A novel in progress by
Sikon.
Inga Zerkalova is a reclusive lab assistant living and working in the Akademgorodok, the science center on the outskirts of Novosibirsk, Russia. One day, she gets into an accident involving an unknown woman who claims to know her in the future, which somehow infuses her with memories of the location of the lost time machine
Insight at the bottom of a river elsewhere in Russia.
As Inga and her grandfather go on their first trip through time,
it only gets more complicated from there.
The first three chapters are available
here
. Some of the spoiler tags below refer to the parts of the story not yet written.
- Action Girl: Ivy
- Aliens in Cardiff: The Insight is where?! Not to mention the locations of the six stardomes of 2515 Earth.
- Brains and Brawn
- Brainy Brunette: Guess frigging who.
- Creator Provincialism: Since the author herself lives near Inga's workplace, all the locations in present-day Russia are real.
- Expy: Inga, Igor and Ivy are based partially on the Doctor, Wilfred Mott, and River Song of Doctor Who.
- Failure Is the Only Option: Invoked in-story with the attempt to prevent Alexander II's assassination.
- Footnote Fever: One or two per chapter. The main purpose of these is to explain some aspects of Russian culture that may be unfamiliar to the reader, but it is generally done in a whimsical roundabout way.
- Free-Love Future: Subverted. Yrna looks like this at first, but that's actually just a small community and the rest of the population looks at them with as much suspicion as we would.
- Yuri Genre
- Have We Met Yet?
- Hermaphrodite: The twoform. An entire planet's worth of those.
- Humanity's Wake
- Jigsaw Puzzle Plot
- Lost Colony: Yrna. Mnemosyne eventually becomes one.
- NaNoWriMo: What triggered the writing in November 2010. It got nowhere close to the 50,000 word mark over that month, though.
- Negative Space Wedgie: All Faster-than-Light Travel in this setting is based on exploiting the properties of one of these. The titular time machine is built inside it. Ouch.
- Painting the Fourth Wall: Machine voices are written in monospace font.
- Shout Out: A couple to We, plus a completely unintentional one to Through the Looking Glass.
- Stable Time Loop: The entire premise of Inga and Ivy's relationship hinges on this.
- Strawman Political: Pobedonostsev looks like this; however, his speeches are based on his actual behavior and letters of that time.
- Theme Naming: The names of the protagonists and the time machine all start with the letter I.
- Time and Relative Dimensions in Space: Type 4. The Insight is capable of traveling through space as well as time.
- Translator Microbes: A specific kind with defined limitations. Also combined with Translation Convention, since most of the time the characters are supposed to be speaking Russian.
- Verbal Tic: "Right".
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