Synopsis - MEETING OF THE WATERS (mid-length)
Posted: April 26th, 2010, 2:01 am
Hey all. Folks here provided some excellent help with the query for my novel, and now that I've finally finished the first draft of my synopsis, I'm hoping y'all'll pull through a second time. Thanks in advance for any help or critique you can offer.
This synopsis runs 4 pages single spaced. I still have to take a crack at a more 'general overview' 1-pager.
(Edit: After this posted I realized it's a pain in the butt to read on my screen, with the text running so wide. I found it easier to read by making the browser window narrower, about the width of an actual sheet of paper. Or just copy-paste it into a Word document. I just don't want to turn anyone away due to the thing being unpleasant to look at. Hope this helps)
MEETING OF THE WATERS
In August 2016, JAIME ADRICKS quits playing his favorite video game, Ages: High Seas, because the company making the 17th century pirate MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) chose to have a crossover with their 20th century game Ages: World War. Jaime thinks time-traveling Nazis are cheesy, and even though he was close to defeating the game’s archvillain, the demon pirate QUINDON SABRIEL, Jaime just can’t take the game seriously anymore.
While attending a friend’s wedding in New Orleans, Jaime gets a call from his ex, AFIONG WHITEHEAD, whom he broke up with after high school because he couldn’t handle her depression. Afi asks him to visit her in Brazil, where she works for Tachyon, the company that produces the Ages games. Though he senses she needs his help, Jaime initially refuses, but afterward he discovers her father has fallen into a coma. When he’s unable to contact Afi again he resolves to fly to Brazil to bring her home.
Jaime tracks Afi’s call to somewhere in the state of Amazonas, near the city of Manaus, but political turmoil and the upcoming Olympics in Rio de Janeiro complicate his trip. The normally-friendly Brazil has grown hostile to Americans after the United States deployed warships to defend its interest in Brazil’s off-shore oil reserves from the Chinese. Civil unrest and the possibility of war are on the tongues of pundits and politicians, including Senator BOB DICKWORTH, who unbeknownst to Jaime plays the Nazi occultist who sank his ship in Ages and made him give up the game he loves.
Denied permission to enter either Manaus or Rio, Jaime gets as close as he can: São Paulo. Figuring he’ll need some guidance, Jaime uses the Ages social network to contact ALESSANDRA “ALÊ” ROCHA, a Brazilian gamer who works a boring government job, pines for her more magical college days, and whose World War II superspy character recently snuck into the 17th century aboard a time-traveling U-Boat. Alê picks Jaime up from the airport, and they hit it off over dinner at his hotel, where Jaime demonstrates his knack for getting into places he shouldn’t be by sneaking them both up to the roof – with a bottle of wine.
As they drink and swap stories, Alê tells tales of her ‘faerie powers’ ruining her past relationships, like how she accidentally discovered that her ex-boyfriend was going to propose when the man’s dead grandmother called her and spoiled the surprise. Jaime assumes these are just stories, until Alê casually mentions the names of the pirates she has allied with in Ages; by seeming coincidence, she met Jaime’s former crew mere moments after he decided to quit the game.
The next morning Alê asks to accompany Jaime, because she longs for a real-life adventure and is afraid Jaime will get in trouble. She has a friend in Rio who can get him a travel permit to Manaus, but police checkpoints dot the main interstate, so they take the longer scenic coastal highway, and they have to stop for the night at a rustic beachside bed and breakfast.
While Jaime tries again to get in touch with Afiong, Alê plays Ages on her laptop, practicing for an upcoming event where players will have a chance to determine the influence of the game’s plot. During an evening stroll along the beach, she tries to convince Jaime to give the game another try, especially because Manaus has a top-line gaming arcade run by Tachyon. Jaime, though, still can’t reach Afi, and so is in no mood to play games.
The following day they reach Rio and hit dense pre-Olympic traffic. To get out of gridlock they pull off for coffee and briefly admire a public art display with a two-way teleconferencing screen to the New Orleans riverfront. When they get back on the highway the traffic has cleared out, bewildering Jaime. Alê just chalks it up to her faerie powers.
