Subject: #19, The Departure
Author:
Posted on: 2022-05-06 12:50:49 UTC
So an up-to-date author would know about it . . .
—doctorlit remembers a weird amount of specifics from that series, despite only reading it once . . . something something formative years of brain development . . .
Welcome back to the far-off world of 1999, where the cops wore sashes, the agents wore permanent expressions of mild terror, and the SO wore a pinstripes suit (hey, not everything was different, I'm not a monster). This time, the PPC's only Animorphs experts* get chucked headfirst into a crossover between their canon and... something I know nothing about? Oh, yeah, this'll go well.
*Expertise not guaranteed.
Except it will, because in a rare (nowadays) turn for me, this is a cowrite with none other than Sergio Turbo! Yes, the PPC's two most dedicated writers of extremely long history-type stories with more characters than you can shake a laptop at have finally teamed up. Given our predilections, you'll be either relieved or disappointed to learn that we've managed to keep the mission under 7K words (plus a bit for notes and A Very Mkellin Mystery**).
**Which is cowritten with Lily Winterwood, so technically this is kind of a three-author crossover!
Apples & Oranges 3: The Morphers
As ever, we hope no canon knowledge is required - and we're even more confident this time, because we only know one of the colliding canons each. ^_^ Enjoy!
hS
PPC lore's always seemed really interesting, and it's nice seeing more of what it was like, um, back then. It was a fun read!
I do wonder why most of the DIS were all sociopath-like, though. Did the Big Mushroom fellow actively brainwash new recruits and such, or did it just seek out folk who were already like that to begin with? Or maybe a combination of both?
The DIS was founded by the Mysterious Somebody - it's stated somewhere that they're the only department directly created by him. So they didn't have an auspicious start. But they also actively poached from other departments - Dassie and Nyx are both this kind of recruit - so it's not like they just sought out the multiverse's worst or anything.
But this happens in the real world as well. Think of all the cases where police departments, or military units, or government offices are all aware of horrifying behaviour in their ranks, but cover it up and treat it as normal. What's the saying about a few bad apples? Because it's not "should be ignored".
hS
Because Sam and Alex's last names, and because pun.
Yeeeees I love the idea of guerilla resistance!Disentangler spray-painting DIS mockery in HQ's halls! And I am desperate to learn what happened in the Large Auditorium.
Hm. "Overexposed pretty-girl." For a second, I thought the whole murder mystery was going to be a misunderstanding that someone saw Kayleigh Leonard sunbathing and mistook her for dead. But Kayleigh is DBS, not DIC. (And perhaps more relevant, not physically in HQ yet, according to her Wiki page.)
—has doctorlit mentioned he's really bad at figuring out the mysteries in stories?
right down to spraypainting ACAB everywhere (this is where I learnt that the phrase started in Britain in the 1920s haha) and holding anti-DIS rallies :P Not a lot of actual substance, just a lot of ideological posturing (I mean, she's openly a renegade Time Lord; she's definitely a little anti-establishment no matter where she goes)... until it comes back to bite her for real.
And wow, the plot sure is thickening.
Arumi is cool
(I don't have particularly detailed thoughts, yay being sick)
Don't worry - I know what it's like to barely be able to pull together a "Have read, did like". :) Get well soon.
hS
And if it makes you feel better, “have read, do like” is most of my reviews on the Board anyway.
Is it normal for Cardcaptor Sakura characters to turn into plushies when struck, or is that something Arumi did to them? It's not a Knight Rider thing, though, is it? Alex and Sam don't question this at all, but I'm very confused. ^_^;
Otherwise, nice work! The "badfic" doesn't read as invented for the purpose at all, helped by the fact that it takes a back seat to the character interactions. Arumi is interesting, and I feel like I'm getting to know Alex and Sam better; I've struggled with that a bit. Since they started off as Generic Agents, deliberately, for the Playscript, it never seemed important to know who was who. But now that I want to, I do. {= )
Looking forward to the next installment!
~Neshomeh
As I mentioned in the author note, she's been in Development Limbo for so long, I'm happy she turned out well in the end!
So, let's go a bit more into detail, shall we? Some time before I discovered the PPC I used to hang around in the Italian fandom for Knight Rider. And, at some point, I also wrote in the fanfiction section of their forum. Story was, as you can guess, a crossover between KR and Cardcaptor Sakura. Like pretty much all of my pre-PPC work it likely wasn't stellar, but I got mostly positive feedback so I think it wasn't a complete trainwreck either. The plot involved Baddies kidnapping Sakura's father while they were on a trip in America, Sakura's magic somehow reactivating the abandoned and damaged KITT, Cardcaptor and talking car managed to reunite the KR cast and rescue her father.
