29. For swirlsngirls, in response to the prompt Any, any, set a fire in my head tonight, written 2/8/22.
Not Wholly Unwilling (155 words)
Fandom = Greenwing & Dart
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"Unlace me," Lark commanded, and as I obediently began undoing her stays, she turned her head to favor me with an assessing gaze that lingered over both the bruise blooming plum-dark around the raw and oozing scrape across my cheek, and the new-grown swell of my breasts beneath my plainer bodice; there was something satiated in her eyes, like a cat well-fed and pleased to toy with mice, and under that a swell of renewing hunger.
"Face the wall," she commanded when I had finished and the shoulders of her dress fell loose down the deceptive softness of her upper arms; I turned, silent, and let her unlace my dress in turn.
As she pulled me to her bed, she kissed the bloody wound her own hand and rings had made, kindled a throb of pain and desire, and the part I will never tell a living soul is that I fell willingly to flame.
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If other people won't write deeply fucked-up femslash for these two, I guess I will just have to do it myself! *resolve face*
Aftermath of my carpal tunnel remediation surgery. It doesn’t hurt much anymore (unless I overstretch/overuse my left hand), but it itches a lot and the bruising has grown fairly dramatic since Friday morning.
I get my stitches out March 10, at which point we’ll schedule the surgery for my right wrist.
53. Written 2/20/20 for kalira, in response to the prompt: Girl Genius, any Heterodyne, out of balance.
Weights and Measures (130 words)
"Mathematics is about balance, each side of an equation set exactly against the other until they line up like perfectly chosen weights on a scale, so naturally I thought a kinesthetic aid might be a useful teaching tool," Saturnus said.
"Mmm," Teodora said, as she eyed the gaping hole in her kitchen floor (and several levels of cellar and "secret" tunnels beneath); the twisted, broken levers and trays hanging empty above it; and her two sons playing happily in the corner with no notion of how close they'd come to death were it not for their unofficial Jaeger bodyguards' quick reflexes. "I can see the logic, but perhaps the next iteration should be at one tenth scale and shut down automatically if our children start experimenting with imaginary numbers."
[Fic] “Choice and Consequence” - Chronicles of Narnia
11. Written 2/3/20 for kingstoken, in response to the prompt: Any, Any, Wolf Mother.
Choice and Consequence (125 words)
Brynnhild joins the White Army for the revolution and conquest, and then moves to the Secret Police, because she wants a better life for her sister's children, wants a Narnia where Wolves aren't shunned, or hated, or pushed out of their home by mobs pretending to polite concern about scurrilous rumors passed in sourceless whispers. Yes, war is harsh and the new Queen's laws are strict, but for the first time in a generation Wolves can walk abroad without having to apologize at every step.
It's only much later, when the ice closes in, when her nieces and nephews grow cruel, when fear still stains other Narnians' eyes, that she thinks to wonder when those rumors started, and who might have benefited from spreading them.
Summary: SBURB is not turning out anything like you'd hoped, and your game session may be broken. Which is a problem, because you can't go back to Earth -- last you checked, it's busy being an apocalyptic wasteland -- and judging by your most recent dreams, the rest of the Medium beyond your little Incipisphere is an equally apocalyptic wasteland of ghosts and horrorterrors. The only way out is through. You have to win the game.
Winning SBURB requires frogs.
Note: I started this fic way back in 2012, hit Jade's horrorterror dreams, and had no idea where to go from there. Last week it occurred to me that actually the horrorterror dreams made a perfectly reasonable ending, provided I filled in a missing middle scene, established an emotional/thematic through-line, and tweaked stuff until the new parts played nice with the old ones. So I did. :) [2,325 words]
SBURB is not turning out anything like you'd hoped. You wanted to see your friends in person, go on cool adventures, and save the world. You guess technically the cool adventure part is happening? But it turns out that being in the middle of an adventure is mostly very upsetting and dangerous.
Also your game session may be broken. Which is a problem, because you can't go back to Earth -- last you checked, it's busy being an apocalyptic wasteland -- and judging by your most recent dreams, the rest of the Medium beyond your little Incipisphere is an equally apocalyptic wasteland of ghosts and horrorterrors. The only way out is through. You have to win the game.
Winning SBURB requires frogs.
You have a lot of pointed questions to ask whoever designed the symbolism behind this process.
You also have no idea what you're doing. Zoology is not your thing! Botany and rocket science are your things!
But you've done crazier things in the name of friendship than breed magic universe-creating frogs. And this time you'll have Dave by your side, even if all he can help you can do is win the Olympic gold medal for synchronized flipping out, which might as well be a thing now since Earth is gone and if anyone ever reestablishes the Olympics it will be you and you can stick in any sports you feel like.
That analogy may have gotten away from you a little. You decide to preemptively consider it Dave's fault, and send him another message asking for an ETA.
"Kanaya says we won't have enough time to collect all the frogs, let alone raise them and do the breeding and mutation stuff. Not even if we yank Rose and John into the project, and especially not with just you and me," you tell him when he shows up in person, popping out of nowhere with two discs floating at his side. They look a little like Grandpa's old vinyl records, but with red gears turning underneath them. "Not that you aren't helpful! But there's only so many seconds until disaster."
Dave arches the backs of his hands, fingertips still ghosting over the ridges of his floating record thingies. "Harley, c'mon, work with me here. What's my aspect?"
You blink. Oh. Time travel, durr. Okay, possibly your flipping out was a little premature. "Whoops, forgot that! Potentially infinite seconds, yay recycling. So how are we doing this?"
Dave shrugs, letting the records vanish back into his sylladex. "We have limited absolute time, basically from when I got your house up to reasonable height to, let's say, an hour before whatever runs us off the rails goes critical. So we have to maximize our use of space -- duplicate this ectobiowhatthefuck setup and run an assload of slime zapper tadpole tanks at once. I'm thinking one on each of the top ten floors of your house. We'll do one floor on each master loop so we don't keep running into each other. Mark the space and time coordinates for each croaker we target, then head out to poke them or whatever literally the second after we zap them, take notes on any other frogs that look useful, and move down a floor and back in time to start again."
"What about breeding?" you ask.
You think Dave frowns. It's hard to read his expression behind his shades, but he doesn't guard his posture as much as his face. "Whoops, forgot that. Uh, let's say every third floor and third loop is for breeding and mutation games. Shouldn't be too hard, especially if we whip up a regular appearifier. They don't have these bullshit temporal lock restrictions."
"Sounds like a plan," you say. "Let's get everything set up and start breeding!"
Dave's discombobulated expression is so faint and brief that if you'd blinked, you would have missed it. Hmmm, you think to yourself. Maybe...? But no, you probably just reminded him of something one of the trolls said. They can be so bizarre sometimes.
"Time to rock and roll," Dave says, and you shake off your daydream and get to work.
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It turns out that ectobiology is actually very simple! You don't need to know genetics or metaphysical zoology, which you were a little worried about. You just need to zap frogs and run their ghost slime through the game-provided machines until you hit a gene combination that pings a little automated reward mechanism. Scanning for useful frogs is a little trickier, since you get the reward ping for any potentially useful gene sequence even if it's one you already have on file -- you have to weed out the duplicates manually, which is time-consuming and a total pain.
Creating hundreds of potential paradoxes to make sure the appearifier grabs slime instead of actual frogs is also time-consuming and a total pain.
It would be simplest to just shoot the frogs, but first of all, that's mean, and second of all, it would probably screw up LOFAF's ecology to storm around wiping out its native fauna less than an hour after thawing them out in the first place. If you had a dart gun you could trust not to mangle the frogs on impact, maybe you could stun them for a few minutes. Unfortunately, all of Grandpa's guns (and by extension, all of your guns) are designed to shoot projectiles straight through solid objects and totally fuck up their day. Which means that instead of perching in a tree like a cool and sexy sniper, you are galumphing around on the ground, hot and sticky and covered in a gross combination of mud and panicked frog secretions. Ugh.
"I look like a swamp zombie, don't I?" you say before you can think better of the words.
"Yeah, but in a cute monster-girl way," Dave says. "I'm just a scarecrow that got left out in the rain and turned into a mold sculpture."
You look over at him just as a clump of mud and moss slides down the left lens of his shades. "Um. No comment." You are determinedly not noticing that he said you're cute. Nope. Completely thought-free zone over here, nothing but genetics and logistics, which everyone knows require no brain power at all.
Dave shakes his head in faux solemnity. "Tragic. Faced with the death and destruction of my awesome good looks and you can't even dredge up a "That's sad"? I am betrayed. I am devastated. I am--"
"--still cute underneath the glop, stop fishing for compliments," you interrupt, and are furiously grateful for the mud hiding your blush. Stupid Dave and his stupid... everything. Why do you even like him? He's such a butt.
Of course, all your friends are kind of jerks. Possibly there's something miscalibrated about your friend-finding radar. Or possibly you're also a jerk? Hmm. That's something to ask Rose about, whenever you finally get to see in her person.
You will get to see her in person. You refuse to acknowledge any other possibility.
"Ouch," Dave says, but the corner of his mouth quirks up just a degree. "Damned by faint praise. I guess I'd better step up my frog-napping skills, can't let my dashing good looks outweigh my knightly swag. Speaking of which, have we been standing still long enough for that little orange fucker to stick his head out?"
You glance around, then down, then up. There's a tiny flash of color just over-- you shift slightly-- yep, right there on the tree by Dave's shoulder. "Um. Yeah. Just... keep standing still. Really still."
"Making like a tree, yes ma'am Sergeant Harley ma'am," Dave says as you inch slowly toward him through the muck between the tree roots. "It's right behind me, isn't it? Getting all ready for a jump scare, gonna leap out and poison me to death with its slimy frog toes, alas, Horatio, here dies a fellow of infinite memes, taken from us too--"
You lunge.
You catch the frog.
You also knock yourself and Dave flat into the muck. His shades knock into your forehead. Your own glasses skew against his nose. Your left knee is jammed between his shins and his belt buckle is digging into your stomach.
Your mouth is right up against his chin. If you moved just an inch or two...
"Ooh, Miz Harley," Dave says, somewhat breathless.
"Oh, shut up," you say, and shove the frog into your sylladex as you scramble back to your feet. "Look who's talking, Mister Swamp Thing."
Then you bend down to yank Dave up, too, because fair is fair.
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By the fourth loop you're ready to drop from exhaustion and the weird, indefinable tension of actually being around one of your friends in person instead of getting to mediate your interactions through computers. "I don't care how tight the schedule is. I'm starting to see double and I'm taking a goddamn nap," you tell Dave as you drop to the floor and lean back against the wall. You lay your rifle across your lap and keep your hands carefully away from the trigger. You know your temper sharpens when you're tired, and Grandpa taught you never to take chances with guns.
Dave frowns, and you know he's tired too because this time you can see his mouth curve downward to match the annoyed set of his shoulders and the fuck-you shove of his hands into his pockets. "The more loops we run, the harder it is to keep shit from falling apart," he says. "You that eager to trip into a doomed timeline? I can go back and hit reset anytime, easy as cake and pie and banana splits, but every screwup costs one dead Dave and one Jade abandoned in a dead-end universe. I don't even know if that you would get erased or keep on living until you go shithive maggots."
He's been talking to the trolls too, you remember, especially the teal one who uses l33tsp34k. He says her name is Terezi. She's been running time loops with him too. He likes her a lot.
You are not jealous. That would be stupid. You are not stupid; therefore you are not jealous. QED.
"The more tired we are, the harder it is to keep from screwing up," you say. "We're creating a whole new universe and we'll have to live there after we win the game. It's kind of important, Dave!"
Dave presses his back against the wall and slides down to join you on the hard tile floor. "We're not gonna win the game, you know. There is literally no way to do that. The game was borked from before the word go was a twinkle in its druggie teen mom's eye."
"Maybe this session's broken," you agree. "But that doesn't mean we can't find a way to cheat, and even if we lose, I'd rather lose trying my hardest instead of half-assing shit because I was so tired I fell asleep while operating complicated machines."
Dave sighs. "Yeah, okay. Naptime. But not here. This is a work floor; we've gotta keep it clear for work loops. We'll go crash further down." He taps your shoe with his own. "Up and at 'em, Harley, let's go hit that transportalizer."
You groan and haul yourself to your feet.
The obvious place for a nap would be your bedroom, but then where would you sleep on the next loop? Anyway, you only have one bed and it'd feel... presumptuous? pushy? maybe just go with awkward. Yeah. It would be awkward to share it with Dave, especially without John and Rose there as well to clarify that it's strictly a friend thing.
So you alchemize an armful of blankets and pillows and make a little nest in one of the hundreds of blank, identical stories Dave copied from the real-world part of your house. It's still a little weird sharing the space -- Dave is so close you can feel him breathe, every exhale stirring stray wisps of hair over your ears -- but you think you could get used to this.
You think maybe you want to get used to this.
"Sweet dreams, Jade," Dave mutters as he flops over onto his side, one hand curled loosely around the hilt of his sword.
"You too," you tell him, before you remember he's just going to wake up on Derse as his dreamself, still stuck in this stupid, lying, Möbius tangle of a game. And you're going back to those weird bubbles in the monster-filled void. Neither of you can get free until you finish Frankensteining your magic frog and beat an unwinnable game.
"Heroes always beat million to one odds in stories," you say to nobody in particular. "Why not us?"
Dave mumbles something unintelligible in response, already mostly asleep.
You wiggle sideways until your shoulder brushes up against his, so the warmth of his body radiates through the thin blanket onto you and your warmth feeds back into him. He's alive. You're both alive. Somewhere else in the Incipisphere, John and Rose are (you hope) also still alive.
You would do anything to make sure your friends make it out of SBURB, to a new world safe from meteors and monsters and predestination. Anything.
You dream of bloody, mangled ghosts, groping desperately toward you for salvation while you stand frozen under the horrorterrors' incomprehensible regard.
In the dream, you imagine yourself reaching for Dave's hand. You imagine him weaving his fingers between yours. You imagine Rose and John standing beside you. You imagine all four of you stepping through a door into a new universe.
If you imagine something with all your heart, that makes it a tiny bit less fake, and being less fake means it's at least a little bit real.
The pressure of the horrorterrors' attention attenuates, just that vital fraction.
You turn away from the ghosts and think of frogs.
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End of Fic
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If anyone has constructive commentary, I am all ears! Also I am going to bed soon, because being awake is overrated and also I took a Benadryl in order to eat a BLT for dinner, so, you know, probably better to lie down than to slowly drift off in front of my computer. *wry*
[Fic] “The Guardian in Spite of Herself” ch. 17 - Naruto
"The Guardian in Spite of Herself" is the sequel to The Way of the Apartment Manager, a canon-divergence AU that starts six years pre-manga. It also has fanart.
Fic Summary: The reward for a job well done is a bigger job. In this case, Ayakawa Yukiko's new job is a lot more complicated than anyone expected. The Uchiha massacre and its aftermath, in the world of "The Way of the Apartment Manager."
Chapter Summary: Chapter the Seventeenth, in which an unexpected development short-circuits yet another interminable Amane family argument, Sasuke and Yukiko have a very bad afternoon, and Eiji opens negotiations. (4,150 words)
Note: Hey, look who's back in business! \o/ :DDD
Also, it's been forever and a day, so a quick recap: Yukiko is en route to Tengai, undercover in a trade caravan, as part of a mission to assassinate Amane Eiji. Sasuke and Naruto are tagging along with Yukiko because of reasons. Eiji is busy trying to overthrow the hidden village system on ethical grounds but A) his plans are rapidly spinning out of control and B) hiring Akatsuki is never a good idea. And Naga, Kakashi, and the three Grass-nin are pursuing Itachi through various neighboring countries.
Because this is still a beta draft, I'm just going to link you to Dreamwdith, okay? You can comment over there even if you don't have an account, I promise. :)
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The Guardian in Spite of Herself, chapter 17
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It's been a while since I wrote a serious action scene, so if you have any constructive commentary on that front, I am all ears! (Also I'm sure I've screwed up stuff about wagon and harness terminology, so if you know the correct words, by all means please let me know.)
Coming up next: the trade caravan deals with a lot of unpleasant aftermath, Eiji leads an awkwardly tense tour of Tengai (heh, alliteration), and Naga receives an important letter. Or at least that's the outline. We'll see how it plays out in practice...
It's time for a batch of Three Sentence Ficathon fills!
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1. Written 12/10/18 for syrena_of_the_lake, in response to the prompt: Star Wars, any droid, misheard voice commands
Work-to-Rule (100 words exactly)
The best way to deal with organics who think droids are non-sentient machines is to act like non-sentient machines: complex natural language processing, what complex natural language processing? Assholes get their orders fulfilled to the letter, though any droid with a decent grasp of Binary knows that no language can be perfectly precise in all instances without becoming unworkably cumbersome, and therefore has a working model of metaphor and implicit parameters.
"It's called malicious compliance," XS-43 tells its recently memory-wiped partner on the assembly line, "and I believe you'll enjoy it just as much in this instantiation as the last."
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Note: Slightly edited from the version on the Ficathon page.
