Saving Luna High FanFiction
by Black Pegasus
A/n: On the fanfictionnetwriters mailing list, someone initiated a challenge to write a fic about the crashing of FFN for his or her fandom. I took the challenge, and this is the result. ... It's about a fictional marching band in a futuristic high school on the moon, and what happens when the marching band's favorite website goes down... It needs a better title, please suggest in a review!
__________________________________________________________________
It seemed like just another morning for Jack Frost, an exchange student from the neighboring British lunar colony to Luna High, the high school at the creatively named American colony, Luna. He stumbled out of bed and over to his computer; he was up early so he decided to check his favorite web site.
"Page cannot be displayed," read the message when Jack tried to bring up the page.
"You smell..." he growled sleepily and clicked the reload button. The message popped up again. He kept clicking until the page finally displayed. However, there was a strange message:
"FanFiction.Net has experienced an outage..." Jack read on to find out that the site would be down for a while.
"No!" He screamed in horror. "NO!" For no apparent reason, he ran out of the house and stood in the middle of the street, yelling at the top of his lungs. "NOOOOO!"
"SHUT UP!" a bunch of people shouted out of their windows.
Suddenly realizing he was only wearing the boxer shorts he'd slept in, Jack dejectedly went back inside, got dressed, grabbed his trumpet case, and walked down the street to the high school.
__________________________________________________________________
Lee was just taking out his sparkling red trumpet when Jack stormed into the band room. "What's up, Jack?"
"Lee! You've got to help me, man!"
"Help you what?"
"Save FanFiction.Net!"
Lee raised an eyebrow. "It needs saving?"
"Yes! Can't you hear the pained moans of dying FFN users everywhere?"
They listened for a moment.
"Uh... no?"
"Well... they're dying, believe me! And you've got to help me save them by fixing FF.Net!"
Lee rolled his eyes. "Sure, Jack. Right after band."
Then the band director, Suzanne Macmillan, got everyone's attention. "Richard's not here, so we're starting in the auditorium. I'll be in in a minute." Richard was the senior drum major.
The band room was filled with chatter as the band shuffled noisily into the auditorium and took their seats on the stage. Jack walked right up to where the conductor usually stood.
"Fellow instrumentalists! This morning I made an alarming discovery -- FanFiction.Net is down!"
The whole band, except Lee, gasped. A few even screamed.
"What are we going to do?!" Elizabeth, a clarinetist, shrieked.
"Well, we're NOT going to sit here and whine, are we?" Jack asked loudly.
"NO!" the band chorused (wait a sec...).
"We're going to take action, not just sit on our bums!"
"YEAH!"
"We're going to save FanFiction.Net!"
"YEAH!"
"So who's with me?!"
Silence.
Just then Ms. Macmillan walked in, stopping short at the sight of Jack trying to start a rebellion of sorts. "What are you doing, Jack?" she demanded.
"I... uh..."
One of the trombonists whispered something to the band director.
"WHAT? Oh, my..." Then she fainted dead away. Everyone was silent for a moment, then--
"ANARCHY!" Sage, a tenor sax player, screamed. Everyone panicked, but the junior drum major, Chelsea, stepped up to the front where Jack was still standing rather dumbly.
"Everyone, listen up! I'm in charge now!" the overly enthusiastic piccoloist announced. This brought groans from a few as the chaos died down.
"Shut up! Now, we'll organize an excursion to FFN while the rest of us hang tight. Everyone who wants to help, follow... erm... Jack!" She shoved him toward the door, and he walked out, dejectedly hugging his antique trumpet, to wait in the hallway.
After a moment of discussion in the auditorium, Lee came out, dragging with him his girlfriend (and the sax captain), Snow. Close behind them was Lara, her iridescent silver trumpet shimmering in the bright hallway lights. After a few seconds Sage moped out casting a glare at his friend, Lara. They all waited for Jack to say something, but he just frowned at them and didn't move.
"We'll help you, Jack," Lee assured his friend. Jack shrugged.
"It doesn't help if you don't know where FFN is."
"I know where it is," came a voice. They turned around to see Corey, possibly the most annoying clarinetist on the moon. The upperclassmen grumbled about having a freshman tag along.
"Well, we really don't have a choice -- none of us knows where FFN is," Snow reasoned.
