story ideas I will never write

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

tanadrin:

A starship encounters an alien probe launched by a long-vanished civilization that downloads a mysterious virus to its computers. The virus slowly begins taking over critical systems, and spreading throughout the local subspace network; although apparently not intentionally malicious, this causes a huge headache for everyone affected. It turns out that the entire point of the virus appears to be to simulate the architecture of an alien computer system–indeed, a fairly primitive one at that, one that the builders of the probe must have long ago surpassed. While the starship’s crew can access the program this virtual system is running, they’re confused by it: it seems to be a crude representation of a three-dimensional space, full of shifting iconography, hideous faces, and symbols that mean nothing to them.

Eventually they are contacted by the daughter civilization of the daughter civilization of the daughter civilization of the empire that built the probe. “Ah, yes,” the ambassadors say, “we’ve run into this kind of thing before. An old cultic practice of our most distant ancestors.” “Is it a message?” the captain asks. “An attempt to preserve some fragment of their civilization? An ancient greeting? A weapon?” “No,” says the emissary. “Just the work of a handful of monomaniacal obsessives who wanted to ensure that, even after they were long gone, their mission to try to install Doom on every computing system ever invented continued.”

Tags:

#oh my god #Doom #story ideas I will never write #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

unknought:

Star Trek but when they say “this maneuver only has 0.1% chance of success!” it actually fails, and then every episode ends with them dying and reality resets sitcom-style for the next episode.

Tags:

#Star Trek #story ideas I will never write #death tw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

dreaminghermione:

Harry Potter AU in which Fred and George are in different houses and they steal and wear each others ties whilst doing stupid things in hope of the others house losing points

 

thatwriterchickyouknow:

Finally a Fred and George AU that doesn’t make me want to set myself on fire.

 

lytefoot:

AU where Fred and George are in different houses and they get their hands on house ties from the other two houses as well. By the end of their first year nobody knows which house either of them is in and just take points off a random house whenever they see a redhead getting up to something.

The confusion runs so deep by the time Ron starts that Snape once takes points off Slytherin for Ron fighting with Malfoy.

 

chippish:

There’s a few months in Fred and George’s second year when they successfully convince most of the school that they’re actually quadruplets, one in each house.

 

roseverdict:

“George! Why are you wearing a Slytherin tie?”

“What? No, I’m Edward. Y’know, Slytherin’s resident Weasley?”

“Wh…huh???”

“Next you’ll be telling me you don’t know Hubert!”

“?????”

 

doctorgeekery:

After this confusing quadruple mess, a conspiracy theory emerges that Fred and George are actually just one person, and there were never any Weasley Twins. To add fuel to this theory, Fred and George make a point to never be seen together (publicly).

When asked about this theory, Fred/George subtly insinuates that he used Polyjuice Potion so that there could be multiple versions of himself at once. This goes around the Hogwarts Rumor Mill like fire. The Weasley family says nothing to dispute it, not even Percy.

 

hippocrates460:

Percy makes polyjuice successfully for the first time in his fifth year, when he finally has sufficient motivation. Fred, George, Edward and Hubert walk into the great hall one morning, identical but for their school ties, and the chaos is so great that nobody realizes Percy and Ron are missing.

Tags:

#Harry Potter #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #fun with shapeshifting

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

Concept: a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting where the First Empire was brought low by their own hubris and annihilated utterly, except for their comprehensive – and apparently indestructible – automated public transit network, whose trains still run perfectly on schedule when everything else the Empire built has crumbled to dust. Nobody knows what (if anything) is controlling the network, but there always seems to be a train coming along in just a few minutes whenever you need one, even if anticipating that need would have required some sort of prescience, and the civilisations that rose from the First Empire’s ashes are built around the sites of the network’s former stations.

Further random thoughts:

  • The trains are capable of incredible top speeds and punch right through nearly any obstacle placed on the tracks, so efforts to block or redirect them generally fail,

  • They also take their role as public transit seriously, and seem to actively resist attempts to control access to them; if a station is secured against public access, the trains will simply pick a new stretch of track nearby and begin to stop there instead.

  • The trains will forcibly eject anyone who attempts violence against another passenger, so the interior of the cars is an enforced neutral zone. Creatures that would ordinarily be wholly inimical to humanity can be encountered safely while riding the rails – though the trains won’t stop them from following you off when you disembark!

  • The attendant difficulty of forcibly removing passengers from the trains renders them something of a sanctuary. Fugitives sometimes end up living on the trains full-time as a result, bartering with regular passengers for their daily needs; it’s whispered that even those who’ve offended the gods may find safety on the trains.

  • Owing to the trains’ apparently prescient ability to anticipate public demand, efforts have been made to predict the future – or at least the flow of commerce – from the patterns of the trains’ schedules; this typically meets with limited success.

  • Reports of the trains showing up in times of great need even where there are no tracks to run on are unsubstantiated, and are generally dismissed as superstitious folk-tales.

(Of course, it’s not all sunshine and roses; the trains are entirely amoral outside of their mandate, and will happily show up in the nick of time to provide a murderer with a convenient escape, or transport an invading army straight to your doorstep, provided that army doesn’t try to prevent others from boarding, and refrains from harming anyone while they’re actually on board!)

Tags:

#trains #story ideas I will never write #violence mention #death mention

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

prokopetz:

Inadvisable D&D campaign premise #137: the Old Republic’s code of laws is unique in that it binds the natural world as well as human society. While these laws don’t always work in humanity’s favour, they establish a web of obligations that can be leveraged for humanity’s advantage; thus it’s possible to bargain with a storm, make contract with a river, or take the seasons to court. As the the features of the natural world have no particular ability to communicate or assert their needs, they’re assigned human advocates, who swear fearsome (and magically binding) oaths to represent the best interests of their “clients”.

Of course, nothing lasts forever. The Old Republic fell apart centuries ago, dissolving into a loose affiliation of sporadically warring provinces that each claim to be the Republic’s only legitimate successor. Even in this fractured state, the old laws retain their temporal power, but they can’t be modified or repealed, as no valid legislative body can be convened. In the campaign’s present day, those laws are nearly four hundred years out of date, which often places them considerably out of step with the needs and concerns of contemporary society – but any province that tries to simply discard them loses the protections they afford and is promptly ravaged by natural disasters.

The player characters in this campaign are a roving team of lawyer-adventurers who specialise in devising and implementing solutions to the bizarre legal conundrums that emerge from this state of affairs.

Tags:

#story ideas I will never write #fun with loopholes

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

claudiapriscus:

marithlizard:

siniristiriita:

I keep thinking about that post about the whole genre of movies about a white guy getting into an asian philosophy, matrial art etc and then proceeding to surpass his teacher and be the best ever at it, and I started thinking about the opposite of it.

 I want a movie about a chinese dude who comes to Finland, downs an entire bottle of Koskenkorva, tries to fight a nearby cow and ends up lying face down in a ditch while sobbing about his ex wife and having like 5 finnish dudes staring at him in awe like

 “That’s him. That’s the chosen one.”

The 5 finnish dudes bring him home with them.  The next day, the chinese dude wakes up on the couch with a mighty hangover.   He turns on the TV and for the first time in his life sees Moomintroll.  Instant spiritual bonding experience.  Overcome with emotion,  he begins to sing an ode to Snufkin in a high clear tenor voice. The 5 finnish dudes hastily call their live-in wise old mentor.  “Yes,” says the mentor after watching chinese dude for a few minutes.  “The prophecy was true.  This is the chosen one.  This man…will be our 2020 Eurovision act.”

Having seen Eurovision… This seems entirely credible. Would read.

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #Eurovision #story ideas I will never write #racism cw? #alcohol mention

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

aenramsden:

I want to see a fanfic where Harry hatches a basilisk.

I want to see a fanfic where he looks up “magical snakes” as soon as he gets to Hogwarts because that thing at the zoo always bugged him, and so the Trio works out that it’s a basilisk immediately after the first petrification in Second Year. But they don’t know how it’s getting around or where it is or anything, so Harry is just like WELP SET A BASILISK TO FIND A BASILISK while Hermione and Ron are like HARRY NO.

I want to see a fanfic where Harry sticks a chicken egg under a toad and makes all these plans about how he’ll talk to his huge deadly snake and get it eye-blinkers and shit so it doesn’t kill people and make sure it’s not too aggressive, and somehow it never occurs to his twelve-year old brain that the chicken egg has a total volume of about four tablespoons and he is not going to get the giant King of Serpents he is expecting.

