January Poll Results!

Greetings everyone! I hope you all had a good Christmas :-). Or, at the very least, that you weren't compelled to murder any annoying relatives! Always good to set that as the low baseline standard...

Anyway, the Poll for which Poll Stories get updated in January wrapped up at midnight last night. To absolutely no shock whatsoever, the big winner was Displaced Hero, which will mean it gets another update. Yeah, that was pretty much a given, huh? It has yet to ever lose the poll, after all. Still, for those that didn't know yet...I'm quitting my side-gig job at the end of the year so I have more writing time (and less drain on my sanity). As a result, I'd mentioned in the poll that the top two winners of the poll will be getting updates, much like what happened this month. Frankly, most people weren't willing to risk deviating their votes from Displaced Hero, so the other winner was tied until I snuck in a last-minute vote of my own to tip the scale. Given that its update this month showed off one of the biggest plot twists I have planned, then left things hanging, I decided to give the win to Mass Effect: Eridium Dreams. So that story will be getting another update of currently unknown size in January!

I also have another small surprise planned, as well. Since Mass Effect: Final Error will be finishing up in January, Can One Displaced Hero Save the Galaxy will be moving off the poll to become a permeant fixture. Since I want there to always be three stories to choose from on the Poll, I'll also be posting a new story in January, which will join Eridium Dreams and Pandora's Box on the monthly Poll. And that new story is...

*Insert Drumroll here*

One Piece: Halfway Broken

This will be a Gamer fic set in One Piece. I've been binge reading a few gamer fics all month and decided to try my hand at one. Mostly so I can do it better, of course ;-). Well, better than average, at least. An insert character (Not an SI, for reasons that will be explained when it releases) will be merged with a child Luffy after an accident renders Luffy braindead (damn it, Garp!). 

The fact that the character is an 'insert' will essentially be irrelevant by the time Luffy sets out on his Journey. I mostly needed a reason/method to modify Luffy's personality a bit, so he can actually properly make use of a Gamer System. Canon Luffy would...probably just dump everything into Strength and end up as essentially a duplicate of himself in Canon. Urgh. You should all know by now that canon and I have a great relationship! We wave cordially at each other as I blow past where it was sitting at the coffee shop...

Anyway, for any of you that like One Piece, you can look forward to a more intelligent and well-rounded Luffy. One with a different DF he picks out for himself, and who has been a lot more proactive during the Romance Dawn arc. I will specifically note that, while Luffy will be more powerful than canon, as will some of his crew (which will be slightly larger as well), I'm not intending to make him stupidly OP. I'm customizing his Gamer System to be a lot more limited than some of the power-trip-fantasy-self-insert gamer fics out there. No spontaneous access to magic, out-of-universe powers and items, or instant shortcuts to the top via exploits. He'll have to work hard for what he wants...and will still find that the various Powers of the World are a very credible threat to him. He'll be a big fish in a small pond in the East Blue. But once they hit the Grand Line they are still going to have to fight and struggle, not just curb stomp everyone. Their struggles will be different, but still deadly.