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moonlight-dragon · 6 years

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Allurance - Roommates AU (Home is where you are) CHAPTER 3

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The raindrops were impacting against the glass when Lance woke up. He yawned, stretching beneath the sheets before taking off his headphones. His feet landed on his slippers, leading his half-asleep body through the apartment. It was dark outside, but not a sunless dark. It was the dark that you saw underwater, surrounded by the ocean and looking up to an endless liquid sky.

The rain always made the apartment look like it had been built under the sea, or that it had suddenly became an underwater ship, travelling among the currents. Had he been at Cuba and he would already be running to scream under the falling drops… but here, well, neighbours didn’t exactly appreciate a boy laughing to the bottom of his lungs on a Sunday morning. Any day or moment in fact.

Everything always felt silent when it rained, as if the storm had absorbed every single sound except the one of its own drops, creating a world whose time seemed to pass in a completely different way. Like being in another dimension as long as the water worked its magic.

Lance smiled, resting a hand over the cold glass of the windows. No matter where you were, the rain was rain and it wasn’t hard to imagine he was in Cuba, waiting for the storm to pass accompanied by the scent of his mum’s coffee. Rain had that power, of taking him home, but the silent it always created reminded him the simple illusion it was… It never mattered how much the water poured outside, the “rain silence” had never been able to beat the noises he called home.

He breathed heavily, wanting the clouds to be the only ones creating water. He headed to the kitchen, with the idea of making coffee in his mind, a “café con leche” to bring the confident Lance back.

Allura rolled onto the other side of the bed, trying to keep her eyes shut, in hopes to stop waking up more. She wasn’t a morning person… she raised with the Moon and the Stars, not the Sun. She was ready burry herself under the blankets and ignore the obligations imposed to her by humanity’s cycles when something caught her attention. Something that simply was impossible to ignore.

Reluctantly she blinked, standing up as a sweet coffee scent found its way into the room. She wrapped her body in her robe, feeling the cold wood in her bare feet as her drowsiness resisted to leave her.

Someone was singing.

And it could be because she had just woken up, but it was beautiful. She stood in front of the door, telling herself that she would listen to it just a little before opening the door leaving the room. If it was a dream, let her enjoy it for a few more seconds.

“Well, get up, up on the dancefloor, move, it's a Saturday night

I fell in love with the sparkle in the moonlight

Reflected in your beautiful eyes

I guess that is destiny doing it right”

She slowly opened the door, following that youthful charming voice singing a song that somehow had become her favourite. Her arms stretched above her head, followed by a yawn as her feet carried her into that Mediterranean rhythm. Probably Shay had left the radio on…

And dance like they do in the Mediterranean

Spin you around me again and again, and

You're like something that God has sent me

I want you, baby, solamente (…)”

Then the song ended abruptly as her body hit someone, and when the person turned, she couldn’t help but to scream, grabbing his ear as she reduced him to the ground.

“Who are you?!” she demanded to know, acting out of instinct. “What are you doing in my house?”

“Ahhhhh, ah! Allura, it’s me! Lance!”

“Lance... Lance!” reality hit her, making her remember she didn’t live with Shay anymore, that the person she was reducing was her new roommate and that it was “his” house.

“Omg I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”

“Si…?” he cried, massaging the ear that he almost sure he had lost. Allura was unsure of what to do, reaching her hands to him but retracting before they could touch him. That was it, he was going to kick her out. Her eyes adventured to look at him, finding Lance’s ones pinned on her. And with the sight of his face, well, she couldn’t help to start laughing.

“Sorry, I, it’s just…” her hands covered her mouth, trying to protect the little composure she had left “You cannot blame me for being scared.”

“Oh, no, you’re not the one getting an apologise here ‘Lura” he answered, standing in front of her as she tried to avoid his gaze, failing miserably.

He was singing, leaving the coffee being made in the kitchen as he headed for the bathroom, a shower in mind and then his knees hit the ground and a pain jolted throughout his body. A robbery crossed his mind, but then he caught gaze of moonlight curls and Allura’s voice was so unique for it to be mistaken.

Wow. She was strong -he could feel the power she was performing against his limbs- and she knew how to use her force. Man, he had always had a thing for women who could kick his ass… but not that literally. Ouch, that was hurting, that was hurting!

