toujours_nigel | answers to the 15 characters questions (lj + dw)

CHARACTERS

Hephaistion Amyntoros
Ralph Ross Lanyon
Zuko
Bucky Barnes
Aral Vorkosigan
Draco Malfoy
Maurice Hall
Natalia Romanovna
Sirius Black
Bagoas
General Iroh
Jack Benjamin
Morgan le Fay
Lancelot du Lac
Idgie Threadgoode

QUESTIONS

2 (Ralph Lanyon) and 7 (Maurice Hall) decide to adopt. How rough will the kid have it?

Maurice will be a little at a loss if it's a girl. Well, Maurice will probably still be at a loss if it's a boy, and he'll think he's rather old to be raising babies, at his age. Ralph is deeply contemptuous of any and all such opinion, since of course Maurice makes a fine father, do they need to talk about Clive yet again?

The kid is going to have one uber-prepared parent who's a fair bit controlling and essentially incapable of remembering that s/he's likely to have opinions that aren't his but is willing to twist a lot of things around to his (and his baby's) advantage, and one who's willing to cut him/her a lot more slack and pay attention to her/his opinions but also has a fairly bullish stance on right and wrong from which he cannot be budged.

So that's going to likely be a kid who is deeply frustrating to teachers, because s/he gets up to the worst sort of trouble, and has most of his/her classmates turned into minions by sheer force of charm, but is also in the top five people in class and a fair athlete. And you can never find proof of his/her involvement in pranks.

15 (Idgie Threadgoode), 12 (Jack Benjamin), 8 (Natalia Romanovna), and 3 (Zuko) form a band. What type of music do they play, and who plays what instrument?

They play covers to classic rock, mostly—it's what they could compromise on—but their individual tastes are very different, both from that compromise, and from each other's; Idgie likes bluegrass, Jack likes opera, Natalia likes jazz, Zuko says he likes death metal but sometimes still dusts off his old tsungi horn. But none of that is anything any of them can get the others to even hold still long enough to listen to, so Red Hot plays classic rock.

Idgie plays the drums; Natalia's lead guitar; Zuko's bass; Jack's their frontman. They trade off for the songs, but usually Natalia and Jack end up singing most of them, cause Zuko's oddly shy about his voice, and Idgie, well, she ain't quite that good. This has led to rumours in the local scene, which Natalia's boyfriend finds endlessly amusing. Of course, he also finds it hilarious to take photos with Jack and pretend they're brothers, so it's possible that Bucky's sense of humour is a little bit fucked-up.

14 (Lancelot) and 10 (Bagoas) run a bakery. Who's likely to poison the cupcakes, and does the other conspire with him/her or call the police?

Their bakery is a small, strange one; it stocks Irani sweets and French pastries, and Bagoas has an unfortunate tendency of banking on the unfamiliarity of Iranian cuisine to slip bits of, well, not strictly poison, but stuff that doesn't get put on the ingredients list to regular customers who annoy him. It's relatively harmless, so Lancelot face-palms a lot and mostly just herds his friends away from the delicious diarrhea-inducing food after they've managed to piss Bagoas off. After he finds Bagoas glancing moodily from his metamour to a can of rat-poison, he starts locking all of that away—it's shitty not being explicitly told that you're in a poly relationship, but Lance figures having your boyfriend's ex/friend-with-benefits/bestfriend dropping by and fawning all over him should have been indication enough. Besides, he can't think what Alexander would do if he let Bagoas poison his boyfriend; it's awkward enough that he's leasing them the shop-front free-of-charge till they find their feet.

But then one day an old man drops in and claims to recognise Bagoas, and then Bagoas blows his lid, and then everyone's in their shop and Hephaistion's physically restraining Alexander and Morgana looks about ready to commit bloody murder and, well, Lancelot can feel his hand itching for the rat-poison, the bleach, anything. God knows Bagoas never did the system any favours, but taking advantage of a little runaway kid like that... Arthur has to eventually pour half a bottle of vodka into him to make him fall asleep and stop putting arsenic into his cake batter.

R-rated fanart of 1 and 13. I don't care if it's Microsoft Paint. Go.

Cannot draw in the least, so not answering this one. Sorry.

4 (Bucky Barnes) and 5 (Aral Vorkosigan) on a road trip. Give me 50 words.

It's not really so much a road trip as that time when Aral Vorkosigan was mourning his first wife by pouring himself into gutters and fights and Ges Vorrutyer's bed and Ezar packed him off to Earth to do rounds at all the old embassies.

Unutterably bored, he manages to slip his guard in Russia—Ministry of Political Education and not ImpSec, and that should've been a warning all on its own—and slips into a bar for, well. For homosexual men. And there's this man about his own age sitting with his back to the wall, and Aral would've known him for a soldier by his eyes alone, but he also has the sort of implants that they've been trying to get accepted back home for medically discharged soldiers. And he grins back at Aral, and buys him a drink, and sits down with him, and Aral, well, he'd known of course that they were more open about these things on Eart, but he hadn't thought it could be easy for him, and the man—Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, he says between kisses—seems easy enough about going anywhere and doing anything, and the arm's a cover if he's recognised and...

