[archivists note- this docment was provided by synodiane, and 'me' in this document refers to her. also note that all instances of curly brackets have been replaced with [] due to neocities not allowing it]


[Several strips toward the end of Poorly Planned Comics were partially scripted by me. Notes in square brackets are from those scripts as sent to Jack. Notes in curly brackets were written months later, as explanation of this document to others.]

[Jack had a plan for where he wanted the next storyline to go (characters trying to figure out what was in the castle in Adventure Kids enter the Adventure Kids fiction as an RPG), but was finding working on it, on a panel by panel level, unpleasant and difficult. I suggested helping out with the scripting, and he agreed, more out of curiosity than any expectations that it would be useful. He had a number of objections to what I wrote, but acknowledged that I'd matched the style better than he'd expected, and used the script for his comic, although he didn't get all the way through it. I wrote a second script following up on it, which he also used the first part of, before losing interest.]



[This script, the first I wrote, appears in the end of http://poorlyplannedcomics.com/?p=2351 and the first half of http://poorlyplannedcomics.com/?p=2353. It cuts off at the part where the giant eyeball enters, because Jack didn't think it made sense for her to join this scene.]

Blue King
All right, where's this substrip that we're fixing?

Computer
Adventure Kids is shot on deck C, subfloor 18, superstructure b, megafloor gamma, quadrant...[cut off by panel border]
[Note that Jack made no effort to follow the bracketed direction here, and just included it as part of the dialogue, in a panel with lots of space for more text.]

Blue King [narrating]
They went to wherever the Adventure Kids set is

[Gon and Zoop are dancing around on a pyramid of director's chairs]
[Surprisingly, this direction was followed. Jack put a fair amount of time and effort into the chair pyramid.]

[several panels of dancing]

Blue King
Delightful. We need you to start Adventure Kids production back up. What's the state of its plot?

Gon
No can do. The artist didn't survive the spaceship transformation.
[Jack objected to this, as it's clearly inaccurate in multiple ways. I had the characters address this in the next script.]

Zoop
And I've got a bad case of the zoops.
[Jack has a long tradition of being annoyed when collaborators treat "zoops" as a made-up illness. Or any kind of illness.]

Gon
As for the plot, it's kind of non-modal. Can't really help you there.
["Non-modal" in this context is a Triangle and Robert reference, which Jack recognized but didn't think made sense here. He used it as written anyway, because it's fine for Gon and Zoop to use references that don't actually mean anything.]

[Giant Eyeball enters]

Giant Eyeball
Explain status of floating castle.

Zoop
The floating castle isn't really a defined thing, it's just a backdrop. We never bothered writing what was in it.

Blue King
So what I'm hearing is that it could be anything, based on what gets written later. If I can take care of the art, will you produce it?

Gon
As long as we get final veto on the creative.

Zoop
Firm requirement.

Blue King
Fine. Everyone meet back here two strips from now, and we'll get this started.



[The following two fragments were joke scripts written in a deliberately thoughtless manner, sent to Jack to amuse/annoy him. He used them in the comic in their entirety, naturally. They bookend the previous, more sincere, script in http://poorlyplannedcomics.com/?p=2353, followed by the Blue King objecting to the bad writing. I presented this first bit to Jack when he complained about plot errors in the script I had sent him, saying it was my first draft and that he might find it more useful.]

Blue King
OK let's go fix Aventure Kids and free the castle

Advisor
Yes we will talk to the directors



[This fragment was written when Jack objected to Giant Eyeball's entrance in the first script, as an explanation of why she wasn't still busy fighting the RPG party. It's deliberately out of character, poorly written, and so on. Jack's main objection to it (since he knew better than to complain about the rest) was that the Recognizer's description of the state of the conflict contradicts how things had been shown to be going. In the comic, he made this sequence extremely badly drawn and laid out, to match the writing.]

Giant Eyeball
How goes the war effort?

Recognizer
It's-a no good, cap-atain!

Giant Eyeball
OK, then forget it, just let them live.

Recognizer
Sure.

RPG characters
Now we will go away in peace.





[The beginning of this script was used in http://poorlyplannedcomics.com/?p=2362. It's very long, and instead of progressing the story, piles up confusion. Several characters give inaccurate exposition based on misconceptions, and this is not explained to the reader.]


Blue King
It's hard enough making progress around here without outright noncanon events getting dropped in. It's like wading through self-parody and self-dismissal at the same time.

Gon
Or like when your essay for a class gets swapped with the jokes you were telling a friend about dumb things you could write in the essay to blow it off. And also you weren't in the class, your friend was.

Blue King
And you! What's this nonsense about needing an artist to film your actors?

Zoop
Oh, not a literal artist! My colleague meant our head of costuming. We can't get a single take done without her, you know.

Blue King
Setting aside the unimportance of costuming, you have in fact made strips since your comic turned into a spaceship.

Gon
That's not what we meant by our artist not surviving the spaceship transformation. We meant a different transformation, that happened to the spaceship only recently.

Zoop
Her quarters were ripped into quarters. Tragic.
[Including a clever-sounding line like this turned out to be a good way to sell Jack on using material that he otherwise might not have.]

Blue King
There's a fine line between fiction and lies, but even this fiction isn't as transparently post hoc as whatever it is you're doing.

Advisor
Do we even need to care about the production details? You just wanted to work out what the deal is with the floating castle, right?

Blue King
Right, right. So, tying up plot threads, Maggie's notes, favor to the green strip, blah blah read the archives. What's the deal with the floating castle? What's actually in there?

Zoop
The floating castle isn't really a defined thing. We never bothered writing what was in it.

Gon
There isn't even an interior set for it. It's a matte painting.

Blue King
Not a problem! We'll just have to check it out from inside the fiction.

Blue King [narrating]
Nelson Novak appeared again

Nelson Novak
ok, i don't have the map, so if you're about to tell me to go somewhere, i'm just going to wait until the others catch up

Blue King [narrating]
The rest of this guy's party showed up to shortcut his excuses

[establishing shot of RPG party]

Pentatech
Pentatech is displeased at being forcibly teleported. Pentatech was enjoying the celebrations.

Green Treasure Hunter
We already got the loot and worked out things with the eyeball. All you're missing is some extra post-negotiations socializing.

[Giant Eyeball bursts through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man]
[Jack did not like this description.]

Giant Eyeball
My pawns are not to be abducted

Blue King
What happened with you? And don't give me any of that faux-Italian wrong-font nonsense.
[This line got a big laugh from Jack when he read it.]

Giant Eyeball
You refer to my agreement with the intruders

Green Treasure Hunter
We killed Lieutenant Whoever, and then worked out that the eyeball's the one who brought us here, so she's given us a quest and agreed not to attack us.
[Meant as a parody of RPG players not following the plot of their games very accurately. This is hard to get because the events she's inaccurately describing aren't shown anywhere, and in fact neither Jack nor I had a plan for what the actual version would have been.]

Giant Eyeball
Indeed, I shall make use of them for the time being

[Starting here, each row of panels has progressively more panels, with the panels narrowing on each row to fit. First row has two panels, then three, then four, and so on. Note that I haven't bothered to separate the dialogue up into panels, so the number of rows depends heavily on how you group the lines together, and this will probably end with a partially completed row.]
[In retrospect, I don't think this effect would have worked out well. Some lines of dialogue are very long, and they're towards the end of this section, so they would have had to be squeezed into narrow panels.]

Blue King
All right, everyone listen up. You all know Adventure Kids. Well today, we're going to--

Operator
That's the one with the dead spiky-haired guy, right?

Blue King
Since when are you out of the yellow strip? Judy!

Judy
Strip number 241. The Operator and Recognizer tricked the eyeball into copying them in the red king's voice.

Blue King
Ugh, fine. Anyone else here not in the strip I thought you were?

Alger
I'm still in the blue strip, but what about you? How am I seeing you if you're not still in our intangible observer setup?

Blue King
I moved over to the green strip. That's not important, really.

Nelson Novak
actually you're in suzzzzzy alpha star

Judy
When did that split off? Are Maggie and Ludolph still in the same strip as me? I mean, they're frozen, but still...

Blue King
It didn't split! Alpha star is just a colorless version of green, but with--

Nelson Novak
i don't want to be alpha star anymore, i want to be debbie

Green Guy
I don't know if it's a "strip" exactly, but I used to be in a place with a bunch of doors with file names.

Recognizer
The plaid strip switched places with the paisley strip, in case that matters to anyone but them.

