Death

Since its very inception, the Deathverse™ has always been heavily influenced by three things: puns, mythology, and poetry. For example, a big part of Life's characterization comes from plays on popular sayings: she's mean, bottle-blond, and vertically challenged (Life's a bitch, Life's not fair, Life is short); likewise, it's mentioned at one point that Death's powers can apparently be used to end phone calls with a touch (the line went dead), which is why he needs a special phone that's immune to it. The mythology is where I draw a lot of the cast and some of the canon events (Death's pale motorcycle, for example, or poor Kyle mistaking Bastian and Elle for Hades and Persephone and trying to play his sitar for them to redeem his lady love). And poetry is huge--the concept of Death in the very beginning came from Emily Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop For Death, and the rest followed shortly thereafter.

When I was writing in the Deathverse™, some two years ago, I was taking a literature class that dealt heavily with poetry, which probably had a lot to do with the influence of it in the canon. And none was influenced more heavily than this piece here; to this day, I think I've lost count of the number of poetry references that crept in somehow. Bonus points to anybody who manages to count them all. o/

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Title: Poetry in Motion
Universe: The Deathverse™
Warnings: Death and language. That's about it.
Summary: The true story of why Death and Life hate fundies.
Notes: This story turned out to be an interesting one in the Deathcanon, if only because it chronicles one of those Major Canon Events that keeps getting referenced and referred back to over and over again--a Noodle Incident that actually made it into text, if you will. It's also notable for the fact that it's one of the first times that we hear about some of the inherent limits on what Death and Life can do. And, as usual, even in a story about Life, Death still manages to steal the show. ♥

( Elle Rosenberg made a face, leaned her head against the cold steel wall of her prison, and thought—for perhaps the seven-hundredth time in the past seventy-two hours—about just how many members of her staff she was going to fire when she eventually got out of this predicament... )