Voices in my head

I have recently discovered the TV show Leverage. It is quite awesome: sort of a modern-day Robin Hood group. Steal from the rich (and corrupt) to give to the poor (and wronged). There's some heist or con job every episode. Oodles of fun.

Almost immediately upon hearing just the premise, I thought of Cory Raines and Amanda from Highlander, both of whom are warm-hearted thieves. Cory Raines would fit in best with the Leverage group being completely insane in an adrenaline-junky type of way, and going on bank-robbing sprees and donating all the of the stolen goods to orphanages.  However I really want Amanda to meet up with Parker from Leverage, becaues they're both talented pick-pockets and cat burglers, but Parker is severely unsocialized while Amanda seduces her way out of all sorts of situations. I think a meeting between them would be interesting because Parker would probably be uncertain and envious and think that Amanda was much better than her while Amanda would probably see a lot of herself from before she was found by her teacher Rebecca. A meeting would probably bring out one of Amanda's rare serious/mature/maternal moments.

While just the idea of the characters mixing up together is fun, I do have a basic plot.

There is a bad guy who has done something particularly heinous. My current thoughts are that a mobster stole an organ intended for live-saving surgery for a child and intends to sell it on the black-market. Not only a heinous crime but also one that demands a really quick turn-around time in order for any fix to be actually helpful, thus more mistakes to be made.

I'm thinking Amanda probably heard about it while stealing something else from the bad-guy. Thus not only does she feel the need to steal the organ back for it's original owner, but security is much higher than it had been so she needs help: she calls in Duncan, Cory, and Methos.

Methos respectfully bows out, saying he's not planning to make any enemies of that calabre.

Meanwhile the Leverage team is approached by the uncle of the child being prepped for surgery. Given that the motivation of the head of Leverage is all tied up in his own young son's death, this would be something he would take on even without having time to do as thorough a set-up a needed.

There is much high-jinks as both teams run into each other. Many close calls and misunderstandings and whatnot.

In the end, it all works out and they go to deliver the rescued organ to surgery in the nick of time.

It's only then that they realize that the family of the child was still freaking out in the hospital and no one had thought to look for any recovery options and the kid didn't have an uncle.

It's Duncan who's suspicious enough to ask for a picture from the Leverage team and identifies Methos, of course.

So i was walking and chatting this evening and my companion came up with two thoughts that just boggled my mind completely:

The first:

MacGyver meets the Borg. What else is there to say?

The second:

Surely, surely at some point MacGyver needs to have some interaction with the Doctor's sonic screwdriver. How or why, I  know not, but surely some intersection is inevitable.

The Sentinel is a fun show with the basic premise that some people (Sentinels) have hyperactive senses (sight, hearing, etc, including psychic visions) that let them do all sorts of impressive things but also come with weaknesses that require someone else (a Guide) to help them control.

Canonically, the existence of Sentinels and Guides are not widely known although there are some shadowy government types who have a clue. However, there's a significant subset of the fandom that writes AU stories in which the phenomenon is well known and well documented. I like this variation.

And given that I'm still neck deep in my obsession with NCIS, of course I have an idea for a crossover.

I have this idea that Gibbs is a Sentinel: after all he always seems to know what people are saying, even when they're across the room, knows when people are lying to him, and gets "gut feelings" which are generally dead accurate. So I have this idea that Gibbs is a Sentinel and he knows it. He has always known it and was perfectly fine with it. In fact, Shannon, his first wife, was his Guide.

Then she dies and he suppresses most of his abilities. He attempts to replace her every so often looking for a red-headed woman to marry and it generally goes poorly for all concerned. (That's canon.) But he doesn't tell anyone about his first marriage (again: canon) or being a suppressed Sentinel.

Then Tony DiNozzo arrives.

Tony may or may not know he's a Guide, but it's not a flashy thing, and in canon mostly means he likes people and gets along well with most people. But he is a Guide and he while he doesn't know that Gibbs is a Sentinel, Gibbs certainly knows that Tony is a Guide.

