definition → plŏt'bŭn-ē

• a tempting idea for a story that hares off into strange territory upon pursuit.

the warren

• a young barkeep, cassandra, is mistaken for the prophet by two (obviously) delusional maniacs who believe themselves time travelers. now she's being dragged through their most-excellent-esque adventure and must discover whatever prophecy they're looking for (at least if she wants a lift home).
• ages are 24 (cassandra), 19 ("marty"), 17 ("reese")
• while in the future time travel has been invented, it is not authorized for use due to a series of cataclysmic failures. one of the technology's inventors entrusts his prodigal son and the boy's half-brother to go on an unauthorized mission in the hopes that it can change the future.
• to negate the detrimental affects on the human body, time travel utilizes a method of localized storage for a person's essence or soul - individuals uplink to the temporal soup we can access naturally through an area of the vast portion of the human brain we cannot innately utilize.
• once the boys latch on to the prophet, they determine they must piggy-back off her jumps in order to find the prophecy - as opposed to finding their own incarnations and wasting time tracking her down in the physical plane.
• so while cassandra is navigating her incarnations, she is also trying to handle dealing with her hallucinations since no one else can see them.
• due (mostly) to the fact that over the next millennium human (or terran) speech (and therefore baby naming) has evolved to the point where cassandra (with her primitive twenty-first century vocabulary) couldn't hope to pronounce their names, the time traveler's christen themselves after "mighty tera-prime heroes of legend marty mcfly and kyle reese."
  • depending on how desperate my word count gets, they may or may not begin misquoting the movies periodically throughout... but only if i'm truly desperate.
• narrator: either the narration should be 3POV with cassandra as the main character (but again, not the protagonist), or the story should be narrated like fight club.
• use breakup with boyfriend and moving back in with her roommate to establish that cassandra is a coward (generally speaking).