Subject: If I may?
Author:
Posted on: 2015-12-18 01:43:00 UTC
I looked at the wiki page on doors into HQ while I was beta-reading for Dorano, and found a mention of a door near a Swiss town that got destroyed by the Mysterious Somebody. That's where that came from. I guess it's an inactive door or something. hS, confirm/deny how legit this is?
Let's try this again...
Agents Meg Finley and Michelle Brooks are reporting for duty, as Agents in the Department of Floaters.
For their first adventure, they will be given their second mission after a slight recovery period from their first (this pretty little atrocity), in The TwoSue.
In Going Postal, Meg...well, you can probably guess.
Thanks to Scapegrace, the Irish Samurai, eatpraylove, Tira, and James Shields for beta-ing.
Agents: The fact that Meg "pushed the boundaries on what constitutes ‘torture’ once or twice" sent up a red flag for me, but as long as you don't go overboard with her and see to it that any inappropriate behavior has proper consequences, I think you should be fine there.
SPaG: Looks good. Thumbs up. Not much else to say here, move along.
Prompts: First one looks good. I was entertained, and I got a feel for the agents' characters. The second one was good in the same way, but there was some stuff that I didn't like too much. See below.
PPC Knowledge: Why was Meg, who was close to going crazy on everyone to the point where a nurse tried to tase her and she had to be sent to FicPsych, allowed to have visitors? That's a major safety hazard to both parties, and even if you were going by the rationalization that 'she'd help her calm down', the nurses wouldn't want to risk it because of the sheer unpredictability of what might happen. I'm not even going to go into how incredibly calm the nurse was about crazy-Meg escaping from her cell, never mind how she did that in the first place. Come on, HQ gets much crazier agents needing to be restrained; those cells would be pretty hard to break out of.
A few more points: I'd need hS to comment, but I'm pretty sure that Constance Simms was just a FicPsych nurse, never a patient. Then there's this "door to HQ" located in Switzerland. That's not to say HQ can't have other access points besides New Caledonia, but for the sake of requesting Permission it would probably be better to stick to established canon to show you know your stuff. I'm also going to flag the note about how Meg "can usually be found wearing either the department jumpsuit". The PPC doesn't really have a uniform; aside from early mentions in TOS and maybe some other spinoffs, it seems to have become 'whatever the agents want to wear, as long as it involves black and has the flash patch somewhere'.
So, I'm going to have to say Permission Denied, but just barely. Everything else looks great; just make sure you've got your PPC knowledge straight next time and you'll be golden.
I looked at the wiki page on doors into HQ while I was beta-reading for Dorano, and found a mention of a door near a Swiss town that got destroyed by the Mysterious Somebody. That's where that came from. I guess it's an inactive door or something. hS, confirm/deny how legit this is?
My apologies for the oversight. Though, er, if the nearby town was destroyed, that does call into question what Meg's family was doing vacationing there...
The relevant scene is the last one in Crashing Down Chapter 12, at the bottom of the page. The door is labelled 1-Sch-2, which means it's the second door in World One's Switzerland (ie, die Schweiz).
And since I'm here: have the documents been changed since you read them? As currently constituted, I see no mention of Constance being a patient (you're correct, she never was), and no indication that Meg escaped. I'm curious to know what they originally said...
hS
Rereading that scene, I have no idea where I got the idea that the town got destroyed. I'll fix the page.
Sorry, Dorano!
Mention of torture is gone, Constance is now just referenced as "a woman", no mention of a jumpsuit, the door's been changed to New Caledonia, and the entire FicPsych thing looks like it's been changed. There's probably other stuff I'm missing, but yeah.
The Wiki's not giving me any information on visitation policies and I don't recall reading any spinoffs where agents try to visit their snapped partners in in-patient wards, so the bit about safety came down to a combination of common sense and personal experience. I don't really feel like going into details, but I have seen what happens when a kid snaps to the point where they would be kicking, screaming, biting, and the like, so much that just holding them wouldn't be enough; they'd be locked in a padded room and nobody would be allowed to even go near the door in case it set them off again. There was one boy who managed to break his own wrist even in the padded room and when the nurses finally went in because it looked like he'd calmed down, they got attacked. So yeah, even if they look like they've calmed down... you never know.
So, since agents who snap are likely a lot more dangerous...yeah, allowing visitors for raging agents seems like it would be a huge no-no.
There is one story, but it won't necessarily help, since the patient in question had been there a long time and was long since stable enough for visitors.
BTW, y'all know FicPsych has a homepage, right? With links not only to stories set in and explicitly about FicPsych, but also to stories only partially concerning the department and/or its people? (I try to keep it more or less up to date, but it helps if people let me know when I ought to add to it.)
~Neshomeh, who knows about FicPsych.
You wouldn't happen to know anything about visitation rights for inpatients in DMSE&R, would you? It's relevant to one of my characters.
I think they probably call them "subjects." Just spitballing here, but their primary aim is research and experimentation on Suvians—mostly the vapid glitterball sort, AFAIK—so I don't imagine they're too keen on letting people in. Wouldn't want to upset an ongoing study.
