| abstract
| - Sovereign was the final Brady Patrick story, although it was conceived weeks prior to the rest of the second generation one-shots. I was on the Dragon Ball Fanon Wiki chat with TeamUnitedNerds, going over potential story ideas. The idea for a story about a Cell Jr. was one of the ideas I randomly came up at that time. I knew when I thought it up that if I were to write it, it would feature a Cell Jr. being blasted into space and taken by Space Pirates. Weeks later when I was on skype with Destructivedisk going over potential new story ideas, I created the list of 10 that would be the second generation of Brady Patrick stories. The Cell Jr. idea was put in at number 5 because I remembered it from my conversation with TeamUnitedNerds. When I later decided to use all 10 stories, I knew that this would be the last one. Sovereign couldn't be written in the 600-2000 words that all the other stories could, so it had to be the closer. Around the time I was writing Slick, which was the penultimate story in the collection, I got the idea to put all of the twelve Brady Patrick story names into the story. They were put in in the order of being written, with one each in the first eleven chapters. Additionally, each of the first eleven paragraphs' first word was the first word of the named story. So, for example, the first paragraph is for Sixth, so it has the word sixth in it. The first word of the paragraph is "A", which is the first word in Sixth. This was somewhat tricky for the two stories which started with dialogue, but I was able to manage it just fine. There were really only two difficult words out of the 22 put in - and they were speedball and scelerat. Neither are particularly common words, but I was able to find a way for both of them. Suffice to say, speedball's inclusion is what likely alerts readers to the small easter egg, as sixth and slaved are common words and easily passed over. Those 22 words were written probably 2-3 days before the rest of the story. As for the writing process of the story, it was quite unique. I wrote the story in four parts, and for the first two parts, I was housesitting for a friend (thus having more privacy to play with my toys). The first twelve paragraphs were written in one go. I created a playlist of my favorite Radiohead songs and listened to those while writing. This is why I had two Radiohead references in the beginning of the story. The second section was written from the thirteenth paragraph until Crusty Pete's demise. For this one, I listened to no music. This was written two days after I wrote the first twelve chapters, and I don't really have a good reason for not picking a song while writing. It may have been due to the continuation being spontaneous instead of planned, like the other three parts. The part with the space ships exploding and raining down over Crusty Pete and Cell Jr. as they fought was a very colorful image in my mind, and I remember being very excited to write it out. The third part was written several days after the second part. I had returned home from housesitting by this point. I will note that in between the second and third parts, I went through a brief stint of listening to nothing but Beatles songs. So by the time I came to write the third part, I listened to Let It Be on repeat for the duration. The third section was from right after Crusty Pete to when the Cell Jr. got free and collapsed in the closet. I wrote the fourth and final part of the story a day or so later. My song of choice for this was While My Guitar Gently Weeps on repeat. I chose the 2004 George Harrison tribute version simply because the solo that Prince does at about 3:20ish into the song is the greatest solo of all time and I also wanted to put the song into the story. My use of the song in the story was improvised as I sat down and began writing that night. I feel like listening to the song over and over again helped get me in a synchronized writing mood with the song and made it flow wonderfully with the fight scene. All in all, between the four parts, I probably spent more than 10 hours writing the story. A lot of that time was procrastination, though. Only three aspects of the story were pre-planned. They were 1. That the Cell Jr. would survive the Cell Games somehow. 2. The story would not take place on Earth (because that would be illogical and impossible, given the Z Fighter's ability to sense ki) and would include Space Pirates. 3. That there would not be a happy ending. The ending itself reminds me sort of what happens to Kid Buu at the end of In Requiem (a sad piece of the plot that people rarely comment about (but more about that on the IR anthology page)). Aside from those three points, I made everything up on the spot. The Slagg and Pete references were just an attempt to inject a little humor into an overall sad tale. I felt like I made quite a few references in this story, compared to many of my others. But I'm not sure if that is the case. One thing that irked me about this story was that I never really had a proper name for the Cell Jr. I could call him Cell Jr., the creature, and sometimes Junior. But it bugged me that he didn't have an actual name. It made constantly writing Cell Jr. tedious, but I feel like creating a name would detract from the seriousness and realism of the story (to the Dragon Ball universe).
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