The Different, Scathing Investigative Report of Roy (Episode 21) Transcript

You can find the audio version of this episode here.

Hannah: Two friends indicate a willingness to be killed in the north of England with the help of a mean Lord and a group of 30-year-olds who have been friends since high school.

Jennie: Somebody write this.

Hannah: Hi, and welcome to Somebody Write This, where we use a random plot generator to give us an idea and then we brainstorm how that could be a thing somebody might want to write. I'm Hannah.

Jennie: And I'm Jennie. And to help us with our brainstorming today, we have a guest. Welcome Elybeatmaker. So great to have you on the show.

Ely: Hello. So great to be on the show.

Hannah: Yeah, absolutely. So we always like to give our audience a little sense of who our guest is as they join us in on the storytelling. So let's start with a basic question. Go ahead and tell us what kinds of stories are you drawn toward in film or books or TV, whatever you watch or read. What kinds of stories really hold onto you? Which kinds do you gravitate toward?

Ely: I've never been a reader, to say, but I love everything that's movies and especially YouTube role play. I watch a lot of let's plays, which is basically people playing video games, and I love the story-based ones or the role play all that. I'm a huge fan of let's plays in general. So usually when they come up with an interesting story, that's really interesting for me.

Hannah: With a video game, there's always that fight between do you have a story that people are observing versus game play? So how do you think the best video games at this strike that balance? What do you think works really well to make a good video game story?

Ely: Well, it really depends, because the videos I watch the most, obviously because of my background and my YouTube channel, are Minecraft based, and Minecraft is really a sandbox game, which so you can pretty much make your own stories. You can make your own adventures, but some games have amazing writing, amazing stories. So it's really to find that the people you want to reach out to. So like I said, Minecraft, you want to cater towards people who are more creative who want to make their own story and adventure, but sometimes you just want to relax and watch a good ... Not watch, but live a good experience. So games like The Last Of Us, which have amazing stories. So it's really what you want to aim to get. So yeah, that's ...

Hannah: Yeah, no, I think that's interesting that you have some of these games that are just big and open and you can essentially create your own story versus some that are kind of like along a set path. I think that's really good.

Ely: Yeah, you just follow along. And I feel like those, when you're tired, you just want to relax. Instead of watching a movie, you just want to play a game and just be carried by an interesting story.

Jennie: Oh, yeah. I'll replay my favorite games the same way I'll rewatch my favorite movies. Like, "Oh, it's been a while. I'm going to go play that again."

Hannah: Do you find that replaying it brings out the story in a different way?

Ely: Well, you see it's like movies or even books. Sometimes you, not ignore, but you missed a little bit. You didn't realize. And once you know the final plot, you're like, "Oh, this makes more sense now." So when you reread it or you replay through it, you're like, "Okay, I missed this part. This is cool. This is really cool." So you can go back and see new parts of the story that you didn't see before.

Hannah: I have one final question I'm curious about. So Minecraft is your area. I'm curious, has there been a story that you've watched somebody create on Minecraft that was just really out there and really like, "I can't believe that you thought of this," and were like, "This is what I want to do"? What's the weirdest one you've seen?

Ely: I go way back. I follow a couple of YouTubers, shout out to Hermit Crab and Minecrack. These guys I've been watching for a year since 2013. And my favorites have always been generic BNB [inaudible 00:03:59], who had this mafia persona-like story. They were called the B team, and their thing was to flimflam, the way they say. Basically just scam other members of that community, of their server they play on. And they had crazy stories where they would sell land to the other members of the server. It was just so out. It was so before their time, because right now, if you're a Minecraft Let's Play fan, you see people doing Let's Play as a lot and they do stories and they do role play, but they were doing that way before it was popular. So sometimes I go back and I watch episodes, and I just laugh so much. It's what got me into what I do now, pretty much.

Hannah: Thank you for sharing a little bit of that perspective. I'm always intrigued by, yeah, how games bring out story as well. And so I loved hearing a little bit about that. We are going to jump right back on into our brainstorming for our very busy plot. So as a recap, our plot, which takes 30 seconds just to say, there is two friends-

Ely: I'm interested.

Hannah: Yeah. Two friends indicate a willingness to be killed in the north of England with the help of a mean Lord and a group of 30-year-olds who have been friends since high school.

Jennie: Unpacking this is crazy, but I think we need to start with the first bit of that.

