Yuletide Reveals!
Jan. 1st, 2014 09:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
estiroseI wrote 11 fics this year!
In order of posting, they are: Still To Witness (Villains by Necessity - Eve Forward), The Secret Life of Catalogs (Libraries (Anthropomorfic)), Echoes in my Head (Tomorrow People 2013/Tomorrow People 1992), Onto The Painted Sky (Glitch (Video Game)), So Keep Pleasant Things (Dungeons and Dragons (Roleplaying Game)), Of The Things (Ghost Soup Infidel Blue), Spread In Our Winter Splendor (Sleepy Hollow), Should You Fail To Lie Still (Peter Pan - J.M. Barrie), Then Our Promise (Kamen Rider W/Double), And Of Course I Don't Know Why (Cabin in the Woods), and Not Ready For The Fall (Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly). Whew!
Incidentally, the highest hit was "The Secret Life of Catalogs", and the lowest was "So Keep Pleasant Things".
As for my authors, I was right that one person wrote two fics for me. Both of my Fragile Dreams fics were written by Souljelly, and my GSIB fics were written by Elfwreck and ChokolatteJedi!
Some of my yearly reveal musings got pretty long (mostly the ones for "Still To Witness" and "Should You Fail To Lie Still"), so I'm going to put cuts for each story.
Still To Witness:
When I got this assignment, I started laughing in joy. It was so tailor-made to my interests! I'm a Unitarian Universalist Seminarian-to-be and I had the luck to grow up in a family where scholarship was encouraged. My family had tons of books on topics, including religion. In fact, my grandfather had quite a few books on the subject, as I believe his B.A. was in religion. My mother had taken a comparative mythology course at some point in her life and had her textbooks still, and I'm sure I also read those, not to mention both the prose and poetic Eddas. Oddly enough, the first book I reached for was the Deities and Demigods sourcebook for 3rd edition D&D. Probably the first 1st edition D&D book of the same name would have been more in line with what Forward wrote, but the 3rd was nearer at hand and had a very long chapter that included some discussion on why people worship gods. It also, along with my general knowledge of modern religions, helped me out with how to structure the religions in the novel.
I figured that if that world was anything like our own, there would be a ton of different viewpoints about how to worship/view each deity, depending on region and family. Thus, Hruul no doubt had some people who loved shadows for what they were and those who used them to hide their nefarious activities. After a review of the gods mentioned in the book, I settled on the main character being a follower of Azal. This was because most of the mythologies/religions that I knew about had at least one deity having to do with death, if not several, and it wouldn't be too hard to look up various views of the afterlife/burial customs/how the deities were perceived.
One fascinating thing I found was that most "evil" deities had some redeeming feature, which made sense. Burial and/or cremation are almost universal concepts – you don't leave your dead unburied (for practical reasons, if nothing else). Most of what I read had some form of a good afterlife for good people and a bad afterlife for bad people, with the exception of the Norse beliefs of heaven for warriors and a kind of hell/purgatory for everybody else.
(I have a soft spot for Hel, the nearest version of a death deity for the Norse pantheon. She's not evil for the most part, just very depressing.)
At that point, I needed characters. Neri came first. She worked with herbs, and made dead bodies pretty to make things easier for the living. Det came right after, quiet, benevolent, and a lover of the shadows. And a little bit naive. The handsignals he makes at the beginning of the story are actually mostly used in my mind to let less benevolent dwellers in the shadows know he's a priest of Hruul. (It's bad form to attack one, you see.) For their worship/faith styles, I drew from a book called "Four Spiritualities" by Peter T Richardson; Neri's is kind of a mix of the Path of Unity and the Path of Spirituality, while Det's style is mostly Path of Devotion.
I put in quite a few religious references. Some of them were because I checked out my recipient's journal and found that she was also a UU, so I made references to the principles - the first, second, and seventh most overtly, and to a smaller extent the third, fourth and sixth. The afterlife references were all "classic" Western sources - Greek/Roman, Egyptian, and Norse (with a dash of Celtic mythology for the Barrigans, though I used Tir Na nOg as I was still not sure what the Celtic afterlife was). I could have done better at including sources outside the ones schoolkids learn - oops.
