As referred to me by other people on a Discord server, here's a short fic about Jedi Padmé and Senator Anakin.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/24131080

…I’m in the corner thinking about, of all things, house elves. SIRPHE, anyone? Society for the Inclusivity and Recognition of Potterverse House Elves? I mean, if SPEW could exist to promote elfish welfare, then SIRPHE could exist to recognize house elves as elves...? I don't even know what I'm talking about rn

Aliens... pointy ears... stupid 'logical' plans... Prime Directive...

:O

The Abramsverse Vulcans never died! They were flung into the Multiverse and came up with this stupid idea to try and get home! All the differences between various Elves can be explained as different centres of bioengineering. It all works. :)

hS

See, what those long ears are supposed to do is wrap over the head. That means they can channel noise from directly above, as well as off to the sides. The sensitive tips (so much fanfic involves those things being super-sensitive) are intended to directly detect the vibrations when sound hits them, meaning an elf would intuitively know when a sound came from above rather than off to the side.

There are two schools of thought on this: one is that elves originated in caves (see: Drow), and that this evolved to help them listen for potential rockfalls. The other is that it evolved outside, in response to some very large aerial predators.

"The Eagles are coming! The Eagles are coming!"

hS

[Yes this is very NFSW] Remember the dubious lube page? Well, it mentions that badfic authors write Elves having self lubricating asses. I don’t know the logic behind it but I am confused. Squick involving body fluids I also tried to search for reasons on Google, but all I get is umm, some rather NSFW results.

~SomeRandomPersonAccount

[[Nameless Admin: Subject line edited after 24 hours of no response from SRPA]]

Personally, I think they're more bog creature than alien. I mean, have you met an elf?

World of Warcraft, I'm looking at you. There's no way those actually make them hear better, so what gives? Do elves find tall, pointy ears so attractive that they've self-selected for even taller and even pointier ears over the generations? (I know that's true of long, fabulous hair in the Tolkienverse! {= D )

What about glowing eyes? (Or molten orbs, or bright lamps, or whatever the urple synonym du jour is.) Do they somehow help with the telescoping thing?

Turning in another direction, something I noticed when learning about old-school fae elves (the kind that will either fix your shoes or steal your babies depending on whether you remembered to leave them a dish of milk or not) is that you always find them on the other side of the water. It doesn't matter where here is; they're always over there, and you have to cross the water to get to fairyland. It goes right up to Tolkien elves, too. Every Elvish settlement I can think of is bounded by water, and I guarantee that's no accident on Tolkien's part. I'm sure it's symbolic, and also it's a good plan for a settlement to have a source of fresh water plus more easily defended borders, but if you want to over-analyze elf traits, that seems like a fun one. ^_^

And, of course, the classic erotic fanfiction example is that elven posteriors are self-lubricating. Of course. Because reasons. Make of THAT what you will.

~Neshomeh

No, we don't protect pages unless we have to. We've never had a problem with non-members trying to claim fics, so there's no reason to lock the page.

~Neshomeh

Not knowing enough about Discord (I know, I'm a shame on the PPC), I must therefore construct my own zany theory! I propose that elves are ancient aliens who lost their homeworld and bioengineered themselves to be the perfect astronomers, then scattered throughout the universes in order to increase their chances of returning home. They don't tell outsiders because of a variant on Star Trek's Prime Directive.

Because I was able to edit it with the replacement account I had created like 5 minutes beforehand.

holy frick I'm late

'Riders!' cried Aragorn, springing to his feet. 'Many riders on swift steeds are coming towards us!'

'Yes,' said Legolas, 'there are one hundred and five. Yellow is their hair, and bright are their spears. Their leader is very tall.'

Aragorn smiled. 'Keen are the eyes of the Elves,' he said.

'Nay! The riders are little more than five leagues distant,' said Legolas.

-- The Two Towers Chapter 2: The Riders of Rohan

As discussed at blissful length here, if Legolas can count a hundred riders at five leagues (15 miles), he can also literally see the motion of the planets across the sky - where it would take a mortal most of the night to be able to detect the motion of Mars against the starfield, Legolas could discern it in under ten minutes.

Quite clearly, the combination of this with the circles thing (different universes? what different universes? ^_~) indicates that elves were created to be natural astronomers, just like dwarves are natural miners and humans are natural mayhem-generators.

As further evidence: Terry Pratchett's elves (Discworld) can make themselves appear however they want. Obviously, this is because an astronomer up all night winds up looking rather haggard, so they don't want to waste time making themselves look respectable.

