I got dark only to shine
Or I could just write fic for Sapphire & Steel.
Your obligatory disclaimer this time is that I think I faked quite a lot about how a synchrotron works, almost certainly including some of the layout and dimensions, and I do not intend any disservice to the real-life team who discovered how to retrieve lost daguerreotypes with μ-XRF imaging because I think that's fantastically cool. The title is an atomic number. I went with the maxim of write what you know and apparently that includes radioactivity.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thisbluespirit and ashlyme, I think this one's for you.
Assignment 96
The transuranics are unstable. Steel had said it himself not too long ago, half-frozen in a farmhouse kitchen while nursery rhymes unbuilt the stones around them; it was a truism of existence, as unfailing as the Earth-assignment of medium atomic weights or the everywhere fraying fragility of time, and he had not repeated it out of mere received prejudice. Even by the loose and shadowy standards of their calling, he had never worked a job with a transuranic that went as planned. Neptunium and Plutonium crackled with belligerence and suspicion, fought with anyone assigned them, fought with one another, eventually fought with themselves if left unprovoked for any appreciable length of time. Fermium was vague and volatile, as disconnected as if he had just stumbled out of the vast aftershock of a blast. Californium had sullen, lowering moods and a sense of humor that grated against the bone. Steel had stood enough teasing for seriousness—mostly from Silver, but anything the quick-tongued technician said had a way of sticking—to feel as though he should at least give the transuranics the grudging benefit of the doubt when it came to reputations, but then he had never endangered an assignment with his own ego or insecurity or sheer senseless contrariness: he had never let himself get in the way of the work. He had never yet had to call for help, either, but he had come closest on the small, icy, lightless moon where Plutonium had turned her jealous, annihilating attention on him. Watching the small figure walk toward him now out of the roaring hum of electromagnets, he felt himself cooling and stiffening, his shoulders tightening under his plain grey suit, and he forced himself warm again until the time roiling against his skin no longer caught in freeze-dried crystals. He needed to be ready and tensile, not brittle, already locked into decision. He needed not to see his fellow operators as the enemy.
None of them would ever look their age, but Curium had always appeared absurdly, disingenuously young, striding sharp and careless in her long coat the color of clinker, her heavy olive skin and her ink-shock of hair worn like a shrug in the face of her elders who were no such thing. Even at a distance, her grey-violet eyes gave her face the look of an archaic mask, ancient bright glass socketed into bronze; he had never been able to tell whether she was looking at or through him and it did not help to know that she cocked her head like that with everyone, crow-skeptical, she looked profoundly dubious about his presence and sardonically conscious that he was thinking the same.
Sapphire, he was sure, could have put an unstable element at her ease as effortlessly as she smoothed their interactions with frightened, irrational humans; Silver would almost certainly have flirted with her, juggling fire as always and mostly not getting burned. Steel with no small talk, a squarish, fairish man with a measuring face, looked straight at the approaching figure and heard himself reminding his colleague with absolute redundancy, "Transuranic heavy elements may not be used where there is life."
"No one lives in a synchrotron, Steel." Hands in her pockets, Curium flicked her unconcerned gaze down the long curve of bundled magnets and stainless steel and he wondered if she could see the electrons sleeting past them as fast as time, the hard-flung angles of concentrated light no human could stand in unburnt. The same high-density concrete shielding that kept the facility's researchers from unwanted contact with the radiation they employed was all that permitted her presence in this time and place; however firmly she must have been briefed that any damage to the structure could cost more lives than the incident she had been dispatched to deal with, he would never have guessed from the way she rapped her knuckles against the nearest coil. The noise it made was not quite physical, a faint wince of static across Steel's field of vision, the storm-light color of her eyes. "Not this part, anyway."
"No," he agreed grimly. "So where did it get its ghosts?"
He did not like Curium's smile; it suggested she could answer the question. The magnetic field was thick with them, twisting and eddying where there should have been only a particle beam circulating in near-vacuum—blurred and corroded remnants of life in an environment that had never supported it in the first place. They looked alarmingly organic against the smooth weights of machinery, scraps of faces and smears of hands all the blackish, snail-tracked colors of erosion and damp; they seemed to come in patches, like clots of oil on a river's skin. Each blew through him and away down the storage ring almost as soon as he could fix on it, moving too slow for light and too fast for normal time. In a few seconds, the same melted forms came round again.
Without looking away from him, Curium raised her palm into the current, curved a little as if to a candle's flame; he could not tell if the faint edging of violet light where she made contact was an effect of electromagnetics or her own peculiar properties and he did not suppose he cared, really, so long as she transmitted accurately whatever data she was gathering. It did not appear to affect her air of cynical boredom. Electrons spanged from magnet to magnet in sprays of photons like headlights and the ghosts tangled and dragged in their wake. Steel waited as unimpatiently as he knew how.
"It's a . . . contamination." The last word seemed to surprise her; her hand half-closed of its own accord and she stretched her fingers wide again. "No one ever did live here. They came here when they were already dead."
"Their bodies?"
"No." Her smile tightened, cutting further into her thin face. "Not their memories, either. No one knew who they were. No one knows even now. But they were remembered. They had been forgotten and they were remembered."
Something that had no face but a mouth and arms without hands or shoulders sloughed through him with the nauseous flip of deforming time and he thought very clearly, on the frequency no other element could hear, It's happening faster than it should. It's almost over. We came too late—as usual. They sent us too late. He would have let Sapphire hear him, or even Silver in extremity; to the unknown quantity of Curium, he said aloud, "Can you sense anything about the trigger?"
Now she looked as though she were holding herself against a pane of glass or an impossible high wind, her weight braced on the piecemeal illusion of human persistence. Her fingers moved restlessly, almost scrabbling. The light was darkening, royal and baleful, between them. "It's not here. I don't think it ever was. It feels like an echo. An echo of an echo." A sudden small laugh hacked out of her and her hand almost flinched shut again. "The ghost of a ghost of a ghost."
He did not want to believe that the ring was dimming around them, but when he glanced at his own hands they were pale and floating as afterimages, bruise-tinged in Curium's light. The next spectral gust went past him with a taste he recognized and he said almost before he thought of the name, "We should have had a technician." Then, urgently, "Curium—"
But she was sifting the beam for its contaminants even as he spoke, the sticky, tarnished refractions of real chemicals, real metals deposited and developed in a century of industry and progress, fogged and degraded along with the images they had captured in the decades since: unstable maybe, but no one would call her slow on the uptake. Her voice was as precise now as a dispatcher's, swiftly professional as any medium-weight diplomat's: "Iron. Copper. Silver. Mercury. Gold. A photographic process of the mid-nineteenth century. Plates and vapors, fumes and solutions. Alchemy made affordable. When the elemental concentrations that comprise the image are obscured from the naked eye, their distribution can still be mapped by rapid-scanning X-ray." Her other hand glowed in the iron-core coils, absorbing as much information from the synchrotron's ferromagnetic guts as she had from the ghosts it had bred.
With Sapphire, he would have stepped forward to take her arm; he had no desire to touch Curium to communicate his question, crucial as it was, and he did not like to think of it as a constraint. "Can they restore the original image?"
"Not to be seen. Not by them, not under that much time. What they can do—what they did do—is recreate it."
He could see it then, as neatly as a blueprint, a mess of angular momentum and sympathetic magic accidentally touched off by the same unfathomable impulse toward old things and mixed ages that led humans to manage antique shops or establish museums, stockpiling the triggers for space-time catastrophe like weapons of mass destruction or staple crops. "It was carried forward in time with each iteration," Steel said slowly. "Then it was introduced into a machine designed for the storage and production of different kinds of light. That was the trigger—the same light that created the original image. A little trapped piece of time and it wanted out."
When Curium replaced her hands in her pockets, the purplish glow that had begun to drip from her wrists and elbows went out so suddenly that Steel blinked a little in the gloom, except that he could still see its corona in her hair, touching her eyes like a sleepless night. "It's using the synchrotron," she said, her voice her own again, tired, a little drawling. Her mouth raked a faint version of its knowing smile. "It's interfering with it. The ghosts scatter the particles and fill the available space. Like cancer cells crowding out healthy flesh. The acceleration keeps them going, just like the light they once were. The beam won't last more than another hour, but it doesn't need to. Time will have broken here, permanently, before then—here, where they play with the smallest pieces of the universe. They saw their faces again, you see. Their faces were lost and they saw them again."
Another skein of ghosts tumbled past in its own seedy light; Steel could see the traces of photography in it now, the powdery silts of mercury and silver, the fine fixative of gold under the smutch and scaling of oxides, the human echo soft as bruised fruit at its heart. "We could have used a technician," he muttered, but something in him had relaxed for the first time since the assignment had come through: he knew what to do with echoes, even ones strong enough to wear thin places between time and all that lay outside it, and he could even see where a transuranic might be of use in this snarl of particle physics and decaying history. For this work, he did not even need to take off his jacket. He began to drop his temperature and watched Curium's smile return.
He was fascinated to see that she dressed in something like student drag under her coat of no particular vintage; she had stripped it within the first few minutes, alight from crown to heel with the violet fire that looked no brighter than embers but left a star-white stutter across Steel's vision whenever he looked away. It ran as freely as blood from her hands and he thought without embarrassment that he could have used Lead's reliable insulation between them and not only because he was colder now than the liquid helium that flowed around the storage ring, the deep absolute cold that mired ghosts in time like winter molasses and ached in every bone and fiber of his body and could not be helped, not unless he wanted to set Curium on the ghosts like a cat on moths and risk a crack in the shielding that might introduce new factors into the problem—new deaths, new human imprints, whatever mysterious entanglements of the subatomic level she had alluded to. He froze and she burned and the echoes neither ashed like paper nor melted like slag but cindered in small fizzing puffs of sparks, like salts thrown on a fire. Steel thought they looked most human then, illuminated between Curium's cupped hands like the flame of a paper lantern, but there were no minds behind those stiff or smiling faces, no motives in those clasped hands or folded arms, and he could have done nothing for them had there been. He did not let himself wonder if her light was sticking to him, what processes he would need to undergo when they were done. Her eyes were bright coin and burnt violets and she stepped as if she were dancing with him and she had not tried to kill him yet.
She did not try once, even when she was shrugging her coat back on afterward and Steel who had slid down against the frost-whitened concrete was gathering himself to his feet as stiffly as if he really were so much older than she; she reached down a hand and he took it, half welcoming the pressure front of heat that rebounded through him, buzzing in his fingers long after they released. Real weariness on Curium looked like a less angular version of her careless entrance, folding her arms in her coat and leaning up against the overhanging curve of the ring for support rather than effect. He said without preamble, "I apologize. I didn't think I could rely on you."
For a moment he could not tell if it would be worse if she laughed at him or attacked him. The former he could live down, but it might take centuries; the latter, in his current state, he might not survive. One side of the transuranic's mouth crooked and then settled.
"You can't."
She said it simply, without a smile; it made her look older and less familiar, not like any other operator he had worked with before. Even her eyes were greyish again. I don't understand, Steel could have said, or Then what good are you? or any one of a number of pointless, obvious reactions. He kept his mouth shut and his eyes open and waited, in the one way he was good at waiting, for the unspoken thing to reveal itself to him.
As if he were a ghost in a wind of electrons, Curium lifted her hand to him, unfolded her fingers and opened her palm. Under her skin, she was all violet smolder and fission crackle, the energy of her nature straining at the leashes of the body it was bound into. No form she took was ever hers to stay. Steel knew his own structure, its limits and capabilities and loopholes; he knew the angles of Sapphire and the flexibility of Silver and he knew that any of them might be destroyed, but rarely could they be altered past return. In a handful of decades, a century, a millennium, Curium as he had known her would not exist; might return as a semi-stranger or a cordial ally; might have become his enemy like Plutonium in her mantle of murderous blue. No wonder she looked so young, endlessly decaying and synthesizing. No wonder she had recognized the disintegrating alchemy of ghosts. We're all like that, her thoughts said, too wry to be his own. All of us on this side. You're as you're made; we change.
Outside his head, her hand closed and withdrew; he saw a dark girl with her hands in her pockets, her eyes very nearly a human color and the twist to her mouth indistinguishable from human emotion. The way she shrugged was little more than a shoulder and an eyebrow, not actually careless at all.
