Yuletide reveals for 2024!

[estirose]

I wrote 6 fics this year!

Moving Forward at the Smallest Sigh (Earth: Final Conflict), A Dream of Silver Streams (But I'm a Cat Person - Webcomic), Where Flowers Grow on Scars (Plants vs Zombies), Brook and Tree (Slay the Princess), The Hero Cat to the Walled City Returned (Stray (video game)), and Rusty Cogs and Shining Circuits (Stray (video game))

Fandom-wise, I've written in Earth: Final Conflict and Plants vs Zombies before, but Stray, Slay the Princess, and But I'm a Cat Person were new to me.

Moving forward at the slightest sigh (Earth: Final Conflict):
AO3 link

My recipient this year and I share several fandoms. We actually matched on The Tomorrow People (1992), but I went with Earth: Final Conflict instead, despite not writing in it for years and years.

Of course, there was the small problem of me not having seen the series in a good 20+ years, but it was available as part of one of my subscriptions so off to canon review it was! I was most of the way through season 1 when a comment of Beckett's in the episode "The Secret of Strandhill" along with the events of the episodes "Live Free or Die" and "The Devil You Know" made me go for an AU featuring Lili with a CVI set after an alternate version of "The Devil You Know". (I was actually planning to watch all of season 1 to refresh my memory and then hit up season 2 and possibly 3 for Liam and Da'an interactions, but the plot bunny just grabbed me for a Lili-focused fic.)

I really had no plot besides "try to figure out how the series would change with Lili as an Implant" so this fic was very seat of my pants. I figured that Implant!Lili would have insisted on staying on in the investigation even though she was supposed to be off mourning her father, similar to what happened in the series. Da'an being concerned for her, of course, led him to actually ordering her off on an actual bereavement leave (because Da'an is complex and often morally conflicted but in essence a good person). I have no idea if Zo'or was planning something but Da'an definitely wasn't.

As far as the Liberation went, I still wanted Will Boone in the story as a balancing factor/higher up person in the Liberation, perhaps finding more suspicious details than he did in canon and therefore going underground. I also really liked Kate Boone and figured she deserved to live this time around! A small detail that didn't get into the story (because Lili doesn't know) is that Kate is pregnant.

And because of Beckett's comment in "The Secret of Strandhill" she of course had to show up (albeit over global) because I think she really liked Lili in that episode and of course she'd see this Lili as a comrade-in-arms of sorts. (For that story's plot, Lili would have just had to get the Eunoia translated as she would probably not have been trying to learn it like Will did in the series.) So cue the kind of one-sided friendship and yes, Beckett wants to be there for Lili because friend - though she probably would remain in the U.K.

The whole section with her mother was because I really thought they needed more interaction than what they had in "The Devil You Know", and I do think that Lili needed to process her grief, and it just didn't come together for either her or me until they started talking. I intended for the conversation to last a bit longer, but Lili just basically went "okay, I realize what I needed and what Da'an intended, I'm good now" and so it kind of ended there.

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A Dream of Silver Streams (But I'm a Cat Person - Erin Ptah):
AO3 link

I try to do some form of Interactive Fiction every other year; I last did one in 2022 so I was due to do another one in 2024.

I liked this recipient's prompts, and they had also requested in MultiLingYule with an option of Spanish or constructed languages (especially Toki Pona) so I decided to do an interactive fic that featured some Toki Pona. I eventually settled on a plot where Sparrow would meet one of her predecessors and they'd talk while trying to solve the puzzle of why they're there. I figured since she'd already had a dream sequence that featured a character she didn't know she'd be good to have another dream sequence featuring a character she didn't know. I was short of time so I used Twine with Harlowe since I didn't have time to learn anything else.

Since I speak Esperanto a bit but had only heard of Toki Pona, I went about learning it through both the official book and some online learning resources. I'm not sure I'd call myself fluent and I really didn't have anybody to check my writing so hopefully nobody fluent will get too annoyed at my attempt! I wrote the Toki Pona story-in-story first (that's the text that Sparrow sees) and then wrote the interactive fic around it.

I put in a tiny puzzle that if solved correctly gives the reader an extra paragraph of worldbuilding dialogue.

This being me, I put in a bit of randomness into the fic; one bit is at the beginning and references a bit of Abigail dialogue from Stardew Valley (I actually sat in SMAPI and forced it to give me all of its nouns for that dialogue, most of which I incorporated here). The other is the puzzle answer, which randomizes every time.

One of the things I wanted to do and succeeded with was having the story display on one page so that when the reader was finished, they had an entire finished non-interactive fic to reread if they wanted.

Trivia: The original character's friend is L.L. Zamenhof (the creator of Esperanto); there are many ways to transliterate his first name so I just chose one of them. The story-in-story is about Zamenhof's real daughter Lidia, who was a writer and advocate for her father's work. In real life, she died at Treblinka; I wanted to give her a happier ending.

Technical stuff (for those who have met Twine and Harlowe):

• The main passage of the story just displays the title, sets the Abigail reference and the puzzle solution (using a combo of set: with random: and cond:) and then runs the first passage.


• The first and subsequent passages (apart from the passage that handles the puzzle, which had to be done a bit weirdly) basically spit out a bunch of text with a dialogue choice at the end. That dialogue choice does a bunch of heavy lifting (basically, the hook that gets run displays the dialogue, hides the other choices using the hide: macro, does a set: so the story knows what the reader chose, and pops in the next passage)


• Part of the puzzle requires the reader to click on the Toki Pona story bits to get the English. This is done by using a cycling-link: macro. If the reader clicks on them a third second time, you get Esperanto.


• If you tell the man that you know what happened to his friend's daughter (that is, you go into the puzzle dialogue), it's very close to how the dialogue choices run but checks to see if you chose the correct, random answer. If so, the next paragraph (a hidden hook displayed with the show: macro once you click a link) displays a couple of extra sentences before popping in the final section.


• The story is styled with CSS to have a white background and color the links a bit differently than the default Twine/Harlowe colors.


• To get the tall title, I used a macro called text-style: with the parameter "tall".

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Where Flowers Grow on Scars (Plants vs Zombies):
AO3 link

I rarely get to write for pinch hitters because I don't usually share any fandoms with them. In this case, there were two or three fandoms I could have written in but I went with Plants vs Zombies, an old favorite I've written in before. I only managed a short fic, but better that than nothing!

I toyed with the microtransactions snark idea, but I came out with a much simpler kind of war report from the trenches... well, the front yard. This is taking place during an Endless run (because Cactus) but this Peashooter has survived a couple of battles and seen some things - thus the accurate description of the mushroom-types being mentioned.

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Brook and Tree (Slay the Princess):
AO3 link

I've played but have never written for the visual novel Slay the Princess, and I completely missed that the Pristine Cut added so much stuff! I tend to try to be kind to the Princess first and didn't realize that would throw me into this epilogue (you get thrown back to the beginning, just like any other ending before you've played through all the relevant routes). I love the Princess and the Hero's reactions throughout the storylines, which also caused me to feel so bad for both in this storyline.

So of course I had to write it from the Princess's POV! It's surprisingly hard to write it because she both remembers your actions (at least until she gets absorbed) and doesn't remember your actions. And this one is just a weird one because it's not obvious on how much she knows the true identity of the Shadow or how much she is afraid of the Shadow.

I accidentally merged some of the possible endings for this together, which is why it doesn't precisely match with any of the actual endings - but I think that works well and for a fandom I have never wrote in before this came out surprisingly okay!

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The Hero Cat to the Walled City Returned (Stray (Video Game)):
AO3 link

The recipient was hoping for something with the whole ensemble (with a selection of Orange Cat + a combo of Clementine, Zbaltazar, and Momo), so I figured, "well, I'll set this in Clementine's not-boarded-up-anymore apartment with Momo being there as well", had the cat show up, and kind of let it flow from there. I'm good at writing fluff, and fluff this fic very much was.

(The reason the cat got back in? B-12 let the cat back in - but Clementine and Momo wouldn't know that!)

Like the Slums, there are a lot of doors in midtown that don't open, and some of them seem residential, so I figured they made a museum somewhere. I had in mind one of the doors off the main street that you first enter, but for the purposes of getting the cat to follow, probably one of the residence apartments would work even better.

Having the cat not like being picked up (even by the cat's Companion friends!) fit in with cat behavior - after all, the orange cat is not domestic, even you can have it catnap near several Companions throughout the game. But I do fully believe it would follow Momo and/or Clementine anywhere, and it seemed a good way to end the fic, so I did.

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Rusty Cogs and Shining Circuits (Stray (Video Game)):
AO3 link

There were several places I could have gone with this one, but I wanted to feature a story that was more about what happened shortly after the cat left at the end of the game. It is kind of in the same universe as "The Hero Cat to the Walled City Returned" but a while before that story, where Clementine is still getting things sorted out.

I had B-12's drone body kept in the Control Room because Clementine/others were still figuring out how to revive the city and therefore leaving it there made sense. But that didn't feel right so I added in a bit that a local artist had made a cat sculpture to keep B-12's body company. Eventually he'll be moved to the museum. (And yes, B-12 did like the fact that the sculpture and his old drone body were put together!)

Lyn is indeed Clementine's neighbor-of-sorts; he's the Companion who's yelling at his friend because his friend lost his character sheet.

A lot of the rest of this is me wanting to talk about practical stuff. As was pointed out on what I want to say is the Stray subreddit, the sun would probably take care of a lot of the zurks, but not anything underground, in the sewers, etc. So cleanup would be needed before the place was truly safe, especially at night. (Clementine and the others would not know about the day/night cycle at first, I feel.) One of the priorities would definitely be getting that elevator running - it's brought up early in the game but nothing is done about it because it's not really part of the cat being able to leave to rejoin its family.

This is definitely less fluffy than the previous story, but I'd like to think it contains the same hope the other one did.

(And because I like to keep track of such things, hit counts for my Yuletide fics pre-reveals: The Hero Cat to the Walled City Returned, 63 hits, 23 kudos; Rusty Cogs and Shining Circuits, 42 hits, 13 kudos; Brook and Tree, 30 hits, 5 kudos; Moving Forward at the Slightest Sigh, 20 hits, 3 kudos; Where Flowers Grow on Scars, 15 hits, 6 kudos; A Dream of Silver Streams, 13 hits, 5 kudos.)

Comments

[malinaldarose]

Thank you, again! I enjoyed the AU very much. I like the idea of Beckett genuinely being friendly, too.

[estirose]

You're welcome! I was hoping I wasn't rusty given the fact that I hadn't seen the series for so long, but I've been meaning to write you E:FC for a while. Yuletide just gave me the right impetus, I guess!