Come to think of it, Pratchett elves are also natural universe-hoppers, explaining a) why they show up in so many canons, and b) which stars they're meant to observe - all of them.

hS

Ah, elves. Noble, intelligent, long-lived... and also quite favored by Sues. However, today I seek not to inquire into the bland noble wizard forest dudes that Sues create- today I'm curious about the really weird Suvian traits that sometimes get tacked onto elves. For example, not too long ago I picked up a book from the Adventurers Wanted series, not having read it for many years. It... wasn't very good. But the bit that sticks out in my memory the most is the fact that every elf in this cosmology could apparently draw a perfect circle. Why did evolution, magic, or for that matter the book gift them with such a random talent? Perhaps by accumulating more weird elf traits, we can find out.

I’m not the best beta reader, but I hope that I can help. Also thanks to the circuit breaker, I have more time to read now.

You can contact me at my Gmail, which is toorandomperson@gmail.com.

~SomeRandomPersonAccount

I finally got to work on my permission request, but I can't find a beta to look it over. I mostly need someone to critique the writing samples and maybe look at characterization for a bit.

Thanks!

Obligatory, not a PG warning.

So, overall everything looks OK-ish, I didn't look at your previous Permission Attempts when you posted them, and given that you've edited over them from the looks of things, I doubt that I will be likely to make comments on what, if anything has improved between then and now. Personally, I can't really find anything Wrong with your prompts, and while I would like to know why you keep changing badfics to mission first (as that's not the part of the Permission that is being failed, if you can even fail Permission on that), there's nothing wrong with taking that 'fic as your first mission that I am aware of.

One thing, that did strike me as weird when reading your prompts was how Bert spoke. In the Character Summary you did for him you mention that he speaks very formally, however there are contractions littered throughout his speech. Now this might not be something that you're not aware of, but I have always been taught that when speaking (or writing) anything formally, don't use contractions. So for me, that would be something to keep in mind when you're writing Bert in the future.

Another thing that irks me with Bert is his Bio. There's not exactly a lot there, although I do feel like his Personality section overlaps a little. What there is there for the Bio makes me confused why Bert is a PPC Agent. So, in my understanding of it he gets defeated by a monster, dragged by something through a plothole into HQ (Who, what, why? Give me more information here), gets healed by the Medical Team (I'm assuming he landed/got pulled through to the Medical Department, but there's no confirmation of any of that) and he's now working as an Agent to get holiday time to go back on his quest? That doesn't make sense to me. Why is he staying at the PPC, is it because he thinks it'll make him more powerful or gain allies to help the fight? Why doesn't he want to rush back to his world to save it now? What if he's too late, has that been thought about? What happens once he gets that holiday time (if he gets the holiday time)? Does he return to being a PPC agent (Would the flowers let him go like that)? And then that's it. That's the Bio. There's nothing to connect him deciding to become an Agent to where he is now. Why is he a Floater? Has he got any experience in the PPC before partnering up with Vanille? Why did he choose the name Bert? Why does he have this 'external behaviour' that means he speaks formally? How doe he speak formally in a language that everyone else understands?

Likewise with Vanille, her Bio gives us very little and what it does give raises questions we're not given the answer to. How did she get to the PPC? If she was just a drawing for a continuum that never came into fruition, is there enough of a plot there to form a plothole for her to get through to the PPC? How does she know her name? Was it given to her by someone or picked by herself? How did she know she needed paint (and how did she know what colours she needed to be painted)? Why did she need paint? Who painted her? How was she even painted? How did she become a bartender at Rudi's? How did she become an Agent? And why a Floater?

I think you've developed two characters, probably through a lot of RP on the Discord in Rudi's and the Courtyard (I should point out that while I am on the Discord, I largely ignore these two channels at the moment). That's all fine and dandy. But you need to develop their Bio, you've made them characters now, but neglected their characters before now. Give us a how and a why the characters have got from wherever they were to where they are now, make them believable. That's your challenge now I think.

Novastorme.

We’ll see how this turns out.

And here you have a portal to royal pain. Once it gets dealt with, you’ll be able to rest easy tonight.

I am making progress on the mission, albeit very slow progress. I've had the first mission segment mostly written for quite some time; I'm just not comfortable releasing it before the whole thing is finished.

Tell you what, though... I've also been working on a continuation/conclusion of the original, failed mission, to tell the story of what went wrong. It's also not finished, but in honor of the occasion, I'll share a chunk of that. It has some mild swearing, but is otherwise SFW.

---

Subjugation: What Came Before

“What do you mean, it’s gone?”

Two house-elves wearing tea towels and two Gryffindor students in black robes stood in the seventh-floor corridor next to the painting of Barnabas the Barmy. Nobody looked very happy, not even Barnabas.

“Not there,” said Gunny, the female student, who had brown hair in pigtails. “It is no more. It has ceased to be. This is an ex-Room of Requirement.”

The larger house-elf growled and was quickly restrained by the smaller before he could do anything rash.

