Twisted Q&A

Here is a set of excerpts from my correspondence with Morpheus while writing and revising Twisted Throwback. It is not a story bible or official set of "rules" for the setting; it's just some quotes from our emails.

Quotes from my own emails are preceded with TS:, quotes from him are preceded with M:. Places where I deleted something because it seemed too spoilery or irrelevant are marked with a long ellipsis, .....

Earlier versions of this were posted to the morpheuscabinet2 mailing list.

TS:

Are you open to letting other people write stories in your Twisted universe?

M:

Absolutely. It is an open universe. So far only one other person has posted a story in that universe but several others have said that they were going to.

TS:

What are the youngest and oldest ages a person can be when they go through their twist?

M:

I never set a specific age range though, it does usually occur during the teenage years, usually between 14 and 17 but there can be exceptions. I have one story in mind where the main character is half Twisted and is in his early twenties before going through his Twist.

TS:

Approximately where is Spiral? It’s within an hour’s drive of a coast, but it’s not clear whether it’s the west or east coast, or maybe the Gulf coast.

M:

I intentionally kept the location of Spiral rather vague but I imagined it as being in either central or northern California.

TS:

Would you mind if I set a story a generation or so later than your stories? I have an idea for my viewpoint character’s background, that they come of a large extended family of Twisted and that their great-grandparents survived the Antarctic Flu. I can make it work if it was just their grandparents, however, and they have a bunch of Twisted aunts and uncles and first cousins.

M:

You can set it a generation or so later if you’d like, though I think you could probably pull that off pretty well at the current time too.

TS:

You show the Twist process destroying a person’s clothes and nearby electronics, and at least once the chair they’re sitting in as well. Does that happen only with major physical transformations, or with any physical transformation however subtle, or also with purely mental Twists?

M:

I think that the release of energy that causes destruction around them could be proportionate to how much their bodies change. With smaller changes you may get sparks and some burned clothes but no real destruction.

TS:

I just noticed this passage in “Twisted”:

“Yeah,” Janine sighed, looking as though she was unsure of whether to tell me more or not. She finally continued, “About two years ago, my best friend and I were talking about guys we liked and what it would be like to kiss them. One thing lead to another and we decided to practice our kissing skills on each other so we’d be ready when we finally had a chance to do it for real. That was when my twist kicked in and the next thing I know I’m trying to tear her clothes off...” Then Janine sighed with a sad look, “She never even talked to me again after that.”

which seems to imply that with purely mental changes, the person might not even lose consciousness as they do with the major physical changes.

M:

Yep. The lost of consciousness is due largely to the massive energies and overwhelming physical trauma of changing. With smaller changes, I’d imagine a but of a stunned daze for a moment but not necessarily any more. Of course, this is all a bit flexible since every twist is unique.

TS:

Yet another question. Would you mind if I refer to a college or university in or near Spiral that caters especially to Twisted students? I don’t think it’s going to play a major role in my story, but it might be useful. And especially if it’s set a generation later, the existence of such a college, if it’s fairly new, wouldn’t contradict your stories.

M:

As for the university, sure, you can make mention of a university that is friendly to the developed and which would be a natural place for most developed to want to go.

TS:

[In Twisted Throwback, I refer a couple of times to “Spiral State College.”]

TS:

Physical books are referred to in first “Twisted” story, so we know they aren’t totally killed off by ebooks as soon as some pundits now expect, in the Twisted timeline; but maybe they’re less common a generation later.

How do you see ebooks and physical books being used in the Twisted universe, at the time of your stories and perhaps later?

M:

I see textbooks and the like going predominantly digital since its much cheaper than printing them out. However, I don’t see real books going away since there is something more real about them. Perhaps there can be a fad that caught on where paper books started becoming fashionable and popular.

TS:

What kind of regulations are there about Twisted with dangerous or destructive tricks? Are they allowed on commercial airline flights, or public transportation in general? Are such tricks generally treated like concealed weapons?

M:

Your ideas about dangerous tricks not being allowed on public transportation are ones that I hadn’t really thought about, but I can definitely see laws forbidding it. Actually tracking all the Twisted and what their tricks are would actually be easier said than done, but I can see the law being passed.

TS:

I figure some Twisted might need special driver’s licenses or other ID documents, like you portray in your Burke’s Virus series, saying e.g. “yes this person is old enough to drive/vote/drink despite appearances” or “yes this person can see well enough to drive via their trick, though they have no obvious eyes”, etc. And maybe it would be an obvious extension for at least some states to start requiring all Twisted to have their tricks briefly mentioned on their driver’s licenses, with a code for law enforcement or airport security to look up more details. Possibly the Twisted have enough political clout in California, where they’re concentrated in Spiral and (because of the movie industry) Los Angeles, to block such a law, but not in Georgia.

TS:

What proportion of Twisted in the U.S. live in Spiral? What other cities have a significant number of Twisted?

M:

I see Spiral being a large town with the largest gathering of Twisted in one place. I can see other major cities having their own populations as well, especially large ones like Los Angeles or New York. I would imagine that San Francisco might be another population center. I never considered the percentages but five percentage of the entire population being reasonable, though perhaps a little small.

TS:

Okay, I’ll tweak it to a tenth in the final draft. It’s Kerry’s guesstimate, anyway, not an exact Census bureau statistic.

[In an early draft of my story, the main character’s cousin Kerry had said that a twentieth of the Twisted in the U.S. live in Spiral. I changed it to a tenth.]

TS:

[In the first draft of my story I portrayed a government system of classifying tricks by how dangerous they are.]

“Class one tricks were so dangerous that you were hardly allowed to be near other people. Class two tricks were dangerous enough you weren’t allowed to travel by commercial airlines, or trains or buses for that matter. Class three was borderline, and could get upgraded to class two if you showed the slightest sign of antisociality — anything worse than a traffic ticket and you’d be barred from public transportation for life. Dad’s trick of keeping his suit immaculate was class six, perfectly harmless, and I hoped mine would be no worse than a class five even if I got full conscious control of it — as it was now it was an easy class six.”

M:

The addition of the class system for twists is something that sounds reasonable for what the government might put in place, and something that bureaucrats and those who don’t like the Twisted might abuse to make things more difficult for people by bumping up their levels.

TS:

[Some beta readers had problems with the trick classification stuff, and I wound up cutting it from the final draft.]

TS:

[My main character is watching a documentary about Spiral with her date.]

“I forgot I was sitting next to Rob, a situation that had been far more interesting to me than the plot of the movie last Friday, and just focused on the history of Spiral — how this one tiny town was hit harder by the Antarctic Flu than most others its size, and almost a third of the children born in the next few years were Twisted; how more and more families with Twisted children moved in, and then Twisted adults on their own, and how they renamed the town Spiral and proclaimed it a safe place for Twisted. There were interviews with some of the people whose ancestors had lived there before the Flu, and some of the earliest Twisted who moved in, and with Twisted-rights activists and prominent Twisted.”

M:

Your description of Spiral’s history was pretty much exactly what I had in mind.

TS:

[We were talking about ideas for future stories here; this was before "With a Twist of Starlight" was posted:]

That suggests some questions about Twisted law enforcement officers, soldiers, vigilantes, and criminals. It seems that a fair number of Twisted have tricks as powerful as the minor villains and heroes in a typical superhero setting, like Marvel or DC or your Legacy series, but we hear little or nothing about Twisted heroes and villains in the existing Twisted stories. I’m guessing that Twisted heroes typically work within law enforcement or the military (as in my Nat Holcomb series), not as costumed vigilantes, and that Twisted criminals typically keep a low profile instead of being flamboyantly supervillainish, unless a compulsion intervenes. And also, perhaps, that tricks powerful enough to make someone a potential superhero or supervillain are rarer than the sample of characters we see in the Twisted stories would suggest. And maybe registration of Twists and tricks makes it hard for most Twisted to maintain a secret identity while fighting or committing crime — most tricks are unique enough that a report of a vigilante or criminal using a particular trick will narrow it down to one or a few suspects. Someone would have to keep their trick secret from their doctors and everyone who knows them to use it as part of a masked criminal/crimefighter identity, and I don’t see that happening in the Twisted stories.

M:

There are no costumed heroes or villains, at least not as traditional super heroes and villains, and the police do not tolerate Twisted vigilantes.

TS:

Do you reckon teleportation is too powerful a trick for this setting? Clearly tricks on average in the Twisted universe are a lot less powerful than powers in the Legacy universe, but I’m not sure what upper bound to put on them.

M:

Teleportation is not too powerful a trick ..... Some tricks can be pretty powerful, but they tend to be rare and wouldn’t match up to most super heroes. There are a few exceptions though obsessions and personality quirks would limit how they are used.