With the unfailing instincts of a true shipper, you have zeroed in on one of the few, if not the only, full-blown Agnebal WIPs in that entire list. Kudos! 🤣😂💗
This is one of my very old drafts (created before I migrated all my fic over to Scrivener in September 2020, I think). It's also one of the only things I've ever written in second person, now that I come to think of it.
The gist of it is: Agnes has gone swimming on the holodeck, and at some point, she realizes Rios is sitting on a deck chair by the side of the pool, looking very glum and forlorn.
There's only a few snippets of written out conversation and half-sentences or half a paragraph here and there, but let me share a few bits:
“Do you know how to swim?”
“Of course I do.”
For a moment, you sit in companionable silence, before he adds:
“My mother taught me when I was a kid. We went to the beach a lot for a couple of summers.”
“That sounds nice.”
“Hm.”
The silence stretches again, as you both follow your own thoughts.
“I can’t swim like that, though.”
You frown, looking up at him. “Like what?”
“You know…” He still doesn’t look at you but waves his hands about limply. “Proper swimming. With the breathing and arms and all that.”
Another short pause.
“Would you like me to show you?”
For a moment you’re not sure he actually heard you, then he shrugs. You just sit there, watching him for another moment. He looks like you feel so often: drained and dead inside, too numb to feel sad, exhausted enough that making eye-contact feels like a chore.
She does end up teaching him a few things, though they're both too exhausted to have a real go at it. And then the last bit (still somewhat fragmentary) is this:
You end up clinging to the rim at the shallow end of the pool, blue lips tentatively finding each other.
You do teach him how to float on his back - his strong muscles compensating for his weight.
You float next to each other, holdint on to each other’s hands. After a while, the gentle currents of the pool pull your legs apart and your heads slowly circle closer to each other. Even with your ears half-submerged, you are close enough to hear as he says: “Thank you for this.”
As the silence once again stretches between you, your nerves start to jitter, urging you to say... something.
“Did you know that otters hold on to each other when they sleep?" you finally blurt out. "They sleep floating on their backs and they grab each other’s paws so they won’t drift apart in the night. The mother otters pull their babies onto their bellies so they’ll stay all dry and fluffy and… um… sorry.” You laugh, feeling sheepish. “I’m sure the person who told me this made it into some profound metaphor, but I don’t know…”
After another long moment, you can just about hear Cris through the water in your ears. “It’s nice to think about anyway.” And he squeezes your hand, holding on more tightly.
You don’t need profound. Drifting in the shallows, holding on to Cris so you won’t drift apart, is not particularly profound either. But it is more than enough for now.
Thank you for reminding me of this! I haven't read through it in a long while, and it might actually be a WIP I could finish with a reasonable amount of work. I'll have to look into that some more 🤔
Fic cover for @jazzfic 's amazing and spooky contribution to Holoween 2023 run by @holo-squad
Friend Corn Wants to Play - jazzfic - Star Trek: Picard [Archive of Our Own]
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: La Sirena
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Emil | La Sirena’s Emergency Medical Hologram & Agnes Jurati
Characters: Agnes Jurati, Emil | La Sirena’s Emergency Medical Hologram, Enoch | La Sirena’s Emergency Navigational Hologram, Cristóbal Rios
Additional Tags: holoween, Holodecks & Holosuites (Star Trek), Mild Horror, Background Relationships, Gallows Humor
Summary:
Fears are silly, right? But she has Emil on her side, so surely Agnes can face this one.
In episode 1.10, Rios, Raffi and Narek (later joined by Elnor, with sword) had a scene in a conference/ meeting / ready room. I understand the set is the captain’s quarters, redressed, but do we know if this room has an official name, and where it’s located? Thanks and love your work, as always! 🧐😀
Ah yes. This one 🙈
Unfortunately, that room remains a mystery.