“Flip says it’s inside a plothole,” said the male student, Wayne. His fluffy, cherry-red hair stood out, but he had refused to change it. “Apparently it’s never mentioned in the story, despite the fact that it’s such an obvious solution to several problems. And that’s not the only thing.” He waited uneasily to see if any violence was impending.

Suicide, the big, scarred house-elf, took a deep breath and forced himself to relax, one muscle at a time. “Okay. What’s the other thing?”

“Jo and Shae haven’t turned up,” said Gunny. “We’ve waited for hours, but there’s no sign of them. We think they must have cut and run.”

“Can’t say I blame them,” muttered Wayne.

Suicide grinned. It didn’t touch his brown, bulbous elf eyes. “Well, that’s just peachy. More work for us, and no nice, comfy home base to rest in. We’re off to a great start, aren’t we, Dio?”

“It could be worse,” she said nervously, and immediately clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh, shit. Quick, somebody knock on wood!”

Suicide obligingly rapped his knuckles against her head.

“Har har.” Diocletian glared at him and rubbed at the spot.

“Actually,” Gunny said, “Flip was getting a headache from looking at the plothole too long, so she and Rez went to radio for backup from Classroom Eleven. That’s home base now. Let’s go see if the new guys are there yet.”

The four agents headed down to the ground floor. Suicide and Diocletian changed into student disguises on the way, since it would look a bit odd for house-elves to be palling around with kids. Gunny blushed hard at buff, dark-haired, eighteen-year-old Suicide and just managed not to trip over her own feet. After that, she migrated to the front of the group and kept her eyes firmly on the hall ahead of her. Wayne shot Suicide a dark look and put himself between the two.

In other circumstances, Suicide might have made the situation more awkward just for fun, but he didn’t have the energy at the moment. He’d been looking forward to forty winks in a decent bed, prefaced by more Bleepsinthe to numb the pain of badfic enough to sleep, but all he was gonna get now was a cold stone floor. He hadn’t packed any camping gear, and since they’d lost Dio’s pack, they were out half their usual supplies.

“Have we considered the nuclear option?” he heard himself saying. “Portal over to the Pentagon, grab any loose tactical warheads, blow this thing and go home?”

Wayne glanced over his shoulder at Suicide and, apparently deciding he must be joking, shook his head and continued without a word.

“No such luck,” said Dio, who knew better. “If you don’t want to find out what the Flowers do to agents who get captured, I really don’t want to find out what they do to agents who blow up a castle full of innocent students.”

“Casualties are an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of war, Dio.”

“No.”

“Dammit.”

They reached Classroom Eleven without incident. Gunny rapped on the door. It opened a crack, just enough for a suspicious pale-green eye to peer out at them.

“Password?”

Gunny rolled her eyes. “Rez, it’s me.”

“Password?” Rez repeated more insistently.

“We didn’t set a password!”

“Well, we should have,” said Rez. “A real PPC agent would know that.”

“Sweet Kami-sama.” Wayne crossed his arms and tapped a foot. “Come on, Rez, before somebody sees us!”

“Or gets hurt,” Suicide added grimly.

Rez took this on board, but still hesitated. “I dunno . . . ”

Before anyone could explode, Gunny snapped her fingers in inspiration. “Zaphod is a hoopy frood!”

“Yes he is.” Rez pulled the door open. “Come on in!”

The four agents filed in with assorted filthy looks for Rez. Once the door was shut behind them, they dropped their disguises.

Suicide sighed with relief at being back in his own skin. Tattered and at least nine percent artificial it might be, but he was used to it, and three disguise changes in as many hours was a bit much. That taken care of, he surveyed their new base of operations.

Since the fic was set during Harry’s sixth year, but had been written before the release of Half-Blood Prince, Classroom Eleven wasn’t sure whether it was meant to retain its appearance as it had been under Firenze or revert back to a traditional classroom. As such, it retained most of the appearance of a forest clearing, but the log seating had been replaced with desks, and there was a blackboard suspended between two trees. The walls seemed to fade in and out, and if you were quick, you could just catch a cupboard out of the corner of your eye before it turned back into lichen and mushrooms.

“Cozy,” the Scythian remarked, “if slightly nauseating.”

“Believe me, I’m not happy about it either,” said Flip. The short, brown-haired floater was seated at a desk, massaging her temples with her eyes squeezed shut. “It was just the first place we could think of where we weren’t likely to run into anyone.”

“Guys, where’s our backup?” Gunny asked, looking around. “Couldn’t they find anyone?”

“The SO said he’d put out a call for volunteers,” Rez answered, “but shockingly, no one’s responded so far.”

Dio shook her head. “That’s the trouble with kids these days. No sense of civic obligation.”