"But you can trust me."
Steel nodded once and offered his arm, the same gesture he might have given Sapphire even tired to the bone. By the time the last electrons in the beam ricocheted their way through another circuit, there was nothing where the two of them had stood, not even air.
Your obligatory disclaimer this time is that I think I faked quite a lot about how a synchrotron works, almost certainly including some of the layout and dimensions, and I do not intend any disservice to the real-life team who discovered how to retrieve lost daguerreotypes with μ-XRF imaging because I think that's fantastically cool. The title is an atomic number. I went with the maxim of write what you know and apparently that includes radioactivity.
thisbluespirit and ashlyme, I think this one's for you.Assignment 96
The transuranics are unstable. Steel had said it himself not too long ago, half-frozen in a farmhouse kitchen while nursery rhymes unbuilt the stones around them; it was a truism of existence, as unfailing as the Earth-assignment of medium atomic weights or the everywhere fraying fragility of time, and he had not repeated it out of mere received prejudice. Even by the loose and shadowy standards of their calling, he had never worked a job with a transuranic that went as planned. Neptunium and Plutonium crackled with belligerence and suspicion, fought with anyone assigned them, fought with one another, eventually fought with themselves if left unprovoked for any appreciable length of time. Fermium was vague and volatile, as disconnected as if he had just stumbled out of the vast aftershock of a blast. Californium had sullen, lowering moods and a sense of humor that grated against the bone. Steel had stood enough teasing for seriousness—mostly from Silver, but anything the quick-tongued technician said had a way of sticking—to feel as though he should at least give the transuranics the grudging benefit of the doubt when it came to reputations, but then he had never endangered an assignment with his own ego or insecurity or sheer senseless contrariness: he had never let himself get in the way of the work. He had never yet had to call for help, either, but he had come closest on the small, icy, lightless moon where Plutonium had turned her jealous, annihilating attention on him. Watching the small figure walk toward him now out of the roaring hum of electromagnets, he felt himself cooling and stiffening, his shoulders tightening under his plain grey suit, and he forced himself warm again until the time roiling against his skin no longer caught in freeze-dried crystals. He needed to be ready and tensile, not brittle, already locked into decision. He needed not to see his fellow operators as the enemy.
None of them would ever look their age, but Curium had always appeared absurdly, disingenuously young, striding sharp and careless in her long coat the color of clinker, her heavy olive skin and her ink-shock of hair worn like a shrug in the face of her elders who were no such thing. Even at a distance, her grey-violet eyes gave her face the look of an archaic mask, ancient bright glass socketed into bronze; he had never been able to tell whether she was looking at or through him and it did not help to know that she cocked her head like that with everyone, crow-skeptical, she looked profoundly dubious about his presence and sardonically conscious that he was thinking the same.
Sapphire, he was sure, could have put an unstable element at her ease as effortlessly as she smoothed their interactions with frightened, irrational humans; Silver would almost certainly have flirted with her, juggling fire as always and mostly not getting burned. Steel with no small talk, a squarish, fairish man with a measuring face, looked straight at the approaching figure and heard himself reminding his colleague with absolute redundancy, "Transuranic heavy elements may not be used where there is life."
"No one lives in a synchrotron, Steel." Hands in her pockets, Curium flicked her unconcerned gaze down the long curve of bundled magnets and stainless steel and he wondered if she could see the electrons sleeting past them as fast as time, the hard-flung angles of concentrated light no human could stand in unburnt. The same high-density concrete shielding that kept the facility's researchers from unwanted contact with the radiation they employed was all that permitted her presence in this time and place; however firmly she must have been briefed that any damage to the structure could cost more lives than the incident she had been dispatched to deal with, he would never have guessed from the way she rapped her knuckles against the nearest coil. The noise it made was not quite physical, a faint wince of static across Steel's field of vision, the storm-light color of her eyes. "Not this part, anyway."
"No," he agreed grimly. "So where did it get its ghosts?"
