#tpiam

[hyemale]

another chapter in @kaesaaurelia's scarian brainship AU this place is a message demanded more art - yes the very cuddly tentacles pseudopods are Scar. perks of not having to sleep - making sure your neurologist is nice and comfy while he sleeps.

[kaesaaurelia]

long rambling about gender worldbuilding in This Place is a Message

So my D&D group was talking about gender in fictional societies and I did a longass braindump at them about gender in the world(s) of This Place is a Message and it occurred to me that this might be something people who (unlike my D&D group! who are lovely people! but who have limited interest in MCYT and I love that for them honestly) actually read the fics.

Content note that this description contains discussion of some pretty awful stuff. Eugenics has been a background theme in the fics; these are also societies with sexism and cissexism present. None of these places are meant to be utopias!

Also, you can't generalize about whole planets without leaving some nuance out; while none of these planets I've described ever gets away from the binary, in general when I worldbuild societal expectations, it's because I am interested in the places where they don't work for everyone. I don't really plan on focusing on gender stuff specifically in the fics, but it is something I keep in mind as I'm writing.

Btw, if you are like "oh but the way I think of xyz character has [specific headcanon I have contradicted here] vibes" I don't want to take your fun away! I'm probably not going to change how I write them, but often fanfiction is an exercise in reading against the text and I really genuinely think you should read against my text if that's more fun for you. Also, I personally am cis so if you have better things to do than read however many words of rambling about fictional gender worldbuilding from a cis woman, you should enjoy doing those other things instead of reading this bullshit.

Before we get to the main populated planets, a brief note on medical science and medical transition! In this world medical transition has been relatively easy and cheap for a long time, but has within about a generation become SO easy and cheap that if you have no major medical issues you can change your outward appearance in a week or less, depending on what changes you want to make, and if you are willing to have some more intensive surgery and keep up with post-operation treatments, can become capable of impregnating someone or carrying a child. (This was an outgrowth of me realizing that if Scar could survive his horrific accident because of medical nanites, logically people without his immune issues could substantially remake their bodies very easily.) Obviously this has been a big deal for all kinds of people, from cis guys who really want to be able to grow nice beards instead of scruff all the way to people who emphatically don't want to look human, but when I talk about medical transition here I am mostly talking about people who want to read as a specific socially-recognized gender and perhaps have different genitals, which is leaving out a ton of people, I know!

On reproduction: personally, I don't think there are many people on worlds with access to this type of technology who have functional uteri, because having experienced the wonders of a functional uterus, I don't enjoy it. Menstruation sucks. We should have something different. However, on planets where the technology is less available or the population is shrinking, there is often heavy social pressure on some genders to be capable of carrying children. While I am going to put my characters through The Space Horrors, I don't think I'm going to make anyone go through menstruation while they're doing that. Anyway, here we go:

Mercury is an absolute fucking nightmare garbage fire of a planet, politically speaking, and I don't want to go into great detail with the Mercury worldbuilding here because it's depressing (if you've read the fics you know there is some Bad Shit going on on Mercury) but basically for horrific sexism and classism reasons the first child of a wealthy or (rarely) upwardly-mobile Mercurian couple is always raised as/considered a boy regardless of biology; the second is usually raised as a girl. Gender has very little to do with one's interests or skills and is primarily about how one will be useful to one's family as either an heir or a product to be sold off in marriage to someone else's heir. Similarly, marriage is not about love, it's about reproduction.

Adults get the option of one of two gender markers on their IDs. It is probably hard to transition biologically unless it's specifically for reproductive purposes, in which case it is still relatively expensive but also your family will probably pay for it. This is an improvement, because as a society Mercury went through all the usual outcomes of strict gender roles and sexism (there was a lot of infanticide, for example) and "let's just pretend that all our firstborns are sons" was the easiest solution. It obviously isn't a good solution but Mercury has bigger fish to fry. (There's a terrible joke about mercury poisoning I could make here.)

Outside of the upper classes, there is a pretty strict gender binary in theory but birth order doesn't come into it and in practice everyone needs to be working to support the family so while there's a gendered division of labor it's divided into what can be done while nursing a baby vs what can't, so, for example, anything you can do at a computer while sitting down is considered feminine on Mercury unless it pays really well.

