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

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.

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

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.

... 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

(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!)

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

Huh. So that explains things.

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

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.

Have a pair of rose-colored glasses!

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