A third of an idea for nothing

There’s probably a way this story could be wedged into the Grace blog but I don’t think it would work best with the main character not being the focal point.  Which is kind of the flaw with the Grace blog overall, often when I think of an interesting (to me) magic premise, it has her being more of an observer than an active participant.  I’ll probably do nothing with this idea.

There’s this lady you see and she’s just hanging out doing lady stuff.  Based on every sitcom ever that probably means she’s either putting lotion on her hands or folding laundry.  Sitcom ladies love putting on lotion and folding laundry.  Then her wedding ring starts thrumming.  As you might imagine she finds this disconcerting.  Actually yeah, let’s go with the lotion idea, she takes the ring off for the lotion and then said ring starts vibrating and hopping around on the nightstand.  That would be cool. 

WTFF she thinks (you know what the extra F is for) and she grabs the ring as it pops up into the air of its own accord.  Before she can get too freaked out about that though she suddenly knows “oh shit my husband is in trouble” and his exact location pops into her head.  She hops into the car and tears off down the street.  She has a little trouble with the wheel because her hands are slick from all that lotion but she manages.

As she’s driving, the location in her mind is moving and she eventually realizes that she’s heading for the hospital.  Uh-oh, Spaghetti-Os she thinks.  She gets to the hospital and runs in and asks the lady at the counter (are those always nurses or do they have administrator people hanging around?) if her husband is there and when they’re trying to help her and/or blow her off she follows her mental homing beacon into the ER where her husband is all ripped up.

“You can’t be in here!” someone shouts and they push her out the door.  A doctor comes out and says her husband was in a car wreck and they did everything they could but he’s dead, deader than every dead dog that ever died.  She’s sad, funeral happens, sadness, etc.  She mostly forgets about the whole crazy wedding ring thing because it’s so sad.

But then one day she sighs and goes to do something with the big plastic bag of her husband’s stuff they gave her at the hospital and when she pulls out his wedding ring, both rings go bonkers and start shining with a bright light and spinning around and flying around and what have you.  Which is pretty freaky but she’s still too sad to care much about it.

The very next day a dude shows up at the house and he’s all like “Your husband and I were old pals and he told me if he ever died suddenly that I needed to come tell you a secret”.  And she’s not into it because she’s like “I know all my husband’s friends and I’ve never seen you before” and he says they hadn’t seen each other in a long time but he has something really important he has to tell her so she has to let him in right now.

She’s not buying it but she says “go ahead and tell me then if you have something to say” and he barges in and tries to rip the ring off her finger.  I’ll say she’s wearing both rings at this point, that seems like something a fictional person would do if their spouse died.  Maybe even a real person would do that.  If I want things to get really hardcore, he has some tin snips and he tries to cut her finger off to get the rings.  Point is, they tussle and she gets her gun because she’s in the coast guard?  Do you get a sidearm in the coast guard?  Maybe she’s in the naval reserve. 

Anyway the guy goes ‘bleeeeeeeaghhhhhh!” and runs at her like dudes like to do in movies when ladies have guns and she plugs him.  And she’s all like WTFFF?

The cops turn up and she’s telling them about it and one of the uniformed officers is like “I need to take these rings for evidence” and she’s like “What?  Why?  How are the rings evidence?” and then she does some Sherlock Holmes stuff and realizes that this dude is not a real cop.  He notices her noticing his uniform and he’s like “I’m actually an auxiliary policeman so that’s why my buttons look weird” or whatever the thing is that she Sherlocks. 

She calls out to the lead detective and is like “What’s the deal with this guy trying to take my rings?” and the dude bolts and it’s a whole thing. 

That’s a decent first part of a story, but like most of my ideas it’s really a third of an idea.  Her husband was a magic man because magic is real and there’s secret magic people out there.  He enchanted their wedding rings so he’d know if she ever got into trouble but without intending to it also worked the other way round – she was alerted when he was injured.  Now that he’s dead these other evil magic people want these rings because he was pretty dang magic and he put most of his magic into the rings and they’re a valuable commodity. 

So I have a first act and an antagonist and that’s about it.  What happens then?  That’s generally as far as I get with story ideas and I wonder, once again, if that’s because I’ve spent so much time running RPGs.  In an RPG, a set-up and a bad guy is usually all you need.  The players don’t need much incentive to send them running off in every direction doing all kinds of stuff, much of it insane in the membrane. And by all kinds of stuff I mean mostly violence.  Spending time building out story beyond that can be an exercise in frustration because 77% of the time you’re never going to anticipate which way the PCs are going to jump.  It’s uncanny how good players are at unconsciously thwarting the GM.