There is no substantial Mercurian diaspora because most people who would like to leave Mercury can't afford to do so permanently; the small pockets of Mercurians on other planets are frequently discriminated against if they are visibly Mercurian, so they tend to be very insular and traditional.

(Grian is Mercurian on his father's side and Terran on his mother's side, and I genuinely haven't decided what kind of anatomy he was born with, but at this point he has a dick, he has had several other things previously, and I don't think he thinks much about gender. I think if he did he'd actually be happier because maybe his dad's legacy wouldn't have such a weird hold on him? Anyway, obviously even for a Mercurian firstborn child who grew up to identify as male, having a uterus, etc. would affect his adolescence and how he grew up, but Grian's childhood illness and neglectful parents affected him much more. Grian does have a younger sister and I know that she is cis; it was important to Grian's dad to have An Heir or he would not have named his child fucking Grian Grian Grian III, but he was willing to do things the Earth way with a second child. Bdubs is also from Mercury! He also has more going on with his everything, because Mercury is a hot mess, but he's cis. I think this man has many gender issues but they are all to do with ridiculous amounts of insecurity pretending to be confidence.)

Venus is the most complicated one here because it is the only planet with a sizable diaspora population that is markedly visibly different, as most offworld Venusians retain their green-tinted photosynthetic skin. Venus likes to present itself as The Utopia Science Made, where everyone has enough to live well and everyone is happy and beautiful, and Venus is the planet with the most gender options, hooray! Venus is a wealthy planet with an artificially tiny population. They have outsourced any kind of production that needs human workers to more desperate worlds with cheaper labor, legally limited who is allowed to reproduce, and heavily incentivized and, in earlier times, outright banished people with genetic defects from the planet. Their artificially low population exempts them from the wider Solar System's anti-eugenics laws because they're still classified as a frontier world, but they aren't fooling anyone who's actually been to Venus; this is a heavily developed, tightly-controlled, extremely terraformed world.

The stereotypical Venusian-born Venusian is well-educated and cares deeply for the environment. Because this planet used to have an atmosphere full of sulfuric acid, the ancestors of the people who settled Venus are keenly aware that planetary environments are fragile and require dedicated care and upkeep. Unfortunately, a Venusian education emphasizes soft eugenics and keeping a population small and culturally unified as a major requirement for a well-functioning, peaceful world. While it is true that the Venusian homeworld has historically been the most politically stable world in the Solar system, Venusian colonies have a long and storied history of revolution, revolt, and general chaos, and the stereotypical off-world-born Venusian is aggressive, cynical, and likely to ask politically inconvenient questions like "why do people in these neighborhoods keep suffocating if the oxygen scrubbers are being kept up?" and "so is the guy whose company makes the air scrubbers related to the guy who made the laws?"

But more about the Venusian diaspora later! On Venus proper, there are three fairly rigid gender roles and, legally speaking, five gender markers, and you have to have one (only one) (and you can't opt out) and you have to pick one at a big coming of age ceremony in front of your whole family. And you will have to explain why if you pick something nonstandard or that people weren't expecting, and it's very fraught. You can change your gender but it is a process and you will get a lot of relatives trying to make this about themselves somehow. (You get those relatives everywhere if you change any part of your identity, of course, but having the big ceremony gives them more leverage.)

The Venusian system isn't truly nonbinary; the three social genders are male, female, and androgynous, a midpoint between the two binary genders. (The other options legally are "Other" and "None," but people who identify this way tend to be assumed to be actually androgynes who just can't commit or something.) Medical transition is free, assuming you would like to change your appearance to match the gender you picked out and if that gender is one of the three socially accepted ones. (Androgynes are heavily expected to have reproductive anatomy compatible with reproduction with at least one of their spouses, and to change it if necessary, regardless of their own comfort.) If you don't want to do that, it is still going to be cheap, but it will be harder to find someone who will do exactly what you want unless you go off-world to Earth or Mars.

A standard Venusian marriage is a triad marriage -- the ideal is a man, a woman, and an androgyne, but many people have two members of the same gender and one member of a different gender. (Having all three be the same gender used to be the ideal, but it is now considered selfish and old-fashioned, because Venus' population is getting too small for economic comfort.) Because of its artificially small population a lot of these marriages tend to have at least one offworld spouse; they are often subject to societal pressure to conform or lose their citizenship. Off-worlders are allowed to be mildly eccentric in behavior but they can't stray too far from a visual presentation that aligns with the gender they picked when they got married. Because they are not Venusian they are frequently not treated as particularly intelligent and are expected to be primarily ornamental regardless of gender. It is usually not possible for an off-world spouse to get a job, for example. That said, among Venusian-born Venusians, the patriarchy is alive and well on Venus and a Venusian man usually has more opportunities than a Venusian who isn't a man.

The Venusian diaspora is large because, again, Venus has heavily incentivized emigration of people who don't fit within their arbitrary standards, so most people in the world of TPIAM who are "Venusian" were raised offworld and have never been to Venus. The Venusian diaspora population tends to be VERY cynical about the world of their ancestors and will often describe leaving Venus as a bit like leaving a cult. Many of them openly reject a lot of Venusian traditions, but ideas about gender usually aren't the first thing that gets jettisoned, and as with diaspora populations throughout history, Venusian diaspora traditions have changed significantly and become almost more concentrated than they are on-world.

A traditional off-world Venusian family will still do the big ceremony, but in day-to-day life most off-world Venusian families' views of how to do gender publicly are more heavily influenced by their home planet, but privately retain a trinary view of gender that is a lot stricter and more codified (but also less binary) than actual Venusian gender roles. It is relatively common for someone's public and private/family gender not to match, but rather than this being hidden from the family it is acknowledged as a point of cultural pride, and similar to having a different persona at work than with friends. With less traditional families they will often still have a public gender and a private gender, but the two are more likely to be similar, especially on Earth. In off-world families marriage expectations are considerably less strict regarding gender and number of spouses, and there is significantly less pressure to have kids. (Cleo and Lizzie are both Venusian diaspora; Cleo's family has been on Mars for several generations and two of Lizzie's grandparents was Venusian but she was born on Earth. Cleo's family is more traditional, but their family is also a bunch of absolutely stereotypical political agitators and they were very accepting of their child feeling that none of the options available really fit; the party was kind of a "good news, our child is a gender anarchist, we had not considered this option before but we like it" kind of thing. Lizzie's family tend to keep their head down when it comes to politics. Also, she's half-Terran, so half her family just did not have these traditions. She probably picked female at the little party they had and is sometimes reminded that the Venusian female gender role she was raised with is a little different from the Terran female gender role but it is not a big part of her life.)

On Earth most people raise their kids as their assigned gender at birth but are chill if they want to transition. There are pockets of people who are transphobic, still. There are also pockets of people who raise their child with no gender and like the idea of letting their kid pick at a specific age. (Sometimes they go full cultural appropriation about it with poorly understood mimicry of Venusian traditions, which is awkward for everyone involved.)

Earth is still recovering from severe damage to its climate and ecosystems, and the drive to maintain that recovery has driven a lot of cultural change. Specifically, cities are much denser and larger and there is significantly less suburban sprawl. Rural populations are often people with agricultural, technical, or sustainability expertise, and tend to be more spread out than they are now. No one owns very much land; a lot of that rural land is considered public land and is run by one of the Venusian sustainability concerns that many of Earth's local governments have outsourced climate control to, or is corporate agricultural land. This isn't some kind of urbanist utopia -- a lot of people are pretty unhappy about it! So Earth's very dense population is a big driver of space colonization, much more so than some idealistic desire to explore space. But also, people on Earth tend to be a lot more willing to be like You Do You, Just Don't Practice Trombone At Midnight. Because access to resources like gravity and oxygen are free, it's less risky to be openly kind of a weirdo, because no one's gonna cut off your air supply and you don't have to pay for it.

Legally, Earth doesn't bother with gender markers because there isn't a particularly good reason to keep track of gender specifically. In a world where you can change so much about your appearance so easily they're probably struggling with how useful IDs even are. (They are probably considering implementing some kind of DNA-based identification method that will be a privacy nightmare. Sorry, Terrans.)

Transition is relatively cheap and relatively safe and you do not generally have to justify what you want done to a psychologist. If you are going to change your face/body it's generally considered polite to let people know, but it's fairly cheap and not difficult to revert or adjust if you realize later that you want to look different. And for the price of a nice three-day-weekend at a nice hotel, an adult can experiment with a different set of genitals for a week or two and then, if desired, go right back to what they had before without ever having to take time off of work for recovery and without any visible changes while fully clothed; it's pretty common for people who can afford it to experiment a little bit with this even if they don't consider themselves trans, either out of curiosity or because they have a kink they want to try.

(Specific characters: I've obviously written a lot about Scar, who's a cis guy; Scar had an unusually rural upbringing, which is how he didn't know he was allergic to those medical nanites until his accident. I do not think he had much occasion to think about gender pre-accident, but pilot training changed his original body a lot and gave him a second body that he has limited control over in terms of its shape or how it looks, because he literally does not own it; what Scar has going on is its own weird thing that intersects at an odd angle with, but is not exactly about gender.

But also… I decided a while ago that Etho was a trans guy; he transitioned before the era of magical nanites, via hormones and surgery. I don't think most people are aware of this other than Bdubs and probably Martyn. Etho generally is unusually private about his medical stuff in a story where most of the rest of the characters have given their employer a DNA sample and Etho does considers this to be Personal Medical Stuff and not something he particularly wants to talk about for many reasons. I think initially it probably started out as "ugh this is private and uncomfortable and a lot of people in my chosen line of work are sexist," and turned into "well I really don't want to talk about my private life now that the thing everyone knows about me is that time I nuked Europa." Most of the characters I haven't mentioned here are from Earth, and Grian spent his adolescence and young adulthood on Earth, so he kind of counts too.)

Mars was settled by techbros (Well. Tek clones. Look, the pun was not intentional but it should have been, I'm ashamed of myself) and is fairly regressive, but also very corporate; the big companies have offices everywhere and often have to play nice with other planets' existing anti-discrimination laws. They are also much more likely to be policed on this than some little Mercurian mining concern. So the Martian authorities/Martian culture disapproves, but it can't stop you from being trans or nonbinary -- and especially with the advent of easy transition via nanotech, they would prefer not to regulate this technology because Mars holds its identity as being at the cutting edge of technology dear and does not want to regulate any technology if it will limit profits.

Because of this, despite the cultural baggage, Mars is where you want to go if you want to do something really unusual with your body. It may not be as safe -- it may be entirely experimental, in fact -- but you will find someone who thinks they can do it and will charge you money for it. There are a lot of lurid tabloid horror stories, though, and if someone can pull it off safely on Mars it'll probably be available on Earth in a few years.

Legally, Mars, very grudgingly, has three gender markers (male, female, other) and it is a pain in the ass for people to change them, but also, any Earth citizens who work on Mars or regularly travel to Mars often enough to have a Martian ID is is by default "other" unless they change it intentionally, and there are a lot of Terrans living and working on Mars, so people with an "other" designation are generally unremarkable and often cis. There are also a lot of Martians who have lived and worked on Earth for a while, so attitudes are shifting slowly but surely towards "you know, we could take more people's money if we were less shitty. Maybe we want to be richer."

(As for Martian characters, we have Tango and Impulse, although I haven't decided if Impulse is Martian or Europan descended from Martian settlers. Both of them are cis guys, although Tango is a weird case because he's a clone and there's a lot of pressure in his family to be like the shitty guy he's a clone of. That said, he's rejected this in other ways and his favorite relative is another clone he thinks of as his aunt, who got disowned, so I think he's aware that he does not have to be cis, and he is anyway.)

Most of the other worlds where humans live were settled by primarily Terran, Venusian, or Martian colonists and vary accordingly! The further out you go and the less contact a world has with other parts of human civilization, the more likely it is to have ideas about gender that are very different from their planet(s) of origin, especially in cases where people chose to leave because they had their own ideas about what kind of society they wanted to build and in cases where people settled on planets with environments very unlike Earth's inhabited ecosystems, so there's probably a lot of variety out there.

[greycappedjester]

Preview Bonanza

Hey, guys, here both as an update and since I just got an ask for a preview of Hq at Hogwarts (which I'm now using as an excuse to give one for all, lol), here's snippets from all my current ongoing projects. Some of them I know have had a lot longer waits than I anticipated so hopefully this is reassuring that the updates ARE acutally coming and (with all hope) comparatively soon. As always, all of the scenes may be changed slightly when I'm editing

(None of these are in any particular order other than fandom)

--------------

1.) Keiji Akaashi and the Department of Mysteries

Ch. 9

Post Date: Oct. 1-3

“I’m not my family.” It was all Suga could say.

“That’s not--,” Hinata stopped, cutting himself off with a sigh. 

He closed his eyes, shaking his head once before opening them again.

“Nevermind. You don’t get it.” He turned in the direction Oikawa went. “And I have to go. We’ll talk later.”

Suga watched him go and felt like his feet were rooted to the floor.

-------

2.) Weirdness With Witches

Ch. 3/the final chapter

Post Date: ASAP, this one is almost done, I'm just currently in the middle of traveling for best friend's wedding and trying to find time to finish and post it. Expect it within the next few days depending on when I have free time

Iwaizumi tried the handle. “It’s locked.”

Suga hummed, bending down to study the trail closer. “If we’re continuing monster hunting, one of us should really learn how to pick locks.”

“Oh! I’ll do it!” Bokuto volunteered.

“Yeah, I really don’t think we’ll run into monster hunting a third time…or further contribute to our crime skills.” Iwaizumi looked down at Suga. “What is it?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Suga admitted, inspecting the white powder on his fingers.

“Lick it and find out!” Bokuto shouted.

“Do not lick it.” Iwaizumi glared. “What if it is drugs?”

“I wasn’t going to lick it,” Suga grumbled, sounding very much like someone who had been at least considering licking it.

-------

3.) Call Me Your Home At Night

“I think my brother’s trying to kill me,” Atsumu said, face dead serious over the video call. 

Hinata nodded sagely. “Yeah, siblings are like that.” 

“Really?” Atsumu perked up. “Yours, too?”

Hinata considered.

“....No, actually Natsu loves me.” Hinata felt a teeny tiny bit of sympathy watching Atsumu groan; but not enough to stop from adding. “She convinced her school to start their very own volleyball team! Isn’t that amazing? Ugh, she’s going to be so great once she starts high school!” 

Hinata wasn’t saying that this officially replaced baby Natsu babbling a barely recognizable version of his name as her first word for Top Best Natsu-Related Moment...but, it did. And it should.

-------

4.) After the Fall of Olympus

“Penny for your thoughts?” 

“Sorry, I only take credit," Dick mumbles on automatic.

Donna shoves him. “Seriously, Dick, what’s going on in that head of yours?”

He sips at his beer, frowning when he finds it’s gone flat and stale.

“A lot of things,” he answers finally. “The team, I’ve been thinking about the team a lot. And Jason, of course. Alfred, Tim, Barbara. Lian. Mera and Artur. And...and my parents. Wally….Bruce. Like I said, a lot of things. Probably too many.”

And fire and the smell of burnt hair. Of bullet casings laying in the sun. Of a bitter taste in champagne and hands with whispers and--

And a single gunshot.

The stale beer does nothing to wash away the taste. He tries anyway.

-------

5.) Flash Facts of Bart Allen

“Really,” Len drawls skeptically, “and you’re just trusting a bunch of criminals to take care of one of your own?”

“Well,” Nightwing pauses, considering, “someone I respected told me once that the only way any of us could truly take steps forward was to find a way to move together. So, consider it a sign of trust or maybe change, whichever you’d prefer to take it as.”

Len scoffs. “Some hero told you that, didn’t they?”

“How’d you guess?”

“Because it’s naive and hopefully optimistic.” 

Nightwing laughs. “Yeah, I guess he was.” He tilts his head. “But, Barry was also a good judge of character. His grandson is too. So, I’ve got some pretty good recommendations to go off.”

Len narrows his eyes. 

Of course, it had to be him.

“Besides,” Nightwing continues, “from what I hear Bart’s one of yours, too.”

-------

6.) In Spite of Ourselves

“Easy, huh,” Senkuu said.

“I prefer working smarter, not harder.”

“You prefer not to work at all.”

“That, too,” Gen agreed cheerfully, slinking forward to lean against Senkuu. “But, I’m pretty sure when you say it, it’s slander. I could sue, you know?”

Senkuu smirked, leaning against him, too. “Technically, I’m pretty sure as village chief, I’ve got judicial power, too, so good luck with that.”

