Insecure Wednesday: Sometimes the Obstacle is You

One day just almost at random I got to thinking of how I would reboot my Children of Eternity series.  The story centered on Samantha Young, who is about 10 years old at the start of the first book.  She wakes up on an island with no memory of who she is.  The island is populated by 3 adults and a bunch of kids.  The Reverend Crane and his henchman Pryde enforce a strict system called "the Way" (this was 2006 so long before The Mandalorian) while Miss Brigham is the kinder, gentler teacher to the children.

Soon Samantha starts to question things and remember bits and pieces of stuff like cars and airplanes that are unheard-of to the children of the island.  And she soon starts to question Reverend Crane.  With her new friend Prudence, she finds the Fountain of Youth, which the reverend has used to keep his followers as easily-controlled children for centuries.  Reverend Crane and Pryde are killed, leaving Miss Brigham ostensibly in charge, though Samantha is the real leader.

Then there were three more stories.  The second one I completely rewrote in 2012 because the first version was crap.  The new version had a guy showing up on the island who pretended to be Samantha's uncle.  She found some stuff in Pryde's hidden lair to help her remember something of her parents.  At one point Miss Brigham gets pushed into the fountain to become a baby, leaving Samantha in charge.

The third story has Sam, Prudence, and a couple of others going to the mainland for the first time that they can remember.  They meet some of Pryde's relatives, who are not evil like him, and start to learn about the 21st Century.  And Sam starts to fall in love with a boy.

Then in the last story, an old enemy of Samantha's takes control of the island.  A weird fungus on the fountain allows Samantha to go back in time to when she was an adult in the days leading up to her ending up on the island with no memory.  Meanwhile Prudence remembers some of her old life and how everyone ended up under Reverend Crane's control.

I thought they were OK stories but some people whined about them, especially the first and third ones.  I think the bad guy being a reverend turned some people off, along with the scene in the first story where Samantha is whipped as punishment.  The third one featured some more adult situations because I thought if these were traditionally published the audience would kind of grow up with the characters and so by the time Samantha is 16 or so, the audience should be at or over that.  The people who complained weren't kids though, I'm pretty sure.

Anyway, one day I was watching TV or something and I had a thought about how to redo the most critical aspect of it:  the "Fountain of Youth."  What if it wasn't a fountain at all?  What if it was like an alien time portal thing?

The idea would actually solve a problem with the original series.  In the original the fountain would make someone younger but it wouldn't take away their memories.  I kinda hand-waved the problem away by saying the reverend had found some Native American potion that did that.

The new idea would be more like an extreme version of the Men in Black "flashy thing."  You go into the portal and it could be set for a second, minute, hour, day, or of course years.  The body that goes in reverts to that state in body and mind.  So like if you set it for a minute, you lose that minute of memories.  Or if you're a 45-year-old and set it so you'll be 18 you'd lose 27 years of memories.  Except in Samantha's case something would happen and she would not only lose like 20 years; she'd lose almost everything.

But then things got tricky in thinking of the why.  I mean why would the bad guy use this to keep a whole bunch of kids around like in the first book?  I didn't want to go the religious cult route again.  Maybe he just likes controlling people and this was the best way.  Maybe he's a survivalist who wants to make sure some part of the human race survives a disaster.  Or maybe like The Island or Clonus: The Parts Horror they're using the kids to harvest organs; they could take out an organ, put the kid back in the portal, and the organ would be there again.  Maybe like The Sound of Freedom he's using it to traffic kids; just stick an adult in there, turn he/she into a baby and then it'd be easy to sell him/her to some rich couple.  Or...what?

Finally I had to accept the obstacle here was me wanting to have this island of young people like in the first story.  I was pretty much putting myself into a box.  That's why I couldn't really think of anything that worked; I was limiting myself.

So then I eventually thought, what if whoever found this portal hidden on an island is using it to make money instead?  There are a lot of uses for something like that.  A rich star might want to rewind the clock back to her/his glory days.  Or you could, say, get someone's passwords, PIN numbers, or other secret information; stick them in the portal to erase a couple of hours; and then drop them off at home so they wouldn't remember anything.

OK, so the bad guy is doing this on the island and has been for a while.  He could even be doing sort of a Memento where he makes himself younger every so often but has a journal/video to tell himself everything he needs to know.  Then Samantha, a 30-something FBI agent, gets wind of some stuff, follows the clues, and finds the portal on the island.  There's a fight and she somehow gets turned into a teenager with no memory of who she is.

And then we think outside of the old box.  What if instead of like The Village it's more like The Bourne Identity?  She winds up in the water and gets rescued by a fisherman.  The fisherman takes her to some little town and when Samantha wakes up with no idea of who she is, he lets her stay there with his daughter Prudence--though we might use a new name.

This set off a whole brainstorm so Friday you can see what I came up with.  Or not.  It's your life.