{"id":1077,"date":"2025-01-26T23:22:48","date_gmt":"2025-01-27T04:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/?p=1077"},"modified":"2025-01-28T23:10:42","modified_gmt":"2025-01-29T04:10:42","slug":"the-changeling-game-afterword","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/the-changeling-game-afterword\/","title":{"rendered":"The Changeling Game, Afterword"},"content":{"rendered":"<style type=\"text\/css\">\np {\n  border-bottom: 0;\n  border-top: 0;\n  display: block;\n  padding-bottom: 0;\n  padding-top: 0;\n}\np.indented {\n  margin-bottom: 0;\n  margin-top: 0;\n  text-indent: 1em;\n}\np.indented-offset {\n  margin-bottom: 1em;\n  margin-top: 1em;\n  text-indent: 1em;\n}\np.block {\n  margin-bottom: 1em;\n  margin-top: 1em;\n  margin-left: 2em;\n  margin-right: 2em;\n}\np.center-block {\n  margin-bottom: 1em;\n  margin-top: 1em;\n  margin-left: 2em;\n  margin-right: 2em;\n  text-align: center;\n}\np.letter-block {\n  margin-bottom: 0;\n  margin-top: 1em;\n  margin-left: 2em;\n  margin-right: 2em;\n}\np.indent-block {\n  margin-bottom: 1em;\n  margin-top: 0;\n  margin-left: 2em;\n  margin-right: 2em;\n  text-indent: 1em;\n}\np.poetry {\n  margin-bottom: 1em;\n  margin-top: 1em;\n  margin-left: 3em;\n  margin-right: 2em;\n  text-indent: -2em;\n}\np.right {\n  margin-bottom: 1em;\n  margin-top: 1em;\n  text-align: right;\n}\nhr {\n  align-content: center;\n  width: 50%;\n  background: linear-gradient(to right, #4474BE 0%, #243a68 100%);\n  height: 3px;\n  margin-bottom: 1em;\n  margin-top: 1em;\n}\ntt {\n  font: 0.857em menlo, monaco, consolas, monospace;\n  margin: auto;\n}\nh2 {\ntext-align: center;\n}\nh2.chapterhead {\nmargin-bottom: 2em;\ntext-align: center;\n}\nh3 {\n  text-align: center;\n}\nh3.afterword {\n  margin-bottom: 1em;\n  text-decoration: underline;\n}\nh3.headline {\n  margin-bottom: 0;\n}\nh4 {\n  text-align: center;\n}\nh4.headline {\n  margin-top: 0;\n  margin-bottom: 1em;\n}\n.nowrap {\n  text-indent: 0;\n  display: inline-block;\n}\nli {\n  list-style-type: number;\n  padding-left: 1em;\n  margin-left: 0;\n  margin-bottom: 10px;\n}\na {\n  text-decoration: none;\n}\n<\/style>\n<p><b>Title:<\/b> The Changeling Game <small>(Formerly <i>Identity Theft<\/i>)<\/small><br \/>\n<b>Author:<\/b> Ardath Rekha<br \/>\n<b>Chapter:<\/b> 98\/98<br \/>\n<b>Fandom:<\/b> <i>Pitch Black<\/i> (2000); <i>The Chronicles of Riddick<\/i> (2004); <i>The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury<\/i> (2004)<br \/>\n<b>Rating:<\/b> X<br \/>\n<b>Warnings:<\/b> Adult themes, controversial subject matter, harsh language, strong sexual content<br \/>\n<b>Category:<\/b> Het<br \/>\n<b>Pairing:<\/b> Riddick\/Jack<br \/>\n<b>Summary:<\/b> Afterword: Notes and Acknowledgments<br \/>\n<b>Disclaimer:<\/b> The characters and events of <i>Pitch Black,<\/i> <i>The Chronicles of Riddick,<\/i> and <i>The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury<\/i> are not mine, but belong to Universal Studios.  I just <i>wish<\/i> I were in charge of their fates.  No money is being made off of this.  I\u2019m writing strictly for love of the story.<br \/>\n<b>Feedback:<\/b> Absolutely, the more the better!  Shred me, whip me, beat me, make me feel grammatical! I post \u201crough,\u201d so I can always use the help. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n<input type='hidden' bg_collapse_expand='6a6545d3708043007688832' value='6a6545d3708043007688832'><input type='hidden' id='bg-show-more-text-6a6545d3708043007688832' value='Long post is long. Click to read the afterword.'><input type='hidden' id='bg-show-less-text-6a6545d3708043007688832' value='Hide the afterword again.'><button id='bg-showmore-action-6a6545d3708043007688832' class='bg-showmore-plg-button bg-green-button  '   style=\" color:#D9ECFB;\">Long post is long. Click to read the afterword.<\/button><div id='bg-showmore-hidden-6a6545d3708043007688832' >  <\/p>\n<h2 class=\"chapterhead\"><u>Afterword<\/u><\/h2>\n<p class=\"indented-offset\">This has been a really wild journey for me, with a whole lot of twists and turns along the way. Thank you to everybody who decided to accompany me on it.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"afterword\">Some twenty-plus-year-old backstory first\u2026<\/h3>\n<p class=\"indented\">This story began on the Rhiana Griffith Fan Club as an act of rebellion\u2026 and self-therapy of a sort.