#read carter

[scorchingmoonlight]

READ CARTER: LATEST CHAPTER - FIRST CHAPTER

A slim cut of the action, but one that could frame Cain's slender figure perfectly. It was sickening, how perfect it was. A music box ballerina, breezing through a series of tasks that may have been low impact for it but would be physically impossible for Baby. When it was in motion it traced over exact commands with grace and certainty. When it was still, it held poses with such rock steady balance it was as if it wasn't even alive. This was what Baby had to compare herself against. A machine. Something that the Company cored out and filled with everything they needed it to be. Not even a person anymore in all the ways that make one better.

Me when I'm really normal about my coworker. Also for the record no ones telling Cain it cant wear shoes. The opposite of this is happening. No one in this fucking department knows how to behave in a public setting.

[scorchingmoonlight]

Are you looking for "toxic yuri" with actual teeth? Are you tired of every dark ship trope erroding away into fluffy domestic bliss after two chapters? Do you want to read messy poly t4t lesbian bullshit with more red flags than a 27 person portland polycule who INSISTS theyre not a cult even when you didn't bring it up?

#READ CARTER

Carter is my ongoing mechsploitation webserial which follows 41 year old Angel Ortega as the Company leverages her grief over deceased mech operator Toni Carter to strong-arm her into becoming the primary handler for the dangerous and expirimental Cascadian-One mech program. The ghost of Carter is projected on every operator Angel works with, only taking shape more vividly as the c1's identity-corrupting immersion fluid erodes the new recruits down to nothing. This NGE inspired work currently has one published arc taking place over ten chapters at time of writing this post, but updates several times a week.

If you do read carter let me know how you feel! Feedback on ao3 or tumblr is always appreciated. Mind the tags on the fic itself.

[scorchingmoonlight]

Carter Chapter 17 - Rising Ape

FIRST CHAPTER - CURRENT CHAPTER

This seemed to quell the board's incessant probing, allowing Angel to relax in turn. “They want to speak directly with someone in the Cascade project.” The administrator seemed as unsure about that as anyone else was. “We are unsure how to proceed, knowing your predicament, Ortega.” She could feel the eyes on her, the vagueness almost made it worse than if he just went out and said it. This was a bad tension, one that put the taste of iron in her mouth and drew a sound from her bones like a creaking elevator cable. The most she could do is brush past it in kind. “Thank you.”  Angel watched as Cain shrunk back. It didn't want to be picked. Since the board may want to see it they had to take the muzzle off and make it clear just how many of its tells were in the mouth. Tight lips, jaw subtly shifting as it chewed on the inside of its cheek. It didn't like speaking roles. It didn't feel like it was any good at them. A long pause turned into an awkward silence. The board didn't know the team well enough to assign the job, Mariposa wasn't there to perform or delegate the task, Angel couldn't do it.

For the unaware, Carter is an Eva-patterned mechsploitation about a war with no 'good guy' and the substance needed to manufacture consent for it. On a smaller level, its about adultery and 20+year age gap dubcon yuri. You should read it, I worked really hard on it.

[scorchingmoonlight]

Really sorry to all Carter readers for the "I too am in this episode" energy Hazard brings to the next chapter. Shes not really attached to these people and is thinking about lunch

[scorchingmoonlight]

Single-layer c1 Operator sketch. Babs is a little frumpy and boymode but she just needs more Derangement Fluid and to be more comfortable around these people-- very difficult when you remember the shit few weeks shes had. Cain is a lot more feminine now than in its first appearance from that pic of it and Carter before

[scorchingmoonlight]

Carter Act 2 begins with Chapter 11

She was never supposed to get that far. Weekly, sometimes daily missions, battles that raged on for hours, injuries that shattered her bones and tore her flesh. It was a ragged existence whos razors edge could only be dulled by depressant cocktails of whatever can be squirreled away from the supply room. Ketamine, Xanax, alcohol, and king among them, the drug among drugs, morphine. As she survived more and more she became less of an addict and more of a sommelier. Its one of the benefits of being marked for death- anything could happen. So what if you’re destroying your health with post-combat hits from a hand-mixed bottle with a worn label written by a dearly departed friend denoting it as “Primordial Five-Alarm Chili” after every battle? You’re going to be dead in three months. But she just wasn’t. She was a coward in battle, but cowards survived, and if you survive you learn, and when the average pilot has four days of battle experience and you have four months, you start to out-class people.

Aaaand we're back! We're so deep in the story now (26k as of this chapter) that I'm having to redact parts of the blurbs I post to avoid spoilers for new readers lmao. In this, the repop program finally becomes plot relevant, somehow the intox kink in Carter gets more intense, and we return to the ever-giving well of the icebreaker method.

Brief reminder that I've started putting all posts about carter in the tag #read carter, and if you make posts liveblogging, theorizing, or doing anything else with Carter I'd love to see it so please tag your posts with that no matter how small!

[scorchingmoonlight]

Carter chapter 12: Mirror Image

Cain stirred in the high security medbay, the cold feeling of iv fluids drooling into its arm, the sanitized brush of hospital air against its skin. It felt like death. Its lungs were battered from hyperventilation in the liquid environment of c1s control center, burst capillaries littered its skin in pinpoint bruises and stained the whites of its eyes red. The same compound of chemicals that could trick a teenager into becoming an animal could make a healthy operator die from placebo alone. It didn't know how long it was out, but it could pretty quickly patch together its swirling vision to know where it was.

It held onto the IV pole for stability as it dragged itself up and out of the bed. Some movement would do it some good. It squinted towards the clock, half-remembering a time when it could read something like that, but it only served as a mesmerizing rhythm. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. It tongued the roof of its mouth, searching for a wound that was not there, blinking slowly and only when its eyes started to hurt. There was no telling how late it truly was between the windowless and climate controlled bunker and its own untrained mind, but the main light being off implied it was night time. The only thing Cain hated more than darkness was silence- but there was no silence. Someone else was in the room, breathing softly.

This one took some grit to write, but heres a Cain perspective chapter! Recovery, recognition and a return to humanity not by changing who it is but by meeting someone whos definition of human already allows for it.

[scorchingmoonlight]

Carter Chapter 19: Teenagers

First chapter here

This still counts as lesbian because the idea of Junie counting as a man is Laughable. Give her like ONE chapter shes gotta work on some shit