Access to a Forbidden Place

My semester scene assignment from an earlier iteration of the Story Grid Writer Mentorship Program.

The Tower of the Triumvirate

I took a semester of the Story Grid Writer Mentorship program back in June, 2024. Then I ran out of money. But now I’m a mentor, and we do things a bit differently. This scene was based on a chapter from Ninth House by Leigh Bardego and was supposed to represent a protagonist gaining entry to a forbidden place. We wrote by tropes which turned out to be a very bad way to put a scene together. I ended up with 4500 words and it’s lopsided as hell. But, here is my final draft from that program. I’m migrating my website domain to Substack and realized I never posted this here. I may or may not turn this into a novella someday. I’ll include the trope parameters where they fit as well. I’d rewrite it better today, but sometimes it’s best to leave it be so you can see how far you’ve come.

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The Squib wants to Join Mongoose

TROPE 1: PREPARING TO TAKE ON THE ROLE

• The protagonist’s trek to the forbidden place sparks reflection on their relationship to the context.

• This reflection is told through specific events that highlight both the risks of the context from the protagonist’s perspective as well as the protagonist’s fish-out-of-water-ness.

• The protagonist assesses the current context in light of past experiences and current expectations.

• The protagonist takes steps to offset their sense of outsider status.

The pilot cut the engine on the airboat and the flat-bottomed craft slowed and then drifted in the dark. The warehouse was yet a hundred yards off, and Ethan could barely make out the glow of halogen lamps against the rusted metal walls. His chest felt suddenly too small for his thumping heart.

“Hey, why are you stopping?”

“You get off here,” muttered the pilot over his shoulder.

“How am I supposed to get all the way over there?”

“You walk. See, walkway’s right here.” The boat thumped against something hard that shifted disconcertingly, sending ripples of moonlight into the murky water. Other things shifted there too, splashing into the tall grass of the flooded bayou.

“The water goes right up to the place, you can’t take me all the way?”

“Listen, kid, right here’s an imaginary line I do not cross. On this side of the line, I’m just a guy on a boat doing a little night fishing. On that side of the line, I’m a smuggler or a human trafficker, or, to your friends over there, I’m a spy, and I don’t want to catch a bullet from either side of it. You get off here, or I take you back to the road, your call.”

“But I can’t see anything.”

The pilot grumbled and dug around beside his seat. “Here, take my kit. It’s got a flashlight and a flare-gun. I’ll be out here fishing for two hours and then I’m heading in.” The pilot pointed at the rickety walkway. “You need a pickup before then, send up a flare and I’ll get you. From here, not over there. I see anything bright and shiny fly up there, I’m-a skedaddle, got it?”

Ethan nodded, took the bright orange case by the handle and stepped onto the walkway. He clutched the kit to his chest as he watched the pilot fire up the propeller on the airboat and pull out.

“I’m adding a hundred scrips to your invoice for that kit, by the way.” The pilot shouted before revving up the engine and skimming out into the dark.

“Bullshit.” Ethan grumbled as he shook off the chill eating at his stomach. He turned and tested the wood planking with a cautious step forward. Each plank bowed under his weight, but the wood worried him less than the rusted steel that was holding it up out of the water. Lesions pocked the supports here and there like bite marks exposing their brittle emptiness.

Glancing back where the boat had disappeared, Ethan could make out skyscrapers on the horizon. He was twenty miles southeast of downtown Houston, yet the corporate plaza of the Big Three seemed to tower above him. To the fore the tallest building in Texas pierced the clouds at over two thousand feet. At its peak, the red Reuleaux triangle of the Triumvirate logo glared across the miles down through the cloud cover like an evil eye. Somewhere amid all that architecture was the Farm. Effy was there too.

Blue, Red, Orange, Black. Effy had won again. Four guesses that time. Four guesses every time. They were nine, and it was Ethan’s turn. He got it in five. He could beat anyone in school at Mastermind in the library, where they encouraged those kinds of games, where they started watching for abductive savants, monitoring how far a kid could jump to a conclusion, how deep they could go on limited information, how well they could leap. Back then they lived in boxes on stilts over the floodplains, but he remembered those days fondly. They would walk the planks to school to stay out of the muck and Effy would chatter his ear off about the most random things.

