Although, when fkcommentfic opened, I quickly posted a couple of drabbles, I always intended to go back and linger a little over some of the other prompts. However time passed, and more time passed, and then the deadline loomed....

On 27 September, I finally posted a ficlet, "To Dine in", based on one of amilyn's prompts, “Janette deals with amorous advances from a stranger”. It was duly posted to FKFIC-L, and provided with a webpage. However, my trip to Stratford interrupted things pretty thoroughly: not only did it take up a whole day, but left me feeling very tired and stiff from the bus trip; and the kinks did not work out with a good night's sleep. And Saturday brought its own schedule, entailing rather too much walking, leaving every old cramp re-knotted.

However, the next day was the final day of fkcommentfic; so I simply had to go back to the prompts. I wound up spending hours writing, and finished no fewer than four ficlets: "The Church of the Holy Blood", "Truth and Consequences", "Rat's Tail", and "Trilemma". One or two other prompts looked mildly tempting; but not enough for me to be able to churn turn out a story in the time available.

All have now been posted to my website.


"To Dine in":

Since "To Dine in" is set at a time when Janette was travelling alone with LaCroix and Nick had not yet joined their family, I decided that I wanted to use a background graphic that might be interpretable as medieval. In the end, the pattern that I picked is clearly inauthentic, but has something of the repetition of a medieval diaper pattern or fancy tilework. Its dominant colors are light and dark blue; but there are also hints of a muted turquoise green and a yellowish gold. The border around the story panel was therefore done in a selection of deep blue textures, and picked out in the same yellowish gold.


"The Church of the Holy Blood":

To anyone but me, this story must open sadly post rem: what on earth is "The Church of the Holy Blood"? Well, the prompt (“Nick finds, completely by accident, a group of vampires who also seem to be looking to mend their old ways; going from cold-blooded killers, to repentant (quasi-)human folk”) reminded me irresistibly of "A Matter of Taste", one of the unpublished episodes that I wrote for FK5. In it, Nick meets Wladislaw Staniszewski, the founder and minister of this church, which draws its congregation from among carouches. As this little ficlet indicates, while Nick appreciates the function of the church and the achievements of its pastor, he retains (as we saw in "Blind Faith") a strong distaste for the nature of the carouche.

For the webpage, I wanted a background graphic that suggested stained glass. I found it by manipulating a monotone tile that came originally from 321Clipart.com. The initial colorizing was performed some years ago at GRSites.com when it was in beta. (Its software has since altered, and no longer seems to be manipulable to produce duotones.) I further tweaked it with Microsoft Picture Manager.

Deep red and golden tones were then used in the borders around the tables to support the deeply luminous effect of old glass. Again, I got the effects I wanted by tweaking a variety of textured graphics.


"Truth and Consequences":

So going to Janette's funeral isn't quite amilyn's prompt, “Nat goes to see Janette after an episode”! It is, however, a follow-up to "The Human Factor" that has lurked at the back of my mind for a while. In the tag to that episode, the screenwriters were interested in the possible effect on the relationships between Nick and Natalie, and Nick and LaCroix. They dropped poor Patrick and his aunt like a pair of scorched potatoes. Yet, of all the characters in the episode, these are the two most "burnt" by events: the fire at the Bolger house in Uxbridge must have been devastating.

Whether Janette did or did not survive the episode has long been a matter of discussion. At the very end of the ficlet, I did add a sentence to suggest that Nick re-turned her to the dark side; but at least one reader assumed that this really was her funeral. I can only say that, having written the whole of FK4 in the belief that she was supposed to have died in "The Human Factor" (a climax that, in my opinion, would be very effective), a bit of that may have slipped through regardless.

Choosing a background graphic for this story was no problem at all. Years ago, I collected graphics from Absolute Cross, including a pattern with a skewed, sketchy cross shape. All I needed to do, then, was pick out suitable textures for the panel borders—and, as it happens, two of the three I used also came from Absolute Cross! The overall effect is grey, but with a shell-like shimmer of muted mauve and green.


"Rat's Tail":

One thing leads to another: having written of Janette's funeral, I then wrote of Vachon's reaction after Screed's death. The title contains the usual "tail/tale" pun; but, of course, this is also the coda to Screed's story.

In keeping with its subject, I decided to employ brown tones. Failing an effective brown fur, I used a granite texture for the background, and a variety of gritty textures in the border. A screen capture of Screed was carefully clipped, and used to decorate the panel containing the title.

I then looked for rats, with no great hope of finding much that would be useful. Well, Google came up trumps! I found a small but useful collection of graphics on a personal website, Ridges and Rats. This provided a line of rat's footprints (which separate the story from the notes), and a nicely realistic monochrome picture of a brown rat (which I colorized and reduced to miniscule proportions to use between each incident in the story).


"Trilemma":

When I saw pj1228's prompt, “Nick/Lacroix, Janette: Love at first Bite”, I initially thought that I'd write something clearly UFfish. However, the story had other ideas. What LaCroix's reaction was when he did bite Nick (or Nick's response, for that matter) turned out to lie in the ficlet's future. Instead, the story is simply a third-person internal monologue, as LaCroix ponders whether or not to accede to Janette's wish that he bring Nick across.

Selecting the background graphic proved initially difficult: no clear theme came to mind, except perhaps something "three-ish" to reflect the title. However, I could find no triangular patterns in my collection nor on-line (at least, none that hit the spot). Instead, my eye was caught by a ripply water graphic that I had recently picked up from GRSites.com. It was heavily stylized, with white ovals that gave me doubts—well, until I actually tiled it, and saw how it looked. The apricot tones suggested sunset, which was appropriate. The flashes of turquoise, the steely teal-tinted grey—these also suggested a late hour. Something about the graphic just seemed right, but for reasons that I couldn't put my finger on. I think (and here I must admit I am speculating) that the fluidity of the image reflects the vacillation in LaCroix's thoughts, which fix nowhere. Well, not within the story, at least, though we all know how it turned out.

For the border, I picked out the dominant colours from the background while retaining the fluid texture. Darkest teal tones have been combined with apricot, with an inner border from another water graphic.