Document Q, Part 7
Strength and Weakness
Strength
Your Person’s Strength Trait measures their major contribution to the course of the story. Your Strength could be a personal quality, such as loyalty, courage, self-control, generosity and so on; or it could be something they can do that the other Persons cannot, such as Strong People Skills, or Developed Senses.
Strength allows you to flex that quality in such a way as to shine. This is what your character does best: the quality they are renowned for, like Horatio Caine’s “child whisperer” trait from the old CSI: Miami TV series, or Mata Hari’s fabled seduction skills, or Hercule Poirot’s “little grey cells.”
Weakness
Your Person’s Weakness Trait, in contrast, is something your character must fight to overcome. Weakness Traits increase pressure when you are making a decision. Your Weakness could interfere with your judgment, or emerge when your character is confronted by the source of a fear or emotion-triggering phenomenon. Example: the low-pressure task of keeping a cool head in a car chase during the evening could be complicated by the Weakness of Hates Driving At Night, increasing the Pressure from 2 to 3 or even 4.
More about Pressure soon.
Document Q Continues
Doctor Gooding, Vicky, rises and beckons for you to join her. Together, you head for one of the exits from the room. She leads you through a short, curved corridor to another unmarked door. The chamber beyond is dark. Going by the echoes, it is also huge.
A dim light comes on over at one end of the room, highlighting a stage and a large screen. You see seats when you turn to face away from the stage.
‘Come on,’ Dr Golding says, heading up towards a seat near the centre. ‘Let’s get a good view.’ You follow her, and sit beside her.
Vicky snaps her fingers. The room lights dim to blackness, and a video file opens on the screen.
‘This is what’s on that flash drive,’ Vicky says.
The story continues in two weeks