OTOH, though there's not much written about them, what does exist seems to indicate that their personnel tend toward wacky-zany "science is fun!" sorts. Maybe you could talk them into it as long as you convince them it's for science. Who knows?
~Neshomeh
I know the first couple of references to the DMSE (the '&R' was added later) involved chopping bits off Suvians for testing. If Scapegrace is thinking of having them trying to 'cure' a Suvian (who would then be recruited)... they're not really the people I'd trust with that job. ^~ I'd put such a patient in Medical and have them use DMSE&R results in the treatment. The Wiki page even says that they don't often keep live subjects in the department.
(By 'first couple of references', I mean <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1rSa9ssZnbZh193iWrVryDJ7M1ZUw3366j0LZZ6IpfI">Vemi getting a blood sample (as the department's creator, she'd know) and Niamh taking a finger.)
hS
And no, I'm not trying to have her recruited. She's Algie's wife, and Algie's already been recruited, but, well... yeah, if it's not feasible I can always bung her in Medical instead, see how she responds to anti-Suvian retroviral treatments. =]
Obviously, I'm unable to comment on any specific cases of Suvians under the 'care' of the DMSE&R, in or out of partnership with Medical. But speaking in general, I'd like to observe that there are three categories of Mary Sue.
Four. ~Penny Smith, DMSE&R
All right, five. And - again in general - the effaciacy of treatment depends on the Suvian type in question.
1. First up, we have Suvians produced by the League - probably the most common variety. These can be drained of their glitter, but it is rarely worthwhile: their glitterless state is to be a blank nothingness, very similar to a crash test dummy. They show no personality outside that created by their story. They are not really people. Their genome literally spells out what they are supposed to-
Niamh, you're rambling. ~Penny
2. Secondly, there is the comparatively uncommon natural Suvian species. These have a low natural glitter level, but it is low - the League pumps their Sues full of the stuff. A natural Suvian can be trained to supress their Suvian instincts; many of the PPC's ex-Sues are natural.
3. Trained Suvians, created from fangirls. Under the Ispace Accords, these unfortunates are strictly outside the PPC's jurisdiction; they are fairly easy to redeem, though, since their Sueishness comes from indoctrination. Agent Penny believes that they are infused with glitter by their teachers, but when all you have is a centrifuge, I suppose everything looks like blood.
Hey!
At least I didn't say 'when all you have is training as an assassin...'.
Hey!
4. Possessed Suvians. These are usually (but not always) canon characters possessed by a wraith; liberating them is as simple as exorcising the spirit.
5. Artificial Suvians, created by infusing ordinary people with glitter. There are several diseases found in HQ which have this effect. Some of them are simple to cure, others are very difficult.
This whole picture is complicated by the fact that the genus Puella has traditionally been applied to all forms of Suvian. As the description above shows, one category (3) is strictly H. sapiens, while another (1) can be argued to not be a species at all. Sue-wraiths should be a clade in themselves, and-
Niamh, enough; we all know you've got a new cladistic chart planned. What was your actual point here? ~Penny
Oh, that. Um, if we're involved in 'caring for' a Suvian, it's probably of type 2 or 5; type 1 is irredemable, type 3 has been handed over to the Redemption Academy, and type 4 should've been dealt with by the agent on the ground.
But I'm not saying whether we are or not.
=Dr. Niamh, Department of Mary Sue Experiments and Research=
to her original appearance, for the record.))
—doctorlit
Alas, dear Lilianna... I retain some small hope that she is a Type 2. Her successful confinement and committal to Medical was the price of my service; I seek only to have her be well, for our son's sake if for nothing else. I am sorry if doing so has put you at risk of harm.
I beg of you, please treat her as you see fit, but show her some mercy. I was created to love her via the warping of reality into unfathomable shapes, but she is still my wife. I would protect her if I can.
... there have been visitors to FicPsych'd agents before, but I can't come up with any examples. I don't know what the sample originally looked like, but if it had the same 'yeah, she'll be fine in a few hours' feel, then I wouldn't quibble it. I assume FicPsych are used to agents getting dropped on them, and like to get them sorted out as soon as possible. (Equally, I'd imagine they're pretty blase about agents snapping - it happens all the time, if they get all worked up about it they'll never get anything done! But I don't really know FicPsych myself, so.)
Referencing Constance as a patient, though, speaks of a definite issue (and I'm not even querying your decision). I kind of want to know how that got in there - Dorano, could you shed some light?
hS
I rewrote a section to add a throwaway detail, and vaguely recalled Constance being connected to FicPsych at some point. I thought she'd been a patient, but I didn't fact-check it. So that's just my own personal screw-up.
Also yes, I did immediately go back and begin reworking the Agents and the bad Prompt to fit Iximaz's suggestions, hence all the changes. The idea for Going Postal was supposed to be Meg overreacting to Michelle being injured (as opposed to completely snapping) and essentially being sent to FicPsych for an enforced "time-out", if you will. I wasn't entirely sure how to portray that, so I just kind of winged it. But yeah, the break-out and the 'sure go ahead' did need to be fixed. (I figured since Mitch wasn't violent, nor had he ever been, he'd be allowed visitors...?)
Fair enough. I'll fix up those things and try again at...some point.
Going Postal. Sorry about that.