estirose

I wrote 6 fics for Yuletide this year! My assignment, a pinch hit, two treats in main, and two in Madness!

They are, in order: We Have Our Feast Times (Sleepless Domain (Webcomic)), Forest See We Twice (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri), The stops are not all the same (Sometimes the Stars - The Audreys (Music Video)), Pull up a porch and have some lemonade (Cozy Grove (Video Game)), The Light Not Too Bright (My Time at Portia (Video Game)), and And then she left, and then I was alone (Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water)

We have our feast times, Sleepless Domain (Webcomic)

I always offer in a variety of fandoms, leaving my actual assignment up to fate (though I learned since the first year I did Yuletide not to offer fandoms I wasn't completely comfortable writing). This year, I ended up with a new fandom to me: Sleepless Domain, a comic about Magical Girls who help protect what might be the last city left on Earth.

I love Undine and Kokoro, and Undine/Kokoro, so when I got this assignment I was thrilled! Plus, I love worldbuilding, so I was glad I could throw that in too. The idea of Kokoro meeting Undine's parents was too good not to pass up, so that's where my writing took me. I was also planning on them talking about their relationship, but it occurred to me that they were still not announcing that to the world yet, which made things a bit awkward given that the entire story was either in a public setting or in Undine's house, neither of which was a good setting that discussion.

(My actual first idea was IF with one of them racing across town to save the other - which might fit in with the current storyline - but I just didn't have time to learn Inform7 (parser-based IF like the Infocom games) due to RL obligations this year. I know they said they would have been fine with a CYOA-type like Twine, but I really wanted to do parser-based if I could. I have the framework for this game in Twine, and should I have time throughout the year to get it done, I might do a NYR.)

I had fun with sticking in little bits of worldbuilding! I found that some of the ways the setting worked tended to fall apart if you looked at it too closely, so I did what I could to shore them up. For example, the characters have protein powder and food we'd find on our tables, and yet they're limited to one city, so where do they get the food sources? That has to mean lots and lots of fields and places for livestock. Probably chickens could live on rooftops, but I didn't know if sheep, pigs, or cows could do the same. Likewise, I'm not sure that rooftop gardens could provide enough food for the city.

Also, there had to be mines for minerals if you have televisions and other electrical equipment, as well as ways to make electricity. The trolleys have to have power, for example! Also, I worked out the weekend schedule for Future's Promise based on the fact that the classes are apparently shorter on weekends. I had the choice of splitting out the classes (so periods 1,2,3, and 4, for example, were on Saturdays, and periods 5,6,7, and 8 were on Sundays) or making the day really short, and so I elected to have really short classes on weekends - presumably just review days/homework catchup/study hall on those days.

Giving Suzy (Kokoro's R.A.) an actual set of powers and more inteaction with someone other than Kokoro was fun, though I'm sure at some point Cube will actually give her canon powers.

Speaking of the trolleys, the few that we saw didn't seem to be enough for the size that the City had to be, and there seem to be no cars or even horses, so there had to be trolley lines all over the place. I took inspiration from the city of San Francisco (California, United States) on how a city with lots of transit would work.

I also used two post-apocalyptic fandoms of mine for reference, as the fact that there are so many ethnic backgrounds as well as modern conveniences made me think post-apocalypse: Corinth, the city of Power Rangers RPM, and Portia, the titular city of My Time at Portia. Corinth was an already-existing city that had a barrier around it and had superheroes defending it, so I used it to imagine The City. (It also did not have a lot of worldbuilding as to how it worked, and it was likely not meant to stay domed forever, just until the threat was over.) Portia is a much smaller place, but it also had no cars - just busses and fixed-stop DeeDee transports, along with horses. The restaurant that Kokoro and Undine go to, the name of one of the universities (Truman) and the fact that the world might have ended by an AI were all references to Power Rangers RPM. The DD (DeeDee) Transports and Darkness(es) that Ari mentions, as well as the name of the other college (Peach) has to do with My Time at Portia.

Other bits of trivia: Ari is Ariana Blecher, older sister to Zoe and the former Silver Strike; I figure Undine got thrown by the non-silver hair and didn't realize that Zoe looks a lot like her sister. Yenay and Ti, the two that interrupt Undine and Kokoro's awkward discussion, were actually a late addition because I thought that the story ended on an awkward and abrupt note so I wanted a bit more of an ending. They're actually Sleepless Domain versions of Gao Yen'ei and Tian Lian from my original fic "Singing Off Beat". I just randomly generated a band name for them. I think the change worked out well, and also gave me a chance to bring in discussion of Suzy, who I like very much. The title is from a random bit of poetry I found on the internet.

Forest See We Twice, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (Video Game)

I have very fond memories of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, and I love the idea of Planet. So when this pinch hit came up for Planet, of course I had to claim it (while waiting a bit to make sure someone else didn't want it even more). I wanted to try to write Planet based on what was in the text throughout the game, so I first replayed the game as Deidre (that was fun; I essentially made her Switzerland and tithed to Miriam because I got stuck on the same continent with her and didn't want to get destroyed by the idiot Church) and then chased down the text for the Planet interludes. (Fortunately, there are several places on the internet with the relevant text.) I wanted to figure out how the game looked in its "eyes".

I really loved writing the poetry in the story, trying to make it match with the one poem that Planet recites to the player character. (There is a line of text that mentions Planet keeps trying poetry.

The hardest bit was writing Planet/Voice after the huge upload. It was... okay, what's the sequence of events, how do I suddently go from Voice to Planet, and I'm not sure how well I acheived that, but I tried! (After fixing several sequence errors because somehow the voice of planet sequence confuses me!)

The title, of course, is from one of Voice's random bits of poetry that I wrote.

The stops are not all the same, Sometimes the Stars - The Audreys (Music Video) (Youtube video link)

I really wanted to write elwing_alcyone Fatal Frame fic as I usually do, but for various reasons I didn't feel comfortable writing anything for 4 or 5 that required more than quick review of Let's Plays. So I saw that they had requested a 5-minute fandom and jumped at the chance.

The animated story is quite interesting! this young girl is waiting for a trolley with a bunch of other people, gets on it, everybody else gets off at various places to be with others but her. The trolley eventually runs out of tracks and falls, and the girl falls with it, landing safely next to a naked kid (no genitals), who touches the star around her neck and they walk off together. Obviously it's up to a lot of interpretation as to who the girl is, why she's taking this trip through this very odd landscape, who the other passengers are, and who the kid at the end was. It is very pretty, though.

Since I was coming expecting to write Fatal Frame, I ended up with the idea that the girl was dead, just like the rest of the passengers, and the star pendant held her soul. The rest of the passengers had lived out their multiple lives and were coming home to loved ones, while the young girl had so many lifetimes left to go. There is no end for her, just a new beginning, so when she falls, it's to meet the next version of herself. (Of course, this being me, the young girl is Kirie, and the next version of her is Azami, both Fatal Frame long-haired ghost girls.)

The title is just random.

Pull up a porch and have some lemonade, Cozy Grove (Video Game)

I started this one shortly after I finished up the previous one. I had remembered maybe that the recipient wanted worldbuilding, I figured I wrote Lee, and then when I double checked the prompt, it distinctly wanted fluff for Lee. So I turned it over to my beta for spag and a request along the lines of "I think this is fluff, can I make it fluffier?" with the response of essentially "not fluff" with some suggestions about how to zap out the angstier parts and expand the fluffier parts.

So I got rid of all the angst I could (the only part that remains is that the Scout is homesick, and that fits in with Lee's character just fine) and added bits for the fluff. The major part besides the loss of the angsty bits is that the cat story with Patrice that the Scout tells to Lee originally happened with Lee (beta suggested that maybe it should happen to someone else and the scout tell the story to Lee, which works a lot better) and Lee got a defined number of siblings and what games they played.

The title comes from the fact that Lee mentions he could see himself and the scout in rocking chairs on his porch, drinking lemonade. I believe he canonically has rocking chairs... somewhere, and maybe mentions a porch as well in his dialogue.

The light not too bright, My Time at Portia (Video Game)

I wanted to see if I could write (almost) last minute tiny treats, in enough time to meet the main Yuletide opening if the fic got long enough. The first of these was a Builder-and-Sam-centric ficlet. I'd never really written Sam before, so I wanted to give it a try. The Builder that I created, Mandy, harks back to my very first builder, who was so busy that she doesn't think of romance (or isn't interested) while there are things to build! (Though she did marry Mint later.) She wanted to build, she loved building, she was so happy to come to Portia and become a Builder. What surprised me is that while Mandy was not into romance for herself, she fiercely shipped Sam and Phyllis (and no doubt Albert and Sonia). It was a fun fic to write.

The title comes from a random line of poetry.

And then she left, and then I was alone, Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water (Video Game)

Another tiny treat! I wanted to write something Fatal Frame again. Unfortunately, the games that were nominated were 4 (Mask of the Lunar Eclipse) and 5 (Maiden of Black Water), and I'm far more familiar with 1-3. I have played 4, but not for a while, and I'm still in the middle of playing 5 for myself. That being said, one of the requests was for Hisoka and Yuri, possibly using either Yuri's good or bad ending. I remember the endings for 5 from videos I watched years ago, and so the idea of writing a Hisoka fic with Yuri's bad ending was a doable thing. I watched a YouTube video with the endings to double check the sequence of events, and checked a wiki to make sure I made sure that I didn't mess up Hisoka's storyline. I wanted to give Hisoka something nice in terms of what happened to Yuri (with a tiny bit of Yuri/Ouse) since that ending was terrible for her, and so had Yuri's spirit (and Ouse's) show up to try to reassure her that everything was all right. Neeedless, it didn't take.

The title came from a line of dialogue from the musical Come From Away.

(And for those into stats, I snapshotted these right after reveals: Forest see we twice, 20 hits; The light not too bright, 16 hits; And then she left and then I was alone, 15 hits; The stops are not all the same, 14 hits; Pull up a porch and have some lemonade, 12 hits, We have our feast times, 11 hits.)