Re: First Mission!

First Mission! by the Irish Samurai on 2013-02-05 22:54:00 UTC Reply

Books, Bells and a Newbie in which Agents Skeet and Amelia enter the Abhorsen-verse to take on a pair of inadequately described Antagonist!Sues, and end up collecting a whole bunch of minis too.

We don't seem to have had any minis from this continuum before, so I've gone with mini-Moggets. They're kitten-like in appearance, and mischievous and curious in nature (so, quite kitten-like there too). Each one has a collar with its name written on it, from which hangs a small copy of one of the Bells.

The following minis were rescued from the fic, and most of them are still available for adoption:

1. abhorsen
2. ancliestere
3. Anclisteire (adopted by Rats)
4. Aunt Sam
5. Barhedrin hill
6. belisaire
7. belisiare
8. corver
9. corvere
10. Edward sayre
11. Elisimere
12. ellismere fro forwin mill
13. Elismere
14. forwin mill
15. Garth nixes (has chosen Agent Skeet to be his Personal Food Slave. Skeet didn’t get a say in the matter)
16. hedge
17. hedges care
18. moggets
19. Mr sayre
20. Nicholas sayre
21. nick
22. old kingdom
23. paperwing (adopted by Pretzel)
24. prince sameth (adopted by Moonbather)
25. sam
26. the reget
27. touchstone (adopted by Pretzel
28. white cat (adopted by Agent Amelia Renner)
29. yreal (adopted by Moonbather)

And now, it would seem that I've got a fair bit of stuff to do on the wiki.

-the Irish Samurai

PPC Wikia...? by son_of_heaven176 on 2013-02-16 01:39:00 UTC Reply

Not to sound rude, but aren't new stories supposed to show up on the PPC Wikia's "Latest Story Releases" as well?

Yup, you're absolutely right by the Irish Samurai on 2013-02-17 13:56:00 UTC Reply

Sorted that out now, as well as updating the Claimed and Killed Badfic lists, etc.

I meant to take care of all that stuff earlier, but then I got distracted and it completely slipped my mind. Thanks for the reminder.

You're welcome. (nm) by son_of_heaven176 on 2013-02-17 15:07:00 UTC Reply

Re: First Mission! by Anonymous on 2013-02-13 01:57:00 UTC Reply

I am not familiar with that fandom, I'll have to check out your mission. :)

On another note, might I please adopt hedge the mini-Mogget?

Whoops! by Myrddin on 2013-02-13 02:01:00 UTC Reply

Ooops, sorry! I forgot to fill everything out at top ^^; It was me that requested the adoption of hedge.

No worries. by the Irish Samurai on 2013-02-13 16:03:00 UTC Reply

Welcome to the PPC! Here, have a mini-Mogget *hands over hedge and your Official Adoption Certificate*

Wow, that was probably the easiest newbie welcoming gift I've ever given. Here, take some Bleeprin too, just in case you need it.

Looks like we have a few fandoms in common: LotR (as you said, of course - although I'm mostly movie-based seeing as it's been such a loooooong time since I last read the books), Hunger Games and Doctor Who.

Re: No worries. by Myrddin on 2013-02-14 05:46:00 UTC Reply

Yay, thank you! My very first mini! *introduces hedge to Stormageddon* And thank you for the Bleeprin. :D

Storm's my kitten, I think they'll have fun. ^^

I'm in the same boat with the movie books, I did just recently start my first reading of The Silmarillion, and am about half way through that.

I'm finding a lot of Hunger Games fans. XD

Good job! by Forestiger on 2013-02-07 02:04:00 UTC Reply

Aww, the minis sound adorable. And its awesome how the Sue fought back instead of being easily destroyed - makes for a more dramatic read.

Thanks :) by the Irish Samurai on 2013-02-07 21:42:00 UTC Reply

Yeah, Skeet got a little overconfident there. Next time they'll probably remember that the standard operating procedure is to restrain the Sue first.

That was amazing! by Cyba Zero on 2013-02-06 09:51:00 UTC Reply

Portal-style fireball redirect and death by ballistic full stop have to be the absolute two best Sue-slayings I have read.