“There have to be some other schmucks he can drub into service like he did us,” Suicide said, shrugging. “In the meantime, civic obligation be damned: I am getting some sleep.” He looked around, picked a likely patch of moss, and tossed himself down onto it.

“It’s still technically our turn, though,” Dio said. She chewed her lip anxiously. “Buggrit . . . ”

Gunny exchanged a look with Wayne. He shrugged. She nodded.

“I guess we could watch it for a little bit,” she said. “It doesn’t look like there’s any more slash tonight,” she added to her partner.

“Are you sure?” Dio asked, but it was just for show at that point. Her partner, possessing the ability of all military men to fall asleep anywhere, had already begun to snore.

Wayne nodded. “We’ll spot you a night, no problem. You can pay us back later.” He gave a thin-lipped smile, clearly attempting to be friendly in the face of a task he was not looking forward to at all.

“We will,” Dio said. “Thanks.”

Gunny transformed herself and Wayne into house-elves, and they left. Dio lay down near Suicide and tried to get some rest while Rez and Flip kept watch.

* * *

Meanwhile, the Sunflower Official searched high and low, and with the help of the Floating Hyacinth, he turned up a pair of floaters to replace the missing assassins. This brought a pleasing symmetry to the teams. Also, the Hyacinth had been troubled by these two lately. Sending them on what looked to be a nice, long mission would give her a break from having one or the other in her office every other day.

They entered Classroom Eleven by portal, bickering.

“This is entirely your fault, you know,” said the first one, a woman.

“My fault?” barked her irate, male partner. “You’re the one who agreed to the job!”

“If you hadn’t applied for a transfer, I wouldn’t have had to.”

“Insane logic like that is exactly why I’m transferring, Cameo!”

By this time, they’d woken Diocletian. She sat up groggily and squinted around the room. She found Rez and Flip, who answered her inquiring stare with helpless shrugs. They were on their feet, prepared to greet the newcomers, but the arguing pair were oblivious.

“You just don’t get it,” Cameo pouted. She was short and stocky. Her brown hair was done up in a messy bun run through by orange chopsticks. She had sunglasses, also orange, perched on top of her head. Most of what she wore was orange, save for a short black skirt and a small, tight black vest with a Floaters flash patch sewn onto it. She would have been at home among traffic cones.

Her partner, by contrast, was tall and pencil-thin with short, neatly gelled black hair. Everything about him proclaimed that he was a geek of the first order. Most PPCers were geeks, but this guy had everything but the pocket protector: the glasses, the gray pinstripes, the shoulders slightly rounded from crouching over endless books, and the pallor that suggested he had dwelled in basements and libraries for most of his life.

“I get that you’re probably trying to kill me,” he said. “If you can’t have me, no one can? Is that it?”

“What? No!” She shook her head, then paused and put a finger to her lip in thought. “Though that would be romantic, wouldn’t it? But no—I just thought this could be our last big adventure together, so we had to do it. And since we’re supposed to stay for the whole thing, maybe it’ll give you time to change your mind!” She beamed up at him.

“I’m not going to change my mind.” He folded his arms. “And if you try to make me, people will know, so don’t even think about pulling anything with the neuralyzer.”

Cameo sighed theatrically. “Oh, Numey. That stopped being fun, like, forever ago.”

“Yeah, because I caught on. Don’t forget it.” The man, “Numey,” finally looked away from Cameo long enough to take in the three agents staring at them. He took a deep breath and squared up his shoulders. “Hi. Agents Supernumerary and Cameo, Floaters. We’re your ringers.”

---

Only Nume and Cameo are properly mine, though I've more or less adopted Su and Dio at this point (and I really hope I'm doing them justice). The rest belong to their respective creators.

~Neshomeh

Sorry for being late. But I finished it. Florida pastor shows clips of Obi Wan Kenobi as Jesus Christ while giving a sermon by SomeRandomPersonAccount

~SomeRandomPersonAccount

The prompt this time was: "This'll be on the news, won't it?"

Feel free to use it as a writing prompt here on the Board as well

• A piece by Netzbura that was typed directly into chat so I don't have a copy
• A piece by Hanafuda
• A piece by eatpraylove
• "Kiss of Death" by FourMoonsWatching
• A piece by Somariel
• "Capture" by Calliope
• "Making Headlines" by Delta Juliette
• "Almost Newsworthy" by Granz
• A piece by OrangeFox
• "Where We'll Go" by Cicada
• and "Workplace Accidents" by me, Tomash

Thank you to everyone who participated, both in the writing and the giving of concrit!

Celebrian didn't even try to have a plot, just made it clear that it was page after page of squick. Well, at least it's straightforward about what it wants. Subjugation, however, seemed to aim for a semblance of a story, and then utterly failing.

It's the one Legendary even I couldn't read through, and I have quite a high level of tolerance for squick.