A place for short snippets of OC writing. Largely whump, so expect angst and violence, but also kindness. Follows and likes from Chiroptera Jones. She/her pronouns, early thirties. You can call me LJ or Chiro.
A masterpost of all my writing that has masterposts! I mostly run to fantasy, heavy on the character relationships and angst.
Long things:
Ruler and Empress - Probably my most popular, this starts rough but gets fleshed out rapidly. The monarch of a defeated nation contends with the cruel whims of their conqueror. Gilded cage, sadistic choices, vicarious punishment.
Illiam and Helis - Two old friends from university meet up on the opposite sides of a war. Fantasy bigotry, morally grey/sympathetic villain.
Galen and Everet - Set in the world of Dragon Age in the mage-templar war, a templar helps out a mage and deserts from his corrupt company. Sympathetic captor, drug addiction.
TJ and Danny - Set in Wildfae’s Pathverse, the handler of an oppressed telepath becomes disillusioned with his job. Sympathetic captor, institutionalised whump.
Consort Rill - This is currently being turned into a novel! So it’s not going to be here anymore.
First of the Hollow - Our protagonist swears themselves in servitude to an ancient forest spirit, and bad times ensue. First person narration with body horror/gore.
Short things:
Torin - old disconnected pieces about a lost winged boy. Kept as a scientific curiosity, wing whump, sympathetic captor.
Dissonance - Fanfic for the book Ocean’s Echo, containing involuntary telepathy, forced mindlink, enemies to friends.
Keldin’s story - Angsty bodyguard/Prince romance, first person.
Ordered to kneel as punishment or as a show of deference.
Shoved physically to the ground by hands on their shoulders, maybe a kick to the back of the knee.
Picking themself up off the ground but only getting as far as hands and knees.
Crawling because they haven't got the strength to stand anymore.
Dropping to their knees from exhaustion or despair.
Personal space.
Casually invading it.
Uninvited touch - from the deeply creepy to something as simple as a firm hand on the shoulder.
Standing too close - especially if taller or otherwise physically stronger.
Conversely, hurrying to get out of someone's way.
Eye contact.
Staring someone down. Who is the first to look away?
Averting eyes for one's social superiors. Trying to de-escalate by avoiding eye contact.
Too frightened or ashamed to look someone in the eye.
Insisting that someone maintain eye contact while you're talking to them. Insisting that someone never look you in the eye.
Singling someone out just by looking at them.
More generally, Attention.
The room falls quiet when they walk in.
Who cuts in, and who gets talked over. Ignoring those who are beneath your attention.
The excited attention given to the object of respect and idolization.
The careful, wary focus given to a potential threat.
Deliberately attending to something else to appear less threatening. Deliberately burying oneself in something else to avoid attracting unwanted attention.
Codified status behaviours.
Bowing to one's superiors. Bonus points if there are differentiated kinds of bowing for different status differentials.
Soldiers coming to attention when a superior officer comes.
Saluting. Who greets whom first?
Serving food in a particular order.
Standing up when a respected person enters the room.
Non-verbal threats.
Just resting a hand on a weapon, or perhaps even just near a weapon.
Cracking knuckles or rolling shoulders. Clenched fists. The little come-get-some-then life of the chin.
Stepping from a conversational stance into one that's balance for fight or flight.
Pointing a weapon at someone. Casually brushing aside a weapon.
Conversely, de-escalation and surrender.
Open hands, spread in front of them. Hands above head.
(Raised slowly, transitioning from the simple whoa-calm-down gesture to full on surrender as the situation gets tenser.)
Going still. Slow, careful movements being sure to keep hands where they can be seen. Laying down weapons.
Hands on head. Getting down on the floor. Deliberately making oneself vulnerable to prove non-hostile (or non-resisting) intent.
Alternately, deliberately showing "vulnerability" to demonstrate how little of a threat you consider the other person.
The slouch of villainy. Open posture, casual, relaxed in the face of apparent danger.
