Request fic for yhibiki, who spotted the most references in The Gratuitous Vampire AU and wanted Pants on a Stick-verse fic, with Sol flirting with Ky while Ky tries to help someone. Somehow, this is what resulted. I feel vaguely like I've just written a Discworld crossover by accident.

Title: The Third Degree of Denial
Summary: Ky's trying to be helpful. Sol isn't. From an outsider's point of view, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.
Characters/Pairing: Sol/Ky, Sin
Word Count: 2030
Rating: PG

( It must be a hard job, being king. )

Ah, where to start on this one? It ties in with a lot of embarrassingly detailed theories I've been toying with for ages about exactly how the Sol/Ky ship could have been quietly ticking away in the background of the series all along. It's based in part on an attempt to give the first GG game some actual plot, and just as much on one of the most gratuitous premises I could have come up with. It's the angstiest Sol/Ky fic I've written since Game Over. There are a couple more parts mostly written following this one, though it's been stalled for a while now. We'll see if getting part one posted gives me the impetus needed to get going on it again.

Title: Five More Years
Summary: Guilty Gear: The Missing Link didn't tell us much about Sol and Ky's reunion. This wasn't because there was nothing much to tell.
Characters/Pairing: Sol/Ky, others from the first GG game.
Chapter: 1/?
Rating: R
Word Count: 2990

( TLater on, when he needed an excuse, Sol would blame most of what happened next squarely on the fact that after five years, Ky had still had the nerve to look exactly the damn same. )

Finally done! (Sorry for the wait - my beta reader's had to deal with a seriously uncooperative couple of weeks) Total word count now comes to 16,000 words, which I am embarrassed to admit makes this truly gratuitous AU the single longest fic I've yet finished in this fandom (even Chain of Command barely made 12,000). clearly this only means I need to get going with the next long to epic length fic on my WIP list ASAP

Also, now it's done – I've no idea whether people actually have been spotting most of the random (and often somewhat oblique) references to assorted other bits of vampire pop fiction scattered through the earlier chapters, but I'll, oh, offer a drabble request or something to anyone who can list the most of them. ^_~


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: 5 of 5
Rating: NC-17 overall, PG for this part
Word Count: 2260
Previous Parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

( Ky wakes mid-morning to find himself in his own bed, alone. )

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: 4 of 5
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 4690
Previous Parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

( The walk back to headquarters passes in a blur. )

After last year's somewhat lackluster Manifest experience we decided to give Smash a try this time around, which turned out to be as good a call as we could have asked for. Smash is a lot smaller than Manifest – probably not even as big as Waicon – but it may well have been the best organised anime convention we've ever been too. Queues were short and moved quickly, the staff were helpful and friendly and never seemed run off their feet, there were two excellent food stalls right outside, and there was even a live video feed of the cosplay comp for entrants to watch backstage while waiting for their turns. Things ran a bit late on the second day and they could have used more seating for the cosplay competition (a lot of people were left sitting on the floor, standing at the back or watching from the balcony), and the host for the event was, not to put too fine a point on it, not John, but none of that took too much away from the experience. The people were more friendly and enthusiastic than at any other con I can ever think of, and they stopped us to ask for photographs/complimented our costumes/oohed and ahhed over Lisa's art/recognised us from the Internet a lot over the two days, which all terribly good for one's ego. Lisa only managed to book a table for the Sunday, which turned out to be the quieter of the two days, but a respectable profit was still made and for once we had a day free to actually see what was going on around the con. All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable con experience.

( A bit of general travel stuff )

( Smash: Saturday - WEWY cosplay redux )

( Smash: Sunday - Ky and Robin cosplay )

( Monday - last minute touristy stuff )

Still a heck of a lot of things I've been meaning to get written up and/or posted sitting on the queue, but now there's no huge, urgent cosplay projects looming over me, that should be a little easier to get around to.

Full con report is taking some time to assemble, so in the meantime, the uber-summarised version:

Joshua and Sho cosplay: Runner-up Best Skit on Saturday! \o/

Ky cosplay: Runner-up Best Cosplay on Sunday! \o/ \o/

Smash: Very possibly the best run anime convention we've ever been to.

Sydney fandom: Incredibly friendly and completely deserving of such a good con.

Catching up with friends/getting to know some new ones: Only sorry I won't get to see you all again sooner. <3

Sydney shopping: Left us a bit poorer but very much the happier for it. :3

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: 3 of 5
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 3070
Previous Parts: Part 1, Part 2

Because if we've learned just one thing to be from the collective works of Anne Rice, it's that vampires are really just an elaborate metaphor for gay sex.

( Except sometimes, when there's no metaphor. )

Did I say this was going to be four parts? Obviously when you all thought I said four what I actually meant was five. >.>

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: 2 of 5
Rating: Rapidly moving towards R territory
Word Count: 3230
Previous Parts: Part 1

( A quiet night in this job in a city of this size all too often means only that all the trouble is going on somewhere out of sight. )

Only nine months late, finally I have gotten around to sorting and posting all those photos from our The World Ends With You cosplay photoshoot in Shibuya last year:

Part 1: Six overenthusiastic cosplayers take on Shibuya
Part 2: Even more locations
Part 3: Omake

Next on the to-do list, it is so very past time I got those WEWY fic of mine posted - especially considering they've now been finished and betaed for weeks and really just need a few final edits. Free time for such things has been such a limited commodity lately. >.>;

In not completely unrelated news*, pinneagig and I are now all booked up for flights and accomodation for attending Smash this year (an anime con in Sydney about three weeks from now, for the link-phobic). We'll be running a stall there selling all her usual artwork on the Sunday - Saturday we plan to do this crazy new thing where we actually wander around and maybe even participate in the rest of the con for once.

Having been talked into cosplaying Ky around the same time those WEWY photos should have been posted** I've given myself the target of getting the costume done in time to wear it in Sydney, but it's looking thoroughly doable right now - and that would be the other thing eating up my free time around here lately. That and all the GG or CLAMP fic that's similarly overdue to be cleaned up and posted. Not to mention maybe a couple of things buried in the depths of the Cable&Deadpool kink meme... ah, new fandoms, you are so very bad for my WIP list.

* it's about travel! And cosplay! In fact, we're planning to take the WEWY costumes along for this one (because clearly they just weren't well travelled enough yet).
** NOT MENTIONING ANY NAMES

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. )