I dislike the vulgarity, etc, but like the story and its main idea. And a baby Huinesoron? That is Awww-worthy.

Never read this before; it's quite a clever story! I'm not a fan of all the profanity and vulgar bits, but I recognize that's an element of realism meant to contrast with the typical wish fulfillment fantasy that self-insert stories tend to be. Mordor itself has a lot of character in its description, and the unwilling camaraderie that grows between Mary and the hobbits in spite of her attitude is rather sweet. Hopefully Jay and Acacia don't wait too long to interfere; the sooner they talk to Mary, the sooner they can hook her up with a portal home! (I only read up to chapter nine. I am a good non-variant, and will respect the sacred timeline!

—doctorlit hopes the Grey Lady got her car all patched up and—wait, who are you? I haven't done anything . . . what do you mean, I wasn't supposed to eat at Burger King today? How could that possibly affect the timeline . . . no, I—wait—




Howdy, y'all! Don't you worry about a thing. This here branch of the timeline will be pruned in just a few quick moments . . .

A nice little narrative! The assassination is unusual, returning to HQ, but the reasoning for Seymour's presence in the RC is logical and explained, so it doesn't feel quite so much like the engineered set-up it is! I wonder if they ever introduced Seymour to Audrey the Ninth? And flying around in HQ sounds like amazing fun, especially in the Escher rooms!

I'm guessing the [Brrrrrruuuup!] is a point when the Pit banned real person fic? If so, I wasn't aware of that occurring.

—doctorlit kisses the ground goodbye

as soon as I finish some homework and fiddling with inventing myself a a Plort story and double checking things to make sure it makes at least a little bit of sense. It won't make any dollars, though, and I am fine with that.

Hey, this is a nice little story! We've seen new recruits apply from posters and signs before, but this version with an actual person handing out applications is unique! I love the intro package getting shipped out (the "department shirt" is hilarious, considering it should just be a black shirt!), and I shudder to think how much postage Jasper needed to send mail between universes. And hey, a new door into HQ! Difficult to say where it is, though. The only geographical hints about where Jasper lives in World One are the heat, and a Pet World store being within commuting distance. Looks like Pet Worlds are scattered about a fairly random set of United States; the most likely candidate is Florida, but Kansas, Colorado and Virginia can get pretty warm in the summers, too.

Does anyone have a clue what this sentence means?
"'Experience with alarms?' Well, she could win mechanical splatter contests with her pitching."
Because I . . . cannot parse any meaning from this whatsoever?!

—doctorlit, very definitely not a robot. Do you have any questions?

I DID read this! I know because I updated the PPC Manual page with this as a reference almost exactly two years ago. ^_^

But I only had the barest sense that maybe I had done that, so I read it again. I like it! It's unusual (that interviewer must be a retired agent, I guess?), but it's fun, and it does a good job of introducing us to Jasper and the weirdness of the PPC.

Likening it to the MIB is of course very apt. It reminds me that there isn't necessarily a contradiction between having close ties to World One and being something of an urban legend. Sure, regular people might sometimes hear about the PPC, but then one of three things happens: 1. They don't believe it exists, figure someone is having a laugh, and forget about it; 2. They do believe it exists and they join up; or 3. They do believe it exists, cause trouble, and end up neuralyzed.

I still think the PPC must do its best to avoid blatantly advertising its existence such as by introducing space-ships or unicorns to modern World One, but watching fanfiction sites for helpful mission report PPC fanfiction reviews? Placing the occasional want ad? Having a few *ahem* employment agents on the outside? Well, why not?

And remember, Ranger's recruitment was "unprecedented." Nowadays we may read it as unprecedented because he was a badfic character, but I believe it was intended to be unprecedented because he was a fictional character. See also: Dr. Fitzgerald's shock at having a canon character in the Medical Department. See also: J&A being baffled at seeing an illithid at the barbecue. The idea of the PPC as a multiversal organization per se doesn't seem to have developed until TOS had been going for a bit and people like Architeuthis made the natural step from "has access to fictional worlds" to "is accessible from fictional worlds."

Point being, in the PPC's original conception, I believe all PPC agents were World One humans. And I'm not sure J&A agreed on the degree of wackiness to have in HQ, either—I think most of the strange stuff was Jay's idea. Notice how Acacia is sorta fed up when Jay starts going on about how "it's kind of a maze unless you haven't noticed"? It's like, in the RP, author!Acacia figured author!Jay was just being ridiculous, but then Jay took it absolutely literally and Acacia went along with it.

But I'm glad it turned out the way it did. Playing with phrases we take for granted and writing interactions between characters from different worlds are some of my favorite things about the PPC setting. ^_^

~Neshomeh

Well, that was interesting. Quite short, there were a few errors (It slipped into the first person with a "me" at one point) and a very unusual recruitment process. I didn't think that was how most Agents joined. No mission, though. Or partner, for that matter.

(edited to maintain title consistency)

Ah, what a lovely palate cleanser after "Daughter of Darkness!" This is a very PPC spin-off, and I quite enjoyed reading it. peeps ahead Only two missions? Blast. Wish AnyAmy had written more! I think the joke rooms/hallways she makes about HQ in her opening paragraph are some of the best I've seen anywhere, and I need to try to live up to that standard from now on. Although, I'm not sure why HQ would have a mini-Balrog training room? That's very much OFUM's responsibility. Unless it's maybe an early incarnation of the Mini Adoption Center? It's kind of great that this story's depiction of the cafeteria fits into the timeline of the PPC's downward slide from financial security following the Reorganisation. There's still some good food in the Cafeteria now, but you can only get the good stuff through a lottery. (Although I suspect the agents who "win" the pudding will be hungry a lot sooner than the "losers" who got the asparagus!) During the assassination, I love Ela supplying her own surname and shrugging off its pronunciation, as well as Aragorn getting so disgusted by Ela tampering with Arwen's family tree that he straight-up abandons Ela, even while ostensibly still under her influence. I really love the charge about the horse's hoofbeats. It would be so easy to just say something like, "making a horse's feet unnaturally loud," but AnyAmy looked at it from a more physics-based perspective and made it more of a reality-warping point about tampering with atmospheric conditions. Clever!

There are some choices that confuse me, though. That pronoun joke has aged poorly, and . . . what's this about Legolas sleeping with a lot of women? I can't find anything about that on Tolkien Gateway, and it sure doesn't sound like something Tolkien would have written about his elves. And what on earth is Downstairs? Retroactively, it feels like a reference to the DIA, maybe as a co-opted holdover from the DIS's time, but of course, neither of those concepts has been introduced yet at publication time. And you can guess what I'm going to whine about next: they kill the horse, but take the wolves with them? Just a weird, weird decision. The way the horse gets described is maybe meant to signal to the reader that AnyAmy was interpreting it as a Suvian horse, but I still feel like leaving it in Rohan with Ela dead would have been fine for canon. The Rohirrim take real good care of their horses, so an unusually healthy one wouldn't have stood out too dramatically. The fact that this is meant to tie in with the OS's impending flame-based barbecue does give it a little pay-off, but. Still feels weird. I also would have assumed the wolves could assimilate fine, but it turns out Middle-earth is weirdly short on non-demonic wolves, according to Gateway? Middle-earth does have a white wolf that seems to be an analogue of Earth's Arctic wolves, but nothing like Earth's more common brown or grey wolves. The mission doesn't describe Ela's wolves, so maybe they were stated to be brown/grey in the original fic and they couldn't assimilate. Still don't know what Amy and Brent are going to do with wolves in their bathroom now, though. (Oh, hey, look! The first private bathrooms we've seen, I think? Maybe that's where the food budget disappeared to after Reorg?) I won't timeslide ahead, but I am VERY curious. I hope we can justify saying they end up in roman's pack in the modern day!?