Now she was laughing, and Lance couldn’t help to think she was gorgeous. Her hair down like a mass of clouds, her blue robe and her pink nightgown. She was like a princess, a badass warrior princess. What was there not to love?

“So, what’s wrong with my looks?” he inquired, hands on his hips.

“Well, the face mask and the towel on your hair for starters” she answered, hands crossed behind her back.

“Ouch, that hurt!” his hands found a way to his heart, mimicking a shot on the beating organ. “But all necessary for Lover Boy Lance to look the way he does. Small prize for handsomeness.”

“Right, handsomeness.”

“I’m not accepting that look from a person with such pores.” he joked, getting a nervous laugh from Allura. Her hands went up to touch her face and a little worry flashed in her eyes… oh, he had taken him seriously. Fuck! “Good thing I know how to solve that.”

“You… do?”

“Indeed princess, your knight in cosmetic armour is here.”

Allura giggled. “You didn’t… hahahaha, Lance!”

She punched his arm lightly. That was good. He had noticed how unsure she had been about touching him after reducing him to the ground. If it had been other place, other time, other circumstances maybe he would have gathered the courage to say that had been hot -minus the actual pain part. But no, roommate boundaries. Things could get awkward. Because he would be meaning it, truly meaning it. And joking with real things was not okay.

“Okay almost done. Look up, look up.”

Allura had her eyes slightly shut, feeling funny as Lance’s fingers traced her skin leaving a citric scent behind. The mask he was applying to her face was cold and sticky, a mixture of lemon juice and honey that according to her “cosmetic knight” would give her a gorgeous glow. Tough she wouldn’t mind if it didn’t. Just be doing that was more than enough.

She had always loved those kind of things, DIY facial products, chatting, that kind of girl stuff. Back in England she had spent countless afternoons doing that, first with her mum and then with Romelle. She had assumed that sharing a living space with a girl in America would be the same, but it turned out reality didn’t meet her expectations. Most of the times it had been because she’d never felt close enough to the other girls to bring it up, and when she started living with Shay, tough she was the sweetest person in the world, she was aware the girl didn’t exactly enjoy it. Not that she hated it, no, more like she didn’t mind. And so, doing “girl stuff” always felt forced and, where was the fun in that?

And now there she was, letting a boy apply a mascara mixture he had in the fridge all over her face because he had dared to say she had awful pores!

“Okay, lista!” a proud look was written all over his face as he stood up to wash his hands in the kitchen sink.

“And now what?” she asked, hoping somehow, he would notice the hope she was pouring in every word. “Please let’s do something else” “Painting our nails or braiding each other’s hair…” well, her hair, his didn’t have enough length for that. “Anything Lance, please”

“Well, I’ve some nail polish Veronica left when she was here and…”

“Yes!” Allura didn’t let him finish. She jumped from her chair, cornering Lance against the kitchen counter. If she hadn’t been so excited she would have noticed the blush that blossomed in the boy’s cheeks, but her agitated mind and the perfect act he managed to put up after a few seconds made her soon forget about it.

Lance stepped into Allura’s bathroom, searching for the nail polisher as Allura herself rested her back against the door’s frame. The raindrops against the window’s glass made it look like an underwater city, where they were mermaids exploring that abandoned human place in search for hidden treasures.

He laughed to himself, sitting at the border of the bathtub and patting the space next to him, following Allura’s figure as she sat down, trying to remain calm but failing at hiding how excited she was.

“I take this is not your first time doing this.” he looked up, finding Allura’s blue eyes looking at him. They were deep like the ocean, a night ocean reflecting the infiniteness of the universe, as if the stars had melted into the water. Maybe if he took enough oxygen he would be able to submerge into them without drowning… maybe it was part of her mermaid charm to make people paint her nails. He shocked his head. He was sure she didn’t know the power her eyes had. How many would have drowned in those eyes?

“You right princess. 2 older sisters and a niece trained me well” he picked up her other hand, seeing how the one he had held travelled all the way to her chin. She was encouraging him to elaborate that statement. And as his knight, how could he refuse?

“There’s my brother Luis, then Veronica, Marco and Rachael and me. Luis is 7 years older than I am, Veronica is 5, Marco is 2 and Rachel is 0 hahahaha, twin joke, twin joke, sorry… Anyway, as I was the youngest my sisters always liked to play with me and I was cool with it. I liked being with them and do “cosas de niñas” -girly stuff-. Not to brag, but I’m super good at it. Braiding, painting nails, face masks… the pupil surpassed his masters.” he put the hand that was holding the brush under his chin, smirking proudly.

