Arbitrary Title DVD Special Edition

Running commentary for the saga 'Arbitrary Title'--otherwise known as
the group of stories 'All's Fair, Love and War, Best Laid Plans, and
Laid to Rest'--otherwise known as 'meb*.txt'.

Okay, that's a lie. This can't be a running commentary, because I have
no idea of your reading speed. I'm writing this(for your further
edification) while I'm rereading these stories, and in some cases it's
a few years since I've written them. I'm sometimes surprised by my own
talent, mostly because I'm not falsely modest, I actually *forget* a
lot of things I've written. So if I seem unreasonably delighted by a
cute turn of phrase, I really am, I'm not trying to brag.

Hey, this whole text file is me bragging. If you don't care what I
think, don't want to read my rambling stories, or hear my theories,
don't read it. None of this is canon until it becomes a story. ;)

So, let's get started...

-- All's Fair --

The acknowledgements start with an ack for Christine Morgan, for 'the
scene that inspired this madness.' And for the life of me, I can't
remember what it is. I can only remember another fanfic scene that
inspired me to write a story, which was in one of Jewel Faulkner's
'fics. It was something about Matt and Belinda, and my amusement about
the strange relationships that would spring up if Matt actually did
hook up with his partner's daughter. That's the entire reason that I
wrote Dragon Wings and Shiny Things.

Merlin Missy is still in my little personal pantheon of people I
admire, just because her stuff is so... so... so *good*. All Through
The Night is the standard to which all crossover fiction should be
held. If I read it when I only understood one series out of *Four* that
she crossovered, and not only understood but empathized with all the
characters from the *other* serieses... well, it's good stuff.

Jewel Faulkner has, in a similar vein, done great *dark* fiction. No
butterflies and rainbows here, nosiree. She's influenced a lot of my
stuff, from this series where the darkness is fairly light, to stuff
like _A Matter of Trust_ and _Stiletto_, both on my page, which are
pitch black and smell like blood.

Rob, being male, and being there when I was posting bits and pieces of
this story around whenever I hit writer's block, was invaluable in
fixing up one of the pieces in the middle of this story. I'll try to
point it out when I get there.

Shad and J-Rock... ahh, yes, my star reviews. The first 'gaah' was, I
think, when Elisa first came into the apartment and asked for sex. The
second was when it actually happened. I'm not sure about the timing on
Shad's comments, but he was very verbal on how they made him feel. It's
for comments like this that I write this sort of fiction.

The story I mentioned in Pat's ack was a planned B5/DS9 crossover that
had Sheridan from the B5 universe bump into a double in the DS9
universe. I never got very far on it, but seeing Pat's reaction to the
opening line was worth it.

WS2 is a friend in real life, and exposed me to most of the serieses
that I write fanfic for(the exception being Gargoyles.) X-Files is a
television series that I have already discussed elsewhere, and I will
only make one comment here, which is that it is *very* easy to write
fanfic for. At least, it's easy for me to want to write fanfic for it.
Ebert once mentioned that he wanted to beam the characters from "Home
Fries" up into a different movie; that's how I feel about Mulder and
Scully, and I've done it on more than one occasion.

The canon warning... I had to mess with the 'egg time' in order to make
the Jake/Aurora romance plausible, and I had to make that plausible to
get the dramatic irony working. Jake had to fall for a female gargoyle;
the only ones around were either the clan, in which case they would be
younger than he was, or from Avalon, in which case they would be too
old. And weird. I never paid much attention to Avalon, so I decided not
to deal with that possibility.

Not to mention that I'm not sure how much of the gargoyle/human
crossbreeding is dealt with in normal canon. I've taken the position
that since gargoyles are magical creatures, there's no reason why they
shouldn't be able to breed with whomever they choose, as long as
everything gets triggered. Human women just can't carry gargoyle
children, for reasons of health and safety.

Of course, I make up new rules for every series of fanfic that I write.
I don't think I enforce any of these rules in Dragon Wings or in Lost
Girl. The rules I make are for plot purposes only, and I feel no need
to hold myself to them cross-universe.

... Boy did that sound pretentious. Let's get to the story.

As I think I said in the outro, the first two scenes are really the
only remnants of the original 'story', such as it was. I'm not sure
what my original idea was. Something about getting a drunken Matt to
blurt his romantic intentions to a disbelieving Elisa, and...
something. The reason it crashed and burned was mostly because I didn't
have even the rough sketch of a plot that this story does.

The original text file was called 'matt-elisa-badstuff.txt', which is
why I refer to the series as the 'meb' series.

Sunset Boulevard, STR number one. o/` But after a year, a one-room hell
/ A murphy bed, a rancid smell / Wallpaper peeling at the corners...
o/` It's probably said better in William Holden's narrations in the
movie, but I like Kevin Anderson's voice in the WPC recording of the
musical. No, it's not ALW's best musical. But I *really* *like* Kevin
Anderson's voice. Did I mention that Kevin Anderson's sexy voice saves
that musical?

I'll give it a rest.

Furniture Guys, same paragraph, STR two. I used to watch the Furniture
Guys(or Furniture to Go) as a daily thing, back when I still watched TV
of my own volition. Of course, my father is a carpenter-turned-
engineer-turned-programmer and all-around handyman, so I have a little
bit of knowledge myself, making the program a little less esoteric and
more fun.

A lot of this has been rewritten, not once but twice, but shades of the
original are still there. I think that the closing paragraph of the
first scene is at least six years old.

The second scene is pretty much how I first wrote it, which is the
reason for the time jump at the beginning of the third. I don't
actually know what a hangover feels like, or what Matt would be saying
or how he'd be acting under the influence of one. All of my alcohol
knowledge comes from secondhand experience.

... I'm a High School student, for the Goddess' sake.

Ahh, scene three and the 'Two years later' jump from Sixth Sense. Well,
three months.

The 'in bed' joke... doesn't everyone do this with fortune cookies?
That, or 'between the sheets'... it makes fortune cookies more fun.
Actually, I didn't know about this practice until recently. I added
this line when I was mostly done with the story. One of my friends made
a CGI script that would spit out 'Koshisms' that were REALLY DEEP, MAN,
but were more interesting if you tacked 'between the sheets' onto the
end. So he modified the script so it would do just that.

So whatever "Mead is as the pawn flies with the water of incandescence
between the sheets" means, it has something to do with this story. Of
course, Matt's actually comes true, which is what makes it
foreshadowing and not just tacky.

I wanted to think up some reason to get Matt and Elisa in bed, and
therefore destroy their partnership. Well, no, that's not completely
true. It's just that I wanted to explore the consequences of sex
between people who have to work together, and this was the best I could
do. Looking at this from the perspective of someone who writes X-Files
fanfic, this story is an advocation of a strict celibacy policy between
the dynamic duo. People who have to trust each other with their lives
should *not* sleep together, because unless everything goes perfectly,
it's Not Going To Work, and they'll have to get new partners in both
senses.

Of course, this relationship is doomed from the start. It's a nasty
love triangle, and it screws Matt over by giving him exactly what he
thinks he wants, and then bashing him over the head with the reality of
the situation multiple times. Be careful what you wish for, indeed.

I'm sure that Matt's an intelligent man, and he realizes the fact of
the matter relatively quickly. So much for the afterglow.

STR number three is the song. Of course, unless you're psychic, you
wouldn't know that I'm listening to the cover by Great Big Sea, instead
of the original by REM. GBS' version is acoustic and faster by another
50%. They've done some excellent music, and I heartily recommend buying
everything they've put out right away.

I'm endlessly fascinated by things that people get addicted to besides
addictive substances. Alcohol and tobacco are easy to get addicted to,
but what about information? The internet? Sex? Sex that's
psychologically damaging and indirectly bad for your health?

I had to come up with a reason that Elisa was so out of it in this
story, so I put the Sevarius story in the sequel. I tend to go back and
plug plot holes in that way throughout this series. Except they're not
plot holes, they're, uh, things for you to think about. Yeah.

The Graduate, STR number four. I've never actually seen the movie, but
I have two scenes from it in my Movie Scenes for Actors books...

STR five, the song. Simon and Garfunkel, brilliant music.

And in the next scene is where it turns from a relationship of
convenience to something truly desperate. This is the little turning
point, where Elisa decides to continue the relationship despite her
better senses, and where we see that she's getting something out of
this, too, besides the child.

Aaand the afterglow scene is where Rob reminded me that men aren't
*awake* after sex. I'd completely forgotten this. See, for women, an
orgasm doesn't shut down brain function at all. Men are apparently
affected a bit...

STR six, 'Baby, it's cold outside.' Ray Charles. I got to see the man
and his soul perform in my area, and it was a blast. Can you believe me
when I say I hadn't heard of Ray Charles before that? That I didn't
know he was black, much less blind? Oh, well. I picked up a bunch of
his songs, and that duet was one of my favorites. It's also mentioned
in The Callahan Touch in the beginning.

Okay, time for the second plot arc. Demona. Why the hell did I do this?
Short answer: I needed to end the story, and bringing in an anti-
whoever-Elisa's-kid-is seemed to be the best way to set up some foils
and give me a way to leapfrog from one world to another, thereby
setting up group dynamics and some more tension in Matt's mind. That,
and I really like reforming villains. I mean, just look at 'Shadow-
Touched, Shadow-Lost' and even 'My Time No More'. And on my long-term
projects list is "Rewrite Richard III to make Richard the hero." Okay,
I replaced 'make Richard the hero' with 'provide more historical
realism', but the result's the same.

I'm even planning more stupid X-Files fanfic(yes, that's how I refer to
it in real life) to reform Modell, the sociopathic telepath from
Pusher. I. Am. On. Crack.

Then again, many people have argued that Demona isn't really evil, per
se, but more confused and traumatized. That's the tack I'm taking.
Motherhood really shook her up, and Matt's shaking her up even more.

Ahh, El Nino! I remember that! El Nino was going to cause all sorts of
freaky weather to happen. It became common to blame everything on El
Nino, especially when nothing really happened.

I like putting characters' unvoiced comments next to their quotes or
inbetween things they actually say. It's a way to get around using 'he
thought's and et cetera.

Hmm. Conversations about psychology... nothing really of interest here.
Just trying to build the feeling that Demona isn't violently evil, at
least not at this point.

Here's the next turning point. I had to think of a way to make Matt
temporarily insane and jump into bed with anyone, if only to relieve
some of the backbreaking tension he's been under. Having him realize
that Elisa was using moves that she'd practiced on Goliath on *him*
just seemed... well, fitting. And just irrational enough.

And then the fingernails thing. I don't know where this came from.
Wings seem to be a favorite gargoyle erogenous zone for fanfic writers,
so I borrowed it and expanded on the idea. Maybe I've been influenced
too much by Christine/Jewel, but it seemed like a good idea at the
time.

Okay, so once I got the relationship started, I had to end it. And I
didn't want it to end badly, but I had to give the impression that it
was over. So I had them end it. Wish it was that easy for real
people...

STR number seven, 'Fly Away' by John Denver, with Olivia Newton-John
singing the 'do-do-do-do, do-do-dooo' bit. This was... random.

I wanted to drop that the clan was smart enough to figure out what was
going on in somewhere. People know these things, even if they don't
talk about them... of course, they don't find out about Demona until
the end.

So... yeah, Demona and Matt are with each other more or less by
default. They're in love with people who are living together, so they
end up together. Nice, huh?

And then the Owen scene. People have thought up various scenarios that
could make Owen actually lose his composure. I thought that learning
that Matt and the Enemy of Humanity had been sleeping together might do
it.

And then the third girl enters. Vanessa is a plot device to explain the
physiology of gargoyle conception. She gets a more sinister role in
meb2, where I go on to explain she's a spy and various other nasty
things.

Cutting ahead again. I like looking at interesting points in people's
lives, not the dreary day-to-day details. I felt safe in skipping over
a few months, though if I was writing it now I'd probably choose a more
elegant way of doing it. Or a blatantly less elegant one.

More of Elisa's ... dislike of doctors. More planting for the sequel's
real explaination.

And here we go with some dynamic tension between Goliath and Matt, what
with the kid's middle name and all. Whee, more threats of that parapet,
which I suppose is ironic considering what finally happens when Matt
*does* go over a parapet.

I like Matt's little mindspasm when Demona calls him. I mean, that's
what I'd be thinking if I were a paranoid detective with ties to the
Illuminati society.

I suppose you could count 'Nine Months', the movie, as STR number
eight, if you were being anal. I never did, mostly because I know less
about that movie than I do about The Graduate.

And there's the bit of non-canon gargoyle physiology that I was talking
about at the beginning. Just to make that clear, and all.

And the sweet motherhood scene with Demona. By this point, I think
Elisa's the real insane villain of the story. Of course, she has more
stuff to deal with, whereas Demona doesn't have to care what anyone
else thinks.

Time for the rapid time acceleration bit of the story. A bit
disconcerting, but I figured adding labels wouldn't help any, since I'm
not too sure myself when the story takes place.

Eight-year-olds are bright. I should know, I teach them tap.

And then the Mark scene, which honestly goes on for much too long. This
was the first time Mark showed up, and I did want to make a big deal
about the difference between his relationship with Matt and Jake's,
but... it goes on for too long.

Mark is really a mary-sue type character for me, which is why I
consciously tried to un-sue him in later stories. I'm not sure how well
I succeeded. What I should do after writing these is let them sit for a
month or so, and then rewrite... but I don't, because I have more
projects I want to work on, and I like to publish things. The closest I
think I've come is in fixing the Mark/Krysia campfire scene in meb4,
which used to be truly awful.

Hmm. I should have trimmed the stupid 'where have you been' thing. And
the pokemon reference. No good can come of a pokemon reference.

Matt doesn't outrank Xanatos in the Illuminati, though Xanatos isn't
Fifth Circle at this point. Hacker, however, is Matt's friend, and he
outranks Xanatos. So Matt has some leverage, which is why Xanatos is in
Matt's debt, rather than the Society's.

Bad transition into the deep conversation from the spastic stuff.
Should have a couple more lines there, and make the following garbage
that much shorter.

The X-Files is a television show in this universe, which means I can't
crossover with it. It's real in the spastic universe, which means I
can't reference the show. Right?

Oh, yeah, Matt *was* FBI...

In Merlin Missy's X-Files crossover, Matt and Mulder knew each other. I
thought it'd be more fun if he knew Scully instead. Enough on the other
series.

I knew zip about FBI training when I wrote this. Thanks to WS2's
endless research, I know know zip +.001, which is a slight improvement.

