[Fic] "Pay Attention (The Peacock and the Pickpocket)" -- Rusty Quill Gaming
Apparently remixes have been revealed? Cool. :)
Here is the story I wrote:
Pay Attention (The Peacock and the Pickpocket) (1583 words) by Elizabeth Culmer
Fandom: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sasha Racket & Oscar Wilde
Characters: Oscar Wilde (Rusty Quill Gaming), Sasha Racket
Additional Tags: Pre-Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Summary: The first true illusion Oscar creates is a peacock in his tutor's window. The bird cocks its glorious, brilliant head, and adjusts its feathers. Then it screams like a dying train.
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It's a remix of The Pickpocket and the Peacock, by
Nemainofthewater, which is about Sasha spotting and occasionally spying on Wilde over the years and then takes a sharp turn away from canon to set up what looks like a really intriguing spy!AU.
My remix is not terribly deep; I just flipped the POV so it's about Wilde. Well, and I came up with a new opening scene because Wilde's not even aware of Sasha in the opening scene of the original story, and I changed the closing scene for... honestly, a combination of thematic reasons and because if I'd mirrored the original story more closely I could just tell the remix was going to spiral off into that implied spy!AU and I did NOT have time to write a novella-length secret agent adventure. *wry* But fundamentally it's a straightforward POV flip, plus a bit of a thematic musing on the sleight-of-hand, attention-directing (or attention-misdirecting) skills that Sasha and Wilde share, though they approach that skillset from very different directions.
Also, this is a pretty niche fandom! I expect most readers of this journal have no idea what on earth is going on here. To very briefly summarize, Rusty Quill Gaming is an actual-play RPG podcast, whose main story is a Pathfinder game in a homebrew setting that's sort of a steampunk D&D alternate 19th century, wherein a small band of mercenaries get hired for a job that turns out to be a LOT bigger than they anticipated. Sasha Racket is a rogue from Other London (the remnants of the original London that got flooded/destroyed during a pre-canon steampunk disaster and then buried/built over by the posh Upper London) and Oscar Wilde (not the actual historical Wilde, but based on him) is an agent for the Meritocratic world government, and also a bard specializing in illusions.
You should give the podcast a try -- it's frequently hilarious, often moving, occasionally heartbreaking, and always entertaining. If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)
Here is the story I wrote:
Pay Attention (The Peacock and the Pickpocket) (1583 words) by Elizabeth Culmer
Fandom: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sasha Racket & Oscar Wilde
Characters: Oscar Wilde (Rusty Quill Gaming), Sasha Racket
Additional Tags: Pre-Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Summary: The first true illusion Oscar creates is a peacock in his tutor's window. The bird cocks its glorious, brilliant head, and adjusts its feathers. Then it screams like a dying train.
-----
It's a remix of The Pickpocket and the Peacock, by
Nemainofthewater, which is about Sasha spotting and occasionally spying on Wilde over the years and then takes a sharp turn away from canon to set up what looks like a really intriguing spy!AU.
My remix is not terribly deep; I just flipped the POV so it's about Wilde. Well, and I came up with a new opening scene because Wilde's not even aware of Sasha in the opening scene of the original story, and I changed the closing scene for... honestly, a combination of thematic reasons and because if I'd mirrored the original story more closely I could just tell the remix was going to spiral off into that implied spy!AU and I did NOT have time to write a novella-length secret agent adventure. *wry* But fundamentally it's a straightforward POV flip, plus a bit of a thematic musing on the sleight-of-hand, attention-directing (or attention-misdirecting) skills that Sasha and Wilde share, though they approach that skillset from very different directions.
Also, this is a pretty niche fandom! I expect most readers of this journal have no idea what on earth is going on here. To very briefly summarize, Rusty Quill Gaming is an actual-play RPG podcast, whose main story is a Pathfinder game in a homebrew setting that's sort of a steampunk D&D alternate 19th century, wherein a small band of mercenaries get hired for a job that turns out to be a LOT bigger than they anticipated. Sasha Racket is a rogue from Other London (the remnants of the original London that got flooded/destroyed during a pre-canon steampunk disaster and then buried/built over by the posh Upper London) and Oscar Wilde (not the actual historical Wilde, but based on him) is an agent for the Meritocratic world government, and also a bard specializing in illusions.
You should give the podcast a try -- it's frequently hilarious, often moving, occasionally heartbreaking, and always entertaining. If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)