Then Effy stopped going to school when hormones rushed in and social mores took primacy over fun and games. The other children stopped talking to the weird girl that couldn’t keep pace with the conversation, the back and forth, the things you said and the things you didn’t, the niceties. Each day, the anxiety grew until one day she refused to go back.

Ethan felt it too, but it was different for him. Boys were different. Most boys are just happy to have an audience and “weird” can be a badge of honor. It wasn’t always easy, but where Effy cared so much, Ethan just grew a thicker shell, impenetrable to everyone. Everyone but Effy. Effy was special in a way that he couldn’t match. Effy always guessed the code in four turns.

They caught her leaping in an online game. She had topped all the leaderboards under a handle, but they tracked her anyway. Effy was good at games, but Effy couldn’t lie. So, when the social workers came knocking, Persephone Turner was conscripted to the Farm and Ethan moved with his mother out of the floodplains and into a two-bedroom apartment with a porch in an arcology — full on middle-class.

Ethan covered his nose with the hand holding the kit as the smell of the rotting bayou crept up from the muck and the grasses. The waters were higher now in the summer, after the storms, but they never quite went away and there the bodies of dead fish, garbage and the seeping effluence of pre-flood industry mixed and mated. Nobody lived out here that wanted to.

To distract himself from the odor, he played with patterns in his head — Number sequences, code sequences, Fibonacci and Lucas. He was thirteen iterations into the golden ratio when he stepped through a broken plank and dark water enveloped his new white kicks and soaked the bottom of his jeans.

The stipend they got for Effy’s participation paid for a lot of things. It kept him in new, if not name brand, clothes, it paid for food and the suite at the arcology, and it kept them stocked on pharmaceutical grade cannabinoids for his mother’s anxiety. She was high when he’d left her that evening, but she still knew what he was up to. Ethan could lie, but he was bad at it.

“But it’s Effy, momma. She’s in trouble.”

“Damned right, and what are you gonna do? You’re gonna get us all in trouble then? That place can help her better than I can, and if they find out you were involved, they’ll cut all this off and we’ll be back in the floodplains beatin’ away mosquitoes with a tire iron. What I keep tellin’ you, baby? You don’t bite the hand that feeds. Everything will be fine. I’m sure Effy’s just having her anxiety, that’s all.”

But there was no anxiety in Effy’s message. It was pure terror. Not the fear you live in when you know that someday the door might burst open and your life would be over in the flash of a barrel, like on the floodplains. No, Effy’s fear was for the human race. The message itself was calm, but that only illuminated her terror all the more. If anyone understood that, it was Ethan — they were twins, after all. He needed these people to see that. He needed them to see him. He wasn’t as special as Effy, but he had skills. That stipend hadn’t paid for these shoes or the cash-on-hand that got him to this swamp. But those were small stakes, and he wanted more than petty theft and shiny shoes. He wanted to do something real. He wanted to get his sister out of the Farm.

Ethan wiped at the muck on his shoes and just glimpsed the rolling flashlight as it dove over the edge of the walk and plopped into the water, dragging a green aura along with it to the bottom. Shit. He could see the walkway well enough, but still he pulled his smartphone out of his front pocket and turned on its tiny flashlight.

Shining the weak light around him, he saw that he’d stumbled onto a square intersection of three walkways abutting a tree stump overgrown with vines. The serrated metal platform beneath him was a welcome change from the rotting planks, but the bayou seemed to rush around this spot and fall in hollow echoes below him. He searched the murky water, but couldn’t see where it was falling, just a black void beneath the grating and wrinkles of moonlight in the rushing water all around.

Looking up, he traced the leftmost path to the warehouse and followed it until it ended. The walkway had collapsed here, leaving a four-foot channel of water between him and a stair tower that led to a door two stories up. As he approached the ledge, the walkway shifted, and something splashed in the water below him. He heard the telltale hiss of an unsettled gator there and he froze.

