the deep moans round with many voices

Batch the sixth. :)

All prompts drawn from the current iteration of the Three Sentence Ficathon (post one and post two), hosted by the wonderful rthstewart. Come join the fun!

---------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------

( 31. ) For anonymous: Any, any, grieving for the living, written 2/12/21

Last Rites (95 words)

Fandom = The Magnus Archives. SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 194!

-----

( cut for spoilers )

---------------
---------------

( 32. ) For undeadrobins: Any, any, waking up to the alarm, written 2/13/21

Home Front (885 words)

Fandom = The Magnus Archives. This turned into a season 5-style statement fic. It's mostly a Slaughter domain, though there are some elements of the Eye, the Desolation, the Vast, and the Lonely floating around the edges.

-----

( cut for length )

---------------
---------------

( 33. ) For thetransintransgenic: Oz/any set on Earth, any, queer visitors from Oz, written 2/13/21

Rainbow's End (175 words)

I realized after I posted this that thetransintransgenic probably meant queer in the modern sense while I was thinking of queer = odd due to the time period when Oz was written. Also, this is not a crossover. *headdesk*

-----

"And this is my friend Polychrome, she's the Rainbow's Daughter and helped me come visit you even though Philadelphia isn't a fairy country," Saladin said, swinging his left hand forward, his fingers (still a bit pudgy with youth, as if he hadn't aged a day since he vanished) twined with the slender, almost ethereal digits of a strangely ageless girl in multicolored scraps of a fabric that wasn't quite gauze, wasn't quite silk, and looked as if it would cost a hundred dollars an inch for an untattered bolt.

Richard glanced at Eleanor, whose speaking look conveyed quite clearly, 'Your ancestor owned a magic umbrella, mine once killed a dragon, and our son reappeared on the roof after a storm; who's to say he hasn't befriended a fairy?' -- and that was an excellent point, so Richard turned back to Saladin and said, "A pleasure to meet you, Miss Polychrome; any friend of our Button-Bright is always welcome in our home."

"As you are welcome in mine," Polychrome said, and curtsied fit to greet a queen.

---------------
---------------

( 34. ) For thetransintransgenic: Oz/any set on Earth, any, queer visitors from Oz, written 2/13/21

Natural History (250 words)

So I wrote a second fill. Crossover = Oz/Chronicles of Narnia. The Field Museum really does have two separate exhibits of human-eating lions (though one is from 1990, and therefore beyond the scope of this ficlet).

-----

"Dorothy Gale," says the blonde girl with the light of other worlds in her eyes, as she shakes Susan's hand, her left arm tucked firmly around her black-haired companion's waist; "I was born in Kansas, oh, ages ago, but there's not much to see there besides farms and sky so I thought I'd bring Ozma to Chicago and show her a real modern city, and so far it's been awfully good fun, especially the trains and the skyscrapers -- how about you?"

"My father is here for work, and he and my mother thought it would be educational for me to see some of the world beyond England," Susan says; "While I can't say I'm terribly fond of railways, I do agree that skyscrapers are fascinating -- and speaking of fascinating things, I was planning to visit the Field Museum, which I'm told has many intriguing exhibits, including the stuffed remains of two man-eating lions; may I invite you to accompany me?"

Dorothy glances at Ozma who smiles and says, "We must never tell the Cowardly Lion about his cousins' taste or their fates," (Susan, who has her own history with lions, tucks this away to decipher later) which seems to signal agreement since Dorothy plants an enthusiastic kiss on the other girl's cheek before turning back to Susan and chirping their agreement.

Susan never does unearth their story, but that's all right; she's learned to respect other people's privacy, and it would be a shame to spoil such a lovely day.

---------------
---------------

( 35. ) For anonymous: Oz books (L. Frank Baum), Ozma, poppies, written 2/14/21

If I Should Change Before I Wake (445 words)

A nine-sentence fill, because reasons.

-----

Ozma only learned about the poppy field by accident, overhearing the Scarecrow and Nick Chopper reminisce about their journey with Dorothy and wonder idly if the flowers are still there; that struck her as a question worth answering, but not important enough to assemble a Royal Progress, so she rode out to look at the poppy field accompanied only by the Sawhorse which, of course, could not be affected by their sleep-inducing scent.

