Merin Catalog

Earlier Versions of Stitch Doll Boxing

There's a Halloween Stitch Doll on our mantel. (From Lilo and Stitch.) It looks ready to box. Thus, Stitch Doll Boxing. A Stitch doll that you can pay 5 cents to box with, and, if you win---which nobody ever does---you get anything you might want.

**

It looks like I don't have the first unfinished version. That one talked about events in the voice of the town:

...

Now you might think that it'd be easy to beat up the Stitch doll.

It's very light.

Its arms are short.

Mayor Cloon certainly thought so, but the doll took him down fast; and the Box Top Boys; and Mrs. Persimmons; and even Minister Grey.

...

If you beat Stitch, you can get anything your heart desires. It's like a materialist Narnia, a fire-sale at Disneyland. Cotton candy trees! Life-size transformers! Even (no idea what the third was).

(And a description of how hardly anyone bothers, because Jordan walked around and checked and once you figure out that the alley's open in back, nobody really needs to *fight* Stitch.)

...

There was also some discussion about how the guy's beard wasn't actually salt and pepper and you wouldn't want to put it in your beef and broccoli unless you really needed an extra trace amount of zinc. I'm kind of sad that didn't make it to the final version.

...

Why Emily and Jordan, btw? Because the plot doesn't quite fit Jane. I thought about Iphigenia, who fit pretty well, but her name's really long. While Claire and Meredith do play kids sometimes, they felt too old. Thus, Emily. Emily doesn't have a handy brother. I didn't want to use Sid or Saul for this. So, Jordan.

...

Here's a version I do have, in full:

Box the Stitch doll! 5 cents!

Emily staggers in on Thursday afternoon. She's tired and bruised. She hasn't been boxing Stitch! She's got bullies at school.

She drops her backpack.

She flops on the couch. "Oh, man," she says.

Then she sees it.

It's at the mouth of the alley across the street on the other side of the fence outside her yard. There's an old guy with a salt and pepper beard and he's set up a stand and a sign and a stuffed Stitch doll with four arms and a grin, and the sign says,

"Box the Stitch doll! 5 cents!"

"Huh," she says.

He's there all day. He's there all night. He's there the next day when Emily comes home.

She watches out the window as Mayor Cloon strolls up.

He's pretty cocky, Mayor Cloon.

You can tell what he's thinking. He's thinking: "That Stitch doll---it's so light! And its arms are so short! And here I am a very important man. I can take that doll, oh, yes, I can."

So he tosses over a nickel into the bearded man's hands.

He puts up his dukes, which is kind of weird, when you think about it, because presumably a duke outranks a Mayor. But it's still what he does.

He jabs at the Stitch doll.

Hideous laughter rolls like thunder. Emily shrieks and covers her ears. She ducks down. The last thing she sees is the Stitch doll on Mayor Cloon's face and Mayor Cloon stumbling to the ground.

On Saturday her brother Jordan scopes things out.

"Come on," he says.

"Eh?"

He drags Emily out. He leans in. He whispers, "This old guy's a loon."

"He is?"

There's a little crowd there. Jordan, Emily, Mrs. Persimmons, even the Boxtop Boys and Officer Grey. Big Boxtop Boy's punch-drunk, he's a little wobbly and his jaw's swollen up. Mrs. Persimmons' ripped blazer betokens some genteel Stitch boxing of her own. But Officer Grey and Little Boxtop, they haven't boxed Stitch yet.

"Listen to this," Jordan says to Emily. Then he steps up. "Sir old guy," Jordan says. "Just why would anybody want to box your stinky old Stitch?"

"Why," says the old man, eyes dancing, "to get whatever you want."

"Really?" Emily says.

"To get past Stitch, you've got to beat Stitch. And at the end of the alley, once you've beaten Stitch, there's anything you want! Cotton candy bushes. A life size Transformer. Cheese of the month club---for life. And that's just a tiny sampling of what a winner could obtain."

"It's a materialist Narnia," Mrs. Persimmons says wistfully.

"A fire-sale at Disneyland," says Officer Grey.

"Best deal for a nickel you ever will see," says the old man with his beard.

Jordan says, "Shh," to Emily, and then he walks left down the street. He turns right at the crossing and right again at the light.

Little Boxtop Boy steps up pugnaciously.

He tosses the old man a nickel. He says, "I'll give it a go, now that he's worn down."

The Boxtop Brothers aren't big formal fighters like Mayor Cloon. They're down and dirty rough and tumble types and pretty soon he's down and dirty after a rough tumble down the hill.

"What's your badness level, Stitch?" the old man asks.

And the stuffed Stitch doll snorts.

That's all it has to do. Just snorts. Because it's the baddest damn thing in this whole little town.

Officer Grey steps forward.

He says, "Here's my coin."

But when Stitch comes for him he freaks out. He goes for his gun. There's a bang and a boom and Officer Grey limps home.

Jordan comes back.

He's licking a world peace candy cane. That's one of those candy canes where you lick it down and then at the center there's world peace.

He says, "Wow."

"Wow?"

"There really is everything you'd want at the other end of that alley."

"Er?" the old man says.

He looks back over his shoulder. He's thinking, right about now, that he shouldn't have chosen a two-ended alley. But he needn't have worried, not really, because nobody rushes around to the other end. Instead, they're all looking at Jordan and thinking, "You shill! I'd beat you up if it weren't for world peace."

**

Incidentally, after I finished this version of the story, I thought about going back and cutting it right there. I didn't like that, though, because it made Emily a total passive non-character.

P.S. You can actually ask one of our Stitch dolls its badness level. It'll answer, if it's got batteries in. That said, I really should have used "badass level" here.