And they get out on the street and there are people shooting at them, and Sergeant Barnes has a hover-bike, and all Aral can think, when they've stopped for rest five hours later and Barnes is meticulously disassembling his weaponry, is that Captain Negri is going to be expansively unimpressed by all of it. General Lord Piotr Vorkosigan does not bear thinking of.

11 (General Iroh) runs away to join the army. How does 9 (Sirius Black) react?

It depends on how old everyone is: Imma say that Sirius is the drill sergeant or somesuch, because he would be hideously inappropriate.

In that case, I imagine he would take a long look at Iroh, sigh a lot, then ask to see him after having drilled the entire cohort into the ground. When Iroh turned up, he'd give him tea and ask him to a game of pai sho, and finish up by giving him a white lotus tile when Iroh won and commend him on his eagerness to serve.

When the Fire Lord's men turn up to take his errant son back home, he's convincingly pretend he had no idea, that's Prince Iroh? I'd have thought he'd look more... pampered. Who knew?

In what situation would 6 (Draco Malfoy) ever say to 8 (Natalia Romanovna), "I think those are my trousers you're wearing?"

For this one, I'm all for Draco being an Unspeakable, and one of Natalia's contacts on the Wizarding side of things. They work together when something involves both the Wizarding and the Muggle side of things, as certain crimes do.

At some point, to establish an alibi for Draco, who is off doing Unspeakable things among Muggles, who are selling potions as drugs, very likely unknowingly, she has to sub in as him at some Wizarding soiree or the other, much to Blaise's disgust. Draco, who normally knows better than to be trapped, is betrayed by someone or the other, and has to be rescued by a team—Natalia among others.

He's punchy and drugged enough when they find him that that's the first thing he says after they get the gag off him. Natalia desists from swatting him upside the head because he might already have a concussion.

1 (Hephaistion), 3 (Zuko), and 6 (Draco Malfoy) get stuck together in an elevator between floors. Who (if anyone) panics, and how do they get out?

Zuko panics a little because it's a metal box and he doesn't want to risk firebending because they might all end up in a melted heap.

If it's a Muggle elevator, Draco simply Apparates everyone out.

If it's an elevator in a Muggle location, they force the roof off and slowly climb up the cables—Zuko should have no issue blasting out through a set of doors unattached to a cage—with one of the other two probably helping Draco somewhat.

9 (Sirius Black) loses a bet and has to enter a talent contest. What talent does he/she display, and how does he/she do in the contest? (And who did he/she lose the bet to?)

I'm assuming this is at Hogwarts.

Everyone's execting his talent to have something to do with Transfiguration, but it turns out that Sirius can actually sing rather exquisitely, which makes him stand-out since it's one of the rare non-magical talents displayed by the participants.

He doesn't win, because a Hufflepuff prefect turns out to be a sword-dancer, but he doesn't do too badly. James swears up and down and on his mother's soul that it was worth the win just to see the look on McGonagall's face when Sirius' talent wasn't causing rampant destruction.

Sirius says, “I'll show you rampant destruction, Potter, you bastard, you cheated.”

If 8 (Natalia Romanovna) and 3 (Zuko) were in Kolkata together, what would they do?

Hmmm. Well, Natalia's just here to collect Dr. Banner's belongings; the chance of picking up information about the Fire Nation from a rebel princeling is just a very welcome bonus. So the first part of their day is routine, if not uneventful.

But in the evening, once she's handed the package over to Darcy Lewis and seen it safely on its way to Agent Hill, she takes Zuko to the Blue Poppy for dinner. It's not that she likes the kid or anything, it's just important to keep her sources reasonably-satisfied, if not happy. Plus, she can always stand to get in a bit of practice at fencing.

5 (Aral Vorkosigan) and 7 (Maurice Hall) have a personality switch (also genderswap if applicable). Write from Five's situation?

When Aral wakes up with a very distinctly nude, very distinctly male, body curled up next to him, he has a short bout of horror, followed immediately by a thorough checking of the room in order to determine whether the Politicals have planted recorders. He doesn't immediately want to harm the plant, because clearly the boy's under someone's power, but that doesn't mean he'll flinch from it if he must.

Then, of course, because his life is any number of things, but it is not easy, it turns out that the boy's not a prostitute, that he went to bed with lover, and that, as far as he's concerned, Maurice has lost his mind. The mirror confirms this, but it's definitely within the bounds of galactic surgery, Maurice being much of his build, and not longer by more than a very few inches, and not even too different in features. Different enough, though, and his scar's gone, and he doesn't—after adrenaline's stopped pounding through him—move the way he should; he has a civilian's stance and lack of battle-readiness.

No way to prove anything without fast-penta. The boy—Alec—sticks stubbornly to his story, and eventually throws a shoe at him before storming out.

(A/N: I think if this couldn't be fixed within, say, a few months, that Aral might settle down to life on Earth, with or without Alec, so long as this is his pre-Cordelia life.)