Zaniida's Fics(in other fandoms)

In converting him into their puppet, they've removed key portions of his humanity, and he can't even remember why that's important.

Content Warnings

Gore, trauma, brainwashing/mind manipulation, body horror (sorta)

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Five Moments Lost

Fan Comment

Oh man, the smiiiiiile, imagining that and the strain often in Kevin's voice, excellently creepy!

Kevin's last moments before Strex takes him down. He's a radio host to the very last.

By "acted podfic" I mean that it's not just me reading a story; I actually played it like a scene, complete with background sound effects and plenty of emotion in my voice. Also, the original fic is a lot more gory than my take, chiefly because mine merely implies what Kevin is seeing (and stops short of the ending). Be warned!

Content Warnings

Implications that Very Bad Things happen, but most are

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Last Broadcast

Original Fic

Sing, Little Hummingbird by kittleimp (much worse than mine)

Fan Comment

Excellent work, now please excuse me while I sob

Things that the citizens of Night Vale take for granted and Carlos is starting to wonder about.

This one's kinda weird: Basically I've been going back through the early episodes and listening to them with Carlos-colored glasses on, trying to pick out what he'd pick up on while hearing the show, and how he'd categorize it. What sort of questions he'd ask.

It's been an interesting exercise, it's just that, despite its short length, it's highly time-consuming to create. I literally cannot do anything else while trying to pay attention to the content. With just about any other project, anything I need to listen to or watch or remind myself of, I can multitask, but not this one! Any time my mind wanders, I completely lose sight of the main reason I'm listening to the content. (Maybe I should do it while sorting laundry.)

Content Warnings

You might not be able to listen to certain scenes again without some disturbing thoughts. More than usual for the series, I mean.

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Things to Get Used to in Night Vale: A List

Fan Comment

That reminder is cute, and very scientific of him 😊

Ways in which Rayek and Cutter touched each other, and what it means to Rayek in retrospect.

Rayek has long been my favorite character, although he drives me mad sometimes with his inability to abide by certain standards of ethical behavior.

Still, when Rayek's not acting like an ass, he's quite the compelling character, and I'm glad to start my (hypothetical) ElfQuest collection with a piece from his point of view.

Content Warnings

Rayek imagines what would have happened if Cutter had died on the Bridge of Destiny.

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Touched by the Wolf Chief

Fan Comment

Rayek's an interesting character, in that he's originally an antagonist but not exactly a villain, and for the rest of the series (the parts I've read) he wanders back and forth over the line between ally-we-don't-always-see-eye-to-eye-with and wait-he's-gone-off-the-deep-end-again. Which is to say, he grows and learns in some ways, and he has some redeeming qualities, but he never quite grows out of his big central flaw and everything that comes from it.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

The filk song about the cat-snake-beast that destroyed half the tribe before the story began. (Yes, I know it's technically called Nightcrawler, but I figured that would be confusing to my normal audience (on account of them being MCU fans), and "Madcoil" better expresses the idea if you know nothing of the original context.)

I sung this one in the shower enough that I went off in a whole different style. Can't say that the singing's all that good, but I like how it turned out, more or less. I could see singing this one in public if I ever ended up famous enough to have strangers/fans ask me to sing one of my cover songs.

Content Warnings

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Madcoil

Fan Comment

Oo, I like the style choice here—it wouldn't have occurred to me to do it that way, but the soft/sweet rendition is effectively creepy and a good match for your voice.

See Octodad's antics from the point of view of a local woman who has no reason to think anything's amiss.

I don't think I'll ever give the neighbor a name, or any personality other than being generally positive and accepting and totally oblivious to the implications of what she's seeing. I rather like having a characterized non-character as a host for these tales 😊

Content Warnings

Series

Quirky Neighborhood Dad

First Fic

Some Random Neighbor

Sequel

My Quirky Neighbor's Daddy-Daughter Moments

Fan Comment

This is absolutely adorable. Very well done. And it is always nice to have a outside POV fic.

Xellos comes to Zelgadis in a mood more inscrutible than usual, with a problem and a plan, neither of which Zelgadis is likely to appreciate.

The fic I based my on leaned heavily on the comedy side; I lean heavily on the drama side (as is pretty normal for me).

