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Title: PPC Mission: Worth Loathing
Authors: Sedri and Trojie
Rating: R
Summary: Agents Sedri and Trojie take on a Wicked badfic involving rape, abuse, more rape, more abuse, bad language, illogic, violence, gore, and a lot of OOCness.
DISCLAIMER: We do not own the Wicked or the world of Oz in any way. The PPC belongs to Jay and Acacia, and the original badfic, "Loathing" belongs to tbka, who can keep it.
Mission: Worth Loathing
It was a fairly ordinary morning in RC#45. Agent Paddlebrains had wandered off to the Nursery to feed and cuddle her twin sons, and Agent Trojanhorse was feeding and grooming her menagerie, managing to only sustain minor scratches in the process. It was while she was in the process of disentangling Apple the mini-Chimera from Edmond the mini-Dragon that there was the sudden thumping noise of someone running up the corridor, and then the door flew open. "TROJIE!" bellowed an agent. "TROJIE, I NEED HELP! NOW!"
Agent Trojie raised her head to see DMS Agent Sedri, brown-haired and stocky, barge straight through the menagerie into her RC. "Sedri? What're you doing here?"
"I've got a mission in the Wickedverse and no partner. I know you've seen the play, and I need someone to hold me back when I get angry. It's got abuse, rape, rape babies, self-mutilation, stupid angst and sneaky OOCness. I can't do it alone! Get UP!"
"You're angrier than usual," muttered Trojie.
"I've got good reason to be. Come on, we need to go!" Sedri paused and looked around. "Where's Pads?"
"With the boys, at the Nursery," said Trojie. "Keep your hair on, woman, I'll give you hand once I've got this bunch fed."
"How long will it take?" snapped Sedri. "I'm supposed to be in there already. Stupid bloody Flowers. I had to threaten the console with a hammer just to make it redirect the specs to your RC."
"Where's Iza?" Trojie asked, putting Madame Pomphrey down as she remembered that Sedri usually had a partner. "Cowering at the thought of bloodshed again?"
"Reassigned. She asked a canon character to help kill our last Sue; the S.O. was furious. And there's no OCs in this one!" added Sedri with a growl, kicking a random piece of furniture. "Just OOCness. Unless someone turns out out to be a replacement, I can't kill ANYTHING.”
"It's okay, love, it's okay," said Trojie soothingly. "I'm done. Let me grab my stuff." She picked up the Bag from where she'd dropped it on the floor after her last mission, and looked at Sedri quizzically. "Do you have a recording of the musical or something? A copy of the book, at the very least? I don't have one."
"I have both," replied Sedri, gesturing to the pack on her shoulder. "Hardback copy of the novel and a burned DVD of the musical. Which is good, because this fic seems to be a mix of the two. Mostly musical events, but Elphaba's allergic to water." She tapped her foot. "Are you ready yet? Let's go."
"I'm ready, I'm ready." Trojie hitched the Bag further up her shoulder and leaned towards the Console. "Do you have the intelligence report?”
“It should be be on your screen by-"
[BEEEEEEP!]
"-now."
Trojie grinned, skimming over the text and nodding as it printed out. "We'll be generic Shiz students, then? Looks like half of this takes place in the women’s dorm anyway," she added, hitting the portal button and standing back. "Come on then, gung-ho girl. After you," she bowed. Sedri stomped through the portal into the Wickedverse. Trojie, after checking that her bell was safely stowed in her pocket, followed suit.
They emerged in a standard version of Galinda and Elphaba's dorm room at Shiz University. Elphaba was sitting on her bed, precariously close to an unnoticed glass of water, which Galinda managed to spill over her via domino effect before the agents had even closed the portal.
"Obvious contrivance," muttered Sedri, grabbing her notepad. "This is going to be a very predictable fic."
"Oh? So what's coming?"
"What else? Elphaba's just been sprayed by the water, which Galinda obviously doesn't know will hurt her – and how can that glass of water shatter when it must have hit the bed on the way down?" she asked rhetorically, then went right on answering Trojie: "So in one way or another, Galinda's going to find out about the allergy. All the chapters so far are one-shots, have you noticed? The author says so herself in the beginning. So this entire 'chapter' will be about the allergy, I'll bet you anything. It's just like all those other Wicked fics." She paused and added, "so far."
"Hmmm," said Trojie, observing Galinda's behaviour towards her burnt roommate. "Given they're still not a hundred percent friends at this stage in the fic, methinks Galinda's being a little touchy-feely."
"Touchy-feely?"
"You didn't happen to notice a femmeslash tag on this fic, did you?"
"No – why? Do you think it's heading that way?"
"It might be worth keeping an eye out for, is all," said Trojie, narrowing her eyes at Galinda's hands wrapped around Elphaba's wrist. "Just in case.”
"If you say so. You're the slash expert," shrugged Sedri. "I'm more concerned with the fact that Galinda is almost in tears, rather than stunned, when she realises what caused those burns. And the fact that Elphaba's completely ungrateful about it."
“I’m amazed at how deep your perception is,” Elphaba said, her voice dripping with harsh sarcasm. “Now, if you don’t mind, I would like for you to let the matter drop.”
Sedri scribbled a charge, muttering, "I thought this was a graphic rapefic. Don't tell me I got all worked up for some mild OOCness..."
"Oh, don't worry," said Trojie airily. "The crying and the general tone of the story... I'd say we're working up for some major angst at the very least. And what better way for an author to set up angst than to use rape?" she added, slightly bitterly. "And the complete lack of realisation that it should be 'bedding' not 'beddings' is starting to get to me."
"The grammar in general is irritating," Sedri added sourly. "It goes on fine for a while and then out of the blue you get 'It was my fault the water was splashed'. And don't get me started on the lack of commas." She grumbled and leaned against a wall, letting her eyes slide out of focus until she could see the Words. "Ugh; more mini-chapters a-coming. Next is a copy of the Ozdust Ballroom scene and a random moment where Glinda decides to be nasty to Elphaba in public anyway. Let's jump ahead."
"How far?"
"Erm... chapter eight, I guess. No, how about chapter nine? Galinda's stupid 'I have a popularity status to uphold!' preaching will be repeated later anyway, or so the report said. Nine is the rape scene – sorry, the FIRST rape scene," growled Sedri. "There are several."
"Oh goody," said Trojie flatly and sarcastically. "That sounds spiffy."
Sedri pulled out a Portal Generator and fiddled with it for a moment. She led Trojie through the standard blue twinkly doorway into... an Author's Note.
Author's Warning: Implied rape. You have been warned.
Sedri spluttered. "Implied? IMPLIED? What would you call 'explicit', then? Let alone 'graphic'."
"So, not-so implied then," said Trojie, stroking the handle of her bell and keeping one eye on the now-growling Sedri while Elphaba stumbled around after having drunk some... coffee?
"No."
"Apparently," said Trojie, tentatively, "she remembers one of the boys who wasn't being nice to her putting something in her coffee. Forgive me, but wouldn't Elphaba have, uh, done something about that?"
"Thrown it in his face, most likely, if this were bookverse-Elphaba, which the author is never clear on." Sedri sighed. "Why is Avaric always the Designated Evil Bastard?" she asked rhetorically.
"Because someone has to be and Boq's too tragically adorable and Fiyero's too pretty?" said Trojie. Sedri barked a laugh. "Ours not to wonder why, ours just to clean up the blood and the semen and try and make sure that none of them remember it," the Bad Slasher added, sighing. She squinted at the rape scene going on before them. "Heavens, she doesn't wear very secure undergarments if he could just pull her bra off through the collar of her dress. Not that I understand why he's doing so, because he doesn't appear to be particularly interested in having a grope," she added as Avaric went for other regions of Elphaba's body.
There was a slight pause.
"Did he just put his whole hand...?" asked Sedri, in a slightly strained voice.
"Yes. Yes, he did."
"But... that hurts. Anything hurts, and a whole hand... there's no room for it... is there?"
"No, there isn't. But since when did rapefics make anatomical sense?"
"You're asking me? You're the bad slasher," replied Sedri, regaining herself. "I usually get sent into lovey-dovy Suefics written by teenagers with no idea what sex is. Most rape scenes I've had to deal with are like unsticking toy dolls; no details. Though there have been some," she amended, eyes closed. "I took Bleeprin for those."
Elphaba began screaming – quite understandably – and both agents winced. "Portal?" asked Trojie.
"Please. Just a hop over the chapter break, I think."
"Sure thing."
They made the requisite hop, landing in Galinda and Elphaba's room as Elphaba stormed through the door to find Fiyero in bed with Galinda.
"What the- Is that canonical?" asked Trojie, peering at the couple with professional interest.
"Not in the bookverse – they weren't even interested in each other," the other agent replied with a shrug, watching blandly as Elphaba screamed and threw Fiyero out, 'yanking him up by the hair'. Sedri added, "In the musicalverse it's still up for debate – no proof either way. Peoples' opinions usually depend on which actors they first saw playing the part; sometimes Glinda actresses play her as crazy, and other times more sensual. Some Fiyeros are complete playboys; others are sweethearts. But personally? I think not. Maybe that's just my romanticised opinion, but I think not. It probably depends on how formal society is; the musicalverse isn't clear. But in any case, this is not canonical."
She gestured to the three canons, who were in complete disarray as Elphaba pushed an apparently-naked Fiyero out the door while shouting, "Learn to keep your fucking dick where it belongs!"
"Strong language from the lady," commented Trojie.
"And she threatens to kill the rapist next," said Sedri. "And then there's angst."
"Oh, joy."
"Indeed. And why does she think Fiyero was in on the attack? He's a good guy – she's supposed to be in love with him."
"Because this looks like one of those fics where the author thinks she knows everything about post-traumatic psychology," soothed Trojie. "It's all stereotyped."
"Bah. Everyone reacts differently, and Elphaba is nothing if not logical." Sedri folded her arms and leaned against the wall to watch the badfic, and sighed.
“Don’t Elphie me! I’m just your roommate, remember? The green-skinned freak! Don’t try to act like my friend just because I’m upset!”
"This is post-Ozdust and post-Popular. You are friends."
The soft click of locks sliding in to place told Galinda that her roommate had effectively locked herself in the bathroom. A few moments later the sound of running water reached Galinda, who had managed to shrug her discarded nightgown back on. The blonde figured that her roommate must be taking a shower to calm herself down.
“Wait,” Galinda said to the empty room. “Elphaba’s allergic to water, isn’t she?”
"Oh... no," moaned Sedri, faster on the uptake than Trojie. "Not suicide. Come off it."
"I'm right with you," said Trojie, stepping smartly up behind the other Agent and Galinda as the latter literally broke through the bathroom door. "...Glod help me. Where do we even start?"
"A CAD scan," said Sedri decisively. "Amazingly, Galinda's almost in character."
Trojie looked pensive. "I ... might have a CAD," she said. "It's been ages since I used it. Here, you hold this." She passed Sedri the end of a ball of string, tied the other end around her waist, and unhitched her Bag from her shoulder.
"No need," said Sedri, waving a Character Analysis Device which she'd taken from her own bag. "Some of us actually use the tech we're given," she added with a teasing grin.
She pointed the gadget at Galinda, who was busy turning the taps off.
[Galinda Ardu- Upland. Human female. Canon. 20.3% OOC. Nice girl.]
"Only twenty?" asked Trojie, surprised. "I can't remember the last time I saw a CAD scan that low."
"Galinda's strangely maternal," shrugged Sedri. "I can see her doing all this. And at least we know now that it's meant to be musicalverse," she added, tapping Galinda's surname on the readout. "It's Elphaba I'm worried about."
Point. Click. Beep.
[Elphaba Thropp. Human female. Canon. 38.5% OOC. Victim.]
"Bugger."
"Yep," said Trojie. "So what, now Elphaba's suffering from whole-body chemical burns?"
"That's about right."
"... shouldn't there be more screaming?"
Instead of 'argh, argh, argh, melting, burning pain', which is what Trojie was expecting from someone allergic to water who'd got into a shower, Elphaba and Galinda were having quite a calm, if angsty, exchange.
“Elphaba…”
“Go away,” the green girl muttered, her voice slightly muffled by her knees.
“I don’t believe you’re in any condition to be alone right now… roommate, friend, or freak.”
"A lot more screaming," answered Sedri, stabbing her notebook with a pencil. "If she could be melted into a puddle by a bucket of water – much of which, the laws of physics tell us, would not have actually hit her – then anything more than a sprinkle would put her in hospital. On the other hand," she added, sounding almost approving, "except for the 'freak' part, this is very much like Galinda. It's almost like these characters are fighting back."
The agents watched in relative silence for a while as Elphaba insisted that, “I… I just needed to… to feel clean,” and then flatly refused to explain what had happened. This Galinda, however, wasn't stupid, so after cutting Elphaba out of her soaked dress (which Sedri insisted would have long since killed the green girl) and rubbing Elphaba's soothing cleansing oil into her burns (which Trojie declared was definitely pre-femslash behaviour), she noticed her roomate's lack of bra and suddenly knew exactly what had happened.
