#fwjb

[callipraxia]

October 1: Getting up in the morning

Made in response to @thepromptfoundry's Oc-Tober list of prompts. Here are a couple of Gravity Falls OCs I haven't actually used in a published work yet, but which have been part of various half-formed Plans for some time now. Everyone, meet Dr. Corwynt (a therapist in the weirdest place on his version of Earth) and Rouk (a bird person on a mission through the multiverse, which has been slightly sidetracked by the Gideon Gleeful and Ghost Eyes of the FWJB-verse hijacking his spaceship).

Dr. Corwynt

The alarm clock went off precisely thirty seconds after Dr. Corwynt opened his eyes, and he went through the first of the two facial expressions which bracketed his morning routine as he frowned at it while turning it off. Why he turned the thing, with its capacity for producing head-splitting racket, on every night was not something he could adequately explain: it was simply part of the routine to do so, just as it was routine, once his eyes had focused on the stamped seventies ceiling above his narrow bed and he had reviewed his memory to ensure it contained no dreams, for him to then rise, bathe, and put on most of a dark blue suit. There was no alarm to tell him when to stop each of those activities and when to begin the next one, because that was not part of the routine. Then he shaved his face, taking extra care as usual with the right side, and went into the kitchen.

The appliances were not as uniform as the ceilings, but they did have an average age of more than ten years in common between them. He did not mind this especially, not least because he hadn't bought them; this flat had been advertised as furnished, and he was therefore satisfied with everything in it so long as each item continued to work correctly. The stove was one of the older devices in residence, so he waited to make sure it had actually started getting hot before he started taking out the things he'd need to prepare the same breakfast he ate every morning: that was, two eggs, scrambled together and seasoned with a single twist of each of the spice grinders in the cabinet above the stove, two slices of toast with lemon curd, one cup of milky coffee, and one cup of plain, strong black tea, which - for reasons he had never been entirely sure of, considering they were on the opposite side of the planet - the vendors insisted on calling a Scottish Breakfast blend. Once the food and coffee were consumed, he marked off all the routines necessary to the maintenance of a human body as complete and moved into the next phase of the day, which began with washing and putting away the dishes he'd just used: the pan for scrambling the eggs, the plate which had held everything solid, the mug which had held his coffee, and the cutlery which had made eating an at least reasonably tidy affair. Once he was satisfied that the kitchen was in order, he picked up his teacup and saucer and took them with him into the lounge, where he proceeded to drink his drink his tea while sitting in the soft chair and looking intently at a framed photograph on the opposite side of the room, which hung beside the door which led out of the apartment. Once the tea was complete, he put the cup and saucer on the small, faux-marble-topped table beside his chair and then walked over to the photograph, where he made his second and final facial expression of the morning, frowning again as he examined it at closer range.

It was old, this photograph: it had been taken in color, but most of the colors had long since started to fade, so that not everything was as sharp as it might have been. It was, however, nevertheless easy enough to make out that there were two boys in the foreground. Both were dark-haired and dark-eyed, and they stood about the same height, but one was heavier-set than the other and had a third figure, a girl, perched on his shoulders and peering over the top of his head as he smiled at whoever had been holding the camera. This boy was the main subject of Dr. Corwynt's scrutiny, with his eyes only occasionally rising to consider the girl and almost never going toward the second, slighter, more solemn-looking boy at all. If a third party had been present, and had looked closely, they might have noticed that the second boy's features could have easily matured into something very similar to Dr. Corwynt's own, but there was one difference between the two which he imagined would always keep the casual viewer (not that he was in the habit of allowing either casual or attentive third parties into his house or allowing them to study his belongings) from realizing that they were the same person: the boy in the photograph had nothing even vaguely resembling the long, curved scar which stood out against the doctor's right cheek, and which was easily the most memorable aspect of his appearance to most others.

"No," he said, aloud, after a moment. He rested a couple of long fingers gently on the image of the other boy. "No...I don't think I'll forgive you today, Perry. I'll consider it again tomorrow."

Perry, obviously, did not answer. Because he was quite sane, though, Dr. Corwynt didn't expect any other outcome, and with that last ritual complete, he took his suit jacket off the cloakstand beside the front door, put it on, and started undoing the several layers of locks holding the door shut in order to get on with his day as the only licensed practitioner of mental health services who had, so far, managed to stay for any length of time in Gravity Falls, Oregon.

__________________________________________________________

2. Rouk

He had trained himself to ignore it, at least for the most part, but there was always a part of Rouk which missed mornings. Unfortunately, it didn't seem to be a part of him that had any inclination to decrease in size as he spent more and more time away from home, and it was especially noticeable when he found himself, as he now did, waking up for the far-too-manyth time in the timeless chaos of the Inbetween. Even, he thought irritably, the perpetual dark of the Void and a handful of fringe dimensions he'd visited before wasn't quite as disorienting as this; at least in those places, one could pretend that eventually the sun would rise. Here, though....

One day again.

It had been a long time, of course, since the mantra had started to lose meaning, but he held onto it just the same. To do otherwise might well be to begin the process of giving up, and to give up would be to fail, and to fail was not an option. Therefore, he recited the phrase to himself once, allowing his mind to go where it would for that moment, before he firmly put all thoughts of suns and his colony's roost out of his head and began his devotions to the Lady, who, in the mornings (or what passed for mornings, anyway, at the moment), was in her bright aspect as the Watcher of Ten Thousand Ways. That done, he left his sleeping pod, thinking vaguely of his breakfast and only remembering that he might need to have a knife fight or two in order to obtain it once he'd stepped out onto the main deck, where the ship's other three true bipeds were all gathered, if not exactly gathered together.

A quick look around showed no evidence that anyone else had resorted to violence this morning, which was always a good sign, but since Ivan wasn't in yet, there was still a chance things could get...interesting. in the meantime, though, the ship's night pilot, a Hybrid Mutate called Meili, bared her teeth in what passed for a friendly greeting among her kind despite the dark circles under her golden-green eyes, and Rouk inclined his head in an equally familiar gesture of acknowledgment as he bowed to her in response. The bow was shallower than usual, but although he still struggled to interpret mammalian body language and supposed they found his just as perplexing, he suspected that, this once, Meili would realize that he intended no offense to her and was merely keeping the area's other two occupants in clear view of one eye.

Humans, they were; he hadn't met many of their kind, but he'd met enough to recognize them. Peculiar creatures, they were, even more peculiar than Meili, who at least had patterns to her, blots of dark grey breaking up the otherwise white hair which covered most of her head and fell down her back. The two creatures sitting off to one side, though, were...blocks of uniformity, only occasionally broken by blocks of other uniformity: the one who seemed to be in command between them, the pale one, at least had something of a crest, but the other, the big one, seemed to have put his head together wrong, so that his hair fell from nose to chest instead of perching on top like his master's did and the way Rouk had gathered most humans' hair did. Meili, at least, also didn't have hair on the bottom half of her face, and although it was a distant relationship, the Hybrids were still considered part-humans in regions where that mattered. Rouk endeavored not to stare, but it was disconcerting to see just how much bare flesh true humans seemed to put on display, and he wondered, not for the first time, how they managed not to freeze to death with neither fur nor feathers to supplement their clothing. Fur was uninteresting, not nearly as visually appealing as his feathers, but at least it was some covering....

The pale human stood and, to Rouk's surprise, folded his talonless hands at his waist and bowed correctly, just as one should to a new acquaintance. From the way his face moved about, Rouk thought he was possibly surprised by his own behavior, too, but then, humans were known for using their bodies and voices alike to lie; humans weren't to be trusted, everyone knew that. That did not, however, mean that it was excusable to be rude to them, even if they had just stolen the ship he had only recently managed to steal back from someone else, if they somehow knew enough to be marginally polite, and so Rouk returned the bow just as correctly, being very sure not to incline his head or break eye contact in any way.

"You have traveled more than most of your kind," Rouk observed.

The humans seemed to take a moment to figure out what he'd said even after their translators rendered into human-babble; creatures without beaks often seemed to have that problem, so that wasn't a surprise. Finally, they glanced at each other and then back at him.

"I - I reckon so?" the pale human glanced at the big human. "I'm guessin' we've met other fellers like this...sometime or another?"

"A few times, Boss."

The pale human shook its head. "How I forget seein' some kinda bird-man before but don't forget how to say hello to one, I got no idea..." With an effort, Rouk refrained from either pointedly ruffling his visible feathers or clicking his beak in annoyance at the creature. It frowned at nothing for a moment, then said, "well - nice to meet yer, anyway. Name's Gideon."

Rouk felt a few of the smallest feathers on his face stir involuntarily in confusion once his translator implant conveyed the sense of what the creature had said to him. "Nice," he repeated. "I did not think that hijacking ships was what humans considered...nice."

The humans both began to look redder in the face, but not, apparently, for the same reason; the big one started to rise, growling something that sounded like a threat before any effort was made to translate it, but the pale one snapped his fingers and turned his head back and forth a little twice and then the big one instantly sat down again. Yes - the big one had been the one who had come barging into the ship demanding that they get him and his 'Boss' off Lottocron 9 immediately, but the pale one was in control, even though that made very little sense. What sort of hierarchy would put the pale one on top when he was shorter than Meili and anyone else on this ship, including Ivan, could have broken him in half without much effort? Did he come from a world where humans did everything backwards just for the sheer joy of contrariness? Was this supposed to be human humor?

"Temp'rary matter of necessity," the pale human, Gideon, said. "This - old gal we ran into back there in where we just come from, she done gone and robbed us. Soon as we catches up with her, we'll be out of y'all's hair and no harm done."

Rouk's translator made a valiant effort to cope with Gideon's syntax and vocabulary variations, but it finally conceded defeat with a beep. Going over what he understood of the language the human was using manually didn't do much good, either; he gathered that someone had robbed the humans and that they wished to apprehend the someone, but everything else....

