Fanfic Recommendations: The Next Generation

[zojojojo]

The Killer and the Refugee also attempts to file the serial numbers off his favorite American ninja, Rinkin, of assorted Alex Mack fame… ?

[batzulger]

There is no filing at all. If you know, you know.

[ECSNorway]

The Pork-Chop Express

Battletech, through the eyes of Jack Burton

[classicdrogn]

What happens when you take a handful of memes and write seriously about them being implemented in the Battletech setting? Awesome things!

Solve all your problems with Urbanmechs, until Urbanmechs are the only problem you have left

Super Urbanmechs, Ruralmech industrials, UrbanHammers. Urbanarmor and UrbanLAMs. We do what we must because we (trash) can.

It was not enough to merely own a planet with a face

Somewhere in the badlands of a backwater world, a metal extractor was planted. By an Urbanmech.



Dare you enter this magical realm?

The story opens on an SI-as-Dr.-Robotnik appearing in an alley. It continues with his adopted son approaching the Eridani Light Horse me4rcenary compay's current operating base in a Super Shiny Rare Ubanmech and challenging one of the guard patrol in a Phoenix Hawk (normally about three times as fast as an Urbie) to a race to prove he's got a message wirth hearing, a few months after SI-Robotnik's (or at least the biological original's) death.

This is Throw a Stone, where it's too late to close the barn door because those little ponies are already running wild.

118 threadmarks, 423k words, updates every week or two for the past couple months and usually faster before that.

C'mon, you know it's gotta be fun if even I am moved to rec a BT fic, not just passively read and move on or drop early over the setting's innate premises!

[ECSNorway]

Welcome to Rivera's Repairs, an ongoing original sci-fi LitRPG story set on a distant colony world currently degenerating into third-world status because its Dungeon is apparently dying. Into this comes Tess Rivera, who seems destined to Do Something About That. 

Tess Rivera doesn't need a combat class to survive. She needs one that can fix a dying city.

Nineteen-year-old repair technician Tess lives on Tertius-Prime, a crumbling megacity built atop a dungeon that's been "cleared" for twenty years. The Aether barely flows. The power grid fails nightly. Her father's health is declining, and their freighter-home is one broken component away from becoming a coffin.

When desperation drives her into the dungeon's outdated tutorial system, it malfunctions. Tess fixes it herself, and accidentally gets branded with a {null} class that no one's ever heard of. No combat skills. No normal leveling. Just the ability to see dungeon code, interface with broken systems, and talk to an AI that's been alone for far too long.

Turns out the "cleared" dungeon isn't empty—it's just been abandoned. And Tess's "broken" class might be exactly what's needed to wake it back up.

What to Expect:
> Progression through crafting/repair, not combat
> Wholesome AI companion learning to trust again
> Slice-of-life repair jobs building to larger mysteries
> Found family and community building
> System-light LitRPG with custom skill creation
> Science fantasy setting (Dungeon-core meets Dune meets Culture)

[Bob Schroeck]

I just stumbled across this and blitzed through the four existing installments (the most recent one posted not quite twelve hours ago as I write this, and all of them posted in the last month):

The Invincible Iron Soul (Worm/Marvel Cinematic Universe)

Tony Stark's final act was not just a sacrifice.
It was a wish.

Driven by love.

And the Infinity Stones listened.

Across time and space, that wish reaches a girl at her most vulnerable moment. In 2008, Taylor Hebert survives an accident that kills her mother… and awakens with something impossible in her mind.

A spark of infinity.
A friend named Morgan.

Her teenage life will never be the same.
In a dangerous world, she does all she can.

She's Iron Soul.

[classicdrogn]

Welcome to Rivera's Repairs, an ongoing original sci-fi LitRPG story set on a distant colony world currently degenerating into third-world status because its Dungeon is apparently dying. Into this comes Tess Rivera, who seems destined to Do Something About That. 

I read this through the end of Bk1 and can second this rec pretty strongly - apparently the action and intrigue ran away from the author but they decided to roll with where the characters wanted to go, and the result is a noce blend of western sci-fi and sttats-light dungeon core litRPG.

