A Dirty Pair Story
Ryan Mathews
How I spent my Christmas vacation...
I live out in a rural county of Ohio, not a very productive place to
live if you're a CS grad student with no transportation. It's a toll
call to anywhere, so even if we had a modem my family could not afford
computer access. Add to this the fact that I had left in Buffalo
certain books I needed if I was going to spend the vacation studying
and what it boiled down to was that for a month, I had no life.
If that wasn't bad enough, Dirty Pair: A Plague of Angels #3 was late
(and still is). So what does a Pair fan do when he's bored out of his
friggin' skull? He writes his own Dirty Pair story, of course.
Well, it is finally done. Originally written on 46 sheets of legal-pad
paper, front and back, it shrank a bit when typed. What I would *like*
to do is post it. I'm no stranger to the net, and I understand
nettiquette fairly well, so I would break it up into 5 to 7 pieces and
post them every other day, so as not to overload small systems and
also not to be obnoxious. Still, I'm announcing this ahead of time so
that people who think this is a bad idea can tell me so. I hope not. I
mean, it wouldn't be the first creative work posted to anime or
comics, 'though perhaps the first of this magnitude.
Let me state my case here. This isn't another work by a pretentious
jerk who thinks he already knows everything there is about writing and
is under the delusion that he is going to get it published. No, I'm
fully aware that I am a beginner, my sole credits being a couple of
well-received Star Trek parodies over on the Trek group. I wrote this
basically to amuse myself, and about a quarter of the way through I
realized that it had the potential to amuse a few others, so I worked
my butt off trying to perfect it, spell-checking, smoothing out
dialogue, keeping everyone in character, fixing plot holes. I felt
drained when I was done.
The story is written in a modified script form, with the action
descriptions written more textually then in a real script. Annoying
camera phrases like "cut", "pan", and "zoom" are avoided wherever
possible, for smoother reading. As in a real script, the name of the
speaker is placed on the previous line.
You've read this far? Good, you're curious! So what's it about? The
story is called "Big Bang" and features a time-traveller whose
character is based on a mix of concepts found in Doctor Who, James
Bond, and Issac Asimov's Eternals. The story begins as this man is
dispatched to the Lovely Angels' universe to somehow prevent it from
exploding. Meanwhile, the Angels have been assigned to break into a
large research complex to retrieve some computer files. The complex is
supposedly abandoned, but the company was in the business of making
security devices, and the building has allegedly already "eaten" two
local teams that tried to break in. Of course, the two plots
eventually converge.
So if you'd like to see...
-- Kei and Yuri SAVE THE UNIVERSE! (But somehow manage to destroy a
shopping mall, a research complex, several squadrons of fighter jets,
and a small island along the way.)
-- Kei successfully catch a time-traveller by starting a fight in a
bar!
-- Mughi save the day!
-- Action! Mayhem! Humor! Drama! Romance! Deadly mirrors!
-- Plus, more bullshit science than you can shake a stick at! (But
internally consistant bullshit science!)
...then don't miss "Big Bang". Possibly coming soon to a newsreader
near you!
---------- Ryan Mathews
--
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