These were the coordinates Athena had given him, but something felt off. A cool sweat had developed behind his ears and he studied the gap in front of him and the door above where dim yellow light leaked out of a boarded window beside it. He pulled a round chip from his back pocket. This was his invitation. It had arrived on his doorstep in response to a relay to Athena about Effy’s message. On the inside of the brown paper wrapping were the coordinates of the warehouse and a handwritten note in black ink, “The chip will get you inside. BURN THIS!” That’s what had triggered the argument with his mother, him burning a secret note in the porch ashtray. That’s how he ended up here.

But there was no other entrance. So he pocketed his phone and the chip, clutched the flare-kit to his chest, and jumped as far as he could, landing squarely but encouraging another hiss from the gator behind. He put down the kit and straightened his shirt.

TROPE 2: APPEALING TO ROLE WITHIN THE CONTEXT (PLAYING THE PART)

• The protagonist attempts to gain access to the forbidden place through the antagonist/Threshold Guardian.

• The protagonist appeals to their role, responsibility, or right within the context.

• The antagonist/Threshold Guardian undermines the protagonist’s appeals through strict adherence to their own role/position (pits the protagonist’s role against the antagonist’s role).

Up the stairs, the landing at the top was square and sturdy. From here the red eye of the Triumvirate glared like a watcher over the suburban neighborhoods that cascaded out from the city under a blanket of warm, steady light. Here and there the dark carapaces of corporate drones reflected the moonlight dimly as they surveilled the streets, protecting the wealthy in their single family homes. Ethan liked drones, one of many fixations, and he could see that these were autonomous, well armed, and deadly to anyone that didn’t belong. But that protection ended at the flood lands where the blanket of light faded, where the cartels and gangs took control, where Ethan now stood at an abandoned warehouse alone.

He turned to the door. It was simple, but sturdy, with a single pull handle and a thick metal latch guard. On the right was an RFID reader and a call button above a speaker and below a camera. He rolled the round chip over his knuckles, back and forth, back and forth, breathing. It looked like a poker chip, blue, ridged, smooth in the center but otherwise unmarked. How would it work? Was it just a token representing the high esteem of Athena, or was it a key? Athena had helped him in the past, given him tips, even praised his work. She made him feel like he really had what it took, but this was Mongoose, an organization as infamous as it was anonymous. Here Ethan felt little more than an imposter entreating entrance to their secret hideout.

Athena had done more than simply relayed his message, though. She’d invited him into the fold. That had to count for something. Ethan stopped fidgeting with the chip and passed it over the reader. An embedded strip of light flashed red with a buzz. The chip was tech, but not a key, it seemed.

He pushed the call button and waited.

The speaker hissed and a male voice crackled through. “We don’t want any.”

Ethan cocked his head and opened his mouth. Shut it.

“You deaf? That means go away.”

“I’m Spitfire- I mean, my name is Ethan Turner. Athena sent me.” He fumbled the blue chip, caught it before it hit the landing and lifted it to the camera.

“What am I supposed to do with that?”

Ethan pulled back the chip and looked at it, then leaned toward the panel. “Um… Athena sent it. She said it would get me in. She gave me these coordinates.”

“Athena does a lot of things I don’t like. Why are you here, squib?”

“My sister is at the Farm. She sent me a message about what’s really going on there. Athena said you could help.”

“There are a lot of kids at the Farm with a lot of families that regret letting them go. How’s that a reason I should let you in here?”

“I can help. I have skills, Athena can tell you. I’m an ace cracker.”

“Athena this, Athena that. I say, we don’t have any use for you. Now, you get along back to your momma and let us grownups do our job.”

“Look, I know I can help. Just let me prove it. I’ll show you I ain’t no squib.”

The speaker sighed a hiss of static. “Turn around, kid.”

Ethan turned. At eye level and inches away hovered three hexacopter drones that he hadn’t heard coming, that he still couldn’t hear now that they were staring him down. These weren’t simple surveillance drones either. They were military grade builds with a small-caliber, coil-accelerated, slug gun mounted to a gimbal turret under the frame.

