[Margo] About That Business Card…

The shift was really dragging on. Margo was tapping her foot impatiently, scanning people when necessary, and constantly dwelling on the fact that Mr. Eszes’s manuscript had been mere feet from her at one point. She told and retold herself that it wasn’t her fault. Margo’s only as good as the information she’s given.

Another detector goes off. “Sir, please hold your arms out straight and to your sides.” The man stepped ahead a little so Margo could get behind him.

He laughs. “I know the routine. Probably forgot a key or my phone or something. Always forgetting something.” Margo passed the wand lazily over the man in the usual pattern.

“All right, now turn around.” She continued her scan.

“Whoa, I wonder who the suits are.” Suits?

She turned back slightly to see the men he was referring to. Margo suddenly hoped that her face and her breathing didn’t reveal her inner terror. A conspicuous group of men in black suits was moving toward the security checkpoint.

“I think you’re actually good to go, sir. False alarm, maybe?” She began to walk away.

“What? False alarm? Is this what passes for security around here?” sputtered the man as Margo raced off. Lester noticed the commotion and put on his unhappy face. Before he could even say anything, Margo had already ducked down below the table where the suitcase was hidden. She popped it open quickly rifled through the pockets until she found two things: the promised business card for contact and…the proverbial jackpot. Miklós had filled out a postcard, but apparently he forgot to send it. Margo pocketed both items.

“What are you doing now? Go back and finish scanning, Margo. I shouldn’t have to keep reminding you to do your job,” Lester rattled off his rant, putting on a show for the travelers going through the checkpoint.

“Fuck OFF, Lester!” He immediately recoiled from Margo as she stood up and went for the door that led to their break room and the service entrance. She needed to get to her locker as quickly as possible at this point.

As much as she was annoyed to have the contents of her bag piled in the bottom of her locker, it was worth it to have the business card and postcard, absolutely worth it. She dug out her phone, put it in her pocket. Somewhere in the pile was her pistol. The moment Margo had her hand around its grip, she heard quick steps approaching from the direction of the concourse. Margo quickly brought the gun out from the locker and steadied her aim on the intruder’s head.

Interruption:
Who has joined Margo in the break room? Good guy? Bad guy? Lester? A wizard? (Please not a wizard, although…well, not my choice!)

As always, any other suggestions are welcome!

[Margo] It's Just a Suitcase

“Look, Lester, I have to go take care of something. I’ll be right back,” Margo started to walk out from behind her table.

“What? You look, Margo,” the large man walked up close enough to Margo that she was surprised when his gut didn’t brush up against her. “If you don’t stay here and do your job, you might as well not come back.”

There were two strange feelings that Margo had a very good grip on: nonchalance and curiosity. This was why she didn’t have to think about her next foray into both. “Then I guess we’ll see what happens when I come back,” she said – nonchalantly – and walked cautiously toward Mr. Eszes, now talking a bit more calmly to the security officer.

“We just can’t let you take that as a carry-on, sir. I’m sorry. You check it or it doesn’t go.” The security personnel in the airport had clearly dealt with a lot of disgruntled passengers and passengers-to-be in their time, and it had led to them being direct and stoic even while being bombarded by startlingly irrelevant accusations from foreigners and domestics alike.

“So just because I am from Hungary, I cannot take my bag on the plane with me like everyone else? You Americans have become such idiots since your nine-one-one. Puh,” Miklós thankfully only mimed spitting with his last sound.

Margo sheepishly stepped into the conversation. “Mr. Eszes?”

He turned to look at her, noting that she was an employee of the airport as well. “What? What do you want now? I already know I can’t take my things with me on the plane. This is unacceptable.”

“No no, I understand that it’s a problem. I was just wondering if it’s the suitcase that’s important or the contents. If you want, I could trade you a smaller bag I brought to work for your suitcase.” Margo didn’t notice any noticeable change in body language from the Hungarian, but he seemed to be thinking it over.

“Will this bag be let on the airplane?” So he was definitely curious.

“Yes, I guarantee it. And it’s surely large enough to hold the manuscript you have in there,” said Margo, pointing lazily toward the suitcase. Miklós tightened his grip.

“Well…it would seem I don’t have much option. You will then send me my suitcase? I will pay to send it if this mess can be gone quickly.”

“Yes, sir, that’s not a problem.” At this point the security guard wandered off. The TSA agents and airport security had a mutual trust that let them trade away problems like this.

Miklós seemed to relax a bit. “Please hurry, miss. I do not want to miss my flight.”

Margo quickly went back into the break room for the agents and took her bag out, quickly emptying the contents and placing them into her locker. With that, she went back to Miklós, who was waiting patiently with his accordion file already out of the suitcase and ready for transfer.

“Here you go, sir.” He poked around in her bag for a second before carefully placing the file in it and zipping up.

“Do I need to be checked again through security?” he asked.

“Oh, no, you’re all set as long as you have your boarding pass.”

“Then thank you, miss. I left one of my business cards in the suitcase so you can contact me in one or two days for my address. I must go,” and with that, Miklós Eszes went off to board his flight without further delay. Margo, on the other hand, had to go back to work. She had noticed Lester keeping an eye on her, and it was likely at this point that he would not fire her. Lester was a sucker for someone genuinely doing a good job. Margo took her suitcase and set it behind the table near the checkpoint. No one would bother it there before her shift was over.

Part of her was disappointed that she had the suitcase but no pages. She was mostly curious about what was on those damn pages. Something about Mr. Eszes had screamed “my things are important,” but she couldn’t be sure that all of the screaming wasn’t just a misguided sense of self-importance.

What Next?
At this point, Margo has simply gone back to work. I'm open to many suggestions, including switching perspectives, adding a new character, or just having Margo do something interesting on her own. Go nuts.

[Margo] Nicholas the Wise

She was certain that if his suitcase had been lighter he would have started swinging it. Violence does tend to accompany that sort of blind, uninformed anger.

“Miklós Eszes? More like Miklós Fejes. You’d think people would know not to yell in the middle of an airport these days,” Margo said as she looked on. A smartly dressed Hungarian man stood not fifteen feet past the security checkpoint arguing with one of the airport’s security officers. Mr. Eszes had been very upset when he was told that he could not take his large suitcase as a carry-on item. No one was sure why, really. All he seemed to have in it were some manuscript pages tucked neatly into an accordion-style file. There were a lot of pages, though. If they were unique, Margo could imagine why he might be a little upset, but-

“Margo! Come on,” her boss grabbed the wand from her hand and went around the counter to help the traveler who was waiting patiently to be scanned. People never set off the metal detectors with anything dangerous, so it was hard for Margo to care. Last week she had let several sets of nail clippers through baggage screening, which is why she was supposed to be manning the wand. Oops.

Her boss’s name was Lester. While Margo felt like being a TSA employee was nothing glorious, Lester marched around with his chest puffed out like he was single-handedly preventing the procession of terrorism into his glorious land. His attitude was made even more annoying by his age. Margo had close to ten years on Lester. This didn’t help her garner any extra respect from an overweight, baby-faced TSA agent on a power trip. If anything, it made the Michelin Man hassle her even more. Taking the wand from her was just another attempt at dehumanization.

“God, Margo, if you can’t even pay attention to the people heading through the checkpoint, what good are you?”

Reaction:
How should Margo respond?

[NSP] The Format & Story Prompt 1

[NSP] vs. [Story Name]
For sorting/tagging purposes and reader clarity, each post will receive a prefix tag stating clearly whether it is a Non-Story Post, [NSP], or part of a story we have in progress, [Story Name]. The reason I will make the story name a tag and not the post title with an appended number is so that I may title different sections of the story if I so choose.

Note: I may use abbreviations for a story with a particularly long name. (e.g.: “The Terrific Tale of Sully the Porpoise and His Magical Sword of Fire, Which is Quite Useless Underwater, Sadly” – a story I hope not to write – is most certainly going to become [TTTSPHMSFWQUUS], which is itself still quite long, but it’s a bit more palatable in a blogging sense.)

Story Posts
I will try to give credit at the beginning of story updates to those comments that gave me the most inspiration. After that short aside, I will recap (if necessary) and continue on with the suggested narrative path. At the end of posts, I will try to keep my prompts very clear. The reason I say this is that sometimes I will be looking for a very general direction, while other times I might want to know exactly which box our intrepid hero is going to pry open and why.

Possibilities
I’m not sure at this point what I’m capable of in terms of production quantity. Part of me wants to allow the option of the story branching off like a regular CYOA, but that would immediately slow the pace of all branches of the plot should I keep to my regular update schedule. For now, I’m going to stick to one plotline that is determined largely by my readers, but I will let everyone know if I want to split things up. I might only branch at the very end to allow different conclusions while minimizing the extra workload. We shall see!

Story Prompt 1
WHAT: an event (a birthday, a car accident, the unveiling of a new space station, a space station accident, the birth of a new car, the unveiling of a new day…)
WHO: a character/entity (main or otherwise)
WHEN: this can be a number of things (i.e., is it the dark of night, the day after a king’s assassination, or 12:34 PM on a rainy Friday? Remember to be creative. If you think the time is as significant as the event, be clear.)
…THING: I want you to give me something to focus on at the very beginning of the story, like in the first sentence or paragraph. This can be a sound, a character noticing some minor detail of some furniture, or the description of a foreboding calm that has settled over a large group of people despite recent belligerent actions against them that would have set any other collective mindset on fire.

I will do what I can to find something intriguing in all of your suggestions that fits with my other choices. Feel free to suggest a WHAT and a WHO or a THING and a WHAT without bothering to come up with an idea for the other two parts. If four readers can come up with one brilliant suggestion for each scene criterion, we have a good story on our hands. And on that note, please don’t feel like you are limited by the listed criteria. If you want to suggest something that seems beyond the scope of the prompt, you can be sure that I’ll take it into consideration if it comes in before I’m knee-deep in causality.

Now have at it, and be clever!

Cranks (they’re turning),
M. Charles

[NSP] The Big Idea

Most everyone is familiar with the Choose Your Own Adventure story format. It’s an interesting type of interactive narrative, and one that’s introduced to children fairly early on in their reading careers as a way to make reading seem more playful to those kids who are choked by the rigidity of an immobile plot. CYOA books do not have a much greater audience, though, because they’re typically frowned upon after a reader hits a certain age. Whether this is due to writing quality or subject matter is beyond me.

Maybe there’s some hidden detractor in this type of writing that I’m missing. Does one lose a sense of attachment to the story if they know it could have gone a different way? Perhaps. And this is actually one reason why I’m going to eschew the typical CYOA format – short scenes with a limited number of choices – and crowdsource all of the narrative choices.

Here’s how we’ll do it:
We may create more than one story in the long run, but for now we will focus on one opening scene. An event, a thought, a character, a sound…there are many compelling ways to start a story, and that’s what I want you to do. Give me a list of elements, and I will craft the beginning to our tale. From then on, it’s up to you to lob possibilities my way. Then I will return to you with the next scene, hopefully giving credit to the comments that inspired my direction.

I will be trying to update this blog on a bit of a strange schedule: Saturday nights at midnight, Monday nights at nine or so, and Wednesday nights, also at nine (or so). This will give me a break at the beginning of the weekend and allow your ideas to develop and accumulate for a bit before the story picks up again. You can post ideas any time you’d like until the actual update is posted, but I probably won’t give as much weight to ideas that crop up once I’m three-quarters of the way through writing that post. Keep in mind that updates are subject to delays, and I may post updates early so that I might focus my energy on other matters in my life. A delay, though? That’s so depressing. Let’s focus on the fun…

Be creative! I have plenty of ideas as a storyteller, lots of which will be tested with this little project of ours, but combined, you all have FAR more ideas than I could ever come up with. I welcome the silly, the short, the lengthy, the arrogant, the unintelligible, and the corrosive, just as long as YOU think there is some merit to what you are suggesting.

So…[drumroll] without further ado…[more drumroll] please take a look at the next post!

Thanks,
M. Charles