Any advice for people who have lots of Thoughts™️ about fictional characters but who have not, in the past, enjoyed the act of writing? I was always bad at it in school, which didn't help, and I know ~"you should write it even if it's bad"~ however I am still a recovering perfectionist and this is easier said than done (hence the not enjoying it). Add on top of that that writing fiction is very different from writing a 5 paragraph persuasive essay or whatever else they taught in school, so the little I do know doesn't feel applicable. (I'd just draw fanart instead, but my abilities do not lie there either lol). But I desperately want a way to actually engage in fandoms instead of just lurking in the shadows, and you seem to be quite knowledgeable about writing
Okay so first of all I am SO EXCITED for you because you get to start a new creative pursuit and it's one that comes with a huge community of like-minded people. One of my absolute favourite things in fandom is getting to see people posting their first fic. Truly a magical experience. I am always so so proud of them.
Second, have a quote from Jodi Picoult which is a favourite amongst my beloved writing group:
You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.
The trick with writing is that in order to do it, you have to do it. In this way it is similar to the majority of human endeavour.
If you genuinely hate the process then my sincere advice is to not do this. You've only got, like, 100 years at the outside on this little rock. Better not to spend any of them doing things you do not enjoy in your leisure time, if at all possible. Make playlists or reclists, start conversations, take up podficcing, take up fic binding, write meta about your character thoughts, do something congenial to you (and some part of fandom must be congenial to you or you wouldn't like. Be here.)
However. If you do want to write, and you think you could learn to love the process, or at least want to try, here are some inroads you could take a crack at:
Outline your idea rather than trying to write it as a polished narrative and post that. I do this a lot. Sometimes I then go back and actually write the fic, sometimes someone else writes the fic for me, which is delightful. (This looks like "So I'm thinking about a fic in which Aloysius inherits a haunted mansion..." etc.)
Use an established format. The only one of these still remotely in fashion is 5 + 1 fics, I think (back in my day we wrote songfics and listfics and Very Secret Diaries riffs but I think if you do that last one now Cassandra Clare steals your lunch maybe idk). This I also do all the time, as a way to break the seal on a new fandom. The format is such that you're practically just filling in the blanks. You could do something like this in as little as six sentences.
Try epistolary format (letters/texts/emails/post-it notes/notes scribbled in the margins of a notebook/whatever). This cuts all the tricky bits of prose narrative and allows you to focus on the events of a story using a form of writing you are undoubtedly already comfortable with.
Try a retelling. This is what the pros do when they're stuck & it's just fanfic layered with fanfic, really. Crack open a copy of your favourite fairy tale and just rewrite it. Sentence for sentence if you like, with nothing more than names and details changed. Pick a single scene from something you like and rewrite it for The Characters.
There are probably a million more ways to approach this, but the overall point is to get you to start. You simply cannot do a thing without doing the thing. Once you've started, then you can worry about improvement. Or not. You are not obliged to be 'good' at writing in order to do it. Many professional career writers are fucking awful.
A bonus few things I wish I could personally carve into the inside of every new writer's skull:
You are allowed to write more than one story in your life, the first one does not have to say Everything You've Ever Wanted To Say or contain Every Single Idea You've Had. It's probably better if it doesn't, even!
It is orders of magnitude better to finish a very short story that has a complete arc than to get 10% in to an epic and then stop because you don't know how to continue it. If all your writing practice involves writing openings and then stopping, you are teaching yourself to write openings and then stop. Better to write 100 words and have it be a complete story than 10,000 words of introduction.
There's no such thing as 'good' or 'bad' art and you should be suspicious of anyone who tells you there is. The measure of success in art is that it's what you meant it to be.
You cannot possibly please everyone. The person you should focus on pleasing is yourself, because you are the only person obliged to interact with your work. Might as well be fun for you.
Talent isn't real. Anyone who appears to be 'talented' has put a lot of hours of work into doing the thing they're doing.
If you take no other advice from this list, take this piece: read more. Read widely. Read old books, read new books. Read people's dropped grocery lists. Read amateurs, read professionals, read poetry and lyrics and the backs of shampoo bottles. The more words you absorb, the more you have to draw from when you sit down to write.
All that said: please imagine me rolling out the welcome mat and blowing a party whistle while eagerly beckoning you to come in and join the wider writing community.
One of my favorite exercises, when I want to write but the perfectionism demons are paralyzing me, is what I think of as a jukebox exercise. Start listening to music on shuffle. It works best with songs you know well. Use each song as a prompt. As long as the song is going, you can write the idea that it gives you. When the song ends, you're done. You have to move on to the next one. The point is to practice letting an idea move from your brain to the page without any detours.
Your first few attempts will likely not be more than a sentence or two, since it takes a lot of work to shut down the internal critic, but once you get the rhythm of it, it's a fun exercise.
(I'm adding a couple examples from my last jukebox warmup under the cut, just to show how short they tend to be, even with practice.)
"The Wrong Company" - Flogging Molly
"Go to hell," Entreri said as Jarlaxle entered the cell.
"If that's how you've been greeting visitors, no wonder it's quiet."
-
"The Black Fox" - Heather Dale
"A highwayman?" Entreri scowled at the poster. "I thought you might have something more interesting in mind."
Jarlaxle shrugged. "Perhaps it will be a dragon in disguise, to make things a challenge."
Three hours later, Entreri watched the grinning man on the other side of the river bare sharp teeth.
"You just had to say it, didn't you?" he muttered to Jarlaxle.
"Do you want to be right or do you want to run?" Jarlaxle responded, taking a step back.
Picked back up with my marathon catch-up on the whole Legend of Drizzt canon by re-listening to the Sellswords Trilogy on audibook at work, which means I’m once again subjecting a fandom to my ridiculous work doodles.
There is genuinely nothing I love more in this setting than the ongoing and eternal drow drama, I missed these murderous little weirdos so much.
"I could make him better" "I could make him worse" I want him to be in a polycule with both of these people simultaneously so I can study the cumulative effects
I am the opposite of an apologist. I get personally offended if you pretend my faves didn't do horrible things. If you can't accept them at their worst then RIP to you but I'm stronger.
Sometime last year there was someone on tumblr dot come going “I’ve seen this before, folks, FFN is going down”, but I think it’s been nearly a year since that
so FFN could have been abandoned for two years at this point, as long as they paid for hosting and domain name in big enough lumps, and it’ll go down in a dramatic fireball when one of those prepayments runs out
The fun thing is that at least for me, the tweets that both FFN and FictionPress list on their front page have timestamps that are like “10h ago”, but if you look actually through their twitter thread, those are actually from January 2021. I don’t know if the thing is actually actively dying, but it certainly isn’t very alive right now.
(As always: Always make sure you have a local backup of all your fanfics. You never know what might happen, to this or indeed any other fanfic site.)
I just hope that if it’s dying, the people in charge make sure to contact ArchiveOfOurOwn staff before it goes under, so that they can perform a mass fanfic rescue. I’m sure there are already plans drawn up for that eventuality, as ambitious as it would be.
Fanfictiondownloader.net will download any story from fanfiction.net into whatever format you like (PDF, epub, mobi, rtf, and several others). It won’t be an online archive available to fandom as a whole, but it means you can at least keep a personal copy for yourself.
I recommend doing this for any fic you like on ff.net.
Just in case.
As a Fandom Old, I can tell you that it really really sucks when an archive just disappears and you can’t find your favorite fic anywhere else.
So I know someone who’s trying to perform the fanfic rescue flightfoot is talking about.
IT IS NOT POSSIBLE due to the way ff.net is coded. EVERYTHING HAS TO BE SAVED BY HAND. Which means actively retyping it. Word by word.
IF YOU WANT TO ASSIST WITH THE PRESERVATION OF FANFICTION HISTORY, NOW IS THE TIME TO DO IT.
