LJ talk and xxxHOLiC fic stuffs
Jul. 31st, 2007 08:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rallamajoopI downloaded LJ Talk a while back but I haven’t really done anything with it since, so I was wondering, are any of the rest of you using it? Is it worth bothering with, or should I just stick with the usual gmail/occasional AIM chat programs I’m used to?
On to an unrelated (though much lengthier) topic, it’s generally known that not everyone who enjoys a fic comes up with anything to say about it (and much as Ilive for like getting feedback, I’d be the last person to complain about this since I’m very aware I don’t leave feedback on everything I read by a long margin). So one of the nice bonuses of doing polls like this one is suddenly you’re getting a slightly better idea of about how many people really are reading your work and getting enough out of it to have an opinion on what they’d like to see more of, and – well, I’m not sure what number I was expecting, but still. Cool. That’s quite a lot of people. ^_^ And of course it’s extra gratifying when they all vote for the one you wanted to continue anyway.
The post-apocalyptic AU is coming along nicely, but there are a lot of background details that need to be sorted out, some of which I think I’ve got figured out, some of which I’m still pondering. So, in the hope I can talk people into helping me bounce ideas around, here’s what I’ve got so far:
The nearest Complex was 200 miles away, where a giant glass dome and round-the-clock security protected just enough arable land to support, by safe calculation, exactly five hundred and twenty-four men, women and children. When the year was good and they had food enough to spare, they stored it in giant underground compartments which some said had contents enough to support the whole population through the worse years when nothing would grow. When the storage was full, they’d trade food for what outsiders could bring them; salvaged tech from the junk piles and raw metals were their favourites. Not much went in or out, everything under the dome was recycled – the air, the water, probably even the people. Twice in Doumeki’s memory they’d expanded past their borders, new domes springing up like slow growing mushrooms. They had a way of reclaiming the dead lands now, he’d heard tell, but it was slow and the components were rare, and expansion put the whole colony at risk until everything was finished. Workers and guards had swarmed like bees over those new sections every moment of the long months it took them to finish.
It was a closed world to outsiders. Most of what anyone knew reliably about life indoors came from the few residents who ever left – the old or the crippled or the crazy, or people who were too sick with strange new diseases to be quarantined. They told stories about a life inside like the old days – where there was running water, regulated temperature and working technology, and the greatest luxury of all – to always know where your next meal was coming from. It sounded like paradise to someone raised out in the dead lands, people outside dreamt of getting in someday, and eagerly repeated even the most unlikely stories that made it sound possible.
Doumeki didn’t want any part of it. It was survival of the fittest wherever you went these days, but he’d take natural selection over artificial any day. At least out here the old and sick had the same half-arsed chance at survival everyone else did, they weren’t raised in a sandbox and thrown out into the cold the day they outlived being useful.
Thanks to Fye, Doumeki had heard more about life on the inside than most people, since their tech would sometimes talk about it when he was in the mood. Doumeki half-suspected he embellished a lot of it when he got bored though, so he’d never been sure exactly how much to believe. What Fye was doing on the outside was mystery enough itself – he was still young and healthy and patently not useless. People who broke the rules – the criminals – got thrown out sometimes too, of course, but ultimately, Fye was another of those people in the category of being too useful for anyone in the camp to have the luxury of prying any deeper.
Kurogane had always been the one in charge, not the leader in any official sense, but he was the one who always knew was they needed to do and when he gave an instruction they others obeyed it. Doumeki was second-in-command by similar token – there were no official ranks, but the suggestions he made were good and Kurogane rarely argued with them. Doumeki could hit a moving target at two hundred yards too, which always did no harm to one’s command status.
Doumeki had come to learn that Sakura was stronger than she looked, but she was such a pretty, fragile thing that she would never have lasted long in this world alone. The reason she had survived was that Syaoran would rip anyone who hurt her limb from limb – literally, if he felt it was necessary and she wasn’t there to see it. Syaoran fought like no-one else Doumeki had ever seen – he was more than proficient with all variety of guns, but it was with hand-to-hand combat or blade-weapons that he truly excelled. The kid could twist and strike like a snake, he go into fits of such intense concentration in a fight that it scared even his allies. It was too much relief sometimes to be reminded that even then – so far – he’d always remembered who those allies were. Where he’d come from or where he’d learned to fight like that Doumeki had no idea, even Syaoran himself was seemed hazy on the details of his own past. All he remembered for certain was that Sakura was important, and he took to the task of protecting her with the single-mindedness of a man who had nothing else in the universe that was real to him. If Sakura knew anything more she’d never said and no-one asked. It was the first, unwritten rule at their camp, as long as you pulled your weight, you past was your past and no-one would make you talk about it.
Still, something about the way Syaoran moved, the way he learnt faster than anyone else but never quite seemed to be all there made Doumeki remember one of Fye’s taller tales – the one about the labs in the Complexes where they took their approach to artificial selection one step further and experimented with children who’d be born stronger or smarter or with more endurance. He wondered what they’d do with one – or two – who’d worked a little too well, and not well enough all at once.
Syaoran stayed at the camp mostly, guarding the perimeters on regular patrol. He didn’t like going further from Sakura than necessary, so it said a lot about how far he’d come towards trusting his companions in the past few years that he would occasionally sometimes leave Sakura in their care for now for hours at a time to take his part in occasional missions elsewhere.
Fye didn’t leave the camp very often either. Most of his day was spent in the endless cycle of checking and repairing the nest of solar panels in the centre of their camp. The power went to two places – one was the electrified fence that ran around the perimeter, to catch anything Syaoran might miss. The other one was Chi.
Chi was Fye’s pride and joy – very probably the only working computer outside of the Complexes in this side of the country, more valuable than a whole year’s ammo or food. Communication between the Complexes went by radio waves or satellite – low tech stuff that anyone could pick up, but without equipment of Chi’s calibre it would be indecipherable. Her main job was to get them the weather reports. Acid rain and cataclysmic storms were rarer these days than they’d been ten or even fives years ago, and people were getting bolder and were less and less prepared when one did hit. Knowing when one was due was worth all the work her upkeep took. Information like that sold at a good price to any other camps they wanted to trade with, as long as you kept up your reputation as being reliable and they didn’t ask where you got the information from. The general rumour – ones they did their best to keep alive – was that they had a contact in one of the Complexes, the kind of thing that couldn’t be stolen and would become useless if their camp was ever ruined. If rival gangs ever learned about Chi, not even the electric fence would keep them out for long.
Chi could draw them maps of anywhere they might want to go too, and could update them whenever the Complexes sent each other word the landscape was changing again. Even gang movement would come in with the news sometimes. No messages ever went out from her that might be traced back to a source – all she did was listen.
Why she had to look like she was a she or even a human, Doumeki had never understood, he would have preferred his machines to look like what they were, but at least it made her interface easy to deal with. Fye had keyboards and monitors he could hook up to her ears, but mostly people just asked her their questions and she answered them, or drew them maps in the sand with her fingers.
Other characters and stuff to come:
So, talk to me people. Am I heading in a good direction with all this? Anyone got any good suggestions about what I should/shouldn't be doing with this world?
On to an unrelated (though much lengthier) topic, it’s generally known that not everyone who enjoys a fic comes up with anything to say about it (and much as I
The post-apocalyptic AU is coming along nicely, but there are a lot of background details that need to be sorted out, some of which I think I’ve got figured out, some of which I’m still pondering. So, in the hope I can talk people into helping me bounce ideas around, here’s what I’ve got so far:
The nearest Complex was 200 miles away, where a giant glass dome and round-the-clock security protected just enough arable land to support, by safe calculation, exactly five hundred and twenty-four men, women and children. When the year was good and they had food enough to spare, they stored it in giant underground compartments which some said had contents enough to support the whole population through the worse years when nothing would grow. When the storage was full, they’d trade food for what outsiders could bring them; salvaged tech from the junk piles and raw metals were their favourites. Not much went in or out, everything under the dome was recycled – the air, the water, probably even the people. Twice in Doumeki’s memory they’d expanded past their borders, new domes springing up like slow growing mushrooms. They had a way of reclaiming the dead lands now, he’d heard tell, but it was slow and the components were rare, and expansion put the whole colony at risk until everything was finished. Workers and guards had swarmed like bees over those new sections every moment of the long months it took them to finish.
It was a closed world to outsiders. Most of what anyone knew reliably about life indoors came from the few residents who ever left – the old or the crippled or the crazy, or people who were too sick with strange new diseases to be quarantined. They told stories about a life inside like the old days – where there was running water, regulated temperature and working technology, and the greatest luxury of all – to always know where your next meal was coming from. It sounded like paradise to someone raised out in the dead lands, people outside dreamt of getting in someday, and eagerly repeated even the most unlikely stories that made it sound possible.
