#and possibly also as lu-tze who is just called sweeper here

[mywingsareonwheels]

Listening to the BBC radio adaptation of Pratchett’s Night Watch (which is great, incidentally, and I will link to below) and fully realising that not only is Vimes an influence on Endeavour’s Fred Thursday (that goes without saying and has been confirmed by Russell Lewis as well as being just obvious once you know both characters pretty well :) ), but a couple of Igor’s lines (ones definitely lifted from the book) are suspiciously close to the sorts of things Max says. I mean “I find that when I’ve got someone on the slab and had, you know, a rummage around...”... (We are talking about the young Igor working for the Watch, after all, and he’s pretty much a pathologist...) Russell Lewis, you are a beautiful Pratchett-obsessed weirdo. ;-)

Here’s that link. Not all the episodes are up yet, but the first three are. The first episode’s only up until 16th May 2023 so be warned... https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/b010ns42

(Night Watch is fantastic. It also comes with some content warnings especially for things concerning childbirth and political oppression. Also also it itself is partly an AU of Les Miserables which means that Thursday is based on a (heroic but very cynical) character who is both Javert and Valjean at different points in this story which is PERFECT because of course Roger Allam has played both, one in the musical and the other in the radio adaptation :D ).

[fixaidea]

OH I HOPED YOU WOULD DO THAT ONE. I would please like to know about "Cruise Trip", "ExF _East", and I'm torn between "witch wwx" (which I suspect is more Discworld??? ^_^) and "dumb villain" (because I always enjoy your dumb villain stories), so maybe both of those? ^_^

Cruise trip

This is a supernatural mystery, that takes place on a cruise ship. It stars one of my all-time favourite OCs, Dr. Ali Rana and his boyfriend Anton Szalóky (who just unexpectedly inherited a large sum of money).

Here’s the prologue:

The thing about stories, is that sometimes it’s hard to pin down when exactly they started. Take this very story, for example: it would be easy to say it started in a busy port in New Orleans, but it wouldn’t be quite true. You could also claim it started in a courtroom, and even though it would be somewhat closer to the truth, it still wouldn’t be quite correct.

No. If you wanted to get to the bottom of it, you’d find that, despite having seemingly nothing to do with them at all, this story started with an army of Soviet tanks in 1956. It started with a failed revolution and a man called András Szalóky who seized his chance and, using the general mayhem snuck out under the Iron Curtain and escaped to the United States to seek a better life.

He found it, at least in terms of material comfort, if not so much in domestic happiness. In that, he was quite unlucky, as he managed to marry into the most unpleasant of families – the kind that tends to serve as the backdrop and subject of some quirky private detective, as someone inevitably ends up poisoned for their money. Mr. Szalóky escaped this fate, but the older he got, the more bitter he grew towards his new relatives. By the time he turned 80 his resentment was right off the scale.

He took certain measures. He consulted a lauded psychiatric professor who officially confirmed that he was, indeed, in full possession of all his faculties. He hired the quirky private detective himself, but this time mostly to trawl through Facebook and check birth certificates.

The certificate confirming his sanity and an e-mail containing the name and address of the nephew twice removed he never knew he had arrived the same day.

Mr. Szalóky smiled. He signed his newly constructed will and testament.

His only regret was not getting to see the faces his family would make.

ExF_East

Probably disappointingly this one is the more-or-less publised ‘Enjolras, Feuilly and the Great Roadtrip of 1832′ which still needs and epilogue, and so is technically unfinished.

witch WWX

...Is the working title of the technically still ongoing ‘Of Hats and Flutes’. Here’s an excerpt from a possible future chapter:

‘Here’s the thing though, and this is something I learned the hard way’ said Wei Wuxian ‘Presentation and reputation are double edged swords. See, when they send someone after you people took to calling Light-bringer Lord, that’s pretty impressive, right? You know you’re in it right up to your eyeballs. But since you know it, you have your guards up. No such thing when you’re facing down someone nicknamed Sweeper. And so you may not have the time to realise that you are in much, much bigger trouble.’

 Once it was just the two of them left, Nanny added a hefty shot of brandy to her tea and nudged Granny.

‘Wonder which way he meant that little tirade. Did Lu Tze mop the floor with him, or was he just an example and he wanted to say he’s better off known as a lil’ village witch, and not for what he really is?’

Granny peered over the rim of her cup.

‘Both, I reckon.’

dumb villain

Answered! But here’s another excerpt:

Xie Lian was meditating on his own, among the ruins on Taicang Mountain. Ever since his amnesia incident, both him and Hua Cheng were trying to come up with a way that would allow him to keep his cultivation base while freely enjoying his marriage. Finally Xie Lian had some promising theories, though none were solid enough to put into practice yet. It was high time he worked out something though, because once again, he found himself with no spiritual power.