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Ninjin,
A B5/?? Crossover Shortfic,
By Aleh
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The Earth-Minbari war was a disaster for the Earth Alliance. In the end, Earth's forces were forced to mount a final, desperate defence against the Minbari forces, a defence that they knew they could not win. Nonetheless, the Alliance forces courageously fought, selling their lives as dearly as they could.
On the cusp of defeat, however, they were saved by an unlikely source. An unknown ship, composed of several black, crystalline spikes centered around a red ball, appeared, as if out of nowhere, and devastated the Minbari forces. Within a few seconds, half the Minbari fleet had been destroyed. Within a minute, the entirety of the Minbari force had either been destroyed or had retreated.
While attempts at communication with the Alliance's mysterious saviour were successful, the responses were somewhat confusing, consisting of a language that appeared to be composed entirely of variants on a cat's meow. Given the emotional undertones, however, it quickly became apparent that the ship could understand the communications that were sent to it, and was replying as best it could. After several minutes of questioning, the Alliance managed to interpret that the mysterious ship wanted to land. Not wanting to offend their mysterious and rediculously powerful savior, the Alliance's leadership quickly directed the ship towards a landing area on a military base in Nevada.
Much to the shock of those present at the base, however, the ship, upon reaching its designated landing zone, appeared to collapse, before turning into a small creature that appeared to be a bizzarre cross between a cat and a rabbit. Judging by its reactions to the various personnel present, it was friendly, but, as an unknown factor, finding out more about humanity's savior was a high priority. In the end, Psi-Corps sent a P-12 rated telepath to attempt to make contact with the friendly being.
Upon scanning the small, grey cabbit, however, Alfred Bester had only one thing to say.
"My God, it's full of carrots."
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This fic came about as a result of the latest spat of Tenchi crossovers that managed to completely underestimate the power levels of the Tenchi cast, as well as some of the cliches of B5 crossovers.
And yes, Ryou-ou-ki is that powerful.
-- This message brought to you by Ely Lilly, makers of SeraFem: Happy Pills for PMS.

New topic so as to not clutter up the Gazeeteer thread, with a few other random items.
First, the Gazeeteer comment:

Quote:

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Space Pirates (Leijiites, Buccaneers): Free men of Space, the Pirates hold themselves to the moral code expressed by their symbolic founder, the great Captain Harlock. Known best for protecting the weak in the asteroid belt, flamboyant dress codes and melodramatic speeches.
Village Hidden in Asteroids (Ninjas): Founded by an international coalition of Naruto fans, the Hidden Asteroid is considered the finest martial-arts center in all of Fenspace. Also has the highest concentration of fenkinder anywhere save the Potterite districts. Has an odd friendly rivalry thing going on with the Space Pirates.

---

A thought for Mister Sandman, by The Chordettes (lyrics)
Each person in the area of effect has a pleasant dream the next time he or she falls asleep. If the person thinks an erotic dream is "pleasant", that's a definite possibility, thanks to the lyrics.
As for why Doug would do this... well, if people in the AoE had just witnessed a disaster or an atrocity, they might need the help in sleeping...

-Rob Kelk
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

By request... Cliff's notes for the ending of I'm Here to Help.
- Previously, Emerald had discovered that Sailor Moon was Serentiy.
- He takes her to a Strange Place in order to try to convince her to not Do That Cleansing Thing.
- Her ghost mom steals her away before he can finish with the convincing, and convinces her to ignore his arguments. Meanwhile, Beryl is attacking. Mom sends the Senshi to fight and die.
- Mom and Pluto deliberately push Emerald's buttons, so that he'll go after them. Pluto is the one who suggested this.
- Emerald descends on the waiting youma and does Bad Bad Things to them. Meanwhile, the Senshi all die. This makes Emerald unhappy.
- Pluto shows up to mock Emerald. Emerald encourages her to keep mocking. Eventually, Pluto realizes that he's draining her. By that point, it is Far Too Late.
- Emerald sucks almost (but not quite all) of the energy out of Pluto. Emerald then uses this to Revolutionize The World in his own special way. That done, he dies from overchanneling.
- Somewhere in here, the Senshi all reincarnate. They're Senshi like that.
- Pluto hops forward briefly into the future she was from, now ending. She reveals that this was all, in fact deliberate on her part. Specifically, once she *had* Crystal Tokyo, she had realized that lobotomizing everyone really wasn't the happy plan after all. The current storylineis the result of her tweaking the timeline over and over and over again, exhaustively, desperately trying to figure out a way to make the Great Cleansing not happen, without destroying the chance of a reasonably happy, functional future. There is a suggestion that at least two of her previous attempts led to Emerald winning - one by going into exile and connecting to the planet Nemesis and one by sticking around and inspiring the invading Nemesians. Regardless, that future ends, taking that Pluto with it.
- Back in present day, the kid who was going to grow up to be Emerald gets a taste of his poiwer a bit ahead of schedule.
- Jump a couple of years forward. Classic slap slap kiss kiss moment between Young Emerald and Reincarnated Mars.

