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So, here are my ideas for agents so far.

Agent Quantum is a vampire from the diary of a neurotic zombie continuum (where vampire abilities are limited to immortality, flight and super strength and though they crave blood they can go without it. They also burn easily in the sun but this can be dealt with using SPF 150 suncream.). They were an unmentioned character who fell through a plot hole and landed in hq. They have short messy dark brown hair and silvery blue eyes. Her preferred outfit is an xkcd 'stand back I'm going to try science' t-shirt, a fleece of some sort, black or navy tracksuit bottoms and some loose trainers. She loves growing plants and collects cuttings of native plants from continuums she visits, meaning that the RC she works in is lined with many plant pots. She also likes chemistry, and by chemistry I mean mixing stuff together with her chemistry set and seeing if it explodes or not. She is currently trying to make something that is like sugar but with an even greater effect. Quantum is often very ditzy, unfocused and excitable, but is dangerously competent when made angry enough. However, that threshold is rather high.

Agent Kit is a half human half yo-kai from the yo-kai watch continuum. She was taken via embryo extraction kit from this fic and grew up in the nursery, just recently becoming an agent. She looks mostly human, apart from fox ears, clawed fingers and nine brown tails. Her brown hair is usually tied up in a neat ponytail. She did inherit some power from her father, but that mostly equates to small, slightly-bigger-than-a-candle-size fireballs. She just moved into a response centre with Quantum and is less than amused with her behaviour. Like her father, she is quite obsessed with looking good and spends most of her free time brushing herself, or trying to make her disguise as beautiful as possible. Before joining, she read through a large portion of the PPC handbook at least twice. She is highly protective of her canon relatives, but despises fics that ship her parents, or one of her parents and someone who they're not canonically related to, especially if they end up with kids.

...So, yeah. These are my agents so far.

It's a fun read!

"“RUN!!!!!!!” Melissa bellowed like a foghorn, spraying her comrades with excess punctuation."
Love the imagery!

--Ozzielot

I'm really glad to hear that you've enjoyed the mission. (Tell me, which were the parts that made you laugh? I'm not a native English speaker, and writing comedy in my second language is kind of tough, so I really appreciate any feedback on my work.)
And you're right, the cleavage thing is a character moment I should have caught while editing. Oh, well... I have plans anyway to feature Sean in the future, and hopefully by then I'll have a better grip on his character.
As for the next mission... it isn't *quite* as disgusting as this one, but that's a pretty low bar. All I'll say is that copious amounts of Bleepka are going to be involved. :D

Could I have your email? It's so I can allow just you to see the doc.

I'm not exactly the most experienced of beta-readers but I should be able to spot anything obviously wrong and pick up on some SPaG errors.

I didn't realize you weren't a native speaker. Interesting that Hungarian has a different rule for paragraphs like that!

—doctorlit learning something

That ought to get people's attention. ^~

And they ought to pay attention, because this was a good mission! The fic is godawfully disgusting and almost certainly a troll, but the mission handles it adroitly, providing just enough information to show that it's awful without dwelling on it enough to make the audience suffer. Not as much as the agents, anyway.

There were a few good moments that made me snicker, but I think my favorite is the unexpected scene transition. It was a brilliant way to extend the story without it feeling forced, and funny to boot. ^^

I mostly agree with doctorlit about Sean, too. I absolutely buy him being dazed, confused, and of little to no practical help. My one criticism is that, even dazed and confused, he should still be Agent Sean. I find it hard to believe he could have his face in a girl's cleavage after who-knows-how-long in that plothole and not so much as grin about it. There in particular, he reads less as "dazed" and more as "sedated." Remember, he dated Luxury, and he's the one of the pair who actually hit on Jay. He's about as much of a pervert as Lux is. {= )

That said, I did like his interactions with Melissa overall. They could all probably be played up a little more so they're presented as deliberate actions on Sean's part rather than as things that are passively happening to Melissa, but it's just the cleavage thing that really struck me as OOC.

... And oh god, it just hit me again... the poor Medical staff. Heck, poor Logan. (Or "Steve," lol, don't they know his name is Jimmy?) None of them deserved that. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry. The agents had better help them out! But at least the Flowers won't lack for fertilizer anytime soon...

Good job, and here's hoping Melissa and May's next mission is not this horrible. {= )

~Neshomeh

Like this:

<img src="https://www.img.url" width="300"/>

Note the absence of the comma and most of the spaces, plus the slash at the end to close the tag. Your browser can compensate for many formatting errors, but it's always better not to make them in the first place. {= )

Oh, and for how I did the angle brackets, see here.

~Neshomeh

...I don't entirely agree with you on Sean. I can definitely see where you're coming from, but I didn't really see him in TOS as a particularly snarky character, at least no more than Luxury is - and I feel that, after being lost for decades without even being aware of it (my headcanon is that time works funny in plotholes as well as HQ), maybe it is justified for him to be a little dazed.
Still, it's just that we seem to have different interpretations of the character, and I'm glad to hear that otherwise you liked the mission. Thank you for reading it. :)

I'm very happy to hear that you liked the mission. As for the issues you mentioned, I'm afraid those turn up frequently in my fics. I'm Hungarian, and sometimes I tend to follow Hungarian spelling rules (such as separating actions and dialogue) instead of English ones. I do try to improve on that, though - I've looked over the mission and corrected the mistakes you'd caught.
Thanks for reading my intro to the PPC. :)

And more generally, all badfic? True, it's more PvE than PvP, but it counts.

This wouldn't be the first time someone attempted to introduce a Big Bad to the universe, but IMO, it doesn't work very well. If it's not an Emergency that drags in half of HQ whether we like it or not, it's aggrandizement for the few agents whom the villain sets up to be the Big Heroes, and that can be more irritating than entertaining without just the right balance of gravitas and humor. What makes your agents so special that the villain is picking on them, you know? Where are the DES and DIA, who ought to be dealing with this sort of thing?

I think Artemis and friends almost pulled it off with the Red Sue, way way back in the day. Some of the agents involved were DIA, which helped. But IIRC, the arc was never finished, which is always a potential pitfall.

I'll admit that a card-carrying, monologuing, mustache-twirling sort of villain sounds like it could be fun, though, if other people wanted to play on an opt-in basis and it didn't end up being a power trip for a couple agents singled out to be Big Heroes. There are questions that would need answers, too, about how he knows about the PPC, how did he ever become an agent and/or go rogue without being found out and stopped if he's prone to expositing his evil plans, how does he keep getting away from the agents to strike again, etc. The short answer to all of those might be "comedic hijinks," but a long answer would be required at some point. {= )

As always, I advise newcomers to start small, with a regular pair of agents doing regular sorts of missions, to establish your characters and also yourself, as a writer and a community member. It really helps to build a solid foundation first if you want to go on to do bigger things later. {= )

~Neshomeh

I'll try to explain it as best I can.

If https://www.img.url is the URL of the image and you want it at a width of 300 pixels, then the formatting would be:



without the backslash.

To me, this was a most excellent first outing. That being said however I do have some complaints. And by some I mean two.

I feel like you should've spent slightly more time establishing setting in the beginning. To me it felt like I was just dropped into the story with no prior... I want to say agency.

Second, I feel like Sean should've been at least a little deadpan. A good John Mulaney "Same [crap] as always" here, a nice snark off there. He's a veteran teaching the ropes to some agents who don't quite know what they're doing yet, and the way you had him written felt off balance between the rest of the mission's cast.

This mission was some tricky subject matter, but I think you handled it well. You kept direct quotes from the fic down to a bare minimum, which gave me just enough information to know what was going on without forcing clear mental images on me. It's also a good choice in this case to have the agents check ahead and prevent some of the worst stuff from occurring at all—not just the scatological stuff, but also the nuclear explosion. Cleaning up a canon city from that kind of destruction could be an interesting interlude on its own, but would be a bit too much to tag onto the end of a short mission.

It's been a long time since I read any of Sean's previous appearances (I had forgotten he had blue hair and piercings), but I at least feel like you've done his character justice. It would have been a mistake to make him overconfident and domineering just because he's an Original Series character; I think keeping him meek and submissive, even towards the newbies, was the right way to go. Especially considering he's apparently been wandering Middle-earth for decades up until this mission. I do love that even after being gone for decades, the Queen Anne's Lace immediately sends him on a training mission right after he got back!

I like the pair of agents you've introduced, with a rash but active one and a more reserved but overly analytical one. I think they'll make for a good team going forward. I would like a little consistency on Hurley's name, though. In this short story, she's referred to alternatively as "Melissa" and "Hurley" throughout, and then says near the end to call her "Lissa." I would think she's more likely to bring up her preferred nickname when she first introduces herself to her partner or Sean. Keeping each character's name consistent helps the reader keep track of dialogue tags and action when a lot of characters are on-page at once.

I like that you included the moment where Hurley shows sympathy for Sam. I agree with her lack of fondness for the live-action Transformers films, but I also agree that this fic went way too far in its treatment of Sam, and I like that the narration there serves as both an in- and out-of universe acknowledgement of that.

I do want to point out that you sometimes split a single character's action and dialogue into multiple paragraphs. It makes for easier reading when those things are kept together. For example, in the exchange:

“This… that’s… oy,” she spluttered. “They’re giving us that for our first mission?!”

Melissa snarled.

“I’m going to kill someone,” she spat, and was out the door before May could react.

The first paragraph has May speaking. A new paragraph starts, which my brain expects to be about Hurley, and that proves correct. Then another paragraphs starts, which my brain expects to switch back to May, but instead, it continues Hurley-based action, with May only getting mentioned at the end. It would read better as:

“This… that’s… oy,” she spluttered. “They’re giving us that for our first mission?!”

Melissa snarled. “I’m going to kill someone,” she spat, and was out the door before May could react.

Keep an eye out as you write for places like that.

Also, one little typo:
"Scene change, God and the author only knows, and hey, Jean Grey’s arrived!"

That middle fragment has a plural subject ("God and the author"), so the following verb should be "know" instead of "knows."

—doctorlit, eating second breakfast

Watch as Agents Melissa Hurley, May and Sean try to untangle a truly horrific crossover squickfic. (About Agent Sean's status: I had asked earlier if it was okay to use him, and the general consensus seemed to be yes, as long as I considered it carefully. If my using him in this mission is a problem, please say so, and I will take the mission down/rewrite it.)
https://rc746.dreamwidth.org/439.html
Many thanks to Quincy Jones, Badger421 and S.M.F. for beta-ing it.
Enjoy! ^_^

I have recently been introduced to a poet named Neruda who wrote really intense (naughty) love poems. I won't link them directly here, but they have certainly changed my opinions on poetry.

I did some kind of silly little fanfic Haiku. Fandom is Lucifer.

Lucifer, my son
Light the sword, cut existence
Time to move forward


Back again aren't they?
An angel wing dumpster fire
Devil once again


Angel, Lord of Hell
Desired, rebelled, punished
God-given afraid


Are you not afraid?
Prove to me I'm a monster
Bleeding to save hope


Lucifer, Chloe
Have fun with mortality
Maze beats everyone


We can take it back
The power we have given
But we trust in love

The official romanization is "Time Mazine." Anyway, I'd recommend mini-Shocker Troopers for the whole of Kamen Rider (including the entire Showa Era) and mini-Another Riders or mini-Wozes for Kamen Rider Zi-O specifically.

Since it got bumped off the front page, signups are still open until April 4th!

The rules document can once again be found here.