In the Set Me Up behind the scenes tour, production designer Todd Cherniawsky refers to it as Rios’s “ready room”, but I don’t know how official that is. It certainly doesn’t look like much of a ready room, which is why I’ve mostly stuck with calling it the conference room for now.
Since, as you said, it’s clearly filmed in the captain's quarters, things like the view out of the door or the angles of the walls and ceilings don't really hold any clues as to this room’s in-universe location.
The most obvious point of reference might be the slatted light at one side of the room.
I have often seen people refer to this as a half-shuttered window, which would mean that this wall, at least, must be part of Sirena’s outer hull. Also, it would have to be in a part of the ship that’s facing the sun after the crash on Coppelius (i.e. facing forward or possibly aft, given the angle of the light, possible paths of the Ghulion sun and shadows cast by the surrounding mountains).
However! If you look closely at the two times throughout the season that we see the light/window in Rios's quarters, this conclusion becomes less clear.
First: In ep. 3, "The End is the Beginning", Rios has Sirena in orbit around Earth, making repairs and waiting for Picard to beam up.
We don't get an establishing shot for this scene, so we don't know at precisely what angle the ship is to the sun. It's possible the light we can see flooding the room here is Sol’s sunlight coming in through a window. No contradictions so far. But...
Second: In ep. 8, "Broken Pieces", Rios holes himself up in his cabin on the way to Deep Space 12. La Sirena is at warp at this point (as we can tell from the window behind Enoch shortly before we see Rios in his quarters).
Even if there is light outside the ship from the warp effect, it wouldn’t create this “steady sunbeams through shutters” effect we see here:
All this has led me to believe that this fixture in Rios’s quarters and the conference room is not, in fact, a window, but a large light. Someone (either the Starfleet engineers who designed the cabins Rios added to Sirena when he got her, or some denizen of the ship itself) designed it to look like sunlight through a slatted blind, possibly to give the ship a more homey feel.
Unfortunately, this means the “window” doesn’t tell us anything about the position of the meeting room in relation to Sirena’s hull after all. Essentially, we have no hints of any kind about the whereabouts of the elusive “ready room”.
Of course, that isn't going to stop me from speculating :D
(Wild mix of educated guesses and complete headcanons after the cut.)
Basically, I can come up with two scenarios, neither of them completely satisfactory.
Option 1
The most straightforward explanation is that the meeting room is set up in an empty cabin.
By the end of season one, there are seven people living on La Sirena, so we can expect there to be at least seven cabins. One day, I will write a whole screed about the cabin placement on Sirena, and how this ship is bigger on the inside, but for now, let’s just assume there are seven cabins somewhere and two of them (Elnor’s and Seven’s) are empty at time of the crash on Coppelius.
It’s possible one of these cabins has been used as some kind of meeting room in the past, and that’s why it has a table and way too many semi-matched chairs in it. Maybe it’s left over from the last time Rios was ferrying around a group of academics and/or businessmen and they needed somewhere to convene their Important Meetings. Or maybe it’s just a storage space for some excess furniture.
There is, of course, the possibility the furniture in this room isn’t real but projected, given the omnipresence of holo-emitters throughout the ship. I’ve mentioned many times why I don’t think the furniture in the normal living quarters is a holographic projection, but for something like a temporary meeting room in an otherwise empty cabin, it might make sense.
An argument to the contrary, however, can be found in the details of the room.
There are two additional chairs by the back window for a total of eight when the table only fits six,...
... the chairs at the ends of the table don’t match the ones on the side,...
... and if you look closely at the images above, you see that the table shows the same signs of age and wear as many other places on Sirena.
In my opinion, these kinds of incongruous details don’t necessarily fit with a purpose-built, holo-projected meeting room. You can, of course, find explanations for how it would still make sense (I have a few springing to mind right now), but the most straightforward assumption is probably that these chairs and the table were standing around the ship/the empty cabin anyway, and Rios just decided to use them for the occasion.
