cold yet heavily armed. They belong to "Alice Company", made up of juvenile delinquents and the daughters of imprisoned and executed dissidents. In a manor or mansion, they wait in ambush for their Russian counterparts, led by a 14-year-old girl known only as "Blondie" (who is really Jennifer). They kill a few, but brutal Corporate mercenaries force the enemies to join forces. The Russian girl soldiers' commander is a redhead the same age, later revealed as Irina. They are soon joined by a band of very young kunoichi from Japan led by a 13-year-old called "Nana", which means simply "seven" in Japanese. To seal their alliance, the three young commanders become sworn lovers. Then the Caliphate sends waves upon waves of jihadi hordes, and the girl soldiers spring into action. But then comes the soul-crushing gut-punch revelation of the horrific and disgusting real reason the military commands conscripted and sent those girls in the first place...
This is what you get when you cross a brutal war movie with, say, Lyrical Nanoha, or play something like Strike Witches or Sound of the Sky like All Quiet on the Western Front directed by John Woo. I vividly dreamed it all yesterday morning, and I wrote it all down. It could make a NaNoWriMo novel in itself, but I think it would work better as a graphic novel (the most grimdark and depressing yuri manga ever?). And it proves more significant to Jennifer's backstory in Spanner itself than the "Blake Island incident" (her, alone, against 52 hitmen and serial killers out to get her) referenced throughout the story. Irina first appears in Chapter 14 R4. It triggers Jennifer's memories, which she will relate to Leila in the crucial main scene that ends 16.2. And we will discover over the next several chapters just how her Kriegserlebnis (her word: war experience) impacted her entire worldview, and just how politically radical it made her. The thread's name: "The Return of Alice Company".
Like the new thread of the nameless beauties, this dream-spawned backstory is a major new addition to the Fourth Revision. Unlike the Second Revision original, this new Spanner is starting to look extremely interesting indeed...
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