Forsan et haec olim scripsisse iuvabit.

Title: Sketch: The Faultless Monster
Fandom: Pumpkin Scissors (animeverse)
Character(s): Muzé Caplan
Pairing(s): None
Rating: PG
Word Count: ~1400
Warnings: Mentions of suicide and medical/psychological experiments
A/N: This character sketch of Muzé Caplan has been sitting on my desk in draft for years. I had intended it to be longer and include a version of her canonical meeting with Oland, but that got stalled in development. Looking it over, however, I decided that what I had managed to write could stand on its own. Concrit welcomed with psychological evaluations.

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There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand. I am practically industrious — painstaking, a workman to execute with perseverance and labour — but besides this there is a love for the marvellous, a belief in the marvellous, intertwined in all my projects, which hurries me out of the common pathways of men, even to the wild sea and unvisited regions I am about to explore.

— Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Muzé Caplan slit open the embossed envelope with the same swift efficiency (if but a fraction of the interest) she brought to a dissection. The three flimsies hardly seemed worthy of the rag paper and red wax seal that enclosed them, but she was Caplan now and such courtesies were deemed her due. She often thought that the ancients should not have dismissed the philosopher who defined man as a featherless biped by showing him a plucked chicken. The Institute, the military, the imperial court: how little different they were from a fowl run in the energy their inhabitants devoted to creating and maintaining a pecking order.

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Title: Drabbles: Angles of Reflectance
Fandom: Pumpkin Scissors (anime or manga version)
Character(s): Alice, Oland, Oreldo, Lionel
Pairing(s): Canon 'ships.
Rating: T (Oreldo doesn't go any lower)
Word Count: 300
Warnings: None. Takes place during the duel at the ball.
A/N: Written for a fandom that needs more love -- unfortunately, I think I need more canon before I can start imagining my own plots, but given that the anime concluded with the ball arc and Del Rey's release of the manga is proceeding at a glacial pace, that ain't going to happen any time soon. The fun here was writing character haiku: taking the existing concepts and paring them down to essentials in the appropriate voices. Concrit welcomed with three hots and a cot. Crossposted from nebroadwe to pumpkinscissors.
Dedication: For Laura Mulvey, for obvious reasons. ;-p

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1. Narcissus

      When she stumbles, awkward in the silks and manners her sisters graciously affect, Lionel catches her -- his lovely pawn, advancing rank by rank toward her apotheosis, ignorant of the game's subtleties. He woos her in clichés because he sees her thus: chess-piece, princess, callow maid.

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CLAMP, Tokyo Babylon 1-2 (tr. Ray Yoshimoto, Alexis Kirsch and Carol Fox)

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岩永 亮太郎 [Iwanaga Ryotaro], Pumpkin Scissors 2 (tr. Ikoi Hiroe)

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CLAMP, Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle 16 (tr. William Flanagan)

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Back when I attended Otakon, I was annoyed to have missed most of ADV's showing of the first episode of Pumpkin Scissors (especially since I had forced myself to sit through the entire first episode of Air, ack ptooie!). Well, as part of the marketing rollout for the R1 DVD release, the good folk of IGN are streaming that first episode (dubbed), as you may see below the cut. ( Read more... )

How about y'all, my faithful readers? What do you think?