One day, Alice and a studymate, Affan
were working on a homework assignment. Alice’s mania was acting up, she had a
great deal of energy and the idea of an interpersonal, multimedia book club
came up. They forged a tight bond, and Affan crashed on the couch that night.
In the morning she made him breakfast and gave him the other in a pair of
bracelets that had meant a bond was formed in Alice’s past. That bond had
broken, but the alliance between Alice and Affan had just begun.
As they talked more and more, Alice
realized she wanted two more elements to be involved in the book club: real
world events to raise awareness for personal philanthrpoic causes, and a
pretend, fantasy reality where people have become a superhero, supervillain,
or a hybrid. Everyone would develop their own background, abilities and
characters. Alice and Affan agreed on the number of
pairs of teams as twelve, meaning a what she called a “thought club” of
twenty-four people.
Immediately names came to mind came
to mind and she began listing them. She proposed that Affan and she split and
pick their own partners. Alice was interested in partnering with Jacob Johnstone, a guy with
the technology and seemingly the intensity of interests to help her kick off
with an awesome reading list and curated exhibit-blog. The game was to start in
December.
Obviously, Alice realized she had to
start creating her own character, but to name her anything but Alice felt so
strange. She decided on Temple, for now…
…Once
Alice named Temple, she realized that Temple had dualing identities: she is
Temple Turner, but when her powers take control for the worse she can become Temple
Tantrum. When this happens her power of creating ideas that help others warps
and misfires and Temple’s life turns disastrous.
Alice realized immediately that a
mission back to when she was seventeen, back in time, was a good idea to try to
confront Temple Tantrum, to help her character understand her own dangerous
side before she had fully gained use of her abilities. Alice knew that she
gained her superpower in April of 2008, when she had her first psychotic
episode.
She needed a time turner…how could
someone go back into their own past and warp it such that negative qualities
about herself never came to exist? Realizing this was impossible, Alice knew
she needed a way to turn her life into a kind of shrine to Temple. She had to
flesh out Temple’s imaginary skeleton by forming a group of others interested
in creating characters of their own, willing to listen, teach and learn. Why
not a book club, a multimedia book club?
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