Writers (and readers) who are also, in their own way, fineapples. All friendly here.
Help! My heroes need to fail!
Okay, so I'm going to try to give as much background as I can. The Heroes have discovered that a series of seemingly random could-be-street-crime deaths are, in fact, an attempt to kill every member of a research team. They have located the still living members and split up to try to save them both. One (A) arrives too late. The other (O) arrives while the target is still alive.
Two things need to ultimately happen: O needs to fail to save the target, and O needs to follow the killer back to their vehicle, which will have some Vital Information for moving to the next location.
So... I need a way for O to fail, but not because he's stupid. He's supposed to be quite good at this heroing business and decent at strategy. But taking the right moves and reasonable precautions should still ultimately not be enough.
First thought: When you know someone is going to be killed, you move them to a more secure location. So he'd reasonably take that step. The most secure location is going to be intergalactic embassy. Perhaps the embassy has pretty good measures for ensuring that only people who are supposed to work there get inside? DNA scanners? Some reason to believe that the assassin Isn't going to be among the staff, at least easily. Things not accounted for: assassin getting on the guest list through political means, assassin hacking the embassy computers.
One of those things happens. More guards are sent to guard the target, the assassin replaces a guard and kills the target, chase to vehicles ensues.
Too easy?
Second Though: Bypass the whole "planning" aspect and have the attack hit as they're leaving the first location, in the "get you to a safe place" part of the plan. So it's not that the hero planned poorly, it's that he didn't really have time. Target panics, runs the wrong way, dead, pursue attacker. It shortcuts around having to come up with all the contingencies and having them fail. Maybe doesn't make the hero seem like an idiot. But it does rely on pretty damn close timing for two people traveling between planets to end up in the same place at the same time, such that 5 minutes either direction would have meant a complete getaway or complete victory. That may stretch credibility.
I was also thinking maybe he arrives early enough to set up a decoy. But then, the target still has to die, so somehow the decoy plan would involve not just sending them straight off world, which would be the reasonable thing to do.
Other ideas?




I like solution #2 the best. I think #1 works too, without reflecting badly on the hero, but #2 sounds like it'd be more thrilling to read, especially if you amp up the urgency factor in the text as the hero races to get the target into safety on time.
In that case, the failure could be practically anything. The target trips and falls, environmental. They're running and fighting and all it takes is a stray shot to take the target down. At which point the assassin tries to get away (and also fails).
I think that's pretty solid to be honest. Doesn't always have to be complicated, and time as a factor always adds good tension.
You don't think it's too convenient for two groups of people to arrive at basically the same house at the same time? Or that readers just largely won't think about that.
Hm... possible. There could always be some reason why they'd be likely to arrive simultanesouly. Like, maybe information about the location was released to both sides at the same time? Or maybe the bad guys followed the good guys?
Is there a reason that the villain couldn't have arrived a little bit earlier and was basically waiting to ambush them as soon as they left?
They could have. But... why not just kill the guy in his home and leave? That's actually what they did to everyone else and is what they'd have been planning to do this time, too, except the heroes show up.
The bad guys are operating from a position of more information than the good guys right now. What the good guys eventually gain from their failures is a key piece of information that gets them back on an even playing field.
So how did the good guys find out where this person was? Just trying to get the image in my head.
Well he's literally just at home. He has no idea he's in danger.
Once the good guys realized that everyone involved with this one project was being targeted, they did some facial recognition off a team photo to get names and contacted the embassy on planet to get them working on an address for when they arrived.
The bad guys started with the names already. I imagine there are a number of ways they could have gotten the home address, including using political ties to also ask at the embassy or going to the place of employment and stealing it. Or torturing it out of one of the previous people. Something like that.
Or... maybe not? Maybe it's a very security-conscious planet and the bad guys DID have to wait for the heroes to get the address... which would solve the timing thing.
Oh yeah, that could work too.
Also, you could potentially have it be a... race that switches? Like, maybe the heroes hurry to get there before the baddies once they have the info, and beat them there through luck but just barely? Or maybe the heroes catch the target like... on the way back to the house from the store and start to usher him away but then it turns out the baddies were already in the house waiting. So first it's a race to him on time and then a race away.
I also like #2 better, because I always get annoyed with stories where the villain is impossibly smarter and better all the time and always 1 step ahead no matter what, and I feel like you'd have to stretch too much into that area in order to get it to work. I can believe chance contributing to a failure more than I can believe the super-villain who magically overcomes all the planning and obstacles you create to try to defeat or escape them.
Another possibility: O did everything by the book, but fails because the assassin(s) have access to tech/weaponry that shouldn't be there. O's involvement forces the baddies on the scene to pull out some trump card--and the fact that they have access to that kind of tech is a clue the heroes can use.
If the baddies were trying to make these look like random could-be-street-crime deaths, maybe they've set up some sort of surveilance around the house, with the hope of killing O's researcher (quietly, without needing to break into the house) the next time they left. Once the baddies see O enter, they correctly guess that O will try to take the researcher to the embassy, and scramble to prevent this from happening. We can have a long chase scene of O strutting their stuff, e.g. with a bunch of "Gosh, these guys are really good... but I'm better"-type remarks from O. Right after clearing the last ambush (maybe throw in an observation about how desperate the baddies attempts are becoming--that they've completely given up trying to be discreet, and this carnage will probably make the nightly news) O suddenly notices something is off, and realizes, seconds before it happens, that some tightly-controlled military-grade weapon is being pointed at them, and it's too late to save the researcher. Again--the existence of the thing they pull out is a big reveal, (with a lot of emphasis on how badly O forced their hand) and the cause of O's failure can be the mechanism for driving the plot forward.
This is an interesting idea. I'll have to think on whether there's a tech they could use that would furnish a useful piece of information.