Looking for Suggestions

[Jimmy Olsen]

My stories tend to get overly complicated, which means it takes many sessions to complete them, and sometimes even requires research.  I'm trying to write a brief, simple story instead.

I have the ending.  A woman is in public when she suddenly loses her clothes and her bladder and bowel control.  But why does this happen?  I'd like your suggestions.  I started working on a story for this, but it became insanely complicated multi-chapter affair with world-building.

My newer idea is better, but it's still pretty complicated and not that entertaining.  A woman finds some kind of robotic alien suit that boosts her strength and does other cool things.  It's easily portable and concealable, but can surround her body when she needs it (it's either liquid metal or made of a bunch of tiny parts).  One day she's about to take a much needed restroom break when the P.A. system in the building warns that there's a hostile individual with a gun.  After solving a hostage crisis, the aliens who built the suit show up.  They've been watching the city, waiting for their lost gadget to resurface.  They steal the suit off her body, leaving her naked in full view of the crowd who had assembled to witness her heroics.  To make matters worse, she'd forgotten all about using the bathroom, and the sudden loss of her super-strength forces her to immediately urinate and defecate.

Like I said, I'm not crazy about the idea, and if you have a better suggestion for a story with the same outcome I'd love to hear it.

[BlueSniper]

My stories tend to get overly complicated, which means it takes many sessions to complete them, and sometimes even requires research.  I'm trying to write a brief, simple story instead.

I have the ending.  A woman is in public when she suddenly loses her clothes and her bladder and bowel control.  But why does this happen?  I'd like your suggestions.  I started working on a story for this, but it became insanely complicated multi-chapter affair with world-building.

My newer idea is better, but it's still pretty complicated and not that entertaining.  A woman finds some kind of robotic alien suit that boosts her strength and does other cool things.  It's easily portable and concealable, but can surround her body when she needs it (it's either liquid metal or made of a bunch of tiny parts).  One day she's about to take a much needed restroom break when the P.A. system in the building warns that there's a hostile individual with a gun.  After solving a hostage crisis, the aliens who built the suit show up.  They've been watching the city, waiting for their lost gadget to resurface.  They steal the suit off her body, leaving her naked in full view of the crowd who had assembled to witness her heroics.  To make matters worse, she'd forgotten all about using the bathroom, and the sudden loss of her super-strength forces her to immediately urinate and defecate.

Like I said, I'm not crazy about the idea, and if you have a better suggestion for a story with the same outcome I'd love to hear it.

One word: Nanobots. If the suit is made of a cloud of nanobots, it would be able to assemble itself and dissolve into a small container or really do whatever you wanted, since nanobots.

If you don't want that background story you described, you could simply have the loss of her bladder/bowel control be the result of the shock of losing her clothes rather than having a specific external cause => effect. Or, she's testing a new diet pill and there's a runaway giant vacuum cleaner that just happens to suck off her clothes in a strangely specific and gradual manner. Or she's a witch trying and failing to turn herself invisible. Or, she's doing some sort of spy-vs.-spy thing, and she realizes she just drank a mild laxative left by the other spy to slow her down, but while she's parkouring across rooftops to get to her hotel and drink a counter-agent, her skirt gets caught on a stray hook or something, and RRRRRIP

Also, I totally understand how you feel regarding work that goes into your stories, especially ones that are original or involve original characters. It is actually difficult for me to just throw something together where a girl dashes into a bathroom, drops a load, washes her hands, and gets out (possibly bumping into someone or realizing she hasn't quite finished). It's why I tend to fall back on the sorceress/shapeshifter/alien/"other" explanation, not to mention that it makes it easier to justify the sheer size of the...output, so to speak.

I definitely understand the frustration at having to do research for a fetish-fic on a small corner of the net. I distinctly remember looking up some of the secrets/trivia of Pac-Man for Schizo, which I still haven't finished and may never finish. One suggestion I have is to try not to force it. Write when you feel like writing, or just let your fingers go without thinking. Another option is what I like to call "dictionary soup"; flip around through random words in a dictionary until you have a weird assortment of words, and then find some way to string them together. So something like

purple - bottle - window - excessive - linguistic - tuba

becomes a story about a person who finds a purple genie in a bottle by her windowsill and wishes for something excessively extravagant, not realizing that the genie speaks a different language and the word for "money" in English sounds like the word for "flatulence" in the genie's native language, causing her to have uncontrollable farts that sound like a tuba.