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">A lot of fans of <i>Pitch Black<\/i>, and its ensemble cast, felt our places in the fandom got subsumed when one of the cast members, Vin Diesel, rocketed to stardom a year later behind the wheel of a muscle car. Within a matter of months, virtually all the <i>Pitch Black<\/i> fansites converted into Vin Diesel fansites to stay relevant in his exploding fandom, and the rest of the cast, and their fans, became afterthoughts within a community that <i>had<\/i> been a lot more egalitarian when I first discovered it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">I got pulled into co-modding one of those \u201cVin\u201d sites by some fans of the stories I was writing; later, when its webmistress decided to step down and wanted to name me as her successor\u2014right, ironically, as I was planning on stepping away from Vin fandom and focusing on creating a site for Rhiana Griffith\/Jack fans\u2014I put aside those plans and took over running <i>Art of Vin Diesel<\/i>, prioritizing an already existing community over the one I\u2019d wanted to create. As much as I love all the friends I made on AoVD, that decision became one of my biggest regrets.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">I still wonder, from time to time, whether it would have made a significant enough difference if the site I finally began building a bit over a year later had come into existence <i>then<\/i>, if Universal Pictures would have <i>dared<\/i> treat Griffith so shabbily if her fanbase had been more visible at the time. Thanks to my position of running one of the \u201cbig\u201d Vin fan sites of the period, I ended up privy to a lot of the insider gossip about what had happened behind the scenes during <i>Chronicles of Riddick<\/i> preproduction, something that really soured me on Hollywood, Universal, the nascent \u201cRiddick franchise,\u201d and even Vin himself for a while.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">Although there was no question at all that he was reprising his role, and Keith David was <i>handed<\/i> his part back, <i>Rhiana<\/i> was forced to re-audition for her part and, even after she <i>won<\/i> it hands-down and planning was already beginning for her to travel to the northern hemisphere for shooting, it was subsequently taken from her before contracts could be signed and given to another actress. The news of the casting change slowly leaked out as fans learned that a character named Kyra, who might or might not be connected to Jack, was being played by Alexa Davalos rather than Rhiana Griffith.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">Most of us knew Davalos, at that point, as the chronically underdressed electrokinetic thief from the TV show <i>Angel<\/i>, where she\u2019d been portrayed as a sexpot and had displayed a lot of over-the-top combat moves, and the idea that <i>those<\/i> were the characteristics that might have recommended her as a continuation of Jack didn\u2019t sit well at all with much of Jack\u2019s existing fanbase. Plus the two actresses looked and sounded absolutely nothing like each other. We held out hope that maybe Kyra was an unrelated character, or that the casting change had been necessary because Rhiana hadn\u2019t been <i>interested<\/i> in reprising the part, until the news broke in October 2003 that Rhiana had been forced to audition for that very role only to be denied it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">When backroom chatter indicated that she\u2019d lost the role in part because Vin had used up all of his producer-level influence with Universal securing Judy Dench and Colm Feore for the film, and hadn\u2019t saved any of it to help defend Rhiana\u2019s right to reprise her character, I was done. I wanted out of Vin fandom and away from all the gossip about a movie I\u2019d gone from anticipating to dreading. It took me another five months to get my partners at AoVD to let me go, though, and that only finally happened when I got so fed up that I told them they had 48 hours to find a new webmistress or I was pulling the plug on the whole site; in the meantime, I built the Rhiana Griffith Fan Club and finally decamped to it with other Rhiana fans who wanted to focus on nurturing <i>her<\/i> career in the face of that major setback instead of continuing to invest in a fandom where we were clearly unwanted afterthoughts.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">After the film came out, to combat a lot of the actual <i>depression<\/i> Jack fans were feeling on RGFC over how she had been drastically altered (almost none of the hallmark personality traits she\u2019d displayed in the first film still existed), repudiated (the whole \u201cJack is dead\u201d speech felt like a slap in the face to many of us), used as little more than a MacGuffin, and then killed off, I posted a writing challenge which I called the \u201cCoR AU\u201d challenge: write stories in which, in spite of everything we saw on the screen, Kyra turned out not to be Jack after all.