#fic worldbuilding

[whimsicalwreck]

probably a meme that's been done before but yk.

sobbing.

[yours-wilderness]

Posting fic thoughts until I get around to writing them

Elarion used to be seven different villages/towns but they all got absorbed by the original Elarion once it grew

Each village is vaguely linked to a primal source:

Lorimann: Moon. The village is right next to the area's holy burial grounds. You know, pilgrimage place and all. At first I wanted to say they get most of their food from trading with the other villages but apparently corpses make for pretty fertile ground so never mind that.

Nitaris: Sky. Situated on the side of the mountain Osgonath is built under. Now they probably do the most trading for food. Since, ya know, they live on the side of a mountain. And they have a—for the most part—food-wealthy neighbour. So yeah, trading and bird-taming or hunting.

Banep: Sun. Right on the edge of the forest. They're known to maintain a sacred, ever-burning flame—cult of Vesta vibe. Probably the village that eats the most fresh meat due to them living so close to the woods and being able to make consistent fire to cook it.

Osgonath: Earth. Biggest town, roughly equal to Rul-vah. They’re the only ones to have a primal mage, which helps them feed themselves. Situated/built half underground, in a cavern in the side of a mountain. They’re known for their great stone pillars of unknown origins.

Rul-vah: Ocean. Also biggest village in the area, equal to Osgonath. Situated right next to the Sea of the Castout/River flowing from it. Their main source of food comes from the water, so a lot of fish, algae and seafood. They probably have boats, unlike the others.

Vesaros: Stars. It's like the smallest village in the area. Most people don't even know about it, except maybe in the area. They don’t do much trading and exchanging with the other villages either. What it is known for is its tattooing practice as a coming of age ritual and as a therapeutic technique. It’s also the villlage Ziard is from.

Elarion: Deep/Dark. Not the biggest town, but likely one of the most well-known one. It's the only village to have a library/archive/collection of written knowledge. It’s said that they have remnants of old magic in its foundations; runes of old magics long forgotten.

It's like an allegory/metaphor/whatever

Also, notice how the biggest villages are those with stable food supplies? Yeah, I'm sure that won't have any impact on the narrative or anything

Anyway, one of the struggles is figuring out how to make them big/far enough apart to be distinct entities with their own names while also being small/close enough to all be absorbed into one big city. And also being canon compliant but that’s slightly less of a worry

But hey, it’s also something that roughly kind of happened in my birth city so I guess it’s not impossible. Happened over a much longer period of time and people weren’t starving and struggling for most of it, but still

[juspion25824]

[Sabigiyuu]

The Funerals in Summer | Chapter 4: Captured Pieces (持駒) is now up! 🦊

In shogi, captured pieces don’t die. They wait on the sidelines until someone drops them back onto the board—fighting for a new side, serving a new purpose. This chapter is about that: about being picked up, placed somewhere, and learning whether you’ll stay.

Some breadcrumbs for you:

- Giyuu introduces himself twice in this chapter. Once as a lie. Once as the truth. The order matters.

- There’s a folding screen in this chapter. It was meant to be a pair. Someone only took one. I’m not emotionally okay about this.

- The Tōmanjū count is now at 5. It has officially appeared more times than some characters.

- One boy invents a communication system using shogi coordinates just to talk to another boy he thinks he’ll never see again. And then immediately tells him his real name.

The name he’s been hiding from everyone.

On their first meeting:

What fascinates me about writing Sabito and Giyuu’s first encounter is how differently they cope with loss. Sabito is silent, contained, his grief compressed into something hard and useful—a blade. Giyuu is also silent, but his silence is made of shame, of drowning, of not knowing how to surface.

And yet.

Sabito has spent months refusing to connect with anyone. Giyuu takes one look at him and thinks: *I need to feed this person immediately.* He has no sword, no skills, nothing to offer—except half a Tōmanjū and a clumsy, desperate wish to be useful.

Sabito’s walls are ice. Giyuu walks up to them with a Tōmanjū and somehow doesn’t notice they’re supposed to keep people out.

There’s something almost absurd about it—the boy who can’t chop firewood, offering his only sweet to the boy who looks like he was born holding a sword.

But maybe that’s exactly why it works. Sabito has met plenty of people who respect his strength. Sabito has met plenty of people who respect his strength. He hasn’t met anyone who looked at him—wounded, voiceless, untouchable—and thought,“ He should have something sweet.”

That’s not romance. That’s not even friendship yet. It’s just two broken boys, each carrying something the other lacks, brushing past each other in the dark—and deciding, without quite meaning to, not to look away.

The line that lives in my head rent-free：

A lie had carved the hollow. A life would have to fill it.

🔗 [Link to AO3]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/73306981/chapters/203557541

[velvetafterdark]

Love your food worldbuilding in the most recent chapter! Can you say anything more about V/osian food?

Absolutely! <3

As St/arscr/eam mentioned, fliers are considered military-class outside of V/os, so being able-bodied and capable of flight was the only way to prove your value in the Fu/nctio/nist society if you left the safety of the winged city. Even within V/os, forged bots and win/glords got first dibs on e/nerg/on, so many a CC see/ker found ways to make filling meals using limited ingredients. Innovation is bred from limitation, in a sense.

With Vo/snian dishes, you'll notice it's a common trend for me to describe them as either very spicy or very salty; anything that encourages solvent retention and coolant circulation to keep your core at a comfortable temperature during flight. Bromine, alkaline-earth metals, and other halogens are common ingredients I'll use when talking about the seasoning and flavoring of V/os/nia/n food; these are absolutely toxic to humans, but to a giant, inorganic space robot? Quite tasty.

Despite not having much in the way of e/nerg/on to spare for its "second class citizens", V/os does have some other pretty impressive natural resources, so the average col/d-cons/truct can usually find something edible, even if it's not quite as nutritious or beneficial as e/nerg/on.

Alkaline noodles was a comfort food; much like ramen for us, it's quick, it's cheap, and can be fancied up with a few simple additions. Iodine-glazed pig iron is another treat, which is unique and kind of a novelty because it stains the mouth blue.

Not specifically native to V/os, (it hails from the slums of Ka/on) but one of St/arscr/eam's favorite snacks, which you'll see in a later chapter, is something called a nitrotiger cake, or a nitro cake for short; these are a kind of cheap oilcake snack that's been flavored with those kinda chemically sweeteners to cover the slightly "off" taste. He will plow through a box of them; absolutely loves them. They are 100% inspired by zebra cakes and I'm not sorry.

[juspion25824]

🌊The Chess Move That Explains Why Giyuu Will Never Forgive Himself

🧐a worldbuilding note for "The Funerals in Summer"

So a few readers asked about the Chapter 1 subtitle—"Checkmate by a Dropped Pawn (打ち歩詰め)"

—and what it means for the story. Here's the shogi symbolism I'm working with in this fic!

(Quick note: this is my fic interpretation, not canon psychology. Just the emotional framework I built for this particular story.)

🈚️打ち歩詰め (Uchi-fu-tsume): The Illegal Move

In shogi, this is a move that looks like it should work—you drop your cheapest piece (a pawn) right in front of the enemy king and deliver instant checkmate.

Except you can't. It's forbidden. Too easy. Too cheap. The win doesn't count.

That's exactly why it became the emotional shape of Giyuu's trauma in this fic.

📝How It Maps to the Tomioka Tragedy (in this story)

In The Funerals in Summer, I write Giyuu as someone who learned shogi young—it was how his father taught him to think（and this is actually a canon setting）. So when he's about ten and can't process what happened that night why he pushed Tatsuko away, in the hospital, his brain reaches for the only framework it has: the rules of the game.

He sees himself as the pawn. He sees Tsutako as the other major piece in Shogi. He sees his survival as a move that should have been illegal.

A forbidden exchange. The kind you're not supposed to win from.

📝Why This Matters for the Fic

This isn't about canon Giyuu—it's about the version of him living in this story, who grows up unable to forgive himself for a move that "shouldn't have worked."

He didn't just lose his sister. He won a game he believes he had no right to win.

And that's the weight he carries into every chapter.

📝Why Every Chapter Title Is a Shogi Term

Because in this fic, shogi isn't decoration—it's the lens through which Giyuu interprets everything he can't say out loud. Each chapter title is another move, another rule, another way of measuring the distance between what happened and what should have happened.

It's the architecture of his guilt.

If you're into fic-worldbuilding posts or character studies through symbolism, let me know what else you'd like to see! (I have thoughts about the wisteria/funeral imagery too.)

[help-me-writes]

since there were some questions and it's semi-relevant, some Dead or Alive maps and worldbuilding notes!

There's a lot of mess and disorganization as humanity spread into space, so a lot of the systems have weird quirks.

For example, sectors are organized roughly by planetary orbit, but because humanity started at Earth, numbering starts with the 000s ("the Zeros") around Earth, then follows based on how things generally expanded. (If you want to get nerdy and nitty gritty with the physics, sectors around a planet are generally bounded by their L4 and L5 Lagrange points.) Anything outside of a planet's sectors are considered 'open space' and are very sparsely populated, and are generally grouped by inner, mid, or outer system open space.

Going in order from the Sun:

400s: Mercury 300s: Venus 000s: Earth 100s & 200s: Mars 500s: Open Space (inner system) 600s: inner asteroid belt 700s: outer asteroid belt 800s: Jupiter (due to the density of the Trojan Asteroids, the 800s are also split into 8L4s and 8L5 sectors) 900s: Saturn 1000s: Open Space (mid-system) 1100s: Uranus 1200s: Neptune 1300s: Open Space (outer system) 1400s: outer reaches 1500s: extreme outer reaches

Station Naming Conventions/Designations

Most stations have local names, but anyone who's doing a lot of travel is generally going to just use the alphanumeric designation, because it's a very immediate 'what is this station and where is it.'

The general format is [type of station]-[sector]-[further details] The back half of a designation depends on what kind of station it is, but generally it's some combination of sub-type, a station number (sometimes this is just a number, sometimes it's tied to the corporation that runs it), and the station's class/size.

Example: F-8L4.62-IX-B-KL2 from chapter 5 - F: a freight/shipping hub - 8L4.62: located in sector 8L4.62 (around the L4 Trojans of Jupiter) - IX: sub-type designation for a freight station. in this case, I means it's mixed between pressurized (P) and unpressurized (U) shipping, X means it's mixed between automated (A) and manned (M) - B: size, B-class. pretty damn big (more details on station class below) - KL2: as a freight station, its station number is tied to the corporation that runs it. in this case, it's Kline Corp's second station in the sector

Mainstations are the exception since they're functionally cities (mixed use residential, business, retail, etc.) Since they're central hubs without a specific function, they just use their sector number. If a sector is populated enough to have multiple mainstations, then they get hyphenated with another string of numbers.

Some station types and their designations:

Communications [C] Freight/cargo/shipping [F] Mining [M] Service/Ship Maintenance and Repairs [S] Manufacturing [U] Fill Stations/Fueling [X]

Station Size/Class

Station size originally was ordered A-F from largest to smallest (with a few very tiny designations tacked on to the end), but as stations got bigger and bigger (mostly industrial stations), they had to then expand to AA class, then eventually go in reverse order, G, H, I, etc.

So in order of smallest to largest: S, N, F, E, D, C, B, A, AA, G, H, I...

Size/class is determined by a combination of physical size and occupancy, so they can vary greatly, but a very rough ballpark, assuming it's residential occupancy (an industrial station of the same size will have a fraction of the population):

S: unmanned satellites N: outposts with only 1-3 people F: a single household (or equivalent) E: several households D: 100-1,000 people C: 500-2,500 people B: 2,500-25,000 A: 15,000-100,000 AA: 100,000-500,000 G: 500,000-1mil H+: multi-millions

Most residential stations don't actually pass A-class, because it gets exponentially more expensive to build and upkeep. Highly populaced sectors usually opt for a network of dozens of smaller mainstations and substations. But there's a few big ones!

(Ship classifications follow the same letter order, even though they're operating on a different scale to stations. So an AA class ship is considered a fucking huge ship, even if it might only be the physical size of a D-class station.)

[purpleshift]

So apparently this is what I do instead of studying for chemistry. [SPOILERS for a 20 year old book]

So this Friday afternoon I spent fic-worldbuilding (yay)(!) Through the weekend I looked at timelines that were for neither CHEM1102 nor MATH1005:Statistics. These are some of the results.

I've finally cleared up the relation between the Evans sisters and their (financially) Disowned Cousin Who Very Likely Isn't Dead (Again) (in-fic): 2nd cousin, via his great-aunt on his surprisingly-not-dead-of-patricide paternal side, who was their grandmother on a maternal line. Also, her husband was an Armsman or something. There was definitely an Armsman. Maybe even their father.

(Armsman?) Evans, Ma Evans, their family (and by extension the Snapes) lived somewhere industrial in HP-canon, and the mentioned industrialised people/places, even if ~15 years ahead of this in-VK-canon (yay neofeudal aristocracy (this is also mentioned in-canon)) are Vordarian's District & Vorsmythe-the-industrialist. Given Petunia ends up not living far from the capital, the former sounds more plausible immediately-prior to the free-settlement-of-proles bill, being about the next District over IIRC.

Vernon Dursley is a Vor-disliking middle-class business sales personthing, which is natural, you know, unearned privilege and all. He isn't in the People's Defense League of Barrayar and/or descendants because, to quote Petunia, "My sister, her husband, my cousin, and my great-uncle all died because of politics, and you want to go into politics?!" (Even though one of them isn't (dead, that is*) and the other died iN AN INVASION rather than INTERNAL POLITICS the point still stands.)

*She is fully aware of that (thanks, Dumbledore! Personal condolences, what are they?). What she isn't aware is that said cousin is currently more of a blobby ball of annoyance hiding out on South Continent as of the first mention of that statement. Politics! Magic! Magic politics! Hate 'em all.

Addendum 1: Also, Ma Weasley's accountant second cousin is not an ac-Count-ant </lame canonical pun> but is, however, accountant/stockbroker to some Count, like Tsipis (from VK-canon0.

Addendum 2: That financial disinheritence? Most of that's royalties from terribly (silly) infatuated wartime love poetry by Tom Riddle Sr (who here is closer to TR the 7th or something**) to Merope. They contain many, many allusions to Greek mythology (and probably also Shakespeare; everyone likes Shakespeare), especially Sisyphus/Merope-the-lost-Pleiad. (This becomes extra-hilarious once you take canonical!That Fruitcake into account. Y'know, really, really disliking the idea of death?) These poems now get studied in Barrayaran literature courses, especially those that cover the late-Cetagandan-Occupation period, hence royalty money being a thing.

The cutoffness-from-royalty-money of The Cousin We Don't Speak Of is contingent on whether or not he's found guilty of Vorloupulous' Law, a.k.a. of running an army (larger than 20 for Counts/heirs, 0 for everybody else) against the Emperor/the Empire/the Imperium. Naturally, his lawyer insists it's Impossible, I tell you, Impossible. (See: Death Eaters/Knights of Walpurgis) Probably even with evidence from the Ministry of Political Correction. What? Especially with that evidence, don't you know who you're accusing? (Yes, even if there are many highly-placed character witnesses to say that [THAT CHARACTER] is capable - you plan on calling the Regent/Prime Minister? Who once killed you in a duel***? How are you even alive?)

Addendum **: The main Barrayaran (or at least Vorkosigan) naming scheme attested in the books for the first two sons is: First son: [paternal grandfather's first name] [maternal grandfather's first name] [surname]; Second son: [maternal grandfather's second name] [paternal grandfather's second name] [surname], which of course would have exceptions. Well, given that HP-canon gives us an unbroken run of at least three T(h)om(as)es in that family, well...

(This means I can have jokes about the surprisingly-to-others functional Thomas Thomas, whose kids all turned out all right. We think.)

Addendum ***: Remember I mentioned Lady Bella Vorrutyer Vorkosigan, of at least two lovers by the end? And in canon once the family found out there was a duel where the two lovers were dead by the end and were assumed to have killed each other? And then she purportedly killed herself? Well, let's just say here that Bellatrix & Rodolphus are very definitely dead, and nobody believes Tom Vorriddle the elder when he says he ran a woman called Bellatrix through with a sword when she came over to kill him for the crime of being related to his son. Everyone knows she was a Muggleborn who "killed herself" by burning her face off with a plasma arc. Even if everyone but Lord Vorkosigan suspects Lord Vorkosigan. (Note, it's probably true that everyone is wrong. Everyone in the literal sense.)

Addendum 3: Why even are there blood-purity wars in the future? The investigation was definitely borked and then epically derailed**** (7-volume series on the last years!) when someone was impatient for the power to Do What He Wants. He died. He definitely isn't coming back. IIRC he had the grace to get vaporised die in public not very far offscreen in a Vorkosigan novel, (At least his heir isn't stupid or evil. So far. That we know of.)

Addendum ****: Minerva is Never Forgiving His Betrayal of HIS (Not Just My) Principles. Even if the whole "whoops there goes my cousin's family and their house and their kitty too because prophecy and orders" thing hadn't happened. WHAT WAS THAT YOU SAID ABOUT NOT BEING A PAWN? CAN'T HEAR THAT! CAN YOU SAY IT AGAIN? The point about 20th C Defence course content and methods in the 30th C still stands, though. Why is Barrayaran Hogwarts stuck in time?