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shadowsong26fic · 1 year

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Almost Entirely Human

Author: shadowsong26

‘Verse: Untitled Intrigues Story

Rating: PG-13

Characters: Larien, Metanrye

Warnings: References to sex; inter-species relationship

Notes: Written for the Year of the OTP prompt list; February prompt: mermaid AU

(I am also doing this for Star Wars, BSG, and two of my other original ‘verses, if you’re interested in checking those out! One ship per canon. The fanfic ones will be posted to AO3 probably a day or two after they’re on tumblr. Master list of all fills can be found here.)

For the most part, Larien and his brother look almost entirely human, especially from a distance. One has to pay very close attention to note that their eyes are an unusual color; or that the shape of their hands is slightly off--webbed fingers make their palms seem just a little bit longer than seems natural, even in the specially-made gloves they wear. And everything else that might give them away is usually covered by their clothes, or is even more subtle. Like their translucent inner eyelids, or the texture of their skin and hair--not quite scales, not quite tentacles, but not quite human, either.

Of course, it's hardly a secret that the late Queen was one of the Sea Folk, and that her sons are therefore only half-human, but it’s also not something one talks about. At least not openly.

Metanrye, though, has long since learned all of these signs and more. She knows the feel of webbed fingers against her skin; the faintly briny taste of her Larien’s kisses; the slightly roughened texture of his thighs. None of this is what drew her to him, exactly--except in that it's part of him and he drew her from the start--and it only felt strange the first few times they were together, but she is intimately aware of the ways it sets him apart from other men.

They still don't discuss it often--no more than they might discuss the color of her eyes, or the texture of her skin--but there are moments when it comes up, when the two of them are alone.

“Do you ever wonder,” she asks him one night, not long after their wedding, “what it would be like to be like other men?”

“Sometimes,” he admits. “Less now than I used to. Do you wish I was?”

“No,” she says. “Unless it would make you happier.”

He presses a brief kiss on top of her head; like the surf at low tide, brushing gently against the sand and then ebbing away. “I am who I am. I wouldn’t want to change it now, and have to learn a new way of being.” One of his hands drifts down to her abdomen and rests there for a moment. “It will be…easier for this one, I think.”

“I’m not sure yet,” she reminds him.

“I know,” he says, and she can hear the smile in his voice. “Still.”

She nods. “I do hope it has your eyes, though.”

“Oh?”

“It must be convenient, to sleep with your eyes open,” she says. If a little unnerving, the first time she'd seen him do it. “Not to mention keeping the wind out, or dust on the road…”

He laughs. “I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.”

“Yes,” she says, then turns in his arms to kiss him properly, drinking in that briny taste she loves; and they say nothing else at all for quite some time.

Not in words, at least. Of course, some things are much better said without.

#shadowsong writes original fic

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falloutforties · 4 years

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Five Years (Deacon x Sole)

CHAPTER ONE: TOTAL ATOMIC ANNIHILATION!

Description: The second she crawled out of that vault, dead cockroach meat in her pocket and tongue still not completely thawed, she knew she didn’t have to lie anymore. No more candy-striped wallpaper coating the halls, no more perfect wife and mother. She was no one. She was everyone. She didn’t sugarcoat her feelings, she didn’t hold her tongue. And it wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate that honesty, it’s that he had to mix in his honesty with a little sweet prevarication, like rum and coke-- but she was straight vodka, and he was starting to feel a little dizzy. Set in a world in which David Bowie did exist at one time, because the author can’t imagine a world in which he didn’t.

Warnings: Swearing and some fighting as well, but aside from that, no real warnings. I’m shit at writing angst, so there’s none of that. Slow burn, all chapters already written, hopefully one chapter a week unless grad school totally swamps me. Also, there are several elements of this story that are little fix-its for me, because todd really made me try to care about a son and husband smh. I was running around the wasteland like “why does everybody keep talking about my son? The only son I know is named Dogmeat, and he is a Good Boy.” ALSO because todd won’t let me romance Deacon.

Note from the Author: Hi folks! I wrote this to help me get through my writing block and because I needed a lil comfort in these trying times, so I figured I would make this blog to share it. I’m in the process of also putting it on ao3, but this is the first fanfic I’ve ever written so I’m not sure how this all works. I hope y’all enjoy!!!! This story gets started a little slow because I wanted to give an introduction for how I interpret the sole survivor’s personality and such. Pls let me know if you like this, and if you want to read more!! Love you!! <3

When she woke up in the morning, she knew the exact percentage of how likely she was to die that day, down to the decimal. It was not like a superpower, per se, just a sixth sense. An awareness, she might call it. She was incredibly aware of herself.

She couldn’t sense this clearly in other people, though she did have a sense of it. A vague direction as to how closely they’ll come to seeing their entire life flash before their eyes. She had seen it once or twice in Nate’s eyes over the breakfast table— a tint of green in his brown eyes that wasn’t there the day before, almost like a warning.

Something’s going to happen. It might not be bad, or it might be terrible. But it’s something.

She watched him turn his nose up at the box of Sugar Bombs sat on the countertop, favoring instead a cup of coffee and half a tato. She waited patiently for him to start his bi-weekly diatribe against the Sugar Bombs Corporation and their devious aims against the children of the Commonwealth.

“Did you know there’s a Sugar Bombs factory in Beijing?” He’d mentioned, several months ago for the first time. She was honestly just excited to hear that he’d managed to establish a new argument, though she wasn’t convinced that the Sugar Bombs factory in Beijing was a direct link to Childhood Communism as much as it was just outright standard capitalism.

When he finally settled at the table with his half-tato in one hand, coffee in the other, and Boston Bugle folded neatly under his arm, she watched his eyes. He was looking a little green, and she wondered errantly if perhaps he’d be scraped by a car while crossing the street. She herself, however, was at a solid 15%, which was a little higher than her standard measurements, but nothing out of the ordinary or concerning. Perhaps she would break a finger, sprain her ankle, crack a tooth on a Nuka-Cola bottle.

She appreciated the extra air of danger.

Life in Sanctuary was beautifully but painfully dull, less dull now that there was a child in the house, but dull nonetheless. Now, the stale quiet that usually settled over the house in the afternoon was permeated by the frequent cries and laughs of the child and the exclamations of their brand new housekeeper, who thought the child was a marvel of modern science.

He was, at the very moment his parents were eating breakfast, sleeping in his crib in the back room, the powder blue of his walls shielding him like a personal sky as he went completely unaware of everyone around him. He had the enviable manner of a child, crying whenever he felt a slight discomfort, laughing at the simplest of things.

She wished sometimes she could burst into tears just because she was hungry, or weep at the thought of being sleepy. It had been so long since someone had properly addressed her humanity that she thought if someone held her against their chest, she’d fall asleep, just like the child did at night when she rocked him.

“Mum,” Codsworth chirped as he hovered into the kitchen with a wet rag in one hand and a rattle in the other.

“Morning, Codsworth,” she replied with a mouth full of cereal. She, unlike Nate, was not too good for Sugar Bombs, and if they were implanting Communist Tracking Chips into her brain, well, that was a risk she was going to have to take. As long as she was the one who had to do the grocery shopping, she was not going to deny herself the simple pleasure of marshmallow cereal.

“Young Shaun should be asleep for approximately the next two hours.”

“Thank you, Codsworth.”

Nora loved Codsworth. There were days when she thought of him more as a husband than Nate. Codsworth, in his thrumming metallic voice, asked her everyday how she was feeling. Nate sometimes quirked his brow at her, and she nodded in response, but their marital conversation was frustratingly dry.

Like Sugar Bombs without milk.

Chip Harris was grandstanding on the news, and his thick croon filled the background of the house with a pleasant sort of domestic white noise along with the gentle clink of her silverware and the crinkling of Nate’s paper. She tuned her ears for a moment to Chip’s voice as he read from a teleprompter about some new information about China’s secret nuclear plants.

Everyone has nukes nowadays, she thought bitterly. Her Sugar Bombs were now soggy. Why are we allowed to hide them, but China has to send us a report or else we accuse them of some kind of crime?

She absentmindedly wondered if having a crush on the newscaster might turn her into more of a nuclear housewife. She knew Natalie Hawthorne had a crush on Chip Harris. She watched him every morning, even had a signed picture of him that she kept in her nightstand. Mr. Hawthorne was fine with it, of course, because no one in Sanctuary Hills could even prove that Chip Harris was real. No one could prove that he wasn’t just an incredibly advanced Protectron— a Mr. Handy in a pinstripe suit. Mr. Hawthorne didn’t have to worry about Chip Harris stealing his wife.

A knock on the door broke Nora’s concentration.

“Must be that sales guy,” Nate intoned, obviously bored senseless by the notion of a salesman at the door. “He’s been asking for you all morning.”

“All morning? I didn’t even hear him knock before now.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what happens when you sleep until 9 AM.”

Thank you, Nora, for staying up until the Devil’s Ass-Crack of dawn comforting a weeping child. Thank you for feeding him while I put earplugs in and turned over to the cold side of the pillow so I could go back to sleep. I answered the door for you, and the salesman gave me a free ticket to Fuck-Off-Ville, and I’m taking the child with me. You and Codsworth have fun now!

A woman could dream.

The salesman at the door was a weasel-looking fellow with an awfully mustardy-colored coat and matching hat. His smile seemed like it might be genuine, but based on the wrinkles that beamed from the corners of his eyes, it seemed he was well-versed in faking a good smile.

“Good afternoon, Ma’am! I am glad you took the time to answer the door today, because what I am about to tell you is a matter of utmost importance,” he promised, his smile somehow extended as he emphasized utmost importance.

“Utmost importance, huh? Glad I answered the door, then.”

“As you should be. Because of your family’s service in the military, you are eligible for entrance into the local vault— Vault 111!”

She eyed him warily before glancing up towards the hill at the end of the cul-de-sac. She had remembered the day Vault-Tec had started construction into the hillside, promising the neighborhood that “We won’t work until 9 AM, we’ll be gone in a flash, and you and your family will soon be protected in the unlikely event of total atomic annihilation!”

She didn’t buy the working until 9 AM part, she was skeptical about them being gone in a flash, and she hadn’t taken the time to assess the thought of total atomic annihilation. That was something that happened to people in the movies, or on radio shows, not in Sanctuary Hills. Total atomic annihilation might actually spice up her life, if it deigned to come close to Sanctuary Hills.

“Thanks,” she mentioned passively, ignoring the clipboard that was slowly being edged towards her. “My family too?”

“Yes, of course! Except the robot, mind you. Would you mind taking a few moments to fill out some paperwork?”

Nora turned her head to eye the situation inside the house before accepting the clipboard. If the salesman had knocked before, there was no reason to send him away then. He was working hard, and she appreciated the thought if not the persistence.

“Excellent! Now you and your family are… Prepared for the Future!”

She gave a half-hearted laugh at the way he performed his reading of the motto— the Vault-Tec promise that had been broadcasted via billboard all over every cityscape and neighborhood nearby. If total atomic annihilation never came around, Vault-Tec was sure going to look foolish.

She shut the door and sauntered back over to the breakfast table, but just as she sat down, a cry rang through the house. Shaun was awake, and Nate was eyeing her above the folded edge of his paper.

“Mum!” Codsworth chirped once again, hovering back into the kitchen. “Young Shaun seems to be inconsolable. Would you mind using some of that… maternal instinct you seem to be so good at?”

“Sure, Codsworth. Thank you.”

Once the door was closed in Shaun’s little room, she felt a great weight lift from her shoulders. True, she had not liked the child at first, but he was growing on her, and she appreciated the fact that he had to listen to everything she said without commentary or judgement.

“You might be unsure now, but once that beautiful baby boy is handed to you in a pretty blue blanket, you’ll love him more than you’ve ever loved anything,” Natalie Hawthorne had told her at the baby shower in a moment of vulnerability. Nora had escaped the Hawthorne’s living room to cry in their bathroom, marking it up to hormones at first, but the second she looked in the mirror and saw that damned stomach of hers, the crying got worse. Natalie stumbled into the bathroom by accident, catching Nora in the midst of a coughing fit.

So, Nora waited until Shaun was born, and when the nurse handed him to her, she stared at him and felt absolutely nothing. But she cooed and tickled his tiny feet, promising to herself that if she could just get the child home, maybe it would get better. Maybe it was the anesthetic and the drugs that made her so emotionless. It wasn’t.

It was the fact that she hadn’t wanted a child at all, the fact that she hadn’t even really wanted a husband, but her parents had set her up with some soldier boy, fresh out of a set of power armor, and that was that. She would marry Nate because it was what she was supposed to do, not because she had fallen in love.

She adjusted Shaun’s cap before scooping him into her arms.

“What do you have to cry about?” She muttered to the child. “You don’t have to pay taxes. You’re not going to have to wear heels and go grocery shopping and attend baby showers. You’re going to play catch in the backyard with your father, and then one day, some girl will marry you because she has to. You’re set for life, little buddy.”

Shaun merely gargled something, his hands grabbing for her hair. He was like a partially-sentient diary. She would pile her troubles on him, and he would go, “Ah!” And then go back to sleep.

“I was thinking we could go to the park today,” Nate remarked as he stepped into the nursery. “Would you be interested?”

“Sure, sure. Might be nice to get some fresh air.” She had intended to say more, perhaps something about finishing her Halloween preparations, but when she turned to him, she saw his eyes fully for the first time that day, and Shaun nearly slipped from her grasp.

“Woah, woah, hey,” Nate took the child from her arms. “You alright?”

“Yeah, I just… are you feeling alright?”

“Fine. You look pale, though. Maybe it’s all that Chinese Cereal.”

She chuckled despite herself and maintained eye contact with as much focus as she could muster. His eyes were near fully green. She was sure it was nothing. It had to be nothing. They were going for a walk in the park, and besides, her percentage was still standing at a solid 15%. It was nothing.

But Chip Harris knew more than she did, and when Codsworth called them all into the living room, Chip Harris was, for the first time on the air, misty-eyed. His head was in his hands, the morning report discarded as he faced the camera with shaking eyes.

“Shit,” Nora whispered, and Nate scolded her for her foul mouth. “Sorry, I just… is this it?”

“I think this is it.”

“Whatever it is, I will certainly miss you all dearly. Sir, Mum, Young Shaun. I believe this is goodbye.”

Codsworth’s goodbye started her heart thrumming at an unbelievable pace, and she kicked into gear, sweeping herself up from the loveseat and rushing towards the door, ushering Nate and Shaun behind her.

This was it. This was the end of the world, but it wasn’t going to kill her.

#deacon x sole survivor #deacon fo4 #female sole survivor #fallout 4 fanfiction #fo4 fanfic #fallout 4 deacon #fo4 deacon #deacon x nora

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coffeebooksorme · 6 years

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‘FURYBORN’ REVIEW

GOODREAD’S SYNOPSIS: The stunningly original, must-read fantasy of 2018 follows two fiercely independent young women, centuries apart, who hold the power to save their world...or doom it. When assassins ambush her best friend, the crown prince, Rielle Dardenne risks everything to save him, exposing her ability to perform all seven kinds of elemental magic. The only people who should possess this extraordinary power are a pair of prophesied queens: a queen of light and salvation and a queen of blood and destruction. To prove she is the Sun Queen, Rielle must endure seven trials to test her magic. If she fails, she will be executed...unless the trials kill her first. A thousand years later, the legend of Queen Rielle is a mere fairy tale to bounty hunter Eliana Ferracora. When the Undying Empire conquered her kingdom, she embraced violence to keep her family alive. Now, she believes herself untouchable--until her mother vanishes without a trace, along with countless other women in their city. To find her, Eliana joins a rebel captain on a dangerous mission and discovers that the evil at the heart of the empire is more terrible than she ever imagined. As Rielle and Eliana fight in a cosmic war that spans millennia, their stories intersect, and the shocking connections between them ultimately determine the fate of their world--and of each other.

I received a a free eARC in exchange for an honest review.

As per usual, I was sucked in by a badass cover and intriguing premise, only this time it paid off! I read this book (a 512 page book) in a day. A DAY! I hardly ever (meaning, very very very rarely) do that! I was so enthralled by this story and its characters that I honestly could not put it down, even when it meant being exhausted for work the next day. Totally. Worth it.

I’m being 100% candid with you when I say that I think this book is going to be one of the next top fantasy YA books. It’s got action, romance, magic, TIME TRAVEL, well fleshed out characters, and a really interesting premise. It’s original without being all “But I’m not like other YA books”, wah. There’s really something here for everyone in this book and I think anyone who has any inkling for fantasy or just...badass books in general, should pick this up when it comes out.

The premise does a very good job of giving you an idea of what this book is about, but it still leaves enough to the imagination that there will be points in the book where you will gasp in shock. And laugh because the author did an excellent job of incoorporating some humor to lighten it up every now and again.

Our two main protags are Rielle (the past) and Elianna (the future) and they’re obvious the Blood queen and the Sun queen, respectively, in our story. We start off the book knowing Rielle is the blood queen and end knowing that Elianna is the sun queen so...no spoilers, I promise.

Rielle is this sheltered...I don’t want to say meek, but let’s say...hrm, she’s been beaten down. She’s got this awesomesauce power that no one else has (yeah, yeah, trope-y tropiness going on here) but she’s taught by her dad and the ministers of her faith to tamper it down because it’s weird, the yokel locals might not like it, and this awesomesauce power caused a horrifying accident when Rielle was little. Secretly, she’s a badass magician who just wants some Princely loving and to be allowed to live her life like any other normal chick. Simple enough.

BUT OH NO! She shows off her awesomesauce power and as predicted, the yokel locals and ministers freak the heck out! In order to prove that she’s not some rando magician willing to murder everybody, they decide to put her through a 7 week trial where she proves to everyone that she’s loyal and devot in using her powers only for good. Rielle, who has never even been encouraged to use her powers let alone really learn about them in depth (like every other magic wielder in the country) is totally gung ho for it! Thus, shenanigans ensue!

With each trial, we see more and more of who Rielle truly is shine to the surface. It was so great to really see the growth of her character and cheer her on as more of her badassery emerged. I know the ‘chosen one’ trope is there with her and it makes you want to roll your eyes that she has this ‘power that no one has’ but I really enjoyed Rielle as a character. She is fiercely loyal to her friends, absolutely dedicated in wanting to prove this loyaltly, a 100% fighter to her very marrow, and yet she’s vulnerable. We get to see this vulnerability throughout her interactions with her father (who has never shown anything more than barely checked disdain) and it just made me want to reach into the book, hug her, give her some cake, and tell her it would be alright.

The next POV is from Elianna who is this smarmy, smartass, egotistical assassin who is literally snapping necks and cashing checks. She was taught from a very young age by her mother how to kill folks in order to put food on the table. I was very pleasantly surprised at the fact that the author made her mother an amputee because I had never encountered that in a novel. She’s a side character so I don’t want to say it’s rep (?) but hey, I was surprised. And then pissed off with what happened to her character later on. I won’t go into it because it’s major spoilers for the book, but...yeah. Back to Elianna.

Elianna is annoying at first. Think Celaena Sardothien from the ToG series or Mia Corvere from Nevernight and that’s pretty much Elianna. She’s got amazing fight skills, she’s stealthy, she’s sexy, and she knows it. Oh, and she’s like Wolverine because she can heal from anything. She is indestructible! But she has no idea why. But, of course, she’s got an ooey gooey inside to her. She portrays this mask of hardness in order to hide the ooey gooeyness because killing folks is how she supports her family, it’s how she’s going to get them out, and if she doesn’t do it, then they’ll starve. She is the breadwinner for her family and her devoutness to her family really sold me with her character.

Her POV follows her going from hunting down this known rebel and being ordered to kill him to basically lusting after him and joining his rebel cause. It’s all a ruse at first and then, of course, as the story progresses, Elianna’s ooey gooeyness comes to the surface, one of the rebel leaders (Wolf and Elianna’s man) and a princess in disguise (no, not Jasmine) basically submerge her in what is actually the real world and help her come to terms with the fact that she’s been part of the problem instead of the solution.

Rather than rehash the book, I’m going to leave it there because going any further would spoil it and I don’t want to do that because it is so good and you must read it! There’s diversity of characters but it’s never made into a big deal. It’s always thrown in like ‘Yeah, I like chicks.’ or ‘Yeah, my name is Bob and this is my husband.’ Women are in high positions of power. There’s a king in Rielle’s time frame but he isn’t the kingly type that puts down women. I mean, the entire religion in the book is focused on two queens. None of the women hate on each other over a man. There’s actually some really good positive female interaction through the entire book. I dig it a lot.

The writing itself is astounding. The author did such a good job painting a picture of not only one world but two different worlds and still making them weave together that I didn’t feel like I was reading two entirely different books. That is difficult as hell, but it was pulled off so beautifully. The characters are well written and even though they could be considered trope-y because of what I mentioned before, they have enough flaws and different characteristics to really set them apart. Not to mention there is significant growth throughout the book! I can only imagine what happens throughout the rest of the series. Not to mention, the side characters are awesome! Our sidekicks, if you will, are just as fleshed out as our mains and were so much fun to read! I loved them just as much as I loved the two mains. Heck, there were some characters that only appeared in the book for a chapter or two and I fell in love!

Oh, before I forget, this is a pretty explicit sex scene in the book. It was...weird. I mean, I’ve read SJM so I’m used to explicit sex scenes in YA but this one just felt...unnecessary. It could have faded to black and I would have been fine with it. I mean, I used to write NSYNC smut back in the day, I’m fine with smut, but this was just...weird. I honestly have no other word to describe it. Well, wait, no, I lied, maybe bad. Bad would be a good word for it because it made me feel awkward and I didn’t appreciate the fact that the author perpetuated the idea that a girls first time is supposed to be painful. Nah, son, it’s not...not unless you have something physically wrong with you or you’re not properly lubricated. Otherwise, the first time just feels weird and awkward and then should move on to amazing. Not painful. But whatever, let’s keep that stereotype ball rolling, eh?

So...if you like assassins, magic, diversity that’s in there without needing a huge neon sign pointing to it, badassery, and just an all around amazing fantasy novel, then this is the book for you!

#booklr #books #furyborn #claire legrand #book review #book reviews #mine #bookish #bookish thoughts #bookworm #book dragon #read #reader #reading #bibliophile

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believerindaydreams · 6 years

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listing to port

did anyone want an author’s commentary for my fic “The List”?

well, here’s one anyway. MacGyver and FL comments below.

(notes short enough to be readable. I did try keeping notes for Fulgent Engineering, but those are scarily long now.)

The thought process was simple enough: I'd already written "A little honest extortion", where Jack figures out he's heading for the Neath, and I'd done the introduction to "Vertere", where he meets up with MacGyver. All I had to do here was get from one to the other.

I've always been very fond of "Brian's Return," and Jack is a materialist; the concept meshed very nicely with his character. He doesn't know much about the Neath, isn't specifically aware that he's going to be trapped in a whole different century, but he does know that what he brings along might be the last he'll ever see of Surface culture. With the additional complication of making purchases for a friend/fellow spy/something-or-other who he rightly suspects to have left his old life behind with nothing more than a couple of good knives and an extra shirt.

(I have not yet settled on a Correspondence shorthand for "Fulgent Engineering", but a sigil for "the understood loss; and a price beyond" is a strong candidate. The state of the Tireless Mechanic's Surface jacket in "Alike in Dignity" was a precisely considered detail.)

SAKs

Well, yeah. The folks on MacGyver Online, anti-slash though they may be, have done a terrific job of cataloguing minor details in the series; I'd have had to find another and less specific way of writing this scene if they hadn't listed all the SAK statistics for the Informed Clerk to spout off.

Jack's got the gant-coloured knife. Which is initially mistaken for a Spartan (because that's what they used while shooting "Serenity"), but as per the Parabola sequences in "Fulgent Engineering", is actually a genuine 19th century article. Or a dreamed-up version of the real thing, at least. Wonder what happens when Mac- or his Reflection- gets it back.

When Jack started thinking of people in Adjective-Noun formation...I don't know. I suspect, though, that it's a little more common in the Fallen London universe than just in the Neath.

Camping Gear

It just tickled me to suggest that Jack's reaction to safety gear is to say "Safety? Who needs safety?" I'm tempted to write the Doomed Camping Trip in which all of Mac's improvisations happen entirely because Jack's a cheapskate and everything he buys is broken.

Guitar

Over in Tanista's Neath stories, Penny Parker is playing Lois Lane on "The New Adventures of Lois and Clark". This is a sound suggestion and I went with it.

Jack's taste in bad newspapers, aside from setting up the later punchline, is probably something that'll be relevant either in "Deep Romantic" or "Vertere" in good time. Even if it's only as a joke.

Watches

Pete doesn't know nearly as much as he could about the Neath (and almost none of what he does know made it to MacGyver; Pete, much to his regret, was hoping it'd be a case of 'least said, soonest mended'). But he is, at minimum, aware that there's an Underzee.

Which is more that Jack did, but he can take a hint.

Tape deck

Heh. I went to a lot of trouble chewing over which one would be best.

Jack is being an optimistic idiot, of course; you can't recharge the Sony WM-F107 without several hours of sunlight. Of course, you can also carry sunlight in a box in the Neath, so he's lucked out there. (It also has a battery hookup, which Mac will no doubt be able to sort out.)

Making Jack a draft dodger seemed an obvious opposition, once I'd had the idea to bring in Toberman (he's from the MacGyver episode "The Spoilers": seemed the most likely candidate among Mac's friends to give a crafting hobby to.) And it seems to work pretty well for his character anyway.

Cassettes

And the Grateful Dead backstory let me set up Jack as someone who's been involved in bootlegs for ages (the tales of bootlegger Grateful Dead fans are something epic).

I've listened to all of these musicians at one point or another while writing "Ecstasy". Helps me get into the mood for writing these two. The epic-length "Brothers in Arms" tape will be immediately understandable to anyone who has ever seen that episode of Miami Vice with Bruce in it.

Clothing

More borrows from the official forums again. Plus a chance to follow up on Cynthia (several stories). I like Cynthia.

Another fic concept for some later date, Mac going on the run. I know I already did that a bit with my non-Ecstasy story "here is a memory", but that was more an exercise in how far it's possible to push my protagonist before he ceases to be recognisable.

Come to think of it, perhaps I could combine it with the Camping Trip From Hell as per above.

Guitar redux

Penny writes herself. I just put it to keyboard.

Books

So. Desert Island Discs stipulation: no one gets to pick the Bible or Shakespeare for their one book, because that'd be dull.

Plus my awareness of Tolstoy's opinion of the Bard (as mentioned in a very entertaining essay by Orwell), plus the idea of Murdoc implementing a plan that would have terrified Mac but hardly fazes Jack...the chain of thought here was pretty smooth.

Chow

For the record: I am completely unable to imagine Jack as a Seeker in any way, shape, or form. Besides, the rhythm of the fic worked better when I underplayed something.

Also, there's some character development happening. Not that Jack's exactly pleased about this.

Gemstones

Nikki Carpenter's adventure as a gemstone expert was from her first story, "Fire and Ice". Easy thought process. And she gets to point out all the practical concerns Jack ought to be considering, which I'm not on the grounds of being too dull to include. Writing is also about knowing what *not* to write.

Plane

Jack Dalton flies planes. This is as integral to the character as engineering for the Innocent Spy. Therefore: ouch.

He has an...unusual relationship with Kate (see "Rock the Cradle" for the details on this- even if you're a Failbetter fan and ignoring all these MacGyver continuity comments, watch it anyway, because it's hilarious. Lots of banter, the Innocent Spy commits atrocities with duck tape. And despite the plot hinging on Jack's heterosexual shagging, it also manages to be very gay.

Like, very gay.)

Duck tape

Natural bookend, if you're starting with the SAKs.

Another scene inspired by the "Deep Romantic" plotting with Tanista; Jack has a mum, we had to dispose of the mum to get him down to the Neath, how shall we get rid of her? Witness protection! (Consistent with the MacGyver episode that she was in: "Ma Dalton," funnily enough).

I think this scene was about the right note of sentiment and a mutual acknowledgement that, deep down, both of them are pretty selfish so-and-sos who just aren't interested in the other's life. Like mother, like son. Also, Nikki's pretty smart.

Spent ages agonising over the ending. I may yet rewrite it. But the quiet shift of emphasis, from the stuff he's been accumulating all story to who he's expecting to find?

I confess, I am rather proud of that part...

#macgyver #fallen london #fic

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