#wikipedia plot summary for a fic I'll never write

[taoofshigeru]

Okay, tell me about that Partitio AU. I don't have specific questions. Tell me anything you want to talk about. 👀

[cracks knuckles] Okay, so.

Partitio is now a business tycoon, a steam cowboy who's known the world over. He's loaded with wealth and looking for ways to invest it to benefit people. And he's got world's most competent guy™️ Thurston on some investigations into how he can put that to work. Among other things, this leads him to an interest in canal sanitation, which is how he finds out about the mysterious amnesiac apothecary. Thurston's efforts to locate her only succeed on the day of the attempted mass poisoning at Timberain, where he helps Edmund persuade the guards to evacuate and joins Castti in the rooftop struggle versus Trousseau.

In the course of dealing with corrupt officials demanding bribes, Thurston notices many of the same issues in the judicial system writ large, and reform becomes one of Partitio's civic projects. Pulling on this thread (ala The Court of Last Resort) uncovers some key irregularities in the trial of one Osvald V. Vanstein. When attempts to overturn the conviction stall in court, Partitio takes matters into his own hands. A trip to Terry's shipyards in Toto'haha and a chance encounter with Ochette later, he sails the Grand Terry to Frigid Isle and exposes the brutality behind the system. This happens to be the same day that Osvald and Emerald are staging their escape. They get past the warden, but Partitio stops them on the docks, offering to take both with him and forge new passports for both, on the condition they work for Partitio & Roque. Of course, he praises the innovative nature of their attempt, and the careful planning. Osvald is not candid about his revenge quest, but does use his new job to gather information.

Now Partitio's party is going to help Ochette in her journey to stormhail. The Glacis situation is dealt with, but they decide to linger while Thurston and Floyd try testing some new machinery that works best in cold weather. While stuck there they encounter both Hikari and Temenos. Hikari is met in a bar, and Partitio and Osvald persuade him to not go and persuade Rai Mei alone. Meanwhile, Ochette and Castti encounter Temenos on the day of Crick's death and follow him after Ochette notices something about the cleric's smell.

Castti, Osvald, and Temenos putting their heads together afterwards makes it clear there might well be a greater force at work behind many of their problems. In this AU, Ori has become Partitio's executive secretary. Though conflicted, she still works for the moonshades. Throughout the story, sometimes important calls for help/assistance get conveniently dropped to the bottom of the pile. She gets more and more conflicted seeing Partitio do more good and get upset when he's unable to help his new friends out. Eventually someone who's not Partitio confronts her, and she cracks. Castti, Temenos, and Osvald probably would be close to catching on. But the one who clocks the mole first is actually Ochette, and she confronts Ori about the interference she's been running. Cue Orichette hours.

After the events of Stormhail, everyone needs a break and Partito takes the group down to Merry Hills for the festival. Watching Agnea and Dolcinea's competition from front-row seats, Partitio is smitten with the redhead and the entire rest of the gang prods him to go backstage and introduce himself. She also falls for his dorky cowboy personality, and decides to tag along.

At this point, Ori has been spilling the beans and the gang immediately decide to head down to Lifeseed to confront Claude, one of the chief masterminds behind the conspiracy. They get there only to find he's already been killed at the hands of Throné Anguis, an eleventh hour addition to the team.

…From there, the journey for the dawn unfolds as follows. -Arcanette sacrifices herself once she gets word Claude has died to douse the Flamechurch flame. Ochette confronts Petrichor directly before the night of the scarlet moon starts, but just barely fails to prevent the dark hunter's sacrifice. -Tanzy extinguishes the Crackridge flame, fulfilling Arcanette's last command. -The travelers, now knowing there's only one flame left keeping the seal, race to Ku to find Mugen's troops arrayed outside the tranquil grotto, waiting in a trap set by Oboro. Partitio and his army of mercenaries fight to break through, while Hikari and Ori both end up confronting Oboro at the sacred flame with the darkblood blade ready to slice his stomach. The two make one last, desperate attempt to save him from his despair.

In one branch of the timeline, the Hikari/Ori duo are able to talk him out of it and Vide's resurrection is thwarted.

In the other, Harvey is the one waiting for them at Vidania, and challenges Osvald to a duel with Elena on the line. Elena is trapped by a magical curse that will only be lifted if Harvey dies and will kill her if anyone interferes with the duel. Upon failing to defeat his archrival, Harvey spits and curses with his last breath before tossing himself into the fire pit. Then Vide is fought more or less the same way as in the main story.

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Addenda: The other travelers, ranked by how well they could fit into such an AU after the outcome of their main story:

1) Agnea - She tours all over as a diva and has plenty of time to get mixed up in local affairs like the other travelers' main paths, and she'd be happy to lend her celebrity to their causes. 2) Osvald - There's unanswered questions about why Harvey bribed the judge to spare his life, versus other forces who wanted him dead. And, like it or not, being the wielder of the one true magic makes him a target for the moonshades. It's possible one of the other travelers witnesses an attempted hit on Osvald and steps in to nurse the stranger back to health, leading to them getting mixed up. He's still a man on the run, and that would lead to a dramatic tension when he struggles to decide whether to be honest with another traveler he decided to help. [It's just Urasawa Naoki's Monster. [It's just The Fugitive, created by Roy Huggins.]] 3) Temenos - [Unsolved Mysteries theme intensifies] 4) Castti - There are questions remaining about the man who corrupted Trousseau, but I think she'd be more interested in rebuilding Healeaks than continuing to travel. 5) Ochette - The new guardian of the village, she has responsibilities that keep her there unless some new ill omen forced her to leave again. 6) Hikari - He is now a head of state, confined to a localized region in the outskirts of the map. 7) Throné - She wants to leave the continent, and there's no real attachments left to stop her from doing so immediately. More likely she winds up finding her way to Orsterra and mixed up with the crows. (Throné x Primrose AU: She's tired of murders, she can't get enough. They become queerplatonic travel buddies.)

[makkoskafanfic]

The use of AI in Fanfictions - an essay I'm sure many people wrote before me

I've been thinking about this back and forth a lot lately and here's my two cents nobody asked for on the topic of AI in fanfiction.

Long text under the cut

I'll make a distinction here between using AI to enhance some of your creative fan writing and just prompting AI to write something for you en bloc, because in my opinion we are speaking of different things here. For the former there are some arguments I can make. For the record, I use claude.ai as I find it the most politely human sounding and a lot less inclined to come up with complete lies. (chatGPT I'm looking at you)

The thing I sporadically use it for is information gathering. Sporadically, as I quite enjoy reading through long Wikipedia articles about subjects I never dived into before, but sometimes I just need a two line summary that I'm struggling to find. Some of the random things I had to research for the current fic I'm working on:

- clubs/nightlife in the early 2000s in outer London/Reading

- parent-teacher meetings in Japan for 16 years old students

- popular drugs in Tokyo in the 2000s

- traditional musical instruments from Tibet

I've read through a bunch of blog posts, reddit posts (which I always find really draining), PDF reports, while I needed pretty much a 3 word answer on these. In a better late than never moment, I asked from AI as well, and decided to accept what it said as truth for the missing bits.

Then, for this same fic, I decided to write some song lyrics - and found that I really suck at it. In a pitch, I tried to get AI to write them for me - sadly they ended up even worse then my own ones, but I could use a few lines as inspiration at least.

So, I would say when you need a paragraph in a different style, let's say a news article, a diary entry, you can try to prompt it. I'd never use the text as it is, as AI writing is quite flavourless, missing the soul if you will, but it can help you through those bits that make you stuck for days at least. 

As a non-native English speaker, I'd really love it to help with the language at times, but I don't see it fit for this, at least not at this stage. Maybe specific translation tools are better at this, never tried them for any creative purpose, but I'd only ever recommend them if you are confident in understanding what the returned text says. We are very far from the point where you can type in a whole story in your local language and trust AI to return the translation while keeping not just the meaning but the quality of your writing as well.

And this is, I think, the crucial failing point of AI in creative writing. A story isn't only the plot, isn't only the characterisation, or the dialogues, which you can prompt to a degree. It isn't even only the smut. (I don't know any AI that writes you explicit scenes, there might be some out there already.) So many times I've said I have great story ideas inside my mind, if only I could plug in an USB stick to download them, but this wouldn't work for other reasons than the obvious.

Anyone who tries to write down one of the many ideas in their mind will know that a written story isn't the same as the one the internal movie machine provided. There will be gaps and plot holes and stuff that just doesn't work when written down. There will be conversations that will fail on paper. There will be things you can just not make your characters do. Even moreso, a written story is also your choice of words, your pacing, your style. A good story will be reflecting you, or the parts of you that you decide to expose through writing.

And this is why I don't see AI's point in creating whole fanfictions. It will miss *you* from it, it will be nothing but templates and cliches put next to each other and sure, we have all seen movies and series which didn't do much else, but it isn't what we should aim for, is it? A creative process is sometimes painful, sometimes frustrating, but strangely is still a fulfilling thing. If someone wants to prompt AI for a fic for themselves, why not? I did, mostly to prove my point that it won't be good, and yes, it wasn't good. I actually had a good laugh as it was so cringe. Posting it isn't evil either, but I find it fully pointless. Why would I read anyone's prompted AI fic, when it takes me less than a minute to create a bad story for myself? As far as I can see you gain nothing but a few kudos and lots of hateful comments if you post an AI created fic, so unless you want interactions from others regardless if they are positive or negative, why would you do it?

Bottom line? I don't see harm in trying to use AI smartly for fanfictions, it is nothing but a tool after all, don't let the "intelligence" part mislead you. It's not. But let us not forget to cherish the human creativity, and appreciate the beauty in different styles and thought processes. Let's use fanfictions to learn English (or language of your choice) on a higher level. Make it a *good* story. Make it a well-written story. Create believable characterisation and dialogues. Write that sex scene.

One more thing: I'm talking about fanfictions only, where we are already playing with someone else's toys and can have a lot less claim about what's "ours". For an original piece of fiction, especially if you are one of those brave souls considering publishing something, the level of AI usage I'd find acceptable converges to 0.

To prove, or disprove my point, I also asked AI what it thinks of this.