Brent is . . . different. I got very bad vibes off him at the beginning of the story, but he did seem to mellow out further on. He's almost got an Atticus Finch vibe to him: stern and unquestionably an authority, but still pretty compassionate and thoughtful when it matters. Brent just needs to learn a bit of patience from Mr. Finch! Oh, and I think this is the first agent team we've had where both agents are veteran? (Other than Jay and Acacia, of course.) Brent does feel more experienced, but it's clear from Amy's comments about HQ that she's been living there a decent while.

—doctorlit feels bad he isn't catching up faster, but it's 30 minutes past bedtime, and 4:30 am will be here all too soon

And I think it's been gone a long, long time. I tried searching the Sue's name, Ela Gwairoch. (Wind-horse? 'Kay.) The only hit I got was an entry in Limyaael's InsaneJournal from May 26, 2003, and there isn't even a link alongside the other links there.

(Side note: Some of you will remember Limyaael as the creator of the Mary Sue Classification System. Her journal contains the makings of that, some very interesting rants about a Master's-level feminism class, and, oh, the facts that she got a Master's degree in English and had already written several novels. I'm in awe.)

~Neshomeh read the mission, but then went a-Googling and is too sleepy to comment on it now.

Okay, I'm really going to push to get caught up on reviewing these today! . . . Although, it's already noon, and I need to get groceries, and I'd better take a nap before my work week starts tomorrow . . .

Boy oh boy, do I have things to say about this one. (I did not read any reactions to this chapter from before the time slide, so I may be making redundant observations here.) Let me first quote this line:
"'I hate amateurs! I REALLY hate incompetent morons. AND I HATE INCOMPETENT AMATEUR MORONS MOST OF ALL!!!!!'"
Alas, this mission is written both incompetently and amateurishly. Both of which are forgivable, especially considering the authors were probably teens at time of writing, but the hypocrisy is a lot grosser. This whole story is riddled with typos, many of which would make for rather amusing imagery in a badfic being missioned. (Especially annoying to me are "Mydraal," which would be a Wheel of Time mini of "Myrddraal;" and "tetrodoxin," which should be "tetrodotoxin." What is with these early PPC Boarders misrepresenting marine life!?!?) The agents have nearly indistinguishable personalities, and they're introduced with physical description dumps of the sort we often charge for. Despite doing missions in the Tolkien fandom, the authors/agents misidentify "Morwen" as being stolen from another canon's character, rather than recognizing it as Elvish for "dark maiden," which is clearly what the original author was going for. (I only know that thanks to the current most recent review on the mission; thanks, Narwen!) Between all of this and the overt aggression towards fanfic, there's no question that this story must look terrible to any non-PPCer reading it.

Okay, I do have some compliments to give. At least it has a bit of intertextuality, mentioning the report as having come from Architeuthis. I like the doorhanger mentioned at the end, and suspect such hangers are common throughout HQ. I also appreciate Gandalf calmly smoking his pipe while the assassination is about to go down, and that he and Gimli are largely unaffected. (Though even then, I don't see how Gimli can manage to trip multiple others of the Fellowship when he's among their slower members, and Gandalf's barrier spell feels a little Dungeons & Dragons to me.) Also, the following passage is legitimately excellent:
"She paused as she felt a familiar tingle going through her body. The land welcomed her, it knew she was there to help. Thus it hid her from its denizens and protected her as best as it could. It was humbling, to feel the gratitude of a land as ancient as this one."
Just beautiful; I love that. Also, I don't know if this was intentional or not, but I love the double meaning in the second clause here:
"The land could hide them from the natives, but the Mary Sues were another story."
Get it? Mary Sues are literally another story from their surroundings! On the other hand, we have this passage:
"The two assassins wandered around Rivendell, taking in the beauty of the Last Homely House. It was breathtaking, and Kage never grew tired of it."
What a weak, tell-don't-show imitation of Jay and Acacia's tendency to go sight-seeing on missions.