The Lovers! The Complication! If this were any more Shakespearian, it'd
have to end in a pile of corpses or a marraige.

And there we go with the bizzare 50s-TV-show in the middle of confusion
and panic. And Xanatos' little explaination of what Demona's been doing
the past twenty years. And... well, yes, cheap exposition.

And there goes Mark being Charming, which really makes him a mary
sue...

And the happy ending. Yaay!

I guess I didn't say anything in the ending credits. And there's me
flirting with Japanese... which I'm actually taking as my foriegn
language credit, so I have a reason. 'Hajime' means beginning, 'owatta'
means 'finished.'

All's Fair clocks in at 100k in un-linebroken state, which is about
101k with linebreaks. Lots and lots of carraige returns, most of them
done by hand at this point, I think.

I didn't set out to write the entire thing from Matt's POV, but once I
got about halfway through there wasn't a real point in breaking from
it. I stopped that in Love and War because I couldn't do the whole
thing from Matt's perspective and still do everything I wanted to.

Generally I write stories for one or two scenes that I picture, think
up a plot that connects them, and start at the beginning. If I can
visualize other scenes in the middle, so much the better; it makes the
connective tissue either. The scenes I want to write don't always
become the most important scenes, either; most of the time they're not.
Sometimes it's blatantly obvious, sometimes it's hard to tell... it
depends on the story. In Life Sucks, Bite Me, for example, I pretty
much didn't *write* anything except the scenes that pertained to the
Scully-as-vampire thread, which was the only thing I cared about.

In Love and War, I wanted to write the scene where Matt and Elisa met
in the elevator, and the one where she came over to his apartment and
announced that she was pregnant... again. Everything else came from
those scenes.

So let's begin...

-- Love and War --

Either Rob or phen found me a great site with all sorts of South
African names on it. I've since lost it, but I found an even better
one(for first names, anyway.)

I'm still waiting for Jewel's last story, when she takes a break from
writing Gundam Wing and Slayers fanfic long enough to write it.

Oh, the Surgeon General's Warning... I noticed that I had a lot of
broken glass in this fanfic. I mean, a *lot*. I decided to stick a
warning on in case people were worried about my sanity, which probably
worried them even more.

Okay. Starting out with the anti-aging drug and some hints about the
whole Sevarius thing. Between finishing All's Fair and writing this, I
fleshed out the whole 'what happened' thing and applied it.

We then cut from the middle of the last story to a year after it ended.
Here starts the big 'Gargoyles: The Next Generation' plot. This story
has a lot of both generations, as does the following one, but the last
story is pretty much all about Mark and Jake. It's not that I don't
like the series characters, it's that I don't feel entirely comfortable
working with them since I haven't seen the series in... years.

Everyone should see Rent. And Ragtime, though I didn't know it at the
time.

I like the tailor gag. It's cheap, but I like it. And the line about
Alex's brain crusting over... I hate parties in general, and think
everyone else should too.

... and there's my little 'Woo, Vermont!' tag about civil unions. I'm
annoyingly pro-Gay-rights, and often find myself in a position where I
simply can't *comprehend* people who think that same-sex marraiges are
somehow 'wrong.' I just can't wrap my head around the argument. It's a
civil agreement that protects both people legally and gives their union
permenance and a level of formality. What's the beef if these people
are both the same gender?

This is pretty much one of those arguments where people are either on
one side or the other, though, so I won't spend more time harping on
it.

Oh, first mention that Mark's claustrophobic. It comes back with the
sensory-deprivation booth reference, but *anyone* would be leery of a
sensory-deprivation booth. If you're not, you haven't thought about it
hard enough.

The ALW-cancer thing was a throwaway reference. Even I'm not sure if I
meant something by it. And the Wizard of Earthsea thing... that's a
Warehouse 23 reference. There's an Oscar with a 'best director for
Wizard of Earthsea, Antonio Banderas' plaque attached to it somewhere
in there.

Mark thanking Hera... I had this idea that Mark's an all-inclusive
panthesistic multiculturalist multipantheonist, and changes who he
prays to on a whim. I even had him say the above description in the old
version of the campfire scene in meb4, but it's gone now.

I think Betty was a hangover from listening to Rent or something.

I actually heard one of my classmates make the Kashmir/Cashmere mixup
in world history. It hurt just as much then.

The fuel cell thing is wishful thinking, I'll admit. But I saw a
presentation on fuel cells at CalTech before I wrote this part... and
it was *really* cool.

Goliath... I wanted to touch on Goliath and what he was feeling about
the whole situation, because I'd only hit Matt's side of the story. I
mean, I'd made the guy out to be the bad guy, when he was just trying
to protect his mate. Everyone in this whole relationship has been
affected, which is the point I'm trying to make.

And of course, it's dramatic irony when put together with the next
scene, where we see just how affected Elisa is.

The cancel button is there so that people can have kinky elevator sex.
What do you think?

Desmond Morris, who has written several excellent books on human
behavior and had a series on The Learning Channel a few years ago,
speculated about signals that people get from one another that make
them more attractive as far as sexual coupling goes. Now, of course
Elisa and Goliath are in love with one another. But they aren't the
same species, so some of those signals are going to be messed up. On
several levels, it feels wrong, uncomfortable, and unsatisfactory.

Now, that's not the main reason that Elisa really jumps Matt--but it's
a reason, and it's the one that I have in the narration.

The post-coital drink/smoke has been replaced by kleenex and breath
mints. Whee, metaphors for disposable sex.

I think it's perfectly charming to have Elisa wondering why her life's
screwed up a minute after she cheats on her husband with her ex-partner
in someone else's private elevator.

... and I wanted to get rid of the evidence, too.

Mark's stupid story is partly inspired by Piers Anthony novels; the
Xanth ones. I'd come up with the exact title but I don't care enough to
do the research.

There's another Sunset Boulevard reference at the end of the scene. I
think William Holden has a similar line, mostly because most of the
best lines in the musical were stolen directly from the movie.

And here's the first time I've *ever* used the word 'fuck' in a story.
And the second, following it quickly. I stay away from swear words as
much as possible, but the level of self-loathing that Matt was reveling
in necessitated the use of heavy language. Plus WS2 was leaning on me
to grow up and write more cursing into my stories.

Now, I have the feeling that if Jake had really been kicked out, he
wouldn't have been let back in. But then again, he *does* have friends
and relations in the Illuminati society, so...

Tim Hilton is an enemy of a friend. Let's leave it at that, shall we?

Why Matt told Jake I'm not sure. Guy never has been that stable.

And here's the scene where we meet Jake's inferiority complex. Hi,
Jake's inferiority complex!

Now, I have some issues with Wyvern. It's not really a castle, it's a
keep. A castle would be much too big to fit on top of a skyscraper, any
skyscraper. Not that it matters.

Poor Jake. He just can't make his father happy, and it's not even his
fault.

People are always questioning the state of the universe in my stories.
I think it's a natural consequence of having me as an author.

So far, not even a full night has gone by. Mark was heading to the
party soon after sunset. Goliath's scene and Elisa's scene happened
about the same point in time. After that, Matt delivered the stuff and
headed home, where he met up with Jake. Mark and Alex were at the party
for another hour, but Alex got home considerably faster than Mark did,
so he was there for Jake's arrival, while Mark only showed up...
nowish.

Mark has much too much enthusiasm early in the morning for someone
who's supposed to be nocturnal. I hate people like that.

