Backstory: Dark Steel · 3:18am May 27th, 2021
Dark Steel was the last story written in the original Quicksilver Chronicles series. I'd finished the big ending story and was thinking about what to do next. It occurred to me that I'd introduced a new secondary character in chapter 3 of One of Us, the private investigator Dark Steel who aided Quicksilver and Misty in their search for Tinker Cob. He was only in the story for a couple of scenes, and we didn't see any of what he did to try and find Tinker. I wondered what the search would have been like from his perspective. So I wrote it.
When I was done, I thought: this is a classic detective tale, it should be written as one. I copy/pasted the story into a new doc and edit it from third-person into first-person. Additional internal dialog was added turning it into the general story/film Noir style. This makes it a totally different type of story from any of the others in the series.
One big problem was how much content from One of Us to duplicate in Dark Steel. The scenes when Quicksilver and Misty hire him, and when he reports his findings are obviously the same in both stories. But I didn't want to directly duplicate those scenes in the new story as it would be too much copied content. So it became a balancing act as to just how much to duplicate, and how it would be altered as viewed from Dark Steel's perspective. The result works, but has increased the importance of reading the prequel first to fully understand the context of his search for Tinker.
Of additional note is that some five months later, I returned to Dark Steel again. He now has two more stories in the editing queue making him an official spin-off series from The Quicksilver Chronicles. We'll have to wait and see if any additional stories reveal themselves in the future.
