What Might Have Been: Incandescence

[Alicorn]

Oh boy, this is a hard one.

Here is what might have been if we were continuing Incandescence, folks. (Contains a few suggestions on the meta level about what may yet be to come in Effulgence, too.)

I. Peal Plots

Prime and Aya:

Prime was going to eventually touch the necklace. Items up in the air about the details included whether he'd have sex with Spring first or not, and exactly how he'd get his hands on it what with it being parked in Chamomile. They would then proceed to be adorable and unable to keep their hands off each other and frequently slip off to privacy.

Phix:

The world of Tayane still being something of an open problem, Phix was going to be on an expedition (exact composition and purpose of the expedition unspecified) thereto. The expedition would overfly a magic, which is known from quantities of unmolested birds to be safe. Phix's fairy princess magic would of its own accord take exception to the existence of the magic below. The two would fight. Phix's fairy princess magic would lose, and, as is customary when her fairy princess magic does anything by itself, she would pass out - and fall, directly at the magic. Max would then have to be physically forced to not dive after her, and someone would conjure her to a not-inside-the-magic location with some spell or other. She would appear. And she would be a very fetching brown leather boot. Max would then be totally inconsolable and, on the off-chance that the boot that was Phix could see or hear, attempt to keep her company and entertained. The alethiometer would have nothing useful to say about the boot that was Phix.

Rain and Katydid:

They've had unprotected sex, so, surprise, she's knocked up. We had two loose kid-template ideas for Adarin/Bell offspring, and the firstborn would be a perfect little angel and the second a skipped-a-generation hellraiser sociopath. Rain and Katydid get the first instance of the firstborn, but we didn't have a schedule on who'd get to the hellraiser first (Rain and Katydid need a heir; the spare is less urgent).

Zevaia and Feathers:

Remember how Zevaia was necklaced to rescue her from being cut? Yeah, that's still dormant. When she meets her peryton alt she latches onto her. Feathers finds this pretty awesome. They otherwise continue to be normal Zevs about the matter.

II. Threaded Bells

Ravel:

Ravel was supposed to peal next. There was no substantial unpealed plot to go through left; we could just as easily have timeskipped over any relationship development that we wanted to handle first. Shara would have been able to repair Phix, given a lot of sleep, questionably wise stimulants, and as much motivation as an alt in trouble can supply unto a Bell. Max would have been very grateful and Quilt very proud. Shara can pull more fun tricks with her metamagic; in particular, she can (extremely lossily) turn her own energy into mana for the mages.

Quartet:

The plot setup should make it pretty obvious that Mira is a Cinder-bella of sorts. There was going to be relationship development, Kelsey (PB Chen Hao, icons selected but no screenname yet) was going to be handled somehow, Mira's stepsisters were going to be handled somehow, Mira's dad was going to be handled somehow, ??? to follow.

Greenhouse:

Astrid and Martin are both from the same world. They were going to grow up - Astrid mostly a loner in Forks who discovers that she sprouts a flower on her back every autumn but doesn't get in touch with any of her fellow plant faeries, Martin with his very bestest friend in Britain. Darian was of course going to fall in love with his very bestest friend, and fess up about it, and Martin would be both apologetic and straight, and they would try with reasonable efficacy not to make this awkward. The two of them and Astrid would all wind up at med school - or at least Astrid and Martin would be in med school; Darian might not be there for that in particular - in the States, possibly Johns Hopkins, and Astrid and Martin would be instantly magnetized to each other like, uh, two Bells who don't feel like they are on any level related to each other, and Darian would feel like a third wheel but he'd still be their best friend. At some point they'd peal. The peal would look at them quizzically. Darian would feel EVEN MORE like a third wheel. The peal would probably help them find other plant faeries I guess but we had no other-plant-faeries related plot. They would also resurrect Astrid's mom's first kid and Astrid would be a big little sister.

Cycle:

We were going to do more Sylvi/Avedan development interspersed with lots of dreams, somewhat unrealistically frontloading the cool stuff (deaths, meetings, weddings, starts of major projects). Sylvi would invent a shine-based Turing machine. They'd peal. Avedan would be very confused when the other Adarins asked him about a twin. Sylvi would ask "did you just call him a sheep?" (It's funny because sheep have a high rate of twinning and nonsapient animals are the only things on Cycle that give birth or have twins or anything and translation spell. Ahahahaha.) There would be cultural translation issues with the "people in Cycle don't have kids" thing. Adarins' terrible parental situation, hereditary slavery, hereditary monarchy, racism, etc. would not help people with conventional reproduction sell this concept to the Cycle folks. We decided that the mechanism for reincarnation involves a witness to the (first) death of a soul who desperately wants the dying person to live - they can want this for selfish and/or possessive reasons but must still strongly prefer the dying person to live even under the condition that the wanter never sees them again. Aydanci did this for Aly and Kib did it for Aydanci and after that they were set even when they outlived each other and had unwitnessed deaths. We were going to write out the death scenes. They would have been Very Sad. Kib was going to direly threaten to be alone and miserable in his next life if Aydanci did not manage to come back to him, and everything. This is one of the settings you are most likely to see crop up in my other work; the magic system was already invented and adapted for Incandescence from my ideas folder to begin with.