Death was rare in Oz, so rare as to be nearly impossible, and the poppies' lure of repose was nigh overpowering, yet as Ozma and the Sawhorse wandered through the brilliant expanse of red blossoms, they found no slumbering bodies under the swaying stems and leaves -- either the poppies' victims had sunk into the earth entire, or someone with magical protection (or no need to breathe) had been collecting them.

"Which do you suppose is more likely, old friend?" Ozma asked the Sawhorse, one hand resting lightly on her Magic Belt.

"I have no knowledge on which to base a guess," the Sawhorse said, pawing idly at the base of a poppy stalk with one wooden leg, "but I can stay and keep watch; sooner or later someone will fall asleep and then we'll know what happens."

Ozma considered this, then nodded: "It's my royal duty to remove my enchantments and let the poppies' power affect me," she said; "I cannot let any of my subjects risk this danger unaware, and if we return to the Emerald City to ask for a volunteer, who knows what might occur while we are gone?"

"Royal duty sounds terribly unpleasant," the Sawhorse said, but it agreed to Ozma's plan so long as she used her Magic Belt to send a message to the Scarecrow before she fell asleep.

As she removed her enchantments and lay on the soft ground between and beneath the swaying poppies, Ozma wondered how long their perfume would need to take effect, not to mention how long before whatever fate befell the other sleepers would claim her in its turn.

The poppies' scent was heavy and warm, rich without cloying, and Ozma stared upward at the red petals bobbing, the green leaves fluttering, the blue sky and white clouds beyond, all melding into a strangely familiar swirl of color and scent and that echoed behind her slowly closing eyes.

As her mind unmoored from the tethers of the waking world, she realized this swooning, dizzy whirl felt almost exactly like Mombi's spell that had changed her from Tip to Ozma, and had one moment to wonder what body she would wake in before she drifted into the unmapped sea of sleep.

---------------
---------------

( 36. ) For rthstewart: Doctor Who, Donna Noble, That's where all the weird stuff's happening. In the paperwork., written 2/14/21

Worthy of Her Hire (195 words)

-----

Not that it's any of Donna's business, or that she's been looking in particular, but if you want to know how the marketing director spends his holiday bonus (very posh tastes, that man, in the best fucking-the-pig tradition) or where the hired lorries took the old office furniture after the big switcharound (not, shall we say, any of the usual places one takes old furniture, and she might do a spot of digging to satisfy her own curiosity on that point), she can tell you; she can tell you everything.

She files all the paperwork, after all, and scans and files the digital versions, too -- it takes a bit to learn what's normal, what's normal-weird, and what's proper weird for any company, but she has practice; she can pick that up in two weeks or less -- and it's beyond her why nobody ever expects a temp to read the papers she handles.

And if she should happen to spot something not just proper weird but dangerous... well, Donna may be a little fuzzy on the past few years of her life, but she remembers just enough to know, bone-deep, that she can make things better.

---------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------

I have such a lot of fun with this ficathon every year. :DDD

Today is Yuletide reveal day! Here is the story I wrote this year:

The Stolen Colors of Oz (5268 words) by Elizabeth Culmer
Fandom: Oz - L. Frank Baum
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Button-Bright, Original Characters
Additional Tags: Adventure, Misunderstandings, Colors, Giant Spiders, Negotiations, Whimsy

Summary: The chief difficulty with having lost his Magic Umbrella, Button-Bright reflected a few days after his arrival in the Emerald City with Trot and Cap'n Bill, was that it was harder to get to far-away places without it. On the other hand, having to travel through all the in-between places on his way from here to there did mean he got to see a lot of interesting things he might otherwise have missed.

(Written for moon_custafer)

-----

So, thoughts! moon_custafer and I actually matched on two fandoms -- the other being Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees -- but in the event I only had the time and spoons to write for one of them. (I might try writing a New Year Resolution fic for the other prompt, because I did have a good idea for it; it's just that Mirrlees has a trickier narrative voice to imitate under deadline pressure. *wry*)

Anyway, these two prompts gave me a perfect excuse to reread a number of books I have loved for a very long time, which is always welcome. And then I figured the best response to a prompt about A) people in Oz making adjustments that allow very different people with very different needs to live comfortably together, and B) Button-Bright as a vehicle for exploring that, was to write a story in which Button-Bright helps resolve a conflict between some people with superficially conflicting needs and also gets some insight into the ways his approach to the world is slightly askew from many other people's attitudes. (In other words, tell your parents you're alive, child! They must be worried out of their minds.)

