#incidentally Ocean's Echo is good and you should read it

[tendertenebrosity]

Not sure if any of you have read Ocean's Echo, but this is fanfic for it! Surit is a cinnamon roll and I wouldn't have him any other way, but this is an 'assholes-slowly-learning-not-to-be-assholes' blog, so.

I wouldn't get attached to these guys in their current incarnation because this is likely to become original fiction and then all of this will become noncanon, but it might as well go here in the meantime.

“It will feel like a key in a lock,” the pilot in the instructional video had said. “Or like one of those telescoping rods - I don’t know, it could feel like something totally different to you. But you’ll feel it click. Might be difficult if the reader has strong walls - sometimes it’s hard for them to drop them, but they have drugs for if that happens.”

“All right,” the medical technician said, pushing the scanner wand on its articulated arm aside. She managed to look bored; how many of these did she oversee? “When you’re ready, sir.”

Davi moved in as if he was going to write the person in front of him, but - all of him? He tried to encompass too much of the mind at once, was pushed back by slippery walls and lost his grip.

“Could you try to drop your defences, please?” he asked, distantly, all of his attention focused internally. Anxiety and insecurity gnawed at him. He wasn’t doing it properly. It should be done by now. It hadn’t sounded like a difficult procedure in the instructional vid.

The reader - Davi’s reader, as soon as he managed to actually do the procedure - took a deep breath that hitched in the middle. He looked small, even now that the guard had left; shorter than Davi, hair cropped close, the featureless prison scrubs loose and faded in stark contrast to Davi’s smart uniform. The ID cuff on his left wrist had a wooden gender token on it, plainer and somehow even less like jewellery than Davi’s button.

“I don’t…. Do I have defences up?”

Davi gave him a suspicious look, but the reader looked honestly bewildered behind his neat little glasses. No formal training, huh.

“Yes, you do,” Davi told him. They wouldn’t have stopped a determined probe, but this wasn’t a normal probe and they made things just slippery enough that he couldn’t get purchase. “If you can relax and be open, this will be a lot easier.”

“I’ll - I’ll try.”

And he did, Davi could feel it, the walls softening and thinning and the mind turning its face up to him and -

It wasn’t a click, but he could see why you’d describe it like that. Like the threads of a screw-top jar engaging. Like one of those intricately carved puzzle boxes that needed to be moved in a very specific way before they opened up. More than anything, the sense that two things that were supposed to fit together in a whole had finally found the orientation in which they did. Davi reached out and pushed those pieces together firmly.

And suddenly there was a presence, filling the tiny interview room, warm and alive and close enough that Davi felt like he was crammed up against the walls moving with its breathing. Breathing with it.

The reader’s knees buckled. Davi was somehow there as soon as it happened, to catch the slight frame in his arms and stop him tumbling to the hard metal floor. He’d known that was going to happen because the body was his, in some weird way. Part of him.

The technician spun in her chair, pressed a few buttons. “Successful sync,” she said. “All vitals looking good.”

No, Davi wanted to say. Wait. They can’t all be good. If they’re good why does this feel…

What did it feel like?

He still felt like Davi. He was just Davi with… something else stapled into the middle of his senses. It was difficult to talk around it, difficult to think around it.

The reader’s fingers moved against the chest of his uniform shirt. Stiff coarse fabric, the line of piping hard underneath his thumb - wait, what?

The fingers closed up as if to grasp him, but then flattened to push him away. Sensation, emotion, something poured out of the unfamiliar presence in Davi’s head. He struggled to name it but it was… bad. Like fighting against a torrent of dark water.

You’re in control of this, he told himself. You’re the architect. This is under your control. Get a grip.

He set his mental shoulders against the deluge, tried to rise above it. He made himself push the reader’s body away from his - not you, that is not you, keep all of that to yourself - prop the reader back up, set him on his feet. The reader was looking around the room, blinking, looking as stunned as Davi probably was.

What have you done? What have you DONE?

