Do you have a roundup anywhere of all of the AUs y'all have kicked around for the Run Aground gang? Any chance that the extras in the final version would include any AU snippets?
Well the FIRST question is fairly easy to answer because I recently went through and compiled all of our extremely scattered side-fic documents into collection docs so we would stop losing things lmao. I categorized them thus:
CANON DIVERGENT - Mostly aligned with the canon plotline or world, but riffed on, shifted, or alternate in some way:
Patron+Patrician - Rafael makes it big on the west coast as an actor instead of *waves hands at canon* and takes Rich on as a sexy hoverboarding patron. Then gets brought over to visit NYC and meet Rich's east coast patron. Sol has. A night.
1950s Reskin - a brief little style experiment from Ray about how the writing style/dialogue and the tech of the Fleet might differ if it was written several decades ago.
Sympatico Basil (Flavor I)- Instead of Rich having been sent off to deathboat, Basil went; he comes back to the Reliant deeply burned out in the brain+implants+emotions from storm piloting with a baseline brain.
Basil/Rich But Watch Out - Rich doesn't have Trimmer in his corner on the Sympatico and comes back to the Reliant much pushier and meaner, with the expectation that people wanting sex with him is a play for his protection. Basil does a sort of a horse girl+beast tamer thing in between Nasty Fuckin.
Babydoll!Rich - Little snips of Hastings+Babydoll!Rich, centered around the scene in After The Storm where he meets (in this version, SS-modded) Liam. And they fuck about it. That part is going to be a theme in many of these lmao.
PRT!Rich - Thena comes and finds Rich on the Sympatico and bails him out, and gets him an interview and subsequent job on the PRT ship that Liam's mom and his friend Jordan work on. Fucking ensues but honestly probably not as much as you'd think.
Sympatico Basil (Flavor II) - Rich's shitty Sympatico supervisor kicks it, and Rich becomes supervisor and hires Basil in. Culture clash ensues.
Sympatico Basil (Flavor III) - Instead of the Sympatico getting gutted and flipped, the admiral sends a fixer captain with a mandate to get the place in order, who very quickly pegs Rich as a really helpful guy to have on his side and makes him department head. Basil gets hired in but this time also has to deal with the fact Rich is completely starstruck about an authority figure being nice to him and has definitely contrived to blow the new captain.
Mars Boys - Kind of a borderline case with the full AUs below; Trimmer ends up actually in a Mars program like his genetics were intended for, and gets bundled into a space station pod with a huge extremely nervous Hastings kid.
NYC!Rich - Rich does actually get run aground after the last fight on the Sympatico, and ends up in New York, where he saves a pretty little guy from being run over by a hover-taxi and Sol offers him a couch to stay on in return while he gets his feet under him. And they fuck about it. Also there's daemons in there.
Young Carraway - Back-shifts several decades to catch Arthur at the point in his life when he just stole his mansion and needed a quartermaster, and inserts a Hastings Rich in there. Who has high standards and no patience for Sandgren and redirects things in a way that would make a lot of peoples' lives a lot nicer if it had happened lol. EDIT there are daemons in this one, it appears.
Catch-And-Release - Hard to sum up! Run Aground adjacent situation but messing around with how the guys would interact and what would keep them coming back if they were disparate visiting booty calls instead of prisoners? Came with the terrible realization that in this situation Connor would not actually go for Carraway as much and would instead default to just the worst hookups with Sandgren the world had ever seen.
Conditional Freedom - almost put this in the "snippets that didn't end up in the novel" doc, but for a second there was going to be a point in Run Aground where Rich argued Liam into being allowed to come out and be around the other prisoners. Didn't end up happening because of Liam's temperament, but a few hundred words remain.
Harem Redistibution Logistics - Angela Bane's squad of Hastings soldiers break open some old lykoi guy's compound; Rich is put in charge of getting some rich boy back to his weird little boat commune, along with some other hotties that tag along for the ride.
CANON ADJACENT - These started out as non-AUs that could have happened or did happen off-page, and I don't know if they're of much interest? I will briefly pause to call out:
Various AtS scenes but there's daemons in
Various RA scenes but there's daemons in
Various (Upcoming/Redacted) scenes but there's daemons in
Quite a few scenes cut from RA, largely fun but unhelpful fucking.
