Kitty ([info]kittyrainbow) wrote in [info]af100,
@ 2006-01-15 06:58:00
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Current music:"Tinted Eyes" - Billie Piper

Challenge 15 entries
Title: Missing
Prompt: #15 - Puzzle
Rating: G
Characters: Artemis, Angeline
Points to: The Unofficial Jade Princess Fan Club
Words: 100

-----

Angeline interrupted. "Don't bother with that, darling. It's missing some pieces."

"Missing?" Artemis froze. "But I want to do it. I haven't before."

Angeline stroked his head. "As long as you know you can't finish." She departed.

Artemis didn't resume the jigsaw for a while.



Later Angeline saw it – as finished as possible – off to one side. Artemis was now cutting up cardboard. She smiled. Such imagination...



Finally Angeline saw he'd abandoned the table. Only the jigsaw remained.

Then she noticed: no holes. There were strangely sunken pieces – perfect fits, matching the picture from the lid.

The jigsaw was complete.

-----

Title: Symbiosis
Prompt: #15 - Puzzle
Rating: ...depends on how you interpret it
Characters: Juliet, Holly
Points to: The Unofficial Jade Princess Fan Club
Words: 200

-----

How she treasured the moments like this: the soft sensation of the cushions, her companion's skin resting on hers, the silence. Juliet usually felt she had to distance herself from people by talking too much. It was only with people she trusted that she could sit in complete silence without beginning to itch. That she could be naked.

There was only one man in the world who had ever seen flashes of this self. She had always especially feared intimacy with men. No matter whether they tried to be gentle, everything that their sex strove for would hurt her eventually.

But Holly wasn't a man. She wasn't even human. Despite this, they understood each other. They had their differences – girly, tomboy; silly, serious – but at the core, they were the same. Juliet didn't have to pretend with Holly. She couldn't pretend with Holly. She inclined her head slightly to look at the fairy, reminding herself of the lines and curves that harmonised with something inside Juliet's soul.

They fitted together like a pieces of a jigsaw.

She delicately slipped her fingers between Holly's, the separate entities forming one solid mesh. Holly smiled at her through warm sleepiness.

Like a jigsaw.

-----

Now the question about the rating here is - am I talking metaphorically or literally, and is this just one big metaphor? *waggles eyebrows*


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[info]blueyeti
2006-01-15 01:58 pm UTC (link)
The first was very cute. You could certainly take up fanfic100 for 'fluffy scenes from Fowl Manor' and have it finished first. I think the question of Arty's logic (of not starting a puzzle that can't be complete) versus Arty's perfectionism (making the peices to fit) would be a wonderful source of debate over on Crim.

The second: wow. You just got be scribbling all about Juliet, because I just hadn't *thought* of Jolliet in terms of ... Juliet. This sounds incredibly nieve, but the implications of dating a non-human hadn't quite opened themselves up to me in terms of ficability, and so... Yes. Juliet! *scribbles ideas like mad* What would happen to her to make her turn to a fairy over a human? What would make her turn from a fairy to no one? Why in the first place? Oh, deary me, thank you. You can tell I've only ever had the vaguest ideas of logical ways to get them together.

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[info]kittyrainbow
2006-01-15 11:56 pm UTC (link)
Thankies. :) But you know I won't join fanfic100 - the table would drive me to insanity trying to finish it! XD; I think it was sort of important to the fic that Artemis (who's actually supposed to be about seven or eight in this, but I had to cut the direct age references out) didn't actually know when he began the puzzle that it was "unfinishable"... If he'd known, would he still have tried it?

*wonders how you managed to get inspiration for the human/fairy question, as she was intending it to be about male/female...* Now I know I am Little Miss Innocent and all that, but seriously, this fic is not innocent - it's about sexual politics. Put your Innuendo Hat on and reread it. ;)

I'm glad it's got you inspired though. :D I want to see these fics on my desk by 9am Monday morning, sharp!

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[info]blueyeti
2006-01-17 01:06 pm UTC (link)
I know. The table(s!!) for fanfic100 are driving me crazy too - mainly because I have a severely misplaced sense of challenging myself and therefore don't excuse very many 'but this doesn't fit prompt #57'. Oh dear, I think I might be able to tell you, of the top of my head, that 57 is ... Fire. *checks* Damn, that's 52. 57 is 'Lunch'.

*ponders the matter of Artemis.* Is Artemis a 'challenge for the sake of the challenge' person, or just extremely logical and so limited by his logic? I say write it up on Crim!

The Juliet!inspiration was inspired by yoru choice of language. It wasn't necessarily what you said, it was the way this was worded which opened up a few more possibilities. So the Not-So-Innocent male/female talk provided the right... questions to apply to a fairy/human talk as well. Wonderful!

Hides under a rock with my piles of novel-ideas, and shuffles Juliet to the bottom.

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[info]kittyrainbow
2006-01-17 02:31 pm UTC (link)
I'm proud that I'm managing to be only slightly psychotic about "fitting" the challenges for [info]1sentence. Maybe you should just try my highly distant, metaphorical "gag me with a sock" tactic? XD; The rules of [info]fanfic100 just say that the fic has to suggest the word... *pokes your multiple certificates of insanity*

I think Crim is ignoring me at the moment, because nobody's yet replied to my suggestion that we should do a selective fanart archive. And that was a couple of days ago. :(

I've suddenly realised, actually, that I do think of Jolliet in terms of Juliet. She's the driving force in the ship as I view it now. Which is weird, because I'm fairly sure I started out with Jolliet in terms of Holly, and have had points where they were fairly equal in their influence. o.O;

There isn't much human/fairy analysis done in the fandom, is there? Not properly. Really it ought to be the focus of most H/A fics, but it isn't, which I guess is why they're on the Heracles Challenge... I'd really like to see what you do with this for Jolliet.

*crawls under the rock with a flashlight so she can see the ideas ferment*

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[info]blueyeti
2006-01-18 10:24 am UTC (link)
Oh, I'm not really that picky for the fanfic100 tables. My main problem there is with 'saving' prompts which I like or I think have merit for better ideas. So I don't want to use 'series' prompts (like Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall) separately. It's very irritating.

I don't *think* about Jolliet in terms of either. I think about it in terms of Jolliet, with more emphasis on Juliet just... because. Which doesn't work at all, and is probably why I don't have a good development fic for the ship. When I finish Life I'll start on my Jolliet development fic,which is the sequel to it.

The fandom is so limited in hwo they look at their shipping. I think we can put this down to the amount of a/a fics which attempt to be romances. Holly and Arty are interacting in the same way as they're interacting in the books, so the same things are discussed. Since Colfer doesn't tackle the height issue, or the issues of fairy/human interactions, the fandom doesn't either. The format doesn't lead towards discussing those problems, but overcoming them by adrenaline and intense action-inspired emotion.

Thinks that crawling under the rock is very easy because it's rather high of the grounhd because of the amount of fics it's covering.

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[info]thewhitelily
2006-01-17 02:55 pm UTC (link)
I like them both. The first one, I think, is my favourite. Then I read the second one again and go - well, it's just so pretty...

But the first one's got young!genius!Artemis - I can't go past that, and it's such a brilliant idea and so Artemis. I love the jigsaw puzzle. And I've got a niece who'd actually do exactly that, if she could, so it hit all the right maternal buttons for me. *melts in the face of genius!child*

And then the second one - the main feeling I'm getting from it is not actually the darker overtone - I'm just seeing two people in love who are completely open and trusting with one another, in a way they can't be with anyone else. I think it's sad that Juliet thinks that no man could ever be trustworthy to that extent, when I think it's about the person you've chosen to trust compared with all the people who you don't let in quite to that extent. But that's only a tiny part. The whole thing just drowns me in lovely warm honey. It's not about sexual politics - it's about love. And you're not going to convince me otherwise even if you are the author.

I'll just have to say I like them both. :D

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[info]kittyrainbow
2006-01-17 03:12 pm UTC (link)
I think it is very Artemis. I think that's exactly what he'd do. Even if, from my point of view, it's slightly illogical - because he'd completed the jigsaw as much as possible, and everyone would say, "yes, it's finished, well done", but he still has to fill all of the missing pieces. (Which I thought was a compulsion born out of insecurity and feeling misunderstood by others, but I didn't tackle that much in the drabble, except for vaguely through the highlydistant!Angeline viewpoint.)

I did somewhat design it so that the "darker" side would be hidden by the "lighter", because I didn't want it to be too blatant. But it's meant to be less that Juliet doesn't think men are trustworthy, but being at this point (because she's never managed to get close to a man) still a virgin, she's afraid of the physical aspects of sex. The drabble does contain two very different portrayals of the ship though, and I think they actually work best when combined, rather than one at the expense of the other - because then you get both sides of their love. (And it becomes even more of teh Aww, Twue Wuv Fwuffiness.) I'm trying my best here.

Heehee, thanks. :D

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[info]blueyeti
2006-01-18 10:28 am UTC (link)
Kitty, love, you've got great ideas, but you need to write longer things so that they're not just hinted at but explored. I end up enjoying your explanations more than the fics themselves because I'm an idiot who doesn't get subtlety because most of the time they just need more *words* so the Story isn't stripped down to illusions and short dialogue. Or I'm an idiot. Whichever.

Let this be motivation to write MORE! More, my pretty!

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[info]thewhitelily
2006-01-18 01:54 pm UTC (link)
Exactly. "What do you mean there's something I can't do?" Artemis just isn't capable of leaving it at that. :D

Interesting. I had thought the implication was that she was talking from the position of having experienced of some bad relationships - men she'd slept with, but hadn't actually experienced that connection with - rather than a position of fearing!the!unknown. But yeah, I agree - without that balance for the Awww, Twue Wuv aspects, it would have been a bit sickening. There needs to be something to give it a level of complexity, so that a whole background of story is implied rather than a disconnected piece of not-much, and you've delivered that.

Anyway, that's half the fun of leaving stuff implied - it makes each reader puzzle over it a bit (no pun intended) and fill in the gaps with stuff they can relate to, which ultimately makes it mean more to them.

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