Who wants to hear about one of the most baffling AUs that has ever popped into my brain? And I’m saying this as someone who has a multiverse mad scientist AU, an ‘Alice goes back in time Peggy-Sue’ style AU, a ‘Victor and Alice are Jennifer Parker’s ancestors’ AU, and a WALL*E AU. Ready? Okay, here we go:
-->AU is multifandom, with Corpse Bride, Alice games, Back To The Future, and Portal main characters
-->AU involves Victor, Victoria, a still-living Emily, a still-living Bonejangles, Alice, a still-living Lizzie, Marty, Jennifer, a teenage Doc (aka Emmett), and a teenage Clara all waking up in a mysterious sciencey area where they’ve apparently been kidnapped and kept in suspended animation. None of them can remember what led them to there, and they’re all baffled by this metal ball hanging from the ceiling introducing itself as Wheatley and saying he’s saved them all
-->Wheatley explains they’ve been taken to be experimented on, that there’s been a massive power failure (”Which isn’t more than 10% my fault“), they’re the only ones left alive, and offers to help them escape
-->The group decides they might as well follow the one “person” who has any idea what’s happening and starts trekking through the facility -- only for Wheatley to insist they have to see the view and lead them to a big window. . .
-->Which looks out on SPACE. Nope, they have NOT been kidnapped by Aperture, they’ve been kidnapped by aliens! Who have time travel technology and have been capturing subjects of interest to help them in their plans to conquer Earth. Hence why three of the should-be-dead people are alive -- Emily, Bonejangles, and Lizzie were all taken before their deaths. Emmett was also specifically taken before he could invent his own time travel technology, which annoys the shit out of him once he learns about it
-->Oh, also the aliens have been visiting other worlds as well, and thanks to the power failure one of their specimens has escaped containment -- an Alien. As in the Ripley family bane Aliens. So not only do they have the angry and scared kidnapper aliens after them, there’s a real chance they will run into a literal MURDER MACHINE
-->Shenanigans ensue! Shenanigans tend to include:
Alice gaining the Otherlands-style ability to enter other people’s minds, and the ability to summon her imaginary weapons into reality
Emmett being revealed to have technomancy, which really helps in hacking alien computers
One of the group being revealed to have been programmed to become a sleeper agent, activated with a code phrase -- which Wheatley says; everyone thinks it’s Alice and is relieved when it appears the conditioning didn’t work, but then they run into some aliens and the agent is revealed to be Victor -- who, thanks to Wheatley blurting the code phrase, has ‘imprinted’ on his friends as the people he is fighting for. (Alice later uses her dream-walking to help better merge the programming with Victor’s regular personality so he doesn’t go into a murder trance every time there’s enemies)
Wheatley admitting this whole thing is him feeling super guilty about how things went down in Portal 2, and he’s hoping that if he can get them back to Earth, he can finally apologize to Chell
Wheatley gets badly damaged, but manages to hook into the alien systems -- his attempt to download himself as the ship AI goes awry, however, and instead he ends up with a standard-issue human Wheatley body (you know, looks at least vaguely like Stephen Merchant)
Wheatley’s first appearance in this human body is running at some aliens threatening his new friends wielding a wrench BUTT-NAKED
-->In the end they all manage to get in an escape pod and get back to Earth, crash-landing near Area 51 because some cliches will not be denied
-->The military base takes them in -- and wonder of wonders, Chell is there! Wheatley is initially tongue-tied, and later tries to argue that he can be friends with her again if he never ever talks (Alice: “Wheatley, you’ll explode“); however, it’s not long before the beans are spilled on his identity -- fortunately, since the group speaks highly of him helping them escape and she can see that his eventual apology IS sincere, Chell agrees to give him a second chance
-->Shipping notes:
Definitely a Victor/Victoria/Emily/Alice situation -- Victor and Victoria were taken right after the rehearsal, so of course they’re already close, and they warm up to Emily and Alice during the shenanigans (Victor and Alice in particular during the dream-walking bit). There’s a bit of confusion on the part of these Victorians about their feelings, but eventually they throw caution to the wind and become a happy cuddlepile
Back To The Future characters follow their canon pairings -- Marty with Jennifer, Emmett with Clara. Have occasionally debated Emmett maybe having some attraction to Jennifer too, but not sure if it would go anywhere
Lizzie and Bonejangles hook up, of course, largely because they end up having each other’s backs so much during the shenanigans
And Chell’s second chance ends up turning romantic because I am very much into Chelley too
No I don’t know where this came from when will you all learn I am merely the conduit for the madness
Since "fairy tale AU" seems to be the name of the game around here lately (see the posts I've been reblogging from Nebby labeled "cindervictor"), I figured I ought to talk about one of my own takes on the whole business -- "The Tale!" This was my 2009 NaNoWriMo, right before the one that spawned "Secundus," and it's kind of important in it marks the transition from me focusing on Back To The Future characters to focusing on Corpse Bride & Alice ones.
My initial inspiration was a webcomic, "No Rest For The Wicked" -- a crossover comic featuring the princess from "The Princess and the Pea" on an adventure to find the lost (possibly dead) moon and cure her insomnia. Her traveling companions are a anthropomorphic Puss In Boots and a vicious, not-quite-sane version of Red Riding Hood, and they interact with people and creatures from other fairy tales (notably Beauty and the Beast, The Girl With No Hands, Hansel and Gretel, and Bearskin). It hasn't updated in ages, sadly, but one scene, in which Princess November is in Red's cabin and happens to somehow sense that Red's grandmother died in a certain bed, stuck with me, to the point where I started imagining it -- with Victor in November’s place and Alice in Red's.
After that, it was just a matter of assigning roles to characters. I decided my version was going to feature some lesser-known fairy tales -- if I remember correctly, I was inspired in that direction by some Let's Plays I'd seen of American McGee's Grimm on YouTube at the time. And since my main fandom was BTTF back then, I naturally thought those characters would be in the hero roles. The Boy Who Didn't Know Fear appealed to me for Marty, and a story about a man who wins an enchanted object after helping the King of Snakes and has to rescue it from a princess who steals it away from him seemed an okay fit for Doc -- I made his version an enchanted watch, natch. Jennifer, of course, had to be Sleeping Beauty (I mean, her main role in the sequels is to be dragged around places while unconscious -- and Marty even wakes her up with a kiss in Part III!). For my CB and AMA characters, Alice was already settled into the Red Riding Hood role, and I decided to do a variation on Godfather Death for Victor -- again, felt like a natural fit. Victoria got a role as Cinderella (with Sir Christopher the White Knight as her Prince), and Emily got -- well, a variation on the Jewish fairytale CB is in fact based on. Richard the Hatter became a variation on the Brave Little Tailor (seven in one blow, remember?), and Barkis Bittern Bluebeard. Throw in the tentacley Queen of Hearts as the villain for everyone to defeat, and a few other fandoms I was into at the time as other fairy tales for them to come across (would you believe I did the MST3K cast as a variation on Rapunzel?) and I felt I was set!
And then I started writing the thing and -- discovered I was a lot more interested in Victor's arc than Marty's.
I suppose part of the problem was that I'd given Victor a lot more complex backstory -- his godfather gifted him both with magic cure-all medicine AND the ability to see wherever Death had been -- and since he's been everywhere for pretty much everything, Victor actually lost his mind for a little while trying to cope with all the ghosts around him. This was also around the time I seriously started getting into Victor/Alice shipping, so their love story (with both of them doing the 'too scared to tell the other' thing) got me going more than Marty and Jennifer's 'true love's kiss' tale. Add in that, according to the plot I'd set up, Marty's arc actually ended BEFORE the climax, and -- yeah. Was it any wonder that, for 2010's story, I decided to go with Victor as the main character right from the start?
So yeah -- if you're curious about my first foray into multifandom madness, and my first step out of being primarily a Backie and into being Captain Of The Valice ship, you can read "The Tale" here. But, uh, fair warning -- it's unfinished. I suffer from this awful tendency to win NaNoWriMo without finishing the story, and -- well, this is the one before "Secundus." Guess what I was more interested in after 2010. I TRIED to push it to a conclusion in 2012, but no dice. Which is a little pathetic, since I'm not that far from the end. . . Look, let me see how long it takes me to wrestle "Remembering You" into submission.
