Here there be dragons. At least if you make it all the way to Temeraire.

[melannen]

Last night I dreamed about Lord Peter Wimsey buying pot. I think it was a direct result of being trapped in a small room with both Harriet *and* Diana Villiers. Luckily, he had Elmo to back him up.

...right, no more reading crossovers before bed.

And before you ask, no, I have not yet found any crossovers with Diana and Harriet. Or Lord Peter and Elmo. Though if you know of any, let me know.

I have been reading a lot of crossovers, though. Because damned_colonial mentioned on age_of_sail that they needed someone to take over recc'ing AoS crossovers, and saying that around me is like saying to my roommate's cat, "Hey, Yzma, someone needs to eat that piece of paper on the carpet!"

So, yes, I have been looking at AoS crossovers. Because I am a sucker for crossovers. Way back in 2004, when I was just starting to be polyfannish, I was getting into PotC and XF at the same time, and reading Austen and Aubrey/Maturin, and I was like "Oooh, why isn't there an MSR Regency AU?"

(I did start to write one. But then I started wondering if the only way to explain Mulder's first name was to give his family Quaker connections, so I started looking into whether he could have a Quaker parent and still be a peer, or at least a wealthy landowner in high standing with the Crown, and what I learned is that the people who do British history on little_details don't even know who George Fox was, much less William Penn. Then I realized that what was going to be a silly crackfic would require figuring out how to write a romance between the disgraced bluestocking crypto-Catholic daughter of a Navy captain and an American Quaker aristocrat who was secretly a spy, and decided this might be a bit much. I did ponder changing the names and trying to sell it as an original romance and seeing if anyone would notice. Especially if I left in the crashed saucer. And the giant squid.)

Anyway, I never did find the Regency AU, but stellar_dust did find me a crossover with the Aubreyad, in which Mulder somehow ended up injured, disoriented, and in Dr. Maturin's cabin on the HMS Surprise. (This isn't as unlikely as it seems, given Mulder's tendency to take stupid risks in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle.) I tried to find it for the crossover recs post. Google was unhelpful. Searching my LJ and e-mail were unhelpful. It pre-dates when I started keeping bookmarks. I vaguely remember it being on a specialty archive, which means it was probably in the un-indexed 'deep web', assuming it's even still up.

So. This is when I dove into wide, wide world of old XF sites on Geocities. I figured surely somebody had a list of all XF-related specialty archives c. 2001. Google got me to X-Files Lost and Found, and after a brief detour to tell the Open Doors people about their project to save Geocities XF sites, they led me to The Ultimate XF Crossover Archive, which is gone, but available on the WayBack machine. It didn't actually, alas, list any Aubreyad crossovers. But it did link to the Sharpe Files! It was a broken link, of course, but it was a broken Gossamer link, so in the end I was right back on the Gossamer search page where I started.

Anyway, so here: The Sharpe Files: novel-length, posted 1995, and apparently legendary in its day! It's not going on my actual recs post, because from what I've read of it so far, the characterization is not actually all that ... good, and the period accuracy is ... not there. It is certainly, however, worth a read, if you like the idea of watching Sharpe try to investigate the paranormal events that are spooking his men while encumbered by Lady Scully of the Academy of Sciences and Mr. Mulder, the wealthy American cowboy. :P

There are apparently depths - murky, murky depths - of Sharpe fandom of which I'd been *entirely* unaware. I'd only encountered it peripherally through LJ friends, and got the impression it was a small, new-ish fandom made mostly of former Pirates writers, AoS people, and Sean Bean fans. This is not so. Wandering around on Seventh Dimension, for example, looking for stories about immortal pirates, landed me on the Sharpe Smut Page, on which 90% of the links are broken. But it teases me with the former existence of an apparently semi-shared large, ongoing AU where Sharpe is an immortal and sleeping with Methos. One of the links that isn't broken is the one where Immortal!Sharpe attends the Gathering in Sunnydale. And then there's Lord Rossendale, Fearless Vampire Killer; and La Princesa Guerrera, which is ~1000k of Sharpe/Xena/XF crossover.

ANYWAY.

/me goes back to looking for that story where Mary Bennett helps build a Zeppelin.

(this is why we need an Archive of Everything. Where we own the damn servers. And there is full-text search. Or at least really good tagging & folksonomy.)

Comments

[damned_colonial]

OH GOOD LORD. *hides under desk*

OK, I kinda wish I'd been around for all that crack. But... wow.

[melannen]

Oh, see I was wondering how far back you went in the fandom! That Sharpe Smut page has a .au domain, after all...

[staranise]

/me goes back to looking for that story where Mary Bennett helps build a Zeppelin.

Resolve and Resistance by S. N. Dyer? I can't find an online version anymore, but apparently it's in print.

[melannen]

Yes! Thank you!

Okay, with that much I was able to figure out that I read an online copy somebody linked on Making Light a couple years ago, which is no longer available. Sad!

[isis]

Then I realized that what was going to be a silly crackfic would require figuring out how to write a romance between the disgraced bluestocking crypto-Catholic daughter of a Navy captain and an American Quaker aristocrat who was secretly a spy, and decided this might be a bit much. I did ponder changing the names and trying to sell it as an original romance and seeing if anyone would notice. Especially if I left in the crashed saucer. And the giant squid.

I vote HELL YES.

And your "Sharpe files" link is access denied - but I did read a few of those AU links on the Sharpe Smut page, which I found last month, and quickly exhausted the actual working links on....but speaking of crossovers, there's a story called "Portsmouth" I liked quite a bit.

[melannen]

Huh, apparently Gossamer doesn't allow links directly to story files anymore. I switched it to a search page; that should work.

Some of the ones with broken-links on the Sharpe Smut page are available elsewhere with a little Google work (like the Xena one), I don't think I'm sufficiently into Sharpe to actually go looking though. Um.

And of course *you* vote YES, it had a giant squid in it.

[flourish]

I'd like to second that HELL YES and add a FUCK YEAH!

I would be all over that like white on rice hot chicks with bad intentions on Mulder.

Please? Please? Please?

(But seriously, I would write this, if only I had any confidence in my ability to do Mulder & Scully characterization, which I do not.)

[melannen]

If I had any confidence in my ability to co-write in long form, I'd offer to do Mulder & Scully if you did the history!

Since I don't -- feel free to run with in it *any direction you like*. My answer is also "Hell yes, as long as someone else does all the work."

[stellar_dust]

Did you ever ask at xfstoryfinders?

Hmm, if it was off-lj .. you could try searching the wayback machine archives of mulderinjeopardy, if they exist, since the way you recall it certainly sounds like MulderTorture. *g*

Woah. Wait. omg. THE SITE IS NOT DEAD ANYMORE! When did that happen???

Anyway, The Far Side of X.

(ANSWER MY EMAILS WOMAN)

[melannen]

I NEED TO CALL MOM FIRST & I KEEP FORGETTING.


And wow, you found it! I wouldn't have ever thought to look under Muldertorture; what happened to him in that story was actually pretty average in terms of what tends to happen to Mulder...

[stellar_dust]

I am not in any way qualified to explain this, but I think if Mulder gets whumped in any way it counts as MT - especially if it's also MSR and Scully comforts him, but I'm not sure if that's technically a requirement of the genre or not. *g*

[melannen]

But -- if Mulder doesn't get whumped at *all*, it's totally OOC! Getting whumped is what Mulder does. I think this category is too broad. :P

[jest]

Last night I dreamed about Lord Peter Wimsey buying pot. I think it was a direct result of being trapped in a small room with both Harriet *and* Diana Villiers. Luckily, he had Elmo to back him up.

That just broke my brain a little. I think it trumps all previous crack for either POB or Sayers.