Okay, I need to talk to SOMEONE about this: I got permission to write a continuation/au of Wizards IN SPACE and I have ideas but almost no one who is both interested in Wizards IN SPACE and knows the fandoms I am borrowing characters from (there aren't enough adult characters for me to use in HP and I am lazy and don't want to use OCs), so I thought... maybe on the internet? Anyway, if you are 1) interested in the DA becoming a wizarding space agency and 2) familiar with TAZ and/or Girl Genius, here's some stuff (also on tumblr): Although I'm thinking about having one of the kids get ahold of an issue of the research magazine Lucretia writes for and have them seek her out, rather than her stumbling upon them. (Also, if anyone can think of a suitably punny yet dry name for a Canadian magical research magazine, lay it on me, because I am coming up blank.) If I do go this route, they will notice her in particular because of a book or article or essay where she talks about Earth's natural magic (ley lines and shit) and speculates about whether other planets have magic too, and what that might look like. Also, whether some kinds of magic would be impossible to work in the void of space. For that matter, is space a void? Does it have magic in it? This is understandably interesting to a bunch of magical school children with an alien spaceship.
Agatha Heterodyne might be a historical figure whose works and (translated) writing Hermione and Lee (the engineering department) go *o* over, or she might be a contemporary figure who they can have enthusiastic if somewhat linguistically incompatible conversations with. If nothing else, Hermione and Agatha both speak French, and a modern Agatha has probably learned English. The rest of the cast I haven't thought much about, except that Lucrezia Mongfish is definitely dead, and Agatha's boys will exist in whichever time frame she does.
@Jean oh hey, i found Wizards IN SPACE quite enjoyable, would def be interested in any sort of fanfic in that verse! i’m not really far enough into taz to comment on those character integrations, but they sound cool!
Awesome! :D Do you know any other fandoms you think would be good to steal characters from for these purposes (caveat that I may or may not start reading something new if I don't know the fandom)? Also, how far are you? I am actually less far than I seem; I've just been spoiled for pretty much the entire podcast by this point.
hmm i'm not really coming up with any other good fandoms to steal characters from for this purpose, sorry oh, i'm way back in Murder on the Rockport Limited and have been for months because what is attention span, though i've also been spoiled for some stuff.
Contemplating Lucretia/Hermione. They'd be so fun/terrifying to listen to. ...talk, I mean. At the very least, they'll be friends.
thumperdaetime came up with the idea of a spell called "i'll name it after finals" which allows the castor to get twice the sleep in half the time, and gave me permission to use it. In my Wizards IN SPACE fanfanfic, this is how it comes to be: Lucretia and Barry attend the same Canadian magical university, and become friends in freshman year following a group project in their spellcrafting class, where they were forced to carry the team and were the only reason their assignment got a positive grade. The fact that it was in spellcrafting that they met was perhaps prophetic; over the next several months they spent an unnecessary amount of time trying to develop spells to help with their somewhat outrageous courseloads. Said courseloads may have been less overwhelming if they hadn't spent so much time researching for unrelated projects. In any case, "i'll name it after finals" (which they did not name after finals) was the first and by far least detrimental to their health of their successes. By the time they graduate, they have many more under their belts. It serves them well in their research, but when Merle joins the DSF and Harry responds to them finally having a healer by having the entire crew and staff go through regular checkups, he (merle) is appalled at what they've done to their bodies. To quote @theprettiestboy, “It's always the quiet studious ones that give themselves heart problems by doing weird science to coffee” and man, do they do weird science to coffee.
I'm making (very slow) progress! Spoiler: Wizards IN SPACE spinoff snippet: Lucretia Lucretia was yanked out of her intense focus on her notes by the sound of something clicking against the window of her hotel room. She jerked her head up to find… a snowy owl. Carrying a whole bundle of letters. Pecking at the window of her muggle hotel room in Bihar, India. At 10:46 in the morning. Oh, dear. Lucretia hurried to let it in, closing the window and curtains behind it. The bird landed on the back of her chair and stuck its leg out expectantly, giving her a look that long association with mail owls let her interpret as impatient. She bustled over, conjuring a bowl of water onto the desk in front of her chair. “I’m afraid I don’t have any owl treats,” she said apologetically as she untied the bundle. The owl ignored her, focussing its attention on the water, and she leafed through the letters quickly, making sure that they were all for her, and she wasn’t simply the first of a series of stops. Lucretia Grindstaff read each envelope in various levels of neatness. She opened the top one and was faced with the neat cursive of someone who had grown up writing with a quill pen. Dear Ms. Grindstaff, I recently read your book Mostly Void? and I was -- The owl had flown to the window and was making demanding preck! noises. Lucretia startled, looking up. She’d had no idea that snowy owls barked. Quickly letting the bird out, Lucretia drifted back to her seat, attention on the letter once again. -- entirely captivated. I don’t know how it could be that neither I nor anyone else had up to this point considered the possibility of magic in space, but now that it has been raised I find I can think of little else. To that end, I have written you with my responses and theories. I hope I do not put you out, especially as I know many of my colleagues have written similar letters. Well, that explained the sudden influx of mail. With regard to your hypotheses on the subject of unobstructed sunlight… The last name Grindstaff was given to her because she needed one, and that was the first one to pop into my head that seemed appropriately badass.
Okay, I promise I'll get back to my HP/TAZ stuff immediately, I just have to tell someone about this: What if when Jason Todd died, rather than going to whatever afterlife exists for dcu characters and getting yanked back by superboy prime's punch, he ended up in the furthest ring? With the dreambubbles and the horrorterrors and maybe Feferi. And he comes back and doesn't tell anyone about it but he keeps slipping into tongues and vomiting up black ooze and he can hear them, sometimes, especially at night, whispering to him, trying to tell him to do things. And he can't understand their voices except maybe he can, just a little. Sometimes he looks in the mirror and his skin is grey. And he tries so, so hard to ignore it or dismiss it and deal with it alone, but then a small eldritch abomination shows up in Gotham, and he talks to it. The bats, for once, call in reinforcements in the form of Raven, and she takes one look at him and knows. And maybe she can help -- but maybe she can't. Maybe he's stuck like this for the rest of his life, however long that lasts, vomiting up sea water full of tiny eggs and dumping gasoline on it to light it on fire or bleach, maybe, anything he can think of to kill them because he doesn't want to know what they'll be when they hatch. Anyway yeah. Sometimes I think about Rose Lalonde and get emotional, which translates to grimdark crossovers, apparently.
more of that animorphs/undertale crossover: the animorphs begin to learn magic, and discover they can use it in morph. ax's magic is mostly just better thoughtspeech-images and feelings, if he wants, as well as just words-while jake has like, healing and maybe buffs rachel has fire magic but to her endless annoyance she's really bad at it so it's mostly just light i dunno what everyone else has also the hork-bajir can sense magic as well-the yeerks treat this as an annoying defect in their sense of touch
Three rapid fandom hops later: I swear that one day I will learn to focus on one project at a time. For right now, though: Discworld/Harry Potter! Please join me in imagining Hermione Granger as raised by a reality-displaced ghost!Tiffany Aching. Of course Hermione, being the only magical in the family, is the only one able to see her, and so her parents are quite baffled by the "made up" language she speaks as much as English and her odd habits, but they're quite proud of her inclination towards helping people and, well, looking around for what needs to be done and doing it. She is, after all, emulating, to the best of her ability, a Discworld witch. And she's still bossy and socially awkward and a Gryffindor through and through, for all her intelligence. That won't change. But what does is this: a little girl sees a boy in rags on a train, and decides to help him; a little girl hears the story of a boy dropped from a window, and decides to help him, too. Hermione Granger sees every injustice in the wizarding world much earlier than she otherwise would have, and sets out to do something about them, because somebody has to, and it might as well be her. And she isn't afraid to be selfish, and she isn't afraid to be loud. And she knows what evil looks like whether she's really seen it or not, because evil begins when you begin to treat people as things, and she knows as well as any witch: light or dark doesn't matter; anyone can do that.
More discworld/harry potter! This one is mostly @theprettiestboy's idea. Sam Vimes is an incredibly disgruntled auror. Sybil Ramkin is a rich pureblood who spends most of her time smuggling illegal dragons to dragon reserves. I'm not sure how they met, but there was at least one dragon involved, along with an annoyingly enthusiastic rookie named Carrot and the reigniting of Vimes's somewhat beaten-down sense of justice. Since then, they've been seeing each other on and off and his little apartment really is a dump, she has loads of room and she's hardly ever home, anyway, and if he's that hung up on propriety he can have a guest suite (he is not that hung up on propriety). When little eleven-year-old Ron Weasley writes to his brother about a baby dragon, Sybil is one of the people to fly over and smuggle it out. Later, Charlie gets a disturbing letter from the twins, who talk to him more than Ron does, telling him about how they went to pick up Harry Potter from his relatives' house, and there were bars on his windows an locks on the outside of his door, and how his stuff was locked in the cupboard under the stairs and he was so skinny and ate like he was starving later, and how could anyone do that to their own blood? Charlie frowns, and writes a reassuring letter back, and wonders who he knows who could do something about this. And isn't his friend Sybil dating a rather upstanding auror? What he knows of Sam Vimes is that he is grumpy and takes absolutely no shit and will stand up for what he believes is right come hell or high water. Not to mention he and Sybil clearly adore each other. So Charlie writes another letter, and Sybil shows it to her boyfriend, and Vimes narrows his eyes and growls something sharp and disgruntled that makes her almost feel bad for the Dursleys. Hell hath no fury like... well, like Vimes. As the Dursleys learn, soon. And Sam is a muggleborn who remembers how the muggle world works, and he has no problem with getting them arrested by the muggle authorities. Vernon and Petunia are charged with child abuse, Dudley is removed from their custody, and Harry... has nowhere to go. Of course the Weasleys would be delighted to take him in, but Harry refuses to be a burden on them, and the ministry gets involved and won't hear of him going to a muggle or muggleborn family, so the Grangers are right out. Dumbledore sweeps in before he can end up with the Malfoys, and a young ministry worker in... no one is sure what department he works for, actually; he just seems to always be there, always knowing what's going on and just how to solve a problem. Havelock Vetinari is a man who makes things run smoothly, no matter what "things" are. Vetinari steps in before he can end up anywhere else, and puts forward the suggestion of Sybil Ramkin, a fine upstanding pureblood from a good, old family -- a light family, even, which settles Dumbledore somewhat. And so Harry finds himself with his own wing in an old manor, with a grumpy auror and cheerful dragon enthusiast for company. Eventually, they get the story of first year out of him, and that day Harry learns many, many new words, none of them pleasant. Dumbledore feels an inexplicable shiver of foreboding run down his spine.
*another* animorphs/undertale crossover au one day, frisk joins the sharing. they manage to convince their yeerk-let's call them Venbop because that's what the http://animorphs.karrth.com/ yeerk name generator spat out after being given 'frisk dreemurr'-that bodysharing is a better route than bodysnatching, and become a voluntary controller. a few weeks later, on the heels of a very bad week, they mess something up and become Convinced that some visser or subvisser is gonna kill them for their bad job. this is possibly even true. their response to this "welp gonna die anyways i don't wanna die to a visser...i know! mt ebott!" they survive. now they are bodysharing with 2 people and one of them is chara, and oh, whoops, there is no yeerk pool under the mountain, Must Leave or else venbop Dies by hotland, they realize there's no way they can break the barrier, get down the mountain, reach town, and get to a yeerk pool before venbop dies, so they take a massive risk and tell alphys about the problem of "my alien symbiote is going to die soon" alphys manages to make a mini-kandrona-generator in time...that uses much, much less power than the typical empire ones alphys is also interested in seeing if venbop can bodyshare with a monster-scientific curiosity, of course in this AU a yeerk's 'take over the nervous system' thing and their method of entry and exit are both magical in nature (that's how they avoid ear damage to their hosts, literal magic) so unlike the other crossover it works, sorta, as monsters of alphys's species have their consciousness split between their brain and their soul and magic use is mostly under soul control, so a monster can rebel with magic with a lot less effort than it takes a human to rebel in a meaningful way frisk, chara, and alphys discuss the bodysharing thing while venbop is in a bowl of somewhat salty and muddy water (they...did their best to replicate the yeerk pool,, but just don't have the appropriate clays-even with the helpful effects of monster food, venbop needs a real yeerk pool sometime in the next week or so), and frisk/chara explains a little of the empire-enough that alphys has a general grasp on the situation they break the barrier, like in canon, but later, since the four of them had to work out a possible reason why venbop survived that wouldn't cause more issues later: they eventually settle on "we ate a whole lot of monster food, it can only delay kandrona starvation and you feel horrible and your host gets way harder to control but it did work" they also explain the monsters as "like some weird fusion of a class 1 and a class 4 species-you can control them, but it only really works voluntarily. a quirk of their biology means that if they lose hope completely-if you crush their will-they will die. also, they have magic. an involuntary host monster could reach out with their magic from inside their cage, and cause havoc, and there is no way to stop them without leaving marks that, to other monsters, are like a glowing neon sign of 'I have had my magic suppressed! Somebody is going around and applying magic suppression to random monsters!' also some of them are just too big, or too small, or have their nervous system somewhere where a yeerk just can't reach without bodily modification." meanwhile, five human teens are busy trying to get an alien out of the pacific ocean. frisk manages to get themself adopted by toriel, and proceeds to work on getting alphys a few little samples of yeerk pool sludge (a process that involves deliberately 'falling' into the yeerk pool avoiding a hork-bajir-controller sub-visser) so she can work on the process of starting a rogue yeerk pool frisk abuses the hell out of their save ability to gather info and see who's interested in a rogue pool. and cassie, of course, remembers. the venn diagram of 'people able to save/load, if nobody else currently has the power' and 'sub-temporally grounded people' is a circle. this leads to some Interesting Times. ax has absolutely no idea what to do with the information that some people just really, really like the idea of bodysharing. Eva suspects something is up, but Visser One ignores her. the mt ebott forest is better-tended than it has been in years. somebody appears to somehow be kidnapping yeerks. people have strange senses of deja vu. the andalite bandits seem to have an informant-because there is no other way they can predict what's going to happen next that well, surely? where are all those hosts disappearing to, anyways? and why does everyone just sort of know that there's a rogue pool, even though nobody's ever said anything about it for fear of being killed for sedition? EDIT: fixed link, changed a little wording
also i am imagining the frisk/chara/venbop group ending up as a bizarre, bodysharing, poly <3/<> group chara has that soulsight, and as a ghost is technically now a monster who is fully capable of magic (took them a long time to figure out that that had happened and how the hell to do it though) frisk is a mage, who is learning...weirdly fast?? it's almost like they have extra hours in the day (they do, in between the time travel and the only needing like 4 hours sleep a night) venbop has a little on-demand healing magic that's not 'put all the ear stuff back where it was'. venbop has no bullets yet. frisk's bullets are like, little moving stick thingies, and also, Fire, although they are trying to learn to copy as many different types of bullets as possible. so far they have managed a shaky bone and a croissant that caught fire. chara has little stars-both semi-realistic looking ones and five-pointed ones like asriel's-plus flowers, flower petals, and leaves
also i'm thinking that frisk's general attitude changes so much under the mountain that everybody else who knew them on the surface is like...really confused? venbop became more outgoing, although still quiet-they never talk very loudly, although they offer to go palp-to-palp to share memories and talk in silence even with yeerks they just met frisk is friendlier. more confident. they actually talk to the other voluntaries, rather than just kind of slinking off to the cafe to eat in silence. also they flirt with people, like, often?? and like...*all* species of people, they do not appear to have a preference. they talk about souls as if they're a provable thing and offhandedly say they have magic powers as if this is completely believable. although most of their time at the yeerk pool-and they visit weirdly often, usually just to hang around and chat-is spent doing things like hanging around the pens where the hork-bajir children are kept, or chatting to hosts in the cages, or fetching random documents for various sub-vissers somehow, they appear to be picking up languages-they let slip one day that they understood enough hork-bajir to recognize when one made a bad joke, and to make a truly terrible joke back, and have been spotted talking to gedd in their own language they just kind of...know things...somehow. it is deeply weird. also they seem utterly fascinated by a few specific voluntaries. or besotted. seriously, frisk, what is so fascinating about erek?
Somewhat obvious one but Fate/verse (especially the "Tonight's Menu At Emiya's" spinoff) paired with Shokugeki no Soma (Food Wars) Erina Nakiri, after trying Emiya Shirou's cooking: "Fascinating. He's obviously had no formal training whatsoever, but has somehow managed to develop his own unique specialization through sheer force of will." Rin Tohsaka: "He does that." Shirou and Megumi Tadokoro discussing ways of making food more relaxing and homey. Kotomine Kirei trying one of Soma's "special" dishes and being moved to tears.