Content Warnings

Xellos reveals that he's been ordered to find a way to turn Lina into a Mazoku agent

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Bound

Inspired by

Bind by Irk (sadly, the site appears to have gone down)

Fan Comment

Oh wow! What a fantastic start!

I've got like three chapters rough-drafted, but I'm stuck on a piece of the next chapter that is simply not coming together, so I give it another shot now and then, realize I'm still blocked, and go do something else.

I miss having a steady beta reader. We fixed these problems so much more quickly and consistently than me trying to do it on my own.

Recette spends some time with five of her new adventurer friends, outside the normal dungeon and store encounters.

Content Warnings

This is probably the most wholesome and least traumatizing fic I will ever write of any significant length. Maybe use it as a fluffy blanket for when you get traumatized by my normal stuff.

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Five Moments of Friendship

Fan Comment

I don't understand why Recettear doesn't have more fics! There is such potential here that is being wasted!

Thank you for writing this; maybe it will shine light for people who still enjoy the game to write something too.

For each series, a pair of outsider characters connect.

My favorite characters in Star Trek (and many other shows, but ST in particular) have always been the fish out of water, the characters who can view humanity from odd perspectives: Spock, Data, Odo, the Doc, Kes, 7/9, Garak (also Bashir, who was outsider in a different way). It actually bugs me that the captain is Always Human.

For this piece, I chose the normal outsider character and paired them with a different, less prominent outsider character, and then tried to figure out any common qualities or connection or contrast I could make.

Content Warnings

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Moments Like Stardust

Excerpt

“The way I talk, people don’t take me seriously,” he slurs. “I’m not skilled at writing, either. No one’s going to listen to what I know, or carry it into the future. But as a storyteller…” A slow grin spreads across his face. “I can plant ideas. And long after I’m forgotten, maybe those ideas will carry on and spread out and become what people know of Russia.”

I haven't watched much of Enterprise, so I had to depict Hoshi Sato and the doc from the bits I understood about them and some browsing of wikis and YouTube clips. Hope I didn't do too badly.

Twilight decides to spend a day getting to know each of her new friends.

She maybe didn't think this through.

It's been a while since I was watching the show, but I'd wanted this to be one of my first alt-fandom FMI pieces, on account of the abbreviations (FIM + FMI). The timing didn't quite work, but I'm glad it got started the same year I hosted my first FMI writing event, August Intimacy.

Content Warnings

Canon-typical shenanigans

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Five Moments of Friendship Is Magic

Excerpt

“See, if anypony needed help and nopony paid attention, they’d be stressed instead of happy, right? So every week I check in on everypony and make sure that they have whatever they need. Since I know everypony in town, I know what each pony can do, and since I know what each pony can do, if one of them needs help then I know who to ask! Because it would break my heart if there was an easy solution to the problem and it didn’t happen just because they didn’t know who to go to for help!”

“That’s… surprisingly logical,” Twilight admits. In fact, the more she talks with Pinkie, the more she finds that there’s an underlying rationality to her behavior—well, most of the time. Some of the weirdness they’ve been through today seems beyond explanation, but, on the whole, she’d expected Pinkie to be far more scatterbrained than she turns out to be.

And a bit more self-centered, to be honest; she’d expected Pinkie to be focused mostly on her own enjoyment, but it turns out that she takes her role quite seriously. Even if that means running off to arrange a welcoming party for a newcomer before even getting to know her.

Double-Drabble sections (with two-word titles) about the main character meeting five outlier characters.

I'm still a bit annoyed that you can't marry Clint.

Anyway, this is characters getting to know the (narrative-viewpoint) main character over time, and being able to open up to them and find connection. It's not gonna be all sweet and uplifting, but I expect an optimistic ending (eventually).

Content Warnings

I have some darker topics planned for the second or third chapter, including possibly miscarriage.

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Five Friendships in the Valley

Excerpt

But when you try to pay, the guy behind the counter pushes your money back toward you with a smile and a shake of his head.

“Use that to buy some seeds,” he says, “and start that farm up right. A little extra now can make a big difference, come autumn.”

The unexpected generosity brings tears to your eyes, and as you savor the nostalgic treat you promise yourself to pay him back somehow… come autumn.

Menlo feels nostalgic as he watched TJ playing with his new friends, and recalls the friendship that they used to share.

In one episode, it gets revealed that TJ and Menlo used to be the best of friends. (It's also an episode where TJ displays great loyalty and honor: "A promise is a promise!") Since I've always felt a kinship with Menlo, it was nice to see him given an episode where he comes across as human, historied, and positive, rather than merely an annoying antagonist.

Content Warnings

Canon-typical childhood traumas

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Five Wistful Memories

Fan Comments

I like how, from the get-go, Menlo's feeling the bittersweet nostalgia of having grown apart from someone with whom he was once so close. You can really feel that.

Damn. That was beautiful. Menlo is actually one of my favorite characters; I liked the little tidbit about TJ and Menlo previously being friends. Thought it was interesting and gave some depth to the studious bespectacled boy. Probably a good thing that this was bittersweet, sometimes you have to let go.

Again, this puts a focus on characters other than the most prominent.

My favorite characters are Winchester, Sidney, Mulcahy, Klinger, and Radar, in that order (more or less). Not that I didn't enjoy many other characters, but those ones stand out to me. And I think the best thing that ever happened to the series was the cast switch, allowing the characters to evolve from comic relief to heartfelt connection (without losing the comedy). Winchester is layered and nuanced in a way that Burns never was. BJ feels real to me in a way that Trapper never did. And Potter feels like a guy who could actually run a place this messed-up, whereas Blake seems like the kinda guy who would never have been promoted to that kind of position. Even Margaret Houlihan was allowed to evolve once Burns was out of the picture.

One of the fandom exchanges I participated in had M*A*S*H as a possible choice, and I got all excited until I found out that the only pairing options were Hawkeye/someone and Margaret/someone. Like, okay, Hawkeye's the main character, fine, but… that same exchange had like twenty possible crack-pairing ships for Revolutionary Girl Utena, and they certainly didn't stick by the main characters. I'm still a bit miffed over that letdown.

Content Warnings

Some of the characters bring up some big topics, and you might need to bring tissues.

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Little Wartime Intimacies

Fan Comment

Nice to see a fic not focused on sex. These characters have so much depth to go into without it. Loved this!

I made Sidney Freedman and Father Mulcahy as Sims 3 sims, but unfortunately my CC is buggy and I need to do a fresh install and remake everyone from scratch. Which I don't have time for right now. But it's quite fun to see Sidney enjoying himself in my personal Sims 3 runs 😊

Agents discuss how to deal with a group whose scips prevent other people from getting near them.

This isn't within the SCP fandom as far as any recognizable characters or groups of interest; it's just set within that worldbuild, using the general idea of how to handle this kind of retrieval.

Content Warnings

Some of the details and implications get really dark, including suicide, self-surgery, and animal abuse.

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Bracelets of Intimacy +5

Fan Comment

This fic is amazing! It starts off okayish, and then as the conversation goes on and new detals are added, the slow build up of creepiness, it's disturbing, makes you slightly uneasy. I loved it so much!! Exactly the right level of creepy. Just what I needed to start off October.

Each of the siblings (minus Destruction) sends Morpheus a dreamer, and he deals with them in various appropriate ways.

Content Warnings

Deals with some sensitive topics, including despair (naturally), adjusting to new disability, and gender identity.

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The Intimacy of Dreams

Fan Comment

That last one made me cry. It was just so beautiful, Z.

I'm not sure, but this might be the first fic I've posted with gender-neutral pronouns. I do explore gender concepts in a lot of my work, but I'm kinda feeling my way around when it comes to evading the way that language enforces a gender binary. I also have a piece called Costumes that depicts a canonically masculine character in an ambiguously genderqueer way by not using pronouns; that was quite the challenge to write with natural-sounding language!

Content Warnings

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Clopin's Illness

Fan Comment

Possibly the most amateur-fanfic-hour ideas out of all my Amateur Hour. Kinda interesting in that respect.

Content Warnings

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Freedom Perishing

Excerpt

Frollo hurried on to read the letter, and at once his eyes grew wide and his face white. The gypsy seemed moderately pleased by the reaction.

Staring at his visitor in something approaching trepidation, Frollo asked incredulously, "It is true?"

"Would I be here were it not?" he replied, enunciating each word.

"No… no…" mused Frollo in clear, if unexplained, distress. "Come inside," he barked sharply, then turned without even assuring himself that his visitor followed. With narrowed eyes, the gypsy entered the Palace.

Content Warnings

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Leonardo's Fears

FFN version

Fan Comment

Really well done! Poor angsty Leo is so up in his own head that it's affecting him….

A group of strangers try to figure out how best to go about their first days under the surface.

I used to love Exile, back when it actually worked on my computer. Great RPG with oldschool aesthetics, enormous and detailed worldbuilding, and the best Shareware Demon I have yet to encounter. And one of the key features that made my day was the chance to develop a team of six whole characters, fully customizable.

I can't think of another game that allows six characters in the same party at the same time, let alone one where you got to customize those characters. The most I can recall is five (Final Fantasy IV). And the thing is, a four-character team is basically the Tank, the Healer, the Wizard, and the Rogue/Archer. A five-character team lets you have a Tank, a Healer, and a Wizard, with two characters to spec into Archer, Rogue, Lancer, or Hybrid Mage. It's fairly limiting, if you want to include all the basics.

But a six-character team? Tank, Healer, Wizard, Rogue, Archer, and you still have an extra character to play with. I did runs with a Lancer, or with an even split between magic-users and not, or where some of the front-row fighters had a few points in healing or magecraft. I did runs where the sixth character was specced into all the non-combat skills (I forget the terms, but search/perception, cavelore, lockpicking, first aid, etc.). I did runs where the sixth character was a pacifist, unable to raise a hand in combat, and it didn't handicap my team to any noticeable degree.

And then they brought the game to Steam, under the name Avernum, and I was elated… briefly. Then I realized that they'd (a) added a compulsory hand-holding tutorial, (b) drastically reduced the amount of fine-tuning I could do with character stats, and (c) reduced the team to four members tops.

Also got Phil Foglio on board for art, so it's not like I can complain too much 😋

But anyway, this piece was written well before the Steam port, so only the name refers to that. And I guess this is a good example of the type of writing I did twenty-odd years ago when trying to come up with my own characters, rather than craft stories around the characters of others. (Or, more to the point: In most of my fanfics, I borrow the characters; in this fanfic, I borrowed the worldbuild.)

Content Warnings

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Six-Character Teams Are Awesome

Excerpt

"A thief, like I," he said, putting a hand delicately to his chest as if prouder of that than of anything else he could ever have or do, "steals things. A crook deceives and tricks people into acting against their best interests. I'm not at all like a crook. And Koshoa thinks worse of me than that—I'm sure he thinks I might murder, rape, destroy, pillage, and commit all sorts of other atrocities. I'm not that kind of person—that's why I ended up here instead of being sent first class to the afterlife."

"You disgust me," said Ada with drawn brows.

Raising his eyes heavenward, Ner gave a comical sigh. "I've never gotten on well with redheads. Some flaw in their genes, I'll warrant."

I'm pretty sure I based Ner on Silk from The Belgariad.

Some years back, I had been vaguely playing out a whole CATS AU in my head; this is what's left in my notes.

The first chapter is just a little snippet of what might've been; the second is a rundown from my notes of how I would've played the characters. I kinda wanted to get that all posted before I went and saw the new version of the show, so as to ensure that my mind could treat the characters as two variations, not infect the old versions with the new interpretations.

Also, somewhere along the way, I ran into a behind-the-scenes tidbit: The cast are given only three words around which to build the character. Grizabella, for example, is described as "Proud, Hurt, Indomitable," while one variation of Rumpleteazer is described as "Naughty, Impressionable, Effervescent." This is quite an intriguing way to characterize. Also, I'm still annoyed that they gave the role of motherly, fastidious, homemaker Jennyanydots to Rebel Wilson, who seems practically the opposite; I can't help but think that they did this entirely because of her size.

Content Warnings

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Worries (an old snippet of a tale)

Fan Comment

Some interesting sketches here! I particularly like your take on Skimbleshanks—I've found him a bit trickier to get into so it's appreciated!

I was once contemplating the spider egg sac I'd just squashed, and came up with this idea.

Content Warnings

The idea might make you feel uncomfortable in your own home.

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"Finding Nemo meets John Wick"

Fan Comment

I'd watch the hell out of that

Content Warnings

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Fan Comment

Content Warnings

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Fan Comment