“You… you were… that’s why… they… you were raped!”
"Tactful," declared Sedri.
The scissors echoed loudly in the now silent bathroom as Galinda’s shaking hands dropped them. The blonde girl had no qualms about sex before marriage for herself but she knew what her roommate thought on the matter. After all, Elphaba had never had any qualms about expressing her disgust at Galinda’s sexual endeavors. Especially when the green girl would accidentally walk in on Galinda and her lover, whomever that lover might be at the time.
"No! How dare-!"
Trojie suddenly had her hands full trying to balance her Bag, notebook, the CAD, and a handful of her partner's hair.
"Ow! Trojie!"
"Hey, you're the one who said you'd need to be held back. What was it?"
Sedri jabbed her finger at the passing Words. "I said musicalverse isn't clear on whether Galinda slept with Fiyero, but I refuse to believe she was an outright slut. That is an insult."
"Yeah, from what I remember that sounds a bit ... out of character. CAD again?"
"I don't want it to explode," said Sedri, yanking free and frowning at the Bad Slasher. "I have a good record with this one."
"What interests me," said Trojie, changing the subject as she saw Elphaba begin to cry and then quickly wipe away her own tears, "is that someone 'allergic to water' can cry. Surely the allergy isn't just her skin and her external bits and bobs? Why haven't her lachrymose glands, y'know, inflamed and swollen up? And how can it be any less painful to brush away the tears with her hands than to cry them in the first place?"
"Got me there; I haven't a clue. All I can say is that Elphaba crying is canonical; in the book she tries hard not to, saying they 'burn like fire', but there she's wise enough to wipe them away with her sleeve." She paused for a moment, thinking. "Don't suppose there's any way to do another biology experiment here? I'm still itching to cut open a Twilightverse vampire. Maybe if she ends up a replacement?"
"So very game for that," said Trojie eagerly. "Haven't done a dissection since LxC."
"Well, she's not enough OOC to be a replacement yet, but we'll see."
"Hmmmmm," said Trojie again, peering at Galinda and Elphaba. "I do hope this isn't going where I think it's going."
"Where do you think it's going?"
"Hurt/comfort post-rape femmeslash?"
"... I hope not."
"So do I."
Sedri, who didn't like surprises, looked to the Words again. "It's not," she said, with quite some relief. "Nothing overt, anyway. They're about to get wrapped up in the amount of blood Elphaba has left in the bathtub, and Galinda won't even look at its source, so I think we're safe. The rest is just Galinda crying and being nice and Elphaba being stoic as well as grateful, which is nicely in-character for both of them."
"Time to move on?"
"Please. This is a very long fic; almost one hundred and fifty chapters – though admittedly, most of them are short. Some are just drabbles. And the in-character-ness is going to make it hard to charge either of them for a while. I'd like to sleep tonight."
Trojie skimmed over the report, which included a chapter summary. "The next big thing is her pregnancy in chapter fourteen, but there's a scene in twelve that looks absurdly OOC to me."
Sigh. "Let's go there, then."
The portal deposited Trojie and Sedri in Shiz's cafeteria, and the author had actually taken a moment to describe heavy rain falling on the windows, which was a sound that, for some reason, always soothed the Assassin. "Aaaah..."
"Forget the rain, woman; I see food."
Indeed, real, edible food – so unlike the PPC's usual offerings – was sitting temptingly on every table in the room, and the agents, blending in perfectly with the other students in their blue-and-white uniforms, pushed and shoved their way towards the plates. But, because the Narrative Laws of Comedy had been feeling rather ignored lately, the result was that both agents had their mouths full when Avaric dropped into a seat beside Elphaba, who then 'gasped, shuddered, let out a strangled sob, and jumped up'.
There was a loud crash as her lunch tray hit the floor. "Damn."
"No more food for us," said Trojie sadly, getting up and moving closer to the scene, hand closing on the handle of her bell.
"Why doesn't anyone else seem to care that Avaric is obviously harassing Elphaba?" asked Sedri. "And look at that grammar abuse! No comma! Do you have any spares?"
"Hang on a sec, I might do." Trojie dug through the Bag for a few minutes before bringing out a squeaking bag. "Good thing Pads and I restocked last time we were in the Potterverse."
"Thanks," said Sedri, taking the punctuation and hammering it into place between Words. "Dammit, Avaric wasn't such an idiot that he'd announce having drugged someone in the middle of a crowded room. I mean, neither was he such a bastard that he'd rape Elphaba, but..."
"Boromir Syndrome?" asked Trojie sympathetically.
"Pretty much."
As Avaric pulled her against him, Elphaba froze in uncharacteristic fear, and then a 'high-pitched, squeaky voice shocked everyone' as it commanded, “Leave her alone!”
Galinda marched right up to Avaric, whose hold on the green girl loosened, and after a bit of useless dialogue, slapped him across the face. “Leave Elphie alone you fucking pervert!”
The whole cafeteria, including Elphaba, gasped in unison at the blonde’s incredibly rare use of the swear word. “Galinda, please…” Elphaba’s voice seemed to suggest that she was on the very edge of tears. “Please… don’t do this. I’m not worth it.”
Galinda whirled around.“Of course you’re worth it!” the blonde screamed. “You’re worth it more than anyone else in this whole school!”
This would have all been very nice and good – aside from Elphaba's lack of self-worth – if Galinda hadn't continued her valiant defense of her friend by announcing to the entire room that Elphaba had been raped.
“Raped! And you all laugh about it! You’re all fucking twisted in the head! She’s not the freak, you guys are!”
"... Gah." Sedri thumped her head against the table.
"It gets worse," warned Trojie, touching her shoulder.
“Raped?” Avaric questioned with a small laugh. “Is that what she told you?” After a moment he qualified this by claiming, “She let herself get drugged. And everyone knows what boys want to do when they get a girl drugged.”
"In the holy name of Kurt Cobain," said Trojie angrily, glaring up at the ceiling. "Why not just call it 'suprise secks' and get it over with? You don't think rape is actually a crime. You think it's the fault of the victim, cos clearly they were asking for it, is that it?"
Predictably, no one answered. Sedri merely fumed. "Let's go. I can't stand this. There's nothing but repetition and a few sentimental lines left. Let's get on to something that's actually chargeable. What chapter is the pregnancy realisation?"
"Fourteen, skipping a Happy Friendship scene where Galinda gives her a present. Hang on." Trojie fiddled with the Remote Activator for a moment, and then the agents stepped through into the familiar dormitory bathroom, where Elphaba was staring at a very modern-style pregnancy test. The Words informed them that it was "months" later.
Sedri sighed, rubbing her forehead. "Oz does not have twenty-first century technology. Admittedly, the musical goes higgelty-pigglety with time settings, what with the tuxedos and the microphone and the short skirts, but Fiyero still arrived in a cart, not a car, and you yourself have Elphaba going for a herbal later, not a pill. Be consistent."
Trojie peered at the bump on Elphaba's stomach. "I'm guessing she's at about four or five months – at least, that's what Pads looked like at the time."
"The report says she had twins," reminded Sedri. "I'd peg it at three, maybe just four. Elphaba's not stupid – she wouldn't have been able to deny it any longer than that. The Words are vague."
Galinda waltzed off to shop, and Elphaba threw out the test and its box, the Author making sure to point out that she didn't bother to hide either object.
"That seems mildly out of character," said Trojie quizzically, looking to Sedri for confirmation.
"It is."
They followed Elphaba out of her room, through the university and down to the lower levels of the town, a journey of two hours.
"It didn't take me two hours to cross central Wellington, when I lived there," said Trojie impatiently. "And that's the capital city of New Zealand. Just how bloody big is this place?"
"Shiz? It's not clear, but two hours is definitely too long, unless she was walking at snail's pace." Sedri shrugged. "Feel like shopping, to kill the time?"
Trojie looked around, noting how the Words were making everything – right down to the shops and all their goods – downright gloomy. "What would be worth buying?" she pointed out. "Let's portal on."
They did so, neatly avoiding more angsty narrative about Elphaba's "cruel" allergy as well as the "eighteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds" that it took for Elphaba to make herself walk into ther herbal remedies shop.
The inside was nothing remarkable; Sedri thought it looked oddly like the inside of Ollivander's shop, just lacking the wand-boxes. It didn't take long for the old woman who ran the place to intuit exactly why Elphaba was there, and offer her a choice between having a very painful surgery there and then, or taking pennyroyal.
"Well, I'd take the pennyroyal," said Trojie, eyeing the 'tools' that the crone was displaying. "You DON'T just shove bits of metal up your bits. It's unhygienic and can lead to nasty side effects."
"I'll take your word for it," said Sedri, glaring at the old woman, who was – for some reason – attempting to wheedle the name of the father out of Elphaba.
Elphaba put the bottle into her pocket, after paying for it, and then ran. The agents presumed she was running back to the university, but it wasn’t specified. "So now that she's got the pennyroyal, her energy levels have picked up?" asked Trojie. "It took her two hours to get here ... I wonder how long it'll take her to get home?"
"I'm not particularly worried," said Sedri, waving the portal generator. "We'll meet her back there anyway, however long it takes her." She checked the Words. "All we need to do is witness her drinking the pennyroyal straight – despite having been told not to – and contemplating the apparent innocence of the liquid, because apparently all poisons should smell bad," she snickered. "Right."
Skipping the next three days by portal, Trojie and Sedri stepped back into the dormitory to find Elphaba moaning, sweating, and bleeding heavily onto her sheets, terrifying Galinda. The agents were unfazed, having witnessed or personally spilled a great deal more of the fluid in question in their time, and were far more interested in the dialogue and angsty prose.
Elphaba opened her eyes, which had somehow squeezed shut, and distractedly stared at the ceiling. “Pe… pennyroyal is an… an herbal oil,” she croaked out around her pain-filled sobs. “It in… induces miscarriages.”
A small squeal escaped the blonde’s mouth against her will. “You did what!” Galinda screamed, unable to keep her disgust at Elphaba’s actions from her voice even though she knew that now was hardly the time to be judging the green girl.
"No, it's not," Trojie informed her. "So shut up."
Thankfully, that’s just what Galinda did, and the agents had the unusual pleasure of witnessing a character act truly in character for a while as Galinda filled her 'best friend' role perfectly, gathering towels, changing the sheets, and being otherwise competent.
"I don't know if Galinda would canonically handle this so well – book or musicalverse," mused Sedri, "but it's not impossible. How do you think this would show up on the CAD?" she asked. "Does 'indifferent' register?"
"I honestly don't know, and given my own experiences with CADs, I wouldn't try," said Trojie. "There's a reason I don't usually use one."
"Fair enough."
Birth occured ridiculously fast, to the point where Galinda merely had to suggest to Elphaba that she 'push a little more', and the uncanonical foetus made its appearance.
"This amount of blood really is verging on the ridiculous," said Trojie. "I can't quite see – wait. Oh, for the love of- Spare me!"
What the screaming Elphaba had expelled from her uterus was not an undeveloped three-month-old foetus, but a 'miniature version of a baby boy. So frail and tiny. Looking as breakable as glass. It was just a tad bigger than Galinda's hand'.
"At least it's already dead," said Sedri, looking at the tiny boy. "I'd hate to kill a baby, and the Nursery is already- Oh, come on. Did you see that?" she scowled, scribbling in her notebook. "Galinda just cut the cord with her fingernails."
"‘Perfectly manicured nails', too," noted Trojie, glancing at the Words. "They won't be anymore. Oh, look; here we go again."
Galinda watched as 'blood once again began to pour from her roomate's body with furious force'. Elphaba thrashed and gasped while Galinda tried to stop the bleeding with pressure.
"That would work if this were a skin wound, dearie," Sedri informed the oblivious character, "but those injuries are internal; all you'll do is keep it stuck in her womb." She sighed. "I'm bored. Do you still have the report?"
Trojie handed it over, paper folded so the chapter summary was in front. "We get another ten minutes of this 'gushing' – which, by the way, would kill her – before Galinda runs off to the ‘infirmity’ and refuses to tell the campus nurses why her friend is bleeding to death. Apparently Elphaba keeps screaming the whole time, too, but no one else in the dorm comes to see what's wrong. Then they pull out the other baby, which happens to be alive."
"You're joking."
"No."
"Bugger. We'll have to witness that bit, won't we?" Sedri grumbled.
Thankfully, it didn't take long. The nurses were clinical to the point of being cold, but they did their job, and somehow Galinda kept her friend calm enough to keep from accidentally killing them with her magic. The child was extracted, and it cried.
"What? No – no, not possible," declared Sedri. "Even babies born at six months need help to breathe."
Then the Words decided to compound the problem further:
Galinda could clearly see its body going blue as soon as the nurses cut the umbilical cord.
Thunk. Head, meet wall.
“Her lungs aren’t fully developed,” the nurse holding the fragile baby explained. “She’ll soon suffocate to death. There’s nothing we could do to save her even if you wanted us to.”
