abandoned ideas 2

This ended up being more "occasional" than I initially thought it was, but I've had a slow week and so here's the second lot of abandoned story ideas. 2 today:

Devotion of Purpose

This got very close to being completed. It was quite a long short story.

The basic plot was that it's about a terrorist who is being tortured to reveal the identity of his fellow terrorists. There were three strands to it.

The present day was the main plot and involved the terrorist being tortured in a variety of ways - some psychological, some physical. It was quite brutal and this was the part I pretty much wrote all of.

The second strand was the terrorist act that had got him caught. Essentially it was an assassination attempt on the leader of the country. It never quite got finished as I couldn't really decide what was what.

Questions I ended up with included how did they get "on the inside" (it kinda involved an inside job)? Did all of his fellow terrorists die so the torture was pointless)? Did civilians die and did the terrorist regret that? Or had he gone over the edge or something?

The third strand was why it never got finished. The basic idea was that the terrorist was recruited by a woman he fell in love with. I had this strong idea about a small china cat decoration - how they met and what he thought of before he died, maybe.

Problem was I couldn't get the link of how he actually became a terrorist. I'd kinda made it so that his woman was killed with the other terrorists in their attack, and that's why he wasn't talking - he wanted to die. But how did he actually switch to being an actual terrorist who kills innocent civilians? Especially given he's meant to start normal.

I couldn't really think of anything, especially since the way I'd intended the structure to go I didn't have a lot of space. It had to be something fairly quick, but I just couldn't think of anything significant enough.

Hanger 12

This idea was on a course to non-completion from the very beginning.

Basically, I had this idea of a big passenger jet exploding on the tarmac. It was a future plane with multiple decks so the deaths were huge.

And that was it - I tried to build a story around it and just kinda failed. I seem to recall I managed to get myself tied up in knots with all sorts of conspiracy ideas, though.

I can't remember all of them, but it was like there was somebody trying to stop the explosion and it wasn't clearly going to be terrorists blowing it up or the terrorists were really government people, or... I dunno, I remember it got really messy :/.