The Winter Court of the Insane, Philosophical Ladybug

Even though I've had the climax of my current fic ready for a while, it just hasn't felt right. Sunday morning I finally realized what was wrong and how to fix it. The climax went from being seriously ludicrous to seriously beautiful. I just adore it now! I did cringe a bit that I felt I couldn't split it up and had to post its 17-page self (eeek!) all in one gulp. Hopefully it will be so entertaining that people won't notice the length. I also decided that the next chapter, where they have to solve the other of the two mysteries, needed more stuff, which I'm putting into it now.

One thing I really want to do in the New Orleans fic is a scene based on this awesomely creepy scene in a Hardy Boys two-parter called Voodoo Doll. The boys end up at this voodoo ceremony and are tricked into believing that voodoo is killing them, gah. (They're really just being chloroformed.) They wake up laying in open coffins in a cemetery while a band plays When the Saints Go Marching In. The coffins even have their names on them! It's probably my favorite scene in the episode. I'm thinking something similar happens to some of the YGO characters, probably Joey, Tristan, and Bakura. And I must keep the creepy lady calling, "Where are the children?" at the ceremony. For the fic, I think I'll either leave it up in the air as to whether it's really voodoo or I'll say it is, rather than chloroform. But it's still just a knockout tactic meant to seriously scare them. Everyone else is panicking looking for them all night, including the Big Five. Events in the current fic seem to indicate that they will be considered part of the group by the end.

One thing I have to be sure of is to have good voodoo and bad voodoo people, and to emphasize that only corrupt people are going to use it for evil purposes. And I need to restudy the differences between vodun and hoodoo; I suppose most of what I want to do is more hoodoo. I haven't looked that up since I was writing for Mignon Germaine, so probably about seven years or so.

I've also been preparing with atmospheric media. I have a wonderful Nancy Drew game set in New Orleans that I've been enjoying. And I was given $5 in Kindle credit and got several books with it since I have the Kindle app on my Fire Tablet. One was a Nancy Drew parody set in New Orleans.

I am so frustrated with that book. It started out kind of adorable, with the characters really the Nancy Drew characters in everything but names, and even then, the main character is still Nancy (with a surname of Keane, ha ha). And Bess is still Elizabeth, but called Beth. George is called Hannah. I guess that was just a way to keep Hannah Gruen remembered, since she doesn't have a counterpart in the story. Otherwise, it would have made more sense to call George Georgia or something. So anyway, it starts out cute, and definitely is like a Nancy Drew book, just with Nancy's abilities being stretched more to slightly WTH levels. There was some nice New Orleans atmospheric goings-on. And I was slightly amused by turning some tropes on their heads, like instead of the girls meeting strange boys who are really nice, they meet some who aren't and have to flee.

But what I didn't like was that the more I got into the book, the more it seemed to emphasize the naughty side of the city and the characters and often seemed to have passages and adventures that were clearly there for no other reason than to be adult. What's more, even though the book is called The Ghost in the Plantation, they've barely visited the plantation or the ghost. A real Nancy Drew book totally would have that plantation as a main setting! There's really not much voodoo content even though it looked like there might be some, and I'm getting sick of Nancy and other characters taking the Lord's name in vain. Plus, it's mostly devolved into chasing down corporate creeps who are after oil and getting very technical and it feels like it could be set anywhere. It is so aggravating. I only got the thing for the New Orleans setting, and honestly, the only thing I can really take away from it to help my fic is for Lector to warn the kids not to go to Bourbon Street.

It says in the summary that it's written for Baby Boomers who fondly remember the Nancy Drew books. Honestly, if they love the Nancy Drew books so much, chances are that they would like to see a book that's like the Nancy Drew books instead of having all of this unnecessary adult junk thrown in. The great thing about Nancy Drew books is that they're clean!

By contrast, the real Nancy Drew in my game brings everything I wanted for the New Orleans atmosphere: a creepy house, a huge cemetery, a voodoo shop, weird stuff going on.... I am so in love with this game. And also stumped; I'll probably have to get out a walkthrough. I generally have to at some point with these games. I always go as far as I can on my own at first, which may or may not be far depending on the difficulty of the game. (And I'm playing at the easier level, oy.) I'm not very good at puzzle games, but I love them.

Then tonight I watched a really intense Mod Squad episode about a kidnapping and I decided I am still going to do that story about Gansley, but I will probably have it known as a kidnapping outright instead of Portman trying to make the others think Gansley is dead. They'll have to try to get the ransom together and be agonizing over whether the crooks will kill Gansley anyway. And I'll still keep Gansley giving his captors Hell, because of course you know he would. **snerk.** I love him. Although naturally I don't love him being so sadistic with Atem and Yugi in canon; that was disgusting. But it will help with characterization for this fic; he can put that sadistic streak to good use.

I started wondering what would happen if Gansley ever snapped. Considering he's the level-headed one and is almost always calm, it would probably be very bad. I wrote a blurb where he snaps and starts beating Yami Marik with his cane (and I swear it's darker than that description seems to make it sound, lol. I mean, a cane can be a dangerous weapon). Yami Marik is taunting him and brings up all the things the others have endured in these fics and says that maybe he'll hurt them some more. That's when Gansley snaps. Crump finally stops him, worried about him and not Yami Marik, and he and the others try to comfort him.

And I was also thinking, oddly enough, canon redeemed the Big Five years before I ever had the thought of trying. Okay, game canon, not anime canon, but still an official canon. Reshef of Destruction does feature them having apparently crawled back to Seto and he has them working as an acting troupe, putting on shows for kids as their Duel Monster Deckmaster characters. I had thought those people were just random actors, but considering that Crump is specifically identified in the script bothering Tea at one point, it's definitely them. (He's not named and he's still in costume, but from what he says, it's absolutely him. He wants to build Penguin Land and goes on about penguins and numbers.) Even though the animators were too lazy to give them proper human form sprites. It's kind of adorable at the end; Crystal showed me this scene where the kids are all scared about the worldwide danger and Roland is insisting that the Big Five help him calm them down and inspire them, and they get fired up and agree, lol. Aww. So apparently whoever made that game felt that they weren't beyond redemption. I had thought only Lector was really deserving of it, but I like the idea that they all are. One thing that is certainly true is that they haven't committed worse sins than some of the characters who did get redeemed, like Marik and Mai and the bikers and Dartz. I love how one of YGO's main themes is clearly redemption and another is forgiveness. It fits in perfectly with the kinds of stories I love to write.

Of course, one problem I ran into is that I made some of them do things arguably worse than in canon during Static Code Analysis, and had I known I was going to end up falling in love with them and wanting to redeem them, I might not have done some of those things, especially since they didn't go that far in canon. (One could technically argue that Gansley wasn't trying to kill Mokuba, since it was virtual reality and not real; he knew Mokuba would still exist. It was still horrible, though. And we don't know what Nesbitt was going to do with Mokuba in season 3. He definitely went after Seto with kendo, but what with virtual reality it's hard to say what he was going to do.) But Mokuba comments on Marik being able to find redemption even after the abominable things he was trying to do to innocent people, so I'm trying to work with that concept and figure that they, even Nesbitt, can still be redeemed in my verse.

Other interesting things of note: Pegasus came to the Big Five on his own in the original and made them feel like aligning with him was the only way to save KaibaCorp. They planned to dismiss Seto from his position, not to hurt or kill him. Of course, then we have the sticky problem of the game. In the original, they make it, and seemingly without anyone's knowledge, so they were planning it for some time and perhaps intended on trapping Seto in it before Duelist Kingdom happened. In the dub, Seto made it, and it is possible that they panicked and rewrote the ending only after Duelist Kingdom, once they knew Pegasus had lost to Yugi. Since I combine dub and sub and kind of like Seto making the game, I might go with the latter.

I was pondering the other day on who did what with the game in the original. Nesbitt animated it, no doubt. Maybe Crump did character designs. I wonder which one of them mocked Mokuba by making Adina look like him.

Can't recall if I mentioned it, but I think the plushie bases I have are going to be used for other purposes yet again, lol. Of course, I would end up feeling like I wanted Lector to have his friends. The smaller-framed plushie can be Nesbitt and the stockier one can be Gansley. I'll have to go back for more plushies to make Crump and Johnson. I'll need another material for Crump's hair too. Right now I have materials at home to make Gansley and Nesbitt, especially after picking up some fabric last week. Haven't had a chance to work on them yet. I'll probably make them concurrently, like I did with Ginger and Lou.

I did get a picture finished: http://meromeroyui.deviantart.com

I had a pretty awesomely weird dream the other day that would be really fun to make into a fic sometime. It was a Wild Wild West dream and had Jim and Arte investigating this saloon/casino place. They found that Lucrece Posey was running it, and that Snakes was serving as her right-hand man. It seemed to be an AU where Snakes and not Ascot Sam was the sole male survivor of the gang, and weirder, where he was the only one who had remained loyal to Miss Posey. When I woke up, I really wanted to do something with it, but AU usually feels so cheap to me and I wanted to figure out if I could make it work in my established canon-compliant timeline. I came up with the thought of a mad scientist, maybe Dr. Faustina, experimenting with brainwashing and amnesia drugs and managing to alter Posey and Snakes' memories so they think something different happened than what did. Jim and Arte stumble into this mess and are utterly baffled. Maybe they are also part of the experiment and Dr. Faustina has made them forget all about time-traveling to the future and Snakes turning over a new leaf, etc., and they only remember their initial encounter with the gang and are stunned by Snakes being alive, not to mention loyal to Miss Posey. Eventually they do remember and have to try to get Posey and Snakes to remember.

I had a lovely birthday. At first we weren't sure if we'd even be able to go out because the weather was supposed to be wonky, but it ended up being fine for most of the time we were out and it was a wonderful outing. I ended up being able to get some of the retro My Little Ponies from Target after all. I asked for a couple, and I received those, and I also bought a couple more. I also got the Kelly figure. Kris, of course, is not out yet. But she is on the website, and I'm seriously considering ordering her there since it could be months before stores get her.

Build-a-Bear once again didn't send a birthday coupon, and this year I'm wondering if they've stopped the birthday coupons in favor of that Count Your Candles thing, which isn't nearly as good since it's only for one specific plush and only benefits the kids. There are lots of adult shoppers too, and they should still be considered. I don't know if I want to call and ask about the coupon this year or not. Last year I got someone who thought I was a moron, sigh. She didn't even seem to know about the birthday coupons. It seemed like a problem for everyone born in October that they hadn't got their coupon and eventually they were sent out in the latter part of the month, and the coupons were good through November to make up for the mess.

Anyway, I didn't miss the coupon too much this year. I do kind of hope I can get another Lalaloopsy before she's gone, but meanwhile I found something actually exciting at The Disney Store. They haven't had a very interesting plushie section for years; it's so streamlined from what it used to be. But they had Oliver and Dodger as part of a 30th anniversary celebration of Oliver and Company, and they were running a plushie sale that made each of them $12. I had to get them both. I'm wondering now if I should have also got Lady, or at least seen whether she was part of the sale too. I was so excited about Dodger and then about Oliver too that I wasn't thinking at the time, but I only have a puppy Lady plush. I've always wanted an adult Lady too. Eh, maybe I'll get to go back soon and check. Anyway, they seem to run plushie sales a lot, interestingly. Most times I've gone, it seems like they're having one.

I also got this awesome Nancy Drew computer game with a haunted mansion and a ghost. It looks like maybe there really is something supernatural going on in addition to the probable fraud. I hope so. It's a really fun game so far. I love puzzle games, especially with mansions and ghosts! There's a cemetery on the grounds too. So creepy! And it's giving me some possible ideas for my YGO Bad End Night fic.

There were other fun things too: a lovely card and a fun blurb with Bakura and Yami Bakura from Crystal, Ladyamberjo sent the movie Coco, and other things from my parents included a card, the My Little Pony movie (the one from last year, not the 1980s one), the 90 Minutes in Heaven movie, a gorgeous autumn leaf necklace, and Roma Downey's Box Of Butterflies book (totally a surprise there, but a thrilling one!). An aunt sent a card plus a couple of DVDs and a couple of books, all romance, which isn't a surprise. I think she's trying to get me interested in romance. Everything looks interesting, though, and one of the DVDs is four Christmas movies, and there can never be too many Christmas movies. I actually saw one of them last year when I was with my friend and she had the Hallmark Channel on in the background. It was a very cheesy movie but kind of cute and sweet, and I actually had kind of wanted it, so I'm excited about that. One of the books also sounds like it has some friendship stuff going on in addition to the romance plot, so I'm anxious to see how that goes.

I really felt like a kid again this year. It was amusing, being surrounded by Ponies and Disney plushies, but it felt so good. For a little while it was kind of like I was ten again, when I was first longing for more Oliver and Company plushies.