Doumeki didn’t want any part of it. It was survival of the fittest wherever you went these days, but he’d take natural selection over artificial any day. At least out here the old and sick had the same half-arsed chance at survival everyone else did, they weren’t raised in a sandbox and thrown out into the cold the day they outlived being useful.
Thanks to Fye, Doumeki had heard more about life on the inside than most people, since their tech would sometimes talk about it when he was in the mood. Doumeki half-suspected he embellished a lot of it when he got bored though, so he’d never been sure exactly how much to believe. What Fye was doing on the outside was mystery enough itself – he was still young and healthy and patently not useless. People who broke the rules – the criminals – got thrown out sometimes too, of course, but ultimately, Fye was another of those people in the category of being too useful for anyone in the camp to have the luxury of prying any deeper.
Kurogane had always been the one in charge, not the leader in any official sense, but he was the one who always knew was they needed to do and when he gave an instruction they others obeyed it. Doumeki was second-in-command by similar token – there were no official ranks, but the suggestions he made were good and Kurogane rarely argued with them. Doumeki could hit a moving target at two hundred yards too, which always did no harm to one’s command status.
Doumeki had come to learn that Sakura was stronger than she looked, but she was such a pretty, fragile thing that she would never have lasted long in this world alone. The reason she had survived was that Syaoran would rip anyone who hurt her limb from limb – literally, if he felt it was necessary and she wasn’t there to see it. Syaoran fought like no-one else Doumeki had ever seen – he was more than proficient with all variety of guns, but it was with hand-to-hand combat or blade-weapons that he truly excelled. The kid could twist and strike like a snake, he go into fits of such intense concentration in a fight that it scared even his allies. It was too much relief sometimes to be reminded that even then – so far – he’d always remembered who those allies were. Where he’d come from or where he’d learned to fight like that Doumeki had no idea, even Syaoran himself was seemed hazy on the details of his own past. All he remembered for certain was that Sakura was important, and he took to the task of protecting her with the single-mindedness of a man who had nothing else in the universe that was real to him. If Sakura knew anything more she’d never said and no-one asked. It was the first, unwritten rule at their camp, as long as you pulled your weight, you past was your past and no-one would make you talk about it.
Still, something about the way Syaoran moved, the way he learnt faster than anyone else but never quite seemed to be all there made Doumeki remember one of Fye’s taller tales – the one about the labs in the Complexes where they took their approach to artificial selection one step further and experimented with children who’d be born stronger or smarter or with more endurance. He wondered what they’d do with one – or two – who’d worked a little too well, and not well enough all at once.
Syaoran stayed at the camp mostly, guarding the perimeters on regular patrol. He didn’t like going further from Sakura than necessary, so it said a lot about how far he’d come towards trusting his companions in the past few years that he would occasionally sometimes leave Sakura in their care for now for hours at a time to take his part in occasional missions elsewhere.
Fye didn’t leave the camp very often either. Most of his day was spent in the endless cycle of checking and repairing the nest of solar panels in the centre of their camp. The power went to two places – one was the electrified fence that ran around the perimeter, to catch anything Syaoran might miss. The other one was Chi.
Chi was Fye’s pride and joy – very probably the only working computer outside of the Complexes in this side of the country, more valuable than a whole year’s ammo or food. Communication between the Complexes went by radio waves or satellite – low tech stuff that anyone could pick up, but without equipment of Chi’s calibre it would be indecipherable. Her main job was to get them the weather reports. Acid rain and cataclysmic storms were rarer these days than they’d been ten or even fives years ago, and people were getting bolder and were less and less prepared when one did hit. Knowing when one was due was worth all the work her upkeep took. Information like that sold at a good price to any other camps they wanted to trade with, as long as you kept up your reputation as being reliable and they didn’t ask where you got the information from. The general rumour – ones they did their best to keep alive – was that they had a contact in one of the Complexes, the kind of thing that couldn’t be stolen and would become useless if their camp was ever ruined. If rival gangs ever learned about Chi, not even the electric fence would keep them out for long.
Chi could draw them maps of anywhere they might want to go too, and could update them whenever the Complexes sent each other word the landscape was changing again. Even gang movement would come in with the news sometimes. No messages ever went out from her that might be traced back to a source – all she did was listen.
Why she had to look like she was a she or even a human, Doumeki had never understood, he would have preferred his machines to look like what they were, but at least it made her interface easy to deal with. Fye had keyboards and monitors he could hook up to her ears, but mostly people just asked her their questions and she answered them, or drew them maps in the sand with her fingers.
Other characters and stuff to come:
- I feel vaguely as though there should be more members to their camp, but I’m not sure any of the Tsubasa/xxxHOLiC regulars will be appropriate. Touya and Yukito are almost definitely out, unless I remove any relationship between Touya and Sakura. If they get even a cameo, it’ll probably be as some kind of freelance duo who show up now and then but mostly keep on the move. Souma’s a possibility, but I probably don’t know her well enough to write. I’m toying with the idea of Tomoyo as someone from the Complexes who actually ventures far enough to talk to the outsiders sometimes and Souma as her bodyguard, but it doesn’t quite feel like they fit in anywhere yet. Alternately, there may just be a couple of recent, unnamed graves at the back of the camp, which I could probably get away without mentioning in more than passing, since that’s just the sort of stuff that happens in a world like this.
- I could also have a couple of characters (presumably other transplanted CLAMP characters) who’d appear as ghosts to Watanuki, but I haven’t got the faintest clue who they’d be yet…
Hey, maybe I could work Mugestu in as some kind of radiation mutant critter!- Since Doumeki recognised Watanuki so quickly as the ‘spirit-seeing-boy’ when they first met, I’m wondering whether he has some kind of distinguishing feature – possibly also whatever it is that makes it easier for the rest of the raiding gangs who’ve stolen him from each other in the past. If he’s blind in one eye (a la volume 7), that might do nicely…
- Since the Tsubasa characters are all on first-name-basis (and not all even seem to *have* last names), I’m pondering whether I should have everyone referring to Doumeki and Watanuki as Shizuka and Kimihiro for consistency. Which means I’ll have to decide whether I’m referring to them that way or by last names in the text too.
- In case there could have been any doubt, I will state that this world is definitely going donuty in a serious way in the near future, and I have a pretty good idea how it’s going to get there too. The only question I’ll have to deal with is how much will be shown on screen.>.>
- Watanuki in this world is not domestic in the least. He can’t begin to understand why anyone would even bother learning to cook or clean.
- There will very likely be a Kohane – probably someone Watanuki and Doumeki will pick up in the ruins of a destroyed Complex. Details are still being figured out, but I think she may have been born on the outside, but her mother managed to use whatever Secret Power her daughter possesses in this universe to convince the Complex poeple to let them in. I suspect it’ll turn out she and Sakura can see ghosts in this world too – they just don’t attract them the way Watanuki does, so it doesn’t make such a difference. Also, it should be pretty much a given that anything that ruins a whole Complex in one hit is going to be something nasty.
- All the X characters from the Acid Tokyo arc are getting a direct transplant, because I loved that world to bits, and they won’t take much rewriting at all. I did actually toy briefly with setting this whole world in the same universe from Tsubasa, but I wanted a little more freedom to invent stuff, and having the same X characters who met the regular Tsubasa crew meet my own warped versions would get a little awkward (there may well still be a similar food source in the form of monsterous, mutated animals though). Anyway, the two Acid Tokyo groups will be the two biggest (and, all considering, least unpleasant) gangs in the vicinity of where the main characters live, and they’ll be on decent but hardly friendly terms with the main characters.
- There is a Himawari in this universe – or there was, because by the time Watanuki joins Kurogane’s camp, she’s been dead for some time. She’s going to be someone who Watanuki used to know, probably a year or more ago. She’s starting to develop an interesting story too which I hope to get to go into at some point, because I don’t think Watanuki ever sees her ghost and he certainly wouldn’t talk about her under most circumstances, and naturally we’re not going to see her alive.
- It turns out that part of the reason Doumeki was so mad at Watanuki for bringing Haruka up is that until that moment, he was still holding on to a faint possibility that his grandfather might be alive. I did not see this coming when I wrote that scene. Now I’ve only gone and given Doumeki another reason why he doesn’t want to believe what Watanuki can do is real.
- And because people are bound to be wondering about that other rather important xxxHOLiC character I haven’t brought up yet, there’s no Yuuko in this universe. If there ever was one, she’s been dead for a long time.
So, talk to me people. Am I heading in a good direction with all this? Anyone got any good suggestions about what I should/shouldn't be doing with this world?