I want to see a fanfic where it finally breaks out of the shell and Harry finds himself with a bb!basilisk too smol to even have the murder-eyes yet, who can only petrify someone for about half an hour before the effect wears off. She eats spiders and gets tired very easily and demands that he wear a hood she can curl up in and sleep.

(She is also the same vivid green as his eyes and already hideously venomous, but doesn’t like using her fangs because she says they get cold and give her brain freeze when she unsheathes them.)

I just… I really want Harry with a haughty, demanding, arrogant danger noodle who has an overinflated sense of her own importance, views Hedwig as a TERRIFYING MENACE because she isn’t big enough to eat owls yet and keeps up a steady stream of insults hissed in Harry’s ear whenever she’s near someone who has a Dark Mark (which she can sense at close range). And who is basically useless as a familiar because she refuses to slither across anything other than sun-warmed stones or Harry, hasn’t got a very powerful gaze yet and doesn’t like biting people.

(Except snake-arm-people. She finds snake-arm-people confusing and annoying, and would probably make an exception on the no-biting thing where they’re concerned.)

 

thepioden:

I mean there are obviously a lot of factors influencing snake growth rate but if we assume basilisks just get stupidhuge because they grow their whole lives and are immortal, this snake is probably going to be at least 8 feet long by Deathly Hallows, which is a significant and intimidating chunk of scaly muscle that is intelligent enough to do what it is told. Like, you know, hey, bite this necklace.  

So I mean by like his fourth year it’s going to be pretty hard to hide this snake that is nearly as long as he is tall and it’s not going to do much for his reputation that the Boy Who Lived has a pet fucking basilisk but holy damn does it make book seven a whole hell of a lot shorter. 

 

frosttrix:

I feel like I should write this

 

twinkie13:

can you just imagine him ron and hermione coming up with increasingly ridiculous excuses trying to hide their pet baby basilisk in the dorms (hagrid would be so proud). how long do you think it’d take before harry’s pet basilisk is just a really badly hidden secret between all of gryffindor? and the ensuring antics of the entire house as they try to keep mcgonagall from finding out? (she knows something is up, but even just thinking of what could be big enough the entire house is trying to keep it from her makes her want to break out the firewhiskey)

ron gets the idea to try and practices parseltongue with baby basilisk since he hears harry talking in his sleep with it all the time anyway (and ngl, baby basilisk is kind of adorable and eats all the spiders in the dorm so he doesn’t have to deal with them, he’s pretty smitten once she hatches), and as soon as hermione overhears him trying it, she’s dragging him and harry to the library because, well, parseltongue is a language, why can’t they learn it? so it’s the two of them alternating between hissing at harry and hissing at the basilisk and harry is trying so hard not to laugh because 90% of what they’re saying is utter nonsense and the basilisk doesn’t even bother, because she likes these two humans but wow are they dumb, that’s not how words work.

 

mzminola:

 

amloveabledeathmo:

I love parseltongue and Hermione like welp it’s a language and then most everyone in their year ends up learning it even the other houses just like the horrible scary snake language ends up being the secret language between the kids so they can gossip and the teachers are like what. Also Hagrid would love the baby basilisk.

 

yamihiei:

You know most would just pick up a few curse words and insults.

what is everyone else is thinking when the Gryffindors start hissing under their breath? Their table sounds like a snake pit and it’s eerie af. The Slytherins are pissed cause surely this is a joke at their expense. And obviously everyone turns to Harry because he’s the ONLY ONE who could have stared this.

And can you imagine someone flubbing a scentence and activating a parseltounge feature of the castle? A small group of Gryffindors are complaining about astronomy and suddenly the stairs turn into a super slide. Discovering Salazar’s secret liquor cubbord. Secret passage ways being stumbled into left right and center because no one can pronounce ‘greasy git’ in parseltoung(besides Harry) but they’re sure as hell gonna try

 

thetwentycommittee:

What if parseltongue isn’t in any books so Hermione just gets gets harry to say stuff and then she writes it down like

‘Harry I’m tearing my hair out please conjugate “to want” in the present continuous’

‘Hermione it is three in the morning’

 

thesmolandangryfriend:

*five minutes later*

“HERMIONE I DONT EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS IN ENGLISH STOP”

 

zorilleerrant:

You know that thing where really big dogs listen to really little dogs because they’re like someone that confident obviously knows what they’re doing?

Well, here we have Hermione treating this baby basilisk like a person because Harry keeps having actual conversations with it, so obviously it’s got a personality and capable of thought and such, and she doesn’t want to set a precedent of treating it like a lesser creature or especially not like a servant the way the big basilisk has been treated. Everyone follows her lead, because Hermione probably knows what she’s doing, she’s read books.

Now this other basilisk has been following commands only, some of them very old and some of them from the more recent master (the diary), having been carefully trained to Just Do What I Say from a young age. It’s not really making its own decisions, but trying to do its best the way it was trained.

But Harry’s bb basilisk has other ideas, and who is it really going to trust, some creepy smelling wizard, or another basilisk, which it probably never even met before, but instinctually recognizes as Like Me. Especially since that baby (”excuse me but what do you think you’re doing!! how dare you scare my friends!!”) is alternating between threats (the big basilisk has never met another basilisk and doesn’t know they’re not credible) and telling all about walkies and the nice warm rocks they could go lie on if it would just stop fighting.

Hermione, once she learns parseltongue, starts teaching the large basilisk all about morality and how to make its own decisions.

Tags:

#Harry Potter #story ideas I will never write #fanfic #snake #my past self has good taste #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

eternalgirlscout:

Avatar OC concept: a pedantic earthbender with a degree in geology who can bend ice on a technicality

 

bananonbinary:

the implication that bending is completely reliant on whether you think you should be able to instead of like…innate laws of the universe pleases me greatly

 

lesbianbrachiosaurus:

me bending someone’s bones: buddy they’re practically just limestone I mean it’s on you for walking around full of rocks

 

sufficientlylargen:

A waterbender, levitating a slice of pizza: See, I believe that pizza is technically a soup, not a sandwich, so

Tags:

#Avatar: The Last Airbender #story ideas I will never write #fun with loopholes #I love when superpowered people talk the universe into letting them do stuff #by arguing that the ability logically follows from the powers they already have

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

accio-shitpost:

how good would it be if luna, who believes in the crumple-horned snorckack and nargles, thought that dinosaurs were made up by muggles

 

unified-multiversal-theory:

Okay, but consider:

Someone (probably Hermione) takes Luna to a muggle museum of natural history, in a last ditch effort to convince her that dinosaurs really did exist. They go through all of it: full and partial skeletons on display, fossil imprints of skin textures, a little video about carbon dating, exhibits on the evolution of all life from tiny one-celled sea creatures, bird-hipped vs. lizard-hipped, living giant isopods and coelacanths, the whole spiel about how the dinosaurs aren’t actually completely gone, since some, like the anchiornis and archaeopteryx, were the predecessors from which today’s birds – including every owl in the Wizarding World – evolved.

Luna takes all this in with her usual calm demeanor until the very end, when her eyes seem to grow even more enormous in her face, but doesn’t say anything. After a full minute of Luna’s silent astonishment, her companion prods her for a response. “Of course!” Luna exclaims, “no wonder I’ve never found them. I’ve been going about things the wrong way!” She launches into a lengthy explanation that the records that she and her father have been using for references were copies of copies of copies of absolutely ancient scripts, so in order to find the creatures as described in them, she needed to be looking for fossils. 

Luna (with Rolf as her assistant) begins searching through areas of Wizarding Britain, using magical equivalents of the muggle tools she read about at the museum (a variation on Tempus to determine the age of a magical item or creature, Cryptozoam Revelio as a substitute for ground-penetrating radar). She finds the remains of a number of magical creatures from various ages, as well as accidentally uncovering a nest of Knuckers, a relative of the dragon previously thought to be extinct. After this discovery, she and Rolf are given a bit more credence than before, and they gain the support among creature-handlers, especially dragonologists.  Because of this, they get access to more regions of the world, and their team grows. Eventually Luna ends up founding the Wizarding Archaeological Society, the first institution to combine both muggle and wizard research methods at a single institution.

On the 50th anniversary of the Society’s founding, they open a museum of their own (”Everything that was, at the WAS!”), to display the various fossils of magical creatures that they’ve managed to locate over the years. Unveiled at the opening ceremonies was what would become the pride of their collection, a diorama of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks in every stage of development, along with details about their habits, average lifespan, and a map of the full range of their habitat at their peak population in the mid-17th century. Their extinction at during the 20th century was attributed to rising global temperatures, as their most flourishing period coincided with the coldest years of the Little Ice Age, and no specimens from any later than the 1976 Heat Wave had thus far been recovered. The disappearance of the Snorkacks, it was said, had been an early warning sign of the global climate change which had troubled the entire world, wizarding and muggle, for the better part of the last half-century. A cooperative partnership had been reached between the WAS and the Royal Society a scant decade after the WAS’s founding , allowing research witches and wizards to pool their resources with muggle scientists, in time to prevent a catastrophe that the wizarding world would otherwise have been unlikely to survive.

In her speech at that evening’s gala, Luna told the story of how it all happened, to reveal the person who had singlehandledly started this series of events, which resulted in not only a golden age of discovery in the field of cryptozoology, but also an era of peace and cooperation between both worlds, allowing restrictions imposed by the Statute of Secrecy to be loosened for the first time in nearly five hundred years, all in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.

Hermione Granger, who had been grumbling in her chair the entire time, rose when acknowledged. Luna Lovegood beamed at her aging friend, the witch who had gone from being her most skeptical critic to her most dedicated – and most challenging – supporter in a mere half-century. 

 

notesoftruth:

@deadcatwithaflamethrower

 

ryanlewisandclark:

@ruffboijuliaburnsides

 

ruffboijuliaburnsides:

;_; god yes this is so good.

 

comicgeekscomicgeek:

I can dig it.

Tags:

#Harry Potter #fanfic #story ideas I will never write

Multilingualism on DS9

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

apolesen:

The Universal Translator is the most boring invention in Star Trek, which is why I tend to ignore it. It’s useful for first contact, but the idea that everything someone says is translated means that we never get any depiction of linguistic diversity in Star Trek, particularly in something like DS9. Imagine the possibilities: 

  • Kira being sent on a crash-course on Federation Standard when she is made liaison officer.
  • Bashir sitting with several dictionary PADDs and a grammar, trying to figure out if the translation matrix Garak ran the Cardassian novel through has messed up or if Garak is playing a very intricate practical joke on him, because surely it can’t mean that. 
  • Molly cheerily code-switching between Japanese, Irish and English. Sometimes she throws in some Bajoran too – Aunt Nerys taught it to her.
  • Sisko asking for Kira’s help to get better at Bajoran. They meet over coffee and practice Bajoran.
  • Dax sometimes dreaming in languages she no longer knows, but previous hosts were well-versed in.
  • Kira and Odo always speaking Bajoran to one another and only switching to Standard when Starfleet folks are there.
  • The entire storyline of Garak, Kira and Odo with the Cardassian Resistance being in Cardassian
  • Kira learning Cardassian properly only then – before that she spoke only a Bajoran-Cardassian pidgin which developed during the Occupation.
  • Nog teaching Jake Ferengi as a way of returning the favour of Jake teaching him how to read.
  • Garak eavesdropping on everyone. No one is sure how many languages he understands. 
  • The chatter of dozens of languages on the Promenade – the gutturals of Klingon, the uvulars of Cardassian, the retroflex liquids of Bajoran.
  • Multilingual swearing!

 

conceptadecency:

Julian gets really confused because there are about fifteen different past tenses in Cardassian and according to Garak he’s using the wrong one every single time. There is only one future tense.

 

sigynpenniman:

15 different past tenses and one future feels perfectly culturally sound for Cardassian.

 

vanshira:

Jake trying to write a story in Bajoran – which he thinks should be easy, because he’s been living among Bajorans for so long he can speak it almost as easily as Federation Standard – only to be hopelessly tripped up by the fact that there are actually three forms of Bajoran (colloquial spoken/written, formal/religious spoken, and formal literary) and he really only knows colloquial Bajoran

 

apolesen:

I love it! Kira agrees to read it to help him out with some of the dialogue. She’s all for the use of colloquial Bajoran in writing – feels more real. 

 

conceptadecency:

Jake, along with a lot of Bajoran writers who grew up during the Occupation and so did not have much formal schooling, start a literary movement of writing in mostly colloquial Bajoran. It’s very controversial, with some saying the more formal written forms of Bajoran are being lost and that’s another thing the Cardassians took from us, and others saying, what, so we can’t move forward and change just because we were occupied?

 

aidaran-alha:

Has anybody written a series with this premise yet? Because I love it. As someone who writes in a language that’s not her own, and if she did, would do it in her our dialect instead of a neutral, I feel so attracted to this idea.

 

gplusbfics:

Yes, somebody write this, please?

Tags:

#Star Trek #DS9 #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #language