If you're trapped in the body of an untrustworthy enemy, how to convince your nearest and dearest

[jack]

1. For the love of God, don't try to do it in person. You'll get stabbed before you can open your mouth, and it'll all be uphill from there. Send a message.

2. Lead up to it. Hint that you might be alive, and then what might have happened, and then admit in whom.

3. Don't start with the extraordinary hypothesis, and then try to provide evidence. However convincing, it always looks like flannelling. Start with hints, and then the evidence, and when they're hungry for an explanation, propose the hypothesis.

4. On the other hand, if try to lead up to it, leave a good explanation somewhere safe, so if you're killed again, they can piece it together

5. Being trapped in the body of an enemy is always dire. However good an idea it might seem, always try to avoid it.

Comments

[darcydodo]

Have you been watching Buffy again? Tsk tsk. ;)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

ROFL. Actually, no -- I seem to recall Buffy actually did this very well (well, in the most prominent example, I can't recall how many other similar ones there might have been). Buffy and Faith learned useful things from the experience, and didn't as I recall behave very stupidly at all (apart from the initial premise). Maybe I'm forgetting some of Buffy's difficulties, but I thought she was captured almost before she had a chance, and the watcher's council didn't trust either of them, and then she finally did convince her friends.

It was actually a book, which isn't that good as a book, but most of the ideas are interesting, but that made me rant about this :) It's about someone cursed to repeatedly swap into the body of anyone who kills him; but as things fall apart, it feels very much like an introduction to a character we've seen elsewhere, thouasands of years later, who can't remember where his plural existence started, and is slowly going mad from the combined snippets of recollections from so many bodies.

He still hasn't come up with one of the painful but potentially effective methods of assassination his condition affords him: walk up the opposing army and start hacking. Likely, once all but one of the guards have been stabbed in the back by their comrades, he'll be the one left standing :)