The "everybody goes to heaven, but Azal lets you know about your sins" is part of my personal belief system - I had Universalist beliefs long before I became a UU because I have really big problems with the concept of an eternal hell. (I can understand a temporary hell/purgatory, but not being punished for eternity for non-eternal crimes - it just does not compute.) The "Kindness is the path to faithfulness" saying is a reference to the prophet Mohammed's words "Kindness is a mark of faith, and whoever is not kind has no faith." The actual quote isn't something I could imagine Neri saying, so I gave her a variation.
Trivia: Det is short for Delbert (he really hates his real name), and Neri is really Nerissa, but she's gone by Neri so long that she doesn't care. The title is from the hymn "The Fire of Committment".
Needless to say, I enjoyed writing/researching the darn thing, and I was so glad my recipient enjoyed it.
The Secret Life of Catalog(ue)s:
The prompt warmed my little library-loving heart, so I wrote a fic for it before my assignment came out. I am trained as a library tech, but I have yet to put it to practical use because I got inspired in one class to learn supervising skills.
Lynx was modeled after a terminal I once saw in the central library in San Francisco, the nameless catalogue computer after my school library's system, and of course, I grew up on card catalogues. In fact, I typed library catalogue cards in high school as a library assistant. I have my own cheap personal copy of one of the later AACR2 books (back when we were all sure that the next thing would be AACR3), though I can't write a MARC record to save my life.
Incidentally, I love mentioning Sears because one of my very first assignments when I was taking library tech classes was on Minnie Earl Sears, who created the system. I also couldn't decide whether to spell it catalogue or catalog, so I split the difference, thus the title/summary has one spelling, while the fic has the other.
The book I used for determining the Dewey Decimal number was "A Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism", which was meant to tie in with the bit about the Unitarian books having coffee (Unitarians have a lot of coffee.)
Echoes in my Head:
I'm still figuring out what I think of the CW version of the Tomorrow People, but I couldn't resist a prompt crossing this version with one of the earlier ones. Lies is, as people familiar with the 1992 series probably figured out, Lisa with her WorldEx assumed identity. She's managed to keep under ULTRA's radar by not using her powers at all. Lies' friend Hayley is a shout-out to some fics that I have written - she's actually a canon character in Power Rangers Dino Thunder, and I've had her become a 1992 series type TP.
Of course Lies/Lisa figured out pretty quickly what Stephen was, and tried the do what she could for him without revealing the truth about herself. If I could figure out how to write some of the other CW TP, I'd write a sequel where Stephen tells John about Lies, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable enough with the characters to do so right now.
The title is from "My Murderous Urge" by Yohio.
Onto The Painted Sky:
I took a prompt about a Butler wandering around Ur and ran with it. I didn't like the Ancestral Lands, but I happened to be looking at street names and "Hayseed Road" caught my fancy. I named the butler James, because I remember someone named their butler that. (Same with Sylvester; I ran across two Sylvester-the-Butlers in-game.)
The "farming in distant places" refers to the fact that I went to Miramagia after Glitch died, and Miramagia is a farming game. James' Glitch was essentially me - I was selling completed wall panels and other stuff at a low price so people could complete towers in the end. And of course, I had to include Friendly. I loved Friendly.
The title is from "Where Butterflies Never Die" by Broken Iris.
So Keep Pleasant Things:
The prompt was for any D&D story (within the general likes/dislikes of the recipient, of course). I saw it and immediately was seized with the urge to write a fic about Sather and Grunther from "Return to the Tomb of Horrors", two minor but plot-important NPCs from the module. As it happened, the recipient had played through the module so it turns out this was a good choice! As I mention in the notes, if the party abuses Sather, Grunther stays with her. So I wrote a story about how Sather starts to put herself together after an encounter with some careless, pushy PCs (who hopefully died on the way there, and hopefully before Acerak could use their energy).
