Dialogue Prompt – Don’t Fall

In this prompt by The Fake Redhead, we have someone who is seemingly more concerned with getting yelled at than at the physical well being of another person. Now, we don’t actually know that’s the case and this kind of language doesn’t usually mean what it seems to at surface level. It’s kind of on par with, “If you don’t come back alive, I’ll kill you,” but not exactly.

We don’t know much about the relationship between these two, but it seems likely they are not siblings at the very least don’t share the same mom. They could be parent and child, half siblings, step-siblings, cousins or other relatives, or friends, but I doubt that they are are more distantly related than that, mostly because the speaker seems to have some sort of a relationship with the hearer’s mother.

Depending on the general seriousness or lack thereof for the speaker, their relationship may be different. Most serious people aren’t going to joke about this kind of thing, but technically it might not be a joke. They may genuinely believe that if the hearer falls off a cliff, the hearer’s mother will kill them.

Another thing to note is that we know nothing about the cliff other than there is one. It might be a short cliff with little chance of death or even injury. This is unlikely, but not impossible, so it is something to keep in mind if you decide to use this prompt.

I said before that this is between the speaker getting yelled at and the hearer getting injured. It’s also possible that the mom actually would kill the speaker if their child fell off a cliff, regardless of the outcome of the fall, so it’s possible that the speaker could end up in worse shape, dead, than the hearer, injured. That’s one way you could take this if you wanted. What kind of character would you need to create to make such a threat credible to the speaker? Maybe the mother is head of a mafia like organization and her child’s well being is the top of her priorities to the point where she has already left a trail of bodies of people who hurt, deliberately or not, her child.

I also considered the possibility that this is a group trip. Maybe it’s a school trip and these two are together on some sort of buddy system, making them responsible for the well being of each other. If there are other people around, I wonder what they think of this comment, assuming they even hear it. Is it a normal comment they don’t even take mind to or no more than to se what the hearer is doing to bring it about? Or is it scary and causes them to be worried for everyone in the group should something happen to the one? As with most dialogue prompts, there is a lot of leeway with this prompt. Where do you see it going?

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