Life had been interesting as of late for Mica Vitrianna.
First, she had died, gone to hell, been rescued, sent to heaven, and there met a girl who'd said that Mica's life was fictitious.
And then, Mica had been sent back in time, back to before her parents had gone rogue, before she and her brother had been separated, and long before she and Tim had ever gotten engaged.
And, most importantly, before she'd been revealed as a vampire spy to the human populace.
Many words could have been used to describe Mica's second run at life, but she herself would have gone with 'hilarious.'
Though that didn't diminish her worry that something would kill her and start the whole cycle over again. Sisyphus, she was not. Or, at least, she didn't want to be.
And so, when she'd awoken one day in a strange place, only to be told that she'd been enrolled in a school, well, Mica had decided to be cautiously optimistic.
Of course, she'd kept her appearance locked down; she wasn't insane.
But still, this was something new.
And, yet, somehow also familiar.
"Welcome," said a predatory alien standing onstage, to the clustered group of several dozen confused youths that constituted his audience.
"My name is General Martok," he continued. "I realize that most of you have your hands full facing the trials of Jak'tahla, or, in unfortunate cases, with trying to escape Stovokor. But, rest assured, I am no Kos'karii. This is very much real."
"What…" began a fey-looking girl. "What do you want from us?" Her lower lip trembled.
"You are, all of you, practitioners of an ancient earth craft known as 'Fan Fiction.'"
There was a collective intake of breath.
"Your works contain too many typography errors; thus, you have been brought here to learn the ancient Klingon art of Copy Editing."
They blinked at him.
He couldn't be serious.
He couldn't be.
"I wish you the best of luck in your studies here," Martok finished, crossing his arms in one final salute. "Qapla'!"
"Qapla'," returned a smattering of the students, though they sounded uncertain more than anything. A few of them had been surprised into responding. A human had been startled into crossing her arms as she returned the farewell, Mica noted. Next to the human, an alien seemed to have reflexively crossed her arms into some salute native to another empire altogether.
No one clapped.
But taking another look at the human/alien pair, Mica found herself moving over to start a conversation with them, since she was fairly certain that the human was a body-snatcher, and that said body-snatcher had been one of the five people she'd met in heaven.
As it turned out, that human hadn't been Sai, merely an alternate-universe doppelganger. Several times removed.
A month later, Clara Hart and Cultivar Muscovite had been gone, anyway, along with three others, so it hadn't mattered much, in the long run.
And, Mica wasn't stupid, she'd read Sue-niversity fics before, and dismissed them as mean-spirited. There was obviously more going on here than met the eye. Especially since people would 'graduate' fairly regularly, never to be seen again.
And so, Mica had kept her guard up, and used all her infiltrator training to figure out what was truly motivating their captors.
Well, almost all of her skills. Mica hadn't seen any point in accumulating social capital, so she'd styled herself as an iconoclast, spending most of her time with those left behind by the formation of cliques, big-sister instincts kicking into high gear at the double-threat of their gilded cage of a school, and the sharp memories of how painful loneliness in such a place could be.
Though the blatant manipulations some of her classmates had been attempting on Mica and on each other certainly weren't helping.
She got that there would inevitably be some amount of preconception involved in meeting people previously only known as fiction, but, really, this was getting ridiculous. Did they think they were being subtle, when they stared at her blood red pendant with sympathetic eyes? Did they think she would find it encouraging when they told her to 'just hang in there a little while longer'?
All they were doing was making her feel uncomfortable at their blatant pandering.
Less than two months later, they got a few transfer students. At first, she'd just thought it had been Clara and Muscovite getting dragged back.
When 'Muscovite' had spotted Mica and waved enthusiastically, however, Mica had revised her expectations a few times. Clara had the body she'd recognized, but the person she'd met had been the body-snatcher, 'Sai,' she remembered.
With the two of them was a third woman, who seemed like some kind of halfling? She looked something like a smaller version of Sai, at least.
"Well, this is highly irregular," said Q, their history teacher.
"Ah, these are transfer Students," explained Malthazar, their math teacher.
"Not repeat offenders?" asked Q, eyeing them, suspiciously.
"No," said Malthazar. "They are not of our reality, per se, but rather from the mirror universe."
"Well then, welcome!" He beamed. "I am Q."
He snapped his fingers, and a woman appeared.
"This is my wife, Q…"
Snap. A teenager appeared.
"…my son, Q…"
Snap. A middle-aged man appeared.
"…and this here is Q, an old friend of the family."
He snapped his fingers one last time and they all vanished. "And yourselves?"
"Saino Moore," said Sai.
"Ash Hughes," said Ash.
"Celadon," said the third.
"Charmed, I'm sure," said Q, before waving a hand, dismissively. "Fight over the open seats yourselves, then fill out these papers and hand them in."
He snapped his fingers and each of them held a stack of forms, presumably the same quiz the rest of them had filled out upon arrival.
The newcomers acquiesced and moved apart to find seats.
They sat down and began writing, while Q continued on with his lecture.
The instant one of them finished marking their papers, the packet vanished.
First Celadon's.
Then Sai's.
Then Ash's.
"Let's see what archetypes we have…" began Q, before reclaiming and perusing the tests. "Agony Sue, Broken Sue, and Possession Sue," he read off, before frowning.
"Were you honest on the tests?" he asked.
"Yes," lied Celadon.
"Technically everything I said was true," hedged Sai.
Ash shrugged. "It doesn't count as lying, if it's a survey."
"Because, if I look at your records," Q went on, "it looks like you've been assigned archetypes, already. 'Breaker Sue' for you," he said to Ash. "'Bullet Sue' for you," he said to Sai. He frowned at the paper. "And all yours says is 'Fusion,'" he said to Celadon. "Care to explain?"
"Certainly," she said. "I am a fusion of Ash Hughes and Saino Moore."
She paused, dredging up old memories. "I've been told that I'm the cross product of my components' 'vectors' in six spatial dimensions."
Q put a hand to his chin in consideration. "Now that I look for it, it's obvious."
For all that Mica's treatment had bothered her, that was nothing compared to her indignation at the treatment of everyone else, especially the three new kids.
She'd come into school mid-year before, and she'd always found it immensely frustrating whenever teachers acted like weeks worth of material could be caught up on in a single week. Ether it implied that the information was much less condensed than necessary, or the teachers did not value the education of the new students. She figured it was some combination of the two.
Though her life experiences had certainly not left her predisposed to trust authority. This whole thing was giving her flashbacks to the empire's training methods, which involved putting no pressure on the students mid-curriculum, before slaughtering those who failed to pass the final exam.
She couldn't let that happen, not again. If that meant she had to badger everyone else into studying, if that meant that she had to take these three newbies by the hand and recap all the previous lessons in excruciating detail… then so be it.
It wasn't as though they were jerks. If anything, the three of them seemed… almost afraid of her? Ash rarely met her eyes. Sai's priorities seemed to be skewed to such an extent that they existed on an orthogonal plane to normality.
In other words, a typical fangirl.
Celadon had eyes and ears only for her two components. She seemed oddly protective over the two of them. Which, considering the fact that if one of them was killed, she could very well cease to exist, Mica could kind of get.
Ash was apparently her 'author' and Mica wasn't sure what she'd expected from such a person, but it certainly hadn't been this. She would have expected a chess master, or a dramatic artiste, not this withdrawn, focused individual who spent most of her time reading textbooks and going over Mica's proffered notes.
Though, Mica supposed it made some amount of sense. More than an author, Ash was a writer. Writers were usually thinkers more than doers. And Mica was Ash's protagonist. It made sense that she'd have given Mica traits that she wished she'd possessed herself. Such as social skills, charisma, and talent. All of this made sense, intellectually, it was just. Hard. To wrap her head around.
"What did they mean when they said we had 'archetypes'?" asked Sai, in one of their numerous study sessions.
Ash paused in her reading, obviously interested to hear the answer as well, though she remained silent. In fact, she never spoke to Mica unless spoken to, apparently waiting for Mica to make the first move, something that Mica had no intention of doing. She didn't mind tutoring people, she found it calming, in fact, but a serious conversation with her quote-unquote 'creator' wasn't something she felt up for, at the moment.
Celadon had yet to crack open a book in Mica's presence, but she had also rarely failed to answer a question correctly, so Mica figured whatever cheat she had was fairly reliable.
"All characters can be said to have an archetype," Mica answered. "Since we're here, that archetype is 'Mary Sue.' Normally, that would be sufficient, but since there are so many of us, further distinctions must be made."
"Like when you've watched so much shonen anime that you have to start coming up with sub-categories," offered Sai.
"I suppose," said Mica, who wasn't about to admit to watching anime, if she could help it.
"I was told that I am a 'Parasitic Sue,' and—seeing as my nature is to be a quite literal bloodsucker—this accounts for things on the surface level. Going deeper, though, I have noticed that I define myself in large part by other people's opinions of me, how they react to my actions, and so on."
"Possession Sue, I'm familiar with," said Celadon. "As well as Peggy Sue, Marty Stu, and God Mode Sue. But what were the ones they saddled us with?"
"Well, your two halves initially tested as Agony Sue and Broken Sue," said Mica. "An Agony Sue is one who agonizes over her knowledge of the future and her decision to keep said knowledge to herself. A Broken Sue hits most of the same notes as a Broken Bird. She gains power through pathos.
"They were then assigned polar opposite archetypes," Mica continued. "A Breaker Sue is one who destroys canon as she knows it simply because she can. A Bullet Sue is one who immediately bites the bullet and informs everyone that they are living in a story, simply because she can't be bothered to keep secrets."
The three of her students exchanged meaningful looks, but declined to comment further.
Professors Demona and Xanatos were passing through the library on their rounds, so Mica herself shut up for a few minutes as well, until they were gone.
Once the four of them were alone once again, Mica sighed. "I don't suppose you three have any leads on what the true motives of our captors might be?"
Celadon hummed in thought. "I wouldn't be so quick to rule out benevolence, if I were you."
Mica blinked. "What?"
"You know anything about Vulcan in this universe?" asked Celadon.
Mica was guarded, "Can't say that I do."
"Way back when," began Celadon, "there were only humanoids on Vulcan. They were a wild people, ruled by their emotions and instincts. Then, came the invasion."
She turned over a Padd, which was playing a movie clip.
"The invaders were insectoid, nearly indestructible, and insatiable. They were parasitoids, incubating their young in the chest cavities of other living beings, causing the host's death upon emergence. The war of mutual extermination continued for generations until a Vulcan named Surak noticed that one of the insectoid Queens seemed more rational than others of her kind. A tentative alliance formed between the two of them. When the Queen laid the egg of her successor, Surak took it upon himself to host it, in the hopes of making the next generation more like himself. This act of self-sacrifice led to the old Vulcan Proverb, 'The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one.'"
"…and it worked?" guessed Mica.
"It worked," agreed Celadon. "It was centuries before they discovered the genetics to explain it, but the Xenomorphs fertilize their eggs using DNA from their hosts. This made them physiologically more like the Vulcans. The philosophies and teachings of Surak unified the two peoples to such an extent that today they consider themselves as two subspecies of Vulcans, rather than as indigenous or invaders. Today, hosting is considered a great honor, because it is seen as following in the footsteps of Surak. And the Vulcans are far from an abnormality in this universe," Celadon went on, switching tabs to show another video.
"The Medusans wear holographic appearance generators in public," Celadon continued, "to protect the sanity of other species. The Betazoids eschew certain forms of telepathy to avoid flaying the minds of the less psychically inclined. The Klingons abide by a strict code of etiquette and behavior, to ritualize the violence demanded by their traditions. Despite what one might think at first glance, this universe is defined not by monstrosity, but by mindfulness."
"Even if that's true," said Mica, "why collect Sues? It doesn't make sense."
"No," agreed Sai, "It doesn't. But that's because Fanfiction Universities don't make sense in the first place. After all, the whole point of fanfiction is that there are no barriers to entry.
"People have differing levels of education and proficiency in any given language," Celadon pointed out, "so fixating on grammar of all things is certainly elitist."
Sai waved a hand. "Not to mention that shipping outside the original author's intentions is often used to increase the amount of queer representation, so advocating against it is at least a little homophobic."
"And then there's the people who write fanfic in lieu of therapy," said Celadon, with a sigh. "Censorship is not good. If only victims of trauma are allowed to write fiction exploring trauma, then that creates a culture where everyone must put their trauma on display or else face censure and scorn."
"And really, when it comes right down to it, writing is allowed to be fun," said Sai. "Sure, a revenge fic or false accusation fic may not ever win a Pulitzer. But it doesn't need to. That's not what it's for."
"What is it for, then?" Mica wanted to know.
Sai shrugged. "Well, if you want it in one word: catharsis. The purging of negative feelings through art."
"Regardless of their motives," said Celadon, "they rescued us when we were stranded and alone, and we trust them."
"Do you?" asked Mica, turning to Ash who, characteristically, hadn't said a word in Mica's presence.
"Yes," said Ash. "But I can see why you might not want to. As C.S. Lewis wrote, 'If it's evil that troubles us, we can call upon good to save us. But if it's good that frightens us, then there's nowhere left to turn.'"
Even when she spoke, she avoided using her own words, Mica noted.
She'd reserve judgment for now.
They spent the rest of the session in silence.