“I can corroborate that.” Allura smiled, placing both hands in front of her to see. The polish was of a soft pink colour, and somehow, he had managed to paint small white stars with a touch of glitter. And how she loved sparkly things!

“Okay, my turn!” he reached for a light blue polish, offering it to Allura. She looked up to him, shocked at first but rapidly picking the polish as he offered her his hands.

“I apologise in advance, I’ll probably won’t do it as good as you.”

“Va, va, va, nonsense. You will do great ‘Lura.” she smiled with her whole body, insecurity fading as she started painting, biting her lip in a way Lance assumed meant she was fully concentrating on the task. The first strokes were clumsy, but as she kept going they became more secure, in the way you start remembering when it has been long since the last time you did it.

“Okay, done!” Lance stared at his hands, giving her a thumbs up. She clapped, closing the nail polish and collecting the other three ones to put them in the cupboard he had taken them out from.

“I’ll be back in a second” he said, rushing outside the bathroom as Allura nodded, watching him pass her without much time to think of an answer.

Allura sat on the bathtub’s edge, starting at her sparkly nails. Lance had lied to her. It was impossible for a person to forget four nail polishers at someone’s house. They were his, she was sure of that! That blue colour was matched his usual colour palette too well for it being a coincidence.

She smiled, hugging her legs as she rested her check on the top of them. He would never know how much letting her paint his nails had meant to her, how that face mask now dry had reminded her of home, how him being there made everything unexpectantly hurt less.

“Is this why you convinced me to move here Shay?”

“Hey Allura, look here.” Lance’s voice stared her, making her turn to hear a click. There he was, smiling at her with his phone, focusing on its screen as if it contained a really important thing.

“As expected, you’re a natural.”

“Did you just take a photo of me?”

“How else are we going to remember the day we became friends?” the sincerity of his voice took her off guard, making a soft feeling spread in her chest. She stood up, standing next to Lance to take a glance to her photo. She liked it.

“Okay now’s my turn!” she took the phone off his hands, opening the camera and searching for the front camera option. She smiled, finding cute how Lance’s face had surprise written all over it.

Tough in the next photos his Lover-Boy-Persona took over and his smirks became the signature in almost all the ones they made. In others she had the chance to see a more genuine smile, and she decided she liked those ones the best. And in others they simply made weird faces, even adding the mice to the pictures. As Lance said, “as expected from their owner’s pets, they’re naturals”.

She laughed at the memory of that, now lying on her bed. Tomorrow was Monday and she needed to sleep enough for the idea of waking up being at least somehow appealing. She hated morning lectures.

She was about to go to sleep when her phone lighted up, showing she had an incoming message from Shay.

Shay: Looks like someone had fun today :)

[photo attached] This one is my favourite

Allura stared at the screen, a picture of her and Lance smiling back at her.

Allura: How did you get that?!

Shay: Well, perks of living with your roommate’s best friend and that Lance likes to share…

not like others.

Allura: It’s not like that.

It happens that I don’t have the photos.

Not my fault.

Shay: Guiltless as always.

Allura: Because I am not guilty.

Shay: um, um… So, I can assume you had fun, right?

Just like 30 minutes ago Hunk’s phone started to go crazy and when he checked. Boom!

50 photos Allura

50 PHOTOS

Something to declare?

Allura: We simply spent a nice Sunday together.

Common thing between roommates.

Shay: Allura, I consider myself quite an expert in the roommate’s subject and I can tell you

What you did was not common!

Allura you spent your second day with him doing face masks and painting nails!

With a stranger

Allura: Not a stranger. You knew him!

And you told me so much about Lance it almost felt as if I had known him since forever.

And he’s just like you told me… so you could say I “knew” him.

See? Not a stranger

Shay: Your logic never ceases to astonish me.

Hahahaha

But I had never seen that smile on your face for a long time…

You look happy ‘Lura, genuinely happy, not the “fake- happy” it hurt watching.

And Lance helped, right?

Allura stared at the ceiling, eyes focused on the lights that shined over her head. She knew that. She knew she wouldn’t have smiled that way if Lance hadn’t been there… The person that no longer was a stranger or a simple roommate. He was her friend.

And Allura didn’t remember making a friend so fast or feeling so comfortable around someone or simply feeling it was okay to be herself. And it felt nice. It really did. But she was not going to admit it, not yet.

