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I'm unsure how much this really matters in the grand scope of things, but to my knowledge we have one TF2 mission on record: the last one written by SkarmorySilver. Was that one linked on the page or was it just a flat copy/paste from TV Tropes?

Noting that you mentioned the TF2 page was just cribbed from TVTropes, I went ahead and deleted it. We don't need a copy of a TVTropes page on a canon that doesn't have anything relevant to the PPC yet. If/when you find (or write, in the more distant future perhaps) something relevant to the PPC, then creating a non-plagiarised page for it would be perfectly fine, like Nesh said.

I don't know that you need to write a badfic report, but you could reiterate what you find bad about that fic and why here on the Board.

--Ls

We prefer if people don't create continuum pages unless there is already something PPC-relevant to say about it. Has there already been a mission there? Is there an agent from that universe? Has the PPC significantly interacted with TF2 at all? If not, then the PPC Wiki does not need a page about it.

This is especially premature since you don't have Permission yet (unless I've missed something), and the journey from getting it to actually completing a mission may be longer than you think.

Please take what should be at least your second look at the Wiki Rules before you continue editing. Be sure you have read them thoroughly and understand them. Thanks!

~Neshomeh

Oh, and if you’re confused, I used to go by pepekyky. I didn’t change my fandom name, though. (Oh yeah, I should write a Badfic report)

Welcome to the "gap moe" trope again 🤣 It refers to "cute" characters whose cuteness derives from the utter mismatch ("gap") between their appearance and behavior/personality.

(https://theasylumriffs.wordpress.com/category/avatar-the-last-airbender/wild-at-heart/)

--Ls

I love it when you add world-building details to HQ and New Cal! I never would have thought about makeup, and I love how all the colors are styled after “genres” of Suvian! There’s so much you can do with that, it’s a great idea!

Haruko is very fun to read! Her demeanor and speaking style are off-putting coming from someone who looks like a child, but not in a spooky or threatening. A “little kid” acting like a doting auntie is such a funny mental image!

My favorite element of the photo contest is the detail that the background has to be in a badfic. Let the shenanigans ensue! (Heh heh, en-“sue”)

—doctorlit, painting the walls with Tree-Hugger Eco-Terrorist Sue, a lovely shade of forest green

Exciting that you got to add a second story! I'm looking forward to my copy arriving. : )

—doctorlit

You want to avoid anything that's generically, boringly bad, since that makes for unentertaining missions. You also want to avoid anything you entirely hate. If there's a thing or two that gets your goat, that's usually fine, but you have to spend a lot of time with a text if you're going to mission it, so if you don't find its badness at all entertaining, you won't have a good time sporking it, and neither will anyone reading said spork (assuming you even finish).

You do want something that you can make a story out of—something at least one of your agents will have some strong feelings about such that comedy and a smidge of drama ensue. You should (through your agents and some good gags) be able to express what makes the writing bad, and what would have made it better.

This can be very individual, but the best way to get a sense for what tends to work (or not) is to read a bunch of other missions and see what worked (or didn't) for other people. Enabling this is why we have a wiki. {= )

~Neshomeh

How bad does a fanfiction have to be to be able to be sporked?

Do keep in mind that the RP won't affect the actual contest result in the story itself, because the arc is already planned out.

Question, though. Could others write their agents participating in this photo contest?

--Ls

On the Demonly Kings' fun trip to the Inconvenience Store, a new character is unveiled and a new challenge awaits.

(( I've had this around for a while and finally get to post it! It's mainly a story, but it does end in a potential RP starter ))

The impacts of canon shifts upon those in the PPC varied wildly. Sometimes, new facts about the nature of someone’s existence would hit them like a truck, radically altering what they could do. Sometimes, the changes would be subtle. Sometimes, they’d sneak up on you.

Yet, most often, the evolution of canon felt like nothing at all.

Tomash — Tomash#Post-Self, the digital one, the cladist, the fork of a canon character who helped keep the twisting virtual corridors of the PPC tidy (as opposed to Tomash the DoSAT technician) woke up to a message: Marsh was out.

The dog-person, or perhaps, one might say, the digital dream of a dog-person, thought about how he felt this morning and how he’d felt last night. He didn’t notice anything different.

