The Brisbane Event Master Post
Title: The Brisbane Event
Author: jaune_chat
Fandom: Criminal Minds
Spoilers: Up through Season 5
Characters/Pairing(s): Aaron Hotchner, David Rossi, Emily Prentiss, Derek Morgan, Dr. Spencer Reid, Jennifer Jareau/William LaMontange Jr., Penelope Garcia/Kevin Lynch, (Jack Hotchner, Henry Jareau), various OCs
Rating: R
Warning: Violence, language, and apocalpytic scenarios
Word Count: 37,872
Notes: This was written for the au_bigbang. Much thanks to speccygeekgrrl, redandglenda, brighteyed_jill and the very patient redhillbones for betaing, correcting, and just plain telling me how to make it better.
Disclaimer: I don't own Criminal Minds or its characters and I don't make a dime off them.
Summary: In 1952 the world was changed when the unexplainable Brisbane Event caused the rise of a new race, the metahumans. Sixty years later, the B.A.U. team is one of the leading experts in human/metahuman crime. But when the Brisbane Event returns with a vengence and terrible consequences, Aaron Hotchner's profiling team must team up with the metahumans to discover an unsub with a plan that has world-wide consequences for both races...
Master Post
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
The idea for The Brisbane Event came from a lot of separate plot elements colliding in my brain like marbles on a Hungry Hungry Hippos board.
This was a big bang that almost didn't get done. I was laid off and in a serious bout of depression when I should have been writing, and the bulk of the story was written at a late date and at a feverish pace. If I hadn't had encouragement from my betas, I'm not sure I would have gotten it finished. This was a story I felt really strongly about, but my motivation was so low that I went weeks without being able to touch it. I'm really glad I managed to finish, though, because this story just would NOT leave me alone.
Music was a huge inspiration for this fic. At the temp job I was working at the time, I was allowed to listen to my IPod while I worked. And the majority of the ideas for this story came right from Evanescence's album The Open Door, some songs by Lordi and Disturbed, and Britany Spear's song Circus (it was my anthem for Lark's club, so sue me!).
Allow me to babble on about some specific elements in the story:
The metahumans, particularly Lark and Kincaid, have been kicking around in my head since I was thirteen or so. Originally, they were X-Men mutants, but as my taste in shows changed, so did their origins.
Kincaid's body design actually came from a Mercedes Lackey book (one of my favorite sci-fi and fantasy authors). She wrote a series of books called the Heralds of Valdemar, and one of the cultures, the Hawkbrothers, lived with a race called the hertasi. As the author had some art in her books, Kincaid came right from those drawings. His cynical personality came partially from looking very different in a human-dominated world, with a good dose of Dr. Gregory House thrown in.
Lark's weird arms came from a scene in the movie Total Recall. At one point, Arnold Schartzenegger's character and his Bond Girl go somewhere with a taxi driver, who tries to prove he won't turn them in to the goverment by proving he's a mutant. He takes off a false hand and shows he has a second forearm folded back against his regular one, and that second forearm has three long fingers at the end. I co-opted that for Lark, though I'm not quite sure where her goat legs and purple coloring came from.
Kara Tucker's appearance I think came from two things. One, in one of my Dungeons and Dragons books there's a picture of a monster called a Crabman, who is a bipedal crab. Also, I watch Deadliest Catch. What portals have to do with crabs is a mystery, though.
Obviously, I like the movie Fight Club, which is where the underground Pits came from. But I wanted the metahumans to fight for a reason, rather than to just feel alive. Also, from a storytelling standpoint, the metahumans had to have weaknesses. Lark and Kincaid are old and beloved characters, and it would be incredibly easy to make them into Mary Sues.
I needed reasons why the metahumans hadn't taken over, and why they weren't in the military. I was causing an immense amount of change into the world by introducing these very strange race so far back in the history of the Criminal Minds characters that none of them would remember a world without metahumans (or at least not very clearly). I ended up making it more like the Altverse in Fringe, mostly our world, but with a few casual differences that make you stop and stare from time to time.
The Brisbane Storms were basically just an awesome excuse to pull a 28 Days Later type of apocalytpic zombie scenario. And who doesn't love zombies? I like zombies! But the scariest type of "zombies" are the kinds with guns and half-functioning brains. Obviously it let the Criminal Minds guys do what they do best, profile, and look good doing it. There were already plenty of physical threats around, but it was the psychological threats that were both the worst and the most crucial to solve. While I wanted some action sequences, I'd introduced some pretty physically powerful characters, so I wanted to CM characters to shine in their own element.
And hopefully, all of this came together in a story that you, gentle reader, have enjoyed!
Author: jaune_chat
Fandom: Criminal Minds
Spoilers: Up through Season 5
Characters/Pairing(s): Aaron Hotchner, David Rossi, Emily Prentiss, Derek Morgan, Dr. Spencer Reid, Jennifer Jareau/William LaMontange Jr., Penelope Garcia/Kevin Lynch, (Jack Hotchner, Henry Jareau), various OCs
Rating: R
Warning: Violence, language, and apocalpytic scenarios
Word Count: 37,872
Notes: This was written for the au_bigbang. Much thanks to speccygeekgrrl, redandglenda, brighteyed_jill and the very patient redhillbones for betaing, correcting, and just plain telling me how to make it better.
Disclaimer: I don't own Criminal Minds or its characters and I don't make a dime off them.
Summary: In 1952 the world was changed when the unexplainable Brisbane Event caused the rise of a new race, the metahumans. Sixty years later, the B.A.U. team is one of the leading experts in human/metahuman crime. But when the Brisbane Event returns with a vengence and terrible consequences, Aaron Hotchner's profiling team must team up with the metahumans to discover an unsub with a plan that has world-wide consequences for both races...
Master Post
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
The idea for The Brisbane Event came from a lot of separate plot elements colliding in my brain like marbles on a Hungry Hungry Hippos board.
This was a big bang that almost didn't get done. I was laid off and in a serious bout of depression when I should have been writing, and the bulk of the story was written at a late date and at a feverish pace. If I hadn't had encouragement from my betas, I'm not sure I would have gotten it finished. This was a story I felt really strongly about, but my motivation was so low that I went weeks without being able to touch it. I'm really glad I managed to finish, though, because this story just would NOT leave me alone.
Music was a huge inspiration for this fic. At the temp job I was working at the time, I was allowed to listen to my IPod while I worked. And the majority of the ideas for this story came right from Evanescence's album The Open Door, some songs by Lordi and Disturbed, and Britany Spear's song Circus (it was my anthem for Lark's club, so sue me!).
Allow me to babble on about some specific elements in the story:
The metahumans, particularly Lark and Kincaid, have been kicking around in my head since I was thirteen or so. Originally, they were X-Men mutants, but as my taste in shows changed, so did their origins.
Kincaid's body design actually came from a Mercedes Lackey book (one of my favorite sci-fi and fantasy authors). She wrote a series of books called the Heralds of Valdemar, and one of the cultures, the Hawkbrothers, lived with a race called the hertasi. As the author had some art in her books, Kincaid came right from those drawings. His cynical personality came partially from looking very different in a human-dominated world, with a good dose of Dr. Gregory House thrown in.
Lark's weird arms came from a scene in the movie Total Recall. At one point, Arnold Schartzenegger's character and his Bond Girl go somewhere with a taxi driver, who tries to prove he won't turn them in to the goverment by proving he's a mutant. He takes off a false hand and shows he has a second forearm folded back against his regular one, and that second forearm has three long fingers at the end. I co-opted that for Lark, though I'm not quite sure where her goat legs and purple coloring came from.
Kara Tucker's appearance I think came from two things. One, in one of my Dungeons and Dragons books there's a picture of a monster called a Crabman, who is a bipedal crab. Also, I watch Deadliest Catch. What portals have to do with crabs is a mystery, though.
Obviously, I like the movie Fight Club, which is where the underground Pits came from. But I wanted the metahumans to fight for a reason, rather than to just feel alive. Also, from a storytelling standpoint, the metahumans had to have weaknesses. Lark and Kincaid are old and beloved characters, and it would be incredibly easy to make them into Mary Sues.
I needed reasons why the metahumans hadn't taken over, and why they weren't in the military. I was causing an immense amount of change into the world by introducing these very strange race so far back in the history of the Criminal Minds characters that none of them would remember a world without metahumans (or at least not very clearly). I ended up making it more like the Altverse in Fringe, mostly our world, but with a few casual differences that make you stop and stare from time to time.
The Brisbane Storms were basically just an awesome excuse to pull a 28 Days Later type of apocalytpic zombie scenario. And who doesn't love zombies? I like zombies! But the scariest type of "zombies" are the kinds with guns and half-functioning brains. Obviously it let the Criminal Minds guys do what they do best, profile, and look good doing it. There were already plenty of physical threats around, but it was the psychological threats that were both the worst and the most crucial to solve. While I wanted some action sequences, I'd introduced some pretty physically powerful characters, so I wanted to CM characters to shine in their own element.
And hopefully, all of this came together in a story that you, gentle reader, have enjoyed!