#ficmeta

Overall Fic Outlining Process:

Whenever I start a fic, I have a base idea and (usually) a list of scenes in my head that I want to happen (which is only a fraction of the final scenes, I'll give examples in Tab 2). Outlining the entire fic (mentally or in writing) is rare. Usually when I do write down an outline for a whole chapter/fic, it's for one of two reasons: 1) I'm trying to figure out the path to get the story/characters where I plan to go, or 2) I need to figure out the arrangement of scenes leading up to a scene I have in my head so I land on the correct POV for it (since I use alternating POV).

If I don't have a need for either of those, I don't outline the chapter, so I don't use outlines for every fic and I might not outline every chapter even within fics where I am using outlines.

For individual scenes, I will outline them as I think of them sometimes, but that's still only half of the time! The other half it stays in my head until I'm writing the final version on the page. I'll talk about this further down.

I do all my written outlining in Scrivener (or my phone to paste into Scrivener later if I'm on the go). I have a single Scrivener project I outline all my fics in. Each fic has a folder and inside it will have stub files for: 1) the title document where I brainstorm (Title = "Patchwork [Soulmarks AU]", 2) the fic notes (separate fic extra posts are nested underneath this file), 3) the backstory (if it's significant enough to have in writing instead of just my head AND separate from the title doc), 4) the overall (chapter-by-chapter) outline (if needed), 5) the timeline (if needed), 6) individual files for any scenes I've done a significant amount of outlining for, 7) a folder for any cut scenes (more on this in the Ellipsus doc!)

I have two stages of outlining:

Outlining/Planning Stage 1) Scattered notes for specific scenes and ideas

Every fic starts here and only expands into full outlining if needed. This is better described as brainstorming, but it does include outlining some scenes. It happens in the title file named after the fic - and in my head.

I start the title file with a rough summary of the fic universe/the base idea for the fic I had.

I throw all my ideas that I want to note down as they occur to me, using whitespace (3-5 blank lines) to separate each idea or chunk of scene outlines. I don't write down everything I've come up with, just things I want to remember.

I arrange the ideas roughly chronologically (it might change).

I delete each idea/outline after I have put it in the fic. Anything unused gets left in the file until I've decided I'm not going to use it. Sometimes I move ideas to other fics if I like them and think they could be applicable.

Examples: Patchwork

I don't have any of these saved anymore for anything I've posted, so here's some rough recreations from memory

Example rough summary:

Catra doesn't have a soulmark and she's fiercely jealous of anyone who could be Adora's soulmate, when glimmer first meets her she's like "who's this angry bitch" because catra is aggressive with her and then catra relaxes as soon as she sees her soulmark and glimmer's like oh the clowns are on parade alright I'll watch this show. Adora's mark is gold. colored soulmarks are really rare so it's supposed to mean she has a really special love with her soulmate. she doesn't understand how catra couldn't be hers but shes jealous of all of catra's girlfriends.

This is recreated to the best of my memory and I'm omitting two big spoiler sentences. I mostly remember the clown thing and (now non-canon) colored soulmarks stuff from my original fic summary.

Example story idea:

oh catra has a heat in this AU and fucks her way through the school during it trying to avoid her feelings

There's usually scene outlines scattered throughout this document, but specific examples of those are shown in Part 2 on Ellipsus. You can see how this file is mostly brainstorming. When I do outline a significant amount for a single scene, I'll give that scene its own stub document.

All my fics start with this kind of planning even when there's barely anything written down. Most of them stay here for the most part (except for adding more scene stubs). Any more in-depth outline is usually just in my head (which I'll cover later). Some fics do get a written chapter-by-chapter outline and move onto stage two, though.

Outlining Stage 2) Written Chapter-by-Chapter Outline

This is where that outline file actually gets used. I'll have chapter headings and write down a general outline for each, using one or both of these components (color-coded for clarity): 1) a rough list of the scenes and POVs with a few words/sentences describing each (purple below), or 2) a few sentence summary of the chapter's narative focus (blue below).

Example 1:

Chapter 8: [catra’s heat coming] [adora something] [brushies] [fuck]*

*this scene actually had its own outline, so I just wrote one word here as a placeholder and knew to switch to that scene's stub document when I reached it. The rest I mostly wrote off the cuff.

Example 2:

Chapter 3: exploring more about soulmates and ways they can blow up relationships with seamista. [catra reflecting on the difference for magicats in the past and going to cuddle adora for comfort] [adora waking up with catra in her arms] [catra hanging out with mermista and showing soulmates who had a bad first meeting and somehow still got together despite other dating people. An active example of soulmates pulling apart two more couples in front of her and shes crashing out about it. Catra asks if she ever would have gotten with sea hawk otherwise and mermista pauses and says yes. Catra is surprised and aodra looks even moreso. Yeah its shocking] [adora pov hanging out with mermista alone, asking why she lied. Mermista scoffs and plays it off but admits she knew catra needed her to say it. Adora feels so bad and thinks catra needs some who can just be there for her, sowing the seeds of their relationship later] [catra overhears]

Yes I'm preserving my typos for all of these.

Most fics that reach Stage 2 use just the first style. As I go through the outlined scenes/chapters, I'll strike out the parts I used and leave the ones I didn't so I know they're still available for use or need to be covered. How thorough the scene descriptions are ranges a lot. I start each scene's description with either the name of the POV character or their initial ("[C: adora has been acting weirdly]").

This is how 99% of my fics that get chapter-by-chapter outlines (which isn't all of them) are done, and usually I'll stop doing it at a certain point in the fic because I don't need to pace things out or am writing entirely off the cuff as I go. Sometimes, however, I'm handling a more complicated story, and I need to tackle it a different way. This where I use a third method:

3) Arc Coordination

I almost never use this style and it's extremely difficult to convey since it's situational, so I'll be brief with it. This is where I have to thoroughly break down ideas. Individual story arcs will get their own file, I'll think through what I need to get where I'm going and approach each problem individually, and then mentally work back and find how they connect.

This is the style I used for In The Great Beyond. I had a file breaking down the Crucible arc, the Primavera arc, etc, and I don't think I even compiled it into one overarching outline, but I knew how they interconnected. I had to break down CotC too, but that was far enough back I only remember I had multiple files for outlining. The focus for this is not scene-by-scene outlining, though, it's for the entire story arc. My understanding is that this is, uh, what people usually consider outlining to actually be? And I almost never use it, lol. I mean I almost never utilize a written outline beyond individual scenes, but this my general outlining process.

Okay, that's it for big overview outlines. Let get to the map in my head and specific scenes!

Going From Mental Outline to Written Fic:

My mental outline for a fic, whether or not I have a written one, consists of a list of scene ideas and a loose order for them. I'm calling each of these scenes waypoints to make describing this easier.

For Patchwork, I think I had like… 4-5 prior to writing Ch1 (in the final fic, these were placed spanning from Ch3 to Ch11). Yeah, there's a reason I always underestimate the length of my fics. The amount of scene ideas I have vary a lot by the fic, but they're usually sparse and more fill in as I write.

As I reach each chapter, I mentally map out a general flow of the things that need to happen to get to the next waypoint on my outline. That might not mean mapping specific scenes, but rather figuring out how much time needs to pass and what character realizations need to happen to get to that waypoint, and then I'll write those one scene at a time.

Waypoints:

Waypoints are scene ideas that I'm working towards. They're ideas I've known I wanted to do for at least a few chapters in advance. A lot of the time, I don't actually write these down. The scene comes to me in a maladaptive daydream and I watch it, like the idea, and either build a fic around it or add it to the existing mental outline (depending what stage it's at).

While plotting/daydreaming, I might come up with multiple waypoints at the same point in a fic that conflict - a scene results in them not talking for weeks in one waypoint, and it results in them getting together in the other. Usually I pick the version that leads to plot progression and character growth lol. It's not unusual for me to picture a waypoint multiple times, each one a bit different, but it's all a refinement process, and a way for me to get dead-end story ideas out of my system by the time I'm actually writing it.

For people who have followed me a loooooong time, you might remember I used to talk about the concept of The Scene™️. The Scene™️ is a waypoint, specifically the most intriguing one(s) to me that made me go, "I want to write that fic", and that kept me excited and motivated as I worked.

I use written chapter-by-chapter outlines to figure out what scene arrangements I need to reach my mental waypoints, so you usually wouldn't even know the waypoint existed from looking at my notes until I'm ironing out its chapter in prepartion for writing it.

While waypoints may not be on the chapter-by-chapter outline until the last minute, sometimes I do have the waypoints outlined (usually just partially) on a scene level, though this will vary a lot (for Patchwork I had only two outlined as an individual scene), and sometimes the outlining I have written down does nothing to convey the waypoint's plot beat because it's just a snippet of its dialogue.

Individual Scene Outlines:

When I outline a scene, 99% of the time I don't outline it start-to-finish. Usually I'm writing a middle chunk of the scene, or just the start of it, and I flesh out the rest of it when I get to actually writing it in the fic.

For scenes I outline ahead of time, they're usually skeleton outlines, just containing the dialogue, a few "action tags", and occasional sentences from the internal monologue (examples later). I write these on my computer and on my phone. I pictured the whole scene in my head, but I know there will be changes by the time I write it, so I don't try to fully write a scene outside of chronological order. I'll do this

Since I don't write ahead, usually fleshed-out outlines only happen for the very next/current scene I'm writing. These are almost exclusively written on my phone when I'm supposed to have stopped writing (usually to sleep) but the ideas wouldn't stop. They might have 20-70% of the text in the written version of the scene before editing.

Regardless of how fleshed out the outline is, it's pretty common for me to keep mentally writing - and thus outlining some on my phone - scenes after I finish writing for the night, and I'll flesh them out into full scenes in the morning.

This line art from "The Heart Pt. 2" was made and posted by Soyun Park, I used color temperature editing to make it match screenshots from the show more (below) and drew over it for my vision lol

This manip spiraled so hard, I intended to 1) block the color of the entire floor, all the walls and decorations on them, and sky as one so it would only be three colors 2) plaster over arches and draw the window/seat, and then 3) I realized I needed to draw the vine pool and that's where it spiraled. That meant some serious coloring, and the little plants around the room looked so weird in monochrome after that, as did the gold touches when I'd drawn the one window and colored the little gold faucet points for the fountain. The hanging crystals on the right also needed to be either covered up or superimposed since the window was running over the middle of them, and then I found myself coloring more and more, and then I was like at this point I need to draw that cabinet since it's difficult to describe and I'm drawing something anyway, and then it was so full I had to do all the little decorations I'd told myself were fine around the room.

Epilogue Life:

I did a little more exposition in the end then I normally do because I had a very clear vision for the rest of their lives lmao, so a lot of this stuff was covered/introduced already, but to expand on it:

Hope’s contamination was severe. There’s not a single organ in her body not missing cells after the teleportation, no matter how microscopic. One of her nails even fell off and needed to be regrown. She has brainfog and migraines for a few years due to the particles she lost in her brain and nervous system. She also can’t really walk for a few years, and has to use the wheelchair on and off after that until she eventually then ends up using braces and canes for the last few years of her treatment. Still, she always says it’s better than the alternative whenever someone comments on how frustrating it must be. She almost certainly lost some cells in the teleportation that weren’t contaminated, but waiting longer to refine the machine could have let the contamination spread instead and not led to a net benefit. It takes time to adjust to her new life, but Global is good at accommodating her disability.

After a year or two, Hope is in good enough shape that Mara doesn’t feel the need to stay home with her every time she calls out of work and she returns to the sheriff’s office full-time (though she does still stay at home with her sometimes). Adora stays sheriff for a while, which Mara says makes sense while her attention is split, and then, much like Catra’s separation, just kind of stays the way things are formally. It has no impact on their actual dynamic given how close they are and when it is brought up, Mara alternatively jokes that she’s getting older and the youth should do it (literally not true, she’s only in her 40s), that this gets her out of the sheriff paperwork, or that she likes having more time to be with Hope since Adora is expected to be the one who sacrifices her evening when only one of them is needed.

Hope and Glimmer’s machine takes many years of testing to work out. In that time, it continually shows promise and it gets continually more annoying for Glimmer to have no security permissions, so eventually she is reinstated even though she is locked out from access to every lab and Section except her own. Bow also does propose.

Scorpia returns to security staff full-time, though she’s always available as a volunteer officer whenever the sheriff’s office needs an extra hand. Perfuma also waits, like, two months after the whole incident to shoot her shot. Well, shoot her shot a second time. Scorpia missed it the first time and Perfuma has to be extremely direct the second. When Perfuma tells Catra that, Catra groans and puts her head in her hands.

After the initial recovery from the incident, the BFS takes a trip up into the mountains to stay at the cabin and also clean it up, burn evidence, etc, something they should have done earlier but they had other priorities, didn’t think it would get discovered organically, were worried about drawing attention, and also didn’t want to confront the trauma (hence them doing it and not Mara or Hope). They end up staying for the weekend and calling it a “vacation”.

Speaking of vacations, Adora does take Catra to Disneyland that winter, and Catra actually gets scared she’s going to propose there which she would hate (she’s also not ready), but it turns out Adora is just being gooey in love and there is no other reason for her behavior. Adora waits until a few weeks after their two-year anniversary to propose, because she thinks Catra might be warily expecting it on their two-year anniversary (again, it’s too basic for her), so she lets it go by and thinks she sees a look of concentration, maybe even perturbedness, on Catra’s face a few times that night when she’s expecting it to come up and doesn’t. She ends up proposing at the stargazing point from Lake Archimedes and Catra is relieved despite how cliche it is. Adora knows she loves cliches when they aren’t basic LOL.

(For Adora’s one-year in Eureka anniversary, they do end up renting the cafe, because how are they going to celebrate her being in Eureka by being anywhere else? For their one-year together, they go on a daytrip a few towns over to see some sights and eat at new restaurants).

Okayyyyyy let’s talk D.O.D. The story to the D.O.D. ends up being that Glimmer and Hope were both feeling unwell after Section Five and thought it was grief and stress. As the weeks went on, it got worse and worse. They were displaying cancer-like symptoms and were worried they were irradiated by Section Five or something so they didn’t think they could go to a non-Global doctor. Glimmer was basically exiled from Global and didn’t want to push her luck there and get arrested again (though if she did it wouldn’t have been a problem if this scenario were real), so she went to her friends for help and Hope isolated in the mountains with her wife, refusing to get help out of survivor’s guilt and instead spending what she thought could be her last days researching a new radical cure for cancer. Glimmer couldn’t find any source for her illness while Hope wasn’t looking. Eventually Bow built a new scanner that was able to pick up the exotic particles and they realized what was happening to their bodies. They called up Hope since she had more science background in this regard and Hope was surprised to hear it wasn’t just her, and realized the solution she had been working towards could apply to this too, and it could work out-of-the-box. The exotic particles should be extremely different and easy to remove, unlike cancer cells she was tearing her hair out trying to target even in theory. Since Glimmer was the old teleportation project lead, she “remembered” a lot about the project and was able to get Hope and Bow the information they needed to build a new machine. It was admitted to the D.O.D. that Glimmer was involved in science/research again in this way, but supposedly she was never given direct access to anything and just provided her own knowledge (and certainly there was no smuggled prototype), so it was let go. The teleporation was a success and they were able to recover with therapies at G.D.

Glimmer:

Okay I wanna talk about Glimmer’s experience throughout this fic because while Catra and Adora are in their domestic era and falling in love, Glimmer is in an entire different sci-fi story confronting things beyond human understanding and I want to talk about it.

During the portal incident, Glimmer kept being shifted between reality and the void as she and Hope tried to coordinate while they were in the right reality to shut the thing down. From that point forward, Glimmer was living across dimensions. She had to travel after being released from custody because she was told she should leave and she needed to settle some of her mother’s affairs elsewhere, but it also let her stay on the move, keep out of sight, and hide the glitching.

Traveling was easy since she was practicing crossing back into her home dimension at different places, so she didn’t exactly need plane tickets (which also helped with not being tracked by the D.O.D.), but when she crossed out, it wasn’t just to the void. It started there, but the more she crossed, the more she pushed beyond the void. She did this from curiosity, the need to gain something from her ordeal, and to search for understanding and knowledge that they didn’t have in her home dimension that could help her. Glimmer literally spends months of this fic teleporting around her home dimension (she went to France!) and exploring alternate realities, all while struggling with “chronic pain” and trying to hide that fact from Bow (more on that in the chapter 7 notes).

Glimmer had glitched to Eureka once or twice while on the run, which is part of why Catra was floored seeing her in Global when she returned, because she knew she could sneak into town via teleportation and she was choosing not to. Of course she was, she had been invited back and she wanted to be home so badly after being alienated from not only Eureka, but her dimension. Once the data was “clean”, she knew she was supposed to leave, but the D.O.D. never showed up at her door, did they? And she was finally experiencing a moment of relief, so she stayed and just followed Catra’s rules for things to stay that way. While Catra and Adora were making out, Glimmer spent her days in alternate dimensions confronting as many pastel realities as bizarro ones, researching, locking herself up in Catra’s house when the glitches were bad, and hanging out with her boyfriend when things were good.

Post-fic, Glimmer had a lot of adjustment to do. There was the lack of tearing pain, and the physical weakness, and the bruising and risk of broken bones, and all the treatments and physical therapy, but psychologically, she went from experiencing infinite realities — ones where humanity was entirely different, or didn’t exist, or was identical but the sea was red, or magic was real — to having to physically wheel herself to every location she wanted to go because she couldn’t teleport anymore. Being trapped on solid ground was a big change. She also lost access to her mom, which might not have really been her mom anymore, but she could at least visit her, and now she was gone for good. There was no recovering her. She really could use a therapist, but she can never talk to one. All she could do was lean on her friends.

There is a sense of loss in no longer having those abilities, but having the pain and physical danger gone is well-worth the trade off, it’s just a massive adjustment. Being part-time at Global is actually a good thing because it gives her more time to slowly adjust to her new (old) life after experiencing something akin to a few lifetimes of experience. She has stories she can’t even figure out how to verbalize to people who have only experienced their dimension. She does try over the years to her friends, though, even if she feels like no one really understands when she speaks on them, because it does help her process them some.

Chapter 1:

⦁ If you don’t know, Eureka’s name is sometimes stylized  with the second e in superscript and on some of the DVDs they throw e² into the word “Season”. That kind of inspired me to do a mathematical formula for the fic name. I looked up a bunch and settled on c² + a² = e² as a play on the Pythagorean theorem. One, because I was having trouble finding a nice, simple, recognizable formula I could bend around new variables, and then partially for the “love triangle” bit (although that ended up being missed since most people didn’t think Catra had an actual ex-wife and it was either a necessity arrangement or Adora from another dimension). The new version of the formula is Catra + Adora = Eureka. They represent Global and the people of the town respectively, which come together to form the heart of the community.

⦁ I got the idea for this fic while rewatching Eureka, obviously, but originally it was really vague and I had this idea for a collection of one-shots around the different SPOP couples and their role in Eureka, and then I started dreaming too big and was like oh but I don’t really write Seamista, etc, what if I tried to get people who do write those couples to do a collaborative series, and then I realized 1) I don’t have time or social energy for that and 2) it’s a fucking niche TV crossover AU, who’s gonna do this but me. And then an actual plot came to me and I liked it so I decided to just do that lol.

⦁ Pink-white light is a feature of both Glimmer’s teleporting and the portal void in the show, so people and objects moving between planes appear to temporarily convert to it in this fic. Adora thought the car appears pink for a moment just because it was red turning white as it turned to light, but it was actually doing both.

⦁ When Adora met Catra for the first time, she wasn’t wearing her wedding ring. Though this wasn’t something she was conscious of, this put a green little “available” flag next to her in her brain, which made it very confusing to Adora when she later met her and she was wearing a ring after she thought that they were vibing. Not that Adora was trying to pursue her at that point, but joking was how she dealt with stress, she was very stressed moving to Mara’s town, and Catra was someone who laughed along and offered a lifeline, even if she was a little judgy about it. Adora had no idea what was going on with Catra’s relationship — to be honest, nobody did — but they would have taken much longer to get anywhere if Catra was wearing the ring in their first encounter because Adora would have immediately filed her as married in her mind and then be confused with the inconsistencies otherwise, rather than assigning her single and being confused by the presence of a ring later.

⦁ Angella had become a surrogate mother figure to Catra, so losing her was really hard. Knowing she still existed in the void was the only thing that lessened the sting, but Catra had serious guilt despite it really, super not being her fault.

⦁ Okay, let’s talk overall Eureka inspo for the people not familiar with it. Plot wise, this fic is based much more off of the portal in She-ra than Eureka. The town is largely 1-to-1 with SPOP character replacements, but the show itself is a “monster of the week” (science hijink, whatever) format, and what overarching plots that exist are usually minor and serve to explode in one episode of plot pay-off, so storywise, there isn’t a lot from Eureka. At one point in the show the head of GD does change  after the last head made a bad call with an experiment and was removed from the position, which is kind of the inverse of what happened with Catra — she couldn’t have known the call was bad and handled it the best way she could have, plus the previous head was gone, so she was just the best fit available at the time. To be honest, her promotion was probationary, but then she handled it very well, and at such a high level, she had more levels of judgment filtering decisions up to her that had a stronger science background than her, so she was actually always better suited to the position than Section head, where she had to make those calls herself. I’ll talk about teleportation and exotic particles further down where they’re relevant, but they do have mention in the show. The only other plot point inspo I used from Eureka was my own take on the lust plot, also covered in its relevant chapter. The overarching stories from Eureka were more secret war bunkers and shady spy groups stealing scientific secrets than gay ass shit LOL.

⦁ Now, for character comparisons/explanations: Sheriff Carter = Adora. In the show, Carter is an older divorced dad who has a completely different backstory than Adora. The similarities are basically that they’re both underqualified on paper, know nothing about science, and often save the day through simplistic thinking, keen observation, and knowing the right people to bring together. Carter worked for the US Marshals before and Adora was just part of the California Highway Patrol (because she’s much younger than Carter and fuck the Marshals). Carter also lives in the “S.A.R.A.H.” bunker, which is Darla’s bunker for Adora. Carter has a will they/won’t they with Allison, the head of GD. They don’t really have any other similarities except for joking around.

Allison Blake/Catra: Allison is very different from Catra, but she is separated from her spouse, which is what led me to think “lol what if Catra was separated in this” and then built out what a reason for that could be. Allison is older, has a kid, and is a researcher herself, so that’s pretty much the only similarity except for their job and being the love interest of the Sheriff. Allison was promoted to head of GD in season 2.

Deputy Lupo/Andy/Scorpia: Jo Lupo is ex-special forces and was the deputy passed over for promotion when Carter came to town, which puts strain between her and Carter at first, especially because she is able to adapt to the science stuff easier because she has been in town longer. She’s a total badass who tries to suppress her feelings and has 0 similarities with Scorpia or the backstory I gave her in this fic. Adam was really in Jo’s position, but then he died, and Scorpia came after. This makes more akin to Deputy Andy, who we don’t talk about, because if he was ever deputy, it potentially would only ever be in an alternate timeline after season three, which doesn’t exist because the show ends at season three and there is no season four or five. If Andy ever was a deputy, though, he wouldn’t have much similarity with Scorpia seeing he’s an android, but they’re both cheerful!

Mechanic Henry/Bow: Henry quit  GD in the same protest backstory Bow has in this fic. The main difference is Henry is a widower and Bow is much younger, getting into science because Lance was in medical research. Bow found working for the D.O.D. alienating, hence leaving to work with mechanics. Engineering was always his favorite anyway, but it’s “lower-brow” and was a terrifying conversation with his fathers even if they were ultimately understanding.

Vincent/Perfuma: Vincent runs the local cafe and that’s pretty much it. Perfuma does that and researches plant growth because. Perfuma. The cafe is named Cafe Diem in the show and it’s the center point of a lot of community moments (and dates).

Angella, Glimmer, Hordak, Entrapta, and Lance have no real equivalent and are just in roles that fit them and the story.

Chapter 2:

⦁ Adora and Catra basically have the same backstory as they always do, except they didn’t have each other for it. Adora’s foster home also wasn’t physically abusive the same way Catra’s was, though that isn’t to say they didn’t cause her physical harm without forcing it on her, such as by shaming her for how she ate when she didn’t contribute enough for it and making her do all the chores in the home, leaving her exhausted, only to get yelled at for falling asleep in class and falling behind in school (possibly bringing them scrutiny). They were primarily verbally abusive. Adora had some angry outbursts over time because of this and was in the middle of property damage to vent after being gone for an entire day — she wasn’t ready for the verbal abuse she was going to go through when she went back and she didn’t think she was going to have dinner with her test grades anyway — when Mara stumbled across her, went to stop her thinking it was just a teen acting out (she wasn’t really intending to arrest her, it wasn’t her job), and when Adora started panicking asking if she was going to take her back, all her warning bells went off. She obviously wasn’t going to press anything except the issue of her home and worked to get Adora moved to another one when she managed to pry the truth out of Adora. From that moment on, she was her mentor even if Adora didn’t realize it for a while. She thought Mara was just calling to check on her because she was a “good cop” who cared about protecting citizens, and she certainly needed protecting.

⦁ When Catra says she’ll kick Glimmer out and make Bow deal with her, she means kicking Glimmer out of the house and making her move in with Bow, something they’ve been avoiding to hide Glimmer’s glitching.

Chapter 3:

⦁ Glimmer was starting to glitch in the lab. She was trying to hold it in, but that wasn’t easy. When Adora went to get the drink, she was able to let it out a little, and she was hoping to just hold it down until she was steady enough to ask for the bathroom and maybe work through more there, but the cafeteria was a better excuse, and one Adora couldn’t insist on following her into for her safety since she would have to be the one to leave. When Catra came down, she found her totally glitching and phasing through realities and tased her to stabilize her. They managed to get it under control by the time Adora was approaching again, and then they leaped for meaningless conversation as Adora opened the door. Catra stayed in case it happened again so it would be easier for her to send Adora away to get them something else they “needed” without protest.

⦁ Catra didn’t “know” about putting the pill between her teeth because she never had anyone to teach her those little things growing up and it hadn’t naturally occurred to her yet. Nasty taste was just a part of having medication to her.

⦁ The possibility of Glimmer being in the middle of a glitch or their under the table research is why Catra and Glimmer didn’t want Adora doing drop-ins.

⦁ If you were around for AMLAIT, you know it was important to me in that fic that Catra's disability wasn't temporary and I explained why at the time, how people can have disabilities and have happy endings without them being "fixed". However, AMLAIT was a different kind of story, when Catra's disability was critical to the plot. Temporary (even long term but temporary) disabilities do exist, and there’s nothing wrong with portraying them as long as they’re handled correctly. I have someone in my family who recovered from paresis in their arms and those stories are important too. Part of making sure there wasn’t a “fixing” narrative in this fic was 1) Catra being past the disability at the time of introduction, so it didn’t seem like she was “healing” in the fic, 2) still having long-term drawbacks that she and her loved ones worked to accommodate like they were just facts of life (the knee issues, the medication, etc), and 3) Glimmer and Hope accepting their own temporary disability status and also finding it accommodated by their loved ones.

Chapter 4:

⦁ Alright this is that one plot from the show. There is a one-off episode that features the Sheriff getting spores or something on him that hyperdrives the libidos of women around him and makes them slowly go absolutely feral trying to get him (like sprinting down the street and trying to break into his car feral) until they come up with a neutralizing agent. This plot was funny — enough, there’s the consent issue of two  women kissing him and how horrifying one of them communicates it was when it’s done — but the mechanics of it were always extremely straight. Why does this effect only women? Why are all women in Eureka seemingly straight? I already had a joke about the gaydar lab and decided to make a plot where a similar mechanic only affecting one gender and sexuality would make “sense” (as much as any of the science on this show makes sense), expanding te gaydar lab as a chekov’s gun. Originally this was supposed to happen right after they got together so Catra’s desk crawling seemed wild but not the kissing until Starla burst in, but as I said in the chapter notes, I thought Catra having a crisis over people knowing she has emotions was funnier. It also acted as a good inciting incident for getting them together. I liked Adora making the carefully plotted calendar from the confidence that incident gave her rather than months of casual flirting building up to actually getting together 100% organically. It’s extremely Adora to have a planner for asking Catra out.

⦁ Bow was 100% right about the existing attachments thing, Starla was having the haze from the moment she saw Adora but it took longer for her brain to urge her to take action because she’s not in love with Adora.

⦁ Don’t knock floor time until you try it (carpet or rug base mandatory, though)

Chapter 5:

⦁ Adora is sitting at the bar despite not drinking because she feels bad taking up an entire table when it’s just her. She is Adora, after all. Gotta have some completely misplaced guilt in there somewhere.

⦁ Originally Chapter 5 and 6 were supposed to be one, but they got too long so the chapter count got bumped.

Chapter 6:

⦁ After Glimmer rescued her, Hope staggered from the building when she caught her blue reflection in one of the windows into the labs, able to to run out in the confusion by ducking her head and hiding behind her headscarf as everyone was distracted running towards Section Five. In the official report, Hope fled the scene immediately afterwards due to trauma and disorientation (not wrong tbh). No Global doctor ever looked at her and Catra forged paperwork to cover it. Catra held her official report interview with Hope and Mara in their home, and recorded it on her phone with an audio log so that if the D.O.D. asked, she could say she was trying to accommodate both procedure and trauma — since they’re already seen what a Global scientist does with trauma — by holding it in a familiar/safe environment and it was only audio because she did it without Hope’s knowledge (Mara knew) and it was easy to record audio with her phone without stressing Hope out further by feeling like she was under scrutiny rather than giving a “normal” witness account.

⦁ Originally there was also supposed to be more explicit “sneaking around” in their relationship. Catra did this for innocent reasons and she thought Adora understood her separation, but obviously it didn’t feel that way to anyone who didn’t know the full truth. This ended up being cut because Catra and Adora’s relationship was explicitly romantic and in that initial outline it was more ambiguous on if there were feelings involved or it was more sexual in nature. As a result, it didn’t make sense for them to be hooking up in Adora’s car and such, even if that was originally in the outline because Catra didn’t want to have sex at Darla. If they were already at Adora’s place for a date, obviously they’re just going to have sex there. The secrecy of these dates still strained at Adora even if she was trying to hide it because she didn’t want to seem like she didn’t trust Catra, though.

⦁ Catra really was scared in the car that Adora was getting ready to break up with her for being too closed off — if not in that moment, then soon when she couldn’t take any more — so when Adora asked that question about her wife, Catra worried just saying “yes” would leave slivers of doubt that caused future issues between them, so she decided she had to take the plunge for the sake of their future.

⦁ The lemons are a reference to that girl from 50 Shades of Gray who embarrassed Ellen Degeneres. She did a home tour video where the company (I think AD?) insisted on staging the space in secret first, and part of that was setting out a giant bowl of lemons on the counter for some reason, so she did some improv with it and just started gushing about how much she loved lemons and kept them everywhere because she needed to see them all the time. I reference that shit all the time because I find a giant bowl of lemons on the counter hilarious.

Chapter 7:

⦁ In the show they just summon that little nook table for Carter’s date after never showing it so he isn’t awkwardly close to Allie and Stark’s date, which I always found funny, so I included the table here.

⦁ The bathroom wasn’t big enough to contain all the lights summoned by Glimmer glitching, which is why Catra was saying there wasn’t enough room for her to hide in there. The spreading holes in reality only happen when she glitches, not when she purposefully jumps. The hope with the taser was to contain the energy and let her purposefully jump out for a bit and then jump back in without Bow seeing her tear apart.

⦁ Bow was aware from the first day that Glimmer was glitching between realities, but had no idea the severity. He was really distressed following the incident — understanding why she made the bad decision because she had just lost her mom, angry because she endangered the entire planet (and killed their friends), terrified what would happen to her legally, and anxious what would happen to her body — and Glimmer wanted to put as little strain on him as possible (partially to keep their relationship from deteriorating and partially from concern for him). It wasn’t the right call to hide it, but she knew Catra would cover for her if she guilt-tripped her, so as far as Bow knew, she chose to jump the void to deal with the  pain that built when she didn’t (she was still being torn between dimensions on an atomic level after all), and sometimes the glitches would come on if she didn’t voluntarily glitch often enough, but the pain — plus the trauma of being torn between realities — was the daily effect while the rogue glitches were less common dangers even if someone seeing her glitching on these uncontrollable occasions was a massive risk until they resolved it. Glimmer and Bow mended the strain to their relationship in the months following the incident, but then she worried about breaking it again when he found out she had hidden it from him, so she asked Catra to continue keeping it a secret. Bow was mad at them both for the lie, but once Adora knew, the situation changed with someone new in the fold (especially someone who needed some help understanding and catching up), and he had worked through that anger some and wanted to waste the time he had with Glimmer even less, so they made up even if there was some strain occasionally for  months afterwards. He was mad with Catra at first, too, but less so since it was Glimmer’s idea and he was very aware of how guilty Catra felt and how easy it was for Glimmer to exploit that to get her to lie for her.

⦁ Lance’s medical trial has moved on to large-scale testing for FDA approval, while Catra has been able to keep a more “personalized” version of the trial since she is at Global and needed a lot of help.

⦁ Catra and Scorpia being married was complicated at GD. When they both were hired, it was in low-level positions in different departments and wasn’t an issue, but once Catra got promoted to section head, they needed an HR meeting to discuss the boundaries with how Catra could interact with the security department. When she got promoted to Head, it was another meeting, this time with actual policy changes put in place. Catra could not have any power over Scorpia’s position, which is to say she was not allowed to approve her raises, promotions, or demotions, they all went directly through Juliet to HR, and she was supposed to follow the general boundary/detachment rules from before so Scorpia didn’t feel like Catra’s position of power was pressuring her. This was far from an issue for them, but they would be basically under the same rules when Scorpia went back to Global since ex-wife is, on paper and in policy, even more likely to be biased against than just “wife”.

⦁ Part of Catra marrying Scorpia was her need to have a family, and Scorpia’s parents were more than ready to take her in. They still invite her for every holiday as her ex-wife and Catra says she’s busy with work for the most part, but for those first few years that was her safe-haven, and getting divorced and potentially losing all that safety and comfort was a terrifying, another part of why she never pushed the legal stuff — she wanted them to hate her as little as possible. She keeps thinking of them as her in-laws for longer than she thinks of Scorpia as her wife.

⦁ Okay so, if you read Medical Power of Attorney, I’m sure Catra mentioning legal next-of-kin here didn’t go unnoticed. I was actually considering that backstory for this fic because of her disability alongside the MPoA idea, but liked MPoA much better for that (I love that fic, it was really fun to write), so this fic’s marriage became a complicated layering of reasons, but ultimately they were in a romantic relationship before getting married, the other stuff is just why they got married so fast.

Chapter 8:

⦁ Catra didn’t like lying to Bow, and after everything with him, knew she couldn’t lie to Adora about the lab. When it just hadn’t come up, that was one thing, but when Adora outright asked what she was doing, she couldn’t say “nothing”. She knew her two options were giving Adora vague details about her research (what she did when Adora saw the printout) or telling her it was a secret that she was working on with Glimmer. The latter was more honest, and if she did the former, there was the risk Adora might mention it to someone else not knowing it was a secret and somehow they would put it together. She didn’t think it was as big of a risk as Glimmer did, but she was still scared, which is why she went on to give Adora as much information as she did and showed her the lab, so Adora could feel like she could trust her and would hopefully do the same.

⦁ Catra legitimately wasn’t trying to lie about the readout — she thought there was no way in hell Adora would have seen it before.

⦁ Exotic particles do appear in Eureka, but it’s to do with time travel and in the seasons that  don’t exist. TLDR: guy time travels, gets some exotic particles stuck in him, objects get pulled between his time and the new time until they neutralize the particles somehow (I truly don’t remember how given this entire season doesn’t exist but I know he’s fine after that). I also have a long-time OC that is a dimension walker whose backstory partially inspired this. That all combined with Glimmer’s glitching at the end of season one of SPOP for the inspiration for this storyline.

Chapter 9:

⦁ When Hope was glitching, she didn’t move beyond the void for the most part. She did see flashes of other worlds, but she didn’t exist in them the same way Glimmer did, so while they still have a shared trauma, the two of them have different bends to them. Hope had a more traumatic experience — physically and psychologically — with how she was split between reality and the void, with the void seeming to claim more and more of her each time. Glimmer had a more alienating experience, moving between multiple worlds and growing an understanding of the cosmos no one else will be able to comprehend, while also going through a lot of physical trauma but with a less looming threat as her condition didn’t seem to be worsening and, in fact, seemed like it might be getting slightly better with time. They are definitely able to offer each other support, but they have their differences and unique experiences regardless of having the same “condition”.

⦁ It doesn’t come up, but they teleported the particles into the mountain cabin, because the membrane was already thin there from all of Hope’s glitching so they hoped the particles would be able to cross back over if they were somehow attuned to their bodies in a lasting way, and they did disappear by the time they made their way up there to clean it up.

⦁ Melog’s special set of toys for when he’s at Adora’s eventually backfires with him demanding to go over there just so he can play with them. Almost like Catra should move in or something.

Original Outline:

It has been KILLING me not to reveal my chapter outline titles since I incepted this AU, so they were as follows:

Intro

Gaydar

Get together

Lust haze incident

Discover wife truth chapter

Dsicover past truth chapter (yes with the typo)

Discover jesus truth chapter

(I don’t know why I started calling Glimmer Jesus in this just because she was the only person in the world with “magic”, but that’s what I called her.)

Okay but the actual story. These were not supposed to be the only story points, they were just the only things I had plotted out from the start. Intro-Get together ended up being 5 chapters instead of 4 (including the lust haze I moved up) because Glimmer and Catra’s disability added another chapter. When I originally wrote this outline, Catra didn’t have a disability. That came to me while I was lying in bed I think while writing chapter one and I was like “where did this come from” but it’s fanfic so I can do whatever I want, so I decided to go for it. Weaver was already intended to be physically abusive, part of what drove her to Scorpia, so this just added an acute incident to the abuse.

There wasn’t really a plan for the end stretch. Adora was supposed to discover Glimmer while she was glitching on accident and I had some stuff outlined for that, but the rest was more murky and I was still playing with Light Hope dying a good halfway into writing the fic. Buuuuuuuuuut now I have to talk about how this fic solved itself because I live for that shit.

The plan from the start of the fic was that Light Hope was working on a solution to stabilize the glitching particles while up in the mountains. I was playing with either 1) when Light Hope dies, they all study what she did and Adora blurts out the dumb solution to stabilizing the particles or 2) Light Hope not dying but the second part happens still and Glimmer gets to safely keep her powers while Light Hope is too far gone and maybe gets caught in the void upon stabilization. The exact specifics of what this solution would be I was just waiting to come to me as I wrote, something I do often because it fucking works.

So in chapter one I mention a bad teleportation project. There was actually a longer mention that talked about how organics don’t survive it which I cut down, and it’s there because teleportation happens once in the show and the old body literally turns to fucking ash, which is weird and not how it would work (not that teleportation would work anyway), so it was kind of a jab at the show, and foreshadowing at Glimmer’s own teleporting later. Catra’s disability, and thus her treatment, I already mentioned came out of nowhere and were their own detached subtplot.

By changing it so they removed the particles instead of stabilizing them, I could make Catra’s subplot the solution to saving their lives, and the Idiot’s Gun (it’s not Chekov if I didn’t plan it lol) of teleportation the tool by which they do it. This all came to me while I was writing chapter 7. For some people that may make the writing “worse” to you but it’s literally my favorite thing when writing, because it never feels like I was flying blind, it feels like the plot was building itself with me and it just took me a while to see it.

Using teleportation to remove the particles does have some similarities to how teleportation is used in the show, but less stupid. In the show, it is used once to teleport someone mentally connected to something in order to sever the connection before it kills them. Somehow. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, it’s supposed to teleport them back to the same spot and instead turns their body to ash and randomly teleports them into the next room with no explanation, and teleportation is kind of a vendetta for me because of how it would never actually teleport you and instead kill you and make a copy elsewhere, so what started as a dig become it’s own thing where instead, it was just the best way to remove something microscopic inside their bodies and they stayed exactly as/where they were.

Upcoming:

Here's the updated floor plan, plus some proper doors. Once again, don't take this scale as exact because I'm terrible at it.