Meili had her hands on her head, flattening down her ears. "I think I know what language you're speaking," she said, "but you have the strangest dialect I've ever heard."

The humans seemed displeased by that remark as well, but were distracted quickly - quickly and understandably. Ivan had just hopped onto the deck and was talking to himself in a rapid rumble of disjointed syllables which instantly inspired Rouk and Meili to tap the sides of their heads in order to shut their translators off before they started trying to make sense of them. Ivan, for his part, showed no sign that he'd noticed any of them. His bulbous eyes were fixed on nothing as he came to a stop and rose up on his back legs so he could raise the front ones to check and re-check the straps which secured his helmet, making sure it could not move a micrometer off-center on his pebbly head. This was fairly routine behavior, too, but there was an extra sort of urgency Rouk recognized in the gestures which it seemed logical to attribute to the humans' recent behavior....

"Sleeping over," Ivan croaked finally. "Sleeping over. My ship now. Mine." And he groaned as if he found the idea physically painful, webbed toes spreading out to press his helmet just a little bit more firmly down on his head.

"Yep," said Meili, doing an admirable job of maintaining the tone which she seemed to think indicated all was well and normal no matter how bizarre it might happen to actually be. "All yours, Iv. My turn to sleep."

As soon as Meili was out of the pilot's chair, Ivan - still with no acknowledgment of their unwelcome guests - dropped his front legs from his head back to their default position at the floor and hopped over to it. He began to laugh as he strapped himself in, singing 'mine, mine, mine' to himself as he adjusted the controls back into the positions more comfortable for his anatomy, all distress seemingly forgotten. The humans were staring at him and even Meili shook her head and said, in an undertone, "You know, you said you and Ivan are from the same place, but you never did explain why you didn't leave him there...."

Rouk considered several answers before he settled on, "that's because I would prefer not to."

[callipraxia]

Writings from 3am

As the title indicates...sometime in the night, I got up, feeling compelled to write out a little scene that doesn't have a proper story to go with it. It's minimally edited for coherency here. If you haven't read my fic Interproximal Gradations (third in the For Want of a Jailbreak trilogy) on Ao3, then none of this will make any sense whatsoever, as Quattro and Stan are referring to events from the last three or four chapters of that story; specifically, this occurs sometime after the end of chapter 26, which itself takes place after a ten-year time skip. It...probably won't make that much sense even with that context in mind, to be honest, but it'll make marginally more sense than it would without said context.

All clear as mud? Great. Here's the thing:

Stan sat alone at the kitchen table, smoking a cigar and laying out cards for a game of solitaire. He didn’t look up when Quattro – carefully; he hadn’t yet gotten around to repairs to his suit since the shootout with the feds – sat down, but he did speak.

“No,” he said.

“No, what?”

“No, there’s nothing significant about me playing solitaire right after my brother’s funeral.”

Quattro nodded slowly. “Right,” he said, not bothering to attempt to sound sincere. He remembered the day his brother had died, and what he’d said after he’d finally been forced to accept the reality of the situation, at least as well as Stan did, if not better: I guess I should pick a different name now, huh? Mine doesn’t really make any sense anymore. I guess I’m just Solo. He would bet his best wig that the reference was deliberate on Stan's part. "Sure there isn’t.”

Seconds passed, and the sound of the kitchen clock ticking them away was the only thing that interrupted the silence.

"How's the leg?" Stan asked finally.

"A few minutes at the auto shop and it'll be fine." Quattro shrugged. "I've told you, I don't really feel things anymore. I'm not sure if I would even if I took off my suit...maybe. Who knows." Half his trouble had been that it had been so long since he'd consciously felt anything that the impact had thrown him for a loop; before that, he had honestly thought he no longer sensed contact with his person ‘naturally’ at all. He had no intention of taking his suit off just to test the limits of his probably-atrophied sense of touch, though. Instead, he cleared his throat and added, “you know I’m going to kill him, if I ever get the chance."

Stan grunted in acknowledgment, showing no signs he found this shift in topic at all strange. “Know you’re gonna try,” he conceded.

Quattro nodded and thought he might have smiled, bitterly, behind his mask. “Because we both also know you’re going to try to stop me.”

“Yep.”

“Even though it’s his fault we just buried the last family either of us has besides each other.”

“No we didn't. Mabel’s still out there, somewhere, and I’ve heard you call Soos your brother with my own ears.” Stan pointed to one of the ears in question to illustrate, as if Quattro could have possibly missed them. “Plus, Dipper’s still part of the family. He might not want to be, and you might not want him to be, and I might even ring his bell for being an idiot and a fed and especially a fedidiot if he walked in here right now, but he’s still family.”

“If you want to get technical about it, I guess he’s sort of my father,” Quattro agreed. “In a...weird, Dr. Frankenstein-y kind of way. Except he’s the one who’s gotten to wander around the world and do whatever he wanted to do all these years like the Monster, and I’m the one who gets to watch everyone I care about die whenever he’s around. You might outlive me, but Soos? Mabel? Everyone else?”