Hannah: Yeah.

Ely: Yeah. Why do they want to be killed?

Hannah: Yeah. So we have a mean Lord. Is there a monetary component to this? Are they trying to be killed because is this like a life insurance thing where they're going to, like the money is going to be passed on to somebody who needs it? Are they wanting to be killed for a or willing to be killed for a cause?

Ely: Huh.

Jennie: And are they actually going to be killed or did they just need to indicate the willingness to be?

Hannah: Yeah.

Ely: Hi there, I'd like to be killed. Maybe it's a Romeo and Juliet type of thing. Like they can't be together. Maybe. I don't know.

Hannah: Maybe. That's kind of an interesting angle to go at it from.

Jennie: If we can't be together, we'll hire this guy and the group of 30-year-olds to do it for us.

Hannah: I'm intrigued by the two groups of friends, that we have two friends, and then we have this other group of 30-year-olds who are also friends. And so I'm wondering if they were connected. Were these two friends part of also went to high school with these guys or people and somehow that there's a connection there or is it two separate groups of friends?

Ely: They've been friends since high school. So that means they know each ... How many are they?

Jennie: It just says a group.

Hannah: Yeah.

Ely: A group. Huh.

Jennie: It could be three or it could be 30.

Ely: Is the mean Lord their friend?

Jennie: Oh.

Ely: Or is the mean Lord just someone else?

Hannah: Does the mean Lord hire the group of friends as assassins?

Ely: Oh.

Hannah: Is that his group of people that he sends?

Ely: I like that. I like that.

Hannah: Is he mean because He goes out? Yeah.

Ely: Maybe they reach out to the mean Lord because the mean Lord maybe is a gangster type person. He or she hires a group of thugs, maybe. I don't ...

Hannah: So yeah. I like this idea that the mean Lord has been hiring these 30-year-olds who are really tight knit friends. They were the leaders of the assassination club in high school. Maybe the Lord hires them to kill them, and then they go to kill these people, and they were also ... They were people who they knew in high school but didn't know well, and it's like, "Oh, hey, I remember you."

Ely: "Hey, what are you guys doing here today? Why do you have guns?"

Hannah: Yeah.

Jennie: "Oh, well, this guy hired us to kill you." "All right. We'll let you do that. That's fine."

Ely: "All right. We were just looking for a way through that."

Hannah: I wonder if you could do something really interesting with the fact that maybe their current willingness to die for whatever reason is connected to something that started in high school.

Ely: Oh.

Hannah: Like maybe it started with something that they got really into in high school and maybe the group of 30-year-olds also got into this cause as well, but then dropped off and became assassins for hire instead. And so maybe the two friends try to bring them back and be like, "No, we should all be willing to die for this cause." I don't know.

Ely: What if we go the fiction way and the two friends want to go the death land to save their other friend who died.

Hannah: Ooh.

Jennie: Oh.

Ely: And to get that person back. I don't know.

Jennie: No, Ely, that's brilliant.

Ely: Is it?

Jennie: I love ... Yes.

Ely: Cool.

Hannah: Yes. I love that. You could take this in an interesting direction that, yeah, that they want to be killed so that they can rescue somebody else from the afterlife. And maybe you could play with the idea that the Lord is, first, becomes the antagonist of the story, and the group of 30-year-olds are first working for him and then maybe group up with the two friends to go against him. Maybe the mean Lord has been imprisoning people in the afterlife who weren't supposed to be there yet.

Ely: Oh. So they deal with him to try and pursue him to let them go save their friends.

Hannah: Yeah.

Jennie: So the 30-year-olds, instead of killing the initial two friends, dead forever killing, they figure out a way to just almost kill them so that they're able to come back. They're mostly dead.

Hannah: Yeah. There's some way of bypassing the death part and going on into the afterlife.

Ely: Maybe the group are in charge of holding, not holding, but guarding the doors to the afterlife?

Jennie: And that would make it ... Because of the setting for this is in the north of England, that brings up a lot of ...

Ely: Oh, yeah. We forgot about that.

Jennie: ... Celtic, like ancient Celtic mythology kind of stuff.

Ely: Mythology and all that.

Hannah: Yeah, lots of mythology.

Jennie: Right? Maybe the sacred site, like standing stones or whatnot. Where exactly is Stonehenge? I can't remember.

Ely: Oh, I don't remember.

Jennie: I know it's there somewhere.

Ely: Maybe a quick Google search.

Jennie: Quick, to the Google.

Hannah: Is Stonehenge in the north of England?

Ely: To the Google. It's in the south.

Hannah: Maybe Stonehenge was moved to the south. It used to be in the north on the mystical area, and it was moved because people were trying to use it for magical purposes. And so they moved it to conceal.

Ely: Weird idea here, but hear me. In Stranger Things, there's the upside down. So what if the afterlife is the opposite? So the south is now the north and that solves our problem.

Hannah: I love that. As they're setting out to try to find this portal to the afterlife, that's an amazing, like we solved the puzzle moment, where they're like, "Wait a minute. It's in the south."

Jennie: Does that mean in the afterlife they have to work together to move Stonehenge back to the south so they can get back?

Hannah: Maybe. Yeah, I feel like they have to flip something.

Ely: They have to wear their socks upside down.

Hannah: It does talk about the friends indicating a willingness to be killed, so it's not ... They're willing to die to make this happen, not just do this weird afterlife bypassing thing. So maybe they think that the only way that they can get this person out is to actually die. And the 30-year-olds can be like, "Actually we know a little bit more about that. This is the information we have. We can find ... If we can figure out how the mean Lord does what he does, maybe we can get you down there without anybody dying. And then we can bring you all back."

Ely: Yeah, that is a cool way to like plot twist, they won't die.

Jennie: And they decide to trust them, because first they were willing to die in the first place, and second they know these guys from high school.

Ely: They were part of the chess club, but it was a cult. It wasn't really a chess club.

Hannah: Okay. So I do have to pause this for a second. I have a title for us. Our title is The Different Scathing Investigative Report of Roy.

Jennie: Roy is obviously the guy they're trying to save.

Ely: Yeah, okay. Roy.

Hannah: Okay. Yeah. So this has kind of a quirky vibe to the title. It's slightly too long, too many adjectives.

Ely: It takes 90% of the cover.

Hannah: Yeah. So Roy did an investigative report that was different and scathing. Was he about to take down the mean Lord's afterlife plans?

Jennie: I think that's the only thing that makes sense.

Ely: Maybe he was investigating into the chess club's communities in England and how they weren't really chess clubs.

Hannah: I think I need to know about the dynamic between the group of 30 somethings and the two friends in high school and now. Is it that the two friends are part of chess club and the 30 somethings were all jocks? Were they on the same team together, all doing chess club?

Ely: That's true.

Hannah: Were they antagonistic at each other in high school?

Jennie: Just because they were all in high school together does not mean they were friends.

Hannah: And so you've got this group that clearly stuck together with their high school friends, and then these two people who they either didn't know or didn't like or just didn't pay attention to after high school. And I'm curious as to that dynamic.

Jennie: Does that mean they decide to help take down the mean Lord for reasons of their own, rather than just trying to help the friends save Roy? Did everybody know Roy?

Ely: Roy seemed like a popular person.

Hannah: So suggestion. Roy has not disappeared recently. Roy disappeared in high school.

Ely: Years ago. Oh, that's cool.

Hannah: The tight-knit group were friends with Roy, were close with him, and that's why they kept together because they bonded over this shared traumatic experience. And the two friends also knew Roy, maybe knew him in a different way. Maybe they ... I don't know.

Ely: Maybe Roy introduced them to this whole thing.

Hannah: Maybe. Yeah. They knew something about Roy that the others didn't. Maybe he ... I don't know.

Jennie: Maybe they were on the high school newsletter committee with him. That's why he has a report.

Ely: And he always missed ... He was always absent or something, because he was busy doing other things?

Jennie: With the group of 30-year-olds?

Ely: Yeah.

Hannah: I think it would be really fascinating, yeah, to have the idea that these 30-year-olds, this group of people who connected so strongly over their loss of this person, find out 12, 13 years later that they didn't really know him at all as much as they thought they did. That these two people who they didn't know had extra information about Roy.

Jennie: I like that.

Hannah: And so kind of dealing with the root of all their friendship over the last 15 years has been maybe something that was not true.

Ely: This is such a cool idea, you guys.

Jennie: It's got all the fantasy elements, like we're dealing with the afterlife and mythology and all this kind of stuff. But then we also have the potential for a really strong emotional story here with the friends.

Ely: Yeah, like their strong friendship.

Hannah: Yeah.

Ely: Yeah, I like it a lot.

Hannah: Yeah. I think finally, I guess I want to come back to is that if the investigative report of Roy is the title, it probably needs more action in our story. It needs to be more actively part of it.

Jennie: What if the mean Lord was also somebody they knew in high school? He wasn't in high school, but what if he was the teacher nobody liked and Roy was doing a report against the teacher?

Hannah: So question. Is he literally a Lord in England who just happens to also be teaching at a high school? Which I don't think they have high schools in England. I think they have a different name.

Jennie: No. Yeah, these are obviously Americans or Canadians.

Hannah: So I need to figure out now, how did the teacher get from teaching at a high school in the US to being a Lord in England?

Jennie: Well, he married a Lady, obviously.

Hannah: He married into money. Okay, he married into the title. Okay.

Jennie: But I think he's got stuff to hide and always has, and that's why he got rid of Roy.

Hannah: The report is front and center. Maybe it's the friends searching for the ... Maybe it begins with the two friends. They know that the report had something to do with his disappearance or maybe they find ... I don't know. They find some indication from ... At some point they have to figure this out.

Ely: So did Roy publish the report or did they stumble upon the report when they realized that Roy was missing years ago?

Hannah: They find the report now.

Ely: Oh, cool, yeah.

Hannah: The report disappeared.

Ely: Yeah, that's better.

Hannah: And they find it. Roy's mom finally clears out all his old stuff. She's holding onto it for years, and then finally is like-

Jennie: Poor Roy's mom.

Hannah: Yeah.

Ely: Poor Roy's mom.

Hannah: And there's some situation in which she hands over the report to the two friends, who start digging and find out all this weird, weird stuff.

Jennie: And because they're digging, the mean Lord finds out and tries to get rid of them by hiring the 30-year-olds.

Ely: Yeah. But they're willing to die.

Hannah: Yeah. Maybe they think that the mean Lord has to be behind the death.

Ely: Yeah. Maybe in the report, there's something about being killed by the Lord.

Hannah: Maybe the afterlife groups people by how they died or who was responsible for their deaths.

Ely: Yeah.

Jennie: That's a interesting idea.

Hannah: And so they're like, "So to avoid wandering the entire afterlife full of all the people who've ever died ever, if we can get killed by the same person indirectly, we'll end up closer to where he will be and can find him."

Ely: So they know he's dead because of the report.

Jennie: As opposed to just missing.

Ely: Yeah. They thought he was missing, and then they found the report. Well, they were given the report ...

Hannah: Given the report.

Ely: ... and then they read it and they realized that, "Maybe he's not missing. Maybe he's dead and there's a way we could get him back."

Hannah: Yeah. Well, our early parts of discussing about this focused heavily on the story being in the afterlife with everybody working together. I think the first third to a half of this story is just going to be the two friends working out the details of what Roy found. And then the mean Lord and the 30 guys show up, which is ... I keep saying the 30 guys, but they're 30-year-olds. And it could be a mix of men and women or all women. I don't know.

Jennie: It feels like a mob, like the dwarves in the Hobbit. Just a bunch of names and faces and we don't really know who they are.

Hannah: Exactly.

Ely: Yeah, they're just the group.

Jennie: So maybe it was a sports team. Maybe they are jocks.

Hannah: Right. That's who I keep picturing. But yeah, again, that is nice because that does put the focus on the main two rather than on the group.

Ely: Yeah, the main two.

Hannah: Okay. So we are right about at time for wrapping this up. Is there anything else that we need to address that hasn't been addressed yet?

Ely: How do we beat the Lord?

Jennie: That's true. How do they ultimately win? Is just saving Roy enough or is everything ... We don't know everything the mean Lord has been up to. We know there's a lot. It wasn't just getting rid of Roy.

Ely: Or we leave that for part two.

Hannah: Exactly. We leave that for our writers to figure out. Exactly. Yeah. Figure out do they ... If the mean Lord has been sending people to the afterlife without killing them, which for some reason is, I guess, worse. I don't know. If he's been imprisoning people in the afterlife, maybe they rescue all of them and they come back and there's 150 people all going to fight the Lord at once.

Ely: Did they just come out of a weird portal with a group of 150 people that were missing for years?