www.warcry.com/news/view/67851-City-of- ... s-Revealed
City of Heroes: Issue #9 Details Revealed
Dana Massey posted on 19 Jan 2007, 11:45 AM
The folks at NCSoft and Cryptic Studios have released some details on Issue #9: "Breakthrough". The official fact sheet made the rounds earlier today. Here are the details.

Issue 9: "Breakthrough"
SUMMARY:
Issue 9: Breakthrough, the ninth free expansion to the City of Heroes universe, introduces an entirely new level of depth and gameplay to the franchise. Players acquire and invent new "loot," and have the option to buy and sell it using the new hero and villain auction houses. Along with Issue 9's other great features, this brand new system results in a wealth of new gameplay for players.
FEATURES
Invention System (Heroes and Villains)
Using the highly anticipated Invention system, players acquire and collect "loot" in the form of Salvage and Invention Recipes. These will be used together to invent uber-enhancements, costume pieces, new powers, gadgets, and more. This creates a world of new activities, rewards and character evolution!
Auction Houses (Heroes and Villains)
Where better to buy and sell all of these new items than in the new auction houses! Wentworth's Fine Consignments have sprung up throughout Paragon City while the villains prefer to do their bidding alongside "black-market" trucks placed throughout the Rogue Isles.
Statesman's Task Force (Heroes only)
This high-level PvE content allows eight heroes to team up in order to face and defeat Paragon's greatest enemies! Completing this difficult challenge results in some of the game's rarest loot!
New Hamidon Encounter (Heroes and Villains)
Not only do villains get their own end-game raid encounter with the "Hamidon," but the new experience is also brought to the Heroes side where players must use new tactics to bring down one of the "City of"s greatest threats

Global: @Jimmy Amp
"Broad-minded is just another way of saying a fellow's too lazy to form an opinion." -- Will Rogers

I've got some serious story-writing planned for Fenspace, but I probably won't be able to do it until RL stops kicking my ass. I expect to be offline for a couple weeks or so. e_e
In the meantime, though, I've posted a few bits of information about my character, his space station, and supporting cast. I requested a reality-check for my preliminary estimates on how big his station should be in Kokuten's Land Size thread...
But I figure I should ask for opinions on some of the other stuff I've stuck in the Ship Registry and Character Profile sections:- the writeups for The Floating Island and Eric Zhu.
Potentially, er, problematic are a couple claims there. The writeup states the Island was the first Fenspace ship/station of its kind. The first to boost chunks of land into orbit. Y'know, making a building and the surrounding real estate spaceworthy, yeah?
That's there because...well, I suggested that notion in the original thread. I think. >_>; The Island also launched early in the timeline, and it's comparatively primitive (initially, only pressurised buildings and basements), as opposed to, say, what Bob's got, or what other flying houseowners have done... the only tricky thing Eric and his crew did was prove you could handwave soil with enough digging. So the assertion makes sense, but I dunno...
The other thing is Eric's biomod. It verges on the superpower side...but it does come from physical alteration to his body. He's basically, er, wireless networked. To any 'waved systems on his station.
There's also a lot of assorted weirdness about the Island, evident in its writeup. But I have reasonable explanations for most of them. Mostly revolving around the strangeness of its 'waved service droid army. They move things when people aren't looking, see.
-- Acyl

GENRE DIRECTIVE:
This is not a dystopia.
Fenspace is intended to be an optimistic near-future space opera. What this means is that neither the Earth nor the rest of the solar system are wracked by wars, corruption, crime, environmental collapse, peak oil, etc. At least, no more so than as of where we stood on New Year's Day, 2007. There are potential rough patches ahead, but the bulk of humanity is looking forward and has better than even odds of making it through with civilization still intact. There are still Big Bads, a shadowy conspiracy or two and plenty of mooks for the heroes to smack around of course, but they are defeatable.
In this light, those who wish to write stories involving catastrophic Mundane wars using handwavium-enhanced weaponry, the total corruption & greed of earthbound politics, the general apathy and/or suckiness of the human race, etc. are kindly invited to do their own thing elsewhere.
(Any attempt to argue that the world must suck because it's "realistic" will fall on deaf ears. As a wiser man than the Management once said, "Only a bitter little adolescent boy could confuse realism with pessimism.")
THE RULES:
Rule #0: This is a collaborative writing project, which means there's a whole bunch of people adding their ideas to the pot. As a contributor, you're expected to behave like the adults that you are (or at least are pretending to be on the internet) when participating. As the man said, "Don't be mean. We don't have to be mean."
a) Offering constructive criticism (why don't you do this?) is good. Saying 'you can't do that' is not constructive.
b) Since this is a collaborative writing project, no one writer can hog all the Good Stuff without upsetting the other writers. Don't step on anyone else's toes - don't consume too much Cool at once, don't try to be better than the already-established "best in Fenspace" at something, and talk with people before you do things that No One Else Can Do.
c) When Rule #0 conflicts with any other rule, Rule #0 trumps the other rule. As Mustrum Ridcully would put it, they're "more of a guideline".
Rule #1: Handwavium is like a cat; it doesn't go where you tell it to, it goes where it wants to. If you're trying to get a random device with no plan in mind, then that's exactly what you'll get. If you have a specific device or set of devices in mind, you will get something close but not exactly identical to your specifications within these limits:
a) You can't show handwavium a picture of your desired genre vehicle and have it build one for you.
b) Handwavium has to be combined with existing hardware in order to accomplish anything. For best results the device should have some tangental relationship to the desired end goal: a car's engine becomes a spacedrive, a fence becomes a collapsible air dome, a laptop becomes an AI-capable supercomputer, etc.
c) Handwavium has quirks. The more complex and interesting the device you're trying to build is, the quirkier it will be on average.
i) Some strains of handwavium are quirkier than others.
ii) Quirks don't apply to critical life-support systems - air, water, food, sewer. Power systems can be quirky, but never to a life-threatening extent.
d) If handwavium is like a cat, then using it to create weapons is like giving a cat a bath; difficult and full of extreme pain. To wit:
i) Any attempt to use handwavium to create advanced genre weapons (phasers, antimatter bombs, any type of anime death ray, etc.) will fail without reservation.
ii) Handwavium is not naturally explosive, either chemically or nuclear. Adding handwavium to an explosive device will just destroy the handwavium.
iii) Handwavium can be used to enhance simple weaponry (swords, knives, staves, clubs, etc.) but the enhancement will not increase the total effectiveness as a weapon - a waved sword may not need further sharpening, but it won't become a Hackmaster +12.
iv) Weapons designed and built using no or effectively no (=
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

Shared world fictional superheroic sort of thing follows.

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

It took us two minutes with a 'waved scalpel to cut the remains of his space suit free. Sal and I were both sure he was a goner. No respiration, almost no pulse, and blood everywhere. No cuts, though. No open wounds. Just blood, around his mouth and down his front and covering the inside of his suit. We both figured the poor guy had major internal hemorraging from his suit rupture, massive internal bleeding, that kind of thing.
Crewing the first ambulance in space, we'd both seen this kind of thing before. Today, we'd seen it far too often. With the battle between the Reavers and the SOS-dan still in progress, wed probably be seeing it all day.
Sally hopped into the front to set our course while I tried to keep our two passengers alive. The one on the right would live. Steady breathing, wearing an oxy mask. He probably had a concussion. He was the lucky one.
The other guys on the ship hadnt had suits when their hull had been holed. One of them had been badly cut up, probably by shrapnel. Two more had died from exposure. The other guy through
The last one was the mystery. He had a suit, but it was badly holed. Hed managed to tie it off with a dead mans belt, but it had apparently been leaking slowly. When we got to him, the pressure in the suit was almost as low as Mars surface. And the internal bleeding. But for no good reason we could tell, he wasnt dead.
Fighting off an urge to procrastinate further, I go over and check him. Not breathing. Pulse, but weak as hell. Blood pressure well below normal. That, at least, is something that can be addressed. Hoping that it won't cause more internal bleeding, I hook him up to an IV and sit back to watch my patients.
"Not this again!" Minerva said. "Albus, it was You-Know-Who, not you, who marked Harry as his equal. There is no possible way that the prophecy could be talking about you!" - Harry Potter and the Method of Rationality, Chapter 84

Yes, as you can see, I'm bored, and I'm stalking Fenspace. Think of me as a lassiez-faire hippy Scirroco. He'll help keep the universe together, I just want you in it.
I challenge anyone who's been lurking Fenspace to man up and throw up a ship descriptor/origin story.
I pledge to have a constructive critique on any additional ship or people posts done before 9pm tonight, done before 9pm tonight.
There's at least one person who's sitting here waiting, and would love to see any additional content.
Write!Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979