The title is altered from a line in Vienna Tang's "Lullaby for a Stormy Night".
Of The Things:
I guess I couldn't resist writing Ghost Soup after requesting it! (And got a hilarious comment in response.) I love worldbuilding and writing fic with no canons, and I just think the whole Ghost Soup Infidel Blue fandom is hilarious. I took the "Allonious has a lover and Bipi glares at him and them a lot" prompt and wrote a story where Bipi keeps doing nasty things to said lovers. Bipi gave the first lover the Verulian parasites, Rufus stabbed the second lover, and Nuri Kabe tried to eat the third. And I had a great time!
Spread In Our Winter Splendor:
I was reading about 18th century American Christmas customs out of boredom, and suddenly realized I could write someone a very nice Yuletide fic about it. I wrote it before the episode that actually discussed Christmas custom, so I had to fix some of it, but I think it came out pretty well. The mentions about Katrina not celebrating Christmas (she was Quaker, and they usually didn't), the herbs, evergreens, and yule log are all out of what I read. I think this was from a page about Colonial Williamsburg, but I'm not sure. Same for the candles. I'm not so sure about the mulled wine, but mulled wine's been around a while. (I make a variant, a mulled cranberry grape mixture patterned after Swedish Glogg.)
The title is a translation of a line from the traditional Swedish St. Lucia song.
Should You Fail To Lie Still:
Astolat got three excellent fics in Peter Pan fandom this year, and I'm afraid this one got overshadowed by the other two. None the less, I'm rather proud of it, especially since I wasn't sure I was going to finish the darn thing in time. This was partially because I started writing this treat shortly before my one-and-only writein (in a city two hours away, go me), looked at who I was writing for, and kind of got anxious - I admire Astolat both as one of the admins of Yuletide and for her work with the OTW and AO3.
Still, after telling three of my fellow participants (and my best friend), I was kind of committed. So, I gave it a title to push myself into writing it. The title it got was "Should You Fail To Lie Still" (picked up from my usual of habit of "turn MP3 player on, listen to song, choose lyric"). It comes from a rather nasty song called the Handmaiden's Song (or Pacifier's Song, if you speak Japanese) from Fatal Frame III. The lyric is about how if the ritual fails/the priestess fails to fall into an eternal sleep, she's skinned alive and sent over to the other world (the afterlife). Thus the lyric "[The tattoos/skin] shall be peeled off, should you fail to lie still." (Lyrics with song, for those interested.)
I knew that I would have to find some way to stick Hook into the story, given that he died. Luckily, the title gave me an idea: Esmerelda would be a vengeance spirit of some kind that wanted to help inflict pain. She surprised by being anti-man and pro-women - she refused to help Hook in any way that hurt Wendy, but she was happy to help him gain revenge on Peter Pan. She's also the one who rescued him from where he was dying. She was unfortunately also very snarky, and so was Hook, and I spent two drafts trying to get them to stop bickering and do something useful.
In exasperation, I went back to the prompt and noticed that Astolat had mentioned wanting an adventure. So, the next prompt was Esmerelda using magic to take herself, Hook, and Wendy to an island so that Hook could use Wendy to attract Peter. Part of this story exists in the the finished draft, at least up to where Esmerelda takes "James" aside. And then they started snarking at each other again, and I figured I had to do something fast.
About this time, I had two things happen. First of all, I realized that as she was, Esmerelda was going to snark, and Hook was going to snark right back, and they were going to get nowhere. So I made Hook into the person he seemed to be (a slightly barmy aristocrat) and Esmerelda into a version of Nana. The location became part of a dream (or time travel, depending on how you look at it). Esmerelda remained a spirit, but she became a benevolent guardian instead of an eccentric vengeance spirit. Secondly, my best friend volunteered to hold my hand so she wouldn't have to listen to me angst about it. I did a small bit of rewriting on the fic, and went from there.