Trojie and Sedri looked at each other, pained. For a moment they were quiet. Then: "Charge for inhumane and unprofessional behaviour?" suggested Trojie.
"Please. And we're portalling – now. I can't watch this."
"Seconded, thirded, et cetera, et cetera. Baby-killing illogic is no part of my idea of fun."
They hopped chapters ... only to find that the babies had been buried in shoeboxes. Shoeboxes.
"As if they were hamsters," snarled Sedri, who was having her arm held in an iron grip by Trojie, an old hand at restraining partners. "There had better be a replacement in this fic – or a bit character, or an uncanonical whale, or something else I can kill, or else I won't be responsible for my actions when I get back to HQ."
After Elphaba and Galinda got back to their room, Galinda promptly informed Elphaba that having aborted her babies was "a sin".
"Is that close enough to a replacement for you?" asked Trojie innocently, redoubling her grip on the brown-haired Assassin.
Sedri literally hissed, but did not leap for Galinda's throat. "I don't bloody know. If she was pure musicalverse, probably. The book was steeped in religion, half of it critical, but Galinda's views aren't clear. If this were Nessa or Frex, then no – they're both zealots – but I can't say for certain. Where's that bloody CAD?"
[Galinda Arduenna/Upland. Human female. Canon. 78.6% OOC. Inconsistant.]
"Bah. At least we can charge for lack of continuity; think it fair that if Galinda is carelessly sleeping around out of wedlock, she shouldn't also be a religious fanatic?"
"Certainly."
Trojie squinted at the Words. "All the rest of the chapter is people hogging the blame and forgetting their commas. Portal again? Quite frankly I don't care what awful smutfic the Lace sends me into next as punishment - procedure be damned. Boredom and angst are not in my job description."
"Nor mine."
"We're agreed then," said Trojie, and so they portalled.
After spending about three minutes in chapter twenty, listening to Madame Morrible scream at Galinda for "witholding vital information from the school" and heartlessly informing Elphaba that her father would be told about everything, Sedri and Trojie portalled again, this time actually ending up in a place other than the girls' dormitory: Doctor Dillamond's 'classroom'.
"Shouldn't that be a lecture hall, being a university and all?"
Sedri shrugged, then jumped out of the way as the door 'slammed open'. Frexspar Thropp barged in, followed by Morrible, who was screeching, "Sir, this would be best dealt with in private!"
Being Designated Misogynistic Bastard #2 for this story, Frex did not, of course, listen. In front of all the other "children", he grabbed Elphaba by the wrist and dragged her towards the door, screaming such things as, "She is a twisted human being! A disgrace! She gets no say in her life anymore!"
"Mrph," Sedri moaned. Trojie patted her shoulder.
"Out of character?"
"Yes. Maybe even enough to be a replacement – I'm not sure. He's a religious fanatic, but I can't see him saying... that." She pointed.
Frex laughed. “Raped? Who in their right mind would want to have sex with you, you’re green! A freak! Obviously you witched them somehow.”
Trojie and Sedri growled in unison. "Yes. Because people ask to be raped," said Trojie, quietly and ominously, one hand shooting out to catch Sedri, who appeared to be fumbling for her weapons. "No attacking yet. We don't know how OOC he is."
"Probably enough to break the CAD," said Sedri.
"Hmm. Chance to kill something versus still having a working CAD. Tough choice," said Trojie cheerfully.
Around them, the students were joining in the chorus of “Abortion Is Murder” and condemning poor, traumatised Elphaba, until Frex hit her. Somehow the evidence of physical violence shocked them more than the screeching and Frex declaring he should have killed his daughter at birth.
"Is it in any canonical way that Fiyero might let this happen?" asked Trojie curiously, seeing the canon in question telling Galinda not to interfere.
"No. The entire point of his character arc was to show that he is not immature or careless, even now. He's Prince Bloody Charming, when you get down to it. He let himself be tortured to death for her sake – in both ‘verses! He would NOT do that!"
"...Okay. Sedri, since when do you have a Lust Object?"
The other agent spun around, red-faced and as distracted as Trojie had hoped. "I do not."
"You're defensive, overly protective, and I'm ninety percent sure you were gazing at him a second ago. Classic signs."
More blushing. "I do not have a Lust Object."
"Whatever you say, dear." Trojie grinned, and turned back to the action, where Frex was pinning Elphaba up against the wall and declaring his desire to thrash the living daylights out of her.
Madame Morrible finally chose that moment to step in and ask timidly that he stop abusing his daughter, whereupon Elphaba ran out, and Frex followed her.
As their shouting died away in the distance, Galinda decided to chase the pair, and so, dutifully, Sedri and Trojie followed her – straight into a chapter break and the accompanying distortion. They were thrown straight back into the girls' bedroom, where Elphaba was packing.
"Ow."
"Seconded." Sedri shook her head, seeing the Words dancing across a blank wall, then groaned. "Oh, please."
Elphaba was packing, energetic enough to be quick and angry, but without showing any sign that she might be trying to escape her 'father's' abusive plans. Despite everything she had seen, Galinda was stunned at the notion that Frex might actually hit his daughter.
"She can't be that innocent... can she?" asked Trojie. Sedri was slumped on the floor, face buried in her knees, closely mimicking Elphaba's new pose.
"Don't know. Don't bloody care. I love these characters. Stupid Flowers never assigned me a Wicked fic this bad before." She let out a breath and answered, monotonously, "Possible. She's a spoiled little rich girl. Not enough for a charge, damnit."
The scene changed again a few minutes later, and the agents didn't bother to portal, merely bracing themselves in a doorway. The regretted that choice when a rare Author's note appeared and announced:
Author's Warning: Abuse
Trojie and Sedri looked at each other, both a little too nauseous from the lurch to bother making the usual sarcastic comment.
"No freaking duh," was all Trojie managed, mid-retch, before the Agents were assailed with the sight of Elphaba being beaten to the point of bleeding with Frex's belt.
"Well, we're in yet another classroom," said Sedri once she'd got her stomach under control. "So that was a spatial distortion as well. Explains the nausea."
"So good of the Author to slip that one in for us," grimaced the Bad Slasher. "As if sickening evidence of depravity weren't enough, she has to make us feel physically ill as well?"
"Apparently."
The agents were interrupted in their musing, however, by a mob bursting in and relieving Frex of his assault weapon. He seemed oddly dazed.
"Well, at least the students have come to their senses," muttered Sedri. "And Fiyero's here, being a gentleman and giving her his coat- Do not give me that look, Trojie."
The Bad Slasher looked extremely innocent.
Unfortunately, Fiyero didn't play much of a Prince Charming. He wasn't even mentioned by name for several more paragraphs, during which Nessa was cold and distant towards her sister even before learning about the oh-so-deplorable abortion.
"You know," sighed Sedri, "the most annoying thing about this fic is not that everyone's out of character, but that the author clearly knows enough about their actual characters to exaggerate real traits to the point of OOCness. Nessa is distant from her sister and Frex is a religious fanatic, but not to this extent."
"Shush; you'll get to kill something soon enough. Look, Galinda's being in-character again," said Trojie.
Indeed, the girl was quietly, but firmly, interrupting Nessa's preachy tirade. "Biq," she then said, "please, could you remove Nessa from the room?"
Boq was a little OOC there, having 'long ago given up on correcting the blonde's mispronounciation of his name' while canonically he should have been increasingly upset, but it was tolerable. Elphaba, on the other hand, became worse, and after almost begging her sister to understand, staggered and fainted in Fiyero's arms.
"It's nothing but boredom and minor events for ages," said Sedri. "I think we should just skip to the next major charge."
"Entirely in agreement," said Trojie. "I hate sitting around waiting for things to happen."
Sedri set the RA to deposit them in chapter twenty-eight, ominously titled 'The Confession'.
"This cannot possibly be anything good," said Trojie, following the Assassin through the portal into the library of Shiz University. "No good ever comes of confessions in badfic. The aftermath is always either major bust-ups or really illogical sex."
"Hopefully the former, in this case."
"I dunno, I'm almost wishing we had some biological crimes to tear apart rather than all this bloody angst all the time."
"I just want proof of a replacement," replied Sedri, absently pulling out one of her daggers and flipping it, apparently a soothing habit. "Oh, look – more mischaracterisation."
Fiyero and Galinda had been talking about Fiyero talking to Elphaba, and asked his girlfriend if she was angry.
“Why ever would I be angry?”
Fiyero shrugged. “I talked to another girl, alone, without telling you.”
“I trust both of you.” Galinda turned to face Fiyero. “Should I have reason not to?”
Fiyero’s eyes widened in fear and he shook his head a little too forcefully. “No! I mean… well, no, of course not.”
Trojie snorted. "Very subtle."
The conversation didn't go on very long; after a moment, both canon characters noticed Elphaba outside the window, stumbling, and suddenly Fiyero took off running. The agents, more fit than Galinda, kept up without trouble, and therefore saw him grab another student and punch him.
Predictably, it was Avaric.
“Stay away from her!” Fiyero snapped at the man now on the ground.
"Is Fiyero being a Prince Charming now?" asked Trojie doubtfully.
"Whether he is or not," said Sedri, "the rest of this scene is enough to make it not matter."
Trojie was inclined to agree with the Assassin – Elphaba was drunk, and while Avaric was dealt with fast enough by the simple method of Fiyero literally picking him up and throwing him away, the action quickly dissolved into slurred denials of drunkenness and the dreaded confession:
“I… I thind… thad… I mighd lo… love you.”
"Oh, perfect. As if that wasn't completely cliché."
"We don't charge for clichés, Sedri," her friend reminded her. "At least, it's not a major offense." Sedri snorted.
"No, but that is."
Galinda was, to put it lightly, reacting. Badly.
“Miss Elphaba!” she screeched. “I dare hope you are joking!”
Once it was established that Elphaba, though contrite to the point of tears, was utterly serious, things got worse. "You cannot, no matter what, go around saying you love someone else’s boyfriend! Especially your roommates!”
"Why the hell not? And charge for that missing apostrophe," said Trojie.
"It gets worse."
Elphaba’s head snapped to the side as Galinda’s angry slap took the green girl by complete surprise. “I do all in my power to help you stay here at Shiz!” Galinda screamed in anger. “And this is the thanks I get! I should’ve left you in the hands of your own father!”
"... Right. I think we've seen enough. Any other major charges in this scene?"
"The bit where Galinda tells Elphaba that the rape was 'a while ago' and she should forgive and forget?" said Trojie angrily. "And then insinuates that the abortion was a worse crime than the rape and therefore Elphaba's pain is all her own fault?"
"Done."
"Then I think we can probably move on, yes."
"Thank goodness."
The RA was seeing heavy use this mission – Sedri opened yet another blue glowing doorway and stalked through it with the air of an angry cat. Trojie followed her, keeping a tight, white-knuckled grip on her bell.
"Where are we?"
"Chapter thirty-five, skipping more of Galinda's stupid 'we can't be friends anymore' preaching, another rape from Avaric – though he got his comeuppance when Elphaba's magic burned and shrivelled his... er... equipment-"
Trojie snickered.
"I also didn't see the point in watching a Random Old Professor beat Elphaba with a cane, nor Morrible scolding her for being drunk and raped and then sentencing her to twenty lashes. So now she's gone crying to Fiyero, who's in-character and sympathetically shocked, and we're in his dorm."
It looked like a standard hurt/comfort scene, and Trojie was about to ask why Sedri had chosen to come here after skipping other potential charges when Fiyero pushed up Elphaba's sleeve and asked, "How long? How long have you been hurting yourself for?"
"Oh, hell. How bad is this going to get?"
"Bad."
It took a while, but after a lot more angsty dialogue, in which Fiyero sounded more like a psychiatrist than a canonical love interest, Elphaba said, “My father used to pour water on me.”
"...But... that would have killed her."
"Indeed. Not that this fic even remotely respects that tiny little, insignificant aspect of canon."
“He used… used to… light me on… fire. Then he… would pour… water on me. You know… to put out the flames.”
"Oh, for Pete's sake," said Trojie, turning to Sedri. "Please tell me that it doesn't go on."
"Oh, it does. It really, really does." Sedri waved a hand at the Words.
“...lock me in the cellar ...”
“ ... never fed me ...”
“... used to give me water. I ... think it was ... some kind of ... joke ...”
“... for silly things mostly ... If I did ... didn't wash the ... the clothes fast enough. Or ... make dinner right ...”
“... locked me in the shed ... set it on fire ... I had to ... to jump in the lake to put it out ... Just to spite him...”
The two Agents looked at each other. "Portal," they said, simultaneously.
They emerged in – surprise, surprise – the girls' dormitory. Again. According to the report that Sedri skimmed over, they had missed Dillamond being murdered, as per book canon, Boq playing the Wise Master of Emotion, a highly contrived rescue-from-the-river scene, and Fiyero briefly kissing Elphaba despite having said in no uncertain terms that he wasn't in love with her. Apparently this scene took place a while later, when Fiyero was trying to apologise for that kiss.
“Why is it that no one will even look at me as an equal but every person with a fucking dick just wants to get in to my pants!” Elphaba screamed, her face so close to Fiyero’s that her loud voice made him flinch.
"Can we call that anachronistic dialogue?" asked Trojie.
"Yep."
“You boys are all the same! My father! Avaric! You! All you want is to use me for your own sick pleasure!”
Fiyero’s voice caught in his throat. “Are… are you saying that… that your father?”
"Oh, no. Please no."
"Look at it this way," said Trojie; "at least this means Frex is definitely a replacement character."
Sedri's eyes lit up with that horrible, slightly crazed look all PPC Assasins seem to get when bloodshed is on the horizon. "True!"
"So... how's this for a deal? If you round up the canons for me, I'll make a proper big exorcism circle, with candles and everything, and then I'll exorcise while you kill him. Good?"
"Deal," said Sedri, grinning madly. "But we still have one more scene to get through before we can punishing anyone," she added.
Trojie sighed. "It's always the way. Still, at least it isn't going to involve dubious lube, right?" The Bad Slasher's face was hopeful.
"Definitely not. No sex scenes at all, actually; just a self-abuse scene which the report calls 'disturbing'." She frowned. "I'm not sure why."
They soon found out. Skipping over an illogical scene where Galinda (now "Glinda", obeying canon) suddenly became friends with Elphaba again, the agents stepped into the dorm room of chapter forty-three. Elphaba was alone, 'flipping the green looking glass in-between her long fingers'. She was reminiscing over it, for the author clarified that it was the same magical looking-glass she had been given by Turtle Heart in bookverse canon.
She reminisced some more.
There was lots of reminiscing.
Then she shattered the glass on a table.
By a stroke of luck, or perhaps fate, none of the pieces flew more than an inch or two away from where it had struck the hard word. Elphaba looked at her hand, now empty, and a few pieces had embedded themselves in her skin. It looked odd; the green glass in the green skin. She pulled each piece out, six in total, and dropped them on the vanity.
She felt numb; broken and yet whole all at once. A pain throbbed in her heart, in her mind, but it throbbed so evenly that it was as if it wasn’t even there. She wanted to go outside but the smell of impending rain was in the air. She was trapped, a prisoner, due to her unfortunate water reaction. Her allergy.
Her curse.
"Here comes the angsty-angst-angst..."
To sum things up, Elphaba leaned backwards in a chair until it tipped over, smacked her head, didn't feel anything, and then decided to experiment with her numbness by eating the broken glass.
"WHAT?"
Trojie reached out a calm hand and knotted her fingers tightly in Sedri's hair. "You heard me."
"Trojie – ow – let me go!"
"Not if you're about to interrupt the major canon break. This is the scene that will get us out of here," said the Bad Slasher. "We'll take her to Medical, she'll be fine, I promise, but by Glod we are going to witness this bloody scene so that we can get this over with."
Sedri stopped struggling, as eager as Trojie to get this done, but her expression was one of great outrage.
"Just keep telling yourself you're going to get to kill the Frex replacement," said Trojie in a soothing voice as Elphaba started swallowing piece after piece of glass and warbling on about how it didn't hurt when it should have.
A broken glass was placed on her tongue. She let it sit there, in her mouth, before swallowing it. She flinched as it traced a path down her throat. It didn’t hurt. It should have but it didn’t. Nothing was hurting. Nothing was happy. Nothing felt. Another piece of the green glass was placed on her tongue. It slid down her throat. She flinched, again. Another piece. On the tongue. Down the throat. A flinch.
She didn’t even recognize what she was doing until the glass was gone. She no longer had anything for her hands to entertain themselves with. Brown eyes tore away from the window and looked at Glinda’s vanity. She watched as blood was dripping on to it, pooling in to a small puddle. Her brow furrowed. She didn’t know where the blood was coming from.
Of course, the blood was coming from her mouth, her stomach, and whatever other internal organs had been sliced by the fragments. Running for the bathroom, and closing her eyes 'to enjoy the sense of feeling', Elphaba vomited blood – and lots of it – into the sink, on the counter, and all over the mirror.
"Right," said Sedri clinically. "That's it."
"Whole-heartedly agreed," said Trojie, letting Sedri go. "If you grab the rest of the canons, I'll take Elphaba to Medical.” She quickly grabbed the oozing, dribbling, unresponsive green woman and swung her with practised ease – and also a decent wince – over her shoulder. "Back soon!"
"Careful you don't make it worse," warned Sedri pointlessly, closing the portal behind her. "Right," she said to the empty dorm room; "let's get going."
Ten minutes and six shiny blue portals later, Glinda, Fiyero, Nessarose, Boq, Madame Morrible, and Frex were all slumped across the beds, floor, desk, and chair of the dormitory. It would have been nice to say that Sedri had followed standard procedure and used some spiffy stolen technology to knock out each character before binding and gagging them, but the simple truth was that all six were developing large purple bruises on their temples, courtesy of her brass knuckles. When Trojie returned with a sedated and de-glass-ified Elphaba, she frowned.
"We have stunners, you know, thanks to Joss Whedon's Serenity."
"Star Trek has them too. This is more satisfying."
"Assasin," Troje said with a smile.
"Slasher," replied Sedri with equal fondness. "Need help with your candles?"
"I'll be all right – just move the furniture. I need space." Trojie paused, looking at the tied-up canons, who were all starting to stir. "Is this the real Frex or the replacement?"
"Replacement. Shall I kill him now?" asked Sedri, looking for all the world like an oversized, frizzy brown puppy. "Or do you need to exorcise them first?"
"Nah; go ahead. That way we can neuralyse them all at once."
Sedri dove, grabbing Frex by his collar and hauling him upright. She shook him a little to wake him faster, then when that failed, slapped him. His eyes opened.
"Frexspar Thropp," she announced, "you are charged with extreme OOCness – to whit, being an over-fanatic zealot, blaming your daughter for being the victim of rape, condemning said daughter for aborting her pregnancy, whipping your daughter, setting your daughter impossible tasks and starving and imprisoning her as punishment for failing them, raping your daughter, setting your daughter on fire, pouring WATER on your daughter with full knowledge of her allergy, and being a Designated Evil Bastard. For all this, and for destroying the character of the real Frexspar Thropp – little as we like him, he's not evil – you are condemmed to death. Bye-bye!"
Replacement-Frex was trying to fight, of course, chewing his gag and wriggling, but Sedri cheerfully punched him in the jaw and then, drawing a dagger, stabbed him in the back of the neck. Spine broken, he collapsed, and then proceeded to bleed to death on the floor.
"Messy," said Trojie.
"Thank you."
"That wasn't a... don't worry." Trojie looked around, hands on hips, at the circle of candles she'd created. "That ought to do. Right." She finally drew her bell out of her pocket, looking satisfied as she hefted it. Then: "Hang on. Sedri, who created this canon? Baum? Or... whoever directed the ‘thirty-nine movie – Fleming. Him? Or Maguire? Or whoever wrote the musical?"
"Schwartz and Holzman," said Sedri automatically. "Can you exorcise in the name of all of them?" she asked. "Might be safest. This fic is awfully mixed up."
Trojie shrugged. "Never done it before, but ... all right." She turned back to the stirring canon characters, whacked them with either book or disc, and began ringing her bell as loud as possible. "AVAUNT! In the name of BAUM! In the name of FLEMING! In the name of MAGUIRE! In the name of SCHWARTZ and HOLZMAN, I bid thee AVAUNT! Foul Author-wraith, spirit of evil and angst, I banish thee from these canons and this continuum! I cast thee out! I CAST THEE OUT!"
A veritable fog of Author-wraith swirled out of the groggy canon characters. "This is the true story of Wicked!" it whined before dissolving.
"It bloody well is not," muttered Sedri.
There was silence for a moment then, as the agents paused to enjoy the feeling of canon snapping back into place, but once it was done and the characters around them neuralysed, she frowned. "Trojie? Who exactly do we throw charge lists at?"
Trojie paused, brow raised, and looked at the heavily-abused notebooks she and her friend held. "Er... actually, we don't usually recite charge lists at an exorcism."
"Not even to the wraith?"
"No; you saw how fast it dissolved."
"Hmph. So it's just for the record, then?" Trojie nodded. "Seems like a waste of time. Oh, well; let's get this lot back where they belong and go home."
"Good idea. And- Hey, watch it!"
"What?"
"You can't put Fiyero back in his room with bloody handprints all over his shirt. Or face," she added, grinning. Sedri blushed and wiped her hands on her uniform. "In fact, honestly, Sedri, look at this place." The Bad Slasher indicated the blood all over the floor. "You couldn't have just strangled Frex or something?"
"No," said Sedri simply. "It's really not a problem, Trojie.” At the Raised Eyebrow, she sighed and asked, “Do you ever pay attention to the gadgetry we are supposed to use? Look at this." She rummaged through her bag for a moment and produced a small, dark red towel. "It originated in a Hitchhiker's Guide fic – we call it a Capillary Towel. It absorbs blood like a liquid vaccum cleaner. Look."
She knelt and draped it over the biggest puddle on the carpet, waited a moment, then lifted it up; it left behind a perfectly clean, rectangular patch of carpet. It took a minute or so to mop up the entire mess, but once soaked up, the fluid vanished into a plothole; even Sedri's hands were clean.
"I want one," said Trojie, her eyes sparkling covetously. "I don't suppose it does semen too, does it?"
"I ... have never tried to find out," said Sedri delicately. "Maybe the tech guys can modify a duplicate for you. In any case, you won't find one here. Have you finished untying them? Good; let's open portals and get them home. Don't need them all waking up again now that they're neuralysed."
It didn't take long. The glass-eating chapter had been set in the daytime, but canon had apparently taken one look at its principle characters – who were all asleep or unconscious – and decided it must be night. Keeping quiet enough not to disturb various roommates was tricky, but soon enough everyone was in bed (Fiyero having been tucked in rather more carefully than Sedri's other wards), and after throwing the dead body into the Kellswater, only one last task remained.
"Where's the real Frex?"
Shrug. "In a plothole somewhere. Probably at Colwen Grounds, where he's supposed to be anyway and the rest of them had absolutely no chance of running into him. Come on; let's go."
"How many times have we portalled in this mission?" Trojie asked rhetorically. Sedri shrugged, stepping out into the beautiful Munchkinland manor.
"No idea. Don’t care. Just need to figure out where... aha!"
There was a shimmery bit of air under the desk in Frex's study, which was where they had conveniently been delivered. Sedri stuck her arm in – rather recklessly, in Trojie's opinion, but the danger of this fic was supposed to have passed – and started hauling something out. As soon as a maroon sleeve was visible, Trojie latched on and began to heave, and soon a dazed but very sane-looking Frex was lying on his study floor. "What happened?" he muttered.
"Absolutely nothing," promised Sedri. "Look at the nice flashy thing."
He looked, was neuralysed, and then the agents were gone.
"And where have you been?" a voice asked as Trojie and Sedri stepped back into RC #45. Trojie's partner Pads was sitting in a chair near the Console, one red eyebrow raised high.
"Mission," said Trojie succinctly. "You were out." She disappeared momentarily under a wave of minis and animals, knocked over by her dog and then swarmed by the rest.
Sedri carefully picked her way through the stampede, and ducked to avoid the aerial attack of Elebereth as she headed for the door. "Cheers, Trojie; the help is much appreciated. I know I'm not the best company on a mission."
"Hey, you were partner-less," shrugged Trojie. "That's what friends are for."
"I know some good would come of making you watch Wicked," Sedri replied, tripping and catching herself on a box of lurid-looking pamphlets. "Ping my RC when you two are ready to do that vampire dissection we talked about. Oh, and did the Doc say anything about Elphaba's allergy?"
"Just that he isn't responsible for what authors make possible in canon." Trojie shrugged. "He fixed her up. I think he was mainly relieved he didn't have to go anywhere near her reproductive organs, to be honest. Anyway, cheers, Sedri. It's been ... interesting.”
"That's one way of putting it.”
Nine hours – or maybe months – later, a shiny blue portal sprung silently to life in a generic dormitory in Shiz University. Agent Sedri stepped through, scowling and muttering something like, "...such an idiot... should've learned last time..."
Avaric lay sleeping quietly, looking nothing like the cocky and immature rapist he'd been written to be, and had been left as by the agents who had somehow forgotten about him during their merry murder and exorcisms. He was a difficult character to class as either replacement or OOC, given that his personality was so poorly defined, but as there was another Avaric sleeping in a nearby plothole, it was rather easy to decide the fate of this particular manifestation.
A swish, a stab, a gurgle and a thump later, one very ticked-off agent left the dorm again, hauling a body-bag that left red streaks on the floor behind her.
Her faithful Capillary Towel followed, wiping up the mess.
Authors: Sedri and Trojie
Rating: R
Summary: Agents Sedri and Trojie take on a Wicked badfic involving rape, abuse, more rape, more abuse, bad language, illogic, violence, gore, and a lot of OOCness.
DISCLAIMER: We do not own the Wicked or the world of Oz in any way. The PPC belongs to Jay and Acacia, and the original badfic, "Loathing" belongs to tbka, who can keep it.
It was a fairly ordinary morning in RC#45. Agent Paddlebrains had wandered off to the Nursery to feed and cuddle her twin sons, and Agent Trojanhorse was feeding and grooming her menagerie, managing to only sustain minor scratches in the process. It was while she was in the process of disentangling Apple the mini-Chimera from Edmond the mini-Dragon that there was the sudden thumping noise of someone running up the corridor, and then the door flew open. "TROJIE!" bellowed an agent. "TROJIE, I NEED HELP! NOW!"
Agent Trojie raised her head to see DMS Agent Sedri, brown-haired and stocky, barge straight through the menagerie into her RC. "Sedri? What're you doing here?"
"I've got a mission in the Wickedverse and no partner. I know you've seen the play, and I need someone to hold me back when I get angry. It's got abuse, rape, rape babies, self-mutilation, stupid angst and sneaky OOCness. I can't do it alone! Get UP!"
"You're angrier than usual," muttered Trojie.
"I've got good reason to be. Come on, we need to go!" Sedri paused and looked around. "Where's Pads?"
"With the boys, at the Nursery," said Trojie. "Keep your hair on, woman, I'll give you hand once I've got this bunch fed."
"How long will it take?" snapped Sedri. "I'm supposed to be in there already. Stupid bloody Flowers. I had to threaten the console with a hammer just to make it redirect the specs to your RC."
"Where's Iza?" Trojie asked, putting Madame Pomphrey down as she remembered that Sedri usually had a partner. "Cowering at the thought of bloodshed again?"
"Reassigned. She asked a canon character to help kill our last Sue; the S.O. was furious. And there's no OCs in this one!" added Sedri with a growl, kicking a random piece of furniture. "Just OOCness. Unless someone turns out out to be a replacement, I can't kill ANYTHING.”
"It's okay, love, it's okay," said Trojie soothingly. "I'm done. Let me grab my stuff." She picked up the Bag from where she'd dropped it on the floor after her last mission, and looked at Sedri quizzically. "Do you have a recording of the musical or something? A copy of the book, at the very least? I don't have one."
"I have both," replied Sedri, gesturing to the pack on her shoulder. "Hardback copy of the novel and a burned DVD of the musical. Which is good, because this fic seems to be a mix of the two. Mostly musical events, but Elphaba's allergic to water." She tapped her foot. "Are you ready yet? Let's go."
"I'm ready, I'm ready." Trojie hitched the Bag further up her shoulder and leaned towards the Console. "Do you have the intelligence report?”
“It should be be on your screen by-"
[BEEEEEEP!]
"-now."
Trojie grinned, skimming over the text and nodding as it printed out. "We'll be generic Shiz students, then? Looks like half of this takes place in the women’s dorm anyway," she added, hitting the portal button and standing back. "Come on then, gung-ho girl. After you," she bowed. Sedri stomped through the portal into the Wickedverse. Trojie, after checking that her bell was safely stowed in her pocket, followed suit.
They emerged in a standard version of Galinda and Elphaba's dorm room at Shiz University. Elphaba was sitting on her bed, precariously close to an unnoticed glass of water, which Galinda managed to spill over her via domino effect before the agents had even closed the portal.
"Obvious contrivance," muttered Sedri, grabbing her notepad. "This is going to be a very predictable fic."
"Oh? So what's coming?"
"What else? Elphaba's just been sprayed by the water, which Galinda obviously doesn't know will hurt her – and how can that glass of water shatter when it must have hit the bed on the way down?" she asked rhetorically, then went right on answering Trojie: "So in one way or another, Galinda's going to find out about the allergy. All the chapters so far are one-shots, have you noticed? The author says so herself in the beginning. So this entire 'chapter' will be about the allergy, I'll bet you anything. It's just like all those other Wicked fics." She paused and added, "so far."
"Hmmm," said Trojie, observing Galinda's behaviour towards her burnt roommate. "Given they're still not a hundred percent friends at this stage in the fic, methinks Galinda's being a little touchy-feely."
"Touchy-feely?"
"You didn't happen to notice a femmeslash tag on this fic, did you?"
"No – why? Do you think it's heading that way?"
"It might be worth keeping an eye out for, is all," said Trojie, narrowing her eyes at Galinda's hands wrapped around Elphaba's wrist. "Just in case.”
"If you say so. You're the slash expert," shrugged Sedri. "I'm more concerned with the fact that Galinda is almost in tears, rather than stunned, when she realises what caused those burns. And the fact that Elphaba's completely ungrateful about it."
“I’m amazed at how deep your perception is,” Elphaba said, her voice dripping with harsh sarcasm. “Now, if you don’t mind, I would like for you to let the matter drop.”
Sedri scribbled a charge, muttering, "I thought this was a graphic rapefic. Don't tell me I got all worked up for some mild OOCness..."
"Oh, don't worry," said Trojie airily. "The crying and the general tone of the story... I'd say we're working up for some major angst at the very least. And what better way for an author to set up angst than to use rape?" she added, slightly bitterly. "And the complete lack of realisation that it should be 'bedding' not 'beddings' is starting to get to me."
"The grammar in general is irritating," Sedri added sourly. "It goes on fine for a while and then out of the blue you get 'It was my fault the water was splashed'. And don't get me started on the lack of commas." She grumbled and leaned against a wall, letting her eyes slide out of focus until she could see the Words. "Ugh; more mini-chapters a-coming. Next is a copy of the Ozdust Ballroom scene and a random moment where Glinda decides to be nasty to Elphaba in public anyway. Let's jump ahead."
"How far?"
"Erm... chapter eight, I guess. No, how about chapter nine? Galinda's stupid 'I have a popularity status to uphold!' preaching will be repeated later anyway, or so the report said. Nine is the rape scene – sorry, the FIRST rape scene," growled Sedri. "There are several."
"Oh goody," said Trojie flatly and sarcastically. "That sounds spiffy."
Sedri pulled out a Portal Generator and fiddled with it for a moment. She led Trojie through the standard blue twinkly doorway into... an Author's Note.
Author's Warning: Implied rape. You have been warned.
Sedri spluttered. "Implied? IMPLIED? What would you call 'explicit', then? Let alone 'graphic'."
"So, not-so implied then," said Trojie, stroking the handle of her bell and keeping one eye on the now-growling Sedri while Elphaba stumbled around after having drunk some... coffee?
"No."
"Apparently," said Trojie, tentatively, "she remembers one of the boys who wasn't being nice to her putting something in her coffee. Forgive me, but wouldn't Elphaba have, uh, done something about that?"
"Thrown it in his face, most likely, if this were bookverse-Elphaba, which the author is never clear on." Sedri sighed. "Why is Avaric always the Designated Evil Bastard?" she asked rhetorically.
"Because someone has to be and Boq's too tragically adorable and Fiyero's too pretty?" said Trojie. Sedri barked a laugh. "Ours not to wonder why, ours just to clean up the blood and the semen and try and make sure that none of them remember it," the Bad Slasher added, sighing. She squinted at the rape scene going on before them. "Heavens, she doesn't wear very secure undergarments if he could just pull her bra off through the collar of her dress. Not that I understand why he's doing so, because he doesn't appear to be particularly interested in having a grope," she added as Avaric went for other regions of Elphaba's body.
There was a slight pause.
"Did he just put his whole hand...?" asked Sedri, in a slightly strained voice.
"Yes. Yes, he did."
"But... that hurts. Anything hurts, and a whole hand... there's no room for it... is there?"
"No, there isn't. But since when did rapefics make anatomical sense?"
"You're asking me? You're the bad slasher," replied Sedri, regaining herself. "I usually get sent into lovey-dovy Suefics written by teenagers with no idea what sex is. Most rape scenes I've had to deal with are like unsticking toy dolls; no details. Though there have been some," she amended, eyes closed. "I took Bleeprin for those."
Elphaba began screaming – quite understandably – and both agents winced. "Portal?" asked Trojie.
"Please. Just a hop over the chapter break, I think."
"Sure thing."
They made the requisite hop, landing in Galinda and Elphaba's room as Elphaba stormed through the door to find Fiyero in bed with Galinda.
"What the- Is that canonical?" asked Trojie, peering at the couple with professional interest.
"Not in the bookverse – they weren't even interested in each other," the other agent replied with a shrug, watching blandly as Elphaba screamed and threw Fiyero out, 'yanking him up by the hair'. Sedri added, "In the musicalverse it's still up for debate – no proof either way. Peoples' opinions usually depend on which actors they first saw playing the part; sometimes Glinda actresses play her as crazy, and other times more sensual. Some Fiyeros are complete playboys; others are sweethearts. But personally? I think not. Maybe that's just my romanticised opinion, but I think not. It probably depends on how formal society is; the musicalverse isn't clear. But in any case, this is not canonical."
She gestured to the three canons, who were in complete disarray as Elphaba pushed an apparently-naked Fiyero out the door while shouting, "Learn to keep your fucking dick where it belongs!"
"Strong language from the lady," commented Trojie.
"And she threatens to kill the rapist next," said Sedri. "And then there's angst."
"Oh, joy."
"Indeed. And why does she think Fiyero was in on the attack? He's a good guy – she's supposed to be in love with him."
"Because this looks like one of those fics where the author thinks she knows everything about post-traumatic psychology," soothed Trojie. "It's all stereotyped."
"Bah. Everyone reacts differently, and Elphaba is nothing if not logical." Sedri folded her arms and leaned against the wall to watch the badfic, and sighed.
“Don’t Elphie me! I’m just your roommate, remember? The green-skinned freak! Don’t try to act like my friend just because I’m upset!”
"This is post-Ozdust and post-Popular. You are friends."
The soft click of locks sliding in to place told Galinda that her roommate had effectively locked herself in the bathroom. A few moments later the sound of running water reached Galinda, who had managed to shrug her discarded nightgown back on. The blonde figured that her roommate must be taking a shower to calm herself down.
“Wait,” Galinda said to the empty room. “Elphaba’s allergic to water, isn’t she?”
"Oh... no," moaned Sedri, faster on the uptake than Trojie. "Not suicide. Come off it."
"I'm right with you," said Trojie, stepping smartly up behind the other Agent and Galinda as the latter literally broke through the bathroom door. "...Glod help me. Where do we even start?"
"A CAD scan," said Sedri decisively. "Amazingly, Galinda's almost in character."
Trojie looked pensive. "I ... might have a CAD," she said. "It's been ages since I used it. Here, you hold this." She passed Sedri the end of a ball of string, tied the other end around her waist, and unhitched her Bag from her shoulder.
"No need," said Sedri, waving a Character Analysis Device which she'd taken from her own bag. "Some of us actually use the tech we're given," she added with a teasing grin.
She pointed the gadget at Galinda, who was busy turning the taps off.
[Galinda Ardu- Upland. Human female. Canon. 20.3% OOC. Nice girl.]
"Only twenty?" asked Trojie, surprised. "I can't remember the last time I saw a CAD scan that low."
"Galinda's strangely maternal," shrugged Sedri. "I can see her doing all this. And at least we know now that it's meant to be musicalverse," she added, tapping Galinda's surname on the readout. "It's Elphaba I'm worried about."
Point. Click. Beep.
[Elphaba Thropp. Human female. Canon. 38.5% OOC. Victim.]
"Bugger."
"Yep," said Trojie. "So what, now Elphaba's suffering from whole-body chemical burns?"
"That's about right."
"... shouldn't there be more screaming?"
Instead of 'argh, argh, argh, melting, burning pain', which is what Trojie was expecting from someone allergic to water who'd got into a shower, Elphaba and Galinda were having quite a calm, if angsty, exchange.
“Elphaba…”
“Go away,” the green girl muttered, her voice slightly muffled by her knees.
“I don’t believe you’re in any condition to be alone right now… roommate, friend, or freak.”
"A lot more screaming," answered Sedri, stabbing her notebook with a pencil. "If she could be melted into a puddle by a bucket of water – much of which, the laws of physics tell us, would not have actually hit her – then anything more than a sprinkle would put her in hospital. On the other hand," she added, sounding almost approving, "except for the 'freak' part, this is very much like Galinda. It's almost like these characters are fighting back."
The agents watched in relative silence for a while as Elphaba insisted that, “I… I just needed to… to feel clean,” and then flatly refused to explain what had happened. This Galinda, however, wasn't stupid, so after cutting Elphaba out of her soaked dress (which Sedri insisted would have long since killed the green girl) and rubbing Elphaba's soothing cleansing oil into her burns (which Trojie declared was definitely pre-femslash behaviour), she noticed her roomate's lack of bra and suddenly knew exactly what had happened.
“You… you were… that’s why… they… you were raped!”
"Tactful," declared Sedri.
The scissors echoed loudly in the now silent bathroom as Galinda’s shaking hands dropped them. The blonde girl had no qualms about sex before marriage for herself but she knew what her roommate thought on the matter. After all, Elphaba had never had any qualms about expressing her disgust at Galinda’s sexual endeavors. Especially when the green girl would accidentally walk in on Galinda and her lover, whomever that lover might be at the time.
