Igenlode Wordsmith

And finally, four years and seventy-five thousand words later... Erik gets the last word. Well, it's canon!

Although I had quite a lot of trouble getting Dar to feel plausibly sympathetic towards him, given that he basically sabotaged everything the two of them had been working for in a fit of pique...

A pair of scenes here to mirror the pair at the beginning; I'd forgotten how amusing Carla is to write, with her overweening self-deception -- she takes care not to think in a straight line even about herself (and very rarely thinks about anybody else). But I did want to show that a lot of the faceless goons on the 'other side' would actually have been boys just like Rall, with people to grieve them. Revolution isn't all bright colours and heroism and Good versus Evil :-(

Chapter 22: The End of the Ghost’s Love Story

Carla trod down the street with a spring in her step, humming a little.

She’d cried buckets — positively howled — when she heard about Salj, of course she had. She wasn’t completely heartless, whatever some people might think, and they’d had a lot of fun together. The last thing she’d expected was to come into work one morning and learn that he’d died in some stupid botched-up attack on the Federation ships just outside her office.

He’d done his duty, defended his post to the last, and helped to beat off the dissidents; no doubt they’d make sure he got some kind of posthumous medal. But all it came down to in the end was that handsome, black-haired Salj, who’d known how to give a girl a good time, had been shot in the head by some angry lunatic with an antiquated energy gun and had his brains boiled out there on the landing field. She hadn’t been able to walk past that point for days.

I can't remember if I thought that telling this scene from the point of view of Gan-the-outsider was inherently a good idea, or if it was just Gan's turn to narrate a chapter, or what... At any rate the impact doesn't seem to have come out as inadequately as I remembered it in retrospect. Fortunately.

The B7 characters' contribution to the crossover plot is basically limited to providing a magic means of exit, but then they did supply the entire setting and political scenario in the first place, so their role isn't quite as uneven as it might seem. Still, it isn't a 'what if character X turned up in plot Y and totally changed everything' plot, more of a 'what if plot Y took place in an AU setting from series X'...

Chapter 20: And Cannot Come Again

The first thing Gan had known about the atmospheric breach had been the buzz of warning as the pressure doors in the shaft to the lowest level began to close while the two of them were still only halfway down. Blake, who’d been ahead of him, had let go instinctively and dropped down onto the floor plates below with a jolt. All that saved Gan himself from injury or worse had been lack of maintenance in the mechanism.

And finally (after I'd edited it, and the computer crashed, and edited it again, and discovered I hadn't installed the HTML mode when I upgraded my text editor...)

I still remember the sense of achievement when I succeeded in finishing this chapter after breaking off to write To Ease Your Troubled Mind in an unprecedented (and since unequalled!) rush of inspiration — oops, that was back in March 2014! https://igenlode.dreamwidth.org/35318.html

This of course was the chapter where I could finally use that eerily apt line from Housman's original poem.

Chapter 18: Into my Heart on Air that Kills

Dar’s men were dying.

Cris watched disaster unfold with dry eyes and an aching heart.

Erik was beyond her pleas entirely now, voice and mind lost behind the mocking, raging mask of the Ghost. He’d routed Dar’s communications back through the control tower at the dockyard and flung them wide open to Federation monitors; every move, every desperate attempt to regroup was betrayed before it could even begin, and long-planned routes of retreat were compromised at the very outset. The Operation on Newparis was falling apart in the vengeful hands of its creator like the toy of an angry child, and the Ghost’s electronic laughter reigned over all.

Rall needs to keep his hand at the level of his eyes... for perfectly good pseudo-technological reasons :-)

Chapter 17: What Spires are Those?

“Keep your hand up— up at eye-level,” Gan prompted again, urgently, as Rall’s wrist wavered; the deactivators themselves weighed little enough, but the strain of keeping them high enough was more than any of them had bargained for. Gan had traded his own device gratefully enough with Blake after only a few minutes of fumbling one-handed through the sub-basement — these haphazard passages past blocks and between girders had never been meant for a man his size — but the young Newpie had been carrying the second deactivator without complaint since they’d plunged through the first hidden door, and Gan suspected Rall’s arm was aching more than he was prepared to admit.

I was a bit stuck on a title for this chapter, but it was of course inevitable once I'd remembered my Blake's 7! ( progress of Swedish story )

Chapter 15: Rumours of Death

Communications buzzed with it. Alerts ran out across the planet. Dispatches were encrypted to Space Command. Sentries neglected their duties to discuss it; surveillance officers, chasing shadows, missed the purposeful movement of bodies of men. Dar Ogar, moving among them, heard the news and had no reason to doubt it. A Federation commander meant nothing to him, and he spared a moment’s wry gratitude for the distraction — the boy had just made his life a great deal easier.

Well, Adrift in Space did every bit as badly as I expected it to( moaning about reaction to 'Blue Remembered Hills' )

First draft of the Hallowe'en story "Annoyance" done, I think. The fandom really isn't going to like that one, given that it depicts their beloved Erik as a psychopath who fantasises about killing off Christine in order to get rid of the uncomfortable new feelings he is experiencing around her; even I wondered if I'd gone too far, given the way that he subsequently behaves around her when he first kidnaps her in Leroux (filling the room with flowers, telling her he loves her). ( Read more... )

This is the chapter I remember having a lot of trouble with when it came to writing up the scene, as I'd imagined the whole thing from an omniscient external perspective, then had to decide whose viewpoint I could possibly use to recount it from: none of the characters are actually on the spot the whole way through. It's a similar problem to the one I would have with my Buquet-story several years later, but in this case I decided to show Erik and Cris eavesdropping through the omnipresent surveillance system rather than telling the story from the viewpoint of any of the actual participants; however, this then raised the question of how I was going to format Erik's little interjections, especially given the extremely limited options accepted by fanfiction.net (bold, italic and underline, basically)!

I think it works...

Chapter 12: A Disinterested Gift

Cris clutched at Erik’s arm, terrified eyes glimpsed through the pale silk of her hair as if through a lying veil of innocence, and he shook her off. She had never been a beauty; with her face blotched and red, she was more ordinary than ever. Just another silly, shallow-minded child, he told himself, trying to staunch the howling tide of pain that swept over him whenever he saw her look at the boy. Whenever he saw her pouring out that sweetness, that compassion, on youthful limbs and a foolish nose... why, it was long enough to provide noses for the both of them, Erik thought savagely. Perhaps he should propose it to her. It was ironic, after all, that one of her lovers should be so gifted and the other so deprived in that department...

“Please—” Desperate hands grasped at him again. “Erik, please — what’s happening to him? Oh, what have you done?”

“You’ll find it’s a question of what you have done,” he flung back, and saw her flinch. There was bitter satisfaction in it, though she still did not understand. But she would. Oh, she would see.

Well, after all the excitement over the initial chapter of "In Regret, Always", the second chapter got precisely eighteen visitors and one review (so much for "please update soon"). I ought to be grateful for the one loyal reviewer (who has reviewed just about everything — except "Blue Remembered Hills"! — since the start, when she was for some time my only person doing so) but... it would be nice to know whether people inherently object to the plot, or the experimental structure, or just don't find it that interesting :-(

Time to try again with the next update on the next story... I think it does pay to write either longer stories or one-shots in this fandom; people seem to like epics, and one-shots don't require much commitment. At any rate, my one-shots seem to do relatively well. (It couldn't possibly be anything to do with the longueurs of my writing, could it? ;-p)

Chapter 10: Happy Highways Where We Went

Rall dreamed of loving Cris, and woke smiling, with the vivid warmth of that memory almost close enough to touch. He lay quietly on the hard pallet, drowsing, reliving the clumsy, exquisite miracle of each kiss behind closed eyes. The ghost of her mouth under his moved against parted lips; drew away in shy disbelief, and gave itself again with an eagerness that brought a stab of sheer joy now in remembering.

She had wanted him.( Read more... )

I'm seriously running out of time on posting this one before I disappear, but I can manage to give it a few hours here before the mandatory pre-FFnet reread..

I'd forgotten just how much E/C I'd put into this story in the hopes of attracting the 'mainstream audience' -- at this point, we're practically in classic "Christine is Erik's prisoner and is learning to love and pity him" territory. What with that and "In Regret Always", I seem to have been paying a lot more attention to Christine's relationship with the Phantom recently than I have for a long time!

Chapter 8: The Land of Lost Content

The third time Cris woke from the nightmare, it was dawn, and light was flooding across her face.

She curled up shivering, attempting to stifle the whimpers. Every time it was the same. She woke... only to exchange the dreamed horror for one that was real. She was trapped here, trapped in a tomb— with a monster who loved her.( Read more... )

And here's the other half of the Blake/Gan chapter; Blake's scenes weren't really long enough to stand on their own, and Gan's big scene would have made a very long single chapter in contrast. So we have here the combined outsiders' view of some fairly tumultuous events (and I've tried to distinguish the two different viewpoints).

Chapter 6: Broken Trust

Gan felt his mouth go dry. The spectre in black and white held them all, effortlessly, by sheer force of dominion. The voice, when it came, was distorted: a rising inhuman hiss through circuits that shielded and manipulated alike.

“People of Newparis— I have brought you here to make an example. An example that some among you have forgotten. An example to all those in whose talent we trust.”

Long, gloved fingers gestured, and a girl somewhere to the right cried out in one short sharp whimper of surprise. The crowd stirred, parting, as two broad-hewed men in dockyard clothes elbowed through with the chosen one caught up between them.

Gan got one glimpse down at her face, white as ash beneath the pale plait that crowned her head; the whisper of Vargas’ double axe sang ghost-like through his mind and he almost reached out to her, but Blake caught at his sleeve, both of them unsure in that moment if she was to be heroine or sacrifice of the hour. “Gan, wait— we don’t know—”

And then she was past and gone, hastened up to the stage where Dar stood rigid and grim, and Gan had only the memory of blue eyes pale as waxen thread, filled with all-consuming terror of the Ghost.( Read more... )