They get Jaime his travel permit, but when they try to book a flight from Rio to Manaus an airline clerk discovers the forged papers, and they just narrowly talk their way out of getting arrested. A nervous Alê asks Jaime to give up before they get in trouble, but Jaime instead convinces her to help him con a woman with a private jet into letting them ride along. They take off, and as their plane approaches Manaus at sunset, Alê points out the window to show Jaime Encontro das Aguas, the Meeting of the Waters, where two rivers dramatically unite to form the Amazon.
Alê and Jaime head to the Tachyon arcade, her to play, him to ask about Afi and find out why she was calling him from the middle of the rainforest. He gets stonewalled though, and while spectating on Alê’s game he sees she and his old pirate crew about to fall into a Nazi ambush. He logs in to the game and saves them, but then is dragged off by the arcade’s security staff. They question him about how he knows Afiong, rough him up, then dump him with Alê, warning them to stop snooping.
No longer interested in having real adventures, Alê wants to quit and go home, but Jaime implores her to see this through to the end. They rent a car and drive into the Amazon, passing through a town having a surreal book fair, and then cutting through a Native American reservation where a booby trap in the road wrecks their car and strands them. Alê blames Jaime as they try to extricate themselves, but then Native brigands arrive and kidnap them. Jaime engineers an escape and gets shot trying to rescue Alê, but is saved when representatives from Tachyon arrive and pay their ransom.
Jaime receives medical treatment at Tachyon’s jungle compound, part of a larger facility owned by VAI, a major artificial intelligence corporation operating in the Amazon without government oversight. Afiong worked here scripting the Ages games, which with their large player base served as testing grounds for ways AI could subtly influence public opinion by means of distributed targeted propaganda.
When Jaime asks to see Afiong, a company lawyer explains that Afi went missing the same day she called him. Though at first they thought she was committing corporate espionage, they later found an unfinished suicide note, and they suspect she simply disappeared into the woods to kill herself. The lawyer hands over Afi’s effects, arranges compensation so Jaime and Alê will keep quiet, and then asks them to leave.
Stunned by Afi’s apparent suicide, Jaime returns with Alê to Rio, planning to fly on to the U.S. and saw farewell to Afi’s comatose father. As the Olympic opening ceremonies turn the city into one massive party, Alê gets Jaime to open up about Afiong to mourn and celebrate his lost friend. The night wears on, and drunk and emotional they wander the streets and eventually make love within sight of the water. When they awaken, however, they discover they have stepped through the screen in the art installation they saw earlier, and are now in New Orleans.
Alê admits to Jaime that she’s starting to fall in love with him, but after all their danger together, and in light of the growing rift between their countries, she had planned for Rio to be their last night together. Now that they have witnessed magic together, though, she is excited and wants to stay with him. Unlike Jaime she’s unconcerned about the ramifications of illegally teleporting into the country, confident that these things ‘tend to work themselves out.’
Jaime, surprised at how easily he accepts this magical occurrence, contacts the friend whose wedding he attended two weeks earlier to ask for money for Greyhound bus tickets. They pay his friend a visit as she is watching an episode of a web series derived from actual Ages gameplay, and during the credits Jaime spots Afi’s name as the lead designer in charge of writing his nemesis Sabriel.
They depart New Orleans for Atlanta, where Jaime lives. During the lengthy bus ride, while Alê sleeps, Jaime looks across the aisle to see Afiong sitting there, perhaps dead yet quite outspoken.
Afi rejects her youthful optimism and proclaims that the world will always be a wretched place because people just want to make their lives better, but once they stop suffering, they stop feeling sympathy for others. The only way to be happy is to never seek uncomfortable truths, to be content with mystery. When she realized that her job was profiting off people’s blindness of why they act as they do, she couldn’t stand to be part of it anymore, so she disappeared. She tells him not to bother visiting her father, then vanishes.
Jaime arrives in Atlanta disturbed and shaken, but determined to do what he thinks is right. He and Alê plan to rest a day before going on to Afi’s father’s nursing home in Savannah. Hoping for a fun date, Jaime takes Alê to Atlanta’s Centennial Park, which commemorates the city’s own hosting of the Olympics in 1996. But just then news breaks of riots in Brazil over a Brazilian athlete who was shot and killed while trying to visit a woman at the American dorms.
Jaime tries to calm Alê’s worries, but they soon argue, each blaming the other’s country for the violence. Alê wants to go home, and claims that seeing Jaime risk so much to help Afi has made her wish she could help others. Jaime, upset at her recent waffling between staying with him and giving up, loses his temper, and so she steps into a fountain shaped like the Olympic rings and vanishes.
When he gets over his surprise and calls her, she immediately regrets leaving, but can’t get back, so says it’s best if they don’t talk. Alone, Jaime returns home and sifts through Afiong’s last effects, finding an old map of Encontro das Aguas, plus obscure notes on her final project for Ages.
He drives to Savannah, says his farewells to Afiong’s father, and when he dies soon thereafter, Jaime attends the funeral. In the process, he misses a major event in Ages, during which the Nazis ally with the demon pirate Sabriel and learn the location of their goal: the Fountain of Time, which can grant immortality. Jaime barely cares, not even when a scandal reveals that Senator Bob Dickworth, the politician pushing hardest for military intervention to protect America’s interests in Brazil, is the leader of the Nazis who have been causing him grief in Ages.
Jaime worries about Alê for days, but doesn’t know how to help. Then, hours before the finale of the Ages time travel cross-over, Jaime learns that the riots in Brazil have intensified to organized attacks against Americans. He calls Alê, and she tells him that numerous Americans have taken refuge in the government office where she works, and she’s with them now. Suddenly their call is cut off, and the news reports that the U.S. military has invoked a telecommunications interdiction in Brazil as a warning to get the rioters to back down.
Glued to the TV with worry, Jaime watches slickly rendered news gearing the nation up for war. Reporters ambush Senator Dickworth, who is preparing for a meeting with the president, where he’ll recommend a military rescue mission for endangered Americans in Brazil, even though this would risk provoking China. Then Dickworth gets a text message on the screen as simultaneously Jaime gets one on his phone: a reminder that the Ages finale is about to start.
When he realizes Dickworth will be playing, he has an epiphany. Though he rejects Afiong’s fatalism, she was at least right about how people are being manipulated by the media. But if the media can do it, so can he. He knows it’s a slim chance, but if he can keep Dickworth and his Nazis busy long enough, he hopes cooler heads will prevail and stave off war.
He still can’t contact Alê, but he knows he needs her help, so he grabs his laptop and sets his car’s GPS for Alê’s address in São Paulo, trusting that somehow he’ll find her. He drives until the streets become a blur, but then realizes he has arrived in Brazil. Though rioters surround Alê’s office, he manages to get inside and claim refuge as an American citizen. Jaime reunites with Alê, just as elsewhere around the world his various friends and enemies log in and begin a climactic naval battle on the Amazon River – at Encontro das Aguas.
Since his laptop magically still connects with the network in Atlanta, they bypass the communication blackout over Brazil and both log in just in time to give the pirates a fighting chance against the Nazis. Using his knowledge of the river and Afiong’s notes, he’s able to turn the tide and crash his ship and the Nazis’ time-traveling U-Boat into the flooded forest surrounding the Fountain of Time. They capture Dickworth’s character, then break the game’s fourth wall to speak out against his warmongering. Dickworth logs out in embarrassment, leaving only Sabriel to deal with.
Instead of a grand duel with his nemesis, however, Jaime’s victory over the Nazis earns him a pre-scripted scene where Sabriel takes the power of the fountain and opens more time portals, revealing that ultimately the game’s archvillain was just a marketing gimmick to promote additional cross-overs between different Ages time periods. Jaime may have defeated the Nazis, but there’ll still be more time travel, which he still thinks is cheesy.
But as all the interlopers from the 20th century – the Nazis as well as Alê’s character – are whisked away to their own time, the novel ends with Jaime having a choice; does he reject the time travel and remain with what’s comfortable but lose Alê, or does he change his opinion and continue his journey with the woman he loves?
This synopsis runs 4 pages single spaced. I still have to take a crack at a more 'general overview' 1-pager.
(Edit: After this posted I realized it's a pain in the butt to read on my screen, with the text running so wide. I found it easier to read by making the browser window narrower, about the width of an actual sheet of paper. Or just copy-paste it into a Word document. I just don't want to turn anyone away due to the thing being unpleasant to look at. Hope this helps)
MEETING OF THE WATERS
In August 2016, JAIME ADRICKS quits playing his favorite video game, Ages: High Seas, because the company making the 17th century pirate MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) chose to have a crossover with their 20th century game Ages: World War. Jaime thinks time-traveling Nazis are cheesy, and even though he was close to defeating the game’s archvillain, the demon pirate QUINDON SABRIEL, Jaime just can’t take the game seriously anymore.
While attending a friend’s wedding in New Orleans, Jaime gets a call from his ex, AFIONG WHITEHEAD, whom he broke up with after high school because he couldn’t handle her depression. Afi asks him to visit her in Brazil, where she works for Tachyon, the company that produces the Ages games. Though he senses she needs his help, Jaime initially refuses, but afterward he discovers her father has fallen into a coma. When he’s unable to contact Afi again he resolves to fly to Brazil to bring her home.
Jaime tracks Afi’s call to somewhere in the state of Amazonas, near the city of Manaus, but political turmoil and the upcoming Olympics in Rio de Janeiro complicate his trip. The normally-friendly Brazil has grown hostile to Americans after the United States deployed warships to defend its interest in Brazil’s off-shore oil reserves from the Chinese. Civil unrest and the possibility of war are on the tongues of pundits and politicians, including Senator BOB DICKWORTH, who unbeknownst to Jaime plays the Nazi occultist who sank his ship in Ages and made him give up the game he loves.
Denied permission to enter either Manaus or Rio, Jaime gets as close as he can: São Paulo. Figuring he’ll need some guidance, Jaime uses the Ages social network to contact ALESSANDRA “ALÊ” ROCHA, a Brazilian gamer who works a boring government job, pines for her more magical college days, and whose World War II superspy character recently snuck into the 17th century aboard a time-traveling U-Boat. Alê picks Jaime up from the airport, and they hit it off over dinner at his hotel, where Jaime demonstrates his knack for getting into places he shouldn’t be by sneaking them both up to the roof – with a bottle of wine.
As they drink and swap stories, Alê tells tales of her ‘faerie powers’ ruining her past relationships, like how she accidentally discovered that her ex-boyfriend was going to propose when the man’s dead grandmother called her and spoiled the surprise. Jaime assumes these are just stories, until Alê casually mentions the names of the pirates she has allied with in Ages; by seeming coincidence, she met Jaime’s former crew mere moments after he decided to quit the game.
The next morning Alê asks to accompany Jaime, because she longs for a real-life adventure and is afraid Jaime will get in trouble. She has a friend in Rio who can get him a travel permit to Manaus, but police checkpoints dot the main interstate, so they take the longer scenic coastal highway, and they have to stop for the night at a rustic beachside bed and breakfast.
While Jaime tries again to get in touch with Afiong, Alê plays Ages on her laptop, practicing for an upcoming event where players will have a chance to determine the influence of the game’s plot. During an evening stroll along the beach, she tries to convince Jaime to give the game another try, especially because Manaus has a top-line gaming arcade run by Tachyon. Jaime, though, still can’t reach Afi, and so is in no mood to play games.
The following day they reach Rio and hit dense pre-Olympic traffic. To get out of gridlock they pull off for coffee and briefly admire a public art display with a two-way teleconferencing screen to the New Orleans riverfront. When they get back on the highway the traffic has cleared out, bewildering Jaime. Alê just chalks it up to her faerie powers.
They get Jaime his travel permit, but when they try to book a flight from Rio to Manaus an airline clerk discovers the forged papers, and they just narrowly talk their way out of getting arrested. A nervous Alê asks Jaime to give up before they get in trouble, but Jaime instead convinces her to help him con a woman with a private jet into letting them ride along. They take off, and as their plane approaches Manaus at sunset, Alê points out the window to show Jaime Encontro das Aguas, the Meeting of the Waters, where two rivers dramatically unite to form the Amazon.
Alê and Jaime head to the Tachyon arcade, her to play, him to ask about Afi and find out why she was calling him from the middle of the rainforest. He gets stonewalled though, and while spectating on Alê’s game he sees she and his old pirate crew about to fall into a Nazi ambush. He logs in to the game and saves them, but then is dragged off by the arcade’s security staff. They question him about how he knows Afiong, rough him up, then dump him with Alê, warning them to stop snooping.
No longer interested in having real adventures, Alê wants to quit and go home, but Jaime implores her to see this through to the end. They rent a car and drive into the Amazon, passing through a town having a surreal book fair, and then cutting through a Native American reservation where a booby trap in the road wrecks their car and strands them. Alê blames Jaime as they try to extricate themselves, but then Native brigands arrive and kidnap them. Jaime engineers an escape and gets shot trying to rescue Alê, but is saved when representatives from Tachyon arrive and pay their ransom.
Jaime receives medical treatment at Tachyon’s jungle compound, part of a larger facility owned by VAI, a major artificial intelligence corporation operating in the Amazon without government oversight. Afiong worked here scripting the Ages games, which with their large player base served as testing grounds for ways AI could subtly influence public opinion by means of distributed targeted propaganda.
When Jaime asks to see Afiong, a company lawyer explains that Afi went missing the same day she called him. Though at first they thought she was committing corporate espionage, they later found an unfinished suicide note, and they suspect she simply disappeared into the woods to kill herself. The lawyer hands over Afi’s effects, arranges compensation so Jaime and Alê will keep quiet, and then asks them to leave.
Stunned by Afi’s apparent suicide, Jaime returns with Alê to Rio, planning to fly on to the U.S. and saw farewell to Afi’s comatose father. As the Olympic opening ceremonies turn the city into one massive party, Alê gets Jaime to open up about Afiong to mourn and celebrate his lost friend. The night wears on, and drunk and emotional they wander the streets and eventually make love within sight of the water. When they awaken, however, they discover they have stepped through the screen in the art installation they saw earlier, and are now in New Orleans.
Alê admits to Jaime that she’s starting to fall in love with him, but after all their danger together, and in light of the growing rift between their countries, she had planned for Rio to be their last night together. Now that they have witnessed magic together, though, she is excited and wants to stay with him. Unlike Jaime she’s unconcerned about the ramifications of illegally teleporting into the country, confident that these things ‘tend to work themselves out.’
Jaime, surprised at how easily he accepts this magical occurrence, contacts the friend whose wedding he attended two weeks earlier to ask for money for Greyhound bus tickets. They pay his friend a visit as she is watching an episode of a web series derived from actual Ages gameplay, and during the credits Jaime spots Afi’s name as the lead designer in charge of writing his nemesis Sabriel.
They depart New Orleans for Atlanta, where Jaime lives. During the lengthy bus ride, while Alê sleeps, Jaime looks across the aisle to see Afiong sitting there, perhaps dead yet quite outspoken.
Afi rejects her youthful optimism and proclaims that the world will always be a wretched place because people just want to make their lives better, but once they stop suffering, they stop feeling sympathy for others. The only way to be happy is to never seek uncomfortable truths, to be content with mystery. When she realized that her job was profiting off people’s blindness of why they act as they do, she couldn’t stand to be part of it anymore, so she disappeared. She tells him not to bother visiting her father, then vanishes.
Jaime arrives in Atlanta disturbed and shaken, but determined to do what he thinks is right. He and Alê plan to rest a day before going on to Afi’s father’s nursing home in Savannah. Hoping for a fun date, Jaime takes Alê to Atlanta’s Centennial Park, which commemorates the city’s own hosting of the Olympics in 1996. But just then news breaks of riots in Brazil over a Brazilian athlete who was shot and killed while trying to visit a woman at the American dorms.
Jaime tries to calm Alê’s worries, but they soon argue, each blaming the other’s country for the violence. Alê wants to go home, and claims that seeing Jaime risk so much to help Afi has made her wish she could help others. Jaime, upset at her recent waffling between staying with him and giving up, loses his temper, and so she steps into a fountain shaped like the Olympic rings and vanishes.
When he gets over his surprise and calls her, she immediately regrets leaving, but can’t get back, so says it’s best if they don’t talk. Alone, Jaime returns home and sifts through Afiong’s last effects, finding an old map of Encontro das Aguas, plus obscure notes on her final project for Ages.
He drives to Savannah, says his farewells to Afiong’s father, and when he dies soon thereafter, Jaime attends the funeral. In the process, he misses a major event in Ages, during which the Nazis ally with the demon pirate Sabriel and learn the location of their goal: the Fountain of Time, which can grant immortality. Jaime barely cares, not even when a scandal reveals that Senator Bob Dickworth, the politician pushing hardest for military intervention to protect America’s interests in Brazil, is the leader of the Nazis who have been causing him grief in Ages.
Jaime worries about Alê for days, but doesn’t know how to help. Then, hours before the finale of the Ages time travel cross-over, Jaime learns that the riots in Brazil have intensified to organized attacks against Americans. He calls Alê, and she tells him that numerous Americans have taken refuge in the government office where she works, and she’s with them now. Suddenly their call is cut off, and the news reports that the U.S. military has invoked a telecommunications interdiction in Brazil as a warning to get the rioters to back down.
Glued to the TV with worry, Jaime watches slickly rendered news gearing the nation up for war. Reporters ambush Senator Dickworth, who is preparing for a meeting with the president, where he’ll recommend a military rescue mission for endangered Americans in Brazil, even though this would risk provoking China. Then Dickworth gets a text message on the screen as simultaneously Jaime gets one on his phone: a reminder that the Ages finale is about to start.
When he realizes Dickworth will be playing, he has an epiphany. Though he rejects Afiong’s fatalism, she was at least right about how people are being manipulated by the media. But if the media can do it, so can he. He knows it’s a slim chance, but if he can keep Dickworth and his Nazis busy long enough, he hopes cooler heads will prevail and stave off war.
He still can’t contact Alê, but he knows he needs her help, so he grabs his laptop and sets his car’s GPS for Alê’s address in São Paulo, trusting that somehow he’ll find her. He drives until the streets become a blur, but then realizes he has arrived in Brazil. Though rioters surround Alê’s office, he manages to get inside and claim refuge as an American citizen. Jaime reunites with Alê, just as elsewhere around the world his various friends and enemies log in and begin a climactic naval battle on the Amazon River – at Encontro das Aguas.
Since his laptop magically still connects with the network in Atlanta, they bypass the communication blackout over Brazil and both log in just in time to give the pirates a fighting chance against the Nazis. Using his knowledge of the river and Afiong’s notes, he’s able to turn the tide and crash his ship and the Nazis’ time-traveling U-Boat into the flooded forest surrounding the Fountain of Time. They capture Dickworth’s character, then break the game’s fourth wall to speak out against his warmongering. Dickworth logs out in embarrassment, leaving only Sabriel to deal with.
Instead of a grand duel with his nemesis, however, Jaime’s victory over the Nazis earns him a pre-scripted scene where Sabriel takes the power of the fountain and opens more time portals, revealing that ultimately the game’s archvillain was just a marketing gimmick to promote additional cross-overs between different Ages time periods. Jaime may have defeated the Nazis, but there’ll still be more time travel, which he still thinks is cheesy.
But as all the interlopers from the 20th century – the Nazis as well as Alê’s character – are whisked away to their own time, the novel ends with Jaime having a choice; does he reject the time travel and remain with what’s comfortable but lose Alê, or does he change his opinion and continue his journey with the woman he loves?