estirose

So, I wrote ten fics for Yuletide. Yeah, I'm not sure what happened either, because I didn't have much inspiration until about a week or two before the archive opened.

Anyway, the ten fics are:
Sarapis Tori (Kamen Rider Gaim), River Wash The Mountain (Kamen Rider Gaim), Split Apart the Light (Kamen Rider Gaim), Paid For Forwarding (Adressändring Paris), Is But A Weapon (Sekirei), Wash Your Hands With Fruit (Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger), I tasted wheat in rosy youth (999: Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors), The Lotus Won't Sit In The Chair (Conscientious Objector - Edna St. Vincent Millay), The Light Is Born Every Day (Zero | Project Zero | Fatal Frame series), To The Rainbow's Dust (The Tomorrow People (1992))

Whew!

So, some details about the fics for this year, under the cut.

Sarapis Tori:
When I got my assignment, I was thrilled. Of course, I got a request for a character that I'd been writing a ton about - Mitsuzane Kureshima of Kamen Rider Gaim. I wasn't sure what to do about it, but my brainstorming partner suggested doing an alternate POV. I thought it would be interesting to do Redyue, set around 36. It turned out she was quite a challenge to write! Which is partly why I have a sparring match between herself and Mitsuzane, and then later Shinmugurun (whose name I can finally spell).

(The title, incidentally, came from a random science fiction planet name generator. It was supposed to be for a different fic, but I ended up giving the title to this one.)

River Wash The Mountain:
I still wanted to write a more traditional Micchy fic, so I ended up with this one, about Takatora coming home from the hospital. I did a bit of research on what he might need, then started writing about Micchy's feelings on this - compounded in dificulty by the fact that Micchy was very much not communicative (he's somewhere between himself in 46 and how he was in 47).

Random trivia: The painting in Takatora's room is a reference to the game "999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors", specifically to one particular character whose fate I shall not spoil. The paintings in the parlor are not mentioned in detail, but they were intended to be part of a set that will turn up in two other fics for Yuletide.

(Title came from the Harry Belafonte song "Turn The World Around".)

Split Apart The Light:
I love worldbuilding. So when I saw a prompt of "how do [Kouta] and Mai cope with their new world?", my brain interpreted that as "literal worldbuilding, yay!". So that is exactly what I did, having Kouta and Mai figure out how to start putting a world together.

(Title unknown, but I suspect it was a Bible verse from where it was on my list of possible titles.)

Paid For Forwarding:
I wanted so much to give the recipient a happy ending for the gay couple in this commercial dealing with address changes. So I did by making sure that Kjell got his mail forwarded in this little double drabble. I had to find a name for his lover, since I didn't have any dialogue and couldn't just have Kjell say "my lover" (I suppose I could have, but it didn't fit). And if you're wondering how the Swedish word "fika" (a coffee break with sweets, more or less) ended up in an English-language fic, I have Swedish relatives and I'm so used to hearing "fika" that it wandered in because it fit what I wanted.

(Title came from what Kjell did to change his destiny.)

Is But A Weapon:
I picked up a pinch hit in the after-deadline crowd of pinch hits, matching on Sekirei. Of the very many things I could have done, I chose to challenge myself and handle Uzume and Chiho. Which proved to be a nice thing, because I could also cover Uzume's friendship with Kazehana while I was at it. This came out as Uzume trying to get Chiho to stop worrying, with some speculation as to the nature of the bond between Ashikabi and Sekirei. Originally, Uzume made reference to how she met Chiho in the manga, and I found after some canon review that the meeting in anime was quite different, so I rewrote it.

(Title is from one of Firion's pre-battle lines in either Dissidia or Dissidia Duodecim. "Magic is but a weapon too." With the premise of Sekirei, it fits.)

Wash Your Hands With Fruit:
This is probably the first treat I started, and one of the last finished, because I just got stuck figuring out how Yuko would react to Candelilla. A little canon review later when I had time fixed that. It's entirely a piece of fluff because I like Nossan and Candelilla together and I like the idea that she would at some point drop by his house (and his family would welcome her).

(Title was a mishmash of two different lines of poetry, but I forgot to write down which lines.)

I tasted wheat in rosy youth:
I picked up 999 in hopes of treating someone on my flist, who was not participating in Yuletide but they will probably read this anyway and end up reading the fic. (Guilty confession: I had played the game before it was recommended to me.) After playing through the iOS version of the game, I started looking for prompts so I could treat others on the way, and this one appealed to me. I found out while I was reading about the game that the DS version had banter along with the puzzles, so I read every single bit of Snake's dialogue I could find online. (Junpei had a lot of dialogue, so he wasn't a problem.) Apparently I got both of them right. I kept flipping between using Snake and using Light for the man's name, which shows up when I forgot to change one mention of Snake to Light. Fortunately, it worked. Also, thanks to said dialogue I now ship Junpei/Snake, though it didn't really come out as much as I wished in this fic.

Random trivia: The puzzle actually exists. The bits I have about how Snake handles the coffee are from reading about how blind people navigate such things. The rest of the set seem to belong to the Kureshimas, since that's where I put them for "River Wash The Mountain". (I have the whole set of titles somewhere in my notes, but I forget where.)

(Title was from another mishmash of lines of poetry and are a little bit of a personal injoke.)

The Lotus Won't Sit In The Chair:
I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that this was the highest hit story of mine, because I loved doing the worldbuilding in it, and it showed. It's very much a science fiction story, about one woman named Hilda who lives on another world with a rather dystopian government. Her parents came from Earth with their cattle, and she continues their ranch (they're dead). She grew up with Mason, who was the son of the town accountant - one line I thought I put in but didn't was that he griped about "how debiting to add cash makes no damn sense". It's a little short, but it accomplished exactly what I wanted, which was to show a scene in one woman's life.

Random Trivia: Hilda is partly named after one of the main characters of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Marble Faun", and partly after a former coworker of mine who I partially based Hilda on. Mason is another former coworker, and his second name is also a reference to the same novel. Hilda's cousin Hester is named after the protagonist of "The Scarlet Letter". I randomly chose Rafael's name.

(The title comes from the password that Rafael drills into Hilda, but the password itself is a reference to a scene in 999: Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors, which features a character codenamed Lotus.)

The Light Is Born Every Day:
I make it a tradition to write a Fatal Frame story every year for Yuletide, and this is no exception. FireEye and I seem to end up writing each other fics in different exchanges! Anyway, I was working off the idea of writing a ghost's backstory. My original plan was to look at the Kuzuharas from III, but nothing clicked. Then I got to looking at the Kiryus from II, and thinking about the stuff Miku made in III. This is how I ended up writing a very fluffy fic for the very dark Fatal Frame canon, where the ghosts aren't usually this friendly. Someday, I might write a ficlet which is "how life is in the Kurosawa household with Rei, Miku, and the Kiryu family" and another ficlet which is "Rei tries to keep a straight face when a sensitive guest keeps hearing the Kiryu twins play tag".

(The title comes from a lyric in the Tori Amos song "Comfort And Joy", which fits, because it's a comforting, joyful fic.)

To The Rainbow's Dust:
I promised tptigger a ficlet for her birthday. I finally wrote one, because I was thrilled with the idea of Ami and Jade spending time together. I couldn't figure out how until I was looking at my own personal calendar and realizing it was time to start preparing for my next class (as a student). That was how Jade ended up with Art History - I wanted to put in an explicit reference to Hawthorne's "The Marble Faun" in one story, at least. (Yes, those are the same paintings that show up in "River Wash The Mountain" and "I tasted wheat in rosy youth".)

Random trivia: The city hall and the church described really exist (and are right across the street from each other), but I imported the art gallery from another city, and renamed the seminary. There is a gourmet sorbet/ice cream place in the same city, but the sorbet flavors in the story are the result of random googling of sorbet flavors.

(I think this one's title is from a random line of poetry, and not a mashup, but I'm not sure.)