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Fraktal's attempts at pretending that he can write

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Fraktal said:
No. It's just... good guys all on one side, bad guys all on the other side, and the odds are stacked in the good guys' favor? It just doesn't feel right. Doesn't feel Gundam.
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Make the enemy terrorist. New Titan has red tape to get across. While Jamitov people do not. AE is fully supporting Jamitov since more conflict more money. The Zeon Remnants can be allied by Jamitov. ect.... Hell have Jamitov group steal all the gundams and that leave none for New Titan. All those over site groups put in place by Amuro and company start becoming a problem once Jamitov group is active since they start see the early failure of Titan and start criticizing them by withholding budget money till they start seeing results. So no new gundams they have to use normal mobile suits against Jamitov group ect... Hell you can have them infight with the EF regular force since Titan was a group made to handle space related terrorist action, them going against Jamitov group would against there jurisdiction.
 
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maguado87 said:
AE is fully supporting Jamitov since more conflict more money.
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That's what I was thinking too. Say... what if the Titans don't know Anaheim is supplying Jamitov and co. because they meticulously remove any and all serial numbers and other manufacturer's markings that can serve as evidence of their involvement (since they make and put the stuff together, they also know where all the markings are)? Amuro and co. have been fighting them for a while now, but without evidence, they can't cut off the supply of arms to Jamitov's group. The breakthrough comes when Anaheim ships the trio of Gundam MKIIs, but Amuro and co. crash the party with a raid and grab one for evidence. Thing is, Anaheim was so thorough in cleaning them up that the mechanics and machine shop onboard the Argama don't have the means to track the manufacturer, so they have to take the stuff back to the rear for a more detailed analysis and are hounded in the meantime by Jamitov's group trying to destroy the evidence.

And seeing how you mentioned red tape... what if at least some of it is deliberately thrown their way by earthnoid supremacist members of the brass and/or Federation assembly secretly aiding/sympathizing with Jamitov and co.? Even if Amuro finds out, he can't do shit without hard evidence. And the infighting part... what if it's a setup meant to discredit the Titans and/or frame them for having gone rogue? Some false-flag atrocities can come up too; Bask Om is enough of a bastard to do that. The Argama successfully delivers a captured MKII for analysis? Oops, the cargo plane taking it to the lab crashed into the ocean. Some parts were sent separately? Oops, chemical spill melted them beyond analysis.
 
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Something that came to me last night.

Am I the only one who'd like to see a visual novel-style multi-route fanfic... for Unreal Tournament?
 
The basic gist of the story is that a few centuries into the future, gladiatorial combat is legalized by the government in order to curb violence by founding a professional league and televising it to the people as stress relief. This works out beyond their expectations, with the broadcasts raking in mountains of cash to the organizers - mostly because forced participation in the Tournament becomes an alternative to the death sentence, providing a steady flow of meat for the grinder. Not all participants are convicts: there are also plenty of ex-military, ex-mercenary and even civilian participants who fight for fun (though the organizers don't particularly like rich civvies buying their way into the Tournament because they're simply not entertaining to watch getting their asses kicked, with the noted exception of lawyers). Also, not all fights are to the death, thanks to the existence of respawner technology - though that's not universal: canon mentions one incident where a well-known arena consisting of an asteroid in low Earth orbit was destroyed by an asteroid impact in the middle of a Tournament match, killing several players. Another instance of respawners not being all-powerful was that of one particular Tourney final where the reigning champion was dethroned and injured so badly that he had to spend a whole year recuperating (and in an alternate continuity, never fully recovered and had to retire for good).

I actually remember finding an UT/NGE crossover waaaay back in the day that only lasted two chapters. In it, Shinji and co. were kicking ass as a professional team until Kaworu was accidentally permakilled (sniper nailed him just as the match ended and thus technically killed him outside the game, so no respawning) and Shinji quit the season right then and there.
 
...something occurred to me just now that in hindsight, it's so obvious that I'm thoroughly shocked it didn't occur to me sooner.

Dystopian world regime backed by aliens with a psychic leadership caste, with propaganda broadcasts shilling them as the best thing to have ever happened to humanity while their masked transhuman mooks are merrily gunning down resistance groups and while the mooks themselves are not that powerful, they have aliens as big guns?

Are we talking about XCOM 2 or Half-Life 2?

Why the hell did no one ever cross the two series? The Combine is basically ADVENT who never bothered with subtlety and PR because they have the actual muscle to not need them to stay in power.
 
...okay, I have no idea where this came from, but it came all the same.

Mirai: Enemy forces retreating. All units, return to the White Base.

Michel: ...we...we actually survived that?!

Eledore: (buries face in hands) Jesus Christ...

Sleggar: (whistles) Yo, buddy. Still alive?

Amuro: (panting in exertion after having singlehandedly killed half of a Zeon cruiser battlegroup specifically hunting him) Yeah... yeah, I'm good.

Karen: It's hard being this popular. But if it weren't for the boss...

Sleggar: Hey, I'm happy with any sortie I can walk back from.

Sanders: Amen to that.
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So... that TTGL idea I've had a while back? I had two silly mental images for it today.

In the first, after the team just racked up another victory, Kittan pops out of the King Kittan's cockpit, drops his pants and moons the fleeing beastmen. Simon finds it rather hilarious... then Kiyal suddenly and enthusiastically joins her brother in mooning the Beastmen. Although Simon immediately looks away and covers his eyes, well... as the saying goes, what has been seen cannot be unseen. I won't elaborate here for obvious reasons.

In the second... you remember that scene during the Battle of Teppelin where Simon exhausted himself wrecking face and told Rossiu to take over, followed by Rossiu flying all over the place shrieking in abject terror while Itano Circusing around a shitload of missiles? What I've been thinking of is that Simon passes control over to Kiyal... who just grins and enthuses "Ouch time, furbags!"

Cue Don't Lose Your Way as she proceeds to wreck so much shit that both Guame and Kittan go into slack-jawed blue-faced shock, with Kittan wondering when the hell did his little sister turn into such a powerful fighter (answer: just like Boota, Kiyal is basically being force-fed with Simon's excess spiral energy, which has skyrocketed her reserves above that of the average human).
 
Fraktal said:
So... that TTGL idea I've had a while back? I had two silly mental images for it today.

In the first, after the team just racked up another victory, Kittan pops out of the King Kittan's cockpit, drops his pants and moons the fleeing beastmen. Simon finds it rather hilarious... then Kiyal suddenly and enthusiastically joins her brother in mooning the Beastmen. Although Simon immediately looks away and covers his eyes, well... as the saying goes, what has been seen cannot be unseen. I won't elaborate here for obvious reasons.

In the second... you remember that scene during the Battle of Teppelin where Simon exhausted himself wrecking face and told Rossiu to take over, followed by Rossiu flying all over the place shrieking in abject terror while Itano Circusing around a shitload of missiles? What I've been thinking of is that Simon passes control over to Kiyal... who just grins and enthuses "Ouch time, furbags!"

Cue Don't Lose Your Way as she proceeds to wreck so much shit that both Guame and Kittan go into slack-jawed blue-faced shock, with Kittan wondering when the hell did his little sister turn into such a powerful fighter (answer: just like Boota, Kiyal is basically being force-fed with Simon's excess spiral energy, which has skyrocketed her reserves above that of the average human).
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Sooooo, any idea when you're going to get around to actually writing it?
 
No idea.

Another idea I had for it is that although Lagann is a superpowered ride meant to handle colossal amounts of spiral energy... Gurren isn't. Consequently, it cannot handle what Simon puts it through: the battle with Lazengann already causes massive internal damage that puts it out of action for nearly a year (and for a good reason: the two mechas trade nuke-level blows during the entire fight and even briefly reach suborbital altitude), but it is the first skirmishes with the Anti-Spirals that finally pushes it past the breaking point, with Gurren's power conduits all being irreparably damaged and the frame having microfractures all over that compromise structural integrity to the point where about 95% of the entire frame needs to be replaced completely. With this in mind, Leeron proposes to build a completely new Gurren from scratch. Everyone expects Simon to protest because it is Kamina's old ride they're scrapping, but Simon agrees on the condition that the old Gurren be gutted of everything but the frame and the armor, filled to the brim with concrete and planted down next to Kamina's grave as a statue to keep him company.

The Gurren II is Leeron's masterpiece and magnum opus, eclipsing every single one of his creations so far. Designed with the processing power of the Chouginga Dai-Gurren's computers, its basic frame is based upon the Grapearl chassis (which in turn was based on the original Gurren) which makes it slightly slimmer and taller than the original Gurren, but the internals are completely different: all optimizations for mass-production have been removed and all stops have been pulled to maximize its power output, partly thanks to the fact that Leeron accidentally stumbled upon the complete schematics of the Lazengann in the ship's memory banks and consequently didn't have to reinvent the wheel. It doesn't need a jury-rigged flight backpack either because it's got that shit fully integrated and built-in. But probably the biggest improvement is that it's explicitly designed to become Gurren Lagann instead of it being a (quite literal) hackjob:
  • Dedicated docking port on the top for Lagann to plug into.
  • Extensive OS upgrade that drops the firewalls and turns over control to Lagann as soon as it plugs in, without trying to shut it intruder out; Ganmen natively have cyberwarfare intrusion countermeasures to counteract Anti-Spiral hacking attempts, but it also activates against a Core Ganmen and although the Core Ganmen eventually brute-forces it into submission, it makes combining take substantially longer. This optimization speeds up combination and separation and makes Gurren Lagann's controls more responsive due to Gurren no longer fighting against it, but also introduces a weakness in that the Anti-Spirals can now remotely jack the Gurren II for as long as Lagann is not plugged in by spoofing Lagann's control signal to get past the firewall (which is exactly why pre-Fall humanity did not do this with their own Ganmen), until Lagann connects for real and brute-force shuts them out.
 
Having had some old Half-Life LPs droning in my ear while doing DWG2 made me think.

What if the major general in command of HECU (presuming that HECU is division-strength) decided to intentionally omit the execution of Black Mesa personnel from the orders passed down to the boots on the ground? He knew it was going to cost him his career, but he still made a stand against what he knew was an unlawful order. I'm not saying there won't be atrocities by some of the Marines, just not all of them. So when Gordon runs into the first Marine he encounters and the grunt doesn't shoot on sight but simply detains him, he goes willingly and debriefs the general that even he, the guy who was at ground zero, doesn't know exactly what's going on, but he still remembers those grumblings from the other scientists that Breen was pushing suspiciously hard for the experiment to be done. Based on this, the general realizes Breen is the real ringleader here and the Marines cooperate with the Lambda team, closing the dimensional rift before the Combine notices it and unknowingly averting the Seven Hour War.

Of course, Breen is now on the run as a terrorist and will likely try a repeat performance elsewhere, considering that he knows enough of the science involved that other countries would be scrambling over each other to recruit him and give him the resources he asks for. At the same time, Black Mesa has basically become the US equivalent of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, fenced off and guarded by the army 24/7 to keep the nasties inside from spreading out into the countryside while scientists are trying to figure out how to seal the whole spatial anomaly permanently. Because said anomaly, which is still bringing said nasties over to Earth, is growing, with the army perimeter periodically being forced to back away, evacuate local towns in the way and set up new fortifications as the old ones get swallowed up (it's basically a mini version of the Eye of Xen in SCE).

All the while the G-Man is musing that this is not going according to scenario, but He can work with this.
 
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Addendum to the above. Quick back-of-the-hand calculations say that if Gordon was 27 during the Black Mesa Incident, that means he was born somewhere around 1971, which in turn means he was in his mid-teenage years when Star Trek TNG aired. So I don't believe it would be a stretch to assume that Gordon is not just a Trekkie but it was what motivated him to seriously pursue a career in theoretical physics.

Same with Shephard, who was born around 1976 and would've been in his early teens at the time.
 
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Dunno shit about HL beyond what I've read in your threads, but I would definitely read the story.
 
In canon, the HECU were explicitly ordered to kill any and all civilians on sight to leave no witnesses. Some of the grunts grumbled about it, but in the end they all followed orders except Shephard (who never got his orders because his transport was shot down literally seconds beforehand). Not only did they get their asses kicked badly enough that they pulled out hastily enough to leave quite a few of their own behind, the brass in charge then nuked Black Mesa to contain the situation.

Except that accomplished precisely jack shit because the Marines actively interfering with the remaining science personnel's efforts to stop the entire catastrophe by sealing the dimensional rift that was bringing all the aliens to Earth ended up delaying said efforts so much that by the time Gordon finally killed the alien that was holding the rift open from the other end, the Combine were already brute-force tunneling through with a full-scale invasion force. Which, to late 20th/early 21st century humanity, is end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it tier.
 
Fraktal said:
In canon, the HECU were explicitly ordered to kill any and all civilians on sight to leave no witnesses. Some of the grunts grumbled about it, but in the end they all followed orders except Shephard (who never got his orders because his transport was shot down literally seconds beforehand). Not only did they get their asses kicked badly enough that they pulled out hastily enough to leave quite a few of their own behind, the brass in charge then nuked Black Mesa to contain the situation.

Except that accomplished precisely jack shit because the Marines actively interfering with the remaining science personnel's efforts to stop the entire catastrophe by sealing the dimensional rift that was bringing all the aliens to Earth ended up delaying said efforts so much that by the time Gordon finally killed the alien that was holding the rift open from the other end, the Combine were already brute-force tunneling through with a full-scale invasion force. Which, to late 20th/early 21st century humanity, is end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it tier.
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So basically, military fucks up everything as usual because nobody listens to the experts.
 
More like military fucks up everything because some of the shit Black Mesa was researching was stuff the government doesn't want to become public because they were the ones funding it (as Portal so gleefully points out, Aperture kept being No.2 in government funding year by year because Black Mesa kept beating them to No.1). We get confirmation that they were doing shit on live and sentient aliens (hell, the vortigaunts aren't just sentient, they're basically Jedi) that's within human experimentation territory. That and the very fact that Black Mesa had discovered alien life and didn't tell anyone even as their survey teams kept getting killed by them was another contributing factor because nobody else had any idea what was going on, let alone how to stop it.




Note that the symptoms listed in the latter are symptoms of radiation poisoning. Specifically, the groundburst that destroyed Black Mesa (and groundbursts leave a lot of nuclear fallout). The exact yield is unknown, but the written instructions on the nuke indicate a minimum safe distance of 55 kilometers and it's a thermonuclear ICBM warhead (the facility is a repurposed ICBM silo complex and still has a few missiles with live warheads lying about; this particular one is taken off from a locally-stored missile as well), so it's not a tactical nuke.


That, or someone in OSHA was murderously pissed at Black Mesa for them so flagrantly violating workplace safety standards all the damn time. Seriously, Black Mesa must've had one hell of a counterintelligence division to have managed to keep operating for so long without the authorities cracking down on them.
 
...you know, folks, as much as I gravitate towards the real robot genre, I've actually been tossing about a genderbent Harry Potter idea for quite some time. A year or so? Can't remember. Don't know if anyone would care, though, since I mostly paid attention to narratively justifying the genderbending instead of... well, pretty much anything else. That being said, I know for a fact that it wouldn't have any bashing and demonizing because 1) that's not how I roll and 2) I've read the whole thing so long ago that I barely remember any canon characterization for anyone to begin with.
 
Well... I decided to give my Peggy Sue Amuro story a try. Posted first chapter before putting myself away for the day - and when I woke up, seven likes and four replies on SB and a review and multiple subscriptions on FF.net. Minimal reaction on SV yet but I may be on to something here because this is not the usual level of reaction my stuff gets.
 
Fraktal said:
Well... I decided to give my Peggy Sue Amuro story a try. Posted first chapter before putting myself away for the day - and when I woke up, seven likes and four replies on SB and a review and multiple subscriptions on FF.net. Minimal reaction on SV yet but I may be on to something here because this is not the usual level of reaction my stuff gets.
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I'll go scope it out.
 
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Fantasy mecha (part 7)
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    • I know it's been more than a year and a half now, but I had some more possible ideas for this concept.
    • Possible refinement of the setting into distant post-apocalyptic, ie. human technology is renaissance-era steampunk right now but used to be more advanced until the last time a major world-ending crisis happened but the current era has about as much records of the time as the Middle Ages had of Sumer. Accordingly, the protag mecha is initially passed off as an advanced state-of-the-art model but would be revealed later on to actually be a recently excavated and renovated model from the ancient era.
    • The elves, on the other hand, either did not suffer a technological backslide or one that wasn't as severe. When the protagonist would see elven technology for the first time, it's not the elemental magic one would expect from fantasy elves but actual nanotech. Magic-powered nanotech, yes, but still nanotech. All those spiffy-looking praetorians aren't seemingly unarmed because they actually are, but because they can instantly shapeshift their robe sleeves into longbows with holographic sights and the rest of the robe into skintight powered armor with just a gesture. Why aren't they ruling the world if they have that kind of head start, you ask? Well, it may or may not be because of something that has to do with humans of the ancient era.
    • The protag mecha would have a sword with a blade that's basically anti-magic hellfire, not only brute-forcing through magical barriers very quickly, neutralizing durability enchantments on contact and even deflecting offensive magic, but doing that last part hits the caster with feedback. Nobody has any idea how it works, but it's OP enough that the sword's existence is kept a secret and the hero is issued a regular sword so that she only has to pull the magic one out under extreme peril. Maybe the elves could figure it out - but there's an equal chance of them declaring its reappearance as a bad omen.
    • While the military camps of orc warbands looks extremely ramshackle and brutish, their actual settlements and cities are much more cleaner in terms of architecture due to durability and utility coming before aesthetics, whereas the camps are built to be quickly demolished when the warband moves on. The streets are dirtier not because of neglect, but because orcs have hardier bodies that do not require as much sanitation as humans do to remain healthy so they don't waste the effort, in the same way as how real-life kitchens aren't universally UV-sterilized airtight clean rooms.
     
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