beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

Not doing much. Bit of reading, bit of research, not much writing. The more research I do the more I find Problems and Pitfalls to the main plot idea, which is what you want in a plot, but it isn't always going from building regs to actual drama smoothly.

Got some Halloween stickers. Because I stopped and thought about where I could put things before I bought a Halloween top hat skeleton statues. ... I am still thinking about the statues. I mean technically I could put them on the windowsill but. Stickers are good.

Looked in a pencil case I haven't used lately, discovered Mystery Stickiness. Which is still not resolved, but. Only one pen in there was a different sort of pen than I usually get, and when I pulled it out with a dettol wipe, sure enough, weird sticky ensued. It was printed with a shop name and phone number in white and the white smeared right off on the wipe. It's like the slightly soft pen sweated the writing right off. Sad and sticky. So I wiped it real good until nothing was coming off it any more and put it in the kitchen to deal with later. I put it in a different holder than I meant to and then just decided to leave it for a bit because if stickiness damage then damage done. The rest of the pencil case is probably still at least slightly sticky so mystery unfun cleaning awaits for later.

The internet needs to know, obviously.

The more I read about ... anything I start reading about lately, the less surprised I am about things failing. Like we're in a very Find Out phase of history. Here are consequences and new knowledge and regulations that were written in blood and fire, and oh now everything has to be changed to work with the new knowledge. Makes sense, important stuff, but, so many complex ways to fail are now known in such detail, and fixing them is going to be harder than starting over, except we're in the middle of things so we can't stop the world to start over.
( Read more... )

Hospital building to world building, gold pieces to endowments and grants, schools for tieflings and targets for bigots, all wrapped in so many systems of real world rules and regulations... start with any one piece and the threads go out and out everywhere forever. Everything is complex in so many ways.

Okay, not getting new solutions right now so I'll go away.

It's interesting following each thread out through the existing rules and complications though.
Just need to be better at that...

I got like two hours sleep before I had to wake up for Cleaner Day so I have been noodling Pathfinder 1e as background for Pathfinder Earth 2026.
Because there are two options, and one goes wildly AU after 1918 when Golarion and all its gods knows about Earth. But the design philosophy of the 1918 adventure was that it was all true background for This Earth, just somehow only happening in the shadows and gaps.
Which makes no sense! If you have a planet of low level characters like this one then the entire predatory ecosystem of the outer planes becomes Very Interested. You have to get to here now without that ever making a Worldwound or a noticeable Cheliax.

You can get there via BtVS and Angel if you buy the whole 'not working despite us, working for us' framing Wolfram and Hart tried to sell. ... which is a specific kind of depressing.
And certainly Pathfinder Earth has the actual devil and his archdevil hierarchy playing here, because they play everywhere. But why not more openly? Why nothing that is not deniable?

It's all sneaky cold war stuff with different Powers acting around each other instead of openly against like they do in the Cage. Why?

one layer of answers says someone Lies Sleeping and they don't want to wake him up

but I am having fun with the idea that: it is paradox avoidance.
There is a specific future date that someone travelled back from (probably the Knight Commander of the Fifth Crusade because I play that game so many hours and because they are a soul plucked from the great beyond in a story with a god of paradox in the DLC)
until they reach that date the majority of the heavy hitters are actively trying to stay hidden (the god of paradox would obviously not, but the DLC has them in extra planar prison or dead again, so they are taking a time out)
after that date it is Open Season

I want to set up a magic school with end game gold to back it and change the Earth to be all post scarcity possibility

but

What are the other teams doing?

the answers i can come up with are
Everything I can think of but for different reasons

that's a lot of things.

And the world is in Pathfinder terms ignorant or disbelieving so vulnerable to like Legends of Tomorrow and the EYES app signing up for Some Things.

And I would want to use Pathfinder style magic to set up a Stargate style future where you can just go live on other planets because simples.
... but promising that with a different agenda ie dropping people into the abyssal breeding planes for mortal slaves? So Much More Simples. They don't have to do the complicated parts of finding viable homes and making them good to live in, because they don't want it to be good and they can drop you in their own back yards.

Mage the Ascension paradigm wars except it's a lot of demons trying to persuade you demons aren't real so they can do goa'uld shit on an Earth population scale.

And they have potentially been here more than a century setting this up! They wouldn't have to build from scratch, just go public!

... so this is a pretty plot heavy plot bunny but it gets difficult thinking up Counters for it. Telling the truth and offering a future made of hard work and freedom has to be made more appealing somehow...

Everything one high level adventurer could do let loose on Earth, all the factions of Golarion have had incentive to do for over a century, and the outer planes residents can get there to do it.

To look even vaguely Earth adjacent at that point takes *work*
but logically builds out a number of urban fantasy horror worlds from parts...

👋 I accidentally didn't post for a week. It has been kind of nothingy. I hate the weather and the weather is scheduled to get so much worse again. Niggly little repair problems have got worse when someone turned up to make them better. And this on screen keyboard in windows 11 continues to be utter pants that sometimes acts like I tapped the taskbar underneath it for no readily apparent reason.

I sat down at the proper keyboard to work in Scrivener to put some ideas in order for a possible actual writing. But last week I realised I just have some characters I am angry about and it isn't even fanfic because I have to change too much to get at the things I want to draw out. And this week I got sidetracked trying to find where the settings were to make the corkboard look like a cork board again. Found it under Apoearance but I tried clicking so many things I'd have to go back into the Help document to try and find where Appearance was.

When the shop set the computer up they downloaded the latest version of Scrivener so I've got some free trial left but I keep meaning to pay for it.

I keep finding that unfocused anger does not a plot make.

Also when I was trying to write what I would do about the Newcastle Incident (for instance, is this actually a thing that is happening to John, or could we usefully consider this an Astra story, in different ways than Legends of Tomorrow)... sentence structure fail try again. I started out thinking you can add a different character or make more of his mates speaking parts and spin the day off in a different direction. But. You don't get John on any day after that if you do that. It's like the Zari 1 and 2 problem I just rereached on my rewatch. This is an entirely different person if he doesn't make the same mistake that day.

I do not want to unravel the person we know, it feels bad.

So I think I need to steal Astra for a different story.
( Read more... )

I have lots of pages of notes like this. Chewing over the same few things and not getting very far.

Also I get stuck on shopping lists and logistics. Not very helpful.

But it's a difference in magic between the comics and the TV. In the comics if they want John delayed a bit then he has to go talk to some people to find other people to get the knowledge he needs to find the right guy to do the thing. Magic is knowing enough to ask the right person and make the right deal.

The TV show and Legends has a lot of Stuff. Magic stuff. He gets sent away to go find stuff. Phoenix feather for healing, that kind of material component stuff. He had a house full of magic stuff and they needed it whenever they did things. Magic lighter means a fancy complicated lighter. It drives me up the wall. Constantine was never a props wizard, he's the guy who looked at all that and decided most of it was for rubes. He can turn cigarettes into magic, but it is not because they are magic cigarettes. His lighter is his talisman, but it isn't a fancy cast embossed thing you have to make or buy. Give him five minutes, a zippo and a sharp thing, and he'll have the snake on a tree etched again no problem. It's a symbol, and symbols can have power. It is not a magic item.

The difference is theologically and ideologically significant. It's the difference between knowledge is power and Stuff is power.

Even the magic asking the right person model risks buying into the idea that some people just Have more power. Different orders of creation, born that way. Do we want to tell that story? We could stick with the only distinctive thing about the First of the Fallen being he has been doing this the longest.

And the iconography of the Deal changes the meaning too. The verbal agreement, the written contract with all the subclauses, the souls turned into Coins. Different than say endless rows of cubicles with work waiting and no way out. Different than being given a weapon and aimed at someone.

