chocolate box reveals!
Chocolate Box 2020 is revealed! I wrote two things, an assignment and a pinch hit. My assignment was for 
sewn:
Petals and Thorns (8807 words) by Isis
Fandom: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Astrid | Skjall's Sister/Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon
Characters: Astrid | Skjall's Sister, Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon, Original Characters, Jaskier | Dandelion, Priscilla (The Witcher)
Additional Tags: Post-The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Witcher Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon, Minor Jaskier | Dandelion/Priscilla, Novigrad (The Witcher), Canon-Typical Violence, Action/Adventure, Backstory draws on Witcher book series canon
Summary: Ciri had thought Novigrad, with its bustling streets and crowds of people from all over the Continent, would be safe. But Astrid had recognized her in an instant.
So, about three years ago I wrote the first Astrid/Ciri fic on AO3. And now I've written the - well, it would be the second, except there's a Ciri/all the women in Skellige WIP, so I guess it's the third.
I decided not to go with
sewn's prompt about sharing a drink after the sauna, because I'd written a post-game sauna story, and I couldn't figure out how to fit in a missing-scene drink after the in-game sauna, since Ciri's anxious to get going. So I started reviewing the canon quest that Astrid's in, and found that the wiki suggests that Astrid and her mother died in the Wild Hunt's attack, since when Geralt and Yennefer talked to the villagers nobody knew what happened to Ciri, which: nooooo! But reviewing her dialogue, I noticed that she's envious of Ciri being a 'traveler', that she complains about being stuck in a 'fish puddle' where everyone's related to each other three times over, so it made sense to me that she might have used the destruction of Lofoten as an excuse to leave.
Where would she go? The big city, of course: Novigrad. What would she do there, such that Ciri might cross her path? At first I thought she could be a barmaid, but there is also a canonical barmaid friend of Ciri's in Novigrad, so I might as well write that pairing, if I wanted a barmaid. I decided to make her an (apprentice) herbalist because there are traveling herbalists in the games, and that would be both plausible as a career, and a way for Ciri to encounter her.
That was the setting, but I needed a story. I watched a few clips of The Sauna Scene (yes, it deserves capital letters!) and saw that if Ciri goes naked into the sauna, Astrid's mother comments on her tattoo, and if Ciri says she got it when she was 'young and drunk', Astrid says that she'd like one herself, 'just above me rear.' Since my recip had mentioned tattoos as a like (er, as an art like, I realized later, but I just saw it in the likes list) I decided that this would be the point of the fic, so to speak - conveniently there are public baths in Novigrad, so they'd go there and Ciri would see Astrid's tattoo and it would lead to revelations and also sex. :-)
Except that what happened was that I had to draw things out a bit - they start out on a sort of sad note, so I wanted to develop their relationship first - so I decided they could go to the forest to pick herbs, but what's the point of that if they're not ATTACKED! and then I realized that it would be boring to just have the climax be tattoo revelation in the baths, but look, I hung this gun on the wall about Ciri trying to be incognito, why not use it? And so the whole subplot happened with the guy tracking her down. (Also, I completely randomly chose celandine for the herb he asked Astrid about, and then I looked it up on the wiki and saw it was Zireael's herb, i.e., the same bird Ciri is named for, and I was all I CAN USE THAT!) So, tl;dr, it wasn't supposed to be a plotty fic, but the bits just fell into place, and I'm really happy with the way it worked out. Thanks to
filigranka for beta.
I picked up
tablelamp's PH because their prompt made me giggle: "What if an action movie hero (James Bond, Dominic Toretto, Batman, etc.) is having car trouble and calls the brothers Magliozzi? Are Click and Clack excited to have a really fancy or unusual car to talk about, or do they mock the caller for having one?"
Turboencabulator Trouble (1480 words) by Isis
Fandom: Car Talk (Radio Show), James Bond - All Media Types
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: James Bond, Tom Magliozzi, Ray Magliozzi
Additional Tags: Humor, Ridiculous Invented Car Parts, I don't know why James Bond is in Montana either, Crack Crossover
Summary: “Hello, you’re on Car Talk,” said a man with a strong Boston accent. // “This is James Bond,” he said. “I’m currently in a rather heavy snowstorm on an unpaved road somewhere in Montana.”
I loved Car Talk, and I especially loved the way the brothers played off each other and made gentle fun of everything, including their poor callers. The prompt immediately made me think of a basic plot: James Bond calls, they make fun of Bond cliches and come up with some ludicrous solution to his problem, which turns out to be the ACTUAL solution. I googled A LOT to get made-up car parts names, and hit paydirt with the Turboencabulator, from which I took most of them.
As several people noted in comments, in this story James Bond is both a real person AND a movie character. This sort of duality is something I love. I'm a big fan of fictional characters meeting real people, which is probably down to my early exposure to historical fiction along the lines of James Michener, books that were about the experiences of fictional people in important historical situations, where naturally they encountered the historical characters. (Currently, this is something I enjoy in Outlander and The Last Kingdom!)
James Bond (the fictional character) being recognized by the real brothers Magliozzi is a backwards version of this trope, but it's also one I love. I've twice written, for example, the actor Paul Gross meeting versions of the characters he has played (in Superego and Five Extraordinary Encounters That (Probably) Never Happened). In a way, it's a sort of reverse portal fantasy. There's the level of 'fictional character dealing with the real world' which can make for a good fish-out-of-water story, but then there's the cracky level of the character being a fictional character in the real world which is an excellent lode to mine for both humor and character exploration. (Uh, this one is mostly humor.) Thanks to
thisbluespirit for Britpicking and for inadvertently providing one of the funnier (to me) lines.
