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I agreed to get in on a writing group with two of my coworkers. The deal is to write 50'000 words in ä month. According to one of them that is roughly 70 pages to write. We start on Saturday.

So as a result I have been planning out my story.

What I have been planning is the story of a man named Leo who is an agent for a extremely powerful and mysterious group called the Benevolents. I was heavily influenced by Iain Banks's Culture when coming up with the Benevolents. The Benevolents enlist agents and send them to different places to deal with problems, think the Texas Rangers, or the Green Lanterns. Agents often possess amazing and unique abilities, and the Benevolents are advanced enough to give you pretty much anything that you want.

Leo is sent to an volume of space dominated, primarily, by an empire of sadists, think Catherine Asaro's Eubian Empire from her Skolian Series. The Empire occupies roughly 2'400 worlds and is strictly divided between the upper class (the Owners) and the lower class (the Slaves). Owners are actually a strain of humanity with the ability to feed off of the pain and fear of others, and so spend much of their time, and resources, finding new and more terrible ways to torture their Slaves, who they breed just for that reason. Owners, by feeding off of the emotional agony of their Slaves, actually get a form of immortality from it.

The Empire itself uses artifacts from an older civilization that allow them to possess FTL communication and transit.

Leo is sent in as an observer, intially, to try and judge what the Benevolents should do about this situation. The Benevolents prefers to operate through agents, though they do possess the military might to actually conquer the Empire relatively easily.

The thing is, from here on out, I'm not really sure where to take the story. Any feedback would be appreciated.

My only guess is that either Leo brings in a few other Agents, each with different abilities and begins to take apart the society, or perhaps he destroys the artifacts that allow the Empire to maintain itself.

I think you have a nice solid concept. Well done.

But, where to go from there? From what I read, the plot seems like a pretty straight forward good vs. evil conflict. The problem is, while vile seems to be of a little threat if the Benevolents have the potential to crush the Owners in a swift military campaign. I'm sure there are good reasons, and I wonder what they are. One reason I can see if in an open conflict the Owners would use there slaves as cannon fodder and that would force the benevolents to have to go through these fear-struck, and possible brain-washed innocents. Too messy with a good reason.

However, for other conflicts. If you want to make use of a team of agents, you can always incorporate a tried-and-true plot twist a toss a rogue agent into the mix. Perhaps, learning about the owners secret of immortality, he/she became tempted by it's promise. It's a little cliche, but it can work.

Rhoades wrote:I think you have a nice solid concept. Well done.

But, where to go from there? From what I read, the plot seems like a pretty straight forward good vs. evil conflict. The problem is, while vile seems to be of a little threat if the Benevolents have the potential to crush the Owners in a swift military campaign. I'm sure there are good reasons, and I wonder what they are. One reason I can see if in an open conflict the Owners would use there slaves as cannon fodder and that would force the benevolents to have to go through these fear-struck, and possible brain-washed innocents. Too messy with a good reason.

However, for other conflicts. If you want to make use of a team of agents, you can always incorporate a tried-and-true plot twist a toss a rogue agent into the mix. Perhaps, learning about the owners secret of immortality, he/she became tempted by it's promise. It's a little cliche, but it can work.

The Benevolents reserve military intervention as a last resort. They believe that it causes more problems then their actually solving. Assuming, for instance, that they go in and wipe out the Owners and their infastructure, they suddenly have 2'400 worlds without a government and huge populations ill-suited to even govern themselves.

That the Owners would use their Slave population as shields was something that actually hadn't occurred to me. Wow, that's an excellent point.

I was thinking of handling it sort of like Asimov's Foundation characters handled their Seldon Crises.

Thank you for your input. I really appreciate it.

70 pages in a month. Wow, that's more than I could do.

I think Rhoades gave you a good idea on where to take the story. If you don't want to use it, you could focus on the artifacts the Owners use, perhaps having Leo destroy them and have said destruction cause...anything you can think of. Rhoades' idea is probably more solid.