Safety pins, sticky tape and hope

[Guilty Gear fic] Skin and Bone - Prologue

2009-07-10T04:57:15Z

Usually I'm pretty good at keeping myself to one major WIP per fandom at a time. In the last six months, however, I've fallen headlong into the trap of starting half a dozen different things at once but never getting very far with any of them, leaving me with a folder full of beginnings and very little to show for it, and all the while getting increasingly despondent about how miserably little fic I've posted this year. This is all by way of saying that this is not the next chapter of my vampire-fic (which is mostly complete but is still in need of betaing etc) – it is in fact the prologue to that would-be-epic idea I mentioned way back when and have had sitting around ever since. The rest of this story is still very much on my to-do list (at this point it's not even to the stage where the summary really applies to it), but in the meantime, the prologue stands alone well enough that it felt like past time to share it.

(To the one or two of you with whom I've discussed the concept behind this one before, I did just want to ask you not to mention it in the comments, as it's going to be a pretty major spoiler for later in the fic.)

Title: Skin and Bone
Summary: Ky's about to find out just how deceptively human Gears can be.
Chapter: Prologue
Characters/Pairing: (eventual) Sol/Ky
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1200

Sol was in the way. A lot of hurried people with very important jobs to do wanted to use the corridor he was standing in, and even though he wasn’t taking up much of it he was obstructing extra traffic thanks to how passers-by tended to give him a wide berth, no matter how much of a rush they were in. A couple of them had already politely tried to ask him to move, but one corner-of-the-eye look from Sol and they all quickly remembered other urgent things that needed to be done a long way from the corridor he was blocking.

It would have been a lot easier to do this casually if he’d had a cigarette, nevermind how many more staff would’ve felt obligated to remind him this was a non-smoking area. He’d had a packet that was still half-full a few hours ago, but no amount of double checking every pocket in his uniform was going to clear up the mystery of where that went to. Out on the battlefield, obviously; probably trampled into the dirt by half a dozen different sets of feet by now.

Fuckdamnit. Fuckdamnit all to hell.

Some kind of commotion, louder even than the rest of the busy noise of the division, slammed through the doors at the end of the corridor. Five serious looking men and women in white lab coats were making their way toward him in the kind of aggressive power-walk that was only a few technicalities short of breaking into a run. One of them was pushing a covered trolley at quite a rate considering that the way its wheels ground against the floor suggested it was loaded down with a considerable weight. A lone Holy Order officer with a stressed expression and Physical Division colours was keeping pace and arguing with one of the white coats at the rear. Sol thought he recognised the man – one of Ky's more favoured direct subordinates, but he'd never bothered learning the man's name.

The whole procession trundled right up to Sol and straight through the double doors he'd been lurking beside without so much as a glance in his direction. At the same time, the white coat who'd been dealing with the protesting officer freed a piece of paper from a well-loaded clipboard and thrust it into his hands, then vanished through the doorway after his colleagues before the doors had even stopped swinging. The officer stopped dead in his tracks outside, staring at the sheet he'd been handed with the look most people reserved for when they'd just been handed their dismissal orders. The paper sported a collection of seals and insignia that looked intimidatingly official.

“You,” Sol called, making the poor man jump, “What's going on?”

“T-they just arrived on our deck by emergency transport,” the officer stuttered, startled into answering before he could think better of it. “Special personal who've been flown in to tend to the Commander personally!”

If Sol had had a cigarette it might have fallen out of his mouth at that point. “Now? They've already been in there, what, an hour?” That might not have been a good guess; he hadn't seen a clock since he got here, but it felt long enough

“Their orders... this is authorisation right from the top!” said the officer, still holding the document he'd been handed with dumbstruck awe.

Sol found himself needing stronger swearwords than his language provided. What the hell were they trying to pull? If an army full of teenagers didn't lose them this war, bureaucracy could be counted on to finish the job. His first impulse was to march in there himself and toss each one of those 'special personnel' off the side of the airship, but he had to face the fact that if there was one thing that could disrupt what was going on in there even worse, that would be it.

“Of course,” the officer went on, displaying the instinctive need to defend authority figures that people so often developed around Sol, “if they have reason to believe Sir Ky needs special treatment...”

“Special treatment, my ass,” snapped Sol. “What do they think makes him any different from every other soldier they pulled off that battlefield?”

The officer looked momentarily flummoxed. “He's our Commander! Even if he is just one life, he's responsible for every life in the Order! You may not respect him, but do you think he could be so easily replaced? What do you think would become of the Order if... if...!”

It was embarrassing to watch. “So? You think our med staff don't know that? What do you think they do all day?”

“But in a case like this, it's only natural they would make every effort...”

“Isn't that the same thing they do for everyone?” Wasn't there some guiding medical principle to that effect? There had been back in his day, though he hadn't exactly bothered to keep up to date in the century-plus since then. “Don't kid yourself. What's going on in there isn't reasonable care, it's celebrity medicine. Heart of the term? There's a reason doctors don't get to decide who's important. Same damn reason you don't let them operate on their own kids. How the fuck are they meant to stay level-headed when you have them flying in like some kind of fucking avenging angels to take over a job that was already in hand?”

Sol knew the look the officer had taken on. It was the look of someone who'd had everything they'd been trying not to worry about spelled out and thrown in their face. “And what if what the Commander is going through is more serious than you realise, if our own staff are overworked and underqualified, what would you have them do then?”

“Sounds like exactly what they'll put in the report if this all goes south.”

A strangled cry came from the room within, drawn out in a voice that was too familiar. Sol closed his eyes and tried not to think about it. The officer's face was still scrunched up when he opened them again, probably dealing with the same impulse Sol had beaten down only minutes before. He turned to Sol with a look of fury and despair.

“And because this is nothing serious and he's no-one special, because there's no call for any unusual treatment – is that why you've been loitering outside here all day?!”

Well fuck. There was no possible answer for that one.

Final volley delivered, the officer turned and stalked away down the corridor.

***

Forty-eight hours later, people were calling Ky's recovery miraculous. Apparently those official clowns had known their business after all, which to Sol's mind was far more miraculous than anything else he'd seen that year.

Poor brat. Not even Commander two months, and already the kid was being elevated to the lofty standards of special propaganda material. If the war didn't crush him, the expectations would finish the job.

Guilty Gear fic - The Gratuitous Vampire AU

2009-06-24T15:07:34Z

Oh don't look at me like that, I know I've even covered this one already, but I have a good excuse, honest!

The degree to which this one is velithya's fault is slightly debatable - she's responsible for putting the idea in my head (it did originate from what was probably an innocent case of mishearing, but she is completely guilty of egging me on well after the mistake was cleared up), but I have no-one but myself to blame for the horrible realisation later that the parallels between Gears and Vampires work just a little too well for comfort. I mean, not only are both particularly nasty monsters that can generally pass for humans when not out hunting them (though they may also be capable of sprouting some various assortment of fangs/claws/maybe even batwings when the opportunity arises), both have their own convoluted way of converting humans into their own kind, not to mention a solid history of producing a member or two willing and capable of controlling the animalistic bloodlust within well enough to want to side with the humans. And what's that organisation dedicated to eradicating the Gears called again? Oh yeah, the Holy Order. They probably hand all their soldiers their own crucifix along with the uniform - they're all set for hunting vampires and I haven't even had to change more than a couple of nouns on the charter.

(I would start constructing elaborate conspiracy theories about whether Ishiwatari really meant to create a race of evil vampires rather than Gears in his very first draft, but that would be me getting way too carried away.)

Anyway, having given in to the inevitable, I resigned myself to turning out at least a smutty little one-parter based on the above, mixed with every vampire-related cliche I could think of in a hurry (look, if you're going to write fic based on an idea as cliched as a vampire!AU, you have to do it properly). Naturally, this turned into two scenes plus a morning-after-bit, and then the intro wasn't working so well so that turned into an extra bit as well, bringing the total up to a full four parter when I wasn't looking. I'm not even surprised when this happens anymore.

FTR, the added irony of writing a vampire AU when one of the playable characters in the source material was a vampire to being with is not lost on me. And if you think you've caught a whole lot of gratuitous references to every piece of popular vampire-related fiction to emerge in recent years in the writing to follow, it's probably not just you.

Title: Sign of the Cross (a.k.a. the Completely Gratuitous Guilty Gear Vampire AU)
Summary: Gears or vampires, it's all just another day's work for the Holy Order. But they never do quite manage to screen some of their more unusual recruits as carefully as they ought to either.
Characters/Pairing: Sol/Ky
Chapter: 1 of 4
Rating: Eventually NC-17, but only PG for this part
Word Count: 2760

It’s barely an hour after sunset when they arrive, Ky knocking smartly on a door that would probably put the entrances to some cathedrals to shame. The last strains of daylight are still dragging themselves over the edge of the sky, and the way they glint off the white marble steps is just bright enough to make the back of Sol’s neck prickle. As irritants go it’s barely around the level of a particularly bloody-minded blowfly, and the only reason he’s letting it bother him at all is because their shift wasn’t even supposed to start until an hour from now, and there’s no goddamn point in them being here, let alone this early.

He’d said as much an hour ago when Ky had woken him up by throwing his uniform at his bed and making it very clear that the only way he was going to get any more rest that evening was if he could sleep through being kicked in the head. Sol had been counting on having the time to sleep in and maybe even go find something to eat before anyone missed him, but all his protests were brushed off with declarations about a call from an important government official and the necessity of maintaining the image of the Holy Order and blahblahblah something-pretentious-and-loud. Whatever the details were he’d been in no mood to take any notice, because having Ky show up in his room like that when Sol was half-asleep and hungry made him want to do all sorts of things that could get him thrown out of the Order, and punching Ky was only the least of them.

One way or the other, that's all he’s gathered to explain why Ky, endlessly commended prodigy Captain of the Paris division and one of maybe four people in their ranks in the city regularly known to take down multiple targets in a night and come home without a scratch (and still have all his paperwork done by morning), is making early evening courtesy house calls to paranoid paper-pushers who wouldn’t know real danger if it bit them on the neck.

The door is opened by a prim looking man in a suit who couldn’t have projected ‘butler’ any louder if he’d had it tattooed to his forehead. He frowns at them like their presence is a blight against his nice, clean steps, but he probably looks at everyone that way.

“Captain Kiske of the Holy Order,” says Ky, all business, holding up his official medallion. “We’re here about an urgent call from your employer.”

As if there’s any danger they’ll be mistaken for making random house calls. Ky doesn’t introduce Sol by name, which is the case a lot lately. Sol’s developing the cynical theory it’s because that way it’s a lot harder for people to file official complaints about him afterwards.

The butler is just opening his mouth for some suitably prim and proper response when a voice from inside shrieks, “Is that the Order? At last? Show them in, man, show them in!” and Sol is forced to come to the uncomfortable conclusion that the owner of the voice is, in all probability, male.

The butler gives them the long-suffering eyebrow raise of I-just-work-here, it’s-all-part-of-the-job, waves them inside, and promptly vanishes in that inexplicable way they must spend months learning at butlers' college.

The entrance hall looks like it was designed for no other purpose than to demonstrate exactly how much space the owner of the house could afford to waste, but the man standing in the middle of it nevertheless looks like he lives in constant and paralysing fear that dress and grooming are the only things keeping him from being mistaken for ordinary gutter scum. With a face like his this might be a real concern but he’s also labouring under the mistaken belief that extra layers will distract attention away from it, or that lacy trim makes him look fashionable and dignified rather than like he’s been dressed by an excited five-year-old girl with a juvenile frill fetish. Sol instantly hates him even more than he’d expected.

“You’re the men from the Holy Order?” he snaps. “What the devil took so long? It’s been nearly an hour! What good is it for you to show up at all when the trail is this long cold?”

Sol imagines he sees Ky twitch slightly.

“Monsieur Ballard, I presume,” Ky replies with impressive composure. “I guarantee you that the Order is treating this matter with the utmost seriousness, although regretfully, any possibility of catching the culprit red-handed would have been lost well before we received your call. However, descriptions of the incident have already been distributed to all of our active agents, and myself and my associate were dispatched at the first opportunity. Given your position, the Order understood you would prefer this matter dealt with discreetly, and also considering that we have few personnel on duty at this hour, I hope you will appreciate that this was the soonest any ranking officer was available to deal with this matter. Now, if you could show us to the scene, we can begin the investigation without further delay.”

If Ky had hoped this eminently reasonable speech might mollify the man, he was disappointed. “No staff on duty at this hour? This is an outrage! The very lives of the people of this city are in your hands! The council – on which I hold a distinguished position! – is responsible for your very funding!”

“Sir, I would ask you to consider that the reason we have fewer personnel on duty at this hour is solely because it is all but unheard of for us to receive any sightings or reports so early – I would hope you can appreciate why. We are short staffed even keeping the streets adequately defended during those hours of darkness.”

That’s about as far as your council’s funding goes, Sol finishes silently in his head.

“Well you’ve had a complaint at this hour now, and I expect it to be dealt with a bit more professionalism! This way, at once! We’ve wasted more than enough time!” The man turns and all but runs for the long spiral staircase that arcs up to the next storey.

It’s only by luck that he’s gone before he can see Sol roll his eyes. Stupid civilians thinking they can tell the Order how to do their job, what does the man expect the Order is going to make of a call that comes when they known damn well calls don’t come in? But loathe as he is to admit it, Ky had probably had a point – a twit like this would probably complain just as loudly about a couple of ‘ordinary’ soldiers showing up right away as about a personal visit from Captain Kiske.

The room he leads them to looks like it might be owned by the five-year-old with the frill fetish – or more likely, by a teenaged girl who’s firmly decided she’s too old for pink but has gone through a great deal of anguish in the process of giving it up. The window is wide open, leaving the (inevitably lacy) curtains billowing around in a manner Sol finds needlessly dramatic. Other than that there’s nothing remotely remarkable about the place – no bloodstains, no overturned furniture, not so much as a discarded dinner plate, unless you count the fact the experience is probably going to have Sol twitching at the mere thought of a frill for weeks.

Ky examines the room with the thoroughness of someone who hasn’t found what he was looking for originally and isn’t sure what he should do instead. Sol goes to stand by the window, about the only feature he can stand to look at very long.

“Perhaps you could take us through the exact circumstances...” Ky suggests uncertainly.

“It was the maid who found it like this!” Ballard wails. “My poor, dear Isabelle! All day she was feeling faint, and in the late afternoon she asked to be excused from supper and retired to her room. When the maid came to check on her, this is what she found, the window thrown open and my daughter vanished! Spirited away under our very noses!”

“While I appreciate how distressing this must be for you,” Ky says in his best tone of professional condolences, “I don’t think I follow why the Holy Order was the first authority you thought to contact.”

“Are you insane, man? And you call yourself a professional?” Ballard yells at him, with the sort of dramatics that wouldn’t be out of place at the theatre. “It could only have been a vampire that made off with her! There’s a drop outside that window of thirty feet. My sweet, innocent daughter abducted without so much as time for a scream?”

Sol can’t help but notice the window faces due west. He can only imagine what the glare in here must be like in the late afternoon – those lacy curtains would be next to useless against it. Thirty feet down looks like about right, but he’s not at all surprised to see that not even two feet away there’s a nice, thick branch growing right along the window sill, attached to a nice, sturdy looking tree almost in arm’s reach. The branch has friends at nicely spaced intervals going all the way down the trunk too. No prizes for guessing the truth about this one.

“Hasn’t been a vampire within a mile of here.” Sol grouches. “We’re wasting our time.”

“What was that?!” Ballard shrieks.

“I must ask you to excuse the manners of my associate,” Ky says quickly, shooting Sol a look, “but I find his instincts on these matters are rarely wrong.”

Ballard is clearly about to protest further, but Ky presses on. “Sir, if, as you describe, your maid discovered the room empty right on the moment of sunset, wouldn’t it therefore follow that at the time your daughter was abducted, the sun was still in the sky?”

Ballard looks momentarily flummoxed. “Well…” he offers unhelpfully.

“Given the degree to which vampires are weakened by sunlight, it is exceptionally rare for them to venture out before darkness has fallen. It’s particularly unlikely one would attempt the sort of athletics required to make it up to this window.”

Ballard makes a spluttering noise of a rather undignified nature. “You must think me a complete fool, Mister Kiske, wasn’t it? Even if that’s true of ordinary vampires, I’m not so uninformed on this subject that I don’t know there are extraordinary ones among their numbers that can withstand a little sunlight quite well. Why, it’s been hardly two months since the papers got hold of that story about that Perne woman – hiding in plain sight in society for years before anyone discovered what she was!”

Sol twitches and forces himself to make a list of reasons why setting the place on fire isn’t a good way of escaping this idiocy.

“I think the accounts you refer to be may have been guilty of sensationalising the matter slightly,” says Ky with the greatest of patience. “The reality is that even the eldest vampires find exposure to direct sunlight very unpleasant. Vampires of that age are extremely rare, and in any case accustomed to a rather better level of discretion than abduction in daylight.”

“Then what would you tell me happened here?” Ballard snaps. “How would you explain how my daughter vanished so completely?”

Ky takes a deep breath and looks toward the window. “Have you considered the possibility that someone might leave this room by scaling the tree outside?”

“What, while carrying my daughter on his back?”

“If your daughter was rendered unconscious, and the perpetrator a particularly skilled climber or acting with assistance, that may be a possibility. But… before we start constructing such scenarios, have you considered the possibility your daughter left of her own means?”

Ballard positively bristles. “Are you now suggesting that a sick girl climbed thirty feet down out of her bedroom window?”

“Actually,” says Ky, “with regards to her ‘illness’… might I be right in guessing that retiring to her room in this manner would be something of a common habit of hers?”

“Well… she has done the same a few times in the last weeks, small wonder the maid was growing so anxious for her…” Ballard admits.

“Might I also be right in supposing she asked specifically that she not be disturbed?”

“She did say something of the sort, but I hardly see how…You there, did you say something?” He shoots a sudden look at Sol, and narrows his eyes.

“Monsieur,” Ky interjects quickly, “forgive my indiscretion, but is there, perhaps, a young man who holds her particular favour?”

Ballard turns a bright shade of red. “I should say not! My daughter, courting young men at her tender age? There was a minor matter of foolishness over that errand-boy back in June, but I made it quite clear to her I would not tolerate any such nonsense – especially with a commoner so far below her station, and that was the end of it.”

“Do I understand then, sir,” Ky says very slowly, “that your daughter was in the habit of retiring to her room with instructions that she not be disturbed, and also that she has... a certain affection for a particular young man with whom she would only be able to meet in secret?”

Ballard’s colour is now getting very close to purple.

They aren’t precisely thrown out of the house after that, but a casual observer might have trouble telling the difference. Sol doesn’t care. As far as he’s concerned, the faster they get out of there the better.

“Could’ve told you that was going to be a waste of time,” he grumbles to Ky on the way back. It fits the theme of the week. The most interesting thing they’ve had to deal with in days was a crazy girl they caught chasing drugged out vampire-wannabes in stupid masks around the city with a stake, and even then only because she managed to elbow Ky in the groin in the middle of his slightly-too-gentle attempts to disable her without doing anything unchivalrous.

“We still need to be seen to take these things seriously,” Ky mutters back, more by habit than with any real feeling. He gives a tired sigh. “It wouldn’t hurt you to be a little more diplomatic. That poor man was genuinely scared for his daughter's safety when he called us, you know.”

“Genuinely in denial that his brat’s grown up into a teenager, you mean,” says Sol, “Same as the rest of those rich sods who think attracting a vampire is some sort of status symbol.”

“You would think any sensible man would have been a bit more relieved to hear his daughter hadn’t been abducted by a blood-sucking monster, wouldn’t you?” Ky admits grudgingly.

Sol lets himself grin. “Still worried about all that crap about our image?”

Ky looks back over his shoulder, eyes sparkling in one of those rare expressions that Sol’s pretty sure most of the rest of his Order don't even know he's capable of. “Well, that all depends on the odds that he's going be sharing the story with all his friends and associates.”

“You mean, 'the odds he'll ever dare breathe a word of it to anyone'?”

“I think we're fairly safe, don't you?”

Sol still thinks a Holy Order that has to worry about the likes of Ballard is a pretty sorry excuse for a Holy anything, but the grin lasts him most of the way back to base. In a job like theirs it's not like there's any guarantee the rest of the evening will be any improvement on this, but solo work was never much better, so why waste the moment.

What the hell, maybe he'll put off getting himself thrown out a little longer.

Life cycle of the fandom butterfly

2009-06-09T05:16:25Z

Here I am, innocently trying to make headway with the WIP list from hell, and what happens? The Wolverine movie throws me headfirst into my annual Marvel-binge, and a week or two of inhaling comics at a dangerous rate later, I'm posting Cable/Deadpool fic instead.

Er. Oops?

Actually, considering how many times this year I've been derailed by stuff a whole lot less enjoyable, I'm not really complaining. The whole Cable&Deadpool series was awesome fun, after all. =3 And I'm, like, this close to being able to whittle a couple of things of that WIP list now, honest! ~~Just don't ask about the Life on Mars/Dr Who crossover taking up twenty pages of my notebook.~~

The Marvel-binge thing actually does look like it's becoming a bit of an annual tradition, which is to say the same thing happened to me last year after Iron Man came out (only focused around the Iron Man/Avengers/Captain America titles that time, rather than 'anything with Deadpool'. And just as much velithya's fault, if not more so). Not much precedent from before that, unless you count my DC fling from back in '04 (Young Justice! <3), but given the number of movies Marvel's supposed to have in the works right now... yeah, if the standard keeps up, plenty of time for this to make tradition-status yet.

They're a funny old medium, Western Comics - as good a practical example of Sturgeon's Law as you could ask for, but the 10% (or 5%, or however you cast it) out there that is worth reading can be a damn good way to waste a few afternoons.

The World Ends With You: A much-belated review/rant/ramble/thingy

2009-05-28T14:01:12Z

My personal backlog of things I meant to post but never got around to is now so long it's long since become a matter of great personal embarrassment. Case in point: when I first finished playing The World Ends With You, I got halfway through a really extended critique/fangirling over it's various elements before I got distracted (possibly by a trip to Japan, possibly by a million and one cosplay projects, possibly by roughly the same number of writing projects, possibly even by the terror of starting a PhD or something similarly trivial). Anyway, excuses aside, the point is I still have three WEWY fic to post (as soon as my beta reader gets back to me), and a whole heap of photos taken in Shibuya to share (as soon as we get them all cleaned up), but in the meantime, getting this bit out of the way has to be a good start.

In brief, I loved it! The battle system, despite being confusing at first and often best handled by button mashing, is surprisingly fun after a little practice, the characters are all impressively developed and likeable – including most of the badguys, and the plot’s every bit as the involving as the best of Squeenix's work. The game gets a big tick in pretty much every box.