"Okay, but then we ditch him," Sage growled. Corey gave the group a self-satisfied grin and led the way down several hallways to a janitor's closet.
"Are you trying to tell us that FanFiction.Net is in a janitor's closet at Luna High??" Lara questioned. Corey shook his head with a look that emanated pity, and opened the closet and walked in, beckoning for the others to follow.
Once inside, Corey poked a corner of the ceiling with the bell of his clarinet, and a panel opened on the wall. He entered a few numbers, and then the closet door slammed shut and vibrated, as if it were moving like an old-fashioned elevator. After a moment it stopped moving and the door opened again, revealing something no one, except Corey, expected.
The six instrumentalists found themselves in an enormous, busy underground empire. There were consoles everywhere, and robots buzzed back and forth, carrying disk-like things labeled such as, "What The Zelda Characters Do W/Their Free Time," "You Know You're a Band Geek When...," and "Big Brother Darunia: A Reality FanFiction." To the left, looming over all this action, were several large, blue, glowing, building-like structures, each labeled "Server" and a number.
Suddenly one of the servers stopped glowing, causing a chain reaction - the rest of the servers stopped glowing, the robots slowed dramatically, and consoles sparked and exploded.
"What a disaster," Snow murmured. The rest nodded in agreement.
"So all this time FFN has been under the high school?" Jack wondered. Corey shook his head.
"Nope. It's under everything - it's the center of the moon. You can get anywhere from here... if you know the codes." The freshman chuckled. "Then again, it could be faster on the surface; the moon isn't that big."
"Thanks and everything, Corey, now SCRAM!" Sage snapped. The freshman stood there stubbornly.
"Look," Jack said carefully, "go back to the auditorium and tell Chelsea and the others that you got us here and we'll be back soon. Your section leader can reward you or whatever."
Corey looked at him cynically, but finally agreed and left via the closet.
"I'm starting to like Terri a lot..." Lee mumbled about the freshman trumpet player.
The now quintet walked cautiously toward the large server-buildings. They started hearing a strange noise; it got louder as they got closer to the buildings. After a bit, Lara, Jack and Lee started to feel a twinge in their heads.
"I'm getting a headache," Lee grumbled.
"Same here," Jack and Lara replied.
"That's weird," Sage commented. He shrugged. "Maybe it's a trumpet thing."
Jack opened the door to the blue building and they went inside, instruments in hand.
The interior of the building was pretty boring, just walls and a floor... until you looked up. Throughout the top of the building was what seemed like a mess of levers, pulleys and gears - the inner workings of a powerful machine. However, now neither a gear turned nor a lever switched. Now that the instrumentalists were inside the building, the awful, squeaking noise was much louder, and the trumpeters' headaches became that much worse. Snow thought a moment.
"That noise may have something to do with the outage... and it's coming from in there." She pointed to a door on the left side of the room.
"Well, if it's coming from that way, we should go the opposite way," Lee reasoned and headed for the door they came in, but Lara stopped him.
"Lee, we've got to save FFN! Otherwise we won't be able to get back."
"... So?"
"Well, I still have a video game to finish, so let's go!" She stomped over to the door, flung it open, and they went inside to find-
"RICHARD!"
"And he's... playing his saxophone!" Lara gasped in horror.
The drum major, upon seeing the group, played all the louder. The trumpeters dropped to their knees, pressing their hands against their ears, hardly able to bear the pain.
"I TOLD YOU... WE SHOULDN'T HAVE... COME IN HERE!" Lee yelled at Lara.
"MY BRAIN... IS GOING... TO RUPTURE!" Jack screamed. Snow and Sage just stood in shock a moment.
"Snow, you've got to do something!" Sage exclaimed. Snow stared at him blankly for a moment, then she was hit with inspiration. She whipped out her lacquered black and silver saxophone and began playing a beautiful melody, canceling out the awful noise coming from Richard's sax. The trumpeters stood up, no longer in such intense pain.
"THANK YOU!" the three of them exclaimed, then turned back to Richard.
"Why did you shut down FFN?" Lee demanded of his rival.
"Because if I control FFN, I control the MOON!" the crazed drum major explained, a power-hungry gleam in his eyes. "First the moon, then the WORLD!" He cackled evilly, then resumed playing his sax. The five musicians contemplated what to do.
"I've got it!" Jack said. "Richard has a good ear, right? So all we have to do is play a really nasty chord, and it'll drive him away."
"Good idea," Lara agreed. "Everyone play as high and loud as you can." They agreed on a few noted that definitely sounded wrong together, and played. It was a beautiful major chord.
"Heh, wrong note," Jack laughed sheepishly. "It's hard to judge that high..."
"I'm out of tune," Sage mumbled and pushed his mouthpiece on more. They tried the chord again, and this time it came out like they wanted - clashing horribly.
However, it wasn't enough. Richard stopped playing for a moment to cover his ears, but continued playing as soon as they stopped. Jack scowled.
"We need something nastier... something that'll send shivers up his spine... something like--"
"This?" came a voice. They turned around to see Katrina, the lone oboist, holding up her beautiful dark green oboe. Jack grinned.
"Exactly."
They played the chord a third time, Katrina joining in, the twang of her oboe ringing loud and clear, clashing with the other instruments. It was horrendous, but it worked.
"AAAARRRRGGGHH! MY EARS!!" Richard screamed and after a moment of yelling more, he blacked out. The others whooped for joy, except Jack.
"But FFN still isn't working," he pointed out.
"I've got it under control," Sage said with a smile and pulled a switch on the wall. The levers, pulleys, and gears slowly rumbled into motion, the building lighting up a blue glow again. The six musicians, quite pleased with themselves, dragged their drum major back to the surface and into the auditorium.
"WE DID IT!" Jack announced. The band cheered and rushed over, picking up Katrina and chanting her name in praise.
"Katri-NA! Katri-NA! Katri-NA!"
Jack, Lee, Snow, Sage and Lara stood in shock.
"I feel so used," Sage grumbled.
"Tell me about it," Lara replied.
"Well, at least FanFiction.Net is fixed," Snow reasoned.
"I guess you're right," Jack agreed with a sigh.
"That is, until some other crazed drum major insists on taking over the world," Lee joked. They all chuckled at the idea.
"Like that could happen again," Jack scoffed.
__________________________________________________________________
Chelsea made her way to the janitor's closet and took it down into the depths of FFN. "Richard thinks he has all the power 'cause he's senior drum major... I'll show him power! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!"
THE END?
by Black Pegasus
A/n: On the fanfictionnetwriters mailing list, someone initiated a challenge to write a fic about the crashing of FFN for his or her fandom. I took the challenge, and this is the result. ... It's about a fictional marching band in a futuristic high school on the moon, and what happens when the marching band's favorite website goes down... It needs a better title, please suggest in a review!
__________________________________________________________________
It seemed like just another morning for Jack Frost, an exchange student from the neighboring British lunar colony to Luna High, the high school at the creatively named American colony, Luna. He stumbled out of bed and over to his computer; he was up early so he decided to check his favorite web site.
"Page cannot be displayed," read the message when Jack tried to bring up the page.
"You smell..." he growled sleepily and clicked the reload button. The message popped up again. He kept clicking until the page finally displayed. However, there was a strange message:
"FanFiction.Net has experienced an outage..." Jack read on to find out that the site would be down for a while.
"No!" He screamed in horror. "NO!" For no apparent reason, he ran out of the house and stood in the middle of the street, yelling at the top of his lungs. "NOOOOO!"
"SHUT UP!" a bunch of people shouted out of their windows.
Suddenly realizing he was only wearing the boxer shorts he'd slept in, Jack dejectedly went back inside, got dressed, grabbed his trumpet case, and walked down the street to the high school.
__________________________________________________________________
Lee was just taking out his sparkling red trumpet when Jack stormed into the band room. "What's up, Jack?"
"Lee! You've got to help me, man!"
"Help you what?"
"Save FanFiction.Net!"
Lee raised an eyebrow. "It needs saving?"
"Yes! Can't you hear the pained moans of dying FFN users everywhere?"
They listened for a moment.
"Uh... no?"
"Well... they're dying, believe me! And you've got to help me save them by fixing FF.Net!"
Lee rolled his eyes. "Sure, Jack. Right after band."
Then the band director, Suzanne Macmillan, got everyone's attention. "Richard's not here, so we're starting in the auditorium. I'll be in in a minute." Richard was the senior drum major.
The band room was filled with chatter as the band shuffled noisily into the auditorium and took their seats on the stage. Jack walked right up to where the conductor usually stood.