I also figured out my Amazon order. It looks like the OS for the cheapest Fire tablet is an older one, based on Android's Lollipop. I'm not sure if Duel Links would even run on an OS that old, at least, not for very long. I think I'll wait on a tablet and maybe I can get a good deal on a more recent one over Black Friday weekend next month. For my order, I'm getting Charlie's Angels, It's a Miracle, and the Secret Agent set. Scrolling through my list of stuff, I suddenly felt like I really wanted to get that. We never did get to see all the episodes because Netflix lost one or two of the discs, and the ones we did see were mostly good. I remember there being very few duds in that series, and I was ecstatic when the boxset came out. I doubted I could ever get it, but I added it to my list anyway. Squee, the set even has all of both series, the thirty-minute one and the hour-long one! So excited to see those again, and to see the ones we missed. (And LOL, the actress who played Miss Posey is in the first episode of the thirty-minute series.)

I also located some good shirts on eBay and bid on one that looks about perfect. With any luck, maybe I can pull off a halfway decent Halloween costume after all.

But nice enough that I wanted to document it.

I was organizing my books, and in the dream I seemed to have more bookcases for them than I do in real-life, and more books too. They were in a big, well-lit room, with bookcase rows and a couple of tables for reading or crafting. It was probably the haunted mansion we usually live in within the dream world. And we'd bought up tons of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books years ago when Borders closed (which we didn't in reality) and I found our stock of them, which we'd been keeping at the bottom of one of the bookcases and planned to mostly use for presents for people. (Heh, in reality we'd only put presents for people up high, not down low! It kind of looked like Barnes and Noble's displays for clearance/bargain books, though, so it wasn't super low to the floor.) I was going to use one for a belated birthday gift for a friend of mine on FF.net. I also wondered where most of my Star Wars books were, because I only found a few on the shelf and I knew there were more.

I also ran into some children's books, including TaleSpin storybooks. The weirdest one was written in 1908 and also included Darkwing Duck characters. LOL. But eh. Made me wish I had the other TaleSpin DVDs....

Then there was this weird object that I could use to wish on and it would create a temporary fantasy world of my wish. It was a nice escape from the real-world (and maybe an indication that I've watched the third Pokemon movie too much lately). One wish was to perform on a TV show. I also talked with someone I apparently knew within the fantasy, and I'm not sure if they were part of the fantasy or someone from real-life in the fantasy with me. The latter, I think. It seemed to be a guy character, yet it seemed like Mom was playing him, so it was like a role-play thing. I used the object more than once, and that was the last fantasy. I can't recall the others.

I dream about books a lot, either at bookstores or libraries, or sometimes with us having more books than we do. I often dream about Nancy Drew books that don't really exist. And I dream a lot about Borders as though it was still here. I heard that Circuit City is making a comeback, first with the website and then with new stores. I wish with all my heart that Borders would come back, but I know that's highly unlikely. A tech store coming back could happen easier in this day and age than a bookstore, although Borders was much more than just books. They had music and DVDs and toys and a cafe, like Barnes and Noble, but the prices were better.

I miss Borders so much.... I don't think I cried about it leaving or has as hard a time adjusting as I did with K-Mart, but that could be because I had plenty of time to get used to the idea as things got worse and worse. I really knew that eventually all Borders would close once they started having so much trouble. The fact that I dream about it so much shows that I miss it badly even though I don't consciously show it as much. And it really hurt when we had to go out to a funeral right across the street from where it used to be. We got there early and I just stared out the window at the shopping center. Dad didn't even seem to remember that the drive was the path we'd taken so often to Borders, but I sure did. I guided him right to the place when he was having trouble with the address.

And I think I've tentatively figured out how things work in my Pokemon verse. They're clearly not traveling in Johto for most of it, since they tend to hug the East Coast, but some Johto events are referenced, so I think it's more of an alternate season 6 than 3. I think I've figured it that Johto did happen, but not exactly the same way. The things I liked happened. The things I didn't like either didn't happen at all or happened in a different way. Ash did get the Johto Pokemon, but after leaving Johto, he must have put them with Professor Oak and reunited with the original team. Same with Misty and Brock, and they didn't leave. (Hmm, maybe they left some of their Pokemon with their families. Misty had to get Starmie back from her sisters.) They don't seem to have a new region to visit at the moment, so they're hanging around Kanto again and sometimes traveling North of it to New York City. Maybe it's kind of an alternate Battle Frontier, since I hear that was back in Kanto.

I also have a new plunnie after watching the first movie on the official website. I always love the trope of being summoned to a mysterious mansion or castle by a strange person, and there being odd servants and such. I want to do something where Ash-tachi and Team Rocket all get summoned to one. And this time it's a mad scientist and he probably wants to experiment on Pikachu and Team Rocket because of all their clashes. Creepy! And the mansion will have a ton of secret tunnels, of course. I think I'll try working on this plunnie next.