The form you see briefly when Esmerelda argues with James is the only thing left of Esmerelda's orginal malicious form. In the original, she's arguing with him about his plan, in this one she's reminding him to behave and not act all weird in front of the young miss. (I also had James look a little more like Hook - in the original bit, Esmerelda briefly loses control of her illusion on both of them.) After turning it over to my beta, she encouraged me to go on, so I finished the fic (much to the detriment of my sleep, but I was so excited!). I tried to make the story both dreamlike and with implications of time travel, and it seemed to have worked! I gave Esmerelda more of Nana's traits to reflect the fact that she would be Nana, and also because it would make sense that Wendy saw her as Nana.
I actually can build one of the lean-to/emergency shelters that James describes and Wendy builds, as I learned how to do so in Girl Scouts a scary amount of years ago (I'm thinking about twenty-five years ago). I checked my memory on a page maintained by the Boy Scouts, and I realize afterwards, given that they were on a beach, they could have scooped out some of the sand and been okay. But both the Boy Scouts and my Girl Scout training emphasize not doing that unless you absolutely have no choice, so I went with the small shelters. They could have gone with a larger lean-to, but Esmerelda would not have stood for James sleeping in the same lean-to as an unmarried girl. So, the backstory I developed for Esmerelda and James is this: James comes from a family that is cursed to attract the supernatural, and Esmerelda tries to keep the family safe. Thus James' obsession with fairies and traveling (not helped by getting stranded a few times), and Esmerelda's attempt to keep him out of that world. Esmerelda recognizes Wendy as one of her charges, and obviously old enough to be told the truth about Esmerelda's true nature.
The Smee-like man that they meet towards the end of the story is another spirit, come to take James away to become Hook. He takes his appearance from Wendy's mind, refines it, becomes Smee, and then forgets that he was ever something else. And then of course Wendy comes to Neverland, has her adventure, remembers Smee, and now there's a kind of a time loop!
I wasn't sure how to end the story - the "Or was it a dream?" can be somewhat cliche, but it seems to have worked here! The flowers that are in the garland are Japanese Sakura, a quiet call back to Nana/Esmerelda's original form. (You can also see them on the dream island, where Esmerelda is working on the garland.) I wanted to imply that Esmerelda really did become Nana, and that's why Nana was such a great nursemaid - Esmerelda wanted to make sure she was Wendy's nursemaid, even if it meant taking the form of a dog. She had a promise to keep, after all....
Then Our Promise:
I realized that I didn't have the energy to put together a long fic, but I could do a good job on a really short scene. So I wrote a little drabble about Shoutarou and Philip, immediately post-series. (I would love to know where Philip lives/will live, post-series, but the little cubie in the agency would work for the moment. The title is from "The Fire of Commitment" by Jason Sheldon.
And Of Course I Don't Know Why:
What can I say? I got a plot bunny about the monsters being given Thanksgiving dinner. I'm studying accounting right now, and the thought of Accounting having to deal with an uncooperative Zoology just amused the heck out of me. I thought about how Thanksgiving might play out with some of the monsters getting a regular dinner and some a turkey, and went from there.
Not Ready For The Fall:
This was last-minute, written when I realized there were no Fatal Frame fics (gasp!) in the archive. One of the requests was for Seijiro and Kunihiko friendship. I thought of Seijiro asking his friend for a camera and went from there. Of course, Ryozo had to show up, as he was Seijiro's apprentice at the time. I had no real guide for Kunihiko's personality, as he never showed up in any of the games and we only have his notes about the cameras. (I do agree that he's a mad genius, and really, if he could get a tea machine to show spirits, he would!) I tried to fit in mentions of the three other games (I don't know enough about Spirit Camera to fit it in). Himuro Mansion of I, Rogetsu Island of IV (I just started playing IV), and the Echo Stone earring of III. I'm not sure if the Spirit Stone Radio in II is newer or older than the one in III, but I made it as newer so I could fit the reference in.
In order of posting, they are: Still To Witness (Villains by Necessity - Eve Forward), The Secret Life of Catalogs (Libraries (Anthropomorfic)), Echoes in my Head (Tomorrow People 2013/Tomorrow People 1992), Onto The Painted Sky (Glitch (Video Game)), So Keep Pleasant Things (Dungeons and Dragons (Roleplaying Game)), Of The Things (Ghost Soup Infidel Blue), Spread In Our Winter Splendor (Sleepy Hollow), Should You Fail To Lie Still (Peter Pan - J.M. Barrie), Then Our Promise (Kamen Rider W/Double), And Of Course I Don't Know Why (Cabin in the Woods), and Not Ready For The Fall (Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly). Whew!
Incidentally, the highest hit was "The Secret Life of Catalogs", and the lowest was "So Keep Pleasant Things".
As for my authors, I was right that one person wrote two fics for me. Both of my Fragile Dreams fics were written by Souljelly, and my GSIB fics were written by Elfwreck and ChokolatteJedi!
Some of my yearly reveal musings got pretty long (mostly the ones for "Still To Witness" and "Should You Fail To Lie Still"), so I'm going to put cuts for each story.
Still To Witness:
When I got this assignment, I started laughing in joy. It was so tailor-made to my interests! I'm a Unitarian Universalist Seminarian-to-be and I had the luck to grow up in a family where scholarship was encouraged. My family had tons of books on topics, including religion. In fact, my grandfather had quite a few books on the subject, as I believe his B.A. was in religion. My mother had taken a comparative mythology course at some point in her life and had her textbooks still, and I'm sure I also read those, not to mention both the prose and poetic Eddas. Oddly enough, the first book I reached for was the Deities and Demigods sourcebook for 3rd edition D&D. Probably the first 1st edition D&D book of the same name would have been more in line with what Forward wrote, but the 3rd was nearer at hand and had a very long chapter that included some discussion on why people worship gods. It also, along with my general knowledge of modern religions, helped me out with how to structure the religions in the novel.
I figured that if that world was anything like our own, there would be a ton of different viewpoints about how to worship/view each deity, depending on region and family. Thus, Hruul no doubt had some people who loved shadows for what they were and those who used them to hide their nefarious activities. After a review of the gods mentioned in the book, I settled on the main character being a follower of Azal. This was because most of the mythologies/religions that I knew about had at least one deity having to do with death, if not several, and it wouldn't be too hard to look up various views of the afterlife/burial customs/how the deities were perceived.
One fascinating thing I found was that most "evil" deities had some redeeming feature, which made sense. Burial and/or cremation are almost universal concepts – you don't leave your dead unburied (for practical reasons, if nothing else). Most of what I read had some form of a good afterlife for good people and a bad afterlife for bad people, with the exception of the Norse beliefs of heaven for warriors and a kind of hell/purgatory for everybody else.
(I have a soft spot for Hel, the nearest version of a death deity for the Norse pantheon. She's not evil for the most part, just very depressing.)
At that point, I needed characters. Neri came first. She worked with herbs, and made dead bodies pretty to make things easier for the living. Det came right after, quiet, benevolent, and a lover of the shadows. And a little bit naive. The handsignals he makes at the beginning of the story are actually mostly used in my mind to let less benevolent dwellers in the shadows know he's a priest of Hruul. (It's bad form to attack one, you see.) For their worship/faith styles, I drew from a book called "Four Spiritualities" by Peter T Richardson; Neri's is kind of a mix of the Path of Unity and the Path of Spirituality, while Det's style is mostly Path of Devotion.
I put in quite a few religious references. Some of them were because I checked out my recipient's journal and found that she was also a UU, so I made references to the principles - the first, second, and seventh most overtly, and to a smaller extent the third, fourth and sixth. The afterlife references were all "classic" Western sources - Greek/Roman, Egyptian, and Norse (with a dash of Celtic mythology for the Barrigans, though I used Tir Na nOg as I was still not sure what the Celtic afterlife was). I could have done better at including sources outside the ones schoolkids learn - oops.
The "everybody goes to heaven, but Azal lets you know about your sins" is part of my personal belief system - I had Universalist beliefs long before I became a UU because I have really big problems with the concept of an eternal hell. (I can understand a temporary hell/purgatory, but not being punished for eternity for non-eternal crimes - it just does not compute.) The "Kindness is the path to faithfulness" saying is a reference to the prophet Mohammed's words "Kindness is a mark of faith, and whoever is not kind has no faith." The actual quote isn't something I could imagine Neri saying, so I gave her a variation.
Trivia: Det is short for Delbert (he really hates his real name), and Neri is really Nerissa, but she's gone by Neri so long that she doesn't care. The title is from the hymn "The Fire of Committment".
Needless to say, I enjoyed writing/researching the darn thing, and I was so glad my recipient enjoyed it.
The Secret Life of Catalog(ue)s:
The prompt warmed my little library-loving heart, so I wrote a fic for it before my assignment came out. I am trained as a library tech, but I have yet to put it to practical use because I got inspired in one class to learn supervising skills.
Lynx was modeled after a terminal I once saw in the central library in San Francisco, the nameless catalogue computer after my school library's system, and of course, I grew up on card catalogues. In fact, I typed library catalogue cards in high school as a library assistant. I have my own cheap personal copy of one of the later AACR2 books (back when we were all sure that the next thing would be AACR3), though I can't write a MARC record to save my life.
Incidentally, I love mentioning Sears because one of my very first assignments when I was taking library tech classes was on Minnie Earl Sears, who created the system. I also couldn't decide whether to spell it catalogue or catalog, so I split the difference, thus the title/summary has one spelling, while the fic has the other.
The book I used for determining the Dewey Decimal number was "A Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism", which was meant to tie in with the bit about the Unitarian books having coffee (Unitarians have a lot of coffee.)
Echoes in my Head:
I'm still figuring out what I think of the CW version of the Tomorrow People, but I couldn't resist a prompt crossing this version with one of the earlier ones. Lies is, as people familiar with the 1992 series probably figured out, Lisa with her WorldEx assumed identity. She's managed to keep under ULTRA's radar by not using her powers at all. Lies' friend Hayley is a shout-out to some fics that I have written - she's actually a canon character in Power Rangers Dino Thunder, and I've had her become a 1992 series type TP.
Of course Lies/Lisa figured out pretty quickly what Stephen was, and tried the do what she could for him without revealing the truth about herself. If I could figure out how to write some of the other CW TP, I'd write a sequel where Stephen tells John about Lies, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable enough with the characters to do so right now.
The title is from "My Murderous Urge" by Yohio.
Onto The Painted Sky:
I took a prompt about a Butler wandering around Ur and ran with it. I didn't like the Ancestral Lands, but I happened to be looking at street names and "Hayseed Road" caught my fancy. I named the butler James, because I remember someone named their butler that. (Same with Sylvester; I ran across two Sylvester-the-Butlers in-game.)
The "farming in distant places" refers to the fact that I went to Miramagia after Glitch died, and Miramagia is a farming game. James' Glitch was essentially me - I was selling completed wall panels and other stuff at a low price so people could complete towers in the end. And of course, I had to include Friendly. I loved Friendly.
The title is from "Where Butterflies Never Die" by Broken Iris.
So Keep Pleasant Things:
The prompt was for any D&D story (within the general likes/dislikes of the recipient, of course). I saw it and immediately was seized with the urge to write a fic about Sather and Grunther from "Return to the Tomb of Horrors", two minor but plot-important NPCs from the module. As it happened, the recipient had played through the module so it turns out this was a good choice! As I mention in the notes, if the party abuses Sather, Grunther stays with her. So I wrote a story about how Sather starts to put herself together after an encounter with some careless, pushy PCs (who hopefully died on the way there, and hopefully before Acerak could use their energy).