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">That was honestly easier than it ought to have been. In spite of the insistence of major players in the production that Kyra was a continuation of Jack, they had done a whole lot to sabotage their own claims. They had cast a woman who looked and sounded nothing like the original Jack performance\u2014there is literally no facial feature that Alexa and Rhiana have in common (aside from having all of the ones you\u2019d expect on any human face), and Alexa\u2019s voice is more like Fry\u2019s than any other female character in the first film\u2014and then, in addition to giving her a completely unrealistic and improbable sketch of a backstory to try to explain all the changes, they made her <i>blow her lines<\/i> every time she tried to do a callback to the first film. Then, at the eleventh hour\u2014possibly as a sop to Rhiana fans\u2014they actually cast Rhiana, as Jack, in the anime short <i>The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury<\/i>, something that had an effect of disconnecting Jack and Kyra <i>further<\/i> for us rather than \u201cbridging the gap.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">So we decided we were going to write all the ways that Kyra didn\u2019t <i>have<\/i> to be Jack, and could still turn out <i>not<\/i> to be Jack in spite of everything that had been seen onscreen. Some among us held out hope that maybe it could even influence sequel plans if the stories were plausible and popular enough, although it quickly became clear that the film was tanking too hard at the box office for those sequels (at least, as they were originally envisioned) to happen anyway.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">My challenge had a few rules, but the two most important ones, which I brought to <i>this<\/i> story, were: first, we would treat what had been seen on the screen itself as incontrovertible (what people said, what people did, etc.) even if we were allowed to twist what those moments had <i>meant<\/i> around and could ignore all of the \u201crules\u201d that tie-in materials imposed, and second, we would never make Kyra into a villain. A lot of us, definitely including me, were struggling hard with the impulse to blame Alexa Davalos for what had happened (thanks so much, Western Internalized Misogyny!) and we\u2019d decided that it was important to portray her Kyra sympathetically to counter that, even if we couldn\u2019t accept her as a continuation of Jack.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">That was the environment in which I began writing a story I initially called <i>Identity Theft,<\/i> trying to reach for positivity in the midst of the free-floating negativity we were dealing with and trying to find a way past. I floated a lot of ideas of how Kyra could turn out not to be Jack during that period of time, but this was probably the most complicated; most of the rest were one-offs.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">But by early-mid 2006, I was vanishing from fandom, and although I continued to maintain the RGFC, and even ran tech for my friends who had taken over AoVD, my writing slowed to a halt. Mostly that was because I was back in college, working on completing a degree, and the Honors program was so demanding that virtually everything I was reading and writing had to be of an academic nature.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">Aside from a crazy plot bunny in \u201907 that resulted in the first few chapters of <i>Falling Angels<\/i> (a story that actually borrows a few themes and ideas that I either used, or planned to use, in this tale, since I wasn\u2019t sure I would ever expand on its original 16 chapters) and a later <i>intense<\/i> bout of writing that resulted from watching the film <i>Prometheus<\/i> right after taking a graduate course on Middle Eastern Epics and Assyriology (and yes, I <i>will<\/i> get back to writing <i>Forbidden Gifts<\/i> soon, I <i>swear\u2026<\/i>), my unfinished stories got shelved. Meanwhile, the sites slowly went quiet as first Undergrad and then Grad School sucked away all of my free time, while fandom moved from stand-alone sites to social media platforms.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">Although Rhiana has never gained the high acting profile her fans were wishing for (in part, selfishly, so we would have more pictures of her to use to create fan art and \u201cbook covers\u201d for our stories), she has had a wonderfully successful and happy life. She\u2019s an internationally renowned fine artist whose works have had numerous gallery showings and been sold to collectors around the world, she has a Master\u2019s degree and is a licensed art therapist who uses the creative process to help children work through traumas and behavioral issues, and she\u2019s raising a wonderful daughter.