Flashbacks

My beta-reader told me I need to have some more character building of the villians, Harold and Wanda. This, I admit, is hard for me to do, preferring shadowy threats. By the beginning of the book, my main character and the villains are not as good friends as they'd been -- it's actually probable that they'd never been close friends, even though they were Kat's friends at a vulnerable time.

So Kat has only three direct interactions with the villains during the book, and when someone's trying to kill you, there's not much time to build character. So how do I do this?

Flashbacks!

I like writing flashbacks, but I usually reserve them for scenes that would ordinarily be one big information dump so that I can show, rather than just tell, the audience what had happened. But I hadn't thought of writing flashbacks for Kat's interactions for Harold and Wanda.

But my readers can't react to what's in my head if it never makes it on paper.

(Wanda and Harold met me just outside the soup kitchen -- 

"Hey, I've just had lunch," I groused, "Do you expect me to jump on a full stomach?"

"Don't be a bitch," Harold said loftily, as Wanda looked down her nose at me as if I'd crawled out from under a rock. "We've got an experiment we need you to do."

"Why me? I'm a Junior Birdman. You're the King." I knew, deep down, that i would do whatever he asked me to, because they were my friends. And Harold -- Harold was special. I would probably do it for him.

"You're faster than I am. I need someone fast to do this. I bet you can't do it, though." Harold examined his hands, probably for invisible dirt specks, as I'd never seen him with his hands dirty. 

"You bet I can't do what?" I demanded.

"Change the outcome of that game over there." Wanda interjected in her haughty voice. 

"But that won't work!" I groused. "The rock principle will keep it from changing."

"I'm going with you," Harold reassured me. "We're jumping into the past to that shell game over there and you're going to tip over the right cup so the mooch sees he's getting conned ."

I protested. "By "we", you mean me. How would I know where the ball landed?"

"You know," Harold gritted his teeth. "You always know. I've seen you run that game."

"You can't change time. I try to change that and the cup won't tip over. It always works that way."  I'd tried it -- I can win the game myself, but I can't change the outcome of the game itself."

"But what if I change one or two other things at the same time? The rock principle only maintains one material fact at a time. With one or two other changes at once, I hope to confuse things so that the rock principle doesn't change the shell game."

"But what about crossing ourselves?" I demanded. "I only have what -- four minutes before I die?"

"You'll have to do it quickly, I guess," Harold shrugged. "Unless you don't think you can -- "

"Alright. I'll do it." I always knew I would.

We jumped to three minutes before the start of the round, and Wanda came with us as witness. She and Harold stepped back while I walked up to the game, which involved a mooch and a grifter (as we called victims and fraudsters on the street). 

The idea was to reach in and tip the cup with the ball under it at the exact moment that the mooch was to guess the whereabouts of the ball. He wouldn't -- the sleight-of-hand of the operator guaranteed it. The big trick was to tip the ball and jump before the grifter caught my wrist and took me behind the nearest building to beat me to a pulp. I wondered why Harold would subject me to that risk, or the risk of crossing myself and being crushed, if he was my friend. But he trusted me...

One exhilarating moment later, I had tipped the cup, revealing the ball to be in a different cup than it would have appeared to the mooch, and I jumped back to my present time without dying. I bent over, gasping and laughing.

"You're the best," Harold clapped me on the shoulder. "I knew you could do it. I think we should make a game of this. Call it -- Voyageur. Like Traveller, but provocative."

Then we blinked out of sight before the irate con artist reached us.)