[YANS] (aka Yet Another New Story!) NaNoWriMo 2017 (COMPLETE)

Day 25 - Back Side Stories, Gogogo!

"Well I think we've officially ran out of plot." The Writer look down at the story outline with a sigh.

"For the moment," admitted the Muse. "But I bet if we take a break from the story and try and flesh out the fictives a bit, we might find something else to work with."

Jashn raised an eyebrow-of-not-buying-this.

"Look, as much as I love you all, you are still basically the same personality," the Writer said with a straight face. "I know a lot of that is the fact that this is NaNo and we're burning through the story at an insane pace, but at some point I'd like folks to be able to tell you apart."

"Fine," sighed Jashn, getting up out of his comfy chair with great reluctance. "But if you give me character traits just for the sake of having them, I object."

"Shoo," said the Writer and chased him into the flashback.

~*~*~*~*~

No matter how many times they asked, the future that the pools gave them was one of the city in ruins, but without any clue as to why. They got choppy, chaotic flashes of faces and landscapes when they tried to pin down the source of the destruction, nothing recognizable enough to search on or give the clues. And the only answer they got when they looked for futures in which the city survived was an image of a town in flames.

Only it was hard to tell which town, because the visions seemed bound and determined not to show them anything identifiable. All of the buildings they could see were the sort you'd find in any small town and there were dozens of those scattered around them. The weirdest bit was that there were no people in the visions. There was no one trying to put out the flames and no one in danger of being hurt by them. It was as if the town had evacuated, but why?

Jashn and the dragon spent days by the pools asking question after question and getting what appeared to be random answers.

They finally brought in the couriers to help, having them look over the town in flames, hoping one of them would recognize it. And thankfully one did.

Now that they had a location, it was much easier to start scrying for answers. They were able to use the fire to determine the approximate date that the inciting event would happen and determine that the town's dragon would be involved. There was an odd haziness to the visions and they skipped and shattered, but the overall picture was clear.

In order for the city to survive the town needed to burn and somehow Jashn was involved.

~*~*~*~*~

"So it's the wild magic interfering with the visions, and maybe the shadow too." The Muse looked over the new words. "Actually it would make sense for the shadow to be directing them towards the path where the town burns but everyone survives. That would be the more important future to the city folks and they wouldn't go looking for alternatives."

"Just like the town folks didn't look for anything going wrong with the town that wasn't the fire," the Writer agreed. "Which I can't figure out if that's too big a plot hole to overlook. The dragons have been around quite a while, they have to be relatively adept at thinking outside the box."

"Once NaNo's over we need to go back and look at all the visions and make sure they agree with one another," pointed out Kahny. "I think you have some that contradict."

"Well Jashn had wings and didn't have wings, so I'm not too worried about it. We'll just go with whatever visions work best for the story once it's finished." The Writer was a lot less worried about the whole mess than her fictives were.