As the Cardinal Flies

I received two stories for Yuletide this past winter, and (as with Holmestice in the prior post) am horribly late in acknowledging their creators. Technically speaking, one was a gift and one a treat, but I'm in the camp that loves its treasures equally irrespective of that sort of labels.

Both works are short (though no less delightful for their conciseness) character-sketch pieces arising from the new CBS series Elsbeth starring Carrie Preston as the sparkling (for multiple values of the word) Technicolor-garbed title character, an attorney-turned-sleuth presently attached to the NYPD. (I did not follow either The Good Wife or The Good Fight, which featured our protagonist as a secondary character; the new show, luckily, is fully self-contained.) Here, Elsbeth Tascione is a delightfully quirky Columbo for the 21st century, supported by an engaging ensemble and - very much as Columbo did - solving murders that we in the audience see firsthand in the opening scenes, often with A-list performers as the killers-of-the-week.

Kaya Blanke's Night Off
Fandom: Elsbeth
Author innie
Rating: General Audiences
Category: gen
Warnings: none
Words: ~1600
Relationships: Kaya Blanke & Elsbeth Tascione, Kaya Blanke & Captain C. W. Wagner, WEslbeth Tascione/Jake Turling
Characters: Kaya Blanke, Elsbeth Tascione, Captain C. W. Wagner, Jake Turling

Kaya and Elsbeth have a night off.

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All Kinds of Music
Fandom: Elsbeth
Author FanchonMoreau
Rating: Teen
Category: gen
Warnings: none
Words: ~2600
Characters: Elsbeth Tascione, Kaya Blanke, Detective Donnelly, Teddy Tascione, Dr. Yablonski

"You didn’t hear this from me," Detective Donnelly began, "but the real Little Italy isn’t on the Lower East Side. It’s in the Bronx.”

Elsbeth takes a day off.

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My contribution for the round was for Gargoyles; I've written several stories in the fandom, but had never previously focused on Elisa Maza, so this was a chance to stretch a bit...and ended up giving me an opening I hadn't expected to play a bit with the show's backstage connections to the Star Trek franchise.

Thrust and Parry
Fandom: Gargoyles
Rating: General audiences
Category: gen
Warnings: none
Words: ~1500
Relationship: Elisa Maza & Puck | Owen Burnett
Characters: Elisa Maza, Puck | Owen Burnett
Additional Tags: missing scene

Puck would claim afterwards that he'd intended to out-Vogel Preston Vogel.

Neither he nor Elisa ever mentioned the theory she'd floated much, much earlier....

As the title suggests, someone's written me kitten!Holmes fic...and specifically, a story featuring both the most arch of arch-nemeses (-nemesises?) and a purrfectly diabolical pun.

(The link above connects to the very short foundation story in this tiny corner of Holmesian apocrypha, and there's a further link in the headnotes of that story to the tiny snippet of video that inspired the parent work.)

To say I'm delighted is an understatement. I am now harboring more hope than ever that we'll see more and further feline adventures from diverse hands arising from the premise...

The Final Purroblem
(Anonymous)
Fandoms: kitten!Holmes; Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats - T. S. Eliot; Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Rating: G
Category: gen
Warnings: mentions of crime, very light violence, one reference to (human) prostitution
Words: ~1400
Relationship: Sherlock (kitten!Holmes) & Watson (kitten!Holmes) Characters: Sherlock (kitten!Holmes, Watson, Macavity
Additional Tags: Story: The Final Problem...; Alternate Universe - Cats; Crime; Humor

I can still see them now, perched on the edge of the snow-white precipice.

(Or, at the paws of his nemesis, Sherlock meets with a terrible fate...for a kitten.)

An especially joyful Yuletide this year for me: I had been morally certain that the count showing two Yuletide stories for me was a system bug (the second showed up right after the restore of all those accidentally purged assignments), but lo and behold I discovered two stories under my virtual tree when the archive opened. And both of them are seriously nifty....

First we have Oz (well, technically, mostly Philadelphia with an eventual excursion ending up in Mo), featuring a really thoughtful and engaging look at two of my favorite characters, a very neat interpolation between several relatively obscure parts of Baum canon, and just exactly the right amount of emotional subtext between our protagonists.  I have certain suspicions about the authorship of this one....

Twin Properties
Written by: ??
Fandom: Oz - L. Frank Baum
Characters: Button-Bright, Polychrome
Rating: General Audiences
Words: ~4900
Warnings: none
Additional Tags: Reunions, Pre-ship, (if you want to read it like that)

 

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And then we have an equally entertaining tale of my very favorite Forgotten Realms characters -- this one mostly sorcery rather than swordsmanship, with deviously complicated magic and a cleverly executed meeting between arch-wizard and arch-rogue that catches both characters very well indeed.  I have absolutely no idea who may have written this one, but I'm extremely happy to have gotten it.


The Amethyst Gate
Written by: ??
Fandom: Forgotten Realms, Songs & Swords - Elaine Cunningham
Rating: General Audiences
Words: ~4500
Warnings: none
Characters: Arilyn Moonblade, Danilo Thann, Elaith Craulnober, Khelben Arunsun