“Mmm,” Gen shook his head sadly, “absolute power really does corrupt absolutely. So quick!”

-------

7.) The Past is a Mirror

“You worry too much,” Ye Qiu assures breezily. “I’m sure I can handle some rookie training. Officer Bao, throw me a spear, won’t you?”

Han Wenqing steps forward. “Wait--”

“Sure thing, Boss!” Bao Rongxing calls right before he throws a fully sharpened training spear directly into the man’s hands--sorry, directly into their officially recognized with a high risk of escape and who absolutely should not be armed captive’s hands.

Ye Qiu catches it easily and Han Wenqing sighs, a second away from just throwing his hands up.

Fine. Apparently this is happening. Why the fuck not?

[kaesaaurelia]

Cursed 4:30 am thought: TPIAM spaceship dating site where you have to fill out your "shipping boundaries" -- which systems you regularly travel to/within, and what kind of cargo you carry because of course you are a cargo ship :) every ship is a cargo ship :) :)

(Scar is so tired of cargo ships.)

[kaesaaurelia]

Silly TPIAM snippet, wherein Grian showcases that he was the type of premed who carefully forgot every single thing he learned in undergrad biology that wasn't immediately relevant to his desired career path.

Lunch with Mumbo and Pearl cheers him up significantly. Mumbo seems a little concerned that they haven't seen much of him, but Grian just says he's had his hands full setting things up with Scar and attending to a few implant issues.

"Is he all right?" Mumbo asks, sounding worried.

"'Course he is, he's fine," says Grian, taking another forkful of salad.

"Why?"

"Well, when I didn't get the usual Mumbo, I'm bored, entertain me call from you during the rebalancing I was a little concerned."

"I wasn't," says Pearl. "Scar was talking your ear off about his movies, wasn't he? Or squid, maybe," she says. "He was asking me loads about my work with squid and pseudosquid."

"Yeah, he talked loads about squid," says Grian, although for the life of him he can't remember anything Scar said about them other than that they looked kind of like Pac-Man ghosts. It wasn't as though he hadn't watched Scar work on his atrium design, but if he'd said things it had been more about color theory and composition, and Grian had to admit that, while he'd liked watching Scar work, he hadn't really been listening to the words much. Once, Scar had asked him a question -- advice on what he thought looked best -- and that had been a deep compliment, but Grian had wasted it because he'd been leaning against Scar, drowsing slightly, enjoying the warmth of him and the smell of him and the sound of his voice more than the actual words. "Er. Pretty interesting stuff," he says now, blandly.

"Are you all right?" Pearl asks, frowning.

"What? Yeah, yeah, I'm fine, why?" Grian asks.

"I just don't think I've ever heard you feign interest in mollusks before," says Pearl.

"Yeah, but squid aren't mollusks, they're like…" Grian frowns. He tries to remember what squid are. "They're like octopuses," he says firmly. "And, uh. Those other ones, with the shells --"

"They're cephalopods, which are mollusks, Grian," says Pearl.

"I don't think that's right," says Grian, although he has a sinking suspicion Pearl, who has studied a fair amount of sea stars and sea slugs and other boneless creepy crawlies, will know better than Grian, who's never had much interest in anything without a spine and a proper brain, wrinkles and all. Still, if he concedes the argument he will be wrong much faster, which is bad. "Aren't cephalopods related to, like… conches?"

"Which are mollusks," says Pearl.

"But those aren't, like… bivalves?"

"Which are mollusks," says Pearl again.

"I thought mollusks were snails," says Grian, because he's sure about that.

"They are!" Pearl insists.

"How can everything be a mollusk?" Grian demands.

"It's not!" Pearl replies despairingly.

"Well, Scar didn't mention any of that," says Grian, "he was just talking about… y'know, colors, and stuff."

"What about colors?" Pearl asks.

Grian tries to dredge up anything from his memory, but sadly, the crab traps have caught no squid. "Er. I think he said something about putting animatronic lobsters in. But that sort of counts, because those are definitely mollusks."

Pearl sighs. "They aren't, but if it'd make you feel better we can pretend."

[kaesaaurelia]

This year for MCYT Battleship I wrote 14 fics and created 1 webweave!

I'll be posting the other stuff in a separate post because a little over half of what I wrote was Scarian, so here's the Scar/Grian stuff (and one Scar-centric fic in an AU that is mostly Scar/Grian.

Most of these fics are NSFW and some have other archive warnings. Please mind the tags as the tone varies WIDELY from fic to fic.

What if 3rd Life Scarian, but they're 1920s gangsters in Chicago?

A series of four fics (I am probably going to write one more) in the required-by-Illinois-statute AU Written By Kaesa That's Set in Prohibition-Era Chicago. These are NSFW and contain Major Character Death and Graphic Depictions of Violence. I am going to do a separate post for recs and things I received (probably several) but worth noting here that there is incredible fanart for the first fic, which can be found here on AO3 or here on Tumblr.

I also added THREE fics to my space AU, "this place is a message." In this AU, Scar is a brainship pilot (his brain is physically plugged into the spaceship and he pilots it as if it's his own body) and Grian is his neurologist who he's having an affair with.

As the pilot of Miracle Cruise's flagship space vessel, the Hawk's Eye, Scar has had to handle a lot of nonsense from passengers, but the reality show being filmed aboard may be the greatest test yet of his patience, impulse control, and ability to get out of being blackmailed for stealing passengers' wallets.

This one is Scar & Bdubs gen, set prior to Scar getting a job with a space exploration outfit. It's rated M for trashy reality-show-typical sexual situations, though Scar himself is not involved in them.

Halfway through a voyage lasting longer than one year, Farlands Planetary Systems policy states that there should be a celebration of some kind, which the whole crew must be defrosted and present for.

Pre-relationship Scarian fluff and space worldbuilding -- in a literal sense, kind of, because this also heavily features the environment-building duties I've given pilots in this AU.

Grian wakes slowly, warm and cozy by the time he's fully cognizant of where he is. "Scar?" he asks, putting a hand to the front of the cryopod. "How are you doing?" The cryopod slides open, and Grian floats out. He has only a moment to feel the chill of the pilot's capsule on his skin before one of Scar's pseudopods snakes itself around Grian's chest and waist. "There you are," says Scar happily, his voice almost seeming to surround Grian. "I missed you. Did you miss me?"

Set after my current WIP Seeing Stars, this is two chapters of fluffy porn, one with Scar in the ship using a mining robot to fuck Grian and the other about Grian taking Scar out of the ship and taking care of him both medically and, you know, by getting him off. NSFW featuring a doctor/patient relationship. Micro/macro (for the first chapter) and light medical kink/dehumanization roleplay (for the second).

I also wrote two completely standalone Scarian fics in Minecraft settings:

There's still an awful lot of squawking from outside, but Scar thinks they're safe for now. He had emerged from Rusty only to be nearly murdered by a large mechanical bird, its red repeater eyes flashing as it honked at him. The flock had not been far behind. They'd chased him off a cliff and into the river, where he found Grian, also pursued by evil robot waterfowl.

One of the tropes we had to hit was something called "Soulmate Goose of Enforcement," a concept I'd never heard of, where basically instead of a tattoo or a red string or whatever, soulmates are brought together by a horrible goose. So here's a Hermitcraft Season 11 setting sex comedy where Mumbo's redstone geese come to life and harangue people who were soulmates in Double Life. NSFW and while it's technically Fuck or Die, it's Hermitcraft so they'll respawn and they both pretty quickly agree they want to fuck.

Grian doesn't look like himself today -- he looks like one of the shadow people -- but Scar is pretty sure it's him. The thing may have talons and a hood over its face, but there's something about the way it moves... "Hey, Grian," he says, as it's finishing checking the knots on Scar's wrists. The thing freezes, and then seems to look away. The creeping, uncanny feeling of being watched eases for a moment. Oh yeah, that's definitely Grian. "Been a while," says Scar conversationally. "Didn't Gem kill you? Somebody killed you. I don't think it was me, but everything's a little jumbled up in the old noggin these days."

Secret Life Scar is visited by Watcher Grian -- or is it several Grians? (This one was originally titled "that's too many Grians, put some back" but that falsely implied Scar had any control over the number of Grians currently tormenting him.) NSFW, Dubious Consent, heavy painplay. This one is fucked-up!

[kaesaaurelia]

In which Scar terrorizes Martyn and Grian learns about steganography.

(Also there's tentacles.)