I'm not sure the exact timeframe in which I had written it, as while the forum seems to still exist my antivirus threw a fit when I tried opening the page and googling the title of my fic yelded no results. I do remember that after a host migration the formatting of older topics got utterly wrecked, so even if it is still up it is likely unreadable by now. I do have a copy on my PC, but various hard drive changes led to the dates on the file being utterly unreliable too (current version of the file appears to have been created in 2017, which is when I made a new computer. Last modification appears to be in August 2010, so barely after I joined the PPC, but I might had just acicdentally edted something while re-reading it as I'm fairly sure I was done with the fic before joining)
Now, I considered making a sequel for said fic, which was to set about ten years later with Sakura becoming an agent for FLAG and getting her own talking car: our ARUMI, of course, at the time still spelled in all caps since it was the acronym for Advanced Roving Unit with Magical Intersystems. I'm not sure it actually makes any sense, but hey italian teenager trying to get an appropriate English multi-word name that would sound like a Japanese name when turned into an acronym. I think I could've done much worse!
However, I drifted away from the Knight Rider community roughly at the same time I got fully invested in the PPC so I never actually wrote it. When I came up with Nikki's basic idea I considered having semi-fic blip ARUMI be her partner, but then I got feedback Sergio and Corolla were unbalanced (I think it was from you, Nesh!) and so I left Nikki with them. Arumi remained in limbo until 2018, when I eventually recycled her as one of the two agents who recruited Sergio in 2009 HST. In the meanwhile, though, I had used a variant of her name (Arumi Knight) as my handle for the single Multiverse Monitor article I wrote, so I used that as her post-recruitment name.
Which, incidentally, makes her have worked in the PPC between 1999 (A&O3) and 2013 (when she wrote for the Multiverse Monitor) at the very least - by complete accident I may have created one of the agents with the longest PPC careers! And also means I used her in a story properly for the first time more than ten years after I originally created her.
Arumi only just appeared in her first proper story. There's no rush to make her a page, and it may not even be something Sergio wants to do at all.
Sergio knows that perfectly well. He also IS Italian. It's really not a good look to 'splain at someone about their own nationality/ethnicity/identity.
Please chill about people's occasional typos in posts. They happen to the best of us. It's fine.
~Neshomeh
As this isn't the last time we're going to see her around...
I also plan on going through my existing agent pages to do a bit of update and cleanup - since I have my own official character models now (that I have introduced in The World Without Authors' illustrations), I can now do a sweep and finally have their profile pictures all in the same way!
Considering I'm also adding in each page stuff about the Unravel timeline (the one in TWWA), I'm also wondering if it is time to do a page about the Unravel itself? it is kind of an alternate PPC timeline too.
Enthusiasm has been taken down to, say, 9-ish.
... of adding a half-line to Arumi's dialogue to explain that (just "knocked them unconscious and back into their plushie forms"). Just enough to make it clear that Arumi expected it, and it's based on the canon.
The idea of you getting to know A&S better worries me - that means I'm going to have to keep them in character! :O (Only kidding - I do know the difference between them, I promise!)
hS
. . . that canon character "Kerochan" who gets mentioned in this mission is a little teddy bear/cat spirit that floats around and guides Sakura while she tries to gather all the Clow cards. At some plot important point in the story, Kerochan is able to revert to his true form, a full-size big cat thing. Since the replacement Sakura and Syaoran have morphed Kerochan's "species," when they get knocked out, they revert to weaker forms, modeled after Kerochan's little doll form.
Super nerdy bonus discussion: would reverting in and out of that doll form reset their morph time count, the way Cassie metamorphosing from chrysalis to butterfly did? Those guardian spirit things probably don't have DNA in the first place, as was discussed in the mission. But I don't think butterfly DNA changes between their life stages, so the magic transformation wouldn't necessarily be that different from metamorphosis, as far as the morphing power is concerned.
— doctorlit only watched Cardcaptors, the 4Kids English dub of Cardcaptor Sakura, and Sergio says it's not very faithful to the original Japanese series
And on this, Cardcaptors and Cardcaptor Sakura are pretty much the same. The main problem with Cardcaptors is that most of the interpersonal relationships between the characters are heavily or completely cut (and they're an integral part of the story), but on the magic mechanics Cardcaptors didn't make any relevant edit AFAIK.