The thought arrived in his head, not so much in words but more the impression, but still crystal clear and foreign. Blank horror.

“You should probably head back to your quarters and rest,” the technician told him. “It’ll take a while for you both to settle into it.” She retrieved something from one of the cupboards in the med-bay - a rectangular packet of cloth. She slapped a packet of medication tabs on top of it and held it out to Davi. “Standard issue equipment for Agent Thirty-two; you shouldn’t need these, but just in case. Come back here tomorrow, or sooner if there are any issues. Do you need help getting him to your quarters?”

Davi didn’t question why she was giving the pack of uniforms to him and not to the reader, swaying and wavering in the middle of the room. Even if the other man hadn’t been on the brink of falling over or throwing up, he was Davi’s responsibility now.

He would always be Davi’s responsibility.

Oh Guidance lights what have I done…

Davi shook off the thought, exerted what he hoped was firm but gentle pressure on the alien presence in his head until it receded a little. He stepped forward and took the packet.

“No, that will be fine,” he said. “Our quarters aren’t far, and we can walk without assistance. Thank you.”

The technician gave him an odd look as he tucked it under his arm.

“Need a tissue, sir?”

“What?” Davi put a hand up to his face. To his complete surprise, his eyes were streaming with tears. He hadn’t even noticed.

The reader - Agent Thirty-two - Saelin Cor - made another small noise from behind Davi, a pained inhale. He was lifting one hand up to his temple, fingers pushing through his hair, and Davi was suddenly convinced that it was supposed to be much longer than it was, that having it short and prickly was strange and unfamiliar still.

Davi hadn’t needed to see him to know any of that.

“I’m fine,” he said roughly. Panic fluttered at the edges of his mind - what have I done what have we done what is this - and if not all of it receded when he shoved it away, well, it would improve. Nobody was expecting them to be out there at the bridge tomorrow. There was time to figure this out.

He blotted one side of his face with the heel of his hand, and turned away. “We’re fine. Come on - Agent Thirty-two. Let’s go home.”

Continued here.

[margindoodles2407]

Muahaha. Here we go

I love it when you find things I must have been thinking about subconsiously because I'm going to be completely honest with you. The things you said about the placement of his tear and hand and the five stars on either side were COMPLETELY incidental but uhhhh actually nope, I am stealing those, they were totally intentional, yep, I did that on purpose. (See part of the reason I asked you to do this was to see just how many things you'd pick up on that weren't intentionally there. Also you weren't correct about the background flowers but the reasonings behind your guesses actually made me tear up a little bit)

I am so impressed you were able to read and translate the aurebesh around his ring. Like I wrote the kriffing things and I can barely read them. Good job o7

Excellent work picking up on the dominoes, there are six of them because I was trying to make them look proportional and evenly spaced and the best way to do that was to have six of them. I should have thought that through first

Okay. ACTUAL THINGS NOW

The three flowers at the top are edelweiss (one of my personal favorite flowers also), traditionally regarded as a symbol of high courage and chivalry.

The flowers in the background are actually asphodel, which for thousands of years have been a symbol of mourning and death.

The oak leaves, in the bottom (cause that's the only place they would fit), are what I was asking you about yesterday. They represent bravery and honor.

The arrows I have because,,, well,,, bro was. Kind of. Shot. Now as to why there are three of them. Well. Uh. *checks notes* Fox's Coruscant-Issue bow shoots three arrows at once. There we go (I promise it's more eloquent and sad than this. I use humor to cope okay)

His CHAIN! Okay so I learned not to assume things with the Commando Wings post but! Just in case you didn't catch it. Here's the post on Clone Ring Culture. Anyway. The links on his hand are painted to commemorate fallen brothers; the blue are for Echo, Hardcase, and Hevy (because i fully believe that had hevy survived he would have been adopted by rex right alongside his vod'ike), and the green are for Cutup and Droidbait (green cause that was the color of their training armor on Kamino). He *does* have more links painted but, again, this is a highly stylized drawing and there were only so many I could add in one go. Also, because Tup's death was so sudden, he never had the chance to paint a link for him.

And then, the background. Colored in the hues of twilight, as his death was only one step closer to the fall of the Republic. (And, as you can see here, I am a huuuge sucker for the motif of the Twilight of the Republic.)

And also the Deleted Scenes (aka things and motifs i was going to add or considered adding but didn't)

Instead of oak leaves, I was also considering: Bluebells (loyalty), White Chrysanthemum (truth, loyalty), Gladiolus (my beloved, i was *this* close to having it in the final cut but it literally would not fit into the frame; strength of character, honor, conviction), Holly (foresight), and/or Lionsheart Flowers (bravery, duh)

Hourglasses. You know. Cause the whole arc's an exercise in running out of time

The actual. Uh. Arrow Wound (stylized obviously). I scrapped this one cause with the position his hand's in it would have blocked it and I did NOT feel like moving and redrawing that hand

More of an ocean motif ;-; Especially spyglasses of somekind because A) he's the lookout aboard the RSS Resolute and B) Foresight

Belladonna berries. For Reasons (tm)

Human Hearts. Specifially his

This one is less of a gut-punch but just. A spiky aureole around the ring, because *sinister* reasons, but I couldn't figure out how to draw it

I am not kidding by the way when I say this took me almost a week

You were not supposed to be a prophet. You were born and bred to be a soldier- your native tongue is the language of clashing steel and death rattles. But here you are, thrust into this role as though you were some ill-fated grandson of Cassandra, uttering insanities that no one believes. Good legionary, you sleep among the stars now. I hope the afterlife is kinder to you than the Archipelago ever was.

AKA your best friend @seeking-elsewhither watches THAT arc, and so you spend the next five days slaving over perhaps the most ambitious piece of art you've ever crafted with pen and colored pencil

I've been told my highly-stylized artstyle looks like stained glass before, so I decided to play wayyyy into that and just. Make a stained glass. Of Fives. And of course cause it's stained glass it has to be HFSW

I will do an analysis of the piece eventually because there are like. Twenty layers of symbolism in this alone. But- and here I am speaking specifically to May- before I do I want you to tell me which ones you can pick out on your own. A fun little game >:D

And now, have a face detail and also the lineart, cause I think it's good lineart, and also a black and white version for funsies :)

[thisblogisalsoboundforglory]

WHAT I HAVE BEEN READING LATELY

Kage Baker’s Company Series

In the Garden of Iden

Sky Coyote

Mendoza in Hollywood

The Graveyard Game

The Life of the World to Come

The Children of the Company

The Machine's Child

The Sons of Heaven

The Empress of Mars

Not Less than Gods

Nell Gwynne's On Land and At Sea

Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers

Gods and Pawns

In the Company of Thieves

Ø  Science Fiction written by a woman with Asperger’s. Wildly uneven. Main protagonist is female, but there are lots of POV characters, male and female.

Ø  Big ideas.

Ø  Lots of adventure, some action.

Ø   Small doses of humor.

 Neil Gaiman

Good Omens (with Sir Terry Pratchett)

Neverwhere

Stardust

American Gods

Anansi Boys

The Graveyard Book

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Ø  Neil’s books are a road trip with Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and a baggie full of sativa.

Ø  Ideas are incidental. The Milieu’s in charge.

Ø  Adventure happens whether you like it or not.

Ø   Cosmic humor. The joke’s on us.

 Connie Willis’s Oxford Time Travel Series

Firewatch

Doomsday Book

To Say Nothing of the Dog (and the novel that inspired it – Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat)

Blackout/All Clear

Assorted:

The Last of the Winnebagos

Ø  Connie loves her historical research. Blackout/All Clear actually lasts as long as the Blitz, but anything in the Oxford Time Travel series is worth reading. Doomsday Book reads like prophecy in retrospect.

Ø  One idea: Hi! This is the human condition! How fucking amazing is that?!?

Ø  Gut-punch adventure with extra consequences. Background action.

Ø   I’d have to say that Doomsday Book is the funniest book about the black death I’ve ever read, which isn’t saying much. To Say Nothing of the Dog is classic farce, though. Girl’s got range.

Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash (After the apocalypse, the world will be ruled by Home-Owners Associations. Be afraid.)

Cryptonomicon

Anathem

Seveneves

Ø  Neal writes big, undisciplined, unfocused books that keep unfolding in your mind for months after you’ve read them. He’s a very guy-type writer, in spite of a female protagonist or two. Seveneves, be warned, starts out brilliant and devolves into extreme meh.

Ø  Big. Fucking. Ideas.

Ø  Battles, crashes, fistfights, parachute jumps, nuclear powered motorcycles and extreme gardening action. Is there an MPAA acronym for that?

Ø   Humor dry enough to be garnished with two green olives on a stick.

  Christopher Moore

Pine Cove Series:

Practical Demonkeeping

The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror (Okay, yeah, Christmas. But Christmas with zombies, so that’s all right.)

Fluke (Not strictly Pine Cove, but in the same universe. Ever wonder why whales sing? They’re ordering Pastrami sandwiches. I’m not kidding.)

Death Merchant Chronicles:

A Dirty Job

Secondhand Souls (Best literary dogs this side of Jack London)

Coyote Blue (Kind of an outlier. Overlapping characters)

Shakespeare Series:

Fool

The Serpent of Venice

Shakespeare for Squirrels

Assorted:

Island of the Sequined Love Nun (Cargo cults with Pine Cove crossovers. I have a theory that the characters in this book are direct descendants of certain characters in Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon.)

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (So I have a favorite first-century wonder rabbi. Who doesn’t?)

Sacre Bleu

Noir

Ø  Not for the squeamish, the easily offended, or those who can’t lovingly embrace the fact that the human species is pretty much a bunch of idiots snatching at moments of grace.

Ø  No big ideas whatever. Barely any half-baked notions.

Ø  Enthusiastic geek adventure. Action as a last resort.

Ø   Nonstop funny from beginning to end.

 Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London Series

Rivers of London

Moon Over Soho

Whispers Under Ground

Broken Homes

Foxglove Summer

The Hanging Tree

The Furthest Station

Lies Sleeping

The October Man

False Value

Tales From the Folly

Ø  Lean, self-deprecating police procedurals disguised as fantasy novels. Excellent writing.

Ø  These will not expand your mind. They might expand your Latin vocabulary.

Ø  Crisply described action, judiciously used. Whodunnit adventure. It’s all about good storytelling.

Ø  Generous servings of sly humor. Aaronovitch is a geek culture blueblood who drops so many inside jokes, there are websites devoted to indexing them.

  John Scalzi

Old Man’s War Series:

Old Man’s War

Questions for a Soldier

The Ghost Brigades

The Sagan Diary

The Last Colony

Zoe’s Tale

After the Coup

The Human Division

The End of All Things

Ø  Star Trek with realpolitik instead of optimism.

Ø  The Big Idea is that there’s nothing new under the sun. Nor over it.

Ø  Action-adventure final frontier saga with high stakes.

Ø  It’s funny when the characters are being funny, and precisely to the same degree that the character is funny.

Assorted:

The Dispatcher

Murder by Other Means

Redshirts (Star Trek, sideways, with occasional optimism)

Ø  Scalzi abandons (or skewers) his space-opera tendencies with these three little gems of speculative fiction. Scalzi’s gift is patience. He lets the scenario unfold like a striptease.

Ø  What-if thought experiments that jolt the brain like espresso shots.

Ø  Action/misadventure as necessary to accomplish the psychological special effects.

Ø  Redshirts is satire, so the humor is built-in, but it’s buried in the mix.

  David Wong/Jason Pargin

John Dies at the End

This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It

What the Hell Did I Just Read?