He did not like Curium's smile; it suggested she could answer the question. The magnetic field was thick with them, twisting and eddying where there should have been only a particle beam circulating in near-vacuum—blurred and corroded remnants of life in an environment that had never supported it in the first place. They looked alarmingly organic against the smooth weights of machinery, scraps of faces and smears of hands all the blackish, snail-tracked colors of erosion and damp; they seemed to come in patches, like clots of oil on a river's skin. Each blew through him and away down the storage ring almost as soon as he could fix on it, moving too slow for light and too fast for normal time. In a few seconds, the same melted forms came round again.
Without looking away from him, Curium raised her palm into the current, curved a little as if to a candle's flame; he could not tell if the faint edging of violet light where she made contact was an effect of electromagnetics or her own peculiar properties and he did not suppose he cared, really, so long as she transmitted accurately whatever data she was gathering. It did not appear to affect her air of cynical boredom. Electrons spanged from magnet to magnet in sprays of photons like headlights and the ghosts tangled and dragged in their wake. Steel waited as unimpatiently as he knew how.
"It's a . . . contamination." The last word seemed to surprise her; her hand half-closed of its own accord and she stretched her fingers wide again. "No one ever did live here. They came here when they were already dead."
"Their bodies?"
"No." Her smile tightened, cutting further into her thin face. "Not their memories, either. No one knew who they were. No one knows even now. But they were remembered. They had been forgotten and they were remembered."
Something that had no face but a mouth and arms without hands or shoulders sloughed through him with the nauseous flip of deforming time and he thought very clearly, on the frequency no other element could hear, It's happening faster than it should. It's almost over. We came too late—as usual. They sent us too late. He would have let Sapphire hear him, or even Silver in extremity; to the unknown quantity of Curium, he said aloud, "Can you sense anything about the trigger?"
Now she looked as though she were holding herself against a pane of glass or an impossible high wind, her weight braced on the piecemeal illusion of human persistence. Her fingers moved restlessly, almost scrabbling. The light was darkening, royal and baleful, between them. "It's not here. I don't think it ever was. It feels like an echo. An echo of an echo." A sudden small laugh hacked out of her and her hand almost flinched shut again. "The ghost of a ghost of a ghost."
He did not want to believe that the ring was dimming around them, but when he glanced at his own hands they were pale and floating as afterimages, bruise-tinged in Curium's light. The next spectral gust went past him with a taste he recognized and he said almost before he thought of the name, "We should have had a technician." Then, urgently, "Curium—"
But she was sifting the beam for its contaminants even as he spoke, the sticky, tarnished refractions of real chemicals, real metals deposited and developed in a century of industry and progress, fogged and degraded along with the images they had captured in the decades since: unstable maybe, but no one would call her slow on the uptake. Her voice was as precise now as a dispatcher's, swiftly professional as any medium-weight diplomat's: "Iron. Copper. Silver. Mercury. Gold. A photographic process of the mid-nineteenth century. Plates and vapors, fumes and solutions. Alchemy made affordable. When the elemental concentrations that comprise the image are obscured from the naked eye, their distribution can still be mapped by rapid-scanning X-ray." Her other hand glowed in the iron-core coils, absorbing as much information from the synchrotron's ferromagnetic guts as she had from the ghosts it had bred.
With Sapphire, he would have stepped forward to take her arm; he had no desire to touch Curium to communicate his question, crucial as it was, and he did not like to think of it as a constraint. "Can they restore the original image?"
"Not to be seen. Not by them, not under that much time. What they can do—what they did do—is recreate it."
He could see it then, as neatly as a blueprint, a mess of angular momentum and sympathetic magic accidentally touched off by the same unfathomable impulse toward old things and mixed ages that led humans to manage antique shops or establish museums, stockpiling the triggers for space-time catastrophe like weapons of mass destruction or staple crops. "It was carried forward in time with each iteration," Steel said slowly. "Then it was introduced into a machine designed for the storage and production of different kinds of light. That was the trigger—the same light that created the original image. A little trapped piece of time and it wanted out."
