Birthdays are Made for Memories (short story)

Birthdays are Made for Memories was a special 10,000 Dawns story written by James Wylder to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the series. It was the sixth story to feature the use of licenced elements from both 10,000 Dawns and the Doctor Who universe. Unlike the prior run of crossovers between 10,000 Dawns and the DWU, it was not part of The Outer Universe Collection; however, as an anniversary special, it tied in with their events among others, hence the appearances by DWU characters.
These elements included the character of Auteur, originating in Faction Paradox, and a mention of the Eighth Doctor's daughter Miranda Dawkins.
== Summary ==
While on a mission for Dawn, Graelyn Scythes and Archimedes Von Ahnerabe have wound up stranded in a universe currently going through a pandemic; losing her crystal dust in a precipice before she could immediately teleport, Graelyn now poses a contamination risk, forcing her to quarantine herself for a while in this universe before she's allowed to go home. This span of time, to her annoyance, happens to cover her birthday. Having never really had a fully happy birthday in her entire life, Graelyn, now in a better place than she'd ever been before, had been looking forward to getting to have a party with all the friends she's made in her travels across the realities. Hearing her complaints, Archimedes decides to help and begins secretly setting something up.
A more active sort of trouble then threatens to rear its head with the appearance at the door of an angry man who introduces himself as Elliott Jo Jordan, once Graelyn's competitor for the vacant position of intern at Project Atlantis where Graelyn got her first brush with the Multiverse and started her life of adventures. Having learned of said life of adventures, Jordan, consumed with jealously at the thought that it should all have been his, made a deal with Dusk to travel the multiverse. Having finally tracked Graelyn and Archimedes down, he has recovered the bag of crystal dust, and is about to make some megalomaniacal demand when Arch simply swipes the bag out of his hands before he can react, before throwing him out of the house and shutting the door.
With that little incident over and done with, Archimedes presents Graelyn with a tablet and explains that, although interuniversal WiFi isn't good enough for live video calls, he's asked all of Graelyn's friends to send her short video messages with their birthday wishes. Graelyn is elated at how many she gets, which include Lady Aesculapius (plus her companions Blanche Combine and Jason Jackson), president of Mars Zhang Han (and her daughter Odyssia), Alice "Songbird" MacLeod of the World Revolutionary Council (specifically the first version of her Graelyn ever met), Shona (as well as Ashlyn Oswin, the Tourist, Pathway and Miranda), an alternative Graelyn, Auteur (now a skinless skeleton-man with a fairly shaky grasp on the boundary between fiction and reality), lawyer James Morrel (who treats the video as more of a targeted ad for his legal services than a heartfelt personal message), the aloof "Chess Mistress Hex" alias Ariadne Moore, and finally a dinosaur-riding Kinan Jans (and the rest of Dawn).
Just as Graelyn is thanking Arch for all of this, one final message comes in, a more recent, more business-like one from Kinan Jans and Backgammon Jenny. They've learned of the Elliott Jo Jordan fiasco and, though they congratulate Graelyn for resolving the situation and recovering her portal-creating dust, they warn her that, since she and Arch made contact with an unprotected person who'd been heaven-knows-where in the infected universe, they quarantine clock must be reset to zero. Graelyn takes this incident in good spirit, noting that she had been thinking her birthday was going suspiciously well, and she and Arch decide to try cooking a birthday meal together (albeit only for Graelyn's benefit, given that Archimedes doesn't eat normal food).
== Characters ==
* Lady Aesculapius
* Archimedes Von Ahnerabe
* Auteur
* Cornelia Carthage
* Blanche Combine
* Zhang Han
* Chess Mistress Hex
* Jason Jackson
* Kinan Jans
* Backgammon Jenny
* Elliott Jo Jordan
* Alice MacLeod
* James Morrel
* Odyssia
* Ashlyn Oswin
* Graelyn Scythes
** "President of the physics club" Graelyn Scythes
* Shona
* The Tourist
== Worldbuilding ==
* Graelyn Scythes claims that she's "never had a good birthday", with every year bringing such hurdles as "unexpected breakups, or familial abuse, or gaslighting".
* Archimedes Von Ahnerabe spent a portion of his life alone on Ahnerabe Station.
* Blanche Combine looks identical to Graelyn Scythes but with white hair. She "tried to kill [Graelyn] a few times" in the past before redeeming herself.
* Lady Aesculapius's companion Jason Jackson wears a shurt identifying him as ace.
* Lady Aesc mentions her friend Virginia Stens-6.
* Zhang Han's wife is not available to take part in the video message.
* "Popular exports" from the version of Mars governed by Zhang Han include "four varieties of olives".
* Alice MacLeod's fellow revolutionaries include Jack, Treyvon, Yi, Chantelle and Shona.
* Auteur refers to Graelyn Scythes as his daughter.
* Kinan Jans dresses up as Sesshomaru from Inu Yasha to call back to one of Kinan and Graelyn's favourite shared memories, "when [they] went trick-or-treating in Nightmoore".
== Notes ==
* As it served as a five-year anniversary for the overall 10,000 Dawns franchise, this story includes callbacks to many past stories in the stories, not just the DWU crossovers. These include several callbacks to the original 10,000 Dawns webnovel, as well as cameos by the recurring casts of two of the subseries spun off from the core of the series: Lady Aesculapius and The Forgotten Heroines of 10,000 Dawns. Indeed, in a metafictional joke, Aesc refers to herself and her companions as "[Graelyn's] most successful spin-off".
== Continuity ==
* Archimedes Von Ahnerabe reminds Graelyn of that "one time" she got "turned into a baby" and "had to redo [her] entire [childhood]", which occurred in PROSE: White Canvas. Due to this event, Graelyn no longer knows how old she technically is.
* When introducing Miranda to Graelyn Scythes, Shona clarifies that she isn't "[Graelyn's] Miranda", referencing Miranda Dawkins, whom Graelyn encountered in PROSE: White Canvas.
* Auteur appears not as the younger female incarnation from PROSE: White Canvas, but the skeletal version imprisoned under guard by Father and Mother, who are name-dropped. He is currently obsessed with the story of Dracula, placing his part in the story around the events of PROSE: A Bloody (And Public) Domaine.
== External links ==
Category:Arcbeatle short stories
Category:2020 short stories
Category:Stories that crossover with non-DWU series
Category:Stories set on Mars
Category:Stories set in the War