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--- playground:cosmere_crossover [2021/10/20 01:16]
mary-mary_dean created
+++ playground:cosmere_crossover [2022/04/12 04:10] (current)
mary-mary_dean
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-====== Playground: Cosmere Crossover ======
+====== Playground: Cosmere Crossover, or, The Thrilling Adventures of Chainsaw, Blow Boy and Oberon the Absent, a Tale in Far Too Many Parts ======
-@Elias, We're making this happen.
+@Elias, We're making this happen. I don't mind you suggesting edits to things I've written, but please at least bring it up with me first.
 @Anyone else, This is a work-in-progress (or, by the time you read this, maybe abandoned?) fanfic by Andrew and Elias: what if Origin Story took place within Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere?
@@ Line 7: / Line 7: @@
 ==== Outline ====
 Although I'm calling these "Chapter n", that doesn't mean I actually intend for them to be as long as normal book chapters.
 === Chapter 1, The Forest ===
-After experimenting with storing herself with Con & Eden, Mary-Mary only manages to escape from the Spiritual by traveling through Invention's Perpendicularity into the Cognitive, wanders around a bit, then back to the pseudo-Physical. Con, being traumatised by her disappearance, ends up hiding even more. Mary-Mary explores the Cognitive more and eventually finds the top-secret prison where Davy is, and steals him.
+After experimenting with storing herself with Con & Eden, Mary-Mary only manages to escape from the Spiritual by traveling through Invention's Perpendicularity into the Cognitive, wanders around a bit, then back to the pseudo-Physical.
+=== Chapter 1.5, Yet More Forest ===
+Con, being traumatised by her disappearance, ends up hiding even more. Mary-Mary explores the Cognitive more and eventually finds the top-secret prison where Davy is, and steals him.
 === Chapter 2, The Silver Sky ===
-Mary-Mary and Davy find the edge of Citropolis's Cognitive and break out of it, then wander away from it towards Roshar (I think I'd prefer to skip Silverlight because I don't want to have to make up what that's like, although that does leave us with a language barrier. Maybe they just learn Veden or Alethi the normal way, or we could find a different excuse. Also, skipping Silverlight leaves them to be more surprised at Roshar.)
+Mary-Mary and Davy find the edge of Citropolis's Cognitive and break out of it, then wander away from it towards Roshar. There's some sort of customs official outside Citropolis who gives them a means to understand other languages maybe. (I think I'd prefer to skip Silverlight because I don't want to have to make up what that's like, although that does leave us with a language barrier. Maybe they just learn Veden or Alethi the normal way, or we could find a different excuse. Also, skipping Silverlight leaves them to be more surprised at Roshar.)
 === Chapter 3, Shadesmar ===
@@ Line 43: / Line 47: @@
 Fitting in with the theme of things in the Cognitive being inverted, if Davy's prison is deep underground, I'd like it to appear as high in the sky in the Cognitive. That way it obviously stands out and it's likely Mary-Mary will visit it. The old subway (which is already connected to a Perpendicularity), mines, bunkers and underground nuclear waste storage facilities (if they exist) would also be highly visible landmarks. Correspondingly, Citropolis's skyscrapers would correspond to deep underwater, perhaps with the souls of their contents intertwined with the roots of the mangroves.
+===== The Story Itself =====
+==== Chapter 1, The Tower ====
+[I don't like having a very in media res start, but when I tried to introduce the scene by writing out the scene that actually happened in the game where Mary-Mary plans the experiment with Eden and Con, that felt much more awkward. It still feels awkward, like too much is happening at once. I'm not sure how to fix that though, because there is a lot happening at once. I think it would be better if there was some build-up, so the reader is expecting the experiment to make a lot of weird stuff happen, but I tried that and it was even worse. I think there's something a bit Alice-In-Wonderland-esque about the narration style, at least until the point where it switches more to her thoughts.]
+Mary-Mary held her brother's hands and disappeared. It was a simple thing to do, no more effort than putting something in her pockets, only in this case, the thing she was storing was herself. The tricky part was reappearing again afterwards, which was in fact the entire point in this experiment. If you reappear in your own hand but your hand is itself in storage, where to you appear? She intended to find out.
+She disappeared, and although this was the second time she had done so, she was still unprepared for the experience that followed. There is no space where she is, or altogether too much, it's impossible to tell. There's a dying cat, and a wardrobe to die for, and all the other things she'd been carrying around for the last four years. There are two vast incomprehensible powers, which she is sure she never picked up (and would not have survived had she tried). What there isn't is any time, just a single moment, a single opportunity to enact the plan she entered with: to leave again. She strains at the task that was usually trivial: moving something from her inventory back into the world. She strains and panics and grasps at anything that is available, any connection to the familiar, and all at once, at the same moment that she arrives, she is gone.
+She fell a short distance to a wide metal platform, and squinted at the unexpected brightness. Not the infinite brightness of the non-place where everything exists at once, but merely the ordinary brightness of a sunny day, which is still much more than she expected. How long had she been gone? Was the apartment building she disappeared from no longer there? She took out her phone and waited for it to find a network connection to tell her when it was, while looking around at her surroundings. She was standing on an enormous gear wheel, with numerous smaller gears and mechanisms surrounding it, many of them apparently floating in the air. The machinery seemed to be at the peak of a tower, and moving off the gear to the relative safety of a nearby walkway, she could see down to a dense forest canopy below. The sky was bright silver but with no apparent sun, and clouds in various pastel hues drifted around it. Lines of smaller towers with pipes and more walkways between them stretched out in several directions from the large machine where she stood.
+She checked her phone's progress at finding a network, and was not at all surprised that it hadn't found one. She sighed anyway. A part of her had hoped that there would be an easy solution to finding her way back home, but she was becoming increasingly concerned by the possibility that her home, or Mayor forbid, all of Citropolis, might no longer exist.
+Wherever she was, it was clearly at least somewhat inhabited, given the machinery, although it was hard to see what such a ridiculous looking machine could actually have been built for. It was better at least than being stuck in her inventory. Unless this somehow was her inventory? She couldn't see any of her stuff here, but it was a strange enough place, it was worth a try. She picked a tree she could see down below, and tried to unstore it, holding her hand out over the railing so the tree would just fall down and not crush her. It didn't work. The tree was clearly not in her inventory, therefore this place wasn't either. Still, the landscape felt too surreal to simply be how the world had ended up, especially the clouds. She squinted at them suspiciously. How did that work? Perhaps this place was part of someone else's Spark, not Mary-Mary's inventory, but Titania's dream forest or something? It certainly had plenty of trees. Maybe someone had a Spark that interacted with hers, like Cass's did, and was able to save her? She knew she ought to be grateful if that was the case, but couldn't help but feel a bit annoyed that whoever it was hadn't even left a note to tell her where to go.
+If it was Titania, it would probably be better to look for her on the ground. Mary-Mary could see a long way from up here, but not much through the forest's canopy. What was it Titania did down there? Had tea parties and cavort with fairies or something? Maybe paying more attention to all the chats about the strange powerful old Sparks would have been useful. Too late now.
+She headed down the tower's staircase towards the forest floor, but as she neared the bottom, she could see that the trees emerged from deep clear water. The roots were broad and tangled, so it would be possible to clamber from one to the other, but she didn't feel like risking getting her clothes wet. Although her Spark would allow her to dry herself in an instant, separating the clothes from the water would still be annoying. With no solid ground, the catwalks between the towers seemed like a much better option for getting places, assuming she could find a destination, so she climbed back up to the large machine.
+Arriving at the top again, she was distracted once more by the strange machinery. If this place was all part of someone's Spark, it didn't necessarily need to have that much logic to it. Nobody really knew what gave each Spark their particular powers, and they were often counterintuitive, but there did tend to be at least a theme to each one, and if this looked like a machine, it probably had some purpose. She may not have been an engineer, but she did have one advantage here (that she'd been meaning to test anyway, and assuming the test actually worked), a sense for intent. It didn't really seem to be what her powers were for, but sometimes when things didn't work, she could feel that the intent attached to the objects was wrong, so maybe she could use that to satisfy her curiosity (and get a clue for where to go) here too. She stepped back on to the large central gear, pressed her hand against it, and focused her mind on asking it the questions, "What are you for? What do you want?".
+The gear's answer was stronger than she'd expected. It thought it was a building, a transport hub, a place to help people to get where they wanted. Did the tower move? That would be quite a sight.
+"Can you get me where I need to go then?"
+"I am old, and broken, but I still have one destination left to take you to." The gear's answer was not in words, but she could feel what it wanted, how it regretted what it had lost, and the opportunity it still presented, so she asked it one more thing.
+"Take me there."
+And it did.
+==== Chapter 2, The Forest ====
+[I feel like this end of the Perpendicularity ought to be more of an obvious feature too rather than just a point in the middle of the train station. I guess Ruin's Perpendicularity was sort of broad too, so it could just be the whole place, but then that begs the question why all the people who explored down here didn't also go through. Something something Intent? The only examples I can think of of what perpendicularities look like are Honor's Perpendicularity when Dalinar summons it, which was a glowing pillar of light it seems you just have to step through, and Preservation and Ruin's ones, which were quite distinct, so I guess anything goes. Something not too obvious would fit best with Citropolis, given that in the original version of Citropolis they don't even exist (or are at most a sort of thinning in the world).]
+She appeared mid-step in a large damp room, and stumbled away from the broad trench in the ground she had appeared over onto a platform. Dim light filtered through stained-glass skylights, and water dripped from the ceiling, leaving trails of moss and grime on the tiled walls. The large sign on the wall waying "Old Town" and the rusted rails behind her made it clear where she'd arrived, the abandoned train station.
+In quick succession, she took out an umbrella, some waterproof boots and a phone from her storage, and waited for it to connect. The time it displayed updated, and to her relief, she'd only been gone 10 minutes. She called her brother Constantine back to update him on what had happened.
+"Hi, I'm---"
+Before she was even able to explain, Con interrupted, "Mary-Mary! You're alive!".
+"Yeah, I managed to get out just fine, but I think I'm in the old train station for some reason."
+"We were so worried you were gone. I tried to make you appear again after a few minutes like you said, but I couldn't even feel you, and Eden couldn't either, and we tried and nothing was happening, and you promised it would work."
+"It did work though. I'm back in the city. I think I may have already been unstored by the time you tried, but I was in a weird forest instead. I'll come home in a bit but I kind of want to look around more now I'm here anyway."
+Another voice came over the phone instead of Con's, Eden, who has also been drafted in to help with the experiment. "You can explore later. I think Con is in need of a hug."
+"Wait, Eden, are you there too? What happened?"
+"I came over to try to help when we couldn't make you reappear individually. Just get back here and we can talk more then."
+"Okay, sure. See you soon."
+She ended the call, and looked back at the spot where she had appeared after leaving the forest. There was an awful lot still to look into, but instead she sighed and took Eden's advice to head straight home.
+----
+When she arrived back at the apartment, Eden and Con were still sitting together in his room, holding mugs of tea. Eden looked up as she arrived, and Con stood up to hug her tightly. She patted his back, trying to be reassuring.
+"It's okay now. I'm fine. Safer than before even, now I know I can always escape if something goes wrong."
+He continued hugging her, and sniffled. "I thought you were gone. You have to be more careful. Please don't do that again."
+"I... maybe. I know it works now, so it won't actually be dangerous if I do."
+He finally pulled away. Now getting a better look at him, she could see that he had been crying. "It didn't work how you said it would though. You can't keep trying things like this." He looked up and sniffed again, exasperated and worried. "Just... school tomorrow, late as possible." He held out his hand for her to take. She raised an eyebrow in objection, but he looked back at her pleadingly, so she took his offered hand and stored him.
+[Did you interact with Eden much? I'm not sure if I'm getting their reaction right.]
+Eden took a moment to process what had just happened before speaking, more visibly angry than before. "You need to be more careful with Con. He thought it was his fault you were gone, you know. He was doing worse than he let on to you too, like he didn't want you to worry about him or something. And what's with you now making him disappear?"
+"He just doesn't want to deal with the stress, that's all. It's... a way of putting it off. We've done this loads of times before, so it's definitely safe."
+She looked around awkwardly, avoiding meeting Eden's gaze. Eventually they left, with a final admonition to be more careful.
+----
+The rest of the evening and all through school the following day, she couldn't stop thinking about the forest, and was itching to go back. The others on the forum hadn't had much idea what had happened when she described her experiences, but did manage to confirm at least that the forest in Titania's dreams had the same colourful clouds, so it probably was the same place. As soon as school finished, she headed straight to the abandoned train station instead of going home, sending a text to her parents claiming she was just going to a friend's house.
+Back on the train platform, she stepped off the edge into the gap where a train would stop if the station were still in use, where she had appeared the day before. As suspected, she was transported back to the clockwork tower in Titania's forest.

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