My Big Fat Inception Fanfic
Aug. 8th, 2010 01:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lunasarielMy Inception fics are coming along nicely. The "elderly billionaire with traitorous son" scenario is now mostly a dead end, although there are a few scenes from it that might be worth salvaging and transplanting elsewhere. The "shady government officials" scenario, on the other hand, is booming. I've got a basic outline in place (although, as usual, no ending as of yet), and at least the first third is pretty much scripted out. On the off chance that anybody is reading this, please read the note at the end before pointing out my egregious lack of scienctific accuracy.
I'm having it take place not too long after the movie ends, maybe six months to a year. Cobb in enjoying his humdrum, extraction-free life with Phillipa and James, and occasional visits from and to Miles and Sophie (the name I gave the unnamed Grandma). He's been home long enough to still be enjoying humdrum things like school projects, grocery shopping, and weekend trips to the zoo, but not so long that he's being ground down by them. Anyway, he is approached by an Agent Charles Barker, whose parents were extractors themselves. Barker has had a brainwave about putting a few extractors on the government's payroll to deal with situations that can't be handled by conventional means, and word on the street is that Cobb and his team are the best. Cobb isn't wild about getting back in the game, but, hey, it's for a good cause. Besides, Barker hints very subtly that if Cobb chooses to decline, the question of exactly why the investigation of his wife's death was called off so suddenly, the exact same day that he returned to the U.S., might be revisited.
At first, it's not so bad. It's kinda nice to see everybody again (although he and Arthur, as always, had stayed in touch), and they're doing good, if sometimes disturbing work, slogging through the dreams of terrorists and murderers to find out what they'd rather other people didn't know. The location of a hostage, the names and faces of co-conspirators, when and where a bomb is set to go off, stuff like that. Good stuff. They're saving lives, the demands on their time are not unreasonable, the pay is more than all right, and they've managed to at least begin to rehabilitate some truly deranged sociopaths via inception. They get along pretty well with Barker and the small cadre of agents he's put together to be the team's collective handlers.
But as time goes on, cracks start to show in the system. Most of their handlers are mysteriously fired and replaced with quite a new breed of federal agent. These ones don't seem to be interested in fighting the good fight as much as mucking about in people's brains. The team starts getting dragged out of bed in the wee hours of the night, shoved into black vans, and sequestered in "safehouses" until they've finished the job. But things really take a turn for the worse when Barker is fired and replaced by Agent Schroeder, a military sort who claims that he wants to "utilize extraction and inception to their fullest potential." Now the team has severe restrictions placed on their communications with each other, as well as with everybody else. Cobb isn't allowed to contact Miles or Sophie, and is threatened far more often with the re-opening of Mal's case. Pressure is put on the other members of the team in various ways: Yusuf and Eames, who are visiting the States to facilitate the jobs, start getting some very worrying calls from Immigration, Ariadne (who is still attending the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris, and commuting to and from jobs with the private jet that Saito very kindly gave her for her 24th birthday) is sure that some of the other students in her classes are reporting on her, and someone has very conspicuously gone through Arthur's apartment.
Things soon become more overt. The team is forcibly relocated from their various homes to a warehouse in D.C. Eames manages to get word of the abductions to Cobb shortly before being taken himself, and Cobb spirits Phillipa and James away to stay with Sophie, who takes them into hiding. He doesn't last long after that, though, and Schroeder threatens to kill Arthur, deeming the point man "superfluous" when all intel will be provided by the government, in order to get Cobb to come quietly. Or at least, to come without killing any feds. When Schroeder finds out that Saito didn't just fund the Inception, he was present during it, he has the Japanese businessman nabbed and stuck in with the rest.
With all this going on, it's not a surprise to the team that their jobs get progressively more shady. Rooting through the mind of a terrorist to find out when he or she plans to bomb a school bus or an office building is one thing, doing the same thing to find out the campaign strategy of an annoyingly powerful anti-war group is another thing entirely. Similarly, the team has no problem performing an inception to convince serial killers and sociopaths to regret their past atrocities in order to prevent future ones, but they are far less okay with brainwashing high-ranking figures of the opposing party to agree to the President's plan of action. (Again, when I say the President, I'm talking about a bloodthirsty crazypants, an exaggerated Bush, if you will.)