Pick a fandom. Any fandom. I’d honestly recommend starting with the ones with very small amounts of fic because those are most at risk for complete fandom loss. Start saving. Do it by screenshots, if you have to. Do it comprehensively—start on the last page and save every. Single. One. Make sure you include the header and any author’s notes. EDIT NOTHING, ONLY DOCUMENT. Yes, if that means someone misspelled something or you spot a misnamed character, you need to keep that error. If you can form a “network” with friends to save all of a fandom’s works, DO IT.
Do not skip any fics. We are not the arbiters of what “should” be saved. If you can get access to the forums in any way, save whatever you can access. I know some of that has been saved by the Wayback Machine, but not all. I can already tell you research into My Immortal has been rendered uncompleteable by the loss of the forums. That’s going to be true for ALL fics. Save whatever you can reach.
I strongly recommend using the following format for whatever you save, so it can be indexed later: fandom_fictitle_author_datefirstposted.fileextension. So for example (I’m making this fic up for demonstration purposes, don’t bother looking for it), naruto_blessing_ichigo98_07192009 would be Blessing, by ichigo98, posted in the Naruto fandom on 19 July 2009. This provides all the information needed to see if a fic has been cross posted to the AO3, and to run a search engine to see if it’s archived elsewhere.
We may not be able to save it all, but we need to save as much as possible. I can start a Google spreadsheet or something if people want to have a database to keep from getting the same three fandoms over and over.
As of today, September 17, 2022, fanfictiondownloader.net does not work to archive things from fanfiction.net. However, retyping everything by hand isn’t the only option - copy and paste is still working for me in Firefox operating on Windows 10.
As previous people in the chain have stated, the fact that the writing has been on the wall for FF.net for more than a year does NOT mean we were wrong - it means we are running out of time. The administration really does appear to have abandoned the site. So whenever the bill comes due for the hosting (and you can indeed buy hosting and domain names etc in large chunks - like decade-long chunks, in some cases) or whatever, and that doesn’t get paid? The site is going down.
There is no FF.net lead mission to archive or save it. There is no “I hope FF.net’s staff contacts AO3 so the fic can be archived.” If we want it saved, it is up to US to do it, and the time to do it is NOW.
Even if you literally go in there and pick a fic at random, EVERYTHING HELPS. Small fandoms, large fandoms, fandoms you’re sure somebody else has already covered - doesn’t matter. Do it anyway.
Please help. This isn’t a huge and co-ordinated effort. There’s no phone tree. If you are reading this, I am begging you personally to help. Even if you only archive ten things - THAT HELPS!
Start in the fandoms you love or start in a fandom you’ve never heard of! Just please!! Help us save this stuff before it’s lost forever!
hey Les Mis fandom olds, remember the days when LJ and forums were where we hung out but FFN was our archive of reference? idk if i have the personal bandwidth to spearhead a full-blown preservation effort right now, but Now’s The Time and there’s lots of history lying around there. one of the other reblogs mentions Fichub Dot Net, btw, as a FFN downloader that still works as of September 2022.
If you go to ffn and ‘can’t copy-paste things’, replace the ‘www’ in the url with ‘m’, which will take you to the mobile site on desktop, and you should be good to go, although check various browsers if you run into trouble, etc.
You do NOT need to retype anything by hand. If the above tip stops working there are also ways to download the text of webpages in ways where you might need to deal with wonky formatting shit, but it is basically never true that ‘you need to retype it by hand’ of anything ON THE INTERNET. There is no text on the internet that is unscrapable, you just need to dig around a bit to find out how, sometimes.
there's so much pathologizing over why enemies to lovers is a popular trope (something something the normalization of abuse something something) when the simplest and less moronic answer is that narratives thrive on irony and reversals, and there's no greater irony than characters going from hating each other's guts to loving each other unconditionally. raw thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
It’s about rage, it’s about obsession, it’s about making that two-person war your entire raison d’être. It’s about loving and mistaking it for hatred and loving and loving and loving to the point of destruction. His or yours, it doesn’t matter. And you think seeing him dead at your feet will make you feel better, but all you feel is a whole lot of nothing.
i just saw the tag “canon complicit” instead of “canon compliant” and im laughing its like “canon is a criminal act that i unfortunately support with this fic”
Canon Compliant: “This fic goes along with canon.” (Because I like it? Because I’m too tired to disagree by writing my own fic? Who knows? The author may or may not tell us.)
