amberswansong

Anything marked "post-film" can be assumed to have spoilers, but really, kids, why would you be reading the fic if you haven't seen the movie?

No Pairing:
Regret* Rotti, Carmela. Backstory, drabble.
I've Got a Dark Alley and a Bad Idea That Says You Should Shut Your Mouth* Graverobber, Amber. Backstory. Amber meets Graverobber.
Wasted Youth Amber, Luigi. Sillyfic, drabble.
We're Only Love Pavi, Amber, Luigi. Shortly post-film, drabble.
Some Rights of Memory* Amber, immediately post-film.

LARGOCEST:
Amber/Luigi:
The Future Waits Without Us (The Future Waits Without Us, part 1) Shortly post-film.
Naked, We Are Suddenly Strange (The Future Waits Without Us, part 2) Shortly post-film.
I Shall Leave You In Ruins* (Luigi's POV) Pre-film.
But I Won't Do That* Backstory, Amber and Luigi's first time.
Desperation (NC-17) Shortly post-film.
Our Love's Confusing, But It Never Gets Dull* (Luigi's POV) Pre-film.
Standards Drabble, post-film.

Amber/Pavi:
Learning Backstory.

Luigi/Pavi:
Mixed Signals Also contains Bill/Ogre, during filming.

Luigi/Pavi/Amber:
Advantage. A drabble.

OTHER PAIRINGS:
Amber/Graverobber:
I Don't Care Just What You Think (The Future Waits Without Us, part 4) Years later.
Learning Backstory.
Zydrate Poem, around the film.
Miles to Go* Post-film.
Warning During, or maybe shortly after.
Out of Fashion Just before the film.
Artifice Pre-film.

Pavi/Shilo:
Luring Post-film, AU.
Consequences Post-film, AU. These two pieces are related to each other but currently nothing else.

Luigi/Shilo:
Spontaneous Post-film, AU (and a different one from any of the others). Kink meme prompt.

Nathan/Shilo:
Appropriate. Pre-film.

Mag/Shilo:
Awkward. Slightly AU, during the film.

Amber/Mag:
Losing Backstory.

Pavi/Graverobber
Anticipation Pre-film.

Graverobber/Nathan:
A Kiss is a Terrible Thing to Waste AU backstory.

Rotti/Nathan:
Laughing. Backstory.

THE FUTURE WAITS WITHOUT US (Series)
The Future Waits Without Us (Lugi/Amber)
Naked, We Are Suddenly Strange (Luigi/Amber)
Thrice Lovelier Shine The Things That Last (Pavi, Amber, Luigi)
I Don't Care Just What You Think (Graverobber/Amber)

* This fic is unofficially included in the The Future Waits Without Us arc.

Darlings, if anybody is now fed up with LJ's culture of privacy violations, I have some lovely Dreamwidth invite codes that I'd be happy to share. Leave me a comment.

Occasionally I write stuff that isn't Repo! related. I know, it's crazy, but take a deep breath and go with it. You can blame ff_exchange for it.

See, I volunteered to be a pinch hitter for Final Fantasy Exchange even though I didn't sign up for the exchange itself. Some days I don't even know what goes through my head. Anyway, the prompt I volunteered for had a FFVII:AC prompt involving Rufus and the Turks that I figured I would be writing to, but for some reason my brain seized on the Fran prompt for FFXII and I haven't even finished playing it yet not that I have finished FFVII either but I have studied it extensively enough that I could write academic works on it. So here it is.

Title: Leaving Means
Pairings/Characters: Fran/Balthier, Jote
Rating: PG
Summary: "Leaving means never coming back," Jote told her on the last day, a final attempt to sway her from the course.
Word Count: 1062
Warnings: Totally making this up, guys.

When she was a girl, she longed for the wider world in a way that her sisters could not understand.

Also having said that I'm leaving LJ except for fic I will observe that I have written a fic for Three Weeks for Dreamwidth that is ONLY available over there. So, you know, if you want some Luigi/Amber fluff you could go over there for it. Just sayin'.

I created my very first Livejournal back in September 2002. Back then, it was an invite-only site, and it was...well, it was different. In the meantime, I've lived through a lot of wank like Strikethrough and ridiculous corporate decisions like Strikethrough II: Electric Boogaloo, and basically have watched the journaling service turn into a site that feels like a profit-hungry monster that doesn't actually care about having anything but eyeballs and clickthroughs.

Most of my posting is being done over on my Dreamwidth. The longer I spend on LJ, the more uncomfortable I become with their policies and their behaviors. For now, I will continue to cross-post fic (except for the stuff I wrote for Three Weeks for Dreamwidth), but don't expect to see anything else.

If you're interested in checking out a journal site founded for and by fans, with a solid track record of respecting user privacy and standing up against cyberbullies, I have an invite code and can probably scare up others. Drop me a comment.

