Final Chapter Outline for Chaotic Connections!

This is it! The final chapter outline for the project.  From now on we will work on more specific scene outlines, and actual writing.

Title: Chaotic Connections.
Tagline: one of us is not as smart as all of us.

Prologue: Basic history of the technology used in the video game.  Description of how the equipment works, and how the structure of the game works on the inside.

Chapter 1: We begin with Polly in the middle of a job.  She is in disguise once again, acting as a member of a drug ring.  She just needs the drug lord to reveal more information (who else is involved, where they’re getting the drugs, and a clear, recorded statement that they can use in court).  At last, the man says the last thing she needs, and then the special ops team comes in and incapacitates the members of the ring/arrests them.  Introduce various characters and their specialties (Micro uses tech to sneak inside/prevent escape/set cool gadgets to catch bad guys, Jared tackles/throws stuff, Polly uses karate, Grant shoots and directs action, and Angelina… well, she does whatever she feels like).  They cart the bad guys off to jail

Chapter 2: The team celebrates at a bar.  We see some of their personalities and interactions.  We also see Polly’s crush on Grant, and how she acts when around her teammates (as we see later, Polly acts differently depending on whom she’s with—comes from having to constantly change who she is as a spy).  As they’re leaving for the night, Grant takes Polly aside and tells her he and Micro have tracked Dr. Herron to an address.  They’ve been searching for Herron for years; they don’t know what he’s planning, but he’s a hacker who shows up every now and then online, getting into copyrighted work and stealing codes.  Grant assigns Polly to go to the address and start finding out about him.

Chapter 3: Polly returns home and talks to her roommate, Jenna (Jenny?).  We see that she acts differently around Jenna than around her coworkers.  Then she hooks up to her online game.  We see some of her life there.  She meets up with James, another player in the 2nd life game who has been talking to Polly for a couple of months now.  She talks to him about Grant, but of course can’t tell James about her real line of work. Perhaps we also see Angelina’s online identity (though we don’t know it’s her), who has also befriended Polly in the game. 

Chapter 4: The next day or so, Polly contacts Dr. Herron.  She claims to be his new neighbor (she’s renting the house next door as a ruse) and tries to become friends with him.  He acts nice enough, but she’s unable to get inside the house.  But she’s used to jobs taking a long time. 

Chapter 5: Meanwhile, Polly is secretly commuting back to her real apartment so Jenna doesn’t get suspicious, and goes to work to collaborate with teammates about how to get Dr. Herron to reveal his secret.  Micro explains more about what Dr. Herron has done in the past.  They know he’s stealing codes, and that many of his activities seem to relate to the online game Polly is involved in.  But they can’t tell exactly what Dr. Herron is up to.  Everyone is assigned various jobs to find out what he’s doing according to their specialties.  She still likes Grant, but we see that he’s not responding to her flirts.

Chapter 6: Polly continues to try to get Dr. Herron to trust her during the next week(s).  Every day she talks to him just a little, then invites him for dinner at her place.  He comes.  There’s a dinner scene, and Polly can tell he’s beginning to see her as a friend.  But when she offers to come to his house to look at a plumbing problem he mentions (she says she knows a little about that) he declines, saying he can figure it out.  Still won’t let her in.

Chapter 7: Polly goes online to unwind and talk to James (she, of course, does this everyday, but this will be a scene rather than a summary).  While talking to James today, Polly realizes she’s falling for him.  She’s conflicted between her virtual life and reality with Grant - although Grant still doesn’t like her back, and James returns her flirts.  She talks to Angelina’s avatar (again, doesn’t know it’s her, she’s just another online friend who knows James) about it, and she tells her to go for James.

Chapter 8: Polly goes over to Dr. Herron’s house to “borrow a cup of sugar.”  He tells her to wait at the door.  She’s frustrated with how he won’t let her in.  When he returns they talk for a minute on the doorstep, then she goes to her house, with nothing to show for her work but an unneeded cup of sugar.  She goes online again, and while talking to James, he says something that Dr. Herron said earlier.  She realizes Dr. Herron and James are the same person.

Chapter 9: She’s conflicted between her fondness for James and her duty to work against Dr. Herron.  She consults with Jenna without revealing too much, explaining that she’s fallen in love with a guy online, but she’s met him in real life, too, and he’s a jerk.  How does she reconcile that?  Jenna suggests she find out which part of him is his real personality—the online sweetheart, or the real life jerk.  We’re different people online and offline, and one or the other can be a front. (sort of blatantly stating the theme).  Tells Polly to get to know him better and then decide what do to.

Chapter 10: Polly decides she needs to find out exactly what Dr. Herron’s plot is before she can figure out what part of him is his real self.  She finally gets inside by going over to his house and confronts him telling him who she is (digitally) and demands he let her in.  He is slow to let her in, but does.  She notices several areas of the house he seems to be protecting.  Asks him about it, but he makes excuses.  She says she knows he’s up to something—he’s obviously hiding something (doesn’t reveal she’s with the government)—and he can trust her.  James/Dr. Herron explains that years ago, he was a hacker, and he was trying to use the codes he stole to control the people who were connected to the second life game (it would have made them into vegetables, their conscious minds trapped in the game.  Anyone that logged on would have been stuck, and he could have used it to get ransoms from some very important people).  However, Dr. Herron’s life was turned upside down when his best friend, the only person left in his life who cared about him, was killed by a random, petty thief.  (see Herron’s bio for more).  After years of mourning and soul-searching, he realized that little men, men like that petty thief, can do great harm.  If he was a great man, he should be able to great things.  So for the past couple of years, he’s been trying to not only right his wrongs, but secretly upgrade the security on the second life game so that no one could ever do what he tried years ago.  The rooms he was trying to hide are full of electronic equipment and codes meant to reverse the damage he’s done.  She’s relieved, but it’s very momentary because...

Chapter 11: Angelina and Micro run inside the house.  They explain they were listening in.  Micro tells Polly that Grant planted a recording device on Polly (he was getting suspicious and impatient with the job) and Micro found out and hacked the bug so he could listen as well.  Micro was sitting with Angelina at work this morning when they overheard Polly’s conversation.  Angelina quickly understood what was really going on (Angelina is the girl she’s been talking to online, James, who is her friend, too, is Dr. Herron) and they came running to warn them: Grant is on his way.  As soon as he heard Dr. Herron admit to hacking into those data bases years ago, he called the special ops team members and told them to head to Dr. Herron’s address.  They want to help Dr. Herron because 1) Angelina knows he’s a good guy and 2) he has to close up those security holes he created.  

However, before they can act, Grant and Jared arrive.  Grant orders Jared (who doesn't know anything about Dr. Herron’s confession) to grab Dr. Herron.  Polly puts herself between Herron and Jared, as a shield and Angelina tries to stop Jared by talking to him (they’re good friends and he listens to her).  Grant gets mad that Jared won’t do as he was ordered, and can’t understand why Angelina is defending Dr. Herron.  Micro confesses that they heard the conversation between Polly and they know the real story: Herron is reformed, and they need to let him finish his work

Grant, however, is not willing to give up on a case he’s been working on for years.  He shouts that Herron is a criminal for hacking codes and needs to be punished.  He orders Jared again to grab Herron and for the others to start packing up the equipment for evidence.  Herron tells them he was in the middle of something before Polly arrived, however, and if they try to unplug anything there could be a lot of problems.  Grant thinks that’s ridiculous, that he’s just trying to stall, and Grant decides to get the job done himself.  He tries to turn off one of the switchboards, James tries to stop him, Polly steps in as well.  Grant is thrown into the equipment and the virus is accidently activated.  Grant is knocked unconscious despite the fact that he was not thrown very hard.

Chapter 12: Herron runs to the equipment.  That shouldn't have killed Grant.  While the others try to revive Grant, Herron checks the monitors, and realized Grant actually activated the code he created years ago to trap everyone inside the game.  He also realizes that Grant must be inside the game, and since Grant never created an avatar he exists in the game as pure consciousness.  Anyone who is logged on, or who does log on, will turn into a vegetable.  There is a way to reverse it, but someone would have to go inside the game and alter the internal security settings while he worked in the physical world. Polly volunteers to go in, and so does Micro (at this point it is revealed that Micro's avatar is a superhero version of himself).  Angelina, Jared, and Herron will stay outside and try to help Herron reverse it.  Polly and Micro meet up with Jenna in the virtual world, and all of them save the day by reversing the codes and everyone gets out alive.  At one point they are mysteriously directed by an unseen power manifesting itself through various glitches in the game.

Chapter 13: Grant does not regain consciousness.  They confront James/Dr. Herron about what he’s done.  He might make a valuable asset to the team.  James says he'll consider the idea, and each goes home.  Polly and James are reluctant to leave each other, but they go home anyway.  That night Polly gets a phone call from James asking her to dinner (in the real world).  She accepts and they have a wonderful time.  Polly confesses her feelings for James, and he does the same.

Meanwhile: Micro asks Jenna out, who has become a good friend since his girlfriend broke up with him.  Jared flirts sheepishly with Angelina (dialogue: "So...do you like cheese?)  Grant begins to help people out within the game, and discovers the benefits of virtual worlds.