Allura: I have no obligation of answering to that

Goodnight Shay

See you in class

She started at the screen, scrolling up to see the picture again. It was a nice photo. Lance had put a tower over her hair, saying that it was the last touch for them to match completely -the robes, the long pyjamas and the nail polisher supposedly to be the other things. She was smiling, and so was Lance, showing all his teeth.

“We look quite good, right?” she asked the mice, watching them made themselves comfortable over her pillows. They squeaked, kinda nodding with their heads in which Allura assumed was a yes. “Yeah, I think that too.”

N O T E S

banner credit: scientists confirm cuddling with ur gf to be the best feeling in the universe by @cherryandsisters

Chapter 3 is finally done. Yay!

I had to put extra work on the dialogues and the messages, as the first drafts were kinda messy and not in character at all. Writing and poloshing... hahaha. Not sure if the format I choose for the messages is the right one, hope it’s at least clear who’s talking.

Also first dialogue for Shay. I hope I have made her character justice. In the show there are not many interactions between Allura and Shay, but for the ones we had, we could see they got along nicely. It kinda made sense to make her Allura’s friend in the AU because of that and because otherwise the whole roommate thing would have not started in the first place. So thank you Shay for moving with Hunk and making this Allurance AU possible.

visual references:

Allura’s nails: ☆ *✧

Allura’s and Lance’s outfits are the pyjamas they wear in cannon (couldn’t find visual references... picture it on your mind. IMAGINATION☆ *✧)

chapter’s playlist:

Owl City - The Saltwater Room

Gabrielle Aplin - Home

Ed Sheeran - Barcelona (the song Lance was signing. No reason in particular, it’s just I like the song)

I think reading the chapter with Saltwater Room or Home gives it even more meaning. Things are always better with soundtrack!

Sometimes I doubt when writing this story, I’m afraid it doesn’t make sense or that there would be plot holes as I keep writing... I know I will have to accept it is a possibility, but still... well, it’s harrrrrd. I want this story to be a good one, to be enjoyable, to be worth the time spent on reading it.

Hope you guys enjoy this fic and I’d love to ear your opinions about it. Any questions, ideas, headcannons or suggestions are always welcome!

#allurance #roommate au #chapter 3 #finally #took me a little #but it's longer so it should serve as compensation #hope you guys like it #allurance discord specially #you're always super supportive #thank you

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spamzineglasgow · 5 years

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(REVIEW) Isha Upanishad by Mario Petrucci

In this review, Nasim Luczaj considers the metaphysical wonders and linguistic oscillations of Mario Petrucci’s new translation of the Isha Upanishad (Guillemot Press, 2019).

> You know when you walk into a museum and either breeze through or get hit and pressed down to the tiles by the sheer age of everything? The latter, in my experience, is best facilitated by mummies, even when these are considerably younger than standalone stone or coral in the cabinet next door. Their shape recalls you; you recall death. You’re ever so transient but if you really try, an outline of your body might remain.

> For an ancient text, like a mummy, to be ‘preserved’, it must be adjusted to its onlookers while offering just the right level of peep into its age. The balance between affirmation of time gap and making contemporary is crucial to how we receive the work – to whether we breeze through, get hit, or something in between. What the thing to be preserved is (the frame? the possibility of movement? the weight?) and how much dragging into the current state of our language it requires will depend on the text as well as personal taste.

> There’s not much I can say about the original text of the Isha Upanishad. I have only just walked into this particular museum on a whim. I am walking around reading the plaques and exploring its reverb. I have no knowledge of Sanskrit or much in-depth acquaintance with Hinduist texts. What I do have are insights of an observer in a new beloved space and some sense for how a text might be performing the balance between overtly archaic and openly present. I will approach Mario Petrucci’s new translation of the Isha Upanishad chiefly in relation to how I receive this performance.

> The Isha Upanishad is one of the shortest out of over 200 Upanishads – ancient Vedic texts, some of which were written in poetic form, which lay out the central ideas of Hinduism. Mario Petrucci’s rendition, recently published by Guillemot Press and contained in a near-square, thick-papered book the height of a child’s hand, neither allows you to breeze past the fact of its age and sanctity, nor lets you worry about it too much. Whenever I read it, it’s like looking at a stone I know is old and savouring the opportunity to hold it in my hand, to choose how tightly I hold on. It shines with the grease we put on it by asking it back into our palms via translation and reading. The persistence of its stillness, its parallel timespan, carves its way into us. Just what we want. A stone carried out of a river, cool with current, balancing quaintness with a sense of refresh. Coming back from old renditions is like going back to reading a Sappho not translated by Anne Carson having already read If Not, Winter. You want to believe the original is this flippant. You want to trust the calm density of the translation, much like that of a body of water, and play its brim like a glass with your finger. It’s that kind of thinking, that kind of prompting, that kind of whoa you’d like to receive.

> Here, perhaps slightly too much quaintness is reinforced by regular capitalization, then counterbalanced, in places, by neologism. Some stanzas shout novelty, others hardly suggest our century. There is a charm and controlled purposefulness to this oscillation. Nevertheless, it forms a rift between passages. Creases emerge in their unity. Depending on the verse, you’re either ignoring the age of things as you walk through the museum, or you have your forehead placed against the glass dividing you from that time and also allowing you to glimpse it. You’re on one side of the valley or the other – the stream in between inconsequential, only a letter – but somehow the vegetation is noticeably different on either side, and the presence of alternatives, within smell and sight, distract.

Here’s one side – verse 3:

Ignorance is a form of possession

whose owner dons perfect sunlessness.

They follow death in procession:

those hollowed by flesh who bodily

deny consciousness.

The neological quality of ‘sunlessness’ adds to its no-caps feel, although this term is present in all other translations I have encountered and follows the original closely. The rhythm of the second stanza, too, oddens the verse – the sentence structure seems necessary but nicely impossible. It also withdraws our attention from death. Emphasis naturally falls on ‘procession’, the colon, the ‘hollowed’ sonically enacting the following. Then the denial is like a twig being bent very nearly to breakage but not quite allowing for it.

> That same death, in verse 14, surfaces capitalized:

The Eternal and its Effects –

those who place these two together,

by the Destructible need no rebirth,

by the Indestructible taste no Death.

Perhaps there is a difference between these ‘deaths’ that is supposed to be signalled here. In the Sanskrit original, however, this would not have been done via capitalization, which, to my knowledge, did not exist in their alphabet. The capitalization can be productive when demarcating ‘This’, ‘That’, ‘It’, which do require additional ballast for us to focus on them to the extent we focus on ‘Sun’ or ‘Cosmos’ by default. Nevertheless, Petrucci’s choice to capitalize more heavily in some verses than in others becomes stylistically confusing. I cannot read the original – perhaps there are differences in tone between parts of the Upanishad that are conveyed in this way, but I doubt it. You might end up longing for a striking off of pompous capitalization or for a more consistent marking of the more important concepts in relation to nouns of less stature, instead of taking the text in as a unified piece which does not admit tweaking. I found it dizzying to oscillate between verses, though each had a tremendously cohesive, complete, and self-contained air when read on its own. At times I would lose myself in testing comparisons – is this more like Anne Carson, Blake, Winnie the Pooh, or, God forbid, the opening paragraph of Lolita (an association I owe exclusively to ‘Pillar of All, / Lone Fire / Orchard-keeper’ – but still)?

> To my mind, the greatest strengths of Petrucci’s translation lie in aspects in which he has the most poetic license – punctuation, line breaks, stanza division. You can tell he is free. You can tell he is purposeful. There are fantastic clusters of dashes and colons, and full stops that you would just like to thread between your toes to look down on as you walk. My previous encounter with Petrucci’s work involved not his translations, but a poetry collection – i tulips – which I remember mainly for the daze of its line breaks – smooth mirrors sharpening up both all in view and all out of it. I wanted to read this Isha Upanishad if only to see what happens to such an angular style when confronting the mould of ancient text, an entity we may be prone to conceptualise as claylike, earthy, elemental, but must resort to try to get in touch with via Spark-Note-sharp-dull renditions. The poetically-minded translator can cookie-cut to whim, but to do so with the same cookie cutter as they use for their own work would most likely amount to getting carried away (when professing to be a responsible driver of a metaphysical tour bus).

> What makes this Isha such a nourishing reread – I’m really not sure how many times I flicked through, tasting the same lines over and over without the slightest loss of pleasure – is its staccato. Sentences never stumble, yet they are persistently gritty in the way they call out, firm while exhibiting an awareness of the inherent issues with conveying truths in words. Our words are like those toy cars set in their own rink for kids to collide with. Sometimes they need seizing and readjusting to true roads. This driver is slow with moments of clutch and then perfectly eager acceleration until a pedestrian – another thought – pops up and we’re clutchy again. My favourite stanza, which demonstrates clutch to perfection, comes from verse 5:

It is action – yet It

remains dormant. Beyond

all reach – It

is more intimate than blood.

I find no mention of intimacy, not a dash of blood or even just a dash, in other translations of the Isa Upanishad. There’s nothing of the velocity, the gift of oceans, rivers, the multitudes of loud trees, the ‘Orchard-keeper / of Karma’ Mario Petrucci offers as generously as he can while staying true to the philosophical content of his source text. The world comes towards our mouths. The world is our eyes coming towards world. The world is modernised through elementality, not technical fervour. You get to it and it turns out to be compact, just as you want more.

> The free meat-grindery translations I glimpsed online didn’t have a tree in them. They merely made me skim and mourn the insistence on the persistence of a dichotomy between light and darkness which never does darkness justice. This still hurts me here but is inevitable, an essential part of the original message that I can get past through focusing on the wonders of everything else. For example, of how the lines in verse 5 stop at ‘It’ to change gear and keep ploughing up a hill – a hill which actually stands for encouragement to stop trying to make it up anywhere. I’m not sure how far up I park in the shade of Upanishad, but park I do. Nothing left to read. I open the door and air comes through from somewhere, at some angle, some temperature, at some leg of mine, which is hesitant at the touch of something holy. Light hits all manners of dust, especially the broken CD input. I like being here. A seatbelt gleams like a hiccough of holiday sea. Everyone has moved on and maybe they’re wrong. It can be so fast to stop. ‘Take stillness from stillness: / Stillness still remains.’ It can take you everywhere, the halt. Thank you.

Isha Upanishad is available to buy here via Guillemot Press.

Text: Nasim Luczaj

Image: Guillemot Press / Cover design by CF Sherratt.

Published 6/11/19

#review #reviews #poetry reviews #nasim luczaj #Mario Petrucci #Isha Upanishad #Guillemot Press

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believerindaydreams · 7 years

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Yuletide letter

(Got enthusiastic and wrote this early. As this is where I’d be posting it anyway…)

Hallo!

Hurrah for shared tastes and all that. Hope you have as much fun writing the fic as I did putting this together.

General DNW list:

Non-con, dubcon, pregnancy, incest, children (any children, don’t want to see ‘em, don’t want to hear about ‘em), queerphobia, Alpha/Omega. No gun use by the heroes.

Dislike:

Feel free to include hanky-panky if that floats your boat, but honestly, I’m just not that interested in the finer details of plumbing. Fade to black is my preferred style.

MacGyver (1985)

(Availability: Amazon Prime)

Do not want: Nothing explicitly supernatural. Absolutely no Sam. Please don’t ship him with Pete; everybody else is fair game for romance.

I'm not looking for crossovers, having been burned on too many Stargate fics that lug in my beloved character just for a joke about duct tape. Not that I have anything against jokes about duct tape! Quite the contrary. But I’d like a MacGyver fic to be about Mac.

That being said, if you are that inexplicable person who agrees with me that the MacGyver characters would map amazingly onto John Le Carre's Karla trilogy, do feel free to write that. (No, really, I wrote up the idea here: https://thatdeepandlovelydark.tumblr.com/post/165773403880/had-a-brainwave-today-rewrite-of-john-le-carr%C3%A9s )

Things I’d like to see….Mac, of course. I’d prefer one other person he’s friends with from the show. There’s this idea that MacGyver’s a heroic loner, and I’ve never agreed with that; even in episodes without the other regulars, he’s always friendly and looking for someone to bond with.

That’s it. I’d hate to dissuade any possible MacGyver fanfiction on the grounds of being too specific.

Though if you want more by way of a prompt than that, I have lots of ideas!

I love writing Pete, but he’s probably a bit dry and bureaucratic for other people. Jack is hugely entertaining. Maybe have him do some piloting if you write him; it’s a good trade-off with Mac being the otherwise wholly more competent one. As for Murdoc…well, there’s already quite a lot of angsty Mac/Murdoc slash out there, I think the fandom’s good on that. Fluff, on the other hand? Fluff I would enjoy.

The girls on the show mostly strike me as poorly written, which I find harder to work with. I never had the time of day for Penny until I ended up needing her for a fic. She’s more fun if you assume she is genuinely blithering, instead of just dumb, and work from there. Nikki largely bores me, though I like the fellow spy dynamic they have going. I do enjoy Deborah, who struck me as having actual chemistry with Mac, and she has an interesting puzzle-box of motives to play with. Mike’s sort of a nonentity; I wouldn’t mind seeing her fleshed out a bit. And Lisa from “Nightmares”, with her macgyving and empathy and smarts, is easily my favourite female character.

I am enormously fond of our hero’s improvisations, but please don’t worry about it if you can’t think of a good one. Especially don’t write a bad one just for the sake of box-checking. A properly-handled domestic scene would be just as nice as an action-adventure. In particular, I have a mild fixation on hunger-related hurt/comfort (Seeking in Fallen London was made of catnip for me), so a two-hander with a famished troubleshooter, some kitchen chemistry and a friend to help out would be just about perfect. That being said, go ahead and write The Big Action Scene, or The Epic Reunion Teamup With Everybody In It, or whatever else if you’d prefer. I’m easy.

Other prompt ideas:

- If you want to write that hoary old chestnut about “oops we accidentally have to get married now for Improbable Reasons”: Jack and Mac all the way! One of the saddest things about small fandoms is the lack of ready crack.

- I have this theory that young Mac n’ Jack n’ Mike went to Swinging London in the 60s. Wot larks!

- Dr Zito is, hands down, the most disturbing villain on the show. He is your go-to if you want to write a deep dark angsty horror-and-suffering fic.

MacBeth has a nice short guide to writing MacGyver; http://bethinexile.livejournal.com/38533.html I concur with most of that, barring inexplicable shirtlessness.

Sunless Sea

(Availability: Steam, Gog)

Do not want: most AUs or crossovers. (Exceptions listed below.) A fic that regurgitates the text of the game proper; I’ve seen this more than once, and the practice annoys me no end. Dick Van Dyke attempts at writing Victorian accents.

Aside from that…will read your story avidly. The more obscure words you can fit in, the better. Feel free to work from a player captain’s perspective; don’t if you don’t want to. I would like one of two characters (you needn’t include both). The Tireless Mechanic utterly fascinates me, and one of the delightful things about Failbetter’s writing is the way in which they balance specific stories with ample room for readers to fill in their own canon. Maybe your version of the Mechanic was addicted to laudanum; maybe he had a lover in Parabola, before he took his engine design home. Maybe he actually likes fungal crackers. I don’t know! Surprise me!

Alternatively, I have an abiding fondness for the Wistful Deviless. She intrigues me, I feel her story isn’t complete (either past or present), and I’m unlikely to get to her in the massive fic-cycle I have going. It’d be nice to see more. Chuck in some romance if you want.

Other prompt ideas:

- I have written four different perspectives on Seeking/Going North already. I think there’s room for a lot more in this world. Feel free to go dark/cannibalistic/blackandveryverydarkgrey/etc.

- What is Whither like when strangers aren’t there? Do they still speak in riddles? How does this society function? How long has it been there? Can you write a whole fic entirely made of questions?

- Stupid crossovers: the Deviless is Missy, popped over from the DW universe to take a break and be a bee for a while. Twelfth Doctor cameo not unwelcome.

I also had this wacky idea about the Mechanic being a Surface spy with a mullet. But then, who’d be crazy enough to write that one…

So (Peter Gabriel)

(Availability: Amazon, Itunes, decent music shop)

DNW: Aside from the general list? Go hog wild.

For donkey’s years I’ve been saying to myself that “So” is a concept album in disguise and I ought to sit down and write out its chronicle. “Big Time” - that’s the young lad dreaming of going to the city, “Red Rain” is when he’s rethinking this decision after the ghastly events of “We Do What We’re Told”, “Don’t Give Up” is the lady in his life encouraging him, and so forth…. Sort the songs into proper chronological order, tell the bits of narrative that come in between, and bob’s your uncle!

Extra points if you agree with me that it’s set in some kind of Moorcock/Zardoz end-of-time kind of deal, because that’s the vibe I get from it.

Hope you didn’t mind wading through all that too much. Looking forward to the result.

Thanks for the fic!

#fic #yuletide #early bird #macgyver #fallen london #sunless sea

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