Stan’s hands had gone very still on his cards. “What do you mean, I might outlive you?”

Quattro looked at him closely for a moment to see if he was joking, but he didn’t look like he was. Did he really think, then, that Quattro somehow hadn’t noticed that….

“You haven’t aged a day since the end of the apocalypse, Stan. Do you really think anyone believes that’s a coincidence?”

The silence turned sullen before Stan finally removed his cigar from his mouth. "That damn lizard."

“Your friend the blind lizard god’s never spoken to me in my life,” Quattro assured him. “It’s just that I do have eyes. Sort of. See?” He reached up and removed his outer mask, revealing his real face for a moment. “Time’s been messed up in this town since the world un-ended, but most of the people kept getting older. Including your identical twin. But not me - “ he pointed to the perpetually twelve-year-old visage normally hidden behind his mask – “and not you.”

Stan squinted at him, clearly trying to tell if he was bluffing – and then, to Quattro’s surprised, laughed.

“Paper boys,” he announced, “have no business being as sharp as you, kid. Scissors are supposed to be one of your natural enemies, aren’t they?”

“Not so much while I’m wearing this,” said Quattro, gesturing toward his artificial body as he reattached his mask. “So – what did they do to you, anyway? And why?”

Stan sighed. “Bozo the Lizard God said that his brother made it hard for him – Bozo, I mean – to see me,” he said. “Said that looking at me made him feel like he’d gotten drunk on a trampoline. No-Eyes then said – something, I don’t remember exactly – but that it had something to do with Bozo spending too much time in the underworld. Nobody told me this, but I’m guessing...from that, and from some other stuff I've put together, I’m guessing that the way No-Eyes kept me alive was by making it...really hard for your standard-issue death gods and death angels and all those kinds of things to see where I am too clearly.” Stan chuckled grimly. “And I even think I know why he did it.”

“To save the world,” said Quattro. “Right?”

“Eh, yeah, that, too,” said Stan. “But I don’t think that’s why I’m still alive, ten years after I did that. I think that’s because of you.”

Quattro could only stare in response to this at first. “Me?”

“Yep – sort of. See, I punched him and Bozo both in the face.” Quattro nodded; Stan never tired of that story. Not that Quattro did, either; thinking too much for too long about Stan's former contacts on the Other Side had still made him angry, sometimes, even before Dipper had come back to town; now, after what had happened to Ford, he just wished he could time-and-dimension travel well enough to loan Stan his suit's gloves for said face-punchings. It was unlikely that even alloys that were nigh-indestructible by earthly standards would have made any difference, but a guy could hope.... “And I told ‘em some of it was for Tracey. The Lord of Jerks said I had no right to get upset after how I – was to you two – back then, and so I told him to shove it, because maybe Tracey wasn’t one of Bozo’s, but he was one of mine, and that therefore I could say whatever I wanted about him, unlike Bozo. So….pretty sure if I ever get a chance to ask if it was supposed to be a reward or a punishment, he’ll just say ‘yes,’ because again, jerk, but I think that’s about the time he got the idea to just...not help Bozo get over feeling drunk whenever I was in the room. Not yet, anyway.”

Quattro thought about that for a moment, and about everything that had happened since, and about how difficult he was to kill lately. "Yeah, it was definitely a punishment" he said. "If it helps, though - even in the absolute worst-case scenario, we'd get taken out in the heat death of the universe I guess, but it shouldn't take that long. Doing the math, thinking about how much air I have to let into this thing to talk...I'm guessing I'll dry rot or something in...probably not more than a hundred fifty, two hundred years, maybe. So if you're right, you'd be off the hook then, too."

Stan seemed to mull this over. "Well, guess it beats sticking around until the heat death of the universe, anyway," he said.

[indizhan-blog]

Коротко о том кто и как получить помощь от государства во время ЧП. Если Вы или Ваш знакомый работающий граждан, потерявший доход (отправленый в неоплачиваемый отпуск) в связи с режимом ЧП. Узнайте у Вашего работодателя подавал ли он на Вас заявление, если нет Вы можете подать его самостоятельно. ⠀ Уволенные работники могут претендовать на выплаты – сроком от 1 до 6 месяцев, в зависимости от стажа в системе соц страхования за последние 2 года. Выплаты будут производиться из средств госфонда в размере до 40% от потерянного дохода. ⠀ И еще если Вы работали по договору ГПХ, предметом, которого является выполнение работ или оказания услуг. За которые платили ОПВ, а также работники субъектов крупного бизнеса в населенных пунктах, где введен карантин. ⠀ Как получить выплаты? Нужны отчисления в в ГФСС (госфонд соцстрахования) в течении не менее 3 месяцев за год до даты введения режима ЧП. Соц выплата распространяется только на работников среднего, малого и микробизнеса. ⠀ Эти выплаты будут длиться только на время режима ЧП. ⠀ Для этого нужно: 1. Подать заявку на портале egov.kz посредством ЭЦП. ⠀ 2. Так же можно подать заявку через Telegram. Скачайте приложение и перейдите к боту «EgovKzBot2.0». ⠀ Нужны подробные инструкции как подать заявление? (at Zhaksy, Aqmola, Kazakhstan) https://www.instagram.com/p/B-d1x1-FWJB/?igshid=o8g5r1hjvkyv

[callipraxia]

Ooh, this is much pleasanter for everyone involved than what I cooked up for the “what if Stan didn’t escape in NWHS” premise. Oddly enough, though, my idea and eventual 300,000-odd word trilogy of fanfics also started with the idea of forcing Ford and Soos to interact more, and I also had trouble figuring out what to do with Stan and the kids while Ford and Soos did that.

(My solution to the first problem was “send them on a road trip,” which raised the follow-up question of “what in blazes could possibly motivate Ford and Soos to go on a road trip together?”, which was in turn solved with “to rescue Stan from a massive legal mishap.” As for what to do with Stan and the kids…that involved both Agent Powers and a shotgun-wielding Tate McGucket becoming major characters, Stan setting a hospital on fire, two extended whole-plot references to The Lord of the Rings, and Ford getting into two fistfights in a library in the span of a week. Ah, the good old days….)

Revolving the AU where Stan doesn't escape the cops in NWHS, Soos and the kids find the portal, but things go sideways differently than in canon and Soos ends up sailing through into the Nightmare Realm. Ford has to call off his suicide mission to haul this strange gopher-man to safety and then they roam the multiverse together.

Highlights:

Soos sees his face and blurts out "Mr. Pines's secret twin brother? I thought I made you up!"

Ford giving his version of their childhoods and Soos politely being like "that doesn't sound right but I don't know enough about Mr. Pines's tragic backstory to dispute it"

Ford going "what do you MEAN Stanley didn't move on and live the flourishing normal life I've been visualizing for him for the past thirty years?? How dare he"

...By the time they get home Ford is much more prepared to not punch his brother in the face. Thank you, Soos.

(Don't ask me what Stan and the kids are doing in the meantime, I still haven't figured out a way to not make this terrible for them)

[callipraxia]

As promised - it is September 2, and I have therefore posted the first chapter of a new work! Happy second anniversary of the day I posted the first chapter of FWJB.

[callipraxia]

Actual words I just wrote in my own hand:

“You said ‘Mart-World is really close to home’ twice in your list, bro. That’s double dipping and we aren’t Dippers.”

Aka, I just wrote 8 pages out in two hours and didn’t even notice until my hand cramped and I counted, and I’ve got the whole first act of this story and how to do it completely clear in my mind and I’ve got like three outlines I’ve made in the past couple of days and yeah. 09/02/2023, there shall be a-publishing something new!

[callipraxia]

New chapter!

[callipraxia]

Oh, hey, it's my boy Powers! (He has just enough dialogue to suggest elements of a personality and backstory, but he acquired more and more traits further and further removed from his source material as FWJB went on. Things I Just Made Up include his first name, his tendency to very rarely use his first name even in informal situations, his asexuality, his lack of siblings, his childhood in a strict Catholic school run by nuns, the name of his department, his family's history with said department, his interest in the psychology of paranormal criminals, his working knowledge of advanced physics, his affection for the Lord of the Rings movies, and, to some degree, how I extrapolated his disorder that makes him incapable of perceiving or producing humor into "nobody ever says 'autism' on screen, but basically, he's autistic." Tate McGucket also involved a lot of extrapolation, but his lifelong ambition to punch Ford in the face and his mother's career path are the only things I can think of which weren't spun directly from one or another sliver of canon; there's more facts about Tate out there than you might think at first glance, they just occur in tiny, unconnected blocks, so you have to patiently comb through lots and lots of material and then piece the fragments together in ways that make a coherent narrative and character. Since I imagine you could plausibly derive a number of other interpretations from the same data, though, I'll call him a half-case compared to Powers, who I...didn't realize I'd actually made up to the degree it seems I made him up. I suppose Emma-May McGucket will count to something close to Powers levels if I ever finish "the Unexpected Memoirs," too.)

i think everybody should get to claim ownership over a barely-canon character and say whatever they want about ‘em. technically not an oc but so close because canon doesn’t really provide anything but a design or a name or a few short lines of dialogue. blorbo from your headcanons or whatever

[callipraxia]

My cruddy internet connection stopped working well enough to support the work platform, so I went back to typing these drafts, and...eugh. Chapter 24, y'all. Chapter 24. I just made myself cry. Part of me is worried people will be like, "that doesn't make sense for that to happen" and that will be the downfall of the whole dang thing, but if I'm tearing up, I suspect there's an excellent chance everyone else will also just follow suit instead.

[callipraxia]

Chapter one yesterday, chapter two today...do not expect this update schedule to continue indefinitely, lol.

[callipraxia]

“Ways to hide from your friends because woo social anxiety” no. 1142: spend like an hour dividing print-outs of your fanfic into chapters, assigning paper clip colors to narrators, adding the correct number of paper clips to each chapter to reflect how many scenes are in it and who narrated them, and then do the math! For anyone curious, here’s the POV and scene distribution stats for Isosesismal Emanations:

…one of these teams was more balanced than the other. And no, it was not planned - Team Camp just…each apparently took ten scenes completely organically, by coincidence. Also, holy scene-hogging, Dipper, you…do remember this is an ensemble piece, right?

[callipraxia]

…this is adorable, and also reminds me that I’ve gotta get around sometime to that one-shot where Soos makes good on his promise in IE to let Ford borrow his ��deeveedees” of the Lord of the Evil Lockets movies.

(The scene in question:

Soos looked briefly embarrassed, but quickly switched to an exaggeratedly suspicious expression. "Weeeellll, I mean, you are kind of a wizard from another plane of reality or something, dude," he pointed out. "These are valid questions."

Ford scowled at him. "I am not a wizard," he said sharply. "I am a man of science, and - "

"Eh, maybe back in the day, but you've been tending kinda wizard since you got back," interrupted Stan, crossing his arms and squinting in a manner which suggested studying a set of scales. "What?" he added when Ford glared at him, too. "You're doing spooky rituals in the woods with teabags and tea candles. Not traditionally what you see from people with lab coats and microscopes." Suddenly, Stan was glaring back at him before adding, "Start yelling at any lava monsters, though, and I will punch you so hard you'll punch a hole through the side of a mountain. We're not acting out any movies. We don't need that kind of trouble on top of everything else."

Tracey and Quattro both looked at Stan in evident surprise before glancing at each other. "You know Lord of the Evil Lockets, Grunkle Stan?" said Quattro, looking surprised while Tracey looked skeptical. Stan glared at them, too, and seemed to consider ignoring them for a moment.

"Just the movies," he muttered finally, as though annoyed or offended by the idea of being mistaken for a person who'd read a book.

"Good movies," said Powers.

"For real, dawg," said Soos. "Oh - you probably haven't seen them, have you?" he added to Ford. "Remind me and you can borrow my DVDs when we get back to civilization."

Now that I think of it, IE might not have been the best book in the FWJB trilogy, but it did have some of the best bits in it.)

Did anyone tell Ford (bonus doodle)

[callipraxia]

I just split FWJB Part II into two word documents, one for each storyline, and even printed the first one before the printer ran out of ink (I solemnly swear to use the backs of these sheets as my scratch/drafting paper for the next year or so). That section was the “Dipper and Mabel/still in town” half of the story - shorter than its counterpart by about ten pages, and, I think, nearly universally agreed to suffer from…something. Going through the pages as I made sure they stacked correctly, though, I came to some conclusions about what was wrong with that entire book, which are as follows:

1) It was written in alternating Group A-Group B chapters to try to create balance. This was a mistake, both because it’s just a bit odd I think and because of what it did to the pacing, and

2) the entire “Town group” story doesn’t actually suck. Chapters 1, 3, 5, 19, and 21 could, I think, stand up to most things I’ve written, and chapters 7, 9, and 11 have their redeeming features. In all likelihood, though, the best version of the tale probably involves 9, 11, 13, 15, and 17 being combined into two chapters. This, obviously, would mean the “town” group has less content than the “camping” group, but this doesn’t matter for two reasons: one, I could expand on Gideon’s side plot, and two, we are going to do some rearranging at some point, there will be places where the same storyline continues for more than one chapter, so that + the two shared chapters the groups have already would likely conceal this slight decrease in content anyway.

3) The “camping” group does need a little fine-tuning. I can feel the exact spot where I got uncertain of what I was doing, of how to move the cast from point A to point B, and I don’t like it at all. So that storyline may also have two chapters combined into one, if I can, er, figure out what should be there in place of the current meandering set of troubles beginning around chapter 12.

On the whole, looking at it like this, I’m…honestly more pleased with IE than I expected to be. It’s salvageable, quite salvageable, all I really need to do is drop the structural experimentation and screw my courage up to the sticking place in a few places. Best get on with that, then.

[callipraxia]

I saw u liked the Asks I did to:

picturejasper20 

(happy u liked and/or at least thought my rambles in the Ask and stuff were interesting. And stuff).

, and was like "wait, you are the author of "For Want of A Jailbreak, right?"

And man, I love that series.

I am still hoping to see a sequel and/or sequels someday of it.

Like Spoilers:

a sequel following Dipper keeping his memory.

And/or a sequel following the canon (Spoilers)

Ending, where he doesn't keep his memory.

Esp. how u imply in the comments that Diipper could still end up finding magic outside of Gravity Falls, and that he could maybe even worst off without his memory, than w/ it. Idk, I just find that super interesting and stuff.

And the one where Dipper keeps his memory and has to deal w/ that, and the aftermath of everything w/ everyone also is interesting to me.

Ask 1/?.

Yep, I am indeed the person who has the existence of the FWJB-verse on her conscience. 😉 I'm glad you enjoyed it!

I do have ideas for sequels to both timelines, and also a spin-off about Gideon...I've just found writing next to impossible ever since I finished IG for some reason. I've made multiple starts on several projects, so maybe/hopefully one of them will pan out soon, or else I'll have the Right Idea after sorting through enough other ones. I've also once again checked out the library book that led directly to the creation of FWJB, so maybe/hopefully that will combine with the stir around TBOB to act as the kick in the trousers that I've needed.

[callipraxia]

I had one of those "open a book to find a specific line, end up rereading said book out of order" moments with Thud! this week, and the more I flip through it, the more I realize how much of an apparently subconscious impact it had on FWJB, particularly concerning the portrayal of Stan. More specifically, how much of an impact late-series Sam Vimes seems to have had on the portrayal of Stan.

Most people reading my blog know who Stan is, but some may not know who Vimes is, so I will tell you. Sam Vimes is a guy who, when faced with the prospect of retirement from the City Watch, got beyond wasted while clinging to his badge so tightly it cut into his hand. Sam Vimes once arrested the ruler of his own city-state, and in the words of that ruler,

"People know about you, Commander. Descendant of a watchman who believed that if a corrupted court will not behead an evil king, then the watchman should do it himself....Sam Vimes once arrested me for treason...and Sam Vimes once arrested a dragon. Sam Vimes stopped a war between nations by arresting two high commands. He's an arresting fellow, Sam Vimes...watchmen across half the continent will say that Sam Vimes is as straight as an arrow, can't be corrupted, won't be turned, never took a bribe." (Pratchett 192).

So...yeah. But then it gets even better. Throughout the series, it's noted that most of the City Watch gets buried in the Cemetery of Small Gods in the grand expectation of nothing much, since being a watchman disillusions most of them too much for them to believe even in things they can see, much less ones they can't. Only a few of the Watch believe in much in terms of religion...but they do pretty much all believe in Sam Vimes. And on the Disc, the sheer force of belief can result in people, whether willing or not, being elevated to godhood. Add in that Sam Vimes, a bit after that quote there, defeats an "invisible and very powerful quasidemonic thing of pure vengeance" (ibid, 296) with the power of the policeman he's created in his head, "the watcher who watches the watchman," and in the process apparently gains said demon's respect and some minor super-sensory powers, and it's a decent bet that after Death has his last "near-Vimes experience," Vimes might actually become the god of policemen in his world. And I wouldn't be surprised if, in such a circumstance, he also became the policeman of the gods, because within a generation or two, every dwarf and every cop on the Disc will probably believe he's fully capable of arresting a god, too, if need be.

And Stan, of all people, was borrowing that guy's lines.

I... don't know what that means, but I am pretty sure it means something, and probably something I would be wise to tell my therapist about, if I had a therapist....

[callipraxia]

This is all very true, and something I've thought of a lot, albeit more for slightly-adjacent reasons.

See, I read way too many writing advice books, and for beginnings, you get told to just...jump straight in. A specific example I recall is the advice to start your science fiction novel with somebody just shooting an alien in the face. So, when I started FWJB Part I, that was literally the scenario I started with: Ford shooting a henchmaniac in the face. In the next scene, when we jumped into the point at which this story diverged from canon, we got Stan in a government SUV, which just crashed courtesy of the last gravitational anomaly. I could do that because between the summary ("In one universe parallel to 46'\, small matters...went differently, and as a result, the next-to-last gravitational anomaly did not allow Stan Pines to escape from federal custody as early as he did in its sibling reality") and the assumption that the readers knew "Not What He Seems" inside and out allowed me to just...jump in there, with no explanation of why this guy is in a government SUV, what's up with his weird watch, why this government agent is acting like he's a supervillain, who this 'Poindexter' person he needs information about is, etc. And so on and so forth. And so, the story got off to an extremely rapid start, and it continued on that way until the end of Part I...just like the writing books recommend. But it only worked because the audience already knew so much of the story up to that point. There were some flashbacks (Tate and Fiddleford McGucket) that filled in elements of the backstory later, and things where characters had to learn information (Dipper and Mabel and Soos getting an explanation of why this guy who looks like Stan just popped up out of nowhere), but even with that in place, I imagine it would have been really hard to understand without the audience having that amount of backstory.

So there we have: the Official Writing Advice...and maybe this is a failing in my imagination (I have a lot of these), but it seems it only really works properly with fanfiction. And then I think back on a lot of classic literature...where now, we need tons of footnotes, but the contemporary audiences didn't because they already knew the basics of the story inside and out. Look at the Bacchae - the last great tragedy, which essentially makes no sense whatsoever if you don't already know the story of the House of Cadmus - about Cadmus and Harmonia, about the deaths of Semele and Actaeon, about the double birth of Dionysus, etc. etc. And who's this Tiresias guy and why do we care? Or go later, check out the Renaissance - Shakespeare's plays, all the references. Dante, who filled Hell with people he did not like and who his contemporaries would have recognized the references to. Or later yet - read the original texts of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, or Through the Looking-Glass, or Flatland, etc. - these 19th century works are amusing and pointed if you know the references, but they range from impenetrable at worst to at least odd and disjointed at best if you don't, hence why we all owe the people behind the annotated versions great debts for their scholarship. Even into the twentieth century, you had elements of this with your writing-circles - friends who wrote together/made bets about who could write the better work in the other's style/shouted out to each other's continuities/etc. And now, today...we have fanfiction.

Another thing a lot of writing advice dictates is that there are at least very few completely original stories, just stories retold from a new point of view, or with new characters, and so forth. I'm not super-familiar with any publisher's lists, but just surveying the New Arrivals in the public library now and again, I can't help but notice evidence for this - for the past couple of years, there's been a positive fad for taking stories from mythology and retelling them as Stuff Happening to Classicists/Classics Students, At Least Some Of Them Evil. Part of that could very well be because Donna Tartt's first novel was about screwed-up classicists and one of Donna Tartt's more recent works won the Pulitzer ("I saw Donna Tartt wearing army pants and flipflops, so I went out and bought army pants and flipflops")...but even then, The Secret History gains extra dimension if you're familiar with Euripides and the Bacchae, which I already mentioned.

(Apparently it gains even more dimensions if you went to Bennington College in the eighties, but I can't attest to that, as I wasn't even born in the eighties and my experiences with Bennington are limited to having greatly admired the advertising at one point. But I digress.)

Point is - despite books, at least, being so often associated with recluses like myself who never really have more than one foot in the real world and aren't entirely happy about the necessity of maintaining even that level of contact with it, stories are meant to build on each other, I think. When they can't - when they try to be too self-contained - they lose something of what could make them great. Storytelling, after all, is far more ancient than reading and writing; Socrates preached against writing things down, if Plato's to be believed, and yet Socrates apparently knew his Homer, as there were festivals for the best recitations in that day. In the medieval period, your average person could not read and write, but still knew stories and embroidered on them as they passed them along - they were entertained by poetry and narrative as much as we are, just in a different format. And why not? Storytelling gives us something to talk about. Why do people form fandoms now? Why do we make friends through our desire to play with fiction? A common story gives us a context in which to express our ideas, a common language of sorts - I might not be able to explain my thoughts on Issue X in the abstract in a way that makes much sense, but if we put it into terms of Character A and Character B, we have a better chance of reaching an understanding. When I study some material in its pure form, it is far more likely to fail to interest me at first than it is if I start learning about it through a good story. And...it's just more fun this way, isn't it? Making up stories together - children who never write a word do this. It seems to be programmed into kids; I was brought up hardly ever seeing other children, and yet there were elaborate mythologies around my dolls. And who doesn't find it more enjoyable to tell a story when you know that you can find an audience that's as interested as you are ahead of time?

I think one of the big strengths of fanfiction as a medium is that it can, on average, assume the reader has a way higher degree of familiarity with canon than like…canon can. If you’re in the Star Wars AO3 tag you probably like Star Wars enough to remember more things about it than the average Star Wars-enjoying-ten-year-old. Which makes it way easier for fanwriter a to get to the juicy stuff and really engage with the worldbuilding or minor characters without having to spell out like. Who Wedge Antilles is for everyone who forgot or never noticed him in the first place. You could write a book about Wedge in the old EU because EU readers could also be assumed to be serious fans, but you can’t make a new canon Disney+ show about him. Those cost money to make and are intended for a broader audience.

And all this means that like. A good fic writer can and often will surpass canon when it comes to like. Thematic resonance and stuff, because they can really dig into something. Star Trek 2009 gave Kirk a new, more generic tragic backstory because it couldn’t expect the average moviegoer to be familiar with Kirk’s old, way more interesting tragic backstory. (Frankly, I’m not sure jj abrams knew about TOS Kirk’s backstory) whereas I have read a LOT of well-written, interesting, deeply resonant fanfic examinations of Tarsus IV, and what it means for Kirk’s character that he’s a genocide survivor. Star Trek 2009 answers the question “why did Kirk cheat on the kobayashi maru?” With “‘cause his dad crashed a spaceship when he was a baby.” A close examination of TOS canon implies the answer is “because he lived through a real-life Kobayashi that did have a win option, but which wasn’t taken.” BUT—and this is significant—even the TOS canon movies can’t really assume knowledge of the full TOS tv show, so that implication is never examined or made explicit. Instead it’s fanfic (and maybe spin off novels? Idk I’ve only read 2 trek books, if there’s one out there that covers this that would be really cool) where we get dives into that thread, where Kirk gets a commendation for original thinking because he can look a testing board in the eye and say “I’ve seen what happens when someone is entrenched in this kind of thinking, and I cannot let it happen to me. I understand the lesson, but it’s not hypothetical anymore and it never will be. I did what I had to do.” And that’s interesting! That’s meaningful! That can’t happen in a summer blockbuster. But it can happen in fic, easily, and that’s a strength of fic, I think.