Between the good and bad, that's where you'll find me, Reaching for Heaven

Thus I put the Barnes & Noble gift card, which my dad gave me for Christmas, to good use: I got

--The other four (currently available) volumes of the Trinity Blood light novels;

--The soundtrack to "Daybreakers" (which includes the song from the trailer);

--Vol 3 of Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Shinji Ikari Raising Project (which I just plain love: it's like the happier, gentler sibling to the Sadamoto manga. Even the artwork is eerily similar);

--Also yet another blank journal, this time with a print of cherry blossoms on the front and back covers (perfect for the plethora of Yami no Matsuei fics that are flying out of my head: I came up with two more ideas on the way home, one being the backstory on Mercy Falcone and how she ended up working for the American division of the Ministry of Hades [Warning: it decided to turn into a mild Bleach crossover]; the other is sick humor piece in which Tsuzuki gets a strange Valentine's package from an admirer. :: Adjusts eyeglasses, smirks:: Hm, I wonder who that could be...).

And a package with someone's Valentine's Day present arrived in the mail. Note to the previous owner of the book: Sidney is a perfectly normal girl's name, and it's been used as a gender-neutral name since the late nineteenth century; there was no need to redact the name through the first story in the book and substitute "Cindy". There are no girls named Cindy in an L.M. Montgomery book; unless a Mary Sue has invaded her world...

I have to admit, I've only started scratching the surface of the Trinity Blood universe since I've only really seen the anime; now that I'm reading the light novels, I felt daunted in deciding to write a fanfiction set in this universe. But I didn't let that keep me from venturing into a world I've come to love and admire (It's like something you might get if you crossed Walter M. Miller's classic novel "A Canticle for Leibowitz", which features Catholic monks in a post-apocalyptic world trying to rebuild civilization, with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Really!). I just followed my heart and listened to what the characters had to say...

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On the Tenth Day of Christmas, the Matrix Refugee fanficced for ye:

Midnight Mass in the Trinity Blood-verse,
Doctor Hobby wracking Joe's brain,
One Meifu Christmas office party,
A drunken Evangelion New Year's party,
Redpills stealing a Christmas tree,
Harry Dresden for the holidays,
Frank Sweitz adopting a David unit,
One Chateau Christmas party,
One Christmas spirit in the American Gods 'verse,
and An A.I. fic with David decorating his first Christmas tree.

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"Star of Wonder"

by "Matrix Refugee"

Disclaimer: I do not own Trinity Blood, it's characters, concepts or other indicia, which belong to the late Sunao Yoshida, Thores Shibamoto, Kentaro Yasui, Tomohiro Hirata, Gonzo, FUNimation, et al.

Author's Note: Set sometime between Episode 19 and 20 of the anime. This is possibly a bit of an extended universe fic: my Grigori characters from a series of Evangelion fics I've been writing decided they wanted to visit the Trinity Blood universe. Mild hints of Abel/Esther. Also, I cross-bred some of the universe mechanics of the light novels into this (not enough to change continuity, though).

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( Midnight Mass in the Vatican, the great nave of St. Peter's Nuova Basilica was thronged with people )

I'd used the Store Availability option on the B&N website yesterday to hunt around for more volumes of the Trinity Blood manga and also the light novels: sure enough, the one in Burlington had the first volumes of both light novel arcs as well as Vol 3 of the manga.

I'm glad I waited till today: Yesterday was bitterly cold and today, while warmer, still had a biting wind, which meant having to bundle up. I managed to get another fic written while riding the bus and having lunch at the Dunkin Donuts around the corner from home; no crimes of the century taking place there, in fact, we had the opposite of the quarrelers recently: I was having lunch there when a light snow was falling and a cute couple came running in, laughing and brushing snow off each other, happy and cheerful and chattering about the snow, holding hands and just being cute as they waited in line. Awww! I just wanted to huggle them for brightening the place up.

The next fic in the 12 Days of Fanfic should be up momentarily: It's been sitting all plotted out in my head for some time now, I just need to finish typing the last handful of paragraphs. I also managed to finish one of the Yami no Matsuei fics that was being a pain to get into: by the time I got about a third of the way into it, I'd warmed up to it and was on a roll to the point of being sad to finish it; what can I say? The crowd at the Ministry of Hades are a fun bunch to write (even Hisoka, when he's being prickly and pretending he doesn't care; Tatsumi can be a pain to write as well, but I find I just have to switch into "rules lawyer mode" when I'm writing him). I even finally got a feel for Watari, who was a tough one to get my head around, don't ask me why; this was why I Put Him on a Bus when I was writing the Twhinelite crossover. Though it's conceivable that the wacky inventor *would* get himself into a weird scrape if he used himself as a guinea pig for one of his strange potions, if he can't use one of the other shinigami... Wait till the fic where he finally figures out the sex change potion... :: Grins conspiratorially at Terazuma::

Also, my darn Grigori from "Neon Enoch Evangelion" seem to want to play in the Trinity Blood universe. Geez, can I keep these fandoms from spilling over into each other?! I suppose I could count this as an extended universe idea. To say nothing of the fact that they want a fic of their own (set after the anime, as Abel and Ion go in search of Cain, who appears to be hiding among these amoral angels...). It stands to reason, somewhat, since the Grigori are, at least by phenotype, the second cousins to the Crusnik. I'm also trying to come up with a new name for the Grigori Sariel, aka Enniel Prussot, since it seems the shell which went by that name has been destroyed and his core has been reclothed in a new body (hopefully one that is less of an Expy of the smirking bastard, though the Evil Albino image suits Sariel nicely).

And the burning question of the moment: what the hell do you call a creature that is half energy vampire and half shinigami? I'm fighting off a kind of "Daybreakers"/YnM crossover of sorts, featuring this weird hybrid -- and more or less angsty one at that, since he has abilities from both parents: he has to be careful about touching people with his bare hands or having them touch any of his uncovered skin with their bare hands, since he can literally drain someone of their lifeforce just by touch alone and the longer the touch, the more likely they are to die. His first soul kiss at age eighteen was a complete disaster and he's now kicking himself for accidentally killing his girlfriend... well, when he isn't running from everyone who wants him dead.

Just got our big tree into the living room! Unfortunately, this meant cleaning the living room, which was in dire need of a dusting, and though I was tackling bathrooms while my mother was dusting, I still got a lungful of dust which caused me to be pretty miserable for some time. Gaah... T'will be worth it, though!

And we're waiting with bated breath for the big winter storm that's on the way: the forecasters are predicting thunder-snow squalls, which are a rare but delightful sight: the crystalline beaut of snow and the power of thunder!

Change in plans in the 12 Days of Fanfic: I added a Trinity Blood fic to the list since I had a lovely idea pop into my head while I was taking a bath. I'm planning to start rewatching the series soon, and I'm also twiddling with a review of it from a Catholic perspective. In a few words: there's things that are off-kilter about how the Church is portrayed, but there's nothing to object about. If anything, it makes the Church look really cool and awesome and there's an element of what's been called "muscular Christianity", ie. strength in faith, in character and in defending the faith and the innocent, sometimes with words and sometimes with your fists or your guns... or your awesome Crusnik abilities. Some people might get tetchy about Father Tres Iques, but I think this is a case of the Church bestowing "honorary Holy Orders" on someone (or something with a certain amount of non-biological intelligence). This used to be done a long time ago, in that someone would receive Holy Orders, usually because they'd served the Church in some unusual capacity, but they were dispensed from the regular duties of the priesthood, eg. saying one Mass every day; the one instance that comes to mind was St. Jerome, who translated the entire Bible from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek into Latin: he was given Holy Orders but because his health wasn't that great, he was dispensed from the regular duties of the priesthood so that he could continue his work.

The only other thing that raises my eyebrows is the female bishop and the female Cardinal: not likely to happen, though no doubt, there were nuns who stepped in to help serve the Church heroically in the wake of the apocalyptic events before the start of the series. This actually put me in mind of the crypto-Catholics who kept the Faith alive in Japan after the persecutions during the Tokugawa period, when dozens of priests were arrested or driven out of Japan: in the two hundred years between then and the reopening of Japan to the West in the 1800s, there were native priests and nuns who hid in the more remote areas and helped keep a small pilot light of Catholicism lit by teaching the Faith to those who would accept it and encouraging them to pass it on to their children. Of course, in time, the only sacrament that could be offered was baptism, but there was a village where one family kept a set of vestments, Mass books and sacred vessels hidden in their house and passing them on from one generation to the next, in the hope that some day the priests would be allowed to return to Japan. They also helped keep a vaguely defined small parish of sorts together, offering a rudimentary service on Sunday and praying the Rosary. They even repurposed statues of Kwan Yin as images of Our Lady and in some cases carved small crucifixes on the backs of Buddha statues (this actually pops up in one anime series, and from an odd source: there's a scene in Yami no Matsuei where the *main villain* of the series talks about this; I'm still puzzling over that, though I have some goo theories on it...).

Well, that wound up as more than a few words. :: laughs::