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(Apologies for tacking on, Thoth. Actually, I guess we're no longer knocking old threads into oblivion any more, are we? But old habits are hard to break. So tacking on.)

I attended a fancy all-male prep school for high school, mostly because Dad ran the bookstore there and didn’t have to pay tuition. But teenage boys in a fancy prep school are still teenage boys (EXCEPT ME OF COURSE), and at the end of each school year, myriad textbooks and novels from all different courses would kinda. Just. Be left behind in the lockers. Despite the fact that the textbooks could have been sold back to Dad for cash. Oh well. The rescued texts would get repaired (some by me!), while the fiction would be stored, in preparation for a traveling used book seller to visit and buy whatever was in enough demand to warranting resale.

But before he came, I would always go through and take my pick. lip smack

I’m, uh. Over the years, I've been slowly getting through the massive amount of books I “adopted” this way. I still have . . . well, I guess I’ll just count: 60 left. And I’m totally going to get to them all.

Eventually.

Yeah.

But I did just read one of them! And it was good. Like real good, like oh my gosh, is this a series? Because I’m immediately invested. The book strangely didn’t include an About-the-Author, so I’ll be looking her up once I finish this review.

Spoilers for A Time of Darkness by Sherryl Jordan. (Apparently, it’s titled Rocco outside of the United States.) I just realized how brilliant the U.S. title is, but that’s too much spoilers.

The basic setup in the beginning of this novel is that a teenage boy, Rocco Makepeace, keeps having an uncomfortably vivid nightmare about being a caveman in a cave, being attacked by a wolf, and falling down a cliff. Not a fun dream, to be sure, but the uncomfortable part comes from waking up with sand in his bed, the smell of stew in his bedroom, and the aching feeling of a wolf bite on his face, even though the rest of his family can’t seem to detect any of this evidence. We spend just enough time on this opening part (what you might call . . . Rocco’s modern life? >.> ) to meet Rocco’s immediate family and learn a bit of the family history—most importantly, that a lot of the people on his father’s side have a bit of ESP in them—before Rocco falls asleep one last time and wakes up in Anshur, a secluded oasis inhabited by a small group of primitive folks.

I’m inevitably comparing this novel to the Earth’s Children series. Whereas EC has a viewpoint character from the time period of its setting, AToD throws an 80s boy into the ancient time period. The cultural divide is shown quite clearly, as sixteen-year-old Rocco’s first action is to get the crap kicked out of him and nearly drowned by a bunch of six-to-eight-year-olds. Sounds legit. The difference in viewpoints is shown so many different ways, Jordan really put a lot of thought into the matter. Particularly fun is the villagers’ reaction to Rocco’s purple shirt, as most of the younger kids had never seen that color before. I also liked the two-way mismatch on medical matters: Rocco’s reaction to the initial distrust of Anshur’s people is to jokingly reassure them he doesn’t have the plague. Which they react very aggressively towards, because for them, the Bubonic plague is a very real and fatal concern. On the other hand, when Rocco gets hurt by a big cat later, he freaks out and tries to keep anyone from tending to the wound, because he assumes their medical care will involve leeches and amputation and contaminated instruments.

There’s also a twist! A big twist, and for once, I managed to sleuth it out ahead of time. But here’s the thing: it’s such a good twist, that I don’t even want to discuss it, because I would rather y’all go find a copy and read it yourselves! I will say that, upon arriving at the end, I appreciated how incredibly tightly woven the primary plot thread was. I realize reviewing, like, a third of a novel and saying “it’s good, go read” might feel a bit disingenuous, but really, saying too much would be a disservice to anyone who decides to pick this up.

—doctorlit, trying to get everyone on the YA bandwagon

“The spoiler bared its teeth and sprang. He felt the impact of its body, coarse and hard and warm.” “The spoiler bared its teeth and sprang. He felt the impact of its body, coarse and hard and warm.” “The spoiler bared its teeth and sprang. He felt the impact of its body, coarse and hard and warm.”

So in the Mass Effect section there used to be tags for Female and Male Shepard (alongside the standard Shepard), now I don't know exactly when it happened but at some point FFN decided to get rid of Female Shepard (or Fem!Shep) and Male Shepard (I think it used to be shortened to M!Shep) and just have Shepard. Which is fine. Until you start to wonder what happened to all those fics that had Fem!Shep or M!Shep tagged in them...

I'm going to be honest, I have no idea what's happened to the M!Shep tags, I think they've been correctly assigned the Shepard tag, or else the tags have just dissappeard into the Aether.

Now we come to Fem!Shep... At this point I'm going to point people to the lovely Mass Effect Wiki page on J Garson, a character from Andromeda. Link here. Now I'm sure most of you will be going "Why Nova? Why link us to this relatively obscure person from a game Shepard isn't even in?" Well here's the interesting point. Every single fic that had Fem!Shep tagged in it (about 9.6k of them as I'm writing this) now has the J Garson tag instead.

Why? No one knows.

Nova

It's crazy how much this has blown up. There's literally hundreds of fics, and while it seems like most of it is from the same group of people that's still a monumentous amount of effort. Even if a good deal of these fics also appear to have double or low triple digit word counts.

So I want to preface this by saying that even if you don’t know Ace Attorney, you should stick around, because you don’t really need to know the canon to understand how bizarre this is.

Earlier today, I decided to look at the Ace Attorney section on FFN at the behest of Silv, after she ran out of badfic to spork in the #badfic channel of the Discord. And I found a phenomenon that is entirely inexplicable, allegedly managed to get an OC added to FFN’s fandom tags, and is surprisingly recent. Like, this year recent.

As a note, I’d recommend exercising caution when following any of the following hyperlinks/doing your own investigation. There’s just so much that I’m not confident I’ll be able to catch every single potentially-applicable content warning.

THE OC (and original story)

Allow me to introduce you to John Phoenix, uncanonical nephew of Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney (born to Phoenix’s uncanonical sister). John Phoenix first appeared in the story The Adventures of John Phoenix, released on February 17th, 2020. It’s an introduction to the titular character, John Phoenix, who is painfully obviously a questionably quality Parody Sue--or, Stu, as the case may be--and follows him from his glittery newborn stage to his… adventures in heaven.

Not because he died, mind you, but because the characters flew airplanes to heaven because heaven is in the clouds so obviously you can fly to it. Obviously.

There are some oddly religious overtones in some bits of this, but they just kind of exist and it isn’t a topic that seems to be emphasized, plus there’s plenty of Bad besides that. Mostly in the form of Hot Takes that are meant more for sheer shock value than for the purpose of exploring the intricacies and pitfalls of the justice system and morality. And blatant violation of canon, among other things. As a note, I can’t exactly attest to how missionable this is.

But in the interest of time, I’ll directly quote and summarize a few things from the first couple of chapters of the fic:

• According to this, a virgin birth is what it’s called when you don’t know the name of a baby’s father.

• This: “Then suddenly the baby reached out and touched Phoenix's lawyer badge that Phoenix uses when he needs to defend people in court. Baby John's face lit up and he seemed to absorb magical powers from the badge. Then his face grew very solemn, as if in that moment he peeked into a window to the future and was contemplating some great destiny that lay before him.”

• The fic says John Phoenix has multiple mental disorders that are forgotten about within a handful of paragraphs and will probably infuriate most of the people reading this, if my knowledge of the PPC community is somewhat accurate.

• John Phoenix has super accelerated growth and becomes a young adult and apprentice to a criminal defense attorney in the span of two months.

There is far more to this, but for the sake of brevity I’ll leave it at that (though I’m probably going to at least spork this in the Discord because yeesh). Putting that aside, let’s move on to…

THE PHENOMENON

As mentioned above, this all began on February 17th, 2020, when the story The Adventures of John Phoenix was originally posted. Subsequently, multiple other authors apparently seemed to take the idea of this strange, strange OC and absolutely run with it. To the point of getting an original character added to the character tags, though it was removed when I went to check.

This blog post on Tumblr summarizes the overall situation better than I probably could (thanks to FourMoons for digging it up). This Reddit post has an actual screenshot of John Phoenix in the character tags. And somebody made an Ace Attorney Online version of the original and put it on YouTube. It’s a bizarre situation, to say the least.

I may make a follow-up to this with a rough timeline of how this situation is going down, but it won’t be tonight. Mostly because it’s almost midnight, I’m tired, and there is (from what I can tell) a fair bit of drama to unpack.

So, I was minding my own business on the Discord server when everything vanished. By "everything," I meant I couldn't access any of the servers I was in. All of them had vanished, replaced with an icon of an exclamation mark that led to Discord's official Twitter.

Eventually, I was able to access all of my servers again. So I did what I usually do and went back to the PPC Lounge. Only problem was, only eight people in the server were online. That eight people did not include any moderators.

In other words, the mods were asleep.

Don't worry, nothing happened aside from Bryn posting the Mary Sue emoji in #generic_channel. Well, if something happened I wasn't around to see it, because I logged off of Discord and wasn't able to log back on. The site just said, "Connecting..." for a really long time.

In other words, the Discord is down.

So, uh... hi?

You can get my email address by clicking on my name, or I can give you my Discord username if you’d prefer that.

As for a chair . . . there isn't really enough space for more than one person to eat at the microwave table, so I would rather spread my stuff out on the floor around me than sit on a chair and have to reach for everything. Plus, we need to keep expenses down during the shutdown, so I would have to pay for the chair on my own . . . and that's not happening! Thanks for the thought, though.

—doctorlit on the floor, where he belongs

Canon knowledge would be nice to have, but I think I know the canon at least okay since I replayed the games last year. However, I am absolutely abysmal at noticing typos/missing words (just ask Neshomeh), so I would very much appreciate help there.

I thought I should add this on, since I'm currently writing a mission on this bleepfic. It's called "The Fires of Sibling Love", and is about incest. That alone would be bad enough, but three of the five chapters include rape, and in one chapter the victim even decides to have a child with her rapist. Said victim is also 13, because the fic really needed to make things worse. On top of that, only one of those cases is actually acknowledged as rape, the other two are treated as being perfectly fine.

In addition, everyone is wildly out of character. Ike, who you may recognize from Smash, has suddenly turned into stereotypical frat boy. Marcia, who is typically kind and caring in canon, is now extremely jealous and catty. Titania, Ike's second in command and team mom for the Greil Mercenaries, is now a total jerk.

Relatedly, the entire fic is ridiculously sexist. The fic goes to great lengths to point out just how great every women mentioned looks, sometimes going into borderline urple prose to do so, but you'll barely see a word of description about men. This description also tends to be laser focused on a few spots in particular, I'm pretty sure you can guess which ones. The fic also insults the women involved for their participation in the fic's activities, while treated the same actions from men as being completely acceptable.

If you're feeling up to reading this fic, you can find it at uggcf://jjj.snasvpgvba.arg/f/4260819/2/Gur-Sverf-bs-Fvoyvat-Ybir (rot13), but it really is NSFW and NSFB, so be careful.

How much about Fire Emblem do I need to know to beta? I can handle general SPaG and things like that, but I know nothing about the canon...

I realize it's been a while since I was here last, so I should probably give a quick intro. I showed up around three years ago, got permission after about 6 months, and finished my first mission last year. I've been dealing with health problems that have made it a bit difficult to be as involved in the community as I'd hoped. In the time I've been here, I earned a bit of a reputation for finding unusual badfic, including M/F and F/F ABO, trans fetishization taken way too far, and things that are just too squicky to inflict on innocent Boarders.

Speaking of that last one, I'm looking for betas for a new mission. The fic in question is "The Fires of Sbiling Love", which is Fire Emblem: Radiant dawn fic. It is NSFW and NSFB, containing rape, incest, and pedophilia, and would probably qualify as a bleepfic. The mission is 9537 words right now. You can PM me if you're in the PPC discord, or leave a way for me to contact you.

I was taking a challenging stance deliberately, but I didn't mean to be hostile, so I'm sorry if I made you feel attacked.

I hope I have provoked more thought than anger, and that others may have benefited from watching the exchange.

~Neshomeh

A very clear and rather pleasant description, a nice bit of action, a little tension, nice writing--made for a very lovely read. Thanks :)

Also, maybe someone should look into getting a folding chair to store nearby for you, or something? It doesn't sound like an unpleasant place to sit, but still. Chair. If you want one, someone should get on that.

~Z

So a while ago I found slashfic of The Emoji Movie. It's Gene x Poop and it's worse than you could ever imagine. It's highly NSFW and so surreal it probably counts as NSFB. When we were looking at it on the discord we were questioning whether it was real or just some disturbing fever dream. I was wondering if I could put it on the list of bleepfics on the wiki.

Here's the fic if you want to see it. (NSFW and NSFB)

Wednesdays are doctorlit's day to spend lunch break with his head keeper, [A]. This does have one small drawback, in that [A] only keeps one chair in her main work room. So doctorlit eats on the floor, in the alcove between the exhibit rooms for the chinchillas and the red squirrels that [A] is responsible for. Next to him is the stepladder used to access the spiny-tailed iguana's display case, mounted against the wall between the two rooms.

On the one hand, it was lucky the head of Grounds, [M], had shown up and interrupted [A]'s lunch to replace the air fan in the ceiling of the red squirrel room, because that meant [A] was inside the room when the meat thing showed up. On the other hand, though, there were now two potential witnesses yards away from the meat thing, with only a pair of doors in the way of them returning to the work hallway.

doctorlit said, "Uh."

The meat thing didn't say anything, but made a squelching noise as it crawled across the concrete floor towards him.

doctorlit sealed his cheese sandwich back inside it's plastic container.

"[D]," called [A] from inside the red squirrel room. "Can you turn the room fan off?"

"Uh, yeeeeaaah . . ." doctorlit got to his feet, sliding up the brick wall at his back. He tiptoed around the meat and hit the right switch on the room's power plate, then climbed onto [A]'s chair before the meat could reach him. He waited for the meat to start oozing up a chair leg, then made a dash for the stepladder. On top of the iguana's tank was a pair of metal grabbers, since the lizard had an infrequent habit of knocking her food bowl down the floor. As he picked it up, he saw the iguana was just inside the tank's lid, head cocked to one side and watching him through the plastic mesh.

