As the Cardinal Flies

Only a little bit later than promised, here's what I've been doing for the last several months' worth of exchanges:

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Mrs. Pollifax and the Irish Expatriate
for genarti 
Fandom: Mrs. Pollifax - Dorothy Gilman
Rating: General Audiences
Words: ~3400
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Emily Pollifax, Carstairs (Mrs. Pollifax), Bishop (Mrs. Pollifax), Grace Hartshorne


This was almost a crossover (and indeed, one commenter very perceptively noted the potential for just such a connection), but the logistics involved in actually staging the necessary scenes proved more complicated than I'd initially thought, and time constraints forced me to scale back.  In hindsight, it may have been just as well; as much fun as it would have been to connect the Pollifax canon to that of Diane Duane's "Young Wizards" universe, it occurs to me that fully integrating the two would almost certainly have ripple effects much more complicated than I'd have been able to deal with in that one story.

But even without the crossover element, I am reasonably satisfied with this one.  I had initially been contemplating a number of other explanations for Grace's background (including the idea that she might have been Emily's guardian angel), but this strikes me as more satisfying than anything else. 

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The Kincardine File: Notes from an Untold Case
for scfrankles 
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Rating: General Audiences
Words: ~1300
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, Mary Morstan, Mycroft Holmes
Additional Tags: Epistolary, Untold Cases of Sherlock Holmes

What it says on the tin – a collection of notes and correspondence from a case for which no full manuscript has been found (almost certainly because Watson thought better of writing this one up for posterity).

This was a pure delight to write, not least because scfrankles has been one of the most dangerously accurate players in the guessing-game stage of Holmestice, and I wanted very much to supply a story that would slip beneath their guessing radar.  I succeeded in that endeavor, and also came up with what I like to think is a reasonably plausible canonical tale (although I slipped in a subtle nod to one of my favorite series of pastiches along the way). 

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X-Ceptional
for lirin 
Fandom: Perry Mason (TV), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Rating: General Audiences
Words: ~4000
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Della Street, Moira MacTaggert, Paul Drake, Perry Mason, Sebastian Shaw, Original Male Character(s)
Additional Tags: Secrets

Don’t get me wrong," said Moira MacTaggert, " but if your boss really wanted to make a deal with Shaw, he’d have brought a whole other sort of professional girl with him. "

"Yes, well," said Della Street, "we shared our report with the local Treasury authorities. And if Paul Drake had run into you anytime during that investigation, Mr. Mason and I would have heard about it in Technicolor detail.”

This took the longest to come together of any of this year's exchange stories; I was contemplating various other prospective crossover plots involving different sets of fandoms until very late in the game.  But once I'd rewatched X-Men: First Class, I concluded fairly quickly that I wanted to do something with Moira and Della -- at which point it took a good bit of further brainstorming to work out just what Della's mutant ability might be.

As with the Holmestice story, I also threw in a really subtle Easter egg, this one so small and tangential that it pretty much matters only to me.  (If you're curious, here are your clues: consider the relevance a carbon-refraction process might eventually have to paleontologic research, and then look for a subsequent generation or two of Mercers in a totally different fandom featuring dinosaurs....)

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A Little Self-Knowledge
for desertvixen 
Fandom: Nancy Drew - Carolyn Keene
Rating: General Audiences
Words: ~1600
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Nancy Drew & Eloise Drew
Characters: Nancy Drew, Eloise Drew
Additional Tags: College, Family
So, my match on Fic Corner this year happened to be to the same recipient I drew for Crossovering last year...and in both cases, the primary matching fandom was Nancy Drew.  In some respects, this story resembles a five-things story I did for Alexis Castle in the Castle fandom a number of years back, but the context is significantly different (although the Drews and the Castles have suspiciously similar taste in restaurants).  Obviously, being an exchange story, I couldn't establish any overt connection between the two stories on the initial posting, but as I noted later in comments, there's nothing specifically inconsistent between them -- and so now I've formally made a series to include the two works.  [One notable feature of this one involves some back story on Nancy's mother, further amplified in a subsequent comment.]

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Astute readers will notice that there are four stories called out in this post, whereas there are six in the prior listing of gifts.  This is because, despite the best intentions, I ended up defaulting late in the game for Remix Revival -- a combination of unusually busy Life circumstances and a complete failure of muse on my part.  The latter rather surprised me; despite a great range of worthwhile choices, nothing whacked me over the head and said "remix me!"  So I bowed out of that one.  (I also did not finish an Into A Bar story within that challenge's designated window, though I do have a Plan for that one and hope to complete it eventually.)