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Language:
English
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Published:
2016-06-22
Updated:
2018-01-11
Words:
121,832
Chapters:
11/?
Comments:
32
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63
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An Endlessly Rising Canon

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Summary:

"A blonde, a brunette, and a redhead walk into a bar."

Notes:

All right.

So, let's talk about writers. Let's talk about the idea of fanworks as the places where writers go to play. Sometimes, when two writers admire one another very much, they'll write each other love letters. Sometimes those love letters are just declarations of sincere admiration, but sometimes, those love letters take the form of riffing off one another's fanworks.

To make a short story long; I write Heavenward. WinterSwallow writes That Which Tears us Apart, Binds us Together (henceforth handily shortened to BBT).

If Heavenward's plot has a driving force, it's manifested in a version of John Tracy, who's gone and done something very stupid, bound himself to EOS, and gone on the run.

If BBT's plot has the same, it's in the form of a very young Scott Tracy, who's slipped his leash and gone bombing off into the wider world, attempting to find himself, or at least attempting to find something to do that's less crazy than International Rescue.

So what happens when I decide I want to write her Scott? She returns the favour by writing my John.

What happened after that was only supposed to be a chance encounter in an airport, a meta-narrative about these two characters having a conversation in a bar. Things Escalated. carryonstarkid (occasional partner in crime & writer of Fairytale AU fame) got involved, to write a sinister Man In Black and our version of SPECTRUM.

Colloquially we've started referring to this entire endeavour as "The Nonsense". Possibly it's nonsensical. It's still a hell of a read.

This has gotten out of control. This has been incredibly fun. This is an adventure with slightly-off-model versions of your favourite characters, chasing each other through an alternate timeline, and it's worth a read.

Chapter 1: Prologue: A Nonsensical Offering

Summary:

being a Heavenward-style prologue for An Endlessly Rising Canon

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

A Shephard's Scale is an auditory illusion, a sound produced by the superposition of sine waves, separated by octaves, and produced by separate voices. Each voice advances through its sequence, diminishing in volume even as the one below it rises, and the resulting harmony seems as though it rises endlessly in pitch.

Stories follow a similar path, a narrative rising action, and the best stories have counterpoints and lower harmonies, plots that run against subplots. The best characters are characters whose stories could be stories of their own. The best writers always try to top themselves.

So three main characters walk into a bar. So three stories tell themselves around, above, and through each other. So a plotline escalates and then for some reasons seems to keep escalating. So sometimes a story is about telling a story, and about being a character, and about how worlds and stories sometimes run in far closer parallel than one might think.

 

Notes:

I'm aware it's pretentious. Possibly you're new around here.