POSEIDON
RISING
Stand Alone Fan Fiction
Reality Check
In March 2002, Roger Howarth’s decision to leave his role as Todd on OLTL was considered official. Scoop columnist announced that his last air date was going to be July 4th. At the time I wrote this story, what was going to happen in the T&B storyline was very much up in the air but there were some interesting elements that had fueled fervid speculation. For one thing, Gary Tomlin, executive producer of OLTL, announced that the dead baby lie would finally be revealed in a live episode in mid-May. Yet another thing was that Florencia Lozano was returning to OLTL to reprise her role as Tea, Todd’s ex-wife. And, finally, Tomlin announced that certain members of the cast were going to Hawaii for ten days in May to shoot 30 shows (six weeks or more of shows). Naturally speculation was rampant that Todd’s exit story would involve the dead baby lie, Hawaii and Tea. When I wrote this story, however, no one had any real idea of what was going to happen. The lack of certainty didn’t stop people from spinning possible storyline developments. The speculation I heard that was my favorite was from Dandesun, an absolutely wonderful fan fiction writer and satirist whose work sparkles and shimmers with depth as well as humor and wit. She suggested that Todd would die an “ambiguous watery soap-death” by supposedly drowning in Hawaii and would return a few months later with amnesia. She believed that as long as Todd's supposed death involved water we didn't have a thing to worry about because water always seemed to save Todd or magically restore him to life. That speculation was the primary impetus for Poseidon Rising.
As the reality of RH's scheduled departure sank in, however, speculation also turned to what would happen to Blair once Todd was gone, presumably dead. Rampant rumors spread that TPTB planned to pair Blair with Sam, an idea that most fans seemed to hate with a vengeance. People presented various ideas about what they would like to happen with Blair and who, if anyone, they wanted her to be paired with even for a short-term relationship. Like a lot of fans I wanted the character of Blair to be written as stronger and more in charge of her life. And like most fans I hoped that RH would decide to return to OLTL sooner rather than later and that T&B would be together again. But given the reality of the situation, I looked around the current OLTL canvas to see if there was anyone I could tolerate Blair being involved with in the interim and the only person I found was Chad Bennett! The idea started as a fanciful joke but the more I thought about it the more I liked the idea. I even started the CHAIR campaign (Chad & Blair) with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek and actually picked up a wonderful co-conspirator, Ladyday. I couldn't shake the idea though so I finally did what most fan fiction writers do, I wrote it! BTW, when Chad made a surprise delivery from Break Bar to Blair on the April 15th broadcast of OLTL, I swear I saw sparks of chemistry between those two that practically flew off the screen. This story was originally posted between April 3 and April 26, 2002.