Operator
It doesn't even matter to them.

Gon
Zoop and I are in the green strip. I think we're the only ones.

Judy
Oh, you are not!

Sleepy Tonson
i'm still the shortstop

Giant Eyeball
You all hasten to color your lack of reality

Giant Eyeball
I will command this holoconference in the name of the red strip

Blue King
It's not a holoconference!

Blue Guy [off-panel]
You're dangerously close to breaking symmetry. Keep me off-panel, otherwise it'll get worse.

Blue King
I have symmetry warnings on, and I haven't gotten any notifications about it.

Blue Guy [off-panel]
Your warnings only tell you about symmetry collapses involving you and your strip, and those you simulate/are simulated by. An asymmetry between two strips in indirect linkage with yours can, depending on simulation fidelity, trigger a cascade. I'm from a red fork that wasn't labeled in Maggie's notes, by the way, otherwise I would have identified my timeline.

Ludolph
Judy, I admit you did well remixing those pre-recorded lines, but this really feels like it's in poor taste.

Blue King
WHAT!

Blue King [narrating]
Ludolph froze

Ludolph [unchanged]
That's not going to work.

Blue King
Oh crap. I directly broke symmetry, and he's... no, wait, Cosmo would have said something. Oh, I know! You're the Ludolph on the actual green timeline, not the colorless one, so of course it didn't do anything to you, I probably just made the version of you over here extra-frozen.
[The Blue King is unaware that, as we've seen in the comic, freezing Ludolph doesn't affect his ability to move because he already exists as a single static pose. So he draws the wrong conclusions here, and nobody clears this up.]

Judy
I don't know if it really works that way. Are there two Judies, or just one who moved around a bit?

[new line of panels; narrowing pyramid thing is no longer in effect]

Giant Eyeball
None of your concerns are worthy of notice

Floating Fish
And what are your concerns, Ms. Eyeball?

Giant Eyeball
Identify yourself

[photographic panel of Ben holding a toy eyeball and a toy fish]
[I actually photographed this new iteration on the fake Request Comics/PPC crossover. http://www.synod.us/ppc-fish-eyeball-photocomic-panel.jpg]

Toy Fish
My name's Giant Fish! I'm from the Land of the Giants, where everyone is a giant!

[back to drawn strip]

Blue King
If you want to appear in crossovers, do it on your own time!

Hawaii
Yeah!
[Hawaii is a character from Metafable, a separate comic project that Jack had been working on but never made. I don't think he had art for her, so I don't know how he would have handled this panel if he'd gotten to it.]





[Those are all the PPC scripts I sent Jack. I did have some very partial notes for the next strip, which would have gotten around to characters entering Adventure Kids as an RPG module run by the simulated version of Jim. The main thing I know about how that strip would have played out is that it would heavily involve Nelson Novak, my favorite character.]


Nelson Novak
fine, i get what you're going for here
Blue King
What are you -- oh, you don't mean me, do you?
Nelson Novak
hey everyone, how about we play a game inside the game


Nelson Novak
narrate that we all get some LIFE player's guides, version 7
because that's the latest one version 5 can simulate, it doesn't have support for third-order logic











Judy

what level of reality?
symmetry?
holoconfer
eyeball insists on being present at holoconference


i don't want to be alpha star anymore, i want to be debbie



Nelson Novak
fine, i get what you're going for here
Blue King
What are you -- oh, you don't mean me, do you?
Nelson Novak
hey everyone, how about we play a game inside the game



Nelson Novak
narrate that we all get some LIFE player's guides, version 7
because that's the latest one version 5 can simulate, it doesn't have support for third-order logic









explain that they want to go into castle

castle's just a matte painting

what level of reality?
symmetry?
holoconfer
eyeball insists on being present

Simulated Jim will run it as an RPG, as a module
module origin? castle in green strip. has room that just has a module

Nelson knows it's Jim







green
Judy
Ludolph
Annika Daily
Rodney
Maggie (frozen?)

red
Jim, Maximum Yuks
giant eyeball
red guy
Gon, Zoop
unnamed purple guard
blue guy
advisor
red king

SUZZZZZY alpha star
Blue King
Nelson Novak

yellow
Operator, Recognizer

blue
Alger, Whit
Mini-Moose
Artist