How To Save A (Fictional) Life

Today is the release day for the third and (probably) final book in the Gender Swap Warriors series, Legacy.  It's also been about 2 years since the series started.  The first book was just kind of a goofy idea to create a gender swap story using Voltron/Power Rangers.  The setup is sort of based on the 2017 Power Rangers movie where a group of teenagers find the power rings or whatever.  Only in this case four college students are out in the woods when an alien ship lands.  To escape the nasty alien, they go into a cave and find a crashed ship.  The ship's crew is dead but their spirits are preserved and when implanted into the college students it turns them into women for...reasons.  And from there they have to adjust to new bodies and also find themselves at the forefront of a war against the evil Starburst Order.

To do that they have four powerful starfighters from the "Victord Project."  Three of them can merge into a MegaJet that has extra power and shields.  But when all four merge into a giant robot, they are almost unstoppable!

I started the first book in September 2020 but didn't finish it until December because I was kind of dogging it for a while and then I took a month or so to write a couple of other stories.  Given the tepid response to my Transformers-themed story Only Human I didn't really think I'd end up doing more, but people actually liked this story.  And I used Chase, one of the main characters, in my Kindle Vella project Guardians of the Swapverse, which helped to reignite my interest in that story universe.

The problem as usual was coming up with a continuation of the series.  People always say to "continue the story" but for something like this if you don't have a fresh gender swap then what's the point?  I mean that is the hook.  And since the original characters were already swapped, you can't really do a lot with that.

Then I got thinking that there were two Voltrons in the 80s so why couldn't there be two of my "Victords?"  So then I got thinking that the good guys want to make a second group because really one Voltron thing can only cover so much space.  The bad guys get wind of it and so recruit a pilot to infiltrate the project to steal its secrets.  The pilot is a male lizard-like alien but the evil witch Harat turns him into a human female to be more appealing to our heroes from the first book.

It took a little while to actually get around to writing the story because I figured it'd take a few weeks and I don't like dead air if I can help it.  So after I built up a bit of a lead in the summer I wrote the second book Turncoat where the Starburst Order pilot S'Olny (named for a character in my First Contact story) becomes Sally and falls in love with an elf-looking alien named Kila (named for a character in the third Girl Power story League of Evil) and ultimately joins the good guys.  I ended that with a little cliffhanger that the Order was launching an attack on Earth.

Now we actually get to the point of all the rambling.  The original idea for the third story was that one of the original pilots was going to die and her spirit would go into some other male human and turn him into a woman and there would be some complications because the  original four pilots had paired off as couples.  The idea actually came from some lame late 90s Power Rangers movie where a kid finds one of the Zords and becomes the new whatever color Ranger.

At first I thought I'd kill off Taylor, who was sort of the leader of the original group.  She used to be a jock who was probably going to the NFL until he became a she and started fighting against the Order.  I thought maybe Taylor would have a brother and was trying to save him but then she dies and her spirit enters the brother.  Which maybe would have been kind of creepy.

Then I thought maybe I should kill off Chase, who was the strategic planner of the group.  She fell in love with Rand, who has the soul of a literal princess in her.  I thought that way I could really focus on the love story angle.

But as sometimes happens, I just didn't really want to kill anyone.  I liked the characters and the world is depressing enough right now that I didn't feel like killing any of the good guys off.  But that would mean finding another way.

One day I thought, "What if there were some kind of prototype for the Victord fighters that went missing?"  Eventually then I refined that to a weapon that existed before those and when that went missing it helped to drive the creation of the Victord fighters.  

Further thinking and refining I finally came up with there was a young woman who had powerful magic abilities she could use to fight evil.  But then she went missing on Earth and so that led to the creation of the Victord fighters.  Someone bitched about the first one there wasn't enough magic, so here you go, magic!

Fast forward a thousand years and one night a hunter in British Columbia sees the ghost of this alien woman.  She leads him to her ship that's been at the bottom of a deep lake for all that time, which is maybe implausible but whatever.  She merges with him and he changes into a woman.  And from there we're off as she meets an electronics store owner named Freddie (who's a girl) who helps her fix her ship but in the process the Order comes looking for them.  They get away and meet our heroes from the first two books and then shit starts hitting the fan.

So there you have it.  I could have killed off a character like I originally intended, but with some extra thought, I found a way to save that fictional life.  If only saving real lives were that easy. 

(Fun Fact:  Since so few people read my Guardians of the Swapverse on Kindle Vella or regular Kindle I decided to incorporate some of the material from that into this story.  I don't mean I copied and pasted scenes but I reference stuff that happened in that and resolve some plot threads from that.  So it's kind of the unofficial sequel.)