Crowley's Christmas Fic Exchange: Snow Days or Rocky Mountain Hunt for Dizzojay

[crowleysxmas]

Snow Days or Rocky Mountain Hunt

Author: swellison
Recipient: dizzojay
Characters: Sam, Dean, Bobby
Word Count: 2,270
Genre: Gen
Original Prompt: A festive away day for the Winchesters and any friends you wish to include. Mountains, hot chocolate, snow and... a hot tub!

Comments

[midnightsilvers]

Those hot springs sound wonderful! That’s definitely the right way to end a hunt! 😁 get all the kinks out of those muscles.
A phantom skier is such an interesting case! And a nice little win for the boys 👍🏻😄 good fun!

[swellison]

Thank you, glad you liked my story. Dizzo's prompt was very specific, and I was stumped by how to include
mountains, until I thought of a ghost on skis---the phantom skier!

[candygramme]

LOL! I love Dean needing to turn his hot chocolate into a mocha! Also, I really want to visit that place with all the hot tubs. It sounds amazing especially right now, since I'm stuck in snowmageddon here. And Bobby is a sly dog, but we knew that!

[swellison]

Thank you! Glad you liked this story. The hot springs spa is in Pagosa Springs, in lower southwestern Colorado, so it may be snowing there, too!😁😃

[dizzojay]

This is wonderful, thank you so much! I appreciate that after their punishing hunt on the slopes, the boys could relax in the gorgeous hot springs. Are these hot springs real ones? You talk about them with a lot of knowledge! It makes it feel like I'm on a proper tour; I can really see them in my minds eye! You also describe the skiing section like a pro - is that first hand experience also?

I really enjoyed the hunt with the old skier spirit, and Sam snowboarding and firing the iron shells - who said men can't multi-task, huh? Dean did very well on his skis - far better than I would have done!

Thank you so much for my gift - I love it :)

[swellison]

You're welcome, I'm glad you enjoyed the story based on your prompts. Once I decided to conflate hot tub with hot springs, I had the story's stick plot. 😊 Now for the questions...
Yes, the hot springs are real, they are in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. I was there, once, at night a couple of decades (at least!) ago, so I relied on googling to get info and video of the hot springs. Most of what I remember is how cold it was padding on the paved pathways from one hot spring to another in the frigid January(!) nighttime air, how wonderfully warm and welcoming the hot springs felt and how amazing the night sky looked.
I'm not a skier, at all. I've had 3 weekend ski trips, 2 in college, where I earned the title "Terror of the Bunny Slope"--although I did work my way up to the main intermediate slope, which you had to access by the ski lift. I liked skiing, and I love watching the skiing events at the Olympics.

[fledge]

Ahhh, brilliant! A case fic! I imagine the poor ghost wasn't really trying to scare or hurt people, he either wanted them to find him so he could be laid to rest, or he was just doing his thing - skiing - and never meant to cause the accidents! At least now he's at rest. It's a good thing they managed to find all those abandoned bones, but I'm guessing they had lain relatively undisturbed under the snow all this time, so not too much scattering. I like the description of the skier, so they knew they were looking for someone who'd died a good while ago

[swellison]

Thank you, glad you enjoyed my story. The phantom skier was disturbed by the new ski trail, which uncovered (at least some of) his remains. I wanted to avoid the hassles of a contemporary ghost - identity, police, recovering the bones, etc---so I made the ghost from a long time ago, freeing the boys to salt and burn it without consequences. Since Big Pretzel is the sunny side of Supernatural, I wanted a light hunt for the boys, I used Sam's 'hand of demon death' and the date of the full moon to clue the readers that this is December 2008 (fourth season). After I posted this, I realized that there's nothing Christmas-sy in the story, so I'll tweak it with a little bit of Christmas when I post it later on fanfic.

[fledge]

Ahhh, of course! Those pesky skiers disturbing his 'rest'. There was a clue there, you did say it was a new trail! :D

The Hand of Demon Death (I really love that phrase, so Dean lol) did set it firmly in season 4 but the full moon swung right by me as it never occurred to me to check the actual date. Kudos for accuracy, I'm usually very OCD about things like geographical facts and distances (I did actually check for my poem that it can snow in Kansas...) but for some reason I don't bother about moons, if I want a full moon, I just throw it in there (whoops... maybe I should pull my socks up!) so yep, that's good research.

I honestly didn't notice the lack of explicit Christmas references, I suppose December, snow, hot springs etc. seemed seasonal enough - I guess you could throw in a line about the resort already decorating for the holidays, but I wouldn't go overboard, it works beautifully as it is!