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apparitionism · 2 years

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Smoke

Here are some of the “Alarm” story outtakes I mentioned. I’m calling them “Smoke,” both because I can and because that’s all they are—evidence/traces of something, rather than the thing itself. I’ve tried to give a sense of where they were intended to fit, and why they didn’t... I do get explainy about process, but I hope it all at least suggests the shaping that (I think) is important for even a trifle such as “Alarm.” Format-wise, I’ve put my extratextual thinking in brackets, and I’ve left the “story” bits pretty rough. So without further ado...

Smoke

[In one of my stabs at the ending, the alarms went off not when Myka and Helena were on the elevator, but rather in the middle of the night, after they’d already sealed the deal:]

As Myka wrenched to consciousness, she recognized one element of the situation immediately: no smoke. Thus this was another malfunction, unless electricity, and walls... not quite as immediately, she registered another extremely salient element of the situation: she wasn’t alone. Rather than being able to revel in that astonishing new fact, she had to struggle to get out of bed and deal with the situation.

Helena sprang up as well—clearly disoriented for a moment—but then she too realized. She flung herself from the bed.

Myka: You aren’t wearing anything!

Helena: What does that have to do with smoke alarms!

Myka: I’m guessing that’s what set them off!

Helena: Flattery does not remove batteries! And you aren’t wearing anything either!

[I probably should apologize for being in love with the flattery/battery rhyme, but I have to admit I would totally have shoehorned it into the final version if I’d got the line itself right. Which I didn’t manage to do: what comes between “flattery” and “batteries” really ought to be another dactyl, and nothing I came up with worked at all in Helena’s voice. Anyway, after battery removal:]

Myka: Well, that was exhausting.

Helena: I thought you said I exhausted you earlier.

Of course, in response to the alarms, there came a banging on the door.

Helena moved as if she might be about to answer that door.

Myka: You don’t even have your dressing gown! Clothes—I have them! (This she said as she pulled on T-shirt and shorts, trying to ignore how inaccurate the term “clothes” was, given the inadequate coverage they provided.)

“I have them.” Helena said. She gestured vaguely around the bedroom, where it was true her clothes were. Most of them.

Myka: Okay, great. Put them on. You answering the door fully dressed at this time of night? What would that say about the masquerade?

Helena: Perhaps that we play particular roles at this time of night.

Myka: File that under ‘things I don’t want anybody thinking about me—or knowing, even it turns out to be true.’

That prompted a raised eyebrow from Helena, and how did Myka manage to notice that in the continued absence of clothes?

Myka: Just let me deal with this.

[Which she would have done, and Helena would have found Myka’s dismissal of Nate impressively emphatic. (I wrote her telling him off at least three different ways, and it refused to sound anything other than clichéd—one of several reasons I backtracked and had the alarms go off while they were on the elevator.) Myka would then have cautioned Helena thusly:]

Myka: I’m sure he can make our lives miserable.

Helena: If we’re truly together? I don’t see how. Won’t we be deliriously happy?

“Measures,” Myka reminded her, even as she was transported by “deliriously happy.”

Helena: (suddenly vicious) I’ll measure him right back. We’ll see who’s more persuasive in conversation with the super. We’ll see who, that is, might bring to any such conversation a professionally executed oatmeal scotchie. Of which I’ve been reliably informed the super is fond.

Myka: You seem alarmingly well prepared for this conflict. Armed for it, even.

Helena: Nate’s been pursuing me for some time, but your arrival intensified the situation. (Pause, clearly intended to recast what “the situation” actually meant.) The masquerade. I so wanted it—subtle as it was—to become real.

Myka: I have to push back a little on ‘subtle.’ Given the initial dressing-gown event.

Helena: Subtle between us.

[Something something something here. The conversation wasn’t working, but eventually:]

Myka: I wanted that too. For it to be real. For just about the whole time.

Helena: I hope we continue wanting the same things.

Myka: I hope we get better about showing it.

Helena: These hopes seem productive. And I know you have an affinity for the productive.

****

[Another version: in the kitchen, after Myka asks if they’re really talking about chairs, Helena initially gives no answer (just like in the “real” version), but then she’s the one who speaks into the silence, like so:]

Helena said, “I might be...” She winced. “Afraid.”

“Of?” Myka asked, as she prayed to the universe, Don’t let her say “you.”

What Helena did say, eventually, was, “Fire.”

Myka had never heard that strong word said so tentatively. An unexpected boon: it relieved her own fears of how differently she and Helena might be feeling, relieved her additional fears of how differently they might be weighting their feelings. She said, “Somebody told me ‘where there is no smoke there is no fire unless it is electrical,’ and while I’m not real clear on how the metaphor works here, I’m pretty sure you said you were going to hold your thought.”

“I intended to,” Helena said. Her fingers were fidgeting... a tell? “But circumstances change, and so does mood, and one begins to...”

“Lose hold?” said Myka, to which Helena nodded. “Okay. If we have to get back in the elevator for you to talk yourself back into something, then let’s go.” Myka took a step toward the door, but Helena didn’t respond.

[To which non-response Myka in turn responds with the suggestion that they bake cookies, and Helena has the same reaction to the expensive chocolate as she does in the “real” version. The bedroom conversation then had Helena rethinking, saying that “afraid” had been the wrong word for the moment. Myka counters with how she (Helena) had come up with the right word, before—“midnight” for the cookies—and Helena goes on to say that no, “afraid” really had been wrong; she should have spoken not about fear but about obstacles, e.g., time. My margin notes there were mostly just frustrated reiterations of “This is not right!” But in any case, there was never a version in which I didn’t call back to the “where there is no smoke” line.]

****

[There was also a draft that went on for longer—it didn’t cohere with the rest of the story at all, but in possibly positive news it did involve a bit more Claudia, and also some Pete, at various stages:]

They weren’t too busy, or too sleep-deprived, when it mattered.

They managed to find time to insinuate themselves into each other’s worlds.

Myka said to Claudia, in a moment of unusual candor, “She’s so important to me. I want to impress her—daily, hourly, minute-ly—but I don’t know how.”

Claudia: You could try to talk her into publishing her cookbook.

Myka: How do you know she has a cookbook?

Claudia: First, every chef has a cookbook. But second, even if she pretends she doesn’t, she’ll be impressed that you think she does.

This turned out to be true. All of it.

It led to Myka and Helena talking, seriously and not, about what such a tome should be titled. “How Not to Set Off Smoke Alarms,” Myka suggested.

“How to Repurpose Recipes As Attempts at Seduction,” Helena countered.

They eventually agreed on “The Midnight Baker.”

In lieu of immediately publishing said cookbook, Claudia booked Helena on one of her podcasts; giving Myka the scoop afterward, all she could say was, “She. Is. A. Smoke. Show.”

“I know,” Myka said, keeping to herself her many and varied feelings about, and theories of, smoke.

****

[As for the Pete-involved version: he works with Helena at the restaurant. He does the fancy chocolate work, sculpting and decorating and whatnot, at which he’s surprisingly talented, and he’s not allowed to touch anything else. On Myka’s first visit to the restaurant, I wanted Helena to introduce them, and for things to proceed kind of like so:]

Pete: So how did you two meet?

Myka: The smoke alarms in my apartment went off.

Pete (to Helena): Because she’s so hot, right?

Helena: I’m embarrassed to admit that didn’t immediately occur to me. It should have. (to Myka:) You in those quite-short shorts. (fanning herself)

Pete: Shorts? Quite short shorts?

Helena: Eyes up, reprobate.

“Does that mean ‘leg man’? Because I am definitely a leg man. Also”—he gestured at his chest—“a you-know man. Basically an all-parts man.”

Helena (to Myka): I’m incredibly sorry. All I can do is repeat that he’s brilliant with chocolate.

Pete said to Myka, “Here, I just made these.” He presented her with a small perfect sphere of a truffle. “It’s Mars,” he said, and it... was. Realistic rusty-red swirls decorated its surface, and it was so beautiful, so Mars, that she immediately forgave “you-know.” And everything else. In perpetuity.

She couldn’t imagine damaging its perfection by biting into it.

Pete said, as if concerned by her reticence, “I’ve got little model Oppys too, if that’s more your thing. They’re crunchy.”

[And then I have a note about how Myka would probably have remarked on how Oppy couldn’t possibly have been to scale, which... who cares, right? I had the Mars thing in there in the first place because I thought it was cool—who wouldn’t want a perfect chocolate Mars?—but of course it had nothing to do with the story. So then I wondered if he could have made something that would be germane in context... like maybe Myka’s Yellowstone-adjacent rock? But that would’ve required a lot of intentionality and surreptitious planning on Helena’s part, which I wouldn’t put past her, in a “Come to the restaurant because I have something special for you” sense, but that would probably have to have been a later visit, not the first.

However, if there had been such a chocolate replica-rock, somebody would have needed to note that it wouldn’t survive a fire unscathed.

The Pete part continued:]

Pete: So is the smoke alarm thing a joke or what?

Myka: No. Literally. Smoke alarms in my apartment, shrieking at four in the morning. Waking Helena up, across the hall in her apartment... but there wasn’t any smoke.

Helena: They were malfunctioning, and I reset them for her. The alarms. Because as Myka mentioned, there was no smoke.

Pete: But I guess there was a fire though.

Myka: I guess there was.

Helena: I’m glad it caught.

[That might have been an okay line to end it on, but that’s all it was: just okay, not particularly resonant. Also if they were going to retell their meeting to Pete, it would have needed to be more interesting. Why recap it unless it adds something?

In the ultimate end of the lengthier version, maybe everybody would’ve met everybody (except Nate), and they would have formed a restaurant and/or podcasting and/or publishing collective that had “13” in its name. But that would’ve been exhausting, and it wouldn’t have had anything to do with the story’s premise.

There was also a really boring ending where I punted and had Myka and Helena just shrug and say “Well, it wouldn’t take much more time to actually date than the masquerade takes, so hey, let’s go for it.”

And finally, I tried to make them go chair shopping for Myka (Helena continuing her insistence on the point), with the idea that it would start to seem obvious that they’d be sharing the chairs—the furniture salesperson would assume they were a couple and treat them accordingly, and it would essentially have been another case of a masquerade becoming real.

And so ends this excursion through some wisps of smoke...]

Oh, one last thing: If these were real outtakes, in the blooper-reel sense, I would hope they’d include somebody, or a couple of somebodies, coming real close to falling off folding chairs. (I had to restrain myself mightily to keep from knocking them off chairs in the actual story; I’ve had occasion to refamiliarize myself with some of Buster Keaton’s work recently, and it reminded me of the abject delight I take in slapstick. Not that I ever really need reminding, but even so.) Or somebody would be completely incapable of unfolding such a chair, and that would probably have been whichever random actor happened to be playing Helena—far be it from me to speculate about casting—when she’s supposed to be impressing Myka with how smooth and competent she is during the first alarm incident.

#bering and wells #Warehouse 13 #fanfic #Smoke #Alarm #outtakes #AU week #I guess it's a little misleading to tag this 'fanfic'#normally I resist showing my work #don't know why this is different #but please enjoy or dismiss as overweeningly self-indulgent #as you prefer

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bet-on-me-13 · 1 month

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Wes ruins everything

Wes had finally done it, he had finally realized why nobody ever belived him about Fenton and Phantom! It made so much sense now, he had been looking for an answer for years, thinking he was going crazy because everybody refused to see the Obvious!

He was Cursed!

He literally had an Ancestoral Curse on his Bloodline that made it so that all those born with the gift of Prophecy would be ignored! A Gift of Prophecy that he apparently had.

It was Cassandra's Curse, the one from Greek Myths. Apparently she was his Great×1000 Grandmother and passed down the Gift (and Curse) of Prophecy to him. And he knew how to break it!

All he needed to do was gather the right resources, chant the correct incantations, make sure not to accidentally summon a Demon in the process, and he could just foist the Curse onto some other poor schmuck. Sure it would suck for them, and he would loose his Gift of Prophecy, but Wes had been ignored for Years at this point, he needed validation!

So he did the Ritual, and he didn't mess it up, and he managed to get rid of the Curse.

Now all he had to do was convince everybody that he was right for the first time in his life! This was going to be great!

...

Cass didn't know what was going on.

A while ago, she had started getting these...gut feelings that she couldn't explain.

She would look over the details of a Case her Family was working on, and see a patern that the others were seemingly ignoring. Like when she realized that The Penguin was about to raid the Docks on the East Side, but the others were convinced it was going to be on the West.

But when she had tried to tell them, they had brushed her off. "We've already concluded that he will begin the Raid on the West side, no need to go to the East."

She had gone anyways, and low and behold she had been right. But nobody even acknowledged that she had been right at all, they had just wondered how they had missed the signs, not even questioning how she had known.

It wasn't limited to Cases either. Even small things, like telling her brother's where the TV remote was were brushed off, and hours later they would still be looking, never even having checked where she told them.

It seemed that no matter what, nobody cared about her point of view anymore. They kept brushing her off, telling her she was wrong, actively ignoring her ideas.

And it was getting worse. They were starting to ignore her more and more, forgetting she was in the room, not calling her down for Dinner, even forgetting to check in on her during Patrol.

She knew that there must be something going on, Magical or otherwise, but when she tried bringing it up with her Dad or JLD, they would also Brush her off.

Her Family was forgetting her. And they didn't even realize it.

...

Danny was not okay at the moment.

When he had gone to school a few weeks ago and noticed everybody staring at him, he didn't give it much thought. Maybe Dash or Paulina had spread another Rumor about him again, not too out of the ordinary.

When his name had been called over the Intercom, he hadn't thought much of that either. His grades were falling even more than usual, so he assumed his Guidance Counselor wanted to have another talk with him.

When he walked into the Principals Office to see both of his Parents and some GIW Agents, that's when he realized something big must have happened.

He didn't have much of a chance to react when the Shields went up, but he did react when the first Ecto-Blast scorched the wall behind him. His Parents began to scream at him as they fired their Blasters, something about replacing somebody? He didn't know, he was pretty preoccupied at the moment.

It took more effort than he cared to admit to escape the Room, but a stray shot to the hidden Shield Projector under the Principals Desk proved to be his saving grace. Unfortunately the moment he escaped the Office, he was met with a veritable Army of GIW Agents, all armed to the Teeth with Weapons he had never even seen before.

He managed to get away for a moment, hiding in the Bathroom as the Agents chasing him passed it by. That's when he met Wes.

He obviously hadn't been expecting him, but the moment he saw him Wes put on a smug look. "Oh hi Fenton, trying to get away from the other students?"

Danny had replied with confusion, "What the hell are you talking about?!"

"I finally managed to convince everybody about you, now everyone knows that you're Phantom! I'll bet you're hiding from all of the other Students hounding you for questions right?"

"...it was you?"

"Yeah, so? I finally get to be right!"

"...You absolute MORON-"

That was the last Danny got to say to Wes before an Ecto-Blast launched him through a Wall, seeing his face morph into a look of Shock just before the dust cloud covered it up.

Since that day, Danny had been on the Run. Nowhere was safe anymore now that the GIW knew both his Human and Ghost's faces, but he had to keep running. He crossed state Lines already, and was on his way to the next Ecto-Rich City he could sense, somewhere in New Jersey.

He cursed his Fenton Luck every day. Why had everybody believed Wes this time?! Nobody had ever belived him before, nobody even seemed to acknowledge his existence after a while! What had changed?

Danny just wanted to rest already.

...

Cass had taken to Patrolling alone recently. She had taken to doing a lot of things alone, actually.

After the first month, it seemed that nobody could remember that she was in the room with them, even if she was within their eyeline, she just faded into the background. By the 2 Month Mark they had stopped talking to her entirely, although occasionally she would get a Text or two from her dad. By the 3 month Mark she was completely invisible, and By the 5th she had been forced to get used to it.

She didn't know what was going on, was it a Meta Ability? Magic? Alien Tech? She had no idea.

She had begun to cook for herself after the first time Alfred forgot to set her Plate at the Table. The same with Washing her own Clothes, Cleaning her Room, and Paying her Phone Bills. At the very least the Automated Allowance Payments to her Account had kept up, or she wouldn't have been able to go to her favorite Cafe anymore.

It was bittersweet for her. She used to go to that Cafe every week with Alfred, but he didn't even come on his own anymore. Had he only come for her? Did she really mean that much to them? It hurt, she finally had a family that cared for her and suddenly she didn't exist to them.

She sat alone at a Table, ignored by everyone in the Cafe as usual, when a new face walked in. He looked about her age, a little roughed up, walking with a sort of cautious gaint, as if he was scared of something. His Body Language seemed to agree with her assessment, as his body practically screamed "Worry" in its movements.

Cass stopped watching at that point. Just another Gotham Teen, probably worried over something like getting not having enough money or getting mugged on the way home. It was a Common sight in Gotham.

She attention was pricked again for a moment when she heard a voice speak up. "Uh, can I sit here?"

She ignored it, he wasn't talking to her.

"Um, excuse me? Miss? Could I sit here?" He repeated.

She ignored him again, he wasn't talking to her. Nobody talked to her.

"Hello? Do you have Earbuds in?" He said, and he waved his hand in front of her face.

Her face. He waved his hand. In front of Her Face.

He was talking to her.

She looked up at him sharply, seeming to startle him for a moment before he asked, "So, is that a no?"

"You can see me?" She asked.

He looked a bit bewildered, but replied "Uh, yeah? Why would I not? Are you...a Ghost?". That last part sounded a bit suspicious.

"No. Not a Ghost. But nobody sees me. Ever. Nobody remembers me." She replied. She had never spoken this much to anybody outside of her Family, but in the past few weeks she had been starved for interaction.

He seemed slightly interested, and sat down at her table. He looked her in the eyes, and said "Do you...talk about it?"

She smiled. He could see her.