I thought I'd try for a continuation of Sarn's Massassi Soap Opera thread which you can read here. Here's a basic rundown of what's happening:

Characters

Sarn: Strikingly handsome. Used to be known as Mr. Wildmann when he had some shady undercover-agent type dealings with Sine Nomen. Lately he's been working as a shrimp fisherman at the wharf. Was just reunited with his lost twin Gebohq.

Flexor: A brilliant young doctor who invented YouthShake cream which somehow slows/reverses ageing. Currently in a coma after falling off of a crane at the wharf.

Correction: A GIS agent.

Gebohq: Sarn's long-lost twin brother.

Sarn and Geb's mom: Not an actual introduced character, but has been referred to several times. Was undergoing some sort of YouthShake-related treatment at a facility in Tennessee, which has stopped due to problems with her YouthShake cream (or something). Presumably only Dr. Flexor can solve this. Knows damning corporate secrets about Yecti.

Yecti: President and CEO of Yecticorp, an evil corporation. Definatley a bad guy. Not an

American; possibly French or Spanish.

Ford: Some kind of agent. He suffered amnesia after being run down by Gebohq's car and is now recuperating in the hospital as a John Doe patient.

Count Von Zuljin/Baron Slugworth: High-society rivals. Both the count and the baron are hugely rich and act like it (i.e. they speak as though they've had an expensive private education, dress immaculately etc. Von Zuljin wears a monocle). They both employ classic servants (butlers/maids/chauffeurs). Each is furious with the other, and they are currently scheduled to fight a duel.

Krig: He might be just an ordinary paramedic with a poor command of English or he might be working for Yecti.

Sine Nomen: Secret-agent type, though not nessecarily an actual spy (could be a criminal, police agent, shady corporate lawyer or some other thing I haven't thought of). Is Russian. He was working with Ford to bring Sarn in on one last job at the time of Ford's accident.

Triste: Sarn's love interest? Like the mom character she never had any dialogue but could/should be important to the story. May have been kidnapped by Yecti.

MadQuack: A crazy hobo living on the streets? He only got a couple paragraphs.

Electro: Was somehow killed when Sarn's car blew up (either by the explosion or the people responsible for the explosion) so he shouldn't be making appearances in here, but I thought I'd mention him. Maybe for flashbacks or something.

mscbuck: Seems to have been relegated to a random insane character. Was thrown in the St. Harmonica Rebalancing Center for being so insane.

Story Arcs

1. Sarn and Geb's Mom
As stated, Sarn and Geb's mom was undergoing YouthShake treatment when something went wrong which lead to her current precarious state of health. Only Dr. Flexor can save her, except he can't right because he's in a coma. The twins (that's Sarn and Geb) need to find some way to save their mother so she can testify (or otherwise speak out) against Yecti/YectiCorp.

2. Sarn's Dealings with Sine Nomen
It's not clear who Sine works for or exactly what job he does, but he seems to have some knowledge of Sarn's pre-shrimping life and knows a name Sarn used to go by ("Wildmann"). He knows that Triste has gone missing (kidnapped by Yecti?) and wants Sarn to investigate her disappearance.

3. Count Von Zuljin vs. Baron Slugworth
As stated before, these two are successful businessmen (millionaires) and high-society types. They're both old. They were only written for by me and I never tied them in with the other characters (to be fair, I only made two posts about them :p) but presumably they're mixed up with everyone else somehow. They're currently slated to fight a duel, though they shouldn't just blow each other away in the first post and never be heard from again. Hopefully they can be involved with the rest of the cast (maybe they got rich off of business deals with Yecti?)

That's a basic summery of the old soap opera thread. I'd like to treat that one as a prologue to this story rather than just continue the old thread (which I think is actually pretty good). If anyone does post, please stick to the present-day setting (i.e. no intergalactic space marines or magical powers) and try to keep it to a soap opera-esque theme. Also, it's not nessecary to use any or all of the characters I listed if you feel like making up a bunch of your own or even go with the three story arcs (I only listed them because they were the main developing plotlines), although I plan on using both. Also, I want the style to be past-tense paragraphs, not script format (like NeS).

It's not nessecary to write for all of the old characters - some of them barely did anything and were just introduced by people randomly posting (for instance, mscbuck and Correction didn't impact the story at all, but I included them here just in case). It's also not a big deal if you want to start new plotlines. I intend to continue on with the ones I listed, but adding new ones should be fine (and although it's not off-the-wall zany this story is satarizing the soap opera genre so presumably the more tangled the characters get, the better :D).

So basically the Massassi soap opera can be thought of as the prologue to this story. My plan is basically to Geb for this thread - I'm just going to hammer away at it until someone else joins (and if noone does, at least I'll be amused by my own writing).

Uh, starting tomorrow...

And maybe tomorrow I can format that a bit better. After sleep.

Sarn Cadrill stood in the hospital's waiting room. Too excited to sit down, his pacing traced a route around several uncomfortable plastic chairs and a coffee table piled with magazines. The sound of a door being pushed open stopped him in his tracks.

Gebohq ran into the room, looking harried from his drive to the hospital.

"Sarn," he said, "I've got bad news. That man who fell off the crane? He was treating our mother."

"Our mother?" gasped Sarn.

"Yes," responed Geb. "They're having to suspend her treatment. Apparently he's some kind of genius doctor - they can't work without him."

Sarn looked at the ceiling and began shouting. "Oh God, why? I finally meet my long-lost twin brother and then you pull this? When will it end?" At that his raging outburst descended into sobs. Geb started to say some comforting words when the door flew open a second time and a doctor in a lab coat entered. He carried a clipboard and had a stethescope hung around his neck.

"I've got bad news," said the doctor, "I'm afraid your handsome young doctor friend is in a coma. There's no telling when - or if - he'll wake up."

This time it was Gebohq who lost control, shouting, "You damn doctors! Can't you do anything? Our mother's life depends on this guy!"

The doctor sighed and shook his head. "I'm sorry; at this point there's nothing we can do but wait."

Choking back his tears, Sarn managed to speak. "Our mother doesn't have that kind of time! You've got to do something!"

"There's no way to bring someone out of a coma," said the doctor in a sympathetic tone. "I think the best thing for everyone would be if you two just sat down and read a nice article on gardening," he continued, gesturing to the hard plastic chairs and boring magazines.

Something on his belt beeped. Reaching down, the doctor produced a pager and glanced at it.

"I have to go," he said and quickly exited the room, leaving Sarn and Geb alone.

Gebohq sat down and opened a magazine, which really was just the Ikeya catalogue. He spoke up as he thumbed through advertisements for European furnature. "Well, I guess that's it then." Tossing a magazine titled 'Country Living' to Sarn he added, "Why don't you just read for a bit? We'll wait it out."

However, Sarn wasn't interested in the nice pictures of cottages. "If there's one thing my years at sea have taught me, it's that the shrimp never come to you; you have to go to the shrimp. And I swear that so long as I'm breathing I'm going to do whatever it takes to save our mother's life."

Geb looked up from Ikeya. "But do what? The doctor said only time would cure Dr. Flexor's coma."

Sarn jumped through this opening. "I'm going back to the wharf, to the site of Flexor's accident."

"But the police already conducted an investigation," protested Gebohq. "What do you expect to find?"

"I don't know. Maybe something, maybe nothing. But the one thing I do know is that nothing is going to get solved on it's own. Like I said, you have to get out there and make the little shrimps come to the net," and with that Sarn strode out of the waiting room.

Gebohq got up to follow him and was about to abandon his reading material when a thought struck him. Checking that the coast was clear he slipped the catalogue under his shirt and then hurried after Sarn.

I'll bite this one then. Ohh, melodrama...

-_-

Mad Quack pushed his shopping cart. It was hard work. When he'd woken up this afternoon his cart had been up on blocks. Someone had stolen his wheels - and his radio - so the cart would barely move, and he didn't even have any tunes.

"Mr. Fowl," said an elderly man who blocked the cart's way. "I have found you at last."

Mad stepped back. He glanced the man up and down. "Quarter?"

"No, no quarters." The man's cane tapped the sidewalk as he stepped around the cart. "You are going to do a favor for me."

"Aliens!" Mad shouted. "Aliens demand quarter! Quarter!"

Tap, tap went the elderly man's cane. He pushed his nose into Mad's face, somehow surviving the smell. "I know who you are."

Mad stumbled back. "I dunno anything. Nothing! Lemmi alone!"

"I can't do that Mr. Fowl. It's time for you to face your past. You are..."

Tap, tap.

"Quakor the Fowl!"

"Wha..." Mad said. "What do you want?"

"You are going to buy shrimp."

[I'm in too. Just don't have time atm.]

[mmk then. Let's see what I can come up with here. Btw, tracer, last we knew, Sarn had been kidnapped by YectiCorp, but you seem to have missed that, so we'll just let it go. :p And I like the idea of using past-tense paragraph type. It'll make the story more serious and it'll give us NeSr's a chance to try something new.]

The sun was just beginning to set as Sarn's shiny, new cadallic pulled to a stop at the docks. (Luckily, he had very good insurance and was able to get his previous car replaced.) The setting sun played out over the water, providing a beautiful treat to the eyes as millions of tiny diamonds seemed to float on the surface of the ocean. Had Sarn stopped to enjoy the scene it might have done well to calm his frazzled nerves, but as it was, he hardly noticed it. He'd seen it a million times before and he other things occupying his mind.

Garish yellow police tape encircled Dock 37, destroying the picturesque scene of burly fishermen rolling up and stowing their nets for the evening, the ropes on their shrip boats hanging slack. Birds could be heard overhead screeching in protest as they dove for the scraps of shrimp left behind by careless fishermen. Occaisionally, the clank of a pulley could be heard against the boats' tall, metal masts, reaching for the sky.

Sarn scanned the docks from behind the police tape. From where he stood everything seemd to be in order. In fact, the only reminder of the recent misdeeds at the docks was the police tape.

Sarn glanced back and forth to make sure no one was looking his way, then ducked under the tape. The police were thorough, but Sarn had learned some tricks in a life long past. Crime scene investigation was one of the many talents he had that didn't line up with his current profession. Surely he would find something...

Sine straightened his three-button jacket and stepped through the metal detector at St. Harmonica Rebalancing Center. He retreived his car keys from the tray and followed the nurse down the plain hallways past an endless line of identicle doors. The nurse stopped at one, it could have been picked at random, the doors did not even have numbers, and opened it.

"Mr. Buck, you have a visitor," the nurse said.

Buck didn't look up. He twitched in his straight jacket.

"Please leave us," Sine said. He looked around at the padded walls, the simple plastic cot, the washstand with it's soft rounded corners; there was nothing in the room that could explain the welts across Buck's face if indeed they were self inflicted like the nurses claimed.

The nurse shut the door behind her. Sine waited for the gentle hiss of the pneumatics sealing before he turned to Buck. He cupped Buck's chin in his hand and pulled his face up. Buck grinned at him. He was missing his two front teeth, and his tounge rolled around in the hole.

"What happened to you, Buck?"

"TAP TAP!" Buck screeched. It was so sudden Sine dropped Buck's chin and took a step back.

Buck mumbled to himself. He let his chin flop back onto his chest. "Shrimp, tap tap," Sine thought he heard.

"I'm sorry, Buck," Sine said. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a single-shot ceramic gun. "Somewhere in there, you know too much. Our boss has decided it's better if you don't have a chance to recover."

Buck looked up at him. He stared at the hole in the end of the barrell.

"Tap tap?" Buck said.

Blam.

NARRATOR: Who is Sine really working for? What connection does he have to MadQuack? Why did poor Buck have to die?

How should I know? I only got this gig cause my voice is sexy.

[NSP: I think we should try to stay away from the tacky narrator stuff. It's been used, and it's more slapstick humor, whereas this thread should be a more refined satirical humor. But anyway, that was a nice post, kinda brings out a suggestion that Sine is (or at least seems himself as being) above the law]

A striking set of brown eyes opened to the sight of a well-kept hand as Rebecca woke. Rebecca, or Fish as she was more commonly known as due to her oversized lips when she was young, shifted her pupils around the carpeted box she was contained in. This was not a familiar place. Her feet touched the floor as she lifted herself off the shag clad table she has been placed on before flying into the air as her skull hit the floor. Something was wrong.

Fish groaned and rubbed her eyes.

"..."


What was wrong with her face, it felt completely different.

Without moving her head, fish slowly pawed at herself finding everything unfamiliar. Thick mop of brown hair; Head partly bandaged; Body hair; Breasts, gone; Wang.

This wasn't her body. She was male!





[! Right, if someone else can try and write her/him into something somewhere it would be a help with the character. I'm not great with that kind of thing.]

[NSP: Awesome! Three writers onboard in three days! I thought Sarn would be interested, but it's great to have you two guys in on this as well. No ideas for a woman trapped in a man's body at the moment Baconfish, but I find your name wierdly fascinating so we'll run with that for a while.

Sarn: Oops. I don't have the greatest track record in regards to continuity. :p Also the phrase "picturesque scene of burly fishermen" cracked me up.

"It'll make the story more serious and it'll give us NeSr's a chance to try something new." <-Yeah. My idea here is realistic funny as opposed to cartoon funny (as Isuwen has already done to great effect).]

Shielding his eyes from the sun, Sarn looked up at the crane that Dr. Flexor had fallen from. Towering above the berthed ships, it was ostensibly for loading heavy cargo though in recent years it's main purpose was as a seagull pearch.

Sizing it up once more, Sarn gripped the ladder and began climbing.

"Hey, wait! Hold it!" shouted Geb after his brother, visions of a third medical emergency playing out in his head.

"It's fine," replied Sarn.

"Be careful!"

"I am careful!" Sarn shouted back without so much as slowing down.

"Hurting yourself on a crane can lead to comas!"

Sarn didn't even hear Geb's reproach - he had reached the control cabin. Keeping one hand firmly gripped on the ladder he reached out and opened the door.

****

Back on the ground, Gebohq ceased squinting after Sarn's ascent and sat down on a crate of fish. Too nervous to watch Sarn he instead looked out to sea, following the progress of a sailboat riding the breeze. Eventually he became aware of someone standing behind him.

"It's a great day to be out there," said an older gentleman. Although he appeared slightly out of place on the wharf (he was fairly well-dressed and his white hair and beard were neatly trimmed) the discerning way in which he gazed at the ocean - as though assessing the ocean's behavior by examining each eave - gave him away as a sailor.

"I wouldn't know, " said Geb. "My brother's the fisherman."

"Is that so? I used to be a fisherman, back in the day."

"How interesting," responed Geb, bracing himself for an excruciating sea story.

"Yes. I brought in some of every fish that ever swam these waters," said the man, beginning his excruciating sea story. "We brought back cod, salmon, trout, pickerel - supplied half the coast."

"Actually, my brother was more of a shrimpman. We never liked actual fish much in our family," interjected Geb, trying to kill the old man's story before it could gain momentum.

"Then I guess you've never tasted the rarest fish of them all," said the old man somewhat conspiratorially, as though he was about to reveal some sort of minor secret.

"No, that's true," said Geb, still trying to end it. "It was my parents really. They absolutely forbade us to have fish in any form."

Unfazed, the old man carried on with his tale. "They called it the baconfish, and if you cooked it right it was just the most delicious meal."

"Growing up as a no-fish child was very traumatizing. It was terrible: all my friends had little goldfish or guppies, and I was never allowed to play at their houses because of it."

Gebohq decided that if he couldn't shut the old man up he could at least break even by telling an awful story of his own.

"But the baconfish was smart," contuned the old man. "It wasn't like the others; it knew that you were trying to catch it." A glint appeared in his eye, "I was the only one able to match wits with it."

"Matching wits with a fish. That's very special."

The old man smiled, "Well, I guess my story probably isn't all that interseting to a young man with the wind at his back and the ocean laid out before him."

Gebohq felt slightly guilty at brushing off an old man who was probably just wishing it was still the good old days. "Well, like I said, it's my brother who'd be more interested. He really bounced back from the pressures of our childhood and confronted his fish head on. Uh, fears. Confronted his fear...um, of fish..."

The old man nodded in an understanding manner and started to leave when he asked a question.

"Where is you're brother anyways?"

"Oh, he's up in the crane." replied Geb. The old man took a brief look up; Sarn was clearly visible in the cabin.

"Nice talking to you," he said moving off, leaving Geb alone on the pier.

[NSP: That wouldn't be my elderly gentleman would it? If anyone writes for HIM, just remember: Don't name him, and Tap Tap. And WTF does NSP stand for anyway?

Yeah. My idea here is realistic funny as opposed to cartoon funny (as Isuwen has already done to great effect) <-Thanks. It's easy when the characters you grab are TOTALLY MAD.]
-_-

"Shrimp?" asked Mad. He peered through the glass door into the darkened Organic Shrimp Emporium. A sign on the door said 'out for lunch'. It had a little plastic clock on it that said 2 pm. It didn't match any of Mad's sixteen watches, and no matter how hard he stared at it, it wouldn't tick. "Hellu? The alien wants shrimp from Orgasmic Pimp Emporer. Hellu?"

[NSP is 'non-story post'. And no worries, my old guy isn't your old guy]

[Small note, it's not quite so much a woman trapped in a man's body, as a brain transplant which the character of Rebecca Bacon [[Gedditt?]] has been involved in.]

[NSP: That would be a body transplant; the brain is the part that's 'you', therefore, if Jane's brain gets put in Bob's body, Jane has received a full body transplant, Bob has not received a brain transplant.]

[Cmon, its a cliché, all in good fun for the soap opera idea. Leave it alone.]

[NSP: I'm not saying the idea is dumb, it's fine and fits with the whole soap opera theme. In fact, I know who did it to her! Muahahaha! I'm just pointing out that it was done to HER, not to HIM. :)]

"You're awake. Good," said a gentle voice by Fish's ear.

Fish whirled to face the speaker, and immediatly regretted it. The sudden motion made her head hurt, and an IV tugged painfully at her arm. Her brain hammered at the inside of her skull. Just thinking was unbearable.

"How do you feel?" asked the blurry shape sitting in a chair beside her hospital bed.

"Urgk," Fish said.

The shape leaned forward. She could just make out a pale blur under tall black hat. He smelled like shrimp. "That's perfectly understandable," the blurry man said. "You had a rather bad accident, Miss Bacon... er, Mr. Bacon, that is. Luckily, we found a donor in time."

Fish's vision slowly cleared. "D.. dunur?"

"Yes. He died of a rare disease that I can't pronounce. Would you like a mirror?"

Fish nodded. That made her head hurt too. The old man held up a mirror. From it, the face of Sarn stared back at her.

[NSP, now wait a sec. Sarn's currently poking around in a crane, and Geb's there watching. Who's body is that? Is Sarn a triplet with a long lost (3rd) brother that no one knew about?]