Just signed up for Stage of Fools 2019. I enjoyed it last time, so we'll see what happens now.

Makeshift League (2797 words) by marcelo
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: DC Animated Universe (Timmverse)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Clark Kent/Lois Lane/Bruce Wayne
Characters: Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Bruce Wayne
Summary:

It's good for them. That doesn't mean they are good at it.

Routine & Ritual (1198 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Jean-Luc Picard
Additional Tags: Tea, Curtain Fic, Character Study, No Plot/Plotless
Summary:

Jean-Luc liked routine; he enjoyed the ritual element a routine added to his life, the barest scaffolding of normalicy and predictability in a life filled with chaos.

I love the choice of moment and character — I think they fit very well.

My entry for Be the first! 2019:

Personnel Selection (431 words) by marcelo
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Cemetery Beach
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: Prequel
Summary:

At the beginning there was nothingness, and brave men in thin metal spheres floating in it. That wouldn't do for the Consortium.

Posted to AO3 my Wayback Exchange and Be The First! fics. The challenge reveals won't take place until April and May — I'll post the links then — so at least this time I'm not precisely cutting it close. (The risk, of course, is that I'll suddenly decide the fics are awful and I have to rewrite everything.)

They were both tricky, though. The Wayback Exchange one because I had to work my way around, or rather with, a very important piece of canon with all sorts of consequences and implications for the story I had to write. The Be The First! story was difficult not due to an excess of canon (there's only a handful of issues), but rather because a couple of details in there, if taken seriously (under Watsonian conditions that I think I can assume but aren't spelled out by the source material) force you to do a huge reframing of the whole situation. It feels weird to do that in the *first* fic in a fandom, but you do what you have to do.

It's a very nice, very reasonable, and actually not at all a niche request, but the more I thought about it (after reviewing the source material, which wasn't at all a disagreeable task), the more I realized that it's an unexpectedly tricky one. So I ended up going to bed late because I was jotting down notes for something of a "bible" for the fic, copying the idea from series/comic books/etc. — not something I usually do.

Anyway, I think I have it. It's not really a solution to the unique trickiness of the specific scenario, but rather an enthusiastic embracing of it. I hope it works for the requester. (Well, first I hope I can make it work in the text...)

(There are many reasons why not, and therefore I'm going to do it anyway.)

Just signed up for Be The First 2019. Somewhat surprisingly, I looked and I don't think I've done it before. Perhaps the explanation is that it took me a long while to find a fandom to be the first for (Fandom. Kinda scarily impressive when you think about it). I ended up choosing Cemetery Beach — Warren Ellis minis seem to lack fics somewhat more reliably than others, which might be a function of his often going off-script, so to speak, or just a smaller readership than my liking of them would make me believe. I am very annoyed, though, that there are three fics for Injection. Three. Either zero or a lot would've been more acceptable numbers.

As subliminally suggested by minoanmiss and gingicat, I just signed up for the Wayback Exchange. Although I must note that, due to my age well-practiced not-getting-killed-so-far skills, my reaction to most fandoms was "What do you mean wayback, this fandom is still active (in my heart)".

I mean, I was trying to get some friends to watch Ninja Assassin a couple weeks ago, there was a TNG episode as background TV during the weekend, my light Tumblr lurking is leavened by a ready stream of apparently new TOS posts, and calling Hamlet or Sherlock Holmes an old fandom is both obviously true and obviously false.

Anyway, Old Man Yelling At Cloud Aside aside (do we still pretend The Simpsons is a live thing, I wonder), yay! This could be fun.

I got a very case-like, and very enjoyable, nu!Tomb Raider fic:

A New Thread To Pull (4630 words) by zynnser
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Tomb Raider (Movie 2018)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Lara Croft, Lu Ren
Additional Tags: Case Fic
Summary:

A misdelivered letter provides an opening to get a step ahead of Trinity, and Lara has never been one to miss opportunities like this.

And wrote

Atomic Secrets (1119 words) by marcelo
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Atomic Blonde (2017), Wonder Woman (2017)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Lorraine Broughton, Diana (Wonder Woman)
Additional Tags: Violence and/as flirting, Not a lot. Sorry.
Summary:

No operation ever goes as expected, but no operation ever went so "not as expected" as this one.

Got this fantastic (creepy, sad, and above all, harrowing) look at, as the summary says, Horatio, a long time afterwards:

Absent Thee From Felicity Awhile (1013 words) by Lexigent
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Hamlet - Shakespeare
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Hamlet/Horatio
Characters: Horatio (Hamlet), Hamlet, Ophelia (Hamlet), Laertes (Hamlet)
Summary:

Horatio, a long time afterwards.
Content notes: sleep paralysis, horror themes, canonical character death, non-canonical character death.

And I wrote this short scene where Lady Macbeth is visited by one of the witches in the back seat of her limo (no, not like that):

Fathomable Prophecies (1081 words) by marcelo
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Macbeth - Shakespeare
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Lady Macbeth, Witch (Macbeth)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Historical
Summary:

Choice can be a blood-soaked thing, slippery and perhaps unreal.