#countessofbiscuit

[kanskje-kaffe]

Art collab that I was lucky enough to share with the amazing @countessofbiscuit !! Fox and Riyo reunite after the battle of Coruscant. Submitted for the Reunion theme of @foxiyoweek !

The concept and lines are Biscuit’s, and I supplied the color.

I loved doing this collab together, Biscuit! I’m looking forward to the next one! 😊

[clonecumber]

For the Character Ask: Besany ♡

<3

First impression : Child me was a major fan of the Ordo/Besany ship but I remember being very annoyed at Besany's main flaw being that she was "too beautiful" and I think it soured me on her actual character a bit, even though I retained some fondness for her take-charge personality. Honestly, I think I liked her primarily as an extension of Ordo's character arc?

Impression now : 501st doesn't exist and I love her, your honor. I love her. I've developed such a better appreciation for her character now; I'm so glad I re-read the series. She's amazingly competent and I love how analytical and self-aware her narrative is (or was, before KT gutted her), but I also appreciate how in over her head she actually is, looking at it from adult eyes, and the way she works to handle herself anyway. Even when she's sick with stress, you really only notice it when you're in her head, and she has an edge to her (her reaction to being shot in a dark alley and facing down an irritated Null ARC in his element is to immediately bare teeth right back; you gotta appreciate it).

Favorite moment : That part where Kal calls her Bes'ika for the first time while we're in Besany's head and Besany's internal narrative goes quiet and sharp immediately. Just that abrupt step back from her emotions and the cool, vaguely amused way she regards him for trying to manipulate her was so fucking amazing. I loved it so much. She calls him to the floor at one point when he's trying this and tells him she knows exactly what he's doing with the heavy implication that he should never try it again. It was such a boss moment that even Kal backed down a bit. That doesn't hold weight in like, any other aspect of their interactions, of course, since everything Besany actually does in the series revolves around Kal (instead of, say, Ordo or Corr or herself), but that was just a hint of what could have been that made Besany such a brilliant character.

Idea for a story: I CHANGED MY MIND. A’den training Besany. Ordo would, but he’s actually not great at training people who don’t have the same baseline as him, and he is summarily banned. The other Nulls stick their noses in for a variety of their own reasons, because of course they do. Goal is Besany bonding with her new family, basically.

Unpopular opinion: (I don’t think this series really has popular opinions, but we’ll work with what we have:) I don't actually think Besany's job was especially dangerous, not the way, say, Jilka's could be. It was one of those things that could theoretically be dangerous, but in practice hardly anything really bad had ever actually happened, and Besany's training was kind of lax and perfunctory in response (the way government-funded training likes to get at the first excuse). Her handling herself in the books was straight-up her, flying by the seat of her pants with her best guesswork and half-gleaned, very out-of-date advice from her shitty, shitty training modules. One of those things was more useful than the other.

(Ordo, finding out about this, horrified, now hiding in the ‘fresher and hissing into his comm: A’den. Can you hear- Yes, I can tell you’re being shot at, this is important, listen. A’den, you train civilians, right...?)

Favorite relationship: To be very boring, Ordo. But like...primarily the version of their relationship that lives in my head? I want them to be friends.

Favorite headcanon: Besany's interactions with Kal in general are nothing more than her reading the room and performing accordingly. From the time she was an injured half-prisoner in his HQ and making grand speeches about the plight of clones all the way through acting the doting daughter in Kyrimorut is Agent Wennen at work.

[countessofbiscuit]

sideblog alert 📢 @biscuit-art

Decided to make a separate blog just for art and fic posting. If you want the pure Biscuit experience, undiluted by text walls and random shit, follow me over there :3 cross-posting will continue here, too!

[kungfuslipper]

“For a few long minutes, Sev watched Ordo. He was struck by the impression of vital responsibilities left unfulfilled as one of Special Operations’ top assets sat there not drinking his milk. Whatever ARC Null-11 was supposed to get done as a captain in the Grand Army of the Republic, it was apparently getting done without much assistance from him.”

From Terms of Engagement, one of my favorite fics.

[kaasknot]

Re: WIP Game ... Dead Letter

okay so this one is ALSO not started, but it grabbed me by the emotional short and curlies so it's still relatively higher-priority.

the 3rd systems army is off running a big campaign on [planet(s)] that's gone fantastically pear-shaped, and cody's been running damage control from the tactical room aboard vigilance for the past 36 hours, cause he didn't make this mess but he's sure as fuck gonna clean it up.

all of a sudden an analyst comes up and says "sir, we've got a message from the front. medic says he pulled it from one of the casualties. it's in a cypher sir, but we can't crack it."

he hands off a battered, bloody scrap of flimsi and cody's heart stops, because he recognizes that cypher. he and rex cooked it up when they were sleep-deprived edgelord cadets on the Q course, inventing steadily more insane cyphers to keep their sanity when the going got tough.

worse is what it says: "cody, i love you. i'm sorry."

he rips through casualty lists, but there's a dozen simultaneous fronts and they're all a shitshow. no one seems to know where the 501st went, or what the stats are, and cody can't leave to find out because he's the marshal fucking commander and there are more lives than just one that are depending on him.

if rex is alive when he finds him, cody is gonna kill him.

to be continued...

[tiend]

poison null byte: 3, 7, 9

Poison Null Byte on AO3

Brought in to investigate a computer problem at the Treasury, Lt. Jaing provides Ellik with a program that doesn't quite do what he said it was going to. Soon after that, his viruses start acting strangely; someone's figured out what he's up to, but hasn't turned him in. Seems like there's another player on the networks, with their own agenda.

3: What’s your favorite line of narration?

“Besides, I’d rather not snuff someone for being smarter than Jaing,” said Mereel, tipping backwards in his chair. “Who knows where I’d have to stop?”

That's a weasel answer because it's mostly dialogue, so -

She was twisting in the wind, all by herself, and the Nulls had plenty of rope.

7: Where did the title come from?

A poison null byte is a legitimate exploitation technique. Embedding a NULL byte/character in a string at a certain point can cause a vulnerable application to parse the rest of the string as a command.

In other words, the appearance of an unexpected NULL drastically changes the effects of an action. As Thujerya has discovered.

It seemed appropriate.

9: Were there any alternate versions of this fic?

So. Many.

This fic started off as a spite write. In RepComm, Jaing uses the cliched trick of sending the rounded off fractions of a cred off to another account to siphon off money for the Nulls. This is not how a competent slicer would rob a bank, so obviously a fix-it fic was needed.

Deciding where and how to diverge from the books took a while, especially changing how Etain might handle her pregnancy. Then there was making an OC to act as a foil to the Nulls, and once Thujerya existed she needed a backstory, and after that what to do about Kal Skirata...

Thankfully, some of the snippets are reusable. The following bit was chopped from a more intense interrogation session that wasn't at Etain's safehouse, but fits in what will be the next chapter;

Mereel leaned forward over the table. Her back was cramping with the effort to stay upright, but Thujerya refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing her flinch.

“Another more thing,” he said. “How’d you get into Jaing’s setup?” He nodded over at the other clone. She tapped her fingers on her arms, a quick ripple to reassure herself, and dug her nails in.

“Cuckoo’s egg in the exfil data, zero-day in your parsing library,” she said.

“Fierfek,” said Jaing. He said it like a curse. “That was walled off.” Not well enough.

She lifted a shoulder and dropped it. “Chained up and out of the ‘viser.”

"How - you must've - " The clone's voice was taut with exasperation. Annoyance. Given the kidnapping, she felt entirely guiltless at his frustration. Hoped Mereel shared it.

[mxopifex]

countessofbiscuit replied to your photo “Alright so I need to do some anatomy practice and I’m roping you all...”

Maybe Commander Cody for #8?

Cody is getting some love in this round of requests, and I am not complaining.

[anzahar-blog]

Commission for @countessofbiscuit! Picture of their Umbaran Jedi OC, Nox Rissus (ﾉ´ヮ´)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