Chapter 7

Chapter 7 — "(untitled)"

TL;DR: Agents burst into Martin’s Seattle apartment; he blinks into his car and wrecks it, drops in on his parents for a rushed goodbye, then triggers his prepped Escape jump to the Middle Ages.

Summary: Federal-looking agents in dark windbreakers swarm the breezeway outside Martin’s apartment; the door splinters under a battering ram as his laptop cursor blinks on a terminal-green screen. Martin pops himself out of the room in a panic, reappearing in the driver’s seat of his car and fumbling the wheel into an immediate crunching crash, airbags exploding like white pixel clouds. Sirens and shouted commands echo off wet pavement as he vanishes again, this time into the soft-lit quiet of his parents’ suburban living room. He delivers a breathless, awkward goodbye—no details, just worry in his mother’s eyes and his father frozen mid-remote—before stepping away from the family photos and knit afghan. With a preloaded macro labeled Escape hovering on his screen—latitude, longitude, and a twelfth-century date shimmering in terminal-green—he steels himself and hits it. The room drops away as if someone yanked the background layer from a game screen.

Key scenes:

• Seattle apartment breach: a low-rent complex breezeway, door kicked in, blinds rattling; Martin glows with screen-light as he teleports out.
• Street escape gone wrong: he materializes in his car; screech, quick lurch, crunch into an obstacle; airbag bloom, spiderwebbed windshield, scattered glass like chunky white-blue pixels.
• Parents’ house farewell: beige carpet, family photos in a tight grid, a crocheted throw over a couch, lamplight on framed school pictures; his mother and father stunned as he says he has to go.
• The Escape: close-up on a keyboard/screen with a big ESC label and a readout of coordinates and “12th century” in phosphor green; finger presses, and the scene wipes to nothing.

Characters present: Martin Kenneth Banks, unspecified federal agents, Martin’s mother, Martin’s father

Locations / settings:

• Martin’s Seattle apartment — narrow breezeway, splintered door, blinds striping daylight, dual monitors with terminal-green text
• Parking lot/street by the apartment — wet asphalt sheen, boxy sedan interior, deployed airbag cloud, crooked hood steaming
• Parents’ suburban living room — soft lamp glow, neutral walls, couch with knit afghan, family photo collage, a TV remote frozen in hand
• On-screen “Escape” interface — terminal-green glyphs on black, lat/long fields, a year set to the 1100s pulsing like a loading cursor

Visual motifs:

• Terminal-green code blocks, blinking cursor, a single oversized ESC key
• Dark windbreakers, battering ram silhouette, splinters and paper drifting like pixels
• White airbag puff, cracked windshield lattice, skewed steering wheel, dangling seatbelt
• Lamplight amber against beige carpet, framed photos with tiny faces, crocheted textures
• Sky-blue negative space behind silhouettes, forest-green shrubs by a driveway, sandy-ochre sidewalk, charcoal outlines
• Computer-meets-medieval wink: parchment-texture overlay faintly under the coordinate readout as he selects a century

Emotional tone: breathless, slapstick, anxious, determined

Confidence: medium — I’m confident about the sequence of beats but not specific props, names, or car details (unspecified in my training)