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.

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.

Switching between the two sets of characters here leaves rather more of an unresolved cliffhanger at the end of the previous chapter than I'd realised!

Chapter 11: That Far Country

Dar watched the two offworlders in the shadowy light, wondering how much to tell them; how far he must betray his friend and that scarred, unhappy past. They’d given him a wild enough story of alien marvels, of teleport travel and miraculous escapes, and he was not entirely sure he believed it.

But whatever —whoever— they were, they would be new faces to Erik. They would have that moment’s precious advantage... and whatever tales they had heard, they were not in unthinking awe of the Ghost. They had not been terrorised, dominated and manipulated; they had not been moulded like the Organisation into an instrument aimed by Erik’s hand. And they had not seen Buquet’s body, broadcast one morning in all its splayed ragdoll ruin as a warning. As an object lesson, Erik had said blandly, when Dar, who’d had to deal with the Federation and the resulting enquiry, had dared to question the act.

The Ghost hadn’t been content to break Buquet’s neck. He’d broken practically every other bone in his body. Most of them, Dar thought, all too familiar with human debris, after death. Most of them.

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... )

And... back to the "Blake's 7" perspective. Reposting the story cynically in one section or the other of fanfiction.net according to which set of characters are being featured (as opposed to using the official 'crossover' section, which very few people bother to check for new entries) at least gives me a chance to gauge readership in the two separate fandoms. Unsurprisingly, it's considerably larger on the 'Phantom' side. (Unfortunately, I forgot to change the fandom back when initially posting chapter 2, so any alerts that went out to my 'followers' will have listed the story as a "Blake's 7" one and thus of no interest to them...)

'Considerably', of course, is a relative term. A grand total of thirty-four people actually went so far as to glance at chapter 2, but one of them was so excited as to 'follow' the story (which I hope means she'll recognise the update when I post this chapter into the other fandom) :-p)

Chapter 3: Down and Safe

Blake was asleep when the call came.

They’d all been on edge for far too long — in the case of Avon, himself and Jenna, more or less constantly since they’d first boarded the Liberator — and Avon for one was starting to look exhausted, all the squared angles of his face drawn sharper and more uncompromising than ever. No doubt he’d barely rested all this time for fear that the rest of them might somehow double-cross him or work out a way to put the ship to profit at his expense. No doubt, Blake considered wearily, Avon himself could have come up with two or three ways of doing just that. He wondered if all geniuses were paranoid, or if it was close proximity to computers that had soured Avon on humanity at large... or more personal reasons, perhaps.

Well, he wasn’t about to pry; he needed Avon’s cooperation, and it was hard enough to get that out of him anyway. Any attempt to restore the man to the human race would have to wait until later. Much later.

When I got out my tape of "Project Avalon"/"Breakdown" to do some Phantom-related research (what happens when Zen goes offline?) I discovered that the video had been left still wound halfway through from when I watched "Project Avalon" for the Blake's 7 Synchro-watch in the newsgroup alt.fan.blakes-7. Apparently that was over twelve years ago...

At any rate, I thought I might as well write up my impressions of the episode for the newsgroup for old times' sake, since I never actually did "Breakdown" at the time; but since there hasn't been much traffic in that group for years and Google have broken the newsgroup archive interface, I thought I'd post the article here as well, for posterity.