AU Writing Meme
6 Sep 2017 08:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thisbluespiritSummer's over, so is my BNA subscription, so let's try a meme!
As ever with these things, anything goes from anything I know - character(s)/pairings all fine. (Not any of the characters from last time, though: Dw - Liz Shaw, Nine & Rose, Leela, Six & Evelyn, Jamie & Zoe, River Song & Romana II, The Master; Other - Justin Alastair, Harry Pearce/Ruth Evershed, Adam & Georgie, Miss Annersley & Miss Wilson, Roderick Alleyn.)
Give me a character/pairing and I will write snippets of ten different alternate universes for it. One line, ten lines, a ficlet if you're lucky.
Wild West
Coffee Shop
Shapeshifters
Fantasy/Fairy Tale
. . . In SPACE!!
Apocalypse
Schoolfic
Police/Firefighters/Medical*
Supernatural
Regency
(I tried to mix it up with some slightly different AUs from last time. Whether or not I will regret this soon, only time will tell, but I was getting rather fed up with Born Another Gender last time round.)
* Why should only one of the emergency services be left out?
As ever with these things, anything goes from anything I know - character(s)/pairings all fine. (Not any of the characters from last time, though: Dw - Liz Shaw, Nine & Rose, Leela, Six & Evelyn, Jamie & Zoe, River Song & Romana II, The Master; Other - Justin Alastair, Harry Pearce/Ruth Evershed, Adam & Georgie, Miss Annersley & Miss Wilson, Roderick Alleyn.)
Give me a character/pairing and I will write snippets of ten different alternate universes for it. One line, ten lines, a ficlet if you're lucky.
Wild West
Coffee Shop
Shapeshifters
Fantasy/Fairy Tale
. . . In SPACE!!
Apocalypse
Schoolfic
Police/Firefighters/Medical*
Supernatural
Regency
(I tried to mix it up with some slightly different AUs from last time. Whether or not I will regret this soon, only time will tell, but I was getting rather fed up with Born Another Gender last time round.)
* Why should only one of the emergency services be left out?
no subject
Date: 8 Sep 2017 11:24 pm (UTC)Susan Pevensie?
no subject
Date: 9 Sep 2017 07:15 am (UTC)I'm sorry, I don't think I could do Susan - anybody else?
no subject
Date: 9 Sep 2017 12:38 pm (UTC)Bea & Evie AUs
Date: 3 Oct 2017 05:06 pm (UTC)Beatrice surveyed the ruined workroom in silence.
“I’m sorry,” said Evie, making a start on righting chairs, and picking up torn silks. It was a mystery to her, but somehow every single guy she dated turned out to be an outlaw on the run, or an inventor with theories about flight or combustion engines, or something equally disastrous. The Eliott Sisters’ Fashion Emporium had been forced to move up and down Main Street at least five times by now as a result.
Bea merely glared. It was clearly going to take a while to win her over again. “I suppose at least this one didn’t shoot the dressmaker’s dummy or blow the place up on his way out!”
Coffee Shop
“She’s being unreasonable again,” said Evie. “Can’t you tell her, Jack? I mean, here I am, working on the perfect new holiday flavour and she never seems to understand that it’s an art. It takes time! She’s always going on at me for not serving the customers, and I can’t do both.”
Jack backed away. “I think you two need to sort it out between you.”
“Coward,” said Evie, but she grinned. “Oh, I expect you’re right, but sometimes she’s impossible!”
Shapeshifters
From a very young age, Mother had impressed upon Beatrice the need to keep their abilities secret. Looking back, she thought she had not ever truly needed telling. She had made Evie promise the same, although secrecy came harder for her younger sister. If Father knew, though, there would be no more escape in midnight adventures, slipping through the undergrowth. A hedgehog and black cat weren’t the most powerful alternative shapes, but it was freedom of a sort, and Bea couldn’t have lived without it.
Fantasy/Fairy Tale
Evie lay awake at nights, fantasising about the two of them running away from their father’s grim castle. From the window of their tower, she and Bea could see the carriages going to and from the palace every time the King held a ball. One day, they’d escape – one day they’d make the ball gowns for princesses themselves. Maybe one day, Evie thought, although she kept this dream private, she’d even get to dance with a prince herself.
But of course, sometimes princes came in strange guises, and this one wasn’t meant for her…
. . . In SPACE!!
“Are you sure about this?” said Bea, drawing back from hugging Evie at the spaceport.
Evie nodded and hugged Bea again. “Stop worrying, Bea. It’s all settled – there is going to be a new branch of the House of Eliott on board that space station – and, what’s more, it’s going to be a huge success!”
