When death and Chicken taste alike

Yesterday I wrote ‘Death as a resource’, my mind kept on racing and now it is time for part two, you see when the story is everything, you need to set a stage for the eyes to watch and to watch from the eyes of a god is not possible, not for many at least, so we need to paint the stage. No matter how we get leaked the information because the media wants its click stream, we need to entice the audience in other ways. In this I always grasp back to the slogan of FX, ‘the story is everything’. It is the most true and the most basic slogan that any writer can ever embrace. So here goes.

In the human corner we get two sisters, the younger one is a special agent of the ATF, the older one is an independent food critic, working and writing freelance. The stage starts with the older one seeing weird numbers. The stage of food poisoning up by 10%, yet the inspections by the department of health Louisiana had increased and showing clear lower transgressions all over the board, as such the numbers do not make sense. Even as the cases of food poisoning are not clearly shown or proven, the number of people showing symptoms are increasing. It was a small article and it was rejected by most, her sister took notice and found out that a similar trend was going on around Disney World Florida and Boston, even as it was rejected by almost all, the 10% raises calls towards visibility and this happens in more than one way. The ATF is not the real player, but the sister knows people and becomes the glue that links Boston (Faneuil Hall with its 15 million a year tourists), Disney World Florida and New Orleans. Her sister the food critic sees the overall quality of the food and attacks the 10% numbers, but also sees that the numbers are panning out. During the investigation she walks home one evening and sees the shadow of a large walking doglike creature as well as Baron Samedi, and then she faints. She sees one as a tourist trick, the other one she cannot explain and even as she is told that she was delirious from some kind of food poisoning, and that a rougarou is often part of Voodoo practice, so it is most likely a large man wearing a costume. (All this in episode one)

The vision makes the Tanya look deeper and as she investigates the restaurant she visited, with help from the Health inspection, she signs off on the quality and cleanliness of the kitchen, the proprietor knows that she has power and cooperates, she promises him a glowing recommendation and no mention of her food poisoning, yet she knows that there is something. She has a cup of soup during the day (the Meng Po element is now visible) and reinvigorated she continues the investigation. In the mean time she gets the location of three suspected food poisoning and as she visits them all, she sees that they look drained, like they had something bad to eat, but also talks to the doctor that there are no lasting complications expected. They merely need to keep to bed for a full day and let it all flush out of their systems. 

As she returns in the early evening she talks to two of the people in the lodgings and hands them some magazines to read, as she walks to her car, she sees a man in the distance, robed, holding a bident (Hades), she ignores the view and drives off. The next morning the three people are a lot worse and they show signs of Severe electrolyte imbalances and are treated accordingly, they recuperate as we hear at the end of the episode. Yet Tanya seeks out the man looking like Baron Samedi, she finds a few in New Orleans, but none look like the one she saw and she draws a picture of him and mails it to her sister. (Episode two starts here). In that episode it will be much more about the gods and part of the explanation of the why they are doing it. Consider that the initial locations shows us 35 million visitors a year, giving them the energy of up to 3.5 million people and it is only the beginning. We see how Christianity overtook the gods of Egypt and Greece, giving us their decay, but the gods were more than people and they survived in silence and in hiding. As time passed we see that Hades and Anubis lived off the land, but in their travels they landed in France where Baron Samedi was visiting (around 1800) and this starts their idea and the path we now see evolve. It is before 1900 when we see Meng Po in France too, they all meet and the plans are drawn and to give them a larger stake in all this, they decide to start the trip in the US so that they will have a much larger increase in power than Zeus and Ra, who have no connection to the American people, giving Hades and Anubis a much larger headway and more energy, but they agree that o ver time their brethren will be fed too, as this will reset the universe to their advantage.

In this in this episode I think that it is also important to introduce Ereshkigal and Mot into the story,  they are in a similar position, but they are much stronger and their universe still feeds them to a small degree. They get wind of the plans and start making their own (we get no idea on how they will go about them until the end), but the introduction is important. When we see a story we need to see levels of balance, the good, the bad and the indecisive. Yet in all this we also get to play with who is good, who is evil and who is indecisive. Good and bad are merely points of view, it is important not merely to use that but to explain to the audience what is what. It is like the customer and the bank, we tend to see the bank as evil, they are not, we see the customer as mere victims, they are not and to shift these vies towards some balance makes the larger whole grow in several ways. So as I am making an inventory, I reckon that the mini series should be done in 5-6 episodes, each around an hour.