'The First Jump' In Depth

In my first post I introduced myself and talked a little bit about The Space Between and about the characters within it and how they became involved in the story. Since I wanted to talk in depth about each part, and the introductory post covered most (if not all) of the Prologue, I thought that I'd skip to Part Two: 'The First Jump'.

After the original five characters meet, they decide on what they will be doing; surviving in the Between, which isn't easy because they have no renewable sources. Or any sources at all for that matter. Which means that they need to jump to other worlds just to even do their shopping.

The First Jump, as you may have guessed, is their first outing to another universe. Like most of their jumps, they gather as much food, water, technology, clothing, books, etc. Whatever they need, they need to travel through the dimensions to get it. And with Martha's want of finding her own universe, they decide to try to visit as many different Earths as possible.

The prompt I got for this world (From my husband) was 'Magic and Technology are switched'. So I thought of it more of, what if Tony Stark were a sorcerer and Stephen Strange were a wealthy man who made Iron Man suits? And from that thought, the story unfolded before me.

Not much of the plot was rewritten, it (for the most part) stayed intact to what I wanted it to be. The biggest change from initially writing it to rewriting that chapter was the Kitty Pryde chapter. When I had written it, it was about J'onn and Martha going to the Xavier Mansion, and asking the X-Men for help to save Stephen. Kitty was already a grown woman, and a member of the X-Men, who went with Wolverine and Jean Grey to stop the clearly mad Sorcerer Supreme Tony Stark.

This iteration of her would have eventually joined the group of the Space Between, but not until much, much later (At that point it had been planned for Book Two). But my Husband (/Editor) was unsatisfied with that, so I wrote what is now J'onns' chapter, where he and Martha end up in Mt. Vernon, NY for a short amount of time.

Then the idea struck me to make her a young orphan that was sort of a reluctant thief, being chased by mutant-hunters. This made it so that she would have a better reason to join them than I could have probably come up with later, and the group would have had more reason to accept her.

In the end, the Sorcerer Supreme Tony dies, and the mirror Pepper Potts (Who is just Pepper on this Earth, and takes the place of Clea as a Faltine Princess), becomes Sorcerer Supreme after him, and the first real ally of the 'Betweeners'. I hadn't really fully planned for all of that, but as soon as it was written down I knew that it was the right thing to happen. This version of Pepper will appear again in the story, although to what extent I can't be sure of yet.

-EDR