When Gibbs hired Tony, he didn't think it would matter. As time passes however, Gibbs discovers that his senses are beginning to present themselves again. Because he won't actively seek Tony's assistance with them, Gibbs can't use them to their fullest extent, but they're still better than before. Plus, Tony and Gibbs are each able to do things like successfully order and/or beg each other not to die. (Both Sentinel and NCIS canon) So Gibbs is trying to deal with his senses and Tony's presence and having a Guide again without telling Tony that he's been co-opted as Gibbs' Guide in the first place.

It would be oodles of fun and I really want to read this story. If someone knows something similar or writes it up, please let me know.

I have recently become absolutely enthralled with the TV show NCIS. It's Naval Criminal Investigatory Service, so military police drama, and all the characters in it are real characters.

I have this image of Amanda, the immortal thief, somehow getting involved with them, sometime when Kate is working for NCIS. Kate would be all sympathetic with whatever story Amanda was telling and would warn Tony off from skirt-chasing the poor innocent Amanda. Tony would tease Kate about Amanda being just his type (lovely, long-legged, buxom, female...) until he got a good look at her face at which point he'd say, "never mind. I'm not going near her without a marine guard. And probably not then."

This is far enough out of character that everyone looks at him. "What? I spent two weeks under review in Philadelphia after an undercover op  completely failed to catch her in the act. Don't you guys recognize her? That's Amanda. The Amanda. The current Amanda of the line of Amanda's that Interpol has been tracking since before they were Interpol."

Kate would be all, "but... she's all... innocent..."

Tony, "not in this universe."

And Gibbs would give that smile that he sometimes does and start walking off towards wherever Amanda is, "this I have to see."



At this point, I'm not sure if Ducky is an immortal himself or if he happens to know about immortals or if he's completely unaware of them, but I think he and Amanda get along beautifully together and trade stories and actually listen to each other's stories.



The more I think of the cross-over, though, the more complex the plot gets.

Becuase it could be an issue that simply has Amanda as a witness or bystander and that's that. But I am more inclined to the idea that Methos is trying to do something big (Possibly steal a nuclear submarine, he's not evil, he just likes to be prepared for all eventualities, and you never know when you might need a nuclear submarine or some other esoteric Navy item. Possibly infiltrate the military dna database so that immortals are harder to track down. Possibly some nameless task that is just really, really important and difficult.) Normally, he would do whatever it is that he needs to do and leave very little evidence behind, and that would be that. However, NCIS and Gibbs' team in particular has become very good at figuring things out on very little evidence.

So, rather than merely leave very little evidence, he decides that the best way to remain hidden is to bury what evidence is inevitable in a massive amount of other evidence. So he calls in some favors and grants some other favors and suddenly Ducky is distracted by the fact that his morgue has lost a body ("Bodies don't just walk out of my morgue, Jethro!"), there's a terrorist cell that makes an attack ("This doesn't make sense, Director. I would swear that I broke them in interogation, but the intel they had... it looks like they were set up, not us."), and evidence of a sailor was left behind at a major diamond heist ("the theif got in, without setting off any alarms, successfully avoids giving the camera any glimpse of her face, and yet wears a naval uniform? That's just weird.")

It would be an absolute mess, with everyone in NCIS working their tails off trying to figure out how and why all of these cases are hitting them at once and how and why they all seem to be interconnected.

Amanda has red hair at this point and gets away with lots of flirting with everyone and a fair number of diamonds into the bargain, Methos who never actually appears in person in the story gets whatever it was that he was actually trying to do, and the NCIS guys deal with various terrorists and bad guys. And are possibly mailed a diamond or two later letting them know that Amanda didn't die in her escape.

First, some background:

The old show "Sentinel", for those of you who don't know, is about a cop who has highly developed senses (hearing/vision/touch/taste/smell) as well as various mystical senses and is thus called a Sentinel. An anthropology grad student helps him deal with the sense without getting overwhelmed and be able to use them to their best ability to catch the bad guy of the week, and is thus called a Guide. All of this is done while trying to keep the fact of the sense a secret so as to avoid government laboratories. There's a lot of stress on the Sentinel needing a Guide.

Within the Sentinel fandom, there's a fairly popular genre of alternate universe stories, in which Sentinels and Guides are well known and quite useful resources. The fandom likes to deal with power issues and whether the Sentinels should subjugate the Guides or vise versa. However, regardless of the way the power goes, it's generally a theme that one of them can demand the presence of the other, even from society at large. There's even more stress on the two being bound together by uber mystical bindings.

So I have this idea in my head of a Stargate: Atlantis fusion with this alternate Sentinel universe.

There's Rodney McKay who's gung ho to go to Atlantis, and create the grand unified theory of everything. However, he needs the right people to get it done and he wants Radek Zelenka on his staff. Zelenka, unfortunately, has revolutionary ties and does not pass the background check. Rodney gets a bit pissy about this, then has the brilliant idea of declaring that he is a Sentinel and Zelenka is his Guide, thus Zelenka must be allowed to go with.

While this is patently a ploy to get his way, the government licensing agents for Sentinels come, Rodney passes all of their tests and nobody can figure out how he's cheating. (He is after all, brilliant.) They already knew, of course, that he had various allergies, and he says he never zones because he is brilliant and always thinking of too many things to ever zone on just one, especially something as trivial as a physical sense. And he says he has no problem with geographic boundaries because he's an astrophysicist and clearly his territory is the rest of the galaxy.

Zelenka is equally clearly not a guide, but this is even easier to fake because no one has ever developed a perfect way to identify guides.

Finally the government agents throw up their hands and say, fine, he can take Zelenka but if Zelenka is supposed to be his guide, then Rodney will have to be responsible for any security breaches he causes.

Rodney smirks triumphantly.

Meanwhile John Sheppard is a guide and has gone through life perfectly happy to hide that fact. He wants to fly planes and that's not really a good job for someone who's expected to be part of a duo.

Then they both get to Atlantis and John realizes that the way Rodney was faking being a Sentinel was that he wasn't faking. He is, in fact a Sentinel who was just more interested in the extremes of physics than in anything even his hyper senses could tell him.

They were both perfectly happy going through life as they were, until, of course, they are trapped together in a closed society on Atlantis, both of them needing every last skill they each possess and more to keep alive.

While, of course, never letting on that John's the Guide rather than Zelenka.

   

Having gotten my romance novel rant out of the way, I do of course have a couple of ideas for fanfic.

Because really, most romance novels have heroes who are insanely good at everything. Immortals, on the other hand, have a reason to be insanely good at everything, because those who aren't tend to die at the hands of those who are. Stick Duncan MacLeod into a romance novel and he fits right in (as seen in "Dramatic License" when Carolyn Marsh writes him in one.) Methos, on the other hand, has all of the abilities, but none of the character points than the standard romance novel hero has. So I want him to mostly show up the more standard hero, in a fairly classic nerd-beats-jock type of thing.

That is fairly vague, however. So to be more specific, Stephanie Laurens has a series of regency romances that follow the Cynster family. The Duke is the hero of the first book, then his brother, then his cousins, all down the line. And each main character and each of the main character's love interests is not only beautiful but also particularly capable in one thing or another. One is fabulous with investments (his love interest is going bankrupt), one is fabulous with horses (his love interest has a horse farm), one is fabulous with detective work (his love interest has a mystery). And of course the female always has some problem that the guy has to fix.

Despite my mockery, I did enjoy these stories.

My enjoyment, however, does not negate the mockery.

In the stories, there are two women in particular that I find interesting. One is the strong-willed loving dowager duchess Helena Cynster, the mother of the first hero. The second is the incisive and blunt Lady Therese Osbaldestone who wacks people with her cane and tells them to get over themselves and get on with wooing the love interest. Both of them are unattached women who are clearly placed in the role of grandmother and way too old to have suitors. They can maybe have a genteel flirt with some older gentlemen but nothing serious.

Methos, for all that he looks whatever age he looks, is old enough that any mortal and most immortals he dates is going to be him robbing the cradle.

So I would like for him to be making his unremarkable way through London society and fall in love with one of these women. And then have to woo her with all the disadvantages of appearing significantly too young, too poor, too socially inexperienced, and simply not as capable as all the other men in their lives. And then proving that he is in fact, better in all ways. He can certainly defeat them all in swords, on horseback, in conversation, in experience, and possibly in wealth as well although the last is not necessary for my enjoyment.

This story would be pure indulgence, much like the original romance novels were, but just so much fun.

And because I am trying to shed excess plot bunnies so that I can focus on just one or two, here's another one put to pasture:

Crossover between Highlander (ie. Methos, because he's my character of choice) and practically any vampire series (although I think I'll pick the Anita Blake series in this instance because something needs to be done to fix that series.)

Highlander style immortals don't fight on Holy Ground. it's taboo, anathema, generally considered a bad idea with no explanation given. (Although there are a couple of good stories that have good theories, none of them are canon.) However, there's nothing against killing someone wearing a cross or carrying a bible or even a relic, so the taboo only goes so far. The one thing that canon does do, however, is accept that there is such a thing as holy ground, created by any religion that has sacred grounds.

Likewise, vampires cannot stand on holy ground and are repelled by holy items. Now, in the Anita Blake universe, holy symbols can only be used by true believers to repel vampires or demons, but holy ground is holy ground regardless of whether any worshipers are present or not. Thus while representations aren't holy in and of themselves, it is possible for there to be ground and other items are infused with holiness and stand on their own, as it were.

Back with Highlander canon is the fact that Methos is Death of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as seen in the Bible, Book of Revelations. In that vision of the future, there are seven seals, each of which is opened by the Lamb. The Lamb is also a metaphor for Jesus. It's the end of the world and it's full of fire and blood and death and destruction, but it is also by God's will. So, the question is, do the four horsemen count as holy items?

They clearly don't count as Holy Ground, because they can be killed by other immortals. But neither are they simply symbols because no one would particularly recognize them and anyway they aren't representing anything other than themselves.

I imagine a story in which the four horsemen are holy and thus vampires cannot touch them without being burned.

Of course, that's just a premise rather than plot arc in and of itself.

Any plot arc I have would simply have to include Edward, called Death by the vampires of the Anita Blake universe and Ted by the civilians. Dear, dear Edward. He's an assassin.

I can imagine Caspian one of the other horsemen working with Edward on a joint project and then realizing that this man has sort of taken on his brother's name. Kronos, leader of the horsemen, would of course want to kill Edward for such presumption even if Edward would have no reason to know it was presumptive. Caspian wants to keep his colleague alive so that they can continue to go out and kill things together. In order to placate Kronos, though, Methos should come and give Edward permission to use the name.

There is possibly a scene in which some of the older vampires are mocking a captured Edward and some of the younger vampires too for the nickname. In some grand melodramatic fashion Caspian comes to the rescue bringing Methos along with. The laughter of the vampires is abruptly cut off.

"Did you really say, my dear Belle Morte," Methos nearly purred, "that you were going to kill Death?"

She hissed, uncertain what to do. She had known this man back when she had been a mere fledgling but then Christianity has risen and he had vanished. She had been sure he was dead. "Wouldn't you prefer he die, this pretender to your name?"

"If I wanted him dead, he would be dead and by my hands or by the hands of my brother. It is not your place to act in my name." 

It had been a shot in the dark and it had missed.

"But come, come, why don't we kiss and make up?" His voice mocked her. She couldn't even look at him, the holy faith turning her eyes away. Any kiss would burn and disfigure.

Methos and his brother walked unchallenged through the vampires to Edward, releasing him from the chains that bound him. He, at least, she could look at, and she could almost sympathize with the look in his eye. His face was blank but it was a cover for the uncertainty that kept him balanced between gratitude and rage, that uncertainty that wondered who these men were who could walk so fearlessly among the monsters. And from whom the monsters recoiled.



Alternately, say Methos and some vampire want to have a relationship. Which is hard enough to do when one of you is edible to the other, even harder when one is deathly allergic to the other. So Methos is trying to become un-holy, but so far nothing is working. Then he discovers that there is another man called Death. So maybe he can transfer the holiness to Edward and get on with his romance. All he has to do is formally declare Edward his heir and then ... well, then discover that nothing is that simple. Heh. He may or may not be able to give Edward holiness but he can't get rid of his own. And can you imagine what being holy would do to a vampire hunter? It's all very good in a hand-to-hand fight, but it also repels the vampires so it's incredibly hard to get that close. Edward is not amused. Anita Blake is caught between finding it hilarious and horrendous. (She has all sorts of religious issues.)

Anyway, if someone writes this, I would appreciate it. Let me know.

So, Lita_of_Jupiter pointed out that there are simply not enough good Oz fanfics out there. I entirely agree. (And am currently pestering her to write a Hackers crossover with Oz. Please?)

I have also been reading Patricia Brigg's series of Mercy Thompson books.

For those of you who don't know them, a brief bit of background: In the books, Mercy can turn into a coyote. Something that she apparently inherited from her absent father rather than her more flighty youth mother who wasn't quite sure what to do with an infant child who was occasionally a coyote cub. So Mercy was fostered with a werewolf pack. In fact, THE werewolf pack, because this particular pack is led by Bran Cornik, who is the Alpha werewolf for North America.

Being an alpha means more than just being able to beat up anyone who challenges you, it's also about having a type of Pack Magic that lets the Alpha command obedience from those beneath them, which is actually a good survival tool all around because some of those lesser werewolves need to be commanded to stay in control and not to eat the local pedestrians. And while most Alpha werewolves look as dangerous as they are, Bran looks like a college student. To all appearances, he's laid back and soft spoken.

A few more interesting facts about Briggs' universe: #1. Werewolves in wolf form look like actual wolves. Big, vicious wolves about to eat you, generally, but wolves nonetheless. #2. The presence of a demon affects werewolves' self control. They get vicious and crazy around demons. #3. Female werewolves don't have children because they miscarry the first time they shift, and they are forced to shift every full moon. (Bran's first wife managed to hold off the shift for the full gestation period, but she had magic and it wound up killing her in the end anyway although the child survived.) (Briggs' doesn't bring up the possibility of staying wolf the entire time, possibly because the books are pg-13 at most and she didn't want to deal with beastiality issues) 

Now consider Oz: #1. When Oz shifts to wolf, he's like a wolf-man, so to insert him into Briggs' universe, something would have had to warp his form pretty severely. But, lucky us, we have a reason in #2. Oz was infected while living on a Hellmouth and surrounded by demons for the first year of his change. (I don't think any werewolves in the Briggs' universe have survived ongoing contact with demons like that.) And finally, we have #3) Oz can control his own change, to the extent of not changing during the fullmoon and not growing weaker because of the lack.

So I think it would be an interesting story to have Oz approach Bran.

Oz can control his beast even at full-moon which Bran would appreciate learning (as would almost all of the female pack members). However, Oz really does have a beast rather than a wolf, and he could ask Bran for help getting his wolf into better shape. Can the demon taint be cleansed?

Plus, they both like music, they're both quiet, and they're both a lot more than they first appear.
  

This is actually already posted in previous comments, but since I'm using this journal as a pasture for my rabid plot bunnies, I wanted to give it it's own entry. Thus, here is my very basic plot bunny for Methos (my crossover character of choice, good for practically all occasions) meeting the X-Men.

The X-men randomly run across Adam Pierson doing whatever, shopping for socks maybe, and go, "hey, wasn't that you in the military base, stealing our kids?"

Methos says, "you must have gotten me confused with someone else."

Prof X says, "There's an easy way to figure this out. I'll just take a look in your head."

Methos says, "that's pretty much a really bad idea."

Then Prof X goes into a seizure then coma as his mind goes into Methos and Methos' quickening gobbles it right up like it would if it were the free-floating quickening of another immortal.

The Xmen are horrified. "What did you to do Prof X?"

Methos blinks innocently, "Don't you mean what did he do to me? He tried to get into my head! I told him it was a bad idea."

Of course, what I'd really like is to get Methos and Eric Lehnsherr together. Not necessarily in a slash sense, but just interacting.  I can see them getting along a lot better than Methos and Charles Xavier. I can also see Methos being a lot more comfortable with the Brotherhood than with the Xmen.

The Xmen are a bit condescending in their belief that non-mutants are innocent bystanders while the Brotherhood is honest in their belief that non-mutants are a danger. Methos might not approve of their methods, but he would understand both their motives and methods a lot more than the Xmen.

