Totally unrelated to a fic which I am not outlining now, no way, no how, a hypothetical question:

You are Batman. (For the purposes of argument.) You wish to take down the Great Firewall of China. How do you do it?

(Points will be awarded for style and asskickery.)

Idea nicked from eugenetapdance. The theory: put your music on shuffle. Write a ficlet for each song, taking only the time the song runs to do so. When you have ten, post.

The practice: I can't type that fast on my PDA, and between that and the fact I was doing some of these on breaks at work and kept getting interrupted, and the fact that some ideas just would not shut up . . . well, they're short. About half, the ones I did on my laptop, were done while the song played. I should do a formal variant where instead of time, you have the wordcount of the song.

Also, there are twenty. I'd done twelve before I remembered to check. And I skipped some songs which were just impossible. I got 'We Will Become Silhouettes' and all I could think of was to go the Cage route, make six blank lines, and declare it a ficbit. I swear it'd work for 'Watchmen' and that song, but I couldn't bring myself to. And you just

okay, I was going to type 'You just try writing a fic that relates to 'Other Places Jimmy Hoffa Isn't', but I had a flash of inspiration and apparently, ( you can. ) That was fun. But there's still stuff I just can't fic to. I enjoy the challenge, and it's good exercise writing short pieces, but given my worldbuilding obsession stuff is going to get long.

Most of these could be movie- or comic-verse; the two are congruous. Some are movie-verse, more or less. Honestly, my inclination is to declare my 'personal canon' to be a hybrid, with the comic's richness of bckground detail and backstory, but the movie's masterplan and denouement, which made vastly more logistical sense to me.

Am undecided whether I should go with Rorschach warning Adrian, as in the comic, or Dan, as in the movie. On the one hand I like the implication that Rorschach and Veidt have parted ways so far Rorschach doesn't care enough to warn him, and there's no way the grappling gun could reach that office or break the window. On the other hand, the "smartest man in the mourge" line is a personal favorite.

Detail, details. Aaaargh. Also I do subscribe to the theory that Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis aren't as dead as everyone thinks, and have plotbunnies brewing as to how they managed it.

Anyway, onto the ficbits:


smile like you mean it [the killers]
( Comedian (dreams aren't what they used to be) )

photograph [verve pipe]
( Sally (and if you want beautiful, pitiful ...) )

get on your boots [u2]
( Sam & Sandra Hollis (i don’t want to talk about wars between nations) )

space oddity [dave bowie]
( Jon, Laurie (and the stars look very different today) )

bleeders [wallflowers]
( Rorschach (maybe next time is never) )

darkness, darkness [solas]
( Silhouette (in the coolness of your shadow) )

high and dry [radiohead]
( Adrian Veidt (you broke another mirror) )

we didn't start the fire [billy joel]
( Hollis (since the world's been turning) )

if you believe [our lady peace]
( Laurie, Dan, Rorschach (you can't close your eyes) )

ants marching [dave matthews band]
( Bernie (people in every direction) )

the rose [bette midler]
( Nelson, Rolf (the soul afraid of dying) )

viva la vida [coldplay]
( Adrian Veidt (i know st. peter won't call my name) )

sour girl [stone temple pilots]
( Jon, Laurie (i was a superman but looks are deceiving) )

thunder road [bruce springsteen]
( Sally, Hollis (show a little faith, there's magic in the night) )

all tomorrow's parties [velvet underground]
( Laurie (for thursday's child is sunday's clown) )

windowsill [arcade fire]
( Detective Steve Fine (you can't forgive what you can't forget) )

these things [she wants revenge]
( Captain Carnage, Silk Spectre (i'm not a bad man, i'm just overwhelmed) )

leeds [indigo girls]
( Adrian Veidt (on a bed of anxiety over a deep dark drop) )

bizzare love triangle [new order]
( Dan, Laurie (living a life that I can't leave behind) )

streets of philadelphia [bruce springsteen]
( Nelson, Rolf (i walked a thousand miles just to slip this skin) )

I have finally worked out a point in Lanthorn and Terrapin's story, the noun-names universe, that's been bothering me for a while. And will pobably make no sense to anyone but me.

Premise: Thimble is cursed to speak only the truth. This isn't the sam thing as an inability to lie. That could be done on a purely psyhological level. Her curse was intended to check anything she said against the actual state of the universe. This has to have ben done with Systemic magic; blood-magic doesn't have the finesse. At least with respect to local conditions, it could have been done by any sufficiently creative and determined Systemic mage. (Systemic magic doesn't extend past the thermosphere, but as of the time she was cursed, the tech to leave it didn't exist, and any messages entering could be modified.) What actually happened, due to the equivlent of a syntax error, was that the world gets changed so that it matches whatever she says.

Obvious question who cursed her? Many mages could have done what was intended, but what happened needed the Systemic equivalent of root access.

A Matagot could have done it, but probably not by mistake. The Matagot work by necessity without a lot of the system's built-in safeguards. They know it very well and have incredible control. A Matagot can burn out or set off a chain reaction, but only on purpose.

Who else has root access? Even gods don't; gods work on a third type of magic. The founders of the system did, but most of them died starting it up. Only the four Deaths hung around.

Ah-ha.

One of the Deaths would be able to pull off a curse that affects the whole world, and do it without safeguards. They don't make new spells often, so they might well mess it up. And they wouldn't be likely to notice the subtle effects at first, thanks to the static of the System as a whole.

Which leaves the question, what did her parents do to annoy Death so badly? It's not like they were Systemic mages themselves; I can't even figure out how they'd meet.

On the other hand, now I know what to do with Thimble. She didn't geas herself to silence while she worked for Lawn; she did it by determination alone, proving she has tremendous self-control. Thimble isn't her real name, and almost everyone who knew her real name is dead. And she likes peace and quiet and keeping things in order. Thus, should one of the four Deaths, oh, retire in shame after having accidentally cursed someone in a way that might have broken the System and ruined the world, she'd make an excellent replacement.

http://gisho.insanejournal.com/814.html#cutid

16000 words in two parts. Another one of those ate-my-brain fics. Inspired in large part by a Stephen King story. Enjoy.

Originally written for a small private ficletfest. Emishi tries to deal with grief by thinking about might-have-beens.


( would like to say to you but I don't know how )

I am in Ashland! I drove for seven hours today! My IM program refuses to work on my tablet! I have weirdness on the brain! And five gazillion fic ideas for Amon! But, troubling, none of them funny, even though I just got out of a version of "Comedy of Errors" that included a bit out of Gilbert-and-Sullivan.

Here, have some Discworld genderswitch.

(I don't know why gwnderswitch is so much fun. I actually did these because I was playing with some origific genderswitch and realized it was simply unworkable. The other fic in progress was - and still is -Discworld, so . . . )

( Carrot )
( Sam Vimes, Sybil Ramkin )
( Rincewind )
( Susan Sto Helit )

I really need to work on echohotel some more. Oh well, I'll get inspired soon enough. Trouble being, I have to avoid my primary computer - it has a cooling system that is the envy of small creatures living next to undersea magma vents, and the temperature's over 80 here, so I'm trying not to turn it on for more than 15 minutes at a go. But the tablet doesn't have the software to do the image manips.

It occurs to me that if I were *really* clever I'd come up with some way to use CSS to generate the images in HTML; it'd be . . . technically possible, but hard to work. But.

Anyhow. I need inspriation and have run out of springkink stuff. Ask me about a character or world detail, and I'll ramble at length about some aspect of the Poultry Products for them/it.. If possible, I will do so in the form of a ficlet.

(If you're not familiar with the term, Poultry Products is what I call the practical aspects of a fictional economy; so for a character it's stuff ranging from 'so where do they get enough money to eat?' to 'how did they learn this obscure stuff and why?' to 'how does this weird medical condition affect their daily life?'.)

Depending on how the random factor turns out, this will either be my last post with an ID below 100000, or my first post with an ID over it. Wow. I've been around for a long while to just now be hitting that point, but I don't exactly post frequently.

I've gotten a start on E.H.'s story. It's not exactly a serial novel, or even a series of shorts, and it's not exactly a webcomic ... I'd call it komabun if I weren't the only one who had any idea what that meant. Perhaps I shall attempt to start a trend.

Go, read, enjoy, tell me what you think.

http://community.livejournal.com/echohotel/

(Debt of inspiration owed to A Softer World and Sinister Bedfellows.)

ETA: First over! Woohoo!

More of the TRC genderswicth AU, posted hastily, finished about a minute ago, I'm late for work arrrgh. Enjoy. <3

( WHEREIN Kurogane spectacularly fails to learn her lesson, as does Fay )

Rampant AU - in fact, three different AUs, and implied spoilers up to Mirror Game. This was extrordinarily fun to write.

( ~1200 words )

... I can't really set it up for Valentine's Day, but maybe next year?

Idea: a ficathon, a la springkink, called "When I'm Sixty-Four". Any characters, any fandom, but the fics must be set at least twenty years post-series and the main characters in the fic must be over, oh, fourty-five. Immortal characters only eligible if they've seriously changed, or interact with someone who has. Ideally, fics set in the Happily-Ever-After, but the Unhappily-Ever-After is also eligible. The point is to focus on the characters, not the 'next generation' or the next big bad or whatever, although I suppose interesting things could be done with characters moaning about having to go save the world again just when they were getting their rose garden really nice.

Comm name: 64fic? sixtyfourfic? stillneedme?

Would anyone go for this?

I had the ideas anyway, but I should mention large bits of this fic were given firmer form by reading the end-of-chapter profiles. Ayamine-sensei, you're nuts, but we like you that way.

Part 2. Part 1 is here: http://gisho.livejournal.com/97186.html

( wrap life in the brilliance of death to humble us all )

This is the strange fic I've been working on, on and off, all year. Last year, that is. It's the story of what happened to Toshiki between leaving Mugenjou and meeting Lucifer, the story of what happened to Toshiki while he was working with Lucifer, and the story of why he left.

Posted in two parts due to length. This is 1/2. Part 2 is here: http://gisho.livejournal.com/97407.html

( summer move forward and stich me the fabric of fall )

Kazuki and Juubei, dealing with their uncertainties. This was actually inspired by a prompt from last summer's springkink round; someone else responded then, but when I read their fic I got ideas.

Well post-manga. Not work-safe.

( ~2850 words )

More messing about with daemons inserted into worlds where they do not belong! Thanks to nekokoban for egging me on. This one's mostly about Kazuki, early in the series.

Also, 'Salt' is finally, FINALLY, done. I need a beta. Can I get any suckers volunteers? If you havn't seen it, it's a long, multi-timelined Toshiki-centric fic.

( And every bird of wing after his kind ... )