Spanner Chapter 20: Stand or Fall (Final Revision)

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Chaos Angel Spanner — Book 1: Rock City Blues
Chapter 20: Stand or Fall (Final Revision)

The Bangor High Student Council implodes.

The Student Union try to seize the opportunity.

Team Valiant throw them a Challenge in retaliation.

Team Bremelo accept the Challenge.

The winners earn the right to take over Dictel Stadium to celebrate.

After this, the real trouble will begin...

Table of Contents:

1. The Fall of the Student Council (October 1-4, 2011; Final Revision 3/24/13)
2. The Team Challenge (October 5, 2011; Final Revision 3/25/13)
3. Temporary Autonomous Zone (October 6, 2011; Final Revision 3/27/13)

Unusually for Spanner, the three sections of this chapter are the length of two sections of any other chapter. 20.1 is condensed from the first four R2 sections, with certain threads removed and a few scenes added from Chapters 19 and 21; 20.2 and 20.3 are expanded from R2 to double length. What remains is heavily revised to fit the Final Revision continuity. New to the Fourth Revision is the Modernist- (and comics-) inspired experiment with sentences spilling into the next paragraph, scene, section, and even chapter.

Revision 1 title: “Working for the Crackdown”; Revision 2 title: “Things Fall Apart”. Original Revision 2 section titles: “Game Over Man” (20.1; the title scene is now in 19.6), “Simple Matter of Planning” (20.2), “Broadcast Crime” (20.3), “Scandal Wars” (20.4), “The Team Challenge” (20.5), “Temporary Autonomous Zone” (20.6). There is no Third Revision version.

The original Revision 1 and 2 revision notes, the story parts of which are of course no longer relevant:

First Revision Notes: You’d probably expect from the title to find a traitor in Team Spanner. Except for one thing: with all the surveillance tech the government’s overusing, is there even a need for traitors and spies anymore? Besides, Jennifer can spot a spy whenever she takes her glasses off, and Shira can Charm them into betraying the agency that sent them. In this chapter, then, the major villains take the spotlight. And then they try to hog it at each other’s expense.

Meanwhile, the Hackers of Reality continue their assault on the media system from the safety of the Darknet. Desiree takes on the role of point man. Shira manipulates from the shadows, and then tells everybody that (and whom) she’s manipulating. Karen earns her martyr cred at the villains’s expense. Team Spanner argue over how to spring her.

We find out that some of the villains are actually human, some despite themselves. Others, of course, are increasingly, or completely, inhuman. The Cartel’s “Moravec Plan” will explain what Ariel calls the “gods of power” in the seemingly materialist terms the Corporates understand.

Scenarios from the Project Notebooks of the early ’00s: exactly none. New characters introduced from the ’90s Notebooks: Option [not present here in the final version, appearing in Chapter 4 instead].

The battle now kicks into high gear. Expect casualties.

Second Revision Update: The Fearsome Foursome are starting to fall apart. This only makes them angrier than before, and they lash out even more wildly. But Shira, Spanner, the KCUF News Team, and the Wrecking Krewe know where their weakness are, and hit them harder and harder. Leila finally provokes school Tournament champion Bart into losing all control and throwing the Challenge that Team Bremelo has expected all along, the two high-school fight clubs battle their way to disaster, and the School Arc races toward its cataclysmic conclusion next chapter...

The original title was “Working for the Crackdown” (now the name of Part 22.2 [in Revision 2]). Like Chapter 18 (but with more holdovers from the first draft), the new chapter is completely different.

Chapter 21 →

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Copyright © 2013 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.