Plus, I think the general population would probably find the Brotherhood more comforting, in a backhanded sort of way, than the Xmen, because the Brotherhood with all their powers and their anger are bad guys who are successfully defended against. They are a demonstration that humanity doesn't actually have to fear mutant powers too much because even when they're being used to destroy the world, well, it's not that successful. The Xmen, on the other hand, set themselves up as benevolent quasi-deities who are only intent on defending humanity, and thus humanity is just waiting to figure out the catch.

Anyway, one particular way of implementing the crossover would be: 

Methos is confronted by the Xmen which results in Prof X in a coma. He retreats but is later found by Magneto and after a few sarcastic comments about making targets of oneself, Methos and Magneto become friends.

Meanwhile Duncan meets up with the Xmen after getting some odd reports about where Methos was last seen. They get along fine until he discovers that Methos is with the Bad Guys. He calls Connor for advice.

Due to Connor's daughter Rachel's history with concentration camps and the fine line between mutants and immortals, the elder Highlander sides with the Brotherhood in this particular fight.

Joe bangs his head against the bar and finally decides that maybe the original watchers had the right idea with their "observe but never interfere" bit, because when you interfere you have to pick a side and that gets really messy really fast.

I don't have any idea where this story would go but the character interactions sure would be fun.


If anyone writes it, or has read something like it that I've simply missed before, please let me know.

Peace. mg
   

Tom Riddle being Harry's father is somewhat ridiculous because he looks too much like James Potter. But then I had  a thought. Maybe, Tom Riddle isn't Harry's father but Voldemort is. <I cackle evil-y.> No, wait, it can make sense:

I don't think it's ever mentioned if the body's of the Potters were ever recovered and given Sirius' situation, we know wizards are prone to jumping to conclusions. So imagine any bodies found were completely unidentifiable.  Maybe Lily could be identified next to the body of a man. Why not? Now, consider the scene in Godric's Hollow right before everything goes down:

I can't remember if there are random death eaters milling around in the background but they don't really matter at this point. The main players are:
1. Harry Potter (infant), grows up to look like James Potter
2. Lily Potter nee Evans, later confirmed dead by Harry's dementor inspired memories
3. Tom Riddle aka Voldemort, still handsome at that point, comes back as weird snake/man after a decade as a shade, more than a little crazy due to family inbreeding
4. James Potter, handsome young man, put out of commission off stage somehow, has blood as pure as the driven snow and assumably even more inbred than Tom Riddle.

Now, consider the last two characters, both handsome, both inbred. And one of them comes back, but as a shade and then a snake-creature, looking nothing like the handsome man he once was.

So what if Lily successfully manages to kill Voldemort by putting up a shield around Harry using her own death?  James is so traumatized by what was done to him off-stage and the death of his wife and the betrayal of his friends, that he goes completely insane, not helped by the fact that he's a shade. Curse damage, says I, can do things like that.

Thus, James Potter becomes Voldemort.

He could also be pissed off at Harry because from everything we've seen of James, he was a bit of a prat a la Draco Malfoy and Lily clearly chose Harry's safety over James'.

If you need to the blood ties back to Slytherin, that's also pretty easily managed. It's been a thousand years since the founders, right? So let's call it a generation every 30 years on average. So that's about 33 generations away from the founders. So, raise 2 to the power of 33 and you get the number of people alive in the founders time who are eventually related to Harry Potter. And if James is Pure, then half of those (2 to the power of 32) have to be wizarding. That's a lot, especially for a small wizarding community. He's probably related in one way or another to all of the founders.

And the possibilities expand, the more I think of it. So there are these horcruxes but we don't have a particularly good explanation of how exactly they work: just that if you kill someone and/or crack your soul, you can scatter bits and pieces hither and yon which tie you to life. Tom Riddle made oodles but all it takes is one to work. And James Potter was in a fight and more than a bit disturbed, so say he made a horcrux that one night in Godric's Hollow and that's the one in Harry. 

Puts a whole new twist on the final scene in Deathly Hollows doesn't it?