stuff I will probably never write
Feb. 29th, 2008 11:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
holli...even though I totally wish it existed as, you know, finished fanfic. That I didn't have to write. Sigh. Well, consider this me releasing these stories into the Internet, to roam wild and, hopefully, someday grow. In the meantime, a little bit of each:
1. A giant teen-soap crossover superhero AU. Basically, there needs to be a superhero team composed of: Bright and Ephram from Everwood; Rory and Paris from Gilmore Girls; Seth, Summer and Ryan from the OC; and Veronica Mars as Oracle. I think we can all agree that the world would be a better place if this existed.
The next contact came in the mail: a postcard of the Venus de Milo, postmarked from the Grand Canyon, directing them to a warehouse in St. Louis at three in the afternoon the following Saturday. When they got there, two boys in matching costumes were arguing about whether or not this was a bad idea.
"She knew our names, dude," the one with short sleeves was saying. The one with the cape scowled.
"You too?" Paris-- Twister, damn it-- said. The boys both whipped around to stare at them. "Blue Streak and I got the same call. Are we thinking supervillain?"
"Either supervillain, or genius mastermind who wants us to form our own Justice League," a voice said from the rafters. A boy with curly dark hair and like four utility belts swung down from a grappling hook. Another boy followed-- blond, very muscley, hanging by the elbows in the grip of a tiny brunette flying girl. "Can I say, even if it is option A, I vote we consider option B after we're done kicking ass."
"You know, I think there's a door down at that end," Rory said into the awkward silence that followed. "To offices and stuff. Maybe we'll find something there." She zipped over there, clearly figuring the rest would follow.
They did, and found a room with a desk, bare except for a webcam and a speaker. "This is getting very Charlie's Angels, isn't it?" said the boy with the cape. The flying girl rolled her eyes.
"Oh, good," the speaker said. "The gang's all here." It was the same computerized voice as that first, extremely scary phone call.
"So who the hell are you?" Blond and muscley scowled at the little camera.
"Call me Artemis," the speaker said. "I'd like to suggest... a team-up."
"Awesome," said the curly-haired boy, and Paris sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose.
2. WWII in the Temeraire-verse, possibly with some of it done as excerpts from history books like Written By the Victors. Oh man. I have so many thoughts about how this would go, starting with: awesome spy dragons! Partisans getting air-dropped supplies and materiél! Hannah Senesh being partnered with an angry little Plein-Vite who'd lost his captain! The infamous Berlin defection of 1939!
(Please do not tell me how badly I am about to mangle history, thanks.)
"I still wonder what they were thinking, letting the man get so highly placed in the Luftwaffe. We'd been cadets together on Honoria, and he'd served on Consilium under my father before he retired. But he hadn't much chance of promotion, with the way things were, so when they offered pilot training to grounded aviators he jumped at the chance to get aloft again. He had a better head for air battle than most of the fellows he was serving with, naturally, so he was promoted, and promoted again. I was happy for him. I was.
I suppose he wasn't meant to know of the plans-- they can't have thought he'd accept any of it. His father had been an aviator, his sisters were married to aviators, he'd been raised one of us; if they'd told him flat-out, he wouldn't have been able to pretend acceptance. He was the worst liar I knew.
But he found it out somehow, and he stole into the covert in the dead of night and shook me awake. I'd been aloft the whole day, practicing maneuvers, and it took me a moment to wake up enough to understand him. He was saying, Anna, Anna, you've got to get out, I've seen what they're going to do to the Corps. It took me ten minutes to get him calmed down enough to say anything but that.
He told me it had been decided the Corps wasn't any use to Germany, not any more; that we were a leech on resources that should be going to build airplanes. There were too many Jewish captains, too many Jewish crewmen who'd been allowed to stay to keep the dragons happy; we were all of us to be written off as a loss. We were to be taken from active duty, and shut away in isolated coverts, too few in any one place to put up a fight; they meant to put the dragons on quarter-rations-- they were already at half, for the war effort-- so they'd be too weak to escape once their captains were dead. They meant to murder us.
