The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

And thanks for backing me up - I thought that's what the standards were. Ties are not cut!

... though Laburnum has to do it secretly because she's still on the Missing Persons list and there's still a warrant out for her arrest. The PPC is probably a better option for her than anything waiting for her in World One, even if she's the way she is entirely because of her own choices. She chose to get Bloodwrath, though she didn't know it would stick in World One. A hair-triggered berserker really couldn't operate in normal society. In the PPC, she can direct it to a useful function.

Even S&S kind of like the job, even if they did technically get press-ganged. As someone pointed out on the TVTropes page, Stormsong may have ostentatiously attempted suicide, but if he genuinely wanted to die he has enough medical knowledge to have been able to do it.

1) Sues are not people. That's really integral to what makes it funny. Sues and their companions the bit-characters are not sentient, thinking beings in any way that we understand them. To drag in theology, they don't have souls. That's the key thing, really.

2) Agents are not conscripts. Most agents, especially agents from World One, chose this. And like it.

3) In terms of everything against you - very true. But on the other hand, the Word World is protecting you on a mission. That does a lot.

4) Despite all the "no retirement EVER" jokes... retirement is totally possible. And you can go home again. Look at Boarder!Laburnum's characters. I could be misinterpreting but it seems to me that Foxglove stays in contact with her family all the time; Agent!Laburnum was re-establishing contact with her family. And if you don't want to go home, you have ever piece of fiction ever created to escape to. Look at Acacia from the original series, isn't she off happy in some Roman continuum? If a really desperate agent wanted, they could go settle in the Hundred Acre Wood or Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. Horrendous fate!

5. It is possible to live a happy, if incredibly bizarre, life at HQ. I'm gonna cite Pads's and Trojie's Ten Years Hence here - in that future, at least, they're living in HQ and have a, uhm, nontraditional, but very happy family that they could never have had anywhere else. Life is nice.

6. As to funny... I don't know. There is, in fact, an element of black comedy here. I'm curious as to what you read, and why you kept reading if you didn't think it was funny or enjoyable. I'm curious as to why Things I Am Not Allowed To Do At The PPC, Agent Lux being Lux, and spontaneous water fights aren't funny. I guess this is kind of a matter of perspective, though, and a personal thing.

(My apologies if I misrepresented anyone's work, by the way.)

I have also found an epic goodfic. Actually, it was referred to me ages ago by Bronwyn, and she may have told you about it, but oh well. I'll link to it again.

It's a massive Harry Potter AU which actually works. It starts out a little shakily, and the main character has faint whiffs of 'Sueishness about her, but it gets better very quickly until she's in no way 'Sued or in danger of becoming 'Sued.

The story itself tells a completely different version of the stories beginning when Harry is two. I won't say too much so as not to give it away, but I will warn that it's very long, and that there are two completed sequels and another in progress.

I'd love to know what you think of it!
--anamia
p.s. Right, the link. Almost forgot. Here you go: http://whydoyouneedtoknow.fanficauthors.net/LivingwithDanger/index/

And, as a former writer of angst myself, I can understand where you're coming from. (I say former because I've become lazy in recent times and don't have the mental energy to devote to writing proper, realistic angst.) Angst is fun. At least, I consider it fun. Then again, I am a fairly twisted writer who likes to see her characters suffer, but that's a different story.

On the other hand, I think all the craziness is just a coping method. Yes, being an agent, especially a newbie, would be terrifying. Not only to have to go into a badfic (scary in itself), but to have to dispose of a person (who may not be a 'person,' as such, but dangit, when you're looking at her, I expect she might feel like one, at least a little), and to have to do so with a complete stranger is scary. (And yes, I rate the last as the scariest. I have a... warped value scale. Yay for being antisocial...) There are two ways to cope with that kind of thing: you crack, at which point you're taken to FicPsych and probably sent home, or you take it all as absurd but necessary. It's those who take the second track who stay as agents and actually do all the work.

I say this, of course, even as I'm sitting here wondering if my characters are reacting enough to the horrors of the 'fic in which they are currently stuck. Angst is a hard habit to break. -grins-

So yeah, I understand where you're coming from, and I sympathize with you. I find PPC stuff funny, but I also see the darker side, and I want to work with that. As people said, you need a balance, and all silliness is just as bad as all angst.

--anamia

Personally, I'm actually quite fond of them, especially for anime continuua (that is the proper plural of continuum, isn't it? If not, I apologize). Depending on the story, the characters might still retain whatever superpowers/odd physical traits they had in canon, or still have part of them, or have nothing but the name. These last make me sad, but oh well. Moving on.

Killing them is both easy and not, I would imagine. (All of this is hypothetical, mind, since my agents a) aren't assassins, and b) have never worked in an AU before. Actually, for that matter, they've never worked anywhere, officially. I've been slacking on the writing of their missions. But that's completely off topic.) Most AUs are set in what can be assumed to be World 1, so you have access to all of the World 1 weapons. On the other hand, getting guns etc. into High School isn't terribly easy, and they tend to be chock-full of OCs who would notice. I'd say if you had something subtle like a curare-tipped blow dart, it might be the most effective. Killing someone in math class is surely fun, though charging them in class might be a bit disrespectful to the teacher.

--anamia

Welcome aboard! You seem to fit it quite well here. -grins-

I offer you this sparkly rock (pickax not included). It works well as a paperweight, should you have any paper which needs weighting, or it may be thrown at offending 'Sues. You may also find it useful as an emergency punctuation mark.

Again, welcome!
--anamia

I'm a guy who can draw stuff.



Here's the picture.

Joseph's pic will come later.

Welcome! Terribly sorry that I could not pop in and greet you earlier. I have been sucked into the vortex of Goodfic and have only recently managed to extract myself.

Anywho, please accept this gift of a sparkly rock (pickax not included). It works quite well as a paperweight, and may also be thrown at offending 'Sues. An agent working for DTE may also find it useful as a piece of emergency punctuation.

--anamia
p.s. The month goes by quickly, no worries!

Your remote activator can portal you from one part of the fic to another. That includes from one time to another (time is just another dimension). Most agents skip parts of the fic where they're not likely to collect charges, or not likely to collect any *new* charges.

http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/Remoteactivator

Some fics will skip you unwillingly past some of the time that passes. If it's poorly described or there isn't enough warning, you can get a temporal distortion, like a time skip:

<a href="http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/Temporaldistortion">http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/Temporaldistortion

Also, the Fic Location Follower:
<a href="http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/FicLocationFollower">http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/FicLocation_Follower
Tends to be a bit buggy, and not widely used; but can be better than getting dropped on your head after a month-long time skip.

...but you didn't answer my question about the time length of the mission. The fic's in-universe time lasts for months to gather up the fic's charges. Is there a way to skip the unnecessary time?

This post actually includes the link:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GattacaBabies

That's a list of worlds that might have the tech to grow a baby outside of a uterus.

Star Trek and Star Wars are more well-known continua that have this technology. The PPC has been known to take technology from the Trekverse.

Wow, you're missing out. Basically: Sci-fi world with lots of idiosyncratic planetary cultures. Main character is Miles Vorkosigan, a noble with dwarfism and a secret identity as a mercenary.

The uterine replicator is basically a piece of technology that'll let a baby grow in a bottle. Lots of sci-fi worlds have them, but the Vorkosigan saga was the one I thought of first.
http://vorkosigan.wikia.com/wiki/Uterine_replicator

The other one I can remember now is Brave New World's baby-production assembly line, where babies are grown in bottles. That might be a technology adaptable to a single infant; but you'd better make sure you get the model that's used to develop Alpha babies, or else the poor kid could end up with fetal alcohol syndrome. (Yeah, Brave New World is a dystopia.)

I mean, we all see the PPC slightly differently. You say missions aren't terrifying; I think they often would be--really, why wouldn't you be terrified if your partner just got eaten, or if you had a pack of Warrior!Sues running at you with intent to turn you into a bloody smear on the ground?

Not constantly terrifying, I'll grant you that. Not even usually terrifying. More like, hours of boredom, then thirty seconds of running/fighting/whatever for your life. And yeah, getting to see the world you love probably makes up for it.

Writers bring their own ideas into it, though. If you're the sort of person who would hate to have to kill a rabid dog and have bad dreams about it afterward, then you're the sort of person who'll probably write about an agent learning to deal with the fact that they've got to kill the sue to protect the continuum. If you're the sort of person who's dealt with craziness in your own life, then maybe you'll write about how the agents deal with it. If you just want a fluffy humor piece, then you'll write that.

It's just that if we were to take it entirely seriously and write about nothing but the angsty side of things, it'd get simultaneously boring and ridiculous. I've not written any PPC spinoffs, but I've written other fanfiction, and I've made the mistake of going too far into the "downer" part of things. It simply didn't work. It wasn't realistic. Human beings, or non-human beings written by human authors, simply don't live all day every day wallowing in angst. There are better times, and there are worse times; and if you write nothing but badness, it'll become cheap and boring. Write about characters who realistically have good times and bad times and everything in between, and it can be good.

The kind of person who chooses to work at the PPC is almost always a highly resilient individual. Resilience, basically, is the capacity to deal with the crazy in your own life and sometimes in your own head and go on with your life regardless. In the PPC, you'd have to be that way just to accept the craziness of the fact that the multiverse exists. You'd have to be flexible; you'd have to be able to see the ridiculousness of life and just laugh at it. People who don't have that capacity simply wouldn't stay there past the first plothole.

You see what you want to see in a work of fiction. Much like the stereotypical monster in the closet, what is reasonable and prudent to one person is most definitely not believable to another. I think that at least in the most part, your perspective differs from mine enough that the implications you see and the ones I do are definitely two different things.

Take, for instance, the missions themselves. It has been stated (in TOS) that we can't hurt badfic authors, as they have rights. This implies that their creations do not have rights, and thus are not alive - therefore, ending them isn't as horrible an act as it might seem. They're just words, after all, and we're re-writing them to be something else. (Namely, not continuing to distort the canon.)

A lot of the PPC's humor comes from the workplace - management that seems out of tune with reality itself, to say nothing of the employees, is a classical example.

The Ironic Overpower is another entity borrowed from the workplace, especially customer service positions. I do A/V for money, as I'm sure many of you know. Now, the vast majority of my events run smoothly, professionally, and so on. It's the ones that don't run smoothly that would make it onto my blog if I felt like blogging, and especially the ones where multiple things fail for humorous effect. For example, the event this morning. I was scheduled to start (and did start) an hour and a half before an event to set up a single mic for a presenter. When the presenter arrived, they didn't even notice that the mic existed, stood in front of the stage, and talked to the people unamplified. Meh, big deal. However, the thing that has me shaking my fist at the Ironic Overpower is the fact that I started at 6 AM on a Saturday.

The Ironic Overpower is not a force that keeps Agents busy all the time - it's a semi-anthropomorphization of the odd way that when things go wrong, there tend to be multiple things that go wrong, and all at the best possible time to make things entertaining and amusing. I suppose I could sit down and do the statistics and work out how often it actually happens, but in my work, at least, it seems to happen far more than it should. (Then again, the times it does are the ones people tend to remember.)

And no, I do not believe that it would be terrifying to be an Agent. We're going on adventures in far-off and magical places to save the world - not dramatically, not through magic speshul powers, but by stabbing words in the face. Are big-game hunters terrified by what they hunt?

As far as not being able to go home, see Pads's missions - she goes into that a lot more than I ever have.

As with any storytelling, the PPC stories are exaggerations for comic effect. There was quite a bit more to training here where I work than "here's a sound board, go run the state Supreme Court", but that's what it seems like at times, and if I was telling it for humorous effect, that's exactly how I'd tell it.

No, the PPC isn't a descent into madness. For every potential trauma-inducing moment, there are hours of running around in Middle-Earth, seeing the scenery, laughing at people's stupidity, and so on. No, it's not a safe office job, but the ancient chinese proverb that "may your life be interesting" is a curse is complete and utter bunk. The PPC is an adventure.

Also, from a very machinistic perspective, we don't write Lovecraftian spiral-into-madness fics because we don't want to read them. This is fiction. We tell the stories we want to tell, and that is not where we want the PPC to go. We want to read about a flake with a camera and a slightly bloodthirsty card-game aficionado saving Middle-Earth one badfic at a time. We want to read about hospital drama where the patients could be from any world imaginable. We want fun and adventures and completely ridiculous superheroes saving the multiverse, so that's what we write.

If not: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2318355/37/MakeAWish

Have somebody from Medical "acquire" a uterine replicator from the Vorkosigan saga. :)

On further thought, the eyeball would have to fit in the socket with no frames or protrusions onto her face, because elaborate cybernetics would be sort of out of place in most of the continua she works. That, and she's still in contact with her family, and they'd notice anything too elaborate - a funny-coloured magic or tech eyeball could be passed off as a contact lens, but weird Borg stuff couldn't.

I second everything Calista said and so am not going to repeat it, but would just like to add in addition . . .

One important thing to remember is that, for the most part (with rare exceptions such as in Suedom) Mary Sues aren't real people. Not even in fiction. I mean, a well-designed 3D character in a story might be construed as "real" within the context of a story, but Mary Sues are one-dimensional (at most) wish fulfilments. They are, in other words, soulless. The is no more evil in killing them than in killing a pencil drawing of a stick figure.

One last thing: people adapt. I mean, people adapt all the time, swiftly, and necessarily to new situations. They are changed, but seldom broken. While reading your question-thing, I tried to put myself in the place of my agent, and my reaction was:

At first, it would be difficult, but I'd adapt. And it wouldn't drive me insane. It wouldn't be fun, but it would be necessary. And I could do it, if I had to. To protect worlds and lives, I could do it.

I need a female agent maybe a few more to transfer the "freak" of the assbaby and to even the odds against four sues. Two of them are dangerous since they wiped out an army in one chapter. I can't solve the mpreg problem without a girl to volunteer as the surrogate mother.

One question though, can a mission last for more than month?

...use KH Games Cases. DVD versions don't exist.