11-17-2008, 12:39 PM
This is sort of a fic whose idea I floated on the Legendary channel a week or so ago, saying that I thought it was a bad idea and that I hoped that discussing
it would get my muse to shut up.
Instead, people said that they thought that a fic about dumping several different people in the place of the main characters of Macross Frontier had the
potential to be either or both awesome and hilarious.
You know who you are.
This is all your fault.
Waking up was a shock.
At first I was just warm and comfortable, with the sheets smooth against my skin and maybe a slight urge to visit the bathroom before going back to sleep.
Then I realized that there was too much skin exposed to those sheets, and that they were too smooth to me mine. That got me to wake up a little more -
just enough to notice that I felt wrong, too squashed on the chest and too light around the middle, and the blast of shocked adrenaline hitting my
system made me practically levitate out of my bed.
"Oh, god," I said. Atheist or not, there are some things that our society conditions us to say in times of shock. "What the fuck?!"
It wasn't my voice. It sounded nothing like my voice... and I was, I realized a moment after the fact, speaking Japanese. Much more fluently than I should
have been able to.
I like to think of myself as a calm, controlled sort of person. So when I say that I paniced then, it is with more than a touch of shame. I broke out into a
cold sweat, I glanced around frantically (pointless, that - the room was dark) I hyperventilated... at least I didn't scream, that would have been
hard to explain.
After a minute or so of desperate gasping, my lungs decided to register a protest at the heavy workload without prior notice. Each cough was painful, a raw
scraping lightning bolt that started somewhere around my heart and grounded out against my voicebox. It hurt, and it made my vision star and flash
with the amount of difficulty I had breathing through it.
Without thinking about it or conciously deciding to, I slapped on the light on the bedside table, grabbed the bottle revealed thereby, opened it with a
practiced twist of thumb and forefinger, shook out several of the pills inside it and swallowed one of them dry, then dug in to my self control to wait out the
coughing until the thing had taken effect.
Then, once I could do something other than try to stay concious, I asked myself, 'What the hell did I just take?'
I didn't expect to get an answer, even if just one in the form of a rush of memories, the connected associations of my mother (except that that wasn't
the woman who should have worn the title, in late middle age with silver shot liberally through her wavy black hair, but a somewhat younger one with short,
straight black hair and a pacific island cast to her face), of my doctor and manager, of the various bottles and pills and lab tests and...
I had, I realized, arrived in possession of my new body's memories as well as my original ones. That or I had retained my original memories in addition to
the ones created when I went completely INSANE without any warning or cause whatsoever, but being the star of an otakufic made marginally more sense,
especially since my name was Sheryl, rather than Nathan.
Sheryl. Sheryl Nome.
That meant... Macross Frontier. NUNS Capital, where I was now, immensely pretty like a single giant city park on a living world.
I was from... Macross Galaxy, dark and close and neon-lit all through, like something straight out of Blade Runner or William Gibson, with the flash and the
grit and the big men in the flashy suits with the 'candy' and the dead, hungry eyes while the passersby couldn't care to notice.
I knew the... Vajra, not just from the recent attacks and the recruiting vid 'I'd' done, but from eyes int he dark at the end of the
half-remembered time before the cold and the danger and the hunger.
I had... V-syndrome, the deadly disease whose attacks on my brain function were suppressed by the drugs that had such nasty consequences for my lungs ability
to draw oxygen that I had to take an entire OTHER drugs to keep that from killing me.
Eventually the rush of associations stopped, and I tried to consider my situation and what, if anything, I could and should do about it. The Vajra, that Leon
character... Ranka's (she didn't look nearly so much like a young boy in person) cute little pet from the Underwear Incident... I wouldn't call
myself a fan of the 'Great Man' theory of history, but the setup the show had implied and the things I knew about my own position implied that I was in
a position to act on events of significance...
Given how widespread the Vajra were, and their abilities and the increasing frequency of their attacks...
Thousands, even millions of lives might depend on my ability to make those decisions and actions the right ones.
The very thought scared the living shit out of me.
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
it would get my muse to shut up.
Instead, people said that they thought that a fic about dumping several different people in the place of the main characters of Macross Frontier had the
potential to be either or both awesome and hilarious.
You know who you are.
This is all your fault.
Waking up was a shock.
At first I was just warm and comfortable, with the sheets smooth against my skin and maybe a slight urge to visit the bathroom before going back to sleep.
Then I realized that there was too much skin exposed to those sheets, and that they were too smooth to me mine. That got me to wake up a little more -
just enough to notice that I felt wrong, too squashed on the chest and too light around the middle, and the blast of shocked adrenaline hitting my
system made me practically levitate out of my bed.
"Oh, god," I said. Atheist or not, there are some things that our society conditions us to say in times of shock. "What the fuck?!"
It wasn't my voice. It sounded nothing like my voice... and I was, I realized a moment after the fact, speaking Japanese. Much more fluently than I should
have been able to.
I like to think of myself as a calm, controlled sort of person. So when I say that I paniced then, it is with more than a touch of shame. I broke out into a
cold sweat, I glanced around frantically (pointless, that - the room was dark) I hyperventilated... at least I didn't scream, that would have been
hard to explain.
After a minute or so of desperate gasping, my lungs decided to register a protest at the heavy workload without prior notice. Each cough was painful, a raw
scraping lightning bolt that started somewhere around my heart and grounded out against my voicebox. It hurt, and it made my vision star and flash
with the amount of difficulty I had breathing through it.
Without thinking about it or conciously deciding to, I slapped on the light on the bedside table, grabbed the bottle revealed thereby, opened it with a
practiced twist of thumb and forefinger, shook out several of the pills inside it and swallowed one of them dry, then dug in to my self control to wait out the
coughing until the thing had taken effect.
Then, once I could do something other than try to stay concious, I asked myself, 'What the hell did I just take?'
I didn't expect to get an answer, even if just one in the form of a rush of memories, the connected associations of my mother (except that that wasn't
the woman who should have worn the title, in late middle age with silver shot liberally through her wavy black hair, but a somewhat younger one with short,
straight black hair and a pacific island cast to her face), of my doctor and manager, of the various bottles and pills and lab tests and...
I had, I realized, arrived in possession of my new body's memories as well as my original ones. That or I had retained my original memories in addition to
the ones created when I went completely INSANE without any warning or cause whatsoever, but being the star of an otakufic made marginally more sense,
especially since my name was Sheryl, rather than Nathan.
Sheryl. Sheryl Nome.
That meant... Macross Frontier. NUNS Capital, where I was now, immensely pretty like a single giant city park on a living world.
I was from... Macross Galaxy, dark and close and neon-lit all through, like something straight out of Blade Runner or William Gibson, with the flash and the
grit and the big men in the flashy suits with the 'candy' and the dead, hungry eyes while the passersby couldn't care to notice.
I knew the... Vajra, not just from the recent attacks and the recruiting vid 'I'd' done, but from eyes int he dark at the end of the
half-remembered time before the cold and the danger and the hunger.
I had... V-syndrome, the deadly disease whose attacks on my brain function were suppressed by the drugs that had such nasty consequences for my lungs ability
to draw oxygen that I had to take an entire OTHER drugs to keep that from killing me.
Eventually the rush of associations stopped, and I tried to consider my situation and what, if anything, I could and should do about it. The Vajra, that Leon
character... Ranka's (she didn't look nearly so much like a young boy in person) cute little pet from the Underwear Incident... I wouldn't call
myself a fan of the 'Great Man' theory of history, but the setup the show had implied and the things I knew about my own position implied that I was in
a position to act on events of significance...
Given how widespread the Vajra were, and their abilities and the increasing frequency of their attacks...
Thousands, even millions of lives might depend on my ability to make those decisions and actions the right ones.
The very thought scared the living shit out of me.
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
Could we get some behind the scenes information on this idea?