Commentary - Undaunted Part Five

The epic conclusion to the first arc! It was wild ride, and after awhile, it wasn't me writing, Trevor took over for the most part. And we begin with...more banter!

So we start from where we left off with James getting Trevor. Now there's a big pow wow with all the Undaunted crew at the Garden of the Gods. I decided to make the big problem deal with hype surrounding HSG's upcoming Phase 3 that would allow Factions to declare enemies and attack each other which was a tie in to the Carnival...two birds with one stone.

And imagine, that Trevor has this rep of being the crazed loner, you think anyone else in the group would believe him right away? That's where it came important that I establish Seal's relationship with Trevor beforehand. He's sort of the lone person that believes, and luckily he's the leader, too.

A month later, HERO inspired me to change this section just a tiny bit. It sort of came to me as it always does, on how to change a sentence to make it funnier and reference 9th Wonders babble even more. Trevor comes up with this plan and everyone is skeptical, a few of them thought of it, then Seal comes forward and reveals he and a bunch of other faction leaders were working on a similar plan. But then Seal saves his butt by asking everyone to give their opinion one at a time through his power of empathy.

And I bring up the fact that Trevor wasn't read as another rumor among Undaunted, a mere set up to lead to another dark humorous moment and it leads to the group falling in with the plan, only if Seal reads Trevor in front of everyone. And I played with the montage again and replaying events I revealed in previous stories. I thought it'd be fitting that on the image of Samuel, that Seal starts to lose control. I only did this because in the grand scheme of powers on Heroes there's always someone that can resist it or some weakness that comes with the power. Here, Trevor has so much memories and thoughts stored in his mind, Seal begins to get overloaded with trying to empathize (and it doesn't help that Trevor's a little insane in the membrane) and we get these weird nightmare scenes with the DNA Symbols, a callback to young Trevor's nightmares.

And so Trevor goes into detail about his form of the plan and a new montage begins. I imagined how these squads would be like and used classification from AT files to justify it. Maximize powers by teaming them up with complementary ones. This was a set up for the next bunch of stories (there's always a set up somewhere).

I imagined the Heroes theme playing over the muted scene of Seal talking to everyone and the camera revolves around everyone and zone in on a couple Undaunted members while Trevor recites the full Lewis Carroll quote, that Leona used when she texted him in China, in his monologue.

Then I end the story with a "OOOO" moment and revealing Trevor's intention to confront Leona Mills. And like when a volume ends on Heroes, you get a short prologue of the next volume. I did the same here with a classic reveal of Trevor and Seal at Mable's Diner as Leona comes to wait on them. Threw in Tim as a reference to iStory, too. And the ultimate of callbacks, Seal makes the same comment about Mills that Trevor did.

All in all, this was so much fun to write except the part when I get the flow at 12:30 in the morning. I'm happy with the arc, what it became and where its going. I hope some of you did, too.