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">All of that is stuff that a Hollywood career could have nixed, and God knows, after \u201cMe Too,\u201d I think she may even have dodged a <i>bullet<\/i>, but part of me still resents that the decision of whether to reprise <b>her<\/b> character was taken from her, and that the doors such an opportunity would have opened got slammed in her face instead. It still chafes me that Hollywood (then and now) has a habit of treating women (real and fictional) like Kleenex\u2014disposable, replaceable, and indistinguishable\u2014and treating Vin\u2019s fans as too busy thinking between their legs to care who or what else is on the screen as long as he\u2019s front and center on it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">Those mindsets, in my opinion (aside from the fact that they were trying to sell fans of <i>The Fast and the Furious<\/i> and <i>xXx<\/i> on a <i>space fantasy<\/i> at the expense of many of the original <i>Pitch Black<\/i>\/Riddick fans), is a big part of why <i>The Chronicles of Riddick<\/i> did poorly enough at the box office that Universal shelved the planned sequels until Vin, himself, ransomed the franchise back from them by agreeing to reprise the role of Dominic Toretto. That was the character <i>they<\/i> had wanted the whole time. And, honestly, Vin\u2019s Riddick portrayals outside of the one in <i>Pitch Black<\/i> have left me cold, seeming less like the original Riddick than \u201cVin Diesel is Dominic Toretto\/Xander Cage as Riddick.\u201d I\u2019ve tried to bring back the Riddick I actually found compelling in my \u201cCoR AU\u201d stories, instead.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">During the height of the COVID epidemic, while I was recovering from Long Covid and didn\u2019t have the strength or energy for a day job, I decided I needed to figure out what to do with the websites I was still, more or less, maintaining, but which had fallen into extreme disrepair. I officially still own the AoVD domain name and webspace, along with RGFC and my own website, but it had been so long since I\u2019d done much with them. I had been in the middle of earning a PhD when COVID essentially killed it, even if it spared me, and hadn\u2019t had time to read or write anything unrelated to my aborted dissertation in years.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">When I mentioned to some friends from fandom days that I was thinking of shutting the sites down completely, they convinced me instead to keep them and to at least try to revive the portions of them that had been about the communities that had been built and the works of art (visual or fictive) that had been created. Bringing that back is still a long-term project, hampered by my own schedule (a full-time job + residual Long Covid damage = not much free time, and my own writing gets first dibs on that) and the fact that most of the others who could help me have little time of their own to volunteer anymore. I decided to test out the feasibility of it all with my own webspace, which was by far the smallest of the three, and my own art and stories. In the process, several of my writing muses woke up and demanded attention again.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">It wasn\u2019t long before <i>this<\/i> particular muse took over and began running me ragged. That said, once I complete this story arc and finish my other incomplete works, I doubt I\u2019ll have any further contributions to the \u201cRiddick\u2019verse.\u201d Not unless they bring the Jack who inspired me in the first place\u2014<i>Rhiana\u2019s<\/i> Jack\u2014back somehow, which I gave up hope of long ago.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"afterword\">The Evolution of the Story<\/h3>\n<p class=\"indented\">During the first few months that I was writing <i>Identity Theft,<\/i> as it was originally called, it had a much smaller scope. It was going to be, simply, a tale about Jack going to a psychiatric facility for treatment, encountering a \u201cRiddick fan\u201d there and, after the two bonded and shared stories, discovering that her friend Kyra had begun to over-identify with her run with Riddick. The two were going to escape together from the facility, and after Kyra was injured (gaining the scar next to her hip prominently displayed in some scenes in CoR), Jack would spend the entirety of her recuperation telling her such detailed accounts of the events of <i>Pitch Black<\/i> and <i>Dark Fury<\/i> that they became, in Kyra\u2019s head, something she\u2019d personally experienced. Then the two separated, with Jack returning home and discovering that the unpleasant circumstances she\u2019d fled were the lead-up to the birth of the baby sister she\u2019d always wanted (yes, that plot point really was 20 years in the making). Kyra, meanwhile, by overidentifying as Jack, would get caught by mercs hoping to use her as a stalking-horse for finding Riddick; when they realized she had no connection to him in spite of her beliefs to the contrary, they\u2019d slave her out as she had claimed in the film.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">Things got more elaborate the deeper I went, though, because I began planning out the sequel I wanted to write, covering what happened once Riddick and Jack were reunited on the <i>Basilica<\/i>, and my plan for <i>Song of Many \u2019Verses<\/i>, and the galaxy-shaking mystery driving its plot, was born. That included having Jack develop a connection to multiple universes, and that she and Kyra would already have connected to a separate \u2019verse during their run together.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">I should put a shout-out to Christopher Stasheff here, because there\u2019s a moment in his novel <i>A Company of Stars<\/i> that inspired me: a grizzled space captain, helping a theatrical company pick out a ship to buy for their interstellar touring itinerary, reacts in horror to one of the ships, pointing to its hull\u2019s unique \u201ccrinkled\u201d finish as evidence that it got trapped between universes at some point and barely made it back. The idea of Jack and Kyra being on board a ship that something like that happened to, and that left them straddling two universes and struggling to survive in both, inspired the whole second act of my planned story\u2026 even if my writing time went away almost completely before I could actually get to it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">Most of the events that have occurred in the \u2026<i>holy shit<\/i>\u2026 97 chapters are things I originally planned out in \u201904 and \u201905, believe it or not, but two areas that definitely got significantly more development as I picked the story back up were the time Jack and Kyra spent on Tangiers Prime and how\/why Jack transformed, after her return to Deckard\u2019s World, into the fearful and distrusting person we met in the opening chapters even as she simultaneously developed powers on the same level with any of the major players of <i>Chronicles.<\/i> I also realized I needed a whole lot more space to develop the mystery of the <i>Apeiros<\/i>, who hadn\u2019t yet been introduced when I stopped writing in 2006, and\u2014oops, spoilers, can\u2019t tell you what else yet\u2026 but a lot of what happened on Tangiers Prime figures heavily in future events of <i>Song of Many \u2019Verses<\/i>, and I realized I needed to set more of it up before returning to the \u201cframe story\u201d if I wanted the eventual outcomes to feel naturalistic and earned. I guess I\u2019ll talk more about those elements in <i>that<\/i> fic\u2019s afterword.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">But I sure as hell didn\u2019t expect it to turn into a 400K+ word monster. That\u2019s blowing my mind a little. Still, I\u2019ve loved every second of writing it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"afterword\">Names, Places, and Canonicity<\/h3>\n<p class=\"indented\">So here are the rules I follow in this story: If it happened onscreen in the <b>Director\u2019s Cuts<\/b> of <i>Pitch Black<\/i> or <i>the Chronicles of Riddick<\/i>, or onscreen in <i>The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury<\/i>, it\u2019s canon and I won\u2019t contradict it. Everything else is optional. Everything.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">The makers of <i>the Chronicles of Riddick<\/i> set that in motion by retconning TF out of the extended materials connected to <i>Pitch Black<\/i>, which had included elements such as Jack originally being named Audrey (and described, in the tie-in novelization, as looking <i>exactly<\/i> like Rhiana had in her prior film, <i>15 Amore<\/i>) along with a general lack of supernatural elements even if Riddick himself may have come across as a little preternatural. Riddick, meanwhile, had multiple contradictory backstories depending on which tie-in you consulted, all of which were then swept aside for the Furyan backstory. If they can cherry-pick, so can I.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">So Jack\u2019s \u201creal name\u201d remains Audrey, Kyra has her own new backstory and lineage that has nothing to do with any of the tie-ins, and the Lord Marshal gets to keep his \u201cZhylaw\u201d name but the B in Riddick\u2019s name now stands for \u201cBooker\u201d instead of the WTFery of \u201cBruno.\u201d If you see something that contradicts what you \u201cknow\u201d about the franchise canon, it\u2019s very likely something that never made it onto the screen in the first place and only has legitimacy through tie-ins that the majority of filmgoers have never seen. (Those tie-ins can enrich a fan\u2019s experience of a film, yes\u2026 <i>if<\/i> the studio continues to honor them\u2026) And whatever Furya is due to appear on the movie screens sometime in 2025 will have nothing in common, in all likelihood, with the one I\u2019m depicting in <i>The Changeling Game<\/i> and <i>Song of Many \u2019Verses<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">I decided, shortly after I picked the story back up, that it needed a new title. <i>Identity Theft<\/i> had been appropriate when I wrote the first few chapters, and it was a smaller-scope story involving a mentally unbalanced girl overidentifying with Jack, to the point where she accidentally set herself up for the worst possible fate that might have awaited Jack herself. As the story grew in scope, and as I became increasingly charmed by the Kyra I was writing and the sister-bond she and Jack were developing, it didn\u2019t fit nearly as well. I began to think about a title that would be better suited to a story about a pair of girls with multiple identities and personas, and an identity that wasn\u2019t necessarily tied to either one of them. I went through a bunch of possibilities and decided that this one worked best for the course the story was taking, and its themes of protean identities, shared aliases, and reunions being upended when they\u2019re with someone who either is no longer the person everyone expected, or never was that person to begin with. So <i>Identity Theft<\/i> became <i>The Changeling Game<\/i> in July of 2024.<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">Some of the locations in the story are tied into canonicity, while others are my own creations. The <i>Hunter-Gratzner<\/i> was \u201cen route to the Tangiers system\u201d according to Owens in <i>Pitch Black,<\/i> and many of the early tie-in materials made references to planets and events in that system that connected to Riddick. I went with a similar naming structure as planets in the Helion system apparently use in CoR, with the main in-system colony world being \u201cPrime\u201d rather than numbered. At the same time, I decided to play with hints that other naming systems are frequently used, especially since I had already named Audrey\u2019s home planet \u201cDeckard\u2019s World\u201d before I began exploring naming conventions. And, since CoR portrayed \u201cNew Mecca\u201d as a stop on a rail line at one point (or at least a transit station serving as a shelter during the invasion), along with having the locals insist that their world was extremely multicultural, it became an ethnic suburb of Helion Prime\u2019s big city, which I named New Athens in keeping with the idea that naming the star Helion (as opposed to, say, Shams, \u0634\u0645\u0633, which is the Arabic word for the sun) pointed to a <i>Greek<\/i> base for the colony. So I\u2019ve had a lot of fun playing with place-names throughout the story, and most of them have specific meanings and significance. The two moons over U1\u2019s version of Tangiers Prime, for instance, are named Qamar (\u0642\u0645\u0631, Arabic for \u201cmoon\u201d) and Taziri (\u2d5c\u2d30\u2d63\u2d49\u2d54\u2d49, Tamazight for \u201cfull moon\u201d).<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">I actually put together an appendix of all the names, places, dates, and vocabulary in this monster-story, but the damn thing is <i>ginormous<\/i> and nearly novel length itself. It even has an hour-by-hour (in places) timeline I constructed to keep track of what happened when (a total necessity when your characters hang out on a planet with 44-hour days but you\u2019re trying to keep track of how much your main character is actually aging and when her next birthday would be, OMG). I definitely need all of the references to keep things straight, and had to go back and fix a few things once I\u2019d put it together. Maybe after both stories are concluded, I\u2019ll put it up, too, as a tie-in. (If I put it up now, there\u2019d be way too many spoilers for <i>Song<\/i> in it.)<\/p>\n<p class=\"indented\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"afterword\">Soundtrack<\/h3>\n<p class=\"indented-offset\">Wouldn\u2019t you know it, I had a whole playlist of music that I listened to, and connected to, as I was writing this. A kind of soundtrack formed for me. It originally started with the song \u201cOrdinary World\u201d by Duran Duran, which back in \u201904 was about Audrey shrugging off her wild adventures and returning home to her family with no intention of leaving Deckard\u2019s World again (although she ended up being far less \u201cordinary\u201d upon her return than I\u2019d originally planned!) and developed from there. So here are key tracks (and links to where you can listen to them on YouTube) that influenced me and helped me set the right mood as I was writing:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=71GTbLweTok\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cLorretine\u201d by Clan of Xymox<\/a> \u2013 A kind of all-purpose theme melody for the story. Especially with the beginning suggesting something rising up out of the darkness, and the end effect that makes me think of a celestial body arcing away and escaping.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=TynHJ0_amDY\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cIn the Shadows\u201d by Amy Stroup<\/a> \u2013 I have a tendency to visualize Riddick carrying an unconscious Jack into the Chamber of the Quasi-Dead (no, I will <i>never<\/i> treat \u201cDeads\u201d as a real word) during the opening bars, meditating over her and delving into her mind, and envisioning a variety of moments from the story as the song unfolds. There\u2019s a moment right before the final chorus that makes me imagine the <i>Scarlet Matador<\/i> making its final descent into the phantom waters of New Marrakesh.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=mVunmXFx0Qg\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cI Feel Love\u201d by Donna Summer, as performed by (of all things) the <i>Riverdale<\/i> Cast<\/a> \u2013 I know, I know, but somehow this became the \u201cescape from the hospital\u201d theme for me, maybe due to the frenetic synth pulses, and also a song about sister-bonding (I have an even <i>more<\/i> improbable song about sister-bonding here, too, LOL) and the connection that begins to be forged between Jack and Kyra during their run together\u2026 symbolized by the way Ashleigh Murray and Camila Mendes weave their voices together in this rendition.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=uKc4sUKwQC4\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cSalt in the Rainbow\u201d by Duran Duran<\/a> \u2013 yeah, this is one of <i>three<\/i> Duran Duran tunes in the list. The song never made it onto any of their studio albums after bootleggers got hold of this early cut, so it didn\u2019t get smoothed out and shined up the way a lot of their materials do, but I love Nick Rhodes\u2019s synth work on it and it fits into the shining moment where things are going really well for Jack and Kyra, their bond is strengthening, and the power building between the two of them feels like something that can take on anything. When I went back to get the link, I found other, more \u201cpolished\u201d versions, but this one, with the chorus of \u201c<i><u>we<\/u><\/i> are forever,\u201d is the one that inspired me.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=fQbTQ0BJBhE\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cThank You\u201d Led Zeppelin, version performed by Duran Duran<\/a> \u2013 In my head this is, instead of a love song from a man to a woman, somehow another <i>sister-bonding<\/i> song for the story. The opening sounds made me visualize Megaluna hanging over the King Tide in Chapter 23, making the waters glitter, and the moment when Jack realizes that her bond with Kyra has transcended friendship and the two of them have become sisters. It\u2019s an odd choice, I know, but it helped me get into the right mindset for writing a lot of their adventures together.\n<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=WodIWmkzCr0\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cTime For Flight\u201d by Baby Alpaca<\/a> \u2013 I listened to this a lot as I was writing and developing the Tomlin plot: this man who was going to listen to, and mentor, Jack and Kyra as they explored their burgeoning powers, before suddenly realizing, \u201cshit, the story needs him to get killed off, doesn\u2019t it?\u201d<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=LfXnoEFbVrU\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cThe Beginning of the End\u201d by Klergy (featuring Valerie Broussard)<\/a> \u2013 There\u2019s a line in the song that\u2019s especially telling: \u201creckless behavior \/ is looking at a man like he was a savior,\u201d which is pretty on-the-nose. The bombast and drums right around the 1:30 mark make me imagine the Ennead Kids performing at the Helion Prime spaceport with Eve Logan as their captive audience, while Jack and Kyra slip past her. The frenetic strings building up around the 2:40 mark make me visualize Jack and Kyra racing through the darkness to Othman Tower before the Battle of Othman Plaza. And the closing beat right before the final \u201cthe end?\u201d The New Marrakesh Spaceport Explosion. I see it so clearly every time, with the final note revealing the devastation that followed. It\u2019s <i>so<\/i> vivid for me. (And yes, I know it\u2019s also a song associated with <i>Riverdale<\/i>, but I actually only heard it when part of it was used in an episode of <i>Lucifer.<\/i>)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=9P_4nNNxrdQ\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cTrenched\u201d by Tipper<\/a> \u2013 In my head, I call this song \u201cThe Sebby Dance.\u201d There may also be some portions of it that make me think of the <i>Apeiros<\/i>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=k-JQozbs6uA\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cGuyane: V. Lullaby\u201d by Aram Khachaturian (performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Neeme J\u00e4rvi)<\/a> \u2013 This is the theme of New Marrakesh itself, for me. Neeme J\u00e4rvi\u2019s version is by far the most beautiful I have ever heard.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=NunQx5aE7FM\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cRadiance\u201d by Peter Boyer (performed by the London Symphony Orchestra)<\/a> \u2013 This is, to me, \u201cThe Love Theme of Ewan and Tizzy.\u201d I always visualize, as the piece\u2019s final strains spread out, the moment when the two of them are sitting on Elsewhere\u2019s beach together, eyes locked and hands resting on each other\u2019s cheeks.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=VzrP59jAKA8\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cSomewhere in Paradise\u201d by Karen Lawrence<\/a> \u2013 This is Ewan and Tizzy\u2019s \u201cGoodbye\u201d theme. The lyrics are <i>so<\/i> on the nose.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=vfvRXoZave0\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cWaves\u201d by Dean Lewis<\/a> \u2013 If there\u2019s a song that better nails the adolescent struggle of veering between one\u2019s childhood self and one\u2019s new adult mindset, I can\u2019t think of it at the moment. Both Jack and Kyra have multiple moments when they wish they could reach back to their more innocent selves and chart a different course, along with moments in which they wish their more adult versions of themselves would stop flitting off and stick around already. I tended to listen to it more when I was writing about the moments leading up to their separation, something neither of them wanted and both dreaded, but that they couldn\u2019t figure out a way to prevent.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=5wCvAep9C1Q\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cEchorus\u201d by Philip Glass (performed by Jennifer Koh, Jaime Laredo, Vinay Parameswaran, and the Curtis 20\/21 Ensemble)<\/a> \u2013 In my head this is called \u201cMarianne Goes Home,\u201d and reflects Jack\u2019s mental state as she attempts to hold herself together after the New Casablanca Spaceport Explosion.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=tm8d1uhzemw\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cPiano Concert in D-Flat Major: II. Andante con anima\u201d by Aram Khachaturian (performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Neeme J\u00e4rvi)<\/a> \u2013 This is the \u201cTheme of the <i>Apeiros.<\/i>\u201d Try not to find it a little spooky. I dare you.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=LiB1CfNmgf8\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cOrdinary World\u201d by Duran Duran<\/a> \u2013 Audrey returns home and tries to take up a life as a normal girl again. Harder than it looks, of course. There were some specific lines in the song that connected really well early on, but became even more fitting as the story grew in scope: \u201cHere beside the news \/ Of holy war and holy need \/ Ours is just a little sorrowed talk,\u201d which felt like it related to her putting aside her past with Riddick to focus on the more deadly threat of the Necromongers. There\u2019s also a bit at the end where a background singer sings: \u201cAny world \/ Is my world \/ Every World \/ Is my world,\u201d which is oddly on the nose for a character who can move between universes, so the song became even apt as the scope of the story grew.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p class=\"indented-offset\">Thank you again, everyone, for reading and accompanying me on this adventure. I hope you like the next leg of the journey, too!<\/p>\n<p class=\"right\">\u2014Ardath Rekha, January 26, 2025<\/p>\n<p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Title: The Changeling Game (Formerly Identity Theft) Author: Ardath Rekha Chapter: 98\/98 Fandom: Pitch Black (2000); The Chronicles of Riddick (2004); The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury (2004) Ra","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"\u201cThe Changeling Game\u201d Afterword","bgseo_description":"Notes and acknowledgments.","bgseo_robots_index":"index","bgseo_robots_follow":"follow","footnotes":""},"categories":[9,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fan-fiction","category-the-changeling-game"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1077"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1117,"href":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1077\/revisions\/1117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ardath-rekha.com\/wips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}