Canon Compatible: “Listen, I know it ISN’T canon, but think of it as Microsoft Office for Mac, it’s COMPATIBLE with canon, and that counts.”
Canon Complicit: “I have not died a hero, so I have become an accessory to the Villainy of Canon.”
Canon Compatible is a great term for when your fic is Probably Not What Tolkien Would Have Wanted but it doesn’t really contradict anything in canon either
There’s canon compliant as in “you’d need to double check to make sure this isn’t just a retelling of something that happens in canon“.
There’s canon compliant as in “technically this doesn’t actually contradict anything that’s explicitly established in canon“.
And there’s canon compliant as in “prove me wrong, fucker“.
Anybody can just blatantly ignore canon, but sometimes you want to challenge yourself – and sometimes challenging yourself means writing a hypothetically canon-compliant fic that reveals the protagonist’s heretofore-unmentioned housecat was secretly (albeit inadvertently) responsible for all of their notable victories.
Okay, but this finally gave me a name for my favorite genre of fic. Nearly all of my favorite fanfiction is of the “prove me wrong, fucker” type. Some fandoms do it better than others, but almost all of my favorite fics in any of them could be described that way.
y'know sometimes fanfiction is just an increasingly convoluted series of setups to make characters sit around and talk about their feelings, and that's ok
I mean, we've all read the canon. It's not like these charactets are going to sit around and talk about their feelings without an increasingly convoluted series of setups.
fic: the synonyms for ‘barrier’ include hindrance, obstacle, and trammel
Summary: Ability to speak does not necessarily confer the ability to communicate. Entreri and Catti-brie are still learning this the hard way. Opposite of Arrogance AU. (Basic premise of the AU is that Catti-brie started working for Bregan D’aerthe during Starless Night in order to convince Jarlaxle to help rescue Drizzt.)
Wordcount: 2880
Wordcount: 1405
Summary: Space Opera AU. Vierna wonders sometimes if the flaws of the old jumpships have fallen wholly out of human memory; Jarlaxle would know, perhaps, but she daren’t turn his mind to the question if it isn’t already there. Takes place between But Only So An Hour and Underbelly.
[Warnings for canon-typical drow sexism.]
fic: the synonyms for ‘barrier’ include hindrance, obstacle, and trammel
Summary: Ability to speak does not necessarily confer the ability to communicate. Entreri and Catti-brie are still learning this the hard way. Opposite of Arrogance AU. (Basic premise of the AU is that Catti-brie started working for Bregan D’aerthe during Starless Night in order to convince Jarlaxle to help rescue Drizzt.)
Wordcount: 2880
They were on stake-out again. Catti-brie had noticed that none of the drow soldiers were sent out in pairs, and she wondered what it meant that Jarlaxle kept making Entreri work with her. She didn't need a translator to recognize the "it takes two humans to do the job of one dark elf" jokes as they left, but she didn't think that was Jarlaxle's reasoning. At least, that wasn't all of it.
Whatever Jarlaxle's rationale, it had resulted in the two of them sitting on the roof of a crumbling building, watching the street below for—someone. Catti-brie wasn't actually sure who they were looking for, but she had been assured that Entreri would recognize them. Which meant that, while Entreri studied the sparse crowds and watched for their target, Catti-brie had an idle mind and no one else to talk to.
"What're ye muttering?" she asked him. He'd been frowning and saying something under his breath for the past half hour. It almost had the rhythm of a poem, and she wondered if it were possible that the man who had haunted some of her nightmares would really be reciting poetry in his spare time.
Annoyed grumbling, followed by "Vocabulary." Not poetry, then. Far more practical, and Catti-brie was annoyed at herself for not guessing that first.
"That'll be in drow, then?" They were speaking in Surface Common. Catti-brie had half expected Entreri to insist on speaking drow in order to avoid talking to her, but he seemed to enjoy hearing a surface language again too much to argue.
Entreri rolled his eyes instead of answering.
"Drill me," she said.
"What?"
"I need to practice and so do ye." She nodded at the street. "It's not like we're going anywhere for a while."
He rolled his eyes again.
"Brane'sa," he said. Catti-brie grinned.
"Insect, pest, or annoyance." She'd heard that one a few times already.
"It also means 'prey,'" Entreri pointed out. He looked much less amused, though Catti-brie wasn't sure if that was just his face or if he'd gotten sick of hearing it muttered at him in the hallway.
"My turn," she said. "Delmah."
"Headquarters or fortress." He paused to watch someone exit a building across the row from them. "Uln'hyrr."
"Liar," she said. Entreri nodded.
"The synonym for that one is Jarlaxle," he said. Catti-brie started to etch the new word into her memory before she realized that Artemis Entreri had just made a joke. She searched for some hint of humor, but he kept his face totally blank.
"Uln'hyrr," she said. He raised an eyebrow.
"We just did that one. Choose another."
"Vynnessia," she said, grinning as he frowned. She'd remembered this one because it was pretty, but suspected Entreri might not have bothered to memorize it. He scowled.
"You made that one up."
"It means 'butterfly.'"
"You must be joking."
"Nope."
"Why do drow even have a word for butterfly?" He gestured at the ceiling, at the walls, at everything around them. "We are miles below the surface. There are no butterflies down here."
Catti-brie was silent for a moment, enjoying the view as Entreri's face shifted between astonishment and disbelief.
"Mayhap they're invisible butterflies," she said after a moment. His mouth opened and shut a few times before he responded.
"It's not a matter of visibility—butterflies could not survive in the Underdark. They're too delicate, and there is nothing for them to eat."
Catti-brie frowned and gestured at a pack of rothe down the street. "There's plenty o' food."
Entreri blinked. "I thought butterflies ate flowers."
"And meat. I saw a flock of them nibbling on a deer carcass once. Looked like a patch o' daisies until I got close enough to see their wings move."
He stared at her, clearly hoping for some indication of untruth. She could see the idea but they're too pretty to be dangerous flutter across his mind, unspoken. She shrugged.
"Ye've met Jarlaxle, and he's awful pretty. Are ye gonna tell me he's not dangerous?" She leaned forward. "But more importantly...if I'm lyin' about the butterflies, then why do dark elves have a word for 'em?"
He looked away, staring at the deserted street below them.
"We should move on to verbs," he said. "Run."
Catti-brie blinked, then considered whether she was supposed to run. "Oh! Er, z'haanin."
"That's 'running.'" He stretched one leg, then the other, without losing sight of the road. Catti-brie realized her own legs were stiff from sitting and started to stand as well. "Usstan z'haan, dos z'haan, il z'haane, udos z'haan, nind z'haan—I run, you run, she runs, we run, they run. Dos z'haanus. You ran."
Catti-brie sighed. This was less fun than nouns, but she couldn't deny it was necessary. She winced, remembering the times she'd heard a goblin mangle verbs in common or dwarvish and how easy it had been to discount them as real people. At home, she'd wanted the others to respect her as an adult, as someone who could be trusted to make her own decisions. She had thought she wanted that. But the basic respect that came from acknowledgement that she was a person...she hadn't noticed until it was missing, and she hungered to have it back.
"I hate this," she said.
"Usstan phlith nindol." He eyed her for a moment, then turned his gaze back to the abandoned street. "And in third person singular?"
"Er, il phlithe. She hates."
"If you hate this so much, why not leave?" Apparently satisfied with the results of his stretching, he sat back down cross-legged on the edge of the roof. "You could probably convince Jarlaxle to return you."
"Why would he do that?"
"Gold. Surely your father could pay a ransom that would interest him."
