Jun 2016 Archive, part a

I'm a MASSIVE sucker for mecha anime, particularly the robots. And yet I'm stuck out here since I don't have a character yet (well, I do, but I don't have permission) ;-;

At this point I'd kill for a text-based clash between giant robots with abilities like planet-cracking swords and the ubiquitous Macross Missile Massacre.

Why is DoSAT destroying incredibly useful technology? Seriously. They keep that sort of thing around and put it to good use. Makes-things would fire everyone involved as soon as he found out about this. And in this case, I think "fire" might imply "from a cannon".

I'm not saying that random RPs are a bad thing, of course. Just that this one seems to run counter to what DoSAT actually does.

-Phobos

I definitely want in. And what better way to celebrate the end of my placement than with some betaing? (...okay, yes, ice cream works too, but writing-related things are good to have with the ice cream...)

I think you have my email, but if you don't: dawnfire360 (at) gmail (dot) com. I should be available from about Sunday or so.

~DF

...this thing with someone marrying Data and calling him a blender, would it? I've come across that one before, and, well, yeah. Be interesting to see someone mission it. (If this is the one, though, I doubt I can help much--I don't know TNG well at all. I should really keep watching sometime.)

~DF

AKA semi-thread hijack.

Looking for someone willing to beta my Prelude. Also an on-board reminder to the two beta's I had before who I haven't heard from in a while.

Also Bramandin, my email is clickable, I'll be busy with exams until the 9th June, but after that I should be free to look stuff over.

Did you happen to find any minis in your Treasure Planet mission? Because I'm sitting on a finished mission into that continuum, but have to wait on two others to be betaed and published first. I've got a handful of mini-Morphs running around, but if you picked something different, one of us would have to rewrite.

Screenshots please?

Bats are great.
They're also smelly and noisy, but in a great way.
I hope that the legendary, and the game, manages to take at least one of those descriptors.

This may be the first time I've ever been this hyped. Mostly because rotom pokedex! Rotom has always been my favorite so yay!

...Though Ix does have a point about the typing.

~Mattman, who is going to be treading lightly for a little bit in terms of the Board

...until this region gives us a canon Skarmory pre-evolution. Looks like there may be a chance for new relatives of existing Pokemon, though, seeing as Rotom is confirmed - and in amazing and adorable style! I want a Rotom companion now. But... But... What does Lunara's ability DO??? O_o

Anyways, can't wait to see what this region will give us!

The Sun Legendary is not only not Fire Type but is weak to it? What sort of witchcraft is this? And the Moon Legendary being weak to Dark? What?

Other than that though, I'm still excited. The new region looks gorgeous.

Well, it’s mostly in dialogue and thus may be intentional:

I didn’t expected to be buying this... but, then again, I didn’t expect this to be your job.
Should be "expect".

Why I am not surprised?
Word order should be "Why am I... ".

Ok, aside from stuff we already charged for there isn’t nothing worthy to see...
The double negation means that there actually is something worthy to see.

Keiko nodded and opened a portal to Gryffindor common room.
Missing word "the"?

"I... kinda want to have a word with that book’s author. " Keiko said, raising a eyebrow.
"a" should be "an".

HG

“I messed up bad, huh?” Sergio said to no one in particular while inspecting the damage on his Sprinter Trueno. The former agent was in his garage, and it goes without saying that the last drift competition he took part in didn’t go well.

Sergio looked at the intercooler and sighed - installing it on the bumper hadn’t been a great idea, as both parts were going straight into the trash bin. He was about to start taking out the damaged part when he heard Nikki calling him. “What is it?”

“Corolla just called me. She says she needs to speak to both of us - something big is going on, I’m afraid.” Nikki said, poking her head in.

Sergio instinctively brought his right hand over his holster at “big”, prompting a laugh from Nikki. “Don’t worry, it’s isn’t an emergency. Besides, that’s an electric screwdriver.”

Sergio stared at the device he was holding like it was a gun. “Oh.”

***

“So, what is it all about?” Sergio asked as soon as he and Nikki walked out of the portal. In front of them, Corolla waved from her extremely messy worktable.

“Well, the Flowers asked me if I could get you on standby, we might need some help in the future. Look at this.” Corolla said before tossing them the July 2016 issue of Nakayoshi. Nikki catched it and started skimming through.

“Corolla, we’re retired. Just look at our clothes.” Sergio said, pointing at his racing suit and Nikki’s apron, both emblazoned with her café’s logo.

“Bwah...?” Nikki said, before poking her boyfriend’s shoulder and showing him the first page of one of the mangas featured.

“Hm...? Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card Chapter? Is this for real?”

Corolla nodded. “Yup. CLAMP came up with a full-fledged sequel for CCS’ twentieth anniversary. The Flowers are kinda worried about it, though - they fear a badfic explosion, but apparently there are very few Agents left who are knowledgeable in it.”

“And that’s where we come in, I guess?” Sergio wondered. “Still, I’m not sure. I mean, CCS hits me and Nikki close to home, but...”

“I knew you would say something like that, so I spoke with the Marquis and he said he’s fine with the two of you working as contractors. You decide whether to accept or not each mission, and you can stop taking them on whenever you want.”

Sergio hmphed. “The stupid daisy must be really desperate if he’s giving us such good conditions. What do you think, Nikki?”
Nikki shook her head. “You said it, Cardcaptor Sakura is like home for us. Let’s do it.”



[Yes, CCS:CC's first chapter came out today. Scanlations were out less than 24 hours from release - the hype is real. At this point the fanfic explosion is all but confirmed.]

And I like this. Hope you've got other missions of this type waiting to be done, because I really find this interesting.

Keiko, second generation Magical Girl. I just love this, and other small things like Sergio sniping her monsters. Please continue.

More Elanor too, that's wonderful! But I'm with Ave here, the Flowers were just feling sadist there. Guess she won't be trying anything like this for a long time.

I have no gift, for I am terrible at gift-giving. I'm actually not allowed to give gifts to my family anymore, after the incident with the hammock. But I can ask you questions! How do you feel about nicknames? I predict that the Board is likely to shorten your name to Granz -- did you anticipate that? What pronouns should we use to refer to you in the third person, should such a thing become necessary?

--Key, or Cat, she/her/hers

Wrong greeting... Anyway, welcome to the PPC! Here as your newbie gift, you can have this Replica of the One Ring, that becomes a copy of the Ember Celica when you require it! Also you can have this Gen-3 TM, TM-13 Ice Beam, for your Swinub!

And tell us your fandoms, please. We hope you have fun here.

I'd make my customary offer of a seat by the fireplace, but I suppose the whole Ice Cream Monarch thing means you probably don't like heat. No matter, I can still stick to my normal gift of a Replica Holocron. I'm sure monarchs have lots of royal secrets to record, so it should come in handy.

Since I see you listed Harry Potter as a fandom, might I ask which House you're in?

I'm probably a wee bit late welcoming you, but I do recommend that you join DOGA. Why? Well,

I am aware that this may not be historically accurate.

Have a purple glitter gel pen. Your agents aren't allowed to write mission reports with them.

Welcome to our little hovel of the internet, have Rotom-in-a-Pokedex. You can engage in conversation with it!

Or, in Hebrew English: Hi! Here, have this card — I think it fits.

Welcome, your highness. Do avoid the dark corners, we put the bodies there.
Not enough space in the basement, unfortunately.

I present upon you, your royal highness, a warm campfire!
Oh, er that won't do?
Ice-cream? Monarch? Of ice-cream?
Er.
How about this microwave?
Right, of course, silly me, an oven!
No?
I can see that, how about a furnace?
Oh, of course, of course.
How about the sun?
Oh, dear, you're right.
Melts ice-cream, too.
I'm very sorry.
Please don't wage war on us.

Please have this pot of black-hole coffee.

Only one hundred tabs open at once? Little player, back in time I could do up to 140. Then I began pilling up bookmarks to avoid this.

Now, I see all the questions have een asked, so only thing left is saying welcome to the madhouse, and hopes you enjoy your stay enough for sticking around for a long time.

Please accept this starter Pokémon:-

Iiiiiiiit's Swinub!

And your starting item is:-

Breath of Hachiman from Ascendant!

The Breath of Hachiman is a really interesting item in competitive, because it really suits offensively oriented 'mons. Its effect is a boost the damage of STAB moves by 2x when you reach 50% health, but the catch is you can only use it once. Swinub's not got much in the way of HP or Speed, but it does have one asset: priority. Try an Adamant one EV trained in Attack and HP, with Ice Shard, Earthquake, Rock Slide, and Curse if you think you can get a boost off or Superpower for the coverage. Just remember to have fun!

(the temptation to fudge the random pokemon generator and give you vanilluxe was enormous. =] )

Here are some sprinkles and a pack of dog-shaped sticky notes! :)

Anyway, welcome aBoard! Have one of my own shed feathers and a complimentary kit of Spikes!

Hello, and welcome aBoard! For your newbie gift, take this plate of freshly-made SPaGhetti!

You already answered my usual questions, so I'll instead ask what your favorite fandoms are. :D

Hope you like it here!

Have a shovel that digs up...

...more shovels. Um.

I am, however, in DC for the weekend, so if anyone happens to be there... :P

Have fun, doc!

Nume was partnered with Ilraen from the beginning of their spin-off, but the reason he didn't start off partnered with Cameo, as he was in my Fill the Plotholes, is because I discovered, in writing her, that she was a total psycho, aggressively manipulative and not very nice. She would not have made a good agent at all. So, when Twiggy mentioned that she was PPCing an Animorphs fic and needed a good home for an Andalite recruit, I jumped at the chance, and thus we have Ilraen. {= )

As for Derik, Earwig didn't work out as his partner because he was never really my character—Phobos came up with him—and I couldn't quite get a grip on how to write him. Plus, as much as I intended my DMS spin-off to be lighter in tone, Derik insisted on being a serious, down-to-earth person, so pairing him with a happy-go-lucky, zany kender made striking a balance a real struggle.

So, I decided to recruit Gall to replace Earwig. She has excellent qualities to play off Derik's: she's younger and more reckless, and can test his authority; there are plenty of anachronisms in her home canon, so I can make modern-Earth jokes I didn't have access to before; she and her dragon very much aggravate his trauma, so he's forced to deal with it; but she doesn't really care for his angst, and won't indulge him in it very much, so she helps keep the tone in balance. And she's a girl. My action teams were all boys before, and I like writing boys, but it's nice to have a girl.

As I've written her, too, I've discovered that her relative illiteracy gives her a more direct approach to missions, and she's more likely to notice visual or auditory weirdness around her. She was the first to catch on to the plagiarism in "With One Step," for instance, just by listening to the dialogue. She remembers what she sees and hears. It's fun to look at things her way, and she makes me pay more attention to interpreting and describing the effects of the Words.

Oh, and to answer your last question, writing Earwig out was just a matter of him being a kender: they tend to get distracted and wander off, and that's what happened. Phobos and I intended to bring him back, but we haven't found an opportunity yet. He's still out there, though.

~Neshomeh, kind of proud that three of her four agents are badfic recruits, saved with a purpose and not just cuz.

I ditched Gabby because she just wasn't an interesting character, to me or the readers. I shoved her to the ESAS, and brought in the much-more-interesting Stephanie.

Specifically, boredom with Sarah working as a trainee with Falchion and Rashida. I know Sarah and Falc aren't identical in terms of personality but they share similar interests and contrast enough with Rashida that the grumpy kitty can't possibly care less about their differences. Falc and Rashida could work well together, but I realized that Sarah and Rashida probably couldn't because, surprisingly, they have somewhat similar temper issues. Two women who get angry easily probably wouldn't make as interesting a story as an angry woman and a fast-talking knife bird. So I took the temper clash to its logical conclusion and had Sarah and Rashida have a falling out, before sending the former to the DIC which was my plan for her in the first place.

As for Sarah's current partners, while recruiting Cupid was largely a matter of salvaging the origin story described in his homefic and applying it to a Pit clone (which I'd been planning sometime prior to his creation), I'd had the idea to have Sarah ultimately pair up with a Pit clone because when my own original writing project was still a mega-crossover, Sarah would meet and befriend Pit himself. That subplot was out the window once I transitioned the project into an original work, but Sarah being partners with Cupid is a remnant of that old idea.

This of course left me with a problem: Sarah and Cupid have a little more contrast than Sarah and Falchion, but they still share enough personality traits that I had to bring in someone else to balance them out. The answer came to me when I reread my old Pokemon fic and found Lapis, whom I noticed was quite neurotic even as a Sue. So she ultimately became the panicky but somewhat more sensible foil to the other two, which also gave me a good way to practice writing her in general.

Tl;dr, Sarah got sent to the DIC, not because she has anger issues, but because she and Rashida BOTH have anger issues. XD

As far as I remember, around November 2013 I figured that I had no idea what to do with Anebrin (Des' former partner). I had massive problems writing him in a way that wasn't Elf!Des; looking back, he definitely didn't have much substance to him as a character. So I decided to write him out, and since Drama was fun back then, I had him go insane. Wanting to bring in a Time Lord self-ish insert might have figured into the decision as well, though Lump as he is now is both very different from me and very different from his original incarnation.

I hope this helps.

I already detailed my answer to you in an email, but for the sake of discussion I'll say again here.

Randa wasn't actually written by me, but by one of my high school friends. I brought in Zeb when Randa's author and I stopped being able to hang out like we used to, thanks to class and eventual graduation. The last few missions involving Randa were actually her handing the character over to me, but since I didn't want to write a self-insert of my friend, I started thinking about who would eventually replace her, and thus Zeb was born.

Among all of the wacky things that happen in the PPC, it's nice to see something serious. It's a nice glimpse.

I just got access to Legion beta so I've been checking out stuff on that for the past few days. I'll probably get back on pretty soon though.

Not really.
I've burnt all my Minecraft fuel, to be honest.
I probably won't come on again unless something absolutely insane comes on.
Like armageddon, or somebody starts baking heaps of cookies. Whichever comes first.

But that's rare at the moment, I'll probably try and get on it more after my last exam (the 9th)

Which reminds me, if people are still interested in being added to it, I can as long as I have their username.

I just hate playing with my brother because he has a Green elf deck centered around THIS. I play a Red/White deck involving a lot of angels and dragons, so I don't really have a way to counter it. He wins every stinkin' time.

So I agreed that I would play against him (and get my butt repeatedly whooped) in exchange for one episode of Ponies for every two MTG games. It worked out pretty well in the end.

So I was randomly browsing pages whilst trying to avoid revision, and the link to the PPC Manual doesn't work, or rather goes to a 'page not found' page. Is there still a copy of the Manual on the web?

The background does not display many of the flash patches at higher resolutions. I can only see four on a 1920x1080 computer and all of them on a much smaller Chromebook.

Any pointers as to why?

it seems that there are some flash patches that I do not recognize. What is that patch with the flaming man in the bowler hat?

And isn't FicPsych's flash patch five exclamation marks, not three?

Nicely done. I'll try and update the question in the morning.

Assuming the plant is a Purple Sage, the only one I don't know off the top of my head is the Swiss Army Knife.

hS

The Bayformer series has been of... varying quality (Most of it was bad, Barricade in 1 and apparently now 5 is great, as were the Dinobots in 4) but if they actually get ROM involved I will gladly spend money to see this in a theater. Honestly ROM is probably the perfect robot franchise for Michael Bay.

Silly me, more money is far more important for Mister Bay. Especially when he only needs plots like 'We fear Transformers because of Megatron. So let's create an army of Transformers based upon Megatron. It Cannot Go Wrong.', with explosions everywhere. Oh, and Optimus Prime violating the very core of his character.

It could be worst i guess. Hasbro could have gave him MLP. Imagine what he could have done to this franchise.

I lost faith in these movies the moment Optimus said "I'LL KILL YOU ALL" to humans.

I don't care what my dad and brother say about the events between Dark of the Moon and Age of Extinction; Optimus is Robot Jesus. He would never break like that.

(She said, having little to no exposure to the Transformers.)

Switch to French horn and make the world a better place. We need more horn players!

Step 2: ???

Step 3: Profit.

:P

In all seriousness (and this is all the help I can give): here.

(Also, yay, I'm remembered ^_^)

I will note, though, that the note telling Kaitlyn and Selene to do it was... uh... less than convincing, given that it was signed:

The Sub Rosa
The Sunflo
The Board o
Your Department Head

So be careful how you justify it.

hS

Yup, here it is.

And yes, I expect it's as canon as anything is in the PPC.

~Neshomeh

Also, you accidentally put in a horizontal line instead of a "read more" cut. You might want to fix that (though I don't care that I got spoilered).

Good luck with all that employment stuff, mate.
I'm already terrified of HSC, lord knows how I'd fare in your shoes.

And it's always good to see more writing on the board.

^-^

By the way, what is your degree in?

Graduating is a big one- your life is going to change in new and unexpected ways from here. I wish you all the best!

And I bring graduation gifts! Have a ridiculously fluffy blanket and a pen of +1 resume writing.

And good luck with your mission and other writings!

That's fantastic. That's the sort of ridiculous thing that ought to happen in HQ.

I have no problem with you using Hazelhead (I've always treated the older DIA agents as semi-free-to-use), and the idea that it took them 13 years to notice amuses me immensely. (Also, Agent Elanor namedrop woo hoo!)

So... if the four El(e)anors in HQ are all named in the Wiki, what does this tell us about the size of the PPC? What percentage of a group do you have to sample to find everyone of a single name? And does it matter that, assuming the PPC's name-distribution is the same as America's, 0.076% of the US population is named Eleanor or Elanor?

(In the latter case, extrapolating gives us a HQ size of around 5000; that fits with my previous discussion of the topic from a fic-load POV, though I can't find the post in question.)

hS

There’s one typo causing an unintentional tense shift: Leyuu ruffles Iris’ hair.

And in the mission, the word existence has been duplicated.

HG

That was a funny TYH. Only one tiny nitpick: from the opening scene, I thought that the Carmines' home was not in PPC HQ. But like I said, that was just a minor nitpick.

One question: When did Lapis pick up the name "Armenus"? Memory serving, she was always just "Lapis Lazuli".

Interesting mission, and a creative assassination of the Sue. The random Japanese words did throw me off a bit; having to look up an unfamiliar term mid-mission can detract from the flow of a story.

I only caught one error:
Cupid gulped. “Uh… A friend of ours’,” he replied.
Remove that apostrophe after "ours".

One more thing: Out of curiosity, why is Steph an Assassin when she is so squeamish about killing?

(Firstly, to avoid confusion, I checked my mail first and replied to your message there, before going to the Board and reading this post.)

Look, I'm perfectly fine with you going ahead and posting the mission if you feel that it has gotten all the betaing it needs.

I'm not fine with the way you described my role or lack of such. I got the link on Wednesday and now it's early Friday (where I am anyway). You didn't say, not when you asked for a beta nor when you sent me the link, that you were planning to post the interlude less than two days after, so I assumed I could look it over Friday evening or in the weekend.

I had a vet emergency and haven't really checked my mail for a couple of days, but that's obviously not something I knew in advance and anyway, I don't think that counts as disappearing from the internet.

So yeah, I don't want to be a b**** about this, but I feel like I'm being accused of ghosting you, because I missed a very short deadline you hadn't even told me about.

The rest of the post (including the link) is missing!