As the Cardinal Flies

Remix Revival is live!  I can't tell you what I wrote yet (anonymity, you know), but I can tell you that I was remixed by a Super Genius (probably not the actual Wile E. Coyote, but one can't be too sure nowadays).  The work below takes a bit of whimsy I put together for "Into A Bar" a couple of rounds back, and cranks both the crack-o-meter and the hey-this-is-good-o-meter up to C-11. 

[puzzled reader voice] "C-11"?
[Foghorn Leghorn voice] "That's a joke, son!" 
Which you will totally get if you read the story.

Needless to say, I am delighted.  And have been chuckling all day.

The Super Genius Caper (The "Left Turn at Albuquerque Caper" Remix) (7650 words) by Anonymous
Fandom: Castle, Gargoyles (TV), Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?, Looney Tunes | Merrie Melodies
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Words: ~7650
Relationships: Kate Beckett/Richard Castle
Characters: Victoria Gates, Richard Castle, Carmen Sandiego, Kate Beckett, Wile E. Coyote, Zack (Carmen Sandiego), Goliath (Gargoyles), Elisa Maza, The Chief (Carmen Sandiego)
Additional Tags: Crossover

My "Into A Bar" story is live -- in this case, together with bonus podfic, courtesy of the estimable and gracious malnpudl 

Title: Chance Meetings  •  (podfic version by malnpudl)
Fandoms: MCU, Castle
Word count: ~2300
Rating/Contents: G / no warnings needed
Summary: One of the five men in Manhattan most likely to be working for HYDRA has just left a brewpub in Morningside Heights.  Now that he's gone, it's time for the story to start....

Lifted (and slightly modified) from eleanorjane, because I'm feeling opinionated this morning:

Who is your Doctor?
Five, aka Peter Davison.  I came into Who fandom during Tom Baker's tenure (and the era in which US public television stations were airing the series), but I didn't fully bond with the series till Davison took over.  I think for me, it's the balance between the Whoniverse's innate weirdness and Five's relative calm in the face of it all that really makes his tenure memorable for me.  [In this respect, I really wish Eight had gotten a proper series of his own, and I suspect I would be very fond of a lot of the audio material in which he features.]

Who is your Doctor's companion?
Nyssa of Traken.  Yes, this is partly because I was young enough at the time to have a crush, but I also liked her for being one of the Doctor's most sensible and well-rounded Companions.  In strong second place: Anthony Ainley's Master, who -- while not a proper Companion -- remains one of my very favorite Whovian characters and one of my all-time favorite archvillains.

Who is your Batman?
Easily Kevin Conroy of Batman: The Animated Series -- although I will always have a lingering soft spot for Adam West, who was my first screen Batman (I am also old enough to have grown up with first-generation reruns of the Adam West series on weekday afternoon television).

Who is your Catwoman?
Julie Newmar, from the Adam West Bat-series.  This is not entirely consistent of me, but I tend to think that B:TAS pushed just a little too hard on the Batman/Catwoman chemistry, and none of the other live-action iterations of the character have struck me as anything approaching definitive.

Who is your Sherlock Holmes?
This is hard -- and it's none of the obvious ones.  I am...allergic to Jeremy Brett's version, I'm invested too much in the Doyle canon to quite bond with Rathbone, and none of the major modern iterations -- Downey Jr., Cumberbatch, Miller -- feel quite right either.  For visual media, let me give you three relatively obscure picks: Christopher Plummer, in Murder by Decree, Michael Pennington, in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (a made-for-TV film from 1987 that put Holmes in the modern day), and Jason Gray-Stanford (from the animated series Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century).  And here are three from the world of post-Doyle literary pastiche: Holmes from Richard Boyer's The Giant Rat of Sumatra (my favorite, by a wide margin, of anyone's take on that "untold" tale), Holmes from Laurie R. King's "Mary Russell" series, and Holmes from Larry Millett's series of Minnesota-centric yarns beginning with Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon.  And one sideways entry: here's a recommendation for August Derleth's classic Solar Pons series, which is almost-but-not-quite Holmes in a totally charming way.

[ADDITION] Who is your Moriarty?
This one, by contrast, is easy: it's the Professor Moriarty from Michael Kurland's eccentric but utterly ingenious series beginning with The Infernal Device.  If you have not read these, you should, though be prepared to make a sharp sideways turn from strict canonical interpretations.  Above all else, Kurland is having fun with these stories even as he remains reasonably faithful to the essence of the original material.

Who is your James Bond?
For good or ill, I am a child of the Roger Moore Bond era; I saw Moore first and most often, and imprinted strongly on the template established during Moore's tenure -- which is to say, I greatly prefer Suave Yet Dangerous Bond to Gritty Angsty Thug Bond.  As a result, my second favorite Bond is Pierce Brosnan, though I do like and respect Sean Connery in the part. By contrast, I really disliked Timothy Dalton's turn in the role, and -- though I know I should -- I have resisted seeing the Daniel Craig Bond films.

Who is your captain of the Enterprise?
This is a tie.  I grew up on Captain Kirk, again in weekday afternoon reruns, and imprinted very strongly on the Trek franchise as a result.  But I watched TNG beginning-to-end with increasing fascination, and TNG holds up way, way better than TOS to sustained rewatching.  So I am a Kirk groupie and a Picard groupie in more or less equal measure.

Who is your fictional female assassin?
Insufficient data. I haven't absorbed a large enough sample to have a definitive answer to this one, but I retain the category so that anyone who picks this up from me will have the chance to weigh in.

Who is your fictional female Federal government agent?
Two answers here.  For strict values of "Federal", my vote goes to Agent Jordan Shaw, played by Dana Delany on the Castle episodes "Tick Tick Tick" and "Boom".  (I really, really wish that had turned into a recurring gig, but Delany landed Body of Evidence shortly after doing these guest shots.) 

However, if we recast the question slightly, we dodge the implied US/American limitation on the question, and that lets me pick the inimitable Emma Peel, as played by the equally inimitable Diana Rigg.  For whom there really is no equal....

What I got for Rare Women 2014:

Destiny, by raktajinos
Ancient Egyptian RPF
G • gen • ~1500 words
Ankhesenamun, Nefertiti

Ankhesenamun reflects on the lessons her mother taught her about being Queen.

This was the longest of all possible long-shot matches, but the resulting vignette is a fascinating, intriguing look at one of the most elusive young women in the Egyptian archaeological record. Most of what we know about Ankhesenamun -- the young sister/wife of Tutankhamen -- comes from the latter part of her life; here, we get a speculative yet wholly captivating look at that life's beginning.  I am very happy indeed to have had this written for me.

And what I wrote:

Something in Common for prettysophist
Castle
G • gen • ~3100 words
Alexis Castle, Mandy Sutton

"Six hundred numbers in this phone, and guess how many of those I could call for help with this stuff." Before Alexis could answer, Mandy Sutton made a game-show buzzer noise. "That would be one."

I matched on Castle for the second time in a row; having done a Martha story last year, I put the focus this year on Alexis and followed up the threads from the 6th-season episode "Limelight", featuring pop star Mandy Sutton (a character presented as sort of a Miley Cyrus/Lindsay Lohan fusion).  

Title: Spy Stories
Characters/Pairings: Castle, Kate, Alexis, Martha
Word Count: 1120
Rating: G
Warnings: none
Spoilers: Episode tag for s5's "Target" & "Hunt", discusses plot details of both.
Summary: “I know that look,” Castle said. “That’s your this isn’t right look. So spill.”

Notes: I can't be the only one who thought certain aspects of the two-parter were a little difficult to swallow...can I?

This was written for the Not Prime Time gift exchange, which lives here on Dreamwidth and here on AO3.

Five College Careers Alexis Castle Might Consider (and the Consequences Thereof)
Fandom(s): Castle, NCIS, NCIS:LA, BtVS
Characters: Alexis Castle, Richard Castle, Kate Beckett, Tim McGee, OC
Relationship(s): Alexis/OC
Words: 2653
Rating: PG-13 (drug & sexual references; nothing graphic)
Spoilers: None.  AU for Castle (several times over), secondary character death in one segment.

Is it that the college you choose defines you for the rest of your life -- or that the life you choose will define the college you attend?