Her own bed. Seeing friendly faces again. Sunlight, rain, a soft breeze. She wasn't sure what season it was on the surface. Autumn, perhaps? There would be fresh apples falling from the trees. Everyone would be taking stock of their supplies, getting ready for winter. Usually she'd be helping buy preserves, storing turnips, deciding which spices to purchase and how many before the roads became too icy for merchants.
If she mentioned it to Jarlaxle today, maybe she could be home before the first snow fell.
Jarlaxle's words echoed in her mind. Drizzt may even outlive you, if they have their way. House Baenre is not known for killing its enemies quickly.
"No. If I leave, then Jarlaxle don't need to hold up his end of the bargain."
"Do'Urden must be quite gratified, to have so persistent a rescuer."
Catti-brie shook her head. "He'd hate it if he knew I was here. He told Regis to hide it from us."
He looked at her, his regard frighteningly intense. "Then why pursue him?"
Empty hallways. Her father, red-eyed and silent. The guilt that would eat her away if she didn't go, if no one went. Alustriel watching her with unexpected hope and respect.
She closed her eyes.
"I already lost one friend." Whatever arguments they had had, whatever Wulfgar had been to her before he died, she could still say 'friend.' "You killed him attacking Mithril Hall."
"One of the dwarves?" He frowned, clearly unable to put a face to her description.
"Not one of the—" Her throat ached with the effort of stopping tears, but she held them back anyway. She would not cry in front of Artemis Entreri. "Wulfgar. He died in the attack."
"But I was not the one who killed him."
"Ye helped." Her voice trembled. "If ye hadn't, perhaps the battle would have gone different."
"Perhaps. Perhaps not." He shrugged. "If I had not been involved, it's possible you would have died and Wulfgar would have gone chasing Do'Urden to the Underdark."
"Or no one would have died!" She was vaguely aware that she was standing over him, her voice raised. He didn't seem the slightest bit intimidated, and that only made her feel worse. "We would have beaten them off and kept living our lives."
"Does Jarlaxle strike you as incompetent? If I had not been there, the drow would simply have used a different tactic to pry Drizzt out. Teleportation spells and a larger army, perhaps. Alchemical explosives in the mineshafts. Smoke, like hunters use for foxes."
"So ye joined them to reduce the body count?"
"Hardly." His lip curled in scorn.
"Then what does it matter, if I blame ye for his death?"
"It doesn't. But you hardly have cause to be upset. You did not wish to marry him anyway."
She stared at him, flummoxed.
"How do ye know—"
He arranged his features into a politely neutral expression that she'd never seen him wear. But she'd seen it on Regis's face a few times, when she needed to confide to someone. Like she had before drow attacked, when Regis had been...oh.
"You spying weasel," she spat. "That was—it's none of your—" She kicked a piece of decorative metalwork sticking out of the roof. Pain shot up her foot and spread like lightning through her leg. She cursed, still angry, but it was a pure, hot anger, something she could burn out. Grief was a dark tunnel that she couldn't afford to follow right now, not if she wanted to rescue Drizzt.
"How was I supposed to stop you?" Entreri's voice was harsh. "Say 'I cannot listen to your girlish woes right now, as I have espionage to commit and a prisoner to check on'? Or would you prefer that I simply pretend not to know?"
"Let's go with that."
"Very well." Another strange expression, this time an obvious caricature of sympathy. "I am so sorry about the death of your brutish fiance, whom you were so very excited to wed."
"Someone should have drowned you as a weanling."
He shrugged. "What makes you think no one tried?"
Exhausted by her anger, she sat down at the edge of the roof, close enough to speak but far enough away that he wouldn't think he was forgiven. I'm not sitting with ye, we just happen to be sitting in the same tunnel.
"Why do ye care if I go home, anyway?"
"Jarlaxle would need to give you a map, or send a scout to show you the way out. I could use that."
"So you're just bein' selfish."
"Yes. You could try it sometime."
"I think you're selfish enough for the both of us, aren't ye?"
He bared his teeth in what might have been a pleased grin. For a while they sat in silence, watching the street below them. Catti-brie's stomach growled, and she unpacked the fruit and cheese she had brought with her. She took a bite of the fruit, first. It was unfamiliar to her, but apparently commonplace in the Underdark. The skin was soft pink that faded into green. It tasted like a plum that wasn't ripe yet, but sweeter. She'd found she liked them.
Entreri glanced at her, then at the fruit. "Have you had a chance to look at the drow orchards yet?"
The question was so innocuous that Catti-brie was instantly suspicious.
"The drow have farms?" This far down, with no sunlight or rainfall to speak of?
Entreri nodded. "They're much like the great farms in the south, with aqueducts. They build in terraces to maximize space."
That...actually sounded rather nice. She'd seen aqueducts used in mining, to help carry away dust and debris. It could make sense for farming, too. She felt a pang of homesickness, thinking of the mines. Perhaps it was the case for Entreri, too.
"Do ye miss it?" He blinked, and she clarified. "Calimshan, I mean?"
"Parts of it." This time he didn't manage to hide the note of wistfulness from her. Was that him loosening up or her getting better at reading him?
"Like the food?" Her visit to Calimport had been too brief, too fearful, to really understand the city.
"Like the freedom to kill anyone who talked too much." Catti-brie took another bite of the fruit, and Entreri smirked. "But yes, some of the pashas keep fine gardens. Keeping plants alive in the desert requires time, water, money—it's a chance for them to show off."
Catti-brie didn't remembering seeing any such gardens, but she supposed that they were probably walled off. Knowing that Calimport hadn't been as barren as it looked but that all that green was simply hidden away didn't make her like the place any better.
"Is that why the drow grow fruit? To prove they can?"
Entreri thought about that, then chuckled. "Perhaps. Although, water is not the problem down here."
"Sunlight." She frowned, thinking. "Light spells?" But surely that would take too much magic to maintain, and the dark elves barely tolerated torches along crowded streets. They couldn't possibly be casting enough light spells up to keep any sizable farms alive.
"Some of the fields have light, yes, but plants don't need to get their energy from sunlight. Some can get warmth from the ground." He grinned wolfishly.
"And most of the plants down here get their energy the same way we do—they eat."
Catti-brie finished chewing her bite of not-plum and swallowed. "Eat what?" she asked.
"Meat." He jerked his head at a goblin corpse, already being dragged away. "Whatever kind is available."
Catti-brie looked at her mostly-uneaten fruit with disgust. Entreri huffed in annoyance, then took it from her.
"If you won't eat it, I will."
Catti-brie swallowed her objections. It wasn't like eating a person, not really. She couldn't shake the certainty that it had tasted like blood, nonetheless. Entreri rolled his eyes.
"A few days of hunger, you'll get over it," he said, carving the not-plum into small pieces. He popped a piece of fruit into his mouth. "Or you'll starve. I care not which."
Catti-brie scowled at him, then snatched a piece of the not-plum and ate it, never breaking eye contact. He laughed.
She raised an eyebrow, considering how, when she'd first known him, he'd butted heads with the guard from Luskan for no apparent reason other than that it seemed to amuse him to insult the man.
"Do you have to work to piss off all yer potential allies this much, or do it come natural?"
"It took practice."
"Oh, so ye want otherwise neutral parties to be looking to take yer head off," Catti-brie said sarcastically. Entreri nodded.
"It weeds out the opportunistic leeches. Anyone who sticks around after that is probably just planning to kill me."
"Or mayhap they weren't planning to kill ye until ye opened yer damned mouth."
Entreri shrugged, as if people wanting to murder him was a natural consequence of existing. Then he perked up, like a cat that heard the skitter of rodent feet nearby. He jerked his chin as an armored figure down the street.
"Our target." Then he stood and started climbing down the building, not bothering with a rope. Catti-brie peered over the edge after him, then down at the rapidly-approaching drow.
"What am I supposed to do?"
He sneered but didn't answer. As their target got closer, Catti-brie recalled Jarlaxle's instructions: I need him alive, but not undamaged. She growled under her breath, drew her bow, and fired into the target's leg, pinning him to the nearest building.
Entreri, halfway across the street, whirled to scowl up at her. She made eye contact for a long second, then deliberately lowered the bow. She looped a length of rope around the decorative metalwork and started to climb down the side of the building. By the time she got down, their target was bound and gagged. He whimpered through the gag as Entreri roughly tourniquetted the wound on his leg. When Catti-brie let go of the rope, Entreri knotted the bandage and stood up.
"What were you thinking?"
"I was thinkin' ye hadn't exactly shared a plan, and this seemed like a halfway decent one. If ye were expecting me to do something else, ye should've said."
He tilted his head, and she expected an attack. A shove, a slap, something. When it didn't come, she ground her teeth and maintained eye contact until a particularly loud groan from their target drew her attention. Entreri was still frowning at her.
"If you get in my way again, I'll leave you at the bottom of the Clawrift, Jarlaxle's orders be damned."
With that, he dragged the captive to his feet and shoved him toward Bregan D'aerthe's base.
"Walk," he ordered in drow. A glance at Catti-brie suggested that the imperative was targeted at her, too. She pulled her rope down and followed.
"I don't suppose ye can tell me how drow say 'thank you,'" she said, draping the coil of rope over her shoulder. "Given that ye don't seem to know it yerself."
"If you shut up, I'll express gratitude by letting you live." He ran his thumb along the pommel of his dagger. "If a drow were going to deign to thank iblith for anything, I suspect it would be by killing us fast instead of slow."
She spent the rest of their walk in silence, wondering if he was right. When they returned, Jarlaxle smiled in delight, praised their work, and offered not a single word in thanks. By Entreri's grim smirk as they left Jarlaxle's office, he'd noticed too.
1. You're back! : ) 2. I just inhaled all the parts of this AU and it's, ugh, so good. Really like the worldbuilding (loads of great visceral detail), and the interplay between the characters is fascinating. This is such an interesting episode of Jarlaxle interacting with an alternate version of Vierna who's still fanatical but much more cunning and icily collected than she was in canon.
I'm back-ish. For a number of reasons (which mostly boil down, weirdly enough, to my mental/emotional health being pretty good) I've been having difficulty focusing on FR stuff. This kills me, because there's a handful of fantastic-looking fics out there (including yours!) that I really badly want to read but can't muster the focus for because I'm too distracted. My interests tend to be cyclical, so hopefully the cycle will bring me back to FR sooner rather than later. In the meantime, I can clean up some of my mostly-done stuff and see if it accelerates the process.
This particular fic has been about two sentences away from completion for months. ladyzwei reblogged a list of my WIPs, which reminded me about it. (WIP #3 on that list is also 99% done. I'm planning to give it another pass of edits tonight after gaming, then post that one too.) If anyone out there is wondering how to get me to write, I am highly, HIGHLY susceptible to flattery and peer pressure.
I’m so glad you like it! The space opera setting has been a lot of fun to play with. I can't remember why the drow are creepy bioengineers, so it's probably the fault of either cohabbitation or Lois McMaster Bujold. (Menzoberranzan is has a non-zero amount of overlap with Jackson’s Hole.)
Vierna fascinates me because she's one of those characters who could have been glorious if she hadn't gotten stuck in RAS' mold of female antagonists being "crazy." She's the last of her family (other than Dinin), dealing with a fall from power and a smirch on the family name, trying to regain everything she once had. She was (if we can trust Drizzt's childhood memories) the least vicious of her house, which means we can trust her to make the smart choice instead of the stupidly evil one, and she's willing to look past prejudices and assumptions to make the best use of the tools she's given, as evidenced by the fact that she's the one who sent Jarlaxle to recruit Entreri. She has a lot of potential to be a ruthlessly smart, pragmatic player in power politics, and I would love to see what would have happened if she had returned victorious from the capture mission in Legacy, because she'd be simultaneously working with/threatening Matron Baenre. (It also doesn't hurt that I crack-ship her with Sharlotta Vespers because Reasons.)
