Ideas for Fanfiction
Some of it's random. Some of it's bizarre. Some of it's smart, and some of it's stupid.  It wasn't working for me. Perhaps something will inspire you.  Have fun, and email the results to theresia00@yahoo.com
Recent / Random Ideas :
1) One young English noblewoman is obsessed with the scarlet pimpernel (and ridiculed for it by her friends). She's collected everything pimpernel -- even a copy of Sir Percy's poem, autographed, (even though she doesn't think he has a clue what he is talking about).  She's even taken notes on the pimpernel's possible identities.  She befriends a young man who seems eager to listen to her speak endlessly about her favorite subject, not knowing that he is, in fact, a French agent...
I may write this one yet...
2) A pair of non-League Englishmen who take Percy very seriously as a trendsetter see the League in some outrageous disguise, and decide it's the latest fashion.
3) Where did Percy get the damn geese from? And how did the French go about catching them? (Envisions Chauvelin running through the streets after a stray fowl, arms outstretched?)
4) Sir Percy rescues Sydney Carton [A Tale of Two Cities] from the guillotine. Though Sydney is distressed since his life has now become useless again, Sir Percy offers him a place in the League -- especially since he seems to have a taste for suicide missions.  [Could also include : Chauvelin recalls his breif affair w/ Mme. Defarge.]
5) Potter the Vampire Slayer and the Scarlet Pimpernel of Penzance.  Or any combination of the four. For instance: 
     Pimpernel/Harry Potter (Tom Riddle's ancestors begin the French Revolution as a way to get Muggles to kill each other),
     Pimpernel/Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the cast of Buffy gets stuck in a time warp during a botched spell and sucked back to the French revolution; or, Paris is secretly full of bloodsucking demons...Like LA! (on
Angel)            Pimpernel/Pirates of Penzance (Blakeney meets some questionable bucaneers).  Actually, at the end of that show, Ruth the pirate lass sings that the pirates are all noblemen who have gone wrong...where did these noblemen come from? Even thought that takes place in about 1870, it's still food for thought...
6) Marguerite reveals her scandalous past.
7) Percy reveals his.
8) Chauvelin has an intense fear of small children.  (Percy loves them.)
9) Englishman: Those Americans, now, they know how to have a revolution!
French Person: (Howls in rage)
10)  Chauvelin: You miserable excuse for a female.
     Marguerite: You loved me...once...
    Chauvelin: Once, you were worth it.
11) The Orczy novel is only a dream of Marguerite's.  She, a poor factory worker, awakes to a beating for oversleeping.  She is laughed at for talking in her sleep: "Oh, Percy, but I cannot walk!"  The pimpernel is a fantasy she invented to sheild herself from the horrors going on around her?the last scene is her looking at the guillotine, with no brave Englishmen to stop its ghastly work.
(New idea..the book is Fantine's (les Mis) dream...in the novel, Tholomyes (the father of her child) even says, "Oh, Fantine, worthy to be called Marguerite, or Pearl, you are a jewel of the purest water." Hmm...
12) Marguerite encounters a neurotic frenchman who believes they were former lovers (she said "hi" once back in the Comedie Francais days.)
From some dumb stuff I wrote quite a while ago:
1) Marguerite lets on that the mysterious scarlet pimpernel loves her...and the English aristocracy is convinced the pimpernel is Sir Andrew Ffoulkes.
a) aristo: So, Percy, how does it feel to have your wife stolen out from under your nose?
    Percy: (idiotically) I don't know what you're talking about! She's right over there.
  b) Andrew: I tried to convince them they had the wrong man. They wouldn't convince!  I went overboard. I out-and-out told them I wouldn't touch the man with a ten-foot pole...
    Percy: And yet, here you are, standing on my foot.
  c) Marguerite: Why does everybody in this confounded story seem to want me?
      Percy: Because you're you.
      Marguerite: Oh, that helps.
2) Andrew and Hastings don the coalheaver disguise once more. Hastings picks up an ugly blonde lady of the streets who just won't leave him alone. With some embarassment, they realize later that Marguerite disguised herself in desperation to escape from some soldiers.
a) Marguerite: where's my pimp?
You can skip these next ones; they're mainly here for my own peace of mind.  I wrote these when I was about twelve. I was a weird, weird twelve who seems to have missed the entire concept of 'pimpernel'...
1) Let me see...Sir Percy, a few League members and Marguerite are on their way out of France, hiding in busy inns and Percy's underground (????) fortress with an indescipherable name.  They eventually get out of France.  Umm...Percy loses his horse on the way, and they see some scary poor people.
2) Marguerite has twins -- two daughters, one smart one, one with a snooty attitude.  Percy is stalked by former lover Veronica (who seems to live nearby and just never bothered to stalk him before).  She spends a lot of time being mysterious, leaving threats in the form of poetry on his bedside table, pushing swords through walls, and playing Catwoman on his roof. One day, she falls off the roof.  She crawls over to Percy and tells him to kill her. He refuses.  Muttering, "you bastard..." she stabs herself.  Percy buries her. Percy has no recollection of who she is.  A mysterious rhyming epitaph appears at the end. There's some subplot about Andrew being preoccupied with bratty Victoria, who's cousin to ditzy Linette, who meets night-in-shining armor type Edmond (I think I meant Edmund). Whatever.
3) Entitled "The Man in the Bookcase".  The twins turn four.  The Blakeneys are haunted by Chauvelin's ghost (Chauvelin seems to have died in prison as a result of Blakeney.)  Chauvelin is particularly disturbing to Marguerite.  What to do?  The children -- Chauvelin has a deathly fear of little kids -- chase him away...
4) Marguerite dies in childbirth.  She has a very dark-haired, pale-skinned boy with the eyes of one posessed (fathered by Chauvelin's ghost).  Percy dies saving the boy when their house catches fire years later, and, I think, saves the child's soul....
Like I said, I think I missed the point...
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