Not Your Average Mary Sue Story
Copyright 2002
Bye Anne Fraser
Okay, this one requires a bit of explanation. (I know that some of you won't need it, but some will. Bear with me.) Julia (e-mail friend of mine, formally of Vampyres) sent me a URL where you find your Mary Sue name and characteristics. A Mary Sue is a character, self-inserted into fanfic (fanfic is fiction written about popular tv series or movies or books by fans, it's usually fantasy-fulfilling) who represents a very idealised version of the author. A Mary Sue has a long, flowery, improbable name, strange hair and eye colours, some sort of bizarre distinguishing mark (the one thing I forgot in penning this), a mystical power, a hitherto unrevealed relationship with a major character, a memorable perfume, and a glamourous job. Get the idea? You can get your own Mary Sue character at.... http://www.maggiefic.com/marysue.htm
At any rate, after playing with this website for awhile, I thought it would be fun to try to incorporate as many of the Mary Sue characteristics as possible into a story without making it an actual Mary Sue story. This isn't set in a recognisable fictional universe; although I did sort of hint at the Buffy the Vampire Slayer world, none of the characters from that actually appear. I had fun with the weird suggestions without actually making it a Mary Sue story. A real Mary Sue would have gone to Sunnydale, out Buffied Buffy, straightened up Zander and Anya's relationship, closed the Hellmouth, married Spike, and resurrected Joyce Summers. (If none of that means anything to you, don't sweat it, it would take me five years to explain.) Anne
I'm a stunt driver. I drive cars. Fast cars, big cars, sports cars, old junkers, vans. I drive cars.
It's a pretty glamourous living for a woman. Usually they stick a long blond wig on a guy if they need a long shot of a woman driving her car off a cliff, but I impressed the hell out of them at the studio when I nearly ran over the best boy with my turbo-charged Nissan. Of course, maybe the wafted scent of my Midnight Gardenia perfume tickling the noses of the big money helped. You never know in this business. I make half the crew break out into rashes when I walk past. I hate the allergic.
So here I am, little Giselle le Croix, driving stunt cars, my long sun-kissed brown sugar tresses flying in the breeze if I'm lucky enough to get a convertible, getting paid pretty good money for something I love doing, but there's a real hole in my life, you know? Maybe it's because I'm Rupert Giles' love child who he's never acknowledged, and there's Sunnydale just down the road from Hollywood, and the distance between us is too great for even a stunt driver to cover. I say to myself, Giselle le Croix, you just hop into a car or a van or a truck and drive yourself over to Sunnydale and confront your watcher daddy; but somehow, I never get around to it.
But one day, something twigs behind my swirling azure eyes and for a change it's not the Hollywood sun in them. I'm supposed to be driving this old tank of a station wagon down the road and let a tractor trailer nearly hit it. End of scene while everyone in the audience gasps. Right? Wrong. I miss the tractor trailer, but instead of braking and hopping out of the wagon, I keep on going. I can hear the director screaming "Cut, cut!" and someone yelling, "Giselle, what the hell...?" but I keep on going.
I drive cars. I know how to drive so fast that nobody in the stupid studio can keep up. By the time they figure out I'm stealing the stunt car, it's too late. I'm halfway out of Hollywood. So, there I am, cruising on the California freeway in a stolen studio car, that doesn't have legit plates, when it happens. I should have known. It's happened before, usually at really inconvenient moments like this. Usually when my emotions are at fever pitch.
Did I mention that I can time travel?
One minute, heading for Sunnydale. Next minute, the car's bouncing like a jack rabbit on speed across plant life like nothing on earth and it comes to a dead stop at a tree trunk. Except it's a knobby gray-green tree trunk with nails instead of roots. I look up. And up. It's not a tree. Oh, shit. It happened again. I'm not in Sunnydale. I'm in freaking Jurassic Park and there's no Spielberg around to save my butt.
The brachiosaur doesn't even bother to look down. It probably didn't even hear or feel the car. This thing is a monster. I've worked dino flicks; they do it all with models and CGI. This isn't CGI. It must be thirty feet tall or more, with hide a foot thick. I try backing up the car and get a whine from the engine. Great. What am I going to tell the car wrangler back at the studio? Sorry, a brachiosaur stepped on it? I always find a way back home when I time travel, but it's never the way I expect. I get out of the car. It's not going anywhere.
There's a whole herd of brachs wandering around the foliage, just like in the movie, except that it's noisier and I don't give a damn if they have hot blood, cold blood or Zima in their veins. I just want to find the way home. It's hot and humid and already my clothes are soaked. Wardrobe's going to be pissed off at me, too. A fly the size of a Buick checks me out. Never mind the dinosaurs, the insects here will eat me alive. It smells, too, worse than L.A. on the worst smog day. Some of the stink's coming from the big pile of dinosaur shit, some of it from the plants. I avoid the compost. Unfortunately, there's no neat little Jeeps on tracks, no gates, no main structure of any kind. Just a big herd of big lizards, giant insects, and lots of smelly plants. There's nothing to eat. It's a studio car. If it was a real station wagon, it would have a bottle of water, half-melted chocolate bars, an apple and a rubber meat sandwich in the glove compartment. All that's in there is some electronic equipment.
I suppose I could eat dinosaur, if I could figure out how to kill one, skin it, fillet it and cook it--if I had any way to make fire. But I quit smoking two years ago. I could drain the gas out of the car, but there's not much left in it because all it was supposed to do was zoom up and down the backlot a few times, and I don't know how to get sparks anyway. In movies, all you have to do to make a car explode is drop it over a cliff, but damn it, I left the special effects crew back in Hollywood. So, here I am, back in the age of the dinosaurs, which would be terrific if I was a palaeontologist. But I'm a stunt driver with a weird little knack for time travel. At least I don't have to make explanations to anyone, unlike the time I ended up in a men's steam bath in Victorian England. Not that it wasn't educational...
I'm alone, unarmed, no food, no water, not even a change of clothes or a supply of Midnight Gardenia perfume. With a shake of my now-sweat-soaked sun-kissed brown sugar tresses, I start trudging away from the brachiosaurs. They're vegetarians, sure, but they also don't watch where they step. It's really tiring to walk through dense vegetation. There are trails, here and there, made by big dinosaurs. Half the time they're blocked by dinosaur crap; and sometimes by rotting carcasses and bones. The sun beyond the haze is hot. I need water, and soon.
I can hear water nearby. Following the sound gets me to a little stream running along, heading downhill. It's probably full of parasites, but I scoop some up anyway. It's drink or die in this heat. With no better ideas, I follow the stream. Hunger grips my stomach, but the commissary's too many years in the future and I don't think I can order out. Some of the bushes have fruit on them, but it's nothing I recognise and poison's a nasty way to die.
It's getting darker. Great. The predators come out at night. My stomach is complaining like hell, but I tell it that it won't do it any good if I get eaten. I find a tree I can climb, since I'm fairly sure that no dinos can climb. Maybe some can glide, but they'd have trouble seeing me among all the green stuff. I'm really regretting the Midnight Gardenia now, but with all the other smells, maybe it's not that noticeable.
Something wakes me up and I waste a minute wondering how the hell I could have fallen asleep in a tree. Something is crashing through the jungle, roaring. It sounds like an L.A. city bus crossed with a really pissed off lion. It's big. Maybe not as big as the brachs, but big. It's heading right for my tree. Right on cue, here comes the allosaur, stomping along, searching for prey. It stops by the tree, right under me, sniffing the air. My grip, weakened by hunger and thirst, slips. Whack!
A roar, a scream--is it me or Al? What the hell happened? I cling to the tiny shoulders as it shakes its head, trying to dislodge this funny insect on its back. No director in the world would have filmed a scene where a woman falls out of a tree directly onto the back of an allosaur, but that's what happened. It stinks worse than the brachiosaurs did; of rotting meat, mostly. Yuck. It shakes and shakes, but I have a strong grip, from all those years of clutching steering wheels. I'm on the scariest ride ever invented and nobody around has a camera. Al stomps along, pausing now and then to shake me. It's too freaking big to run fast, but it can go quite a clip. We barge through, roaring and screaming, me clinging for dear life... slipping, slipping...
One last shake, and I'm flying over its head, it tries snapping me out of the air but its jaws are just too damned big... my body is arcing, sailing... the jungle vanishes, and I land whack! right beside the tractor trailer on the back lot of the studio.
"Giselle!" people are gathered around me. "What the hell did you do with the car?"
Maybe I'll try driving to Sunnydale some other time.
The End