Tentative steps, summoning a shirt, a quick fork-and-merge … all seemed to be the same. Whether this was good news remained to be seen.

Tomash decided his plans for today could wait — the nest of adbots wasn’t that urgent — so he pulled a copy of the new book out of the air and sat down to read.

It didn’t take long for his ears to perk up uneasily. A year of downtime? Lots of instances lost? ???

He wanted to know what had happened, if everyone would be safe. He wanted to know if he — well, the branch of his clade that was still on Lagrange — was fine.

He wanted to keep reading. He wanted to see if canon had anything to say about him.

As the old saying went, When you see two paths, take both.

Tomash forked. Then, as was his practice, he flipped a coin to decide which instance got their pick of tasks. His up-tree won the choice and took over the console so he could go looking for evidence of canonical survival, while the original sat on his bed and resumed reading.

Around two hours later, the Tomash who was reading Marsh reached the end of the book and finally looked up to see what his fork was up to. That second dog was, it turned out, playing solitaire.

“So … any news?” he asked.

“Our down’s definitely around after the incident,” his fork said. “I found some promotional material. But … six Scout instances didn’t make it, unless there’s a bigger happy ending …” He trailed off, trying to keep a bit of hope in his voice.

The other Tomash shook his head. “Nope. Twenty-three billion … dead. And six of ours, sounds like.”

“System preserve …” his up-tree mumbled as he quit. He could tell there didn’t need to be two of him anymore: the splitting up had accomplished his purpose.

Tomash took the merge and let the memories that weren’t solitaire or other thumb-twiddling into his recollection of the past. As he did so, a fresh wave of grief washed over him.

Two different memories, two different moments when he’d learned of the deaths. Twenty three billion. Six.

Twenty-three billion.

Six.

He'd held out hope that his canonical self had been unscathed. His other instance had hoped everything would be fixed eventually. Both hopes were destroyed by the collation of memories.

Twenty-three billion.

Six.

Twenty-three billion.

Six.

His home, which still felt like his home despite him having joined the PPC, had been attacked, and he hadn’t been there … not that he’d have been able to do anything if he had been.

Six of those instances of himself who’d gone out into the System to be dogs hadn’t made it home.

So much had gone wrong and all he could do was read about it.

Twenty-three billion.

Six.

He set the book down by the console and decided he’d go deal with those adbots now. Maybe he could help his new home, even if only a little bit. Not to mention, it would take his mind off of … that.

Hell, he’d liked In The Wind, even if they hadn’t known each other too well. Of all the ways for her to go … .

His emotions kept him distracted enough to get him to that pesky code wandering the ‘corridors’ of digital HQ and shouting about places on new colonies and improved armor.

The bots were soon herded back into their home universe, and while that helped, the systech was still reeling from the news. It was written all over him.

So he set off to absolutely not look for a bar, let alone any of the ways he might get to phys-side HQ, where there were more people who he could commiserate with.

To make progress, he began considering what he’d need to do to get cross-tree merging (for he discovered that, by virtue of running somewhere other than Lagrange, he hadn’t gotten the patches, just like the LVs hadn’t). As he realized he might want to ask his alternate-universe self for help, he almost ran into a door.

Tomash walked in slowly. These last few hours had been a day.

(( And so if people want to chuck any characters of theirs who’ve got tragic canon shifts to deal with at the doggo — or just want to pick up an RP from here — I’d be down ))

After many delays, Marsh is out. It's a new novel in the Post-Self universe that's at least intended to be a new entry point to the setting which doesn't require reading the previous sequence of books.

The book has an anthology "Stories From After" attached, which contains a bunch of stories showing the impacts of the Century Attack that don't show up in Marsh. I was going to have one contribution, but, thanks to the delays, ended up with two - “The Party at the End of the World” and “Sentences”.

Neither of my stories require having read Marsh first and should make sense on their own (though context certainly won't hurt).

All this is free to read online, but you can buy the ebook (which does include my stuff) or order the paperback (which is heading off to the printers shortly).

So yeah! Words I wrote will be available to buy!

(And there'll be a little meta piece and RP starter below)

Ah, this was a fun one! I like all the little details you added to expand on working in the kitchens, like the maze structure and sleeping in the pantries. (I’ve been sitting on the first draft of a kitchen interlude for like 10+ years. If I ever get around to touching it up more, I’ll have to incorporate some of your world-building elements! I know some of the “structural elements” need a major overhaul, anyway.) A Delivery Division feels so natural, it’s shocking it’s only appearing this late in the PPC’s history! And the hidden punchline that a pepperoni pizza was ordered, but a mushroom-only was delivered, is . . . I was going to say “very PPC” but I guess that’s more of a “real pizza orders” thing, isn’t it?

I also like how you incorporated the ability Steadfast into Riley’s personality in a non-combat way, and how his personality contrasts against the typical portrayal of Lucarios. Poor kid!

Your presentation of Pakura is actually really fun to read, though I’m not sure that’s how you wanted me to feel about her . . . she’s undeniably a monster of a person, but her unabashed embracement of such obvious villain tropes make her kind of fun to picture in my head; she’s evil and threatening, but in such an over-the-top way it comes of as almost dorky. It also makes her an interesting counterpoint to Tess, with Tess looking a lot less human on the outside, but ultimately having a much more person-like personality than Pakura, despite Tess’s flat affect. And, of course, the fact that Tess is happy to take on a support role in the PPC and not draw attention to herself, flying in the face of what factory Suvians are produced for, while Pakura is . . . Pakura.

So yeah! A very fun read to open my weekend with. Thank you! You also taught me a couple new words, sort of. I had heard the term “jarhead” applied to soldiers before, but never realized it was a reference to the hairstyle! And now I know that “chef’s hats” have the more proper name of “toque.”

A few errors spotted:
The door had a strange hold cut into it, shaped like a moon.
I suspect you wanted hole here?

Tess glanced back through the window, wincing as Pakura .
This sentence never ended!

“Did not miss this for a second, let me tell you that much.
Matterhorn never closed his quotation marks here!

—doctorlit takes his pizzas with cheesas only, pleasas

I liked how inventive you were with the pizza delivery concept. It's hard not to like Tess or Matterhorn, and this was very funny. I definitely think this one set a very PPC-accurate tone. Reading that Pakura bit really makes me want to see her properly missioned. Ugh. I did like the "language" line from Matterhorn. Funny bit of meta there.

Oh, and typo time:

"As the fight went on, it became more and more clear that for all her cybernetic bits, Tess was not a trained ighter."

"ighter".

--Ls

Good story! I should really finish my PAL mission lol

If you hung around in the Discord sometime between 2020 and 2023, you might be familiar with the fic series this interlude ‘references.’ I use that wording specifically because the PAL series, standing for ‘Pokemon Awakens Love,’ is a megacrossover that features a recurring cast of dimension-hopping Suvians who attempt to solve inconveniences in ways that make someone like Empress Theresa look wise and pacifistic. Sometimes they’re a family, sometimes they’re parents of adoptive characters, and the series thrives off ‘references’ that are just renamed powers or caste systems stolen from anime. There might be a chance that even if you’re a Board-only poster that you’ve heard of it, as it’s been brought up a couple of times before.

Anyways, here's a Cafeteria piece. Enjoy!

She's a new character who will appear in the next Demonly Kings arc. In fact, this mini-spin-off is partly to set up her appearance.

I’m definitely feeling bad for Arare now. He hasn’t been the nicest person, but I wouldn’t want to see him completely drained of power, either! Hinata is cool (as are gashadokuro in general), and it made for a fun excuse to see a fire vs. ice magic fight in HQ. (Though I’m sure the Janitorial Division won’t find it as amusing!) I love that Arare extinguishing the fire in that Courtyard interlude had a greater significance than I realized at the time, with consequences paying off in this story!

I forget if the “seemingly a little girl” has been mentioned before or not. I’m guessing she’s another yōkai, and another of the Wonders?

As for mini-Balrog adoptions, we aren’t really in contact with Miss Cam nowadays, so there wasn’t any formal process to go through to adopt them! Honestly, it’s probably true for most minis at this point. If a mini has been sitting on the wiki for years, no one’s likely to contest a new adoption!

—doctorlit, yearning for an updated passport