"No! How dare-!"
Trojie suddenly had her hands full trying to balance her Bag, notebook, the CAD, and a handful of her partner's hair.
"Ow! Trojie!"
"Hey, you're the one who said you'd need to be held back. What was it?"
Sedri jabbed her finger at the passing Words. "I said musicalverse isn't clear on whether Galinda slept with Fiyero, but I refuse to believe she was an outright slut. That is an insult."
"Yeah, from what I remember that sounds a bit ... out of character. CAD again?"
"I don't want it to explode," said Sedri, yanking free and frowning at the Bad Slasher. "I have a good record with this one."
"What interests me," said Trojie, changing the subject as she saw Elphaba begin to cry and then quickly wipe away her own tears, "is that someone 'allergic to water' can cry. Surely the allergy isn't just her skin and her external bits and bobs? Why haven't her lachrymose glands, y'know, inflamed and swollen up? And how can it be any less painful to brush away the tears with her hands than to cry them in the first place?"
"Got me there; I haven't a clue. All I can say is that Elphaba crying is canonical; in the book she tries hard not to, saying they 'burn like fire', but there she's wise enough to wipe them away with her sleeve." She paused for a moment, thinking. "Don't suppose there's any way to do another biology experiment here? I'm still itching to cut open a Twilightverse vampire. Maybe if she ends up a replacement?"
"So very game for that," said Trojie eagerly. "Haven't done a dissection since LxC."
"Well, she's not enough OOC to be a replacement yet, but we'll see."
"Hmmmmm," said Trojie again, peering at Galinda and Elphaba. "I do hope this isn't going where I think it's going."
"Where do you think it's going?"
"Hurt/comfort post-rape femmeslash?"
"... I hope not."
"So do I."
Sedri, who didn't like surprises, looked to the Words again. "It's not," she said, with quite some relief. "Nothing overt, anyway. They're about to get wrapped up in the amount of blood Elphaba has left in the bathtub, and Galinda won't even look at its source, so I think we're safe. The rest is just Galinda crying and being nice and Elphaba being stoic as well as grateful, which is nicely in-character for both of them."
"Time to move on?"
"Please. This is a very long fic; almost one hundred and fifty chapters – though admittedly, most of them are short. Some are just drabbles. And the in-character-ness is going to make it hard to charge either of them for a while. I'd like to sleep tonight."
Trojie skimmed over the report, which included a chapter summary. "The next big thing is her pregnancy in chapter fourteen, but there's a scene in twelve that looks absurdly OOC to me."
Sigh. "Let's go there, then."
The portal deposited Trojie and Sedri in Shiz's cafeteria, and the author had actually taken a moment to describe heavy rain falling on the windows, which was a sound that, for some reason, always soothed the Assassin. "Aaaah..."
"Forget the rain, woman; I see food."
Indeed, real, edible food – so unlike the PPC's usual offerings – was sitting temptingly on every table in the room, and the agents, blending in perfectly with the other students in their blue-and-white uniforms, pushed and shoved their way towards the plates. But, because the Narrative Laws of Comedy had been feeling rather ignored lately, the result was that both agents had their mouths full when Avaric dropped into a seat beside Elphaba, who then 'gasped, shuddered, let out a strangled sob, and jumped up'.
There was a loud crash as her lunch tray hit the floor. "Damn."
"No more food for us," said Trojie sadly, getting up and moving closer to the scene, hand closing on the handle of her bell.
"Why doesn't anyone else seem to care that Avaric is obviously harassing Elphaba?" asked Sedri. "And look at that grammar abuse! No comma! Do you have any spares?"
"Hang on a sec, I might do." Trojie dug through the Bag for a few minutes before bringing out a squeaking bag. "Good thing Pads and I restocked last time we were in the Potterverse."
"Thanks," said Sedri, taking the punctuation and hammering it into place between Words. "Dammit, Avaric wasn't such an idiot that he'd announce having drugged someone in the middle of a crowded room. I mean, neither was he such a bastard that he'd rape Elphaba, but..."
"Boromir Syndrome?" asked Trojie sympathetically.
"Pretty much."
As Avaric pulled her against him, Elphaba froze in uncharacteristic fear, and then a 'high-pitched, squeaky voice shocked everyone' as it commanded, “Leave her alone!”
Galinda marched right up to Avaric, whose hold on the green girl loosened, and after a bit of useless dialogue, slapped him across the face. “Leave Elphie alone you fucking pervert!”
The whole cafeteria, including Elphaba, gasped in unison at the blonde’s incredibly rare use of the swear word. “Galinda, please…” Elphaba’s voice seemed to suggest that she was on the very edge of tears. “Please… don’t do this. I’m not worth it.”
Galinda whirled around.“Of course you’re worth it!” the blonde screamed. “You’re worth it more than anyone else in this whole school!”
This would have all been very nice and good – aside from Elphaba's lack of self-worth – if Galinda hadn't continued her valiant defense of her friend by announcing to the entire room that Elphaba had been raped.
“Raped! And you all laugh about it! You’re all fucking twisted in the head! She’s not the freak, you guys are!”
"... Gah." Sedri thumped her head against the table.
"It gets worse," warned Trojie, touching her shoulder.
“Raped?” Avaric questioned with a small laugh. “Is that what she told you?” After a moment he qualified this by claiming, “She let herself get drugged. And everyone knows what boys want to do when they get a girl drugged.”
"In the holy name of Kurt Cobain," said Trojie angrily, glaring up at the ceiling. "Why not just call it 'suprise secks' and get it over with? You don't think rape is actually a crime. You think it's the fault of the victim, cos clearly they were asking for it, is that it?"
Predictably, no one answered. Sedri merely fumed. "Let's go. I can't stand this. There's nothing but repetition and a few sentimental lines left. Let's get on to something that's actually chargeable. What chapter is the pregnancy realisation?"
"Fourteen, skipping a Happy Friendship scene where Galinda gives her a present. Hang on." Trojie fiddled with the Remote Activator for a moment, and then the agents stepped through into the familiar dormitory bathroom, where Elphaba was staring at a very modern-style pregnancy test. The Words informed them that it was "months" later.
Sedri sighed, rubbing her forehead. "Oz does not have twenty-first century technology. Admittedly, the musical goes higgelty-pigglety with time settings, what with the tuxedos and the microphone and the short skirts, but Fiyero still arrived in a cart, not a car, and you yourself have Elphaba going for a herbal later, not a pill. Be consistent."
Trojie peered at the bump on Elphaba's stomach. "I'm guessing she's at about four or five months – at least, that's what Pads looked like at the time."
"The report says she had twins," reminded Sedri. "I'd peg it at three, maybe just four. Elphaba's not stupid – she wouldn't have been able to deny it any longer than that. The Words are vague."
Galinda waltzed off to shop, and Elphaba threw out the test and its box, the Author making sure to point out that she didn't bother to hide either object.
"That seems mildly out of character," said Trojie quizzically, looking to Sedri for confirmation.
"It is."
They followed Elphaba out of her room, through the university and down to the lower levels of the town, a journey of two hours.
"It didn't take me two hours to cross central Wellington, when I lived there," said Trojie impatiently. "And that's the capital city of New Zealand. Just how bloody big is this place?"
"Shiz? It's not clear, but two hours is definitely too long, unless she was walking at snail's pace." Sedri shrugged. "Feel like shopping, to kill the time?"
Trojie looked around, noting how the Words were making everything – right down to the shops and all their goods – downright gloomy. "What would be worth buying?" she pointed out. "Let's portal on."
They did so, neatly avoiding more angsty narrative about Elphaba's "cruel" allergy as well as the "eighteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds" that it took for Elphaba to make herself walk into ther herbal remedies shop.
The inside was nothing remarkable; Sedri thought it looked oddly like the inside of Ollivander's shop, just lacking the wand-boxes. It didn't take long for the old woman who ran the place to intuit exactly why Elphaba was there, and offer her a choice between having a very painful surgery there and then, or taking pennyroyal.
"Well, I'd take the pennyroyal," said Trojie, eyeing the 'tools' that the crone was displaying. "You DON'T just shove bits of metal up your bits. It's unhygienic and can lead to nasty side effects."
"I'll take your word for it," said Sedri, glaring at the old woman, who was – for some reason – attempting to wheedle the name of the father out of Elphaba.
Elphaba put the bottle into her pocket, after paying for it, and then ran. The agents presumed she was running back to the university, but it wasn’t specified. "So now that she's got the pennyroyal, her energy levels have picked up?" asked Trojie. "It took her two hours to get here ... I wonder how long it'll take her to get home?"
"I'm not particularly worried," said Sedri, waving the portal generator. "We'll meet her back there anyway, however long it takes her." She checked the Words. "All we need to do is witness her drinking the pennyroyal straight – despite having been told not to – and contemplating the apparent innocence of the liquid, because apparently all poisons should smell bad," she snickered. "Right."
Skipping the next three days by portal, Trojie and Sedri stepped back into the dormitory to find Elphaba moaning, sweating, and bleeding heavily onto her sheets, terrifying Galinda. The agents were unfazed, having witnessed or personally spilled a great deal more of the fluid in question in their time, and were far more interested in the dialogue and angsty prose.
Elphaba opened her eyes, which had somehow squeezed shut, and distractedly stared at the ceiling. “Pe… pennyroyal is an… an herbal oil,” she croaked out around her pain-filled sobs. “It in… induces miscarriages.”
A small squeal escaped the blonde’s mouth against her will. “You did what!” Galinda screamed, unable to keep her disgust at Elphaba’s actions from her voice even though she knew that now was hardly the time to be judging the green girl.
"No, it's not," Trojie informed her. "So shut up."
Thankfully, that’s just what Galinda did, and the agents had the unusual pleasure of witnessing a character act truly in character for a while as Galinda filled her 'best friend' role perfectly, gathering towels, changing the sheets, and being otherwise competent.
"I don't know if Galinda would canonically handle this so well – book or musicalverse," mused Sedri, "but it's not impossible. How do you think this would show up on the CAD?" she asked. "Does 'indifferent' register?"
"I honestly don't know, and given my own experiences with CADs, I wouldn't try," said Trojie. "There's a reason I don't usually use one."
"Fair enough."
Birth occured ridiculously fast, to the point where Galinda merely had to suggest to Elphaba that she 'push a little more', and the uncanonical foetus made its appearance.
"This amount of blood really is verging on the ridiculous," said Trojie. "I can't quite see – wait. Oh, for the love of- Spare me!"
What the screaming Elphaba had expelled from her uterus was not an undeveloped three-month-old foetus, but a 'miniature version of a baby boy. So frail and tiny. Looking as breakable as glass. It was just a tad bigger than Galinda's hand'.
"At least it's already dead," said Sedri, looking at the tiny boy. "I'd hate to kill a baby, and the Nursery is already- Oh, come on. Did you see that?" she scowled, scribbling in her notebook. "Galinda just cut the cord with her fingernails."
"‘Perfectly manicured nails', too," noted Trojie, glancing at the Words. "They won't be anymore. Oh, look; here we go again."
Galinda watched as 'blood once again began to pour from her roomate's body with furious force'. Elphaba thrashed and gasped while Galinda tried to stop the bleeding with pressure.
"That would work if this were a skin wound, dearie," Sedri informed the oblivious character, "but those injuries are internal; all you'll do is keep it stuck in her womb." She sighed. "I'm bored. Do you still have the report?"
Trojie handed it over, paper folded so the chapter summary was in front. "We get another ten minutes of this 'gushing' – which, by the way, would kill her – before Galinda runs off to the ‘infirmity’ and refuses to tell the campus nurses why her friend is bleeding to death. Apparently Elphaba keeps screaming the whole time, too, but no one else in the dorm comes to see what's wrong. Then they pull out the other baby, which happens to be alive."
"You're joking."
"No."
"Bugger. We'll have to witness that bit, won't we?" Sedri grumbled.
Thankfully, it didn't take long. The nurses were clinical to the point of being cold, but they did their job, and somehow Galinda kept her friend calm enough to keep from accidentally killing them with her magic. The child was extracted, and it cried.
"What? No – no, not possible," declared Sedri. "Even babies born at six months need help to breathe."
Then the Words decided to compound the problem further:
Galinda could clearly see its body going blue as soon as the nurses cut the umbilical cord.
Thunk. Head, meet wall.
“Her lungs aren’t fully developed,” the nurse holding the fragile baby explained. “She’ll soon suffocate to death. There’s nothing we could do to save her even if you wanted us to.”
Trojie and Sedri looked at each other, pained. For a moment they were quiet. Then: "Charge for inhumane and unprofessional behaviour?" suggested Trojie.
"Please. And we're portalling – now. I can't watch this."
"Seconded, thirded, et cetera, et cetera. Baby-killing illogic is no part of my idea of fun."
They hopped chapters ... only to find that the babies had been buried in shoeboxes. Shoeboxes.