Hannah: I have always said that I would love ... I don't play a lot of video games, but I've always been like, "You know what would be fun? If you have this giant sprawling game, like Skyrim style, where you can spend hundreds and hundreds of hours playing. And at the very, very end of the game after you've spent hundreds of hours doing this, the last boss is every single thing you've ever killed in the game rises back up."

Ely: Oh, my God.

Hannah: And so you get to the end and you realize, "Shoot, the only way I can win this is to go back to the beginning and go through the whole thing, killing as little as possible."

Ely: That's such a good idea.

Hannah: And I feel like that's what's going to happen to the Lord here. He's going to be like, "Oh, no."

Ely: "Uh, oh. Maybe I shouldn't ..."

Jennie: Oh, my gosh.

Hannah: I should've killed more people.

Ely: I love it.

Hannah: I think we have an amazing story.

Ely: Oh, that is great.

Hannah: And I'm so happy to turn this over to our listeners to create anything they want to out of this. I think this is a great creative, new fantasy Epic and/or series. I love it.

Jennie: Somebody write it. We want to see it.

Hannah: All right, before we close things out, we're going to take a moment to each shout out a story that we think our listeners should check out. So I'm going to go first, and I'm going to also recommend something that's like a fantasy/reality mesh. I just read and then watched A Monster Calls. So the book is by Patrick Ness, and I enjoyed it a lot. And then I watched the movie version, and I think I love that even more. It reminds me a little bit of Pan's Labyrinth in the sense that it's about a child going through some horrible stuff in their real life and the fantasy creatures that help them respond to it and adapt to it. And it's really lovely little fairy tale fable story that also is rooted in a lot of real life relationships and heartbreak and learning how to grow from that and how to withstand that. I sobbed throughout the entire last 10 minutes of the movie. It's so good. So I highly recommend it. Both book and movie are great. I slightly prefer the movie, but they were excellent. I'm going to toss over to Jennie. What would you like to recommend for our listeners today?

Jennie: In the spirit of this episode, I would like to recommend a game series that I have really, really enjoyed and play over and over again. The series starts with The Room. It is by Fireproof Games, and there's four in the series so far. To put it simply, it's a room escape game, but the artistry and the graphics in this game are so beautiful. They have kind of a steampunky, alchemical feel, and quite a dark story where you are following in the footsteps of this guy who is trying to harness the power of the Null, as he calls it. You get little blue pages from his journal and letters and stuff every once in a while. And you're trying to figure out what this guy has got himself into and how you can get out of it. And it's just one of my favorite things to play. Each game is only a couple of dollars at most, and there's no ads or anything. So definitely worth the purchase if you're into those kinds of games. Highly recommend it.

Hannah: All right, we're going to toss over to you, Ely. What's a story you would recommend for our listeners?

Ely: I'm going completely opposite way of you guys. It's still kind of fantasy, but it's my favorite series of all time. I've watched it like five times. It's an anime type story. It's Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Hannah: Yes.

Ely: And I absolutely love it so much. And I had the chance to speak with someone who drew the backgrounds of the series ...

Hannah: Ooh, really?

Ely: ... and I was so interested by it. It was so cool. He talked to me about how he worked and all that.

Jennie: That's so cool.

Ely: And the movie I did not like, but the series I love so much. I've watched, like I said, four times, and I think I'm going to rewatch it.

Hannah: All right. Before we take off, Ely, let our listeners know where they can find you or your work, anything that you want to plug for them.

Ely: So basically I'm a musician, and I remix Let's Players. I take when they sing in their videos and I just make songs out of that. So you can find my work on YouTube, youtube.com/elybeatmaker. And sometimes I tweet funny stuff, I like to think. So twitter.com/elybeatmaker, and that's where you can find me.

Hannah: Awesome. We'll make sure and put both those links in the show description so people can find you. Thank you once again so much for joining us on this. We ended up with a really good story. So thank you for being part of that.

Ely: This was so fun. This was extremely fun. The idea you guys have is amazing. Love it.

Hannah: That's our goal, that our guests have just as good a time as we do coming up with these crazy stories.

Ely: Oh, I certainly did.

Hannah: Awesome. Well, that is our episode, folks. As a reminder, you can find us every other Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

Jennie: Follow us on Twitter @writethispod. And if you've been inspired by this episode and have questions or comments or a game or anything else, email us at somebodywritethis@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you.

Hannah: We will be back with another episode in two weeks. See you then.

Jennie: And as they say, if you want to know your friend, lie down by the roadside and pretend to be drunk.