Oh. My. Goddess. A plot bunny has eaten my brain. Seriously. 

You have to watch out or I'll be staggering around a literary graveyard muttering "Brains. Braaaaaaaains!" and lurching after any likely looking candidate. Which is entirely appropriate, given that it's a Buffy/Charmed crossover AND a When I Woke Up challenge answer. See? munchmunch. 

It kind of goes against the spirit of the 'woke up drunk and married in Vegas' challenge, but if I write it juuuuust right, I can squeeze around the challenge requirements. The problem is that I suck at forward-moving flashback. Well, and that the epic I have valiantly yet to abandon (in my head, because I haven't written SH*T [how should one conjugate that, anyway? Shit, shat... shut? Shet, shot? Sometimes shyt?] on it in far too long) started out the same way. Maybe it's my history degree coming back to munch on my brai... too late. Catch the bunny and wrestle for it. wrestlewrestle

I might - just possibly - be bitter about the wasted opportunities in Charmed Season Six - Chris is Piper and Leo's son from the future? Please. Piper and Leo should have gotten and stayed divorced. That's the way it was in all their AUs, with good reason. So I'm wish-fulfilling and writing the back half of Season Six my own damned way, with Xander-y goodness sprinkled in despite the fact that I haven't watched Buffy in YEARS and have no Xander voice to speak of. Isn't that what fanfic is in the end? A loyal attempt to change the elements we didn't like in our favorite media while exploring the ideas/pairings/plot arcs the real author didn't or couldn't? rationalizerationalize

Arrgh. munchmunch.

Okay, fic idea, take two! ;-) Having read ALL the previous posts now (thank you, havocthecat!), I have a proposal for a WIP with an arc to follow. Any other ideas I've put forth, please to ignore.

I'd like to do a spin-off of the Coyoteverse using marginal characters from SG-1 and SGA. I envision this being like the Buffy/Angel arrangement where whatever fic is posted in coyote_sga is canon in the Vancouverse, whether or not it is mentioned in the story. NOTE: I'm not suggesting my Vancouverse be canon for Coyoteworld unless people want to use it, and then feel free.

Because I'm tickled by the way SG-1 and SGA reuse each other's tertiary character actors, I'd like to write the people who play two separate characters in the linked SG'verse as identical twins in Coyoteworld. For example, Allison Hossack played Zenna Valk in "Cure" (SG-1 6.10) and then played Perna of Hoff in "Poisoning the Well" (SGA 1.07). 

I'd like to write an arc in which Zenna Valk and her identical twin sister, Perna Valk-Hoff, are both mutants and associate with a few other pairs of 'Vancouver twins' who may or may not all be mutants. The first story would be just after the Seabrook Incident before anybody knows much about mutations-to-come, but one of the above-mentioned pair of twins is researching the immediate effects of the Seabrook Incident on the environment.

Timeline: WIP - A few months post-Seabrook

Arc - through the neverending present (through Unnatural Strain and whatever else gets added)

Characters:

Dr. Zenna Valk, PhD medical anthropology

Ms. Perna Valk-Hoff, M.A. Biophysical Chemistry, working on a Ph.D in Environmental Science at UC Seabrook (What, they did it for Sunnydale!)

Dr. Carson Beckett, M.D. (possibly, mostly in an academic way)

Seabrook Usual Suspects - Rodney, Radek, Lindsey, Bill Lee, etc. - in a referential way, but not as active characters

Nobody makes that sound quite like Charlie Brown, do they? 

Well, I managed to get so frickin' distracted tonight I forgot to re-set my VCR to tape Atlantis! Woe! And I say unto thee, woe! The power went out for 19 minutes yesterday while I was at work and I was SURE I'd remember to reacquire the 'weekly' setup I use for SGA. Unfortunately, the very fix and forget nature of that pesky preprogramming thing made it harder to remember. So now I've missed the second showing as well and there is no love on tvguide.com. 

Okay, realistically, I'm not going to watch Season Four until I've finished Season Three on DVD, and I still have four seasons of SG-1 to go since I'm still doing that stupid writer's integrity thang and refusing to watch further beyond when my AU diverges from canon. (Except for the little bit of cheating I haven't been able to talk myself out of. I have the self-control of a stubborn gnat.) But I was so proud of myself for keeping up with the taping even though I have yet to watch the canon version of Sam in Atlantis. *Sigh* 

I should sleep in order to be perky for yardwork tomorrow - in order to pay for an unexpected car repair I sold my soul promised my dad enough yardwork in trade to pay for the cost of the dehoobieflopper I needed replaced and he has claimed my tomorrow in its entirety - however, I'm pouting and misery loves company, right? Well, only if it's miserable, too. Or purring.

And can I just say that the possibility of writing a secondary character arc for coyote_sga has me bubbling over with ludicrous and fantastical ideas? No? Okay, then, I won't mention it. ;-P

Yeah, I've got it bad and that ain't good. Poor Ella, she didn't know she'd be abused quite this badly when she sang. ;-)

So, yeah. Me, writer's block, complete incapacity to make even the slightest attempt at dialogue. If it weren't truly beyond me, I'd take the opportunity to turn this into one of my self-challenges for Straight On Till Morning, but I know what has to go next there and it doesn't fit this at all. *Sigh* That was supposed to be my funfic, the one that I went to when all else failed. And now it's almost as bad as FHtA. Grrrr. 

And in a cheesy gesture to end all kaisicheness - I have to confess that I was inspired to begin thinking about and writing FHtA because of song lyrics. STING's Song Lyrics. Not that I didn't take them and run with them to a place the King of Pain would never conceive of visiting, but it all comes down to Sting in the end. Well, and Vienna Teng. And possibly Mary Chapin Carpenter. Help. 

So, the initial concept came from this:

If I Ever Lose My Faith in You (partial)

You could say I lost my faith in science and progress
You could say I lost my belief in the holy church
This is sort of what I see as Sam's religion - the faith that science and progress will bring about security and prosperity for the people that labor for it and those they labor for. What would it take to have Sam lose that sense of belief, that calm, rational logic that's such a part of her value to the team? She has seen science that challenged her basic beliefs about the laws of science she has studied and played with - the Stargate, the Replicators, FTL travel, Nox invisibility, ascension - but none of it really effected her faith that she knew what the rules were, who the bad and good guys were, how it would all come out.

You could say I lost my sense of direction
You could say all of this and worse but
So what would it take to make Sam lose that sense of direction - science equals progress towards good things. She has certainly seen ways that science is perverted - the Orbanian children, Goa'uld tech, the clones of Alar's people - but it has never been more than a cautionary tale of 'what not to do with my awesome power'. 

And I came up with this:
If I ever lose my faith in you
There'd be nothing left for me to do
A betrayal by someone Sam trusted, an inability on the part of her team to rescue her, a fundamental experience of what it feels like to be the monkey, the rat, the captive... all of that together might do it. But it wouldn't be enough to break down that faith completely. Desperate Measures covered the last element, but it would take an extraordinary measure or seven to keep her guys from having her back. And yet, there were some points in Revelation and in Season Six where I could see Sam losing her innate trust in her team's invulnerability and support of each other. Once Daniel was really gone, that shell of invincibility cracked and she had to deal with the increasing likelihood that one or more of her boys would be taken from her. And Jack really killed her trust in his regard for her emotions by shoving the team back out into the grind of world save-age. I thought that didn't get enough play, especially with the tacit 'shipping the writers gave us in Season Four. So Sam was ripe for the breaking and reassembly in Season Six IMHO.

I could be lost inside their lies without a trace
Sam would have to be somewhere that her captors controlled completely, but more than that, it would have to be somewhere her assumptions would be irrevocably challenged. Somewhere she thought she knew the rules, and yet she would be SO wrong. That, to me, said alternate reality. Some universe where Sam didn't have a place and people waiting for her to shore her faltering beliefs back up, even if she had the nasty experience of being a lab rat. No return to status quo ante kidnapping.

I never saw no miracle of science
That didn't go from a blessing to a curse
I never saw no military solution
That didn't always end up as something worse 
And I very much wanted the 'bad guys' to have good intentions. Some compelling logic or rationale that Sam would understand and maybe even agree with if it weren't for their methods. Because Sam really is a creature of logical habit - she's not all (scientist and soldier), but that's the mold she pours herself into most readily. I'm still wrestling with the details of some of the designs, but I think I've gotten to the point that Sam's nastiest realization upon rescue and recovery is that she could be on the other side of the table if not for her ethics and traditions of limitation. And there are powerful, respected and valued entities that could very much benefit from the experiments that hurt her so much. That needs to be Sam's breaking point away from science and progress. Because this reality doesn't have the same ethics and morals she knows - they may be similar, but they're not the instinctive same. And it would take even more than an experiment, I think. Science, progress, knowledge itself would have to become something she couldn't take comfort from or retreat to. And I think I've found a way.

Now if only I could write the damn thing.

I need ice cream.