Formidable Characters

I think I've more or less recovered from travel, and I may have kind of started working out what needs to happen in the rest of the book. It's a huge shift from what I had planned, which means I have to totally rethink it, and I need to come up with details and specifics. The fact that this is pretty hard is a good sign that I'm on the right track because it means I can't just handwave my way past it, and it means I'm really pushing the characters to the limit.

One of my current challenges is...