As the Cardinal Flies

And because I need a distraction from the two fic exchange assignments I'm working on at the moment, let's do this again:

Rules:
I've made a list of fifteen (15) characters from a variety of fandoms. Your job is to ask questions about various combinations of these characters (examples: What secret past do #8 and #14 share? What if #2, #6, and #9 went on a road trip? If #5 and #10 were having dinner, who invited who?), which I'll do my best to answer.

Once we've accumulated sufficient questions, I'll compile the results and make a new post or posts incorporating all the Qs and As. (Many ages ago by 'Net time, the answers were given in comments to the questions in the original post, but that was long ago and far away, and nowadays the new post means that everyone sees all the answers at once, and no one besides me has to backtrail through a reading-page to find the original meme.)

Notes:
Different practitioners of this meme make different sorts of lists. My approach tends to involve recruiting from as many different sources as I can possibly manage. Thus, queries are extremely likely to produce Improbable Crossover Theater for various - and sometimes really weird - values of "improbable". Management will do its best to respond to all queries posed, but reserves the right to designate some results Just Too Bizarre To Contemplate.

[Also: why, yes, if anyone else is inclined to start one of these going, I will happily wade in....]

All of a sudden there are three or four iterations of the venerable 15 Characters Meme on my reading page.  How can I possibly resist adding to the mayhem?

ETA: The list of meme-ists, so far (because it's only fair to give everyone credit, and to encourage cross-reading)
 astrogirl 
 calliopes_pen 
 el_staplador 
 senmut 
 thisbluespirit 
  trobadora 

Being me, I have long since tweaked the exact verbiage of the meme to my own specification, so the following is not actually copied from any of the other current meme-artists, but the process is identical.

Rules:
I've made a list of fifteen (15) characters from a variety of fandoms.  Your job is to ask questions about various combinations of these characters (examples: What secret past do #8 and #14 share?  What if #2, #6, and #9 went on a road trip?  If #5 and #10 were having dinner, who invited who?), which I'll do my best to answer.

Once we've accumulated sufficient questions, I'll compile the results and make a new post or posts incorporating all the Qs and As. My original reason for this was to accommodate both the Dreamwidth and LJ versions of this journal; nowadays, it's because I tend to write sufficiently detailed answers that the threading would get complicated if I didn't.

Notes:
Different practitioners of this meme make different sorts of lists.  My approach tends to involve recruiting from as many different sources as I can possibly manage (in this instance, either 13 or 15  unique fandoms are represented depending on how you count/label).  Thus, queries are extremely likely to produce Improbable Crossover Theater for various -- and sometimes really weird -- values of "improbable".  Management will do its best to respond to all queries posed, but reserves the right to designate some results Just Too Bizarre To Contemplate.

Let the game begin!

From astrogirl2

Mary Russell, Sarah Jane Smith, and Brigadier Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart are stranded at sea in a tiny lifeboat. Do they easily survive to be rescued, perish horribly at sea, or find themselves resorting to cannibalism by day five?

All three are much too civilized to resort to cannibalism and much too experienced at surviving difficult circumstances to be severely challenged by this one. Also, between Sherlock Holmes, the Doctor, and Sarah Jane’s own various allies, someone will show up to bail them out well before the end of day two.

Why is Sherlock Holmes trying to kill Dairine Callahan, and how likely is he to succeed?

[boggle]

The only way this even begins to be possible is for Holmes to have been really well brainwashed, and that just about has to mean that some incarnation of the Master is involved. Which is actually possible, given that it’s established in canon that the Doctor exists in the Young Wizards universe. Since that appearance involved Five, we can further extrapolate that it’s Anthony Ainley’s Master, who is probably trying to co-opt Dairine’s planet of silicon life forms for his own ends. However, like all of the Master’s plots, this one is doomed to failure – in this case because he really doesn’t quite get the degree to which wizardry is rather more than a weird scientific sub-discipline.

Peggy Carter has become a vampire! Does she angst about it endlessly, or wholeheartedly embrace her creature-of-the-night status?

Peggy only does serious angst if it involves Captain America, and since he obviously wasn’t the one who turned her, there will be no angst at this table. If Howard Stark or the SSR can’t find some way to turn her back (very possible, though not guaranteed), she’ll adapt with no great difficulty, though she may have to get very stern with a few people about how much blood they’re willing to donate to her cause. And eventually Stephen Strange will probably find a way to unvamp her, several generations down the line.

Richard Castle, Victoria “Victory Anna” Cogsworth, and Severus Snape are having a movie night. Who brings the snacks, who loses the remote control, and how hard do they fight over what to watch?

[reboggle]

Castle brings the snacks (because he doesn’t trust Torrey’s culinary skills and because snack-bringing isn’t in Snape’s vocabulary). Torrey does not lose the remote, she merely borrows it, and somehow its parts end up scattered among two ray guns, a teleportation device, and a pair of rocket skates. There is actually very little fighting over the movie, Torrey will watch just about anything in the name of learning more about her present dimension, and Snape is there less for the movie than to try and figure out what diabolical scheme has prompted Castle to set up the event. Since Castle is screening the new Nebula-9 feature film (produced after the events of S5 episode “Final Frontier”), both his guests end up more confused than ever....

From lost_spook:

Vala and David Xanatos are stuck in a lift! Will they escape, meekly wait till the fire brigade gets there or kill each other?

Knowing Xanatos, he secretly caused the elevator to get stuck in order to plot an ingenious caper of some kind in which Vala will be a key player. Knowing Vala, the odds are dead even as to whether she’ll go along with the scheme whole-heartedly or play along just long enough to (at least attempt to) pull the rug out from under him at the last minute.

Mary Russell has been murdered. Cat Grant is the detective, Xanatos is her faithful sidekick and Victoria Cogsworth is the plodding police ally. Why is Rupert Giles a red herring, and who actually dunnit and why?

[re-reboggle]

This one is so full of improbables that one hardly knows where to start. David Xanatos is so definitionally a mastermind (if not precisely an evil one) that he’s difficult to envision as a sidekick. Victory Anna? Absolutely Does Not “Plod”; she may not be quite the loose cannon she often appears, but she is a woman of action and intuition. And of course, despite the title of her latest adventure being The Murder of Mary Russell (how’s that for a scary coincidence) it’s difficult to contemplate one of the world’s premier sleuths (alongside her more famous husband) actually getting herself killed.

Which leads me to believe that the whole thing must be part of a party game set up by someone with really good superpowers in order to generate this particular guest list. On this list, that looks like Dairine, though it could also be Xanatos’ aide Owen Burnett in his alternate Puckish persona, or just possibly one of the most recent Doctors. That being the case, Giles is a red herring because that’s the game-card he drew, and in all probability the in-game mastermind will turn out to be (ta-da!) Sherlock Holmes himself, who will reveal in the climax that of course Mary Russell has not actually been murdered after all.

Will Riker and Severus Snape are going camping in the woods! Fun holiday or complete disaster?

On the one hand, Riker’s woodcraft skills are impeccable (and he’s known to be an avid fisherman). On the other, a situation in which Riker would invite Snape on a camping trip – and Snape would accept – is difficult to conceive, unless perhaps Snape needs to go out in search of potion components in the wild and someone in authority has insisted that he needs not to go by himself per the relevant wilderness-safety regulations. (Where and how he comes up with Riker as a campmate is left as an exercise for the student of improbable time travel.) My guess is that the trip would start out reasonably enough, but that by two or three days in, the two men would rapidly figure out that they’re catastrophically incompatible, mostly because Riker would be having fun and Snape is, if not constitutionally incapable of experiencing fun for its own sake, at best deeply uncomfortable with the concept.

Because yes, I have stories in progress for two exchanges...

OTOH, I just had one of these pop up on the LJ side of this journal (and followed it over to another iteration), and have been reminded of how much I like playing the Wacky Crossover Theater game.  So why not?

Rules:
I've made a list of fifteen (15) characters from a variety of fandoms.  Your job is to ask questions about various combinations of these characters (examples: What secret past do #8 and #14 share?  What if #2, #6, and #9 went on a road trip?  If #5 and #10 were having dinner, who invited who?), which I'll do my best to answer.

Notes:
Once we've accumulated sufficient questions, I'll compile the results and make a new post incorporating all the Qs and As -- this way, the Dreamwidth and LiveJournal readerships both get to see all the collective wackiness.

Different practitioners of this meme make different sorts of lists.  My approach tends to involve recruiting from as many different sources as I can possibly manage (in this instance, 12.5 unique fandoms are represented -- we'll talk about the .5 later).  Thus, queries are extremely likely to produce Improbable Crossover Theater for various -- and sometimes really weird -- values of "improbable".  Management will do its best to respond to all queries posed, but reserves the right to designate some results Just Too Bizarre To Contemplate.

All right, time to finally deal with the (short but deeply amusing) collection of scenarios I left hanging some while back in the latest round of the "15 characters" meme.

First, here's the list of those characters chosen in the present round.  Note that #5 was not selected at all (so we'll save him for next time), and that #11 only appears indirectly.

1. Barnabas Collins (Dark Shadows)
2. Barbara Gordon aka Batgirl aka Oracle (DC Universe)
3. Laura Holt (Remington Steele)
4. Tom Swift Jr. (Tom Swift series)
5.
6. Demona aka Dominique Destine (Gargoyles)
7. Loki (The Avengers -- Marvel movieverse)
8. Alexis Castle (Castle)
9. Tony DiNozzo (NCIS)
10. Vala Mal Doran (Stargate SG-1)
11. The Master (Doctor Who)
12. Wesley Wyndham-Price (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
13. Sarah Jane Smith (Doctor Who)
14. Jessica Fletcher (Murder, She Wrote)
15. Tony Stark (The Avengers -- Marvel movieverse)

( And now, the answers: )

Starting with this round of the "15 characters" meme, I'm adopting astrogirl2's practice of presenting the answers in a separate post -- this way, the Dreamwidth and LiveJournal readerships get to see both sets of Qs and As.

First, this round's list:

#1 -- Alfred Pennyworth (Batman)
#2 -- Detective Elisa Maza (Gargoyles)
#3 -- Artemus Gordon (Wild Wild West [the original version, not the theatrical film])
#4 -- Mrs. Emily Pollifax (the "Mrs. Pollifax" novels by Dorothy Gilman)
#5 -- Dairine Callahan (the "Young Wizards" novels by Diane Duane)
#6 -- Jack O'Neill (Stargate SG-1)
#7 -- Luna Lovegood (Harry Potter)
#8 -- Indiana Jones (you have to ask?)
#9 -- Q (Star Trek: TNG)
#10 -- Captain Jack Sparrow (Pirates of the Caribbean)
#11 -- Carmen Sandiego (Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?)
#12 -- Martha Rodgers (Castle)
#13 -- Xander Harris (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
#14 -- Sarah Jane Smith (Doctor Who)
#15 -- Balthazar Blake (Sorcerer's Apprentice)

( And now, we present Wacky Crossover Theater! )

To Jack Sparrow, Martha, and Sarah Jane: better luck next time.  (Meanwhile, I encourage the gallery to go over and pester twilight2000 with some more questions as she takes her turn at the meme.)

Borrowed from liviapenn (her results here):

I've made a list of fifteen (15) characters from a variety of fandoms.  Your job is to ask questions about various combinations of these characters (examples: What secret past do #8 and #14 share?  What if #2, #6, and #9 went on a road trip?  If #5 and #10 were having dinner, who invited who?), which I'll do my best to answer.

Notes:
Obviously, one shouldn't peek indiscriminately at the comments thread before posing a question, as there will be spoilers for who's where on the list as the game progresses.

OTOH, if some numbered characters are consistently overlooked, questions concerning these yet-unknown characters are encouraged so as to give everyone on the list a chance at the limelight.

Given the diversity of the list, there's definite potential for generating highly weird and improbable pairings based on the direction of the questions.  Management will do its best to respond to all queries posed, but reserves the right to designate some results Just Too Bizarre To Contemplate.

Let the game begin!