Momentum:

So the bit you got to see was a prequel. Originally we were planning to peal Kithabel without any previous threading of her at all. She was going to be found, asleep in her castle, under a curse that has left her unconscious more than long enough to fuck with her momentum. Because of interactions with the mean cursing person's sorcery and Kithabel's own, the curse does have an ending condition. Guess what! It's true love's kiss! (If we didn't find a way to make Dianira able to turn up this information with sorcery Shara could tell. Shara is not however powerful enough to break the curse.) And guess what the peal has? The peal has a stray Adarin. They throw Darian at the snoozing Kithabel. They inform him that she is Just Like Martin Except Female, White, Asleep, And Local, What More Do You Want, Kiss Her. They have to do some detective work to produce enough additional details about Kithabel's likely traits to get him to actually do it but probably don't have to resort to peering into her notebooks. The kiss works. Kithabel awakes, confused, upset, momentum totally drained. Darian is very flustered. But he moves in with her and they work on acquiring momentum together. (They do find that it dissipates completely if they leave the world, so they lobby to have a wing of the Belfry added by portal into their world.)

III. Prospects

Stargate Ripoff:

One idea that was floated was doing a BDSM AU. You may have seen this in fanfic - worlds where practically everybody leans dom or sub, and these roles are layered on top of, in many cases replacing, gender roles. (I honestly came up with this principally because I love the worldbuilding intricacies that go into this kinda thing.) As an homage to the origins of this sort of thing in fanfic, the setting was going to also be a Stargate ripoff, although not outright Stargate (too military, haven't seen most of it, the aliens come with a lot of baggage, etc). There were going to be portals to other planets and people were gonna colonize them and the Bell would be a (dom) doctor and the Adarin a (sub) engineer on the same new colony. Dom!Bell walks around with a cane for... aesthetic purposes. (Bells can learn to use canes to help them walk, if they try it as teenagers or later, but it's a little tricky, it doesn't help immediately; she had the... aesthetic... incentive.) Large Space Wildlife of some kind was going to trap the Adarin in her clinic with her and they'd get to talking and eventually she'd tell him to meet her for lunch or something. Cute extremely possessive D/s relationship ensues. This Bell was going to have a (boy) Alex, who took one look at the BDSM AU conceit and said "can I just be asexual and nondynamic please", so he was going to be that, though he passes for a dom in public for social reasons. Other assignments: Zev is a dom, odd in being monosexual (it is customary for BDSM AUs to include Everyone Is Bi) but not odd in her monosexuality fixating on girls and perfectly typical in preferring subs (she isn't the BDSM AU version of gay, just regular gay). Charlie is a sub, Renée is a switch, Renée's second husband Phil is a dom.

Soot And Blood:

We had an original setting with ritual magic involving a lot of soot and blood and bits of things. This magic, unfortunately, causes stuff to decay into total nothingness - in a cool way that results in floating sky islands, though, stuff doesn't fall through the gaps left or anything. It's getting faster, but the population is too big to sustain itself without any magic at this point. So the Adarin and the Bell (who were both going to be boys in this one) cast a spell to cheat and get outside help. Which they get. Possibly in the form of Revelation and Prime or something. This world was thereafter going to be a source of interdimensional transit in general on top of the mages.

Angela:

We had notions of replicating the Angela/Micaiah plot with an Adarin instead. Instead of him just turning up at the Eyrie one day, we were going to kill off Linus (the reigning Archangel during Isabella's late teens) and have Isabella confirmed to finish out his term. She'd show up at Sinai to get Alleya to tell her who to marry and Alleya would look at the interface and then present Isabella with one of her acolytes. Isabella would carry him home with her and they'd be adorkable. We had no further details.

T'Mir:

We also had notions of doing the T'Mir/Lalita plot with an Adarin instead. Except he'd probably be some kind of Federation enforcer who suspected her of things before she had her sudden crisis, and then there would be vaguely traumatic lifesaving sex (just one of it, he'd flee when her life was no longer in danger), and he would look at her Very Large Number and decide not to turn her in because damn that's a Very Large Number, and then they'd be soulmatey at each other, because, Bells and Adarins. There was maybe also going to be a thing about the Adarin's Zev being a space pirate.

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We'll take questions about this stuff if you have them.

[Aestrix]

Appropriately enough, I'm wearing black for the occasion.

[Tamien]

I have no questions immediately, but I wanted to say you guys do good plots (damn, that boot thing) and I'm happy you shared them with us, even in spare outline format.

[Shoal]

thank you both for the stories

[Bluelantern]

Thank you so much for bringing us these amazing tales!

The Bell/Adarin ship is perfect and so was everything else


wish you two the best of the luck. :)

[thebutcher]

Damn, now I really want you to do an... if not BDSM AU an alternate psychology AU. I love love love Xenofiction and am incredibly enamoured with the Adarin-Bell dynamic of "It's the next best thing to fate." And then: "Oh, and if it still doesn't work out, have some FATE(Fearsome Antagonistic Terrible Enemy) pushing you together anyway."

Mh... anything else... Oh, yeah FATE controlled what worlds were "close" to the Mages and the relative time flow in them to piece together the Plague(What I call the I-Peal to distinguish them.), just as Milliways pulled certain doors out of all of possibility to form the Peal, all of possibility was available to the Mages, but worlds with alts were "close". That doesn't mean that those alts had to be of Bell and Adarin. Plenty of the close Worlds were close because both at one point contained alts of Jennette McCurdy.

[Anya]

Astrid/Martin sounds adorable.

[DanielH]

Would Alex from the BDSM AU have decided “oh, if that’s possible, I might not be asexual after all” when encountering all the non-BDSM worlds? Your phrasing makes it unclear whether he’s actually asexual, or whether he’s just sexual in a way that isn’t supported by the standard system.

EDIT: Missed OP point about Alex’s gender; fixed

[Alicorn]

He is in fact asexual, not just nondynamic. I guess he might poke his head up and turn out to be demi or gray-a if the right situation presented itself but he would not enter the story having ever experienced sexual attraction.

[Bluelantern]

How Flicker's twin would feel about her male counterpart?

And god, there isn't any chance of that BDSM AU to crop up somewhere else? It sounds both interesting and hilarious-when-they-peal xD

Which of these settings you want/will re-use?