Eloquent JS, chapter 4 plot draft

gistfile1.txt

== The weresquirrel ==

Every now and then, usually between eight and ten in the evening,
Jaques finds himself transforming into a small furry rodent with a
bushy tail.

One the one hand, Jaques is quite glad that he doesn't have classical
lycantropy. Turning into a squirrel tends to cause less problems than
turning into a wolf. Instead of having to worry about accidentally
eating the neighbor (that would be extremely awkward), he worries
about being eaten by the neighbor's cat. After two occasions where he
woke up on a precariously thin branch in the crown of an oak, naked
and disoriented, he has taken to locking the doors and windows of his
room at night, and putting a few walnuts on the floor to keep himself
busy.

That takes care of the cat and oak problems. But Jaques still suffers
from his condition. The irregular occurences of the transformation
make him suspect that there might be some trigger that causes them to
happen. For a while, he believed that it only happened on days when he
had touched trees. So he stopped touching trees entirely, and even
avoided going near them. But the problem persisted.

Switching to a more scientific approach, Jaques intends to start
keeping a daily log of the things he did that day, and whether he
ended up changing form. Using such data on his own life, he hopes to
be able to narrow down the conditions that trigger the transformations.

The first thing he does is to design a data structure to store this
information.