My answer is: what book did that happen in? Because if it's anything after #29, it wouldn't have been published at this point, so even the best fanfic writer wouldn't have known it.
But honestly, I doubt Sakura's author even bothered to consider morphing time limits. They certainly didn't think about the time it takes to morph - except for that first time. ^_~
hS
So an up-to-date author would know about it . . .
—doctorlit remembers a weird amount of specifics from that series, despite only reading it once . . . something something formative years of brain development . . .
(To Huinesoron) I didn’t even realize that you’d invented the badfic for this purpose, I thought it was real. So...good job on doing a bad job? And, as someone who wasn’t alive in 1999, it certainly seems different.
Which has got me thinking. I should write my own bad trollfics so my Troll Division Agents can exorcize me. Constructive trolling! (And since I’ve already written one, it should be easy!)
It was fun bashing together early-noughts style fic - especially since I didn't have to write any of the boring bits, just the lines I needed.
I'm not generally a fan of writing badfics for purpose: where's the observational humour in writing something bad and then lampshading it yourself? This (and other 1999 stuff) is a bit of a special case, because fanfic is hard to find from the timeframe, so you can't find something that 'just about' fits. In looking for missions for A&O, I managed to scrape together all of seven Animorphs fanfics with OCs in at all, and several of those don't qualify as mission-worthy.
But if you do decide to go that route, I can only recommend taking the badfic "seriously". Don't write deliberately over-the-top stuff; write what you would actually write if you were however many years younger and trollier. Then switch your present-day brain back on and tear it to pieces.
hS
And maybe introduce an Agent!Linstar as a Trollcubus. Like E.V.L. If that seems like a thing that would make sense. But yeah, not too over-the-top.
I've just noticed that he got missed out of the disclaimer and notes, so have stealthily added him and then publically posted about it. ^_^
hS
And all the other agents who disguise their origin in the early days of HQ. There's a brief discussion of this at the end of the mission, but they don't go into why.
My theory is that in the early PPC, including 1999, there was a certain degree of prejudice based on your origins. Not in an official way, of course - of course not, right? - but all-pervading. The undercurrent is that agents from World One are the "realest" people in HQ - this would include the Flowers, of course. After them come the natives of fictional worlds - they're all right, but they're not exactly, y'know, proper people. Then, right at the bottom, come recruits from badfics - the ones who, ewww, were created by a writer.
This would account for the likes of Dafydd and Morgan, who pretend to be human - because anything else means you're definitely not on that top level, and might well be a badfic character. A certain agent from this mission would qualify too. And it would work well with the point someone (doc?) noted in a PPC+20 thread that it feels like the 2002 PPC mostly recruited from World One. Yes, they did draw from elsewhere - but people don't like to talk about that.
Once Jay and Acacia started actively recruiting badfic characters, while at the same time breaking down the walls of misunderstanding between departments, the prejudice mostly disappeared - because most PPC agents now are from badfic! There are probably some older agents who find the whole thing vaguely unclean, but as this isn't a democracy, they can be ignored.
Any thoughts?
hS
I do think there's one element that pokes a bit of a whole in this theory: if World One residents see themselves as the most equal citizens, and gain social advantage from being perceived as such, why do so many of them go under bizarre aliases within HQ? Sam Apple, Dassie Hyrax, Dour K and that whole naming convention . . . wouldn't goofy names like that feel more artificial and fictional, compared to common names from Earth cultures?
BUT to poke a hole in my own argument: Anya, Elizabeth and Osbert are pretty clearly using their real names. Maybe, as Makes-Things's portal system and the PPC's W1 recruitment measures began pulling more and more people out of World One, people who came to HQ realized it was fairly easy to get back to HQ and look up where anyone lived or worked. So then, as agent staff increased, more and more people started using pseudonyms to protect their identities back home. Which would also get exacerbated by the interdepartmental distrust and rumor-mongering . . .
BUT EVEN THEN, you would think more canon and badfic recruits would switch to "normal" Earth names, rather than come up with "Dafydd" or whatnot.
—doctorlit may have lost the thread of this post somewhere
Is Sam human? Is Sam under an alias? So many questions! :D
In any case, Dassie Hyrax is his real name, and he's from an unspecified fantasy 'verse. (And of course, Dafydd himself is using his human alias from his fic of origin - which happens to be a very nice Welsh name, thank you very much. -_-)
But in general, yes: those counterexamples are exactly the sort of evidence needed to put the theory to rest. PPC-wide prejudice is probably not a thing, even in 1999; and while badfic recruits, particularly former Suvians, probably do meet with prejudice, this is recognised by everyone involved, not something brushed under the table. (The DIA probably has to deal with it somehow. The DIS did too, and given that most of them are from fictional worlds I bet they were rough on the perpetrators - "in the name of equality"!)
(Which is a classic "get off my side, you make my side look sociopathic" scenario, tbh.)
hS
And same with "Dafydd." I've totally been assuming that was Sindarin all this time. Sorry!
—doctorlit, checking his privilege
... I reckon A&S are pretty solidly human by this point. It may even be obliquely stated in this very mission. But the rest still stands. :)
hS
....it was on his wiki page.
-Ls, not sure what point, if any, he’s making.
Like you said -- some people deliberately use aliases to protect their World One identities. I also don't buy everyone not from World One trying to keep a low profile -- Morgan might be hiding, sure, but Dis and the Agent are obviously Time Lords and don't really pretend otherwise, nor do they seem to care if people might be suspicious of them for it. I would argue that if there's any mistrust or discrimination, it's definitely against agents who hail originally from badfics, and is an issue that continues to pervade HQ given stuff like Sue Trackers and Sue Support Groups. A lot of grey areas exist when a group dedicated to eradicating Suvians get some ex-Suvians in their midst.
Huh. So that explains things.
I write fan-fic for on a number of topics, but maiThat's literally its entirety. Something seems off there, but I can't tell what.
In, uh, Bamfy's defence, FFn has repeatedly broken its own formatting system, and that bio has probably been in place since 1998. My guess is that the rest just got eaten by the site at some point. ("mai...nly Labyrinth" would be my best guess.)
hS
And it has been tons of fun. Part of me is still incredulous at the fact I've somehow ended up shoehorning a character of mine into a pivotal point of PPC history (and a character thad had barely any screentime until now!) but... yeah, it happened!
Now, the announcement part. I had officially left the Board in 2017 following some happenings (which I won't go in details about because Drama Is Bad, so please don't inquire about it.). However, a lot of things have changed since them (I barely recognize some names here now!) and I still love the PPC worldbuilding so I've decided to give the Board another chance. So, yeah. I guess I'm officially back
Not that I was actually truly gone at any point as I kept posting my stuff here (and will for the foreseeably future, of course!).
I don't think I'll ever write a "true" mission within an actual badfic again (the one in this collaboration was completely made up by hS and yours truly), and don't expect me to be super active as I've always been a bit of the quiet person, but I'll hang around and I'm not against writing more PPC-focused things. Maybe even missions, as long as the badfic is made up - my view on fiction has changed, and I'm not really into picking apart other people's works anymore, but as I said the PPC shared universe is a place I just love.
My focus will be, of course, on The World Without Authors though. It's a big project, but it doesn't mean I won't write other things as well! As hS can attest, I get easily distracted by shiny new ideas, and proof is this very story.
So, i'm back, hello everyone!
I didn’t know about the drama (but have since found out so :P) but I did sorta drift off to do fic for a while, and only recently came back because I love the worldbuilding and playing in that sandbox. So same hat, Sergio! Hope we can do some interlude stuff together.
Mission-wise I’m only interested in finishing up my old stuff, though hS did manage to convince me into a Reorg-era thing similar to your co-write :P But in terms of new things I‘ll just be here for the interludes.
And, yes, having a proper collaboration some time would be nice! While I lent you my characters in the past (Sergio and Corolla for the battle at IAHF and Sergio and Nikki for the Blackout, if i remember correctly?), once again we ended up only tangentially being both inolved in a piece. We should really rectify that!
(For those wondering, the two parts of this release were so independent that they got worked on two separate documents)
After all, they all took down Slorp together...
(Yeah, that's also how things have been with one of my older missions that's actually a cowrite with hS, too. Two separate docs. But in his defence his version of the mission is first person from his agent's pov, so...)
All my crazed experiments must be kept in separate, carefully-labelled jars, or else there might be unexpected reactions and even unintentional explosions! (Which are not nearly as good as intentional explosions; no time to get the camera out.)
hS
Have a pair of rose-colored glasses!
I liked it! It was nice to see Sam and Alex interact, and see some historical PPC characters.
It was a fun mission to work on, and I really enjoyed having a third character around to shake up the bickering.
The sentence you quote is correct; check the first half:
"We can claim to be Controllers if we need to be, or whatever," a quick glance at the screen, "Car Captor Sakura has for humanoid villains."
There's no break in the sentence, so the intended reading is "or whatever CCS has", not, "eh, whatever; CCS has four".
hS
Guess I misinterpreted.