Well, I'll be honest: I didn't believe him. Not at first. Things were bad, I knew that. I had my uncle coming twice a week, to see if I could find a place for children from his school as cadets, as ground crew, as anything that would get them classed essential to the war effort. But he kept insisting it was true, that I had to go, that there was no time to waste, and finally I told him I believed him, and he left.
I didn't yet, though. I couldn't. My family had fought for Germany for generations; I was Consilium's third captain. So I went down to his pavilion and told him, and he-- smart old bird-- wasn't a bit surprised. He'd had men, high-up SS men, coming to him for weeks, asking if he wouldn't like a good German captain better than me. He wasn't the only one who had, and I think it must have been them all refusing that decided our fate.
In the morning, I went to my uncle and told him we were going, and he asked me how many we could carry. I figured he meant himself, and his wife and my cousins and the rest of the family, but he said, no, how many can you carry? All of you, together?
When we landed in England, the papers made it sound like we were carrying every Jewish schoolchild in Berlin. It wasn't as though we could carry so many, on only ten dragons; but when the rest came, six months later and half-starved, they carried even more.
As for Arne-- we never knew what happened to him. He was arrested, of course, after we left, but beyond that-- who knows? Certainly he didn't survive the war.
Honoria laid an egg, though, in-- it was 1946, I think, and she talked to the boy they'd picked out for his captain, and between them they decided to name it after him.
--Captain Anna Schmetterling (ret), from a 1980 interview; translated from the German by Mirifice
3. A giant Discworld futurefic about Young Sam, wherein he finds with laser accuracy the single girl in all the world his father will disapprove of most, and romances her: Her Royal Highness Crown Princess Esmerelda Margaret Note Spelling of Lancre. Of course, he doesn't exactly mention that his dad's a duke, and *she* doesn't exactly mention that her dad's a king (she does tell him her mother's a witch, though. He thinks it's neat). So Sam and Meg, each thinking the other is perfectly ordinary, get to know and like each other-- foiling a plot against Lord Vetinari in the process-- until Sam's mother insists that he has to escort some stupid princess to a stupid ball and wear his stupid stupid fancy clothes. Poor Sam.
Other highlights: the Police Academy (founded because Vimes would send his son to the Assassin's Guild school over a whole *heap* of dead bodies), Igors, choosing a new Patrician, and Penny Ironfoundersson.
Policemen have their own walk. It's called "proceeding," and it is the gentle, rolling gait of every law enforcement officer in the history of the multiverse. It is a constant, like the deliberate dimness of sergeants or the missing three dollars in the tea kitty. Or like the way a running man will catch a watchman's eye...
***
Sam Vimes, nineteen years old and a newly minted corporal, was proceeding down Attic Bee Street in a not untroubled state of mind. On the face of it, he should have had very little to feel uneasy about. He was, after all, the scion of Ankh-Morpork's wealthiest family, son of the Watch Commander, and promoted not though the nepotism that advanced so many well-bred young men, but through the patient solving of a nasty murder. Sam was still rather proud of that.
It was just that all his good fortune made him rather more noticeable that he was used to being; his parents certainly had a high profile, but Sam had always enjoyed a little more obscurity. Mostly because any news organization interested in changing that state of affairs had, previously, caught seven kinds of hell from Dad.
There was a news-stand on the corner. Sam couldn't help but wince as he passed it. It was the way his own face seemed to grimace at him, as if in pained sympathy, from half the covers.
That bloody article! "Ankh's Most Eligible Bachelor." It was such a *lot* of nonsense, but Dad said you could never underestimate how much nonsense the magazine-buying portion of the public was willing to consume. Dad said a lot of things like that, and Sam found he was very rarely wrong.
The article itself wasn't actually that bad, although it got his eye color wrong, listed his hobbies as painting watercolors and pursuing great justice, and included a truly terrifying fold-out poster that was now in pride of place on the bedroom walls of twelve-year-old girls across the city. No, the *real* problem was that the article seemed to have announced an open season on him, Sam Vimes, and every eligible young lady in the city-- and their mothers-- had taken their romantic crossbows down from above the mantel and begun polishing, as it were, the stocks.
Sergeant Colon's granddaughters had been bad enough, Sam thought to himself as he proceeded down the busy sidewalk. But this was an order of magnitude more alarming.
It's lucky that Sam had a Watchman's instincts, because most people would have been, by this point, much too distracted to notice a single running man in the crowded street. But Sam *was* a Watchman, and quite a good one, so no number of personal problems would have kept Sam from noticing the figure, carrying a satchel, shoving his way through the crowd. A girl was following him, running with the single-minded determination of the recently robbed. Sam sighed, and reached for his bell.
The man was running towards him, which was lucky. Sam angled out into the crowded street to intercept him-- once the thief realized there was a copper in the way, he'd have to try to dodge him, or arrow off into an alley, or possibly drop the satchel and feign sudden-onset amnesia, which someone had actually tried on Sam's friend Gordon once when they were lance-constables.
What Sam was not expecting was for the man to spot him, start frantically waving his free arm, and shout "Officer! Officer!" But life in the big city was full of surprises.
The thief reached Sam a moment ahead of the girl, and pushed Sam into her path. The two of them immediately began conducting a screaming argument over Sam's helmet. Sam winced.
"--showed her my license, I did--"
"--and what kind of a city are you running here, I ask you--"
"--chased me all the way from Goosegate, and the missus says I'm not to put a strain on my knees--"
"--tried to tell me it was some sort of a licensed theft, of all things--"
"--mad, sir, I really think--"
"--completely insane--"
A small crowd had begun to gather already, with the typical Ankh-Morpork enthusiasm for street theatre. Sam sighed. "Sir, if you could just-- miss, really, if you would calm down for a moment--" No response. Sam took off his helmet, unholstered his truncheon, and hit one with the other, producing a resounding clang that silenced the man, the girl, and the fellow selling sausages to the bystanders.
"That's better," Sam said. "Sir. Miss. Mr. Dibbler. If you could all be quiet for a moment, I think we can get this sorted out, hm?"
Everyone looked suitably chastened, although Sam noticed Mr. Dibbler taking the opportunity to pocket the change he'd been about to hand a man.
"Sorry, sir," said the thief. The girl blushed furiously and looked away.
Okay, that was fun. Now, back to the stuff I'm *supposed* to be writing.
1. A giant teen-soap crossover superhero AU. Basically, there needs to be a superhero team composed of: Bright and Ephram from Everwood; Rory and Paris from Gilmore Girls; Seth, Summer and Ryan from the OC; and Veronica Mars as Oracle. I think we can all agree that the world would be a better place if this existed.
The next contact came in the mail: a postcard of the Venus de Milo, postmarked from the Grand Canyon, directing them to a warehouse in St. Louis at three in the afternoon the following Saturday. When they got there, two boys in matching costumes were arguing about whether or not this was a bad idea.
"She knew our names, dude," the one with short sleeves was saying. The one with the cape scowled.
"You too?" Paris-- Twister, damn it-- said. The boys both whipped around to stare at them. "Blue Streak and I got the same call. Are we thinking supervillain?"
"Either supervillain, or genius mastermind who wants us to form our own Justice League," a voice said from the rafters. A boy with curly dark hair and like four utility belts swung down from a grappling hook. Another boy followed-- blond, very muscley, hanging by the elbows in the grip of a tiny brunette flying girl. "Can I say, even if it is option A, I vote we consider option B after we're done kicking ass."
"You know, I think there's a door down at that end," Rory said into the awkward silence that followed. "To offices and stuff. Maybe we'll find something there." She zipped over there, clearly figuring the rest would follow.
They did, and found a room with a desk, bare except for a webcam and a speaker. "This is getting very Charlie's Angels, isn't it?" said the boy with the cape. The flying girl rolled her eyes.
"Oh, good," the speaker said. "The gang's all here." It was the same computerized voice as that first, extremely scary phone call.
"So who the hell are you?" Blond and muscley scowled at the little camera.
"Call me Artemis," the speaker said. "I'd like to suggest... a team-up."
"Awesome," said the curly-haired boy, and Paris sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose.
2. WWII in the Temeraire-verse, possibly with some of it done as excerpts from history books like Written By the Victors. Oh man. I have so many thoughts about how this would go, starting with: awesome spy dragons! Partisans getting air-dropped supplies and materiél! Hannah Senesh being partnered with an angry little Plein-Vite who'd lost his captain! The infamous Berlin defection of 1939!
(Please do not tell me how badly I am about to mangle history, thanks.)
"I still wonder what they were thinking, letting the man get so highly placed in the Luftwaffe. We'd been cadets together on Honoria, and he'd served on Consilium under my father before he retired. But he hadn't much chance of promotion, with the way things were, so when they offered pilot training to grounded aviators he jumped at the chance to get aloft again. He had a better head for air battle than most of the fellows he was serving with, naturally, so he was promoted, and promoted again. I was happy for him. I was.
I suppose he wasn't meant to know of the plans-- they can't have thought he'd accept any of it. His father had been an aviator, his sisters were married to aviators, he'd been raised one of us; if they'd told him flat-out, he wouldn't have been able to pretend acceptance. He was the worst liar I knew.
But he found it out somehow, and he stole into the covert in the dead of night and shook me awake. I'd been aloft the whole day, practicing maneuvers, and it took me a moment to wake up enough to understand him. He was saying, Anna, Anna, you've got to get out, I've seen what they're going to do to the Corps. It took me ten minutes to get him calmed down enough to say anything but that.
He told me it had been decided the Corps wasn't any use to Germany, not any more; that we were a leech on resources that should be going to build airplanes. There were too many Jewish captains, too many Jewish crewmen who'd been allowed to stay to keep the dragons happy; we were all of us to be written off as a loss. We were to be taken from active duty, and shut away in isolated coverts, too few in any one place to put up a fight; they meant to put the dragons on quarter-rations-- they were already at half, for the war effort-- so they'd be too weak to escape once their captains were dead. They meant to murder us.
Well, I'll be honest: I didn't believe him. Not at first. Things were bad, I knew that. I had my uncle coming twice a week, to see if I could find a place for children from his school as cadets, as ground crew, as anything that would get them classed essential to the war effort. But he kept insisting it was true, that I had to go, that there was no time to waste, and finally I told him I believed him, and he left.
I didn't yet, though. I couldn't. My family had fought for Germany for generations; I was Consilium's third captain. So I went down to his pavilion and told him, and he-- smart old bird-- wasn't a bit surprised. He'd had men, high-up SS men, coming to him for weeks, asking if he wouldn't like a good German captain better than me. He wasn't the only one who had, and I think it must have been them all refusing that decided our fate.
In the morning, I went to my uncle and told him we were going, and he asked me how many we could carry. I figured he meant himself, and his wife and my cousins and the rest of the family, but he said, no, how many can you carry? All of you, together?
When we landed in England, the papers made it sound like we were carrying every Jewish schoolchild in Berlin. It wasn't as though we could carry so many, on only ten dragons; but when the rest came, six months later and half-starved, they carried even more.
As for Arne-- we never knew what happened to him. He was arrested, of course, after we left, but beyond that-- who knows? Certainly he didn't survive the war.
Honoria laid an egg, though, in-- it was 1946, I think, and she talked to the boy they'd picked out for his captain, and between them they decided to name it after him.
--Captain Anna Schmetterling (ret), from a 1980 interview; translated from the German by Mirifice
3. A giant Discworld futurefic about Young Sam, wherein he finds with laser accuracy the single girl in all the world his father will disapprove of most, and romances her: Her Royal Highness Crown Princess Esmerelda Margaret Note Spelling of Lancre. Of course, he doesn't exactly mention that his dad's a duke, and *she* doesn't exactly mention that her dad's a king (she does tell him her mother's a witch, though. He thinks it's neat). So Sam and Meg, each thinking the other is perfectly ordinary, get to know and like each other-- foiling a plot against Lord Vetinari in the process-- until Sam's mother insists that he has to escort some stupid princess to a stupid ball and wear his stupid stupid fancy clothes. Poor Sam.
Other highlights: the Police Academy (founded because Vimes would send his son to the Assassin's Guild school over a whole *heap* of dead bodies), Igors, choosing a new Patrician, and Penny Ironfoundersson.
Policemen have their own walk. It's called "proceeding," and it is the gentle, rolling gait of every law enforcement officer in the history of the multiverse. It is a constant, like the deliberate dimness of sergeants or the missing three dollars in the tea kitty. Or like the way a running man will catch a watchman's eye...
***
Sam Vimes, nineteen years old and a newly minted corporal, was proceeding down Attic Bee Street in a not untroubled state of mind. On the face of it, he should have had very little to feel uneasy about. He was, after all, the scion of Ankh-Morpork's wealthiest family, son of the Watch Commander, and promoted not though the nepotism that advanced so many well-bred young men, but through the patient solving of a nasty murder. Sam was still rather proud of that.
It was just that all his good fortune made him rather more noticeable that he was used to being; his parents certainly had a high profile, but Sam had always enjoyed a little more obscurity. Mostly because any news organization interested in changing that state of affairs had, previously, caught seven kinds of hell from Dad.
There was a news-stand on the corner. Sam couldn't help but wince as he passed it. It was the way his own face seemed to grimace at him, as if in pained sympathy, from half the covers.
That bloody article! "Ankh's Most Eligible Bachelor." It was such a *lot* of nonsense, but Dad said you could never underestimate how much nonsense the magazine-buying portion of the public was willing to consume. Dad said a lot of things like that, and Sam found he was very rarely wrong.
The article itself wasn't actually that bad, although it got his eye color wrong, listed his hobbies as painting watercolors and pursuing great justice, and included a truly terrifying fold-out poster that was now in pride of place on the bedroom walls of twelve-year-old girls across the city. No, the *real* problem was that the article seemed to have announced an open season on him, Sam Vimes, and every eligible young lady in the city-- and their mothers-- had taken their romantic crossbows down from above the mantel and begun polishing, as it were, the stocks.
Sergeant Colon's granddaughters had been bad enough, Sam thought to himself as he proceeded down the busy sidewalk. But this was an order of magnitude more alarming.
It's lucky that Sam had a Watchman's instincts, because most people would have been, by this point, much too distracted to notice a single running man in the crowded street. But Sam *was* a Watchman, and quite a good one, so no number of personal problems would have kept Sam from noticing the figure, carrying a satchel, shoving his way through the crowd. A girl was following him, running with the single-minded determination of the recently robbed. Sam sighed, and reached for his bell.
The man was running towards him, which was lucky. Sam angled out into the crowded street to intercept him-- once the thief realized there was a copper in the way, he'd have to try to dodge him, or arrow off into an alley, or possibly drop the satchel and feign sudden-onset amnesia, which someone had actually tried on Sam's friend Gordon once when they were lance-constables.
What Sam was not expecting was for the man to spot him, start frantically waving his free arm, and shout "Officer! Officer!" But life in the big city was full of surprises.
The thief reached Sam a moment ahead of the girl, and pushed Sam into her path. The two of them immediately began conducting a screaming argument over Sam's helmet. Sam winced.
"--showed her my license, I did--"
"--and what kind of a city are you running here, I ask you--"
"--chased me all the way from Goosegate, and the missus says I'm not to put a strain on my knees--"
"--tried to tell me it was some sort of a licensed theft, of all things--"
"--mad, sir, I really think--"
"--completely insane--"
A small crowd had begun to gather already, with the typical Ankh-Morpork enthusiasm for street theatre. Sam sighed. "Sir, if you could just-- miss, really, if you would calm down for a moment--" No response. Sam took off his helmet, unholstered his truncheon, and hit one with the other, producing a resounding clang that silenced the man, the girl, and the fellow selling sausages to the bystanders.
"That's better," Sam said. "Sir. Miss. Mr. Dibbler. If you could all be quiet for a moment, I think we can get this sorted out, hm?"
Everyone looked suitably chastened, although Sam noticed Mr. Dibbler taking the opportunity to pocket the change he'd been about to hand a man.
"Sorry, sir," said the thief. The girl blushed furiously and looked away.
Okay, that was fun. Now, back to the stuff I'm *supposed* to be writing.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-03-01 06:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-01 06:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-01 11:46 am (UTC)how many can you carry? All of you, together? - gave me chills.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-01 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-01 03:01 pm (UTC)