Jul 2014 Archive, part c

As seen here. They all look different, though they all fall loosely under the category of 'luggage' (ie, they're all containers of some description, on hundreds of little legs).

From memory, Unclean University - the previous UU mini - was a stone pot (as seen here), so Unseesn University will be something similar (though presumably less dirty). Mustrum Ridicully is clearly a relative of Mustard Ridicully, and so will be a matching suitcase - though in red, not yellow. (I really should make a picture of all the mini-Luggages... maybe tonight)

Of course, according to PPC rules, these two minis won't count as 'found' until and unless someone goes into the story on a mission and rescues them. The Administrator will prepare a space for them.

(All mini-Luggage adoptions should go through the Adoption Centre; it's not like we're restricting them, though! Please adopt! We're drowning in homicidal handbags here!)

hS

I love the clever use of that song and the voiceovers are really sick?! Whoa.

On that particular topic, I'd always imagined that Frodo, under the influence of the Ring that was more prominent at that moment, was doing the talking. This seems like a much more likely theory.

Butterbur's Beard kept me laughing for hours. Thanks for sharing these, they were fascinating and quite funny.

'The Lord of the Rings may be Tolkien’s attempt define the modern English heroic romance as it might have evolved from an uninterrupted Anglo-Saxon literary tradition.'

I have to admit, I just really like this idea. :D

hS

(That doesn't flow as easily... :( It's hard when the best exclamation of disbelief is the utmost in unthinking blasphemy...)

'Does Barliman Have a Beard? And Other Important Fannish Issues

Yeah, that... that sounds like the Tolkien fandom to me. ^-^

hS

But the sands of the hatching grounds are so hot their feet would be burned raw! They wear sandals in canon and even those don't do much!

I'm going to have to take a look at this. It sounds bad...

I think it should. The author has another story up, and I'm less convinced that she's a troll.

For those of you who don't know, CoC by Fenoxo is a text-adventure game that is very dirty. And weird. This is so NSFW and NSFB that Bad-Slash agents would balk.

The story I started reading had Pinkie Pie using some sort of virtual reality system so complete that she forgot that she wasn't human.

given your description, It seems that the same person who wrote this also wrote "forbidden fruit" and "My immortal".

'Bad Assery'? The practice of having an ass so horrendous even other asses hate it?
Also, if we're talking about additions to the Bleepfic page... TSAB DOWNFALL with its trivialisation of mass murder and terrorism and its "I survived an Arc-en-ciel to the face"!NanohaNova and "I'll torture this woman I know and respect in front of my child"!Fate Torturossa definitely belongs there, IMO.

...for Rina's next partner. You don't mind, do you? I don't what you to feel like I'm copying. {:-)

And like I said, I'm only toying with the idea, so nothing's solid yet.

Your agents won't need an internal power to disguise themselves. But here is an agent that does have an ability to change shape. http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/Ilraen-Aroline-Fothergill

Name: Fawkes of Silver
Species: Skarmory (a.k.a. Airmd, Armor Bird Pokémon, or simply Armorbird)
Home Continuum: Pokémon
Age: Roughly corresponds to 21 in human years.
Lust Object/s: Too many to count, but most notably Pit from Kid Icarus and Sora from Kingdom Hearts.

Appearance: Fawkes, like most Skarmory, is a silver-gray steel crane (not the construction implement, but the bird). He has a long neck with metallic blue plating, long legs with blue three-toed feet, and a triangular crest on his head like a cassowary. The razor-sharp, hollow feathers on his wings have scarlet undersides, and his eyes are yellow with blue irises. One distinct feature is that Fawkes' armor is far more lustrous than most Skarmory, bearing greater similarity to polished silver than iron or steel.
Fawkes has to disguise himself as a human on most of his missions. In his human form, he is 5'8", 128 lbs, and of Asian (Indonesian) ethnicity. His skin is light tan with a yellow undertone, his eyes are dark brown and often require glasses to fix his vision (a necessary compromise for his sharper avian sight), and depending on the context his side-parted curtained hair is either the same metallic blue as his neck armor or otherwise black, though always with sharp specular gloss like polished metal. He's quite slim and lanky for his size, though if superpowers are acceptable, he will often have rather muscular arms with metallic bladed feathers (colored like Skarmory's wings) attached in the same manner as the flight feathers of a bird.

Powers: Fawkes' known moves are Spikes (he wasn't bred with Stealth Rock, alas), Whirlwind, Roost, and Brave Bird.
Like other Skarmory, Fawkes is covered in hard, metallic armor, allowing him to take a lot of damage in close combat. It's really hard to take him down when he steps forward or swoops in to defend an ally. His ability is Sturdy, which makes it impossible to take him out in a single blow, no matter how strong, though a powerful-enough first strike can weaken him to the point that he can still be two-hit-KO'd. Thankfully, his Roost move allows him to recover damage by regenerating his armor, though he has to land to draw the required metal ions from the soil through the undersides of his taloned feet. He is also vulnerable to energy-based attacks and is especially afraid of extreme heat, since metal armor, being more thermally conductive than skin, will not only melt in the presence of fire, but also trap and cook his insides in the process.
The bird can also heal through eating, which is a standard power for most video-game characters, and is as omnivorous as any human and most types of Pokémon with a tremendous appetite. His held item is Leftovers, which manifests as the fact that whenever he feels hungry or needs to heal, he ALWAYS manages to pull snacks out of his mission kit. Don't ask how he does it. Even Fawkes himself doesn't know the answer.
Offensively, his razor-sharp feathers, beak, and claws can slice through all but the toughest hide. He also hides sharp feathers beneath his wing sheathes (corresponding to the secondary feathers on a realistic bird wing), which he can fling like darts at opponents - per the Inverse Law of Sharpness and Accuracy, he almost always misses his target, but getting them to step on the Spikes scattered about is a whole different story.
Fawkes is also an excellent flyer, and can reach speeds of up to 180 mph outside of battle (though he has to fly a lot more slowly in a combat situation, since high-speed flight impairs his coordination). His agility in the air allows him to avoid most scene hazards, bypass ground-based obstacles, and dodge enemy fire, as well as attack opponents from above. Fawkes can also use his powerful wings to whip up Whirlwinds that can blow away all but the heaviest enemies, useful for crowd control especially if paired with Spikes. His strongest move, Brave Bird, causes his armor to glow blue with stored energy as he dives from the heavens like a bird of prey and slams into the opponent like a guided missile, slicing up foes with every sharp edge on his body.

History: Fawkes first appeared in the Pokémon universe in the late 2000's, being hatched as a Skarmy (a fan-created pre-evolved form for Skarmory itself), and spending his time learning to fly and battle like other members of his kind usually do. He was never involved in any major events, undertakings, or epic storylines, though he did encounter a number of trainers during his time without being captured. He arrived in the PPC in mid-2014, when a retrospective review of his life led him to realize that Skarmory doesn't actually evolve to or from any other Pokémon as of yet in the official canon, upon which he realized that he was a fan-created self-insert. The resultant "puff of logic" led to the creation of a Plot Hole right in his flight path. The bird flew straight into it, ended up in the HQ, and was promptly taken down by a very displeased Sphinx. She reluctantly took him to the infirmiary for recovery and later took him under her wing - a decision which Rose has regretted since then.

Personality: The first thing one needs to know about Fawkes is that his nature is Impish. This armored bird is enthusiastic and fun-loving, but is noted for by his lack of initiative and penchant for mischief, since he has always lived alone and has never really learned responsibility for others. Most of the time during missions, he opts to hang back and make comments he thinks are witty, funny, or otherwise light-hearted. This earns him the ire of Rose who tends to regard him as a rare annoyance and she would probably be all too happy to beat him senseless if he weren't protected by razor-edged metal armor. However, he still considers her a friend and a mentor to some extent, and the reason she hasn't kicked him out of their RC is that he has been known to prove himself should the need arise. One thing Fawkes has going for him is his determination to see a job done, and even on occasions where he has literally Pignite-backed upon his partner the whole time, he can be counted upon to know what to do at a critical moment. And if he feels that a matter has touched him personally - if his partner is threatened/hurt, or if his or someone else's behavior has led to misfortune for either partner - he will go out of his way to do the right thing, be it backpedal after a poor decision or take responsibility should Rose give up hope. While reluctant to pull his own weight or look out for others, his boundless optimism and ability to shake off angst more easily than most can be valuable traits to have in the right situation.
Interestingly, being a self-insert character, Fawkes channels all the traits of his creator, including the weirder ones. In particular, he is rather lascivious for an avian creature, and though such is to a lesser extent than some other agents, having an steel-encrusted crane ogling below your waistline is not exactly a pleasant experience for most people. After all, sexual arousal from human feet and tickling would be a lot more bizzare (and disturbing to some) in the case of an armored bird as opposed to a human. Despite being highly unlikely to mount anything that moves (especially considering the obvious risk of slicing hypothetical lust objects to ribbons), if Fawkes is in a story with an appealing character, and in a form that doesn't maim things with just a touch, he WILL exploit the opportunity for all it's worth. He has a slightly broader spread of paraphilias than most characters, and isn't one to complain about such things in general, save for the obvious exceptions of inflation, scat, vore, and guro. Those are just wrong, man.