It's not long before things go too far, and somebody balks. A call girl is about to testify against a Senator who has gotten himself involved a highly-publicized sex scandal. Her testimony will almost certainly end the Senator's political career, and as he is a highly-placed member of the President's inner circle, this could have rather dire consequences for The Powers That Be. Schroeder orders the team to "convince" the girl not to testify, or, failing that, to screw her up so badly that she would be declared non compos mentis. Ariadne, in her usual vocal way, states plainly that not only will she absolutely not be a part of something this heinous, but the others should follow her lead and stage a palace revolt. Long story short, Schroeder forces the issue, things get ugly, somebody throws a punch, somebody else pulls a gun. When the metaphorical dust settles, one of the feds is dead, having been shot by Arthur while he (the fed, that is) was attempting to shoot Ariadne, who he saw as the root of the problem. Schroeder and his goons muscle Arthur out of the room.
The next day, Arthur has not returned, although his torn, bloodstained tie is left conspicuously on his bed. In his place is an analyst who could not be more obviously the government's watchdog. The team hates him, of course, both because he is a thoroughly unpleasant person and because he isn't Arthur. The team is divided as to the fate of their unflappable point man. Eames and Saito are convinced that they simply took him out back and shot him, and left his tie as a warning to the rest. Yusuf thinks that Arthur has been transported to a Gitmo-esque "re-education facility," and that leaving his tie was just a scare tactic. He is hardly more optimistic than Eames and Saito, however, believing that if Arthur doesn't die over the course of his brainwashing, he will return a beaten, broken, unhinged man at best, a beaten, broken, unhinged government stoolie at worst. Ariadne agrees with Yusuf that the tie is only a scare tactic, but she firmly clings to the hope that he is still alive and being kept in the same facility as them, possibly to be used as leverage should the team balk again. Cobb wants desperately to agree with Ariadne, but can't quite bring himself to hope.
Things continue in this uneasy state for several days, until the team can get a little time alone and fairly reliably unobserved. Yusuf takes the chance to reveal a project that he had been working on, one which he believes will help them A) find and B) rescue Arthur. Apparently, the sedative he uses to put them under leaves a telltale residue in the user's bloodstream that can remain for weeks, or possibly even months or years. This residue, in high enough concentrations, acts as a crude sort of remote PASIV, altering the brain chemistry to allow dreamsharing between those who have already shared dreams without the need for wires and needles. However, as has been said, remote dreamsharing is possible only between those who already have a high concentration of the residue in their blood, and thus their brains, i.e. those who have been previously joined on multiple occasions, i.e. the Inception team. On the other hand, because there is no active sedative to put the dreamer under, it only works when the dreamer in question is actually asleep or unconscious. Theoretically, Yusuf tells the team, his "little invention" should allow them to communicate with, and thus locate, their missing compatriot. Having no better plan in mind, they agree to give it a shot.
Several more days (and, more importantly, nights) pass with no luck. Eames, never exactly an optimistic sort to begin with, wants to call the mental search off, as it has everyone stretched to the breaking point, and Cobb is starting to agree with him. Eventually, however, they get an echo of Arthur's consciousness, and trace it back to his mind. They find him in a sort of mental lockdown, what he calls a "preemptive fugue." This turns out to be another of The Magical Yusuf's "little inventions," this one a cocktail that is triggered by the firing of certain synapses of the brain, these ones related to fight-or-flight and pain tolerance. Simply put, when the subject is in immense amounts of pain, or thinks himself or herself about to be so, the cocktail kicks in and the subject enters a state of catatonia until Yusuf can provide the antidote and awaken him or her. Arthur got a chance to take the cocktail for a test drive when Schroeder's bully-boys planned to torture him into compliance, and then send him back to the team to talk them around. And it worked admirably, as it turned out. Schroeder assumed that a few of his agents had been to hard on the point man and sent him into a coma.
Of course, the downside to this little trick is that, since Arthur is essentially comatose, he has no idea where his physical body is, or what condition it's in (other than "alive," that is), and will remain that way until Yusuf can get the antidote to him. To get around this, they turn to their would-be new point man. They concoct a dream-within-a-dream setup in which the team goes on a job, completes it, and "wakes up." Keaton, the new point man, then leaves the small set of rooms where the team is being kept. Thanks to an innovative design of Ariadne's, everything outside the team's rooms is more or less raw dreamspace, with only suggestions of walls, floors, ceilings, etc., and Keaton's mind fills this space with what he expects to see, i.e. the rest of the compound and the other feds. In this manner, and with the assistance of Eames' dream-forgeries, Cobb and his crew find out not only the exact layout of the compound, but that Arthur is being held in the small medical bay two floors up. They've given Keaton enough sedative so that he appears to go through the rest of his day (they conveniently forgot to tell him about totems), fall asleep, get up, go on *another* mission with the team, and only then will he truly wake up. To cover their deception in the real world, Yusuf had to give them all the same "accidental" overdose, but not before impressing upon their federal guards that the job they were being sent on was extremely delicate and might take a little extra time, and how very, very bad it would be if they were woken before the job was finished and they woke themselves up.
So that leaves them knowing theoretically how to escape, but lacking the practical means to do so. The solution for this one comes, rather unexpectedly, from the heretofore quiet Saito, who comes up with something of a brainwave. He proposes that they perform another dream-within-a-dream on dear Agent Keaton, but this time, instead of an extraction, they perform an inception. Playing on his already-healthy sense of paranoia, they manage to implant the idea that there is a mole somewhere within the organization, that one of Keaton's colleagues is really a member of a rival organization that wants to steal the secrets of extraction and inception. They then lead him to the conclusion that the only way to ensure everyone's absolute loyalty is for the extractors to examine each and every one of them personally. This idea takes time to gestate, but when it finally works itself to Keaton's mind, he convinces Schroeder of the necessity of "his" plan, and things proceed accordingly. Schroeder is, of course, somewhat suspicious of using prisoners to verify the trustworthiness of previously flawlessly loyal employees, but Cobb manages to put him off by pointing out that as long as the feds have Arthur (Schroeder, by this point, has confirmed that Arthur is alive), Cobb's best friend and Ariadne's boyfriend, the team isn't going to make any trouble that would jeopardize their absent member.
As the team proceeds to "interrogate" every agent in the place, they secretly infect them with a latent sedative, loosely based off of the preemptive fugue that Arthur is currently under, is on a timed release, effectively dropping everyone infected with it (theoretically) at the same moment. Of course, this still leaves them the problem of what they're going to do once the actually escape the compound, since they don't know how many people are out there, whether or not they're friendly, or even exactly where all this is, but at this point, the jobs have gotten bad enough that they're willing to just wing it. Also, Arthur is getting fed up with only being able to communicate via dreams.
The day for the great escape draws nigh. Cue dramatic music. Yusuf's delayed-release sedative works like a charm, and the agents drop like flies. They're set to be out for about half an hour, which is how long they theorize the compound can be expected to maintain radio silence without attracting undue attention. Working fast, they locate Arthur, wake him up, give him his tie back, and head out.
But as they near the top level (the compound, as it turns out, is underground) and freedom, it quickly becomes apparent that something has gone wrong. They hear people moving around, cars pulling into the garage, and voices exclaiming over the unconscious agents. When they reach the top level they find, to their dismay, the entire place swarming with conscious, active, and armed agents. Seeing no alternative, the team decides to try to fight their way out, even knowing that their chances of making it are...not good. But just as they're about to stage their own re-enactment of the Charge of the Light Brigade, they see a familiar face among the milling feds: Barker, their old ally who had been fired for trying to help them against Schroeder.
Not quite trusting this seemingly fortuitous turn of events, Ariadne, the smallest of them, sneaks close enough to overhear Barker talking to his people, and deduces that he had come to break them out, come hell or high water, at the urging of one Miles Wright, a well-respected Extractor and a close friend of his parents. Of course, Ariadne isn't exactly a combat-trained federal agent, unlike some people in the room, so her hiding place is discovered fairly quickly. Barker's people initially think that she's one of Schroeder's, but Miles manages to clear things up fairly quickly.
...And that's the end of the interesting part, really. Everybody goes back to their normal lives, although it's intimated that Barker is looking for a way to get the whole project started up again.
Of course, all this stems from the first version of this scenario, which was much simpler and much, much bloodier. In version 1.0, Cobb is contacted by Schroeder, who has kidnapped Arthur and is using him to force Cobb to recall the team. After that, I didn't have much of a plot beyond vague ideas of Miles doing something awesome and dream ninja-y. But basically, it was just an excuse to whale on poor, pretty Arthur and then have Cobb get all protective of him. I had some fun writing it, and some of the ideas generated by it, such as the preemptive fugue, were useful, but overall it needed some serious work. First, I realized that all the CIA agents were being portrayed as selfish, violent, borderline-psychotic goons, so I added Barker and his crew for some diversity. Yes, I realize that that whole gang is (or should that be are?) severely underdeveloped as characters, but...meh. I'll get around to it, I guess. Maybe. I don't want to clutter the fic up too much.
After that little problem was fixed up, I then realized that the whole thing was just one long H/C fic between Arthur and Cobb. Don't get me wrong; I love me some sweet, fluffy, bloody H/C, whether platonic or romantic (again, I try to leave as much ambiguity in their relationship as possible), but that's kinda the problem. I really do like the dynamic of the team as a whole, and I felt like I was doing Ariadne, Eames, Yusuf, and Saito a huge disservice by playing favorites. I think I may have overcompensated a bit in this regard, since as the fic stands now, Arthur spends most of his screen time being either quietly efficient or unconscious, and Cobb spends most of his screen time listening to Ariadne's pontification or Yusuf's technobabble. I'd like to add back a few "Arthur gets whaled on, Cobb goes berserk" scenes, and at least one "Cobb bites off more than he can chew and/or gets whaled on, Arthur gets his ninja on and/or proves that he does know everything" scene. The way it is now, I'm proud of the complexity, but it's just not...appealing, I guess. I always try to write the kind of fic that I'd want to read, and I like my action-adventure leavened with emotionally resonant relationships between the characters.
Note: YES, I KNOW THAT THE SCIENCE SUCKS! I freely admit that I don't have the faintest clue what I'm doing when it comes to advanced biochemistry or psychology. But this is a fandom where Paris folds in on itself like a giant taco, people age decades within minutes, and dead spouses run around with an impressive variety of lethal hardware and a grudge. Given all that, a little Doctor Who-esque quasi-sciene probably won't hurt too much.
I'm having it take place not too long after the movie ends, maybe six months to a year. Cobb in enjoying his humdrum, extraction-free life with Phillipa and James, and occasional visits from and to Miles and Sophie (the name I gave the unnamed Grandma). He's been home long enough to still be enjoying humdrum things like school projects, grocery shopping, and weekend trips to the zoo, but not so long that he's being ground down by them. Anyway, he is approached by an Agent Charles Barker, whose parents were extractors themselves. Barker has had a brainwave about putting a few extractors on the government's payroll to deal with situations that can't be handled by conventional means, and word on the street is that Cobb and his team are the best. Cobb isn't wild about getting back in the game, but, hey, it's for a good cause. Besides, Barker hints very subtly that if Cobb chooses to decline, the question of exactly why the investigation of his wife's death was called off so suddenly, the exact same day that he returned to the U.S., might be revisited.
At first, it's not so bad. It's kinda nice to see everybody again (although he and Arthur, as always, had stayed in touch), and they're doing good, if sometimes disturbing work, slogging through the dreams of terrorists and murderers to find out what they'd rather other people didn't know. The location of a hostage, the names and faces of co-conspirators, when and where a bomb is set to go off, stuff like that. Good stuff. They're saving lives, the demands on their time are not unreasonable, the pay is more than all right, and they've managed to at least begin to rehabilitate some truly deranged sociopaths via inception. They get along pretty well with Barker and the small cadre of agents he's put together to be the team's collective handlers.
But as time goes on, cracks start to show in the system. Most of their handlers are mysteriously fired and replaced with quite a new breed of federal agent. These ones don't seem to be interested in fighting the good fight as much as mucking about in people's brains. The team starts getting dragged out of bed in the wee hours of the night, shoved into black vans, and sequestered in "safehouses" until they've finished the job. But things really take a turn for the worse when Barker is fired and replaced by Agent Schroeder, a military sort who claims that he wants to "utilize extraction and inception to their fullest potential." Now the team has severe restrictions placed on their communications with each other, as well as with everybody else. Cobb isn't allowed to contact Miles or Sophie, and is threatened far more often with the re-opening of Mal's case. Pressure is put on the other members of the team in various ways: Yusuf and Eames, who are visiting the States to facilitate the jobs, start getting some very worrying calls from Immigration, Ariadne (who is still attending the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris, and commuting to and from jobs with the private jet that Saito very kindly gave her for her 24th birthday) is sure that some of the other students in her classes are reporting on her, and someone has very conspicuously gone through Arthur's apartment.
Things soon become more overt. The team is forcibly relocated from their various homes to a warehouse in D.C. Eames manages to get word of the abductions to Cobb shortly before being taken himself, and Cobb spirits Phillipa and James away to stay with Sophie, who takes them into hiding. He doesn't last long after that, though, and Schroeder threatens to kill Arthur, deeming the point man "superfluous" when all intel will be provided by the government, in order to get Cobb to come quietly. Or at least, to come without killing any feds. When Schroeder finds out that Saito didn't just fund the Inception, he was present during it, he has the Japanese businessman nabbed and stuck in with the rest.
With all this going on, it's not a surprise to the team that their jobs get progressively more shady. Rooting through the mind of a terrorist to find out when he or she plans to bomb a school bus or an office building is one thing, doing the same thing to find out the campaign strategy of an annoyingly powerful anti-war group is another thing entirely. Similarly, the team has no problem performing an inception to convince serial killers and sociopaths to regret their past atrocities in order to prevent future ones, but they are far less okay with brainwashing high-ranking figures of the opposing party to agree to the President's plan of action. (Again, when I say the President, I'm talking about a bloodthirsty crazypants, an exaggerated Bush, if you will.)
It's not long before things go too far, and somebody balks. A call girl is about to testify against a Senator who has gotten himself involved a highly-publicized sex scandal. Her testimony will almost certainly end the Senator's political career, and as he is a highly-placed member of the President's inner circle, this could have rather dire consequences for The Powers That Be. Schroeder orders the team to "convince" the girl not to testify, or, failing that, to screw her up so badly that she would be declared non compos mentis. Ariadne, in her usual vocal way, states plainly that not only will she absolutely not be a part of something this heinous, but the others should follow her lead and stage a palace revolt. Long story short, Schroeder forces the issue, things get ugly, somebody throws a punch, somebody else pulls a gun. When the metaphorical dust settles, one of the feds is dead, having been shot by Arthur while he (the fed, that is) was attempting to shoot Ariadne, who he saw as the root of the problem. Schroeder and his goons muscle Arthur out of the room.
The next day, Arthur has not returned, although his torn, bloodstained tie is left conspicuously on his bed. In his place is an analyst who could not be more obviously the government's watchdog. The team hates him, of course, both because he is a thoroughly unpleasant person and because he isn't Arthur. The team is divided as to the fate of their unflappable point man. Eames and Saito are convinced that they simply took him out back and shot him, and left his tie as a warning to the rest. Yusuf thinks that Arthur has been transported to a Gitmo-esque "re-education facility," and that leaving his tie was just a scare tactic. He is hardly more optimistic than Eames and Saito, however, believing that if Arthur doesn't die over the course of his brainwashing, he will return a beaten, broken, unhinged man at best, a beaten, broken, unhinged government stoolie at worst. Ariadne agrees with Yusuf that the tie is only a scare tactic, but she firmly clings to the hope that he is still alive and being kept in the same facility as them, possibly to be used as leverage should the team balk again. Cobb wants desperately to agree with Ariadne, but can't quite bring himself to hope.
Things continue in this uneasy state for several days, until the team can get a little time alone and fairly reliably unobserved. Yusuf takes the chance to reveal a project that he had been working on, one which he believes will help them A) find and B) rescue Arthur. Apparently, the sedative he uses to put them under leaves a telltale residue in the user's bloodstream that can remain for weeks, or possibly even months or years. This residue, in high enough concentrations, acts as a crude sort of remote PASIV, altering the brain chemistry to allow dreamsharing between those who have already shared dreams without the need for wires and needles. However, as has been said, remote dreamsharing is possible only between those who already have a high concentration of the residue in their blood, and thus their brains, i.e. those who have been previously joined on multiple occasions, i.e. the Inception team. On the other hand, because there is no active sedative to put the dreamer under, it only works when the dreamer in question is actually asleep or unconscious. Theoretically, Yusuf tells the team, his "little invention" should allow them to communicate with, and thus locate, their missing compatriot. Having no better plan in mind, they agree to give it a shot.
Several more days (and, more importantly, nights) pass with no luck. Eames, never exactly an optimistic sort to begin with, wants to call the mental search off, as it has everyone stretched to the breaking point, and Cobb is starting to agree with him. Eventually, however, they get an echo of Arthur's consciousness, and trace it back to his mind. They find him in a sort of mental lockdown, what he calls a "preemptive fugue." This turns out to be another of The Magical Yusuf's "little inventions," this one a cocktail that is triggered by the firing of certain synapses of the brain, these ones related to fight-or-flight and pain tolerance. Simply put, when the subject is in immense amounts of pain, or thinks himself or herself about to be so, the cocktail kicks in and the subject enters a state of catatonia until Yusuf can provide the antidote and awaken him or her. Arthur got a chance to take the cocktail for a test drive when Schroeder's bully-boys planned to torture him into compliance, and then send him back to the team to talk them around. And it worked admirably, as it turned out. Schroeder assumed that a few of his agents had been to hard on the point man and sent him into a coma.
Of course, the downside to this little trick is that, since Arthur is essentially comatose, he has no idea where his physical body is, or what condition it's in (other than "alive," that is), and will remain that way until Yusuf can get the antidote to him. To get around this, they turn to their would-be new point man. They concoct a dream-within-a-dream setup in which the team goes on a job, completes it, and "wakes up." Keaton, the new point man, then leaves the small set of rooms where the team is being kept. Thanks to an innovative design of Ariadne's, everything outside the team's rooms is more or less raw dreamspace, with only suggestions of walls, floors, ceilings, etc., and Keaton's mind fills this space with what he expects to see, i.e. the rest of the compound and the other feds. In this manner, and with the assistance of Eames' dream-forgeries, Cobb and his crew find out not only the exact layout of the compound, but that Arthur is being held in the small medical bay two floors up. They've given Keaton enough sedative so that he appears to go through the rest of his day (they conveniently forgot to tell him about totems), fall asleep, get up, go on *another* mission with the team, and only then will he truly wake up. To cover their deception in the real world, Yusuf had to give them all the same "accidental" overdose, but not before impressing upon their federal guards that the job they were being sent on was extremely delicate and might take a little extra time, and how very, very bad it would be if they were woken before the job was finished and they woke themselves up.
So that leaves them knowing theoretically how to escape, but lacking the practical means to do so. The solution for this one comes, rather unexpectedly, from the heretofore quiet Saito, who comes up with something of a brainwave. He proposes that they perform another dream-within-a-dream on dear Agent Keaton, but this time, instead of an extraction, they perform an inception. Playing on his already-healthy sense of paranoia, they manage to implant the idea that there is a mole somewhere within the organization, that one of Keaton's colleagues is really a member of a rival organization that wants to steal the secrets of extraction and inception. They then lead him to the conclusion that the only way to ensure everyone's absolute loyalty is for the extractors to examine each and every one of them personally. This idea takes time to gestate, but when it finally works itself to Keaton's mind, he convinces Schroeder of the necessity of "his" plan, and things proceed accordingly. Schroeder is, of course, somewhat suspicious of using prisoners to verify the trustworthiness of previously flawlessly loyal employees, but Cobb manages to put him off by pointing out that as long as the feds have Arthur (Schroeder, by this point, has confirmed that Arthur is alive), Cobb's best friend and Ariadne's boyfriend, the team isn't going to make any trouble that would jeopardize their absent member.