Two docs-ful of fragments that would eventually hammer into the shape of Run Aground--character introduction scenes (now very OOC and wrong) character dynamic scenes (several of them no longer correct) and a prologue and part of a chapter from Rich's POV of meeting Rafael, who then got an idle fragment of same written from HIS POV, and who quickly grew into an interesting enough guy we pivoted lol.
FANTASY ETC - Full AUs, usually sorted as such because of fantastical elements that aren't part of the main canon.
Demon Lord Merrill - Basil gets isekai'd into a tech on the Michigan Fleet, the backstory/origin of the cool scary landside warlord character in his favorite sexy fantasy novels--and finds out he's uh. Some guy with trauma named Rich.
Soulmarks (Fleet) - "When you touch (one of) your soulmate(s) a representative image appears in that place and them touching it feels nice" edition--brief little snip of Trimmer finally unbending enough to let Rich touch the little sparrow-holding-a-human-heart on his arm and everybody involved is relieved that theirs isn't the kind of "feeling nice" that's kind of horny.
Soulmarks (Landside) - Similar to the above but it's flowers that fill in with color when touched and then wither or bloom depending on the love and attention given to the relationship. Rafael meets a big Hastings soldier in the woods and comes away with a colored-in soulmark and a lot of questions, and Rich Bane following him around like 🥺💞
AB/B/A/O Shenanigans - Listen I know there are only like three people in the world who have any knowledge or interest RE: my blood-type-based homebrew A/B/O hack. And yet!!! Various configurations of characters fucking and having extra gender be upon ye except not because it's all in a doc lol
Various fantasy creature bits - Largely in the form of sex, lol. Establishing shapeshifter!Rich, classic Vampire+Werewolf friends Basil and Mitch, vampire/fae Rafael, half-elf Sol, still a witch!Andy, and Carraway primarily as a werewolf/vampire/(other stuff?) mix.
Raksura - I don't know enough about the Books of the Raksura to speak much on this one, but if you do, it appears Ray has made the Merrills 1/8th Kethel arbora, Connor and Basil mentors, Rafael a consort, Sol a queen, and Carraway a ruler-consort. 👍
Red Knight - Superhero Rich, mad scientist Liam, and the pretty actor Rich's human alter-ego is dating, all get picked up by some Hastings aliens and go on an adventure.
Rich/Liam Swap - Exactly what it says on the tin, lol. Liam and Rich inexplicably switch bodies, Liam gets to deal with being scary and much too big and stronger than he knows how to control, and Rich gets to deal with emotional dysregulation and being a small pretty guy who has to work to get taken seriously. And a dick that simply will not quit.
Deluxe/Fleet Swap - Rich has been Key's OC since long before all this, and was utilized in crossovers with the show Motorcity before he was in the Fleet. Swapping Fleet Tech!Rich with Dystopian Detroit!Rich provides quite a lot of culture clash.
Future/Past Swap - "Sympatico Rich shows up in (post-RA situation) and is SO small and horny and skinny and scared" Edition with corresponding "Huge Future Merrill shows up and upends Trimmer's whole life on the Sympatico" and "Six months into Rafael's imprisonment a huge Hastings shows up, breaks open the garrison, and presents Sam and Rafael with some compelling plans and invitations--and also Rafael's siblings".
Dream Boys - Rafael, in his troupe caravan, starts seeing Rich like a ghost visible only to him--it turns out they're jumping to each other when they sleep. Their blooming romance is of concern and confusion to Rafael's friends and loved ones, and Rich's Trimmer.
WHOO. So. That's not even all of the side-writing, just the stuff that's describable and of interest lol. RE: posting them somewhere, this has been an ongoing discussion! We would like to share, but almost all of (^^^) those are loose collections of scenes with no plot or solid beginning/end. (And also as you may have noticed Ray likes to write daemons from His Dark Materials into things, which is obviously not something we can sell as a novella).
The most doable concept to me is a google doc of the most shareable bits and pieces, and to just share a link! But figuring out which stories would be in there, and doing the amount of work it would take to keep them from being professionally embarrassing to post.... tricky!
SO: it's unfortunately not currently in the cards to put any of them in the extras for the novel. Although we do have about uhhhh...fuck I hadn't counted........we have about 30K of extra bits and bobs that are slated to go on there, lol. The current list including flashes of how the various guys got caught by Carraway, a novelette about a turning point in Sol's young life, and a few key Run Aground scenes re-narrated through Rich and Sol, because Rafael is a very odd character who experiences the world very differently from them, and it's fun to explore what they saw/noticed. :)
