xt1me: (Default)
[personal profile] xt1me

so I've often had the notion that if I used voice recorder dictation or something maybe I'd have a better chance of actually writing more. The hardest part of writing is always the actual writing part after all.
Editing is slightly easier, so if I just be spew out a wall of text maybe it'd be easier edit than actually trying plonk it out on paper manually.

I never got around to doing it, never looked into any software options. But today there was general meeting about accessibility awareness and all that at work and they pointed out there is a dictation button in their Word. So you know what? I figured I'd try it see how this goes.

I don't know if I’d ever actually write a story like this but you never know.
I figure let's try a fic idea and see how it goes.

So I I've been reading this really cool long fic called “Heroes of the Squared Circle” by Mithen.

It's a really cool AU fusion fic of DC heroes and professional wrestling. You know, the WWE type wrestling.
I have not watched wrestling in an age. When I was a little kid sure I watched it a bit but like yeah, that's a long time ago and I couldn’t really say I know much about it. I can recall some of the names & possible at a stretch a few moves but that’s about it.
I know enough that the good guys are known as Babyfaces or just Faces and the bad guys are called Heels and that’s where the phrase heel-face turn comes from.

But the great thing about fanfics is that some fantastic writers out there really make you invested in stuff you know nothing about. And I know about showmanship and theatre from when I did backstage work and stage-managing so it was a fun read.

The convoluted mess of comic book storylines really mesh well with the convolution mess of professional wrestling storylines.

But anyway.

In the grand tradition of tying everything back into whatever recent fandom you've dived into I was thinking of what a version of that with Assassin's Creed would be like.

Obviously I'll never write it, I don't know enough about either to have a go at it, but it’s fun to muse on.

 

 

Okay so let’s start with Desmond. He’d probably be technically good but like absolutely rubbish coming up with his own gimmicks. He'd be great like all the physical aspects though. I figured a back story for him would be like his mother is in mixed martial arts and his father was in the army and he was always expected to follow in their footprints. So he was trained from an early age for be good at fighting and stuff. But while he liked the physical aspect of what he learned he hated the competitive side of things. It was always so stressful. Not to mention he never actually wanted to go into the military anyway.
He’s pretty non-confrontational for a guy that’s 6 foot and can take almost anyone in a real fight.

He likes professional wrestling because it's fake.
So basically he ran off to join a wrestling crew.

Of course while he’s good the technical and physical side of things he’s not so good at the performance side of things. Especially at the start.
But he's really laid back and people like working with him since he’s good at going with the flow in a match and making his opponent look good. He doesn’t let his ego get in the way of following directions which means he might never make top billing in the ring but that kind of thing is gold for backstage so it’s enough to keep him on. (Anyone how has ever worked in a field full of egos can appreciate this)

He’s probably stuck in minor rolls like playing henchmen for a heel or as a plant in a crowd or whenever a big name wrestler needed some civilian to beat

But he got friends with Lucy, Shaun and Rebecca. Their all in the minor leagues. (Listen, I know I could make Shaun and Rebecca be more on non-physical side of things but they’re Assassins too. They get to be wrestlers as well.)

Lucy’s a heel minion type and is toying with the idea of going face.

Shaun has a gimmick as a historian, coming in all dressed up in glasses and the sweater vest and stuff like. The thing is he actually is a qualified historian and he has that as his backup plan.
Whenever he leaves wrestling he's going to go back and teach history as a “real job” but he's having far too much fun at the moment to do that any time soon.

In wrestling Rebecca actually started the tech/set-up side but was always athletic so fell into the showbiz side pretty quick. Whenever a story beat calls for a heel to bawl out tech crew she usually gets picked. She’s good in front of a camera, can sell a hit and is a woman so it's a great way of making heel look extra nasty.
She even got a minor storyline where she made a robot (robot played by Desmond because all it really required was staying still all the time when not in the ring.) Nothing major but it got them some matches.

