dust can’t settle: Commentary
I thought you were done with credits and notes and commentaries, I hear you say. You had an entire chapter dedicated to credits and notes. Why do you have more notes?
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, @stellarfoam and I wrote a thing for @pod-together, got a whole ton of talented people to help us read it, and created the first ao3 relationship for the tag “Original Fear Entity Avatar Characters & Original Fear Entity Avatar Characters (The Magnus Archives)” except the tag was too long so the “the” got dropped. You can find that here. If, however, you have already read/listened to/somehow otherwise experienced our oc/self-insert-heavy original statement fic, welcome! I assume you’re here because you wanted to listen to me ramble on for yet another thousand words. If you’re not looking for that, well, here it is.
Under the cut, anyways
The World of DCS:
This is, very technically, the Magnus Archives fanfic.
I say technically, because nowhere in this does canon appear. It appears in the inspiration and base worldbuilding, but other than that... yeah no.
So this started when Kai and I looked at the worldbuilding TMA has for the U.S. and went “yeah there’s got to be more than one institute.” Thus the San Francisco Institute for the Unusual and Paranormal was born, along with its satellite offices in Denver and Chicago. Those same satellite offices also serve The Usher Foundation in DC. The branch offices collect statement, both written and recorded, and other research on the paranormal. Every five years, SFIUP sends along a couple of archival assistants to go and transfer those files to long-term storage in San Francisco or DC. The relationship between the branch offices and SFIUP can be best summed up as follows:
Chicago & Denver: Bigger archives are always bossing us around :( San Fran & DC: Alright but can you like, actually store your statements Chicago & Denver: No.... San Fran & DC: Okay, so...? Chicago & Denver: DON’T TELL US WHAT TO DO
Also, we said screw you to Smirke’s 14. There’s every chance that by defining and putting boundaries on the 14 he actually helped shape them into those roles, and we figured that different places would have different mergers and interpretations of those 14. Most of our statements merge or ignore the defined fears- Something There is Dark/Hunt/Eye, Hung is Vast/Buried, Beauty is Eye/Vast, Shasta Lake is just a weirdly big fish, Dragon’s Cauldron might be Hunt? It’s more just a “alright but wouldn’t it be COOL if...”
We also have another giant document about how the fears might manifest in different parts of America.
Because there is never an end to the worldbuilding.
The Car:
Some random facts about the car for your enjoyment: - It woke up because something something knowledge = power and Lee and Dusk (LD) kept reading it statements - So now the equation knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass applies, which is to say that the trunk is a transdimensional space that LD primarily use for storage of random things. - Also a flesh monster. - It’s just back there. - It tried to kill them at one point while crossing through Minnesota. They shoved it in the trunk. It just sort of. Remains there. For awhile. - The car did not approve. - In case your wondering, the car is more or less a traveling archive, and LD are its archivists. - However LD did not sign up for this, and so their road trip culminates eventually with them killing the car. It is a long and terrible battle, and the two of them nearly die. - I have, somewhere on this computer, right now, a recording of the Car’s lovely voice actor Lynx doing a variety of absolutely terrible voices, including petulant teenager and valley girl.
Statements:
We have two pages worth of statement ideas still that we’ll get around to writing someday. If we stop adding to them. Here’s the stories behind some of the ones that made it into the fic, and some other general things I wanted to talk about.
Chapter 1: Archivist’s Note, San Francisco, Shasta Lake:
The recording classification system does not have much thought put into it, but follows the following format
[Media type];[Supernatural Classification].[Year].[Month]:[Employee(s) responsible for the case]
So in the case of [S;F15.2015.06-09:LD)], it’s: Statement(s);Multiple fears.2015.June-September:Lee & Dusk
Is this a perfect system? Hell no. Did this get as deep into archive classification systems as I wanted to go for a 15k fic? Yes.
The Shasta Lake statement pulled heavily from several sources, including the Shasta Lake fishing website, Wikipedia, and an actual news story about a couple of guys who saved a sturgeon from choking on a catfish. It’s kinda an amazing story, especially since the fish was actually about 8 feet long.
Things I don’t want to run into, thank you.
Chapter 4: Empty City, Gas
Empty city was, as mentioned in the fic, inspired by a statement @laurenbrightwing gave to us. And yes, LD absolutely have gone and explored graveyards and abandoned buildings for the Aesthetic of it.
Gas, however, came from The Car, an absolutely beautiful TAU fic by Feneris. Don’t ask what it runs on. You don’t want to know. Chapter 6: Greenway
Fic-Dusk used to work for the Denver Branch Office before going to San Fran. The branch office never forgave them for their treachery.
Chapter 7: Hung
Eastman Chemical Company is an actual company stationed in Tennessee, and this statement was very heavily modeled after Mag 124: Left Hanging, except with more buried vibes.
Needs more buried should be a motto.
Chapter 9: The Dragon’s Cauldron
Guess who went down a research hole? It me.
Research notes for this statement can be found here.
Sources: Debunking the Myth, Fear of Yellowstone (U.S. National Park Service) Native Americans and Yellowstone National Park: Hot Springs, Legends and Sacred Places Explore the Fort Yellowstone Historic District (U.S. National Park Service) Whittesly Yellowstone Myths.pdf Timeline of Human History in Yellowstone - Yellowstone National Park (U.S. National Park Service) Legend of the Sheepeater Indian Tribe in Yellowstone - My Yellowstone Park The History of our Local Tribe: The Sheep Eater Indians - Bitterroot Ranch Dragons in Yellowstone - Yellowstone National Park (U.S. National Park Service)
Chapter 10: Something There, Archivist’s Note 2
RIGHT. This is a fun chain of events that have taken about three years to mature into this story.
Something There started off with a nightmare about something stalking me through my house. I was thoroughly creeped out, and then promptly forgot about it for the next day until I went to walk through my house at night and thought I heard something moving behind me.
About a year later, my composition teacher told us to write a speech. I think the prompt was truth?
So I went off about the thing supposedly living in my house, how no one would believe me if I told them, and implying that I absolutely was lying about the entire thing. My teacher loved it, and I got the highest grade I’d gotten that year for that assignment. (“They lauded me for that, did you know?”)
If that sort of vaguely existential crisis sounds like something you’d have fun reading, the full speech can be found here.
A bit later, I read the same speech for an open mic. One of my friends there yelled out that she believed me- something that did make it into the final version. (“One of my friends told me she believed me, once. I… I just shrugged and told her that there wasn’t actually anything there.”)
It eventually made its way into this project via me trying to figure out what the hell to use for a more spooky statement and stumbling across the speech sitting in my google drive.
I managed to scare myself to the point of not being able to go upstairs in the dark for about a week with the updated version.
I wrote it.
This seems counterintuitive.
Does this make this a self insert story? No. Statement giver here does not in any way respond like I would have in this situation, and they’ve since drifted even farther into full OC territory.
The “they can’t hurt you if you’re watching/if you see them comes from the lovely tma time travel fic “Strangers in the Dark” by Mayarene Rose.
MouseK also gave us the closing line for the fic! It wraps it up so nicely, and I’ve already squeed about this in the fic itself, but they deserve more because the line’s amazing and I love it. Conclusion:
Thanks to everyone who gave us statements, inspired us, and helped us with the project. It’s been an excellent time, and there have already been discussions of either statements collected on this journey or short stories set in the same universe being written.
Thanks for reading!
- Dusk