The Dressage Ring

so, i've mentioned before in, i believe, the mag7ficfinders lj-com that i both love and hate Mary K's Something Wicked.  this fic has a really good premise, which is melding Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes and the Mag7:ATF AU.  in sum, Ezra and Vin have been sent undercover at the carnival in Something Wicked, and the proprietor uses the carousel to de-age them.  Mary's piece focuses on how Ezra and Vin get home and how they and how Team 7 solves the problem of getting the pint-sized agents back to their adult-versions.

Mary put in a lot of really good details in here, including the tendency for Ezra and Vin to forget that they're 'just children' now and how other people - specifically, the adults around them - will react to 'kids' deliberately putting themselves in danger.  she details how well Ezra and Vin work together when they're alone to get back to home base (Denver), and i think she has a really good grasp of how the members of Team 7 would react upon facing the carousel once they find the carnival again. 

for the most part, i agree with a lot of Mary's character decisions and plot developments, but it occured to me to wonder... what would happen if the carousel was destroyed before Ezra and Vin were able to use it to become adults again?  maybe something in the final encounter would have happened to make the destruction of the carousel imperative before the end of the fight with the carnival-master.  hmmm, this has possibilities....

the other thing i disagreed with was that so *many* people were let in on the 'secret' of pint-sized Ezra and Vin.  while Team 7 should certainly know and understand what's going on, i don't think that many people, especially the adults, would have believed the tale, much less have just been able to go along with it.  as they say: three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.  the more people are in the know, the more likely something is to go wrong - Ezra and Vin being picked up to be tested at secret government facilities, or all of Team 7 committed to the funny farm.

 
I find myself really wanting to set this universe up, for which i need to write an alternate ending, for which i feel like, in a rather OCD-manner, i *have* to rewrite Mary K's story to produce the ending i want.  i'm not sure which details will change, and think those details may come back to bite me late, i suppose.

the thing is... Mary wrote a 63k-word masterwork, here.  a true novella that's actually kinda rich in the reading.  i have a feeling that this project is going to take a long, long time.

-bs

*****************MAG7: ATF LB AU**********************************

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-bs

 -bs