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teratornisLS and I have finished posting another of our Matthew McCormick main stories, and this one was a bit of a milestone for a couple of different reasons.
Small Town Mentality (30614 words) by argentum_ls, Teratornis
Chapters: 9/9
Fandom: Highlander: The Series
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Matthew McCormick, Original Characters, Gregor Powers
Additional Tags: Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, TV Logic, Minor Character Death
Series: Part 12 of Highlander: The Agent
Summary: With Talbot on leave, Matthew travels on his own to assist with a months-old serial case in a small, insular town. As he digs deeper and the murderer accelerates, he's forced to confront his assumptions about who is a friend, and who is a foe.
So this story was actually the first one ever written for this series. Talbot didn't exist yet, Diana didn't exist yet. I think we'd spent a bit of time discussing Sam and Matthew's family background, but we hadn't really established much of anything yet.
Which meant I wrote this without any consideration for the supporting characters and events we've since built up, and finding a way to fit it into the series was pretty interesting.
I actually started with the second chapter of this story. LS and I had been talking about some other canon Immortals Matthew might have fun interactions with, and got to speculating about Gregor, and how a scene of those two interacting might play out. I got inspired to actually put that into practice, and wrote the scene that would eventually become the second chapter of this story.
I don't think I even really planned to turn it into a full story at first. It was just a fun little scene. But then I ended up writing a first chapter to set it up, and just kind of. . . kept going from there.
As a side note, once upon a time I remember very distinctly thinking to myself "I don't know if I'll ever write a casefic. That seems complicated."
LS thought this was very funny when I told her.
So this was the first Matthew story, and my first casefic ever.
Given how much more the characters and setting have expanded since I originally wrote this story, the revisions were extensive, to say the least.
For a while we had no idea where it would fall in the series, before realizing it would actually make a lot of sense for Talbot to be absent, directly after finding out about immortality in a traumatic sort of way, but there was still a lot of established background that needed to be acknowledged in this story. A lot of scenes have been altered to reference back to past events and now-established supporting characters, Talbot especially, and how those events and characters have impacted what's happening here in this story, now.
During revisions, there were also some scenes I found that needed some serious expansion to make sense, and a few points in which some entirely new scenes needed to be added in. My writing style has definitely also undergone some changes, so I wanted to make some alterations to reflect that.
The original wordcount for this story was just under 20k. The new wordcount is just over 30k. It uh. Grew a little.
Our other little milestone for this story is that we ran into our very first continuity conflict in this series so far, specifically with the historical flashbacks. Matthew's presence in Oregon in 1883 was in direct conflict with another place we needed to be for not-yet-revealed reasons, also in 1883. Unfortunately, both of these events were based on either specific points in Highlander canon, or actual real-world events, so our ability to move them around was limited.
Fortunately, 1883 gave us an entire year to work with, so with some tweaking to our wording and explanations in this story, it worked out fine. Still, we were both pretty impressed that we hadn't run into any timeline problems like that until this point.
Anyway, this was a pretty fun jumping off point for the rest of the series, and it was a lot of fun to write, both when I originally started it and in the more recent revisions. This was the first time I wrote Gregor, and I've found him a uniquely challenging character. We see two different versions of him in his canon appearance, but he'd be somewhere else entirely at this point in his life, nine years down the line after that canon appearance. Finding a balance between Gregor-the-healer and Gregor-the-nihilist and whatever else he's had the opportunity to become in the meantime, while also keeping him recognizably himself, was a pretty interesting experience.
Writing some of his and Matthew's interactions in this was a joy, though. I got to give Gregor some pretty snappy lines.
We're more than halfway done with the planned stories now, too. Crazy.
Next up we're bringing Talbot back in, and everyone will have to deal with the ramifications of her discovering immortality. Very much looking forward to posting the next couple of stories.
Small Town Mentality (30614 words) by argentum_ls, Teratornis
Chapters: 9/9
Fandom: Highlander: The Series
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Matthew McCormick, Original Characters, Gregor Powers
Additional Tags: Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, TV Logic, Minor Character Death
Series: Part 12 of Highlander: The Agent
Summary: With Talbot on leave, Matthew travels on his own to assist with a months-old serial case in a small, insular town. As he digs deeper and the murderer accelerates, he's forced to confront his assumptions about who is a friend, and who is a foe.
So this story was actually the first one ever written for this series. Talbot didn't exist yet, Diana didn't exist yet. I think we'd spent a bit of time discussing Sam and Matthew's family background, but we hadn't really established much of anything yet.
Which meant I wrote this without any consideration for the supporting characters and events we've since built up, and finding a way to fit it into the series was pretty interesting.
I actually started with the second chapter of this story. LS and I had been talking about some other canon Immortals Matthew might have fun interactions with, and got to speculating about Gregor, and how a scene of those two interacting might play out. I got inspired to actually put that into practice, and wrote the scene that would eventually become the second chapter of this story.
I don't think I even really planned to turn it into a full story at first. It was just a fun little scene. But then I ended up writing a first chapter to set it up, and just kind of. . . kept going from there.
As a side note, once upon a time I remember very distinctly thinking to myself "I don't know if I'll ever write a casefic. That seems complicated."
LS thought this was very funny when I told her.
So this was the first Matthew story, and my first casefic ever.
Given how much more the characters and setting have expanded since I originally wrote this story, the revisions were extensive, to say the least.
For a while we had no idea where it would fall in the series, before realizing it would actually make a lot of sense for Talbot to be absent, directly after finding out about immortality in a traumatic sort of way, but there was still a lot of established background that needed to be acknowledged in this story. A lot of scenes have been altered to reference back to past events and now-established supporting characters, Talbot especially, and how those events and characters have impacted what's happening here in this story, now.
During revisions, there were also some scenes I found that needed some serious expansion to make sense, and a few points in which some entirely new scenes needed to be added in. My writing style has definitely also undergone some changes, so I wanted to make some alterations to reflect that.
The original wordcount for this story was just under 20k. The new wordcount is just over 30k. It uh. Grew a little.
Our other little milestone for this story is that we ran into our very first continuity conflict in this series so far, specifically with the historical flashbacks. Matthew's presence in Oregon in 1883 was in direct conflict with another place we needed to be for not-yet-revealed reasons, also in 1883. Unfortunately, both of these events were based on either specific points in Highlander canon, or actual real-world events, so our ability to move them around was limited.
Fortunately, 1883 gave us an entire year to work with, so with some tweaking to our wording and explanations in this story, it worked out fine. Still, we were both pretty impressed that we hadn't run into any timeline problems like that until this point.
Anyway, this was a pretty fun jumping off point for the rest of the series, and it was a lot of fun to write, both when I originally started it and in the more recent revisions. This was the first time I wrote Gregor, and I've found him a uniquely challenging character. We see two different versions of him in his canon appearance, but he'd be somewhere else entirely at this point in his life, nine years down the line after that canon appearance. Finding a balance between Gregor-the-healer and Gregor-the-nihilist and whatever else he's had the opportunity to become in the meantime, while also keeping him recognizably himself, was a pretty interesting experience.
Writing some of his and Matthew's interactions in this was a joy, though. I got to give Gregor some pretty snappy lines.
We're more than halfway done with the planned stories now, too. Crazy.
Next up we're bringing Talbot back in, and everyone will have to deal with the ramifications of her discovering immortality. Very much looking forward to posting the next couple of stories.
no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2026 07:10 (UTC)I cannot believe we got two years and 7 casefics into this project before running into a continuity snag--especially the way we write.
no subject
Date: 28 Feb 2026 20:46 (UTC)Right? And it wasn't even that hard of one to fix.