And in another canon, Good Omens has been bugging me for a while, because if holy water detroys demons you are calling the power of god in the water inherently destructive, or weird cleansing, driving out. But it is still God that has the power. If also hellfire destroys angels then instead of a single Power who can accept or reject your very existence, a single Power who would be the one dealing with angels by letting them Fall, you get an opposition Power. As I understand it there aren't really supposed to be two equal and opposite in Christianity. But it's a very popular framing in horror stories.

Also it actually should work in internal logic for the angels to try and reject a guy, decide he is fallen because *they* chucked him out, but discover holy water doesn't do a damned thing to him.
And how much more mysteriously ineffable if the same is actually true of the other partner.

ANY way.

I keep having these bits of thoughts and not getting anywhere with them.


Other than that I rewatch Legends, relisten Big Finish (River Song is wonderful), and reread books.

I am looking forward to weather we can actually cope with and the sky to be full of falling water again. Britain is built for that. It would be nice to get it back.

This evening's dream involved
getting swallowed by a hellmouth
(teeth teeth so many teeth)
with the Legends, so Ray, Nate and John were there, but everyone got split up
until I was just sticking with John
but gradually becoming less and less sure he was in fact actual John
which, in Hell, could be seriously Consequential.

Hell was a lot more like a going out of business sale in a department store than Dante wrote it
but it was otherwise pretty themey by floor.

The basement was cold and flooded
and I stopped the lift before we got drowned
but then had to decide
stay with and support (probably) John
or leave (that) him
and either way gamble with belonging down there.


I woke up thinking I should reread the Inferno

... but possibly the Niven version...

The thing with Nick Necro is most of the issues have him be a bit boring about John stealing Zatanna
but then that one issue
has him torturing John by putting cigarettes out on his chest ( Read more... )

He is so messed up and that one issue changes the meaning on ALL of it.


Lovely stuff
that might make me buy more comics
if I just ignore how little I liked, oh, about 3/4 of the other stuff I read.



I want to keep this particular messed up dynamic and run into another canon with it.

I keep on trying to come up with a good way to start a story with a relatable protagonist (ie kinda me)
and it is difficult.

To start with I do not go out much, so the story either starts at the duck pond or it comes to me.
... very little comes to me.
... mail order Adventure isn't the main chance, I feel.

I think I have a Terry Brooks book about it on the shelf below the edge of the bed but crucially once the protag bought the adventure he went to it. Which I personally would not be great at.

A protagonist who has to bring a support worker with them would be keenly relatable to many, but, I do not think support workers typically sign up for Adventure. I mean, there's supposed to be paperwork about making a safe working environment. They want to know before they go in that there are smoke alarms and an ongoing lack of fires. It seems like their number one priority would be to get away from Adventure as swiftly as possible and bring their person with them.

... at that point it is the support worker's Adventure, but that wasn't quite what I had in mind.

... got distracted by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Kingdom_for_Sale%E2%80%94Sold! which I haven't read in a reeeeeaaally long time. I should reread that.
... also vacuum under the bed.


I keep circling back to the Deck of Many Things because it is a way to have unexpected random Adventure happen. Like, pull the Throne card, and now you have a Castle of your very own. In D&D you probably have to fight something for it, but it's still yours already.
... imagine having to pay the taxes on a castle you can't even clear on your own.
... imagine one of them castles like in Book of Many Things, the sort with ghosts and all that, and it's yours now, and probably not far past the duck pond if it's somewhere you can actually get to.
... a lot of people would be quite put out about that.

Oh, imagine instead one of the existing castles suddenly being magically transferred into your ownership. Tourist trap... becomes a bit too literal if it's suddenly a challenge for adventurers.

There aren't many castles intact enough to make good defensive fortifications. I have looked around several of them. Not as big as you think, tea rooms are nice, not originally designed for accessibility. Rather the reverse. Also, extra flippin slippery in winter. Vivid memories of finding an icy patch in school uniform, do not recommend.

But if you suddenly got one of those via Throne card, you'd have a grade one listed building to look after, a sudden tax situation, a lot of tourists to look after, and not necessarily anywhere resembling a place to sleep. Or possibly somewhere resembling but full of waxworks.

... that is another way to have Adventure come to you. Imagine being one fo the tourists, and their support worker. Imagine how annoyed you'd be if you had to adventure your way out of a haunted castle and then realise you weren't even the main character, because the MC is taking the Throne back in the big stone thing.



In some rpg sule sets there are ways to turn downtime into magic items. In some sets you might not need anthing but time. Thirteen to thirty years of Epic Doing Nothing should make for some impressive magic items.

GURPS rules about religious magic item creation are what I'm thinking of but it has been Long since I looked up a GURPS rule so I can't cite it right now. ... several minutes poking the internet just tell me I have forgotten a lot about GURPS so I can't bet on this brain cell being correct.

ANYway, I'm not sure it's at all helpful to base an adventure on a Reward For Doing Nothing.



In Pathfinder ageing rules there's days you get an improvement to your mental stats - specifcally on tour actual birthday, you lose out on some physical and gain some mental. And in Pathfinder both Sorcerers and Oracles can have magic without any deliberate effort on their part, usually statted off Charisma. But you'd need a 10 in Charisma to even cast cantrips. So, in theory, you could wake up on the birthday you become Middle Ages, or officially Old, and just suddenly be able to do cantrips or orisons when you couldn't before. And it would probably be embarrassing once someone figured out why, because now they know how charisma you are not. But someone who was at a minus modifier on charisma was probably a bit clumsy with people and potentially not doing grand at friends. Might be a bit isolated. So, in a totally not a reward way, you could go from being isolated to having magic. It just wouldn't be the direction of causal in the other idea.

Also, if your prime casting stat is that low, you are not doing grand at Adventure without quite a bit of help.



I suspect I am not doing grand at Adventure. Unless visiting the ducks counts.
... the ducks would probably prefer a lack of pond based Adventure.



The Asking for Help phase is a bit trickier about Adventure when you don't have the social mechanisms implied by the existence of the Pathfinder Society. I mean if Pathfinders are real then you call the Guild and explain you need to found an adventure party, or hire one but that is very spendy. You'd have standardised Charters as suggested by effectively the Adventurer's Guild, and you could probably find a handful of people to agree to help you clear a castle for a split of the treasure.

You could not however get rid of them afterwards or get to be the one who decides who keeps what treasure, on account of all being the same level (enforced by Pathfinder Gulld in the computer version of Pathfinder, as is standardised pricing for hiring). Once you are out umbered by Adventurers they can pretty much do as they will.

It's a puzzler.

Of course if you call one of the real world emergency services about the potentially trap filled castle you are not going to be leading the response. They will treat you rather differently than a Fellow Adventurer. And if you decide you want to be them when you grow up it would have minimum Adventure content.



Even with Story people, if you call the Watchers or Slayers about a problem, this does not usually result in a new best friend Slayer, it is likely to resilt in a Slayer who does their job and tells you to wait outside while they do it.

Trying to work with Torchwood gets you treated like Ianto as best case, and more likely as fanboy from Random Shoes Eugene.

... haunting the usual protagonists is a rather extreme way to be In The Story and on the whole I would prefer not.


Call the Waverider for help and you could get all sorts. They're more likely to treat you as an equal but that might not go so great for you. Also they lie a lot a lot if they think they need to work around you, so your new friends might not be.


... okay it is one in the morning and the plot bunnies have gone down the well trod rabbit hole of And Then They Leave, instead of the useful one of And Then Adventure.



Today my best idea for how to get invited to storm my own castle involves a castle that is only Probably there, and they have to bring me to make the castle decide to Actually exist. It do make it sound like the least fuss version is to make it Not Actually Exist, but the tourist trap aspect would certainly solve that. ... being useful once in there would be a mixed bag though, even with the accompanying Diplomacy boost.


In the Book of Many Things their Throne castle is specified as having statues of Istus. I looked up Istus and she's the spinner of fate? Legends of Tomorrow has an equivalent. Tricky to recognise a shapeshifter goddess. Especially tricky to figure out which one fo the statues, if any, actually is a result of Flesh to Stone.

... I decided the shapeshifter friend needs a fancy freindship bracelet so she's recogniseable.
... that exact reason would be why she wouldn't wear it but worth a try.



Okay, silly oclock in the morning, time to go attempt rest.

I noticed how many days I did not post so *waves*
I got all tired out doing xmas even though that was like two movies with a meal in the middle
so the next day I slept like twelve hours

the tired sleepy is mostly winning this week

but it's cool, I already read one of my xmas present books, just in several installments due to the sleeping.

Yuletide isn't grabbing me. Don't know what I would have looked for but it isn't there.


I haven't been doing much fic reading this year until right at the end when I started to read All The Constantine fic and got sidetracked by apparently Justice League Dark canon.


I have thoughts now about how characters can change so much by staying exactly the same that they become unrecogniseable. And how becoming iconic absolutely trashed the fundamentals of the trenchcoat brigade. You shouldn't be able to pick them out of a crowd, that's what the coat is *for*, what do you mean Legends' coat is designer enough you can tell from the collar, the original comics coat might be a demon in itself from being worn to hell and back, and Dark has the coat be inherited??? I mean, utterly changing the meaning of the symbol every time, much? Also! Being a punk when punk was the new thing signifies something entirely different than being a punk when you grew up a generation later. Every generation's music should generate its own trenchcoat Constantine and I feel strongly about that even when I am not enough of a music person to have a clue how to do it. And! There are trends and developments in occultism too! Like seriously, I haven't paid attention since the 90s but there's several waves of 20th century New Hot Thing I vaguely read about. Vertigo!John had a very specific relationship with them when I was reading. If you keep him standing still in some kind of post modern mashup that mostly references previous issues of *itself* now then you smush the meanings into a new kind of Tradition instead of the original Transformation, in music and magic both.

I have opinions and they're not very educated on this one, but still.


I have only the vaguest of ideas what a guy you couldn't pick out from the crowd who is still the explosive New Thing would look like even if he was my age exactly, it would change rapidly. I have no idea what a 21 year old rebel looks like right now.


So. Feelings about Iconic and iconoclasm. I has them but they're all vague and get off my lawn.

Oh, and I'm not complaining about how other people write, that's not the way up I mean. It's just the guy who acts the exact same way at 20 and 60 becomes a very different guy, even if a sliding timeline gets involved, and so do his cultural referents. And it's interesting even when annoying and makes me want to reinvent again.

And there's a character who when I google him the articles rather improbably say he's a way of bringing a multiverse John back into JLDark? Only then they are dating. And then he's evil. Which is a lot, and apparently in very few issues, which I haven't read. But. At this point a trenchcoat using the exact punk magic of the Vertigo sort could have a generation or two of *mentors*, and relationships within a community doing the same things. Not just lateral ones (like you get in BtVS xovers because Ripper and Conjob were interestingly similar). Long term community that existed before you got there. And that is a different guy! And it's fascinating even if they aren't magic married, but if they *are*... well none of the fic is doing the same as the other fic so I can only assume source is really skinny on this one but, concept.


I keep thinking I could do something fiction shaped with several concept, but the characters in my head don't even match the fic, let alone the sources, so I'd have to file serial numbers off or something.

Like I keep coming back to the question of who wants to be John Constantine when they already know about John Constantine, because you kind of need to to explain John, and it's a tricky one. He built the icon and now what?

Now a lot of canon I haven't read that sounds very dark.

And some TV show I have waiting for me to watch any time I want to get up and do that.



Mostly though I am probably going back to sleep.

Just like in general this week.

I am reading fic and figuring out which bits of these dynamics are personally compelling.
( Read more... )

So I keep turning these characters around in my head and the weird blank space of reading lacking canon is being filled in with a variety of configurations and I am today finding them fascinating.

But more in my head than on the page, where different elements change with every telling.

Today I woke up from a dream
where the brain chip Spike had in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
was retasked by US law
to enforce modern slavery
as punishment for a crime
where the crime was notionally theft
and the theft was inability to pay a bill or pay back a loan.

