john_amend_all

aralias asked me for a commentary on this fic:

why this pairing, why this summary, why is it so great? :D

I can deal with the first two questions relatively easily. The third, I think, is one only the reader can answer.

Once upon a time I was idly looking through the unconventionalcourtship prompts, wondering if, were I to sign up, I'd be able to produce anything worthwhile. I was trying to 'cast' various characters in the plots, as I'd previously been accustomed to do for Storytime, and presently I came to number 34:

34)COUNTDOWN by RUTH WIND
Silhouette Sensation
10...9...8...
Hotshot NSA code breaker Kim Valenti had cracked a code revealing a terrorist plot to take over a major TV network, a takeover that Kim learned too late was only a diversion for a far more dangerous threat.
7...6...5...
She had just minutes to thwart the real plot — a bomb at a major airport. Kidnapping a member of the FBI bomb squad to help her was a start.
4...3...2...
Now it was up to Kim — and one angry FBI agent — to find the bomb, defuse it and live to fight another day. Except...was this explosive just the tip of the iceberg?

An angry explosives expert? Casting Ace was a no-brainer. Now all I needed was the hotshot codebreaker who'd kidnap her. The Whoniverse has several characters with the necessary skills and impulsiveness (I think I considered Vicki for the role), but the thing with bomb-defusing is that usually one person does it alone, guided by a voice in their earpiece from Mission Control. Rather like the way Dalek Oswin guided the Doctor and Rory in the Asylum. In fact, exactly like that.

The title follows pretty directly from my conception of Oswin appearing to Ace as a disembodied voice. It's a play on the Latin tag vox et praeterea nihil (literally, "a voice and nothing else": ie, empty words). What Ace encounters is a voice, and then one mystery after another.

We open with Ace travelling through the bowels of Boris Island, with travel documents forged by the Doctor, and you can tell it's the future because everything is curved and white.

On the off-chance that you're reading this in the distant future and don't recognise Boris Island, it was (and maybe still is) a proposal to build a major airport on an artificial island in the Thames estuary. It's named after the Mayor of London at the time of writing, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. In the setting of this story, as will become apparent, he's remembered as the legendary Lord Boris, a Dick Whittington-esque figure whose real history is lost in myth and exaggeration.

(Side-note: In 2007, I had an idea for a ficlet where Sam Tyler of Life on Mars runs into a time-traveller from further in the future, and there was a gag about Boris Johnson now being the Prime Minister. I'd intended it to be a piece of comic outlandishness; these days, it sounds all too possible.)

Anyway, whatever Ace was doing, she finds herself diverted by Oswin. I tried to give Oswin the same sort of attitude and dialogue she had in Asylum of the Daleks: confident, flirtatious, and firmly avoiding any topic that might require her to face up to what she actually is.

The intention of the exchange "Hang on, you listen to the fuzz? / Verily and sooth, milady." was that 'fuzz' seems ridiculously outdated to Oswin, rather as if someone today referred to the police as 'Peelers'. Of course, 'fuzz' has lasted reasonably well compared to some of Ace's slang. Similarly, Ace is of exactly the generation to consider a mobile telephone the mark of a yuppie rather than a teenager's vade-mecum.

The unflattering jumpsuits worn by the technicians are those seen onscreen in The Seeds of Death. Seriously, what were the costume designers thinking?

"15:42PM" makes me wince every time I look at it; it should be 15:42 or 3:42PM, but not both. Still, it's too late to fix now.

Having been given a pet name by Oswin — and being somebody who dispenses nicknames at the drop of a hat — Ace obviously had to come up with one for Oswin. "Hotlips" seemed fairly obvious, given that Ace only knows her as a voice.

And then, once Ace has reached the bomb, Oswin finds she's got to take a more active role. I'm sure her original hope was that she could just talk Ace through the bomb-defusing, and stick to flirting from the far side of a voice link, something that would be well within her comfort zone. But events aren't that simple. In order to save Ace's life, not to mention her own and thousands more, she has to admit to herself (and reveal to Ace) exactly who and what she is.

Ace's confrontation with the terrorists was mainly designed to lead up to her scornful "Don't like it when someone does it to you, is that it?" I'm not sure the terrorists found her bluff with the deodorant can convincing, but I hoped the audience — those familiar with her, at least — might.

Having made her decision, Oswin sets out from her cable duct and, thanks to the power of narrative, arrives in the nick of time and the best Big Damn Heroes style. In Asylum of the Daleks she never got to exterminate anyone, doubtless for the best of reasons, but I decided to let her cut loose here. I also took care that the word 'Dalek' didn't appear until the very end of the paragraph.

The room in which Ace and Oswin take refuge from the bomb was previously occupied by the Boris Island Model Railway Club. I was thinking here of the long-disused Platform 6 at Holborn tube station, which according to those who've been there bore signs of later colonisation by railway modellers.

It's here that Oswin finally brings herself to tell Ace the whole story. As I mention in the comments, this conversation (and a lot of Oswin's personality in general in the fic) was influenced by The Completely True and Canon Story of How Oswin Oswald Seduced Jo Grant, Or Jo Seduced Her, Or Something. So I don't claim any particular originality for that. Ace, on the other hand, is more concerned about the baleful effect she has on anyone she gets close to. She exaggerates a little; as far as we know, a relationship with Ace is only fatal for men. For women, the odds are about fifty-fifty.

The plot on Io which the terrorists are in some way involved with could well be the same one that ends the first season of Babylon 5. In which case, the unexpected intervention of a teenaged explosives expert and a soufflé-obsessed Dalek might just have put a major spoke in the Shadows' plans, not to mention the next four seasons.

And there we leave Ace and Oswin, heading off in search of further adventure. I feel that what, if anything, they get up to, all alone in their stateroom, is a matter more suited to the reader's imagination than my prose.

If anyone's following Complications of Glamour, Chapter 7 is now up: { AO3 | Teaspoon }