I am once more back to reading a bunch of The Sentinel AUs around the idea that of what if Sentinels and Guides were a known thing. And it occurred to me that pretty much all of the stories have Sentinels as the primary powerful individual and the Guides as their support, to help them achieve all they can achieve and all that. Power dynamics and social situations vary, story by story, but the focus remains on the Sentinels. 

But what about the reverse: There are these Guides, who just think outside the box and trail blaze new paths for whole populations and are destined to achieve great things if they can just survive long enough and avoid assassination by the power structures who don't want any new paths cleared. 

And Guides just get themselves into so much trouble and the Sentinels are the ones who find them and imprint on them and become their body guards and their war leaders. 

And so of course Daniel Jackson is a Guide, even though he's depressed and doesn't think he'll be able to change society because he got laughed out of academia; and Jack O'Neill is a Sentinel who thought he'd found his purpose in the military and lost it with his family. But then they meet and go through the Stargate and now Daniel doesn't even care about the whole Guide thing because he's too busy actually accomplishing amazing things and meeting amazing people to care about some stupid destiny marker or whatever. And Jack is scrambling behind him to keep him protected and going, come on, I'm your Sentinel I need to keep you safe, please stop throwing yourself into danger!

And Sam and Teal'c kind of look at this dynamic and are like, wow, Jack, you are not going to accomplish protecting that guide on your own. So, I guess you now have a team to help you with that because he's a guide that's a guide.

Meanwhile, Rodney McKay is a Guide who thinks any Sentinel within his immediate vicinity should be making sure he's safe and any Sentinel outside of his immediate vicinity is out of sight and out of mind.  

And John Sheppard, who has always had mixed feelings about his Sentinel status because his father wanted him attached to an ambassador or politician, and he liked his freedom too much to want to be tied to a single person, finds himself just enthralled with Rodney who is accomplishing what no one else can do and manages to be super demanding and super accommodating at the same time to all of John's issues.  

Real life has been draining enough that I've largely reverted to fandom lurking even more than previously. (which is saying something, because previous levels of activity were not setting the bar very high.) And I've been reading a lot of really self-indulgent stuff that, for me, includes a lot of fanfic of the Sentinels & Guides Are Known AUs. 

Of course, there's no escaping rabid plot-bunnies when reading that much of a single topic area, at least not for me.

And thus I have a plot-bunny for a Stargate Atlantis fanfic set in the type of Sentinels & Guides are known and have various legal protections AU.

The idea starts with the standard trope of: 
Rodney McKay is a Sentinel who doesn't think he should need a Guide and John Sheppard is a Guide who's been hiding his status in order to maintain his military position

However, it turns out that McKay is right, that he doesn't really need a Sentinel because:
1. he's very careful (and vocal) about policing his own allergies
2. the things he works on are so massive or so infintesimal that not even he could see them with physical senses anyway, so there's no need to push his senses since he's dealing with galaxies and electrons
3. his sense of "protect the tribe" is on just as massive a scale as his science, so he's determined to ensure that humanity survives on different planets and has the capabilities to protect themselves etc, and he's not interested in protecting any particular individual

Second however, is that Radek Zelenka didn't pass his background check to get onto the Atlantis expedition. He's from the Czech Republic and was part of the protests in the 1980s. Obviously this can't stand since McKay wants Radek on the expedition, and thus McKay declares that Zelenka is his Guide and thus has to come on the expedition regardless of the failed background check.

Everyone knows that McKay is lying, except that there's just this shadow of a doubt, because McKay and Radek really do work together extremely well, they're both super smart and can pass any of the variety of standardized tests to weed out fake pairings, and it's really a bit taboo to question a sentinel about the appropriateness of their guide as a guide. So, everyone *strongly suspects* it's a lie, but McKay is officially down as a bonded sentinel and Zelenka is officially down as a bonded guide.

Then along comes Sheppard, joining the expedition at the last minute, and unaware of all the unofficial versions of the official files.

So, of course, Sheppard and McKay are excellent matches for each other. But, and this is the thing, they're all adults. Not only are they all adults, but they're also completely disconnected from Earth for some time. So McKay joins Sheppard's SGA-1, and Sheppard starts hanging out more in the labs, and everyone side-eyes all three of them for a bit but mostly get distracted by trying to stay alive and generally running for their lives.

And then they get back in contact with Earth.

*grin* 

I'm not entirely sure what happens at that point, but I think maybe people from Earth (Blair and Jim maybe?) come in a delegation to make sure everything is okay and deal with all the psychological trauma that must have been experienced and are just kind of boggled by how well everyone is doing and how poorly any of this is going to fit into any sort of template report.

("You can't just declare that you have a sentinel-guide bond to every single person you want to make sure stays on the expedition, Rodney!" 
"Why not? It's true!" 
"It's not true!" 
"But you can't prove it's not!") 

Real life has sort of sucked recently and while that hasn’t pushed me out of fandom, it has pushed me more towards the lurking and reading side of things rather than the commenting or writing side of things. On the other hand, Star Wars fandom caught me by surprise and created an immediate craving that was answered by a set of really awesome authors:


First, there's Flamethrower

Flamethrower has an amazing, long, and completed series: Re-Entry.

And a follow-up series, which is also amazing and long but is also being actively updated: Re-Entry: Journey of the Whills.

Plus a whole bunch of awesome single stories, including:
On Ebon Wings, Ere I Breathe, which is a crossover between Star Wars and The Crow!

In a Lonely Place, which is just so good and I want to say is one of my favorites of all of these.



Then, there's Dogmatix and Norcumi who have an amazing partnership going on that has resulted in: 

A Star to Steer By which is an amazing crossover with Stargate, and while it's not complete, it's still being updated and I love each chapter that comes up.

Knock on Effect, which is inspired by Flamethrower’s series

Plus a whole bunch of other short fic that are all well worth reading.



And then there's Esama, who I've always loved for her Harry Potter, and Sherlock, and Temeraire stories, but now has some amazing Star Wars fic, too, including: 

Negotiator, which is complete and awesome.

Lost Reflections which is theoretically unfinished but doesn't actually feel incomplete, so mostly that just means that there's potential for more sometime if Esama feels inspired to continue.


For the most part, I just wanted to escape from my own head, but then there's Fialleril's amazing stories that are completely gorgeous and do not allow the reader to avoid thinking, but must be read all the more for that. Two of her series, in particular, are must reads:

The Guiding Winds

The Tatooine Cycle




Mentioning some of this to a friends also brought a Cracked.com article, 6 Reasons The Jedi Would Be The Villain In Any Sane Movie, to my attention.

Which, you know, makes some very good points.



Anyway, this all leads me to an idea for why the Jedi are the good guys, despite all their deeply questionable activities. However I’m not sure how to turn it into a story, so I’m going to release the idea into pasture and hope it inspires someone else.

The idea is this: Force sensitivity is like food sensitivity, ie, it’s not a good thing.

The Force is the power that holds the universe together and is life itself and all that, right? So, what if some children are just born sensitive to it, and by sensitive, I mean allergic, and the main symptoms are early death and/or raging psychopathy if they survive long enough?

There’s this massive ocean of power that reacts to emotions and most people who can sense it at all, much less manipulate it, drown before they gain any sort of control. The Sith manage to ride the swells and become one with the destruction, whil the Jedi manage to calm themselves enough so that the Force moves through them rather than breaking them.

So while, yes, Force sensitive children are taken away from their families, those families start grieving for that child as soon as they know they’re force sensitive. Acceptance into the Jedi temple is the child’s only chance of survival.

And Jedi knights are those Force sensitives who have mastered the ability to work with and around the Force without become either soulless puppets of entropy or mad power houses suffering constant allergic reactions to life itself. Members of the Jedi agricultural corp are those Force sensitives who can be trusted only under supervision and without the stressors that Jedi knights face.

So as much as the Jedi temple is admired from afar and the Jedi knights are considered celebrity heroes, no family wants to see a Jedi come for their child. But the families are also the ones who call the Jedi temple to come for their children before their children blow up the local preschool or kill a whole community.

And maybe under Palpatine’s propaganda, politicians forgot what sort of refuge the Jedi temples provided for innocent children who were just too dangerous to let live in regular communities, the absence of that refuge is going to have a major impact across the whole Empire.

So 2014 sucked pretty badly. I am really hoping that 2015 is a massive improvement. (And please, please let it not be worse -- I have a finite number of family members.)

Anyway, the end of the year showed some improvement and the new year is starting off well. So I am paying a bit more attention to fandom and realized how long it's been since I posted here. Even when I had posted fanfic, I never got around to updating here. So, to correct this error: 

The Price of Secrets (on AO3) (or on FF.net)
Fandoms: Buffy and NCIS
Summary: This fight for jurisdiction did not go the way Gibbs had expected.

Leah's Happy Ending (on AO3)
Fandom: the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs
Summary:Everyone knew that Bran had only married Leah because she was too stupid and petty for him to ever run the risk of falling in love with her. No one thought about how Leah herself must feel that knowledge like a constant insult. No one deserves that kind of abuse.

The Ambassador (on AO3) (or on FF.net)
Fandoms: Labyrinth and Stargate
Summary: Ambassador Sarah Williams is brought in to the Stargate program to help deal with the Tok'ra. (set after Her Kingdom as Great, and does not stand on its own.)

Smooth as a River Stone (on AO3) (or on FF.net)
Fandoms: Highlander and Stargate
Summary: Thousands of years later, Jake O'Neil's descendant looks out the temple palace to see what the god Methos sees. (This will make absolutely no sense if you haven't already read A Square Peg in a Round Hole.)


To everyone reading this: Happy new year!

Last year (good grief, time got away from me), the amazing pentapus drew a picture of Taura and Methos on a space station.



Here (finally) is the story I wrote for it: 

Walking Away Whistling

Summary: Taura doesn't like House Bharaputra. She doesn't like Cetaganda. And she is extremely curious as to why they are both trying to acquire Dr. Pierce Argall.
Available on: AO3, FF.net, and below: 



( Walking Away Whistling )

While attempting to work on a different fanfic I've promised, my muse got distracted by a short meeting between Xander Harris of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Jethro Gibbs of NCIS.

Thus, mostly to get it out of the way:

The Price of Secrets (on AO3) (on FF.net) (on TTH)
This fight for jurisdiction did not go the way Gibbs had expected.

( Read the story here )

More than a year ago, I wrote a quick comment fic in response to the prompt: Avengers movieverse, Tony/+Loki, Instead of becoming a supervillain when he fell to Earth Loki somehow ended up as Tony Stark's personal assistant.

Now, some eighteen months and 29K words (not to mention a new degree, a new job, and a new residence) later, I have finally completed Tony's New Assistant (also on AO3). It kind of got away from me (darn trickster Loki!) and I finally managed to complete it less by the standard method of tying up all the loose ends as by my own method of tying up some of them and declaring that the rest are really decorative fringe. (It's not a bug, it's a feature!) 

The experience makes me even more impressed by those authors who somehow manage to keep an epic story going for years on end. I enjoyed writing the fic, but, dear god, I am glad that it's finally completed.

LIfe continues to be tough going but there appears to be light at the end of the tunnel. And even if it's an approaching train, maybe I'll be able to hitch a ride, so that would work out, too. Here's hoping.

In the meantime, this article about the end of a turtle marriage makes me sad. They were together for 115 years, but have since turned violent and had to be separated. It brought up the issue, however, of immortal marriage. If you live forever or even for a super long time, marriage seems like it could wind up being a bad idea. But I was thinking: many of the vampires and immortals in fiction these days tend to have mortal identities which they just change periodically, so no one notices that they age. Maybe immortal beings should just always restrict their marriages to the length of their mortal identities. Thus, it is marriage "until death do you part" except that it's the death of the identity rather than the death of the actual person. And if two immortals really love each other, then each successive set of identities can get married, but there would always be that renewable requirement. Plus, if one spouse wanted to get out of the marriage sooner, they could just fake their own death, leaving their spouse to finish out the years of their own identity as a "grieving widow," minus the actual grief, plus some nicely ambiguous raging to the heavens of "why did enter_name_here leave me?!?"

Also, having informed my sister that my cat is "Audrey, Lady of the Leaps" by day, but by night, down at the speakeasy, she goes by "Cat McLegs", my sister told me that there clearly needed to be RPF about my cat. Without having any plans to actually write any thing like that, I have to wonder, exactly how crazy of a cat lady would I need to be, in order to write my-cat!fanfic? 

I've been reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time (just 400 more pages to go!) and it is an extremely thought-provoking read. As a political treatise, it's awful, but as a piece of literature, it draws you in and makes you think.

One such thought that I had led me to an actual plot-bunny, which I'm fairly sure is not going to be Joss'd in the next 400 pages, but is awesome enough that I want to read a fanfic for it.
( Spoilers ahead... )

Real life has been incredibly busy/messy for me lately. Not only busy, but it's all been mostly unpleasant business, so it saps away my will to do fanfic or anything else fun, other than sleep a lot and read what other people are writing. (Teen Wolf fanfic is highly addictive.)

But while I haven't been being very productive, other people have been and it just brightens my day.

Styxhana (aka styx) just translated a bunch of my stories into Chinese! Is that not awesome?! I am incredibly excited.
Check them out:

何梦将至 (What Dreams May Come)
米索斯的万圣节故事 (Halloween Story)
体验飞翔 (A Taste of Flight)
脱身之途 (Escape Route)
层层伪装 (Layers of Pretense)
任他何名 (By Any Other Name)
窥望深渊 (Into the Depths)

This is actually the third language (third! awesome!) that some of my stories have been translated into.

My first translation (and I was so excited that I actually forgot to mark down the date) was by black_leather, a Russian translation of Halloween Story by Methos: check it out!

My second translation (in September of 2008) was by Franavu, a Dutch translation of Halloween Story by Methos: check it out!

And now I have Chinese translations by Styx! Awesome!

Also, I have two illustrations made for me!

I got an illustration from IceAgeSurvivor123 for Icarus in October 2010. Coolness!

And an illustration from Pentapus in May 2012 for Seventh Time's the Charm and Every Ending a Beginning and Every Beginning an End. *grin*

Real life has been beating me down recently, but fandom is made up of so many awesome people doing wonderful things.