If this is the case, the likeliest location for this room is at the back of the upper deck, possibly in the area marked for additional cargo on the set plans:
(Starboard aft/Bottom left. There are some issues with possible cabins in that space, given that the back of the deck isn’t symmetrical and there isn’t quite enough space for cabins of the same size as the ones on the port side and a corridor. But that is a discussion for another time.)
Of course, if we go with this assumption, we have to just accept that the angle of the walls and ceiling in the conference room and the view through its door don’t line up with what they’d be in universe. These are just unavoidable artefacts of the production process, and we’ll have to ignore them or come up with very elaborate explanations.
Option 2
Now, the inconsistencies in the shape of the room might be explained by my second option for the location of the meeting: The conference room is a programme Rios is running on the holodeck.
In my opinion, this explanation is somewhat less likely.
Rios is very practical. I doubt he’d create a purpose-built meeting room for the interview with Narek. Throughout season 1, most important discussions take place on the bridge or in the mess. And if Raffi and Rios were trying to have this talk in a controlled environment where Narek wouldn’t have access to anything he could, say, pocket and use as a weapon later, simply projecting furniture into the otherwise empty holodeck would have sufficed.
The room in its current configuration being already present in the holodeck database also seems unlikely. Why create a perfect recreation of the captain’s quarters only to fill it with a scratched-up table, too many mismatched chairs, and nothing else?
The only explanation I could see here (and now we are entering the Wild Lands of Boundless Speculation) is that the recreation of Rios’s cabin already existed in the database. After the ship’s systems were knocked out so thoroughly by the orchid and then rebooted through synth magic, it was the programme the computer defaulted to through some random act of chance. So, Rios might have taken Narek to the holodeck, expecting to have their talk in Picard’s Chateaux, but walked into his own cabin instead. And whether it was just quickest solution, or he didn’t want to admit the mistake in front of Soji’s murderous ex, rather than shutting the holodeck down and starting a different programme, Rios just told the computer to delete everything inside and project a table and some chairs. No, not those chairs, something more comfortable. No, don’t just add more chairs I meant - oh, fuck it. Nevermind.
Now, why would there be a recreation of the captain’s cabin and a bunch of associated, fittingly scuffed-up furniture stored on the holodeck in the first place?
Here, I want to offer the suggestion that somebody on the ship must have the task of periodically stopping by IKEA Intergalactic to replace worn-out or broken furniture in the cabins. With holo-emitters at their disposal, trying out how certain options would look in real life (and whether they would age in a way fitting the ship’s general aesthetic) is a superior option to merely looking at the IKEA catalogue. So, if this hypothetical holo person were very earnest about their job but also hesitant to use the built-in holo emitters in the actual captain’s quarters out of fear of getting yelled at, a full-scale recreation might be a sensible way to go........
It’s within the realm of possibility, is what I’m saying.
Still, in my opinion, the likeliest explanation is that the meeting room is an empty cabin at the back of the upper deck, on the starboard side of the engine room. We will probably never know for sure (barring some truly surprising developments in season two and three), but hey: more space for us writers to explore ;)
Rios was still getting used to the ETH. (Emergency Tabby Hologram)
The abbreviation caused some issues, including one particularly hairy moment where activating a hologram with thumbs and the ability to control the phaser banks would have been *much* more useful. Though either way, asking for the ETH still always resulted in summoning a hologram who enjoyed sleeping on the bridge, paws or not!
Honorary addition to Pets of La Sirena for @jazzfic <3
It’s sign up round up number three, and after only 2 weeks there are just three dates unclaimed!
We’ve got the promise of three more fics for you, as well as another serving of meta-essay-goodness to add to this years StarTrekPotluck2021 ✨
A warm welcome to the kitchen to:
@thelaithlyworm - Voyager meta essay, 6th August
@song-spero - Picard fanfic, 11th August
@scriptrix-eclectica - TOS fanfic, 12th August
@weimarweekly - Picard fanfic, 13th August
Who join our existing chefs:
@regionalpancake - Picard fanfic, 1st August
@jazzfic - Picard fanfic, 2nd August
@spinifex-ao3 - Picard comic, 3rd August
@chicksonspeed - Picard fanfic, 4th August
@victor-is-a-punk-shocker - TOS fanfic, 5th August
@youvearrived - VOY/DS9/Lower Decks crossover fanfic, 8th August
@procrastinatorproject - Picard meta essay, 9th August
StarTrekPotluck2021 is looking for fan creators of all types from across the all the Trek fandoms: Could you make a gifset of every on screen gagh appearance? Think you could write a Tom Paris POV poem about his pepperoni pizza? Want to try writing what happens over Sisko’s famous dinners with his senior staff?
If so, put on your aprons and send us an ask to book a date between the 1st and 14th of August:
(1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th)
Your hosts ( @regionalpancake - 1st August @spinifex-ao3 - 3rd August) are more than happy to shuffle to another date if it means you can join in!
Remember: any Star Trek fandom, any media. For more info, see here.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
[ID: "Peeta’s face hovers in darkness. In the bottom right is a cluster of violet flowers. Title reads, ‘What Normal Really Is, written by jazzfic, read by Thimblerig’" End ID]
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Katniss Everdeen/Peeta Mellark
Characters: Peeta Mellark, Katniss Everdeen, Haymitch Abernathy
Additional Tags: Post-Mockingjay, Podfic, Podfic Length: 20-30 Minutes
Summary:
In which Peeta learns that there’s no real recipe for parenting. Mistakes and all, this is something they’re starting from scratch.
**
I enjoyed working on this ‘they’re going to have a happy ending by damn’ post-canon fic by the very talented @jazzfic
16. If you could steal the basic plot of an episode for one show and apply to another which would you choose?
OH MY GOD, what a brilliant question! I overlooked that in the list, I think 🤣
I already opened various episode lists to answer @curator-on-ao3's question, lemme see if I can find some inspiration...
There are so, so, so many possible answers to this, but the first things that come to mind (because I was once again thinking about my favourite episodes being The Fun Ones): "Spock Amok" but make it... honestly any of the other shows. Elnor suddenly finds himself in Picard's body and has to handle some Dicy Diplomatic Disaster, while Picard briefly considered pretending to be Elnor at some important Qowat Milat ceremony, but then gave up because that is counter to absolutely everything they believe in and asked for their help instead (an important facet of that episode which I love a lot!). Everyone else is on some version of shore leave and when they find out what happened (probably from Zani, who understands the situation is Very Uncomfortable for Elnor and Picard but also found Picard's brief attempt at Being Elnor hilarious), they're having A Whale Of A Time!
Alternatively: Kira body-swaps with one of her Important-Politician-Partners and suddenly has to handle Bajoran politics in a way deeply counter to her usual instincts -- while her partner finds themselves at the receiving end of another of Dukat's Attempts At Flirting or have to fend off Kai Winn or something along those lines...
Also: Take "Those Old Scientists" and apply it to literally any combination of shows, or "Trials and Tribble-ations" for that matter. Imagine Rios getting stuck on TNG-era Enterprise and being entirely incapable of preserving the Temporal Prime Directive, because he can't deal with Will and Deanna's Will They Won't They or he keeps geeking out about all the "retro" tech and blabbing about unfortunate details...
Sooooooo many possibilities!!!
Also: overlap between All Of The Holo-Madness! That'd be quite something!
(And now excuse me, while I think about some kind of crossover between the various holo-characters. I want to see Moriarty, Badgey, Doctor Chaotica, et al face off against Vic Fontaine, Voyager's Doctor, and Sirena's Holo Squad! (And also, possibly, another version of Badgey 🤣)
--
Thank you so much for the ask! And if anyone else wants to know more:
