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edenfallingToday is also NFE Madness day! I wrote three extra gifts this year, and will talk about each in a separate post.
Start of Line: Lucy looks around, wondering what makes the Professor's workshop so dangerous. At first glance, she can't see anything special: just a bunch of computers on a rack and a half-dozen monitors scattered about to no apparent plan, each surrounded by drifts of notepaper and graph paper. But then one monitor switches from its screensaver -- snow falling onto pine trees -- to a black screen with a single line of text.
Lucy steps closer, curious.
<Hello?> the computer says again. The cursor blinks in silent invitation. (2,550 words, written for![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
songsmith)
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Songsmith requested alternate Narnias. Her suggestions included steampunk, space opera, and superhero AUs, but I went for a Tron fusion instead. Well, okay, I did initially want to do a WWII Tron fusion, with the conceit that Uncle Andrew had built a working Babbage difference engine, or analytical engine, to sort of bring in the steampunk aspect, but those machines just aren't the right kind of computer, and I couldn't think of a smooth way to integrate magic to paper over that problem. So I went for a ten-minutes-in-the-future AU instead.
The chief problem here was figuring out where the story ought to end. I thought initially I could cut off right after Lucy enters the Grid and meets Tumnus, but I really wanted to get some more exposition in there, and also make Tumnus a little more sympathetic than his actions would otherwise paint him. (He does essentially kidnap Lucy into a war-zone, after all.) On the flipside of that issue, Lucy needed some agency to counteract that inadvertent victim role. So I kept going until she makes her own choice to stay and help. It's still kind of sketchy, but honestly, Tumnus IS fairly sketchy early on in canon, so I figure it's a plausible extrapolation to new circumstances.
The title is a silly reference to "end of line," which is a programming command that appears with varying significance in Tron and its related canons.
Start of Line: Lucy looks around, wondering what makes the Professor's workshop so dangerous. At first glance, she can't see anything special: just a bunch of computers on a rack and a half-dozen monitors scattered about to no apparent plan, each surrounded by drifts of notepaper and graph paper. But then one monitor switches from its screensaver -- snow falling onto pine trees -- to a black screen with a single line of text.
Lucy steps closer, curious.
<Hello?> the computer says again. The cursor blinks in silent invitation. (2,550 words, written for
-----
Songsmith requested alternate Narnias. Her suggestions included steampunk, space opera, and superhero AUs, but I went for a Tron fusion instead. Well, okay, I did initially want to do a WWII Tron fusion, with the conceit that Uncle Andrew had built a working Babbage difference engine, or analytical engine, to sort of bring in the steampunk aspect, but those machines just aren't the right kind of computer, and I couldn't think of a smooth way to integrate magic to paper over that problem. So I went for a ten-minutes-in-the-future AU instead.
The chief problem here was figuring out where the story ought to end. I thought initially I could cut off right after Lucy enters the Grid and meets Tumnus, but I really wanted to get some more exposition in there, and also make Tumnus a little more sympathetic than his actions would otherwise paint him. (He does essentially kidnap Lucy into a war-zone, after all.) On the flipside of that issue, Lucy needed some agency to counteract that inadvertent victim role. So I kept going until she makes her own choice to stay and help. It's still kind of sketchy, but honestly, Tumnus IS fairly sketchy early on in canon, so I figure it's a plausible extrapolation to new circumstances.
The title is a silly reference to "end of line," which is a programming command that appears with varying significance in Tron and its related canons.
