The
Virtual
Realm

Wild Ride - Production Notes

Scatter count:
Presto produces:
Portals missed:
New characters:
Named Walk-ons:
Star Wars references:
No Scooby Doo refs either, but there are 3 quotes from the "Blackadder" series.
Groovy Objects:
Named Places:


Notes

On Inspiration.

In the cartoon, they are all coded as "friends", even Eric, and I thought it would be fun it have a story where they weren’t all working together, from beginning to end. This is the perfect opportunity.
It has Sheila upset with Hank, Presto upset at Eric, Hank upset with Eric, Eric upset at everyone.
Bobby and Diana are the two you can never really be sure about what they think. Bobby does make it pretty clear that he’s taken Hank’s side, but Diana…I think she is starting to realise she feels *something* for either Presto or Eric.

On Krin.

"A wizard by the name of Krin" is mentioned at the very end of "The Winds of Darkness" It's taken a long time story-wise to meet him! I didn't mean to delay it for so long, and in many ways he wasn't as impressive as he should have been.

On The Changes in the Weapons.

Something I do keep on coming back to is the nature of the kids' weapons. Here, the wepaons' magic has been altered and I decidedto have some in-jokes with this as well, since there were some gratuitous quote dropping going on anyway. The first is Sheila putting the Cloak on and changing into Venger. That's not just a shout-out to Sheila-Venger shipping, but also a very small allusion to Gail's Mask in Only Heroes. The second is that Eric Shield tries to lift him up off the groud - a hidden attribute of the Shield that was in the original Series Bible, but was cut out.

On Titles.

The title is a vague illusion to "Wild" magic, as introduced in the D&D RPG; magic that has serious and unpredictable consequences and that is its appeal. I had the idea to include that notion within the story, but it didn't quite work out like that.

On Quotes.

For reasons that I can no longer remember, Random Scribbles challenged me to drop some Blackadder quotes into this. So I did. The two she gave me were - "You don’t have to talk to me like that, I’m not a tourist" and "Sometimes I’m nice, sometimes I’m nasty, and sometimes I like to sing a song about goblins.". There was other little nods to Blackadder in this too - Bob the servant and "Mrs Miggin's Pie Shop" as well as a mis-quote of "If you want something done right, kill Baldrick before you start".

On The Making Of...

Truthfully? There were times where I really hated writing this story. It was the first one I'd done without knowing the ending, it was the first one I'd done with a kind of "hope for the best" outlook - so it was a wild ride for me as well. I was also very pregnant through a lot of it, and trying to write was very difficult. But I got there, and it's not as awful as it could have been.
Having moaned about it in the above paragraph, it is true to say that I learned a huge amount about the way I write while writing this, so in that sense it more than served its purpose.

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Original Header and Footer Info
(from ff.net)

DISCLAIMER: I know I put one in here somewhere, um, just a sec… and I’ll go see if I can find it.

STORY: Set after the story ‘Hall of the Mountain King’ but it is not necessary to read that story first as this is NOT a sequel.

RATING: PG13.

THANKS: Goes, as always, to all who reviewed my other stories, also to those fun people who have some of my stories tucked away in their favourite stories folders. And I tug my forelock in the direction of one Mistress R Scribbles: “For in this fic, thy challenge is met!”

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Author’s notes.

On Quotes. (or spot the Blackadder references)

“You don’t have to talk to me like that, I’m not a tourist”

“Sometimes I’m nice, sometimes I’m nasty, and sometimes I like to sing a song about goblins.”

… not to mention Bob (also known as Kate) and Mrs Miggins, who owns that pie shop.

‘If you want a job done properly, killed the hired help before you start!’ is actually a misquotation, since I couldn’t justify the Manticore being called Baldrick.

(And a big “Ta very much, luv…” to Random Scribbles for not picking really difficult quotes!)

On Weapons.

Sheila’s change to Venger was inspired by a conversation with my friends RK and RS. The behaviour of the Shield was taken from the original Series Bible, where it had an extra property of levitation.

ff.net reviews link

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Wild Ride

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