When Curium replaced her hands in her pockets, the purplish glow that had begun to drip from her wrists and elbows went out so suddenly that Steel blinked a little in the gloom, except that he could still see its corona in her hair, touching her eyes like a sleepless night. "It's using the synchrotron," she said, her voice her own again, tired, a little drawling. Her mouth raked a faint version of its knowing smile. "It's interfering with it. The ghosts scatter the particles and fill the available space. Like cancer cells crowding out healthy flesh. The acceleration keeps them going, just like the light they once were. The beam won't last more than another hour, but it doesn't need to. Time will have broken here, permanently, before then—here, where they play with the smallest pieces of the universe. They saw their faces again, you see. Their faces were lost and they saw them again."
Another skein of ghosts tumbled past in its own seedy light; Steel could see the traces of photography in it now, the powdery silts of mercury and silver, the fine fixative of gold under the smutch and scaling of oxides, the human echo soft as bruised fruit at its heart. "We could have used a technician," he muttered, but something in him had relaxed for the first time since the assignment had come through: he knew what to do with echoes, even ones strong enough to wear thin places between time and all that lay outside it, and he could even see where a transuranic might be of use in this snarl of particle physics and decaying history. For this work, he did not even need to take off his jacket. He began to drop his temperature and watched Curium's smile return.
He was fascinated to see that she dressed in something like student drag under her coat of no particular vintage; she had stripped it within the first few minutes, alight from crown to heel with the violet fire that looked no brighter than embers but left a star-white stutter across Steel's vision whenever he looked away. It ran as freely as blood from her hands and he thought without embarrassment that he could have used Lead's reliable insulation between them and not only because he was colder now than the liquid helium that flowed around the storage ring, the deep absolute cold that mired ghosts in time like winter molasses and ached in every bone and fiber of his body and could not be helped, not unless he wanted to set Curium on the ghosts like a cat on moths and risk a crack in the shielding that might introduce new factors into the problem—new deaths, new human imprints, whatever mysterious entanglements of the subatomic level she had alluded to. He froze and she burned and the echoes neither ashed like paper nor melted like slag but cindered in small fizzing puffs of sparks, like salts thrown on a fire. Steel thought they looked most human then, illuminated between Curium's cupped hands like the flame of a paper lantern, but there were no minds behind those stiff or smiling faces, no motives in those clasped hands or folded arms, and he could have done nothing for them had there been. He did not let himself wonder if her light was sticking to him, what processes he would need to undergo when they were done. Her eyes were bright coin and burnt violets and she stepped as if she were dancing with him and she had not tried to kill him yet.
She did not try once, even when she was shrugging her coat back on afterward and Steel who had slid down against the frost-whitened concrete was gathering himself to his feet as stiffly as if he really were so much older than she; she reached down a hand and he took it, half welcoming the pressure front of heat that rebounded through him, buzzing in his fingers long after they released. Real weariness on Curium looked like a less angular version of her careless entrance, folding her arms in her coat and leaning up against the overhanging curve of the ring for support rather than effect. He said without preamble, "I apologize. I didn't think I could rely on you."
For a moment he could not tell if it would be worse if she laughed at him or attacked him. The former he could live down, but it might take centuries; the latter, in his current state, he might not survive. One side of the transuranic's mouth crooked and then settled.
"You can't."
She said it simply, without a smile; it made her look older and less familiar, not like any other operator he had worked with before. Even her eyes were greyish again. I don't understand, Steel could have said, or Then what good are you? or any one of a number of pointless, obvious reactions. He kept his mouth shut and his eyes open and waited, in the one way he was good at waiting, for the unspoken thing to reveal itself to him.
As if he were a ghost in a wind of electrons, Curium lifted her hand to him, unfolded her fingers and opened her palm. Under her skin, she was all violet smolder and fission crackle, the energy of her nature straining at the leashes of the body it was bound into. No form she took was ever hers to stay. Steel knew his own structure, its limits and capabilities and loopholes; he knew the angles of Sapphire and the flexibility of Silver and he knew that any of them might be destroyed, but rarely could they be altered past return. In a handful of decades, a century, a millennium, Curium as he had known her would not exist; might return as a semi-stranger or a cordial ally; might have become his enemy like Plutonium in her mantle of murderous blue. No wonder she looked so young, endlessly decaying and synthesizing. No wonder she had recognized the disintegrating alchemy of ghosts. We're all like that, her thoughts said, too wry to be his own. All of us on this side. You're as you're made; we change.
Outside his head, her hand closed and withdrew; he saw a dark girl with her hands in her pockets, her eyes very nearly a human color and the twist to her mouth indistinguishable from human emotion. The way she shrugged was little more than a shoulder and an eyebrow, not actually careless at all.
"But you can trust me."
Steel nodded once and offered his arm, the same gesture he might have given Sapphire even tired to the bone. By the time the last electrons in the beam ricocheted their way through another circuit, there was nothing where the two of them had stood, not even air.
no subject
I don't think I know him at all. Nice face, though.
Although I can effectively still airlift you out of the queue by the same method if you wanted (as long as you send me the same email address, obviously)
Will that confuse AO3? I don't want to wind up jamming my own signal. If not, then that would be convenient for me and get at least one invite out of your hair!
no subject
I don't think so - I was in the queue when I got sent an invite and all it did was get me an account on the spot and take me out of the queue. That was years ago now, but I doubt it's changed (and I can't see what it would do other than to prevent the second, now unwanted, one from being made as the account already exists at that email address) but obviously fair enough if you don't want to risk it! Otherwise just pm me the email and I'll send one off to that address for you.
no subject
Done! Thank you.
On casting Elements
A long time ago I made a post of my Elemental casting, even though some of the pics have since been deleted - it is here, although the short answer for those specific Elements is that Mercury is Saeed Jaffrey, Iron is Martin Jarvis and Emerald (who I hadn't cast at that point) is probably now Judy Geeson. (I realised I was somehow picturing her that way when I wrote that little fic the other week, I'm not sure why!) I do try to cast contemporary actors when I can, because it amuses me - and because I think there is a kind of 70s 'look' sometimes! But some of them are just out of my head, or modern actors, or older ones. (Bronze was not really 'cast' but I think secretly I was always kind of thinking of Rachel Weisz, but I'm not sure.)
Copper is James Maxwell, which you might expect at this point, but actually, it's back-to-front - I listened to the Big Finish audio of Zero, which had this exchange:
Silver: You’ve heard what they’re saying, I presume? About Copper? … That they made him an offer, that he joined them out of his own free will, you’ve heard that rumour, too, haven’t you, Sapphire?
Sapphire: We’ve all had to face that choice.
Silver: No, not Copper. He wouldn’t break the rules, not even bend them. I doubt he has the imagination.
Sapphire: Oh, yes… you led him a merry dance by all accounts.
and I just suddenly had this very clear idea of him and wanted to write fic, and I knew in my head he was modelled on someone who had guested in a Doctor Who serial, but I couldn't remember who or which one. And then a few weeks later, I watched SotT, was impressed by JM and looked him up online and found out he was Copper (he was in the little loved DW serial Underworld, the finest moment of just about nobody except maybe the production team for getting it made with actually no budget left) and that he was reputed to be a ghost. Clearly an Element! I decided to find out more and at this point, you know exactly how that went. :-D (I can see from my entries that it wasn't until about 2015 that I finally stopped picking up new JM things in the hope that he would look suitably Copperish in it for iconing and just watched them for him.)
(I had to look up my entry with that quote for picking up When the Lights Go Out again recently and wound up laughing at myself a lot, because I'd forgotten how much of this JM thing began in a determined quest to find a thing in which he was the right age and didn't wear a moustache. That was a lot of terrible moustaches and beards he thwarted and led me on with...)
So, now it's kind of predictable and embarrassing, but then it was just totally out of left field. (Jackson from Underworld? Okaaaayy, brain, whatever, it works...)
And I am kind of assuming that if you had a 'casting' for Curium you would have said, but I am curious as to if you would have any idea of who you would use, or if she just came straight out of your head?
Re: On casting Elements
Thank you! I agree that Dreamwidth is more suited to conversations than AO3, although it's been done.
(Bronze was not really 'cast' but I think secretly I was always kind of thinking of Rachel Weisz, but I'm not sure.)
I have no trouble thinking of Rachel Weisz as a time traveler. I've seen her in several different period settings and her face always looks right for the period, which is impressive considering some of them are sixteen centuries apart.
And then a few weeks later, I watched SotT, was impressed by JM and looked him up online and found out he was Copper (he was in the little loved DW serial Underworld, the finest moment of just about nobody except maybe the production team for getting it made with actually no budget left) and that he was reputed to be a ghost. Clearly an Element!
Nice! Do you have a particularly Copperish picture of him to point to? The drawing in your post (a) has outdated glasses (b) doesn't actually show.
And I am kind of assuming that if you had a 'casting' for Curium you would have said, but I am curious as to if you would have any idea of who you would use, or if she just came straight out of your head?
She just came straight out of my head! I could look for actresses with the right kind of face, but right now she doesn't look like anyone but herself.
Re: On casting Elements
lol! How very dare you, it's an amazing drawing, all the better for not being visible! When I first posted it, everyone said how much it looked like David Collings! (Me: It's not David Collings! :-( EVeryone else: It's you, obv it must be David Collings.)
I actually never came across a suitably Copper-ish screencap of him while I was looking (curse the Many Moustaches of Mr Maxwell) but I must have one by now, so I should look again sometime. In the meantime, I think this was what I resorted to while the search went on, but it's not ideal:
But clearly this is the most compelling proof that he must be a technician:
(But, yeah, I ought to be able to find a cap now; maybe from Thriller even.)
I have no trouble thinking of Rachel Weisz as a time traveler. I've seen her in several different period settings and her face always looks right for the period, which is impressive considering some of them are sixteen centuries apart.
Then clearly she must be an Element also!
She just came straight out of my head! I could look for actresses with the right kind of face, but right now she doesn't look like anyone but herself.
My assumption was correct! I really like her, btw! I am a little amused actually - my first Element came out of my head and was Cerium. So close! (Actually, I made her up for a fic that I never typed up - I wonder what happened to it and why it wasn't usable? I remember it being about stained glass, which seems like a good S&S idea...)
Re: On casting Elements
Oh, my God, that's wonderful. Please tell me this scene is reenacted somewhere in your Copper fic, with or without glasses. What's it from?
Then clearly she must be an Element also!
It wouldn't surprise me. She should be on the list of immortal celebrities.
My assumption was correct! I really like her, btw!
Thank you! I'm very glad.
(Actually, I made her up for a fic that I never typed up - I wonder what happened to it and why it wasn't usable? I remember it being about stained glass, which seems like a good S&S idea...)
That is a good idea. Maybe it bears revisiting and/or rewriting?
Re: On casting Elements
It's from Otley (1968), which turned out to be a surprisingly good but little-known comedy, and, to my pleasure once it eventually came out in R2 (the gif was made by somebody else from a YT clip), the random barometer is just as random in context as out of it. (It does break my brain a little, as James Maxwell is married to Phyllida Law in it and she looks and sounds exactly like Emma Thompson and I keep failing to compute.)
And no, I haven't ever put it in fic! I really should. It might even cheer
That is a good idea. Maybe it bears revisiting and/or rewriting?
Yes, it might. I've fished out the notebook that contains a page of it, but there's not anything more, and that is less than I remember there being, though. Still, somewhere I do have a mass of printed out wiki pages on Elements and things like that, too - I'll have to have a further root around before I give up. I suspect it was just too much for me at the time. There were a lot of abandoned things in that notebook, many of which I typed up a year or two later.
Re: On casting Elements
I've heard of it! I knew it starrred Tom Courtenay; I had no idea it contained James Maxwell.
And no, I haven't ever put it in fic! I really should. It might even cheer justice_turtle a little too (they have a v old fondness for the random barometer gif).
Yay! It's an extraordinarily charming .gif.
In the meantime I will wait patiently for Cerium and stained glass.
Re: On casting Elements
*nods* He's a red herring! He and Tom Courtenay were in a few things together, as they were friends irl - James Maxwell met Tom Courtenay when he was still at RADA & brought him into his particular group (that wound up founding the Royal Exchange Theatre).
In the meantime I will wait patiently for Cerium and stained glass.
I wouldn't be surprised if the barometer has a better chance of existing sooner!