In the meantime, I'll drop in occasionally and glance over my flist, but I've really reached the point where almost everybody on here is on DW too, so most of my list is duplicated. So if you haven't, I totally encourage you to jump ship with me. It's fun over there, I promise. It's like old-school LJ, with a commitment to actually stay that way.

This is the very last request from the meme I did a while ago. Somehow it became two drabbles, perhaps that will make up for how damned long it took me to write them.

Title: Artifice
Pairings/Characters: Pavi, Amber/Graverobber
Rating: PG
Summary: There are secrets, but not between them.
Words: 198
Requested by: supercrook

( One thing Pavi had learned from his sister was that if you never spoke of anything of substance, everyone assumed you were a shallow, self-absorbed idiot.Collapse )


Title: Anticipation
Pairings/Characters: Pavi/Graverobber, Amber/Graverobber implied
Rating: PG
Summary: He should have expected this.
Words: 144
Requested by: supercrook

( Graverobber's eyes narrowed as he recognized the man.Collapse )

I have to ask this, so I can concentrate on the paper I'm supposed to be writing, rather than sitting here mulling over this or (worse) researching it.

O ye writers of fanfic:

Have you ever written a gender-swap AU? This includes fics where one, a few, or all characters are just naturally genderswapped (e.g., a universe in which Squall and Seifer are female and Quistis and Rinoa are male), or Something Happened to cause one or more of the characters to spontaneously swap genders (e.g., Hermione slipped polyjuice potion in Ron's pumpkin juice to make sure he NEVER laughed at her cramps again).

( If you have, could you answer me a few questions?Collapse )

Feel free (oh please please please) to pimp this out to your friends, relations, acquaintances, random people on the street, whoever.

The last two weeks have been totally chaotic. I went on an amazing vacation with finesharpedge up the coast of California. We went to Disneyland (because that's the kind of geeks we are), had dinner in the Blue Bayou, and he proposed to me. On the way back from vacation, I got a call that my grandmother had passed away, so I had to make a flying trip to Georgia, where I'd just about recovered from jet lag when I got to come back home. But this entry is not about that.

It's about my proposal, which was entirely on impulse, (He'd apparently been seriously considering proposing for several months, but he hadn't been planning to do it that night. Disney magic, bitches.) so he didn't have a ring. This meant, of course, that I got to find one I liked. We've sort of been looking around, but I can't stand the vast majority of the type of jewelry found in regular jewelry stores. I'm also not terribly crazy about (white) diamonds, and while most girls can just go with their birthstone instead, I'm an April baby, so my birthstone... is a diamond.

Anyway.

We went out to the Renaissance Festival for the last day, and stopped by the booth of a jeweler I'd bought from before, Da'oud. He makes unusual, lovely jewelry, and is one of the few people I've found who will set precious and semi-precious stones in silver.

Cruising the booth, I asked to see what looked like an odd red stone in the case. Brought into the sunlight, it was a darker golden color with an incredible fire. The saleslady explained to me that it was a half-carat chocolate diamond set in white gold.

It fit my finger like it was made for it.

( And so I had to bring it home.Collapse )

This is apparently the first thing I've finished since the beginning of the year. Pretentious titles, ahoy.

Title: Some Rights of Memory
Pairings/Characters: Amber
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Catching her red reflection in the mirror, she blinked until her eyes were the right color. Her own eyes, her father's eyes, looked back at her, narrowing in disapproval.
Word Count: 1043
Warnings: Body count of 3 - this is immediately post-opera.

For me, with sorrow I embrace my fortune:
I have some rights of memory in this kingdom,
Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me.
- Hamlet, Act V

( Amber forced herself to stare into the mirror.Collapse )

I'm smart. I've always been smart. And by this I mean academically - I pick up on concepts easily, ace tests without studying, write A papers in the two hours before they're due. I don't say this to sound pretentious or anything, it's just the way it is. And I'm pretty sure that most of you guys are the same way, because I tend to make friends with smart people.

( This is long.Collapse )

Title: We're Only Love
Pairings/Characters: Pavi, Amber, Luigi
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Amber in a knee-length skirt with her hair covered seemed like the most ridiculous thing ever, and Pavi wondered at the mercurial nature of a god that would create a creature like his sister and then demand modesty and chastity from her.
Word Count: 263
Warnings: Character death.

( A snippet from Rotti's funeral, Pavi's POV.Collapse )

I knew it was a crazy idea when I signed up for it - on the heels of NaNo, a fic of over 1000 words in an obscure fandom, due right in the middle of finals. I offered a lot of fandoms, including a lot that I was generally familiar with but had never written. (I'm sort of considering as a challenge to myself, going down my offered list and writing something for all of them.)

