Oh, wow! Quite a lot of firsts in this chapter! The department of Bad Parody gets named, along with the species of its head. Newbies being majorly untrained, consoles being explicitly huge, and "offices" being numbered and separate from other DMS "offices" all seem to originate here. Plus, I think this was the first time a manual got mentioned? And of course, the first Hitchhiker's Guide reference!

I think mulberry deserves definite kudos for being so creative with their concept of what the DBP's work looks like. In the modern day, action departments that have actually been written all go into the field for missions, but mulberry decided early on that not every department needs to follow the DMS formula that Jay and Acacia created. It's interesting to think how the PPC might look today if every department had been developed with a wildly different method for interacting with badfics.

Also, aw, Tick is so sweet for sleeping in an uncomfortable position to keep the console from going off until after Jaz finished reading! What a good partner.

Also also, I'm noticing one thing a lot of the early spin-offs seem to have in common is that . . . the characters never get described?! I know this was a very heavy self-insert era, so a lot of the authors probably weren't thinking to describe themselves in the narrative, but it kind of sucks that we don't even know what a lot of these early characters are even supposed to look like!

—doctorlit honors mulberry as a fellow all-lowercase screenname-haver

The comment section, man. The Smauging comment section.

Okay, hold the hold up. Has Doctor Fitzgerald been an Architeuthis original creation all this time?!!?!?!! The Wiki claims he's first named in the 16th TOS mission (and implied in the 15th), but we aren't remotely near those stories by release date. Holy cow, it's so easy to credit the authors Jay and Acacia with creating so many things, but it looks like Archie was the one who really started the existence of a medical department all along! And Jay and Acacia adopted him into their own canon after the fact! I think this is the biggest surprise I've run into so far!

Also, wow, Architeuthis really is My People. A bio major, who insists she's well even if she isn't, and stays late at work when the job is ostensibly done (when she stays in the fic past the point where further data was unnecessary.) ((Assuming these traits aren't original to the character Architeuthis, of course.)) Also, interesting note about Archie not recognizing "plussed" as a word: Wiktionary gives its earliest example quote as originating in 1970, but all other examples are taken from the twenty-first century. The word must not have been frequently used enough in that time period for even a grad student to be familiar with its usage?

So. Upstairs used to issue laptops to the PPC's spies? No wonder the job shifted more to desk work as time went on; computers aren't cheap, but they won't need replacement as often if they're staying out of the field!

I'm so used to Middle-earth Suvians being elves that I was pronouncing Clefe's name "CLAY-fey" with long "A" sounds. But then I reached the full name at the end and read, "CLAY-fay mec-CRYG . . . wait. That was just an earth name all along, wasn't it?" Not that I could guess at pronouncing "Clefe" in any earth language I'm familiar with . . . The concept of characters being literal cliffhangers as a story role has a lot of potential, and feels downright PPCish . . . shame it just boiled down to having knowledge of the Ring. But maybe there's a payoff to the name in the fic, past the point where Architeuthis's report ends? (I am not going to spend time reading the original fic.) Also, I have to say, Archie recommends terminating all three OCs, but the only one I could see assassinating if I were writing the mission would be Ash, the semi-wraith. They all feel like trans-dimensional hoppers, and while we don't do Despatch any more, I wouldn't be above "returning" Clefe and Shea to the "modern day," as though they were authors within Tolkien's world itself. (I've done it once before, in Sherlock Holmes.) Shea is overtly normal, and there's not enough to the Cliffhanger concept to really make Clefe feel supernatural. And at that point, why not swing by Medical and see if they can cure Ash of the undeads? Neuralyze them all and send them back to middle school, easy peasy. But that's just my take. I know we're a bit more conscious of being assassination-happy these days, compared to the TOS era.

—doctorlit, slowly getting through his reading "assignments"

Yeah, KazraGirl doesn't seem as willing to drift away from the original series as Architeuthis was. With that line about Jay and Acacia being "down the hall," is this the spin-off that set the modern concept of an RC in motion? (As opposed to what we saw in "What Might Have Been," where it seemed like J&A received missions in a sort of office (by my interpretation).)

I rather like the agent dynamic here. While Jay is presented as a bit ditzy in tOS, she and Acacia are still very much on equal terms as far as dialogue and planning go. Here, though, Kazra is pretty explicitly the decision-maker of the pair, while Rich is lazy to a cartoonish degree. But while he is lazy, he's also rather supportive of Kazra, complimenting her a few times throughout and ultimately helping her get the assassination done when his arms are needed. I like that kind of low-ego laziness!

—doctorlit, soon to be bleaching the Andes rodent exhibit