Template:Undocumented Features

Undocumented Features

In the fall of 1991, a burgeoning anime fan named Benjamin D. Hutchins (who had chosen the login name "Gryphon" for the campus computer network) was attending Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. He had recently fallen in love with a series called Dirty Pair, and had seen the first anime fanfics to be posted on the Net written about it by Ryan Mathews and Larry Mann. Gryphon decided to write a Dirty Pair fanfic as well, and in an effort to demonstrate the possibilities to his friends, he churned out something he initially considered a quick-and-dirty "proof of concept" story in which he brought Kei and Yuri to WPI with a plot device from a friend's story and generally let chaos ensue. Some of his friends (including, among others, John "Truss" Trussell, Rob "ReRob" Mandeville, and MegaZone) collaborated with him on the project; they threw in a Big Bad courtesy of Bubblegum Crisis, they packed it full of WPI in-jokes, and named the story Undocumented Features.

Although Gryphon initially intended for the story to be discarded once the "real" writing began, it soon took on a life of its own. Local reception was so positive that they decided to post it on the rec.arts.anime newsgroup. Much to Hutchins's surprise, everybody who read it wanted a sequel. So the writers -- later to be known collectively as "Eyrie Productions, Unlimited" -- wrote one. And another. And then some side stories, and more and more...

This is Undocumented Features. Three decades after the first story was posted (as of late-2021), new stories are still being written in its universe. It is almost certainly the greatest Mega Crossover in all of Fan Fiction, and possibly in all fiction, period. The result is an epic, sprawling Space Opera setting that stretches across several thousand years of history and ranges across (and out of) the entire galaxy, written with a sly sense of humor and an almost religious regard for the Rule of Cool.

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