The song that Mark is singing is 'Barrett's Privateers' by Stan Rogers.
It's a truly great song. And if you don't think it's happy... well,
you're not drinking enough, that's all!

The fight scenes... um, there's not much I can say about them. I don't
really like writing action, unless it's whacked out and trippy. That's
why I do better with the burning stuff.

'Guerre' is one of the few French words that I actually know.

Yes, a helicopter really can hold that many people.

I'm still not sure what Zaire is calling itself these days.

I think I wrote the Elisa/Matt scene first, and went back to add the
Demona/Matt scene, which is why the tone is so different. That would
make since, as this is the other reason that I wrote this whole story.

I *like* the line "We need to decide if we're having an affair or not."

I thought that this was the first breaking-glass scene, but I guess
not.

Toby Shreck is lifted straight from Simon Green's _Deathstalker_ books,
which are great fun if you like space opera. I happen to, and I have to
say that the series is the best space opera I've come across. It
doesn't try to make excuses. Toby Shreck in the books also has a
cameraman named Flynn, though his last name isn't Skye. Flynn in the
books isn't just gay, he's also a transvestite. I already had Betty, so
I kept Flynn more normal than not.

I also like the 'one handhold away from experiencing beautiful Victoria
Falls a little too close for his liking' line.

The French that Mark shouts apparently means 'fuck off and die', but
one can never trust the Internet too much.

The City, as in New York City, is a force of chaos, of order, of
control, and of despair at different times in these stories. I have a
lot of people noticing the city without really thinking about it in
depth. Elisa, here, at the party, and Matt at the end of Laid to Rest.

I just realized that the fact that Jake can look past a dead body and
talk to Mark about a party says something sick about his personality.

I have a thing about Alex being gay. I'm not sure where it came from.
But hey, it works.

And here we have Demona showing Restraint. Restraint, you'll remember
if you've ever been in an English class where you had to dissect Joeph
Conrad's _Heart of Darkness_, is the one true indication of true
morality in a human being when they have no artificial restraints put
on them by civilization. By this reckoning, Elisa is immoral and Demona
is moral, at least in my stories. Go figure.

Destroying happy visions of reality is the recurring theme running
through these stories, in case you hadn't noticed. I start off by
destroying the happy Matt-Elisa partnership, go on to destroy Matt's
happy life, throw fractures into the lives of both his children, and
later on I destroy the illusion of Matt's marraige and then Jake's. I'm
mean.

Oh, and then I get into the fun S&M theory of happy well-adjusted
living. I'm not saying that it would be *better* for Elisa to get
garbed up in leather(Mmmm, Elisa in leather...), but she needs to get
*some* control in her life. Can you imagine stewing in self-pity for
twenty years? She's fundamentally a strong person, but she couldn't
finish healing until she got proactive. And she couldn't do that
without another couple shocks to her system and someone to point out
the obvious.

Matt is a sub in both of these serieses. That might just be how I look
at the character, but it might say something deeply disturbing about
*me*. Hmm.

There we go; first sign of broken glass.

Mark's singing the introduction to 'When I'm Up' by Great Big Sea. I'm
not... *quite* sure what the song's about, but it's a good deal happier
than I'm making it out to be in this context.

Mark is as pro-life as I am pro-choice, which is "under any
circumstance that's debatable." I say that if you can debate it, give
the mother the choice; Mark doesn't want anything dead, the big softie.

The sparring scene... aside from the cute lines, the height thing is
important. Well, not important, but it's important to me. I'm five foot
eleven or so without shoes. I'm never going to be taller than my
father, but my mom's five ten, and I'm taller than most of the people I
learned anything from. I have memories of these people as giants, and
when I actually meet them again it's a little shocking to find out that
I top them by a couple inches. It's a disconcerting feeling, especially
when you're given a renewed appreciation of their abilities at the same
time.

Of course, I'm talking about dancing, but kicking ass is just as
impressive.

Foreshadowing at the party. When Mark says he'll jump out a window, he
means it.

I want a room like that, but I'm sure it's physically impossible. Oh,
well.

Idly, the aquarium reference... I live relatively near the Monterey Bay
Aquarium, which has the biggest single-pane aquarium window on earth.
It's a truly awe-inspiring sight, and it's what I think of when I think
of giant scale.

Ahh, and fighting the urge to throw things out windows... I like to
leave hints for my readers when things are about to hit the fan. Most
of the time, anyway.

I wrote most of the cocktail party conversation right after seeing a
video presentation about what happened in Rwanda in 1996. It's shocking
how much people look after number one when truly awful things are
happening in other parts of the world. We're outraged over Israel and
Pakistan, yet we almost never hear about Sri Lanka, Angola, the Sudan,
Myanmar...

I also happen to hold a number of un-politically-correct views on
government, one of which is that if it works, it's a good thing.
Dictatorships can be highly benificial for a country that needs a
strong, unified government. Socialist democracies are great for
countries that have tons of resources and can afford to focus on
smaller problems. People often find it hard to reconcile anything
except for 'democracy' with 'good government'.

I pulled 'Tibet, Brazil, and Egypt' out of a hat. I don't know how
regional conflicts are going to look in twenty years, and I don't want
this to go down as extrapolation.

Here's more breaking glass, and more of the City as metaphor for chaos
and reality. The party going on in its little fish tank, ignoring the
world spinning around it...

And here's Jake, with the requisite dramatic irony. A little bitterness
about the clan, about Mark, and then the explosion. Third use of the f-
word.

"With all due respect, sir, would *you* have tried to stop him?" I
wouldn't have.

I asked one of my friends what a window that size would cost, and he
said 'something like six figures.' I took that to mean six zeroes. Ah,
well.

I have a lot of cute lines in the UN building scene. By the way, yes, I
did say 74 and not 47. I meant it.

The Catholic Church line... the Church is getting a lot of heat from
the whole priest thing, and I don't want to add to the fire. I like
people who happen to be Catholic. However, if you count up the
Crusades, the Inquisition, and tally in the deaths caused by their cat-
drowning crusade that increased the spread of the Plagues, the death
toll is huge. Of course, if you don't count the plagues, the direct
death count is significantly lowered... though still impressive.

Now, I don't want to blame the UN for all the deaths of everyone in
every conflict, or the League of Nations for World War Two.
Everything's more complicated than that. But it is damnably frustrating
when peacekeepers are ordered out of situations where they're actually
helping to contain violence just because the people back home are more
concerned with zero-casualty 'combat' than they are with civillian
deaths.

"I am not repeating myself I am not repeating myself oh God I'm
repeating myself!" is from the movie _What's Up, Doc?_ with Ryan O'Neal
and Barbara Streisand. I only mention this because it's so good.

Mark can speak an obscene amount of languages. This comes up later, but
I wanted to make it clear as early as possible. He never got formal
schooling, so all the brainpower that in 'normal' society would be
spent learning the required math and science and predigested history
was spent learning how to communicate and the history of the world that
matters to people living it. Of course, this means he doesn't know how
incredibly cool AP Chemistry classes are. Chemistry... explosions...
mwa ha haa. Er, sorry.

I like Demona's 'check under the sink' response, because it's so...
well, psychotic. I'm not sure where my Mark-and-alcohol thing came
from, but probably from a description of a drink in Niven and Barnes'
story "The Locusts", where a character drinks something called a Black
Samurai--"Sake and soy sauce." Mmm-mmm, huh?