The title is altered from a line in Vienna Tang's "Lullaby for a Stormy Night".
Of The Things:
I guess I couldn't resist writing Ghost Soup after requesting it! (And got a hilarious comment in response.) I love worldbuilding and writing fic with no canons, and I just think the whole Ghost Soup Infidel Blue fandom is hilarious. I took the "Allonious has a lover and Bipi glares at him and them a lot" prompt and wrote a story where Bipi keeps doing nasty things to said lovers. Bipi gave the first lover the Verulian parasites, Rufus stabbed the second lover, and Nuri Kabe tried to eat the third. And I had a great time!
Spread In Our Winter Splendor:
I was reading about 18th century American Christmas customs out of boredom, and suddenly realized I could write someone a very nice Yuletide fic about it. I wrote it before the episode that actually discussed Christmas custom, so I had to fix some of it, but I think it came out pretty well. The mentions about Katrina not celebrating Christmas (she was Quaker, and they usually didn't), the herbs, evergreens, and yule log are all out of what I read. I think this was from a page about Colonial Williamsburg, but I'm not sure. Same for the candles. I'm not so sure about the mulled wine, but mulled wine's been around a while. (I make a variant, a mulled cranberry grape mixture patterned after Swedish Glogg.)
The title is a translation of a line from the traditional Swedish St. Lucia song.
Should You Fail To Lie Still:
Astolat got three excellent fics in Peter Pan fandom this year, and I'm afraid this one got overshadowed by the other two. None the less, I'm rather proud of it, especially since I wasn't sure I was going to finish the darn thing in time. This was partially because I started writing this treat shortly before my one-and-only writein (in a city two hours away, go me), looked at who I was writing for, and kind of got anxious - I admire Astolat both as one of the admins of Yuletide and for her work with the OTW and AO3.
Still, after telling three of my fellow participants (and my best friend), I was kind of committed. So, I gave it a title to push myself into writing it. The title it got was "Should You Fail To Lie Still" (picked up from my usual of habit of "turn MP3 player on, listen to song, choose lyric"). It comes from a rather nasty song called the Handmaiden's Song (or Pacifier's Song, if you speak Japanese) from Fatal Frame III. The lyric is about how if the ritual fails/the priestess fails to fall into an eternal sleep, she's skinned alive and sent over to the other world (the afterlife). Thus the lyric "[The tattoos/skin] shall be peeled off, should you fail to lie still." (Lyrics with song, for those interested.)
I knew that I would have to find some way to stick Hook into the story, given that he died. Luckily, the title gave me an idea: Esmerelda would be a vengeance spirit of some kind that wanted to help inflict pain. She surprised by being anti-man and pro-women - she refused to help Hook in any way that hurt Wendy, but she was happy to help him gain revenge on Peter Pan. She's also the one who rescued him from where he was dying. She was unfortunately also very snarky, and so was Hook, and I spent two drafts trying to get them to stop bickering and do something useful.
In exasperation, I went back to the prompt and noticed that Astolat had mentioned wanting an adventure. So, the next prompt was Esmerelda using magic to take herself, Hook, and Wendy to an island so that Hook could use Wendy to attract Peter. Part of this story exists in the the finished draft, at least up to where Esmerelda takes "James" aside. And then they started snarking at each other again, and I figured I had to do something fast.
About this time, I had two things happen. First of all, I realized that as she was, Esmerelda was going to snark, and Hook was going to snark right back, and they were going to get nowhere. So I made Hook into the person he seemed to be (a slightly barmy aristocrat) and Esmerelda into a version of Nana. The location became part of a dream (or time travel, depending on how you look at it). Esmerelda remained a spirit, but she became a benevolent guardian instead of an eccentric vengeance spirit. Secondly, my best friend volunteered to hold my hand so she wouldn't have to listen to me angst about it. I did a small bit of rewriting on the fic, and went from there.
