Brain Fic

I did not start out as a writer, mostly. I was primarily a reader who came up with elaborate what-ifs for the stories they read. I wanted to tell the story differently, I wanted to add this or that detail. I wanted to see what would happen if Character A ended up in Story B and how that would affect the plot. (I occasionally wanted to do very mean things to certain characters.)

What I was not, was a writer. The first few times I attempted to write these proto-fanfics I was uh…lectured rather harshly for plagiarism. And the occasional original settings I came up with were scrutinized rather closely for Anything Suspicious. (They were also read for Hidden Something Or Others because I was a very weird kid with weird interests. This is why I eventually stopped showing my family members anything I wrote. They seemed to think whatever bad guy character I wrote was secretly them for some reason. And one time someone got angry because a parent was left behind in the story.)

All of my stories were primarily in my head where I could not be lectured about them. I would spend a lot of time thinking about them when I probably should have been doing some normal type of activity. (What that would be would be something of a mystery. I was not a normal kid by any stretch of the imagination. At least, according to the kids in the neighborhood and at school. And possibly the teachers.) Some of the stories got quite long, and I would occasionally get lost in whatever mental plot I was going on, so I’d backtrack and start over.

So, the following are a few of my media-related story settings.

Phyllis Eisenstein’s Alaric the Minstrel stories. These stories are collected in the books Born to Exile and In The Red Lord’s Reach. I both love and do not like the main character Alaric–for pretty much the same reason. Our boy is a self-proclaimed coward. He has seen some things and gone through things and despite being a self-proclaimed coward with an absolutely epic ability to get the heck out of dodge, he occasionally manages to do brave things. (A friend who heard me complaining about this boy asked me why I read the stories if I hated the character. I was unable to articulate that I desperately wanted the character to feel better about himself.)

Alaric can teleport. He can teleport long distances without knowing what his destination looks like and he was able to do it since birth. (He was found on a hill with the hand of his poor midwife around his ankle.) He has been driven off or nearly burnt at the stake multiple times because people think he’s a witch (as one might if you show up in a pretty suspicious way when you were born.)

At some point in Alaric’s story, he finds the people he came from. They are all teleports and they control a very large territory by basically using their teleportation powers to sneak up on their enemies and assassinate them. Alaric is not having with this, and these other teleporters try to force him into it. Alaric however is too much of a “coward” and as punishment gets dropped down an oubliette–with intentions that this would be permanent. Which would have been a death sentence for an ordinary teleport, but not for Alaric. So Alaric escapes and decides he is never, ever going back.

Now, I tended to like stories about people with telepaths and teleporters and telekinetics and the like. What I wanted was for Alaric to meet a telepath who might also have telekinetic powers and they could become friends. Maybe even romantic friends! And this telepath would help Alaric with his massive issues related to the circumstances of his childhood and so on! With the end goal of their being baby telekinetic teleports with telepathic abilities. As you do.

David Eddings Belagariad/Mallorean series. I loved this series when I was a kid but as I got older I started to have problems with the writer’s conservative opinions which are very present in the series. The writer is also somewhat racist in his attitudes and had a habit of mistaking culture for inherent biological traits. (All Thulls were actually cognitively impaired, all Drasnians were too clever for their own good and loved to spy, all Tolnedrans were greedy for gold, all Arends were very courageous but also phenomenally air-headed, and so on.) I also ended up disliking him on a somewhat personal level as it turns out he’s not only conservative, but he was also abusive to his kids.

Now, I had two different settings for this, both post-canon. When I was a kid, the post canon involved Garion’s son and daughters having adventures. I don’t have a clear memory of what kind of adventures but some of it had to do with the daughters taking after their dryad mom and oak trees of the kind the dryads have needing to be imported. (I think I might have had an early headcanon that the dryads needed a specific species of oak as part of their life cycle. Later we find out dryads do a form of parthenogenesis. Yes, the Belgarath book indicates they go into heat and go after anything, but whiptail lizards also exhibit mating behavior and they are a single-sex species.) These ideas were mostly explored before the Mallorean came out. Very occasionally I would speculate about Taiba and Relg or Mandorallen’s disaster of a relationship.

In the second and more recent setting, I tend to explore more of the Relg and Taiba relationship. I have longish speculation about a Sendar trader living in Gar og Nadrak and his relationships with various women who are using him as the male figurehead (and logistics director) for their general store. I have another longish bit about the Thull king in the Mallorean(whose name I’m too lazy to look up right now) and his friendship with Barak’s son. (The idea basically involves a comedy of cultural errors that have to be untangled by one of the king’s older sisters.)

So there is a book called The X-Factor by Andre Norton. No, it has nothing to do with the Marvel team of mutant superheroes. Instead, it is just one mutant named Diskan Fentress, who is not a superhero and is cognitively disabled. He’s also telepathic with animals, who are his only friends because the boy is not accepted due to his size, strength, and cognitive impairment. From what I remember, Diskan spends most of his childhood being abandoned by his father and abused by his planet’s (non-existent) child welfare system. Eventually, his father decides to take him back, and he still doesn’t fit in.

Eventually, Diskan runs away from home, steals a space ship and becomes very invested in the animals of a planet being explored by space archaeologists. (From what I remember. It has been years since I’ve read this book.) These animals have a connection to some ruins on the planet, and these animals want their people back. Diskan tries to help them achieve this and it has what I consider to be a horrifically sad ending because I do not trust the little furry animals the way Diskan does.

There is only one setting for this and it is what you might call a “rescue setting.” In this, I have someone take in Diskan Fentress–the owner of a space inn — and Diskan grows up helping at the inn. This setting is largely so Diskan can kick his father to the curb. Followed by the hotel manager/owner kicking the father to the curb.

This setting is somewhat related to the previous setting. It is a catch-all setting for all the stories where the kid is scary, has mutant powers and is scary, is a mutant monster, and is scary. This setting is very “guess who I empathize with in these stories! Spoiler: It sure as heck ain’t the grownups!” In this setting, there is an organization that finds and rescues these kids from the adults in their lives/rescues the adults from these kids. (Yes, I was very aware that the kids were dangerous, and wouldn’t want the adults to be further hurt by the kids. I just wasn’t on the side of the adults in the stories.) Once these kids are removed from their homes, they’re put in the care of adults who have the ability to actually take care of them.

There are two variations of the story. The first is from the point of view of the kid being extracted and their experiences with the school and their placement in new homes. They interact with other kids and learn about the classification system the school uses for the various talents, and how the school was founded.

The second variation involves the adults doing the extractions. The adults infiltrate wherever they’re going depending on what abilities the kid has or what kind of danger the kid is in and either make contact with the kid or adults. From there, explanations are made and the kid is extracted.

As an example, using Anthony from It’s a Good Life by Jerome Bixby. A single adult would enter the bubble surrounding the town. (We’ll assume that Anthony bubbled the town rather than separated it and sent it somewhere else or destroyed everything around it.) This single adult would have powers similar to Anthony or otherwise be immune to his abilities.

The first extractor would assess the situation and make contact with both Anthony and Anthony’s caretakers. The ordinary people would be removed from the town first and compensated as much as possible for the situation. Meanwhile, the first extractor would be attempting to bond with Anthony and teach him. (This might be easier with feral three-year-old Anthony from the story than with six-year-old Anthony from the Twilight Zone episode.)

The first extractor’s job is to keep the kid calm while the extraction of the ordinary people takes place and make sure no one gets hurt. Since the bubble is primarily because of fear, the extractor works on getting the kid to take down the bubble, though sometimes the first extractor has to do it themselves. With some reassurance, the kid is taken into custody and whisked off to the school where they get new, more durable caretakers.

The last one seems the most like something I could file the serial numbers off of and turn into an original fiction setting. I do have some basic story ideas for it (mostly centered around extractions I wouldn’t know what to do about an overarching plot. It would tend to be episodic is what I’m saying. I will work on it and see if I come up with anything.)

_{Previously posted on my Patreon.}