This confused me until I realised what it was you were trying to achieve. Got there in the end.Nicely written although a little clunky for me at times. Good premise and with a little bi of tidying up could be a great story.
Well done.

Thank you suffering through this script, everyone. The scenes are exactly in reverse order, and other than a disjointed side-trip to two weddings, are supposed to be explaining the cause of the previous scene. Billy's predictions for his choices are exactly wrong: Bill does not live longer, nor does William leave a legacy, so the right answer would be to do what he wants rather than trying to optimize some kind of score.

The trait tying both versions together was a Hank-Hill-level of devotion to the employer, though obviously I failed to get that across in six pages. The William side in particular desperately needed some beefing up.

Dave, supers indicating the time would be an excellent idea... it just didn't fit with the page limitation.

Quoted from Matthew Taylor I'll get there before Libby does - she lies on the sidewalk, and the chubby man is lying in a pool of blood.

Never mind, changing "laying" to "lying" opens up so much space that supers would fit easily

Of course Bill died due to his life choices... he should have chosen not to be born into a group that would be targeted by racist assholes many years later. This was an anyone-can-die-anytime bit of randomness. With extra space I'd've shown him putting off re-evaluating life insurance because he's constantly handling minutia at the store. As Rene put it, when your time is up, it's up.

The overwriting/unfilamble stuff is intended to help the actor and director know how to portray the character. Describing him as "American-born" is a description of his accent or lack thereof, since I really don't want the storytelling to get distracted by discussions about immigration and assimilation. As far as I can tell, no one actually describes themselves as "American-born Japanese," though the term "American-born Chinese" is common enough to have its own Wikipedia article.

It is unrealistic that the two timelines would actually intersect. Definitely happens at the end (opening scene) and implied with the business interruption insurance. I used some poetic license there

Quoted from ReneC So this becomes an allegory, where anyone could be William and anyone could be Bill, because it isn't about who they are, it's about the fallout of that one decision made by Billy at 16.

Or, yeah, totally did that on purpose to get people thinking about allegory. I was really shooting for a "that could have been me" effect, but Rene's idea is way cooler.

For anyone who was curious about what the "spooky purple bat" looks like:



This particular comic is rare, but not so rare that a comic book store owner like Bill couldn't find it. Plausible if Bill has his heart set on something with a CGC condition of at least 9.9 out of 10 because those rarely come up for sale.