Here we have more broken glass, and a piece of my theory on magic. Yes,
it's handwavy, but it makes sense if you think about it. Really.

I'm not sure if my general pro-choice stance toward abortion comes
across in this fanfic. I had to give Mark the opposite viewpoint, which
was slightly disturbing. Of course, it wasn't so much that he's pro-
life(which he is) but that he's adverse to performing the procedure
himself.

And then the argument about what peacekeepers should *do*... it's all
well and good to say that the UN should do 'something', but 'something'
is in many cases a lot more complicated than it first appears. Though I
stick to my statements that pulling peacekeepers out because you don't
want your soldiers hurt in local conflicts is cowardly, aggrivating,
and contemptable.

Mark's quote about drinking is the first line of a poem/slam piece by
Geoff Trenchard called 'War in a Bottle.' You can order his CDs at
bleedingedgespokenword.com, if the site is still working.

The whole Vanessa thing was put in as more compensation for what I felt
was a weak bit of storyline. Putting in hidden motives later makes it
seem like I truly thought everything out in advance and had all these
demonic little plots going under the surface. Pshyeah, right.

Upton Sinclair, the anti-Ayn Rand. I didn't so much mind reading _The
Jungle_ in history, but it is not a good book from a literary
standpoint. I'm glad he wrote it, though. Hot dogs that they make *now*
are scary enough.

Oh, wow, Alex's little conjuring trick. Forgot about that. "A Rose for
Ecclesiastes" is the best short story ever written. It's by Roger
Zelazny, and can be found in the collections _The Doors of His Face,
the Lamps of His Mouth_ and _Four For Tomorrow_. I just want to say
again how good this short story is. One of the central themes is how
it's worth struggling against the ineviatble corruption and death of
society just because you can. Brilliant, brilliant writing. Gorgeous.
Brilliant. Beautiful.

Matt's toast is indirectly borrowed from the Callahan stories/novels.
For a complete description of what it all means, buy a collection and
read; they're highly worth it. Between quality and quantity, they're
worth as much praise as I heaped on "A Rose for Ecclesiastes", which is
also a brilliant moving work of art that everyone should purchase and
share with their friends and relations and enemies and co-workers and
random people they meet on long bus trips and plane flights.

The ending montage might have ended the series right there, but I got
some more ideas. Figures, doesn't it?

Here's where I'm going to do something really nasty and rail at fan
fiction in general. If you don't want to listen to me up on my
soapbox... well, sheesh, you wouldn't be reading this far in the first
place. So I'll go ahead.

I have been reading fan fiction at the Gargoyles-fans website since
before it was gargoyles-fans.org and hosted back at castle.net. Back
when there were few enough stories on the site that all the stories
were put up in one long table instead of sorted by author. I mean, I've
been reading fanfic since the time when new "Athena" stories came out
on a regular basis. I can't claim to have read everything on the
archives, or even a small fraction of it; there's simply too much out
there, and my time is finite. Not to mention that during a lot of the
crashes and restructuring I simply left the area and paid attention to
other areas of my life, such as writing Babylon Five fanfic and
entering high school.

But I think I've read enough to know a little about the tastes of a lot
of people. And I've found a couple of trends that annoy me.

The first is the wedding fanfic. I hate wedding fanfics, on principle.
They can be done well, and they're darling fantasy pieces, but they're
taffeta, frippery, and wish-fulfillment of the worst sort. I didn't
want to write one. I really didn't want to write one. I'm still never
going to write a Goliath-Elisa wedding fanfic.

Another trend is that the Goliath-Elisa relationship is sacrosanct
unless the story is placed in an Alternate Universe with the caps
firmly in place. It's all right if they're not Goliath and Elisa, but
if they are, they're set together in stone, and nothing's gonna change
that. Well, you've already seen my response to that trend.

The last one is that of killing characters.

People don't like to do it. If characters are still healthy enough to
run around and have adventures, they shouldn't have to deal with death.
They come close, time after time, and are whisked away from the dark
wings of Dream's big sister by the skin of their teeth. Sometimes they
even pass into death and come back, or at least have the appearance of
same to the other characters, who then emote joyfully when the
character reappears. The only characters who seem to ever die off are
either Mary Sues, who get lamented over and carried to the bier by four
captains with a 21-gun salute, or those who are out of 'the active
generation', whose deaths are avenged by their active, healthy,
twentysomething children. Villains occasionally die, but more often
than not their lives are also saved by extraordinary measures. It's
enough to make you wonder if anyone ever dies in fanfic universes by
accident or bad chance.

I have a policy that I try to stick to in my stories. If I cry 'fooled
you' at the audience, I try to not only have a darn good reason for
doing so, but I also want to have gone through with the action before,
so that audience members know that I could be serious.

Killing Elisa, then, wasn't just a matter of "Oh, let's see if we can
do this." It was to set up the stage for the switcheroo later, and it
was also the most psychologically damaging thing that could happen to
all my characters at that point in time. I mean, if Matt or Mark or
Goliath had died, people would have grieved, but they would have pretty
quickly gotten on with their lives in a social-group sense. Elisa was
the keystone, and it was only by knocking her out of the picture that I
could create total chaos and set things up for a reconciliation of
views later on.

Not that I really thought about this when I did it, but it turned out
to be an excellent choice.

-- Best Laid Plans --

The 'turn me into a gargoyle' line, if you'll remember, first showed up
at the end of All's Fair.

I finally started pinning ages onto people. Of course, it doesn't
really help, because we don't really know what age they are in the
series, and I didn't date any of these stories. They're vaguely from
2000 to 2020, but that's hardly a fixed timeline.

'I've sort of fallen in love with you' is a great quasi-romantic line,
in my humble opinion. I like quasi-romantic or amusingly anti-romantic
lines. There's a great one at the end of Muriel's Wedding, where ****
SPOILER **** she turns to her husband and says, "I don't love you,
David," and he replies, "Well, I don't love you either, but... I dunno,
I could like having you around."

I guess that's not much of a spoiler, but hey, I feel obligated.

Empress of Grenada... I have a friend who goes by 'Empress of
Constainia' when she's on line, and is setting up a roleplaying
universe under that name. She moved to Grenada, and got a call from the
local government telling her to 'stop her imperialist activities or be
deported.'

Okay, here we go with the Jake-as-FBI-agent scene. I wanted to Not Have
a Mulder-and-Scully ripoff, which is the obvious comparison whenever
someone writes a male-female FBI-agent pair into fanfic. Le sigh. Jake
knows about abnormal occurences and magic, of course, but he's striving
for normalcy so hard that he's kind of an anti-Mulder. And Lise knows
more about occult phenomena than she's letting on.

Lise Glass, by the way, is a name that came about in an odd way. My
family bought a bunch of tapes from The Teaching Company containing a
lecture series on Shakespeare done by Professer Peter Saccio of
Dartmouth College. In the lectures, titled _Shakespeare: The Word and
the Action_, he occasionally had parts read out by a couple of actors
named David Glass and Lisa Walker. I stole the names, mixed them up,
and gave the British spelling of Lisa. Simple.

I'm not quite sure how the US government got to Mark, or why, but it
probably had something to do with the ceiling of the UN. Jake, having
become a loyal citizen, is more than a little embarassed at his half-
brother's shenanagins, not to mention embarassed about his existence in
the first place.

Here I timestamp the story, putting it another year after the last one.
Mark has a habit of coming back to New York every year or so, so I
suppose he sticks to it even when he's been kicked out of the country.

Accent identification. More stupid pet tricks.

And here we go with more song quotes. This is 'Home for a Rest' by
Spirit of the West, which also did the great song 'And If Venice Was
Sinking.'

I figured that if Ford was going to stick with symbols of the Zodiac,
it might move on to Gemini. Besides, Gemini is The Twins, which is
ironic considering the gulf between Mark and Jake.

Indian/East Asian hybridization doesn't seem too weird where I come
from, in the Bay Area, in a high school where a lot of the kids are one
or the other. It's cool to go to a musical set in New York in the
1890s, and see that most of the chorus is Chinese. Viva la difference!

Mark's first period of prolonged confinement, showing just how bad his
claustrophobia can get. I definitely wanted to give Mark a big weakness
that I could exploit later, because people who are under massive
emotional stress are more interesting to write about.

I'm not sure what I think about giving Flynn the pronounced accent. It
seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I'm not sure. Add that to
the fact that I'm not sure what sort of accent he should have, and my
only examples of accents come from the three truly British people I
know and my copies of Red Dwarf, Monty Python, and Lock Stock & Two
Smoking Barrels, and...

I figured that Demona would have made a backup of her nasty stuff if
she could have. But even the most virulent diseases are pretty
worthless if they can't spread.

Why don't they trust Jake with the news? Well, he is a government
agent, and he doesn't want to believe anything bad about the US
government. Plus there's the clan alignment. Jake's moved away, so he's
not really part of the clan any more, and therefore not to be trusted
with inner confidences.

Plus, that's not the sort of thing you want going over an open phone
line.

More fun and hijinks with Tim Hilton! I had too much fun with this.
See, in my X-Files fanfics it's Agent Tom Colton who gets the short end
of the stick, because he's one of the few canon characters who didn't
die five minutes after he was introduced. Since X-Files people don't
exist here, I pick on Tim Hilton.

Nobody knows much about Lise's background, which makes her the perfect
Illuminati spook. Mwahahaa!

The whole conversation about the dangers of flying cars is anti-
foreshadowing. Of course someone's going to get splattered across a
grille intake, but it won't be because of a flying car or some
dangerous new technology. I'm mean like that.

The process for exploding the chemicals and turning them into harmless
carbon compounds was BSed. However, some interesting news is that the
makers of Semtex, Explosia, got bought by the government of the Czech
Republic. So Mark's Semtex is either twenty years old or guaranteed to
go bad after two years of storage.

So Matt's happy, for a period of about six days in my entire story arc.
Demona and Elisa are friends, Goliath isn't going spastic, Mark's back
home and in one piece more or less, Jake has a job, the virus has been
dealt with, Alex has a boyfriend... I had to do *something* to screw it
up.

'Peace, quiet, and or--der' is borrowed(tangentally) from an It's Walky
strip, where Jason expounds on his view of what Walkerton is like.
Well, technically it's a different line completely, but I really like
that strip.

I didn't touch much on the clan in earlier stories, but didn't want to
jump in with both feet. Patrols are easy enough for everyone to
understand, and I did want to make the gradual change of power from
Goliath to Brooklyn understood. Time passes, after all.

There's the next flying car anti-foreshadow. It's a sensible piece of
advice at any rate.

Mark's bitching about being half-human is important in character-
development sense, and for understanding why I had everything go
straight to hell when Elisa died. Goliath should really be a
sympathetic character through all this, and I don't get that across
enough. Having him overhear Mark talking about the differences between
humans and gargoyles from a unique perspective gives me an excuse to
have him reconcile things later... after screwing up with half of his
family royally in the near future.

I often come up with actions for my characters first, and then go back
and make sure that the reasoning is solid, or at least believable. If I
couldn't comprehend a real person doing something one of my characters
does or reacting how one of my characters does, I change things. Mostly
it's dialogue that doesn't make sense that goes, but sometimes it's
actions themselves. I think I have the hardest trouble writing
completely callous people, because while I act callous at times, I try
hard to understand the other side of the argument before taking a hard
line stance.

Okay, the bizzare Shakespeare conversation. This is a case of author-
intrusion that probably should have been revised, but I figured that
occasionally we shouldn't be able to folow someone's in-group
conversation. Let me try to explain what I'm talking about with this
exchange...

"Get thee to a nunnery / Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?" is
from Hamlet, of course. (I say of course because I've been dissecting
it in lit for the past month.) Hamlet shouts this at Ophelia to try to
convince her to leave Elsinore, and he isn't very successful. He wants
her out for her moral and physical protection more than anything else.
It doesn't make much sense for Mark to be quoting it, except that it's
a nice 'get away from it all' line.

The second quote is from Aristotle's Politics, which is either
translated as 'Man is a political animal' or 'Man is an animal that
lives in cities'. Simple. Except that I got it, not from reading
Aristotle, but by watching one of those Shakespeare lectures I
mentioned earlier, the ones I got Lise Glass' name from. The lecture
was on Coriolanus, and the quote came in talking about how Coriolanus
could not, as he claimed, live on his own without the citizens of Rome.
A man who can live without other people isn't a man, he's either a
beast or a God. The third quote is from Coriolanus, where someone is
describing the man, and says he is godlike except that he doesn't have
the l337 m4g1k p0w3rz, which makes the godlike status rather suspect.
He has all the bad aspects of godhood, but none of the good stuff.

I guess Alex and Mark watch the same lecture serieses that I do.

I was going to have Goliath have a nice inner monologue about parenting
a changeling child, but I got sick of it rather quick and stuck in the
wedding planner scene instead.

Asymmetrical beards are Niven's invention, and there's no reason to
suspect that they won't come into style in twenty years. More bizzare
things have happened.

The gilded lilies are ironic, because they're flowers of death, but
'gilding the lily' is just a nice phrase for overostentateous displays
of wealth and abundance.

Ahh, the wedding scene that you've all been waiting for! The bride, the
groom, where everyone stands, who cries, who catches the bouquet and
the garter, the bridesmaids... I didn't want to deal with any of that
crap.

I decided to be equally cruel and do a "You had to be there" scene
right after. I figure that everyone else's imaginations are probably
better than mine about this sort of thing.

Mark's little romantic rendevouz with Winter was supposed to be cute
and meaningless. We already knew that she had a crush on him from Love
and War, so this is continuing the trend.

Dr. Stephen Franklin is stolen from Babylon Five, though of course I
didn't say that. The nice, happy, let's get over our fears scene was
unnecessarily cruel, but I felt it was important that Elisa die with a
clean slate, so to speak.

Should have been 'Disneyland' just to make the line work, but hey,
Disneyworld is a little closer to New York.

The Goliath scene hurt to write, in the good character-empathy way.
There's not much more I can say about it. I don't know how I write
emotion, I just do it.

I blatantly stole the 'take another shot' device from Jewel Faulkner,
who deserves mucho props for using it in the first place.

There's the fourth ever use of the word 'fuck' in one of my fanfics. If
you count this as a fanfic, the total comes up to ten or so.

There is no real answer to 'why'. Stupid accidents happen every day,
and we have to deal with the consequences. Yes, it would be great if
nobody got behind the controls of a multi-ton mass of tempered steel
and accelerated it to speeds topping 60 miles per hour without being in
complete control of their senses. But it happens anyway; people
misjudge their tolerances, and drive while drunk or high or otherwise
incapacitated. And people die. And families get torn apart.

It's kinda sick to put a 'fooled-you!' after that, but I was glad to
get this finished. I was stunned when I realized that I actually could
end the story on the funeral line and didn't have to explain anything
else. I was going to tack on a couple scenes at the end, but it would
have ruined the impact.

While I was writing Laid to Rest, which at the time didn't have a
title, a lot of things happened. I became a senior in high school and
found my workload strangely skewed as a result. I stopped taking my
Japanese courses for credit. I had to go through the college
application process. And, of course, September 11th happened.

I knew that I wanted to blow Mark up, and wasn't sure for a time if it
would be responsible to do a terrorist 'fic. I quickly decided that it
would probably be okay, and then tried to decide if I should mention
the WTC attacks, or if I should make it plain that this is an alternate
universe and they never happened... or what.

I finally decided to not mention them.

Why? Well, for one thing, I'd never mentioned the buildings earlier in
the series. I live in California, for the Goddess' sake. I don't know
anything about the geography of New York City. I've never been there.
So while the towers were a recognizable landmark, I never really
recognized them. So make your own decision as to whether or not the
towers got attacked in this universe; it was twenty years ago for my
characters, and it's not likely to come up in casual conversation.

-- Laid to Rest --

The quote, of course, is from the beginning of Fight Club. Excellent
movie if you think about it instead of taking it for surface value. I
heartily recommend getting the DVD--four feature-length commentaries
with anyone you could ask for giving their two cents. I skipped the
narration because that would have made it too plain what movie I was
ripping from.

I write the author's notes right before I publish. They're the last
thing that gets tacked on, and usually I'm too hyper about finishing
the thing to be coherent.

Krysia... I'd made it plain, or thought I made it plain, that Mark has
had dalliances with a lot of people. Gratitude is a strong aphrodisiac.
I figured that if he'd actually concieved a child, it would have to
have been before he learned the 'general-use contraceptive spell' that
he talks about in Love and War.

Plus I like teenagers a lot more than I like little kids. That probably
stems from all my negative experiences in elementary school and my
generally positive ones in high school, but it could just be random
prejudice.

The Author's Intrusion right after that scene was a big fat warning, of
the kind that I sort of gave with the flying-car foreshadowing in the
last story. It's linebroken at a different width and indented because I
copied it from an IRC window.

Manfred Mann's Earth Band and the song Waiting for the Rain...
recommendations on both fronts. The song has a killer violin solo
during the instrumentals, and beautiful lyrics. The album is "Angel
Station".

Annie is very Women's Lib, as we can see. She probably had to do a lot
of rebuilding after the flood, and learned a lot of independence.

A lot of important conversations in my stories take place in bed. This
is my little recap section, where Mark details why he left New York.
This is the post-funeral stuff that I was originally going to put on
the end of the last story, but it would have been too many new
complications detracting from the real tradgedy.

One of the vignettes that didn't get into here, that will probably
never get addressed, is that I wanted to have Alex and Flynn break up
at this time and reconcile at the end of the story. But I never
detailed it, so you can believe what you want about the stability of
their relationship.

The story Mark tells about when he was six... I was going to write it
up as a short story or put it in the middle of All's Fair, but it ended
up as a piece of backstory that never got used. I added it here so we'd
know a little bit more about Mark. I probably should have given him
pyrophobia on top of claustrophobia from that.

Matt becomes truly pitiable in this story, which is unfortunate but
necessary. I say that a lot about my characters, which is one of the
reasons I have a reputation among the figments of my imagination for
being a heartless bitch of a puppetmaster.

Hmm, I'd forgotten that I had Mark chanting Dune stuff in there. I
probably should have come back to that in the sensory deprivation
scene, but I would have needed to translate it to Scots Gaelic.

Talon in this is the first appearance of any of the mutates in the
series. I missed the second and third eps where the mutates came in, so
I never really wanted to deal with them. I thought I should have a
mention that they're still alive, though.

The red leather jacket was going to be more important, but it ended up
just getting put in Jake's closet. It's a reminder of the past that he
hasn't faced up to yet.

I don't know how Talon got into Jake's apartment without being noticed.

One can make great lasagna with uncooked noodles, ricotta, mozerella,
and sauce. A layer of sauce on the pan, a layer of noodles, ricotta,
moz, more sauce, repeat. On the top put a layer of noodles, more
mozerella, and the rest of the sauce. Cover with tinfoil and bake. So
easy, even Jake can make it.

The Renewal of Personal Liberties monument... I figured that sometime
in the next 20 years, personal liberties would be curtailed with a
series of laws which would then be repealed. I didn't anticipate it
would be because of a terrorist attack.

Mention of the clones, of course... still no eggs in the rookery.
They're just too messed up.

'Fine, fine, we're all... fine... here...' is Star Wars, A New Hope, of
course. Because Harrison Ford is cute in borrowed stormtrooper armor.

It seems that Mark and Talon have met and taken a liking to each other.
Seems reasonable to me.

It's August(not June, if you're reading the uncorrected version). I
don't know what Krysia plans to do about school, but I'm sure Mark had
some plan for getting her home in time for the start of school. It
takes them about a week to get halfway across the country, so they're
making pretty good time.

The campfire scene... it used to be bad. Really bad. I like the
conversation about family better than the one about religion that I
used to have there. Of course Krysia would want to know about Mark's
father, because she wants to know what Mark thinks a father should be
like. And she's probably heard about New York as the place her father
comes from, so she's developed a fixation on it.

The Matt scene was not one of my planned scenes, but I like how it
turned out. I just get this impression of Matt eternally waking up in
this unchanging Jack-the-narrator-esque apartment with a giant flashing
screen looming over him and an empty bottle in his hand. Kinda like
1984.

I'd just watched the MST3k episode I Accuse My Parents before I wrote
this. It begins and ends in a courtroom, and has songs in it. It's also
one of the worst movies I've ever seen, with the stupidest main
character imaginable. I don't know if they're still running those
commercials because I don't watch TV any more, but it made sense at the
time.

I don't know if this hangover scene is any more realistic than the one
in All's Fair. Like I said, my only experience is third-hand.

I remember going to Washington DC and being surprised at how short all
the buildings were. Even in California, where we have earthquakes and
can't build *real* skyscrapers, the buildings get pretty tall. Of
course, the hills help with that.

Jake doesn't live in DC, but he lives close. And he does mind having
Mark drop in on him at the last minute, but he's too hospitable to put
up a fuss.

Jake and Aurora are living in Pleasantville. Everything is neat, clean,
and pretty, but they're slowly being eaten alive from the inside by the
wormy beast of corruption. The image has to be perfect because Jake's
striving for some sort of super-reality, and Aurora's given up her clan
in a fit of romanticism and emulation of the daring, dangerous Mark,
and she's grabbed onto Jake as her new clan leader and won't dare
contradict him. Jake really loves Aurora, but he's been blinded by
society and is trying to hold onto his equality-for-all values at the
same time he tries to gain respect from his community. It's killing
them both, but it's getting to Aurora faster because she's biologically
programmed to have a clan, and she only has Jake.

Lapis and Lazuli Long are Lazarus Long's clones/daughters in Heinlein's
later books. They can only be told apart by... wait a minute, you can't
tell them apart. They're much too cute for the room.

Mark never gets a real chance to talk with his father. This is the
closest he gets, which is better than nothing.

At this point, he still doesn't want to go to New York, but he has to
say something or risk betraying himself. Of course, if he doesn't go
now, it's an even worse betrayal.

Use number five and six of really bad profanity. Jake's more American
than Mark is, by far.

From the dark night of uncertainty into the bright sunlight of
realization. It's a lot easier to face problems in the sun. And once
Mark makes the decision to go back to New York, he can realize that
agonizing over the decision was worse than facing up to his past. It
doesn't matter that he never goes back to New York; he just had to make
the decision.

Another mention of the accent thing. Mark learns by imitation, and he
learns fast.

So how could a man with a pony nuke get into this event in the first
place? It's not a plot hole if the Illuminati are involved.

Daniel Jones is a friend of mine who is Canadian. It's ironic to
imagine him as the president of the US, which is why another friend of
mine made him president in a *different* alternate timeline at
fnord.sandwich.net. That's where I got the PAU from as well.

The speech is fading in and out because I didn't want to write the
whole thing, but I did want to hit some nice inspiring points without
having to go through the whole rigamarole.

The CBS crew thing is an attack on the press. Yes, I realize that in
order to have an informed public, we need to have reports on all major
events. But some of these people are pirhanas.

Matt's hitting the wallscreen with a piece of Furni furniture. Well,
not really, but it's expensive Scandinavian design at the very least.

There's the last(I think) use of the City as metaphor. I thought about
having Matt die from the fall at one point, but decided that it would
be better, after all of this, to have him be saved. And not by his
'close friends' in the clan, but by Goliath, who has hated him for a
good part of this series.

I didn't put Mark's name into the scene where he's babbling
incoherently, because he's past trying to confirm his identity at this
point. Sensory deprivation is evil.

The 'I can eat glass' project has a metric ton of languages on its
page, sometimes multiple versions of the same language. I didn't just
go alphabetically; I really tried to think of some rational order for
everything.

Technically, Mark would be thinking all of this in old Scots Gaelic,
but since I don't know Gaelic, we'll overlook that.

Idly, all the languages I used are real languages in use around the
planet. I skipped the invented languages like Elvish and Klingon,
though I'm sure I could make a case for Mark knowing how to speak
either. It would be pretty pointless, though.

So. Two shocks in a short while: Mark is alive, and Lise has something
to do with it. Also, Mark using profanity, while not completely new, is
mostly unexpected. My reasoning is that he's worn so thin that he can't
think of anything else to say.

I thought it was clear enough that the ring had a pyramid on it that I
didn't have to say it straight out. The mystery gets solved soon
enough, anyway.

Fifth Circle and The Five are used interchangably because it's
convenient. Besides, it helps to confuse your enemies to have two names
for the same group of people.

And after all this time, Xanatos is still an opportunistic bastard.
Fatherhood mellowed him out, but he still has nerves of iron and a will
that Kaiser Soze would envy. Well... not really on that last count, but
he's a mean, lean, Illuminati machine, and don't you forget it.

Use number eight of the f-word.

A lot of people apologize over the course of my stories, but of course,
apologies really don't change anything. They're useful when the damage
is done with words, because they're retracting the old opinions and
showing that you're repentanant for the hurt you're causing. Best-case
scenario, anyway. But when things have gone truly askew, words don't
help very much. They still have power, though... and Xanatos realizes
that.

The last scene is... anywhere from thirty to sevendy years later.
Matt's suffered enough; he deserved at least one reassurance. Now,
whether or not this helps or hurts him in the long run is up for grabs,
but he doesn't have much of a long run left anyway, if we go by the
Xanatos-is-dead-already logic. It was, as a matter of fact, the second
scene that Caused me to write this fanfic. The other one was Mark
getting blown to smithereens.

I wanted and still want this to be the end for the Mark stuff. It was
fun while it lasted, but I don't want to get embroiled in any more
sequels. I have vague drifty ideas for things that I *could* do, but I
have a feeling that they'd be a worse idea than not.

Why would it be a bad idea? Well, Mark is my Mary Sue. That means that
he's everything that I'd like to be, in one way or another--that, or
he's my ideal guy, which is just as disturbing. And that makes him
dangerous.

Sure, he's a likeable guy, but he isn't very real. He's balanced,
composed, Knows What's Right, and has an impassioned argument in any
situation. He can talk to anyone and put them at ease. He's
charismatic, always gets the girl, and can speak more languages than
most of us have heard of. He's knowledgable but not sunk in any one
particular culture(though I probably miffed that one just because I
*am* American.)

Therefore, Mark is only an engaging character when his entire life is
getting destroyed around him.

In order to make a future story engaging, I would need to either alter
a basic part of Mark's makeup, or I'd need to set him up with another
happy world to get pulled apart and driven into the ground. And because
any world he happens into from now on will be alien, setting up that
foundation would take another ten to twenty years of story time, which
would not be interesting to read. It would consist of Mark doing his
charming thing and building up a family or something, and it would get
very dull very soon. Even if it wouldn't be dull to read--I enjoyed
Jane Austin, honestly--it would be very dull for me to write. So I
won't do it.

What about writing inset stories? There's a lot of ground I didn't
cover between stories, and I could go back and...

No. I won't do that, either. And the reason? Hawkbrothers.

Let me elaborate. The first time that the Hawkbrothers appear in
Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series, they are mysterious, creepy people
with huge hunting birds of prey and bright blue eyes who appear out of
nowhere in the middle of the woods. They're exotic, striking, and very
very neat.

The second time they appear, we get a look at who they are: ranger-like
mages with incalculable power and the Goddess-defined task of cleaning
up evil, polluted magic in the mountains. Not so scary, now, but still
different, exciting, and exotic.

The third and fourth times they appear, main characters go and live in
their homes, eat their food, participate in their rituals, and the
entire books become infomercials for The Hawkbrother Way of Life.

Now, maybe that's an exaggeration, but in the case of the Owl* trilogy,
it's not far off. And I really *like* a lot of Mercedes Lackey's stuff.
I'm not knocking it. But she's written so many Valdemar books that the
temptation to flesh out and flesh out and flesh out different aspects
of the world has become overwhelming, and all the stories start to
sound the same after awhile.

Orphaned kid grows up apprenticed to magician so his powers don't get
out of hand, gets new mystical tutors who eventually grant him l33t
p0w3rz--saw it in Another Fine Myth. Kid grows up and is teased at new
school, doesn't fit in, and destroys the place in a burst of flame--
sounds familiar for some reason. Good rehashes of old tales are all
right, but the solution to every problem can't be either Heralds or
Hawkbrothers.

I don't want to fall into that trap, so I'm not writing any more in
this universe. Simple.

So that's the end. Mark's in storage, Alex is one of the head honchos
of the Society, and David Xanatos is dead. We don't know what happened
to Jake and Aurora's marital difficulties, to Flynn, to Matt, to
Krysia, to Goliath and Demona, or to anyone else, for that matter. Lots
of loose ends... but that's life. Make up your own stories. This is the
end of this one.

Thanks for holding on until the end. I know this is a lot of
concentrated babble. I hope this has been as fun to read as it was to
write... and if it wasn't, well, gee, I've just taken minutes off your
life that you can never get back to peddle my inflated ego and
narcissim in your general direction.

-- Aris "TGD" Merquoni