"As if they were hamsters," snarled Sedri, who was having her arm held in an iron grip by Trojie, an old hand at restraining partners. "There had better be a replacement in this fic – or a bit character, or an uncanonical whale, or something else I can kill, or else I won't be responsible for my actions when I get back to HQ."
After Elphaba and Galinda got back to their room, Galinda promptly informed Elphaba that having aborted her babies was "a sin".
"Is that close enough to a replacement for you?" asked Trojie innocently, redoubling her grip on the brown-haired Assassin.
Sedri literally hissed, but did not leap for Galinda's throat. "I don't bloody know. If she was pure musicalverse, probably. The book was steeped in religion, half of it critical, but Galinda's views aren't clear. If this were Nessa or Frex, then no – they're both zealots – but I can't say for certain. Where's that bloody CAD?"
[Galinda Arduenna/Upland. Human female. Canon. 78.6% OOC. Inconsistant.]
"Bah. At least we can charge for lack of continuity; think it fair that if Galinda is carelessly sleeping around out of wedlock, she shouldn't also be a religious fanatic?"
"Certainly."
Trojie squinted at the Words. "All the rest of the chapter is people hogging the blame and forgetting their commas. Portal again? Quite frankly I don't care what awful smutfic the Lace sends me into next as punishment - procedure be damned. Boredom and angst are not in my job description."
"Nor mine."
"We're agreed then," said Trojie, and so they portalled.
After spending about three minutes in chapter twenty, listening to Madame Morrible scream at Galinda for "witholding vital information from the school" and heartlessly informing Elphaba that her father would be told about everything, Sedri and Trojie portalled again, this time actually ending up in a place other than the girls' dormitory: Doctor Dillamond's 'classroom'.
"Shouldn't that be a lecture hall, being a university and all?"
Sedri shrugged, then jumped out of the way as the door 'slammed open'. Frexspar Thropp barged in, followed by Morrible, who was screeching, "Sir, this would be best dealt with in private!"
Being Designated Misogynistic Bastard #2 for this story, Frex did not, of course, listen. In front of all the other "children", he grabbed Elphaba by the wrist and dragged her towards the door, screaming such things as, "She is a twisted human being! A disgrace! She gets no say in her life anymore!"
"Mrph," Sedri moaned. Trojie patted her shoulder.
"Out of character?"
"Yes. Maybe even enough to be a replacement – I'm not sure. He's a religious fanatic, but I can't see him saying... that." She pointed.
Frex laughed. “Raped? Who in their right mind would want to have sex with you, you’re green! A freak! Obviously you witched them somehow.”
Trojie and Sedri growled in unison. "Yes. Because people ask to be raped," said Trojie, quietly and ominously, one hand shooting out to catch Sedri, who appeared to be fumbling for her weapons. "No attacking yet. We don't know how OOC he is."
"Probably enough to break the CAD," said Sedri.
"Hmm. Chance to kill something versus still having a working CAD. Tough choice," said Trojie cheerfully.
Around them, the students were joining in the chorus of “Abortion Is Murder” and condemning poor, traumatised Elphaba, until Frex hit her. Somehow the evidence of physical violence shocked them more than the screeching and Frex declaring he should have killed his daughter at birth.
"Is it in any canonical way that Fiyero might let this happen?" asked Trojie curiously, seeing the canon in question telling Galinda not to interfere.
"No. The entire point of his character arc was to show that he is not immature or careless, even now. He's Prince Bloody Charming, when you get down to it. He let himself be tortured to death for her sake – in both ‘verses! He would NOT do that!"
"...Okay. Sedri, since when do you have a Lust Object?"
The other agent spun around, red-faced and as distracted as Trojie had hoped. "I do not."
"You're defensive, overly protective, and I'm ninety percent sure you were gazing at him a second ago. Classic signs."
More blushing. "I do not have a Lust Object."
"Whatever you say, dear." Trojie grinned, and turned back to the action, where Frex was pinning Elphaba up against the wall and declaring his desire to thrash the living daylights out of her.
Madame Morrible finally chose that moment to step in and ask timidly that he stop abusing his daughter, whereupon Elphaba ran out, and Frex followed her.
As their shouting died away in the distance, Galinda decided to chase the pair, and so, dutifully, Sedri and Trojie followed her – straight into a chapter break and the accompanying distortion. They were thrown straight back into the girls' bedroom, where Elphaba was packing.
"Ow."
"Seconded." Sedri shook her head, seeing the Words dancing across a blank wall, then groaned. "Oh, please."
Elphaba was packing, energetic enough to be quick and angry, but without showing any sign that she might be trying to escape her 'father's' abusive plans. Despite everything she had seen, Galinda was stunned at the notion that Frex might actually hit his daughter.
"She can't be that innocent... can she?" asked Trojie. Sedri was slumped on the floor, face buried in her knees, closely mimicking Elphaba's new pose.
"Don't know. Don't bloody care. I love these characters. Stupid Flowers never assigned me a Wicked fic this bad before." She let out a breath and answered, monotonously, "Possible. She's a spoiled little rich girl. Not enough for a charge, damnit."
The scene changed again a few minutes later, and the agents didn't bother to portal, merely bracing themselves in a doorway. The regretted that choice when a rare Author's note appeared and announced:
Author's Warning: Abuse
Trojie and Sedri looked at each other, both a little too nauseous from the lurch to bother making the usual sarcastic comment.
"No freaking duh," was all Trojie managed, mid-retch, before the Agents were assailed with the sight of Elphaba being beaten to the point of bleeding with Frex's belt.
"Well, we're in yet another classroom," said Sedri once she'd got her stomach under control. "So that was a spatial distortion as well. Explains the nausea."
"So good of the Author to slip that one in for us," grimaced the Bad Slasher. "As if sickening evidence of depravity weren't enough, she has to make us feel physically ill as well?"
"Apparently."
The agents were interrupted in their musing, however, by a mob bursting in and relieving Frex of his assault weapon. He seemed oddly dazed.
"Well, at least the students have come to their senses," muttered Sedri. "And Fiyero's here, being a gentleman and giving her his coat- Do not give me that look, Trojie."
The Bad Slasher looked extremely innocent.
Unfortunately, Fiyero didn't play much of a Prince Charming. He wasn't even mentioned by name for several more paragraphs, during which Nessa was cold and distant towards her sister even before learning about the oh-so-deplorable abortion.
"You know," sighed Sedri, "the most annoying thing about this fic is not that everyone's out of character, but that the author clearly knows enough about their actual characters to exaggerate real traits to the point of OOCness. Nessa is distant from her sister and Frex is a religious fanatic, but not to this extent."
"Shush; you'll get to kill something soon enough. Look, Galinda's being in-character again," said Trojie.
Indeed, the girl was quietly, but firmly, interrupting Nessa's preachy tirade. "Biq," she then said, "please, could you remove Nessa from the room?"
Boq was a little OOC there, having 'long ago given up on correcting the blonde's mispronounciation of his name' while canonically he should have been increasingly upset, but it was tolerable. Elphaba, on the other hand, became worse, and after almost begging her sister to understand, staggered and fainted in Fiyero's arms.
"It's nothing but boredom and minor events for ages," said Sedri. "I think we should just skip to the next major charge."
"Entirely in agreement," said Trojie. "I hate sitting around waiting for things to happen."
Sedri set the RA to deposit them in chapter twenty-eight, ominously titled 'The Confession'.
"This cannot possibly be anything good," said Trojie, following the Assassin through the portal into the library of Shiz University. "No good ever comes of confessions in badfic. The aftermath is always either major bust-ups or really illogical sex."
"Hopefully the former, in this case."
"I dunno, I'm almost wishing we had some biological crimes to tear apart rather than all this bloody angst all the time."
"I just want proof of a replacement," replied Sedri, absently pulling out one of her daggers and flipping it, apparently a soothing habit. "Oh, look – more mischaracterisation."
Fiyero and Galinda had been talking about Fiyero talking to Elphaba, and asked his girlfriend if she was angry.
“Why ever would I be angry?”
Fiyero shrugged. “I talked to another girl, alone, without telling you.”
“I trust both of you.” Galinda turned to face Fiyero. “Should I have reason not to?”
Fiyero’s eyes widened in fear and he shook his head a little too forcefully. “No! I mean… well, no, of course not.”
Trojie snorted. "Very subtle."
The conversation didn't go on very long; after a moment, both canon characters noticed Elphaba outside the window, stumbling, and suddenly Fiyero took off running. The agents, more fit than Galinda, kept up without trouble, and therefore saw him grab another student and punch him.
Predictably, it was Avaric.
“Stay away from her!” Fiyero snapped at the man now on the ground.
"Is Fiyero being a Prince Charming now?" asked Trojie doubtfully.
"Whether he is or not," said Sedri, "the rest of this scene is enough to make it not matter."
Trojie was inclined to agree with the Assassin – Elphaba was drunk, and while Avaric was dealt with fast enough by the simple method of Fiyero literally picking him up and throwing him away, the action quickly dissolved into slurred denials of drunkenness and the dreaded confession:
“I… I thind… thad… I mighd lo… love you.”
"Oh, perfect. As if that wasn't completely cliché."
"We don't charge for clichés, Sedri," her friend reminded her. "At least, it's not a major offense." Sedri snorted.
"No, but that is."
Galinda was, to put it lightly, reacting. Badly.
“Miss Elphaba!” she screeched. “I dare hope you are joking!”
Once it was established that Elphaba, though contrite to the point of tears, was utterly serious, things got worse. "You cannot, no matter what, go around saying you love someone else’s boyfriend! Especially your roommates!”
"Why the hell not? And charge for that missing apostrophe," said Trojie.
"It gets worse."
Elphaba’s head snapped to the side as Galinda’s angry slap took the green girl by complete surprise. “I do all in my power to help you stay here at Shiz!” Galinda screamed in anger. “And this is the thanks I get! I should’ve left you in the hands of your own father!”
"... Right. I think we've seen enough. Any other major charges in this scene?"
"The bit where Galinda tells Elphaba that the rape was 'a while ago' and she should forgive and forget?" said Trojie angrily. "And then insinuates that the abortion was a worse crime than the rape and therefore Elphaba's pain is all her own fault?"
"Done."
"Then I think we can probably move on, yes."
"Thank goodness."
The RA was seeing heavy use this mission – Sedri opened yet another blue glowing doorway and stalked through it with the air of an angry cat. Trojie followed her, keeping a tight, white-knuckled grip on her bell.
"Where are we?"
"Chapter thirty-five, skipping more of Galinda's stupid 'we can't be friends anymore' preaching, another rape from Avaric – though he got his comeuppance when Elphaba's magic burned and shrivelled his... er... equipment-"
Trojie snickered.
"I also didn't see the point in watching a Random Old Professor beat Elphaba with a cane, nor Morrible scolding her for being drunk and raped and then sentencing her to twenty lashes. So now she's gone crying to Fiyero, who's in-character and sympathetically shocked, and we're in his dorm."
It looked like a standard hurt/comfort scene, and Trojie was about to ask why Sedri had chosen to come here after skipping other potential charges when Fiyero pushed up Elphaba's sleeve and asked, "How long? How long have you been hurting yourself for?"
"Oh, hell. How bad is this going to get?"
"Bad."
It took a while, but after a lot more angsty dialogue, in which Fiyero sounded more like a psychiatrist than a canonical love interest, Elphaba said, “My father used to pour water on me.”
"...But... that would have killed her."
"Indeed. Not that this fic even remotely respects that tiny little, insignificant aspect of canon."
“He used… used to… light me on… fire. Then he… would pour… water on me. You know… to put out the flames.”
"Oh, for Pete's sake," said Trojie, turning to Sedri. "Please tell me that it doesn't go on."
"Oh, it does. It really, really does." Sedri waved a hand at the Words.
“...lock me in the cellar ...”
“ ... never fed me ...”
“... used to give me water. I ... think it was ... some kind of ... joke ...”
“... for silly things mostly ... If I did ... didn't wash the ... the clothes fast enough. Or ... make dinner right ...”
“... locked me in the shed ... set it on fire ... I had to ... to jump in the lake to put it out ... Just to spite him...”
The two Agents looked at each other. "Portal," they said, simultaneously.
They emerged in – surprise, surprise – the girls' dormitory. Again. According to the report that Sedri skimmed over, they had missed Dillamond being murdered, as per book canon, Boq playing the Wise Master of Emotion, a highly contrived rescue-from-the-river scene, and Fiyero briefly kissing Elphaba despite having said in no uncertain terms that he wasn't in love with her. Apparently this scene took place a while later, when Fiyero was trying to apologise for that kiss.
“Why is it that no one will even look at me as an equal but every person with a fucking dick just wants to get in to my pants!” Elphaba screamed, her face so close to Fiyero’s that her loud voice made him flinch.
"Can we call that anachronistic dialogue?" asked Trojie.
"Yep."
“You boys are all the same! My father! Avaric! You! All you want is to use me for your own sick pleasure!”
Fiyero’s voice caught in his throat. “Are… are you saying that… that your father?”
"Oh, no. Please no."
"Look at it this way," said Trojie; "at least this means Frex is definitely a replacement character."
Sedri's eyes lit up with that horrible, slightly crazed look all PPC Assasins seem to get when bloodshed is on the horizon. "True!"
"So... how's this for a deal? If you round up the canons for me, I'll make a proper big exorcism circle, with candles and everything, and then I'll exorcise while you kill him. Good?"
"Deal," said Sedri, grinning madly. "But we still have one more scene to get through before we can punishing anyone," she added.
Trojie sighed. "It's always the way. Still, at least it isn't going to involve dubious lube, right?" The Bad Slasher's face was hopeful.
"Definitely not. No sex scenes at all, actually; just a self-abuse scene which the report calls 'disturbing'." She frowned. "I'm not sure why."
They soon found out. Skipping over an illogical scene where Galinda (now "Glinda", obeying canon) suddenly became friends with Elphaba again, the agents stepped into the dorm room of chapter forty-three. Elphaba was alone, 'flipping the green looking glass in-between her long fingers'. She was reminiscing over it, for the author clarified that it was the same magical looking-glass she had been given by Turtle Heart in bookverse canon.
She reminisced some more.
There was lots of reminiscing.
Then she shattered the glass on a table.
By a stroke of luck, or perhaps fate, none of the pieces flew more than an inch or two away from where it had struck the hard word. Elphaba looked at her hand, now empty, and a few pieces had embedded themselves in her skin. It looked odd; the green glass in the green skin. She pulled each piece out, six in total, and dropped them on the vanity.
She felt numb; broken and yet whole all at once. A pain throbbed in her heart, in her mind, but it throbbed so evenly that it was as if it wasn’t even there. She wanted to go outside but the smell of impending rain was in the air. She was trapped, a prisoner, due to her unfortunate water reaction. Her allergy.
Her curse.
"Here comes the angsty-angst-angst..."
To sum things up, Elphaba leaned backwards in a chair until it tipped over, smacked her head, didn't feel anything, and then decided to experiment with her numbness by eating the broken glass.
"WHAT?"
Trojie reached out a calm hand and knotted her fingers tightly in Sedri's hair. "You heard me."
"Trojie – ow – let me go!"
"Not if you're about to interrupt the major canon break. This is the scene that will get us out of here," said the Bad Slasher. "We'll take her to Medical, she'll be fine, I promise, but by Glod we are going to witness this bloody scene so that we can get this over with."
Sedri stopped struggling, as eager as Trojie to get this done, but her expression was one of great outrage.
"Just keep telling yourself you're going to get to kill the Frex replacement," said Trojie in a soothing voice as Elphaba started swallowing piece after piece of glass and warbling on about how it didn't hurt when it should have.
A broken glass was placed on her tongue. She let it sit there, in her mouth, before swallowing it. She flinched as it traced a path down her throat. It didn’t hurt. It should have but it didn’t. Nothing was hurting. Nothing was happy. Nothing felt. Another piece of the green glass was placed on her tongue. It slid down her throat. She flinched, again. Another piece. On the tongue. Down the throat. A flinch.
She didn’t even recognize what she was doing until the glass was gone. She no longer had anything for her hands to entertain themselves with. Brown eyes tore away from the window and looked at Glinda’s vanity. She watched as blood was dripping on to it, pooling in to a small puddle. Her brow furrowed. She didn’t know where the blood was coming from.
Of course, the blood was coming from her mouth, her stomach, and whatever other internal organs had been sliced by the fragments. Running for the bathroom, and closing her eyes 'to enjoy the sense of feeling', Elphaba vomited blood – and lots of it – into the sink, on the counter, and all over the mirror.
"Right," said Sedri clinically. "That's it."
"Whole-heartedly agreed," said Trojie, letting Sedri go. "If you grab the rest of the canons, I'll take Elphaba to Medical.” She quickly grabbed the oozing, dribbling, unresponsive green woman and swung her with practised ease – and also a decent wince – over her shoulder. "Back soon!"
"Careful you don't make it worse," warned Sedri pointlessly, closing the portal behind her. "Right," she said to the empty dorm room; "let's get going."
Ten minutes and six shiny blue portals later, Glinda, Fiyero, Nessarose, Boq, Madame Morrible, and Frex were all slumped across the beds, floor, desk, and chair of the dormitory. It would have been nice to say that Sedri had followed standard procedure and used some spiffy stolen technology to knock out each character before binding and gagging them, but the simple truth was that all six were developing large purple bruises on their temples, courtesy of her brass knuckles. When Trojie returned with a sedated and de-glass-ified Elphaba, she frowned.
"We have stunners, you know, thanks to Joss Whedon's Serenity."
"Star Trek has them too. This is more satisfying."
"Assasin," Troje said with a smile.
"Slasher," replied Sedri with equal fondness. "Need help with your candles?"
"I'll be all right – just move the furniture. I need space." Trojie paused, looking at the tied-up canons, who were all starting to stir. "Is this the real Frex or the replacement?"
"Replacement. Shall I kill him now?" asked Sedri, looking for all the world like an oversized, frizzy brown puppy. "Or do you need to exorcise them first?"
"Nah; go ahead. That way we can neuralyse them all at once."
Sedri dove, grabbing Frex by his collar and hauling him upright. She shook him a little to wake him faster, then when that failed, slapped him. His eyes opened.
"Frexspar Thropp," she announced, "you are charged with extreme OOCness – to whit, being an over-fanatic zealot, blaming your daughter for being the victim of rape, condemning said daughter for aborting her pregnancy, whipping your daughter, setting your daughter impossible tasks and starving and imprisoning her as punishment for failing them, raping your daughter, setting your daughter on fire, pouring WATER on your daughter with full knowledge of her allergy, and being a Designated Evil Bastard. For all this, and for destroying the character of the real Frexspar Thropp – little as we like him, he's not evil – you are condemmed to death. Bye-bye!"
Replacement-Frex was trying to fight, of course, chewing his gag and wriggling, but Sedri cheerfully punched him in the jaw and then, drawing a dagger, stabbed him in the back of the neck. Spine broken, he collapsed, and then proceeded to bleed to death on the floor.
"Messy," said Trojie.
"Thank you."
"That wasn't a... don't worry." Trojie looked around, hands on hips, at the circle of candles she'd created. "That ought to do. Right." She finally drew her bell out of her pocket, looking satisfied as she hefted it. Then: "Hang on. Sedri, who created this canon? Baum? Or... whoever directed the ‘thirty-nine movie – Fleming. Him? Or Maguire? Or whoever wrote the musical?"
"Schwartz and Holzman," said Sedri automatically. "Can you exorcise in the name of all of them?" she asked. "Might be safest. This fic is awfully mixed up."
Trojie shrugged. "Never done it before, but ... all right." She turned back to the stirring canon characters, whacked them with either book or disc, and began ringing her bell as loud as possible. "AVAUNT! In the name of BAUM! In the name of FLEMING! In the name of MAGUIRE! In the name of SCHWARTZ and HOLZMAN, I bid thee AVAUNT! Foul Author-wraith, spirit of evil and angst, I banish thee from these canons and this continuum! I cast thee out! I CAST THEE OUT!"
A veritable fog of Author-wraith swirled out of the groggy canon characters. "This is the true story of Wicked!" it whined before dissolving.
"It bloody well is not," muttered Sedri.
There was silence for a moment then, as the agents paused to enjoy the feeling of canon snapping back into place, but once it was done and the characters around them neuralysed, she frowned. "Trojie? Who exactly do we throw charge lists at?"
Trojie paused, brow raised, and looked at the heavily-abused notebooks she and her friend held. "Er... actually, we don't usually recite charge lists at an exorcism."
"Not even to the wraith?"
"No; you saw how fast it dissolved."
"Hmph. So it's just for the record, then?" Trojie nodded. "Seems like a waste of time. Oh, well; let's get this lot back where they belong and go home."
"Good idea. And- Hey, watch it!"
"What?"
"You can't put Fiyero back in his room with bloody handprints all over his shirt. Or face," she added, grinning. Sedri blushed and wiped her hands on her uniform. "In fact, honestly, Sedri, look at this place." The Bad Slasher indicated the blood all over the floor. "You couldn't have just strangled Frex or something?"
"No," said Sedri simply. "It's really not a problem, Trojie.” At the Raised Eyebrow, she sighed and asked, “Do you ever pay attention to the gadgetry we are supposed to use? Look at this." She rummaged through her bag for a moment and produced a small, dark red towel. "It originated in a Hitchhiker's Guide fic – we call it a Capillary Towel. It absorbs blood like a liquid vaccum cleaner. Look."
She knelt and draped it over the biggest puddle on the carpet, waited a moment, then lifted it up; it left behind a perfectly clean, rectangular patch of carpet. It took a minute or so to mop up the entire mess, but once soaked up, the fluid vanished into a plothole; even Sedri's hands were clean.
"I want one," said Trojie, her eyes sparkling covetously. "I don't suppose it does semen too, does it?"
"I ... have never tried to find out," said Sedri delicately. "Maybe the tech guys can modify a duplicate for you. In any case, you won't find one here. Have you finished untying them? Good; let's open portals and get them home. Don't need them all waking up again now that they're neuralysed."
It didn't take long. The glass-eating chapter had been set in the daytime, but canon had apparently taken one look at its principle characters – who were all asleep or unconscious – and decided it must be night. Keeping quiet enough not to disturb various roommates was tricky, but soon enough everyone was in bed (Fiyero having been tucked in rather more carefully than Sedri's other wards), and after throwing the dead body into the Kellswater, only one last task remained.
"Where's the real Frex?"
Shrug. "In a plothole somewhere. Probably at Colwen Grounds, where he's supposed to be anyway and the rest of them had absolutely no chance of running into him. Come on; let's go."
"How many times have we portalled in this mission?" Trojie asked rhetorically. Sedri shrugged, stepping out into the beautiful Munchkinland manor.
"No idea. Don’t care. Just need to figure out where... aha!"
There was a shimmery bit of air under the desk in Frex's study, which was where they had conveniently been delivered. Sedri stuck her arm in – rather recklessly, in Trojie's opinion, but the danger of this fic was supposed to have passed – and started hauling something out. As soon as a maroon sleeve was visible, Trojie latched on and began to heave, and soon a dazed but very sane-looking Frex was lying on his study floor. "What happened?" he muttered.
"Absolutely nothing," promised Sedri. "Look at the nice flashy thing."
He looked, was neuralysed, and then the agents were gone.
"And where have you been?" a voice asked as Trojie and Sedri stepped back into RC #45. Trojie's partner Pads was sitting in a chair near the Console, one red eyebrow raised high.
"Mission," said Trojie succinctly. "You were out." She disappeared momentarily under a wave of minis and animals, knocked over by her dog and then swarmed by the rest.
Sedri carefully picked her way through the stampede, and ducked to avoid the aerial attack of Elebereth as she headed for the door. "Cheers, Trojie; the help is much appreciated. I know I'm not the best company on a mission."
"Hey, you were partner-less," shrugged Trojie. "That's what friends are for."
"I know some good would come of making you watch Wicked," Sedri replied, tripping and catching herself on a box of lurid-looking pamphlets. "Ping my RC when you two are ready to do that vampire dissection we talked about. Oh, and did the Doc say anything about Elphaba's allergy?"
"Just that he isn't responsible for what authors make possible in canon." Trojie shrugged. "He fixed her up. I think he was mainly relieved he didn't have to go anywhere near her reproductive organs, to be honest. Anyway, cheers, Sedri. It's been ... interesting.”
"That's one way of putting it.”
Nine hours – or maybe months – later, a shiny blue portal sprung silently to life in a generic dormitory in Shiz University. Agent Sedri stepped through, scowling and muttering something like, "...such an idiot... should've learned last time..."
Avaric lay sleeping quietly, looking nothing like the cocky and immature rapist he'd been written to be, and had been left as by the agents who had somehow forgotten about him during their merry murder and exorcisms. He was a difficult character to class as either replacement or OOC, given that his personality was so poorly defined, but as there was another Avaric sleeping in a nearby plothole, it was rather easy to decide the fate of this particular manifestation.
A swish, a stab, a gurgle and a thump later, one very ticked-off agent left the dorm again, hauling a body-bag that left red streaks on the floor behind her.
Her faithful Capillary Towel followed, wiping up the mess.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Awesome work, both of you
Date: 2009-03-18 08:38 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2009-03-18 02:21 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2009-03-18 09:57 pm (UTC)From:Although...
What's a class of water?
no subject
Date: 2012-05-12 06:06 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2009-03-18 10:55 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2009-03-19 12:50 am (UTC)From:Good story.
I always wanted to do this sort of thing...hmm. Perhaps it may or may not be a good idea to start my own 'firm'. Involving betas wielding stiletto heels and AK-47s.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-20 10:04 am (UTC)From:I believe it's spelled "fanatic".
Apart from that, this is great. Well done, guys!
no subject
Date: 2012-05-12 06:06 am (UTC)From: