Dream with Our Eyes Open

C. J. Cherryh has been having troubles with the fish pond in her backyard, but now that things seem to be back to normal, she introduces us to her fish (link to her blog, where there's a photo):

The fishes are: Ari, the big cream-colored one; Maddy, the white one with the fins; Byakuya, the black with gold fins; Renji, the orange/white, and the owner of the black spot against the white is another white fish, Ishida, who has black spots. I’m not sure who is crowding in from the bottom, but it could be Kenpachi or Denys.

(For those who may not be familiar with the fandoms involved, the fish are named after characters from either her own novel Cyteen or the manga/anime series Bleach.)

lady_ganesh wanted to know about "Top five characters more dangerous than they look." Because proving this about a character always involves a reveal, there are spoilers (which I have covered) in each answer.

Cho Hakkai from Saiyuki (right). On the surface, a mild-mannered, absent-minded young man. But cross him, and you'll find out that he's totally bad-ass - even before he takes off his power limiters and becomes a youkai covered with prehensile vines and whose strength and reflex speed greatly exceed those of virtually every other youkai we've seen in the series.

Sanada Saemon-no-Suke Yukimura from Samurai Deeper Kyo (in the post icon), a cheerful short guy whom we first see as a harmless drunk with a woman on each arm. A few minutes later, he's puking his guts out. Who would suspect that he's one of the only swordsmen in Japan who can give the notorious Demon-Eyes Kyo a good fight ... and can chop lesser opponents in half vertically with a single stroke?

Yoshino Dōa from Blade of the Immortal (right), a very petite, very young Ainu woman who turns out to be a ruthless, blood-thirsty swordswoman with ultra-fast reflexes who takes out male opponents much larger and stronger than herself with fearsome efficiency.

Sister Yolanda from Black Lagoon, an elderly, sweet-faced one-eyed nun who is the Mother Superior of a church outside of Roanapur, Thailand, who packs a a gold-plated Desert Eagle pistol and is efficiently running an arms-smuggling and intelligence-gathering operation. (Sadly, I have no Sister Yolanda icon ... )

Ayasegawa Yumichika from Bleach (left), a fey, vain, eccentric little goofball who's too pretty for his own good and seemingly too refined to even perspire, yet in actuality is the Fifth Seat of the notoriously combat-ready and violent 11th Division of Soul Reapers, meaning that he can whip the ass of just about any even semi-normal opponent without ... breaking a sweat.

So now that it's officially autumn (or will be, this afternoon, I think), here are the icons I've been working on ... .

Previews:

I've been having much too much fun with my icons. At first I felt very protective and parental and didn't want to let any of them go, but now that I have lots of them, I don't mind so much ... and it's very warm and fuzzy to see them show up in other folks' posts.

Samples:

If there's another one I use regularly that you'd like to have, you can always ask ... (the ones I still feel the most protective about are the Yukimura ones I use regularly), and I love making them by request too.

ETA: And I meant to put all the disclaimers: no hotlinking to my poor Earthlink account, please credit, etc. etc.

Actually, at this point I've read the entire Bleach opus currently available in English. I didn't intend to read through the series so quickly, but the Mr. got into them. Whenever he got stuck on the other side of town because of a lousy rush hour - which is probably half of the time - I'd get these calls: "I'm at the bookstore. Exactly which volume of Bleach are we on?"

So that tells you something right there: Bleach, the manga series that the whole Cho family enjoyed enough to read it in 3 weeks flat.

However, I'm not going to blog them all at once - I started to do that, and the write-up just got too blessed long. So there will be another post for the remaining volumes.

Ichigo Kurosaki is more or less a normal high school student - except that he had orange hair and can see ghosts. (So can his fraternal twin little sisters, although they don't see the spirits so clearly. Their widowed father, a doctor who runs a clinic, is the only one in the family who can't.) Suddenly, one night, Ichigo notices that there's a girl in samurai-style gear in his room. She's Rukia Kuchiki, a "Soul Reaper," and she's hunting a type of evil ghost called a Hollow, which was probably attracted by Ichigo's psychic powers. When she becomes too injured to carry on, Ichigo agrees to take on some of her power to carry out her mission and save his family. Unfortunately, somehow all Rukia's power drains into Ichigo. Now she can't get back to her home - and she can't carry out her remaining missions in our world. If Ichigo's family, friends, and town are to be protected from Hollows, he must learn become a proper Soul Reaper.

In related news, telophase has created a nifty little online toy that lets you create your own zanpakuto - these are the nifty spirit-powered weapons used by the Soul Reapers: