My current work in progress, tentatively titled
Adventure Constant, features a hero of undefined race (character insert vagueness for the win!) fighting the Nordic villain and his middle-eastern henchmen through sea caves. He is hard pressed and facing Certain Doom, when his adventure team buddies show up. They consist of a Hawaiian warrior complete with leiomano (pictured below), a British spy, and a rifle wielding samurai.
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| My hero wields one of these made of steel |
I didn't set out to make an international team of heroes, it just sort of worked out that way. The hero's spaceship crashed into the Pacific Ocean and he washed ashore on Waikiki Beach in the middle of a kidnapping attempt. There's really only one kind of princess you'd expect to find on Waikiki Beach, and that's the Hawaiian kind, and it's only natural that her chief guard would also be Hawaiian. When the duo hare off to Shanghai to rescue her, it only made sense for them to find an ally in a samurai serving the Shogunate as a sort of knight errant. When they fight off the French-Algerian pirate serving the Haitian Pirate Prince, it only made sense for the prisoner they inadvertently rescue to be a captured British secret agent.
To be fair, because this is an alternate-earth tale, the whole point is showcasing how different nations developed. The two best ways to do that are to write a globe hopping adventure and to include people from lots of different countries. My novel hits three tropic islands in two different oceans and the hero touches down in Asia, Central America, and New York City. That's a whole lot of mileage. The climax of the adventure also occurs in the alt-earth's version of the United Nations, which provides an excuse to mention
every nation in a way that is completely natural and unobtrusive.
These things don't need to feel forced. It actually makes for a better story when they happen organically.