Crossposted from isis at Dreamwidth where there are
comments. | Comment at Dreamwidth
sewn:
Petals and Thorns (8807 words) by Isis
Fandom: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Astrid | Skjall's Sister/Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon
Characters: Astrid | Skjall's Sister, Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon, Original Characters, Jaskier | Dandelion, Priscilla (The Witcher)
Additional Tags: Post-The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Witcher Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon, Minor Jaskier | Dandelion/Priscilla, Novigrad (The Witcher), Canon-Typical Violence, Action/Adventure, Backstory draws on Witcher book series canon
Summary: Ciri had thought Novigrad, with its bustling streets and crowds of people from all over the Continent, would be safe. But Astrid had recognized her in an instant.
So, about three years ago I wrote the first Astrid/Ciri fic on AO3. And now I've written the - well, it would be the second, except there's a Ciri/all the women in Skellige WIP, so I guess it's the third.
I decided not to go with
sewn's prompt about sharing a drink after the sauna, because I'd written a post-game sauna story, and I couldn't figure out how to fit in a missing-scene drink after the in-game sauna, since Ciri's anxious to get going. So I started reviewing the canon quest that Astrid's in, and found that the wiki suggests that Astrid and her mother died in the Wild Hunt's attack, since when Geralt and Yennefer talked to the villagers nobody knew what happened to Ciri, which: nooooo! But reviewing her dialogue, I noticed that she's envious of Ciri being a 'traveler', that she complains about being stuck in a 'fish puddle' where everyone's related to each other three times over, so it made sense to me that she might have used the destruction of Lofoten as an excuse to leave.
Where would she go? The big city, of course: Novigrad. What would she do there, such that Ciri might cross her path? At first I thought she could be a barmaid, but there is also a canonical barmaid friend of Ciri's in Novigrad, so I might as well write that pairing, if I wanted a barmaid. I decided to make her an (apprentice) herbalist because there are traveling herbalists in the games, and that would be both plausible as a career, and a way for Ciri to encounter her.
That was the setting, but I needed a story. I watched a few clips of The Sauna Scene (yes, it deserves capital letters!) and saw that if Ciri goes naked into the sauna, Astrid's mother comments on her tattoo, and if Ciri says she got it when she was 'young and drunk', Astrid says that she'd like one herself, 'just above me rear.' Since my recip had mentioned tattoos as a like (er, as an art like, I realized later, but I just saw it in the likes list) I decided that this would be the point of the fic, so to speak - conveniently there are public baths in Novigrad, so they'd go there and Ciri would see Astrid's tattoo and it would lead to revelations and also sex. :-)
Except that what happened was that I had to draw things out a bit - they start out on a sort of sad note, so I wanted to develop their relationship first - so I decided they could go to the forest to pick herbs, but what's the point of that if they're not ATTACKED! and then I realized that it would be boring to just have the climax be tattoo revelation in the baths, but look, I hung this gun on the wall about Ciri trying to be incognito, why not use it? And so the whole subplot happened with the guy tracking her down. (Also, I completely randomly chose celandine for the herb he asked Astrid about, and then I looked it up on the wiki and saw it was Zireael's herb, i.e., the same bird Ciri is named for, and I was all I CAN USE THAT!) So, tl;dr, it wasn't supposed to be a plotty fic, but the bits just fell into place, and I'm really happy with the way it worked out. Thanks to
filigranka for beta.
I picked up
tablelamp's PH because their prompt made me giggle: "What if an action movie hero (James Bond, Dominic Toretto, Batman, etc.) is having car trouble and calls the brothers Magliozzi? Are Click and Clack excited to have a really fancy or unusual car to talk about, or do they mock the caller for having one?"
Turboencabulator Trouble (1480 words) by Isis
Fandom: Car Talk (Radio Show), James Bond - All Media Types
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: James Bond, Tom Magliozzi, Ray Magliozzi
Additional Tags: Humor, Ridiculous Invented Car Parts, I don't know why James Bond is in Montana either, Crack Crossover
Summary: “Hello, you’re on Car Talk,” said a man with a strong Boston accent. // “This is James Bond,” he said. “I’m currently in a rather heavy snowstorm on an unpaved road somewhere in Montana.”
I loved Car Talk, and I especially loved the way the brothers played off each other and made gentle fun of everything, including their poor callers. The prompt immediately made me think of a basic plot: James Bond calls, they make fun of Bond cliches and come up with some ludicrous solution to his problem, which turns out to be the ACTUAL solution. I googled A LOT to get made-up car parts names, and hit paydirt with the Turboencabulator, from which I took most of them.
As several people noted in comments, in this story James Bond is both a real person AND a movie character. This sort of duality is something I love. I'm a big fan of fictional characters meeting real people, which is probably down to my early exposure to historical fiction along the lines of James Michener, books that were about the experiences of fictional people in important historical situations, where naturally they encountered the historical characters. (Currently, this is something I enjoy in Outlander and The Last Kingdom!)
James Bond (the fictional character) being recognized by the real brothers Magliozzi is a backwards version of this trope, but it's also one I love. I've twice written, for example, the actor Paul Gross meeting versions of the characters he has played (in Superego and Five Extraordinary Encounters That (Probably) Never Happened). In a way, it's a sort of reverse portal fantasy. There's the level of 'fictional character dealing with the real world' which can make for a good fish-out-of-water story, but then there's the cracky level of the character being a fictional character in the real world which is an excellent lode to mine for both humor and character exploration. (Uh, this one is mostly humor.) Thanks to
thisbluespirit for Britpicking and for inadvertently providing one of the funnier (to me) lines.
Crossposted from isis at Dreamwidth where there are
comments. | Comment at Dreamwidth