[Meme] random fandom genre or temporal AU summaries

[edenfalling]

Found via hungrytiger11 and selenak:

Take any one of the fandoms you know I write/rec/read AND give me a type of AU (space opera AU, pirate AU, superhero AU, etc) OR another time period (Ancient Rome, Regency England, etc). I will then explain the gist of the story I would write for that AU.

Comments

[lesserstorm.livejournal.com]

Chrestomanci in Space?

[edenfalling]

Hmmm. Okay, supposing that Christopher's magic, instead of allowing him to travel to different realities, lets him instantaneously teleport to the various planets of a loose interstellar trade network, which is overseen (to the extent that it is overseen at all) by Chrestomanci and his agents, who are the only people with the ability to jump from one planet to another without the bother and expense of months-long starship voyages.

Then you can play out The Lives of Christopher Chant more or less as-is, though without the nine lives business and also maybe with his father having known about his talent and tried to keep it secret because... oh, I don't know, maybe it's considered vulgar on his world to work for Chrestomanci?

When you get to Charmed Life, again Cat is gifted with the world-jumping talent, which Gwendolyn is madly jealous of, and at some point while Christopher was growing up somebody found a way to siphon off the "energy" into a device that lets ordinary people travel the same way; this has disrupted trade patterns, among other things, since now some world-jumpers, rather than working as Chrestomanci's agents, sell their power to governments and spies, or to pirates and traders who hook the jump-machines up to ships and thus can instantaneously jump actual cargo from world to world.

Gwendolyn has been draining Cat's power for years without him ever being aware of this, and makes a habit of trying out new worlds in hopes that she'll find one she likes better. She ends up swapping more directly with... oh, what's her name, Janet?... which means I'd somehow have to combine Janet and the lookalike queen, but I'm sure that could be dealt with somehow. :-)

[lesserstorm.livejournal.com]

Brilliant - you get entirely new world building giving rise to the same characters

[edenfalling]

It has been forever and a day since I read Charmed Life or The Lives of Christopher Chant, which is why the summaries are, alas, so fuzzy. I confess I always liked Christopher best, though, which is why I took his book as the basis for the world and wound up in a muddle over Cat's plot. If I started with Cat and Gwendolyn and worked backward instead, I suspect I'd end up with a story about biotechnology wars and the ethics of cloning and genetic engineering rather than a story about interstellar transport and trade.