As the team proceeds to "interrogate" every agent in the place, they secretly infect them with a latent sedative, loosely based off of the preemptive fugue that Arthur is currently under, is on a timed release, effectively dropping everyone infected with it (theoretically) at the same moment. Of course, this still leaves them the problem of what they're going to do once the actually escape the compound, since they don't know how many people are out there, whether or not they're friendly, or even exactly where all this is, but at this point, the jobs have gotten bad enough that they're willing to just wing it. Also, Arthur is getting fed up with only being able to communicate via dreams.
The day for the great escape draws nigh. Cue dramatic music. Yusuf's delayed-release sedative works like a charm, and the agents drop like flies. They're set to be out for about half an hour, which is how long they theorize the compound can be expected to maintain radio silence without attracting undue attention. Working fast, they locate Arthur, wake him up, give him his tie back, and head out.
But as they near the top level (the compound, as it turns out, is underground) and freedom, it quickly becomes apparent that something has gone wrong. They hear people moving around, cars pulling into the garage, and voices exclaiming over the unconscious agents. When they reach the top level they find, to their dismay, the entire place swarming with conscious, active, and armed agents. Seeing no alternative, the team decides to try to fight their way out, even knowing that their chances of making it are...not good. But just as they're about to stage their own re-enactment of the Charge of the Light Brigade, they see a familiar face among the milling feds: Barker, their old ally who had been fired for trying to help them against Schroeder.
Not quite trusting this seemingly fortuitous turn of events, Ariadne, the smallest of them, sneaks close enough to overhear Barker talking to his people, and deduces that he had come to break them out, come hell or high water, at the urging of one Miles Wright, a well-respected Extractor and a close friend of his parents. Of course, Ariadne isn't exactly a combat-trained federal agent, unlike some people in the room, so her hiding place is discovered fairly quickly. Barker's people initially think that she's one of Schroeder's, but Miles manages to clear things up fairly quickly.
...And that's the end of the interesting part, really. Everybody goes back to their normal lives, although it's intimated that Barker is looking for a way to get the whole project started up again.
Of course, all this stems from the first version of this scenario, which was much simpler and much, much bloodier. In version 1.0, Cobb is contacted by Schroeder, who has kidnapped Arthur and is using him to force Cobb to recall the team. After that, I didn't have much of a plot beyond vague ideas of Miles doing something awesome and dream ninja-y. But basically, it was just an excuse to whale on poor, pretty Arthur and then have Cobb get all protective of him. I had some fun writing it, and some of the ideas generated by it, such as the preemptive fugue, were useful, but overall it needed some serious work. First, I realized that all the CIA agents were being portrayed as selfish, violent, borderline-psychotic goons, so I added Barker and his crew for some diversity. Yes, I realize that that whole gang is (or should that be are?) severely underdeveloped as characters, but...meh. I'll get around to it, I guess. Maybe. I don't want to clutter the fic up too much.
After that little problem was fixed up, I then realized that the whole thing was just one long H/C fic between Arthur and Cobb. Don't get me wrong; I love me some sweet, fluffy, bloody H/C, whether platonic or romantic (again, I try to leave as much ambiguity in their relationship as possible), but that's kinda the problem. I really do like the dynamic of the team as a whole, and I felt like I was doing Ariadne, Eames, Yusuf, and Saito a huge disservice by playing favorites. I think I may have overcompensated a bit in this regard, since as the fic stands now, Arthur spends most of his screen time being either quietly efficient or unconscious, and Cobb spends most of his screen time listening to Ariadne's pontification or Yusuf's technobabble. I'd like to add back a few "Arthur gets whaled on, Cobb goes berserk" scenes, and at least one "Cobb bites off more than he can chew and/or gets whaled on, Arthur gets his ninja on and/or proves that he does know everything" scene. The way it is now, I'm proud of the complexity, but it's just not...appealing, I guess. I always try to write the kind of fic that I'd want to read, and I like my action-adventure leavened with emotionally resonant relationships between the characters.
Note: YES, I KNOW THAT THE SCIENCE SUCKS! I freely admit that I don't have the faintest clue what I'm doing when it comes to advanced biochemistry or psychology. But this is a fandom where Paris folds in on itself like a giant taco, people age decades within minutes, and dead spouses run around with an impressive variety of lethal hardware and a grudge. Given all that, a little Doctor Who-esque quasi-sciene probably won't hurt too much.