Also, can I adopt abhorsen, please? (Sigma doesn't have a mini yet.) Is there any specification to which bell he has, or do I get to pick?

abhorsen is yours :) by the Irish Samurai on 2013-02-07 00:58:00 UTC Reply

There's no hard and fast rules on which bell they get, I just picked a couple for the descriptions in the mission so that I could give a full picture of what mini-Moggets looked like.

I had a vague notion for worse spelling mistakes corresponding to larger bells, which I'll probably use for any of them that my agents adopt (unless of course I forget about that or just decide to do it differently), but feel free to choose for yourself. I figured it might be a little better if people could personalise the minis slightly (don't forget to pick the fur colour/patterning too).

I'm glad you liked the assassination methods, they were the closest I could get to the Sues defeating themselves, which is always an entertaining idea.

Thanks for your comments.

Thank you! (nm) by Cyba Zero on 2013-02-08 10:59:00 UTC Reply

Overall, not a bad mission. by HerrWozzeck on 2013-02-06 03:44:00 UTC Reply

Well, my first impression when I read the summary was this:

"Holy hell, this thing has TWENTY-NINE MINIS!?"

Yeah, that's a lot of minis. And I love how they all sort of just gravitated towards Amelia like that, especially with the whole "Chief Mini-Wrangler" thing. That was awesome. And hilarious.

I think overall this was an interesting first mission, from a pacing standpoint. On the one hand, I love what you did with the spelling errors and the missing punctuation, and I loved that the over-described door that was shown mid-mission ended up being the door behind which a plothole was hiding. But at the same time, most of the mission felt kind of 'eh' to me: it was basically me waiting to get to the next surreal spelling-related mishap. And I think the issue is that there's too much summary in this mission and not enough action in it. Large stretches of time are summarized, and I don't think that makes for good pacing. So those are my two cents: if there's a long stretch of time where nothing real happens, I would just use a scene change rather than sum up what happened.

But where it really shined was the characters. Skeet and Amelia had a GREAT chemistry together. I loved the whole newbie/oldbie dynamic between them, especially as realized with the oldbie being more insane than usual. Seriously, I loved the chemistry between them, and the fact that they had such a good characterization meant I could look past the pacing issues.

So it's not the best mission, but it's a good first mission, and I'm looking forward to seeing where you go from here.

Yup, 29 of 'em by the Irish Samurai on 2013-02-07 02:29:00 UTC Reply

When I first went through it I thought I was dealing with about 40, but there were a couple of mini-Sues and several duplications. Still, 29 is a lot. I'm pretty sure that every character or place name that was mentioned was misspelled at least once (including a fair few where that one time was the only time they were mentioned).

The minis were also exceptionally good fun to write.

I'm glad you liked my agents, and the chemistry between them. When I read other peoples' missions I always like it when you can feel that sort of thing from the partnership, so it's really cool to hear that I can actually write like that myself.

As for the pacing, to be honest I know what you mean. It is a little slower-paced than I would have liked, and I did get similar comments from my Betas, but when I was drafting it up I experimented a little with different versions, and they just felt 'different' rather than 'better', if that makes sense.

The badfic itself was pretty slow (I'm still not sure if that was a failed attempt at gradually building the tension, or just a dull plot), and at first I tried taking advantage of the slow pace to go into more detail with Amy's training, and her getting to know the PPC. But then it ended up being slowly paced and overly long, which was sort of a compounded problem.

When I tried cutting down the scenes that I dealt with directly, or at least cutting them shorter, it just felt like it was being artificially rushed (probably only because I'd read the original fic in full, it might not have been noticeable to someone just reading the mission, but it was noticeable to me writing it). And there didn't seem to be any real need for the agents to rush it; those two were hardly the worst Sues the PPC has come across, mostly they just seemed to wander around the country spawning minis (and small craters from ballistic punctuation marks). From an in-universe point of view, I think it kind of makes sense for new agents to be sent out on slower paced stuff, to give them more time to learn what they need to know.

But yeah, I'll definitely try to keep a close on the pacing in future missions. Maybe I could've done better with this one.

Thanks for your comments.