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As I Was Saying Before I Interrupted Myself

Today's chapter—"The World, Your Cafeteria" ; interactive only, until the archives catch up—finishes a short five-chapter run. You can probably now guess why I wrote it.

I chopped a huge number of chapters off that branch because they were out of continuity with the most recent developments in the interactive. In parallel branches the Durrases had moved to Westside, and the original branch didn't take account of the investigation that they would be sure to launch. And it would be very easy for Frank and Joe, with the latter's truth-telling technique, to track Will down. They would talk to Gordon (who is really Dane), who would send them to Dane (who is really Chelsea) who would send them to Chelsea (who is really Chen), who would send them to Will. It would only take them a few days to roll up Will's operation, ending the story.

So these five chapters were designed to close off their investigatory path. Will has discovered the "golem" paste just in time, and I used these chapters to seal up some key people so that Joe's truth-technique, which doesn't work on golems, wouldn't lead them to Will. They can still interview Chelsea (as Dane) but that would only lead them back to the fake-Chelsea, who would be a dead end. They are now stymied, even if Will never realizes that they were a threat, so that this branch still retains possibilities.

I had two other purposes in mind in writing the branch.

The first was to set up possible schemes for Will to execute. The deleted chapters, I felt, had wandered around without direction. Today's chapter explicitly sets up some possible goals and therefore storylines. But it also sets up a continuation of the simple drug trade storyline, so that, with some editing, it might eventually be possible to return most of the deleted chapters to this continuity.

The second purpose was to put Frank and Joe onto Will's radar as potential impersonations. That's always a fun possibility.

* * *

Tomorrow I return to the branch I was working in before, for a nine-chapter run. It got suspended here:

Interactive: "Why You Should Never Dig Up Your Mistakes" 
Public: "Why You Should Never Dig Up Your Mistakes" 

Will has lost the grimoire, but he's made some new friends. But the current crisis is that he was caught on video helping Caleb dig up the class time capsule, and an anonymous person is taunting him about it.