Department: Department of Implausible Crossovers

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And here's my obligatory persona! Hopefully a non-human self-insert isn't too far out there.

Fawkes was originally created as a persona for my first account on deviantART, and was originally a shiny Skarmory. Since I never got to use him for anything significant (he's only got like two to three old pics to his name on my dA gallery), I decided to dust him off, repaint him, and use him at the PPC.

Again, feedback is welcome~! :)

Name: Rosetta Bin Giza
Species: Sphinx (Mystic)
Home Continuum: An AU version of Earth created by the author for a story in progress.
Age: 35 (biologically), ~2400 (chronologically)
Lust Object/s: N/A
Appearance: Rose is an Androsphinx, a mythical creature with the head of a human and the body of a lion (Panthera leo). Her ethnicity is African in origin (being related to the Theban Sphinx, one of the most famous Mystics from this race), but she is albino - a notable aesthetic trait, but biologically possible in this continuity, and therefore not unique enough to be considered speshul (albino Sphinxes are similar to Spirit Bears, 1 in every 10 being white, for the population Rose is descended from). Nonetheless, her straight white hair, pale skin, and reddish pink catlike eyes do attract odd looks. Her ears are furry and feline-like, not humanoid, with tufts like a lynx or bobcat, and her teeth have fangs like a lion's. The jewelry adorning her body is typical of Sphinx mystics, with bangles, headress/crown, and an Egyptian necklace decorated with gold and rose-cut diamonds, but it isn't magical. Everyone knows that won't end well. Her Sphinx form has a lioness body with pure white fur, being albino and all, but she also has the wings of an eagle, feathers running down her back and, for flight control, a feathery tail like a dromaeosaurid dinosaur, with an ankh-shaped tail fan at the tip.
Like other Sphinxes, Rose can turn into a humanoid form, which is similar to the Kemonomimi of Japanese pop culture. Only in her case she insists that she isn't a "cat-girl" but a "lioness-woman". Or simply a "Sphinx" if you don't want to be pedantic. She retains her white hair and pink eyes, but her whole body is human with the exception of her cat ears, sharp claws, and the feathered dinosaur tail of her Sphinx form. She used to have an Egyptian priestess outfit, not unlike stock depictions of Cleopatra except white and rose-colored rather than blue and gold, but now she wears a black outfit like other agents of the PPC, not unlike Black Widow from the first Avengers movie, save for the cleavage being completely covered for moral reasons. She's not particularly proud of her work uniform.
Powers: As expected from a Sphinx, Rose is a ferocious battler if pressed to act. She has razor-sharp, fully retractable claws, bony spurs on her wings, and a powerful bite. The name of her kind, Sphinx, is adapted from Greek, sphingo, meaning "to strangle", which is how she usually kills prey and opponents, crushing the victim's windpipe with her jaws and suffocating them to death. She is not a brawler, however, and relies primarily on ranged, energy-based attacks to fight. As a Mystic, her Sphinx form can theoretically use a number of psychic powers, but she has only felt the need to use telekinesis and psionic projections, which can form a number of simple implements like blades, fists, and blunt-force projectiles, though no-where near as complex and strong as more dedicated psychics for reasons noted below. She can also "throw" crescent-shaped cutting beams of energy from her claws, as well as batter opponents mentally as well as physically by generating mystical gusts with her wings.
When Rose is in her humanoid form, she is much weaker physically and her mental powers therefore increase to compensate. Her passive mental abilities are levitation, enhanced senses, and the same crude mental constructs as her Sphinx form albeit on a human scale and with a timespan of up to a minute, which she has to make do with on most missions to avoid becoming too overpowered. When humanoid!Rose goes on full offensive mode, her telekinetic abilities include tornadoes of flying debris, complex implements of psychic energy (not unlike Green Lantern, but pink rather than green), and frightening visions and mental manipulation in weaker opponents. Her powers drain her energy very quickly, though, so she cannot use them for extended periods and has to rest after sweeping each battlefield, with break times ranging from several hours to at least a week. She also loses control of her powers, with more anticlimactic results than one would expect (the tornado debris abruptly stopping and dropping everything, for example) if even minor injuries or impacts are directed at her head, specifically her forehead (which is why she always wears her jeweled headgear during missions). A full-on mental onslaught is only reserved as a last resort, e.g. if a particularly destructive Sue goes on a mindless rampage.
In the Pokémon continuity, Rose would be a shiny female Meowstic with the ability Infiltrator and Choice Specs (Psychic-type Sphinx Pokémon have yet to show up in canon). Per the above information, her known moves are Calm Mind, Psychic, Shadow Ball (she'd like Ominous Wind, but Meowstic can't learn it and Shadow ball is stronger), and Sucker Punch.
History: Rose comes from an alternate world where the monsters of most mythologies were created by magic, which is in turn part of a mega-crossover currently developed by the author. She is one of the more prominent members of the main group of mentors who assist the heroes in her story, and was slated to monitor and guide a parody of the Gary Stu archetype into developing a better-written story arc involving the legions of Christian Hell. She never liked Mary Sues/Gary Stus, as one of her earliest encounters involved having to exorcise one from a canonical character that had been mutated into a man-eating monster. This is why, upon learning that she was given immortality 2400 years prior to the current storyline, as well as the full knowledge of the lost Secret Wing of the Library of Alexandria and a magical link to one of the 21 Sacred Beasts in the lore of her story, she was secretly terrified of being referred to as an impurity herself. Knowing of her backstory but unable to accept it until she was better developed, she fled through a Plot Hole and immediately signed up for the PPC, in the hopes that she could learn more about her own character as well as Mary Sues in general before rejoining with her allies back at home. Heroes of Yonder may be the story about the growth of the protagonist Rose is tasked with protecting, but the PPC is where she develops in her own right.
Personality: At first glance, Rose appears stoic and completely unsympathetic, which is typical for a Mystic who has to empty her mind of all things trivial to make use of her power. Her long history of having to keep a cool head in times of crisis has led her to consider most matters as being below her effort, one of the few exceptions being the guidance of protagonists and the destruction of "canonical impurities" (a.k.a. Mary Sues/Gary Stus). Characters who are borderline Sues or Stus are given the benefit of the doubt if they show their worth, but anyone beyond that line is likely to be swiftly and systematically terminated. It can be said that Rose's demeanor is very business-like, preferring to get a job done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Some of her personality aspects are quite similar to Raven from the Teen Titans TV show, being anti-social, reclusive, studious, and dryly sarcastic, but she lacks any demonic influence in her history or personality, seeing it as a sign of impurity. While not as much of a "neat freak" as several other characters in her home continuum, she prefers being organized and coherent, being a Mystic and all, and has a relatively low tolerance for unneccessary disarray. She means well despite her "wet-blanket-ness" (as her partner once put it), though she expects at least some form of karmatic retribution for people who annoy her (blatant Sue/Stu material aside).
It's hard to push Rose to her limits, but the fact that she has the habit of bottling up her subjective emotions until they explode is made clear upon overexposure to senseless violence, debauchery, and selfish, ignorant, and heavens forbid, destructive behavior conducted by people around her. It's part of the reason why she dislikes missions because she knows that especially graphic content will turn her into a ticking time bomb in short order. The aftermath of the inevitable explosion means either the target is cowed into submission by an onslaught of infuriated screaming (often while being tossed about like a ragdoll by her telekinesis), or what's left of him or her will have to be mopped off the floor. Partners and peers typically have to endure the former; the absolute worst Mary Sues and other "impurities" end up on the wrong end of the latter.
Minor quirks related to her include being partial to milk and raw meat, her dislike of water, her fascination with ancient and/or mystical inscriptions, and the DISTURBING UNBLINKING THOUSAND-YARD-STARE OF IMMINENT DEMISE she makes when she's angry with someone.
Department: Department of Implausible Crossovers

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Tl;dr, I'm working on a mega-crossover called "Heroes of Yonder" that I plan to research *thoroughly* and write well. Rose is an OC from that particular story, and I'm dropping her off at the PPC so I can get a hold of her personality. Again, feedback is welcome~ :)

*tosses confetti and shiny stars*

Here, have an infinite amount of typewriters. Now all you need is an infinite amount of monkeys to use them, and very soon you could have the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Here! Have some chocolate!

-Aila

Really cool that you've stuck around for this long.

Happy one and a bit years! Also, wow, I've been on for almost six months. I'm still a noob, aren't I? :P

Have a ribbiting penguin as a celebratory present!

Also at staying and remaining present.

You're nice and toasty. *warms hands over her favourite JulyFlame*

I look forward to hearing what you have to say! (Again.)

Please to meet you. Please accept this pet Titan as a welcome back
Present. But be careful, he eats people

Hi, July! Nice to see you again.

I think quite a few of us drop in now and then, no need to post obsessively, right? I'm not near as active now as I used to be, but I still check in and I still read the new missions that come out.

Welcome, tired internet traveller! Glad to see you back here again, even if it's going to be infrequently.

*throws confetti and packing peanuts*

-Aila

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee July =D

Good to see you back! Like you, I'm a lurker these days, but still - essited to see you!

And... I don't know what else to say, I'm afraid. Welcome back!

Since Sea Turtle already mentioned it, I'll give you a cup of tea with killer leaves, as is my custom.
-Also offers jam and scones-
How have you been?

Yer naught but a freshling newbie. Ya don't get to call y'sel an 'oldbie' unless you can remember the days when the very foundations of the Board - nay, of reality itself - were laid, in blood and fire and the bones of those who fought and died for wait I beg your pardon I'm thinking of something else.

Hi again!

hS

I'm glad to see you back and safe! Welcome home!

Good to see you July.

I actually haven't been around in a while myself.


THE EMPEROR PROTECTS!

Good to see you around again! (Extra! Extra! Local Man Uses Way! Too! Many! Exclamation Points in One Post!)

PoorCynic had another writing workshop. I put up another mission. There were some new additions... So nothing out of the ordinary! *hugs* Glad to see you back!

Glad to see you're still active!

It's been pretty normal here on the Board: some lots of newbies, a few new stories, Agent Gall and her dragon are having their names changed, I animated an episode of my (Un)Intelligence spinoff, and Desdendelle is still handing out killer tea leaves to everyone.


If I recall correctly, your last visit was in March and you were joining the Navy or summat. How did it go?

Ne vous en faites pas, je suis ici! (Don't worry, I'm here!)


All right, let's have a look.

Original quotes

-Que continue ici?

-Nous ne connaissons pas monsieur. Les écrans sont allés blanc et nous ne pouvons pas trouver une source à elle

-Pas encore monsieur. Celui qui a fait ceci est au delà de notre monsieur de technologie


Literal translation

-What continues here?

-We don't know*, sir. The screens went to white and we cannot find a source to her.

*There is a difference between the verbs "savoir" and "connaître": the former means to know a fact and the latter means to know a place or person personally. It's the difference between "I know where the park is" and "I know this park". The quote uses "connaître" instead of "savoir".

-Not yet, sir. The ones who did this are beyond our sir of technology.


What it should say (according to me)

-Que se passe-t-il ici?
(What's going on here?)

-Nous ne le savons pas, monsieur. Nous avons tous des écrans vides* et nous ne trouvons pas la source du problème.
(We don't know, sir. We all have blank screens and we can't find the source of the problem.)

*Subbing in "vide" (empty) works.

-Pas encore, monsieur. La technologie du responsable surclasse la nôtre, monsieur.
(Not yet, sir. The technology of the one responsible for this is vastly superior to ours, sir.)

Anyone else have an opinion?

I have a lot of projects that are tied up by not knowing if Despatch should still exist as a department or as a DIC specialty, and if the procedures are still relevant.

Also, does PP...angle all crossovers? I'm talking about stories that lack OCs. Or the OCs are there to support the stories and there are no canons who could play their role. I'm talking about plausible crossovers where the characters remain in-character mostly while interacting.

Supernatural/Doctor Who/Sherlock is somewhat plausible if you take out the big things that the entire world notices. Actually, Doctor Who can crossover with just about anything with barely a stretch.

This is way too far down the page to be seen by anybody, but it may be relevant here.
Note to wiki workers: "despise" is too strong a word, I "object to" (this comes from being too hasty).
Note to doctorlit, poorCynic, Tira and Irish Samurai to keep you in the loop: I still intend to do the remaining beta exercises , but this may take some more days.

zdimensia, I don't understand what you are talking about in your second paragraph. Is it Elizabeth from "Selfishness" again?

Apparently, "Sleepover!!! - A Girl Called Bob” is the only real Despatch mission ever written.
(I'm sure there are several canon-characters-snatched-to-high-school missions, but they were handled by other departments and are hard to find now.)

Teddy Bear – Celeste is confusing in many ways. I couldn't find the badfic (“Teddy Bear” by Celeste?) either, I don't know much about Sailor Moon, and the mission doesn't show us much of this continuum's representation in the badfic. I suspect that, because Sailor Moon mostly or at least partly takes place in Tokyo, the place where the Sue lives is called "Tokyo", but while Sailor Moon's Tokyo resembles the real Tokyo, all we see of “Tokyo” is one small house, a park with a swamp in it, one street, one car, and some people in the park. Thus, "Tokyo" probably looks more like a small town than a big city, and when the badfic's reality falls apart, the canonical Tokyo (from Sailor Moon, not from Real Life) reoccupies its position.

As far as the mission report exists, it just shows a Sue in an implausible crossover. She somehow snatched Boromir from LotR into Sailor Moon, but Despatch only covers trans-dimensional snatching into the real world. She may or may not be a trans-dimensional hopper from the real world, but she is also a Sue and the plan is to have her killed by assassins who shall be called in later. Thus, she doesn't need to be despatched to World One, and taking Boromir back to LotR is covered by Shelley and Nia from DIC.

I don't see any reason to involve Despatch here, other than: Meg Thornton and her co-writer had decided to have their agents in Despatch, and then just went with it.

HG

Pika, of course, is most famous in this corner of the internet for her OFUM fanart. Elves in Black Leather? That was her. (And yes, there's a PPC image in there, too...)

She also has a very small Tolkien gallery, but recently, I read her ongoing comic, Girls Next Door. It's a crossover of... well, practically everything! Orli!Legolas is in there, but most of the main cast are Labyrinth, Phantom of the Opera, and Les Miserables. It's rather silly, but fun.

And Jareth looks pretty darn cool.

("So, hS, do you prefer 'Girls Next Door', or the original 'Roommates' it's a spinoff of?" Don't ask me that. :P Just read both of them. I will say I really liked 'Roommates' recent 'Kings War' arc, but that I often prefer the fluffier nature of GND... anyway, moving on)

Wait, there's nowhere to move on to. Er... hey, look, a distraction!

hS

Closer to stained glass than anything else, I think (so, anyone up to building a Cathedral of Tolkien? :D) Really pretty, though, and I could figure out all the vignettes in the Luthien & Beren image.

I also found the most hilarious image in her(?) gallery: Mount Doom. Smeagol is a hamster, precious!

hS

I love the ones that look like ceramic murals.

Somehow, I ended up with a lot of slashy artwork.

http://lorna-ka.deviantart.com/gallery/49787505/The-Hobbit-fanart Has such a variety of styles, and I love a lot of them.

This one took a lot of effort, and the other stuff is good. http://breathing2004.deviantart.com/art/Arwen-425777537

Gold Seven: has gorgeous watercolors from Tolkien, favoring scenes from the Silmarillion, A Song of Ice and Fire and Harry Potter. Her Inkheart stuff is mostly older work.

Windmaedchen: has some of the most adorable Sherlock Holmes art and little comics I've ever seen.

Shoomlah draws  a range of things, but historically correct costume re-imaginings for disney princesses and Myst fanart are my favorites.

Speaking of Silm art, there's this person who does these fantastic pieces where they use actually text from the book to make the pictures. It's beautiful.

http://zdrava.deviantart.com/gallery/

-Aila

That's... wow.
-Head asplode from too much awesome-

(Did you slip up and mean to post this in the Fanart thread below? Ah, well, what's past is prologue)

I have a few of these - the ones which are large enough - on my revolving desktop. My absolute favourite has to be number 2, with the ISD appearing out of the mist... makes me want to find a continuum where antigrav technology means mile-long spaceships are equally comfortable in terrain-following mode. :D

hS

Y'know what, I think I'll post anything related to the 2014 Godzilla movie on this thread. Including badfics thereof, alas. Anyway...

http://io9.com/the-godzilla-sequel-will-feature-mothra-rodan-and-king-1611449449

*INCOHERENT ARMOR BIRD SCREECHING*

I mean, the modern Godzilla movie had New York, but the Tokyo Godzilla would probably attack Oregon, or Canada, or more likely Southern California.

I'm just reading through the first chapter, and that is impressively bad. Beige prose, unexplained happenings, and crazy pacing...yikes.

Have a Random Rocket Launcher! It's like a rocket launcher, except every shot you fire with it is different in completely random ways. It also comes styled to look like pretty much any rocket launcher from real life or any continuum, like Quake or TF2- the one I'm giving you being your choice, of course.

You are more than welcome to post your characters for concrit after we get to know you a little better. In the meantime, I suggest you read all the pages linked to at the top of the Board main page.

Also, yay, another Pokémon fan! Have some Berries, a Squirtbottle, and four tiny pots to grow new Berries in!

Have some blello yarn, a handful of watch gears, two busted slinkies and some peanut butter fudge! *Dumps Newbie gifts and scuttles off.*

Have a roaring kitten! It's soft and fluffy. =^_^=

Welcome to the Board! Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Fandoms, favorite foods, hobbies, that sort of thing? We like to know each other; we're really diverse and I promise we won't find anything you say out of the ordinary. ;)

If people without permission start putting agent pages in the out-of-continuity section, would they be easy to move later?

In fact, it's encouraged. It's easier to get concrit before you apply for Permission - it's certainly less hard than getting your request denied.

The first chapter pretty much sums it up. They're character replacements, they'll return to copy of their world, and it's a deliberately stupid meta!pwp.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/2465079/1/Self-Insert-Authoress-Tripe

Not really sure if these are sporkable (been a while) but here goes nothing.
First up, from FIMFiction, we have "My Little Fortress: Teamwork is Magic". This one seems pretty solid charicterization wise and really just needs a red pen, if you overlook a minor plothole (Who designed the pony outfits, the Team or Rarity?!) a major canon break at the end (spoiler:the Team supposedly never visits their families and said families think they're dead, despite in-canon their being shown in their homes-heck, just look at the canon comics for the "WAR!" update, it shows Demoman taking care of his mother in his mansion for crying out loud), and (spoiler) the Medic's gun supposedly breaking down for no reason to force the ponification of the Engineer.

Next up, fresh from the sewage of the Pit of Voles, we have "friendship and violence" (sic), a fic that seems to have a much better grasp of TF2 canon (unlike the previous fic's utter disregard for things like the WAR! update comic, this one even references the WAR! update's comic) at the time it was written (it's been on hiatus for a while and hopefully forever). However, it reeks of grammatical errors (mainly capitalization) and is really badly structured. The story itself seems pretty solid sometimes, but I'll leave you guys to decide that one.

LINKS:
My Little Fortress: Teamwork is Magic
friendship and violence

Also, here's one set in the canon era: https://m.fanfiction.net/s/10471737/1/In-Life-and-Death-and-Fire-and-Ice

I call character replacements. Even someone as weird as Luna would neither time travel in order to "beat up Dumbledore" nor casually reveal major worldview-shattering details to anyone in the past.

I'm continuing on the path of scrolling the Pit for badfic, and have now unearthed a dark!Harry--which, okay, I can see that being done well, but not when twelve-year-old Harry admits to the diary horcrux--right after seeing the memory of Tom Riddle accusing Hagrid, the first person Harry remembers being nice to him, of opening the Chamber--that he finds the panic with the basilisk funny.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10347022/1/Shared-Diary-of-Orphans

Good luck, if you want to read it. It also features the diary somehow knowing all about events that happened after Riddle graduated, despite there being no sensible way for Ginny to have told him, Riddle saying he wouldn't kill Muggleborns, Harry at twelve saying that he thinks he's dark and not being upset by this...and, in the prologue, 'little horcrux' being used as a pet name.

In addition to that rather creepy bit, there's the fact that one conversation with Riddle in which Dumbledore was never mentioned led Harry to conclude that Dumbledore had staged the entire first book. Also, Dumbledore said Harry was exaggerating the way the Dursleys treated him, which didn't happen anywhere in canon. There's some funny irony in that Harry can't wait to get away from Ron, who is an 'annoying, bigoted moron,'...so he can go talk to Tom Riddle. Who of course is nothing near bigoted, right?

And Hermione is neglected by her parents and is studying the Dark Arts. Right.

The only good thing about this is that it's only five chapters so far, although it still could be updated.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8502434/1/The-Extiction

Mass Effect/Warhammer 40k crossover, 'speshul' characters, fairly obvious lack of knowledge about anything in depth to do with 40k, bad SPaG. And all this gathered from the first chapter which is nothing more than a character sheet.

Unfortunately probably not long enough to kill just yet. But definitely bad enough to be sporked when it is.

Storme Hawk.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10304298/1/What-the-Heart-Wants

And here, we have an excellent example of a Mary Sue masquerading as Hermione. Or, I'm sorry, 'Hermionie,' who has, true to form, changed a lot over the summer. Anything describing Hermione's hair as 'sexy ringlets' is bad, right? Especially if Hermione's doing the describing, in the first person. Also either OOC or replaced Draco, as he's happy that his father got the Dementor's Kiss. Also, it's rated M on the Pit, as a warning.

Other than that, in the way of problems, there's a lot of gratuitous capitalization and OOC canons, tense changes--really really bad tense changes--lack of proper punctuation (I think the author has something against question marks and commas), Ron-bashing, creation of uncanonical locations (ie the Head Boy/Girl Common Room with only one bathroom), bad spelling, making Hermione a total Sue, changing the Hogwarts uniform, lack of consistency regarding the Hogwarts uniform...this is from four out of eleven chapters. I doubt it gets better.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8867929/1/The-Knights-of-Equestria

Six bronies in MLP. One of them has so many mental problems that it's unbelievable.

Any time I try to decipher it, my brain starts to run into my shoes... I should start MTS'ing it just to see if I can mission it.

Minuets are very, very different than minutes.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4478725/1/

Excessive ampersands, chatspeak.

For those who don't know, Light Jak and Dark Jak are supposed to be an angel form and a demon form for Jak.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10156950/1/Stuck-in-Harry-Potter It's been a while since I read Harry Potter, but they have a lot of "Stuck In" stories. The biggest thing I see wrong in the first chapter is that she recognizes where she is from an obscure clue.

Their Last Airbender fic looks sporkable with the movieverse contamination and the inserts being multi-benders.

let's attach new badfics to existing badfic posts, like the one two posts down, okay? Each post pushes a new one off the back of our records.

Marauder's Era Sues are the ones I hate the most. This b***h need to DIE. Nobody messes with the Marauders. NOBODY.

As far as I know, even minor canon characters are needed to play their role in canon and cannot be recruited.

You may try to pretend that this is an ancient game nobody wants to play anymore, so that Smithers‘ absence would never be noticed (I don’t know whether this is true for Half Life I), but I don’t really believe that you might get away with this.

Smithers might have to deal with occasionally being called back into the game to do his duty. This may be quite inconvenient while being on a mission, but fortunately he doesn’t have to stay in the game long. Anyway it only works if you can reasonably expect that worldwide not more than one person per day would try to play Half Life I.

You need to get more opinions from Boarders who know the game before you dare to do this. Or, better, don’t do it.

HG

I suppose "adopting" a canon character who only appeared once or twice isn't too much different from recruiting a bit character. You'll have to ask an older member, though; I'm fairly new as well.

The idea of Wtak killing things with writing makes me think he could be able to manipulate the Words. I'm probably wrong, but it'd be cool to see how that power/skill gets used against Sues regardless.

I don't quite understand how Smithers can be "fastidious and methodical" but careless about the Rules at the same time. Wouldn't a methodical personality apply on missions as well? (But on the bright side, that desire for order might make dealing with Wtak easier. Might; I know very little about Halo.)

Hmmm, I don't think there are any canon characters working in the PPC. There are such things as recruit-able character replacements and duplicates that aren't Sues. Either way, I'd make him completely human, though perhaps the trouble with walls has to do with old age.

Be careful with how much he breaks the rules. Perhaps he could want to, but his partner keeps yelling that he doesn't want anymore punishment fics. (Look up Suebuprofen.) Ah, I see that his partner is very by-the-book.

Clean-cut, does that mean Wtak doesn't have the full-length mohawk? Doesn't seem to go with vain unless it isn't mating plumage.

The magic seems interesting. I wonder how many missions he'd actually get to use that.

Agents bickering, snarking, and playing off each other is my bread and butter. I just absolutely love when writers make full use of their characters' personalities for comedic effect.

That incredibly unhelpful response aside, I really do laugh at what are supposed to be the jokes. I think most of the writers here do a very good job of creating interesting characters, and I enjoy their interactions. Typically it's the bits that happen 'around' the badfic that I find the funniest - to use an example from the Original Series, I still laugh my head off at the Cheese Elves.

"So you see, violence is the symptom of an unhealthy mind," said Socko the sock puppet.

"Speaking of violence, let's talk about the .2 strain of Gondor's national cheese," said Millie the sock puppet.

"You see, once a cheesemaker had five substrains of Gondor Blue Vein. So he called them all one cheese. But then he discovered another strain of Gondor Blue Vein. Oh, hello Acacia, is something wrong with your face? And so he said, 'Oh, NO! I have discovered another .3 piece of cheese!' But then his friend, a mathematician, said, 'No, silly, that's .2 of a strain of cheese...'"

Acacia's eyes flickered from Jay to Alex, noting with a fair amount of satisfaction the Sue's expression of stunned bewilderment. Torture. Fun.

Alex's eyes swiveled from one elf to another. Then she turned and ran away.

"Wait! We have pamphlets!" said Millie the sock puppet.

"I don't even want to know why you brought sock puppets with you on a mission," said Acacia. She sat down on a handy flat rock and sighed. "PTerry got it exactly right."

"Improvised them. And I know he did, but what is he right about this time?"

Acacia sighed again. "'Ninety percent of true love is acute, ear-burning embarrassment.'" She pulled out her book again, clearly hoping not to be asked more questions. She should be so lucky.

"Acacia, he's a fictional characteh!"

"So?"

"It's not healthy to be in love with fictional charactehs."

"Is it healthy to bring up cheese in a discussion of why violence is bad?"

"Thehe's neveh been a Stah Trek episode about THAT." Jay arched one fine eyebrow.

No?

hS

Yes, I like the silly moments like punctuation storms. I also like the dramatic moments where things just go wrong. Then there are the character development moments.

I also like the things that I shouldn't laugh at, where agents get hurt (shows that they really need to be smart to survive) or the agents get really squicked, or they snap because of one-too-many attacks on their sensibilities.

I think it's funny to see how they react to the parts that drive them up the wall. Also immature jokes. Heh, heh, 69. So sue me, I find them funny because I'm also immature like that. :P

But if you don't find the PPC funny, why do you read the missions? I'm just wondering because I don't tend to read stuff if it doesn't catch my interest.

Welcome back! Incidentally, I actually just came back from falling off the planet a year ago, but that can't stop me from giving you a welcome-back present, can it?

Here's a Black Box rocket launcher from the TF2 continuum, because rocket launchers.

*tosses you a lined Infinite Notebook from my absurdly large overstock*

(It has urple covers and wilver binding. Do be careful. I would not wish to be responsible for your blinding.)

-Aila

Here, have a cup of Earl Grey tea (don't let the leaves eat you), scones, and jam!
I won't critique Aaron because I don't know anything about the Falloutverse, but Natalie feels really, really, really similar to a certain Natalia. Is that a coincidence?

What universes you intend to use these two for?

I guess I got to buckle down and watch AOT. (Stupid Netflix, forcing me to read subtitles or go to less legit sites for the dubs.) What I do see about Aaron is interesting. He seems like a good foil for Natalie. What will his dual memories do to him, if anything?

I'm liking Natalie's attitude that she acts cool about what's happening and redirects her emotions like a weapon. She reminds me of one of my own with the snarking and the smoking.

Don't worry, they're different enough. But I would like to show you something that was said about my less-flappable character...

"Agent Feinstein feels like a rather unique character for the PPC. I don't think we've had a brusque secretarial personality in an agent before, and that alone makes her entertaining to watch/read. At first, I was worried that she was too aloof from things happening around her, since a large source of a mission's entertainment value comes from what the agents experience. But you showed that she is stuck facing missions of a type particularly distasteful to her, and that she isn't necessarily the best at thinking on her feet when she is met with an unexpected encounter."

For yours, she already takes things out on the target. Does she ever put in extra range time or train on a punching bag to get rid of leftover problems? Will she ever snap and go too far? Will anything ever phase her?

I got caught up in the description of "not being able to control her powers unless it was inconvenient" until I figured out that you were describing the Sue. I'm going to blame my poor reading habits for that one.

Have a squawking mini-moose!

The first thing that jumps out at me is the issue of scale- an Agent small enough to ride on someone else's shoulder would actually be something I'd like to see happen. It would, however, make actually affecting his environment very difficult, so he'd end up being either completely dependent on his partner or possessed of, I dunno, telekinetics or something. Disguises would help with this, but to do so they'd also have to eliminate the main trait that sets him apart from the other Agents.

If we're not leaving him a rat, I do have to question what would happen to the personality of the "host" the chip gets implanted into. There's some MAJOR ethical concerns to that, even if the host body is not sentient.

You have some detail going on here with what your agents are, but there's not very much of what they're like.

I'm not saying this is a necessarily a bad thing- certainly, having a species and some kind of background attached to them is a good thing- it's very useful to know when a character is human or not human, as the case may be!- but it doesn't give them anything to make them stand out as interesting characters, rather than things.

Yes, a character can be more memorable when these things add to them on top of them being memorable via being interesting characters due to their actions and personality, but it doesn't help them stand out.

Lemme try to explain this in different terms.

Let's think of characters in terms of food.

Your average poorly written character is junk food of various levels of quality. When you add things on top of that- loads of powers, extra special things, super unique things that don't really do anything but be there for the sake of being there- it's added junk. Sugar, sugar substitute, those dyes that make food all those great colors only found naturally in poisonous or venomous animals or plantlife- all that. It's fluff and adds no nutritional content.

When a character is written in a way that doesn't rely on those sort of things, it adds nutritional value. For example, let's take one of my favorite characters: Sam Vimes from Discworld.

Vimes starts off as a very sorry sad sack of alcoholism and profound cynicism. There is nothing about him that makes him apparently special in the grand scheme of things.

What makes him an interesting character is what he's like and how he reacts to everything. That's where the meat and potatoes is. Vimes doesn't become more interesting by being forcibly further and further up in terms of importance through the progression of what's going on in the Disc- it's his reactions and how they build on top of each other to give us a very vivid image of this man and what he's like. His reaction to things.

All you've given here is the uplifted character is lewd and has knowledge of Shakespeare and is fine with presumably gross things, which tells us very little in the grand scheme of things. As a character point, it's not all that compelling.

A few years back when I was first getting into the PPC, I read every single spin off, mission, side story and otherwise available PPC thing available online at the time. Kept up with loads of spin-offs since then and plenty of agent ideas.

I could not to save my life tell you how many of the ones that I found dead boring were the ones with all the junk food details added on because I don't remember them. There are a few that were memorable, but not as characters with compelling personalities or arcs. Instead, it was for the sheer amount of fluff that had been added on that resulted in something that was completely ridiculous and out of place.

I'm not saying that the uplift is a bad idea, but I do think you should consider more than just the what of the character; think about how they act, react, their personality, how they are.

When it comes to characters and writing, it should come down to qualities, not quantities.

Well, mice and rats are actually generally lactose intolerant at adulthood, like most mammals except for humans, but since I assume you're not actually a rodent, have a wheel of Gouda and a clock gear!

In lieu of your MLP fandom, have a statuette of one of the Mane Six of your choice, and a mooing horse!

Have a peanut butter sandwich on toast!

Have a pair of Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses. Designed to help the wearer develop a relaxed attitude to danger, the lenses turn completely black at the first hint of trouble, thus preventing the wearer from seeing anything that might alarm him/her.

Mordar is not a reference to LOTR. It is the name that my LARPING team use to describe the opposite team. I was a Mage and I could inflict death, freeze, and healing on the other players. I spent the whole game talking in a Medivel noble, and only on guy found it annoying. I'm going to give you to stories to work with today, Sorry about the formatting, but my phone can't paragraph. Do you know the campfire song "there a whole in my bucket Dear Eliza, Dear Eliza?" we sang that song at campfire and made up our own lyrics. Things got crazy. I believe it started with tape and ended with the safe word. No father comment.

I won't post them all at once since its so late here. I will, however, post the first one right now. It was our campsite tour and, as a joke, we named it the Fellowship. For more fun we chose to nickname our selves after Fellowship members (I was Legolas. FYI ). When originally called ourselves the Batfamily (I was Cass Cain) but we dropped that name after we realized we kinda stink at Frissbee. I'll type up the other stories later, when it's day

You got me if you really meant the french thing for free-running.

...Something tells me all those misspelled words are intentional.

Nonetheless, it's been a while, do locations generate minis? If so we have a mini balrog named Mordar and a mini... whatever real-world minis are, named Jamica.

This sounds like a really interesting agent concept. It would also be cool to see him paired up with trainer agent.

We've had one digimon agent, who is kind of similar to this character, though.

What kind of moves would your Porygon-Z use? Zap cannon or Tri-attack for offense, or both conversions to generate a disguise, or perhaps protect to shield from lethal attacks?

You can find it here.

If there's anything in the thread I left out, or if you have some concrit on this, I'd love to hear it.

I also suggest simply calling it Data, for both literal accuracy and a Star Trek: The Next Generation reference. Would Cheesy be able to search for things on the Internet? I know agents have Googled various things in the past, and it's able to show up in cyberspace, so...

How would it communicate with its partner? Built-in translator device? Silent snarking a la Gromit and Perry?

Your summation gave us a lot about what Cheesy can do in regards to its powers and interactions, but next to nothing about what it's actually like as a character. You tell me nothing about its likes, dislikes, hobbies, habits, or quirks of personality. You have given me no reason to care about Cheesy. That has me concerned.

As I have said before (like here, for instance), characterization must take precedence over powers. Allowing powers to take the lead in making a character will leave you with someone who is essentially a walking gimmick at best. My concern is you approached Cheesy with a mindset of "oh, wouldn't it be cool if this character could do this and this." You should make characters that are interesting. Compelling. People/creatures that you would want to read about even if they had no powers what so ever.

I'm not saying that the concept should be scrapped. It needs a lot of work, though.

The question is though, considering how often a CAD crashes, would it really be responsible of DoSAT to put one in the Agent's mind? It's similar to why they won't put a CAD in the omni-tool from Mass Effect, citing the danger of putting such a dangerous device around an Agent's arm as the main reason.

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

As far as an agent pairing, having someone from the Dresden universe might be too problematic. Someone from Final Fantasy X might treat him as something demonic unless they're Al Bed or from after the ending. Try Xyber 9. It's post-apocalyptic, but they don't understand advanced technology well.

I agree with the lack of Avatar agents. Even if you go forward into Legend of Korra and the steampunk setting, they're still not likely to understand artificial intelligence.

I guess this means I can safely spell it as "Pokemon" without having to worry about getting swarmed by minis, right? XD

Anyway, "Cheesy.exe" sounds like a really fun character, and we definitely need more Pokemon agents (Falchion, my Skarmory agent, was adapted from one of my old Internet personas for precisely this reason). In particular, I really like how it handles certain courses of action (e.g. bleeprin) differently from other agents, as well as the way it perceives the world around it as well as Sues/Stus like a computer program. It would be interesting if, at least on early missions, it had a really hard time trying to figure out the age-old question of "what's wrong with this picture" - as someone with a bachelor's degree in computer science, I can sadly attest from experience that computer bugs take for-freaking-EVER to hunt down and correct.

The idea of a CAD being programmed into Cheesy.exe's software would also make for some pretty fun times as well - it would save DoSAT a few extra headaches, no doubt. I also have a humorous picture of it detecting a super-OOC canon and just spazzing out and sparking before going limp a la Death-Note-style heart failure, after which the other agent would have to revive it with either a Max Potion or some jumper cables hooked up to a car battery. It would make for some interesting black comedy, if nothing else.

The Mystery Dungeon sub-continuum would be pretty interesting to derive characters from, but Pokemon-speak would still be a notable barrier to work around. The programming of a Universal Translator may also have to be installed as well, so that Cheesy.exe can communicate in English or the language of choice. One must also consider the prospect of disguising it as well, which may allow it to speak the language of the form it's in.

As for a partner, I'd recommend someone from a magic- and fantasy-based world, like Harry Potter or D&D, maybe even Avatar (the cartoon) because we need more agents from that continuum too. The science and magic dichotomy would make for some very interesting interactions, and I can totally see Cheesy.exe trying to figure out this magic thing and failing as much as its partner tries to figure out the coding and glitches that it keeps talking about.

Overall, your agent concept is a solid one, and I'm sure it'll make for some fantastic and hilarious writing. Please make Cheesy.exe a thing, pretty please! :)

I don't think we've ever had a software-based Agent before, and there are very few mechanoids. As a computer scientist active in AI, I'd like to see more of both, and a Porygon-Z seems a good way to make that happen.

You've been throwing out a lot of character concepts, especially for someone who hasn't gotten permission yet (I think? I might have missed that. If you have, I apologize profusely). A lot of them also seem to be meant for free-to-use. While there's nothing wrong with that, the PPC does not need characters for the sake of just having characters.

My recommendation to you is to slow down and focus on one agent pairing. Just to start off with. Once you've found your groove, then you can move on to making more agents.

As for the characters you've presented themselves, there isn't really a lot to go on in terms of an actual judgement. Both Nathan and Dwight seem to be aggressively middle-of-the-road (Nathan doesn't show "high passion," Dwight isn't "obsessive" about his exercise). It makes them seem rather bland. Shangmu has even less personality beyond her culture, her being a vegetarian, and her not liking to hurt people.

Shangmu is a blip-fic character from a Last Airbender fic and was born before "Boy in the Iceberg." The backstory about her village is that some of the Air Nomads were away from the temples when the Fire Nation attacked. The remaining nomads were able to instill their culture on a hidden village, but no more benders were born.

Shangmu's sensibilities reflect the culture, and she is trained in a mundane fighting style based on Airbending. (Look up Ba Gua Zhang for move references.) Basically she's vegetarian and isn't fond of actually hurting people.

I was going to pair her up with Zigsa, but they're culturally similar and I want an opposite. Zigsa was created by a young author who watched Pom Poko and thought anime cat girls had the same powers as the tanuki. She's irritated by this.

Perhaps someone into Sci-fi. Maybe a cat-person from Doctor Who?

This would be a Department of Implausible Crossovers team.

Nathan could blend in as an office drone or customer service rep. He's charismatic in an unobtrusive way and slightly intellectual. He keeps himself groomed, but not obsessively. He appreciates sports and literary classics, but doesn't show high passions for most things. Character references: Clark Kent, and Steven Jinks from Warehouse 13.

Dwight is a bit more down-to-earth and likes working with his hands. Before the PPC, it's equally believable for him to have been a furnace technician or a chef in a restaurant. He likes to keep fit, but not obsessively so, and likes to jog or shoot hoops when he gets a chance.


Nathan and Dwight are in a same-sex marriage. Nathan doesn't seem gay to the casual observer. Dwight is bisexual, but he has a complicated opinion about women.

They want to adopt, and both would happily walk the line between maternalistic and paternalistic roles.

They work in Department of Improbable AU's and tend to work Supernatural, Sherlock, and other continuities that tend to have slash, but they handle the non-consumating romance fics.

I didn't recognize all the characters, exactly, but that's OK; I was able to read and enjoy the Buffy/Angel OFU with minimal canon knowledge, too. Good luck and have fun writing!

Really, don't read this post if you're not far into Homestuck. There are, most definitely, spoilers.

I'm in...you know what? These names are confusing me. Somewhere in Act 6 Act 5 an Intermission. Aranea just went on a long storytelling tangent on a dream-pirateship (in the middle of which there was an Interfishin to appease Meenah) and Katkat is playing therapist for Terezi and had a tantrum about a chair. Oh, and Jade and John got to the new session and Jade promptly got possessed by our dear batterwitch.

I don't want to be spoiled about stuff more than I already am, so should I wait 'till I get to the end, then read it?

-Aila

I've been wanting to do an OFU for Ranger's Apprentice, but I'm not sure if I'd ever have the time to work on it. So, here's to the hopes that you'll be able to complete your OFU!

Anyway, since I'm not a Homestucker, I'm not really sure if I should read this or not since I've very little knowledge about the subject matter... Oh, what the heck, I'll read it!

There's a fantastic Marvel fanfic called Polarity that has the B-list villain the Shocker as its protagonist. It's well-written, everyone is in character, and - best of all - no character bashing!...Except for Electro, but we can chalk that up to...well, just read it.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5124106/1/Polarity

There's also a very good novelization of Breathe of Fire II that I can't say enough good things about. It's funny, at times horrifying, and gives a silent protagonist a believable, well-rounded personality.
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6615342/1/Breath-Of-Fire-II-War-Of-The-Demons

So I'll post the link to my rec centre here, since they all come with descriptions and whatnot. http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/PPC_Rec_Center/EileenAlphabet%27s_List
My favourites tend to be crack/humour (especially Mare Sue parodies like Ensign Sue Must Die) but there are a couple of serious among them.

And then I would like to add Bed of Thorns which is a Once Upon a Time fic. http://archiveofourown.org/works/377718/ NSFW. Contains naughty bits. Tasteful naughty bits, but naughty nonetheless. It's an AU that focuses on Belle and Rumpelstiltskin and this was the fic that made me realize that I actually do like romance (and erotica), when it is done properly, (by someone who actually knows how the female body work).
It is a huge work, focusing on character- and relationship development and even if you don't watch OUaT you should consider reading it anyway, for it is a shining example of goodfic. The level of research and attention to detail is mindbogglingly.

Here are some of my favorites, both old and new! (you can see these and some others on my ff.net profile)

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10366090/1/The-Free-Fighter-and-the-Evil-Within Haruka has magic water powers and it's awesome.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/3964606/1/Alexandra-Quick-and-the-Thorn-Circle Harry Potter fic set in wizarding America. Very very interesting, and part of a whole series!

http://s7.zetaboards.com/Nuzlocke_Forum/topic/8771921/1/ Post-apocalyptic FireRed storylocke. Funny, touching, and appropriately creepy.

http://www.fimfiction.net/story/34694/a-pony-out-of-place I remember liking this when I read it. A Ponyta from Alamos Town falls into Equestria because of the Dialga/Palkia battle. Cute and believable, especially Twilight's reaction to him using Sunny Day.

http://www.fimfiction.net/story/11343/another-day-for-the-whooves This fic has it all; cute Whooves family slice-of-life, time travel, alien-related insanity, and of course, muffins!

http://www.fimfiction.net/story/1990/waking-nightmares BLU team enters Equestria. Everything snowballs from there, but in a very good way.

www.fanfiction.net/s/10399457/1/As-We-Go-Along Series of short fics involving Jamie and the Second Doctor. Very, very fun to read.

www.fanfiction.net/s/4469720/1/ Like making fun of slash pairings? Read this!

http://archiveofourown.org/works/981746 OH MY GODS THE LEVELS OF SHIP TEASING AAAAAAAAA!

http://archiveofourown.org/works/1062757/chapters/2131218 Night Vale/His Dark Materials crossover AU. It's beautiful and funny and Witch!Old Woman Josie is best Old Woman Josie.

The Particular Problem of Postern Prison

This is a Sherlock Holmes (not Sherlock) fic that features a younger Holmes that has not yet met Watson. It is not the only fic the author has written (she has 31 on FFnet). All of her stuff is amazing, but this is my favorite. I would pay Real Life money to have this as a real printed and bound book.


On the Road to Come What May

This is a Stargate Atlantis fic. It features an entire cast of OC's that carry the POV, and the story is really how the SGA cast affect the lives of that OC cast. But it is also about the SGA cast in a terribly difficult situation and they are all wonderfully in-character.

The Names Upon the Harp

This is a LotR fic. Try not to read the summary, it is a spoiler. If you can't help but read it, the fic is still powerful. Seriously, I cried. It is sort of in-between the movie verse and the book verse, and if I say anymore, I'll spoil it.

Body Parts

This fic is by Roveare11, who is now my Haven beta. She has a lot of fics written and I love all of them. I am including this particular one, because I have been reading fanfic since 2003 and this is what finally prompted me to start writing fanfic. You don't need to know Haven canon to read this fic. Everything you need to know is pretty obvious from the fic, I think. One of her best qualities in Haven fanfic is that she always gets the dialogue so perfectly in-character.

The Very Inappropriate Misuse of Stark Technologies

This fic kicks off a whole series of hilarious fics that are logs of emails, texts, twitters--that sort of thing. Anyway, good to read if feel like laughing.

I have more! But I've got to get to work now.

Here's a good dimensional snatching one in the Legacy of Kain series that doesn't require canon knowledge to understand. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/1329325/1/Urban-Nosgothic

She also wrote her fursona into LOTR, but I never got around to reading it. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/1155355/1/Necklace

Then there's this one, which is excellent. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/1908163/1/Intruder-on-the-Set

This is another Legacy of Kain snatching by a different person. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/1408150/1/The-Pygmalion-Syndrome

"The creation of new mini types is reserved for either a) the creator of the OFU in that continuum, or b) if there is no OFU, the first person to write about them in a mission to that continuum. The reason for this is that, while it's fun to dream up mini types, it isn't fair to the people actually writing in a new continuum if the perks of doing so are gone when they get there."

Speculation is of course fine (albeit a bit pointless, other than as a mental exercise) but there's no way to suggest a type of minis. You either write the OFU or the first mission for that canon to feature a mini, or you don't.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.


-Lt. Col. John McRae, Ypres 1915


For those interested in learning more about the Great War, I suggest reading about the battles of Verdun and La Somme.

Both events are the prototypical battles of the war: Verdun was deliberately engineered to be a battle of attrition while La Somme demonstrated how the ambitious large-scale tactics of old were obsolete faced with machine guns, artillery, airplanes, barbed wire, and trenches. Both sides incurred massive casualties: upper limits for Verdun and La Somme both hover around the million-man mark each.

The first day of La Somme stands out in particular as the single bloodiest day in the history of the British Army: 60000 casualties, one third of which dead.

I started poking around JulyFlame's stuff and it turns out that both of them are staying on as agents.

There is something called Deparment of Multiple offenses, but they don't seem to do anything special.

Now I need to decide if she manages to escape the first time, the second one is allowed to die, the first one ends up dying first, one ends up getting sent somewhere, or if I really want to have them both in Headquarters.

The one in Headquarters stays there, and a new Sue appears in the 'fic.

I'm basing this off of a system a friend of mine developed for a ttRPG that had heavy time travel elements. There existed areas not fully cotemporal with any other timeline (much like Headquarters) that would not be affected if history was altered, which we called causally protected zones. A person (or any object, really) could enter the CP-zone from their timeline, have that timeline changed so that they never got that far, and then exit the zone to exist alongside the other version, a process we called causal orphaning since it created objects with no apparent origin point. From the altered timeline's perspective, CP-zones became essentially a source from which things that might have been, but did not, would occasionally manifest.

Which requires a code to use; I have several unused codes, if anyone is interested.

I have a fanfiction.net account, but it's going unused at the moment. As far as PPC stories are concerned, I have no clue where I should post them yet. I guess I could post the links in a "hub journal" on dA...or make a Tumblr...

Easy to manage, easier to edit, and comes free with all Gmail accounts. Just make sure to set the final product to "view only" to prevent vandalism.

In the beginning I used my Livejournal, but then I wanted a place strictly for PPC-stuff and made a Wordpress-acount. Then I found that I liked Wordpress better and made another account for all my other stuff.

AO3 for fanfiction. LJ for PPC.

I don't use Tumblr the whole nested commenting/reposted thing makes it hard for me read anything on it. (I'm going to play the old card on this one). I write in Gdocs, but always think the stories look like works in progress instead of polished ready to read stories.

Google Drive because they're already there for beta-reading, plus LiveJournal. LJ is usually delayed a day or so because I have to edit in all the formatting codes.

Fanfiction.net, despite being The Pit Of Voles, is actually the best place to get fanfictions to have a good visibility.

However, to avoid troubles, for missions a blog or something like that is preferred. I use Wordpress, but that's mainly because I already had an account on it. I don't exactly like a good chunk of the limitations it imposes to free users, but it's more than enough for missions anyways.

A good rule of thumb is: don't post the mission on the same site that hosts the fic being sporked. That's asking for trouble.

I also have an ancient WordPress account, but never use it. DA has a very good ability to host different varieties of content, and since a lot of what I work on has visual components I need to be able to upload images as well as text.

And by explanation, I mean "WHY."

First off, what the buck I was rambling on about when I started the post- Well, at that point, I was dead set on Aaron, and the 'bucks everything out the window' bit was because I was trying to hide my prior involvement in 4chan up until that point.

That is, until I realized that absolutely nobody has sporked a badfic from 4chan. And I could tell, because nobody mentioned greentext, the strange hybrid of script and prose that makes up 99.99% of 4chan fics.

And that gave me the idea of a former 4chan anon turning around and sporking greentext badfic the same way that many other agents turn out to have previously written badfic.

As for actual 4chan "greentext," when they are posted there is always at least one anon there in the thread always have two or three Anons there to give him concrit, such concrit almost never goes past writing style or SPaG. "You" (the usual main character) are always a Gary Stu (and yes, here Gary Stus are the majority, not the minority) that Drops Into Equestria, usually without explanation, almost always with an inexplicable immunity to magic, and as for how the canon around you turns out...

I'm just going to bring up the "Flutterrape" threads from 4chan's /mlp/ board to answer that. No, it's the exact opposite of what you're thinking. "You" (man, I can see the usually-underused You crash dummy getting overworked fast here) are the main Gary Stu (or, rarely, , and the whole premise is that everypony wants to have sex with you to the point of raping you. And since Fluttershy is the, oh, I don't know, shy one in canon, she's the one that ends up being the most used target!

Excuse me while I proceed to blatantly ignore everything I say about brain bleach two paragraphs down and smash my head into a wall.

Going back to discussing the character, the part with "f*****" will probably be cut out or replaced with generic insults, mainly because I had forgotten that actual cursing was a Bad Idea here in the board.

The part about requiring less bleeprin is because I genuinely feel that 4chan experience could negate the need for brain bleach, at least partially.

As for appearance, that's me. However, the suit and the green items are a reference to "green-man Anon", a common stylization of Anonymous (or as he's referred in most 4chan greentext, "you") as a character, the idea being that the green skin, blank face, and bald head of the Green-Man Anon would work as a green screen, allowing pretty much anyone to be projected there.

Would Aaron understand Cheesy's AI hangups? Would he gain the smarts to do basic troubleshooting on his partner?

Who would typically hold the charge book? I assume that Cheesy might be the action guy of the pair?

I'm not quite convinced about Falchion being an author-wraith. As the PPC canon goes, wraiths are not creatures with a fixed form. They infect canon characters, but not to the point that they are completely unidentifiable as who they were. If wraiths created entirely new characters, then they would be Sues and Stus (or, if they're good, they'd just be new characters).

The monster/"final boss" concept is what bothers me the most. In a straight-up fight between Sues and agents, the agents would lose nine times out of ten (especially if they are fighting the wraith "on its own terms," as you said in your response to zdimensia). Even the most experienced of warriors would have difficulty facing off against a creature that can shape the Word World to its will. At the very least the agents are not going away without some nasty (and possibly permanent) wounds. There is a reason most Mary Sues are dealt with using non-standard methods such as ambushes, traps, or slow-acting poisons.

That's not to say it can't be done. There's evidence that states quite the opposite, in fact. But it's not something that should be taken lightly, and definitely not right away. If you are dead set on having a big fight, it should be something that occurs once you've gotten a few missions under your belt. A story that ends with a boss battle should have at least SOME consequences for your agents.

You also need a reason beyond "I want a big fight to cap off a mission." The wraith shouldn't be able to turn itself or a canon into a monster just because.

Falchion is already interesting, or has the opportunity to be interesting with just falling through a plothole. He could be gutter-minded with light innuendos and a "that's what she said" sub-routine. Besides, a Sue that doesn't possess canons, but creates a new body, is a replacement.

For the second one, have the wraith fight back before they get it restrained, or maybe have something happen to the containment circle so that it could possess someone else. Maybe the excitement happens because the agents screwed up.

A lot of the stories that stick to formula and go right have the most interesting parts during the "collecting charges" phase.

May I look at the fic you're planning to spork?

Variety is the department's middle name.

How about sudden blasts of hot air? That's all political rants come across as to the rest of us anyway. Oh, and the extra ham-handed ones could smell like a bacon cheeseburger.

I like the "pull to the left or right" idea; it's a simple, physical feature that would continue to be a theme throughout the mission without completely side-tracking the action.

Another possibility, which I've imagined using, but haven't found a fic to use in yet, is to have a character who literally serves no purpose but to spew an ideology (political or otherwise) turn out to be a literal "strawman." As in, scarecrow-type thing mocked up to look like a true character. This lets us strike at the problems behind such political speech-fics--ignoring story and characterization in favor of selling a position--without attacking the viewpoint directly. You're welcome to use this idea, if you wish.

(In my imagined scenario, I would also end by portalling the strawperson into my actual, real world petting zoo for my goats and deer and baby llamas to consume. You're welcome to use that, too, if it's not too weird for you. :) )

An actual soapbox?

I would say that the animagus one might have dancing strawmen.

Maybe the Tea Party ones generate actual tea parties? You know, the tea scones and jam ones.

Speaking as someone with no knowledge of Battlefield, of course.

All I could think was, 'I wonder if Radagast will return on his ridiculous bunny sled?'

I'm still WTFing about the appearance of Legolas and the love triangle with the OC and Kili. So I'm still burned out from the last movie.

Is it bitter of me to say I'm p****d at what they did with Thorin's character?

It looks like the explosions will be quite enjoyable, though.

uhhhhh..... dwarves riding goats? my only reaction is WTF bro.

Battle goats??!! No! That is so wrong! It was supposed to be war pigs! I was promised war pigs!
The ridiculous expression to go with this movie should be 'Dain Ironfoot on a war pig!'. 'Dain Ironfoot on a battle goat!' does simply not have the same ring to it. *huffs and goes off to sulk in corner*

Dwarves riding goats is very World of Warcraft.

The goat-drawn chariot is fine, considering that Thor had one.

If that barefoot person is anyone than Bilbo, I'm going to question why they aren't wearing shoes.

Let's say an agent pair does a Pokémon-verse mission. The Sue has a full team of six Pokémon, but they have relatively minor faults. Maybe her shiny Togepi/starter/Eevee/whatever is highly unlikely but possible to get in a standard playthrough, or her Raichu has one move it can't learn in that region but is otherwise normal. Whatever the case, the Pokémon are not breaking canon by existing.

After the agents kill her, are they allowed to adopt some of her team, like how you would rescue an inoffensive OC/bit character, or do they have to neuralyze and release all six Pokémon?

In fics that kill off canon characters that are supposed to live, what is done?

I'm under the impression that using this too often can be dangerous. http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/Simulation_Generator

Are fics like this killed on an incomplete charge list? Is something else done?

I'm under the impression that some Sorters only read fanfictions to look for the bad ones, but the Spies have a rotation where one day they go into fics and the rest of the time they work as Sorters. Is this a six-day rotation since there are six teams?

Since I would have two Elizabeths if I do both of her stories, I was thinking of having one that just sorts because she is afraid of dying. The other one is really crazy and some of her mission reports will mention liking some things that prove a fic needs to die.

How much damage do these do to canon? And if any, what is done about them?

I determined that this one is unmissionable because it's already meta. Two authors retain their powers as they use plotholes and deliberately cause havoc in the world. Heavy use of anachronisms. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/1025334/1/LoK-Fluff

Then there is this series, in which a place called "The Nexus" connects many different worlds. She's partial to Soul Reaver, but Kurt Wagner from X-Men is usually hanging around. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/917668/1/Magic-Kingdom

Then there's mine, which is a ripoff of these types of fics and admittedly bad. Use of plotholes, authoress powers are cripplingly energy-intensive but there is a deus-ex-machina just about every mini-arc, plus every stupid situation that could come up actually happens. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/2465079/1/Self-Insert-Authoress-Tripe

Mini-sues: Actually, they're typically depicted as being miniature versions of the Sue in question, and are usually killed by either the agents themselves or the other minis spawned by the fic. Since they're not actually even characters, I don't think an offhand reference to one of the agents shooting it is particularly bad. Or just ignore it in the mission itself. It might get pointed out in the comments or something, but if you're honest with people, they probably won't care.

Intelligence: You can see some sample reports here. Honestly, you can probably say the intelligence report is as detailed as you want it to be. In-universe, the PPC isn't all that organized; if an Intelligence agent screws something up, the field agents can go yell at them, but it's unlikely anything else would happen unless it's a recurring issue. In the past, agents have been accidentally assigned missions they're completely unqualified for and basically told, "well, go do it anyways."

Plotholes: The PPC isn't so empty that you could wander it for too long without running into anyone. Plus, given its highly mutable architecture, new arrivals may have a tendency to find themselves ending up at the Marquis de Sod's office. As for what happens after they're found, it seems to vary from character to character. Some people go through official training; others just get dumped at an RC and told to go to it.

I saw the fic where Printworthy fell through a plothole in front of an agent, and was immediately taken to SO.

I see a lot of profiles where the backstory is they fell through a plothole, but I don't see any expansion on what happens before they get assigned to a partner.

What happens when a random person or persons don't immediately run into an agent?

In this case, it would be a character replacement and a... not sure if she's a self-insert, an avatar, or both. She wouldn't have any Sueish powers outside of her own story.

Would the DIA pick them up? What would happen to them?

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9549791/1/

I'd also like advice for this one Despatch case I'm working on. It starts off with a lot of subjective things for my charge-happy agent to get peeved at, but not much she's allowed to write down as actual charges. (Continuity error on a rocking chair, somewhat believable rich-girl life.) I don't think it's a charge for accidentally naming a SI Emma Watson.

It's a mildly decent fi...il about chapter 8 where Rainbow Dash gets mixed up with a drug dealer who's also a serial killer. Rainbow Dash gets tortured, and dies for six minutes in chapter 10 after she's on an ambulance gurney. The paramedics don't seem to be doing CPR or anything, then Fluttershy yells at her and she comes back to life. (What should be done about the serial killer if the agent removes the evidence? Will he just die with the fic?)

That part has admitted lack-of-research on the effects of crack, I don't know how much she's off yet. Afterwards, I'm bothered by what is allowed to happen during the hospital scenes.

I'm thinking it would be alright to kill the fic early in the torture scene, sending Dash to Medical and yelling at the self-insert for just the chapter 8-10 stuff.

Later on, I think there is a screw-up between insulin and epinephrine. Why the guy wouldn't excuse himself to the bathroom, I don't know.

The rest is just dull but not bad, unless something happens after chapter 15.

If you don't know what to do with a thing, just pretend that it doesn't exist.

In this case, just don't put the Mini into the story.

-Phobos

It's not like I forgot or anything, it was...er...that the Delibird was late! Yeah, that was it!
*shifty eyes*
*bows*
All right, I overlooked that detail in all the excitement that you were back; I'm sorry! But look, there's the Delibird right now.

*You look at the direction where SOH176 is pointing. In the distance, you see a Delibird flying in your direction.*

And no, the Delibird is not your present this time, so no warnings from me.

*The Delibird lands and looks around in its tail/pouch for your present.
Out of its tail, it pulls out a plushie of Pyrus Apollonir the Charmander. To the untrained eye, it's just a normal Charmander, but you can tell that it's Apollonir from the never-say-die lok on its face.*

Happy (belated) birthday, Outhra!

I've been gone a while too, but I'm back now too! May not be as frequent as I used to be, but at least I am here! I am sure the others will fill you in better then I could.

I do have one question for you though. I was gone from the Board when the season 4 finale aired. What did you think about it? I thought Tirek was cool, though a little to Gary Stu-ie for my tastes. And that new castle of Twilight's...Ew. That is horrid. I mean, the Crystal Empire at least has some class, this new crystal tree house of friendship is just gaudy. I have more to say on the finale, and season four in general, but I have to head out. I do look forward to your thoughts on it, and if you want, I would be happy to talk about how awesome this season was.

I'm sure someone's said it already, but all this summer's missions are listed on our lovely wiki for your reading pleasure.

Also, happy birthday! *hugs* I don't know what you like, exactly, but I figure a $20 Starbucks gift card is a pretty good present regardless. (When in doubt, give gift cards, right?)

Hope things are settling down for you.

Happy birthday!
*gives a copy of the new Season 8 Doctor Who trailer*

We've missed you so muuuuuuuch!

Welcome back, and happy birthday! Here, have a virtual stuffed boa constrictor and a ton of grape-flavored candy!

That's a lot of exclamation points.

Um, well, further down the page, there's an announcement for the beginning of the Official Fanfiction University of Homestuck, if you're interested.

In other news, though, *showers Outhra with purple streamers and packing peanuts*

-Aila

*ahem*
Well, chapter 10 of Lost Luster is up, and chapters 11 through 13 are on Google Drive. If you're up to resuming betaing, please tell me and I'll send you the link. Just know that there will now be a total of three betas at this point, including you: PoorCynic and eatpraylove have agreed to help me in your absence.

As for PPC-related stuff, I remember that Iximaz put up another HP sporking, and there's a goodfic thread further down the page.

Welcome back! You have no idea how much you've been missed.