#jazz if you are reading this. sarissa <3

[emeraldgreaves]

I'd love to hear more about Take Your Daughter to Work Day for the finish your fics friday, please?

send me a fic title so i can add five sentences and ramble about it

“Because we could change it. We could steal some schematics and leave them in a conference room right now, and just let someone find them.” “How would you guarantee that they use them?” “I don’t know, we’d think of something.” “I have,” Sarissa says sharply. “Think about it, Gwen. Really, properly consider it. You would need to convince multiple people— Riel Syndran, chiefly, never mind our own parents—to divert their resources to publicly constructing defenses when Haven is already being rocked by major political turmoil—” “So we tell them to wait a few months.” “And why do we know how long to wait? How do we justify that information?”

in which gwen and sarissa clash over how much to interfere with their parents’ present. discussion of time travel genre beats, spoilers for terry pratchett’s night watch, and why i’m in wip-of-a-wip purgatory with this fic under the cut!

brief au context: there’s a scenario post on the shoh blog from like four years ago about how the ROs would react to their child from the future coming back, and i think that’s fun, so. fic.

one of the direct inspirations for this fic is terry pratchett’s night watch, in which sam vimes goes back in time to the very start of his police career to stop a serial killer and has to preserve the chain of events started by a citizen revolution. my main structural takeaway was the causal chain, or, the list of cause-and-effect events stretching from the past to the points in the present.

narratively, three things have to happen (examples from night watch): (1) the villain has to break the chain, forcing the protagonist to fix it (e.g. the night watch villain murdered young vimes’ original mentor, forcing him to step into that role) (2) the protagonist must also be tempted to break the chain, but ultimately upholds it for the greater good (Vimes repeatedly debating whether he could jumpstart some of the changes that make his present more stable) (3) the self-fulfilling paradox to preserve the chain (vimes being his own mentor)

so this is me taking a stab at (2). however. i do not know what the causal chain looks like because we haven’t finished the main game, so (1) and (3) are kind of in limbo. and therefore: purgatory!

usually i would just make an educated guess and move forward, but this fic will necessarily involve the difficult choices that go into preserving major endgame canon events, so there are gaps in my outline that i simply do not have the information to fill. on the plus side, it does mean i potentially get a burst of inspiration at the end of every month—the reveals at the beginning and end of ch7 were major for determining exactly when to set this. so for now i just daydream about the girls vs remembering there’s no cable car in past haven and they have to walk??? two hours??? to get across town???

#emerald writes #take your daughter to work day #jazz if you are reading this. sarissa <3