Fic Request/Bunny Farm

[Bob Schroeck]

I like it.

[batzulger]

Struck by a runaway ox-cart, ordinary Mage Academy student Insert Name finds (him|her)self before a strangely easy-going god, who wants (him|her) to act on his behalf in another world to save it from impending disaster. To help in this task, Name is given the ability to understand all languages and a cheat-like enchantment that will link (his|her) student spell tome with any book named from either world. What strange adventures will Name discover in a world where magic is only now awakening after thousands of years without it?

Stuck In Another World With My Spell Tome

it's your standard issekai scenario... but in reverse, with a high fantasy character placed in the modern day, the only human mage in a world where hostile mythical creatures and beings all but invulnerable without magic have already begun to appear. Can (he|she) uplift a whole new magical Adventurer's Guild from scratch in time to turn the tide?

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B082RHYN7C/

A lich, escaping from his enemies, winds up in an American inner-city and ends up in the middle of a gang war.

[classicdrogn]

That does sound interesting, though I tend to insist on a physical copy if I'm going to pay for a book. There's more free screen-only stuff produced every day just for the stories on my tracking lists than I could read if I spent every minute on it as is.

[batzulger]

I have Kindle Unlimited so I read it as part of the subscription

[classicdrogn]

Issekai-nd of Magic - Freddy Mercury died (relatively) young of an incurable disease. Boy, we sure haven't heard that kind of setup before, right? What happened next, though...

[classicdrogn]

While grazing through AO3 I happened to find an interesting story prompt:

Prompt: There is a brief window in the 1800s where you could have an adventuring party made up of a samurai, an elderly pirate captain, a Zulu warrior, a cowboy, and a Victorian gentlemen detective and have it be 100% historically correct.

Sadly the resulting shortfic was nothing noteworthy, and judging by the author's other work they have a few hundred thousand words of writing practice to get through before they'd be likely to turn out anything I would recommend. Even so, the story idea is fun.

[batzulger]

1865 and you could have a former Malay pirate

[Bob Schroeck]

And a ninja for the pirate-ninja and samurai-ninja dynamics...

[robkelk]

Hmmmmm... In the first season of Sailor Moon (and the filler arc that started the second season), the opposing forces were harvesting life energy. The Japanese word "ki" and the Chinese word "chi" both translate as "life energy". So, yeah, they're looking for ki. Better hope that the Dark Kingdom never finds a cinematic martial artist... Oh, wait. Fuku fics. And in his own canon, Ranma is said to have a lot of ki.

It certainly seems to me that "drain Ranma and bring Metaria back in one shot" is a viable strategy if the Dark Kingdom is at all intelligent.

Has anybody ever written a fic about that?

[Bob Schroeck]

... In nearly thirty years of reading fics, I can't say that I recall seeing one with that plot.

[hazard]

I can recall it being brought up a few times, either in story or in author's notes, but it never was part of a plot.

[classicdrogn]

Not quite a fic request or bunny, not quite a "looking for," there were some odd little villain critters I was dreaming of just now that I'm pretty sure either come from an anime I don't remember or are a pastiche of several in a similar style. To start off they are heavily stylized toons in the shape of musical notes and symbols despite the rest of the world being highly realistic or live action, are called Noise, and for the ones that shoot little bits of themselves at you it sounds like someone whispering "noise" Dopplering by on a near miss. They seem to be more ideas that wrap themselves in a loose blob of matter, so the shapes may just be what people perceive them as or be influenced by their picking up on what people associate them with.

They each make a sound like a music box playing but never the same tune or in unison, and listening to it is a cognito-hazard of unspecified type, but probably a slower form of what happens with physical contact - an immediate red rash that quickly darkens to purple veins and bruising with more than an momentary brush, at which point it is both self-sustaining and will spread, with the rate of spread depending on how big the purpled spots already are. This is fatal, and may result in creating more Noise after death.

They move freely through the ground and float up to about waist height, but can't or won't go higher than that from the ground (and possibly in enclosed spaces like basements or buildings in contact with the ground) or climb along vertical surfaces, so being up a tree or in a building on stilts is safe, as is the roof of a place with the walls demolished so only support beams are intact.

No individuals appeared larger than a medium sized dog, most more forearm sized in the largest dimension - I want to say a cubit there specifically, but I'm not sure is that's relevant. It followed the thoughts of one that got grabbed and mashed (more on that below) and found that it had a very weak sense of identity and getting absorbed by something larger and stronger (implying that larger and possibly smarter ones do exist) isn't unexpected or very frightening and it lacked the ability to tell that having a human do that was significantly different. Given how the corrupting touch works, maybe it isn't. All they do when they appear (infrequent and usually in groups of two to five, though the implication is that this is because the initial apocalyptic swarm has ended) is glomp on and infect people.

They moosh around so they don't take much damage from blunt impacts, seal back up from getting cut or pierced quickly, etc. A person with a strong will and probably a bit of protagonist magic can make whatever they pick up as a weapon more effective or create things (as in at a forge or by casting bullets/fletching arrows etc.) that anyone can use to not quite as much effect or increase their own damage output. Protagonist power also reduces how quickly being in contact causes physical and spiritual corruption, with the vague notion floating around that "the protagonist" smacked one until it gave up and let them use it like a Venom symbiote suit without negative effects.

The dream was following a group of superheroes (exactly who varied constantly as dreams often do, but the cartoon Teen Titans featured repeatedly, along with at least one other Robin, Zatanna, a few Harry Potter characters, and some guy who had an egg-sized superball that he'd bounce and catch as the physical mnemonic of casting something rather than incanting or waving a wand, mostly invisible effects or teleports - that guy was cool, I'm going to keep him in mind for other storytelling possibilities) who had little trouble beating on them until they burst into a little puff of smoke and dispersed, except for the team knucklehead.

He(?) grabbed one and mashed it around like silly putty saying "Huh? No I'm fine, see?" when told that kills people, before eating it to see if it gave them any useful new powers. They decided that it maybe increased already super-healing by a tiny bit, and that the Noise's mind was really simple but lasted long enough after his power devoured its physical form to tell that all it wanted was to be part of something stronger, like himself, so it was happy and he wouldn't need to worry about picking up any weird habits or cravings from it.

Now, there's several different settings who call their weird aliens "noise" - one of the Kamen Riders, I think Symphogear, another anime I think was called Listeners, Noiseman Sound Insect, at least two or three more, and there's obvious shades of RWBY's Grimm and Kingdom Hearts' Heartless as well, but do they sound like anything familiar from a single source? I rarely remember so much detail about generic dream-critters, that's why I think it may be drawing on something I've otherwise forgotten. Highly unlikely to be any western media from the last twenty-something years, as I haven't even owned a TV since 1999 and pretty much only go for anime digitally.

[Bob Schroeck]

Doesn't ring a bell, sorry...

[Jinx999]

It MIGHT be "Show By Rock".