Also they had, like, prepackaged debt that could be bought and sold and traded around,
so they didn't have to prove it was originally your debt,
they just had to get your thumbprint on you 'accepting' responsibility for the debt now,
kind of like when companies pursue debt from dead people
and their heirs might not know any better.

But even within that very loose definition of debt
the standards of evidence were insanely low
like debt recovery people in the here now who don't even prove you have the same name or address
just pursue someone with vaguely the same initials
or a similar postcode
and leave it up to the 'debtor' to prove they never were that person.

Put it all together with a chip in your brain though
and it applied aversive stimulus
whenever you failed to demonstrate remorse
ie
said things like
I didn't do it
it wasn't me.



... now I'm awake I only find the whole thing implausible
because the cyberpunk future costs money
and just trashing someone's credit rating and waiting
is practically free
so why brain bomb them
when they'll sign up the old fashioned way
and queue up for zero hour gig economy work
instead of becoming legally property
and an owners responsibility.

Just seems too spendy.



However
thinking about murderbot
the answer becomes
some people have too much power
to leave it unplugged.

So it's brain bombs for the ones with the weapons
or the lawyers who enforce where to point them.

I fell asleep with the light on and my watch telling me to stand every hour. I took off the watch eventually but that was a lot of interrupted sleep I wasn't expecting.

My most recent dream before waking:
I was with Captain Picard and Riker, Picard series editions, and we were trapped in the Abyss, trying to find portals out.
Portals looked like flatscreen TVs at sizes up to and including Battle Cruiser ( Read more... )

So, I woke up knowing if I could get up the lift far enough I could follow Jack Harkness home to Cardiff,
but also that I'd somehow have to warn him to keep the refugees contained and keep an eye on them,
which seems rude now I'm awake but also one of the big conundrums.

I'd also have to close the door I made before Cybermen could get to it, and that would mean staying on the Abaddon side.

And then of course Captains Riker and Picard would need to go back to the abyss to pick up the rest of their friends, and this route out wasn't quite a way home for them, unless we could get all the way back before Susan got a message to her Grandfather. Then there's a lift home waiting.

Tidy.



The exact sort of mega crossover that happens in dreams and goes meaninglessly messy when you try and write it, but, for the characters, tidy.


Writing it down sounds tidy and plotty but dreaming it was all just
Run.

I do have my dreams trained well though, if they know they can always Run to Jack.

I haven't written anything for a while again, so, thought I'd sit down and type up some plot ideas I've been having, and why I haven't used them.

(The Paperwork Thing may have worked? Which would be nice? But then I read the newspapers and end up staring at the ceiling going over old tv plots on my head again again again, so, stress persists.)

I have a recurring plot idea of the sort where first everyone turns against you and then they have to admit you were right all along and secretly the bestest, so already it has both appeals and embarrassments.

It's about me vs Willow Rosenberg. Because it's really easy to take Willow and spin her as the bad guy. And not just by reverting her to one specific episode. The problem with the magic addiction arc wasn't just that it took something that had layers of religion and metaphorical sexuality and power and freedom and just flattened it out into a drug addiction hide the magic bongs answer. It was that Willow's actions raised questions that addiction never answered. Sure she got carried away with spells, but, that was an ethical problem, until they dropped addiction into the metaphor. She never seemed to establish many ethical boundaries about it, just that murder is possibly a bad thing, when it's a human being. Seems like there were just a few more boundaries to be thought on, you know? So you can walk her down a lot of paths that way.

But. Do I want to make Willow, Jewish Wiccan Lesbian, the bad guy?
No. No I do not. That seems like an entirely bad idea.

So maybe the story needs, like, shadow Willow, who had the same problems without the same identity stuff.
And there is Amy. Penance maledictions and all. Could be one story element.

But. The bit I keep circling back to is about stealing magic. ( Read more... )

I see some easy yet effective ways to dark side much of the story, and a final confrontation in the genre of I get by with a little help from my friends.

And the finale needs such a lot of characters you'd have to build up a lot of interesting people to get there.

Plus have had a lot of interesting 'bad guys' for the dark sider to steal from.



I just don't so far see enough of a story to write it.

The characters need a lot of constructing if I'm going to get them away from canon that doesn't need this story at all.

And the cast would go mega crossover. Partly to have a lot of different styles of dealing with power. Different hierarchies or lack thereof.


So the bunny isn't there yet.


... but I do keep on having the final battle in my head, where everyone notices Willow is ill of hoarding too much magic, and I was right all along, and I can use sleep spells and healing spells to fix it.



I don't know, if magic is being a metaphor, then having grabbed powers from your enemies and they're making you ill by fighting in your mind... something something tools of the enemy something something problem?

It's not coming together yet.

I mean you can't enslave your enemies and aim them at your other enemies and end up with a better world for it, but, do we need magic to say that?



I think I've written bits of this down before and I haven't got much further except to clarify who needs to turn up as friend in the finale: people who help each other but seldom agree, yet can get things done anyway.

(if they finally listen to me)
(yes the dark side bit is really really easy to understand. just one teensy make listen spell...)
(but noooo, doing things the hard way, with social skills, works better...)



Idea still stewing.

I have for a while been thinking about Pathfinder and how the easyish presence of ressurection can make any imported character's life super complicated.
And I keep starting with Torchwood.

The thing with Torchwood is
the writers looked at the characters and went
"you know what this one needs? more pain!"

So like, some shows, you've got that one fridged woman in the backstory, so one man can have angsty manpain, and only mention her when mentioning she's dead. Right?

But on Torchwood:
( Read more... )

The thing is you get people saying that bringing back the dead is sort of cheap and loses all the stakes. But there are so many *different* stories right here in a list of people who they once couldn't save but now get a chance to, only they've moved on different amounts since then and don't quite know each other. I mean Owen has arguably done Some Murder, and even Toshiko doesn't know all of it. Ianto has done... so many things that people he'd bring back wouldn't imagine. So many different stakes in there, that aren't just The End.

Not to mention that Torchwood and Pathfinder have different ideas about The End, and making them fit together does not come up pretty.

So I want to get the characters out of their box and make the story continue.




Obviously the point of stories about grief and loss is you never ever ever again get to do that
but I feel after fifteen years we have that story told.

New ones time.

My wrist feels improved. It woke me up a couple times but I put a pillow under it and then it was okay.

My dreams on the other hand... the 'lost in a convention hotel' dream added a couple of refinements, like 'you get to your room and in the drawer next to the bed there's a stack of photos clearly taken by a hidden camera last time you were here', and then the ever popular classic 'invasion of infectious undead'.

... on balance the hidden camera thing creeps me out more. but it's close.

It wasn't just the zombies problem, it was that people stopped taking it seriously and just let themselves get got, because after all it wasn't like the victims were actually dying. Sure they experienced significant impairments in movement and cognition, but it isn't death, so lets carry on as normal!
... my dreams are not subtle and it is tedious.

Then someone got infected enough times they turned into the cryptkeeper, which actually seemed to bother them, and someone else did the cryptkeeper thing but also melded with their chair, so they were a head on top of a very veiny chair walking around by its legs. Those two actually seemed to feel they had levelled up, but everyone else finally started taking things seriously.

:eyeroll:

Honestly though the presence of Rupert Giles, looking like ASH does nowish, made it a pretty interesting dream. Plot, adventure, trying to deal with the same old hazards with increasing new movement impairments, it's solid story.

Also I have spent too long looking at LARP weapons lately, because when the stabby things came out the dream sort of broke levels of reality to remember which LARP shops to buy that particular dagger at.
... it is a nice dagger though.



I think I'd quite like a Ripper series with an older Giles. It's the thing where it's about ghosts, so it just adds more ghosts, and the looming spectre of mortality no matter how good you are in a fight.

Also undeath when you're young is about fear of getting old, undeath when you're older is about knowledge. Whole different vibe.