"Don't look at me that way," doctorlit told her. "I'm doing the best I can."

"Hey, [D]?" called [M].

"Hand us the gloves." said [A].

"Do you have, like, gloves, or a rag—"

"The gloves."

"—or just, like, a wad of paper towels or something?"

"Do the gloves."

doctorlit huffed. The gloves were on a feeding cart close to where the squirrel room's power switches had been. He jabbed the grabbers down at the meat thing and snagged it, then jumped down the stepladder and headed over to [A]'s chair, throwing her microwave door open. He released the meat thing inside, slammed the door shut, and hit numbers until it started heating. Then he grabbed the animal handling gloves and took them through the double doors to the squirrel room, passing them through to [A].

"Thanks," she said.

doctorlit headed back to the microwave and tried to peer through the little holes to see if the meat had stopped moving yet, wiping down the head of the grabbers as he did so. Unable to see, he put the grabbers back on the iguana tank.

He heard a clunk from inside the squirrel room. [M] demanded, "Do you think you guys could fit any more branches in this room? There's still some walking space you haven't filled in yet. God." [A] giggled. More clunking followed, and doctorlit realized they were coming out. He ran for the microwave and stopped the timer, but [A] was already forcing the ladder through the double doors, and doctorlit couldn't risk opening the microwave.

[A] leaned the ladder against a wall and switched the fan back on.

"All right," said [M], plopping the old, failed fan unit on the table. "There you go."

doctorlit sat awkwardly through the ensuing small talk, trying to make himself eat and praying neither of them would have reason to open the microwave. Once [M] left, and [A] went outside to smoke, doctorlit took the grabbers back and gingerly started to open the microwave, ready for the inevitable jump scare.

But the microwave was empty, and completely clean. All trace of the meat thing had vanished.

—doctorlit, using his location from when he first read this thread

There's bound to be some intruders eventually, no matter what people try. Just figured something is better than nothing :)

Kittyauthor shouldn't have been outside.

Of course, she was outside. The courtyard was, as places in HQ went, surprisingly peaceful. There was sun, and the grass felt good under the hands of a woman who hasn't spent time outside since... well, she couldn't remember when. Either way, her outside time back then was limited by a human-like rabbit who kept trying to sell her stuff.

In the courtyard, Kitty didn't have her time limited, at least outwardly. Her only limit was the missions, but O'Ryan would fetch her if-

Squish

Kitty sat up and looked around. There it was: a squishy piece of meat. Cafeteria meat.

It seemed disoriented for a few seconds, as if the fall actually affected it some. It began to move around, forcing Kitty to come to her senses. She stood up and began to run away from it.

"AAAAAAAAAA!" she screamed. "CAFETERIA MEAT HAS COME ALIVE! AAAAAAAAA!" The meat, having realized that Kitty existed, followed after her, picking up sticks, leaves, and other gunk. It was fairly fast for a piece of meat and was steadily catching up to Kitty, until...

SLAM!

The meat paused at the door, almost expecting Kitty to double-check for its existence. Then it slowly moved away.

Kitty panted from behind the door. "Okay, what the actual heck was that?" She looked up at the ceiling. "And I was just starting to enjoy my day too." She sighed and walked back to her RC.

I'm so glad to hear that you liked this story, and I'm happy to have added something of my own to the PPC universe. And I was actually going to ask whether I should add RC 1000 to the list, but you've answered that question for me. :) It shall be done right away. And really, I'd be honored if you were to reference this short tale I wrote one late night in your own writing. ^_^

Thanks for reading!

To: alhawke@rc369.dte-g

Hey,

I just heard back from the Weeds, and they said there's not actually much to worry about, since everyone'll on that site will think you're a roleplayer. Apparently that's what happende before, and that this is just the first time our automation picked up on it like this. Perils of innovation, I guess.

Looks like we're all good.

- Tomash

---

From: bugtrack@dosat
To: [undisclosed recipients], alhawke@rc369.dte-g
Subject: [#844294] Email routing issue - internal communications being posted to Internet (World One)

I was following up on continuity breach incident #844119, and it looks like some of my emails to the agent involved have been seeing the same routing issue.

It's also not clear that this has resolved. I just sent an all-clear message since this is all pretty harmless, per External Security, and I haven't seen if it's shown up yet, but these things might take a while to copy in.

The problems start with the message that ended up at https://www.plotprotectors.org/posts/161924. A traceroute is attached, in case that helps.

Attachment: [traceroute-plotprotectors-cic_1.log]