( go read the fic before you read this part )

Anyway, I would have liked to make the story another thousand words longer, and go into a bit more detail about the cave, the spiders' army, the Farbers' army, and the general appearance of the colorless regions, but I think what's on the page works well enough. *wry*

---------------------------------------------
Master List of Elizabeth Culmer's Fanfiction: Miscellaneous Fandoms
---------------------------------------------

Organization: This list is organized alphabetically by fandom. Within each fandom, it's arranged first by associated story cycles (if applicable) and then by date. Word counts and writing dates are approximations.

Content/Warning Policy: 1) I am not consistent about warnings! I use them when I remember, for a few relatively broad categories of potentially problematic content, but if something is off-page, non-explicit, or generally backgrounded, I probably won't think to note it in the metadata. 2) The things I try to warn for are explicit sex, rape, murder, torture, cannibalism, incest, depression/suicide, familial dysfunction, and occasionally also societal dysfunction (aka dystopia). Sometimes I just slap a general content warning on all my fic for a given fandom and don't label each individual fic. I also don't generally warn for violence, unless the violence in a fic is dramatically out-of-step with the violence in its source canon. 3) I don't use any content rating system unless I'm posting to a site or community that requires or encourages ratings, because I find movie-style ratings counter-intuitive when applied to written fiction, and not particularly useful for anything other than denoting the presence of explicit sex, which I already note in the metadata.

Quality Rating System: I've marked my favorite stories with asterisks, on a scale of 1 to 4. The more asterisks, the more I like the story. This doesn't necessarily mean that stories without asterisks are bad, just that I don't like them as much. Also, I am not claiming to be an arbiter of taste; you may love stories I dislike, and vice versa. I am just providing a heads-up about the ones that I think are best written and/or most interesting.

Notes: Outside of my main fandoms, my fanfiction writing tends toward resolving plotholes and other canon problems, the creation of backstory (which is itself a form of problem-solving, where the problem is a gap in canon information about a character or an event), or prompt responses (often for Yuletide). Therefore, almost all the stories on this page are an expression of dissatisfaction with canon, of curiosity about what lies behind the canon we see, or of an attempt to satisfy somebody else's heart's desire. Once I've resolved a problem, filled a gap to my own satisfaction, or answered a prompt, I generally have nothing further to write in that fandom, which is why these subsections have so few stories.

Anyway, there's a lot of random stuff on this page, and some of it I look back on and wonder what on earth I was thinking, but overall I do like most of these stories -- probably because when something bugs me so much that I write a story to fix or explain it, or when I am writing to make someone else happy, I care enough to give my best effort.

Where To Read: As always, if an AO3 version exists, it is definitive. FF.net versions are definitive in the absence of an AO3 version. Journal versions are the equivalent of beta drafts, though the shorter and/or fragmentary works may never be posted anywhere else.

Contents: American Gods, An Ash-Blonde Witch, Arthurian Mythology, Batman, the Bible, the Black Jewels series, the Bourne trilogy, Chalion, Charlotte's Web, Children of the Star, Code Geass, Damar, Death Note, Discworld, Doctor Who, Dragonball Z, fairy tales, Girl Genius, The Girl with the Silver Eyes, Glee, Gormenghast, Hamilton, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Hexwood,The Homeward Bounders, Howl's Moving Castle, Labyrinth, Lord of the Rings, Lucifer (comics), Mad Max, Merlin, Murderbot Diaries, the Oz books, Pern, Ranma 1/2, Rise of the Guardians, Sailor Moon, Saiyuki, Seaward, Shakespeare, Stargate: SG-1, Star Wars, Tam Lin (Pamela Dean), Vorkosigan Saga, White Collar, Wolf Hall, X-Men, and Yu-Gi-Oh!.

---------------------------------------------

( American Gods )

---------------
---------------

( An Ash-Blonde Witch )

---------------
---------------

( Arthurian Mythology )

---------------
---------------

( Batman )

---------------
---------------

( The Bible )

---------------
---------------

( Black Jewels )

---------------
---------------

( Bourne trilogy )

---------------
---------------

( Chalion )