P.P.S. Do Boxtop Boys have anything to do with Boxing? No. Their parents ordered them using boxtops.

**

On Monday Emily goes around to the back of the alley and gets a magical talking pony. She rides it to school. She comes home without a pony.

"Stupid bullies," she says.

"You should get a bully magnet from the back of the alley," Jordan says.

"Like that would help."

"It would!"

They think this dispute through.

"I mean, a dangling one, you know, like in a junkyard."

Old bullies generally go to junkyards once you don't need them any more for personal growth. The magnets are so that whenever the junkyard owner wants they can suck all the bullies up into the air and then drop them into ego compactors.

"Huh," Emily says.

But she doesn't do it.

On Wednesday, she gets a castle in a distant foreign land, just in case she ever has to flee the country, and a health insurance package for her parents.

"You really should do something about this bully problem."

"It's just," Emily says, "I don't want to sink to their level by getting magical anti-bully artillery."

"That's internalized bullycratic oppression," Jordan observes.

She sticks out her tongue.

On Friday, she's coming home, and there are three of them following her. They're the nastiest three bullies of the whole school: Iron Hand Luke, Iron Foot Lindsey, and Iron Jaw Kay.

And she'd skipped out on the end of the week bullying, had ducked right out while they were busy with Sylvester McGee, so that's why they're following her home.

And she stops there, at the front end of the alley, and she tosses the old guy a nickel, and she says, "I'll box your Stitch doll, sir."

And it's very hard, because she's small and the Stitch doll has four arms; and she's barely thrown the first thin punch before she's got a cold pain in her side and a spinning in her head.

Her hand touches lightly against the Stitch doll's fur before she finds herself falling.

The world wobbles.

"Stay down," someone's telling her.

But she doesn't stay down. She's getting up. She's throwing herself at Stitch again. On and on and on; until at last she tears a bit at Stitch's ear and leaves a blue mark on his chest; and then falls to the final dark.

Her last thought is: there.

there, she thinks.

I can't face them. I don't want to hurt them. But now, at least, they've seen me fight.

Monday, she goes around to the end of the alley and gets a ray gun that cures disease.

**

I didn't like the plot very much. It was the original plot concept, but it was too, well, melancholy, and not really very interesting.

**

So I tried:

**

Emily staggers in on Thursday afternoon. She's tired and bruised. She hasn't been boxing a Stitch doll in the hopes of winning anything her heart desires! She's just got bullies at school.

She drops her backpack.

She flops on the couch. "Oh, man."

Jordan's rummaging around in the fridge.

"Chicken," he says.

"Am not!"

"Are so."

He finds macaroni salad. He claims it and carries it out into the living room.

"Which ones?" he says.

"The irons."

She means Iron Hand Luke, whose left hand is a metal fist; and Iron Leg Lindsey, whose left leg is a metal prosthetic; and Iron Jaw Kay, who can eat anything because his lower jaw is steel.

Jordan whistles.

"You're in the big leagues," he says.

She sticks her tongue out at him.

"Seriously," he says. "If they were picking on me, I would totally be scared."

"I'm not scared," Emily says. "I'm a pacifist."

"Tchyeah," he says.

He eats macaroni salad skeptically, crunching out his doubt.

"I could totally take them," she says.

"Oh?"

"It's just, all the bits of them that aren't iron."

"Then fight Stitch," he says.

She thinks about that.

She gets up. She goes to the window. She looks out. On the other side of the window there's a yard, and on the other side of the yard there's a fence, and then a street, and then the mouth of an alley where the old man with the salt and pepper beard has a Stitch doll out and a sign that reads, "Box Stitch --- 5 cents!"

"That's a lot of money," she says.

"If you win," he says, "then you can go to the other end of the alley and get whatever you want. Even 5 cents!"

"But the liquidity!"

He sighs.

"Here," he says. He rummages in the couch. He digs out a nickel. He tosses it to her.

She looks down at it. She looks up at him. Her face clouds up.

"Fine," she says.

She stomps to the door. She stomps out to the street. She walks right up to the man with the salt and pepper beard and she says, "Same deal?"

**

That's where I stopped.

Part of the problem was that this wasn't getting to the interesting bits fast enough. No hook! But the real problem was that by the time we *got* to the interesting stuff, it was all out of place---it felt like way too much data just to explain the fight.

So I tried jumping straight to the fight:

**

Version 1:
Emily can box the Stitch doll any time she wants for 5 cents.

Version 2:

Emily walks up to the Stitch Boxing station. She says, "5 cents?"

"5 cents," says the man.

He's an old grey...

**

Still blagh. So I adjusted the lights, had some water and some tea, and changed chairs. Then I decided to completely drop the idea of explaining the world they were living in and to just pick a storyline that could introduce the bits one piece at a time. The result is what you have on the imago!

Preserved from RPG.Net

On the subject of examples of non-hit-point based damage systems:

**

All damage during a fight is cosmetic, but you may take meaningful damage at the end of the fight (possibly with the retroactive discovery that one of those cosmetic wounds wasn't.) Record this meaningful damage as an independent trait, such as "Broken Arm" or "Horrible Scar."

Characters begin all fights dead and get progressively better as the fight invigorates them.

Each 1000 points of damage increases your Battered level by one. The favored class for humans in this setting is Battered.

Sorcerer, swapping out "demon" for "damage." When you hit Humanity 0, you retire and run a tavern or store in some 1st level town.

In a similar vein, damage is an ill-defined mystic fuel for damage magic. The characters will principally use it in description, couching these references in elaborate terminology and ritual. The exact nature of damage is an emergent quality of the setting that the group develops in play.

Rebecca