Belinda and Milo (No chapter, tired musings.) (Patreon)

For background, Belinda wasn't planned. She was a generic healer in a player group that got nailed by a stone crusher. They had a tank, a crazed halfling, someone else I forget, and the healer. The idiots in the party needed to argue with someone sane, and that became Belinda, the Healer. Later, for some reason, she ran to help the miners, and part of her stubborn/caring personality snapped into place.

From there, she grew each time I was writing her. The person Milo shoved into an impossible situation of organizing a raid on the fly while he ran off to do impossible things.

Then one day, while thinking about her, she was in a wheelchair. She had problems worse than Milo. I wanted to weave her into his story and she moved into Section H next door. The party got planned...

...and Milo went to the Hollow. A small arc got bigger and bigger. Larry showed up and I couldn't finish the Hollow without concluding Larry's arc. I constantly made the story longer and more difficult.

How do you do that? Easy. Things like two Cheese Fiends, because of course the bad guys have cheese fiends. Then they became two little girls as well. That became a problem. There was no fething way that Larry was going to fight two little girls. It would be bad for Milo as well. What to do with them? And the answer seemed obvious, Larry to the rescue. But what now?

See the problem? The characters take over. Meanwhile, Belinda planned her party for 100 chapters!! It had to be a big event, not just a swap meet. There needed to be complications, connections, things that involved both of them but not together yet. Claw Master showed up.

And then the party was over and I was left with the question I'd been putting off: Does Belinda know who Milo is? So many things hinged on that. Milo went a little crazy for a chapter because I was going crazy. I'd deliberately let it drop that she knew his real name. That was easy, someone at some point would call him Milo.

But what else did she know? Turns out to be quite a bit.
-They played games together and she got to know him, and see how smart he was.
-In SC6 he was plotting the gravitational forces of black holes and doing missile trajectories in his head. She knew he was older, knew how smart he was. Belinda has a much better education than the rest of the gang. Butch might know he's smart, but Belinda knows he is crazysmart. Like another Milo.

The kicker? I reread what I had written when they met. Milo knew how the gloves worked, and how they were different from the M-1000's. He wasn't just wearing a set. He knew how they worked.

I could have done a lot of painful chapters will Milo denying it, but the other half was Belinda, and specifically that people lied to her all the time. The same way it would be bad for Larry to fight his little sisters-to-be, it would be bad for Milo to constantly lie to Belinda, and I had no way to make it work.

So now she knows...and I have to figure out how that works. :)

Thanks for reading.