Fanfic / Forever After Earth

Xander: So...

Willow: So.

Buffy: So...

Xander: We're on a fucking spaceship!

Forever After Earth, aka Ship of the Line: Forever After Earth, is a response to Zaion's the Ship of the Line challenge on Twisting The Hellmouth. It is a Halloween Fic and a mega-crossover that starts off with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stargate SG-1, and Earthchild, and later expands to include Lyrical Nanoha. Local versions of characters from Harry Potter, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA have also shown up.

Buffy convinces Willow and Xander to find a matching set of three costumes, but the costumes turn out to be Fae. When the spell wears off, Buffy, Xander, and Willow are left with new bodies, life-changing memories, and a city-sized starship.

• The main story, Forever After Earth, follows Willow, Buffy, and Xander as their new perspectives and resources cause events to diverge wildly from Buffy and Stargate canon.
• The first sidestory, It Means Flame, focuses on the events on MidChilda and the looming threat of the Ori.
• The second sidestory, Last Hallowed Scar, is a prequel of sorts that shows events prior to the main story from the perspective of Harriet Potter.

Tropes displayed by this fanfic include:

• Alien Invasion: The trio’s actions in later chapters more or less come off as this to Earth's governments.
• Anatomically Impossible Sex: For most humans anyway. The Faes' physical invulnerability allows them to have sex that would certainly injure normal humans.
• Artistic License – Physics: The Fae are presented as nanotechnologically-engineered beings, and more-or-less obey the laws of physics, but their capabilities may exceed what is actually possible.
• Benevolent Alien Invasion: This is what Willow ends up trying to do.
• Big Brother Is Watching: Willow has already covered the Earth in nanotech sensors for real-time surveillance of the entire planet.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Male Fae genetalia do not become flacid like human's do, are better articulated, and grow "wet" with arousal the same way females do.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Fae seem to have an even chance of ending up in this territory.
• Casual Kink: The Fae are openly into...more than one entry in the Permanent Red Link Club. One particulary notable fact is that in addition to rarely turning down any kind of sex, most Fae don't find being raped upsetting in the way that humans usually do, since they can't actually suffer any physical or social harm as a result. (They do know what rape does to humans, though.)
• Deus ex Machina: Willow finds a cloaked Goa’uld bomber in orbit over the Earth that provided them with a matter transmission system for instantaneous transport, which comes off this way.
  • It is actually Fridge Brilliance, since that al'kesh is a canon plot point in seasons 7 and 8 of Stargate SG-1.
• Everyone Is Pansexual: The Fae are engineered this way, to the point that it almost comes across as a second puberty when a monosexual human is upgraded.
• Fetish-Fuel Future: A good description of normal Fae society.
• For Your Own Good: The justification by the Fae for their planned forcible conversion of everyone that dies.
• Free-Love Future: Fae spend a lot of their time having lots of sex with a lot of people.
• Gender Bender: The morph settings that allow Fae to customize their bodies include all sexual characteristics.
  • It was also revealed that Oz wore a mistcloak on Halloween. He still has the ability to use allomancy, but when he does, his body transforms to look like Vin's.
• Gender Flip: Harriet Potter and Luneth Lovegood. Also, Shiroko and Illyan.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: It is heavily implied that this property of Ascended Beings from Stargate is also the driving force behind the theurgic spellcasting of the Buffyverse.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: The Madoka Kaname of this universe is a MidChildan with an affinity for telepathy. She is very powerful.
• Hurl It into the Sun: Mentioned as a way a Fae could theoretically be killed. Also, Xander gets rid of a mostly-incorporeal demon whose thing is "possessing" people by killing them and animating their corpses by putting its current "host" on a Fae shuttlecraft and programming it to crash into the Sun, figuring that even if it can survive there without a body, it'll never be able to find another one to animate.
• Innocent Fanservice Girl: The character Buffy dressed as for Halloween had recently been pregnant, and they find her "daughter" in a "birthing pod" on the main spaceship. Buffy names the newborn Fae "Dawn". Dawn, like all newborn Fae, emerges with some basic knowledge that allows her to act independently, including language and motor skills. Newborn fae are also born sexually mature with bodies that resemble human teenagers, have libidos to match, and completely lack any concepts of shame or sexual inhibitions. Humans raised on Earth tend to find their behavior disturbing.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: The trio started out saving the life of someone who was dying of cancer by converting him into Fae with his consent. They then promptly went to planning the automatic conversion of anyone who dies anywhere on Earth, without bothering to ask them first.
• Living Forever Is Awesome: The Fae definitely believe this, and are horrified by humans' relative frailty and limited lifespan.
• Me's a Crowd: Willow decides to build herself three more bodies so she can finish the project to save everyone on Earth from death sooner. Thanks to the communications links built into every Fae's brain, they can act somewhat like a Hive Mind; they share a long-term memory but are otherwise independent in the present moment.
• Nanomachines: A staple of Fae technology, the Fae themselves seem to be made out of them.
• Nigh-Invulnerable: Not much is capable of injuring a Fae. One of the few things that can is sufficiently intense heat - but they're capable of surviving nuclear explosions and actually killing one would probably require launching it into a star. (In an omake chapter set in the Worm universe, a Taylor accidentally granted a Fae body along with her power finds that even the Endbringers can't injure her.)
• Puny Earthlings: Humans are physically inferior on every level compared to the Fae.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Supernatural Powers!: Upon inheriting vastly powerful technological resources, the trio promptly take it upon themselves to decide the fate of the human race, fairly confident that no one on the planet Earth can stop them with their lesser technology base.
• Scry vs. Scry: Over whether or not the Fae will break the masquerade and reveal themselves to the world.
• Space Elves: Though they are actually a posthuman species, the Fae have heavy shades of this.
• Sufficiently Analyzed Magic: When Samantha Carter meets the time-space administration bureau, Magi Babble is inevitable.
• Superior Species: The Fae see themselves as this, both physically, and more troublingly, morally.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified: The trio’s plan to forcibly convert the recently deceased into Fae is portrayed as a good thing that needs to be done as soon as possible and their actions are moral and just; or at least it’s presented this way when the narrative is from the trio’s point of view.
• The Singularity: Part of Fae history. Their ship's AI is mysteriously disabled, however; the gods of the Stargate and Buffy universes see superintelligent AI as a threat and suppress it. Eventually Madoka finds a way to wake it up.
• Three-Way Sex: Buffy(Lyn), Willow(Eelesia) and Xander(Zach), in their Halloween-personalities promptly have a threesome as soon as they get a free moment.
• Totalitarian Utilitarian: Much like the Borg, the trio plan to forcibly convert the human race into Fae, but they believe they’re doing it for humanity’s own good – they regard it as irrational that anyone would resist their efforts. Much like the Borg.
• Transhuman: What the Fae are.
• Unwilling Roboticisation: Not with cybernetics, but this is essentially the fate of humans who are revived from death via faeification.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: Stopping people from dying and keeping them eternally young and healthy justifies forcibly converting anyone who's just died into Fae without bothering to consider any other possibilities of emergency care, and also apparently justifies kidnapping them to strand them on an alien world, with no way get back home or even let their family and friends know they are still alive.
  • Willow addresses this,
  Willow: The system sends everyone to be reborn somewhere where spaceships literally grow on trees ... If anyone wants to return to Earth, I'm not going to get in their way.
• Visionary Villains: The trio believe earnestly in their cause and plan to save humanity from nature – by forcing them to become Fae.
• Well-Intentioned Extremists: The trio actually do have a worthy goal: giving people immortality as well as freedom from disease, poison and even most injuries is highly laudable, but they believe that anyone in immediate danger of dying must be forcibly converted to Fae at once, apparently without bothering to consider the possibility of other type of emergency care.
  • Theoretically the "salvation program" is tuned to only pick up the "legally dead", according to faeXander anyway – apparently the gap between legally dead and irretrievably dead is wider for FAE tech than earth medicine, not that that's a surprise. None of the examples of people shown being vanished in the story appear to involve those who could be reasonably resuscitated using terrestrial methods.
• Zero-G Spot: So far, most of the erotic interludes have taken place on their starship in orbit.