: Re: How can I get 2 characters to bond while standing alternate watches? Setting is standard space opera. I am writing a story in which 2 characters are crewing a spaceship. The characters are:

@Mendez196

This is part of the plot of The Three Musketeers.

In Alexandre Dumas' famous novel, the main character d'Artagnan belongs to a different military branch than his three friends (Athos, Portos, and Aramis) who belong the The Musketeers military group.

The main character, through happenstance, accidentally annoys those three the first time he meets them, and arranges to meet them for a duel. Before they begin dueling, they are interrupted with by members of a different military group - viewed as their political enemies, but part of the same government - that try to arrest them for dueling illegally (IIRC). The four characters (the protagonist and the three musketeers) join together and fight them off, and bond over each others' skill in swordsmanship, and in the thrill of victory, become friends.

Throughout the rest of the book, the protagonist d`Artagnan joins one or more of his three musketeer friends during their assigned watches, and one or more of them join his, to keep each other company, and then when the nation goes to war, they end up near each other and fight together.

At the end of the book, d'Artagnan finally gets permission from his superiors to join the Musketeers himself. Unfortunately, his three friends are exiting the Musketeers at that point in time. Over the course of two or four more books (depending on how the serialization gets bundled), d'Artagnan rises to be leader of the musketeers, and then still higher. But the entire series, in all the events that occur, often have the characters not technically in the same group, and often even in opposing groups, but has their growing friendships rise above the bureaucratic distance between them, with them contriving methods of giving each other company, or - when actively opposing each other or working against each others' side during political uprisings and civil wars in their country - artificially keeping their distances.

(While this sounds cheesy and gimicky the way I'm writing it, it's not lampshaded, and not too apparent except when you take a step back and analyze it. What I mean is, it's not the plot of the story that they can't hang out or whatever - it doesn't feel contrived, but a natural result of what's going on, and the interweaving stories involving the four)

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