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Very cute! Even in such a short story, these two have such good dynamics. Good seeing Agent Ix in a more positive state of mind, too.

—doctorlit, wandless

Lemme reveal. I'm alluding to one of my manymanymanymany plans for Badfic Games stories. Therefore, "stick around long enough" is true, since they won't come until later this year. I believe that's all I need to say.

-Twistey

Ix and Charlotte experience their first time in Torchwood.

"So, we've got a new player this evening, everyone. This is Cassie, she's a DMS agent, and I'd like to welcome her to the Coterie of Light. Say hi!"

A chorus of muted "Hi"s greeted Cass as she shuffled her feet. Her hair hung down over her face like the shutters on a corner shop, and after a few moments of immense internal struggle, she said hi back.

"Doctor Peep, is she here because of what happened with Bill?"

"Well, Gabrielle, that entirely depends on how much you enjoyed playing in a party with Supreme Commander Murdertron, Chief Eye-Gouger of the Army of Extra Deadly Death."

"Welcomewelcomewelcome! Come sit next to me! Would you like some snacks? My partner made everybody snacks. He's kinda like that."

"Um." Cassie said. Then "Thank you." Then "I'm sorry, but how are you allowed to be that fluffy?"

"Aw! Thank you! I'm a Flareon is why, but it's also because people brush me and snuggle me when I'm on the wards. I'm a therapy Pokemon with the MPND Clinic, but Doctor Peep is my therapist too!"

Gabrielle beamed. Cassie nodded back, her eyes a little wide. "Er. Okay. That's... nice?"

"So who are you playing? I'm the cleric, because making people not hurt any more is awesome!"

"Um. Valiant Cavalier. It's a paladin subclass. More, um, hitty. And his name's Thorin. And he has a bear. Doctor Peep said it would be okay?"

"Thank heavens, an actual tank," piped up Eloise. "I'm sick of getting slapped about because Bill thinks it's funny to watch the wizard get into close combat."

---

It took a few minutes to get everyone settled in, but eventually the group was all set. It was a motley assortment, and Cass was the only human at the table; T'viq was a Reman, Eloise was a drider, Sugi was a bonsai Ent, and the DM, Doctor Peep, was a six-foot animatronic duck. The campaign, Gabrielle explained, had been going on for some time, mostly in spite of a recovering Gary Stu called Bill who was a total edgelord and kept trying to screw things up for the party. Before Gabrielle could go any further on why Bill was a complete butt, Doctor Peep loudly announced the setting.

"After the tragic death of Supreme Commander Murdertron, your characters have returned to the manor at Thandallyn to train and generally relax. A few months have passed without incident... until now. A mysterious stranger is at the gates of the house."

"I go to the window and try to get a look at them," said T'viq. "Such work is suited well for elven eyes, especially those of a ranger. Plus I'm just generally a bit nosy."

"Okay, roll me perception."

Clatter.

"Smeg."

"Astarael, you gaze long and hard, and form a really excellent and in-depth mental picture of the wall you're staring at. Is anyone else doing anything?"

"Oh! Sure!" Gabrielle smiled. "I'll go down to the gate. And bring pie. Everybody loves pie."

A chorus of laughs around the table. Cass sagged a bit, stayed quiet.

"Okay then, Drake. You go out to the gate and see a heavily armoured figure on the back of a cave bear. The rider is even shorter than you are, which is saying something for a halfling."

"Ho there, stranger!" Gabrielle cried in as manly a voice as a fluffy red bunny could manage. "What brings thee to Ascalon?"

There was silence for a bit, then Cass spoke. "Er. Dwarven business! Yes. Definitely. Nothing to do with anything gobliny or stuff like that. My name is Thorin of the Green Beard, and I seek audience with noble heroes who mayst use the service of a strong and righteous sword arm! Verily, 'tis a fine time to be a dwarf of my lineage, and definitely not a day to be a goblin in some scrounged up armour with a load of cave moss glued to his face, why would you even assume such a person would be here?"

There was a very long pause.

"Cassie, is Thorin a goblin pretending to be a dwarf?" Doctor Peep asked.

"What possible reason could you have to suspect such a thing of the noble Thorin Greenbeard, dwarf adventurer and in no way a goblin whose face is covered in lichen that's really itchy underneath this plate mail?"

"... You're going to fit riiiiiiiiiight in around here."

Cassie smiled, and believed her.

"So. You say that I am not real." Thoth loomed over the terrified newbie.

It seemed the newbie had more intelligence than sense. "U-uh.. y-yes... That's t-the idea..."

"And you, originating from World One, are."

"y-yes..."

Thoth smiled. It didn't reach his eyes. "An interesting hypothesis."

The newbie relaxed slightly. Perhaps he'd be alright. "Thank you-"

"Let's test it."

"W-what?"

A fireball appeared in Thoth's palm. "As a non-real entity, I should not be able to effect entities, such as you, that are real. I submit that we test this. Perhaps I light you on fire. Or crush you. Of course, if you're wrong, it may be fatal, but the knowledge to be gained is well worth the risk."

The newbie let off a terrified squeal and ran away.

"Ho, Thoth!" said Tom, turning the corner. "What're you up to?"

"I was having a civil discussion with a newbie," said Thoth. "He submitted the hypothesis that I was not real."

Tom put his hand to his head. "Bloody hell. Not again..."

Harris was strewn across the leather couch. There he lay, in front of the T.V., and behind the coffee table. Another episode of "Friends" was about to autoplay.

"Alexa, how many seasons of 'Friends' are there?"

The home robot that he'd recently purchased lit up, and cheerily responded that there were 10 seasons in total, and 236 episodes total.

Harris groaned and harrumphed as the title sequence played. Episode 4, Season 2.

He was in no mood to get up and simply pick up the remote, and watch something more interesting, but on the other hand it was getting close to four in the morning, and he had to sleep some time.

And so, he sat up straight, and began to focus. Channeling his inner energies. Attempting to straighten out and clear his mind. Closing his two eyes, and attempted to open his metaphorical third.

With a sudden burst of movement, he struck his hand out open-palmed, towards the remote.

No dice.

Too much energy spent, he opted for lying back down, and shoving a pillow over his head.

Somewhere, deep down he remembered something very vital to him. Something extraordinarily important that he had done. Something of great power and use to him, in times of great need such as this. He spent a minute, exercising his mind, working his poor brain as hard as he could.

He had hooked up Alexa to his T.V.

"Alexa, turn off the T.V."
"I'm sorry, I could not understand your request."

Harris decidedly moved the pillow off of his face, and repeated once more.
"Turning off the T.V."

And with that victory, Harris decided that he had some hard-earned sleep to take advantage of, and drifted off.

Ix pointed her finger at the candle in front of her, eyebrows drawn together as she focused. Charlotte yawned, swinging her legs from her perch on the countertop.

"You wanna watch a movie or something?"

Ix nodded with her chin towards the console, not taking her eyes off the candle. "You go ahead if you want. I'm practicing."

"Fwai, you've been 'practicing' for the last half hour."

"I know," Ix said, frowning at the still-unlit wick. "But I've never done wandless magic before, you can't expect me to get this right away."

Charlotte sighed and hopped off the counter, wandering over to their DVD shelves to browse titles.

Ix consulted her book briefly before leaning in, jabbing her finger at the candle. "Incendio!"

For the briefest of moments, she could have sworn she saw a faint wisp of smoke rising up, but she decided it must have been her imagination when nothing more came of it.

"Iiix," Charlotte sang, holding up a case. "How about Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Your faaavorite!"

"You watch without me."

Charlotte sighed and turned back to the shelves.

She was just pulling their copy of Pride and Prejudice out of its case when Ix tapped her on the shoulder. She was beaming from ear to ear as she held up the flickering candle.

"You did it?!" Charlotte asked, her eyes huge.

Ix laughed. "No, I used a match. C'mon, let's just watch that movie. I need a break."

I just checked on my phone, and the index seems fine, but it looks like the light but wide banner is a problem elsewhere. What would you suggest? (A less wide banner is an option; I'm pretty sure I still have the font I used.)

I might put you to work writing style sheets for the non-standard bits of the site, too. I'd kludge it together myself eventually, but if I can have someone proficient at it do the thing well, that's obviously the best plan. {= )

You can e-mail me at neshomeh [DOT] soul [AT] gmail [DOT] com

Thanks!

~Neshomeh

I'm proficient in JS and CSS, and something like TLS probably isn't all that complex.
Also, I just checked, and the site's broken at small screen sizes. I think implementing some proper responsive design would be a good idea.

Yes I'm back with a new prompt, because, hey, I enjoy doing them, and even if it doesn't get people writing I like to think it at least gets people (including me) thinking. So today's prompt is going to be slightly different, and it is:

'Your characters are training.'

Let's see what we get.

Novastorme

When you get right down to it, in a universe where fictional worlds are places you can go to, what is "fictional"? What is "real"?

It's clearly all equally real. You're not gonna look someone like Agent Thoth in the face and tell him he's less real than anybody else. (I mean, you could try. Just tell me before you do it so I can make popcorn.)

But it's also clear that somebody, in some weird universe called World One for dubious reasons, wrote a book, or a film, or what have you, that purports to be the definitive record of a universe that most people in World One don't even believe exists. This is obviously nonsensical, even insane.

And what about agents who are supposedly from World One? Do they have authors? Clearly the answer is yes—but do they know that?

Some do, some don't. It used to be fairly common for agents to know they were just as fictional as anybody else, and to complain about the things their authors did to them. There's even precedent for agents reading the Words of their own stories in TOS 7, when Lux reads Acacia's "subtitled-thoughts" and nicks an arrow for her. Nowadays that's out of style, but you still get the odd duck like Jenni who is perfectly happy with the paradox of existing both as a wholly real, independent, demi-god-like entity on the one hand, and a figment of my imagination subject to my whims on the other. For her, there is absolutely no conflict with both of those things being true, depending on where you're standing at the time. Even Nume has literally glanced at the Fourth Wall once, and if pressed very hard, would probably confess that he suspects everyone has an author, including himself; he just avoids thinking about it most of the time.

And I think that's what most agents do: just try not to think about it too hard.

But that's not to say you can't have fun with it if you want to. {= )

~Neshomeh, rambling past her bedtime.

I would really like to see more crossovers between Nanoha and Madoka, especially finifshed ones, and yours ended in a perfect way... Whfg jung fbeg bs zntvpny tveyf jrer Zbzbxb naq Whaxb?

And if you don't mind it, What sort of Nanohaverse Devices would you think the girls with use? Sayaka and Kyoko looks like tthey would fit perfectly with Belkan style (I can already imagine Kyoko's spear having a 'Skorpion Form'... Yes, it seems similar to the Schlange Form, but it just fits with the way she uses her Puella magi spear), but what about the other girls?

Or, in the other way, what sort of weapon and magic would have Nanoha, Fate or Hayate with Madokaverse magic?

Anyways, good luck with your future writing and life.

Okay, sheesh. You guys are going to think I'm some movie nut at this rate. I'm really more of a books-and-video-games kind of guy, but they take a lot longer for me to get through, and my friends and family have bugged me to watch movies with them lately, so uh. Here we are.

I was planning to watch Moana eventually. I'm tragically far behind on Disney movies. I always preferred the classic, 2D-animated style, but wow, did Moana sway me a bit away from that. This movie is beyond gorgeous. The water, the plant textures, the clouds, the hair of the characters, they're all amazingly detailed and realistic. The one drawback to this is that the human and animal characters are still so stylized and cartoonish by comparison, they almost feel like they don't belong on the same screen as the backgrounds.

(Also, brief note going forward: I may get some of the spellings wrong up ahead, since I don't know any Polynesian languages. But I'm also not going to look them up, because I don't like my initial-thoughts reviews to get tinged with anything I read about the story on the internet.)

There are two aspects of the plot that I really liked. The first is that the writers remained aware of the plot's weaknesses as they went, and examined it during the movie. I'm so used to accepting the hero of any given story as the "chosen figure" that I didn't really stop to think about Moana-as-chosen-one . . . until the character Maui actually pointed out midway through that the ocean choosing Moana seemed baseless, and therefore, arbitrary. This leads to Moana having a moment of doubt, during which she is visited by her grandmother's Force ghost, who admits that perhaps making Moana go out on a dangerous mission by herself was, indeed, a bad thing for the ocean to have done. But Moana, being offered the opportunity to go back, chooses to continue all the same. And that, ultimately, becomes the real justification for the ocean's decision: it wasn't anything supernaturally or physically inherent in Moana that made her the right one for the job; it's simply the fact that she was willing to do it. Her character, not some arbitrary magic or anything about her heritage, made her the best candidate.

The second thing I liked ties a little bit into that, actually. The main "hero team" of this movie is Moana and Maui. Moana is a teenage girl who's never been on a boat before, and Maui is a hulking, strong, agile man with shape-shifting powers and a mystical, literally god-given weapon who also knows how to steer a boat and navigate at sea. On the surface of things, it certainly seems like Maui brings everything to the table, and the story lead me on to easily believe that the final conflict against the lava demon would be settled by Maui; that Moana's only real purpose was in un-stranding Maui so he could get back to the island the lava demon had taken over. But the first attempt to return the stone to the island, with Maui making a frontal assault and leaving Moana in the background fails miserably, and the second hardly goes any better, with its focus on Moana getting past the lava demon. The demon was never an enemy to be defeated or avoided, but the actual island brought to life in fury at the theft of the life-giving stone. It was never a conflict that could be solved by violence or supernatural powers in the first place, and that makes another reason Moana was "chosen." Maui's attitude and strength would never have led him to do anything but attack the lava demon, and therefore he could never understand the true situation of the island. It took a mortal who could be generous and forgiving to solve the conflict. I liked that there was clearly an effort from the writers to not give this movie a violent solution, as there's certainly enough focus on solutions-through-fighting in U.S. media as it is.

One weakness of the movie is a bit of tell-don't show. We're told in the legend at the beginning that Maui's theft of the life stone is filling the sea with monsters that preyed on boats, and that it's slowly corrupting the islands. We do see the crops and lack of fish in Moana's village, but once she gets out on the open ocean, it feels like a pretty normal ocean. Lots of non-fantasy wildlife, and no monsters, except in an underwater cave named the "cave of monsters," which I assume already had monsters in it before the rot began to spread across the ocean.

The character of Moana's father felt a bit flat, too. I understand the reasons the narrative gave for his attitude towards any of his village traveling too far from the island, but when all the fish have disappeared, and your crops are turning to dust, you have to get food from somewhere. And since he doesn't really offer another solution, shutting down Moana's idea to fish outside the reef without any discussion feels pretty ridiculous.

I really liked Heihei (sp?) the chicken. I know chickens are dumb, but they're at least good at aiming their beaks at food—painfully good, as I can testify from experience. But I still enjoyed all of Heihei's mannerisms and constantly haggard look, despite the inaccuracy there.

We seem to be good at filling in the preview area with non-spoiler things, but I'm going to keep making spoiler blocks, because it amuses me. Deal with it.
"What can I say, except, you're welcome? For the sun, the sea, and the spoilers!" "What can I say, except, you're welcome? For the sun, the sea, and the spoilers!" "What can I say, except, you're welcome? For the sun, the sea, and the spoilers!"

—doctorlit, easily impressed by good CGI

Although they're usually a bit more sensitive than that when breaking it.

Is it common for a character recruited from another continuum to be told that they are from a work of fiction? If it comes to it, how do agents go about explaining "you come from a story that someone wrote" to someone else?
"Listen, Harry. A long time ago, a woman named J.K. Rowling sat down at in a cafe..." (Not with a canon character, but that sort of thing.

They were aaaall goofs, especially the daisy clock part. I have absolutely no idea how that even happened - I didn't even know daisies had parts on them called clocks.

Blame those gremlins.

Cheers for the nitpicks you managed to get in, anyhow! Gotta fix up all those gremlin-ridden Larfscribblings, we got to.

It's called Sophia Black, and it's pretty bad. Not as bad as most of the fics on this thread, but bad. It's basically just an OC daughter of Sirius Black who exists solely to be a love interest for Fred Weasley. There was a subplot about her writing her father letters in Azkaban, which I followed for a while before realizing it was just an excuse for her to cry on someone's shoulders. (I forget who; I haven't read this fic in a while.) Sophia also takes Alicia Spinnet's place on the Quidditch team, and Alicia is obsessed with Fred, giving him a love potion to get him away from Sophia. I'm 65% sure she had to cure him with true love's kiss, but that might've been something else. I haven't read the story in a while, and i'm not doing it again.

Here's the link: https://www.quotev.com/story/3880293/Sophia-Black

I don't hate you, you're good people, and I think you're a perfectly fine community member and welcome around here. Sure, I disagree(d) with the position you took during the whole Sprinkles thing, but that doesn't mean I don't like or respect you. (Heck, I've disagreed with hS, Nesh, and the like a good few times and I still think they're good people.)

- Tomash

I appreciate it. Honestly, I kind of *still* feel like that. I don't understand why, and it's not fair to hS, but I'm frickin' scared to death of him and I think I'm gonna make those amends at a later date.

Again, if you still want to talk about what happened, you have my e-mail address.

If you're feeling better about it, though, I think you owe hS a specific apology for acting like he's some big bad wolf out to get you. I understand why it felt that way at the time, him being a big name around here and you just a kid, but he really wasn't—he even said in the original post, "I accept that they did this for emotional, not malevolent reasons."

Also, you are not a sheep, and I'm betting you wouldn't taste good even with ketchup. {= )

~Neshomeh

I can definitely use your 1337 skills. Look for my e-mail in your inboxes. {= D

~Neshomeh

My HTML is a bit better.

One thing I can do pretty well is automagically fix (or "fix") large parts of your site, if that becomes needed.

- Tomash

Regardless of what wrongs you my attribute to yourself, most of the PPC, at least to the best of my knowledge, considers you a perfectly fine community member, and you are absolutely welcome here. And at the end of that thread, from what I saw of the resolution, I think that remains the case.

But... I mean, I don't speak for everyone. So that's just what I've seen.

My skills are... hmm. Acceptable?

I mean, I've worked with HTML and CSS and the results haven't made anyone's eyes bleed. I never used <marquee> or <blink>, and I know what features not to use, more or less.

But really, I would be happy to help you Nesh :-). Could be fun!