#yuletide2024

Report on the HAL 9000 unit aboard the Discovery One

Relationship: HAL 9000/Dave Bowman

Rating: G

3000 words

Summary

The purpose of this report is to analyze key findings among what was recovered from HAL 9000’s memory storage units, to understand the bugs, errors or other issues in the software and make recommendations for further analysis of the case.

I actually posted this elsewhere right after author reveals, but decided to crosspost it here because why not?

So I wrote The Dream Crown of Z'far Tum (Star wars: Doctor Aphra (Comics), Aphra/Sana, Lucky). This fandom is not what I matched on. (If you look at what I've written and who the recip was, what I matched on should be pretty obvious, which is at least partly why I decided to write something else.) But I've also really liked Dr. Aphra since the character was introduced in Darth Vader and I thought it would be fun writing for that this time.

The nature of this particular story was decided early. The request began: "Sometimes I just want a disaster lesbian being a disaster, okay? Give me heists, give me weird and dangerous artifacts" and my brain just stopped right there and decided this year, I was writing a heist of some sort of artifact. (Probably had something to do with the particular media I had been consuming around the time I got the assignment.)

I had the idea of an artifact broken into pieces early and some idea of why that might be the case, but it took awhile before I came up with what the artifact was. The entire first part on the ship was born purely from my pre-existing desire to write a Star Wars fic with a ghost ship. The ship here, of course, isn't a ghost ship because that wouldn't fit canon, but it's still why this part is there.

A lot of the locations in the fic are inspired by other things, though often I didn't realize that until I was actually writing it. I'm terrible at location description, though, so it's probably not too obvious. (When I write, it's often just plot and dialogue and then detail gets added in multiple editing passes. This maybe could have used one more pass. Part of the issue is that I really was imagining the fic as if it were comics, so I was imagining these locations as drawn panels instead of descriptions in words.) I did cut one part of the Z'far Tum description, however, as it would not only have made my inspiration obvious, but probably my identity as well.

Lucky is pretty much solely in this fic because I like him and I love his weird friendship with Aphra. (I don't know if they would say they're friends and it's true they do try to kill each other every so often, but it seems like a friendship to me.) Magna is not because I didn't think this was really her type of thing without a good reason for her to be involved.

I really agonized over whether to call the main character Aphra or Chelli. Her first name is Chelli, of course, but it is used so rarely, even by people she's close to, that in the end I decided not to use it. (I did try to switch to it for the epilogue, but by that point it just felt weirdly out of place to me, so I changed it.)

As far as not writing fight scenes, while some of that is that fight scenes are difficult, a lot of that also goes back to imagining this as a comic. Because while you might think that as someone who has read a lot of comics, I can follow comic fight scenes, the truth is that I really struggle with it and so mostly skip them. If the panels after the fight suggest something important happens, I'll go back and try to figure it out, but mostly skipping them isn't an issue and it's not like the combat is why I read comics. So when I skip right from before the fight to just after with maybe a bit of summary in the fic? Yeah, that's what it's like for me reading comics with combat scenes.

In retrospect, I should have included a description of Inahr Vrinn, but in this version of the final chapter, they don't meet her in person anyway. But I based her appearance on my old Star Wars Galaxies character (who had a different name). I really struggled with the final chapter. I always intended for there to be a rival who had some pieces of the artifact, too, but figuring out what to do with that was harder than I expected. I tried some versions where they had a confrontation, but I never felt those scenes worked. I had a version where it was hidden in the caf maker in Inahr's apartment (and the clue was that she had a caf maker, but went to buy her caf elsewhere every day). And then I ended up with this, which I'm not satisfied with either, but you know, there was a deadline.

The reason Aphra gives up at the end, though, is because at some point I asked myself why she'd keep going and I didn't have an answer, so I figured maybe she wouldn't. The thing is that in the comics, sure, she keeps going no matter what, but there's always an external force making her do that. Her life is usually at stake (and if not her life, something else important to her). I didn't do that, in part because I figured she must pull jobs without being threatened into it sometimes! But then there was no way to make her finish when it got too hard.

Yule was once the name of a Pagan festival but when Christianity became the religion of choice many of its practices were absorbed into Christmas, with which it has become synonymous.

The earliest form of Yule may have in fact have been in celebration of the Old Norse gods particularly Odin, who’s name Jólnir means the Yule one.

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