Apocalypse
Sheltered as they were, Bea had never even heard of Mr Wells’s tales, let alone contemplated the ridiculous idea that they could be based on reality. It seemed that was a mistake a lot of people had made. Now, she and Evie watched the smoke of the city burning from the windows, while Father barred the doors downstairs. Evie filled her notebooks with sketches of the fire’s glow, the silhouettes of alien creatures framed amongst it. Bea helped her smuggle them out and bury them in the garden in a tin.
“Maybe,” said Evie, “it’ll be something left for someone. Some day. Maybe it’ll be all right, after all. Maybe they won’t bother with us here.”
Bea could hear the earth shaking. She held onto Evie, and prayed that the end would not be too long in coming.
Schoolfic
“Arthur Eliott,” said Beatrice, “if you sneak on Evie one more time, I’ll make you sorry you were ever born.”
Police/Firefighters/Medical
“I see what you mean,” said DI Beatrice Eliott of the Metropolitan Fashion Police, on the subject of their latest case. “Those trousers! How did he ever think he was going to get away with it?”
“I know,” said DS Eliott. “I mean, orange – it’s almost impossible to pull off even at the best of times. But if it hadn’t been for Miss Watkins here making a citizen’s arrest, we might never have found him in time.”
Tilly Watkins beamed. “Oh, it was nothing, Sergeant. I mean, he couldn’t go wandering around like that, could he? It’d have been violet crimes next or something even worse. Somebody had to stop him.”
“Quite, Tilly,” said the DI, and gave her an honorary Fashion Police badge in reward.
Supernatural
Ever since she was little, Evie had claimed that the attic rooms were haunted. Bea had thought it was only a story – Evie was always far too imaginative for her own good – but even when Evie got older, she still insisted the ghost story was true.
One night, when Evie had been more than usually upset by a row with Father, Bea had stayed with her, till she fell asleep, when she heard something like footsteps above. There were no servants in the house, only the family. Father didn’t run to such luxuries as housemaids – only Molly who came in daily to cook and clean. Bea held her breath and listened. Whatever it was sounded far too heavy to possibly be mice. Could it be possible there was a ghost?
Bea picked up her candle and set out to find out. Whatever it was, it was soon going to regret bothering her young sister, that much she could promise…
Regency
Wherever society portrait painter Jack Maddox went lately, people kept talking to him about a couple of exquisite new modistes. It was very tiresome, and they weren’t even French, which might have at least piqued his interest for a short while.
“They’re all the rage,” the Hon Daphne Haycock assured him.
He removed her glass of wine. “And you’re drunk.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?” said Daphne, looking faintly surprised that he should comment on the fact. “But they’re both charming and so highly talented! You should paint them as Muses and hang them in – well, in some stuffy gallery or other. It’d make your fortune.”
“I doubt it,” said Jack. “Besides, I’m tired of painting portraits. I’m thinking of giving it up. And I’m not interested in lady milliners!”
A resolution he was sure he would have kept, had it not been for his sister’s interference. Penelope arrived on his doorstep at some unearthly hour very next morning with a face as long as a wet winter.
“Oh, Jack. Hello,” she said, pushing past him as he opened the door, paying not attention to his dishevelled state. He doubted that even if he’d told her he’d barely been home for three hours, if that, she’d only tell him that was his own fault. “Much as I hate to admit it, I need your help. As it seems I am obliged to attend this appallingly wasteful charity ball, I suppose I must have something suitable to wear!”
“Anything for the orphans of Whitechapel,” Jack said. It seemed he would be investigating the Sisters Eliott, after all.
“Fallen women,” said Penelope with a glare. “Not orphans.”
Re: Bea & Evie AUs
Date: 7 Oct 2017 11:21 am (UTC)Bea is the hedgehog and Evie the cat in the shape-shifters, no? Perfect forms for them really, a big dangerous animal light seem cooler but it would be harder for a rhinoceros, say, to blend in.
Metropolitan Fashion Police hahahahahaha brilliant! Go Tilly!
I love how Bea's reaction to a potential ghost is 'go and find it and probably lecture it'.
Jack and Penny <3 I was always disappointed they just shipped her off to Africa and never brought her back.
Re: Bea & Evie AUs
Date: 7 Oct 2017 01:50 pm (UTC)And, I know, Pen was great! It would have been excellent to see her again, buT I expect Africa needed some work in putting right...
Metropolitan Fashion Police hahahahahaha brilliant! Go Tilly!
I tried to resist the pun, but I couldn't.