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At long last, here it is! I finally finished the second part. Warnings for BL2 and swearing.

Link text

Feed it plenty of nuts.

Enthusiasm has been taken down to, say, 9-ish.

1. 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.

2. 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

The main character was a Sue (obviously) and was in love with Eli (for those not in the know, think dark, sort of emo dude with a few emotional issues. In other words, ideal Sue lust object!), and they were both in college and parents of toddlers. The beginning is mostly just both of them being worried about their kids getting too attached, which they were right to worry about because as soon as the kids met Sue/Eli, they started calling them 'Mommy'/'Daddy.' Now, I'll admit that I'm not the biggest fan of kidfics already, but this kind of stuff really annoys me so I was ready to keep spite-reading.

Then, in true Degrassi/soap opera fanfiction, it turned out that Sue's child was actually a twin, and Stalker behavior, abusive ex-partners, child kidnapping Then, after all that, they find out that Eli had a twin brother, and his 'son' was actually his nephew because his (now dead) ex-girlfriend had gotten into a fight with him, slept with the twin brother, and then didn't tell anyone about the mysterious stranger with her boyfriend's face.

Thankfully, the title of this fic has been erased by time, so I am not tempted to torture myself all over again by reading it to fact check any of this. I think Sue's name might've been something like Angel, but I'm not sure.

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.

And if it makes you feel better, “have read, do like” is most of my reviews on the Board anyway.

I thought the mission was pretty good—seriously, that was an odd Sue. And in a new (to the PPC) canon, too!

I didn’t understand the Japanese, but I don’t speak Japanese. No surprise there.

I think I saw an error:

“The other agents didn't have it any easier, as they didn't have much room to move yet under threat of a Sue feet's falling on their heads:”

The “a Sue’s feet” is difficult to parse, it’d be better phrased as “one of the Sue’s feet”.

Can I have Drosselmeier, please?

(Side note: what would a misspelled Mini be?)

Anyway, good job!

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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 . . .

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

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