More plot brainstorming

[sholio]

I got contacted about being a Nielson (TV ratings) household for the week of May 17-24. Lovely - a week during which I will almost certainly be watching no TV, because everything is on hiatus! :/ Why couldn't it have been a couple weeks earlier? Any shows which I might be watching at that point will almost certainly be either from Netflix or streaming on the networks' websites (which is how I'm watching Legend of Korra). Husband points out that sending back a booklet that says "no TV watched for the whole week" sends a message all its own, which is certainly true, but STILL. Next time please call me in the winter, Nielson people!

In other news, thank you, guys, for the help on plotting the zombie story. I still don't have an ending, but I have lots of ideas. :D On a fanficcy note, I am completely stuck on the dragon!Neal story, even though I'm only a couple of chapters from the end. I know how the very end is going to go -- I've known all along -- but there is a really big thing that I can't figure out, and this is why it's been stalled for a couple of months.

The problem is that, now that I've written the first fight with dragon!Keller, I can't come up with their second plan for killing and/or defeating him. I made him too powerful! I've already established that dragon!Neal can't take him in a physical fight, El's magic doesn't do a whole lot against him, and Peter can't kill him with weapons (unless he gets a really lucky shot).

It's not that I couldn't kill him in a fluky kind of way. It's that I can't come up with a good plan for Team Good Guy to think they'd have a reasonable chance of success. Their first plan was sucktastic enough, and now that they know how hard it is to fight him, they need something even more clever and sneaky (not that their first plan was all that clever or sneaky) ... and I'm totally coming up blank. Some sort of con, maybe? How do you con a dragon? Or perhaps he forces their hand by attacking the village and/or taking one of them hostage? El would be the natural option for a hostage (especially in light of season three) but I don't really want to do the damsel-in-distress thing with her if I can help it. Which leaves Peter, and I've already done Peter-in-peril once in this story, not to mention I've been writing a lot of Peter h/c lately and would like to avoid repeating myself too much.

Hmm.

If it makes any difference, it's winter now (there will be a little bit of snow & winter stuff, and then the final fight with Keller, if I can figure out how to stage it).

Maybe they try to bury him in an avalanche?

Ideally, I would really like some sort of clever plan for luring him in and trapping or killing him. (The plan is going to go horribly wrong, of course, but I'd like them to HAVE a plan.) It would probably rely heavily on Elizabeth's magic, which has been my plot deus ex machina so far. She doesn't have any powerful offensive magic, but I can give her just about anything that's defensive or potion/charm-based. She probably also knows how to make things that we have in the real world, like explosives or poison gas.

What's mainly giving me fits is the fact that Keller can fly, cannot be reliably located, and isn't enough of an idiot to be easily lured into a cave, dead-end canyon, or anywhere else that they could trap him. They don't have long-distance communication, and because dragons have been established as very solitary, Keller is unlikely to want to cooperate with anyone on anything.

Ideas?

Comments

[zillah975]

So...what's Keller's weakness? Give him one they can exploit, then figure out how our heroes learn of it and what they can do to use it. Yes?

[sholio]

Yes! And it sounds so simple when you put it that way. :D But honestly, it had never occurred to me to look at it from that point of view, even though that is the simplest and most logical thing to do.

[zillah975]

This kind of thing happens to me all the time. That's why it's so useful to have people to bounce stuff off of! :D

[sahiya]

Well . . . in canon, Keller has a problem, in that he has a more powerful and deadly enemy (the Russian mob). Most of what he does, he does because he's trying to both tweak Neal and avoid being killed by the Russians at the same time. I don't know if a bigger or badder dragon would really solve your problems (since then there would just be a more badass Keller-type), but what if Neal found out that Keller was in debt to some other dragon (had, say, stolen a piece of this dragon's treasure) and they used it to trick him into a trap? Perhaps the other dragon (who you could perhaps call Adler?) has a reason for allying himself with Neal, at least briefly, but there would almost have to be a sudden but inevitable betrayal of some kind, once they took care of Keller.

[sholio]

I really like this idea - or something similar to this, basically incorporating the Russian mob plot in some sort of fantasy-scenario version.

there would almost have to be a sudden but inevitable betrayal of some kind

Hee!

[schneefink]

Hmm. You have Mozzie, of course, and together he and Elizabeth could probably do some really good illusion magic. And there has been time for word to get to the capital, so you could have Diana and Jones show up to investigate the rumors of a wild dragon in the Valleys and the sheriff's pet dragon. Maybe they don't have much experience, since dragons have become so rare, but they probably have tricks and strategies and weapons to use. Some method to trace Keller, maybe? With the help of Elizabeth's illusion they could spread the rumor that Diana and Jones brought extremely valuable things (a magic circle made out of gold?) from the capital to fight Keller, and Mozzie could tell them how to phrase it/make it look so that Keller thinks that the weapons won't work. They'll set a very obvious and seemingly weak trap that Keller will deliberately run into so he can fry them and gloat about his superiority, not knowing that they really do have aces up their sleeves. (That plan requires the rumors to reach Keller, though. You can handwave it with Mozzie's contacts, or get all mine owners to talk about it very loudly in the hope that Keller hears them.)

[sholio]

I had actually forgotten about Mozzie until everyone reminded me!

And there has been time for word to get to the capital, so you could have Diana and Jones show up to investigate the rumors of a wild dragon in the Valleys and the sheriff's pet dragon.

OMG REAL DRAGONSLAYERS. ♥ ♥ ♥ This is the BEST idea! I hadn't thought of that, but that's awesome - Peter & El have to protect Neal against the actual dragonslayers, and now they have allies who actually know what they're doing. Hee! Thank you!