"Fellow instrumentalists! This morning I made an alarming discovery -- FanFiction.Net is down!"
The whole band, except Lee, gasped. A few even screamed.
"What are we going to do?!" Elizabeth, a clarinetist, shrieked.
"Well, we're NOT going to sit here and whine, are we?" Jack asked loudly.
"NO!" the band chorused (wait a sec...).
"We're going to take action, not just sit on our bums!"
"YEAH!"
"We're going to save FanFiction.Net!"
"YEAH!"
"So who's with me?!"
Silence.
Just then Ms. Macmillan walked in, stopping short at the sight of Jack trying to start a rebellion of sorts. "What are you doing, Jack?" she demanded.
"I... uh..."
One of the trombonists whispered something to the band director.
"WHAT? Oh, my..." Then she fainted dead away. Everyone was silent for a moment, then--
"ANARCHY!" Sage, a tenor sax player, screamed. Everyone panicked, but the junior drum major, Chelsea, stepped up to the front where Jack was still standing rather dumbly.
"Everyone, listen up! I'm in charge now!" the overly enthusiastic piccoloist announced. This brought groans from a few as the chaos died down.
"Shut up! Now, we'll organize an excursion to FFN while the rest of us hang tight. Everyone who wants to help, follow... erm... Jack!" She shoved him toward the door, and he walked out, dejectedly hugging his antique trumpet, to wait in the hallway.
After a moment of discussion in the auditorium, Lee came out, dragging with him his girlfriend (and the sax captain), Snow. Close behind them was Lara, her iridescent silver trumpet shimmering in the bright hallway lights. After a few seconds Sage moped out casting a glare at his friend, Lara. They all waited for Jack to say something, but he just frowned at them and didn't move.
"We'll help you, Jack," Lee assured his friend. Jack shrugged.
"It doesn't help if you don't know where FFN is."
"I know where it is," came a voice. They turned around to see Corey, possibly the most annoying clarinetist on the moon. The upperclassmen grumbled about having a freshman tag along.
"Well, we really don't have a choice -- none of us knows where FFN is," Snow reasoned.
"Okay, but then we ditch him," Sage growled. Corey gave the group a self-satisfied grin and led the way down several hallways to a janitor's closet.
"Are you trying to tell us that FanFiction.Net is in a janitor's closet at Luna High??" Lara questioned. Corey shook his head with a look that emanated pity, and opened the closet and walked in, beckoning for the others to follow.
Once inside, Corey poked a corner of the ceiling with the bell of his clarinet, and a panel opened on the wall. He entered a few numbers, and then the closet door slammed shut and vibrated, as if it were moving like an old-fashioned elevator. After a moment it stopped moving and the door opened again, revealing something no one, except Corey, expected.
The six instrumentalists found themselves in an enormous, busy underground empire. There were consoles everywhere, and robots buzzed back and forth, carrying disk-like things labeled such as, "What The Zelda Characters Do W/Their Free Time," "You Know You're a Band Geek When...," and "Big Brother Darunia: A Reality FanFiction." To the left, looming over all this action, were several large, blue, glowing, building-like structures, each labeled "Server" and a number.
Suddenly one of the servers stopped glowing, causing a chain reaction - the rest of the servers stopped glowing, the robots slowed dramatically, and consoles sparked and exploded.
"What a disaster," Snow murmured. The rest nodded in agreement.
"So all this time FFN has been under the high school?" Jack wondered. Corey shook his head.
"Nope. It's under everything - it's the center of the moon. You can get anywhere from here... if you know the codes." The freshman chuckled. "Then again, it could be faster on the surface; the moon isn't that big."
"Thanks and everything, Corey, now SCRAM!" Sage snapped. The freshman stood there stubbornly.
"Look," Jack said carefully, "go back to the auditorium and tell Chelsea and the others that you got us here and we'll be back soon. Your section leader can reward you or whatever."
Corey looked at him cynically, but finally agreed and left via the closet.
"I'm starting to like Terri a lot..." Lee mumbled about the freshman trumpet player.
The now quintet walked cautiously toward the large server-buildings. They started hearing a strange noise; it got louder as they got closer to the buildings. After a bit, Lara, Jack and Lee started to feel a twinge in their heads.
"I'm getting a headache," Lee grumbled.
"Same here," Jack and Lara replied.
"That's weird," Sage commented. He shrugged. "Maybe it's a trumpet thing."
Jack opened the door to the blue building and they went inside, instruments in hand.
The interior of the building was pretty boring, just walls and a floor... until you looked up. Throughout the top of the building was what seemed like a mess of levers, pulleys and gears - the inner workings of a powerful machine. However, now neither a gear turned nor a lever switched. Now that the instrumentalists were inside the building, the awful, squeaking noise was much louder, and the trumpeters' headaches became that much worse. Snow thought a moment.
"That noise may have something to do with the outage... and it's coming from in there." She pointed to a door on the left side of the room.
"Well, if it's coming from that way, we should go the opposite way," Lee reasoned and headed for the door they came in, but Lara stopped him.
"Lee, we've got to save FFN! Otherwise we won't be able to get back."
"... So?"
"Well, I still have a video game to finish, so let's go!" She stomped over to the door, flung it open, and they went inside to find-
"RICHARD!"
"And he's... playing his saxophone!" Lara gasped in horror.
The drum major, upon seeing the group, played all the louder. The trumpeters dropped to their knees, pressing their hands against their ears, hardly able to bear the pain.
"I TOLD YOU... WE SHOULDN'T HAVE... COME IN HERE!" Lee yelled at Lara.
"MY BRAIN... IS GOING... TO RUPTURE!" Jack screamed. Snow and Sage just stood in shock a moment.
"Snow, you've got to do something!" Sage exclaimed. Snow stared at him blankly for a moment, then she was hit with inspiration. She whipped out her lacquered black and silver saxophone and began playing a beautiful melody, canceling out the awful noise coming from Richard's sax. The trumpeters stood up, no longer in such intense pain.
"THANK YOU!" the three of them exclaimed, then turned back to Richard.
"Why did you shut down FFN?" Lee demanded of his rival.
"Because if I control FFN, I control the MOON!" the crazed drum major explained, a power-hungry gleam in his eyes. "First the moon, then the WORLD!" He cackled evilly, then resumed playing his sax. The five musicians contemplated what to do.
"I've got it!" Jack said. "Richard has a good ear, right? So all we have to do is play a really nasty chord, and it'll drive him away."
"Good idea," Lara agreed. "Everyone play as high and loud as you can." They agreed on a few noted that definitely sounded wrong together, and played. It was a beautiful major chord.
"Heh, wrong note," Jack laughed sheepishly. "It's hard to judge that high..."
"I'm out of tune," Sage mumbled and pushed his mouthpiece on more. They tried the chord again, and this time it came out like they wanted - clashing horribly.
However, it wasn't enough. Richard stopped playing for a moment to cover his ears, but continued playing as soon as they stopped. Jack scowled.
"We need something nastier... something that'll send shivers up his spine... something like--"
"This?" came a voice. They turned around to see Katrina, the lone oboist, holding up her beautiful dark green oboe. Jack grinned.
"Exactly."
They played the chord a third time, Katrina joining in, the twang of her oboe ringing loud and clear, clashing with the other instruments. It was horrendous, but it worked.
"AAAARRRRGGGHH! MY EARS!!" Richard screamed and after a moment of yelling more, he blacked out. The others whooped for joy, except Jack.
"But FFN still isn't working," he pointed out.
"I've got it under control," Sage said with a smile and pulled a switch on the wall. The levers, pulleys, and gears slowly rumbled into motion, the building lighting up a blue glow again. The six musicians, quite pleased with themselves, dragged their drum major back to the surface and into the auditorium.
"WE DID IT!" Jack announced. The band cheered and rushed over, picking up Katrina and chanting her name in praise.
"Katri-NA! Katri-NA! Katri-NA!"
Jack, Lee, Snow, Sage and Lara stood in shock.
"I feel so used," Sage grumbled.
"Tell me about it," Lara replied.
"Well, at least FanFiction.Net is fixed," Snow reasoned.
"I guess you're right," Jack agreed with a sigh.
"That is, until some other crazed drum major insists on taking over the world," Lee joked. They all chuckled at the idea.
"Like that could happen again," Jack scoffed.
__________________________________________________________________
Chelsea made her way to the janitor's closet and took it down into the depths of FFN. "Richard thinks he has all the power 'cause he's senior drum major... I'll show him power! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!"
THE END?