Or course none of them are heavy weights except for maybe Desmond. (I did a quick google and Desmond weighs anywhere from 170 lbs to 195 lbs & the heavyweight class is 183 lb to 285 lb. Now, all this could be wrong since I’m going by the first thing to come up in search results but since I’m not going to actually write this I don’t feel like doing proper research.)

But then they catch a break during a slow time and get permission try a storyline they made up together (possibly while drunk).

Something like Rebecca makes a machine, the Animus of course, which is obviously going to tap into past lives to make Desmond a better fighter. He’s working as a kind of boring face at the moment. Honestly, he’s not as bad as he used to be on the mic but he’s not being getting any change to show it.

So I figure Desmond can probably speak a bit Arabic from his mother's side of the family. Just enough to have a conversation with his grandparents. And Shaun latches onto this to make up a character of an assassin (assassin’s are cool), since the origin of the word is from Arabic.
They have a great time coming up with Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad.

And Lucy comes up with kidnapping Desmond so Altaïr can be working as a heel (heel’s have more fun so Desmond’s all for it).

I figure Warren Vidic is like the Vinc McMahon equivalent. (Abstergo is the actual company that owns the Wrestlers because of course the owners are always the bad guys.)  But they come up with a whole secret society like the Illuminati to make things interesting.

So they end up coming up with this whole feud thing with Templars and Assassins.
It means lots of fun shenanigans with Desmond trying to escape but being turned into Altaïr, and Altaïr working for the bad guys until he finds out that *gasp* they are Templars! His sworn enemy.

The betrayal.

Which sets up Lucy’s heel face turn where she rescues Desmond.

They even get to do “Assassinations” which is basically just a regular match but dressed up as Altaïr taking out some historical target.
Shaun gets research historical facts for Lucy to give under the guise of briefing Desmond in the Animus. Which he then take’s over when Desmond gets “rescued
. (The first time they get a piece of fan mail from some saying those bits are what got them into studying history Shaun has it framed.)

Desmond’s have the time of his life. It turns out he’s much better at playing a character if he can hide behind an accent. And if he ever stumbles with what he’s saying he can just lapse into Arabic because everything sounds better in a foreign language. Any fans that’s actually speak Arabic would notice the completely ridiculous insults he throws out (“You absolute coat-hanger”) but it’s all fun.

Is there a one arm’d referee that “Altaïr” always yells at? Maybe Malik is the only other person around who speaks Arabic so they have fun with that.

Maybe he gets a fake romance with Maria after their first match with her dressed up in fake chain mail where he’s shocked, shocked I say, to discover he lost to a woman.
¯\_()_/¯

Altaïr gets to be pretty popular but all things come to an end so eventually he goes back to being Desmond.

But now they've given the writers some fun things to play with.

The main heel is Daniel Cross and he picked up bit of Russian from an old couch. So they decide the Templar's make their own version of the Animus to use on him. He’s not so good at completely changing character so they come up with the Bleeding affect. And having his “Russian ancestor” be an Assassin while he’s a Templar makes for some great bits were he suddenly turns on his allies for bit before “snapping out” of it. He’s not planning on a heel-face turn, he has too much fun playing the bad guy, but it’s a good bit.

And then Clay Kaczmarek decides to get in on it. He has way too much fun playing up the crazy aspect of the Bleeding effect. (Did his previous gimmick have something to do with puzzles or code? IDK.) He has a blast until an injury ends his wrestling career. I’m tempted to be nasty and say he had a blade on him to add some colour to a match (as I understand it, that’s the term for where a wrestler cuts themselves, usually on the head since it only takes a tiny cut to bleed really dramatically, so it looks good on camera) only the blade slipped at a really bad time. A small blade usually can’t do that much damage but when you’re diving around a ring it’s still possible for it get jammed just where you don’t want it. Lots of blood everywhere and he had to get surgery for cut ligaments or something. I don’t know a lot about injuries and there no way I’m looking anything up but he probably gets back to almost full health but not enough to continue his career.
It’s ok, he gets back to his job in IT or engineering or something.

Anyway, after all that Abstergo wants something fresh to get everyone’s mind off it. So they decide Desmond needs a new ancestor to play.

When coming up with a new character they basically just ask Desmond what other accents he can do. He does a terrible Italian one much to everyone’s despair (“Hey Wassa-Matta-You Altair?” “That’s racist” “you’re racist”) but it turns out that Desmond actually did spend a little bit of time in Italy. Maybe back when he was doing the international competition circuit when he was younger or something. He only has the kind of Italian that most people pick up when they’re kids in a different country. Insults and pick up lines basically. But hey, that's enough for a new character.
So after being nagged to figure out how to do a proper Italian accent, or at least a better one, they come up with Ezio.

So they have a great time now with this ‘coz they can set up Ezio’s battles in the past against Templars. In fact they can do a whole parallel story with wrestlers taking on roles as various Templars and stuff to fill up spaces while the main storylines goes on as normal with some added in Assassins versus Templar stuff.

They probably come up with the Pieces of Eden as a nice macguffin so not everything is about the championship belt or just grudge matches.

Writers like options.

So that goes on for a while and becomes pretty popular but unfortunately at some point they get into a little trouble when Ezio has to beat up the Pope. It made the real-life investors a bit iffy though nothing came out of it. Still, business is business, so they decided to maybe scrap that storyline. Though Shaun probably yells about historical accuracy and Pope fights.

So it was decided to wrap up the Ezio storyline and maybe try something else.
They had this whole big plan and then Desmond gets injured.

Nothing too serious. I am tempted to say he gets injured doing something stupid outside the ring rather than in it just because. Maybe he still does free running on the weekends and breaks an arm or something.
Anyway.
They quickly decide they need a new way of doing the gimmick to get around the injury so they decided to still have Desmond put in the machine to tap into his ancestors but this is the first time an ancestor is not being played by Desmond himself. They get a new up and comer, Connor. Since he is an
actual Native American they decided to lean into that. Connor gets a lot of input for this and Shaun looks up all the historical facts in an effort to not get something horribly racist. Maybe Connor even teaches Desmond a little bit of Kanyen'kéha for when he needs to do ‘Bleeding’ bits (and mocks his pronunciation). But the cool new storyline is all his, while he’s injured Desmond’s just used for the set-up bits.

The thing is, the Assassin versus Templar historical parts are getting more popular than the vanilla matches. The company is always going to go with what's making the money so at they see where this is going and they actually decide to wrap up the modern story line. Desmond, unfortunately, is never very popular as himself, he’s always been more popular as his ancestors so it’s not a big surprise for him. But they do get to wrap up the storyline they had going with the modern Assassins. And they’re still keeping them a bit as a framing device.

And it does mean that Desmond gets to defeat Cross for the belt as Desmond which was pretty cool.

I’m not sure where this’d go from here. Obviously you’d have more Assassins from the games coming in here. Edward as a pirate because if you can be any type of person from history why wouldn’t you be a pirate. Jacob and Evie as a brother and sister tag team. Kassandra the Spartan warrior and so on. And narratively, this should probably be the end of Desmond’s career if I’m still loosely following the games. But that’s depressing so let’s stop here.

 

 

So I think the dictaphone thing was a success. It seems to have churned out over 1500 words and after editing and fleshing things out it’s over 2500. Which means it did actually get me writing since without this experiment I would have done nothing.

I had to do a lot of editing however. I mean, a wall of text is not easy to read never mind the fact it didn’t understand what I was say a lot of the time.

And I did have to go back in and write whole swaths to make this more coherent. Still, I think it helps my spelling. It got a lot of words wrong, but they were all spelt correctly.

It was kind of hilarious what it kept thinking Ezio’s name was and I admit I just paused and put in fillers to fix later for some things I knew it was going to get wrong.
But I think I might try this again some time. I don’t know if I’ll ever write a full fic like this but it’s definitely a good place to start.

June 2025

S M T W T F S
12 3456 7
8910111213 14
151617181920 21
222324252627 28
2930     

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 11th, 2025 08:31 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios