Writing experiment - Light is a great element
I write a lot of untagged two-person dialogues, as a check to make sure the characters’ voices are distinct enough to be told apart without them. For the hell of it, here follows an untagged three-person conversation.
"You two are back early."
"Huh. I'm amazed we made it back at all."
"Well, it wasn't until Roxas set a guy on fire with a mirror."
"...I could not have heard that right."
"He deserved it! He called Demyx a retard!"
"Roxas, everyone calls me a retard. Even I call me a retard. That's no excuse."
"Never mind that. I wanna hear the part where you set a guy on fire with a fucking mirror."
"It was easy. I happened to have a little concave mirror in my pocket, it was a sunny day, I just had to get the angle just right so -"
"For fuck's sake, don't encourage - "
"Shut up. I wanna hear this."
" - and the amount of sunlight that was actually hitting the mirror wasn't enough, so I kinda pulled in all the light around it to add to it, got the focus just right so that all the light was on one tiny spot on his shirt, and...first it was smoke, then it was fire. It made a weird shadow, too. Looked like I was holding a basketball."
"Ugh. Shiva. The two of you."
"What? What is your problem?"
"The fact that neither of you can acknowledge that setting a person on fire is a bad thing!"
"Okay. Roxas. First of all, I know he called me a retard. I was fucking there. Second, setting a person on fire is a bad thing even if that person deserves it."
"Isn't 'retard' supposed to be, like, an N-word-level slur now?"
"Axel, you are so not helping."
"What? Come on. You can admit that setting someone on fire with a mirror is wrong and also admit that it's pretty fucking cool."
"What, based on the word of a guy who'd set everything on fire if he could? No. I can't."
"Come on! It's not like he even got really hurt!"
"And whose fault is that, huh? Not yours. Word of advice, Roxas - if you set someone on fire, the chance that they do get hurt is way higher than the chance that they don't get hurt."
"Well, it worked out all right this time, didn't it?"
"Did it? Let's see. Did someone end up on fire who didn't need to be on fire? Yep. So no, it didn't."
"Come on, Demyx. At the end of the day, all I did was scare the guy."
"Oh, that makes it all better!"
"Well, it sort of does, doesn't it? No harm, no foul."
"...I can't believe you two. Does...does someone actually have to explain to you both that usually, when you light someone on fire and they can't put it out quickly like this guy fortunately could, they either get badly hurt or die?"
"Why are you so freaked out about it?"
"Because if I were to hold your empty fucking head underwater long enough for you to feel the lack of oxygen, and you broke my grip - let me emphasize, not 'I let you go' as in I made a conscious decision not to hurt you, 'you broke my grip' as in I had nothing to do with it - in time to get some air before you drowned or suffered brain damage...let me ask, would you be calling it 'no harm, no foul' afterwards?"
"Different? Different how? Different because water doesn't do the same kind of instantaneous harm that fire can or different because water can actually hurt you personally?"
"Did I ever say that setting a guy on fire was okay because I can't personally be hurt by fire?"
"No, you said, or broadly hinted, that setting a guy on fire was okay because he called me a retard."
"Okay, maybe setting the guy on fire was an overreaction -"
" - but you also have to admit it was funny."
"Um, I was there, you weren't, and I don't?"
"Okay, what is not funny, in general, about achieving dramatic effects with ridiculous objects, he asked the man who conjured a siren with a yo-yo once?"
"Okay, first of all, I did not conjure a siren with a yo-yo. I was practicing using a yo-yo as a waterbending focus, which is a completely different process to using it for summoning -"
"Wait, wow. Wait. Never mind setting a guy on fire with a mirror. I wanna hear this story."