...

(but don't use that specifically)

[paragon]

I think the main problem is the "instantly" part of the girl losing her clothes, because nothing happens instantly without magic or sci-fi, the description of which is where you're getting bogged down. Without having to make an expansive backstory, the closest real-life "instant" clothing loss I think anyone can get is having those clothes destroyed or torn away. Like BlueSniper said, a stray piece of scenery can tear clothes right off, like a tree branch for outdoor scenes or a metal protrusion for the indoors. Or the source might play a more active role in the story, like a dress getting snagged in a car door that's angrily driving off or skillfully unzipped by a prankster.

In terms of clothes being outright destroyed, the elements can make short work of flimsy materials, like a cosplayer's tissue-paper costume falling apart when fire sprinklers go off in the convention hall, or an actress' delicate getup getting blown away by a huge special-effects fan during filming. Regardless, I think the key is to not spend so much time forcing the environment to explain instantly-vanishing clothes, and leaning on sci-fi or magic puts even more strain on everyone's suspension of disbelief to the point where you find yourself having to explain the need for mech suits and alien invasions. Less is more!

[EnragedFilia]

If you ask me, the more problematic part of that outline is "at the same time". Namely: does it still count if, for instance, the accident leads to the nudity.

Some time ago, while watching various MMD videos in which costumes inexplicably change in the middle of the dance, I came up with the idea for a story in which an idol singer achieves that mid-song costume switch effect with holographic projection. Naturally, circumstances conspire to force her to keep the projector in her panties, where a small accident gets it slightly damp in the middle of the performance, shorting it out and causing the costume to disappear.

As you can see, the two elements here are more connected than in the original description, which I feel makes it more workable. Using phlebotinum in a story is perfectly reasonable so long as one doesn't push the reader's suspension of disbelief too far. Contrived coincidences, likewise, can be justified easily enough in the story's setup with a little work (she was planning to keep the emitter in her bra, but the holograph wasn't designed with one in mind so it kept clipping through the costume and she had to take it off, and that just left her panties). What can't be excused so easily is springing things on the reader in the climax with no warning. Whether it's surprise phlebotinum (aliens show up in an otherwise mundane setting, a pet cat turns out to be telepathic for no good reason, etc.) or surprise coincidences (she just happened to lose control at the same time as she got stripped, maybe handwaved with "the shock and embarrassment" or some such), suspension of disbelief has a much higher threshold to meet than if you set up a sequence of events beforehand to make that climax believable (which in a storytelling context really just means "not quite unbelievable").

As paragon has also pointed out, adding phlebotinum to a story may create a need to explain what that phlebotinum is doing in the setting and how it works, which can lead to a big unwieldy backstory. But there are other options, such as a relatively simple or widely recognizable bit of phlebotinum (the holographic clothing described above doesn't need much explaining because we're familiar with it from Star Trek and Halo and every other sci-fi setting with a hologram in it), or by using an easily recognizable setting (superheroes have superpowers, and we don't need to explain why because people have heard of superheroes before) or even an actual pre-built setting (D&D has options for mind control, invisibility, disappearing objects, etc., all with very thoroughly defined rules freely available on the SRD). Even that powered armor dealie doesn't really require a big messy backstory with aliens and whatnot if you just say "it's part of a secret military experiment". People know about "secret military experiments" and you don't really need to explain any more than that as long as you don't try to do anything silly with it (so a Halo suit might be pushing things, and a giant robot is right out).

So with that out of the way, let's see if I can come up with some actual suggestions:
As above, idol singer with holographic costume, accident shorts out the emitter on stage.

In a setting with D&D rules: An important lady of some sort ends up wearing clothes created with the Minor Creation spell (which seems to be practically designed to produce stuff just so that it can disappear after a specific time limit). My original idea for this actually just involved disappearing underwear. As you may have noticed I kinda have a thing for girls that aren't wearing underwear, especially without realizing it. Anyway, thanks to a spectacular bit of bad timing the creation spell expires while our unfortunate subject is, I dunno, giving a speech or something.

In a modern or near-future setting, a cartoonishly villainous villainess conspires to assassinate a group of people by swallowing a canister of poison gas, which will then remain in her digestive system until released by remote control or something (there was a thread about this sort of thing a while back). Due to the interference of a cartoonishly incompetent wannabe hero, the deadly canister ends up being filled instead with harmless inert gas and also administered to an unsuspecting bystander girl, who as luck would have it hasn't had a bowel movement for some time. When everyone discovers the situation, our hero and our villainess collide in an attempt to salvage their respective goals, someone accidentally rips the bystander's clothes off at the same time as someone pushes the remote control thingy, and the gas pushes out a big dump which, poetically, ends up all over the would-be assassin.

[Jimmy Olsen]

Thanks for the suggestions, guys!  This forum isn't dead after all. 

I'll be thinking about what you've said.  My first thought is that a magical girl wants to impress or frighten people with her awesomely superior magical powers.  She can only teleport her own body, so she creates magical clothes that appear a split second after she does.  And she's magically holding in her waste, either deliberately or as a side effect of something (like magical strength or a magical skintight shield or a magical girdle).  But her demonstration isn't so awe-inspiring after she gets cut off from her reservoir of magical powers and her clothes and holding power disappear.  That's just one idea.

The reason I plan to use sci-fi or fantasy is that my realistic stories don't seem to be as popular with the users here.

[OrpheumZero]

The idea could be sort of like a twisted take on the magical girl scenario. Sort of like that Madoka series or whatever where it's kind of skewered by some dark takes. Maybe one of the perks granted to the heroine makes it that she can hold far more than she normally could (and maybe used to have a terrible time holding before getting her powers). The cutting off of her powers (maybe the granter is sick or kidnapped) causes a fluctuation and the girl is suddenly burdened by her body's previously held back needs.

[EnragedFilia]

The magical girl paradigm is potentially useful, but I think rather than just "she's magically holding it in", a more indirect explanation might be better in keeping with that paradigm:

Magical girls always have a magical girl costume, obviously. And as anyone familiar with the genre will have noticed (probably without consciously making note of it) a magical girl's costume never gets dirty. Normally it's just an artistic convention, but if we were to upgrade that effect to an explicitly defined secondary power, it could be extended easily enough to even ensuring that the magical girl herself can never dirty her own costume, so to speak. To put it more simply, as long as she's in fighting mode her need to go is suppressed. So if she wears the costume for too long and it's suddenly removed, that could easily account for a simultaneous loss of control.

As for the details, maybe she's new at the magical girl thing, or maybe she's only filling in for the costume's actual wearer. Or she's stolen the costume, only for it to return to its rightful master as soon as she activates her transformation sequence.

[Jimmy Olsen]

I like the idea of the uncorruptible costume, but I have the plot pretty much decided now.  Thanks for the idea, though.  It (and other ideas in this thread) could be useful for future stories.

It's looking like the story is just going to be a battle and an accident, plus a prolog of sorts explaining what's going on.  I'm going to leave out the hostage rescue thing.  I kind of liked it because it led to some interesting dialog, and because it gave the heroine a chance to scold a normal human for having an accident only to later have one herself.  But that scene/subplot doesn't really mesh with the plot and heroine I have now.  Maybe I'll use it in something else.

[Jimmy Olsen]

Posting an update in case you thought I forgot about this.  I finally found the right file where I wrote the accident scene, and it isn't like how I remembered.  In order to make it fit the rest of the story, I'd have to revise it to the point that it would be totally mangled.  So I've written a new accident scene, even though the whole reason I wrote the rest of the story was to utilize the old accident scene.

Just a little more to work out, then I can post the story.  There's a good chance EnragedFilia won't like it because of the unanswered questions, but I think it's turning out quite good.

[OrpheumZero]

Unless you couldn't find a way to work back into what you did, or weren't as impressed with it anymore, you should have kept the old story around and just made both. One being the "roughdraft" and the other "the big budget feature"

[Jimmy Olsen]

I'll most likely use the original accident in a totally different story.  It's told from the point of view of a witness, and features a woman who seems at least a little proud of the mess she's making.