Below is the rough outline for a short story that is in queue for this year’s June Camp NaNoWriMo. You can see a list of all of the stories here, or you can just click on the Camp NaNoWriMo tag and get all the planning goodness.

Verse: Blackguards and Plaster Saints

Working Title: Building a Better Mouse

Blurb: The best defense is a good offense—or a good distraction (aka Humans: Do Not Give Them Power Tools).

Rough Outline

1. The Advisors have a meeting to discuss the progress on the defenses for Earth. Things are going well, but they are concerned that the Humans are focusing on projects that don’t seem to have a point.
2. Teacher stops by one of the groups that seems to be wasting time and resources, only to find them resistant to his attempts to convince them to stop. He hasn’t really run into folks who flat out told him no before, so he hangs around.
3. They are busy developing small spaceships piloted remotely by rats. This makes no sense whatsoever to Teacher and only vaguely makes sense to Gestalt. They demand a better explanation for the resource usage and they get promised a test.
4. The team challenges Sorrow to pilot one of the smaller fighters, tells him and lets him see what he’ll be up against. He is confused, but willing to play the game.
5. They launch off of the orbital platform they are working from, Sorrow uses known tactics of the incoming fleet. The rats offer no real resistance, making darts at his ship, but doing no damage and running when he turns to shot at them. So he starts in for the target ship.
6. And then his ship shuts down.
7. Turns out the rats aren’t armed in traditional methods, they have small focused emp pulse beams that work to disable very small portions of the ship. They’re trained to attack non-vital systems that won’t register hits in battle conditions… only after a while they will cause a cascade failure from the faults.
8. The development team does a small victory dance, the Advisors are still confused, but Gestalt has to acknowledge that the other groups all think this is a win—and considering that both the rats and the rats’ ships can be produced in mass quantities without impacting the overall resource allocations… it sort of is.
9. The Advisors chalk it up to ‘humans are strange’ and get back to worrying about more traditional defenses. Except for Sorrow, who still thinks their bend towards out of the box thinking is rather alarming.

Cast
The Advisors: Gestalt, Mender, Teacher, Sorrow
The R&D team
The rats (well, okay, not really)

Scenes/Sets
The Fortress of Solitude
The R&D lab
Outside the orbital platform

Challenges
I’ve never written anything from the Advisors POV before, so this should be interesting. Plus I need to make the rat ships fit into suspension of disbelief, so there will probably be some hard science tweaking to do afterwords. Well, that and the fact that it’s a viable strategy in the face of the oncoming war. *pokes plotbuny* We’ll see how she rolls! 🙂