Yuletide's a pretty awesome concept in general, but additionally thrilling was the week in between the story reveal and the author reveal, in which complete strangers recommended my fics.

Anyway, so this is what I did:

I was lucky enough to match two fandoms for my recipient, Daria and Mary Renault's Alexander trilogy, both of which I'd never written for. I started tearing my hair out, but I went back and re-read (most of) Fire From Heaven, which I HIGHLY recommend. Getting it up to a thousand words was a major challenge, because it wanted to clock in at about 850, but I managed it and I'm pretty proud of "In Two Bodies.

Considering how close to the deadline I cut it to actually post the fic, I'm really proud of myself for managing it. (At one point finesharp said to me, "If you default, it's not the end of the world," and I snarled back, "YES IT IS." I'm sorry for being such a crabby bitch at the deadline; I love you for putting up with me. NaNoWriMo made me want to slit my wrists in the last week before the deadline as well; deadlines and I don't get along.)

Yuletide Madness meant an opportunity to get a crack at other people's request prompts. At one point I had probably a dozen prompts open, but when it came down to it, I wrote Finding Zihuatanejo, an ending to Stephen King's wonderful novella, "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption." That one actually got rec'd by several different people, which was totally thrilling and gratifying.

And of course since Repo! qualifies as a tiny fandom, I had to write a Madness fic for that, and the fact that I filled finesharp's prompt was sheer coincidence so I banged out the Luigi/Amber fic This Christmas in about an hour, posting in the last two minutes before the collection was locked down.

So I've been involved in a Twitter Repo! RP for a while now, and started out just playing myself, but there's something of a shortage of OCs in departments other than Claims or Medical (i.e., GENterns).

I created Elizabeth Burkett, left-hand henchgirl, (named in honor of Alisa Burket, the actress who played her).

I was bored tonight, so I actually wrote down the backstory I've had for her.

( It is said that every career at GeneCo either starts with a tragedy, or ends with one.Collapse )

My gift for Yuletide was the most amazing, incredible thing. It made me cry, it was just that perfect. So if any of you on my flist are fans of Guy Gavriel Kay, and particularly Tigana and The Fionavar Tapestry, you need to do yourself a favor and GO READ IT.

...I see that LJ notifications are working again.

If you need me, I'll be buried under a sea of virtual gift notifications, as apparently everyone in the entire world sends snowflake cookies to each other. This is sort of like the snowflake-cookie equivalent of a grade school classroom on Valentine's Day, where copperbadge is the most popular kid in class...and I cannot finish that thought without sounding either pathetic or passive-aggressive.

First of all, thank you for volunteering for this crazy project that led you here. This is my first year joining in, and I'm ridiculously excited about the whole thing, not the least of which is the part here.

Just a quick run-down on stuff; I'm fairly easy to please and I don't have a lot of absolutely-do-nots; gen, het, and slash are all good, kink is okay, I'm very sex-positive, so whatever the characters are feeling are fine with me. Please no mpreg, character death, or hating on people.

And this year, these are the worlds I love:

Diane Duane - Young Wizards: Tom Swayle/Carl Romeo
This pairing is one of the things I love dearly about this series, and one of the few reasons I wish it wasn't a YA series. One of my happiest con memories is sitting with Diane Duane for an hour talking about the books, and when she confirmed the existence of this relationship for me, I was delirious with joy. I would adore it if you wrote me something a little racier than appropriate for a YA novel, though it doesn't have to be porn. Younger Tom and Carl doing fieldwork would also be amazing. Really - whatever the Powers give you, I would love.

Guy Gavriel Kay - Tigana: Brandin/Dianora
The first time I read this book, they made me cry. I love them and I want them to be happy, because damn it, they deserve it. That said, anything you're moved to do for them is wonderful; after the book would be even better.

Diana Wynne Jones - Chronicles of Chrestomanci: Any
I'm totally brand new to this fandom, so anything will do. Really. Go crazy. If there's a Chrestomanci fic you've always wanted to write, this is totally your shining opportunity.

Babylon 5 - Alfred Bester
I have to admit, I think poor Bester got a bad rap. Yeah, he thinks he's all that and a bag of chips; well, in his world, he is. I totally think if B5 was coming out today, there'd be a spin-off police procedural show involving psi cops. I'd watch it. Anyway, what I'd really like to see is Bester at home, spending time with his friends/family/whatever. He's not a heartless bastard, he just thinks non-telepaths are inferior. Give me some of that non-heartless stuff. He's married, has a daughter, fell in love with Carolyn - anything with them would be amazing. If you're not into Bester, I would love to have a life-among-the-telepaths sort of piece.

Again, thank you!!

29 days. 22 chapters. 2 interludes. 50,126 words. 1 novel.

Holy Jesus.

Title: Standards
Pairings/Characters: Luigi/Amber, Luigi/OFC (implied)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Lugi's potential date gets screened by his sister.
Word Count: 153
Warnings: Luigi. (In other words, language.)

( You can't date her, Luigi.Collapse )

Due to a scheduling conflict, we are having Thanksgiving dinner today. Which was nice, as I spent most of yesterday with a horrible headache. Also went and saw New Moon, which was a) much better than Twilight and b) much better than I expected, which considering I had basement-level expectations, wouldn't be terribly hard. My response to the movie is much the same as to the book - it's not deep but it's fun.

So, today:

TURKEY: In Out of the oven! Currently "resting," because apparently getting roasted is hard on a turkey. (I'm using the Alton Brown method of turkey-making, so my turkey spent the night in a Styrofoam cooler, which meant my first activity of the day was mopping up brine off the kitchen floor. Styrofoam cooler: fail.)

CREAM OF MUSHROOM SOUP: Complete. (finesharp is allergic to white button mushrooms, but loves green bean casserole, so I am gaining ultimate good-girlfriend points by making cream of mushroom soup using crimini mushrooms.)

MASHED POTATOES: Sitting on the back of the stove to let the butter melt. Otherwise, done.

CANDIED YAMS: Done!

GREEN BEAN CASSEROLE: Done! Looks like it worked, hopefully it will taste as good as it smells.

PUMPKIN PIE: In the oven.

GRAVY: Done.

Eating with guests: Done. Now we all slide into turkey comas.

Left to do:

Go to NaNo overnighter
Write approximately 1.5 million 10,000 words by Monday
Profit????

Including the fact that I'm not cooking until tomorrow.

Leave me a comment saying "Boom-cha" and I will respond by asking you five questions that satisfy my curiosity. Update your journal with the answers to the questions, including this in the post.

betareject asked me:

1. What got you into Repo? Was it the actors the story? or something else?

I first found out about it through my now-ex-roommate, who saw Paris talking about it on Craig Kilbourne. She bought the pre-surgery sampler, and then the soundtrack, and I was totally in love before I ever saw the movie - and THEN I got to see it on the Road Tour, and met a ton of people affiliated with it, and seeing how they loved it made me love it even more.

2. What inspires you to write fiction? Is it music, vids, other tales?

A little bit of everything. A song will set me off, thinking about a scene, reading a fic, or sometimes I just get a sentence in my head and off we go.

3. What is your all time favorite fanvid?

I don't know that I have one. I didn't have a computer fast enough to run streaming video for a long time, so I've only now started to get into the habit of actually watching vid links.

4. In your opinion do you think its possible for a cleaned up Amber to ever be reunited with Graverobber? and 5. In your opinion did Graverobber ever have feelings for Amber beyond the fact she was a cash cow and a good lay?

I'm going to answer these questions together, since they're pretty related. In short, the answer to both of them is "yes." They have a very complicated relationship, somewhere between love and hate, and the feelings vary from day to day and minute to minute. ("Zydrate Anatomy" is a great example of this, with them shoving each other around, totally contemptuous - but when he goes down on his knees to Z her up, the look in his eyes is pure worship. It was that moment that convinced me that there was something more to them than contempt.) The great challenge with clean Amber and Graverobber is, of course, the shifted power dynamic. When she was addicted to what he had to give, it made them something approaching equals. Without it, she's still one of the most powerful people in the world, and he's... not. She may not care about that, but on some level, he will. They may be able to build a relationship, but it will be tricky and will take a lot of work on both of their parts.

I'm thinking about posting my NaNo in progress over on my dreamwidth. Flocked, of course. Opinions? Need an invite? Let me know. <3

I did this request meme back in April. I have ONE LEFT.

Title: Advantage
Pairings/Characters: Luigi/Pavi/Amber
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Who's taking advantage of whom, here?
Warnings: Incest
Requested by: carmelalargo

( Advantage (100 words, Largocest threesome)Collapse )

Title: Appropriate
Pairings/Characters: Nathan/Shilo
Rating: R
Summary: He shouldn't be thinking this.
Warnings: Underage incest.
Requested by: heavenlyblack

( Appropriate (162 words, Nathan/Shilo)Collapse )

Title: Awkward
Pairings/Characters: Mag/Shilo, implied Mag/Marni
Rating: R
Summary: Mag really shouldn't tell her what she's thinking.
Warnings: Half-naked teenage girls.
Requested by: cysfics

( Awkward (190 words, Mag/Shilo, 'short skirt')Collapse )

I have written three drabbles (three of the four I owe from the request post I did a million years ago. Trying to get some of this off my plate so it doesn't distract me from my novel. I'm too tired to edit and format them tonight, though, so you'll get them tomorrow.

So you have that to look forward to.

Because I'm totally a princess.

( Long meme is long.Collapse )