Contraptions

Oh, how I love contraptions. Impersonal devices or set ups that slowly draw a damsel to her destruction are in my view far more fun than personally turning the screws on a damsel stretched out on a rack. I can’t be alone: I think this is the reason for the popularity of the clichéd “damsel tied to the tracks” peril. The train is just coming, nothing personal, just deadly – and there is nothing the damsel can do to stop it.
That principle – impersonal implacability – is the guiding one behind my love of contraptions. If they are scary looking, so much the better. But they should also have an elegant simplicity to them. As a good friend recently said, “If you need to enclose a diagram to make it clear, you’ve gone too far.”
Indeed, that is what separates a true villain from a Promethean anti-hero like Wile E Coyote. Mr Coyote is to be pitied more than feared – a victim of the Acme Company’s mail order promises and made-in-China materials. But I digress.
For the last few months I have been stressing atmosphere and setting in my stories. The perils themselves have tended to be minor embellishments of classics. (An example in a recent story I wrote for Peril Place was filling a dunking booth with highly corrosive sodium hydroxide pellets – this is just a solid form of Drano, and – uh, trust me on this one – it dissolves flesh quickly and horribly.)
I suppose some really fiendish traps are those which have two or more damsels in peril, and making them choose which one lives and which one dies. In another story I wrote a while back for Peril Place (yeah, the place deserves a plug!) three damsels were tied on a melting ice floe over a pool filled with hammerhead sharks. Eventually the floe would shrink until not all three could stay on it. Who would go in first?
There was another very complicated set up later in the same story with three interrelated perils occurring simultaneously. One damsel was trapped in a tank filling with water, with a float attached to a servomechanism that would take a second damsel, who was tied to a log, closer and closer to a buzzsaw. The first damsel could hold down the float and slow down the second damsel’s buzzsaw peril, but drown more quickly as a result. The second damsel could grab a rope that would hold back the log for a little while, but said rope went round the neck of damsel number 3, who would be strangled thereby. Damsel 3 was tied to a chair between some ominous industrial capacitors, with a rod that would slowly descend, eventually connecting a circuit that would discharge the capacitors and incinerate the heroine. Two pedals were within reach of damsel 3’s tidily bound feet. One pedal would drain water out of the first damsel’s water chamber, but, alas, hasten the rod that would incinerate damsel 3. The other pedal slowed down the rod, but accelerated pace of water pouring into damsel 1’s booth, thus speeding up the demise of both the other damsels. Oh, how I enjoyed working that one out…)
I haven’t been doing as many of those because I haven’t been doing many multiple damsel perils lately. I tend to focus on one-on-one perils. I know some heroines really want company (I know of one who wants to do a campy/sexy version of Electra Woman and Dyna Girl – and yes, I would love that!). But it is hard to give equal detailed attention to two heroines at the same time in the same story. So usually my multiple damsel/ extra complicated traps are for public consumption, and for quite a while I was so busy with private peril stories I really couldn’t do any public ones.
I hope I do get the time to do a few more public ones. No promises when, though. I am always looking for damsel, er, volunteers….