The form you see briefly when Esmerelda argues with James is the only thing left of Esmerelda's orginal malicious form. In the original, she's arguing with him about his plan, in this one she's reminding him to behave and not act all weird in front of the young miss. (I also had James look a little more like Hook - in the original bit, Esmerelda briefly loses control of her illusion on both of them.) After turning it over to my beta, she encouraged me to go on, so I finished the fic (much to the detriment of my sleep, but I was so excited!). I tried to make the story both dreamlike and with implications of time travel, and it seemed to have worked! I gave Esmerelda more of Nana's traits to reflect the fact that she would be Nana, and also because it would make sense that Wendy saw her as Nana.
I actually can build one of the lean-to/emergency shelters that James describes and Wendy builds, as I learned how to do so in Girl Scouts a scary amount of years ago (I'm thinking about twenty-five years ago). I checked my memory on a page maintained by the Boy Scouts, and I realize afterwards, given that they were on a beach, they could have scooped out some of the sand and been okay. But both the Boy Scouts and my Girl Scout training emphasize not doing that unless you absolutely have no choice, so I went with the small shelters. They could have gone with a larger lean-to, but Esmerelda would not have stood for James sleeping in the same lean-to as an unmarried girl. So, the backstory I developed for Esmerelda and James is this: James comes from a family that is cursed to attract the supernatural, and Esmerelda tries to keep the family safe. Thus James' obsession with fairies and traveling (not helped by getting stranded a few times), and Esmerelda's attempt to keep him out of that world. Esmerelda recognizes Wendy as one of her charges, and obviously old enough to be told the truth about Esmerelda's true nature.
The Smee-like man that they meet towards the end of the story is another spirit, come to take James away to become Hook. He takes his appearance from Wendy's mind, refines it, becomes Smee, and then forgets that he was ever something else. And then of course Wendy comes to Neverland, has her adventure, remembers Smee, and now there's a kind of a time loop!
I wasn't sure how to end the story - the "Or was it a dream?" can be somewhat cliche, but it seems to have worked here! The flowers that are in the garland are Japanese Sakura, a quiet call back to Nana/Esmerelda's original form. (You can also see them on the dream island, where Esmerelda is working on the garland.) I wanted to imply that Esmerelda really did become Nana, and that's why Nana was such a great nursemaid - Esmerelda wanted to make sure she was Wendy's nursemaid, even if it meant taking the form of a dog. She had a promise to keep, after all....
Then Our Promise:
I realized that I didn't have the energy to put together a long fic, but I could do a good job on a really short scene. So I wrote a little drabble about Shoutarou and Philip, immediately post-series. (I would love to know where Philip lives/will live, post-series, but the little cubie in the agency would work for the moment. The title is from "The Fire of Commitment" by Jason Sheldon.
And Of Course I Don't Know Why:
What can I say? I got a plot bunny about the monsters being given Thanksgiving dinner. I'm studying accounting right now, and the thought of Accounting having to deal with an uncooperative Zoology just amused the heck out of me. I thought about how Thanksgiving might play out with some of the monsters getting a regular dinner and some a turkey, and went from there.
Not Ready For The Fall:
This was last-minute, written when I realized there were no Fatal Frame fics (gasp!) in the archive. One of the requests was for Seijiro and Kunihiko friendship. I thought of Seijiro asking his friend for a camera and went from there. Of course, Ryozo had to show up, as he was Seijiro's apprentice at the time. I had no real guide for Kunihiko's personality, as he never showed up in any of the games and we only have his notes about the cameras. (I do agree that he's a mad genius, and really, if he could get a tea machine to show spirits, he would!) I tried to fit in mentions of the three other games (I don't know enough about Spirit Camera to fit it in). Himuro Mansion of I, Rogetsu Island of IV (I just started playing IV), and the Echo Stone earring of III. I'm not sure if the Spirit Stone Radio in II is newer or older than the one in III, but I made it as newer so I could fit the reference in.
