Fledglings, or: Everything's Better With Penguins
is a Protectors of the Plot Continuum fanfic by an unknown author.
Agents Mallory and Anis make an unsettling discovery regarding one of the organization's former agents. Now they must traverse the PPC's history to carry out the Duty and assassinate a Gary Stu who was hiding in plain sight for several years.
Fledglings contains the following tropes:
- Beige Prose: The prose making up Tawaki Penguin's missions has minimal descriptions of things and a lack of narrative connecting the plot points. This has the side-effect of the setting appearing incredibly generic to the agents due to being underdescribed and the stories occurring at a rapid pace due to lack of additional prose to create more downtime between events.
- Brick Joke: Anis and Mal's console disappeared prior to the start of the fic, and they want to have as long of a break from getting assigned missions as possible. The two attempt to delay getting a replacement console by titling the tech support ticket reporting its absence "where did my emails go????" so it gets marked as low priority. In the epilogue, they come back from the Macrovirus Epidemic memorial to find a new console getting installed; mistitling the support ticket didn't work for very long.
- Buffy Speak: Downplayed when the device the Agents use to make a wall partially transparent so they can track what their target is doing inside of a building is referred to as "the See-Through Thingy"; its proper name is the See-Through Device.
- Devil's Advocate: When Mal is trying to figure out why Tawaki's missions are set at a breakneck pace, Anis explains that sometimes authors get lazy trying to connect plot points with a narrative. Mal gets annoyed with Anis' steelmanning and comments that at the very least, they should come back later to write the narrative instead of skipping it altogether.
- Either/Or Title: The fic is titled Fledglings, or: Everything's Better With Penguins.
- Explosive Instrumentation: The Character Analysis Devices used by Agent Tawaki and his partners tend to explode at the slightest provocation, to the point of being a Running Gag. During the sporking of Tawaki's missions, Anis comments that the narrative is exaggerating the combustibility of the CADs because they typically only explode if exposed to really obnoxious Suvian presences.
- Protagonist-Centered Morality: Deconstructed with the missions of Tawaki Penguin. While Agent Tawaki went on many missions to combat poorly written fanfics and Mary Sues, the stories about his various exploits have issues of similar caliber, such as overly simplistic prose and Tawaki being single-handedly responsible for multiple events that led to massive losses of PPC personnel. This lack of regard for anything nonessential to a Tawaki-centered narrative is one of the factors that leads Agents Mallory and Anis to classify him as a Gary Stu.
- Recursive Fanfiction: While Protecters of the Plot Continuum is already a Shared Universe of recursive fanfiction, this fanfic involves agents going on a mission inside someone else's agent missions, which in turn are set within other fanfics.
- Secret Police: The Department of Internal Operations is a department at the PPC that goes after Mary Sue infiltrators of the organization, and does such a good job at covering up its own existence that most people aren't sure if it's real. By the time the story takes place, however, the DIO has been defunct for over a decade. Some of the department's members end up helping Anis and Mallory assassinate the Gary Stu known as Agent Tawaki Penguin, as the fanfic they're all in is set at a time when the DIO was still active.
- Smash Cut: The Sunflower Official within Tawaki's missions attempts to address Mal and Anis, but is cut off by a scene transition taking them elsewhere before it can finish its sentence.Quite unfortunately, (the Sunflower) then turned back. Who are you and why am I not in my off—
The agents found themselves at the door of RC 4096, inside which Tawaki was apparently meeting his partner. - Synchronization: Agents Mallory and Anis briefly find themselves changing locations alongside Tawaki and his partner due to the narration of the story they're in referring to the later pair as "agents", which the former also are. Mal and Anis are thankfully able to use their CAD's "narrative decoupling" option to desynch themselves.
- Tomato in the Mirror: The replacement of Tadkeeta is completely unaware she's a Relationship Sue until she gets stabbed in the neck and bleeds glittery blood.
- Well, This Is Not That Trope: The story opens with a description of how quiet it is in Response Center 8 and how that would usually mean the console would be loudly beeping at the agents to go on a mission. Then the narration states that said scenario is unlikely to happen for the time being due to the console somehow teleporting itself away and the agents being in no hurry to get a replacement.
- You Can't Fight Fate: Although Anis and Mal warn the agent about his intended fate and make a duplicate of him to take his place in the narrative, they are ultimately unable to prevent Nicholas Duval from dying in 2008. The most their mission changes is his time and cause of death; instead of being murdered by a mirror universe version of another agent in January, he perishes in either the Marcrovirus Epidemic or Mary Sue Invasion a few months later.