“I’m done askin’.” The voice from the speaker now echoed in front of him, bouncing from drone to drone in a menacing reverb. “Now put your hands above your head nice and easy, and walk down those stairs slowly.”

Ethan lifted his arms, but frowned at the display of force. While Effy’s anxiety pushed her inside of herself, Ethan’s became a mirror. And, though his stomach was a ball of ice on this warm June night, his brows furrowed and eyes glared over a sneer pulled taut against dry teeth. “Look, I didn’t come here for trouble. Athena called, and I came.”

“No hard feelings, kid. This is for your own good. Athena made you a promise that she’s in no position to keep and you’ll just get you and your sister killed.”

Ethan shook his head and turned to the stairs, taking each one gingerly as his groin tightened and adrenaline turned his legs to jelly.

TROPE 3: BLUFFING ROLE WITHIN THE CONTEXT

• The protagonist abides by the rules on the surface, but their strategy is driven by their outsider status (the protagonist operates in the letter of the law, but not the spirit of the law).

• The antagonist frames the situation in a way that reveals the shared identity (again, this could be between the protagonist and victimized parties or between the protagonist and the antagonist). This should give rise to the Crisis of whether the protagonist will do what it takes to access the forbidden place or if they will acquiesce to the Threshold Guardian.

“I’ll escort you out. I want you to get to your boat nice and safe.”

“I feel safer already. Those are CyTek G-90s right? I bet you got them cheap on account that they like to fire off rounds for no reason.”

“Good eye, but I upgraded the microcontrollers on these babies myself. Just maybe don’t make any sudden moves.”

Ethan swallowed dryly and frowned.

The drones laughed. “See, you feel that? That’s danger, kid, and this op is gonna be dangerous. We don’t need any squibs getting in the way.”

Ethan glared at the drone to his right. “I can handle it. I’ve broken into plenty of places, some of them armed.”

“Not like this you haven’t, kid. You couldn’t even get through our front door with an invitation.”

At the bottom landing, Ethan bent over slowly and picked up the flare kit.

“What’s that?”

“It’s my ticket out of here. Boatman won’t come unless I throw up a flare.”

“Good ‘ol Captain Steve, he probably charged you extra for that didn’t he?”

“A hundred scrips.”

“Hooo! One-hundred scrips for a flare? You’ve got money for that, and a nice new shirt, them shiny white shoes. Hell, I bet you even get your hair coiffed. Do you pay someone to coif your hair, uh, what was your name again?”

“Ethan.”

“Yeah, right. You got money to coif your hair, real nice, like a hairspray model. You gonna give all that up playin’ squib to a bunch of hacktivists?”

Ethan was too busy searching the water for hungry alligators to respond. He jumped when a sudden zook-zook-zook broke the silence and three magnesium slugs threw up dollops of water around the walk. A bigger splash rocked waves against the landing and a long shadow swam into the marshes, carving out scallops of moonlight in its wake.

“Well, what are you waiting for?”

Ethan glared at the nearest drone and then backed up, took a run at the ledge, and jumped. This time, his toe caught the edge of a plank and he tumbled, rolled, then landed on his back, staring up at a drone hovering above him.

“You alright, kid?”

Ethan kneeled and brushed himself off. The flare kit had broken open and spread its contents over the walkway. He hunted around in the dark until three ovals of light converged on a gap in the planks where the flare gun had lodged. “Need a light?”

Ethan thrust his chin at the nearest drone. He collected the flare gun and the single flare that he could find, but the latch on the clamshell case for the kit had snapped. He kicked the case into the water and loaded the flare into the gun, pocketed it.

The drones swept their spotlights down the walk and Ethan followed, away from the moon and towards the big red eye in Houston.

“I can still be an asset, you know, on the outside. I can scope out the Farm. I’ve got visitation.”

“You ever use it?”

Ethan looked down on the plank in front of him and shook his head.

“They’ll have eyes on you as soon as you walk in the door and throw you in a room with a psy-bot the first time you sneeze. It’s not worth the risk.”

“It is if it means I get Effy out.”

The drones spread out beside the walkway, and the voice pelted him from all directions. “I appreciate your spirit, kid, but we’ve all got someone at the Farm. Ain’t none of us going to jeopardize their safety just to babysit a hotshot that wants to play hero.”

“And what about my sister?”

“We get out who we can.”

“You mean you take care of your own first.”

“Wouldn’t you? But don’t you worry, we’re real good at this shit. Your sister will be home in no time at all, sitting there in your nice arco-suite and chatting all about livin’ at the Farm. You might even take her to get coiffed.”

Ethan stopped, but he didn’t know why. The hairs on the nape of his neck bristled, chasing a tingle down the ridges of his spine. He was standing on the square metal intersection where he’d lost his flashlight. It was different now under the roving gazes of the drone spotlights. What he had first dismissed as a tree stump was nothing of the sort. Rather, the platform was anchored to a thick concrete pillar overgrown with fuzzy-bean vines. The tingle in his spine landed in a clench of his inguinal ring as he focused on something else he had missed — a button pulsing dimly red amid the vines.

TROPE 4: UTILIZING THE ROLE (EXPLOITING THE ROLE)

• The protagonist reflects on their duty within the context.

• The protagonist places their own well-being (opportunity, resources, and/or potential for conflict) at risk to access the forbidden place (the protagonist chooses the transformative option, operating according to the Dynamic).

• The protagonist succeeds in gaining access using a resource, skill, or connection associated with their role or identity in the context.

• The protagonist is rewarded (based on External Genre; this could be with a connection, information that the protagonist needs, resources, or additional opportunities).

“What’re you doing, kid?” Echoed the three drones.

Ethan was leaping — the hollow fall of water below him and the newly exposed button on the pillar beside him triggered a shift in his mental map of the area. The door at the top of the stairs was a decoy. And why wouldn’t it be? Hackers prefer back doors. There wasn’t anything they could do to reinforce that entrance that would keep the corps out if they wanted in. There was another way inside, and Ethan was standing on it.

He didn’t know how it worked or what he had to do but he knew where to aim. He had all the colors but not the order and only one guess left to crack the code. There was just the small problem of a grumpy doorman and his heavily armed drones.

But they didn’t want him here. He should leave well enough alone. All he had to do was make it to the pickup, fire off the flare, get on the boat and go home where it was less smelly and noisy and dangerous. There was food there, there was sleep. But there was also shame in an empty apartment with an always-high mother and nobody else in the world that understood him like Effy.

We get out who we can.

You mean you take care of your own first.

Wouldn’t you?

Wouldn’t he?

Ethan looked at the drone hovering in front of him. “I don’t remember which way I came in,” he lied.

The drones focused their beams on the path to his right. “That-a-way.”

As he walked, Ethan committed as much of this path to memory as he could while simultaneously tracking the surrounding drones, which, he had noticed, weren’t actually silent — they simply tuned their rotor speed in order to blend into the ambient soundscape. Ethan could hear them now babbling like water, chirping like crickets, but those sounds were in the air above, not the marshes below. Knowing their tricks made them easier to triangulate.

He also knew for a fact that CyTek G-90s didn’t have silent running rotor controls out of the factory. The doorman wasn’t lying when he said he’d customized the microcontrolles, but if he’d replaced all the original circuits, Ethan’s plan might not work.

They reached the end of the flood walk, and the sky there was clear. Stars spangled the murky water around him and he stood in the still night, listening. The low level hum of eighteen independent rotors drew a picture in his mind of each drone around him, one on either side and one behind. Their spotlights attenuated on his position, but his eyes were closed. He put a hand in each of his pockets, grabbing the flare gun in his right and Athena’s chip in his left.

“Well, kid, it’s been fun but-”

“It wasn’t the microcontrollers that shitcanned the G-90s, you know that right?”

“What?” An epic sigh reverberated from drone to drone. “Alright, squib, go ahead, tell me what I don’t already know.”

“Better yet, I’ll show you.” Ethan pulled the flare gun out of his pocket.

“Ethan, buddy, don’t do anything stupid.”

“It’s Spitfire, and I told you I ain’t no squib.” With his eyes still closed, Ethan fired his only flare directly at the drone behind him at near point-blank range.

The flare careened off the drone harmlessly but that wasn’t the point. The zero-lux cameras on each drone suddenly absorbed over forty thousand lux of orange incendiary light, frying the flight stabilization systems — the key defect that sent all three into a tailspin. The turret on each drone tracked the flare and fired magnesium bullets that caught light and streaked across the sky like tiny comets, sizzling as they struck the water.

Ethan ducked under the chaos and bolted through the dark, back down the walkway, each foot landing squarely on each memorized plank. By the time he reached the metal platform with the vine-covered pillar, the chaos behind him had died down and the silence pulsed in his ears as even the crickets refused to strum their leg-harps.

If the doorman had any more drones at his disposal, they wouldn’t be long coming. He swept aside the vines covering the pulsing red button, but nothing happened when he pounded it in desperation. The adrenaline that had gotten him this far changed shifts with cortisol and anxiety fluttered his heart into panic. He ripped away the vines, exposing the pillar in full, and searched the dull gray thumb of concrete until he felt a slit on one side of it. He slammed the blue chip into the slot, and the pulsing red button shifted to a hopeful green.

Another set of drones buzzed out of nowhere, not even playing at stealth. He slapped the button and was falling.

Falling as the moon winked out, and the drones went silent.

Falling as water rushed around him but he stayed dry.

Falling as his heart palpitated in his throat and the breath froze in his chest.

Falling and then a jolt where inertia carried him to his knees on the cool metal grating.

When Ethan opened his eyes, a narrow tunnel stretched before him lit by dim strip lights. Two figures argued there in the gloom as they rushed towards him. He held up his hands as he stepped forward shakily, unsure what had just happened or where he was or whether these strangers were going to come at him swinging.

First through the tunnel was a tall woman with golden hair fading to green, then blue as it cascaded over her shoulders. Dark makeup barely concealed tired eyes. “You shot at him with live rounds! Are you insane!” She hollered at a shorter man behind her.

“I didn’t shoot at anyone. That dipshit fired a flare and set off the auto-defense.” That was the doorman. He wore a white shirt covered in bright red hibiscus flowers over dry tan skin.

“Ethan, are you okay?” The woman must be Athena, he realized.

“Sure… yeah, all aces.”

They were guiding him now, Athena with a hand on his shoulder and the doorman beside him. The tunnel opened out into a cement cavern where great pillars marched in evenly spaced rows down the length of it. At the center was a brightly lit platform with equipment, monitors and tendrils of thick cable stretching every which way.

Ethan gawked at the immensity of the space. “What is this place?”

“An underground reservoir. The warehouse above was a datacenter before the floods, and they stored a million gallons of clean water here for cooling servers that trained AI models while people downstream died of dysentery.” This voice was different, in charge, a gentle canter of Kreyòl that echoed in silky waves through the damp reservoir. A dark brown man emerged from behind a pillar. He was wearing a simple white nehru shirt over blue jeans with black snakeskin boots that scraped and clicked in staccato on the gritty concrete.

“And you’re damned lucky to be here, too.” Barked the doorman. “Goddamn kid, you almost got yourself killed.”

“Cerberus, that’s enough. I’m sure Spitfire here was well aware of the risks. Legba opened the gate for him tonight and he is here now, safe.” The man in the nehru shirt cocked his head then. “Do you still doubt he has what we need?”

Cerberus pursed his lips, then stomped his foot. “Okay, so he figured out the door. I still don’t like having a kid here, Wizzer. There’s too much at stake.”

“Precisely. We are too methodical and averse to risk. Step by step, we lose ground, frozen by our fear of doing any harm. We cannot win at chess with an AI. We need chaos, disruption. We need a leaper. Tell me, Ethan, how would you infiltrate the Farm?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“Perfect! Let’s begin.”