Ultimately, the badfic itself would have made for a much better mission in more competent mission-writers' hands. The Boarders missed an opportunity to riff on the fact that Melody, of merfolk descent, is almost definitely plagiarizing one of those "beloved" direct-to-DVD Disney sequels, Cinderella 4: Simba's Pride, I think? Which released two years before this mission was published, so the original fic probably published within that time. And hey, the fic's author gets kudos for getting a most excellent song stuck in my head today, even if their story predated it by roughly 15 years!

What's that? You're surprised I, the local zookeeper, didn't comment on literally killing a bird for its song, back where I was listing the mission's problems? That is because, I have done far more than comment . . .

---

Sakira stamped her feet on the way to the RC door, growling. She flung it open and demanded, "Who's there? I was watching anime!"

Outside stood a young, slightly tanned man in cargo shorts, holding a bird speckled with brown on one arm, while his other fiddled with his universal translator. He wore no PPC black; instead, his clothing was all khaki.

Oh, thought Sakira, when she saw his flashpatch. One of those DMFF agents. "What do you want? We aren't interesting in buying birds, or whatever other dirty animals you weirdos deal with."

"This is the RC of Sakira and Kage, right?" asked the man, with a slight professional lilt to his voice, as though he were talking down an angry customer. "Your RC didn't have a number printed on it, but the—"

"Yeah," interrupted Sakira. "Almost like we don't want unexpected visitors or something, especially not from other departments. You and your bird can take a hike, buddy," She started to close the door.

While she had been talking however, the DMFF agent had given the bird a questioning glance, and the bird had responded with a slight bow forwards. Now, the man stopped the door from closing by shoving his well-worn brown boot in the way. "Uh, sorry, but no." The customer service was gone from his voice. "I'm agent Therwin, of Misplaced Fauna. The Waterlily Commander sent me—"

"We don't answer to any Lily." This time, it was Kage who interrupted, stepping into view behind Sakira. "We're DMS, so if you're done interrupting our precious free time, we'd like to get back to—"

"Here's a fun trick," said Therwin, his voice and face suddenly hard. "Grab your universal translators, and set them to 'Throsel-tunge.' I'll just stand here and wait while you do so." He kept his foot in the doorway, and stared. The bird on his arm started calling out, "TWEETY TWEETY TWEET TWEET"

Sakira stared and him and glared, growling. The man just stared back. She huffed and started clicking around her UT, looking for the obscure language, and Kage followed suit. "Fine," Sakira grumbled, "but can you at least shut that bird up? It's so annoying, it sounds just like one I—Ooooh. Oooooh no."

As she arrived at the correct language, the bird's TWEETY TWEETs had abruptly started sounding like English words: ". . . didn't meant to disturb your slumber, but really, to simply fire an arrow without even asking me to stop first . . . I always thought better of the race of Men! Really!"

Therwin said something, which came out garbled to the assassins while their UTs were still set to Thrush. They clicked them back, and he started over again. "What do you know? A sapient animal in a fantasy series! Who would have thought?" He tilted his head, eyebrows raised high and mouth drawn down in a scowl. "I mean, I would have thought a pair of agents in the Tolkien Division would have thought of it before indiscriminately firing on wildlife, but apparently not. Did you even attempt to read the books?"

Kage sputtered, while Sakira sneered and said, "Uh, excuse me? Like, first of all, I had no way of knowing that bird was a magic talking bird, I was trying to sleep and it was being noisy! Second, you're telling me we can't hunt wildlife if we're stuck on a mission running out of food? There have to be hundreds of birds in Middle-earth, you're telling me killing one is some big deal? Bullcrap."

"Well, Sakira, believe me: I know bullcrap. Quite familiar with the smell, actually." Therwin gave a wide humorless grin. "But let's just consult the bullcrap detector, shall we?" He pulled a CAD from one of the big pockets on his shorts, aimed it at the thrush, and then offered it to Sakira to read.

Sakira crossed her arms and scowled. Kage's curiosity got the better of her, and she reached for it over Sakira's shoulder. She read aloud, "Ancient magical thrush. Tolkienverse canon species. 0% out of character. Critically . . ." Her eyes bugged out, and she raised her head to look from the thrush to Therwin and back. "Critically endangered?"

"They're critically endangered by the end of The Hobbit," Therwin said. "We don't even have numbers data during Fellowship."

Sakira snorted air out her nose. "Well. So?"

Therwin put a hand to his face and stroked his chin in mock dramatic fashion. "Well, so don't shoot things for no reason. Part of restoring canon means not removing things that belong! Make sure to scan wildlife—and flora, for that matter—with your CAD, before messing with them. I know they don't have the same functions as the DMFF models, but it should still at least tell you when you're looking at something other than common wildlife."

"Fine, whatever. Are we done here?" Sakira made to close the door once again.

"Yeah, we're—wait." He put a hand to his ear, listening. Sakira held the door half-closed, practically vibrating with impatience. Therwin narrowed his eyes at the assassins. "Did you feed meat tainted with tetrodotoxin to multiple Velociraptor?"

"No, actually!" Kage said, looking confused. "We've only ever used tetrodoxin."

There was a beat.

"Kage, double-check the label on our tetrodoxin."

"On it." Kage disappeared behind the door. After a moment, she said, "Well, crap."

Therwin grimaced. "Ladies, boot up your console for a portal south of Rivendell. We have a thrush to neuralyze. After that, we're going to Jurassic Park so you can help me lug some dinosaurs to Medical."

---

I had to. I'm not sorry. Well, I'm sorry for making another defunct variety of CAD, but you have to admit, it makes sense the DMFF would need slightly different info from theirs. I know there isn't enough to go on in the bird scene in the mission to definitively say the bird was a thrush, but it isn't too unreasonable, and it made for a good narrative(?) The Veterinary Ward didn't exist yet in 2002, so hopefully something was figured out for those dinosaurs? Also, wow, Therwin. I need to come up with a better name than that . . .

—doctorlit no longer feels like he's going to make much progress today; it is nearly 2:00 as he finishes this

It's the Suvian artifacts episode! Except the artifacts aren't really given much opportunity to do anything. At least our ladies scored quite a haul from that backpack! Interesting that being in HQ made the backpack weigh properly; they must have conceived HQ as being closer to reality than badfics, if not proper word worlds

It's also the callbacks episode! In addition to the return of "stated," which was dictated by the fic, we see the invisible yarn and Aislinn's hide come back, plus we get to see Makes-Things return. He actually doesn't appear in the Original Series as much as I recall happening! We get another piece of evidence that only the Upstairs hallway was intended to be generic grey, with the magnet attaching to J+A's wall, like it would on real wall studs. Then again, since generic surface has no description, it can't be nonmagnetic, so this actually still holds up! There's also the reference to "Acacia's console," yet again implying the agents had their own PCs, rather than a single wall-spanning behemoth console.

I'm guessing what Jay's author note says about the "long-awaited guests of the board" means that the Board's original incarnation was released between "Mithril" and this mission? Her final line also makes it sound like Acacia invited Barton to join or visit the Board, which at least shows she was willing to interact with Barton beyond just dismissing the latter's flaming comments. A shame the comments are gone for good; I would have liked to see how Acacia handled her "essay" in response to Barton's initial complaint.

Ah, gods, I keep forgetting what Otik actually looks like. When I first read TOS, I pictured him basically as Plank from Ed, Edd n Eddy, but with vine arms. I need to remember he's a monstrous, seven-foot potato-nochio from now on. : (

Lastly, while starfish can be out of water for brief time periods, they do very much need to be in water to breathe.

—"I am doctorlit, and this is the secret comment to discuss the mission." doctorlit stated.

I’m reading TOS in order, but this looks interesting. And that cause of death is quite tragic.