Casually putting weapons away or turning one's back, confident that they won't do anything.
A character can vastly expand their area of influence by laying a hand on a table, for example. If you're standing on opposite sides of a large table, and one of you puts your hand down, that can symbolically take you up into the other party's personal space in a much subtler and more deniable way than actually getting up in their face.
This can be used equally well to convey affection or threat.
All right, hold on – is there anyone in this room who wasn't grown in a tube by a shadowy quasi-governmental conspiracy as a living weapon? Anyone at all?
Team Leader saying "Leave. That's an order." hits twice as hard, when they're the kind of person who hates hiearchies and avoids giving direct commands.
What helped me write trauma better is remembering that the nervous system learns predictions. If danger used to come after quiet, calm can feel threatening. If kindness used to come with a price, kindness can feel suspicious. So healing is not just “they know they’re safe now.” Healing is the slow, annoying, deeply unfair process of teaching the body that the old prediction is not always the present truth.
Genuinely one of the best things in fiction is letting a character have a real ugly cry. Get out of here with that ‘single silent tear’ bullshit, you cowards. I want the catharsis of an actual emotional breakdown! Make it noisy, make it wet and snotty and gross! Make it ugly and unfiltered and raw!
it's good enrichment for The Character(s) when one of their friends gets possessed and they have to find some way to bring them back. great friendgroup bonding activity. especially if they have to do some exorcism bullshit and it's traumatizing for everyone involved and there's collapsing and sobbing afterward. great thing for The Character(s) to do. highly recommend.
i agree so much about making your blorbos pathetic but i do fear that many take this to mean 'make them more traditionally feminine/submissive' which genuinely hurts my soul. make your blorbos pathetic in interesting character-oriented ways. understand their neuroses and turn the dials up to eleven. juxtapose the parts of life they handle extremely well with the parts of their lives that make them eat shit. make them angry. make them cold. make them pave their own way to hell while building walls preventing them from seeing any other way. please i'm begging you no more pathetic as an euphemism for bottoming im gonna mclose it.
The Fallen Angel (El ángel caído), (Detail), (2007), by Arantzazu Martinez (Spanish, born 1977), oil on linen, 114.3 x 73.7 cm (45 x 29 inches), European Museum of Modern Art (MEAM), Barcelona
I’d like to propose a sister trope to Character Who Is A Living Weapon: Character Who Is A Living Toy. They might not be a literal toy, it doesn’t have to be a Pinocchio situation, but they were a character made with the purpose to play and entertain and distract, and often have stories surrounding questions of purpose or identity, especially when they’re unable to fulfill this role. A toy knows, fundamentally, that it’s meant to be played with, so what does a toy do when it no longer plays?
Ralsei Deltarune isn’t a literal toy, but he conceptualizes himself as an object meant to smile and host tea parties, which functionally makes him a doll with a complex about it. Spinel Steven Universe is a living toy. Caine The Amazing Digital Circus is a living toy. These are the only examples I can think of, but I’m sure there’s more
One hundred and fifty hands type on consoles; the rest of its hands are occupied about the station, keeping systems operational. Most of its voiceboxes have been repurposed away, but a few speak into microphones. The message leaves the station as a shout, fades to a whisper over truly staggering distances.
It had not been conscious of the first ninety humans. How could it? They were the materials it was conscious with. Even later, the first investigation - it hadn’t understood what they were, or what it did. Only growth, hunger and need. Only that it existed.
It took the next group, thirty strong and all the way from the Core, for it to understand that other things existed. To look outside the station’s metal cocoon. Human biology is ill equipped for that, which lead it to instruments, computers, and finally language...
---
Sam jams his finger on the button, scanning through the comm channels. Nothing but the litany from the station.
He wonders if it’s deliberately drowning out communication from the broken Core. Some of his squadmates thought the station might be aware enough for strategy. Sam doesn’t like that, but the alternative…
Text scrolls. Distorted voices flicker. Don’t come here STAY AWAY cannot PLEASE SORRY…
Someone should have destroyed it months ago. But the Core Empire didn’t care about one distant station and its ninety-odd indentured workers. It cared a little when its scientists vanished, but by then it had bigger problems.
Problems like Sam.
He still wears his Core uniforms; they just cut off and replaced the insignia. The hasty paint job on his stolen fighter is already peeling off. Lazy. Finch would’ve disapproved.
No indenture microchip and meagre rations for Sam, no exile to the edges of known space. The rebellion changed little for him - he was well-fed and safe, and still is, as long as he gets behind the guns.
Ungrateful, an internal voice mutters. You bit the hand that fed you.
Untrustworthy, another spits, and it sounds like that dissident who wouldn’t unmask during negotiations. The enemy. Do we need the Core’s secondhand jackboots?
Once Sam learned of the station’s fate, it almost seemed fitting. The refineries and factories were burning, Sam’s meal slips and water allotment became enviable and despised luxuries. Hunger and horror flooded the news, every week an outpost in flames or just dark. Every week, another mission in his fighter.
…DON’T COME go away sorry sorry sorry STAY AWAY…
So sure, a station’s population could get eaten by some kind of alien goo. And circle the wilds forever, spewing out desperate echoes of their voices. Why not. It fit. Almost less of a surprise than Sam’s CO turning off the cameras to ask after his loyalties.
Sam hasn’t spoken to anybody in weeks - not since taking his fighter from the hangar without orders. That’s probably what makes him lift his hand to the microphone instead.
“Why not?” he asks.
The channel he’s on stops dead. Sam wonders if all the others have too, but he doesn’t check. Scrolling nothing pushes the last words off his screen, and the fighter’s weapons aren’t in range yet, but his hand brushes them.
Finally, words. You are not SAFE be safe be safe too close GO AWAY sorry
Garbled nonsense. It doesn’t mean anything. He asks anyway.
“What are you?”
I don’t know.
“What do you mean, don’t know?”
I did not exist NOW exist I AM MYSELF I do not know.
Sam grits his teeth and asks the stupid, pointless question.
Sam leans forward, eyes on the screen. “Where are they?”
---
It had tried to avoid consuming the last two groups. The realisations took months but in its memory they come blindingly fast, stacked one atop another, until it reeled.
That other minds, other selves, existed - that each small darting autonomous creature it had absorbed was one - that more were HERE, now, tapping and cutting at its metal shell. It had tried.
The final fifteen allowed it to put many things together.
Now its many eyes and fingers read the station’s instruments to determine that today’s newcomer is just one. Desperation mixes with the thrill of communication - it has never spoken with another! What must it do, to preserve that?
It agonises over the question. The newcomer doesn’t want the location of the eyes, fingers, digestive tract, muscles of ‘Finch’, does it? They are here. But it understands the real question.
Its twitching tendrils and limbs draw in close to its bulk. An unfamiliar instinct.
FINCH is dead.
---
It takes hours to reach firing range. Sam ought to turn off comms and wait in silence, but he doesn’t. “You’ll be dead soon, too,” he spits at the screen. “I hope you know I’m coming. I hope you know why.”
DID NOT MEAN sorry
“I don’t care! That doesn’t bring them back!”
Was NOT my choice did not CHOOSE to exist TO KILL to exist
“What do you want, me to feel sorry for you?”
Want to live WANT YOU TO LIVE
Sam scoffs. “Well, you living killed them! If you’re that sorry, you should want to stop! I’ll help.”
Will THAT bring FINCH back?
“That’s not the point!”
Did nothing DIE for you?
The question slides down Sam’s throat like ice. “No!” The rations crumple in his hands as the factory explosion plays, over and over. He suits up and gets in the cockpit anyway. Inner city parasite. “Not like you!”
I choose NO more death.
“You can’t choose!” He wishes he had something to throw at the peeling paint on the overhead locker; the Core insignia showing red underneath. “You are made of death. Nothing you choose can take it back.”
