edenfalling | [Meme] first lines of imaginary sequels

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[Meme] first lines of imaginary sequels

Found via

askerian:

Pick one of my stories and I will tell you the first line (ETA: okay, the first few paragraphs, on the theory that context is more interesting than concision) of its sequel. Even if I was never actually planning to write a sequel. Even if it already has a sequel -- I'll give you the first line of another version of its sequel!

Do not ask me about "Strange Likenesses," because I don't yet know how that will end (basically, there is the wildly unlikely happy ending, several variants of the rather likely inconclusive ending, and the semi-likely 'rocks fall, everyone dies' ending). Everything else is fair game.

-----

Sequel snippets written so far:

for The Way of the Apartment Manager (So how did Naruto wind up friends with Sakura by the start of "Guardian"? I will probably continue this at some point.)

for Lemonade (Thus proving that I do so know where the story's going.)

for Endurance (This one turned into an actual fic, 900 words long. *headdesk* I am not sure how 'canon' this sequel is, though, as I'd left "Endurance" inconclusive for a reason.)

for New Horizons (ie, the story in which Ginny, Harry, and Draco have a post-DH-epilogue threesome in Greece. Naturally there are repercussions. *grin*)

for The Two Secretive Princesses (925 words on Toph and Mai during Ozai's invasion of Toure-on-Marsh. Rather dark.)
---[[or the more canonical version, which includes fewer deaths and more mentions of Aunt Ermintrude]]

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Way of the Appt Manager.

So, things that might have happened instead of "The Guardian in Spite of Herself," or between those stories?

*ponders*

"Hey, hey, Yukiko-neechan, can I have friends over?"

Yukiko looked up from the mission report she was writing for Heika-san, and frowned. Naruto was dancing from foot to foot in an almost perfect imitation of excitement, but there was something wary and nervous in his eyes and posture. Didn't he know by now that this was his building as much as hers?

"Of course you can," she told him. "Now spill -- what's wrong?"

"Nothing!" Naruto said. Yukiko's frown deepend, and the kid looked aside, guiltily. "Really, it's nothing."

"'Nothing' doesn't make you look like it's still you against the whole damn world," Yukiko said. She set her half-finished report aside and walked around the desk, dropping into one of the tall-backed chairs so she was more on a level with the kid. "Seriously, what's wrong? I thought you and Kigaru-chan -- that is who you wanted to invite, right? -- were getting along really well."

"Yeah, me and Shinnin are great," Naruto agreed, still not meeting Yukiko's eyes. "It's just... there's another girl in class, and she's really pretty and smart and stuff, but the other girls pick on her, so I said to Shinnin that we ought to be her friends 'cause picking on people is mean and stupid, but Sakura-chan's mom and dad -- her name's Haruno Sakura -- they don't like me. And when they picked her up from the park yesterday, they were talking to Shinin's dad and they all looksed at me..." He trailed off, dejected. "Yukiko-neechan, why don't people like me? I'm not a bad person, right?"

-----

I may or may not continue that at some point.

*g* I highly encourage you to continue this - it would be VERY interesting to see if Yukiko is somehow able to temper Naruto so he isn't the least popular kid in the class...

Well, according to ch. 2 of "Guardian," Naruto is still friends with Shinnin and they have managed to bring Sakura into their circle -- and even in canon Naruto sort of got along with Shikamaru, Choji, and Kiba at school, though they had no interaction outside of the academy -- so apparently something works?

I'm kind of wondering how school open houses and such would go.

*attempts to remember elementary school* What, parent-teacher conferences and so on? Going from class to class to look at displayed art projects?

...If they do open houses at a ninja academy, I am somewhere between impressed and horrified. Can you just imagine how hard it would be to keep the civilian parents safe and sane when dozens and dozens of little half-trained ninja kids are running around without the structure of classes to keep them in check? I mean, at least at home they would have six-plus years of acculturation saying that we do not play with knives in the house, but at school they are expected to play with knives and so on. Which could quickly lead to bloody chaos.

Lemonade!

It was great that Slayers had an equal voice in Council policy these days, but Faith could seriously do without the quarterly meetings. She didn't care about statistics and spells and negotiations with governments and their spaghetti-tangle of committees and operations, and Mother of God, would Willow just get to the point already?

Across the table, B's eyes were glazing over. Faith felt perfectly justified drawing her knife and starting to pare her fingernails. Yeah, it was rude, but when it came to cutting off a torrent of Willow-babble, the ends totally justified the means.

"Willow. The data is, I'm sure, fascinating, but if you would skip to the conclusion, please?" said Giles. Faith could have kissed him.

"The point. Oh. Right." Willow tidied her papers and clicked through several PowerPoint slides, looking flustered. "Well, the point is that the demon population numbers in New York City don't make sense. They're too low, even with the five Slayers we have in Brooklyn. And word from the demon bars is that there's a new assassin in town, who turned down an offer from the Order of Taraka and then killed the three operatives sent against her."

Faith blinked. Okay, for this, the meeting was almost worthwhile. "Do we know anything about this person? Name, species, prefered weapons? Do we even know she's an assassin, not just a freelance hunter?"

Willow shrugged. "We know she's female; apparently she doesn't hide that. Probably human, but that's less certain. She calls herself the Dagger of Jericho or something like that, and she's been taking most of her contracts from Wolfram and Hart, but Lorne and I don't think she actually works for them, just that they pay best, or maybe they have access to something she wants." She bit her lip, fingers drumming nervously on the edge of her laptop.

"And?" said B, sitting up and giving Willow an encouraging look. "Come on, Wills, what did you do?"

Willow flushed guiltily. "Well, I know I shouldn't go poking around anything tied to the Circle of the Black Thorn without backup, but I've been trying to keep security tighter since that thing last year with the Sarguls, and I did a scrying spell, and I think this Jericho Dagger person might not be from our world."

Faith dropped her knife, her hand curling around the black portal stone she always wore around her neck. "Do you think...?"

"Yeah," said Willow, nodding. "I think she's the Sarguls' first assassin. And I think she wants to go home."

Oh! You write Buffy/Angel fic! I haven't read a pure Buffy story in years but this sounds promising... even if you're not actually writing this. :-)

I don't write BtVS as a regular thing, but I have a few fics here, as well as two crossovers: Locked Room Problems, in which Giles and Indiana Jones are trapped in the lost temple of a demonic fertility goddess, and Lemonade, in which Faith, Duo Maxwell (of Gundam Wing), and Uchiha Sasuke (of Naruto) are summoned to a hell dimension by a malfunctioning portal spell and must work together to get home.

The crossovers are basically crack premises which I treated -- or am in the process of treating -- as if they were dead serious, mostly because it's more fun for me that way. :-)

Even if it's not a regular thing, this snippet above looks very good. I used to write BtVS a long, LONG time ago but not anymore... the last four seasons were uninspiring to me.

Faith and Sasuke... I could see them sharing things in common. (I also stopped watching Naruto though currently, I'm still keeping up with the manga.) I may have to check out some of your other stories (other than Narnia, I mean) when I have more time on my hands.

And howdy from downstate, neighbor! (I'm from NYC.)

"Lemonade" actually started because I did a crack pairings meme where one of the questions was whether Sasuke/Faith or Sasuke/Duo would work better. And I hemmed and hawed and ended up proclaiming (mostly as a joke) that they should have a threesome. And then a plotbunny attacked. *wry* This is why jokes are dangerous.

Ah, you're from the city? Which borough?

Umm, I don't really recognize it, but I'll go out on a limb and say... Jericho? am embarrassed at my lack of pop culture knowledge these days, since I rarely watch TV anymore

But this is awesome- the original "No, honest! It was a JOKE, except it sprouted a PLOT, and now I can't make it STOP" behind "Lemonade" could just keep on expanding exponentially! I can see it gobbling up more and more fandoms as it goes!

Nah, Willow is just guessing Jericho because she doesn't recognize the real word (nor do her informants). The assassin's proper title is "the Dagger of the Jhereg."

Her name is Cawti, and she is from Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series. This fic, should I ever get around to writing it, would be set before Cawti meets Vlad, while she and her partner Norathar (the Sword of the Jhereg) are still working as one of the most skilled assassin teams in the Organization -- which is the business (ie, criminal) arm of the House of Jhereg in the Dragaeran Empire. I picked her because while she is an assassin, Cawti also has a strong sense of justice (she later becomes a proletarian revolutionary, among other things), and she takes a dim view of non-humans killing humans. Also, I think the treatment of gods and multiple dimension in Dragaera would play very interestingly off the treatment of gods and multiple dimensions in BtVS/A:tS. :-)

I'm a Brooklyn girl through and through. :-) Raised here since I was little and am still here today.

Endurance?

"Endurance"? Oh, lord, that's tricky -- I left it inconclusive for a reason. But okay. *ponders* Hmm. I think, maybe...

-----

She will not be canonized; the Church of England does not claim that power. But the Archbishop of Canterbury announced yesterday morning that Dr. Susan Pevensie will be remembered in the calendar of Common Worship as a beloved example of what one person can do to advance God's work on earth. Dr. Pevensie's charitable children's medical organization, Lucy's Cordial, operates in partnership with Médecins sans Frontières and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1972 for its work to mitigate the suffering of children in Vietnam and the surrounding regions. Her advocacy for women's rights won her international acclaim in the 1980s and 1990s. Queen Elizabeth II admitted her to the Order of the British Empire as a Dame Commander in 1987, though Dr. Pevensie preferred not to use the title.

Dr. Pevensie always seemed puzzled by the adulation she received. "I don't deserve praise," she said, in a 1999 interview. "I've done nothing that other people haven't also done, and I've done none of that alone. Don't think that I'm any better than you. Open your heart and God will lend you strength to do the right thing, just as he has helped me."

Dr. Pevensie's faith and calling, the common story goes, came from her grief after the loss of her parents, siblings, and cousin in a terrible railway accident in 1949. This idea persisted even after the posthumous publication of her private journals, which speak of a shared vision she and her siblings experienced during her childhood evacuation from London, and of her struggle to reconcile that vision -- that personal experience of God -- with her desire for an ordinary life. The later tragedy was simply a reminder.

"I identified the bodies in the morgue this afternoon," Susan Pevensie wrote the day after her bereavement. "I have been fighting for so long, without admitting to myself what I was doing. I told Edmund I could not fight the world. He was too kind to tell me that by surrendering that battle, I was fighting myself, fighting my family, and fighting Him. I left myself utterly alone, for the world did not care to see me, only my flag of surrender, and false friends are no exchange for love. But if I fight the world, I open myself again to Him; then I am never alone."

Here there is an inkblot in the original manuscript.

"They are all in His country now, beyond the ends of the world," the writing continues, "and I am glad for them, but if only I had trusted Him to lend me strength, instead of measuring my own heart and finding it wanting, and forgetting that my own heart is never all that I have to lean on-- if I had listened to Edmund, and Lucy, and Peter--"

Another inkblot.

"But if one of us had to remain, best for it to be me. I am the one who waits at home while other go forth to battle. This will be a longer wait, but I am sure I will find tasks to occupy the years, and at least now I have no need to fear anyone's fate but my own."

[[continued in next comment]]

Two months later, when her parents' wills had been mostly executed, Susan Pevensie quit her job as a shopgirl and began training as a doctor. Six years later, she founded Lucy's Cordial, endowing it with her entire inheritance. By 1960, Lucy's Cordial had expanded to every Commonwealth nation, as well as most of Western Europe. In 1976, Dr. Pevensie allied Lucy's Cordial with Médecins sans Frontières. At the time of her death, Lucy's Cordial operated permanent missions in 157 countries, and had a well-trained and funded crisis response system.

"Medicine was never truly my calling," Dr. Pevensie wrote in 2005, one month before her death in a suicide bomb attack in Fallujah, where she was overseeing the expansion of a Lucy's Cordial mission hospital. "Lucy was the healer among us; my interest lay more in beauty and gentle persuasion. But this world is so desperately in need of healing, and I wished to honour Lucy's memory, so I pretended to be her rather than myself. Of course, one cannot live another's story, so perhaps it is not surprising that I have gradually drifted away from the practicalities of the organization and become something of a one-woman protest movement in service of human rights. I am only thankful that I had the good sense not to attempt living Peter's and Edmund's lives as well -- I make a passable doctor with some effort, but as a general, a minister, an MP, a barrister, or a judge, I would be a laughingstock."

Here there is a faint line, as if Dr. Pevensie rested her pen on the page for a moment, followed by, "Well, perhaps I might have made a passable MP. But there is no point wondering what might have happened. This is the life I made with the world I was given, and it is more than enough."

Whatever might have happened to Dr. Pevensie had she followed another path, it is certain that without her faith, her love, and her tireless work for justice and fair treatment for all people in all nations, our world would be a poorer place. On March 4th, the Church of England will attest to that truth.

-----

So yeah, that was kind of random. *blinks*

Also, I chose 1972 as the year for Susan's Nobel Prize because in our world, no prize was awarded that year. :-) I make no guarantees for the accuracy of any other stuff, though I did poke around Wikipedia a bit for some general background information.

Oh man, I want you to complete Lemonade and write that sequel SO BADLY right now.

:D The Harry/Ginny/Draco threesome! I know it's not even close to complete, but where were you planning on ending it?

In a threesome, obviously. :-) And with Draco wondering how in Merlin's name he's going to explain this to Scorpius. Speaking of which...

-----

"Mum? Why haven't you and Dad complained about me spending time with Scorpius lately? Not that I mind," Al added hastily, "but, y'know, it's a little odd after all these years."

Ginny set down the Daily Prophet and smiled sweetly at her younger son. Harry promptly stood from his chair and headed for the kitchen in search of alcohol; it was five o'clock somewhere in the world, and he knew all too well where this was going.

"It would be more than a little hypocritical of your dad and me to complain about your association with Scorpius Malfoy when we're currently having a threesome with his father," Ginny said, still smiling with that dangerous sweetness.

Al choked on his toast. Lily dropped her pumpkin juice. James, fortunately, wasn't visiting that morning. But once they had their breath back, his brother and sister more than made up more his absence with the volume of their protests.

In the kitchen, Harry knocked back a shot of Firewhiskey and wondered how long he could hide before Ginny summoned him out to play mediator.

Damn Malfoy anyway. This was entirely his fault.

It needs an actual plot, but I do badly want to see Cawti interact with the Slayers, and to see the Dragaeran gods have an epic pissing match with the Powers That Be and/or the Senior Partners of Wolfram and Hart.

*CHOKEsplutter* Oh god, GINNY. *massive love* The way she just drops it right there. She's so evil. Also LMAO at Harry immediately going for the booze.

This is exactly what I wanted to see. XD Thank you, you're magic. ♥

*preens* I do try. :-)

This is fun to read. I had never really thought about Susan post Chronicles. Interesting to imagine that she would take the death of her family as a catalyst back to her faith.

Anyway, the reason I commented was that a friend of mine celebrates March 4th. It's the only day of the year that tells you to do something. I found it funny that you chose that as the day they honored Susan. She certainly did "March forth!"

Lovely work, as usual. Nice to see the problem of Susan solved in a positive way - the comparison to her waiting during the wars really rings true.

The Two Secretive Princesses?

♥!! I really liked it :D I liked how narnia is described as a shared vision

"March forth!" I like that; I will have to tell my sister. (I picked the date because March 4 is my sister's birthday. Do not examine me for deep symbolic reasons, for I am really rather shallow. *grin*) But yes, Susan did rather march forth in this fic.

Confession: I have never actually understood a lot of the vehemence with which people accuse Lewis of mistreating Susan. Yes, she does a silly, thoughtless, hurtful thing -- pretending that Narnia isn't real and turning away from her family -- but she's young. She has her entire life to return to Narnia, if she wants to.

And the reason she doesn't go to Aslan's country is very simple: she's not dead. Which to me says that she's the only one who has a chance to do anything meaningful with her life. I feel horrible for what Susan must suffer as the only survivor of a cruel, senseless tragedy, but in a way I feel more sorry for the others -- they die, they watch Narnia die right in front of them, and they have no chance to make a difference in the world anymore. All Lewis's descriptions of "real" Narnian scenery and joyful reunion scenes cannot make up for the characters' basic helplessness and irrelevance at the series' end. Susan, in contrast, still has a future.

Anyway, I always figured that Susan was going to live the rest of her life on her terms, whatever they ended up being. What she does in "Remembrance" is one way of taking the lessons about responsibility and love she learned in Narnia and putting them into action in our world, which Aslan himself implies is half the point of their adventures. (Also, I wanted to write a "Susan regains her faith" story that did not involve Susan getting married, if only for variety's sake. *grin*)

Thanks! I had a lot of trouble working out how Susan might have described Narnia in a way that wouldn't make her sound crazy, and visions ended up being the least awkward solution. (Well, fantasy stories might have been easier, but I am pretending Susan first wrote about Narnia shortly after LWW, when she hadn't yet started denying its reality, so she needed a different way to hide the magic in plain sight. *grin*)

Do you want a direct sequel or just another random snippet from the larger story of which that is a part?

Either way is fine

I have a couple ideas; I will work on them Tuesday night. :-)

Good point. I don't have strong feelings for Susan - she's the Pevensie who never really "clicked" with me, compared to Peter especially. I think the people who do have the issue are the ones who look at Narnia as a religious allusion... and it troubles them that she only got one shot.

Funny -- Peter is the Pevensie who is most opaque to me. I find it much easier to get at the other three. (I do have a very strong idea of what is IC for Peter and what is not. I just find it hard to get inside his head.)

I think the people who do have the issue are the ones who look at Narnia as a religious allusion... and it troubles them that she only got one shot.

And this is where they lose me, because how does anyone get only one shot? So far as I can tell, Lewis's position is that as long as you're alive, you have the option to, I dunno, convert or repent or whatever. Infinite shots! Susan just missed one highly specific chance; she'll have lots more.

Done! The War of Secret Flames: Silent Screams is up now -- 925 words about Toph and Mai during Ozai's invasion of Toure-on-Marsh.

I see Peter more as an archetype than anything else - the golden boy. It's why I had issues with the PC movie. But I love playing with archetypes, so that's why I like writing him. honest to god, I'm one scene away from completing my "Peter fic."

As for Susan, I totally agree with you. But people want the happily ever after spoonfed to them.

Peter's mischaracterization was the worst part of that movie, hands down. (Well. Mischaracterization if we're relying on the books. It made sense in terms of Disney's own version of LWW, but since I think that was mischaracterization too... *sigh*)

I like happily-ever-after as much as the next person, but bittersweet and complicated is so much more interesting. :-)

Or the alternate, slightly less dark version: The War of Secret Flames: Turn to Stone, which includes less death, and also mentions of Alianora's Aunt Ermintrude.

*nods* I didn't like him as the standard "angry teen." Totally destroys what he represents (EDMUND is the angry one, thanks).

Life is bittersweet, after all.

Lovely! And I think a persuasive, very probable solution/ending to the problem of Susan.

Jumping in this discusion once again months after the fact, but I just wanted to say that book!Peter is much too responsible and mature to be up to all that he's up to in the film. I am so bitter about what they did with his character, but glad they didn't screw up Edmund's redemption for me.

Thanks!

I suppose they did better with Edmund because the books already give him flaws (and therefore a ready-made emotional growth arc), whereas Peter comes off more static, and they therefore felt a need to dirty him up a bit. It is perfectly possible to write an already good and noble person having an emotional growth arc -- one doesn't have to express self-doubt or a sense of loss by being an immature jerk -- but apparently that is beyond Hollywood in most cases. *sigh*

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[Meme] first lines of imaginary sequels

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Go on, guess the crossover :-)

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[Fic] "Remembrance," part 1 -- Chronicles of Narnia

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Re: Go on, guess the crossover :-)

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Re: [Fic] "Remembrance," part 2 -- Chronicles of Narnia

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Re: [Fic] "Remembrance," part 2 -- Chronicles of Narnia

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