Like with Tavor, Ali met Rajan in the same location in both the original story I wrote a decade and go and the rewritten published version. Ali was always a nerdy museum lover, so their meeting place got to remain the same. 

Ruby 

But the original version had several differences to the rewritten one – none of which made the story better. Ali actually encountered both Rajan AND Ocean at the museum via their gems originally. And, like with Tavor being in the park, I had no good reason for them being there. My vague thought was that their gems had been lost from The Society and in museum care for some time . . . which, of course, only would have worked if no one ever touched their gems. Which is just silly.

Though I suppose that would work if museum employees only ever handled the gems with gloves. Regardless, I needed a more solid reason for why a genie gem was there in the first place. 

Also like Ali’s meeting with Tavor, there was no antagonist in this part of the story. Ali touched the two gems, the genies appeared, she set off museum alarms, so they ran home. End of the adventure. Partly that was because I originally had Ali meet all seven of the genies in one book rather than splitting it between two, so it was more smooshed together with a lot less action in the beginning of the story.

Taking Ocean out of things and giving Rajan a real reason to be there (his master showing off that he had his family’s fire genie without him explicitly telling people), gave me an opportunity to show off how arrogant and conceited Society members are, gave Rajan and Ali some real time together to get to know each other (they’re meeting is probably my favorite out of all the genies), as well as an opportunity for me to show how frightening Darios’s magic is before he ever arrived on the page.