Gray Cardinal's Nest

The Most Difficult Four Months (1/2)

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 06:32:33 GMT

Title: The Most Difficult Four Months (1/2)
Pairing: Beckett/Castle
Additional Cast: Capt. Montgomery (cameo); Kevin Ryan (offstage); sundry drivers, waiters, etc.
Word Count: 2500
Author: graycardinal*
Rating: PG (for the presence of adult beverages)
Warnings: None.
Spoiler alert: None I can think of; OTOH, futurefic.
Summary: After a strenuous case, Beckett needs to talk to Castle. But first there are preparations to make....

A/N: Sequel to Why Maine Is Such A Good Idea, second installment in The Autumn of Our Content (projected trilogy). This is lattelady6's fault; she asked for Castle's and Beckett's side of the conversation, and plot bunnies must have been listening. Note that Chapter 2 may be somewhat delayed by the Yuletide assignment I should be working on....

*The author tag "author: carmen sandiego graycardinal" is amusing but inaccurate.

The Most Difficult Four Months

Yuletide 2009: Dear Santa...YuleGoat...Solstice Llama?

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:46:01 GMT

Or possibly Solstice Lama, since only a truly enlightened soul would have matched with me on a Yuletide fandom. Salaam, salaam, salami -- [pause, deep breath].

Okay, I'd better stop now, before someone reaches through the Internet and thwaps me upside the head for excessive punmanship. Suffice to say "Welcome" to my Yuletide writer (and anyone else who may end up tossing something in via pinch-hit or Yuletide Madness), and a sincere and heartfelt thanks-in-advance for the effort and attention you'll be giving to one of these requests.

General notes first: As I've noted in prior Dear Whoever letters, I am mellow and flexible in my reading preferences -- I read widely and in a number of different categories as well as fandoms. I most appreciate strong character and/or story development, whether in something as compact as a drabble or as expansive as an epic. If you poke around in this journal and my FFN material, you'll observe that I have a fondness for fandoms and fanfic featuring high levels of wit and snark; I'm not opposed to angst, but I don't tend to wallow in it. I am definitely a crossover junkie, with the caveat that the crossover needs to do full justice to everyone involved. Which can be done in more than one way, and I worship at the altar of those who cam pull off really insane crackfic with a straight face.

I am in no way opposed to hot(!) sex(!) in my fanfic as a general principle, but I generally don't read fanfic for the sex, and most of my present Yuletide requests are not strongly pairing-oriented. I've read and liked gen, het, slash, and a surprising amount of kink, but I just don't get either mpreg or most genderswap, have yet to meet a fandom-of-interest where incest made sense to me, and consider adult/child a definite squick. Also, in my book, well-rendered UST is a thing of beauty, and resolving it often has a tendency to severely dim the sparkle in a lively pairing.

Castle • Alexis Castle
I’ve listed Alexis by herself here, and (recognizing that optional details are optional) I will be deeply pleased with virtually any Alexis-centric story you choose to write. Having said that, I’d be particularly intrigued by a story that shows her interacting with one of the other women (as in “other than Beckett”) in Castle’s life – especially Lanie Parish, Martha, or even Gina-the-publisher. One other request: in deference to canon to date, I’d strongly prefer not to delve into Alexis’s sex life, with the possible exception of futurefic in which she appears as an adult.

Not a lot to add to the request proper, save that having suggested a crossover elsewhere in my requests, I'd be remiss not to note that I'd be inordinately amused by a plausibly designed crossover in this fandom -- although, as noted, that would be Way Above The Call Of Duty. Three thoughts: (1) While it's awfully tempting to peg Alexis as a possible Potential in the post-series Buffyverse, I wonder if she might not actually make a better Watcher-in-training. (2) See the Gargoyles prompt below. There are a lot of ways a crossover there might go -- Alexis crossing paths with Angela, with Demona (and/or "Dominique Destine"), with Elisa, perhaps even with Titania or the Weird Sisters. Bonus points for a meeting between Beckett and Elisa Maza, although that's probably a different story entirely. (3) Two words: Jessica Fletcher.

Also, while I've specifically requested Alexis, and made mostly female-centric plot suggestions, this emphatically does NOT mean that the various male characters are barred from appearing

Gargoyles
First: while I am not mortally opposed to Xanatos/Owen slash, neither is it remotely what I had in mind for this request, and I would be just as happy if you didn’t go anywhere near there. Optional details being optional, almost anything else goes, but I give you three plot bunnies for your consideration: (1) something mildly adversarial featuring Owen and Xanatos operating at cross purposes (this would most likely put Puck, at the least, into strong background), (2) something that explains or otherwise addresses Owen’s periodic turns as Xanatos’ personal chef (given everything else Owen does, that seems like a very odd aspect of his duties), or (3) it would be deeply, deeply amusing – though way above and beyond the call of duty – to see how these two might interact with a certain Richard Castle and his entourage.

I'll observe here that I'm only marginally aware of developments in the Gargoyles comics, so I won't be at all troubled if you concentrate on something taking place in the TV series timeframe. OTOH, I've read enough online and in fanfic so that a story taking place in later continuity should still be readable (worst case, I'll have to go hunt down some comics, O woe is me [yeah, riiiight]). Do absolutely feel free to bring in additional characters as you see fit, not excluding appropriate crossover characters if you're so inclined.

Linda Haldeman - The Lastborn of Elvinwood • Thomas Heaton
This has been my fandom-of-one request for some while now. I’ve always been curious about Tom-the-vicar’s history; there’s got to be a story about how he fell into company with the likes of Merlin and the Fernlord (presumably not at precisely the same time, but who knows?). Definitely feel free to use any other characters from the book that fit your inspiration – and/or, if the plot bunnies call for it, to spin wickedly appropriate crossover characters into the mix.

Odds are that this is not a fandom on which the YuleCode has matched us; as noted above, this book has been my Yuletide fandom-of-one for several years, and I've been pimping it fairly aggressively of late. (See various other of my posts under the Yuletide tag herein for more detailed pimpage.) I definitely recommend the book (which is obscure but not, so far as I can tell, especially difficult to track down), whether or not you have any intention of writing fic to go with it. OTOH, if by some incalculable good fortune you've read the book before now, and are at all motivated to write said fic, you will have my undying gratitude. And very possibly cookies.

Robyn Tallis - Planet Builders series • Daphne DeVries
With as large a cast as there was in Planet Builders, not everyone got as much stage-time as they should have – and of all the underused characters, I’m particularly fond of Daphne, both because of her lively personality and because I’m also a big theater fan. Almost any Daphne story you can imagine would be greeted with delight, whether during canon (or even pre-canon) or long afterward; also, feel entirely welcome to make use of other canon characters and to partner or pair her up as you think appropriate. Working in her theatrical interests counts as a definite bonus but is not required.

Barring a very late surge in popularity, it looks as if there's exactly one Yuletide player with whom the codemonkeys can match me on this fandom. If you are that Yuletider, I likely don't have to explain how amazingly cool this series was, and how amazingly cool it would be to see new Yulefic set in this milieu. The above prompt is very, very general -- but not only am I reluctant to tie down a potential writer for this too closely, this is one case where I really will be happy with virtually anything that shows up, serious or comic, epic or intimate. A romance, a career, an unknown Lost City, a 20-years-later reunion piece -- any of these will make me go all misty-eyed for at least a week.

If you are not the one Yuletider who knows what I'm talking about -- and you can find this series, which has been OP for a long time and is likely to stay that way (the packager that put it together vanished without leaving so much as a trail of breadcrumbs, and the rights issues are murkier than a Magic 8-Ball at the bottom of the Sargasso Sea) -- you've got a treat in store. Imagine Andre Norton (or maybe Charles Stross) writing Tom Swift, only with more pirates and a fair amount of Buffy-esque snark, and you have the beginnings of an idea of the tone. This was classic planetary adventure with a modern spin, the likes of which has been rarely seen, and it's a darn shame the series disappeared as thoroughly as it did.

# # #

And there you have it. Go go Gadget-Llama Word Proc- . . . no, wait, I'm getting excessively silly again. I think my typing fingers have gone off their meds or something.

Yuletide nominations and pimpage

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:16:33 GMT

As the fanfic world ramps up for Yuletide, posts elsewhere remind me that I ought to do a bit of fandom-promotion -- especially considering that I've nominated a whole slate of unreasonably obscure fandoms this time around. Herewith the list:

Legend (tv)
Not the feature film with the unicorn, but the 1995 series starring Richard Dean Anderson and John de Lancie. Yuletide's been fairly kind to fans of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. -- it's time we had some new adventures for Ernest "Nicodemus Legend" Pratt and Professor Janos Bartok.

Kate Chambers - Diana Winthrop series
If there is a more obscure fandom in the entire Yuletide database, I'd be surprised. This was a series of a half-dozen slim "teen sleuth" mysteries first published in the 1980s; the setup most closely resembles the Nancy Drew universe, but the settings were more realistic, the plots more complex, and the characterization somewhat more adult (anticipating the "Nancy Drew Files" incarnation of that series a bit, perhaps); the individual books also featured dedications/homages to various classic mystery writers. There doesn't seem to be a good Web resource for the series, though individual titles are findable from the major used-book vendors (in some cases, at insane-looking prices). "Kate Chambers", incidentally, was one of several pen names for a writer named Nicole St. John [not, apparently, children's mystery writer Wylly Folk St. John, as I initially thought] whose best-known nom de plume was probably Norma Johnston.

Linda Haldeman - The Lastborn of Elvinwood
A very brief summary of this novel: English bachelor and actor Ian James is walking home from his village's theater one evening when he notices two of his neighbors slipping quietly into the nearby wood -- and when he follows them, he finds himself in a Faerie court straight out of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Except that the faeries are fading away, and as penalty for snoopiness Ian is recruited to help them exchange one of their own for the infant child of a visiting American family. While the book is long out of print, it's findable in larger libraries and on the used market, and is well worth seeking out -- fans of Tanya Huff's more humorous books and those of the Wrede/Stevermer para-Regency fantasies should find this utterly charming.

Muppets
All right, the Muppets aren't really obscure at all -- but after signups closed last year, I realized that Kermit and friends had somehow not made the cut, and we certainly can't have two Yuletides in a row with no Muppetational content.

Robyn Tallis - Planet Builders series
Not quite as thoroughly forgotten as the Diana Winthrop books, but close. This was a series of ten paperback-original SF novels dating from 1988-1989, featuring a sizeable ensemble cast of teen heroes and heroines living on a newly colonized planet -- sort of as if someone had hired Andre Norton to write a season of Veronica Mars in Space. In this case, though, the "Robyn Tallis" alias belonged to a collective including Sherwood Smith (Inda), Debra Doyle and James Macdonald (The Price of the Stars), Bruce Coville (the Magic Shop books and others) and Mary Frances Zambreno (veteran writer of fanfic and YA fantasy). Great straight-ahead classic SF adventure with much admirable teen-aged snark. Copies are likely findable via the Net, but I have no good sense of how rare they may be -- still, this did get a bit of exposure in the genre community when the series appeared, so it's not completely unknown.

Tom Swift - Fourth Series
My favorite of the several incarnations of Tom Swift, boy inventor -- and it's not a coincidence that some of the writers behind these books were prior Planet Builders authors. This version is notable for incorporating some nifty SFnal ideas, as well as a strong recurring villain in Xavier Mace aka the Black Dragon; also, there were thoughtful nods to prior continuity.

Zombie writer rises from grave, film at 11:30

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:40:06 GMT

No, I haven't posted new chapters in any of my ongoing projects (soon, I hope). But I've joined the tthdrabbles community (devoted to drabbles crossing the Buffyverse with anything and everything else), and posted several entries over there. Links as follows:

The League of Extraordinary Blondes (Episodes #1 and #2)
(BtVS/Smallville/Veronica Mars)

Words Matter Most
(BtVS/NCIS)

Murder, She Sang
(Angel/Murder She Wrote)

Something Borrowed, Something Green
(BtVS/Power Rangers Dino Thunder)

Travels With Spike
(Angel/Sherlock Holmes)

Yuletide 2008: Recs (1 of ?)

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 20:56:30 GMT

A very preliminary handful of Yuletide recommendations (there may well be more later):

In Which Worlds Collide and Eeyore Investigates a Terrible Crime
A. A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh. Crossovers are a risky business with a universe as distinctive and beloved as Pooh's, but this story dovetails its source canons with eminently fine craftsmanship (and a couple of very sly twists). Illustrated, yet. And there are footnotes.

Fanfare, Fan Fiction, and the Fourth Wall
Boston Legal. Not a fandom I'd ordinarily seek out, but the blend of comedy and meta -- and very sharp meta it is -- is irresistable, wondrous, and completely in keeping with the source material. Also there are footnotes. And the scary thing is, I can see the courtroom scene actually happening....

The Tiger Song
Calvin & Hobbes. A very short mostly-verse with the precise and perfect pacing of the original strips. Pitch-perfect; sometimes brevity is right.

The Seconde Tale of the Wyf of Bath
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales. A very funny blend of Chaucer and meta, with footnotes. [There seems to be a pattern developing here....]

Mrs. Pollifax and the Family Connection
Dorothy Gilman, Mrs. Pollifax series. One of the stories that drew me into Yuletide in the first place was a Pollifax fanfic; like that one, this is short, clever, beautifully characterized, and makes excellent use of Bishop. Unlike that one, there's no crossover element, but this one doesn't need it.

Make a Joyful Noise
L'Engle, Austin/Murry/O'Keefe series. Short but appropriately so; a thoughtfully constructed moment between Dave Davidson and Emily Gregory, post-The Young Unicorns, that displays a canon-worthy ability to blend the practical and the appropriately intimate.

Action Dude vs. The Steel Hwarang
Seanan McGuire, Velveteen vs. series. This is the story written for me -- a funny, ingenious extrapolation of life in (and beyond) the shadow of the Super Patriots, Inc. West Coast Division. Probably best to have a look at the canon material first (see helpful link above, start from the bottom), as this picks up right on the heels of present continuity, but it's a small canon and a universe of surpassing superheroism-mocking niftiness. Oh, and before you ask, yes, this one's safe for work, proving its author's superheroic power of restraint.

Fanfic Advent Calendar, Mark II

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:42:03 GMT

Because I am feeling insane, and can all too rarely resist a challenge -- we'll make another try at this:

Herewith the Fanfic Advent Calendar, Mark II (concept and rules-template cheerfully adapted from cadhla):

What's that?
An advent calendar counts down the days from December 1st to Christmas in some fashion. Mostly I've just seen the ones that involve opening little tiny cardboard doors to find the chocolate surprise inside. The fanfic equivalent, pioneered by the above-mentioned and scarily prolific cadhla, involves producing a flashfic daily starting on December 1 and concluding on Christmas Eve. (Yes, we're also working on yuletide stories...why do you ask?)

Flashfic is essentially short fiction -- as little as a paragraph, as much as a page -- that isn't constrained by the precise word count that makes a drabble a drabble. [A salute to mtgat here, who rightly pointed this out the first time I tried this.] Basically, it's a way of staying short and sweet while giving oneself a little room to play around.

Oh, neat!
Why, thank you.

What fandom?
Multi-fandom. As long as I know it, it's fine.

Uh...how does that work?
Every day will have a fandom, a title, and a character or pairing. These will (we hope) be taken from the comments on the previous day. Things need to have a holiday theme; this is, after all, a countdown to Christmas.

So if I comment first, I can tell you what to write?
Not quite. Whatever is suggested has to interest me, and it has to be in a fandom I know. (I have just now updated my Interests list to include fandoms that weren't there before. However, the list is not necessarily exhaustive, particularly for older TV -- both live and animated -- and for literary fandoms, although I write some of those pretty sparingly. So feel free to suggest things even if they're not on the Interests lists....) I'll go back over the previous day's comments when I get ready to write the next day's entry, and work from there. I won't go back more than a single day unless a day receives zero comments -- that means that you need to comment again if you want me to consider your suggestion for the next day, and so on.

How are you doing the first one?
By looking at any comments I get on this entry, of course. [Or, if necessary, by punting.]

Can I do this, too?
By all means! Just let me know, so I can wander over and...suggest...things. Heh. Heh. Heh.

Game on!

To my Yuletide writer (2008 edition):

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 22:36:55 GMT

Dear yuletide Santa:

First order of business: an apology. I had meant to get in on Monday and replace at least one of the non-matchable fandoms in my initial signup, but time and circumstance intervened (also, I was hoping one of the two would become matchable again at the last minute). As a result, I can be confident that you've been matched to one of two, rather than one of four, of the fandoms I requested (and I rather suspect the odds strongly favor one of those, but we'll see).

Anyhow. First some general notes (mostly reprised from prior years):

I am a fairly mellow Yuletider with wide reading interests. That said, my attitude toward much slash (particularly m/m as opposed to femslash) is more or less meh. I'm not opposed to it, providing it arises plausibly out of the character relationships; the Kim Possible fandom produces an impressive amount of well-written Kim/Shego material, for instance. OTOH, it also produces a lot of well-written Kim/Ron, which I like equally well. As this may suggest, I am most interested in fic with high story value as opposed to fic defined by its pairing or 'ship. Having said that, I hasten to distinguish "story" from "plot"; I emphatically do not mean to suggest that I'm not interested in character-driven fic -- quite the contrary. And having said that, I should add that I very much appreciate strong plotting, too. It's definitely not a coincidence that the fandoms that tend to attract my attention combine strong characterizations with equally strong plots.

Kate Chambers - Diana Winthrop series (Lydian Sinclair)
Do not worry about this fandom for this year. It's brand new to Yuletide via my own nomination, and is apparently even more obscure than I thought it was (and that was pretty darned obscure in the first place). A brief description for pimpage purposes: this was a series of a half-dozen slim "teen sleuth" mysteries first published in the 1980s; the setup most closely resembles the Nancy Drew universe, but the settings were more realistic, the plots more complex, and the characterization somewhat more adult (anticipating the "Nancy Drew Files" incarnation of that series a bit, perhaps); the individual books also featured dedications/homages to various classic mystery writers.

There doesn't seem to be a good Web resource for the series, though individual titles are findable from the major used-book vendors (in some cases, at insane-looking prices). "Kate Chambers", incidentally, was apparently a pen name for children's mystery author Wylly Folk St. John; the Lydian Sinclair character I requested (introduced in the second book, Danger in the Old Fort) was a journalist, novelist, and understated romantic interest for Diana's widowed father. I definitely recommend the books if you can find them, and I hope I'm not the series' only surviving fan. But for this year, this one is clearly a wash.

Linda Haldeman - The Lastborn of Elvinwood (Thomas Heaton)
Also not a matchable fandom this year, though I did enough pimping during the signup process that there was a window where it was matchable, and I know there are other Yuletiders who've at least heard of this book. It's also a reasonably compact novel and a fairly quick read; irrespective of fic-writing assignments, I absolutely encourage you to hunt down and read the novel -- in addition to the usual online sources, this can be found in many larger libraries.

A very brief summary of the story: English bachelor Ian James is walking home from his village's theater one evening when he notices two of his neighbors slipping quietly into the nearby wood -- and when he follows them, he finds himself in a Faerie court straight out of "Midsummer Night's Dream". Except that the faeries are fading away, and as penalty for snoopiness Ian is recruited to help them exchange one of their own for the infant child of a visiting American family. Haldeman's writing simply charms, in the very best sense of that word, and she weaves Shakespeare, Arthurian lore, Gilbert & Sullivan, Peter Pan, and just a touch of Agatha Christie into a story that absolutely sparkles. If you like Patricia Wrede, Good Omens, the Narnia series, and/or The Princess Bride, you are likely to find Linda Haldeman a joy.

If you do read the book and choose to write in the setting, I don't think I need to elaborate much further on the request itself. I will be hugely gratified by nearly any angle of the canon and character you choose to explore (although I have to say that I have a hard time imagining the good Vicar in a slash piece).

Seanan McGuire - Velveteen series (any)
If you're one of the two other Yuletiders who offered this fandom, you don't need the above link to the canonical adventures of Velma Martinez aka Velveteen (four stories as I post this -- five if you count the two parts of the Flashback Sequence separately -- all quite concise). You already know just how wickedly zany and yet utterly compelling this saga is. Also you undoubtedly know much of Seanan's other work, including her contributions to Yuletide itself. If you are not one of those other two Yuletiders, click through and prepare to be amazed (remember to start at the earliest post and work forward).

I admit to a degree of mischievousness in nominating and requesting Velveteen in the first place; this is a very new setting, and given that its creator is deeply infused with fannish sensibility to start with, there's something vaguely incestuous about asking for fanfic of these stories. That said, I'm also completely sincere: I think the canon is utterly nifty and deserves to be expanded on, and that short of cloning Seanan so she can write even faster (technologically impractical), fanfic is clearly the next best option. As to what to write? I won't even begin to prescribe, save to reiterate from the request proper -- respect the canon. I'd be wary of going too far forward in time, so as to avoid diverging too far from future-canon, but that still leaves lots of room to go sideways or back, to highlight minimally referenced other characters, and to inflict righteous whomping on the Marketing Department. Or, in theory, to explain why the whomping might not be righteous after all (hard to imagine, but who knows?). Like Oliver in Oliver Twist, I will be eminently pleased if I can just have some more.

Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? (Carmen Sandiego)
This is my third go at prying Carmen fic out of Yuletide; odds are decent that this time, I've at least got a match on the fandom, and it's certainly the least obscure of my requests for the year. If we've matched on Carmen Sandiego, I will be very, very happy for the chance at a Carmen story at last. That said, don't let me stop you from reading the Velveteen stories -- and the Haldeman novel if you can get hold of it -- and if the mood strikes you to write in one of those fandoms, I will be equally delighted to have that story instead.

As per the prior requests (click on my "yuletide" tag to bring up the old letters): I'm fascinated by Carmen's growing connection with Zack & Ivy; a story that moves that forward will make my year, but virtually any solid Carmen-centric tale will be welcome. I've noted before that het or gen make most sense to me in this fandom; slash strikes me as unlikely, but not impossible -- though no Carmen/Ivy slash, please, and let's not even think about Zack/Ivy as a Wincest-ish pairing [washes brain out with soap]. Definitely bring in secondary characters as needed or desired, particularly the Chief and Avalon. As to capers, I am equally fond of Carmen the gadgeteer and Carmen the old-school cat burglar; it's the theatrical flair that counts.

Good luck! (And no, this message will not self-destruct in five seconds. That's another universe entirely....)

Meme: Lettered Characters

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 22:20:59 GMT

Inherited (and then much delayed in responding) from azarsuerte:

1. Comment on this post.
2. On request, I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters whose names begin with that letter.
4. Post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.

I was assigned the letter T, which produced a reasonably good-sized list. Characters I considered but didn't ultimately choose for comment included T'Pau (and a lot of other female Vulcans), Tasha Yar, Tara Maclay, Terry (Batman) McGinnis, Thundarr the Barbarian, Thomas Magnum, Tigger, Titania, Tony DiNozzo, and Trixie Belden.

Those who did make the cut:

Talia al-Ghul (Batman/DC Comics universe)
I don't know that I ever really understood the dynamic of the romance between Talia and Batman (perhaps most because I can't even begin to imagine Talia and the Bruce Wayne aspect of the Bat having had any sort of chemistry). But Talia is a fascinating character nonetheless. In a real sense she's the direct counterpart of Robin/Batgirl/Beyond!Batman -- the heiress to Ra's al-Ghul's legacy as the others are heirs to the Bat's. But she is far less constrained, or constrained in very different ways, than any of the Robins, etc., ever were.

Mind, the story I'd like to see someone write (or if someone's written it, to read) is the prequel to the Batman Beyond episode in which we see Talia -- that is, the moment in which the Key Moment of Transition occurs. (If you have not seen the episode, I'm not going to say more about that; if you have, you know exactly what I'm talking about.) Somehow, I very much doubt that matters were as tidy as we're told they are....

Temeraire (Temeraire series, Naomi Novik)
The fascinating thing about Temeraire, for me, isn't so much that he's a dragon. It's that he's an innocent -- but a uniquely and enormously powerful innocent. What makes Temeraire's character interesting is that, for all that he's an instrument of war and can kill great numbers of people in one fell swoop (and here, "fell swoop" is a literal reference rather than metaphor), he is in many ways an emotional toddler, asking "Why?" all the time -- not to be annoying, but out of a sincere desire to learn. Only in Temeraire's case, because he's got much greater raw intellect than the average toddler, his "Why?" questions are deeper and more difficult -- and because he's got much greater physical power than a human toddler, the consequence of not answering those questions to his satisfaction is much greater. Novik does an impressive job of adapting the "Why" stage of childhood to the draconic life cycle, and it remains fascinating to watch the series develop. [There are also "Superman" parallels to be drawn here, but that's probably another essay for another time.]

Canon Thomas Tallis (Time universe, Madeline L'Engle)
We do not see a lot of Canon Tallis -- I first ran across him in Arm of the Starfish, and he subsequently appears in various of the books focusing on Poly (and possibly also, if I remember right, in The Young Unicorns). But he's enormously influential and enormously likeable; he is a rock in the face of danger, and a useful shoulder, and that rarity, a deliverer of morals who manages not to be preachy about them despite being an agent of organized religion. I always wanted to read more about Canon Tallis -- it seemed to me that, just as there are clearly many more stories about Charles Wallace than L'Engle chose to tell, there are more about the Canon than we were ever told. And it's not an exaggeration to suggest that Canon Tallis ,and L'Engle's formulation of Christian philosophy, had a great deal to do with the development of my own attitudes toward spiritual belief in general and Christianity in particular.

Tom Swift (Tom Swift series, "Victor Appleton")
Strictly speaking, "Tom Swift" is several different characters. I'm not old enough to have run into the true first-generation Tom Swift (who invented a Motor Boat, a Motor Cycle, et cetera, and actually married sweetheart Mary Nestor partway through the series) as a youngster; my first Swift was Tom Jr., inventor of Flying Labs, Spectromarine Selectors, and all manner of other vehicles, robots, and mechanical marvels. But my favorite Swift is the fourth Tom, whose 1990s series relocated Swift Enterprises to modern southern California and combined solid action plots with actual science fiction ideas -- time travel, nanotech, artificial intelligence -- while giving due credit and homage to its forebears. More than any other version, Tom #4 had fun with science fiction . . . and too little tween-SF has done that in any age.

Trot (Wizard of Oz universe, L. Frank Baum et al)
It will surprise no one who's read my Oz-based Yuletide story that Trot is by far my favorite Oz heroine. I never really took to Betsy Bobbin (and as far as I can tell, neither did Baum -- she fades pretty much into the woodwork after her first appearance). Dorothy is appealing in the early books, but once she moves permanently to Oz, the stories tend to portray her as taking her good fortune too much for granted, and she loses a certain sense of innocence. By contrast, Trot seems to retain a degree of wide-eyed wonder, and also to enjoy adventure for its own sake in a way that Dorothy never does. [I really need to track down copies of Sky Island and The Sea Fairies....]

As the Cardinal flies....

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 05:49:48 GMT

For the ~~legions of~~ half-dozen or so loyal readers still lurking in the shrubbery hereabouts:

I've signed myself up for a Finish-A-Thon over at multific, which involves committing to finish a presently-unfinished WIP. This is relevant because you, the aforementioned ~~legions of~~ half-dozen or so loyal readers, get to help determine which of the four WIPs I'm actually required to complete.

The post with the voting-poll is here; feel free to wander over and join the ~~clamor~~ heckling....

Meme: 15 Characters

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:06:52 GMT

Borrowed from liviapenn (her results here):

I've made a list of fifteen (15) characters from a variety of fandoms. Your job is to ask questions about various combinations of these characters (examples: What secret past do #8 and #14 share? What if #2, #6, and #9 went on a road trip? If #5 and #10 were having dinner, who invited who?), which I'll do my best to answer.

Notes:
Obviously, one shouldn't peek indiscriminately at the comments thread before posing a question, as there will be spoilers for who's where on the list as the game progresses.

OTOH, if some numbered characters are consistently overlooked, questions concerning these yet-unknown characters are encouraged so as to give everyone on the list a chance at the limelight.

Given the diversity of the list, there's definite potential for generating highly weird and improbable pairings based on the direction of the questions. Management will do its best to respond to all queries posed, but reserves the right to designate some results Just Too Bizarre To Contemplate.

Let the game begin!

FIC: I Suppose This Means They Read the Fanfic (10/10)

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 10:23:00 GMT

********************
I Suppose This Means They Read the Fanfic (10/10)
A Sitch in Slash: Episode #2
Fandom: Kim Possible/Narbonic
Author: Gray Cardinal
Rating: PG -13
Classification: You tell me....
Summary: An assassin's after Shego, Mrs. Dr. Possible is trying to resolve matters without involving Kim -- and you just know that's not going to work out....
********************

And now, the conclusion....

Epilogue • I Think I Can Live With Being Squicked

Dr. James Timothy Possible eyed the roast chicken suspiciously, then looked up at his wife. “I thought it was brain loaf night.”

She shrugged. “I had a busier day than I expected,” she said, “so we stopped at Food Tiger on the way home.”

“Mrs. Dr. P. totally rocked,” Ron Stoppable said, from two places farther down the table. “Even during the part where she was a gerbil.”

James gave Ron a sharp look – as, he noticed, did both his wife and daughter. “Gerbil?” he asked. “Kimmie-cat, have you been going on missions with our daughter again?”

She shrugged. “Not exactly. I was doing a favor for – one of Kim’s professional acquaintances – and things got just a little out of hand.”

“Professional acquaintances,” James echoed. “We wouldn’t be talking about one of those circus folk, now would we?”

“I’m quite sure she doesn’t work for the circus,” his wife said, just as Rufus finished the scoop of mashed potatoes he’d been eating.

“Shego!” said the naked mole rat.

Ron glared down at his pet. “You weren’t supposed to tell!” he said sternly.

James Possible’s eyebrows went up. “Shego . . . that’s the woman who works for Drew, isn’t it? You were doing a favor for her?”

Kim spoke up. “It’s – complicated,” his daughter said. “And she was right to be worried; Shego could’ve gotten killed. Or gerbilized. Or maybe even zapped into another universe.”

“I see,” James said, his tone deliberately ironic. “And that’s supposed to make me less concerned? Kimmie-cat, you’re a brain surgeon, not a super-heroine.”

“I was just trying to protect Kim,” his wife protested. “I didn’t want her to get caught in the crossfire.”

“Crossfire? There was crossfire?”

The Possible women looked at each other across the table. “Oh, all right,” Kimberly Katherine said, sighing. “It was like this . . . .”

By the time she finished the story – with contributions from Kim, Ron, and Rufus – James had found a legal pad and was scrawling notes. “Quantum tether . . . vortex inducer . . . parallel universes . . . hmmm. There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” he said, looking up from the notepad. “From what you’ve told me, I don’t see how this Mell person disappeared when she did. The device your Dr. Narbon was using obviously didn’t complete its charging cycle, or they’d all have vanished – but if it wasn’t fully charged, it shouldn’t have been able to send anyone back.”

Kimberly Ann frowned. “Hmm. You know, somebody had to send Mell across in the first place – and it obviously wasn’t Helen. So she could’ve had her own recall gadget all the time.” She traded another glance with her mother. “You think they’ll try again?”

Kimberly Katherine pursed her lips thoughtfully, then shook her head. “It’s possible, but I doubt it; most likely they’ll just go on to something else.” She chuckled. “As long as Shego doesn’t write any more stories about them, anyway.”

# # #
“So where’s Mell?” Artie demanded as soon as the momentary wooziness from inter-universal transit had worn off. The three of them had rematerialized safely at Narbonic Labs – but they’d appeared across the room from the teleporter, rather than inside it.

A brief but thorough search of the premises failed to locate the evil intern. “No idea,” Helen said at last, peering at the innards of the quantum tether. “Maybe across the street, maybe somewhere in one of the universes between there and here. This thing was definitely not fully charged when she poofed out.”

“Not fully charged? Then it shouldn’t have worked at all, should it?” Dave asked.

“You wouldn’t think so,” Helen said. “On the other hand, those Gerbilizers Mell borrowed worked way better than I’d have thought, so who knows? Back to work, people!” she added.

Several hours later, the lab’s main entrance flew open with a bang. “Did you miss me?” came Mell’s cheerful voice.
Artie, Dave, and Helen all converged on the intern. “Group hug!” Helen announced.

“Oof! Need to breathe here!” Mell said after several moments.

“Where were you?” Dave asked. “We were worried.”

Mell pirouetted, mini-skirt flaring. “Had to shower and change,” she replied. “In case you hadn’t noticed, the locals over there did a real number on my outfit.”

Helen cocked an eyebrow at her. “You didn’t have any trouble with the transit?”

“It was a little rough,” Mell said, “but nothing serious. What took you guys so long?”

“It got – complicated,” said Helen. “The white hats over there are entirely too well equipped. I don’t suppose any of the weapons you ‘borrowed’ actually made it home intact?”

Mell shrugged. “Just a couple of the concussion grenades. I haven’t been in a firefight that messy in ages!” she added happily. “When can we do it again?”

Helen eyed her severely. “They phase-shifted a specimen jar, re-dehydrated a capture net, threatened me with high-energy plasma, fried my quantum tether, and zapped us back here with their own tech. Unlike some of us, I’m not suicidal; one trip was more than enough. However,” she added, seeing Mell’s disappointed expression, “you get an A for effort. Give me a list, and we’ll see about restocking the weapons locker.”

“But I didn’t get to flambé Shego!” Mell protested. “And those stories!”

“Under the circumstances, I think I can live with being squicked once in awhile,” Helen said, then added, “Still, it is too bad we didn’t manage to bring that red gerbil back.”

Artie glared at his creator from Dave’s shoulder. “She was a human being! That would have been kidnapping.” Then he sighed. “On the other hand, it would’ve been nice to have someone my own size to talk to.”

Helen’s eyes acquired a faraway look. “Someone your own size,” she muttered softly. And she wandered off in the direction of the genetics lab.

Artie exchanged a worried look with Dave. “She’s got an idea.”

“Yup,” Dave agreed. “Business as usual. Coffee?”

“Root beer,” Artie said, as they headed for the break room.

# # #
Notes:

I'm way overdue in posting this last segment here; lately, most of my KP-related energies have been concentrated over on Fanfiction.Net, where there's a very active community of talented fic-writers devoted to the series. While I have absolutely no intention of abandoning this journal or LJ -- Kim Possible is only one of my fannish interests, and there's too much neat stuff going on over here -- I'm not sure yet whether it's a good plan to post all of my KP material both there and here, particularly since I've now directly linked to my FF.Net profile page from this LJ (opinions from the gallery would be welcomed).

Meanwhile, alert readers will have noticed that this story has been retitled; I decided late in the game that the original title was too obscure and not closely enough connected to the story. Also, Mrs. Dr. Possible’s name morphed in the initial upload of Chapter 9 (and there were a bunch of weird HTML artifacts in the LJ post). I have now re-edited the post to fix both the formatting glitches -- note to self: retroactively editing HTML in an LJ post is a pain in the posterior -- and the continuity error.

On Mrs. Dr. P: while Season 4 canonized "Ann" as her first name, for this series I choose to retain "Kimberly Katherine". James’s dialogue above illustrates my reasoning. I'd wondered for a long time about the origin of his pet name for his daughter ("Kimmie-cub"); as suggested here, it's a diminutive of "Kimmie-cat", his nickname for his wife. It also occurred to me that the single most likely reason we’d never heard Mrs. Dr. P’s first name prior to Season 4 was that Kim had in fact been named for her mother, and it would’ve been too confusing for viewers to hear both characters referred to as “Kim”.

There will be at least one more Sitch in Slash story; the next is tentatively titled Once More With Ninjas, though very likely not for either of the reasons you’re thinking. However -- as indicated above -- I'm presently working on a variety of other KP-related projects, so it may be some time before that story works its way to the front of the queue. Among the plots presently simmering: Unsealed With A Kiss, beginning a projected four-part series concerned with the Kim/Ron/Yori triangle; Monkey Chi, Monkey Du, a crossover with Jackie Chan Adventures; and The Claws That Cuddle, a fusion with...on second thought, let's let the name of that franchise remain a mystery till that story goes live.

And none of this counts various other irons in the fire, fanfic and otherwise....

(previous chapter)
(chapter 1)

Yuletide: Post-Reveal Notes

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 07:51:50 GMT

And so 2008 has arrived, the Yuletide author credits are up, and folk are madly wandering round the LJverse hunting Santas. (Elmer Fudd voice: "Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting witers!") While I don't anticipate vast hordes of groupies trampling the furniture hereabouts, both of the stories I wrote have attracted a number of comments and a handful of recs, so it seems appropriate to provide a bit of commentary here.

So:

About The Solitary Sorceress of Oz:

This isn't actually the story I'd initially planned to write. I had a plot in mind very early concerning Uncle Henry, Aunt Em, a unique piano, and two sets of very small critters with Interesting Abilities. However, I spent too much time plotting and not enough time drafting, and I realized as the deadline approached that I had considerably more plot in hand for that story than I did time to get it written down.

So I set that story aside and started thinking about what I did have time to finish. That led me almost at once to Glinda. Her origins are never discussed in any of Baum's Oz books, and to my surprise, neither Thompson nor any other major Oz author seems to have addressed the matter either. [Incidentally, I highly recommend The Royal Timeline of Oz as a fantastic source of information on all things Ozian, including links to original Oz stories.] It also occurred to me that in canon (as Trot points out in the story), it's very rare to see Glinda except when someone needs her help.

I chose Trot to investigate Glinda's origins for a couple of reasons, not least because she is easily my favorite of the three girls who've taken up residence in Ozma's palace. I never really warmed to Betsy Bobbin, and post-Emerald City Dorothy seems to me to lose some of the sense of wonder that makes the first few Oz books as special as they are (also, having the Magic Belt at her disposal makes it difficult for writers to provide Dorothy with much in the way of adventuring challenges). Of the three, Trot's the one who actually tends to go looking for adventures, and the contrast between her small stature and her outsized curiosity makes her particularly appealing to me.

And from there, virtually all that was needed was to put the two of them together. Trot's questions about Glinda's past mirror my own as I looked back at the early Baum books, and the answers -- Glinda's mortal origins and her essentially self-taught powers -- provide a clear, straightforward explanation of why she didn't intervene in Ozian history sooner than she did. That said, the story introduces an even more mysterious puzzle: who originally built the Quadling castle and stocked it with all those books and magical instruments? (I deliberately didn't even try to explain that one, and I don't have the faintest idea what the answer is.) Fortunately, the story is as much about Trot and Glinda making friends as it is about Glinda's secrets, and that gave me an enough material to hang an ending on.

The comments on Solitary Sorceress have been wonderfully gratifying; I was trying very hard to work within the framework of the extended Oz canon in tone as well as detail, and it's good to know that the attempt seems to have succeeded.

About The Story of the Djinni and the Professor:

I have been an Arabian Nights fan since I was knee-high to the proverbial grasshopper. When I was very small, we visited my grandparents' house for a week in June, another week in August, and sometimes after Christmas, and while they had lots of books, there were only about four that I found remotely interesting -- one of them being a one-volume collection of many of the more familiar Arabian Nights stories. I've been scarfing up stories of djinni and sultans and disguised caliphs and scimitar-wielding thieves ever since (I particularly recommend Elizabeth Ann Scarborough's The Harem of Aman Akbar, the two Arabesques anthologies edited by Susan Shwartz, and the three-fourths of a glorious quartet written by Stephen Goldin, all of which deserve not to be out of print, darnit).

I am also, as a couple of commenters have deduced, an SF reader with a taste for Asimovian logic, and they've pegged this story precisely -- it's the classic "three wishes" problem crossed with a "science vs. magic" theme. From a writer's perspective, it's an easy plot to write; the hard part is making the execution distinctive. Arabian Nights stories live or die by their narrative voices; if you can't make the reader hear the sand blowing off the pages (or the LCD display), you're in deep trouble. And "three wishes" stories live or die on the strength of the twist in the tail; it can't be too easy to spot, but it also can't be too much of a curveball. As much of a challenge as those problems present, it was great fun writing this, and again, I'm inordinately pleased that people are enjoying the result.

Thanks very much to everyone who's commented on one or both of these stories; I'll be responding to the individual comments as soon as I can. (I believe I have emailed copies of all the responses to Djinni; several of the comments for Sorceress, however, appear not to have made it through the email engine.)

Yuletide: Thanks & Recs

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 21:24:56 GMT

Whoof.

Over 2000 stories in the Yuletide archive, and I've had not nearly enough time to sort through. My own two contributions have been well-enough received if not among the year's breakout works (not that I was expecting any such result), so all's well on that front.

Now to a collection of recs:

Arthurian Legend - Concerning the Wine which was Spilt....
A straightforward but extremely readable retelling of a part of the original Malory. The virtue here is in the detail and the insight into Arthur (and Morgan).

Batman:TAS - If Wishing Made It So
This Yuletide's been something of a windfall for Batfen; my favorite, among a number of good stories in several versions of Bat-continuity, is this relatively light tale of a Bat, a Cat, and a Christmas gift.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century - Canticle
A delicate bit of balance, gentleness and angst. And Twiki in a Santa hat.

Commercials - What Dreams May Come
The Rozerem beaver and his friends, with some intriguing fourth-wall-breaking twists. This one's got layers.

Diane Duane, Young Wizards - More Things in Heaven and Earth
It's also been a windfall Yuletide for fans of this series of books, with a number of excellent tales. This one I find fascinating for being a (thematic) homage to Madeleine L'Engle as well as a look at a little-seen character in the canonical stories

Mary Poppins (movie) - Where the Air Is Clear
Clever, thoughtful extrapolation thirty years ahead, opening as Bert haunts the rooftops of London during the Blitz.

Relic Hunter - Beloved Disciple
This is the story written especially for me -- and it's a pitch-perfect evocation of the TV series, complete with a Russian relic, a diabolical trap, and a dance way out to the edges of UST. Better yet, just like the original show, it has the uncanny ability to recognize its own dance with convention and cliche for what it is, and to wink merrily at the audience/readers as it does. This was a romp of the best kind, and I'm very glad to have received it.

Shakespeare, Twelfth Night - Yule Morning, or Malvolio's Revenge
[glyph of awe] This one is flat-out amazing; it is -- believe it or not -- the manuscript of a complete play in Shakespearean blank verse (and prose, as appropriate) constituting a sequel to Twelfth Night. And it works. The writer here has accomplished a truly astounding feat of craft, and I can't overstate just how astonishingly well the material's rendered.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit - The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down
This has the look of becoming 2007's signature Yuletide story, with cameos and running gags scattered all across toondom and into Hollywood proper, complete with references to Enchanted and the new Alvin & the Chipmunks movie, not to mention 2005's notorious Yuletide Care Bears fanfic. I count it the second-niftiest crossover epic of its kind -- not quite the equal of Bugs Bunny vs. the Borg (aka Carrot Juice, Earl Grey. Hot), the now-lost collaborative epic from GEnie's SFRT, but darned close.

Whoof!

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 05:11:41 GMT

And the Yuletide story is uploaded. With something like fifteen whole seconds to spare.

I honestly didn't intend to push the deadline anywhere near that close. Three things happened: I realized partway into my first-pass story that I had too much plot for the available remaining writing time; I underestimated the impact of a new part-time day job on my writing schedule; and I failed to anticipate losing about a day and a half to a nasty throat bug that sucked most of my energy, mental and physical alike, clean out of me.

However, the second-pass story went almost precisely as planned, and upload formatting was entirely painless.

I think I shall now fall over....

Yuletide: Dear Santa

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 19:26:43 GMT

Now that Yuletide assignments have gone out, herewith the customary Dear Santa letter:

First of all, I am a fairly mellow Yuletider with wide reading interests. That said, my attitude toward much slash (particularly m/m as opposed to femslash) is more or less meh. I'm not opposed to it -- providing it arises plausibly out of the canonical character relationships -- and I've read a fair amount of slash that I've quite liked, but I am generally more interested in fic for story than I am for pairings as such. (This is one reason I tend to specify single characters in Yuletide requests.) Note that I say "story" rather than "plot", because I emphatically do not mean to suggest that I'm not interested in character-driven fic -- quite the contrary; OTOH, plot is also a Good Thing, and much appreciated.

You may also notice, if you glance backward at the fics and drabbles posted here (it's not that big a backlist), that I wander as often as not toward the comic side of the Force. While I don't mind darkness in context, I am a real sucker for well-tuned humor, and I gravitate toward fandoms that incorporate comic elements.

Linda Haldeman: The Lastborn of Elvinwood
As it turns out, I was the only offerer/requester for this; I briefly contemplated changing my requests at the last moment, but time ended up not permitting -- and I kept holding out hope till the last moment, too. That said: whatever else you end up writing, I encourage you to hunt down and read this book; it's long out of print, but your library may possibly have the hardcover, and the paperback isn't impossible to locate online. A very brief summary of the story: English bachelor Ian James is walking home from his village's theater one evening when he notices two of his neighbors slipping quietly into the nearby wood -- and when he follows them, he finds himself in a Faerie court straight out of "Midsummer Night's Dream". Except that the faeries are fading away, and as penalty for snoopiness Ian is recruited to help them exchange one of their own for the infant child of a visiting American family. Haldeman's writing simply charms, in the very best sense of that word, and she weaves Shakespeare, Arthurian lore, Gilbert & Sullivan, Peter Pan, and just a touch of Agatha Christie into a story that absolutely sparkles.

Relic Hunter
Of all the cheesy syndicated action series we got during the last big wave of cheesy syndicated action series, Relic Hunter was one of the first, and to my mind it was one of the very few that actually managed to be fun, and to strike the right balance between playing things straight and recognizing the inherent implausibility of its setup. It certainly didn't hurt that they cast it beautifully, either. On balance, I liked the first season or so better than the last episodes -- toward the end they got a little too serious-minded for my taste, and stopped playing with the highly entertaining UST between Sydney and Nigel in favor of lots of Sydney's past associates. The Sydney/Nigel relationship is just fascinating -- there's definitely chemistry there, and a degree of attraction on both sides, but it's a different kind of chemistry than (for instance) the Laura/Steele chemistry in Remington Steele. In Remington Steele, resolving the UST actually worked, even if some of the surrounding plot was a bit bizarre; OTOH, I think the UST in Relic Hunter works precisely because it's unresolved, yet always simmering.

The other cool thing about Relic Hunter is that -- for an absolute wonder -- it tended to get the broad strokes of its history and folklore more or less right. Sure, it extrapolated wildly into the paranormal, but the writers seemed to have an unusually good grasp of their source material for Hollywood/Vancouver.

Tom Swift: 4th series (1991-1993)
I have been reading the classic teen-sleuth books (Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, etc.) since I was six or so, but had only come across a handful of the classic Tom Swift (Jr.) adventures (Tom Swift and his Flying Lab, or ....Spectromarine Selector, or ....Paracyclic Phase Inverter -- okay, I made that last one up, but you know what I'm talking about). And I had pretty much ignored the short-lived third series of Tom Swift stories, set mostly in outer space. But when the fourth series came along (starting with The Black Dragon), I noticed, because it so happened that at the time I was reading SF novels by the likes of Sherwood Smith and Debra Doyle/James Macdonald -- and Doyle & Macdonald, it turned out, had been recruited to write a couple of the new generation of Tom Swift novels.

I was instantly hooked. The books had the spirit of the earlier series (and did a good job of nodding toward prior continuity), but the setting was very much up to date, the SF elements were handled well, and above all, the characters came across as smart without being square. To my mind, this iteration of the Swift series has one of the best supporting casts in the entire teen-sleuth universe, and I only wish they'd managed to showcase Tom's sister Sandra just a little more in the course of the franchise.

Where On Earth is Carmen Sandiego?
This is the one of my requests held over from last year. As I observed back then, Carmen Sandiego actually does have a body of fanfic attached to it, if a small one -- but a huge proportion of it is focused so closely on Carmen that it drops Zack and Ivy out of the equation, and one of the things I find most fascinating about the series is the evolving relationship between Carmen, Zack, and Ivy as the show progressed. The series also did a superb job of balancing the adventure elements with solid educational content, and maintaining an element of fun throughout.

Now having said that, I did not include Zack & Ivy in my character spec for this request, so you're under absolutely no obligation to humor me in exploring that relationship. I will be entirely pleased with virtually any Carmen story you can come up with -- except, I should observe, that I absolutely do NOT see the Carmen/Zack/Ivy relationship as having a significant sexual dimension. Adventure, romance, swashbuckling, devious Carmen clues, it's all cool, and if you're motivated in that direction, I wouldn't object in the least to a crossover encounter.

Good luck, and good writing!

FIC: I Suppose This Means They Read the Fanfic (9/10)

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 02:51:52 GMT

********************
I Suppose This Means They Read the Fanfic (9/10)
A Sitch in Slash: Episode #2
Fandom: Kim Possible/Narbonic
Author: Gray Cardinal
Rating: PG -13
Classification: You tell me....
Summary: An assassin's after Shego, Mrs. Dr. Possible is trying to resolve matters without involving Kim -- and you just know that's not going to work out....
********************

We're in the home stretch....

9 • That’s What You Get For Underestimating the Gerbil

Beep beep be-beep! Kim blinked; that was definitely a Kimmunicator signal, but it wasn’t coming from her Kimmunicator. Her eyes – about all she could move easily from within the Narbonic Labs no-longer-dehydrated capture net – tracked the source of the sound to the unit Wade had given her mother, still lying on the sidewalk.

“I’ve got those EEG—wha-?” Wade stopped in mid-syllable, apparently taking in the change in scenery: Kim, Ron, and Shego squirming in their nets, while Helen and Dave stood a few feet away. Dave had Mell Kelly – also netted – slung over one broad shoulder; Helen, Artie perched atop her head, held her quantum tether – which was humming faintly –in one hand and the peanut jar containing Kim’s mother in the opposite one.

Almost at once, the Kimmunicator rose into the air like a tiny hovercraft, and Wade’s voice spoke urgently. “I need seventeen seconds! Do something, guys!”

Helen grinned. “We’ll be gone in elev-OWW!”

The quantum tether didn’t explode when the finger-sized flash of green plasma hit it, but it crackled, glowed momentarily, and stopped humming as the pulse knocked it out of Helen’s hand. She made a grab for it, but with the jar in her other hand she couldn’t quite keep her balance, the device landed on the sidewalk with a thunk, and Helen herself dropped to her knees and just managed to avoid losing her glasses. She did lose Artie, who had made a desperate but successful leap to Dave’s arm as Helen teetered.

“One for the locals,” Shego said with a sardonic chuckle. As she spoke, the flying Kimmunicator skimmed quickly forward and extended a glowing silver needle toward the peanut jar. The shatterproof plastic shimmered . . .

. . . and without waiting for a cue, the elder Possible sprang forward straight through the temporarily phased material to land awkwardly atop the Kimmunicator, which promptly retracted the needle and flew back to hover next to Kim.

Helen tossed the now-empty peanut jar aside with a muttered curse, picking up the quantum tether, but she spared the airborne Kimmunicator a glance first. “Not fair! Impressive, sure, but that was totally a deus ex machina.”

“Not true,” Kim’s mother replied. “Wade demonstrated that function for me about six chap—“ she paused, “er, a couple of days ago.”

Helen didn’t acknowledge the remark; she was busy examining the quantum tether. “Damn,” she said, “it looks like it’s shorted out. I’ll have to—”

SNAP!

Air whooshed inward, filling the space where Mell Kelly had been in the previous instant. Dave stumbled but kept his balance, and Artie grabbed for Dave’s ear to keep from losing his perch.

Helen eyed the quantum tether suspiciously. “That shouldn’t have happened. You’d better not have fried it,” she told Shego.

“Or you’ll what, shoot me with the death ray you forgot to pack?” the mercenary retorted. “Gee, I’m scared.”

“You’re also kind of tied up just now,” Helen retorted.

“You mean I was tied up,” Shego said, smiling wickedly as her entire body began glowing faintly green. The capture net’s strands visibly thinned; after a few seconds Shego flexed her arms and legs, and the netting crackled and shattered. She picked up a fragment and studied it. “Uh-huh, all nice and dehydrated again. Clever.”

Helen regarded Shego with a surprised expression. “Darnit, those nets were supposed to be plasma-proof!”

Shego responded with a feline smile. “But not heatproof. It’s all about the temperature control, Doc.”

Kim took as deep a breath as she could considering the snugness of her own net, and tried not to grit her teeth as she spoke. “Um, a little help over here, please?”

Shego glanced in her direction. “First things first, Pumpkin,” she said, wreathing her left hand in green fire as she reached down and lightly scooped up a certain candy-apple-red gerbil in her right.

“If you don’t mind,” she said, turning toward Helen again, “I’d kind of appreciate it if you could un-gerbilize Kimmy’s mother here.” As she spoke, she conjured a ping-pong-sized plasma ball, allowing it to roll around in her left hand.

The mad scientist stood up, eyed the fireball bemusedly, and shrugged. “What part of you never know with prototypes did you not get? If I understood Mell back there, your friend got hit with the very last Gerbilizer penlight there was – and lucky for you, it’s the only one in the whole production run that actually worked the way it was supposed to. More or less,” she added, regarding the gerbil in Shego’s hand critically. “I didn’t think hair color would translate quite that vividly.”

“I take it coloration was hard-coded into the shapechange algorithm?” It was unnerving, Kim reflected, hearing her mother’s voice coming out of something that small and furry.

“It was supposed to be, at any rate,” Helen replied matter-of-factly.

“Hmm. Most likely a simple microsecond’s disruption in power transmission, then – just enough to skip over that one bit of code in the sequence.”

Helen was nodding. “It’s so hard to maintain proper quality control when you’re working with nanocircuitry.”

“Focus, you two!” Shego cut in, sounding annoyed. “I don’t care how the damned ray was supposed to work. One more time: either you put her back the way she was, or we’ll see how you like being dehydrated into nice little crackly pieces.”

Plasma flared from the mercenary’s left hand, and Kim’s mother squeaked as Shego’s right hand also started glowing. “Oops,” Shego said, frowning as she concentrated on controlling the two power levels separately. “Sorry about that.”

“No harm done – mostly. However,” Kimberly Katherine Possible added as she scrambled out of Shego’s hand, “much as I hate to say it, I don’t think Helen can fix this, at least not here.”

Helen bobbed her head in agreement. “We just don’t have the hardware with us,” she said. “Now if you’d just let me take you back to the lab . . . .”

“Don’t you dare!” Kim called out. “We’d never see you again!”

“Not to worry,” Shego told her. “I’m still working on your mom’s latest Smallville chapter, and I refuse to try and email the comments into a whole different universe.”

Kim did the best she could to glare through the netting. “Yes, well,” she said, “if you two hadn’t started critiquing each other’s wrongsick fanfics, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

Shego chuckled. “And I’d still be looking for a really good beta reader. Good thing you introduced us, isn’t it?”

“That depends on who you ask,” Helen interjected. She’d been probing the innards of her quantum tether, but now she looked up at Shego again. “Cross-universe email is easy. Getting home in the first place – that may be a problem. The frequency alignment chip’s cracked, and it’s all your fault!”

Dave, who had been literally twiddling his thumbs, traded worried glances with Artie. “Does that mean we’re staying here? Without Mell?”

“Looks that way, at least until I can replicate the chip,” Helen said. Suddenly, her eyes lit up behind her glasses. “Which means I can be as evil as I like over here after all. Dave, what have you got loaded right now?”

Her tall lab assistant tugged a compact, odd-looking gun out of his waistband and glanced at it. “Kelvin-Z clip,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Cover the girl,” Helen told him, waving vaguely toward Kim. “You don’t want to do that,” she added to Shego, who was on the verge of lobbing a plasma-burst at the weapon. “Superheated plasma, supercompressed liquid nitrogen compound – the concussion effect would level this whole block. Not to mention turning all our brains into so much jelly.”

“Jelly, yuck!” That was Rufus; he hadn’t quite worked himself free of the netting, but he’d managed to extract himself from the pocket of Ron’s cargo pants.

Dave, meanwhile, had obeyed his employer, though he was eyeing her doubtfully even as he trained the peculiar gun on Kim. Gas pellets, Kim decided as she studied the weapon. Hard to dodge even if I weren’t wrapped up like a Thanksgiving turkey.

“Much better,” Helen said cheerfully. She thrust the quantum tether into one pocket of her lab coat while drawing a pistol identical to Dave’s from another. “If I’m going to be living in this universe, the last thing I need is someone writing squicky stories about me and passing them around the ‘Net.”

Then a frown crossed her face, and she eyed Shego sternly. “What’s that humming noise?”

The mercenary shrugged. “No idea. Princess?”

“You’ve got me,” Kim said, then groaned as the double meaning registered. “Ron?”

“A strolling harmonica player?” Ron guessed, making everyone else groan.

Rufus, however, made a thumbs-up sign. “Byebye!”

Helen stared down at the mole rat. “Byebye?”

“Poof!” Rufus told her, pointing toward the sports bag lying nearby on the sidewalk – now partially unzipped, with what looked like the business end of a dustbuster poking out of it. Oh, right, Kim remembered, Wade’s projector thing.

“Have a nice trip!” Kim’s mother said, poking her tiny furred head out of the opening alongside the vacuum nozzle.

As she spoke, the space surrounding Helen, Dave, and Artie seemed to flicker slightly. Helen scowled and fired her pellet gun at Shego, but the missile vanished into the flicker-effect, there was a series of rapid multi-dimensional blinks from within its radius, and then the three visitors simply disappeared, leaving behind only the echo of Artie’s voice saying, “Now see? That’s what you get for underestimating the gerbil.”

“Whew!” Shego said. “Am I glad that’s over.”

“That depends on how you define over,” said Kim’s mother tartly. She burrowed back into the sports bag for a moment; when she emerged again, the device’s humming had stopped, and she scampered briskly across the sidewalk to perch on Kim’s head.

Shego tilted her head heavenward, muttered a fervent “Oy!”, and crossed her arms over her chest. Kim couldn’t see what her mother was doing, but she could feel the tap-tap-tap of a gerbil-sized foot against her forehead. “All right, stop giving me that look,” Shego said at last as she walked over to stand at Kim’s side.

“This may get a little warm, Princess,” she warned, as her hands lit with a green glow more muted than Kim was used to seeing. Shego held her palms a hair’s breadth from Kim’s bonds, starting at shoulder level, and slowly ran them across the netting. Kim felt the web-like strands turn brittle as the heat leeched moisture out of them, and in only a few minutes the net had been weakened enough so that she could free herself.

“Now Ron,” Kim told Shego, who tried to look offended.

“What, I have to do everything?” the mercenary complained. “If you bothered to carry a real hair dryer instead of that grapple gun – oh, please, not you too,” she said as Kim hit her with the Puppy Dog Pout. “All right, but I’m not responsible if his pants catch fire.”

Meanwhile, Kim’s mother had scooted back to her Kimmunicator. “Wade, I think you said you had those test results?”

“Right here,” Wade said, his voice sounding a bit frazzled over the video link.

“And?” Kim asked, leaning in as close as she could.

The boy genius shrugged from behind his desk. “The readings look totally stable to me – except the brain waves are human and the DNA is gerbil. Mostly, anyway. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Dr. Possible was nodding. “It’s brilliant work, but I have no idea how she did it.”

Kim gave her gerbilized mother an alarmed look. “You’re saying you really are stuck this way?”

“It’s possible,” her mother said ruefully. “I’ll have to take a longer look at the test results to be sure. There’s just one anomaly . . . .”

Wade made an ahem noise over the Kimmunicator. “If the fireworks are over,” he observed, “you might want to pick up and move out. Professor Wilberforce is going to want his vortex inducer back.”

Shego grinned. “You’re sure I can’t gift-wrap it for Dr. D?” At the four-way glare from Ron, Rufus, and both Possibles, she backpedaled. “All right, you win; it’s not like Drakken could use the thing without blowing up Nevada. I guess I’m out of here,” she said, then paused, casting a hopeful-looking glance at the crimson-furred gerbil. “I don’t suppose this means we’re even?”

The gerbilized brain surgeon snorted. “When I want to cash in that blank-check favor,” she told Shego, “you’ll know it. Let’s just say you’re not any farther behind.”

“Have it your way,” Shego said, looking amused. “I bet your patients are going to be surprised.”

“Very likely,” Kim’s mother said wryly. “But Wade’s right, we’re done here.”

The group spent a few minutes gathering up the equipment that had been scattered along the sidewalk. Bystanders were still giving the block a fairly wide berth, but as Kim and Ron packed Mrs. Dr. Possible’s personal effects into the sports bag along with the PANIC projector and Shego scavenged bits of Helen’s abandoned gadgetry – notably the James Bond figure, which she figured out how to deflate into a tidy four-inch sphere – the Lower Manhattan pedestrian traffic began narrowing the gap.

“Till next time, Princess,” Shego finally said, giving Kim a mock salute. “It’s been – weird.”

“No kidding,” Kim retorted, only to be interrupted by a familiar four-beat beep tone. She reached for her Kimmunicator – and her mother simultaneously tapped at hers, which she was riding like a hover-board.

Wade’s voice spilled from both sets of speakers. “I’m reading some kind of energy release,” he said in an urent tone . . . .

. . . . as a candy-apple-colored gerbil body shimmered, first gently and then with a bright flash that erupted into a silent but explosive FWOOSH! . . . .

. . . . which damped almost as quickly as it had flared, leaving behind the fully human, fully restored form of Dr. Kimberly Katherine Possible . . . .

. . . . standing, slightly dazed, on a New York City street corner, wearing exactly as much clothing as she’d had on as a gerbil. Which was to say, none.

Everyone started talking at once. Kim folded her mother into a fervent hug. Ron murmured something about total awkweirdness. Wade’s voice, over the Kimmunicators, was saying, “I don’t know how I missed the bio-stasis signature,” but no one else seemed to be listening.

Shego merely shook her head bemusedly, shrugged out of the brown trench coat she’d been using as a disguise earlier, draped it over Kim’s mother’s shoulders, and headed briskly north along Rector Street. By the time Kim realized she was gone, it was much too late to go after her.

(previous chapter )
(Chapter 1)

FIC: I Suppose This Means They Read the Fanfic (8/10)

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 00:35:01 GMT

********************
I Suppose This Means They Read the Fanfic (8/10)
A Sitch in Slash: Episode #2
Fandom: Kim Possible/Narbonic
Author: Gray Cardinal
Rating: PG -13
Classification: You tell me....
Summary: An assassin's after Shego, Mrs. Dr. Possible is trying to resolve matters without involving Kim -- and you just know that's not going to work out....
********************

And after much too long a hiatus, we return to our story. But are we through with the evil cliffhangers? Maybe, maybe not....

8 • "I May Look Like a Gerbil, But I'm Still a Brain Surgeon"

It was one of those moments when too much was happening at once. Even as Ron heard the blip-sizzle of Mell’s laser, he saw Kim cock her wrist and send the mirror from her compact spinning outward like a Frisbee, all while whirling her body in another direction and aiming a series of kicks at Mell. At the same time, Shego was dropping sideways into the space between Mell and the sports bag, twisting out of the mirror’s way as she went.

There was a flash as Kim’s mirror intercepted the laser burst, causing it to ricochet over the evil intern’s shoulder and straight toward Ron. He ducked, the energy bolt shot past him – and straight onto the wing mirror of a parked car, which bounced it out over Rector Street . . .

. . . just as Shego, who had somehow got hold of Kim’s lipstick laser and was slicing at the side of Mell’s lab coat, caught the flying mirror in her free hand (free hand? Wasn’t she cuffed a second ago?) and flipped it upward in a high, curving arc . . .

. . . so that it blocked the straying laser fire with another flash, causing the bolt to carom back toward the battle – or, more specifically, on a direct course for the sports bag holding the PANIC projector (it was humming, I know it was humming – how come it stopped?) . . .

. . . except that the eight-inch-tall red-furred gerbil that was apparently Mrs. Dr. Possible (sick and wrong, incredibly sick and wrong, but at least she didn’t get evaporated) had come up with a pair of human-sized mirrored sunglasses from somewhere, and – though she staggered backward at the force of the ricochet – used the lenses to bounce the energy burst back toward Mell . . .

. . . who was busy enough with Shego – who had actually managed to bisect the evil intern’s lab jacket from collar to coattail, and was in the process of tugging the left half of the coat off of its owner’s body – that she didn’t notice the incoming laser discharge until it hit her jacket’s right sleeve with a crackling phhht-PHUT!

Mell yelped and jumped slightly, flinging her right arm outward as the end of the sleeve turned to ash and disintegrated, while the stubby little laser emitter that had been clipped inside it – and from which the shot had been fired in the first place – half fell and half dripped to the sidewalk, the less melted parts clinking and scattering messily as they landed.

Ron stared at the scene, eyes wide. “Wait a second. Didn’t she have a . . . ?”

“Force field!” said a familiar squeaky voice, as Rufus tugged on his pants leg (he had, just barely, had time to put the pants back on before chaos had erupted). The naked mole rat was beaming and holding a small square device with several tiny buttons on its front, which seemed to be designed to clip onto one’s belt. Ron grinned, scooped up Rufus and his prize, and slipped both into his pocket. “Score! Nachos with extra cheese for the little guy.”

“Call it a team effort,” Shego said dryly, one hand glowing and aimed in Mell’s direction while her other arm was nearly elbow-deep in a pocket that didn’t look anywhere near large enough to hold it. “Full marks to the Princess, the mole rat, the merc, and – is that really you down there?” she finished, eyeing the red gerbil presently perched atop the sports bag.

“I’m afraid so,” the gerbil said, its voice clearly that of Mrs. Dr. Possible, and much less squeaky than Ron had expected. “It’s – disconcerting, to say the least.”

“Enough with the gloating already,” Mell Kelly said, sounding more annoyed than cowed even though Kim was covering her with her own pocket Gatling laser – and looking much more comfortable with it than she usually did when it came to guns. “You might as well send me back now, anyway.”

“Ohh, no,” retorted Kim, whose finger was caressing the laser pistol’s trigger with exaggerated care. “You’re not going anywhere until you change Mom back.”

Mell blinked. “Who, me? Do I look like a mad scientific genius?”

“You look,” Shego retorted, “like someone who’s liable to have extra crispy feet real soon now if she isn’t careful.”

“Maybe,” Mell said, sounding remarkably unconcerned at the prospect. “But that won’t help you. Those Gerbilizer™ penlights were one-shots, and even if there’s one left someplace, there’s no reverse setting – Helen didn’t build one in.”

Kim’s eyes darkened. “No? Reverse? Setting?”

Mell started to grin, then scaled back the amusement level in her expression as she studied Kim’s face. “Reverse settings are for wimps. Real mad scientists don’t want their mutations undone at the drop of a hat. And you know, it does say ‘evil’ on our business cards.”

“She’s got a point there, Princess,” Shego observed.

“So not helping,” Kim shot back.

“It’s not the end of the world, Kim,” Mrs. Dr. Possible said, jumping down from the sports bag and poking her gerbil-sized nose into the pocket of the jacket she’d morphed out of. “Wade may have some ideas about this.” With some effort, she tugged her Kimmunicator out of the pocket and tapped the call button.

“What’s the—sitch?” Wade’s voice rose sharply in pitch as his image stared out of the tiny screen at Mrs. Dr. P’s button nose and whiskers.

“Mostly under control, believe it or not,” Kim’s mother replied. “That is, aside from the, um, extreme makeover.”

“No kidding. Let me guess – DNA and brain-wave scans?”

“Please and thank you. And let me have a look at the results,” she added. “I may look like a gerbil, but I’m still a brain surgeon.”

“On it,” said Wade, “but I’ll need to load some extra software to process the EEG; it’ll be a few minutes.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Mrs. Dr. Possible told him, then looked up at Kim and added, “I do hope we don’t end up having to explain this to your father.”

Kim started to respond, but abruptly paused, a frown crossing her face as her gaze shifted. Ron turned his head, following her glance, as a cloud of gray smoke erupted out of the subway access stairwell. Out of the smoke rose a tall, tuxedo-clad figure . . .

“James Bond!” Mell said, her expression turning predatory – though even Ron could tell that it was her hormones, not her assassin’s instincts, driving the reaction.

“But isn’t he a . . . ” Ron trailed off.

“Fictional character?” Shego finished, her voice dry. “Doy! That looks like – Brosnan, isn’t it, the guy who plays him? But what would he be doing here? And why isn’t he . . . “ As the smoke began to clear, the new arrival’s profile began to take on a peculiar, stiff quality – and a whirl of small objects flew from over its shoulder toward the group.

“Hey, Chex mix!” Ron said, reaching up and scooping a square out of the air. Before he could pop it into his mouth, however, the rain of cereal-shaped missiles was followed by a soft phut-phut, and the whole group was abruptly enveloped in a shroud of damp gray mist. “Huh—mmph?!”

As quickly as it had erupted, the mist vanished again with a sharp sucking noise – and in the same few seconds, what had looked like a single square of Wheat Chex expanded into a tightly woven mesh that wrapped itself neatly around Ron’s body, pinning his arms snugly against his sides and binding his legs so he couldn’t move easily. A rapid glance revealed that Kim, Mell, and Shego had all been snared by more of the peculiar nets, which seemed to be impervious to Shego’s plasma. Rufus squeaked unhappily from Ron’s pocket, apparently unable to wiggle himself into a position where he could try his formidable teeth on the netting. And Ron couldn’t see what had happened to Mrs. Dr. Possible – one of the nets had landed on and enfolded the sports bag containing the PANIC projector, but Kim’s gerbilized mother was nowhere in sight.

Ron turned his attention back to the subway stairwell just in time to see Pierce Brosnan fall over like a bowling pin, so that his elegant nose whacked itself firmly against the sidewalk . . . and bounced. “Ohhh!” Ron said. “Rubber! Like those kiddie-clown punching bags.”

The tall blonde woman who emerged from behind the fallen dummy grinned. “Exactly. He’s very convincing, though. Right, Mell?”

“Mmmrpphhht!” Mell Kelly had been caught off balance by the net that had snared her, with the result that she now looked like a sleeping cat that had gotten itself tangled in a basketball hoop.

As she squirmed, an even taller man stepped past the blonde and approached the netted intern. “She looks kind of ticked,” he observed. “You think it’s safe to—?”

The blonde eyed Mell thoughtfully. “Good grief, what did you do to that coat?”

“Give me a minute to get out of this and I’ll show you,” growled Shego from several feet away. She didn’t seem to be making much progress with the promised escape, but she had managed to maneuver herself so that she was leaning against a lamp-post rather than merely lying on the sidewalk, and her fingers flared with green energy as she spoke. “Dr. Narbon, I presume?”

“Helen B. Narbon, mad genius, at your ser—“ The blonde paused. “Waitasecond. You’re Shego! A-k-a jade_firecat! You – you pervert!! Dave! Please tell me you packed the portable brain juicer!”

Her tall companion blinked, looking disconcerted. “I didn’t even know we had one of those.”

“It was right next to the DNA tenderizer,” Helen said. “Darnit, how am I supposed to maintain my evil image without at least one implement of diabolical torture at my disposal? Did we at least bring a portable death ray?”

“Now, Helen,” came a small voice whose source Ron couldn’t immediately identify. “Remember why we came. This isn’t about—”

“Oh, come on, Artie,” Helen said, tilting her head slightly sideways. “You were as squicked out by that story as I was. Can’t I at least traumatize her a little?”

“Hah.” Shego couldn’t quite restrain a burst of laughter, nearly causing her tightly wrapped body to lose its balance. “You couldn’t traumatize your way out of a melted popsicle.”

“Please!” The small voice’s owner – a fuzzy, long-eared brown gerbil not quite twice Rufus’s size – scampered from Helen’s shoulder to the top of her head. “We’re not here to discuss torture – or pornography,” he added, with a measured glance at Shego. “Let’s do what we came to do and go home.”

“And just what did you come here to do?” That was Kim, also still securely netted and sounding none too pleased about it. “Don’t you have enough havoc to wreak back in your own universe?”

Helen Narbon grinned, eyes sparkling behind her glasses. “Oh, probably. But there’s nothing like a quick vacation to recharge the evil batteries. Kim Possible, is it? You don’t look as heroic in person as you do in the press kit.”

Kim glared. “Yes, well, your dialogue’s not nearly as funny as it is in the comic strip. And you didn’t answer my question.”

“Oh, please,” Helen retorted. “Enough with the stalling-for-time shtick. I have read the Evil Overlord Rules, you know.” She turned toward Dave, looking wistful. “No death ray?”

“No death ray,” Dave said, shrugging. “We do have the nerve-gas clips for the pellet guns, though.”

Helen looked intrigued, but Artie’s expression was one of alarm. “We don’t have masks, and that stuff is incredibly fast-acting.”

“Hmmm,” said Helen, fingers twitching as if tapping imaginary calculator keys. “You’re right – in cross-universe mode, the teleport takes three seconds too long to cycle. We’d make it back, but we’d drop dead in the lab once we got there.”

“There you are, then,” Artie said. “Dave, grab Mell and we’ll – wait, what’s that?” And he pointed a tiny gerbil forepaw at the sports bag containing the PANIC projector . . . where a small candy-apple red shape was trying to wriggle its way inside past the netting. Helen stepped quickly around Mell, reached down, and plucked the crimson gerbil from its target by the tail.

She eyed her prisoner curiously for a moment. “You must be – Rufus? Funny, the dossier said you were a naked mole rat.”

“I should think not!” came the reply. “Dr. Kimberly Katherine Possible, M.D., if you please.”

Atop Helen’s head, Artie’s eyes had gone very wide. “Good heavens. That color – it’s . . . stunning. How did you do it?”

Mrs. Dr. Possible tilted her own head upward as best she could. “Oh – hello, Artie,” she said, sounding slightly flustered. “Good genes, I suppose; red hair runs in the family.”

“Yes, but—”

“Hold on,” Helen said, interrupting Artie. “You did say Dr. Possible?” She gestured sharply toward Kim, who had propped herself against a fire hydrant.

“Chief of neurosurgery, Middleton General Hospital.”

“A brain surgeon?” Helen looked fascinated. “But how – good Lord, don’t tell me the pocket Gerbilizer™ beam actually worked?”

“Amazing,” Artie said, sounding faintly awed.

Shego’s tone was dry enough to compete with the Sahara. “You sound surprised. What was it supposed to do, turn her into a hippopotamus?”

“You never know with prototypes,” Helen told her cheerfully, then glanced down at Mell. “I don’t suppose you managed to hold onto the penlight?”

“Mmmrphllffcrsntt!” It was hard to tell whether Mell’s head-shaking was meant as a response; the netting had snagged part of her mangled lab coat collar and pressed it over her mouth. Fortunately, she didn’t seem to be having trouble breathing.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Helen said. “Which means . . . Dave, do we at least have a specimen jar with us?”

Four voices echoed as one – Kim’s, her mother’s, Shego’s, and Ron’s. “Specimen jar?” Three of them promptly followed with “Jinx, you owe me a soda!”

Shego merely rolled her eyes. “What is it with you people and sodas, anyway?”

Dave rummaged in the black bag he was carrying, ignoring the byplay. “How about this?” He held out a nearly empty jar labeled AllMart Dry Roasted Peanuts, unscrewing the lid.

“It’ll have to do,” said Helen. “So many tests, so little time.” Mrs. Dr. Possible wriggled desperately, but Helen wrapped her free hand firmly around the gerbilized brain surgeon and thrust her nose-first into the peanut jar, then held her palm firmly over the top while Dave punched several holes in the lid.

“You so won’t get away with this,” Kim told the mad genius as Helen twirled the jar lid into place. “We’ll come after you, Mom!”

“This from the girl who can’t get out of a simple dehydrated capture net,” Helen shot back.

Artie regarded Kim sympathetically from the top of his creator’s head. “I promise I won’t let Helen hurt her.”

“See? You don’t have a thing to worry about,” Helen said, grinning. “I’m sure Artie will take really good care of your mother. I think we’re done here,” she went on. “Dave, get Mell, and we’ll be on our way.”

Dave gave his employer a you’ve got to be kidding look, but shrugged, and with a certain amount of huffing and grunting, managed to sling Mell’s netted body over his shoulders. Meanwhile, Helen held her prize lightly in one hand, plunging the other into her own shoulder bag. Mrs. Dr. Possible scrabbled unhappily against the inside of the peanut jar – then abruptly stopped, clapping her forepaws together.

A moment later, Helen pulled a compact but odd-looking gadget from her bag. “Quantum tether,” she said cheerfully. “Say goodbye, Kim Possible. Oh, and Shego? You owe me one.”

“And you figure that how?” the mercenary inquired archly.

For the first time, Helen’s smile acquired a truly evil dimension. “That’s easy; I just saved your life.”

And so saying, she pressed a button on the quantum tether . . . .

(to be continued)

Previous chapter
Chapter 1

Livejournal? What's a Livejournal?

Sun, 03 Jun 2007 04:35:42 GMT

No, I have not dropped off the planet, and yes, I do hope to have new chapter(s) before much longer (life has been Chinese-sense Interesting lately).

In the meantime, I did post a short scene this morning at kp_slash, responding to a request.

Fandom: Kim Possible
Rating: PG
Description: An AU re-imagining of a key scene from So the Drama, written for animegurl88.

So Not Exactly the Drama

Meme: improbable pairings

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 19:06:51 GMT

Borrowed from liviapenn:

Ten highly improbable pairings that someone should write:

Two themes seem to be running through these: "like calls to like", and Smallville (the former for reasons which may become obvious as the pairings unfold, and the latter because the relationships on that show are so amazingly dysfunctional that almost anything -- at least from the characters' perspective -- ought to be an improvement. (And yet I keep watching....)

Xander Harris/Chloe Sullivan -- because both of them understand about watching other people save the world. And because Chloe, unlike most of Xander's prior partners, is so utterly trustworthy....

Lionel Luthor/Vala Mal Doran -- Can you just see the waves of deviousness and charm crashing against each other? The incredibly complicated dance of one-upsmanship and counterplot? And Lionel is as insanely wealthy as Vala could possibly hope for, whereas Vala is sultry enough to make Martha Kent look like, well, a farm girl. This would almost certainly not be a happily-ever-after story, but boy, would we have a lot of fun watching the fireworks.

Gen. George Hammond/Martha Kent -- Obviously would happen after George goes to Washington and Martha goes into politics. As two people with unreasonably strong ethical codes, it obviously wouldn't take long for them to gravitate toward each other in that environment, though it might take quite a while for friendship to blossom into Something More.

Clark Kent/Veronica Mars -- He goes to Neptune, she figures out his secret, chemistry ensues. For Clark, Veronica is Chloe without the friendship baggage; for Veronica, Clark is Logan without the trust issues. And the opportunities for world-class snark would be exceptional.

Spike (aka William the Bloody)/Lana Lang -- This is about as improbable as a pairing could possibly get, and yet . . . both of them are incredibly emotionally needy. Both of them are (for their respective audiences) sinfully hot. You'd barely have to point them at each other and they'd be so magnetically fused you couldn't pry them apart with a fusion bomb. Although that might not stop Lex from trying.

Rodney McKay/Fred Burkle -- I have now seen just enough SG:A to understand why the yuletide story a year or two back in which it is revealed that Rodney is actually grown-up Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes makes such perfect, insane sense. Nobody but another brilliantly dysfunctional genius could possibly understand him -- and Fred is about as brilliantly dysfunctional as they come. [Can you just see Rodney being seduced into working for Fred at W&H's research department? Then again, maybe that was where the SGC found him....]

Wesley Wyndham-Price/Barbara ("Oracle") Gordon -- I think the like-ness that makes me suggest this one is that both characters have a kind of doomed encyclopedic wisdom that few of their associates really understand or appreciate. OTOH, I'd think they'd be totally likely to see and appreciate it in each other....

Vala Mal Doran/Jayne Cobb -- Okay, so much for "like calls to like" -- or, for that matter, for anything resembling logic in the romance department. This one would be amusing because Jayne (of course) would totally underestimate Vala's innate cunning, whereas Vala would be likely to totally underestimate Jayne's sheer brute-force durability. But neither mistake would stop either of them from using the other for as long as they could keep the scam going....

Lex Luthor/Glorificus -- The problem with finding a romantic interest for Lex Luthor (particularly the Smallville version) is that you need a partner who's both incredibly strong and incredibly tolerant of his Evil Manipulations. And there aren't many of those characters around. This would take a bit of finagling with continuity to engineer, but Glory clearly qualifies on both counts. In fact, one suspects that they might work entirely too well together; it could be awfully challenging to write this in a way that doesn't end with the two of them either ruling or destroying the immediate multiverse.

Samantha Carter/Jethro Gibbs -- And last but not least, a wild speculation: suppose, just suppose, that Sam was one of Gibbs' legendary ex-wives? It wouldn't be at all unlikely for the younger NCIS agent to have had an eye for a young Air Force scientist....

Yuletide: mad Kermit-waves

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 09:20:44 GMT

I have been glancing into and around the Yuletidearchive (a thousand stories! yow!) since it opened, and have generally been very impressed.

Regarding the story written for me: If You Can't Say Anything Nice is charming and funny and clever in all the right Muppetational proportions. It's attracted a lot of favorable comments (but only one formal rec that I've seen so far), and justifiably so. I'm very pleased, and whoever the author may be, I'll certainly be looking for their other works if it's not someone I'm already familiar with.

Regarding the two stories I wrote (original assignment plus a stocking stuffer): Both recipients appear to be well satisfied with their stories, particularly so in the case of the stocking stuffer -- for which I'm glad, because I was not at all sure that one was going to "work". There are also a handful of other thoughtful comments on both pieces, though as far as I know neither of the stories has garnered a formal rec as yet (not necessarily surprising with an archive this big).

Regarding recs and the reveal: I'm still very much wading through the archives, what with family holiday activities and preparation for an impending trip -- I'll be offline on New Year's Day, but back a day or so thereafter. There will be recs, and I'll be happy to discuss my own stories if anyone's interested (ha!), but it may take me a bit to catch up to the rest of the Yuleverse once I'm home again.

Yuletide: anticipation

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 08:00:39 GMT

Well. Uploaded my primary Yuletide assignment almost a full day ahead of deadline (amusingly, after spending most of the night typing -- somehow, it didn't seem like that long till I looked at the clock). Promptly signed onto the pinch-hit list, but didn't see anything that grabbed me, but when the stocking stuffer list went live, I changed my mind and waded in; the stuffer went up just a few minutes ago. Still not dead sure whether it works or not -- it's an odd piece, and unusual for me in that I rarely work in literary-based fanfic universes. [By itself, that detail shouldn't be enough to give anything away....] We shall see, I expect.

Still also working on what would have been an NYR (and may be again, given something I saw go by on the pinch-hits), and the still-in-progress KP/Narbonic crossover. OTOH, it's unlikely any of those will post before the new year begins, as I'll be out of town and offline for part of the Week Between. I should, however, have comments in on my own Yuletide gift in timely fashion, and I look forward to all responses on the stories I've uploaded. It was a good experience, and I'll almost certainly be back next year.

Yuletide: my letter to Santa

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 07:50:17 GMT

Dear Santa:

Some general notes first: as the Details fields in most of my requests (and the bio material in my userinfo) should suggest, my fanfic interests lean strongly toward character but not particularly toward smut/slash. Not, it should be emphasized, that I have anything against either of those in proper and well-developed context, but I don't tend to view my fandoms-of-interest through that particular lens. Oh, and this is my first Yuletide, so be gentle....

Anastasia: This is possibly my favorite modern animated film ever. It had fantastic songs, it had cool visuals, and oh, the script! The Anya/Dmitri chemistry just crackled, and neither one was lacking in the snappy-comeback department. There should absolutely have been a follow-up half-hour TV series; written properly, it could have been close to Gargoyles in quality. (I have avoided seeing the sequel, Bartok the Magnificent; I thought Bartok worked reasonably well in the context of the original film, but I didn't see him as a breakout character, and I am not sure I trust in the studio's ability to keep him from going too far over the top.)

Anyhow: for me, the centerpiece of the movie is the romance -- but it ends just as that relationship is blossoming, and it seems to me that before Anya and Dmitri get to "happily ever after", they need to (a) really come to terms with what they've found in each other, and (b) have at least several more adventures together. He's still a rogue; she's still an innocent (a pretty pragmatic one, but very inexperienced in dealing with the larger world). There's a lot of story there....

Muppets: Kermit and I go way back; I was a huge fan of the syndicated Muppet Show, and then of most of the feature films (I have mixed feelings about Muppets in Space, and the Muppet Oz telefilm tried way too hard). And as the above may suggest, I have a serious jones for old-fashioned musicals, and The Muppet Movie is pretty strong in that department. "Rainbow Connection" never fails to tear me up, and there's a Tom Smith (aka filkertom) song called "A Boy and His Frog" that does too. Beyond that, the request-details pretty much speak for themselves; S&W are in a lot of ways among the most mysterious Muppets in the canon, and that's always interested me....

Narbonic: If you're one of the four Yuletiders (counting me) who offered to write Narbonic, I'm pretty sure you know the strip at least as well as I do; I came in late (shortly before Helen gave Artie morphing powers in the effort to infiltrate her mother's lair), but was instantly hooked. This is the most fun I think anyone's ever had with the whole Evil Mad Scientist shtick, not excluding Phil Foglio. As you'll note if you look backward through my LJ, I've dipped my toe into this universe already [and really should get back to finishing that story....].

If you're not one of those four Yuletiders, do not pass Go, do not collect $, but go instantly over to the Web site and have a look -- but you'll probably want to actually write in one of the other fandoms. These characters are complicated....

Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?: By now, you may be picking up a pattern in this cluster of fandoms: I'm attracted to well-written source material, and this series certainly qualified. In addition to all the geography and history, the adventure plots were handled well and the three central characters were -- over the course of the show -- pretty well fleshed out. Now, unlike the three other fandoms in this group, there is a small body of fanfic out there for the series (most of what I've seen I located through the Sandiego Manor Web site), much of it quite good. But nearly all of it tends to focus so closely on Carmen that it drops Zack and Ivy out of the equation, and I think the evolving dynamic between all three of them is one of the most fascinating things about the show. I know that in the character selector, I specified Carmen without including Zack and Ivy -- I did that, frankly, because I was worried about triggering slash impulses (and also because I figure that the fewer formal restrictions one puts on one's Santa, the easier it makes the assignment). Anyhow, that's one direction I don't see that relationship going.

I'm looking forward to seeing the direction in which this goes, and I hope you have as much fun writing as I expect to have in reading the results.

Best,

the Gray Cardinal

FIC: I Suppose This Means They Read the Fanfic (7/10)

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 07:53:22 GMT

********************
I Suppose This Means They Read the Fanfic (7/10: “Gluglugluglugluglugshhhllloooooopp!”)
A Sitch in Slash: Episode #2
Fandom: Kim Possible/Narbonic
Author: Gray Cardinal
Rating: PG -13
Classification: You tell me....
Summary: An assassin's after Shego, Mrs. Dr. Possible is trying to resolve matters without involving Kim -- and you just know that's not going to work out....
********************

This chapter ran rather longer than I expected, considering. (I think I've mentioned earlier that the round-robin viewpoints took me a little by surprise, but they've been working out surprisingly well. I think we're looking at two more chapters and an epilogue at this point, but we'll see.)

“DUCK!!!!!”

Four voices shouted the word simultaneously – three from the sky over Rector Street, one from the sidewalk. But there simply wasn’t time for Mrs. Dr. Possible to react before the narrow penlight-beam struck its target. For perhaps two and a half seconds, she glowed with shimmering cinnamon-colored light . . .

. . . and then there was only a series of clinks and rustles as her aquamarine business suit settled to the pavement in a heap, its wearer vanished.

“You’re so going down!” Kim Possible yelled from above and behind Ron, and she swooped past her sidekick at full jet-propelled speed, drawing her hair dryer as she went by.

Ron, as usual, wasn’t nearly as smooth a flyer; he was barely managing to stay clear of Mell Kelly’s laser fire. He was also a little higher up than Rufus liked, but there wasn’t time to wait, so the naked mole rat tripped a release catch, and the tiny open-cockpit toy jet in which he was sitting fell away from Ron’s waist.

Rufus promptly kicked in the power and zipped away from Mell’s line of fire. As he’d expected, none of the combatants were paying any attention to him – they almost never did – and as soon as he was clear of the firefight he looped downward toward the sidewalk. The little jet was one of Nakasumi’s prototypes, and Rufus had spent most of the helicopter ride from Boston modifying its onboard wiring so he could pilot the craft himself.

Evading the crossfire wasn’t as difficult as Rufus had expected; Mell was concentrating almost entirely on Kim, forcing her to circle higher and farther from the section of sidewalk now occupied solely by Mell, Shego, and Mrs. Dr. Possible’s clothing. New York’s pedestrians might be jaded, but they were wise enough to stay clear of a supervillainous battle, and this one was proving more than usually pyrotechnic. Shego, her disguise discarded, was pelting Mell with a barrage of plasma bolts, but the onslaught was being deflected by an invisible force field, and Mell had produced a small bazooka from somewhere and was firing it at Shego – not at all accurately – with her off hand.

“This isn’t your fight, Princess!” Shego was yelling between plasma bursts. “Get away while you can!”

Kim was above Rufus’s line of sight, but her return shout echoed off skyscraper windows up and down the block. “She zaps Mom, she gets stomped, end of story. Then it’s your turn!”

Mell was laughing – not a mad-scientific mwahahaha, but a laugh of pure exuberant glee. Rufus had heard a lot of villainous laughs during his adventures with Kim and Ron; this one was easily the scariest. It sounded as if Mell hadn’t had this much fun in years, and she was enjoying it to the hilt.

“Ready to come down now?” the black-haired intern taunted, as the sound of a sputtering jetpack drifted down from overhead. “Looks like you’re running out of gas; let me help you with that!” Mell stuffed her laser pistol into a pocket, reached into her coat, and pulled out a tubular weapon almost as long as her arm – all while still absent-mindedly firing the bazooka in her other hand in Shego’s general direction. Rufus glanced upward and saw Kim spiral into view, gliding a bit erratically as her backpack used up the last of its jet fuel. Then she suddenly twisted sideways, dodging the bright orange streak that had erupted from Mell’s flamethrower. The shot didn’t entirely miss, though – about half the left wing of Kim’s jetpack was now a melted ruin.

Rufus banked his little jet, again steering away from potential crossfire. Kim, meanwhile, had fired her grapple gun, snagging a fire escape and using her cheerleading ability to bounce herself off a series of walls as she dropped toward the street. As he curved back toward his target, the mole rat caught a glimpse of Ron. Luckily, he was out of Mell’s line of sight. Unluckily, he’d managed to get himself stuck on a flagpole. Rufus shook his head, bemused; for the moment, his human was safe. Relatively safe, anyway.

The craft bucked suddenly, as a nearby KA-WHOOFF! sent shockwaves rippling through Rufus’s airspace. A glance toward Mell revealed the source; her flamethrower’s remains were scattered around her in melted fragments. Mell herself was only slightly scorched, but she looked extremely annoyed.

“You need better toys, inkspot!” Shego taunted. She was still subjecting Mell to a steady plasma barrage, but instead of battering at the force field, she was lobbing small globes of green energy over it.

“Working on it, slime-brain!” retorted Mell, who had retrieved her laser pistol and was shooting the plasma balls out of the air like skeet targets. The bazooka was nowhere in evidence, but Mell’s free hand was thrust deep into a coat pocket. “Damn, I thought I had one more penlight!”

Concentrating on his flying again, Rufus executed one final turn before extending the toy plane’s landing gear. Its engine made very little noise, but he cut it completely once the turn was complete – no sense attracting unwanted attention. A few moments later, the jet skidded to a stop behind the subway entrance, just a few feet from Mrs. Dr. Possible’s now-forgotten sports bag and her crumpled clothing.

As he jumped out of the plane, the heap of pale linen fabric rustled. Rufus frowned, eyeing the rippling coat sleeve sharply as a pointed, black-tipped nose poked out from under it. “Who?” he squeaked softly.

The rest of the body followed the nose. It was eight inches long to Rufus’s five, not counting a slender tail. The ears and nose were jet black, but its eyes were an almost disturbingly bright green, and its fur was a warm candy-apple red that looked extremely odd on a gerbil.

“Rufus?” the gerbil said, sounding slightly dazed. “You’ve – grown.”

Rufus shook his head quickly. “No,” he replied. “You, smaller. Much.”

The gerbil’s nose wrinkled, it looked down at itself – and almost fell over. “Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Dr. Possible. “This is not good.”

Rufus shrugged. “Happens.” He pointed a few yards down the sidewalk. “Bag, important?”

“Very,” Kim’s mother said wryly. “We need what’s in it to send Mell back where she belongs – but it has to be aimed, and I’m not sure we’re big enough to move it.”

“Try,” Rufus replied. “Have to. Save – “ He threw up his paws. “Everybody!”

Mrs. Dr. Possible’s nose twitched, and she peered at it as well as she could. “Dear me, this will take getting used to. The process must have mapped human neurological impulses onto the gerbil physiological . . . sorry,” she said, breaking off. “It’s utterly fascinating, but you’re right, there’s no time; we’d better try to use the PANIC device before someone else gets hold of it.”

Rufus cocked his head quickly in several different directions, taking stock of the battle, then nodded at Kim’s mother. “Clear. Go!”

The mole rat and the gerbilized brain surgeon scampered rapidly from behind the stairway kiosk to where the sports bag had landed, right side up near the inner edge of the sidewalk. After another glance to confirm that Mell and Shego were still preoccupied, Rufus jumped atop the bag, grabbed the zipper tag in his teeth, and tugged. The zipper slid easily, and once he’d created an opening a few inches wide, he stopped, looking expectantly at his companion – who looked back at him with a blank expression.

Rufus jerked his head at the opening. “In!”

“Oh,” Mrs. Dr. Possible said, whacking her red-furred forehead with a tiny paw. “Right.“ She thrust her nose tentatively into the dark slit, then clambered inside the bag rather less clumsily than Rufus had feared. After a moment’s thought, Rufus followed.

Not surprisingly, it was almost pitch dark inside the case, and the two rodents spent a few awkward moments bumping into and scrambling over each other as their eyes adjusted. “Remind me not to mention this to James,” Kim’s mother said absently. A moment later, she added, “Aha!” There was a click, and the small round glow of a pocket flashlight shone into the shadows.

“Much better,” she said. “Ah, here we are – oh, good, I think it’s oriented in the right direction already. We just need to push the induction tube far enough out of the bag so it’s pointing at Mell.” She waved a paw at one end of the device.

“Push!” agreed Rufus, and the two set to work. The PANIC projector wasn’t especially heavy, but it was still big enough that both he and Mrs. Dr. Possible were panting by the time they’d shoved it the five or so inches toward the open end of the bag, then maneuvered the “induction tube” – less formally, the business end of the dust-buster vacuum Wade had cannibalized for the gadget’s housing – upward just far enough to get the end of the tube through the opened zipper slot.

That task accomplished, Mrs. Dr. Possible retreated to the other end of the device where its controls were mounted, while Rufus took scampered atop the induction tube, where he’d be able to peer out through the bag’s opening to make sure their aim was good enough.

“Mell, force field,” he squeaked over his shoulder at Kim’s mother. “Problem?”

“Hmm,” came Mrs. Dr. P’s voice. “I don’t think so. If I understood Wade right, what this thing projects is more like a radio signal than an energy beam. Ready?”

“Ready!” said Rufus. Outside the bag, Mell was still skeet-shooting at Shego’s plasma balls with the laser pistol; in her other hand was something that looked like a speargun.

“Powering up,” Mrs. Dr. P said, switches going click as she spoke. “Quantum resonator on line in ten, nine, eight . . . .”

Rufus missed the rest of the countdown. On eight, there was a tremendous SNAP! as the flagpole from which Ron had been hanging finally gave way – whereupon Ron dropped some twenty-five feet straight down and landed squarely on Mell Kelly’s head. It was hard to tell which of the two made more noise; the combined “Yaaaaahhhhh!!!” nearly burst Rufus’s eardrums.

Several other voices weighed in almost simultaneously, adding to the confusion. Fortunately for Rufus’s ears, they were muffled somewhat by Ron’s pants – predictably, he’d lost them in the fall, and they’d draped themselves partially over the sports bag.

“Ron!” That was Kim.

“Boo-yah! The Ron-man scores!”

“Amazing,” came Shego’s dry comment. “I guess that’s one way to break a stalemate.”

“Owwww, my head.” Obviously, that was Mell. “You’re gonna – huh?”

As Rufus pushed aside the stray pant leg, he found himself staring straight into the evil intern’s eyes. She had apparently landed face-forward on the sidewalk and had just started to get up when their gazes intersected.

“What’s going on?” Mrs. Dr. Possible called from farther inside the bag. “We’re armed and ready . . .”

Shego’s voice drowned out the rest of the sentence. “One microscopically false move, Kelly,” she was growling from somewhere above and behind Rufus, “and there won’t be enough of you left to feed a single-celled organism for breakfast.”

There was a click so soft that Rufus barely heard it, and abruptly, a small black tube was pointing at his nose from inside one of Mell’s sleeves. He froze.

“Better think twice about that,” Mell told Shego calmly. “This is only a three-hundred watt pulse laser – but that’s good enough to fry your little pink friend here. Not to mention whatever’s in that bag. Which is humming, by the way.”

“He – it – isn’t my—”

Before Shego could finish the sentence, Kim’s voice cut in, sounding desperate. “Nobody fries Rufus, okay? And especially, nobody blows up the . . . .” She trailed off.

Without so much as twitching her wrist-mounted laser, Mell tilted her head upward. “Blows up the what? Do tell.”

“I . . . can’t,” said Kim, not at all convincingly. “I don’t have the faintest idea what Mom had in that bag.”

“Yes, you do,” Mell said cheerily. “Now tell me – unless you like your mole rats extra crispy, that is.”

Shego spoke next. “Better answer, princess. Kaboom Girl here doesn’t mess around.”

Kim sighed audibly. “Wade called it a PANIC projector – something to do with parallel universes and dual quantum states. I – didn’t get all the specifics.”

“PANIC,” Mell said thoughtfully. “Dual quantum states. Probably – amp down the plasma there, night-light girl – for booting unappreciated guests out of neighboring universes. Am I right?”

There were several awkward moments of silence. “I’ll take that as a yes,” said Mell, looking amused. “So what happens if I blow it up? Something spectacular, I bet.”

One of Rufus’s few weaknesses – aside from cheese – was the irresistable impulse to cap a sufficiently apt straight line, and Mell had inadvertantly given him one. “Gluglugluglugluglugshhhllloooooopp!” he said, simulating a bathtub drain for the second time that day.

Mell eyed him, impressed. “Black hole, huh? Maybe total collapse of the immediate multiverse?” Reluctantly, Rufus nodded.

“Well, then,” said Mell Kelly, very carefully levering herself to her feet one-handed, her wrist laser wavering not so much as a millimeter from its focus on Rufus’s nose as she did so, “everyone had better do exactly as I say, hadn’t they? Unless you really want to find out what black holes look like from the inside.”

“You can’t let her –”

“We have to, Ron,” came Kim’s voice, sounding resigned. “It’s too dangerous not to.”

“She’s right, Stoppable,” Shego put in, “and you have to know how much I hate saying that. Can’t have world domination without a world to dominate, you know?”

“Perfect,” Mell said, reaching into yet another pocket with her free hand and producing two pairs of black and silver shackles. “So, Kimmy, if you’ll just cuff Shego’s wrists behind her for me? No – that set’s to hobble her ankles; give me some credit.”

Kim sighed. “This is so wrong – in a very wrong way, if that makes any sense.”

“I hear you, princess,” said Shego as the restraints clicked shut. “It’s – embarrassing.”

Mell gave Shego a disgusted look. “No less embarrassing than reading incredibly kinky porn about goinking your boss, your boss’s mom, and a gerbil all at practically the same time,” she said dryly.

“Eeeeuuuwwww!!” said Kim and Ron simultaneously, followed in the next breath by “Too much information!”, and in the breath after that by “Jinx, you owe me a soda!”

Shego simply glared. “I refuse to be guilt-tripped by a comic strip character with wimpy taste in fanfic. Now if Princess here wants to pile it on, fine – she’s got the right. It is my fault her mother got evaporated. But it’s not my fault that my made-up Mell turns out to have a way twistier imagination than yours.” The expression on Shego’s face looked oddly . . . drained, Rufus decided.

“So not the right moment,” Kim said in a dry, tightly wound voice. “If we somehow come out of this in the same universe – we’ll talk. Unless I decide to pound you into Silly Putty.”

“We come out of this in the same universe . . . Kim,” replied Shego, “I may just let you.”

“Oh, spare me,” Mell cut in. “Enough with the tea and sympathy already. Besides, it’s not like—”

Two voices interrupted at once; one was Ron’s. “Weird. It’s not—”

The other came from behind Rufus, as a certain red-furred gerbil poked its head out of the sports bag. “What’s going on out--?”

For a split second, reality seemed to freeze-frame, as six faces registered six different flavors of shock.

Then Mell’s wrist laser went off.

[....to be continued....]

FIC: I Suppose This Means They Read the Fanfic (6/10)

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 08:54:55 GMT

We return to our story after way, way too long a hiatus. I think we're looking at nine or ten chapters overall.

********************
I Suppose This Means They Read the Fanfic (6/10)
A Sitch in Slash: Episode #2
Fandom: Kim Possible/Narbonic
Author: Gray Cardinal
Rating: PG -13
Classification: You tell me....
Summary: An assassin's after Shego, Mrs. Dr. Possible is trying to resolve matters without involving Kim -- and you just know that's not going to work out....
********************

Mell Kelly took her first breath of New York City air, and for one giddy moment allowed herself to take in the atmosphere like an enraptured tourist.

Then she took a second breath, gathered her thoughts, and took stock of her surroundings. After all, she had a job to do.

Dr. Narbon’s portal had landed her in an alley just off Times Square. She lingered there silently, taking mental inventory of the numerous weapons tucked into her unique array of inside coat pockets (Helen had once said they were “dimensionally transcendent”, which Dave had promptly translated as “bigger inside than outside”). Mell resisted the impulse to fondle her toys as she ran through the list; no sense drawing the attention of New York’s finest just yet. Not that she was concerned about being arrested, not with Dr. Narbon’s recall ring on her right hand – but her first priority was locating Shego.

To that end, she withdrew an oversized PDA from an outer pocket of her coat and called up one of the programs Dr. Narbon had loaded. A New York street map lit up the display, and a couple of taps with the unit’s stylus produced a series of blinks and pings as the map scrolled, zoomed, and eventually settled on a small section of the city’s financial district, where a bright green dot slid along a side street. “Gotcha,” Mell said softly. The tracking utility, Dr. Narbon had explained, was designed to identify and track Shego’s plasma aura.

After a moment’s consideration, Mell zoomed the map display out to a wider setting and tapped an icon, bringing up a subway-system map. “R train,” she decided after a few moments’ study. The decision made, she dropped the PDA back into her pocket, ran her finger lightly across the Velcro closure, and stepped briskly out of the alley.

She couldn’t resist pausing briefly in Times Square as she went, especially not when she noted a spectacular explosion being broadcast over the giant ABC network screen, followed by a shot of two pre-teen youngsters high-fiving each other: “Hicka-bicka-boo! – Hoo-SHA!”. Tune in Sunday, read the text scrolling past under the image, for a special Extreme Makeover: Home Edition! And she bought a hot pretzel from a street vendor, munching cheerily as she walked. She had just crossed 43rd St. when she felt a hand attempting to slide into the pocket holding her PDA. Without breaking stride, she slipped a penlight from an inner pocket, angled it to point backward past her right arm, and clicked. There was a quick, high SQUEEK! from behind her, and the questing fingers dropped abruptly away. Mell didn’t bother looking back; whatever the beam had done, there was one less pickpocket working the streets.

She found the stairs leading to the subway platform she wanted within another block and descended. Her timing was near-perfect; scarcely a minute after she’d paid her token and passed through the turnstile, an R train rolled into the station. To her mild surprise, she had no trouble finding a place to sit; while the train was far from empty, the morning commute was long since ended and the midday lunch/shopping crunch was only just beginning to make itself felt. As the subway car rumbled on its way, she made a point of unobtrusively studying her fellow passengers as well as surveying possible cover and mentally marking all possible exits.

Most of the riders were unremarkable – young people with backpacks, skateboards, or other personal gear . . . businessfolk carrying briefcases and cell phones . . . a scruffily bearded street musician with a battered guitar case. But as the train paused at Herald Square to trade one knot of travelers for another, one of the new arrivals caught Mell’s eye. A slim woman of above-average height, she wore a crisp ensemble of aquamarine edged with silver trim and carried an oversize designer sports bag – but her most noticeable feature was the fire-bright red hair that fell almost to her shoulders in a downswept wave. Mell had seen that hair somewhere before, she was sure – oh, yes, there had been an entry and photo in Shego’s file. Making a quick decision, Mell rose from her place toward the rear of the car and moved forward to where the newcomer had seated herself, sitting down again just to the other woman’s left.

“Kim Possible?” she inquired softly.

Her seatmate turned toward her sharply, wearing a startled expression, and thrust what looked like an oversized PDA into her jacket pocket. “That’s – right,” she said, the words carrying a question of their own. “And you are?”

“Knott,” Mell said, improvising madly. “Emily Knott. I’m with . . . .” she paused, glancing around at the car’s other passengers.

“Global Justice?” supplied her seatmate.

“Exactly,” said Mell. “You’re in New York tracking Shego, am I right?”

The red-haired woman’s eyes narrowed slightly. “I gather you’ve had a tip?”

“You might say that,” Mell replied, her mind racing. Dr. Narbon’s report had described Kim Possible as a freelance do-gooder, a major thorn in the side of her universe’s criminal geniuses, and the one individual who could consistently force Shego to work up a sweat in one-on-one combat. In normal circumstances, Mell’s immediate response would be to whip out a mini-cannon and blast the heroine to smithereens – but in her current undercover mode, it might just be possible (she thought, then groaned mentally at the pun) to enlist Possible as an ally in taking down Shego. The main difficulty – the briefing had also warned that Possible was fiercely opposed to killing or severely maiming her opponents.

Not a problem, she decided quickly; I can handle the maiming and killing parts. “Something like that,” she told Possible quietly. “Word’s come down that Shego needs to be taken out of the game. We’re both after the same thing – suppose we work together on this?”

Her companion pursed her lips. “Together – as equals?”

“Of course.” Mell grinned. “All I’m after is to put Shego in custody.”

“All GJ is after, you mean,” Possible said. “So, do you have any specific intelligence, or are we just waiting for the plasma to hit the fan?”

“We can do better than that,” Mell said, chuckling. She pulled out her PDA and brought up the tracking map, but the system merely blinked and displayed a message: cannot acquire target.

Possible eyed the gadget. “Too much concrete overhead. I’m sure you’ll get a reading once we’re back on the surface.”

“Right,” said Mell, trying not to sound annoyed. “I got a preliminary fix before I boarded. We’ll get off at . . . let’s see, Rector Street, okay?”

The other woman looked slightly startled, but nodded. “Good enough – we’re almost there, in fact.” And so they were; a few moments later, the train rumbled to a stop at the Rector Street station. The two women rose almost simultaneously and stepped out onto the platform, where they both paused.

“Tell you what,” Possible said, “I’ll follow you up. That way I can stay out of sight while you get a reading on that gadget of yours; if Shego spots me before you close in, we’ll lose the element of surprise.”

The strategy made sense – but there was a note in Possible’s voice that Mell didn’t like, and she also disapproved on principle of letting a known white hat, particularly one as competent as Kim was supposed to be, out of her line of sight. “Actually,” said Mell, improvising madly, “I was thinking you ought to go up ahead of me. The last thing we need is for Shego to start toasting innocent bystanders; once she sees you, that’s where she’ll concentrate her attention. She won’t be expecting me, though, so I’ll be able to move in and deal with her.” And you won’t be expecting me to take you both out in one lovely explosion, she added to herself.

Possible gave her a peculiar look. “I don’t know – I’m not used to being the distraction. The tip I got said Shego was keeping a pretty low profile just now. If you can zero in on her location before she knows either of us is here, we might be able to take her down without any toasting.”

Mell frowned. She was almost certain she was being played – but there was no way Possible could know Mell’s true identity, was there? She reflected on what she could recall of the heroine’s dossier; ah, that was it. Possible was freelance, and her relationship with Global Justice was decidedly prickly. Normal professional rivalry, then – though the way she’s handling that sports bag, you’d think it had the Crown Jewels in it or something . . . .

“Let’s do this,” she said aloud. “We’re a little conspicuous just standing here.”

Possible took a breath, clearly restless. “As equals, then – side by side.”

“As equals,” Mell agreed, reaching into one of her weapons pockets and crossing her fingers as soon as her hand was out of view. They had delayed long enough on the platform that they had the stairs to themselves as they climbed to street level – Possible hugging the right edge of the steps, Mell the left.

Mell blinked at the late morning sunlight as they reached the surface, not having bothered with sunglasses. Then she blinked again. Two human-shaped forms were diving out of the sky almost directly toward her, and one of them was very nearly a twin to the red-haired woman at her side . . . or rather, who’d been at her side a moment earlier. Her companion had leaped forward, and was tossing the sports bag at a startled-looking woman in a brown leather trenchcoat not quite half a block away. Two voices shouted at once:

“Sh- Jade firecat! Catch!”

“MOM!!!!”

Shego! The fanfic byline only fazed Mell for an instant. Her eyes flicked over the other three figures. Damn, I’m an idiot. Kim Possible’s a teenager; that has to be her and her sidekick with the jetpacks. And my subway lady is – her mother??

Mell didn’t try to sort out the obvious contradictions. Instead, her mind clicked over into action mode; she plunged both hands into her jacket. Her airborne opponents swooped to avoid a barrage of pulsed energy from the pocket Gatling laser . . .

. . . but the elder Possible’s attention was focused entirely on Shego, and not on the beam streaking toward her unguarded back.

[to be continued....]

Belated Yuletide recs

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 00:20:57 GMT

I'm way behind in issuing recs for works from this year's Yuletide Treasure challenge (see yuletide). Here are a few that impressed me:

Slave Bear of Care-A-Lot
This caused a sensation when the stories went up -- and deservedly so. Yes, it's Care Bears. Yes, it's NC-17. Yes, it's warped....

Transmogrification
Calvin & Hobbes; this slightly squicked me in one spot, but it's hard to argue with a lot of the author's extrapolations. There's also a wicked twist ending which I don't dare spoil.

First Day Family
Darkwing Duck, by an author whose other work (musical and fic alike) I very much respect. I'd forgotten just how amusing this universe was.

A Gift for Mrs. Pollifax
Inspired by a lovely series of cozy/spy mysteries by Dorothy Gilman. If you're familiar with the books, this will amuse you no end. If not -- well, this seems to be Yuletide's year for twist endings....

And O'er His Heart a Shadow
The Road to El Dorado (the animated feature of a couple of years back). The author understands not just these characters, but the whole "road" vibe....

In Which a New Child Comes to the Forest
Christopher Robin. The road to fic in the Poohverse is filled with peril; this one seems to me to dodge nearly all the potholes, which is no small feat.