So it’s a real shame that the ending... kinda sucked.

The big issue I had with it – well, actually there are two, but they’re closely related and we’ll start with this one – was all about the Shocking Revelation in the final minutes of the game that Joshua, despite all character development pointing to the contrary, had in fact been the secret, shadowy power responsible for all Neku's woes all along after all. Like most plot devices that can be summed up pretty effectively as the bastard lovechild of a couple of TVTropes pages, it's the kind of twist that could probably be pulled off well with the right spin, but I'm having an awful lot of trouble thinking of an example to demonstrate, and this... really wasn't it. The fundamental problem with discovering at the 11th hour that everything you thought you knew about character X has been no more than an elaborate cover story is that it's only a few steps short of 'and they woke up and it was all a dream!' in the A-lists of tropes that can be used to explain away anything, with equally unsatisfying, cookie-cutter results. Pretty much any western comic title that's been running for more than five years is almost guaranteed to give you an example of exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about here.

Call me picky, but as obvious as it was we'd have to have some kind of big twist at the end given the whole plot winds like a mountain road obstacle course, I was expecting something with just a little more subtly than that.

The reason they got away with it is because Joshua is, not to put too fine a point on it, the kind of smarmy bastard who's ulterior motives probably have ulterior motives, so the revelation that he's been secretly screwing Neku over all along is... not much of a surprise, really. The reason it left me feeling as betrayed by the writers as Neku was feeling by his 'friend' is that up to that point we (thought we) were maybe one or two puzzle pieces short of having a complete explanation for Joshua's attitude that was way more interesting, only to have it all retconned away at the last minute. It's only fair to say I'm probably biased given how attached I was to Joshua's story as we'd been told it up to that point, but I seriously was loving the gradual reveal of just what his deal was all through the second week – it all adds up in ways that make such perfect sense you wonder why you never see coming. By the end of Joshua’s week, half the rules of the Shinigami’s Game we thought we knew from the first week have been bent into beautifully twisted little knots, and while there are still mysteries remaining (not least of all how even a kid in Joshua’s position could have been so damned smug about it all) it’s completely believable that he’s wholly and completely on Neku’s side.

Getting to the end only to discover Joshua really was the untrustworthy bastard Neku first thought he was could only feel like something of a cop-out. Just where does that leave all the plot twists from his week that I was enjoying so much? He knows about the Game because he’s psychically able to see the dead? Nope, it’s because he’s on the staff! He's trying to become Composer? Ha, gotcha, he's Composer already! He’s found a loophole allowing him to take part while still being living? Well, not really, the Reapers aren’t exactly living or dead, so it probably doesn’t count. So much for the flashback revealing he wasn’t the one who shot Neku too. The implications that even Hanekoma – one of the few allies Neku ever thought he had – was working with Joshua to manipulate him all along are even more disturbing, and the thematic problems that leaves the game with are staggering. So much of the story was all about Neku learning to like people for the first time in his life that to have him betrayed by two of the ones most responsible for teaching him other people could be worth trusting doesn’t even make any sense at all. The game simply isn’t long enough for there to be room for a second major twist to everything we know about the motives of a major character – least of all one that replaces so many of the most interesting plot points in the game with something so very much less inspired.

So many new plot points are introduced or revised in the last sequence of the game that the ending feels like something tacked on by mistake. In reality, it’s probably more of a ploy to keep you playing, because the only way to find out what’s really been going on behind the scenes is to go back each chapter in a kind of New Game Plus mode and collect all the ‘Noise Reports’ that go into all the whys and hows of just what Hanekoma was doing to keep stringing you along. It’s a ploy taken almost verbatim from the Ansem Reports of the Kingdom Hearts series, only without two crucial features that made them work in KHII: firstly, while the reports added a lot to the backstory and explained a lot of those niggling little things that never came up in the dialogue, you didn’t actually need to read any of them to make sense of the story, and secondly, you picked them up as you went along. WEWY incorporates neither feature, with the result that the reports read like something that’s come from a completely different story to the one you thought you were playing. All this new information is injected into the narrative posthumously without giving Neku any opportunity to react to it, coming in barely one step up from the level of making people track down obscure interviews with the writers just to find out what the bloody hell was supposed to be going on. The credits still roll on an optimistic note, but one that feels forced and unsatisfying in a way a game with a set up as involving as WEWY never deserved.

Seriously, if you do like that sort of thing I won't hold it against you, but being forced to track down a second story to make sense of the ending to the one you thought you were playing just doesn't work for me. I'm only glad my housemates warned me the ending was a let-down before I got to it, or it would've gotten to me even worse.

Anyhow, now I've got all that out of the way, I do need to admit here that it's been well over six months since I first finished the game, and despite all reservations about that last little section, the rest of the plot is still just about awesome enough for me to lalala my way through the ending. I've made up enough personal canon to knit the parts of the story I liked together, found some really awesome fanfic based on it and done a cosplay tour of Shibuya, and basically made peace with the fact that whatever I think of the ending, the rest of the game was still awesome enough that I'd still recommend it enthusiastically to just about anyone in possession of a DS. But I still can't help feel that after all the setup through the rest of the game, there had to be the material there to lead into a better ending than that. Some things wouldn't be so different – it's pretty obvious that Neku thinking Joshua sacrificed himself because Neku was holding him responsible for his death was just Neku having a (fairly understandable) guilt trip, and the real explanation worked more in Joshua's favour, but it didn't all have to be a lie. I was expecting something like Neku running into Joshua down in the Final Dungeon ™ shortly after he’d met Shiki down there. It’d go something like this:

Neku: Joshua!?

Joshua: Why so surprised to see me, Neku?

Neku: But… that blast… you were killed…! That Conductor-guy said you were...

Joshua: Don’t be so silly. I’m no more dead than you are.

Beat: Guy’s got a point, man.

Neku: But how? He erased all the other players!

Joshua: That’s simple, I didn’t enter the Reaper’s Game this round. There wasn’t any need when I’d already found Shibuya river.

Good thing too, from the sound of things.

Besides, you’d already survived two weeks. You weren’t going to have any trouble making it through another without me.

Neku: (I don’t believe this guy. Is there anything that fazes him…

…!)

Neku: I’m sorry.

Joshua: What for?

Neku: Accusing you of killing me. I didn’t…

Joshua: Oh, you were still hung up about that? Lots of players come in here with confused memories about their death, it’s no big deal. Anyway, if I’d realised what a good partner you’d make, I probably would have shot you there myself.

Neku: WHAT!?

Joshua: Don’t be like that. All we had to do was win the game to bring you back to life again. It practically doesn’t even count as murder.

Neku: #$%&*

(This guy… doesn’t anything…?)

Damn you Joshua, don’t you get it!? Maybe this is all just a game to you, but for the rest of us it’s life or death! You can’t treat it like nothing that happens down here matters!

Joshua: Of course it matters. I’m staking my life on this too, aren’t I?

Neku: !

In here, we’d have a lot of talk about how it’s getting pretty bloody obvious that whoever the current Composer is, he’s not doing much of a job of making sure the Reaper’s Game is being played fairly. The Conductor’s bending rules left and right, what with erasing all the other players and filling Shibuya with Red Skull pins. But maybe there’s another side to that where bending all those rules makes him vulnerable (which Joshua’s probably been subtly finding ways to encourage him to do). We’ve also go Sho taking advantage of the power vacuum to make his own bid for the top job, and perhaps this also included offing a few extra people who could act as players (ie, Neku), or serve as a sacrifice to boost his taboo noise array. Maybe the fact Neku was a fan of Cat (ie, obviously either the current Composer or someone closely connected to him) played some significance there too. Alternately, maybe the shootout was just between Sho and Joshua (who was making an early attempt at playing some games with the less well-behaved Reapers) and Neku just got caught in the crossfire. Lots of possibilities there, but regardless, I doubt Joshua was paying any attention to Neku until after he entered the game and made it through his first week and about to start his second. Not only does that make him unusually experienced, he’s a genius with pins, so of course Joshua had him picked as the ideal partner.

Anyway, the more important point of all that is that the Reaper’s Game is badly in need of a new Composer if it’s ever going to get back to being run fairly again, by which logic you could make a case that what Joshua’s up to has an altruistic side. Not that this negates him being a power hungry brat who thinks he can play the game better than anyone else, but he’s got to be a better candidate than Sho no matter what, so. There’s also got to be an exchange like this somewhere:

Neku: Why did you do it? Jump in front of the bullet for me.

Joshua: Well, it seemed only fair. I only wound up dead, but you would’ve been erased completely,. By the way, you still owe me for that. And you’re going to help me get the rest of the way to the Composer, aren’t you?

So, on they go, the fights with Kitanji happen and are not so very different from before, except that this time as well as a brainwashed Shiki you’re fighting a brainwashed Joshua, and if the audience has been particularly good this year, maybe this even means we get to see him just a little unnerved afterwards. Oh, and for the record, everyone gets to stay conscious in this version, and this gives them the chance to fill Shiki in on a bit more of what’s been happening while she’s been out of the game – namely the Red Skull Pins and what they’re doing to Shibuya. Naturally, Shiki’s less than happy to learn what’s become of the same pins she and Neku were used to promote back during their own week in the couple of weeks that passed since. Neku’s still of two minds about whether they’re about to meet Hanekoma – whether he’s been the Composer all along and even Joshua didn’t know that, but there’s nothing else for it but to go find out. Then they get to the final hall where the Composer’s meant to be waiting for them, only to find it completely empty but for a book with the Game’s skull emblem on the front sitting on a table. A little closer inspection and the book turns out to be a rule book for the Reaper’s Game.

Everyone (possibly excluding Joshua) is just getting over the apparent revelation that the ‘Composer’ is no more than a rule book when Hanekoma takes his cue to crash their little party and finally answer a few important questions. Yes, he’s the Composer – sort of. Only he’s retired. See, there’s already levels and levels of authority in the Reaper’s Game (Game Master, Conductor, etc) and Shibuya itself doesn’t need a Composer on a day to day basis – goes without saying that it’s the kinda town that writes its own tunes. Being at the centre of all that is a hell of a power trip, but most temporary Composers don’t hold the job very long before they clue into how little they’re actually needed and step down, or at least sideways to somewhere like Hanekoma’s café. Trouble is, once in a while things start to fray around the edges (Reapers getting rebellious, for example) or something crops up that the rule book doesn’t cover, and the Composer’s needed again to straiten things out. However, once you’ve hit the auto-pilot and stepped down from the job voluntarily, it’s not so hard to get back in again. Other than in the sense where Mr H. has been carefully nudging the players (Joshua very much included) in this direction for most of the game, because that, or course, would be where our heroes come in.

(I am of two minds about whether Joshua was told about Hanekoma being the Composer or not. Clearly he’s heard most of this before, but that particular detail could quite easily have been left out, especially considering he’s shown no sign he’s been aware of it before, and the whole song-and-dance he’s been doing just to find Shibuya River and the Composer. It’s probably all part of the Rules or something. Look, c’mon, we all want to see something actually surprise the guy for once, right?)

This is all well and good and basically what you’re all here for anyway, but now there are multiple candidates for a new Composer present, and neither Joshua or Beat are keen on missing out on the position. Beat’s mostly interested in getting Rhyme back, but he’s been looking forward to the chance to put one over all those Shinigami a little too long now. Joshua makes a point of asking him whether he’s got any idea what’s actually involved in being Composer, which Beat doesn’t, and naturally Joshua can just offer to bring them all back to life after he’s become Composer, but Joshua, not to put too fine a point on it, is not the kind of guy you would willingly buy a second hand car from, and Beat doesn’t entirely trust him to keep his word.

And somewhere in all this fuss, shiny lights etc because Shiki’s been chosen as Composer while they’re arguing. Well, or Neku – he’d work too, but poor Shiki hasn’t had anything much to do since early in the game, plus there’s been plenty to suggest she’s got a better feel for what makes Shibuya tick than anyone else present. More importantly, she doesn’t want the job, which probably makes her pretty much ideal. Lots of spluttering from Shiki, who never wanted to have any more to do with the Reaper’s Game than what it took to win it and get back to life, but she calms down a bit when Hanekoma points out that she doesn’t have to stay with the job any longer than he did. Being Composer, she’s got instant authority to return them all to life

Shiki: WHAT!? But… but I didn’t even want to be Composer!

Hanekoma: Most of us don’t by the end of a month or two, so you’re ahead of the crowd there.

Shiki: But I mean it! I never wanted anything to do with the Reaper’s Game! I was only ever in it so me and Neku could make it back to life.

Hanekoma: Well, now you’ve been handed the authority to have everyone here brought back. That’s not a problem, right?

Shiki: Oh, no, no, I didn’t mean…! But there must be more to being Composer than that.

Hanekoma: That’s the thing about being Composer, you pretty much make it all up as you go along. Our rebel Conductor’s out of business, and your friends already took care of the worst of our problem Reapers. You could always make some more rules if you like.

Shiki: More rules?

Hanekoma: Any ideas?

Shiki: I’ll say! There’s got to be a rule against those Red Skull Pins! No more messing with innocent people in the RG. And absolutely no more using the players to manipulate the trends like that.

(There’s some surprise and confusion here as it’s discovered that the Rule Book is quite literally updating itself as Shiki speaks, though probably using slightly more concise language.)

Hanekoma: Doesn’t sound like a bad start. Got any more?

Shiki: Sure. From now on, there’s enough slots that everyone who finishes the final mission comes back to life. The whole Game’s about trusting your partner, we can’t keep splitting people up at the end!

I guess we could use some rules to make it fairer, the Game’s really weighted against the players right now…

Neku: Shiki?

Hanekoma: Sounds like she might be on a roll here.

(This would probably be a good place for a bit more discussion about the whole origin and point of the Game, what Noise really are, how Reapers fit in, how the whole mess relates to Shibuya, and other stuff that otherwise got left for the Noise Reports)

Hanekoma: So, any more changes?

Shiki: Um, no, I don’t think so.

Hanekoma: You don’t say.

Shiki: It’s all… life and death and so many confusing factors and so much more than I want to get involved in. I don’t think it’s my part to say what’s fair with all that. Does that sound right?

Neku: I guess… (I can’t blame her. I wouldn’t want any more to do with this either. And Beat and Joshua wanted this job?)

Hanekoma: One thing left before you take off – you’re going to have to appoint a new Conductor.

Shiki: A new Conductor… would anyone do?

To his horror, Shiki promptly appoints none other than Mr Hanekoma himself, which will be a nice way of getting him back for dumping them all into this and make him do an honest day's work for a change, not to mention that the Game is likely to be a whole lot less bloodthirsty with him in charge. Aaaand lets say Kariya gets to be Game Master for a while, because not only is he clearly overqualified, he can be well counted on to give players a bit of a light thrashing, then if he thinks they're worth it, call it a day while he's still in one piece and let them through. And with that all sorted, all's well that ends well, and our heroes exit stage left into the sunset.

…okay, so maybe that still needs a bit of refining, but I think my point still stands. There was plenty of potential for a better ending than what we got.

So now that I've devoted a good three thousand words to talking about what I didn't like about the game, how about a few words about what did work for me? Because the short answer is 'everything else'. =3

One thing that especially stood out for me was the script and translation. As little as I know about the Japanese version (both my Japanese-speaking housemates bought copies while in Japan for comparison, but they're largely lost on me), it's really impressive just how everything in the English translation feels right. People in Shibuya speak English without any lame-arse attempts to convince us we're really in New York somewhere and eating donuts instead of sushi, teenagers talk like teenagers without the slang (of which there is plenty) being jarring or overdone. Not once did I hit a moment where I found myself going 'oh, that sounded kind of lame but I'm betting this is what it was in the original Japanese...' which is actually almost a first. I am seriously impressed by the translation team for this game.

Bad as I was at the top-screen stuff controlling your partner, and despite a few minor gripes about different kinds of pin points and a few pins that never seemed to work properly, the battle system was just plain fun. There are so many different pins that you can keep switching them out (as I did pretty much every time I mastered one) all game and not run out of options. Whereas in most RPGs you find yourself settling into one strategy pretty quickly, having that many different powers and stylus tricks to try out really made all the difference when it came to keeping random encounters from getting tedious. I also couldn't have predicted that the way armour and stat bonuses were translated over the Shibuya fashions and how many burgers you can digest in 24 hours would have worked so well to put a refreshing spin on all the basic menu-system elements we've seen a million times before. The game gives you lots of options, but if you can't be bothered with the hassle of maxing out everything, it also gives you the option of ignoring most of them without missing out on anything important.

As for the characters, the ones I couldn't spend at least good paragraph shamelessly fangirling are probably the minority. Neku's transformation from antisocial jerk into a guy willing to risk his neck to for people he wouldn't have given the time of day a week ago is so logical and natural as it develops you never have to question it. He asks the right questions, gives good advice, and easily lasts as the only steady character through the whole game without me ever getting bored with him. If Beat's the the designated team bonehead, he's no less lovable for it, and while Rhyme's nominally the cute little girl character, it's quite refreshing that one of her defining character traits is how smart she is and a real shame we don't get to see more of her. You can see she takes care of Beat just as much as the reverse, and the whole relationship between them is incredibly sweet in the kind of way you rarely get to see explored like this. I could say plenty about Joshua too, but I think I've more than covered him already.

If there's one character I can take or leave out of the main five, it's unfortunately got to be Shiki – not that I actively disliked her, there was just nothing about her that got me to invest to the same degree as the rest of the cast. She's still got her moments though, and something about her relationship with Neku give me the idea they might actually just be about what Squeenix swung for and missed so badly when they gave us Squall and Rinoa. Y'know, anti-social jerk meets cute perky girl who's influence gradually helps reform him into a real human being, but things don't really get shippy until the point where she's put out of action for a while and he's got to save her, etc. Only with Neku and Shiki, we're spared all the goopy romantic crap because the relationship never goes much beyond subtext, Shiki is spared Rinoa's vapidness and incompetence and has a believable reason for sticking around despite how Neku initially treats her (ie, no choice in the matter), and the two make a genuine and believable connection before the whole must-save-Shiki thing crops up. It's kinda fascinating seeing so many of the elements that did nothing for me in FFVIII used to so much better effect here.

Speaking of Shiki, did anyone else get the feeling Eri was kind of WEWY's version of Zack? Doesn't have a huge role, hardly mentioned in passing until well into the story, nowhere near playable, but halfway through you're suddenly discovering her identity's so mixed up with everything you thought you knew about Shiki that in a big way she's been around all along. And y'know, fandom can debate Neku/Joshua against Neku/Shiki as long as they like, but Eri's on screen for one scene and I would still have to say she and Shiki are the more blatantly in love than any other couple in the game. Lukewarm as I may be about Shiki, they're really kind of adorable.

If I've got any real complaints about character handling, it was just a little sad that to see both main female characters effectively fridged (for the uninitiated, put out of action largely just to create angst for the male characters) so early on in the game. I love the boys and all, and I can talk at length about what a total girl Joshua is, and WEWY did give us two fairly important female badguys in a medium-sized team as opposed to the 1-12 ratio of KHII; but once in a while, you can't help feel that all the feminists out there who come up with concepts like 'refrigeration' in the first place might have just a little bit of a point...

For better or worse, it's a bit hard not to compare the game to Kingdom Hearts, which is a bit of a shame when I do feel like for all their similarities, they've got very different vibes and stand well on their own merits. Still, let's be fair here: spiky-haired hero, red-haired heroine who's not around much, pale-haired pretty boy with questionable alliances, up against a shadowy group of enemies with a weird hierarchical structure, mysterious goals and funny hair, and that's all well before you get to collecting the Noise Reports. On the other hand, there are no airships, no epic quests to save the world, no elaborate fantasy kingdoms (sci-fi based or otherwise) – in fact, you don't even leave the suburb you start in, and half the time you can't even move around that very much. Far from limiting the story possibilities, the feeling of being trapped and forever running out of time are some of the game's defining features, as is Shibuya pop-culture, and as is the way combat is handled. No matter how many points of comparison I've made to other Squeenix games, the end result feels at worst like a refreshing new use of a few old elements, and at best like something innovatively different from any RPG I've ever played before.

I'm still a little tetchy about that ending, but when there's so much experimental stuff in this title and nearly all of it works brilliantly, a fault or two isn't nearly enough to ruin the whole experience.

[Guilty Gear fic] The Lost Boys

2009-05-14T15:43:28Z

Some weeks you would swear the world sees you coming: case in point, I was this close to having this fic posted last week - right up until I got hit with a stomach bug you do not want the details of, and which left me still feeling out of it for the best part of a week. On the upside, my new laptop arrived! But had the choice there been one of those either-or-both things, I would have happily just waited another week or two for the laptop. -_-

Title: The Lost Boys
Summary: Order Commander Sol, Jellyfish Captain May, and the harsher realities of a world without much left to lose.
Characters: Sol, May, Potemkin
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3200
Notes: Not only have I gone and written Guilty Gear fic which isn't all about Sol and Ky, it's Side Red/Side Black AU fic which isn't all about Sol ~~pining after~~ and Ky. Y'know, just for a change (and 'cause there really is a lot to explore in that AU as soon as you start thinking about it). This started way back when that 'what else do you ship' post went up at the comm last year, I got into this interesting little conversation that... actually wasn't about ships at all in the end, and the idea went on nagging me until I finally did something with it.

Did I warn for angst? It's Side Red/Side Black AU fic, and despite the best efforts of a certain cheerful pirate girl, this is pretty much what angst is made for.

By the time the Order got around to contacting them to negotiate an accord, time had forged the Jellyfish Fleet into a very different entity to what they had once been. A new leader, a good dozen newly acquired ships and a few significant changes to purpose and crew were only the start of it, but hardly more than was to be expected when the whole world was changing – faster in the last few years than all the century of war gone before it. Sol had lived long enough by then with the uncomfortable truth that even if the war had ended yesterday, it would be too late. Too late for well over five billion people just for a start, the Jellyfish’s founder only one of them.

It was bad enough the way he’d gone and taken himself out, first in line on what should have been the day they celebrated the death of Justice but which turned into the day they saw the rise of something worse – the legacy in the form of a daughter they’d never imagined she might be leaving behind. Without that stunt Johnny had pulled there well might not have been a Holy Order left after the first surprise attack, but the bastard had done it, and gone and died leaving Sol with a debt to him that he’s never going to have a chance to repay.

Sol had had no tears to waste on the man. He’d seen people he liked more than Johnny Sfondi die. Only last year he’d had to stand and watch Axl Low blown to smithereens not twenty feet away – happened so fast the poor fucker never even saw it coming – never even had the time to stop smiling. Then two weeks later, Axl had materialised out of the blue right in front of Sol, cheerful and healthy as ever, completely unable to comprehend why his old buddy looked so stunned to see him. It didn’t make one whit of difference how well Sol understood the physics of non-linear timelines, what was he supposed to say to the guy? Try never to get sent to August eight, 2180? How about shaving your head, I’ve got it on good reference you’ll live to see it grow back? A lot of good that would do the poor sod.

Sol had known Sfondi just well enough to get to really dislike him, smarmy, swashbuckling womaniser that he was. Had he really imagined Sol hadn’t known that half the reason he’d ever offered the Order any help was to get close enough to the Order’s supplies to smuggle a few cargo loads out to distribute to war-impoverished towns like some sort of modern age Robin Hood? Not that it ever went far enough to be worth making the effort to stop it, it had been a long time since the Order had been in any state to be picky about who it or accepted help from. What remained of Zepp’s forces running around their corridors were living proof of that, and Sol frankly didn’t give half a shit how much the traditionalists in the Order might have complained about working alongside men who used Blacktech weapons. This was war and they weren’t exactly winning. The whingers could suck it up.

But a guy like Sfondi was never really dead as long as he had a legacy to follow him, and he’d pulled that crazy suicide stunt while leaving most of his crew intact – a crew that had at the time consisted mostly of underaged orphan girls, which was the kind of fact the Order had had to strenuously pretend not to know about. Most of them weren’t much less underaged today – those that had survived this long – but they’d vowed to continue on in their beloved Johnny’s memory, learned to keep their ship in the air even when that meant patching over the holes with third-hand scrap metal and rivets held in place by rust. With that much settled, they’d gone out recruiting. In a world where there was hardly an able-bodied man or woman fit to join the Order left, there were orphans by the thousand – kids with nothing left to lose, easily rallied by the promise of revenge. They’d learned or invented a variety of guerrilla tactics so vicious the Order personnel who’d analysed them in action spoke of them with a kind of awe, put them to use in a series of raids on Gear bases that had shocked the enemy into confused disarray more than once, celebrated every kill they made, and buried their casualties like fallen heroes. They had little respect to spare for the Order, which was probably fair when you remembered what a stellar job the grown-up army had done of protecting their homes and families (it would have made Sol a lot sicker if he’d had to meet any kids who’d still had faith in them after all this time). But they were still willing to negotiate, and since they’d proven themselves a fighting force to be reckoned with it would have been self-defeating for the Order not to contact them to discuss how they could coordinate their efforts to best effect.

It was a nice way of sugar-coating the fact the Order was now effectively recruiting kids so young they couldn’t lift a crossbow, let alone anything heavier.

But what else were they supposed to do? The Order didn’t have the resources to waste on shutting the Jellyfish down, and even if they did, the shelters were filled with more people than they could support already. What could they tell those kids, go back to what’s left of your homes and wait for the Gears to come and find you? Even a six-year-old could see that suggestion for the bullshit it was. Giving the Jellyfish official recognition and helping them redirect their efforts to where they’d be most useful was the best option the Order had to stop them throwing their lives away needlessly. It made inarguable sense, that was the worst part, because a world where there was no longer anything to lose by sending children out to fight wasn’t a world with much left worth saving.

The ‘captain’ Sol was meeting today was a slip of a girl – mid teens at best, known only by the name of ‘May’. She wore a long coat with rolled up cuffs that had been inexpertly taken down to her size, and a hat decorated with Gear-teeth that was too large for her and kept from flopping around under its own weight, kept mostly in place only by practice and determination. A mess of jewellery made from Gear claws clattered around whenever she moved. Her eyes gleamed with the determined enthusiasm of the youthful and she had a wicked smile, neither feature diminished by the thin scar which ran from her forehead down between her eyes, narrowly missing taking off a chunk of her nose with it. The mystery of how she of all candidates had held on to the leadership position might have been explained in part by the giant anchor she’d navigated through all the airship’s hallways, hoisted over her shoulder as if it weighed no more than a toy. She’d responded to the offer of a chair by dumping it by the table with a clang and reclining comfortably on its arch with practiced ease. Accompanying her and standing respectfully behind her chair was a second girl dressed in some weird parody of a sailor’s uniform and a well worn headscarf, with an eye-patch that was unlikely to be for show. She gave the impression she would have followed May to the ends of the earth with no more than an ‘aye-aye Captain!’ and a smile. Who knew, maybe all the Jellyfish’s crew were like that these days.

To be fair, she wasn’t the first teenager in the Order’s ranks, or even anywhere near being the first to be addressed as Captain. One had been inches away from being made Commander, if only his own self-sacrificing stupidity hadn’t gotten him killed first, and a day Sol could go without being reminded of that was a rare and welcome one. It was pretty fucking hard to remember why signing up kids was supposed to end any differently this time around.

Sol sat opposite her, on the far side of the conference room table, slouched far enough back to rest his feet on it. Potemkin stood awkwardly between them (the Order never had managed to get hold of a chair large enough for him), single-handedly taking up most of a third side of the table like the universe’s least subtle intermediary. Sol listened with half an ear as he and May negotiated encrypted radio frequencies, though from the way May’s second-in-command kept interrupting to rule options out, he was starting to get the impression a lot of the Jellyfish’s ships were so old or so broken down they’d be lucky if they could handle encrypted semaphore. He was also getting a headache.

“The Jellyfish fleet don’t use radio,” May declared, and far from an apology, she sounded just a little proud of this fact. “Radio signals can be jammed or intercepted, and we know the reason you lost Paris the last year was because the Gears got hold of your plans. We’re not risking that.”

“While we respect your concerns, the information leak in Paris was due to infiltration by enemy agents, not interception of our communications.” Potemkin rumbled, with patience that came proportional to his bodyweight. “The weaknesses you refer to were more true of the traditional ‘old world’ radio predating magic-based technology, whereas today’s...”

“So? Us ‘kids playing war’ don’t know all that stuff,” said May, a gleam in her eye. “We don’t have your scrying networks or your fancy engineers. We don’t know everything the Gears can and can’t do, so we have to stay low tech and stick to what we can rely on. When we plan a raid we set a time and agree on a signal. If it’s important we set up decoys. The Gears never see us coming!”

No surprise either. After over a century of warfare against the most highly trained armies the world could muster, suddenly coming under attack from a bunch of disorganised kids had sent the Gears into confusion. It was always hard to predict what an enemy might do next if they hardly had any idea what they were doing themselves.

“Nevertheless,” said Potemkin, “if we are to coordinate your forces with the greater Order fleet, we will need a proper communication channel. We can lend you the assistance of our engineers to make the upgrades. You may be able to use the opportunity to have them assess any other equipment needing repairs as well.”

“You don’t need to talk me into that, big guy,” May grinned, and Sol already pitied the poor engineers who were going to draw the job of playing Dad to a bunch of brats. With airships in the state they were flying they’d be getting called out to fix everything from anti-aircraft weaponry to toy planes and toasters. Hard to hold it against May’s lot though, half the Jellyfish Fleet were staying airborne on a hope and a prayer, and lord knew those brats deserved all the help they could get.

But May wasn’t done there. “While we’re talking engineers, if we’re working for your Order there’s some other stuff we want from youse. April, the list!” The girl to May’s right produced a new sheaf of paper from somewhere and tossed it to the table, on top of a pile which already contained names, ages and ranks of all the crew members May would admit to (a disturbing number of them in single figures, and many listed with things like ‘chief-official-hammer-and-spanner-carrier-officer’) and ‘technical details’ of their fleet (which included everything from real blueprints to rough drawings in coloured pencil). From what Sol could see, it looked like someone had written ‘chocolate’ on the list before crossing it out again, and under ‘first aid supplies’ someone had written both ‘bandages’, ‘disinfectant’ and ‘that stuff what makes you go to sleep for surgery.’

“We’re feeding our people Gear-meat and burying kids for stubbed toes that went septic,” May went on. “We want on your supply line, and we especially want any med supplies you can give us.”

Potemkin eyed the list with the awkwardness of a man who couldn’t have picked it up even if he’d wanted to and wasn’t sure if he should be taking the ‘specifics’ put together by a bunch of children very seriously anyway. “Hmm... The Order is less comfortably provided for than you may imagine – the help we can provide you without critically diminishing our own stocks may be limited, but we will see what we can spare.”

“Long as you aren’t cheaping out on us, it’s a deal,” declared May.

“In that case,” said Potemkin, “we should move to discussing the specifics of your role in battle...”

“And that is what we want to talk about too!” said May, leaning forward enough to crowd anyone who wasn’t Potemkin’s size, and damn if there wasn’t a gleam in both her eyes now. “‘Cause just ‘cos we’re kids doesn’t mean we’re dumb. We know what you think about our firepower. You’re going to have us acting as decoys and distractions – playing bait just long enough you can sweep in for the glory. Anything you can tell yourself are the ‘safe’ jobs for the kids who don’t get to be real soldiers. Gonna tell me I’m wrong?”

“Do you have another suggestion about how...” Potemkin began, but May ignored him.

“Hey you, I’m talking to you, Mister Big Bad Order Commander-Guy. You gonna let your flunky deal with the Jellyfish all day?”

Sol gave her a long, tired look. “The fuck is your problem?”

May met his gaze with a kind of fire Sol hadn’t seen in anyone in a long time. “One, we came here to we came here to talk to the head of the Holy Order, not his second in command. Two, I just said, and you woulda heard if you cared what you called us here to meet about.”

Sol took his feet off the table. “You think your Peter Pan-crew is too good to play backup?”

“Think we’re not? Last week we took down a whole Gear convoy only ten miles from the shelter – twenty three Large-class and only four got away.”

“And that puts you in the big leagues, little girl?” Sol growled.

“Why don’t you tell me where it puts us?”

“Don’t give me this bullshit, you know where it puts you – with the rest of the cadets we pull out of training and stick on the field cause we’re so fucking low on troops we’re sending in anyone. Your brats made their fucking name springing strike raids, and that’s damn well gonna be what you’re doing for us too. Twenty three large class? Come back when it’s two hundred and thirty.”

May leaned back, a look of victory on her face. “So basically you’re admitting you’re gonna treat us like kids?”

“Gotta problem with that?”

May gave him a toothy grin. “Nope!” she declared happily.

“...nope?”

“Like I told you, we may be kids, but we’re not dumb. We know the reason you called us in is coz you think we’re gonna get ourselves killed out there without ya. I just wanted to see if ya’d admit to my face. We know we don’t have much fire-power, but your engineers can take care of that. We know you don’t think we’re fit for real combat, so we’re gonna run your distractions and whatever the hell else you give us. We’re gonna be right there in your face showing you exactly what we’re made of, and when we’re ready you’re gonna be right there to see it!”

Sol stared, and leaned back, and couldn’t suppress a grin. “Pretty ambitious for a brat.”

“Wouldn’t be much good to anyone if we weren’t, would we?”

“And if we decide you’re not good enough?”

“We’ll keep going until we are. We’ve got a war to win and we know how much we’re good for if we keep fighting on our own. Johnny always said the Order might seem a bit stuck up but they’re the best hope the world’s got. If we’re gonna help anyone, the ones we’ve gotta help are them.”

May leaned forward, deadly serious, looking Sol right in the eye. “Either we win this war or we go down fighting. It’s what I promised Johnny, and it’s what the Jellyfish stand for.”

The conversation wasn’t over there – Potemkin still had a whole lecture to get through on Order protocol, and May even seemed to be paying attention to some of it. But Sol never remembered anything that was said after that as more than static, because somehow it was that – that look in her eye, that willingness to do what she thought it was going to take – that was what finally did him in. Stupid fucking kids with only one lifetime to waste, who never saw the way they kept taking the easy way out for the luxury it was.

He knew he’d got no real legroom to moralise; May hadn’t done anything wrong by leading the Jellyfish the way she was leading them, and he’d be the last man in the world with any high ground to stand on when it came to having the bile to say ‘no’ to someone using their dying breath to ask you be the one to finish the job they wouldn’t be around to see finished, even if it did mean leading a military force you should have damn well known you were the last person qualified to lead. But Sol was just so damn tired of it all – tired of watching everyone around him go to their ‘glorious’ deaths with a smile on their faces, tired of brats who thought they had nothing to lose, tired of being two hundred years old and always the one who had to stick around to answer for his fucking mistakes at the end. Because even if the war had ended yesterday – even if it ended tomorrow – even if there was enough left of the world for there to be anything to rebuild even in a hundred years – there wasn’t going to be much to celebrate.

The dead don't know just how good they have it.

There’s always just enough hope to keep them going – people like May or Potemkin, or all the others who proudly echo the same sentiments in his hearing, but it’s been a long time since ‘hope’ sounded much different from any other four-letter-word to Sol. It’s only habit that keeps him going these days.

It’s hard enough for Sol to picture the war ending after fighting it so long, but even if it does, it's even harder to picture that there'll be anything else left at all.

Seeking beta readers once again (and other minor victories over the WIP list)

2009-04-28T15:00:57Z

A question for the f-list at large: would any of you be familiar with that addictively little DS game The World Ends With You and willing to do a quick beta job on some fic for me? Three short fics, to be exact (written as a loosely connected series but all finished at once in the end) totalling about 8500 words and containing a bit of mild Shiki/Eri and Neku/Joshua. They've been variously floating around my notebooks and harddrive since sometime around last December, but they're done at last ( \o/ ) and well and truly due for posting by now~

[Guilty Gear fic] Normal Continuity Will Be Restored Shortly

2009-04-24T14:35:45Z

Bit of light relief between all those big projects: here's a drabble written as gift-fic for velithya (though also because wordiness is one of my worst habits and some practice with a form that forces you to be concise is always a good exercise - not to mention an attempt to exorcise one of those cheesier ideas that nags at me from time to time in some kind of safe and controlled manner. velithya is now conspiring to make sure that one backfires at me as badly as possible x_x)

Title: Normal Continuity Will Be Restored Shortly
Word count: 100 (we are very traditional about drabbles around here)
Characters/Pairing: Well, it's like this - I'm posting it to solxky, but, technically speaking...

Ky offers the man a hand up, only to find he’s not slumped against the wall but slouched, watching with naked appreciation, face so impossibly familiar it stops Ky cold.

“Nice. Lightning magic? Never seen it handled like that.”

“Ah, I’m…” A bit far from home? How does he explain himself with only the faintest, horrible suspicion of how he arrived… wherever this is? “I’m… Ky Kiske.”

The grip on his hand isn’t quite a handshake. “Call me Frederick.”

The name echoes, hard and wrong and real, but even afterwards part of him insists it must have been another one.

hums "happy birthday to me"

2009-04-24T02:22:31Z

Another year, another would-be-birthday slightly overwhelmed by the need to sort out house/rent/moving-related fuss. Probably should have seen this one coming, since we did sign the lease for exactly one year, but we didn't know then that we'd have a housemate leaving or any of the other complications that came up since. It's not even like we're completely flat out, just badly distracted, and me having a skating comp on this weekend doesn't help much there either.

On the other hand, I did wake up to birthday-wishes in my inbox and my housemates made me Dalek cookies, so it's not all bad. :3

Still want to do something properly celebratory, even if it does wind up a month late, but it'll have to wait a bit. ^^;

And a very satisfactory Swancon it was too! (+ impending upheavals to living arrangement )

2009-04-16T09:29:37Z

Back from another year of Swancon (+ couple of days to recoup, + after party at pancakes). Wasn't much at this year's con that could compare to what an awesome guest of honour Rob Shearman made last year (being one of the writers on the new Doctor Who and all around very approachable and excellent value on every panel I saw him on), but it was still overall a very enjoyable con. Attended many entertaining panels, got to catch up with all the usual suspects and an old high school friend I hadn't expected to see there as well, and as usual when many fans conglomerate met a couple of new awesome people as well. The music at the Masquerade was the one big let down this year - hardly anything worth dancing to was played all night, but the Millia/Ky balldress got me some very nice reactions from people, even if no-one had any idea who I was meant to be. Also finally got to bring out some of the crazier clothes bought in Japan, ate some of the best Chinese food I've ever had, and, more importantly, failed to get sick*, failed to get too horribly over-tired at any point and had no cosplay worries to stress about at all. That may well have been the most relaxed Swancon experience I've ever had. :3

*At least until the day after, and even then only a mild sore throat that's mostly gone already.

So of course we get home to discover that a letter we should have gotten to remind us our lease is running out didn't reach us for some reason, and now we've got rather less time than we were thinking we did to make up our minds about whether we want to move or not (probably yes), whether we need to find a new housemate to replace jaseroque when she leaves us soonish (also probably yes, and certainly at least one or the other), not to mention actually find a new place and/or housemate before crunch time.

Not sure what we're going to do about it all yet, but if any of you are expecting to be looking for a place to stay around Perth in the near future, now could be a really excellent time to let us know.

Good news at last!

2009-04-07T12:27:24Z

RE: The latest spoilers for this year's Doctor Who specials (spoiler free reaction)

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

(deep breath)

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

(okay, I'm done. X3)

Which is also to say that I have had Doctor Who on the brain for the last week, and I already wasted way too much time today (and yesterday) reading the most awesome virtual season 5 Doctor Who fic ever written. Then I went out to the Internet and it was all true.

Well, not all true, obviously. *waves hand* Just both of the important bits.

X3

Goddamnit, what is it with me and the emo posts lately?

2009-04-05T02:46:20Z

I've spent a whole lot of the last two weeks hopelessly stuck on the beginning of a fic I've had sitting around unfinished since last year sometime. Yesterday, I finally cracked it - got an opening written out that I was happy with, made a bunch of extra edits to the rest of the fic and basically got it finished but for the minorest of finishing touches.

Today I tried opening the file - which I haven't backed up anywhere other than my USB drive since mid last month - to find it was corrupted. Suddenly all it contains is a badly formatted version of a list of all the files on the drive. I can only guess that means that something went wrong when I disconnected the drive from the last computer I used it on and some kind of file system information got saved over the last open document. I'm also guessing that means the file is now completely unrecoverable, and the best option I've got left is to try to reproduce as much of the new material I wrote yesterday from memory into my two-week-old version of the story.

I almost printed out a copy to take to PenCafe to work on, but I just had to go and decide it wasn't worth wasting the paper.

And just when my week was starting to look up again. >_<

[Guilty Gear fic] Casualties of War

2009-03-19T12:00:54Z

Title: Casualties of War
Summary: Communication has never been one of Sol’s better talents, but ‘complicating Ky’s life’ probably ranks somewhere on the list.
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 5100
Notes/tags/warnings: *deep breath* War-era, topping!Ky*, some dom/sub-ish themes, explicit sex between persons of a masculine persuasion, misdirected attempts at writing a character study, *hums "The Internet Is For Porn" for good measure*

*Though certainly not bottoming!Sol. Sol comes with two basic modes: "on top" is one, and "topping-from-the-bottom" is the other. ;)

The three commissioned officers lining the wall of the Commander’s office were shortly going to perfect the art of flinching in comically perfect unison. Historically the political struggles labouring the Order’s high command had placed them on differing sides more often than not, but today found them united at last in rising and unanimous desire to be anywhere else but where duty demanded they be – which was, unfortunately, here. Order regulations provided indisputable justification for their presence – all official disciplinary proceedings regarding battlefield misconduct on this scale were to be carried out in the presence of at least two additional parties, even when they were being headed by the Commander himself. The irony of it all was that the main reason that rule had ever been penned at all had been to prevent the exercise from devolving into a scene like this.

The last time any of the officers had tried to offer any input was three minutes past; now none wanted anything more than to be able to vanish into the wallpaper, or perhaps sink into the carpet. The one remaining mercy was that both the other persons present seemed to have long forgotten they were there at all.

“…if there’s enough left to allow identification by their dental records the Medical Division will count itself lucky.” The Commander’s voice seared like an ice burn. “Four of our men, incinerated in an instant!” It was a tone that took no prisoners, cared nothing for collateral damage, made it very hard for the officers to remember it was not directed at them and they had done nothing they had any cause to be ashamed of. Convincing themselves the Commander would remember that was harder than it should have been.

The solider, the infamous Sol Badguy, persisted in looking at Commander Kiske like something he’d scraped off his boot. “So?”

“You deny all responsibility?”

“Farce of a battle like that, you should be thanking me if you’ve got four men left.”

“Four out of twenty five casualties today,” the Commander supplied curtly, “being the only four lost to friendly fire…”

“No such thing.” Badguy’s tone dripped with the implication that anyone who couldn’t get their heads around that point was asking for whatever it got them.

“…and three witnesses,” the Commander went on as if he had never heard the interruption, “who will swear blind they saw the blast that killed them come from you.”

The soldier made no reply. Sir Kiske paused just long enough to let the accusation sink in.

“Would you tell me to doubt them? Nothing on that battlefield but you had the capacity to create such a blast.”

The officers huddled a fraction of an inch further back towards the wall and tried very hard not to wonder how many men (or Gears) the Commander might be able to take down with that glare alone.

“Wasn’t aiming for them if that’s what you’re asking,” Badguy grumbled, the retort coming just a little too soon to avoid sounding defensive; even on him the Commander’s words might have found a nerve somewhere to worry at. “What the hell do you take me for? If your soldiers were in the way…”

“Then it was their own fault, is that what you’d have me believe? You admit no accountability for any consequence of your own actions?”

“Your precious witnesses tell you the blast they saw took down a Megadeath Gear?”

“‘Chased away’ would be the term you were looking for, and it was barely in the upper range of Large Class –”

“Woulda found out if it was ‘Large Class’ if I’d left it there a minute longer.”

The force of the Commander’s hand meeting his desk made a noise like a thunder clap. Everything in the room rattled. “Did you so much as try to warn them? How long does it take to yell ‘get out of the way’, or even ‘duck’? Did you even hesitate for a second when you saw them there?”

“Hesitating’s what lost you the other twenty-one.”

“What are we supposed to tell their families? ‘Died in honourable service on this day, in friendly fire?’”

“Whatever’s on the fucking form letter.” Badguy spat, and made a motion as if to turn to go.

“Sol!” the Commander shouted, and Badguy actually flinched and stopped in place. “Don’t you dare walk out of here! This is not over. You are off duty until the investigation is finished.”

“… have fun dealing with your next extra-Large Class without me,” Badguy threw back, not bothering with even so much as a final glance backwards, and made it the rest of the way to the door unopposed.

The tension in the room did not noticeably lessen. The Commander’s office was a very nice room, not opulent but elegantly furnished. It was something to be grateful for, all three officers silently agreed, that nothing had been damaged or broken – least of all, say, themselves. Any minute now the Commander was bound to remember they were there, and recognising objectively that it was better gotten over with quickly was not enough for any of them to want to be the one who made a noise first.

Finally, as the seconds the Commander had spent staring at the doorway stretched towards infinite, one of them let out the smallest of coughs.

“You may return to your duties,” Sir Kiske snapped, not even looking around.

The officers all but fell over each other to get out of the door, united one last time in the thought that anyone who had to deal with the Commander in the next twenty four hours deserved more sympathy than all the army could generate.

***

By the time Ky allowed himself to return to his quarters that night he was feeling worn to the bone, mentally and emotionally. Specific cases of unjustifiable behaviour were only the final straw to what had been, even against the backdrop of these miserable times, a truly catastrophic day. Sleep could do little to soften the ordeal he’d endured, of which twenty-five deaths in battle was barely the tip of the iceberg, and the investigation needed to resolve this matter the last thing the Order had time or resources for, and at once a measure they could not possibly afford to dispense with. He needed rest desperately if he was to have any hope of untangling this mess tomorrow. He had almost begun to believe he could hear the ticking of the time between now and when the next Gear attack would be upon them draining away every time silence descended around him.

The last thing he needed was to find the very man who’d caused him most of the stress waiting for him, sitting on his bed even.

With energy he would have sworn he no longer possessed even a moment before, Ky burst out, “I do not believe this! What makes you think you’re remotely welcome here, today of all days?!”

“That’s why I’m here,” said Sol, as if that was all the explanation he needed. At least he wasn’t adding further insult by wasting energy trying to make his voice seductive, but that carried the implication that he didn’t think it would be necessary, which was more than insulting enough alone. If anything, his countenance was bizarrely blank even by the standards of Sol’s usually limited emotional range; what was going through his head Ky could not begin to imagine.

“Because you relish the prospect of being thrown out?! Haven’t you done enough!”

“Got you worked up,” said Sol, rising slowly to his feet. “Only fair I give you a way to work it off. How well are you going to sleep if you go to bed like that?”

Ky closed his eyes, ground his teeth and furiously wished Sol a thousand miles away. The curse of it was that he was completely and indisputably right.

“Get your clothes off,” Ky ordered, a few hundred complex objections lost somewhere in the sea of rage in his head. The cue had been right there for him to pick this up from the very moment Sol had stalked out of his office hours earlier; now they were in private there was no way it wouldn’t build up until it came to blows between them, and given how tired and worked up they both were it would be a miracle if it didn’t end up devolving into just the kind of scene Sol wanted. The future was all there unrolling behind his eyes with horrible familiarity, and for once, delaying the inevitable at the price of a little useless pride (not to mention a few bruises and the real risk of broken furniture) simply wasn’t worth it.

Without a word, Sol took his hands to the fastenings of his coat. The many layers of the Order uniform accumulated in an untidy pile by the bed, Sol moving without haste, eyes never quite leaving Ky as he worked. It was the insufferable irony – that this was the one situation when Sol would follow orders without insolence, very nearly the only time he’d follow orders at all.

Finished, Sol stood waiting. Ky very deliberately kept his eyes at face level. (As long as he didn’t draw attention to the fact that Sol’s headband remained the one piece that hadn’t been removed, it was easy enough to pretend it didn’t matter whether that was the one account on which Sol would refuse him.)

“My coat,” he instructed, trying hard not to listen to the sound of his voice in his own ears. “Belt and boots as well.”

Obediently, or in some parody of obedience, Sol stepped forward and helped him out of each item of clothing, hands moving very deliberately around the areas of Ky’s neck, his chest, under his belt. It was a matter of some concentration to keep his breathing steady, lifting his arms or shifting just enough for perfunctory cooperation – to remind himself that the anger that ran liquid through every nerve deserved to be treated as more than fuel for a different kind of fire. Removal of the second boot left Sol looking up at him speculatively from where he knelt at Ky’s feet, a storybook of unvoiced possibilities lurking in the very edge of a smirk. Arranged as they were it was all but impossible to avoid looking down far enough to see exactly how interesting Sol was finding these proceedings, even just this proximity swiftly becoming a terrible tease to both of them, but Ky had no interest in giving him the satisfaction.

Instead, he tangled a hand in Sol’s hair and tugged upwards, just a little, more than enough to make his intent clear. Sol rose on cue, taller now Ky was barefoot, straight up to leave them close enough to taste the other’s breath against their faces. Ky’s fingers barely tightened this time, just enough of a nudge to instruct Sol to open his mouth against Ky’s, the kiss as brief as he could make himself keep it before scraping his teeth over Sol’s bottom lip in a signal to stop. Sol complied, but no more than to the letter required, practically thrumming with anticipation now; the space between them did not widen even a fraction of an inch.

“Bed,” Ky pronounced, in that voice he didn’t trust to anything longer. He watched as Sol stepped away; breathed out slowly and brushed off a sudden childish impulse to run a finger over his lips. Sol seated himself on the edge of the bed and twisted to lay back, all that infuriating skin spread out and waiting, and for that moment the sight of him was just about everything Ky knew.

He’d never been under any illusions about exactly what kind of encounter this was going to be. The worst of it was that Sol knew just as well as he did – had come here counting on it – and wasn’t dissuaded in the least; the lazy oaf probably revelled in engineering a scenario where Ky would be doing the bulk of the work, and just as surely knew how helpless Ky was himself to find any unmanufactured desire to turn him down. But he’d acted on presumption too fast – it did make a difference that he’d agreed to this without a fight. There were rules written into the core of his conscience about how something this intimate could and couldn’t proceed – or should and shouldn’t even if someone like Sol didn’t care – the kind they might have been excused for forgetting if this had all come tumbling out of the heat of the moment, but not so easily like this. Ky wanted to make Sol feel everything he had been through today on his behalf, wanted to carve the blame into his flesh in a way he couldn’t forget; he wanted to climb into the bed, to let himself lose himself in the feel Sol’s skin against his until he forget everything else, everything he wanted or needed from this – everything he hated about it lay bent into such a tangled mass in his head that none of a dozen impulses gained the upper hand. His temper flared in fits and starts, but as long as he was rational enough to be thinking any of this there would be no escaping his share of the responsibility. Sooner or later he’d have to face the question of just how many lines he was prepared to let Sol goad him into crossing, let alone how many they’d crossed already, or whether there was any real will in him to care at all.

Really, he caught himself thinking in one of the distant corners of his mind, if he’d been this worried about sinking to Sol’s level, months ago would have been the right time to think of it.

He couldn’t spend the whole experience thinking about twenty five dead men, or even wallowing in anger over four. It was hard enough just to decide which of Sol’s innumerable faults he were most responsible for driving him into this rage. But he could spend it in anger at Sol and it would make no difference – he couldn’t hurt Sol, and certainly couldn’t lose the respect Sol had never had for him in the first place, and after that everything else quickly came down to technicality.

There were sparks flickering between Ky’s fingers as he clambered onto the bed to kneel over Sol on his hands and knees, but he was almost too distracted to notice – and when a couple leapt to Sol’s skin, making him flinch involuntarily, almost too angry to care. It was far less calculation than habit that guided him as he pressed his lips to the skin above Sol’s navel, caught it in his teeth and dragged up, slowly and deliberately, the taste of it warm and familiar against his tongue. There was the faintest hum of acknowledgement from Sol, but he stayed obediently still. When Sol was the one taking the lead – and that was more often than not – it was unheard for him to be anything like this patient. Even now, when he made the mistake of looking up long enough to catch Sol’s eyes the look in them promised that all it would take would be one word of permission and Sol could be the one that had him pressed down into the mattress, plundering his body and taking him hard and deep for as long as he could last. The thought was just tempting enough to push him that last inch of the way over the edge of something that must have been building inside him all day.

And perhaps it didn’t help to dig his nails into Sol’s arms, to write out his anger with his teeth against Sol’s chest and throat, because for every burst of rage Ky let loose on him there was the reminder than nothing he did to Sol – nothing he would ever be the least inclined to try even in his worst moods – would so much as leave a mark, and Sol would be quite content to lie back and enjoy this for as long as Ky wanted to take. But he could keep the pressure always that little bit short of what he knew Sol wanted; always apply himself just a little away from where it would be felt most keenly, and if Sol made so much as a whisper of protest Ky’s mouth could be gone completely until he’d remembered to behave, and that did mean something, in a way that not even every ounce of Sol’s determination that what they did together was ‘just sex’ could account for.

He knew this, had faced the enemy of Sol’s body enough times to know its weaknesses – better, he liked to think, than anyone else could ever have come close to knowing it. Places Sol had guided him to when this had still been new, things Ky had learned, pressed full length against him, back when half of his concentration had been lost keeping his hands from shaking; how to move his fingers, rhythms of breath and pressure, things that could be done to worry the skin right there until it was impossibly sensitive; or things he’d discovered of his own initiative, that might never have quite returned the favour of how Sol could make him twist and moan so effortlessly – but sometimes, afterwards, might perhaps get him half a look that was just that little bit impressed, that stirred things in his chest in the last moment before sleep that would be lost with his dreams by morning. Things that had begun to come so naturally to him that it was an effort to remind himself to hold back, to focus on what he wanted first. But it was all worth it, just to be able to press his hands against Sol’s skin, humming with current, and still feel Sol twitch underneath him, happy to risk sparks to get Ky even a little closer to where he wanted him. Worth it, just to be able to show Sol just how far inside his defences he’d let Ky get; and it might not have been much in the way of revenge or even compensation, but it was still something he had to hold over Sol that mattered, that drove them both so deep into this that it was only knowing he had control that let Ky draw it out for so long.

At times like this it was hard to remember anything between them that didn’t come down to a fight of one kind or another, somewhere at the bottom of it all.

Getting his shirt unbuckled and unzipped was easy. Getting out of his pants was less so, but achievable with a little agility without getting off the bed completely. He wouldn’t allow himself to care what Sol might think of the show, it would amount to much the same no matter how those items were divested (and really, what did it matter at this point if Sol could see he was just as desperate to be rid of them?). Crouched naked now over Sol’s legs, even the distance over his body looked almost too far to crawl, it was hard enough every inch of the way to resist the urge to just press down and rub himself against Sol in the simplest and most shameless of ways. No matter what his mood, he couldn’t resist dipping his head for one more kiss which Sol accepted gladly, sucking on his tongue in a meaningful way, until Ky pulled himself back again, shuffled that last, agonising, few feet further forward and finally could press himself into the waiting heat of Sol’s mouth, and oh god, that was almost too good – it felt as though he’d been waiting on edge for hours rather than what could hardly have been more than a matter of minutes since Sol had appeared in his room.

The angle for this was far from ideal, the way he was soon moving – rougher and faster than this act should usually have called for – something very little of his mind was in any state to care about, but Sol sucked him down like there was nothing he’d rather be doing. His hands settled on Ky’s hips to guide him – Ky far beyond any state to protest a break of the implicit movement ban now, biting his tongue against a noise that would probably have been heard rooms away if it had been allowed to escape. Even a few moments later, even that was more control than he could have had any hope of mustering. He came, hard and sudden, not the slightest concept of how long that had taken and no more inclined to care. Sol’s mouth released him rather more gently with one final flick of his tongue over newly-sensitised flesh, and Ky slumped down over his body, panting as though he might never get his breath back again. It was pleasing then, that the first thing he noticed – before he’d recovered enough for much coherent thought – was how he could feel Sol’s impatience thrumming through his skin, far more intense now that one of them had had release while the other remained completely untouched, Ky’s resting weight distributed in a manner that was nothing better than a tease. In any case he would have to wait until Ky was ready for a second round – and that wasn’t going to be long in present company, but long enough. It would have been a waste not to let himself savour the moment.

His mind tickled with the odd feeling that a few minutes ago there’d been something about this that hadn’t seemed like a good idea, but it was quite impossible to imagine what it could have been.

For a while he rested there, head nestled in the pillow over Sol’s shoulder and breath tickling in his ear, rather longer than he really needed to get his breath back. Long enough to notice the faint weight of something that pressed lightly at the small of his back every time he breathed in – Sol’s hand, he realised, the possessive streak that was bound to return the moment Ky was too spent to protest. Time enough that when he moved to his hands and knees over Sol’s body again the intensity would be back in his own eyes – to let Sol see everything he was thinking. Let Sol watch him slide back down his body, inch by inch, until he could press his nose to nuzzle along the soft skin just inside Sol’s hip, so close to what Sol had to be almost ready to beg for. Lower still and he could set his teeth along the inside of Sol’s thigh, and with that Sol was far beyond any hope of suppressing the next twitch of his hips or the growl that escaped his lips.

Very slowly, Ky leaned and ran his tongue along Sol’s erection from root to tip. The growl this time was deeper, practically feral, and no matter that he’d come once already – how long had it been, five, ten minutes at most? – that was officially exactly long enough.

Little need for any kind of preparation with Sol, not even when Ky had had half the temper and twice the patience. There was nothing to be done but nudge Sol’s legs a little further apart and press himself inside all at once, the heat of Sol’s body familiar and different and somehow a dozen times as consuming as it had been before, Ky himself rubbed so raw of every pointless defence that even when he was sure he must have gasped aloud he neither heard nor remembered it. No more than a moment to adjust, and he was drawing himself back, terribly controlled, arms shaking under his own weight, and then he was thrusting raggedly back in, needing to get deeper inside. Sol didn’t need to do much to encourage him anymore, could have done more to move along with him or reached to wrap his hands around Ky’s forearms and pull him closer, but Ky certainly needed no reminder this was exactly how Sol liked it. Hard and furious, never able to spare a stray thought for whether he’d found anything like a consistent rhythm, spending every remaining ounce of the anger and frustration of the day in this and this alone.

It wasn’t by any means the first time they’d done this, that incident so long ago now he couldn’t even clearly remember whether it had surprised him that Sol would let him do something like this, let alone be the one to suggest it. It might have been more of a surprise that arguments between them could end any other than this way.

Really, with the welcoming tightness of Sol’s body around him like this was hardly the time for any kind of lasting thought, his mind lost to sheer sensation, climax building again already, leaving him unable to care about anything but pushing himself towards for all he was worth until well after the world had whited out around him, well past anything he might have had words to describe. He was softening inside Sol when he came back to himself, the first thing he noticed was that no matter his own state, Sol was still just as hard. He was just in time to wrap his own hand tightly around Sol’s cock before Sol reached it himself in frustration, their fingers tangling together on the first stroke in what could have been no more than an ungainly mess. But it worked, as Ky panted through what was not any kind of recovery so much as putting off collapse a little longer, barely had they figured out how to move like that together before Sol was coming too with one final moan of a growl, all over his own chest. Ky pulled out at last, barely wincing, and really did collapse, straight down and lucky not to land somewhere that would have been uncomfortable for both of them, utterly spent. Nothing mattered now, not the Order or any of whatever the myriad things that had had him storming in here angrily less than an hour before; nothing but the comfort of being able to rest by Sol’s side, blissfully blank, far from expecting to remember anything else between now and tomorrow morning.

It must have been something of a minor miracle that he was in any state to make sense of what Sol was on about when he muttered, “Four men?”

“You aren’t questioning our ability to count now?” Ky heard himself reply. The urge to roll over and fall fast asleep had run up against the niggling idea that if Sol wanted to talk – now – there was a reason.

“Search me,” said Sol, his voice rough even by its usual standards. “Four men, witnesses, the whole damn cavalry, I never even saw one of those poor bastards out there.” Ky thought he heard something else as well, muttered quieter, but he’d lost it again before he’d managed to parse any words from it.

Ky lifted his head, very slightly. He couldn’t see Sol’s face, and it was too much effort to move that far, Sol’s chest the nearest proxy. “You had no idea?”

“Wasn’t looking hard. A Gear that big jumps up in front of you, you shoot first, aim later.”

One of Ky’s hands had fallen to lie on Sol’s chest, and he splayed out his fingers a little, letting it drift further over his skin, curling himself a little closer to the side of a man with the power to incinerate four soldiers to ash in the time it took to cough, without even knowing it.

Out loud, he at least said the words that had been hanging over his conscience for hours. “If they were that close to a Megadeath Gear, they were dead already.”

There was a pause. Sol made no motion to move towards him, but neither did he move away.

“Poor fuckers wouldn’t even have known what hit them.”

“There… are worse ways to go.” Many of them under orders, suicide missions so bleak the officers didn’t even bother asking for volunteers anymore. Rumour had it the unlucky unit was drawn from a hat behind closed doors these days. Ky officially did not want to know; felt no authority to command his officers to find another way when even he was at a loss to tell them how. Neither of them wanted to talk about battles past; times when similar scenarios had played out with a different ending, when Sol had been their only weapon against the Megadeath Gears that wasn’t airship-mounted, when the order had had to be given whether their men could get clear in time or not. It was easier to think it was different when it was the higher command giving the order. Easier to believe the sacrifices were necessary – unavoidable.

He wondered for the first time whether Sol would be prone to playing the battle back behind his eyes, imagining curls in the flame to be burning bodies he should have seen, Gear-shrieks become human screams. He was less sure the answer would be ‘no’ than he’d would have been had the idea occurred to him earlier.

“The whole battle was a nightmare,” was what he said instead, aloud. “Nothing in Tactical’s reports from the last six months suggested we should have met a single Gear above Medium-Class. Something’s… gotten through the cracks.” It wasn’t an apology, not really, more something of an admission of just how much bigger than either of them this had become since they’d spoken last.

“Get some sleep,” Sol grumbled. “Whole objective was to stop you thinking about that crap.”

He’d said much the same at the start, of course, and it made enough sense even now that Ky found it easier than it might have been to forgive himself for not wondering how much of the truth it had been.

“You haven’t really been helping,” he complained, half-heartedly.

“…my bad.” Sol shifted slightly, reaching the end of his interest in putting off sleep for the night.

“It’s alright,” Ky whispered, feeling it must be the most inadequate sentiment he could possibly have offered, but he was far, far too tired for eloquence.

It would have to do. Sol would understand.

Memeage!

2009-03-11T14:45:25Z

I think I must have now spent most of a month kind of in that productivity-black hole where you've got at least five different things that are mostly written, but that's actually just a nice way of saying that only the hair-pullingly difficult bits are left, or that you've written yourself into a corner where you've got a three-parter that should be ready to start posting, but in reality you're still juggling which idea belongs in which part and probably won't know for sure until you've finished all three of them. Thoughts about posting on non-fic related topics (which happen more often than you might think going by the average traffic on this journal) mostly just lead to guilt over wasting time you could be using on real writing (or any of the million other things you should be doing), so nothing continues to get posted. Then you look at the date and realise you haven't posted anything in over a month.

It's something like the story of my whole LJ career. ^^;

On the upside!

1. Manga translations are done at last!

2. After chewing nails over my latest GG fic for most of the last month, it is finally a) done! b) betaed! (<3 velithya), and c) pretty much only needing a few last edits to be transcribed into the main copy before it's ready to post! \o/

3. Still haven't finished editing Ghost Stories, but I am just about to send a new version of the first chapter* off to my beta readers, so I'm feeling productive on that front too.

4. Relevant to nothing, but parts of my living space that have been pretty much sitting in corners since we moved in here have at long last finally been taken out, sorted through and put somewhere sensible. Not really important to anyone but me, but at least I get to feel organised for once.

*a.k.a. one of the bits with the teeth in it.

More importantly, k_chan009 tagged me with Ky in that character meme that's been going around:

1. Do you like this character?
Oh, y'know. He might just possibly be one of my favourite characters ever. Something like that. =P Or that might just have been rather too predictable for words.

But what can I say, I'm a sucker for characters who might be, say, seriously kickarse or completely mental or the like, and who've generally been dragged backwards through the thorny hedge of life more times than they deserve, but still somehow manage to keep their faith in humanity and go on being Really Nice People. =3 And if they're really cute or are voice acted by certain persons who shall go nameless, that doesn't hurt either.

2. What name/s do you call this character?
'Ky' works pretty well. Ky Kiske if you want to be formal, or you can even stick a Sir/Commander/Captain/King/Your Majesty/His Awesomeness in there if you want to be extra formal. ~~Does 'the shiny' count?~~

3. What image-color do you associate with character?
You know, if you absolutely must have a question like this, you could at least have the decency to phrase it as, "If this character joined a Super Sentai team, what colour would they be?"

But to answer, oh gee, what a tough one. I could be pondering this one all week, srsly.

4.What image-song do you associate with character?
It's pretty hard to beat his official one (Holy Orders: Be Just or Be Dead) - especially the extra pretty Overture version. There's 'Keep the Flag Flying' too, though of course that one's about someone else as much as him. But if we're talking about songs that don't come straight from the source material, 'Holding Out for a Hero' is a personal favourite. =3

5.What blood-type do you think this character is?
His official bio says AB, but since I find the whole 'personality-by-blood-typing' thing to be only slightly more plausible than aviating Suidae, I'm going to go with saying I think he's the type who's learned to appreciate being able to keep his blood on the inside. But he'd be willing to negotiate on that if it meant keeping everyone else's blood on their insides ~~because he takes all that 'good of the many' stuff more seriously than is good for him~~.

6.Of all of the titles to that this character appears in, what character do you like to put this character with?
GEE LET ME THINK. No really, I bet none of you are going to guess this one. Oh all right, I'll give you a hint - it starts with 'S' and ends with massive property damage and someone phoning the fire department.

7.What would you want to say to this character?
DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW CLOSE THAT BATTLE OF ROME STUNT WAS FROM GOING SO FAR SOUTH YOU'D BE LOOKING UP TO FIND THE ANTARCTIC? YOU WERE HOW OLD WHEN YOU SIGNED UP TO THE ORDER? WAS IT REALLY YOUR IDEA TO CALL HIM 'SIN'? HAVE YOU SERIOUSLY BEEN ROCKING UP TO YOUR IPF JOB IN A UNIFORM FROM A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ORGANISATION THAT'S FIVE YEARS DEFUNCT EVERY DAY SINCE THE TOURNAMENT? DIDN'T ANYONE EVEN ASK? IS FILTERING ALL THE MARRIAGE PROPSALS OUT OF YOUR MAIL AN OFFICIAL OR UNOFFICIAL PART OF BERNARD'S JOB? JUST HOW BIG IS YOUR OFFICIAL FANCLUB? (YOU CAN'T KEEP PRETENDING IT DOESN'T EXIST FOREVER!) NO REALLY, HOW LONG HAVE YOU GUYS BEEN SLEEPING TOGETHER? YOU CAN TELL US! WE WON'T JUDGE!

*cough*

Nothing really springs to mind. >.>

8. Which do you want to do with this character: Shake hands, hug or kiss
Hug. I'm definitely going for 'hug' on this one. I know I'd risk goring myself on at least a million buttons and studs in the process, but it would be so totally worth it. =3

9. Write 5 of your friends names down and a character for them to do the Meme for.
I've already seen this meme on my f-list so many times in the last week or so that I'm thinking it must be about time to break the cycle here before it starts getting vicious. ^^; If anyone who hasn't been tagged for it yet wants to be though, hints may be dropped in the box by the door. ^_~

Gosh, those were all generic and easy. ~~Anyone got any other ones they'd like me to answer?~~

Waicon 09

2009-02-05T15:22:32Z

If anyone actually noticed I've been around online lately... even less than usual, then it's safe to say that that thing where Waicon was last weekend probably had something to do with it.

After attending every one since 2004, the point has been reached now that I don't think there's much I can say about this year's Waicon that I haven't already said about a previous one - or about several Waicons, if not about every other con I've ever been too. It was even bigger than last year, pinneagig's store make a killing, and despite all last minute stress our costumes came out great - business as usual. Preparations take over your life for anything up to several weeks beforehand, then the con takes over your life, then you wake up Monday morning feeling vaguely hung over yet strangely convinced it was all worth it and completely prepared to do it all over again at the next opportunity.

I also realised that excluding one or two posts about a giant key I've said sweet bugger all about what I was I've been working on that kept me so busy in the lead up. Oops?

Anyhow, apart from recyling my well-traveled Millia costume for its first appearance in the state from whence it hails, my new costume for this year was Syaoran from Tsubasa (the scary one-eyed black-coated version who escapes from Fei Wong's hideout somewhere around volume 16-ish. I would use the general nickname fandom uses to distinguish him from his counterpart, but it's still a bit spoilerish). I've wanted to cosplay that version of Syaoran ever since I encountered him, but didn't get to it last year as Hiei turned out to be more than enough of a job by himself. Putting it off a year did have the advantage that by the time I got around to doing it I'd been to both the Genghiscon and Swancon Jedi Bootcamp sessions of '08 (Star Wars-inspired fight choreography workshops, for the unaware) and came away itching to find an excuse to use some of those moves in a cosplay skit. Lucky me, Syaoran carries a sword. This will be important in a minute.

So how did it all go?

I WON BEST INDIVIDUAL SKIT ON THE FIRST DAY!!! I was not expecting this. The limit of my weapon handling experience comes down to a bit of background in gymnastics, a bit more in some poi twirling, and having been to Jedi Bootcamp sessions for a couple of weeks. The whole skit consisted of less than a full minute of sword-twirling to music - I didn't think it was going to be long enough to even be considered eligible. But clearly the judges thought otherwise, so who am I to complain? :3
WE WON BEST GROUP ON THE SECOND DAY!!! This was a narrower thing than you may think. jaseroque - who was to be the A.B.A. to go with my key - has a history of finishing her costumes at the very last minute, and this year it was something like five minutes before we went up on stage. So not kidding there. But she made a fantastic A.B.A., and velithya joined us again as Sol, the walk-on went well and everything paid off on the day.

Given that I've never even participated in the competition both days before, that is really kind of awesome. =DDD

Probably my favourite of the photos we got of me that day. The sword was commissioned from k_chan009 (as woodwork is not exactly my forte and I had that giant key to worry about), I just added the paint job and some of the detailing. Tattoos were done by an airbrush tattoo artist down at the Fremantle markets - not cheap, and requiring something like an hour of applying them on Friday then a slightly stressful night of doing my damnedest to avoid rubbing any of it off. They came out a little smudged and uneven in some places, but nothing too visible from a safe distance, which is pretty much our cosplay mantra.

The three (four?) of us up on stage. Incredibly, the six-foot-tall key was easier to transport than either of my giant Yuffie shuriken from previous years, thanks to being made to separate into three parts and lacking all the spikey bits which meant the shuriken had to be nursed the whole way. We probably should've asked for a medal for him too.

Completely OOC, but what the hey. Cosplay medals make us smiley. =D

[Guilty Gear fic] Visitor Etiquette

2009-01-15T15:01:32Z

This is a fic I started over a year ago when an idea bit me, and then promptly abandonned about two pages in when it became clear that to continue the story any further I'd have to write both my first ever attempt at real smut and an awful lot of plot to explain how the situation arose. I still don't have more than a few vague ideas of what the plot would have been, but having decided I was no longer so terrified of the idea of trying my hand at writing smut, and working on the theory that most people would forgive me writing a PWP fic provided I did a decent job in that other category, I went back to it and finally finished the job. This is the result.

Title: Visitor Etiquette
Rating: NC-17
Summary: There are many more pleasant reasons why Sol might have found himself waking up in Ky's bed than this one.
Word Count: 3870

When Sol woke up again, he was indoors – a white ceiling being the first feature that registered clearly. There was something soft underneath him, and it said a lot about how long he’d been roughing it that it took him a moment to click that meant he was lying on a bed. The room he was in was bright, airy and clean. Someone had hung his jacket and belt on a chair near the far wall, with his shoes arranged neatly underneath it. Barely a pace away from the bed, Ky was sitting in another wooden chair, looking off out the window in a distracted manner. He was dressed in a simple white shirt rather than his usual uniform, the relaxed image ruined somewhat by the fact that the Fuuraiken was propped up against his chair in easy reach. There was a book sitting on his lap, but it had been allowed to fall closed and it didn’t look like he’d read much of it. Glancing away from the window, he started slightly as he realised he was being watched.

“You’re awake,” he commented, running a hand over his hair. There was something indistinctly ruffled about him in a way that suggested he was a good night’s sleep short of his quota.

“How long…?” Sol mumbled, finding his voice unusually rough with sleep.

“You’ve been unconscious most of a day,” Ky reported, and his tone barely hinted at the sort of inconvenience this had caused. “You were certainly in enough of a state when you got here.”

Parts of Sol ached in memory. A glance down at his body showed that the worst of it had been wrapped in bandages. If his damnable biology was paying off at all, he should be half-healed already, and everything still seemed to work. “I’ll live.”

“Don’t make light of such injuries,” said Ky, sounding irritable. “I had to call Dr Faust in to patch you up.”

Sol jerked upwards. “You let that freak…?!”

“I kept an eye on him the whole time he was here,” said Ky firmly, reaching semi-consciously for the Fuuraiken’s hilt. “He didn’t try anything. Who else could I have called on when you’d shown up here like that?”

“Cheh,” Sol muttered, slumping back down on to the bed.

Ky’s fingers left the hilt of his sword and he folded his arms, defensive. “Although,” he added, “he knows you’re a Gear now, if he didn’t before.”

Sol didn’t react straight away, just processed the information hanging in the air between them in silence. “Doesn’t sound like that was news to you.”

“It’s… something I suppose I should have realised a long time ago,” said Ky. “You’ve always been… something more than human. And ever since that business with Dizzy, I’ve had to accept that Gears… aren’t all what I used to think they were.”

Apparently, after ten years of accusations and secrecy that was all that needed to be said on the subject. Goddamn.

“I never thought I’d see the day you’d come to me for help either.” Ky went on, looking in a direction that avoided eye contact, and if he could do any more to make his tone unreadable Sol couldn’t think what.

“Guess I should be glad I’m not waking up in a cell somewhere.”

“That would be poor treatment of someone who so badly needed my help,” Ky replied. It was probably some part of his code of chivalry or something. “Besides… if I’d turned you in, I’d lose any chance you might tell me just what could have happened to leave you like that.

“I’m not going to press the matter,” he added, voice just a touch higher and faster, getting to his feet and putting the book aside as he spoke. “But you must know what kind of state you were in. You’ve taken on Justice and come out less of a mess than that.”

“Yeah,” said Sol, digesting that soberly. “Guess I owe you one.”

“I’ll deduct it from the seven I still owe you from the war,” said Ky, with reasonable dignity.

“That would be right.” Sol muttered, almost laughing, because of course the kid had kept count, even if Sol would have had to stop and think hard to come up with more than three. “Real altruistic, aren’t you?”

“It wouldn’t hurt you to show a bit of proper gratitude,” Ky snapped, and Sol took a moment to really consider that for once.

“Mm. You might be right there,” he mused, levering himself up and catching Ky’s eye out of the corner of his own in a way that made him swallow slightly. Not surprising, considering that everything Sol was thinking had to be right there on his face.

After all those years of fighting it was only natural that Ky would go on the defensive if he saw Sol’s hand coming towards him at speed, but Sol moving slowly and so very deliberately wasn’t something he was used to responding to and it confused his reflexes for plenty long enough for Sol to get a grip on the front of his shirt and tug him over and down. Startled, Ky tumbled forward with an undignified squawk. He reached for the nearest thing to steady himself on which turned out to be the bed, and which suited Sol just fine, because from there it was an easy matter to organise for Ky to land kneeling over him and, while he was still trying to get his balance back and stammer out a question that started with “Sol, what…!?” Sol pulled him down the last few inches and kissed him on the lips.

It wasn’t the world’s most memorable kiss, thanks to the fact that one participant was still catching up with events, too startled now and about to be too angry to join in much. It was reckless and stupid, not that that usually worried him - but the important thing was that Sol had gotten this far without being punched or zapped (a real danger even if he wasn’t making Ky very angry) and if that hadn’t got his intentions across then the boy was even more in need of an education than Sol had counted on.

It went on for a handful of seconds before Ky had shoved himself back far enough to focus on Sol’s face, glaring at him in a fury that a lot of people would have cowed in the face of, but Sol would have eaten his belt if it wasn’t at least a little put on. “Sol, what the hell do you think you’re doing?!”

“Being grateful,” Sol reminded him, leaning up and curling a hand around the back of Ky’s head.

“This is your…” Ky got out, faltering in a very telling way as Sol’s lips settled on his neck, “idea of gratitude?”

“Sure,” said Sol, to the base of Ky’s neck. “I’m forgiving you for being a pompous, preachy government dog with your own personal messiah complex and no fucking clue when to back off for your own good.”

“You…!”

“That means I’m out of reasons why I wouldn’t want to sleep with you.”

“I do not believe you!” Ky raged, fisting a hand in the front of Sol’s tank top in a way he really didn’t mind. “Of all the presumptuous, infantile behaviour – after everything I’ve put up with to help you…!” and then the way he was thrashing around kicked his knee sharply into Sol’s leg at and angle that he’d probably meant to be painful right up to the moment when he felt the thicker fabric of a layer of bandages and remembered Sol was still technically injured. “Oh, I’m… sorry, are you…” he stuttered, deflating very suddenly.

“I’m fine,” Sol assured him. “Gears heal fast. Hardly even felt it. You did a good job,” he added, stroking some hair out of Ky’s face with the tip of a finger, sure he saw the kid’s eyelids flutter just for a second. Got you, so bad.

“Faust did,” Ky reminded him, voice softer.

Faust was high up on a long list of people Sol didn’t want to have to think about at that moment. “You could help me feel a lot better,” he growled, and that had to be one of the cheesiest lines he’d ever uttered in his life, but it had the desired effect so what the hell.
When Sol pulled him down this time Ky had calmed enough to consent to give the idea a proper try, and perhaps even decide after a second or two that maybe he didn’t mind the experience so very much. He was awkward and inexperienced at it, very dependent on Sol’s cues, but as with everything else he learned fast, soon leaning into the pressure of Sol’s lips and shifting himself for a better angle. It was pleasant in a not particularly urgent kind of way, but by the time they had to separate for air Sol was well and truly ready to take things up a notch, and let his hands drift down to tug Ky’s neatly tucked shirt out of his pants.

“I didn’t give you permission for anything like that,” Ky complained in his ear, stiffening.

“You know what they say, easier to beg forgiveness…”

“How would you know, have you ever tried the alternative? It results in a lot less electrocution.”

If he wanted to play that game, sure. Sol abandoned Ky’s shirt for the moment and trailed a hand up to nudge the boy’s head down and look him in the eye. “May I?” he intoned, stroking his other hand meaningfully over the curve of Ky’s side.

Ky took on the wide-eyed look of someone who’d already forgotten the question. “Aa…” Oh, but this was going to be good.

The shirt was loose enough to give ample room for Sol to get both hands underneath to trace the shape of the muscles of Ky’s stomach, and well worth it just to see the way the boy gasped and his eyelids fluttered closed, head lowered, thanks to no more than the simple contact. Ky might be used to combat, but against more intimate physical contact he had few defences, and Sol was inside most of them already.

“Take off your shirt,” Sol instructed.

“Huh?” Ky blinked at him. It wasn’t the sort of thing he was used to hearing from Sol.

“I’d do it for you,” Sol clarified, “but you’ll be lucky to keep all your buttons that way.”

Ky looked like he was going to object on principle and the glare came back like it had never left, but it lacked a certain convincingness. He shifted his weight back on to his knees and, very deliberately, started on the buttons, one at a time, finding it hard to meet Sol’s eyes under the attention he was visiting on every movement. Shirt thus freed Ky shrugged it off with a minimum of fanfare, and in what had to be years of unbreakable habit folded it neatly on to the chair by the bed. Now hanging free, the crucifix around his next swung out and down as he leaned forwards again. Sol caught it one handed before it could risk hitting him in the face, and that was as good an excuse as any to tug down the rest of the way until he could capture Ky’s mouth one more time.

Ky endured this treatment for a few enjoyable seconds before reaching up with both hands to undo the clasp at the back of the chain and tug the pendant gently but firmly out of Sol’s grasp, depositing it on top of his neatly folded shirt.

To Sol’s raised eyebrows he said only, “It’ll only get in the way,” which couldn’t have been inflected to sound any more like, “and I’m not having your grubby paws on it any longer than I have to,” if he’d tried, but Sol didn’t care. Getting Ky’s remaining brown undershirt off over his head was far more important at that moment, and with that done he had Ky Kiske straddling him and naked to the waist, an arrangement that took priority over everything.

“Are you just going to lie there and stare?” Ky had trouble sounding truly put out when he was that breathless, and Sol could really get used to hearing that tone more often too.

“Taking a minute here.” Ky was paler under his clothes thanks to that limited wardrobe, but he kept himself in ridiculously good shape, and Sol was in the middle of realising he’d never had the chance to appreciate that fact nearly enough before.

“That’s not…”

“Budge forward,” Sol interrupted. “And lean down.”

It took a little work to get Ky to catch on to exactly how Sol wanted to arrange them, guiding hands on either side of Ky’s chest, Ky’s head as far forward as the headboard would allow; but that also put his chest hovering over Sol’s face and that was the important point. A little unconventional as a position for what Sol had in mind, but it would get the job done. The close up on Ky’s chest wasn’t to be wasted either.

Perhaps Sol hadn’t necessarily had to leave things like that for just long enough to make Ky nervous, or had to fix his teeth on Ky’s nipple with quite so little warning, so if he'd been zapped for it he would’ve had no-one to blame but himself. Ky yelped in protest, and tried to say something that was lost in a long moan as Sol dragged his tongue slowly over the bite.

“Think you liked that,” he grinned, and repeated the last motion again for emphasis.

“It wouldn’t hurt you to be a little more… gentle,” Ky complained, as clearly as he could manage.

Sol responded to that by trying out the full procedure on his other nipple, and was rewarded for his efforts by Ky moaning out, “Sol,” in a manner that was going to guarantee hearing his name on Ky’s lips was never going to sound the same again. That was the last coherent attempt Ky made at any kind of communication for a while as Sol continued his attentions on Ky’s chest, until the way his hands had been scrambling and fisting in the sheets either side of Sol found some method in their madness, latched on to both sides of his tank top and began dragging determinedly upwards. Sol let him go, raised his arms to let him get it the rest of the way off, and then it was Ky’s turn to take in the sight of his partner’s bare chest while he caught his breath again. Loss of the top revealed another row of bandages over Sol’s lower stomach.

Ky brushed his fingers over the edge of them cautiously. “Is this…?”

The truth was it was still pretty sensitive, but Sol wasn’t going to let that put a damper on activities. “Fine. By tomorrow you won’t know it was ever there.”

Ky looked just a little skeptical, shouldered with the extra area of uncertainty on top of being new at this and less than sure what exactly was expected of him. Experimentally he leaned down and ran his tongue along the line his fingers had traced, and Sol discovered abruptly that ‘sensitive’ didn’t necessarily have to mean only in the bad way.

He looked down to find Ky looking back, uncertain about what that reaction meant or how he was doing. “What’re you stopping for?” Sol grumbled. Ky opened his mouth but closed it on whatever he’d had to say. Turning his full concentration back downwards, again he grazed his tongue over Sol’s skin, firmer this time, no hesitation until the stroke was complete, and he paused before moving upwards to begin to map out the upper planes of Sol’s chest. He was tentative with every press but by no means shy, inexperienced in a calculating way that meant Sol got to feel him experimenting as he went, learning how to use his fingers or teeth and where, cataloguing Sol’s responses in a way that sure shouldn’t have been nearly so intoxicating. Another time he could have quite happily played test subject for the kid all day but right at that moment there were more urgent concerns building.

Sol reached for Ky’s belt, prising open the buckle with one hand.

“Want me to ask permission for this too?” he asked, grinning. Before Ky could answer he ran a thumb over the bulge in Ky’s pants that had joined them some time previously and been rudely deprived of attention until now. If he’d cared about the answer the way Ky moaned in response had to be permission enough. He certainly didn’t offer any protest as Sol tugged the belt slowly free of his belt loops and popped the button on his pants, dragging his free hand lazily over Ky’s erection with a pressure that had to be more of a tease than a relief. The look on his face was wide-eyed and virginal, and had to mean he’d realised exactly what Sol was going to do but couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it was all happening yet. It was actually kind of cute.

The look stayed there while Sol pushed his pants back over his hips, and if there’d been any kind of lingering doubt about just how much Ky had been enjoying this, it withered in the face of how very hard Ky had been under his clothes. If a close up on Ky’s bare chest had seemed like a rare privilege before it had nothing on the view Sol had now and Sol had to take another moment there to enjoy it. There was Ky, kneeling over him, naked to the knees (as far as Sol could shove those pants without moving) and blushing to the ears which probably also had a lot to do with how Sol had admittedly been eying his erection with considerable heat. It might have been fun to tease him out like that a while longer, but for once Sol decided it was time to be merciful, wrapped his hand around Ky’s cock and gave it a firm tug.

Ky made a noise that was indescribable and jerked forward in his grip, freezing the moment it was over in what had to be embarrassment. Sol gave him a reassuring squeeze.

“More?” he offered.

“Please,” Ky murmured, more desperate by the minute, and Sol happily obliged. Ky spent the next few strokes stubbornly holding himself very deliberately still, biting his lip even as his body shook with every touch, and its own way quite incredibly appealing.

Sol was just about set to tell the boy that you didn’t lose points for participation when some of that shaking and clutching resolved into Ky tugging open Sol’s pants (button yanked violently open, fingers shaking on the zip) wrenching them down over his hips hard enough to defeat even the hold of Sol’s weight, then he closed his hand around Sol and goddamn, so this might not be rocket science but the kid learned fast and he wasn’t wasting anything on hesitation anymore. The grip of his hand was every bit as intense as the way he was digging into the bed with the fingernails of his other hand – harsh and unforgiving and as far as Sol was concerned absolutely fucking perfect, Ky’s eyes squeezed closed in concentration and pleasure. Sol could feel Ky was getting close, slowed his hand to draw it out that bit longer, getting a moan of his name right on that line between pleasure and protest. He finally leant up one last time while Ky couldn’t see him and bit down on the base of his neck right as his hand tightened and that was it, all it took and Ky was coming long and hard, arms and knees buckling as the shudders wracked through him, his own hand on Sol faltering.

Sol rubbed the back of his neck gently as he calmed down again and caught his eye – open again at last. The exertion had left him strung out to what Sol would have thought was his limit, open in a disarming way he’d never seen before, but the next moment his hand was tightening on Sol again and even while he was still getting his breath back he’d started pumping Sol’s cock, slow and hard while looking him straight in the eye, and any thought Sol might’ve had that this was ever going to advance into something more elaborate than them jerking each other off like this had gone right out of the picture – damn it, he knew he had more stamina than this, how long it had been or present company or how long ago he’d lost all track of time completely notwithstanding and who would have thought Ky would even have had the guts to look at him like that given what he was doing down there and fuckgodamnit…

The next time Sol had the energy to care about anything Ky was slumped down to his side in the crook of his arm, head on Sol’s shoulder, more comfortable and satisfied than Sol had ever seen him before – which was sickeningly cute but also something he’d quite happily take all credit for. There was a rather sticky mess congealing down on Sol’s stomach that someone around here would have to clean up before it dried into something more unpleasant, but what the hell, it could damn well wait five minutes. Ten minutes. However long it took before another round started to seem like a good idea. Maybe it could be construed as an excuse to drag the boy into the shower later…

This was when he finally realised that Ky, sleepy but by no means asleep yet, had tilted his head up to look at Sol and was smiling in an affectionate way that had just the faintest hint of smugness mixed into the effect.

“What?” Sol protested.

“Pompous, preachy government dog with a messiah complex?” said Ky, voice teasing.

Sol was far too comfortable to put any effort into figuring out why he’d be bringing this up. “Gotta problem with any of that?”

“And you still wanted to sleep with me?” Goddamn that smile.

“Don’t let it go to your head,” Sol grumbled at him, which only made Ky make a noise that had to qualify as a giggle, lay his head back down and snuggle that little bit of extra space closer that Sol would not have known was there to snuggle into. Somewhere in the back of his mind Sol had the firm idea he was not the sort of guy who did snuggling, but in his present condition it was beyond him to remember why.

Ky was bound to get all kinds of wrong ideas about this, knowing the kid, which Sol had no excuse for not thinking about before the start of this, but… well, maybe not all wrong. More sex – he could definitely get used to that idea. Might have been the best idea either of them had had in years.

And the rest… eh. It’d keep.

Cons and Terminators

2009-01-14T16:37:17Z

Spent last weekend at Genghiscon, which stands out as the one con we go to each year which has no cosplay competition, no vendors room, no special guests and not more than maybe a couple of hundred attendees, and the major attraction is hanging out with other fans for a weekend, eating pizza, doing weird crafts and maybe chasing each other around with laser guns or hitting each other with foam-padded sticks. And waving shiny things. Can’t forget waving the shiny things.

It is consequently the only con we ever get to go to where we actually get to relax for a weekend rather than going through nearly as much stress as fun, and damn but that is nice and this year was no exception. Especially when we’ve now got two and a half weeks until Waicon, which is at exactly the other end of the con scale, and before then I’ve still got to finish painting and decorating a giant key, paint a sword, style two wigs, make an eye patch, finish organising temporary tattoos, iron a costume and probably a few things I’ve forgotten, not to mention all that fic I’ve still got on my to-do list or a bunch of other posts I’ve been meaning to make for way too long… but eh, the fic WIP list never ends, but at least after January I’ll be able to take a nice long cosplay-break. This is the one upside of deadlines – at least they make you get stuff done.

In completely unrelated fannish news, we of the local household swallowed our pride and gave Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles a try last week.

The thing you have to understand about my investment in this particular franchise is that Terminator 2 has been up there with my favourite movies EVER since I was 14 years old – and when you fall in love with something at that age you fall pretty damn hard. It didn’t just have some of the best action sequences I’ve ever seen on film, it had three fantastic lead characters (not to mention the interaction between them), and a great plot as well. It had a kickarse lead female who never made you worry for a moment had been included purely for sex appeal, it had a young kid who was allowed to act smart and actually got to contribute to events rather than just being relegated to the role of being rescued a lot or acting as comic relief, and it had a cyborg learning human emotions and bonding with the kid without ever descending too far into the warm-and-fuzzy robots-are-people-too! clichés. More to the point, they were all there because the world set up by the first movie made it logical for them to be the leads in sequel, not because they were convenient gimmicks. And then there was the awesomely-freaky villain, the best motorbike-chase scene ever written, the sad but hopeful ending… basically, it was one of few movies out there that didn’t make me chose between action and sci-fi versus characters and plot, which made it pretty much everything I could ask for in a movie in one package.

So understand where I’m coming from when I say that any sequels are going to have a hell of a lot to live up to. This is why we do not talk about the travesty known as Terminator 3, which ripped the happy ending to shreds, ruined the characters and very nearly put me to sleep during its sad attempts at action sequences. The only thing you need to know about the third movie is there is no third movie. But perhaps more to the point, the other problem that’s going to crop up with any Terminator sequels is that part of what made the T2 ending memorable was that it effectively wiped out the possibility of any Terminators ever coming back again, so if you’re going to continue the story in any way that does not go “and they lived happily ever after”, you’re already retconning one of the things I loved most about T2 and that means you're on about negative a hundred points before you've even started.

From the first two episodes of The Sarah Conner Chronicles, it did at least do a much better job at convincing me they had a decent justification for continuing the story, but I came away with a lot of mixed feelings about the result.

Things I didn’t like
The new Sarah Conner. I can’t hold it against them that they didn’t get Linda Hamilton back – that’s just how the business works. It’s not a big deal that her hair looks completely different now (it changed completely between the first two movies after all, though I do wish they’d bothered to stick her in a wig for the old police report photos just in the name of pretending they’re making an effort here). But the Sarah Conner in T2 had spent the last ten years working day and night to make herself into a soldier, to the stage she’s almost unrecognisable as the woman from the first movie. She’s tough, intense and more than a little crazy. The first scene she appears in in T2 she’s doing chin-ups in her cell, and to look at her running around for most of the rest of the movie, by god you can tell she’s been doing that sort of thing a lot.

The new Sarah Conner, by contrast, is built like a stick. Yeah sure, the old one was pretty skinny too, but there’s a difference between wiry and artistically thin, and they haven’t landed on the right one.

I’m letting my own biases sneak in at least a little here, because the idea that the action hero man can be up to his ears in muscle whereas the action hero woman still has to be thin and pretty and feminine is something that always bugs me, whereas one of the great things about Sarah Conner is how thoroughly she broke that mould (and is still damn hot, IMHO). I hate that the series has lost that, even when it does make a lot of sense that she would have bulked down a bit – she’s living incognito and has every reason to believe they’ve seen the last of the Terminators, but even so, that much? Sarah’s one justifiably paranoid lady – five years of relative peace are hardly going to make her slack off completely. Looking the part isn’t all there is to a role, but surely they could at least have sent their new actor lady to the gym for a couple of weeks before they started shooting and found somewhere on that skinny frame to grow a convincing muscle or two.

What the series gives us instead is a Sarah who’s hiding out in the suburbs with her fashionable modern clothes, nicely styled hair and eye shadow and expects us to blindly accept she’s the same person. With a really good script (say, throw us a scene of her getting dressed in the morning and treating it like someone putting on a disguise, just as one top-of-my-head idea) and a really good performance, it might be possible to pull that off, and she looks to be doing the best she can, but the result falls flat. I cannot look at this version of Sarah Conner and even for a moment buy the idea this is a woman who spent ten years making herself into a soldier. A few scenes of her running around with a gun only go so far. There’s nothing to connect her to the Sarah we knew that sticks.

In the second episode, the show also revives a character from the movie, transplants him across the country into a completely different setting, turns him traitor and kills him all before the final credit roll. That’s pretty much up there in my top ten Tropes That Make Me Want To Throw Things At The Screen. Hell, there’s probably a TVTropes page for it somewhere if I could figure out how to find it.

Things I did like
John. More in the first episode than the second, where the writers pass him the Idiot Ball and force him to do some phenomenally stupid things in the name of getting the plot rolling. He’s hardly exactly like the movie John, but a kid changes a lot in five years and I can buy that this is the sort of boy he’d grow into – very much a teenager, a little resentful about his lot in life but no more than makes sense for him to be, and with just enough about his character that you can believe he’s going to grow up to be someone awesome. Mostly I just wish he got a bit more screentime rather than letting Sarah hog it all.

Cameron. My first thought on hearing Summer Glau was to be playing a Terminator was that this might be a case of someone being a little too well cast after her similarly crazy-but-kickarse role in Serenity. Having seen her in action though, I was quickly sold. You can see she’s flexing a lot of the same acting muscles she used as River, but there are plenty of nuances to Cameron that prevent me from being overwhelmed by the feeling we’ve seen it all before. Look, it’s Summer Glau being kickarse and weird, it does not take that much to get me in on this idea.

On this subject, if the plot does not eventually go spiralling into John/Cameron territory in a serious way I am going to be very disappointed in them, because as much as I love Sarah, John bonding with Terminators is what the second move was all about.

Things I am undecided about
The idea of throwing them forward in time to 2007 originally sounded to me like a fairly lame excuse to avoid having to set the series in the nineties. Having seen it how it was executed it bothers me a lot less now, but I can’t help but wonder a little about their motivations.

I loved how Cameron shows up to defend John against the other Terminator and he and Sarah hardly bat an eyelid. None of those silly questions about whether she’s trustworthy, she just saved his life and they’ve been through all this before, hi Cameron, welcome to the team!

On the other hand, there were a few fairly important questions I was disappointed John didn’t ask, along with several points my writer-brain is a little disappointed they didn’t even mention in passing – even just in the name of making things more accessible for anyone who hasn’t seen the movies, or simply refreshing the audience’s memories about how this all works. Even just something to the effect of “So you’d be another Terminator the resistance reprogrammed? They do a lot of that these days?” Hardly crucial, but I’m curious. Are the T2 Terminator and Cameron the only examples of their kind, or does the resistance have its whole own army of Terminators on their side these days? In T2 John takes the first chance he gets to ask his new protector a lot of intelligent and important questions, and lays down his no-killing ground rule shortly thereafter. Five years on, John has less reason to have to ask those questions, but it’s a little disappointing to see him being so much less proactive than his ten-year-old self, especially when Cameron dodges the one important question he does ask her. I do realise that they’re probably saving a lot of those answers for future plot points, but that doesn’t mean I’m not missing seeing them raised now.

Maybe the biggest disappointment out of those scenes is that the good old Schwarzenator who was such an important figure to John back in T2 – who had to have been one of the first things to spring to his mind when a new friendly Terminator shows up – did not get so much as an oblique side-reference, and that makes my inner T2 fangirl awfully sad.

In conclusion: Undecided. Will probably give it another episode or two and see how it goes.

2008 (now that it is finally well and truly over)

2009-01-06T09:12:20Z

In 2008 I moved out of home, quit my job, went back to university to start a PhD, visited Melbourne and attended my first con out of the state, visited Japan and attended my first con out of the country, finished a novel, made two-and-a-half (counting one that's still in progress) new costumes from scratch, barely made it to the skating national champs, and generally ran myself off my feet. It's been one hell of a year, and that's without even touching on all the crazy big international stuff (which mostly doesn't affect me personally but is bound to be how 2008 goes down in history) that's gone down in the last few months (or the fact that we finally got Good News Week back on TV at long last. \o/)

I did not get nearly as much writing done as I might have hoped, but that's probably not something I should beat myself up for too much under the circumstances.

Overall, 2008 was mostly pretty awesome. But I can only hope 2009 will be a whole lot less exciting.

And then I spent the first week of 2009 variously a) building a giant A.B.A. key, or b) procrastinating about building the giant A.B.A. key, but it's actually done now ZOMG! (save painting), so it was not a week utterly wasted. (No, that is not me in the photo, that is instead the prospective A.B.A. cosplayer who will have to actually lug it around on the day - and as you can see they are getting on very nicely and probably planning to elope the minute my back is turned. But those are my feet sticking in on the left side if anyone is curious.)

The 2008 Annual Fic Round up

Tsubasa/xxxHOLiC
The Telling of One Billion Ghost Stories
17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 FINISHED!

Epilogues for others' fic
Wait epilogues
The Incubi continuation ficlet

Other
Superheros - Part 3

Guilty Gear
Collateral
Magma to Ash
Will Not Rest (or, Rage)
Red
Two Sol/Ky ficlets
50 Sol/Ky Sentences
Wait and See
Electricity
Ky Birthday ficlet

Discworld
Quod Erat Demonstrandum

(For comparison, the corresponding posts from 2006 and 2007)

In Total
All that comes to a total of 89,000 words posted during 2008 (57,000 of which were part of Ghost Stories), which is a good 20,000 less than my 2007 tally. Looking back on that list now it doesn't feel like I've written all that much this year, so all excuses aside I am definitely going to have to try and better that for next year.

Goals for 2009
Everything on this list, which I did hope I might be able to shorten down a bit by the end of December but... kind of failed miserably to get around to in the end. On the upside, I did make a good start on editing Ghost Stories (though am still woefully short of the halfway point) and the first fic on the list is back from my beta reader now and well overdue to be posted.

I'd hope I'm going to get a whole lot more than what's on that list written too, of course, but there's more than enough in that list to keep me going for as long as I have any desire to plan for.

In related news, I was earlier this week suddenly struck by the desire to open the word document containing the first part of That Original Story I Have Been Honestly And Genuinely Meaning To Continue Someday for the first time since 2005, and though I retain my plan to revise it heavily before it gets shown to anyone else again, didn't totally and instantly hate everything in it, which is an encouraging sign with any piece of writing you've left untouched for that long. So we will see if this actually, finally goes anywhere useful~

Christmas and Stuff

2009-01-01T16:10:52Z

Christmas
Really quite awesome this year! Presents include quite a haul of Sharp Things (specifically, two craft knives, a hack saw and an electric jigsaw), which is faintly scaring my housemates despite both of them having contributed to the problem. This was all to the good - I was in need of a decent craft knife, and no longer have regular access to my Dad's tool collection. Especially good considering what my plans for the rest of the holiday period included.

We also had my uncle from out of state over for Christmas this year, plus some of our oldest family friends who are practically family themselves, which was really nice - felt more like we had the whole family present than we usually manage. ^_^

Today
A Happy New Year to you all! Dragged ourselves out of bed to attend a send-off lunch for my uncle (whereat we proved once again the sad fact that the fact one has spent $37.50 on a steak does not mean it will taste better than one bought for $20, or indeed much good at all. Bleh. Expensive restaurants = so not worth it.)

The Rest Of The Time In Between
Mostly hung around the house and tried not to die of heat exhaustion. X_X Dear Summer: I know we've given you a lot of crap this year for all that unseasonal raining on everything, but you didn't have to return to form quite that suddenly.

Other good news: Missed out on the highest value scholarship I was going for, but I did land one worth an extra $5000 a year more than what I was originally getting, which was also $5000 more than I'd been lead to believe I had any chance of getting at all, so that was pretty good. ^_^

Questionable news? We got a letter in the mail a week or two ago to say the estate agency in charge of our house was being changed and not to pay any more rent until we heard anything new. We have still not heard anything new, and to all appearances the new agency is closed for Christmas. I hope they weren't expecting to get any rent any time soon... *shrug*

Most of the rest of that time has gone into making this

(Still far from finished, but yes, it really is as big as it looks. Possibly bigger.)

That said, IIIII think I am about done with being stuck in the house by now. Anyone want to go to the beach sometime? Got any interesting plans coming up soon-ish? Anything? >.>

Crossovers that were NEVER MEANT TO BE, take #128

2008-12-17T14:12:22Z

Right. So. Um. You know those cracked little ideas that leap out and bite you when you’re trying you damnedest to work on something else? Well, the latest example to get to me was a Twilight parody. And say what you like about Twilight, if it was put upon this green earth for any just and holy reason, it was to be parodied.

A summary for the uninitiated (should there be any left at this point who have managed to avoid all that mania)
Twilight is about a teenage girl called Bella who falls madly and deeply in love with a beautiful sparkly vampire called Edward. Bella has no interests that aren't Edward and next to no personality, and claims to be humble and ordinary while secretly bitching about how laaaaaame everyone else is inside her head all the time. Edward is a beautiful sparkly vampire (this part gets reiterated a lot) who has a sparkly vampire family, and has been saving his virginity for over a century for just the right girl and who shows his devotion by doing things like sneaking into her room at night and watching her sleep or removing the engine from her car to prevent her going to visit a male friend. She likes him because he's pretty, he likes her because she's the only person who's mind he can't read, and that's about the limit of their chemistry and, indeed, most of the plot of the whole four book series. The remainder is made up of a lot of angsting about how he is a moooonster who can never give her babies and she should stay away from him only not because he can't live without her, a lot of arguing about whether they should make Bella a vampire before or after they married and where having sex should fit into the schedule, some kind of sub-plot about a werewolf who was added to the series primarily to pad it out by also falling inexplicably in love with Bella, and appearances by a few token evil vampire villains who really aren't that important because telling us about them would detract from the space available to wax eloquent about how beautiful Edward is. And he really does sparkle like a glistening, scintillating diamond - that's why vampires can't ever go out in the sunlight! Nor is that factoid even the beginning of the WTF the series has to offer. Twilight means never having to say you're kidding.

Nevertheless, to talk to any of the obsessive teenagers (or equally obsessive adult mothers), it's the greatest romance story ever told, exceeding Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, etc etc. Twilight has apparently succeeded by tapping into a terrifying part of the teenage female psyche and harnessing its power for the forces of evil. Opinions from the more educated are divided over whether it's a work of unforgivable drivel which has single-handedly set feminism back twenty years or just a harmless guilty pleasure. The most truly amazing thing about it is that anyone thinks the result is remotely original. If it is indeed in any way different from the mountains of bad vampire romance out there already, it can only be because few authors have ever before gotten away with publishing a sexual-fantasy-without-sex that was quite that blatant.

The only reason I have paid any serious attention to it at all is that in its growing infamy, Twilight has vaulted past even So Bad It's Good and landed in So Bad It's Awesome by developing a dedicated second fanbase of lolfans who are into the series for no other reason than for the joy of making fun of it. They've produced a motherload of reviews, parodies and regular reports about the crazy antics of the movie actors, author and fans; varying in tone from the outraged to the unbelieving to the merely amused. If you think this should get old quickly, then you haven't yet grasped just how much there is to make fun of. I have not the slightest interest in ever touching a single one of the books, but I have gotten more enjoyment out of laughing along with this than anything I've seen in a very long time. Twilight has become my first anti-fandom ever.

(Actually, if you really are new to all this, go read cleolinda's wiki and recaps - she is far more witty and entertaining about it than I could ever hope to be, and some of this stuff does need to be seen to be believed.)

The danger of getting involved in this sort of thing is that you wind up running into things like people discussing how the infamous “Do I dazzle you?” scene would have made for infinitely more awesome if it had gone down between not Bella and Edward, but Rose and Doctor Who. The reason this is dangerous is because it will lead to you spending the next morning, when you were trying so very hard to work on all that other stuff on the WIP list, fighting off a chunk of your brain that keeps going “Hey, forget the Doctor, you know who else is all shiny and dazzles the people who work for him all the time?” At this point you are doomed and might as well admit it.

The Cast

Girl!Sol (image)
Mainly distinguished from Regular!Sol by the presence of boobs and being actually human, all other differences quickly become much harder to spot. Unlike Bella, she really was declared an unpopular freak at her new school by the time she was done beating a couple of people up, if not even earlier thanks to her habit of sneering at her classmates - something she does openly rather than limiting herself to all Bella's non-verbalised bitchiness. As compared to the real Bella being all ENGLISH IS SO LAME HERE BECAUSE I READ THOSE BOOKS ALREADY, girl!Sol is the one who gets bored stupid in science because she can already do advanced physics in her head, and probably winds up breeding radioactive lizards in a tank in the back of the class or something. Her early impression of Ky as a pretentious little snot does not do anything to curb a swiftly growing desire to screw him six ways from Sunday. Most people meeting girl!Sol would probably presume she's a particularly butch dyke, but even if there is any truth to this, she considers Ky such a total girl that it wouldn't matter.

Sparklepire!Ky (image)
Was made a vampire over a hundred years ago and still hasn't gotten over the angst of it. Being forced to go through high school over and over again for the duration probably hasn't helped so much there. Converted to Catholicism in attempt to atone for past sins (whether actual or imagined) and always wears at least one visible cross somewhere in what is mostly his way of saying "Who, me? I couldn't possibly be a vampire!" Has attempted to master being dark, brooding and intimidating, but was always too naturally polite to get the hang of either of the first two. The last only comes through during the occasional moment of spontaneous heroism, and consequently wins him more fans than it loses him, much to his ~~chagrin~~ confusion. He has kept his virginity all this time through what he will claim is a combination of his old-fashioned Upstanding Moral Virtues and justified fear of injuring his partner with his Vampire Strength, but the truth is mostly just that women intimidate him a whole lot. Considering what he can hear them thinking when they're around him in nine cases out of ten, this is not entirely unjustified. A lot of his fascination with Sol begins with the reverse-psychology effect of her being the only girl (and very nearly the only person) who hasn't fallen deeply and obviously in love with him at first sight. In short, he has no idea what he’s about to get himself into.

Extract 1: The Dazzling
Ky: ...I dazzle people?
Sol: You hadn't noticed? Why the hell did you think you get your own way all the time?
Ky: I thought it was my good manners and reasoned debating skills!
Sol: *facepalm*
Ky: Do I dazzle you?
Sol: <.< .....nooooo.

Extract 2: The Meadow
Ky: I am a monster! You must stay far away from me for your own good!
Sol: Sooo, the sparkles, do they go allll the way down?
Ky: What!?
Sol: Do you sparkle everywhere?
Ky: Um. Ah. That's not really...
Sol: Let's find out, shall we? *rrrrrrrip*

Extract 3: It’s not stalking, it’s love!
Sol: I can see you lurking in the bushes over there. You fail at stalking so hard it's pathetic.
Ky: I just wanted to challenge you to a fight! Wait, I mean I was just worried about the threat you pose to public safety! WAIT I MEAN I was just worried about your safety! I had the best of intentions!
Sol: Suuuuure you did.

Extract 4: What Women Want
Ky: You fascinate me because unlike everyone else in the world I have no idea what you are thinking!
Sol: >D Come by my room tonight and I'll show you what I'm thinking.
Ky: WHAT!? That would be unforgivably inappropriate!
Sol: That's the idea, pretty boy.

Extract 5: The Scene That Would Inevitably Happen A Whole Lot Sooner In This Version
Ky: No, we cannot! What if I lose control of myself and hurt you? I could tear you apart with my bare hands! *angst angst angst*
Sol: Hey, I can top if you're that worried about how you're going to perform.
Ky: o_o But I’m serious! You could risk terrible injury!
Sol: We could always tie you down.
Ky: O_O I-I-I can break through rope!
Sol: How about experimental ultra strong carbon-fibres? *drags some out from under the bed*
Ky: ...halp.

Yes, that's all I've got. Look, it's probably for the best. But this would be already at least a million times better than Twilight could ever dream of being, Y/Y?

New WIP list and general writing blather

2008-12-09T12:44:11Z

Obviously I didn't attempt NaNo this year or you would've all heard about it. But since one thing or another has kept me from writing or posting hardly any fic since I finished the Ghost Stories draft in late July, I did declare November Local Get On With It Already Month, and turned out the reasonably respectable total of about 20,000 words (most of which haven't been edited or posted yet). That's not counting over 15,000 words worth of posts since I got back from Japan about all that stuff I've been up to lately, which doesn't strictly count but does chew into one's writing time in a significant sort of way. So I'm going to call that a decent sort of success.

While I'm talking about writing, I thought I'd post a new WIP list - partly so I can use it for my own checklist, but also for anyone who might be interested in what's in the works (or who wants to put in a vote for where my priorities should be out of all those different projects). No proper extracts this time ~~because I am feeling lazy though convincing me to add them in probably would not be all that hard.~~

Also while I'm talking about writing, cheloya and lunargeography, I know neither of you are on LJ much lately, but if you are reading this, are you still up for betaing duties if the story in question is ready some time soon? ^^;

xxxHOLiC/Tsubasa fic
...so, would anyone be particularly surprised if I admitted that for all my talk about getting The Telling of One Billion Ghost Stories into shape for non-draft tagged posting, all I've done on it yet amounts to a page or two on a couple of those short stories and a bit of fiddling with the beginning? >.> Look, I did rather want a break from it and it's been a busy few months, alright?

But that's enough of that, I am finishing that monster even if it only means going through the checklist and running a spellcheck. I am declaring December Local Novel Editing Month. And I can race the manga to see which of us finishes first.

The World Ends With You fic
After that epic Japan trip with the cosplaying of the game in its actual setting (photo post is coming soon, honest!) this should not be much of a surprise. Three of these in progress totaling about 7000 words, all finished to first draft stage but in need of some fairly serious editing before they're fit to be seen (but if anyone wants to volunteer for beta reading duties, now would not be a bad time!) They're all post-game and loosely connected and so listed in the order in which they'd happen. None of them have titles yet, which is only business as usual for most of my WIPs.

Fic #1 (~2000 words)
So, four kids just came back from the dead - how exactly does that work anyway?

Fic #2 (~3000 words)
Vaguely Shiki/Eri oriented fic, in which Shiki does not actually appear.

Fic #3 (~2000 words, though currently full of gaps)
Even more vaguely Neku/Joshua fic in which Joshua does not appear.

I appear to be developing a bit of an odd approach to shipping in this fandom.

Guilty Gear fic
This is still the big section, so I'll split it down by category (and also to save me having to specify the same pairing over and over again *cough*)

Sol/Ky
Probably to be titled something like 'Visitor Etiquette' (~4000 words, NC-17. No, really.)
Status: Finished, currently with my beta reader. ^_^ yes, I have actually completed smut. stop looking at me like that. >.>
It starts with Sol waking up in Ky's bed. You can guess where this is going.

More smut (~4000 words, NC-17, probably even more so)
Status: First draft done, still needs some serious editing.
Relevant tags: war-era, angry sex, topping!Ky, (ogodwhat am I getting myself into)

Guilty Gear 1 fic (Eventual multi-parter, will need at least an R rating)
Status: Currently writing scene three, loooong way to go yet.
"So, it's kind of like I'm trying to write a novelisation of the first game - or the gap where the story of the first game should have been. Only with more sex."

Overture-based smut (~3000 words, NC-17)
Status: First draft done, still needs some serious editing.
Anyone remember back when I made that post to the solxky about all those possible ways to 'fix' Overture's plot WTF moment? Anyone remember the suggestions that no-one bothered to comment on or encourage me to write? Well, the one that leapt on me and wouldn't let go until I'd written it. Was one of those ones. Then it abandoned me again mid-year and the fic's been pretty much in the same state ever since. God knows I still want to have it finished though, if only because there's material in there I'm quite attached to and I haven't left any fic unfinished in the last two years and that's not a record I want to break now. Being back from that trip to Japan though, I think I'm feeling a bit more enthused about having another crack at it now though. ~~Don't even get me into the question of whether anyone's even going to want to read it.~~

The one that will be EPIC (loooooong. do not ask me how long, i haf no idea. Expect it will be at least R)
There was this conversation I had with aphelion_orion via chat. It went like this, and do not let her convince you otherwise:
Me: Wanna hear about this fic idea I've been toying with for fun, despite how it would obsly be so long and convoluted that I wouldn't ever actually do anything with it?
Her: Sure!
[insert details here]
Her: Wow, that sounds like a great idea! You should totally write that up!
Me: It's okay in theory, but I wouldn't know how to plot it out and the whole concept is kind of wish-fullfillment-gratuitous, and I just finished a novel-length fic and I don't really want to start another one... *ditherditherdither*
Her: Excuses excuses! *ahem* You-want-to-write-it. *jedi hand wave*
Me: I-want-to-write-it-- goddamnit! ><
Status: I do not have a plan, I do not have even more than a couple of plot points outlined in my head yet, but the prologue is written, and if you compare that to the above statement of how miserable I am about the thought of not finishing what I started, that probably already means I am doomed.

The vampire AU fic (If I have any karma worth a damn, I will be able to keep it relatively short. Possibly R, but I wouldn't count on it staying that tame.)
Status: Uh. There was this email conversation? Something like a rough mental outline?
This one is a lot like the above all over again, except that blame falls on velithya instead.

(...look, I just want to make it clear that it's not so much that I've suddenly been hit with the massive desire to write lots of porn, it's just that all these ideas kept showing up, being started, then being abandonned while I went off to write something easier. Only now it's hit the stage where there's basically nothing else but these ones left on the WIP pile anymore. ~~Or maybe I've just suddenly grown a backbone.~~)

Other
Side Red/Black AU fic (Probably a couple of thousand words, PG, will be dark)
Status: Couple of pages written in a couple of notebooks so far, maybe halfway through?
Spawned from this thread, there is probably little more that needs to be said about it. (Except maybe, "Yeah, drama CD based fic that isn't about Sol and Ky! Wonders never cease!)

Assassins ficlets (short, PG)
Status: Basically done, just have not gotten around to posting for assorted reasons. >.>
One Zato/Millia, one Zato/Venom, both hardly more than drabble length. The only real problem with these two is that they were inspired by those drama CDs I never got around to translating properly, and so remembering them is not as much fun as it could be... >.>

...yep, that should about keep me going for a while. x_x

Tokyo Gameshow: The much belated Guilty Gear report

2008-12-05T04:11:46Z

Finally done! ^^; Meant to have this posted ages ago (and I've still got all our WEWY stuff from the same trip to cover yet ><), but as so often happens with good intentions like that, distractions are plentiful and free time rather less so. Anyway, better late than never and all that, there is more than enough to cover.

Since I've already talked about the more general experience of the Tokyo Gameshow in a previous post (and the Squeenix closed theatre session elsewhere) I'll just summarise here: most of the interesting GG-related stuff happened on day two of the convention. I was cosplaying Millia, and velithya (my partner in crime for the purposes of this report) was there as Sol. We were there with a bunch of other friends as well, but they were cosplaying from other series, so won't feature so prominently in this report.

The ArcSys booth was pretty low-key this year. I was expecting they'd probably have some major promotional stuff for that upcoming ~~shameless GG clone~~ BlazBlue game, but there was next to nothing there about it. As compared to the giant display they had last year when they had Overture to promote, there wasn't much more than a small presentation area. This is not entirely a bad thing - as friends of mine had reported from last year, the advantage of being fans of a game made by a small company with a booth that doesn't get as much attention as the big industry names is that the staff are a lot less busy and a lot happier to talk to you or, say, track down Ishiwatari Daisuke for a cosplayer who wants a photo with him. Queues for the signing in the afternoon were much shorter too, which you learn to seriously appreciate after seeing how bad they get around places like the Squeenix booth.

The staff also included a helpful English-speaking staff member was nice enough to answer a couple of our bigger questions, which I'll cover here before I get bogged down with posting all those photos down below.

1. So what's up with the timeline these days, what with all the Overture confusion?
The short answer: all the major games from GG through the rest of the X series and including GG2 are canon, and they're all officially considered to be part of the same timeline.

The long answer is a bit more complicated, since it had to go through all the points where the original confusion came from. One of the main things that originally had people saying GG2 must be set in an alternate universe (massive stylistic differences and story WTF moments aside) was the baffling statement from several news outlets reporting GG2 as 'The first TRUE sequel' to GG1. In reality, it turns out what they actually meant by this was that unlike the GGX series which has dozens of endings per game, GG2 had only one story mode, making everything that happens the 'true' events. So essentially the statement 'the first true sequel' was by way of trying to package the fact the game had only a single, linear storyline as a selling point.

This was also went to explain what was really meant by the statements that GGX and GGXX were 'gaiden' or 'sidestories', which certain fans had leapt on and declared meant that the best selling parts of the series to date had been now declared non-canon. In reality, this was just another reference to the fact that since so many of the GGX-XX endings contradict (or make no sense whatsoever) and we can't make more than an educated guess at which the 'real' events were, most of the story mode from those games was gaiden. This is also presumably what Ishiwatari was really on about in the interview where he talked about parallel worlds splitting off from around GGX. This was one part of what I was going on with my own assumptions about Overture being AU, and which I can now and admit I misinterpreted.

I did try point out to the guy that even the very first GG game had a different ending for each character, making the idea that the gaidens start from GGX a bit debatable, and got only a vague reply about how it was pretty obvious Sol had been the one who really beat Justice (oddities like how Ky's GGX bio talks about him hearing Justice's last words are apparently not important enough to count here). In the end, I cannot blame anyone in the fandom for getting confused by all this 'true sequel', 'gaiden' and GG2 versus GGX stuff, it was not made particularly clear in the context we had. Possibly it was more obvious in the Japanese versions, and simply lost in translations when English news sources first started reporting about the game. But it's damn nice to finally have an explanation that clears all that up.

2. Is Dizzy officially Ky's Gear girlfriend from Overture?
The short answer: Maybe. Maybe not. For all the official sources will tell us, it could still go either way.

The long answer: To steal a phrase from velithya, when we asked our helpful staff-guy this question, he made like a hedge trimmer and hedged for all he was worth. If Overture's the same canon as the GGX series then whether we like it or not, it's hard to avoid it as the most obvious possibility; and a couple of AC+ endings certainly went out of their way to give Ky and Dizzy extra scenes together, but the word from on high is still not to make any assumptions. Stuff you hear from staff at events like this is never to be given quite the same weight as what's in the actual games, and I suppose it's possible that he was working on the assumption that as English speakers we weren't up with all recent canon developments, but I got the distinct impression this was a question he'd been told specifically how to answer should it come up. He wouldn't even say 'well, you can probably see where it's going', or 'AC+ should pretty much clear that one up' or anything else remotely that definite. All he would say on the subject is 'you'll have to wait until the end of the series to find out', which could still be any distance away. So they're not saying she is, and they're not saying she isn't, but it looks like AC+ wasn't intended to clear the matter up after all.

So this does explain, for one thing, why the latest artbook we picked up had only a few very rough sketches of her, and named them only 'Kohaku no Kimi' rather than anything more specific. But where does that leave the actual question? The hints that she and Dizzy are the same person have had all the subtly of an anvil, so if they just don't want to admit it officially yet that's a little on the lame side, but could that all just be misdirection? Are Dizzy and Ky going to go on a hunt for the truth about Dizzy's past and parentage and discover she's got a sister or something in the process? Given the WTF quota of the GG series even on a good day I would not entirely put it past them. However it turns out, I'm picturing another fannish implosion on the way. -_-

Naturally, it was only when we were on our way out that I thought of all the other questions we should have asked while we had the chance ("What's the plan for the series from here, with regards to Overture vs GGX style games? Is AC+ ever coming out in English? Were Overture's sales figures really as dismal as the Internet reported? Was BlazBlue really conceived by taking a Guilty Gear fanfic and changing all the names?" etc). >< Ah well, at least we got the big ones covered.

Jumping back to earlier in the day, we found out there was a signing on at the ArcSys booth at 3:30, so we spent most of the intervening time hanging out in the Designated Cosplay Photography Areas, variously taking photos or posing for them. Guilty Gear was reasonably well represented by Cosplayers at the TGS, but they were mostly Bridget. Also plenty of Dizzys, a couple of Sols and Kys, and a smattering of other assorted characters (an I-no, a alternate-coloured Anji and one of Izuna's nekomata-catgirls were among the ones we didn't get photos of), but still mostly Bridgets. A couple of those Bridgets were even actual males, including one English-speaking foreigner who wasn't cosplaying at the time but stopped to chat with us and show off some of his Bridget-cosplay poses. Anyway, velithya and I spent a lot of our time here either waiting in line to take photos of other GG cosplayers or grabbing them as they walked past to take photos with us. We got photographed a lot more than the first day (mostly because we were set up right next to one of the main walkways and everyone saw us, though probably also because I was dressed as a girl in a short skirt this time around ^^;).

Overture Sol and Ky, almost the only GG cosplayers we photographed on the first day (and we had to run after them and grab them for that), but I'm glad we did - their costumes looked fantastic.

An alternate coloured Jam and the first of many Bridgets. Only got a couple of photos of these two, the queue of skeezy guys waiting to photograph them did not move very fast.

(A funny thing about Japanese cosplayers, often even the ones with really impressive costumes will just have bought a pair of generic, off-the-shelf shoes to go with them, regardless of whether they look like what the character wears. One of our group suggested this might be because a lot of the good costumes have also been bought pre-made off the shelf, but even if so, shoes just don't seem to be much of a priority for them.)

A Kuro Ky and an Order Sol who came and hung out with us in our little corner of wall-space for a while. Lots of photos were taken, and we had a chat about what materials we used our various costumes (as best we could manage given the language barrier). They were pretty cool. ^_^

And later on we were joined by another Bridget.

While there were plenty of other Dizzys around that day, this is the only one we got to take photos of.

By this point 3:30 was rapidly approaching, so we headed down to the ArcSys booth to get in the queue, which was of decent length by the time we showed up but nothing too scary. Unsurprisingly, there were a good few other cosplayers around to keep us company. The ones who weren't in the queue were mostly taking turns to pose up on the small stage that took up most of the booth for photos.

These three were a group we ran into in the signing queue, though unfortunately they ran off afterwards before the group photos were taken. At least one of our friends managed to grab a couple of quick pics of them for us.

Stepping back a minute here to give out some context: velithya and k_chan009 (another member of our group and one of our three fluent Japanese speakers) were lucky enough to have gotten to go to the TGS last year and were now on their second visit. The neat thing about this is that a couple of the booth staff remembered them from last year - which shouldn't actually have been that surprising when you think about how many cosplayers from Australia they'd get coming past in a typical TGS weekend. Having k_chan009 with us was extra handy because she stuck around to translate for us - including compliments from one staff member who was enthusiastically declaring my Millia costume an example of how it should be done right and who made a point of making sure we stuck around at the end to pose for some photos up on the stage (and okay, it may not have been the creator himself, but there is something incredibly gratifying about having someone who works for the parent company go out of his way to compliment you on your efforts ^_^).

The new GG2 artbook was on sale at the convention (including a lift out card with the illustration from the cover of the 2007 artbook), so like most of the rest of the queue, velithya and I brought copies along to be signed. It must be said, I may have my issues with Certain Directions the series has taken lately, but getting to meet Ishiwatari Daisuke in person was hardly less of a highlight for it, and in person, he's really pretty awesome. k_chan009 jumped in to translate for us when we got to the end of the line, not that a lot needed to be exchanged beyond the books, a sheet with our names written down on it, a handshake and a lot of 'arigatou gozaimas's.

velithya getting her book signed. Points to note: the queue, stretching away to the left, including the sleeve of a random Ky-cosplayer who may or may not have been the one we got to photograph, and some guy in the background with writing on his shirt that is almost definitely Engrish.

So we got our books signed, grinned at each other a bit, leapt up on the stage for a few more photos. Everyone who went up there for a photo got handed a couple of goodies - generally a clear file with the GG2 cover art on it and a mobile phone hanger, though by the time we got up there they were out of the files, so we got handed a couple of extra hangers each, presumably to make up for it.

The rest of our friends were heading off at that point in order to make it across town before the Squeenix store shut, but we decided to stick around in hope of getting photos with Ishiwatari-sama after the signing was over. The English-speaking staff member from the booth was nice enough to keep us company while we waited and field those questions from above, and generally be as helpful and friendly as we could have asked for.

When the signing was wrapping up, a Zappa cosplayer ran around and grabbed everyone in costume who was left around the booth for a big group photo.

All the cosplayers at the ArcSys booth, including the Sol and Ky we met earlier, and two different Bridgets. And some guy who came in and sat at the front.

Things were quieting down by then, so when we asked if we could get that last photo with Ishiwatari-sama, he seemed pretty happy to indulge us.

We shook hands again afterwards, and somewhere in the process (and I am still not sure exactly how this happened) I turned around to realise my wig had gotten tangled on his and velithya's hands, leading to various jokes over the rest of the day to the effect of "Holy crap, Millia's hair really does attack people!" We apologised, Ishiwatari himself was again very cool about it all, and then we ran back to our bags and laughed ourselves silly.

Since they were just about closing down by this stage, so all the booth staff took a photo together. (I'm not sure where half these people came from, hiding around the back most of the time, maybe?)

So that was pretty much it for the day, and high time for us to head home and have a rest.

Life update

2008-11-27T00:43:13Z

...and it's a pretty important one, which has already come up in conversation with a lot of people, but here's the short version: as of the beginning of this month, I'm back at university to start work on a PhD.

The whole story goes back quite a way longer: as many of you would have gathered by now, I've long had this problem where I hated my job. There are assorted reasons, starting with the basic problem that what the firm I was working for calls 'environmental engineering' they would have been better off hiring a civil engineer to do, continuing with the general problem that pretty much any job which involves trying to make the mining industry spend money on anything worthwhile is like beating your head against a brick wall, and ending with the ongoing frustration of how most of the rest of the people in the office I've been working in are, while not fundamentally evil in all respects, still the kind of guys who think jokes about how women should stay home and cook all their meals never get old, and that the suggestion that global warming was invented purely by scientists for a research grant is incredibly witty and insightful, even when they've just brought it up for the third time in two months and all laughed about it like they've never heard it before. Then there's my boss, about whom I've said enough in previous posts. Needless to say, I've been in the market for a new job for a good long while.

Finding one has been more of a problem. I was being picky, on the basis of wanting to be sure that I'd be doing something I'd enjoy next time, but the application process developed into a discouraging pattern: Apply for job. Get promising response. Get called in for interview, which goes well, and get assured they'll get back to me within a week or two at most. Wait a week or two, phone up, get told there's been an innocent delay and they're still making up their minds. Wait another week or two and do the same again. Finally get in contact with them to learn that they're so sorry to have kept me hanging but they've decided I'm not quite what they're looking for, or possibly that everything's fallen through and they've decided they're not actually hiring anyone at all. Lather, rinse, repeat.

On the other hand, I'm one of those crazy people who actually really enjoyed her university degree. I went through my last couple of years with a great group of people, got to take a lot of units and be involved with a couple of projects that were genuinely interesting to me, and had my final year thesis supervisors trying quite hard to convince me to come back and do a PhD by the end of it. At the time, the overwhelming feeling I had was that no matter how much I liked uni, I'd been there five years already and it was high time to go do something that wouldn't involve committing to another three years there. Now, however, with a few years of well-paid experience in how much life outside university can suck, and rapidly coming to the realisation that all the interesting jobs out there that hadn't rejected me already required higher academic qualifications, things looked a whole lot different. So I called up my old supervisors to say I was maybe-sorta-thinking about perhaps considering the possibility of maybe coming back and doing a PhD, to which they responded just as encouragingly as before. Except that I hadn't picked the ideal time to raise the subject - there were months to go before the next round of scholarships would become available, but hey, at least that gave me lots of time to think about topics and make up my mind. Work continued to suck in the interim. The universe continued to fail to supply me with any better employment.

Then I got an email to say there was a mid year scholarship round going for people who wanted to start before the end of the year, and it closed in a couple of weeks, and would I be interested? Hell yes. The application was intimidatingly formal and required a couple of paragraphs summarising that topic I didn't have figured out yet. I was assured 1) this was absolutely essential for the application process, and 2) this did not actually have to be the topic I eventually wound up doing, and a dummy topic courtesy of my supervisor would do quite well enough. The important things are that I made the deadline, that news that I'd gotten the scholarship came back a couple of weeks before I left for Melbourne and hinged on the requirement I started a week after getting back from Japan. That, in a nutshell, is why so little on the subject has been said around here until now.

Showing up on the first day was a bit of a harrowing experience. I am still convinced it must have been some kind of miracle that when I got there there was anyone around who had any idea who I was or what I was doing there at all, or that one conversation with my supervisor was all it took to give me at least the comforting illusion the topic I'd been toying with so far was not only workable but made a lot of sense. Details have yet to be hashed out (a state likely to be maintained to some degree for at least the next two and half years) but it's similar to my original final year thesis topic, so at least I'm in familiar territory. To save you all the bother of asking, it's going to be on using wireless sensor networks to study microclimate parameters... and I can already see eyes glazing over at the back there, so suffice to say it sounds good to me.

I'm still waiting for it to dawn on me exactly what I've gotten into. I wasn't initially reluctant to commit to three years on a single project like this without reason, and I won't know until December until whether I've got one of the higher value scholarships which are enough to actually live on without undue stress. I am quite aware I'm likely to start twitching at the mere mention of my thesis within a year of now. And yet... I like being back at the university. It's a nice place to work, in a department full of people who mostly remember me from my student days and whom I mostly remember fondly, and who share a lot of my general philosophies about the world being a place worth taking an interest in. And damn but it's nice having something to work on that feels like it could go somewhere interesting, no matter how much work that might take me - especially as opposed to turning out yet another half-arsed report based on some suspect excuse for scientific theory, which, even if anyone important ever got around to reading it in the first place, will be out of date when all the plans change again in two months anyway. It's been a while.

It's a nice change. Certainly one I look forward to getting used to.

My weekend in summary

2008-11-25T02:29:47Z

Saturday night was the annual PAniC ball. I would give the experience two thumbs up - it had pretty much everything that was seriously lacking at the Amaranth ball, being a dance floor big enough to actually dance on, a proper photographer, announcements that were audible and quite decent food. Still noisy and crowded, but that's always the case. I do still feel a bit like all the time and space it takes for everyone to eat a three course meal interferes with what these events are really about - ie, catching up with people, dancing, taking photos and ooh-ing and ah-ing over everyone else's costumes. But I'm probably just biased by so many years at the Swancon Masquerade, where you'd better believe the budget for that kind of food has gone somewhere more important.

The plan was to pull out my Millia/girl!Ky balldress again for the event, which should have been a nice, easy costume since it was finished months ago. Only... I pulled it out a week before the ball to make one or two very minor repairs, and found myself thinking, "You know what this really needs to count as a real alternate Guilty Gear costume? BUCKLES!" And so those minor repairs became a bit less minor, required a couple of emergency supply trips and chewed up a lot of what was left of my week. It was, however, completely worth it - I was quite happy with how the costume turned out originally, but the new additions made all the difference. Also, since I had a girl!Sol in an awesome coat to take me to the ball this time, that killed any thoughts about spending any part of the evening claiming to be Millia, but that was completely worth it too.

Spent so much time dancing we hardly got many photos taken this time around and haven't gotten many of them back yet, but velithya has a few posted that we took after we got back. <3

Did not get much sleep Saturday night, mooched around on Sunday and didn't get much sleep for Monday either, now seem to be coming down with YET ANOTHER minor cold. >_< Goddamnit, I am taking my immune system back for a refund if this gets any worse! This year has been ridiculous!

My post backlog hasn't gotten any shorter in a while either. *sigh*

Oh hey, look at the date!

2008-11-20T10:38:50Z

Normally this would be a bit much shear fangirl geekiness even for me, but what the hey. A Happy Birthday to Ky Kiske!

And because clearly wrapping some ribbon around a tea-cup wasn't going to be enough to mark the occasion, and a couple of people made a point of requesting it specifically when that 50 Sentences Challenge fic first went up (a certain one of whom would not stop 'helpfully reminding' me how appropriate it was to the date), here's a 1600 word expansion on that not-even-drabble-length ficlet we will call only Number 11. Unbetaed, unfinished, and, to be honest, taking some quite considerable liberties with the original scenario. Also without a doubt the single sappiest thing I have ever written, and despite all promise, still woefully PG.

It was late by the time Ky made his way through the IPF entrance hall that night, with the satisfaction of a job well done and a case closed down to the last niggling bit of paperwork (Fiat iustitia, ruat caelum said the stones under his feet in flowing script – always a welcome reminder if a mere few extra working hours for that cause began to feel unjustified). The night air was crisp and cold through his official cloak, each breath producing a little puff of steam, but a brisk walk home would keep him warm enough. Paris, and most especially the IPF – never slept, but this time of night was as quiet as it ever was, the peace quite pleasant after such a long day.

“Yo,” called a voice out of the blue, and Ky snapped out of his daze to find himself looking into a small alleyway between two buildings he must have passed a hundred times before walking this route, and had to stop a second to make sure he hadn’t fallen asleep on his feet and was dreaming the whole thing. Wedged in the narrow gap and leaning casually against a wall not six paces away, there stood Sol, large as life, unmistakable even without the Order uniform he’d worn every day Ky had known him. The Fuuenken stood propped against the wall beside him, white edges glowing guiltily in the dim light in a way that gave the illusion it might be the sole source of what little illumination there was to shed light on the dark alley.

“Sol?” he blurted, not quite able to believe his eyes.

“Long time no see,” said Sol – and it was definitely him, even if Ky wasn’t sure he’d ever seen that particular grin on Sol’s face before and wasn’t sure what to do with it. “Miss me?”

“You…” None of that had helped convince Ky he wasn’t dreaming the whole encounter. The stolen Fuuenken drew his eye a little too easily. “Showing up here, right at the door of the IPF, what are you thinking…”

“Didn’t actually come here to fight with you today, if you can manage that.”

“Then why would you…”

“Came to wish you a happy birthday.”

Ky stared at him blankly, positive he must have heard that wrong.

“It’s past midnight, if you hadn’t noticed.” Sol stared back at Ky’s stunned look. “Geez, you did know it was coming? How hard have they been working you?”

Ky could not think of anything to say. Of course he’d known in the general sense even if it had been out of his mind at that particular moment. It was even a part of why it had been so important to have everything done tonight so as to give himself a proper day off the following one, but for Sol to be here personally to remind him… that demanded so many questions he didn’t even know where to start – everything from how Sol had arranged to be here to meet him at just this time, to how long he must have been waiting, to how hard he must have hit his head to consider doing anything like this, but the only one Ky could have put words to just then was, Sol knew my birthday?

If Sol thought he could avoid arrest by making Ky laugh himself to incapacity this would be a good start. Yesterday – or even an hour ago – news of Sol anywhere in the city would have had him running to the scene in a fury with the full might of the IPF in tow, but maintaining the anger was much harder when Sol was being so ridiculous. “You…. surely you couldn’t have come all this way just for that.”

Sol shrugged. “Eighteen this year, right?” He took a step forward into the light, letting Ky see for the first time that his new attire left his arms bare to the shoulder, the play of shadow over the curve of muscle momentarily very distracting. “That’s an important number,” Sol was saying. “Used to mean something.”

Ky couldn’t imagine what, it seemed an arbitrary enough figure to him. Some vague recollection of laws that went back a century or more nagged at him in an unhelpful way. He shook his head. It was quite unfair of the world to expect him to deal with this when he was already so tired, crazy feelings of elation notwithstanding. “Next you’ll be saying you brought me a present, and then I really will know the world has gone mad.”

“Not exactly,” pronounced Sol’s strange grin. He jerked his head in an inviting gesture. “Come here.”

“Wh…” Ky’s legs jerked forward a step of their own accord.

“Just trust me on this.”

In all the years of war he’d endured, Ky could not think of any time the sound of his own heart in his ears had been so loud as it was then, while he cleared the distance over the road into Sol’s alley. Sol took a step backwards to make space for Ky to stand facing him, back to the other wall, and in the narrow gap between the buildings that left them very close indeed. Against the night air in such an enclosed space, the heat Sol seemed to generate just by existing radiated out, warm and inviting. The look on Sol’s face – it was fond, there was no other word for it, and that may have been the moment Ky acknowledged exactly what was happening, exactly what Sol was going to do, and how strangely unmotivated he was to do anything to stop it.

Sol raised a hand, horribly slowly to thread his fingers into Ky’s hair at the side of his face; Ky convinced that from there he must have been able to feel his own heartbeat from there as loud as Ky could.

“I never imagined this could be how I’d finally meet you again,” he babbled, voice reduced to an awkward whisper. “Over a year you avoid me, and now this…”

“Was waiting for the right moment,” Sol whispered back, moving his hand very slightly in a gentle caress as he moved in.

“This particular birthday,” Ky might have laughed out loud but didn’t feel he was getting the oxygen for it.

“Call me old-fashioned,” said Sol, and leaned that last little bit more.

The first brush of Sol’s lips on his own was too light and fast to feel any more real than the rest of this experience, and yet already Ky found himself moving to try to follow the moment the pressure ceased. The next press was firmer, Ky needing no prompting to part his lips as the kiss deepened, was kissing back almost before he knew what he was doing. Sol went slow, whether to avoid scaring him or because he wanted to enjoy the experience or some combination of both; the whole sensation intoxicating – the last thing Ky would ever have imagined Sol could be so good at.

When Sol pulled back again at last Ky was faintly dizzy and panting, Sol still grinning like the cat that got the cream. To Ky’s mild horror, the first thing that came out of his mouth was, “Not done much of that before, have you?”

If Ky had been able to put words together after that his response would have been a protest that of course he hadn’t, exactly when was he supposed to have found either the time or the opportunity when there was always so much more important to do, and if Sol had really been sitting on these feelings ever since the war then who’s fault was it if even ‘not much’ was a bit of an exaggeration of the reality? which would have sounded so pathetic that it was a very good thing Sol cut him off before he could start.

“Didn’t mean it like that. All that means,” he said, leaning back in, “is you need more practice…” and then Sol was kissing him again, so much deeper than before, pushing him back against the wall under the press of his body, and somehow only then it clicked with Ky that Sol’s comment on his inexperience hadn’t been nearly as much an insult as something Sol was pleased about. If it was anything like this he would have happily agreed to as many hours of ‘practice’ as Sol thought he needed. He let out a soft moan, and Sol responded by trying to get even closer in a move that ended with their belt buckles colliding uncomfortably. Sol broke off the kiss and stepped back, frowning downwards. The only thought in Ky’s mind was that the offending items of clothing would have to go, and he’d barely started to think about what else that might imply when Sol looked up again, clearly mirroring some variety of the same thought.

“Damn things,” he grumbled. “Want to take this somewhere more private?”

Inexperienced or otherwise, Ky would have had no excuse for pretending he didn’t know exactly what that meant – well beyond taking an activity only as inappropriate as kissing away from a public space. It should probably have shocked him – should certainly have been something he took more time to think about whether he really wanted to do than five seconds at such a heated moment. But far from feeling unreal, now the whole experience was starting to resonate as maybe the only thing that had ever happened between him and Sol that had ever made sense, and losing that just when he was starting to get a hold on it… that was unthinkable.

“My house isn’t far from here,” he heard himself say, though surely Sol knew that, that was hardly the point of the implication.

“Perfect,” grinned Sol, stepping back to let him lead the way.

ETA: Fiat iustitia, ruat caelum: "Let justice be done, even if the heavens fall." Back when I was writing Collateral I made a brief reference to a 'pretentious latin phrase' engraved on the IPF entry way. aphelion_orion was nice enough to lend out her Latin skills by coming up with something beautifully appropriate for what that phrase might actually have been, and I may just have been looking for an excuse to use it ever since. ^^;

[Guilty Gear fic] Electricity

2008-11-18T12:21:32Z

By weird coincidence, to follow that spur-of-the-moment ficlet about Sol getting the Fuuenken from last week, next on my actual WIP queue was one about Ky getting the Fuuraiken, and they're not even remotely connected. ^^; I actually wrote the beginning of this one way back around this time last year, but left it unfinished at the time because I wasn't confident I could do the fight scene justice. Then much later I came back and wrote the ending in a random fit of inspiration - and from then on obviously I was going to have to fill in the middle one way or another. It's very satisfying to finally have this one done.

Title: Electricity
Summary: Sol watches a newly-promoted Ky trying out the Fuuraiken for the first time, and makes an unusual proposition. Or, fighting is not much of a substitute for certain other activities, but occasionally it comes close.
Characters/Pairing: Implied Sol/Ky
Rating: PG
Word count: 3633

The best thing Sol could have said about the ceremony was that at least they’d had the sense to keep it short. He’d spent most of it half-expecting – maybe even hoping – it was going to be interrupted by a panicked runner bursting in with news of a major Gear attack and remind all those twits what this sorry excuse for an army was meant to do with its time and effort. No-one with the basic awareness to remember how to hold up a sword could have been surprised by the choice of new Commander to replace the retiring Kliff Undersn; it had been common knowledge to everyone from the airship maintenance staff to Ky himself for months. They might as well have just sent the kid a memo telling him to move all his stuff to his new office and been done with it, but oh no – they just couldn’t appoint a new Commander without some kind of song and dance routine – to say nothing of the decision to mark the occasion by bestowing what anyone but Sol would have thought of as one of the Order’s holiest treasures on the young knight. As if half the Order didn’t already think the sun shone out of the kid’s ass.

It would have been interesting to see what any of those lines of star-struck knights who’d witnessed the solemnity with which Ky had accepted the Fuuraiken at the ceremony might have made of the scene Sol found in one of the training arenas late that night. Long after even the unofficial celebrations were over, here was the Commander himself, experimenting with his new sword like a kid with a new toy. It might have started off with the usual drill he put himself through daily – simple exercises to let himself learn the feel and weight of his new weapon, all the ways of channelling power that he’d never had available before – but there was a playfulness to his actions, a half-smile that flickered over his lips as he danced through the new moves he was practicing against his imaginary opponent. It would’ve embarrassed him terribly to discover anyone was watching him like this.

For all that he might have been carrying on like the kid he so hated being reminded he was, Sol had to admit it was eerie just how well the Fuuraiken suited him. You could have been forgiven for thinking the Jinki had been made with its future owner specifically in mind. Just how often did the world turn out a gifted swordsman with a penchant for the most obscure and difficult schools of offensive magic out there? Sol couldn’t think of any, and he’d been around since magic was something for children’s stories and obscure theoretical discussions that no reputable scientist would be caught dead getting involved in. The punch line where the truth was that Sol had made the thing himself nearly a hundred years previously, and even he couldn’t remember why he’d made a piece quite like the Fuuraiken anymore (not that it felt much like his own making – that had been Frederick’s work, maybe the last of it) should only have made it all the more irritating trying to figure out where that moment of precognitive insight could ever have come from or what deity up there was finding this funny. In fact, there was something strangely satisfying about seeing the way Ky was handling the thing.

Time to embarrass the kid a little.

Sol’s first footsteps into the arena echoed loudly around the room, making Ky freeze comically mid-swing as realisation dawned on him that he hadn’t been as alone as he’d thought he was. His head whipped around guiltily to see who was there. Hard to tell from his expression whether he was more or less embarrassed to discover he’d been caught out by the one man who could scarcely think less of him for it, but the discovery that it was Sol didn’t look to surprise him much.

“Sol?” he exclaimed, voice cautious, probably wondering whether this was about to lead into another argument about the sanity of someone his age being given a command rank.

“Little late for training, isn’t it?” Sol commented, wandering up.

“You were watching?” Ky asked nervously. So lost had he been in his own little world that Sol could’ve been joined by a small audience and he might not have noticed.

“Maybe. Enjoying your new toy?” Sol grinned at him.

Ky glanced at the Fuuraiken, still raised comically in the air since he’d frozen, and remembered to lower it at last. “Ah, well. It’s not going to be of much use to me if I haven’t learnt to handle it before I’m next called on to fight,” he said, smiling sheepishly.

Sol came to a stop in front of him. “Hand it over,” he instructed.

“Eh?” Ky started, frowning suspiciously. Sol jerked his hand impatiently. Still frowning, clearly unsure about what Sol might be getting at, Ky flicked the Fuuraiken around in his grasp and passed it over, hilt first.

Sol hefted it easily, remembering the feel of the weapon after so many years, then swung it upwards with a flick of his wrist. The motion sent a powerful charge of electricity leaping from the blade, effortless even without a grain of natural lighting affinity to his name.

Ky watched, wide-eyed in amazement. “H… how did you…?”

“What, you’ve been at this all night and you hadn’t even figured that out yet?” Sol grumbled dismissively, handing the weapon back.

Ky was still looking at Sol suspiciously as he accepted the weapon back, but within a couple of tries of his own, to his obvious pleasure, he’d managed to duplicate the effect.

Sol quirked an eyebrow at him when the boy looked back at last. Remembering himself, he said, “Ah… thank you for demonstrating that for me.”

Sol shrugged and passed his own weapon back to his favoured hand. On a whim, he asked, “Wanna try it out properly?”

Ky’s eyes flickered from the distraction of that movement back to Sol’s face again with a look of surprise. A small but very genuine smile quirked across his lips. “You’re actually volunteering? I never though I’d see the day.”

“Don’t get used to it,” Sol muttered, but in fairly good humour. Taking an attack stance, he added, “Ready?”

Ky took a stance of his own, still almost grinning at the older man he faced. “Any time you are.”

“Well? This is your show,” Sol prompted after a moment.

Ky didn’t need further encouragement. He glanced at the Fuuraiken one more time, weighing the options for opening moves, another small smile flickering over his lips. In the next moment he’d swung his sword down in a motion that was practically a signature move to send a crescent shaped bolt of lightning arcing toward Sol. By the time Sol had his weapon raised to deflect it there was a second Stun Edge to follow, and a third, faster than he’d ever seen the boy pull off that move before. Through the electric crackle of the third shot Sol caught a view of Ky’s face, the smile still very much in place, pleased with how much easier this became with the amplification of the Fuuraiken to support it. As the last static cleared he took off at a run, tracing a wide arc around Sol’s position, loosing another Stun Edge on his third pace without missing a step; quickly proving the challenges of aiming rapid fire on the move beneath him as the next three charges went straight for their mark, deflected only by the way Sol swung his weapon to meet them coming. Something like a compressed thunderbolt with enough power to really sting emerged from behind the last one, coming at Sol just when he’d been swinging through the easy part of the curve. Sol snarled and ducked sideways in time to feel the charged Stun Edge whistle past his ear in a trail of residual static that made his hair cling to his neck in a mildly annoying way.

He heard laughter that could only have been Ky. Partially vindictive – a moment when he’d even so much as startled Sol was rare enough to savour – but mostly just having fun. “Too much?” he teased.

Sol sent a fireball back at him before he could think of a snappier retort. Ky did not so much as flinch. He could have knocked it from the air with another counter blast, could have easily deflected or dodged it, but no such move was forthcoming. He stood his ground, focused in the way he sometimes used to stare down Gears four times his size, raised his sword and, on the last millisecond, sliced it clean out of the air, not even blinking.

Nice, Sol might’ve caught himself thinking, though the full shape of that thought would have been much more complicated to verbalise.

They met halfway in a shower of sparks; metal on metal, fire and lightning. From there it was all melee – the familiar old pattern of move and counter-move they’d rehearsed enough times over the last year to have down to an art. With the Fuuraiken in Ky’s hands today it all became that little bit different. Moves Sol had seen him do a hundred times had to be adapted in dozens of minutely crucial ways to fit the new weapon’s length and weight, but Ky hadn’t let those hours he’d spent training here go to waste. With every exchange he only refined it further – learning what old habits he’d have to break, what new advantages were there to be taken. It wasn’t perfect, not yet – there were distracted moments when outdated reflexes took over and left blows to connect at not quite the right angle or with his balance that little bit off, mistakes that could have cost him a real match. But Sol – just this once keeping with the spirit of the exercise – had a lot of uncharacteristic attacks of blindness in that match; grinned as Ky stumbled and stood ready to take the next blow when the boy righted himself again. Few such blunders happened twice. By the end of this he might well be handling that sword as though he’d wielded it for years; if anything, Sol had more reason to be put off his stride by the intrusion of the Fuuraiken into the familiar routine than Ky did. (And if there were a few moments when his own lazy habits cut in and he found himself startled by some move of Ky’s that didn’t work now quite how it always used to, a smirk from Ky was as much advantage as was ever taken of the fact.)

It never was the same twice when he fought the boy. Ky fought smart and had the kind of stoic determination you could use to prop up mountains, and he improved so fast you could see it happen day to day. Sol wasn’t stupid, but fighting wasn’t rocket science, not when he had Gear strength to do most of the work. He should have been able to take the kid on without breaking a sweat anytime, given he could beat Ky with a blow or could drive him into such a furious rage with a few words that it was no challenge, but even for Sol that got old fast, and with any other tactics Ky never made it that easy. Let him see a move once or twice and by the end of the week – by their very next match sometimes – he’d be coming up with some tricky little way to avoid it next time around. All that usually achieved was to keep him from being pounded into the floor until the next move, but it was enough to draw things out to the point of frustration, and if Sol did lose it after that and unleased something that would take a Gear down in a blow to settle the match, it was fifty-fifty the kid would’ve found a way to get past that too by the end of the month. Sol might’ve been stronger and faster and had a hundred odd years more combat experience up his sleeve to boot, but a sparing match against Ky forced him to concentrate, which was the kind of irritation Sol hadn’t had to deal with in longer than he could remember. Given enough time at that rate and he really might start closing in on Sol some day.

(Yeah, a hundred years or so would probably about do the trick.)

It was almost starting to make Sol see combat differently – break habits of a lifetime and stop and think out there on the battlefields once in a while, and that got to him in a whole other way. Staring at him with all that intensity every damn time, never backing down – it was more than any man should have to take. Damn brat could never learn to relax and enjoy a good fight for once.

This now – this was more like it. They knew each other – the way the other moved and even thought every moment on the battlefield – far too well to always take these fights so seriously. There was no need for the vindictiveness to pounce on every opening, and if Ky was so convinced that was the only way to learn even after he’d spent all his memorable years training in one place or another then either he needed his head examined or a whole lot of his instructors did. You’ve spent all that time and effort learning the steps, kid, now just forget technique for a day and enjoy the dance for once.

Ky probably didn’t even realise that was what he was doing today, the edge of laughter in every move, but then, not thinking was pretty much the whole damn point.

With every swing now there was the flicker of lightning – low charges but very much present – running down the Fuuraiken’s blade like rainwater. Showy more than useful, just a reminder to both of them how easy this was, that all it took was a thought now and there could be currents that would’ve drained the boy considerably a day or so ago arcing clear across the room. Sol could see from the timing of every flicker just what openings the boy would’ve been aiming for, and he answered them with fire.

So it went, magic to counter magic, starting as little more than the this-is-what-I-could-do kind of placeholder, but before long Sol was getting tired of that game and escalating every other move just to see how much the kid could take. Ky didn’t disappoint him – not while Sol was giving him plenty of warning each time he raised the stakes – and he was ready to meet every new blast. Close quarters combat began breaking up every few blows as great blasts of magical energy forced them apart, or met in the middle in showers of flames. No-one in their right mind would ever really fight this way, it was far too wasteful, too much power where a simple sidestep could have sufficed, but it was exactly the christening the Fuuraiken deserved. He’d never been able to fight half this seriously against the boy before without having to worry about overdoing it. It was exhilarating.

And then one of Sol’s own fire blasts was exploding right in his face, intercepted by one of those Stun Edges too fast and too close right at the incendiary point – typical sort of trick for the kid when he got cocky – and the only way to answer that was to up the ante again and see how Ky took a Tyrant Rave to the face. Sol didn’t get to see what Ky did when he saw all that coming towards him over the cover of his own attack, but however much power it had cost him to hold his ground he was right there when Sol burst through the last dissipating sparks and swung at the boy while he was still recovering, caught the edge of the too-slowly raised Fuuraiken almost on the hilt and sent him practically flying back, stumbling badly then turning the stumble into an elegant recovery that must have defied gravity and running back in low, and if Sol still had him off balance he was doing a damn fine job of hiding it. Lightning crackled harmlessly off the flat of Sol’s blade, an obvious distraction when the real attack was Ky going for somewhere around his kneecaps, and the only thought in Sol’s head in that millisecond was that if he could take all of that and come out smiling and still wanted to risk getting in that close, they could see how well he could take it at point blank range.

The idea that might have been overdoing it didn’t cross Sol’s mind until several minutes later, but it was a moot point by then.

The first thing that became visible under all the smoke that clogged up that corner of the arena for the next few minutes was the white tip of the Fuuraiken, lying discarded a handful of paces away. But a second later there was a hand emerging to grab for the hilt, the rest of Ky Kiske right behind, frazzled and dusted with soot but still holding to his feet to the very last moment. Sol was ready well before the blade swung back to meet him, blocked it once low and again up high, the last so close he was caught grinning right into Ky’s face inches away, and this time when a shock of high voltage current came his way he took it head on without blocking or hardly flinching and lashed back at the boy before he could register what Sol had done, forcing him back a pace on to the defensive. Caught in an ugly stance with a crucial second before he could right his balance enough to bring the Fuuraiken around for the next shot – and damn if Sol wasn’t going to feel this one if he tried anything that boneheaded again – he lashed out a weak kick instead which Sol couldn’t have said why he’d even bothered to dodge properly. The upshot left him inside Ky’s guard, closer together than either were expecting, Ky caught trying to flinch away from a blow Sol hadn’t made and attack all in the same movement that turned into nothing more graceful than a forward stumble just as it dawned on Sol that this was it, and they both went down in a tangle, Ky on top, the Fuuraiken burying itself point down into the floor not two inches away from Sol’s head.

For a long moment that was where they stayed while the world caught up again, the only movement in the way their chests rose and fell, the drop of a few beads of sweat from Ky’s face to Sol’s neck.

“Still… holding back against me… Sol?” Ky breathed in his ear after a while – barely, in between louder pants as he worked to get his breath back. Only once they’d stopped had the evening’s exhaustion overtaken him. It was a traditional question.

Asked like that, maybe it deserved a bit more honesty than usual. “Kid, the day I stop holding back against you, you won’t know what hit you,” Sol murmured, savouring the taste of the words, the arrangement in which they’d fallen bringing his mouth as close to Ky’s ear as Ky’s was to his.

There was a sharp exhale of breath from Ky in response, not quite a cough and not quite a laugh either, and an admission Sol might never hear again. “Well, I suppose you’d know best.” Arm tightening on the Fuuraiken’s hilt again he levered himself back to a kneel, and from there – a little less steadily – back to his feet. His whole posture was the picture of satisfied fatigue.

Apparently finding something amiss, he pronounced, “Thank you for the match,” – traditional nonsense, probably some habit from his student days. “It was most instructive.”

“Don’t get used to it,” Sol mumbled at him, getting back to his own feet, realised he’d said that back at the start and had to settle for hoping the kid wouldn’t notice.

“Ah. Then, all the more reason to for me to be grateful,” said Ky, apparently oblivious. His attention wavered for a moment. “What time is it?”

“Couple of hours to dawn?” Sol hazarded.

Ky gave a faint, self-deprecating chuckle. “No wonder. I should get some sleep.”

“Mm, won’t look good if the Commander sleeps in on his first day.”

Ky shrugged, no reminder of responsibility about to take the edge off his good mood. “If the Commander can’t decide to sleep in once in a while, I don’t know who can,” he declared lightly, and Sol had to face the unusual fact the kid had just made a joke.

Ky glanced back around the hall as though making sure he hadn’t forgotten something, or more, as though too tired to remember what it was he was wondering if he’d forgotten. Sol took that as a cue to put a hand on his shoulder and steer him gently towards the doorway. The Fuuraiken bumped clumsily against his leg once before Ky shifted to carry it more carefully, eyes flickering downwards. Admiring his new toy hadn’t gotten old yet, but it was hard to begrudge him that.

It really did suit him a little too well for comfort.

“Not bad for your first try,” Sol offered at the doorway. “Few more years, maybe… you’ll actually be making me pay attention.”

Ky’s clear laughter was the last noise heard in the training hall that night.