[Bob Schroeck]

For no particular reason I've been reading a lot of Worm fics recently, and here's a brand new one that I just came across, one of a subgenre I've discovered I enjoy quite a bit, which is "stories told entirely through PHO postings":

Axe Murderer, Interdimensional Murder Tourist by "ReinforcedOtter", about a dimension-hopping guy with powers that can be described simply as "Horror Movie Logic", and his adventures in Earth Bet. While not explicitly comic, it can be very funny at times, in a "I'm so glad I'm not there" way.

[ECSNorway]

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/th...ed.149054/

"Prophecy in Scarlet, Sundered"

In which Albus Dumbledore, in need (as usual) of a new Defense professor, turns to his old friend Countess Remilia Scarlet. 

Oh, and Reimu needs a vacation, how about sending her to Hogwarts, too?

(HP/Touhou)

[robkelk]

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/th...ed.149054/

"Prophecy in Scarlet, Sundered"

In which Albus Dumbledore, in need (as usual) of a new Defense professor, turns to his old friend Countess Remilia Scarlet. 

Oh, and Reimu needs a vacation, how about sending her to Hogwarts, too?

(HP/Touhou)

Awwww...

Whenever I see "FOO in Scarlet", I think Sherlock Holmes (where FOO="A Study"). This isn't Holmes. <pout>

[zojojojo]

What if a son of Hephaestus was reincarnated in Worm, after the whole Chronos mess? And what if that son was some how given the power of the Celestial Forge? And what if all this happened in the fall before the locker incident? Well, you get Son of the Forge…. https://archiveofourown.org/works/83600846

[robkelk]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/812708.../213631186
May I Use That? (A oneshot original superhero-verse fic by JohnBurtonLee).

If you heard "Kelly Wilson, Government Liaison to the South Hill Branch of the Justice Squad" you might imagine a sharp dressed, steely eyed, middle aged man making tough calls on the comms while local heroes engaged supervillains.

That's Director Richardson.

Kelly was a young woman in her late twenties, often in a rumpled skirt suit, with a much smaller office. Her job was mostly to make sure the government's money was being spent well, so she was more of an auditor than anything else. Yes, she had a badge and could technically call herself a federal agent, but you could say the same about a food safety inspector for the FDA. In a perfect world, the closest she'd come to dealing with villains was a guy at an insurance company she had to convince to pay for damage from a hero fight.

That was a prediction that turned out to be both one hundred percent correct and incredibly misleading.

This is a fun little one-shot, and I might end up doing an All The Tropes page for it.

[Matrix Dragon]

And my muse got knocked loose, so have a crossover fic.

Imposter Syndrome (rwby/ffxiv)

"When team RWBY fell into the void, they never could have imagined the world waiting for them on the other side. Nor could they have expected a ghost from Ruby and Yangs past waiting for them..."

SB: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/...v.1310916/
SV: https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/th...iv.155493/
Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/85629251

[Jinx999]

Cloneborne: Mahou Legacy Kuron Uchuu Story!

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/...g.1259383/

Centuries ago, a space station entirely inhabited by clones of a magical girl who'd been defending earth from aliens was sucked into a dimensional void, where it came out on an alien planet in another universe.

Now the First Contact between an interstellar civilisation and a rather unusual Planet of Hats is about to happen.

[classicdrogn]

Figure It Out Yourselves (SB threadmarks link) is a Worm AU where the Leviathan and Echina incident went very, very badly, to the point that four out of five capes and nine out of ten civilians present when it began were dead before the day ended, and the city was domed as a containment zone. This is not that story. This is the story of Vista, Shielder, and nrely drafted probatiobary Ward Skitter as they try to recover and integrate with the Queens South-East team, themselves hastily promoted from the Wards program early by the same act of Congress that drafted any villain in hand who was bnot already Birdcage-bound. It sticks to its limited scope and premise to deliver a tight, character focused arc and declare itself done in just a couple RL months (and not much longer IC) without adrressing the canon endgame mega-battles, though an epilogue was promised that has yet to appear. By its nature, it involves mostly OCs and implies more than it shows of the actual facepunchy crime fighting, but the OCs are reasonably unique and only obnoxious in the IC messing around with your friends way, not the make readers scream at the screen way. It also goes far, far softer on the asspull-melodrama than some other fics (I think) by the same author, pretty much just limited to the poremise of the divergence and the off-camera responses to losing something like two hundred capes in one day.

31k words in 15 chapters, with an epilogue still due as noted.

[Mamorien]

At the end of today's Headless Over Heels, the recommendation is for a story called Class: God, by one of RR's rising stars.

Rent's too high to save a god

I'm Drake, and I'm completely powerless. Delving into the monster-infested tar pits wasn't something I wanted to do, but when my sister got sick, I really didn't have a choice.

Now sometimes, gods will touch someone while on a raid and they'll choose that person as a Champion. But when the Kirin God, one of the pantheon’s best and brightest, joined our routine expedition, he refused to do anything but lord his powers over all of us and show off how high and mighty he was.

During the fight, he was badly injured and I was presented with a choice: save him and maybe get his blessing, or become a god myself.

I twisted the knife until his powers became mine.

Stronger monsters, demon lords, champions, and my debts will all be crushed as I begin my reign as the new Kirin God.

What to expect

• OP MC
• Solo Leveling directed by the Safdie Bros
• Anti-hero MC
• Old-fashioned Monster Killing

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/178289...r-drop-day

[Ebony]

Virtuous Sons

A Greco-Roman Xianxia story, of all things. The heir to the Cult of the Rosy Dawn acquires a new slave, from the fallen barbarian city of Rome. His cultivation and life are forever changed.

[classicdrogn]

Class: God,

I found this one to be a horrible slog of by the numbers Solo Leveling knockoff, but before dropping it picked up on the shill for Imma be a speedster by UnproperMadman, which is itself a relatively standard dungeon-fantasy-apocalypse-invades-the-modern-world, but the MC is obsessed with the Flash and similar superheroes (and also at least some degree of autistic and/or psychopathic) and steadfastly builds his LitRPG stats for pure speed even after thinking it over and concluding that it's not the optimum survival strategy, because if your life turns into an apocalypse survival story with a gamer system, you should at least live your dream or die trying, right?

Curremtly 96 chapters with a new one added every two to ten days.

I also opened a tab for Basic Thaumaturgy for the Emotionally Incompetent (Rewritten) [A Magical Academy LitRPG]
by D.N. Newyn but have not yet assayed to read it or the others mentioned as sharing the setting, so I can not vouch for its quality or lack thereof.

official summary

This book is set in the same world as The First Sovereign of Ash and Maximum Intimidation Knight.

He can’t conjure grief, can barely levitate a pebble, and once submitted a stanza instead of a spell schematic.

Meet Fabrisse Kestovar: aspiring thaumaturge boulder scientist, confirmed pastry enthusiast, professional bird whisperer, and perhaps the least emotionally competent student in the Order’s seven-hundred-year history.

After failing magical examinations for four consecutive years, Fabrisse has accepted that he simply wasn’t meant to become a great mage. He’d be perfectly happy spending the rest of his life cataloguing interesting rocks somewhere nobody expected him to set anything on fire.

Unfortunately, an ancient relic known as the Eidralith has other ideas.

After forty-seven years of silence, the artifact awakens during the Synod’s holiest ceremony, breaks free, and flies across the cathedral...

...straight into Fabrisse’s face.

The impact leaves him bound to the long-forgotten PRAXIS NODE, an impossibly ancient calibration system that only he can see. It insists his collection of useless rocks is of immense historical importance and immediately recommends that he stop putting them in his mouth.

Now the worst student at the greatest magical academy in the world has accidentally become the only person capable of understanding a relic older than civilization itself.

Assuming he isn’t expelled first.

WHAT TO EXPECT

Magical Academy

Emotion-based Magic System

Spellcasting & Crafting Equations

Slice-of-life

Slow-burn progression and slow-burn romance

Currently 47 chapters and on a similar posting schedule to the first.