[Haruhi (AU) / Doctor Who] Anywhere in This World (Mikuru-POV)

[Arakawa]

And as promised, after the recent unpleasantness involving Kyonko, a drugged bento, and some out-of-the-box thinking by Asakura, I went off to work in the opposite genre and tried to come up with the most waffy and starry-eyed story I could think of. Special thanks need to go out to Murphid because this story didn't really come together until chapter 4 of 'The Coin' came out, giving me this idea to switch the fic to Mikuru's perspective, which obviously changed the setup a lot.

"Highly experimental initial arc" means that I'm not sure if this is going to be a long fic or not at this juncture in time.

Spoiler: ShowHide

If you're bothered that Haruhi is sticking a little too closely to the Eleventh Doctor's playbook in this first instalment, well so am I. Let's consider it a Necessary Evil for now.

If you don't mind giving feedback on this, there's a couple of things I'm worried about:

• Accented letters in place names: are they rendering properly?
• Mikuru(big)'s narration style, and the fact that she's the one narrating this (as opposed to a younger version of Mikuru). Obviously I'm trying something odd and ambitious here. Is it working? There are a few possibly rough spots where one paragraph eight year old Mikuru is in her house and the next paragraph Mikuru(big)'s attention has wandered and she's informing you about some nonsense, like the fact that Fujiwara at thirty years old is actually a nice guy to have a couple of beers with.
• Do you find anything in this chapter actively ludicrous? If so, I need to know now because the next chapter will be at least four times as ludicrous.

And of course after writing this I've become curious: are there any other (decent-length, decent-quality) Mikuru-POV fics out there?

EDIT: Now updated with a revised chapter 1, the first part of chapter 2, and a tweaked version of Brian's fanfiction stylesheet. (publicate.sh is the UNIX shell script I use to produce the HTML version) Creative Commons disclaimer is given in Chapter 1 at the moment - Brian, please tell me if you want it at the beginning of every chapter.

EDIT: Second part of chapter 2 uploaded. -- Haruhi's excessively jerkass (to the degree of being sociopathic) behaviour will be rewritten (based on C&C) to clarify that she is severely stressed out and thus temporarily uninterested in basic rules of politeness.

[sarsaparilla]

I'm not familiar with Doctor Who so I'm probably missing a lot of stuff here, but after reading it through once here are my thoughts:

It's wild and wacky but in a positive way, and there are a lot of hints to a larger story behind what is shown here. Yes, it is interesting right off the bat, and quite upbeat. On the other hand, there is something in it that I can't quite put my finger on at the moment, that nonetheless makes me feel slightly melancholic (New Game Plus did that as well, much more forcefully) ...

... oh my, now I understand! I'm actually feeling pity for an omnipotent Haruhi! If she can have anything that she wants it soon loses any meaning (we hold some things in high esteem because they are rare and hard to come by, and although something as ubiquitous as air to breathe is necessary for us it is still mundane) and if she is utterly peerless in power then she is also ultimately utterly lonely. Gah, why do I always think like a killjoy, please ignore me!

I thought that Asahina's future would be much more removed from our time, more like a thousand years than a hundred. Even then, the given description doesn't sound futuristic (although I can see the danger in trying to extrapolate from current trends the scene goes in the opposite extreme and the 'future' part becomes just an Informed Property of the setting).

Concerning your specific questions, the diacritics are shown properly (I checked, they are actually coded so they should be fine on all platforms).

It is rather hard to untangle the POVs of child!Asahina and adult!Asahina from the narration. The action is described in such a detail that one automatically assumes that the narration is real-time, but on the other hand many insights and notions seem to be provided by adult!Asahina. I don't find the voice too implausible but it does indicate one (unintended?) fridge horror: if this person (child and adult) is the same as the Asahina in the books, then the conditioning that she underwent before being sent to her mission qualifies as severe (but apparently reversible) brain damage. Unfortunately, that is something that I have actually contemplated at some point (and indirectly commented in The Shadow, where the 'unconditioned' alternate Asahina had a personality that diverged rather far from the canon).

Ludicrous? No, I think that you've managed to capture one rather interesting aspect of what Haruhi could be. She is unpredictable but predominantly positive, but at the same time a bit frightening because it's quite clear that she isn't a human (in the conventional sense of the word at least) any more.

I'm afraid that I can't provide any meaningful sentence-by-sentence CC.

[Arakawa]

I'm not familiar with Doctor Who

At the moment you don't have to be familiar with Doctor Who. I just slapped a crossover tag on it because the parallels at this point are so obvious it would be insulting to any Doctor Who viewers in the audience not to acknowledge it.

This chapter is basically an almost-complete-and-then-some re-enactment of (i.e. is stolen from), say, minutes 4:20 through 9:00 or so of 'The Eleventh Hour':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRv59GJVSlQ

Man, that Scottish girl's cheeks are way too puffy for her to be an analogue to Mikuru.

The main difference here is that Haruhi isn't quite as rude as the 11th Doctor, and tries to avoid melodramatically spitting things out into the sink... then again Matt Smith's character is actually an alien with a medical condition that requires him to eat *something* weird whereas Haruhi is just roleplaying...

I'm afraid that I can't provide any meaningful sentence-by-sentence CC.

That's all right, everyone contributes what they have and we all get along :-)

[Brian]

She made a partially successful attempt to wipe the soot and grime off her face with the back of her hand. This gave me a good look at her. Judging by the face plus her uniform, she must have been Japanese and judging by the expression on her face, she must have been around fifteen years old.

Expression indicates age?  (You can drop 'the expression on', I think.)

"Nice to meet you," (here I needed a bit of a pause to realize that wasn't exactly true, and to decide what to call her,) "Haruhi. I'm Michaela."

Double-offset?  Shouldn't use both parenthesis and quotation:

"Nice to meet you...."  Here I needed a bit of a pause to realize that wasn't exactly true, and to decide what to call her.  "...Haruhi. I'm Michaela."

(etc.)

this grumble grumble I'd

Hm.  Not used to seeing sound effects in narration quite like that.

I want to say it feels a little awkward?  It may grow on me, I dunno.

Haruhi grabbed the first thing she could reach this time, which turned out to be an onion. She peeled half of it, took a bite, and tossed it away.

Far more edible than you have most likely been led to believe.

I liked the part with Haruhi catching the knife, showing that even if she seems inconsiderate, she doesn't want people around her hurt.

"Due to lack of confidence in yourself! Honestly, any bipedal sentient humanoid being can fry bacon. You have that power within yourself, but you've locked it away just by thinking that you can't have it. It always amazes me how good humans are at not believing in themselves. Then again, I'm not exactly a saint in that regard either..."

Hehe.

I have friends who insist that my ability to turn ingredients into food is black magic of the darkest sort.  These people are challenged by boxed macaroni and cheese....

Haruhi: Are you sure they're bipedal, sentient humanoids?
They could actually be Broodax.  I wouldn't be that surprised.
Haruhi: They're almost certainly Broodax.  They cannot fry bacon.
Because pigs aren't naitive to their planet?
Haruhi: Turns out it's actually against their cultural values.
...right.  Enough of that.

"Look, if you don't like it you don't have to eat it! You didn't eat all the other stuff I gave you just fine!"

*snrk*

If you read eyewitness accounts of my brother's trip to the past, by the way, please take this into consideration. He's not a bad person, just very much a product of his own time. On top of that, he was also stressed, impatient and somewhat desperate at the time, so there wasn't much opportunity then for him to show some of his more redeeming qualities. If you somehow end up in Montréal one day and his thirty-or-so-year-old self is around, I recommend him to you as a very fun guy to have a beer or two with, if you enjoy having beers with random people. He's settled down nicely, is what I'm saying.

I thought Fujiwara was a younger brother?

Also, this does say that Fujiwara was mistaken about a thing or two, or--  *eyes timeline discussion elsewhere*

Mm.  Wibbly, wobbly, timey-wimey.

And of course after writing this I've become curious: are there any other (decent-length, decent-quality) Mikuru-POV fics out there?

Decent-length, yes, decent-quality....

• http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6254986/1/The_Anagram_of_Suzumiya_Kurumi -- Best of the lot, solidly medicre with moments of very good, followed by some epic wall-bangers.
  
• http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6757103/1/The_Entities_and_the_Individual -- 1: Author tract-ey.  2: wut
  Anything else is just Mikuru/Yuki or Mikuru/Itsuki (bleah!) fluff.
  
  Hmm.  No other real thoughts on the story, though it was nice -- feels a bit like it's addressing some of the deficiencies in NG+, actually, with pointing out that Haruhi's friends with Sasaki.
  
  Kind of curious to see where this is going; I think the viewpoint kind of works, if you're going for an 'unstuck in time' feel, but also it doesn't actually wander that much.  You could mix things up a bit (I guess) by bringing in more of Mikuru's observations from the future (the canon timeline, I guess) as well?
  
  Not sure.  Anyway, I liked it; thanks for sharing.

[Arakawa]

Expression indicates age?  (You can drop 'the expression on', I think.)

Oops. This is *very* problematic actually, since I then go on to establish that fifteen-year-olds in the 2080s are more likely to be humourless, workaholic stuck-up sonsofbitches along the lines of Fujiwara. So only if someone were to show up in Mikuru's backyard scowling and/or sneering would she immediately think 'teenager'.

I'll drop it.

Actually, if someone else ends up C&Cing this chapter at any point, can they try a careful look at the whole scene where Mikuru calls Haruhi a teenager and there's this whole digression on late 21st century teenagers, and count how many times it contradicts itself? I got sort of tangled up in the who thinks what about whom there.

Hm.  Not used to seeing sound effects in narration quite like that.

I want to say it feels a little awkward?  It may grow on me, I dunno.

For some reason I see Mikuru as a very sloppy storyteller. The challenge is going to be to show that without implying that the actual author is a very sloppy storyteller.

Far more edible than you have most likely been led to believe.

Desho? Actually I'm perfectly aware of this fact. (The trick is getting the oniony goodness to end up in your mouth as opposed to in your eyes.) But (a) she also rejects perfectly edible tomatoes and (b) there's a bit of an image issue with the most powerful being in the universe munching away happily on an onion. Veering into HP Lovecraft territory just a little, I'd say.

I have no way to establish this in the actual story without omniscient narration, but that's also the reason Haruhi rejected the red-peppers-on-stale-bread rubbed-with-garlic combo. She actually liked the taste there, but -- again -- she wants Mikuru to think of her as a benevolent fairy type, not some boisterous ogre who munches stale bread. Buttered watermelon is the sort of food a friendly fairy might go for, dontcha think?

As for the egg-frying method, no problems with that? I hope I did a decent job establishing that Haruhi chose it because it's a nice easy method to be teaching Mikuru, not because she doesn't know any more delicious methods.

Mm.  Wibbly, wobbly, timey-wimey.

Yep, I'm merrily making the Fujiwara situation even more complicated than it already is in the books, and then doing a narrative end run around the whole thing since it doesn't have anything to do with the main arc. This saves me from my poor understanding of probably the most complicated unresolved in-canon mystery so far.

Fortunately, unlike Doctor Who there's a good reason as to why time is so wibbly-wobbly in the story. I'll give you one guess as to who that reason is.

And of course after writing this I've become curious: are there any other (decent-length, decent-quality) Mikuru-POV fics out there?

Decent-length, yes, decent-quality.... <snip list of fics>
Anything else is just Mikuru/Yuki or Mikuru/Itsuki (bleah!) fluff.

Thanks for the info. Now I will proceed to completely ignore it until my own rendition of Mikuru comes together somewhat.

Hmm.  No other real thoughts on the story, though it was nice -- feels a bit like it's addressing some of the deficiencies in NG+, actually, with pointing out that Haruhi's friends with Sasaki.

Crack fics don't have deficiencies. Crack fics are by definition crack fics. Ya either huff it or ya dont. Some people are huffing that Rickrolling of Haruhi Suzumiya thing (actually, a depressingly large number of people are huffing it, probably since it comes in such small doses that they don't realize they're huffing something akin to asbestos mixed with cat droppings). Some people huffed NG+, some got squicked by it. Wait, is 'huffing' even the right word for what you do with cocaine?

If I were addressing deficiencies in NG+, rather than Haruhi/Sasaki, I'd first be more concerned with fixing the fact that Haruhi's circle of interest seems to have narrowed significantly, from exploring the universe to getting into Kyon's pants. Actually, that's *exactly* what I'm doing in this fic. Go figure.

But yeah, Haruhi minus interest in her surroundings plus self-awareness plus teenage hormones equals instant squick. As 'Kyonko Doesn't Want to Play Today' showed that much more blatantly.

As for Haruhi being friends with Sasaki, that seemed like an obvious thing to establish, without going into any details. (I was actually more concerned about establishing that eight-year old Mikuru doesn't have long hair!) Again, I ended up with a nice end run around another complicated subplot I don't understand yet, especially given the info in novels 10/11 that I still need to digest. I'm partial to the notion that, whatever misunderstanding/conflict exists between the girls in the books, their natural end state is going to be as two sides of the same coin. Namely, they're both omnipotent, but their worldview and concerns are so different that their powers never end up conflicting.

Actually, it'd be interesting to see this Haruhi getting into a mess that she can't fix, and then Sasaki stepping in to restore normality.

Kind of curious to see where this is going; I think the viewpoint kind of works, if you're going for an 'unstuck in time' feel, but also it doesn't actually wander that much.  You could mix things up a bit (I guess) by bringing in more of Mikuru's observations from the future (the canon timeline, I guess) as well?

I'm keeping the 'unstuck in time' notion toned down a little since Mikuru(big) is going to play even more egregious tricks on you later on. Like attempting to narrate the entirety of chapter three whilst getting more and more drunk in the process. Thing is, the deal with the narrator is actually that classified information.

Actually, I'm vacillating between one or two possible paths for the ending, but the most promising one involves the wholesale theft of classified information by Haruhi from the Kyon: Big Damn Hero universe. How ticked off do you get by well-attributed plagiarism? We're doing the fanfiction schtick here, but still...

I guess I'll just write the damn thing and then you can decide if the ending ticks you off or not.

[Brian]

Far more edible than you have most likely been led to believe.

Desho? Actually I'm perfectly aware of this fact. (The trick is getting the oniony goodness to end up in your mouth as opposed to in your eyes.) But (a) she also rejects perfectly edible tomatoes and (b) there's a bit of an image issue with the most powerful being in the universe munching away happily on an onion. Veering into HP Lovecraft territory just a little, I'd say.

I have no way to establish this in the actual story without omniscient narration, but that's also the reason Haruhi rejected the red-peppers-on-stale-bread rubbed-with-garlic combo. She actually liked the taste there, but -- again -- she wants Mikuru to think of her as a benevolent fairy type, not some boisterous ogre who munches stale bread. Buttered watermelon is the sort of food a friendly fairy might go for, dontcha think?

Eh, sorry.  Just meant to echo an observation from my own experiences.

OTOH, I could kind of see Haruhi going for something odd, like peanut butter and pickles, or peanut and onion.

I didn't catch that Haruhi was trying to pass herself off as a fairy godmother type figure, actually; mostly I caught her largely 'Doctor' like behavior, and assumed it was just generic wackiness (mostly).

As for the egg-frying method, no problems with that? I hope I did a decent job establishing that Haruhi chose it because it's a nice easy method to be teaching Mikuru, not because she doesn't know any more delicious methods.

That seemed fine to me.

Fortunately, unlike Doctor Who there's a good reason as to why time is so wibbly-wobbly in the story. I'll give you one guess as to who that reason is.

I'm going to say Kyon.  (Or Haruhi, in response to Kyon.)

Thanks for the info. Now I will proceed to completely ignore it until my own rendition of Mikuru comes together somewhat.

Understandable.

Crack fics don't have deficiencies. Crack fics are by definition crack fics. Ya either huff it or ya dont. Some people are huffing that Rickrolling of Haruhi Suzumiya thing (actually, a depressingly large number of people are huffing it, probably since it comes in such small doses that they don't realize they're huffing something akin to asbestos mixed with cat droppings). Some people huffed NG+, some got squicked by it. Wait, is 'huffing' even the right word for what you do with cocaine?

Me?  Personally?  My adjective of choice would be 'dispose of'.

Among users, the term is 'snort'/'snorting'.  This is the more common method of intake, though not actually the most effective.  Cocaine can also be ingested in powdered form/mixed in drinks (though, if you're not a hardened junkie, your stomach will probably reject it) or rendered and injected.

Cocaine can also be sprinkled on tobacco (or other smokables) and consumed that way, or in refined form (as ... 'crack', lawl).

'Huffing' is for forms of consumption where the product gives off fumes or vapors, like paint/glue.

And before you ask, volunteer work at a rehabilitation clinic.

Yeah, I ... have issues with Superstarultra and his trolling antics, but that's an entirely different (and very tired) story.

If I were addressing deficiencies in NG+, rather than Haruhi/Sasaki, I'd first be more concerned with fixing the fact that Haruhi's circle of interest seems to have narrowed significantly, from exploring the universe to getting into Kyon's pants. Actually, that's *exactly* what I'm doing in this fic. Go figure.

I actually have a complete and official explanation for that.  I like the ambiguity in NG+ to let the reader figure out how Haruhi got a Bad End before that for their own, but will probably have to address specifics in the other half of the story -- the shorter 'Dress Up', which explores Nagato and Haruhi meeting.

I just need to finish it.

At some point. >_>

As for Haruhi being friends with Sasaki, that seemed like an obvious thing to establish, without going into any details. (I was actually more concerned about establishing that eight-year old Mikuru doesn't have long hair!) Again, I ended up with a nice end run around another complicated subplot I don't understand yet, especially given the info in novels 10/11 that I still need to digest. I'm partial to the notion that, whatever misunderstanding/conflict exists between the girls in the books, their natural end state is going to be as two sides of the same coin. Namely, they're both omnipotent, but their worldview and concerns are so different that their powers never end up conflicting.

Actually, it'd be interesting to see this Haruhi getting into a mess that she can't fix, and then Sasaki stepping in to restore normality.

If by 'girls' you mean specifically Sasaki/Haruhi, there's ... not much conflict between the two of them.  Haruhi is jealous of Sasaki being close to Kyon, and Sasaki is aware of that and admires Haruhi (from her own past), so avoids being around Kyon with a vague promise that they'll all be friends even though she doesn't plan on seeing him again (yeah, right!).

They speak ... one time?  Haruhi knows her name and ... evidently suspects that more went on between Sasaki and Kyon than he lets on (or realizes).

I'm keeping the 'unstuck in time' notion toned down a little since Mikuru(big) is going to play even more egregious tricks on you later on. Like attempting to narrate the entirety of chapter three whilst getting more and more drunk in the process. Thing is, the deal with the narrator is actually that classified information.

That'll be interesting.

Actually, I'm vacillating between one or two possible paths for the ending, but the most promising one involves the wholesale theft of classified information by Haruhi from the Kyon: Big Damn Hero universe. How ticked off do you get by well-attributed plagiarism? We're doing the fanfiction schtick here, but still...

You can't plagarize K:BDH, I don't think; it's covered under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license, and thus I am not able to deny anyone the right to use it within the limitations of that license:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Serious.  You just need to disclaim it (and, also, include a mention of the license -- though you probably want to say it applies only to the elements borrowed from K:BDH).  Something like:

'Kyon: Big Damn Hero is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.'

That's all anyone who wants to use any part of K:BDH needs to do to:

• to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
  
• to Remix — to adapt the work
  

  I guess I'll just write the damn thing and then you can decide if the ending ticks you off or not.

  Well, if you want my permission anyway, I'll probably be fine with it. :)

[Arakawa]

If by 'girls' you mean specifically Sasaki/Haruhi, there's ... not much conflict between the two of them.  Haruhi is jealous of Sasaki being close to Kyon, and Sasaki is aware of that and admires Haruhi (from her own past), so avoids being around Kyon with a vague promise that they'll all be friends even though she doesn't plan on seeing him again (yeah, right!).

Great, then! So there's nothing to end run around in the actual books, thus far. I was actually thinking of fanon people create where there *is* some serious conflict between the two warper girls. Or the K:BDH storyline where Sasaki is (put into the position of?) a primary threat to the Brigade because if she finds out about Haruhi's powers she will most likely erase them.

Must be a wonderful feeling to have fanon you wrote coming back to bite you on the behind.

The "I wonder how Sasaki-chan is doing" line is still important because given the amount of fanfiction where they're in conflict, it pays to joss the notion that the two of them are *naturally* going to be at odds with one another.

I'm going to say Kyon.  (Or Haruhi, in response to Kyon.)

I said one guess -- you're thinking way too hard about this. I'll just show you this, I'm planning to edit it down and use it as a header quote or something in some later chapter:

Spoiler: ShowHide

"So, apparently the conference organizers wanted to invite a famous time traveler to introduce the other famous time traveler who's going to be giving your keynote speech today. And they decided to invite me for some reason. I asked them 'are you crazy? do you really want Haruhi to be giving this? it'll be a complete disaster, trust me?"

*appreciative laughter from the audience*

"Because I'm firmly of the opinion that the study of how time travel works is pretty much a doomed profession. I sort of wish it wasn't, but my long and unfortunate experience shows that 'wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey' is about as far as people are going to get in understanding the topic. That's because time works in whatever way happens to be most convenient for me. Haruhi Suzumiya. End of story. If you want my honest opinion, if I were running this place I'd shut the entire institute down, force all of the tenured professors to re-specialize in something useful like botany, and use the leftover money to start, I don't know, a math scholarship or something."

*Throughout the speech 90% of the audience, including the aforementioned tenured professors, keep laughing after each punctuation mark, not understanding that Haruhi, as always, is completely serious. And the remaining 10% of the audience is also busy laughing at the naive 90%.*

"... That said, I don't particularly mind you people studying this, so without further ado, I would like to introduce today's keynote speaker, a passionate student of Time and its intricacies. Someone who actually cares about the topic, someone who, on a good day, can actually manage to tell their CTCs from their retroactive rewrites, the one, the only, ......"

- Haruhi introducing a keynote speaker for a conference at the Institute of Chronological Studies in {SOME UNIVERSITY} on {RANDOM PLANET I HAVEN'T DECIDED ON YET}

I also had Haruhi joss the notion that she created the universe the night of the baseball game. It doesn't *really* square with the "Haruhi = The Doctor" parallel and it would be *so* boring for a variety of reasons.

About the attribution:share alike for K:BDH, will comply with that. Just wanted to double-check; even with Creative Commons, if you were to state right off the bat that you're somehow repelled by the notion, I'd know that it might be worth searching for some other way to resolve the arc. It's basic politeness.

[Brian]

Must be a wonderful feeling to have fanon you wrote coming back to bite you on the behind.

You mean being jossed by canon?

I was a bit sad I guessed wrong, but then again, my presentation in that story was more appropriate for a slice-of-life/sci-fi adventure, so I don't regret it.

I also had Haruhi joss the notion that she created the universe the night of the baseball game. It doesn't *really* square with the "Haruhi = The Doctor" parallel and it would be *so* boring for a variety of reasons.

Unless you spin it off as 'everything in canon is in a simulation/strange 'side' reality' things, yeah.

About the attribution:share alike for K:BDH, will comply with that. Just wanted to double-check; even with Creative Commons, if you were to state right off the bat that you're somehow repelled by the notion, I'd know that it might be worth searching for some other way to resolve the arc. It's basic politeness.

Well, I appreciate that, so thanks. :)

[Arakawa]

Must be a wonderful feeling to have fanon you wrote coming back to bite you on the behind.

You mean being jossed by canon?

No, I meant people basing their impressions of Haruhi off stuff you wrote and not off the actual novels!

[Brian]

No, I meant people basing their impressions of Haruhi off stuff you wrote and not off the actual novels!

As flattering as that would be, I don't think it happens. :p

[Arakawa]

No, I meant people basing their impressions of Haruhi off stuff you wrote and not off the actual novels!

As flattering as that would be, I don't think it happens. :p

I think I'm phrasing it wrong. I'm talking about fanfiction writers specifically. Doesn't it often happen that someone decides to write a Haruhi fanfiction, except instead of doing their research off the novels they read other people's fanfiction and make stupid mistakes that would be averted if they were paying attention to the novels?

Iterate for several rounds and you get some guy writing a fic with severely flanderized characters who directly contradict canon because they are based on some one-off divergence by a much more skilled writer. And they don't even realize the fact.

Very odd. I seem to remember reading you complaining about this somewhere. Basically, I only brought this up because I was feeling sort of bad about my impressions of Sasaki being skewed by your K:BDH arc which deals with her. (Although I reacted by completely rejecting the notion in that arc, which was sort of lucky. Still.)

[Brian]

Oh, I see....

Yes, that would be annoying.  In Haruhi, that's mostly the reason for the physically violent tsundere Haruhi, and the (way more than in the novels) buttmonkeyism of Kyon.  Huh ... I'd hope I didn't influence people too much like that.

Accursed fannon!

It's amazingly prevalent in Ranma, where many writes have not read the manga, only other fics. -_-

[Muphrid]

I mean, having an imaginary friend counts as childish behaviour, right? So I figured always reminding my parents I had an imaginary friend would be a good way to stop them from calling me "precocious" so often.

This seems a bit informal for Asahina, to be honest.  My impression of that stems mostly from "I mean..."  There are a couple other places where I get that feeling, but since it's a general thing, let me talk about that more later.  I just wanted to point out one place I noticed it for example's sake.

And thinking that I needed to be less precocious never stopped them from leaving me home alone as they drove my older brother to cram school, then drove around I don't know where else, almost every weekday evening.

Do they have cram schools in Montreal?

No, really, I swear! One minute everything was quiet and I was just watching the sun about to disappear behind some rooftops and thinking I might need to get out into the backyard and chase the neigbours' vicious stripey cat away from our bird feeder. Then the next minute there was this bright flash like you get with a camera, and someone's mostly bare legs were sticking out of the juniper bush. Which was now on fire.

The first sentence is a bit long.  I'd suggest ending it at "quiet".

Luckily I remembered we had a fire extinguisher in the house, and how to use it, and I put out the fire. There was a surprised shout at this coming from the vicinity of the legs as the bush got doused with foam, and a panicky moment for me when the bush was no longer on fire but the extinguisher still kept throwing suds at it! It seemed impolite to keep pointing it at the strange person then, but I didn't know how to turn it off and I didn't know where else to point it.

That first comma isn't needed.  Two "and"s put together in that first sentence there read a bit awkwardly.

Finally I realized that I could point the fire extinguisher at the neighbours' cat who dawdled about watching this surreal scene, and thus solve two problems with the same fire extinguisher.

"And stay away from our birds!"

This just needs a "two birds with one stone" play on here.  Heh.

Yay! I guess if my parents were here, they'd take this opportunity to call me precocious, right?

I stared at the figure which emerged, which I guess wasn't very polite of me. I couldn't see her face clearly because she was all covered in... stuff... either dirt or soot, it was actually kind of hard to tell. She seemed to be wearing the remains of a Japanese girl's school uniform. And stockings; she'd evidently lost her shoes at some point. She staggered as though she was finding it difficult to maintain her balance. A frightening suspicion occurred to me at that point.

I'm not sure if it's something she should be able to distinguish right away--that it's a Japanese uniform as opposed to someplace else's.

How do I know? Um... I guess I forgot to tell you my family lives in Châteauguay just across the river from Montréal Island.

Just for pacing of the sentence, I'd suggest a comma before "just".

That... sounded like a deal. Wow, I wish it this easy to get my mom to stop ranting at me like a tape recorder.

It's 2080s.  I don't know if she'll know what a tape recorder is, but this is fairly forgivable.

Haruhi's eyes fell on the first edible thing she saw, which was a watermelon this time. We were kind of saving that thing, actually. Tomorrow dad was going to take a day off so we could go hiking, and we'd come back home and eat the watermelon once we were finished.

I think you want "Dad" instead of "dad".


As you can tell, I kinda just wanted to read the thing after picking apart the first few lines.  To echo sarsaparilla, the narration puzzles me a bit.  At times, it reads like that of a snarky eight-year-old.  I like that child, but in the back of my mind, I'm definitely wondering how she can turn into the Mikuru Asahina we know.  Even from the perspective you say it should come from, something seems...off.  Adult Asahina trying to emulate her younger self's thought processes I approve of.  I guess I just can't see how it all fits together yet.

Again to echo sarsaparilla, There are also things to consider about how out of touch with the modern world Asahina seems to be in the books.  2080s doesn't feel like it's far enough out to do that.

Looks like fun, though.  Keep it rolling.

[Arakawa]

Do they have cram schools in Montreal?

They do in the 2080s. By that point basically Montreal is to Tokyo as New York is to London.

Since this won't affect the fic presentation very much I'll just outline my preferred future history for Canada. It might help me with keeping the actual fic consistent to it:

Basically after going into longterm economic stagnation the Canadians redrew their provincial boundaries and split off lots of independent city-provinces. (i.e. they applied the Province of Toronto proposal across the whole country) The country as a whole then grew a backbone and figured out how to weasel out of the onerous provisions in NAFTA, and they wound up using the increased leverage on their remaining natural resources (oil, gas, hydro, &c) to lever their country out of the doldrums by importing personnel and industries wholesale from Asia. (Did you know Canada has a standing offer to join OPEC? They'll never take it because it would amount to giving a huge middle finger to the United States, and the current establishment doesn't want to do that.)

Toronto and Vancouver got mostly a huge influx of middle class Chinese people; Montreal got a more or less equitable cross-section of Japan because the guy effectively running it at the time must have been a former otaku, I guess (he actually financed a remake of K-On! on the side where the girls were aspiring subway buskers in Westmount), and Fukushima Daiichi ended up being much worse than people expected so Japanese emigration rates shot way up. Japanese-type cultural institutions got set up, including cram schools, which the French and Anglophones in the city also started to make use of.

Think how Dubai is currently importing Westerners to do all the mind work for them, and Indians to do all the hard work. The Canadians also improved on the idea with this horrid imperialist practice called 'onshoring' where they buy a company or division wholesale, fire everyone who doesn't want to move to Canada, and move everyone else over. (I heard similar horror stories regarding some tech companies where a division was effectively being disbanded by forcing everyone to either move to India or quit. Naturally everyone quit. The difference with onshoring is that moving from China to Canada might not be quite as unpleasant, so people actually ended up doing it.)

It sounds desperate, but at this point the United States is still kind of complacent and so the Canadians are left trying to singlehandedly armwrestle essential manufacturing industries away from China to regain economic sovereignty. Globalization is so 20th century now.

This was how the time machine ended up in Montreal: the tech company that the inventor worked for (who Haruhi was actually tutoring when still in high school) got a division split off and onshored to Edmonton, until the Canadians realized that the smartest guy in their newly-bought division was actually inventing a machine to drill invisible holes in time, not in oil sands, and the whole thing got classified and shuffled off to a military facility in Mirabel.

Economically, Montreal is the cultural capital and also the centre of a small but lucrative national defence industry. The Golden Horseshoe remains the financial capital and is a huge manufacturing and tech hub. (Due to increased immigration rates it starts to creep up on New York in terms of population.) Vancouver is sort of a remainder bin for industries which still need to be connected to China by convenient sea lanes. (As opposed to its current primary economic activity of importing stuff from China, unpacking it, and putting it on trains that go out to Eastern Canada.) Alberta is trying to switch its economy from oil extraction to something a bit more exciting, and the main occupation of Calgary's city government is to try to one-up Toronto and Montreal while having less than a quarter of the population of either city.

It's weird, but the future is supposed to be weird. Then there are the cultural changes which led the Canadians to start doing this stuff. (Which mostly affected a small cross-section of society that could make all that weird and politically impossible nonsense start happening. Most of it only really got off the ground by the 2040s, which is why Asahina refers to it as a decade where everything seemed possible and nothing seemed easy.) Of course, an eight year old is going to care about precisely none of these historical details.

This just needs a "two birds with one stone" play on here.  Heh.

I considered it, but it'd be a bit of an unfortunate joke in this context since Mikuru's motivation in dousing the cat is to protect birds, not kill them, with stones or otherwise :-)

I'm not sure if it's something she should be able to distinguish right away--that it's a Japanese uniform as opposed to someplace else's.

Point. I guess if I had to defend it I'd say she's an eight-year-old in Montreal in 2080s, where the majority of Asians she sees are Japanese. So if she sees an Asian in sailor uniform she's far more likely to guess 'Japanese' than, say, Korean or Filipino.

EDIT: I mean it's better than just saying "she looked Japanese" which would lead a reader who knows none of the above backstory to think she's able to tell Japanese from Chinese from Korean on sight. Which might be completely impossible to do, depending on what sort of face Haruhi actually has.

It's 2080s.  I don't know if she'll know what a tape recorder is, but this is fairly forgivable.

This is I guess a cultural peculiarity. There's so many different SSD-based recorders and PDAs and specialized implants and I guess with the discussion in the books where Nagato claimed it was simple to build a computer that doesn't rely on a conventional storage hierarchy, Maxwellian computing has been invented already and they don't much resemble present-day computers anymore on the inside. Rather than have to call essentially the same device different names depending on what technology exists under the hood, they just use 'tape recorder' after the common ancestor.

Which is how the expression survives another century. I'm fairly sure there's already archaisms like this in the English language, though I can't think of a good example off the top of my head. I know the Japanese still write the character for 'chariot' when they mean 'automobile', but it's a peculiarity of kanji that archaisms like that crop up much more easily...

Even from the perspective you say it should come from, something seems...off.  Adult Asahina trying to emulate her younger self's thought processes I approve of.  I guess I just can't see how it all fits together yet.

I'll be curious to see if it's off because it's just off, or because it's written to be consistent with the wham reveal in the final chapter... I'm not sure I'm quite skilled enough yet to be pulling it off properly.

Again to echo sarsaparilla, There are also things to consider about how out of touch with the modern world Asahina seems to be in the books.  2080s doesn't feel like it's far enough out to do that.

I just figured out how to deal with that issue (i.e. to have that part of canon work even though the 2080s are superficially just a remix of the second half of the 20th century and Asahina should get more of a 'different but mostly eerily familiar' vibe from Japan). Especially with the way my story works, even if her origin point was in the year 3000 it would still be difficult to justify her *not* receiving extensive training in Japanese culture beforehand.

[Muphrid]

Point. I guess if I had to defend it I'd say she's an eight-year-old in Montreal in 2080s, where the majority of Asians she sees are Japanese. So if she sees an Asian in sailor uniform she's far more likely to guess 'Japanese' than, say, Korean or Filipino.

EDIT: I mean it's better than just saying "she looked Japanese" which would lead a reader who knows none of the above backstory to think she's able to tell Japanese from Chinese from Korean on sight. Which might be completely impossible to do, depending on what sort of face Haruhi actually has.

Sorry about that; I meant to retract that comment when I read further and she described the interior furniture choices.  It struck me as utterly plausible, by that point, that she would recognize clothing as seeming to be Japanese in origin.