#svsv

I've missed a few tags lately! Since I'm only working on the one thing atm, I'm putting all the WIP related tags towards this one, so thank you @sassydefendorflower, @scienceoftheidiot, @lynyangell and @griseldabanks!

Here's a short snippet of what I've been doing:

Yay! Yes! Yay! Okay, so I'm realising that a lot of my humour is more situational than 'here's a funny line' :'D So I might have to give some context ...

This is a deleted scene actually, but: Original fic. Lots of POVs, all colliding in the one space.

POV atm is Li Hua, who is Normal but witnessed Superpowers and has been red-string conspiracy about things for just about the whole story.

She's neighbours with Simon, and has just found out he knows the invisible girl (Penny). From the small bits she's pieced together, Li Hua thinks they're hooking up.

And now she's inside the invisible girl's house with Simon, trying to help a semi-aggressive injured guy (Phillip) who has beef with the invisible girl and her friends (John), and also eavesdropping as hard as a person can to try to understand It All.

Penny called out from the counter, where John had just slid something to her. “Simon! Simon, my phone - it’s - oh.” She faded off, staring at a slip of paper. Simon dropped the antiseptic, abandoning Phillip’s arguments and leaving Li Hua with a pile of bandages and creams she couldn’t tell from one another. “That definitely wasn’t there last night,” he asserted as he joined Penny and John at the counter. The benefit of fighting so hard against rolling her eyes was that Li Hua caught the weight of John’s regard as he turned his angled cheekbones on Simon, the attention of someone drawing their own conclusions hidden behind a light smile. Simon had crossed a boundary somewhere. Thin and a few inches shorter than Simon’s average, broad-shouldered build, John would probably lose in a fair fight, but Li Hua wasn’t sure what a fair fight looked like in a universe with magic.

Explaining a joke is the most funny thing in the world (ahaha oh noo), so let me point out the things I find hilarious here:

Simon wanted so much to be a paramedic, is the only one with any first aid knowledge, and he'd still choose to run over and listen to Penny instead of helping Phillip because Phillip is just that annoying

Simon "last night": Li Hua "hookup confirmed" (it was not a hookup)

John locking on to Simon: Li Hua: "uh oh. Simon's hooking up with someone else's girlfriend, and that guy might have dangerous superpowers too." John: ace for people. (non-romantically) horny for superpowers

Thank you! T_T I'm combing through trying to find something, because first of all - favourite character? I think it's Penny, but probably more for storyline and nuance than for anything that can be seen in a snippet, so here's a bit of the dynamic between Simon and Li Hua instead, because they're just Fun for me :D

Imagine the weird neighbour you've lived next to for a while, who you're about to have weird adventures with.

OOh, yes! Lighthouse is an interesting character. He's the only super in the story who wants a special super name, because he wants so bad to turn this superhero thing into something incredible.

In the current iteration of the story, I've FINALLY got the POVs together to talk, and I've had about 7k words of them all just coping being in the same place before I can actually set them on the right track. Lighthouse, with his focus on the whole Being Super thing, is probably the right guy to get things started because he's got a long-term goal that isn't just about his own personal wellbeing or curiosity.

“A cure,” Lighthouse echoed, Damian’s amusement at the thought rattling around in the back of his head. He found it hard to match that casual enthusiasm, with lives at stake, but he took in Phillip’s death-grip on the neatly repacked record. “We want to let you look for it.” Phillip’s mouth twisted. “Very generous of you.” “If there is such thing as a cure, we would be happy to help spread it,” he offered, feeling the looming strength of his promise hinging on a paper-thin ‘if’. “You’re not the only ones,” Phillip said, baring his straight, squared teeth. No fangs, although that wouldn’t stop him from trying to rip one of them apart. “I don’t care what you do with it once I’m done, but you haven’t exactly left me in a good position to find it. My house is a crime-scene, you stole my car-” “Your car,” Li Hua breathed, mouth agape. “-I’ve been sleeping in garden sheds for the past two nights because my landlord is about to rake me over the coals, and I am thirsty.” The glass of a few last melting icecubes on the coffee-table didn’t do justice to the heat that radiated off Phillip’s spittle-flecked chin. Angus’s cloud-based manoeuvrability didn’t feel like enough protection should this become physical. “What do you need?” Lighthouse asked stiffly.

Rules: post the last line that you wrote and tag someone for every word in the line.

Thanks for the tag, @sassydefendorflower! Ahhh! I'm so happy to see the awesome things people are writing!

I'm still working on my original stuff and having a delightful time of it, but sometimes my brain implodes and so instead of posting the last actual bit full of [fix this] parts, here's the last coherent bit of a confrontation between some characters:

“Yeah,” Simon said. “Take the record, and don’t break into my house again. Is that my shirt?”

You tell him, Simon :')

"A good reunion" - oh boy, I hope you mean from a storytelling perspective, because I want to give Penny something great, but WOW is she always in some dire straits and panicking :D Poor thing. She's definitely relieved by someone turning up who can take control of things, though, because being in charge for like fifteen minutes was stressful!

Lighthouse indicated for Angus to follow them in, toeing the edge of the grass with Penny. “A friend with powers, and a stranger with none?” he asked as Angus disappeared inside. Penny shook herself back into responsiveness. “His neighbour,” she choked out. “She wanted to talk with- with Phillip, but he thought it was suspicious so he asked for my help.” “Hm. Damian may have triggered that chain of events. Does your friend know about his powers?” The moon slid behind a cloud, retiring to rest. Penny nodded, wishing she could put herself on its crescent and hammock, the clouds separating her from all of this, too. “And does she know about any of this? She seems fairly mixed up in it.” “Phillip told her … a lot. She’s still putting it together, but there’s no way to avoid her knowing. What do you mean Damian triggered this?” She couldn’t see Lighthouse’s face in the dark, but she could feel the way light moved against him, could feel the twitch of a corner of his mouth. He seemed almost amused, eager, in that way that he often did as they began planning their next big move. If he had a plan, it was more than anything Penny had.

I have plans to try to give her a proper break after this, but I just need to get through the whole point for bringing everyone together, first :D

AHAHAHA, Okay, so I am fighting against my dreams to make Li Hua (18 years old) just adopt Phillip (50? years old). She shouldn't. He's horrible. But also, this is the first draft, so I can write whatever the heck I want now and then tone it down later when I figure out how it really needs to be to make the story work.

There's something about the way they interact, where Phillip is always in some kind of mood, or trying to evoke something, and Li Hua is just Not Having It. But also no one else is willing to go fully conspiracy-brain with her. So she's starting to lean into the role of keeping him personable, which went from cutting the legs out from under his ominous references a handful of chapters ago, all the way to making sure he gets fed and gets his liquids now.

Phillip offered a protest, but he clearly wasn’t thinking about his own welfare or anyone else’s, so Li Hua took matters into her own hands. In only a few moments she bullied him into the chair, and sent a begrudging Simon off to look for the first aid kit she’d noticed in the bathroom cupboard. “What’s your name?” she asked John’s friend, using the same efficient tone as she had with the guy who wouldn’t leave Georgia alone in the first few weeks of the semester. “Angus,” he responded warily. “Are there any ice cubes, Angus?” Angus didn’t move from the doorway, the open-mouthed look of disturbed inattention at home on his face. “Fill a glass with ice cubes. No water,” Li Hua ordered, then put out a hand towards Phillip - “or, you want water this time?” Phillip threw his burnt hand up in tantrum. “No water,” Li Hua confirmed, giving Angus a brief smile and turning away so he’d get the job done.

ASADSHGASFASHASFKAGF OKAY SO

the title is a bit of a misnomer, because I've been expecting each section to finally get to the bit where they TALK, and then I realise things are going too smoothly and someone or other would throw a spanner in the works before then. I strongly suspect I need to write all the problems in order for me to figure out which ones are essential now and which ones (in another draft) can be reconfigured to another time or a less complicated scene. Or maybe this scene will just end up being five chapters long. Hm. Well.

Simon's POV for this section has been a lot of just trying to keep things moving smoothly without putting himself into the middle of it all. There are a few exchanges I really enjoy in this one, but here's the one that is probably best contained. Draft 1.5, so it's still a bit untidy.