Extras - Being Fiona - Next Steps

Alright! Now that it's finally been revealed that Felix has been in VR as Fiona all this time, I can talk about what is next in the comic without spoiling what just happened. This is a long post.

The below spoilers include an outline for the next phase of the story and a more in depth breakdown for what I have planned for Felix's Friday night VR session practicing being Fiona before Fiona meets Lisa on Saturday:

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At one point, after Jess explains how she pulled off tricking Felix he wasn't in VR, I had been tempted to have Felix jump into a new game of his own making to decompress and have some fun, but I felt that it would only drag things out. Particularly since the strip where Felix meets Lisa in person on Saturday is strip 177, and we're now 67 strips and counting in the "a few days before" flashback ever since strip 179, still on Thursday night, and with all of Friday and Saturday morning to go:

Outline of the next Phase

• As discussed in strips 189 & 190, Jess wants Felix to join her for a private real-life stream on Friday morning. Felix observes as Jess goes through her morning routine and goes to school.

• Jess and Felix need to figure out Fiona's real life wardrobe.

• Felix needs to join Craig and the others in Lost Desert for a game on Friday night (strip 176)

• Later on Friday night, Felix does another VR practice session with Jess. Jess simulates the story of Fiona’s first boyfriend in her first year of university (See below). After getting Felix started in the simulation, Jess will bow out for a date.

• While on her date with an old friend, Jess will confess to her date how she feels bad about using Felix to get closer to Craig.

• Saturday morning will be Felix and Jess getting ready, complicated by Jess' date still being in her apartment or Jess waking up at her date's apartment.

• Then we will finally get to Fiona and Lisa meeting at a cafe and hanging out all afternoon.

• Fiona tells Lisa that she will be changing schools to one in New York next term (Using New York as the location she is fake moving to for now since Fiona should be far enough that it would be a pain to come back to Seattle to visit, but not so far away that the time zones are incompatible).

• Jess has a lot of fun helping Felix hang out with Lisa, so when Lisa suggests that Fiona and Craig join her at a local Star League convention after exams are over. Jess sees this as an opportunity to get closer to Craig, encourages Fiona to accept offer.

• Craig is upset when he finds out what Felix did but becomes less upset when Jess shows up and says she needs to ‘practice’ being very good friends with Craig for their weekend at the convention with Lisa.

• Craig and Jess take their practicing a little too far, much to Felix’s discomfort.

• Craig misunderstands Jess when she tells him not to get too comfortable with her, since they are supposed to be pretending that they are ex’s, Craig thinks that Jess is telling him that she has no interest in him.

• After Exams, Fiona, Craig, and Lisa meet at a hotel next to the convention, the three of them are sharing a room for the weekend.

• Spend Friday night hanging out around the hotel.

• Spend Saturday on the convention floor dressed in Star League uniforms, Craig takes every opportunity to get close to Lisa.

• Saturday night of the convention is a cosplay dance and a series of romantic mishaps.

• The weekend ends with Fiona confessing to Lisa about liking girls, but Lisa, flustered, instead hooks up with Craig.

• After the convention and over Christmas break, everything settles into an equilibrium, Lisa now believes that Fiona lives in New York, Lisa is possibly dating Craig, and Fiona feels free to chase after virtual girls while hanging out with Lisa online.

• All is well in the world.

• And then Jess asks Felix for a favor.

  The Second VR Session with Jess.

  For the majority of the above outline, I have a fairly clear idea of how I want to flesh it out. But for the second VR session Felix will have with Jess on Friday night, before he meets Lisa in person on Saturday, it took me a while work through what I want to do it, in fact, it was only as I wrote this post that I finally figured it out.

  Part of the complication is that I didn’t want to make its story too complicated since I’d like to get to Fiona’s meeting with Lisa in person sooner rather than later, so I think I’ll structure it similar Nori’s tale, but make it shorter, and with more dialogue and less narration:

   

  So here is my current idea for Felix’s second VR session with Jess:

  • Jess gathers together a series of Sense-Streams from her first year of University and adapts the story of her first university boyfriend to a story about Fiona’s first university boyfriend, but gender-bent to be represented by a woman to make things easier for Felix:

  • In that story Fiona develops a crush on a classmate [Adam], a tall athletic woman, after bumping into them at a pool party, the second week of a really hot September.

  • After two months of hoping her crush notices her, she bumps into them again at a Halloween party, but neither recognizes the other in costume, and Fiona and Adam hit it off. After the they invite Fiona back to their place, Fiona is shocked to discover she has been talking to her crush Adam all night.

  • Fiona and Adam start dating, Adam is rich, takes Fiona on her first trip overseas.

  • Fiona brings Adam home to meet her Mom, for Christmas (Is Fiona’s Mom in Upstate New York? Is that why Fiona is moving to the other coast?).

  • The winter term is uneventful, Fiona flies home to stay with her Mom for the spring/summer term.

  • A few weeks later Fiona flies back to Seattle for a surprise visit to Adam, and out of habit uses her key to his apartment to enter without knocking, only to find Adam in bed with another woman.

  And Jess once again, traumatizes Felix.

   

   

  And in developing that short story, here are the various ideas I worked through:

  The first question was whether to base the simulation on one of Felix’s own memories but modified to as if he was Fiona, or to base it off one of Jess’ Sense-Stream recordings but modified as if Jess was Fiona. The first path would be truer to Fiona’s modest nature, the second path would force Felix to face more of a woman’s perspective on events, but would have Fiona acting more like Jess.

  That said, a simulation based off of one of Jess’ memories seems like it would be more fun.

   

  So, then the next question to work through was the setting:

  • A day at the beach with friends.

  • A backyard pool party.

  • One of Jess’ trips to Europe or somewhere tropical with a ‘good’ friend.

  • Night out for Halloween. Options are sexy costume if from Jess’ memories (current plan is a Catwoman / Black Cat knockoff named ‘Cat Lady’), modest costume if from Felix’s memories (Something similar to Marvel’s Ultimate Spiderwoman would be fun).

  The Halloween party was my favorite, with the backyard pool party and international trip tried for second place, my current outline lets me touch on all three.

   

  An early idea that didn’t work out was to take one of the settings above and add a genre twist to it, such as have the backyard pool party take place in a medieval fantasy or convert a memory of the internation trip into a cruise on a spaceship to various tropical worlds.

   

  I had also toyed with the idea that Felix might simulate his meeting with Lisa, but that created a narrative problem where I’d be showing the meeting twice in the story. The genre twist had come out of this idea, such as in the simulation Felix is Felix, but he lives in a urban fantasy world and would use a potion, spell, or nanites, to turn into and pretend to be Fiona.

   

  Then came the question of how is would the session Felix chooses be helpful?

  • Is it simply more practice being Fiona?

  • A way to develop more of Fiona’s personality?

  • Is it a ‘core’ memory that Fiona can tell Lisa about?

  • How Fiona met her first boyfriend/girlfriend?

  • Was it an exciting adventure she went on?

  • Does something crazy happen that has turned this memory into a story she likes to tell others?

  The ‘how Fiona met her previous boyfriend’ story I outlined above was able to cover most of those ideas.

   

  Also, now that Jess has told Felix about Sophie’s security loophole that would let him purposefully trick himself into thinking that he is Fiona living out the events of that memory, it would make some sense plot-wise to use it for this next session. But I don’t think Felix would want to do that. Which is fine, because Sophie’s security loophole will come up again in Sophie’s own story.

Well, that was a big post, thanks for reading!