Ø  Pargin clearly starts his novels with a handful of arresting scenes and images, then looses the characters on an unsuspecting world to wander wither they will.

Ø  Ideas aren’t as big or obvious as Heinlein, but they are there to challenge all your assumptions in the same way that Heinlein’s were.

Ø  Classic action/adventure for anyone raised on Scooby-Doo.

Ø  Occasional gusts of humor in a climate that’s predominantly tongue-in-cheek.

 Jodi Taylor’s Chronicles of St. Mary’s Series

Just One Damned Thing After Another

The Very First Damned Thing

A Symphony of Echoes

When a Child is Born*

A Second Chance

Roman Holiday*

A Trail Through Time

Christmas Present*

No Time Like the Past

What Could Possible Go Wrong?

Ships and Stings and Wedding Rings*

Lies, Damned Lies and History

The Great St Mary’s Day Out*

My Name is Markham*

And the Rest is History

A Perfect Storm*

Christmas Past*

An Argumentation of Historians

The Battersea Barricades*

The Steam Pump Jump*

And Now for Something Completely Different*

Hope for the Best

When Did You Last See Your Father?*

Why Is Nothing Ever Simple*

Plan For The Worst

The Ordeal of the Haunted Room

Ø  The * denotes a short story or novella. Okay, try to imagine Indiana Jones as a smartassed redheaded woman with a time machine and a merry band of full contact historians. I love history, and I especially love history narrated by a woman who can kick T. Rex ass.

Ø  The ideas are toys, not themes. Soapy in spots.

Ø  Action! Adventure! More action! More adventure! Tea break. Action again!

Ø  Big, squishy dollops of snort-worthy stuff.

 Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell Series

The Beekeeper's Apprentice

A Monstrous Regiment of Women

A Letter of Mary

The Moor

Jerusalem

Justice Hall

The Game

Locked Rooms

The Language of Bees

The God of the Hive

Beekeeping for Beginners

Pirate King

Garment of Shadows

Dreaming Spies

The Marriage of Mary Russell

The Murder of Mary Russell

Mary Russell's War And Other Stories of Suspense

Island of the Mad

Riviera Gold

The Art of Detection (Strictly speaking, this is in the action!lesbian Detective Kate Martinelli series, but it crosses over to the Sherlock Holmes genre. If you’ve ever wondered how Holmes would deal with the transgendered, this is the book.)

Ø  Sherlock Holmes retires to Sussex, keeps bees, marries a nice Jewish girl who is smarter than he is and less than half his age and he’s mentored since she was fifteen in an extremely problematic power dynamic relationship that should repulse me but doesn’t, somehow, because this is the best Sherlock Holmes pastiche out there. Mary should have been a rabbi, but it is 1920, so she learns martial arts and becomes an international detective instead. Guest appearances by Conan Doyle, Kimball O’Hara, T.E. Lawrence, Cole Porter, and the Oxford Comma.

Ø  Nothing mind-expanding here, unless the levels of meta present in a fictional world that is about how the fictional world might not be as fictional as you thought come as a surprise to anyone in the era of tie-in books, films, tv, interactive social media and RPGs.

Ø  If these two geniuses can’t catch the bad guys with their dazzling brilliance, they will happily kick some ass. Adventure takes center stage and the action sequences are especially creative.

Ø  Amusement is afoot.

 Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next Series

The Eyre Affair

Lost in a Good Book

The Well of Lost Plots

Something Rotten

First Among Sequels

One of Our Thursdays is Missing

The Woman Who Died a Lot

Ø  In a world where Librarians are revered and Shakespeare is more popular than the Beatles, someone has to facilitate the weekly anger-management sessions for the characters of Wuthering Heights, if only to keep them from killing each other before the novel actually ends. That someone is Thursday Next – Literature Cop.

Ø  Mind-bending enough to give Noam Chomsky material for another hundred years.

Ø  Adventure aplenty. Action? Even the punctuation will try to kill you.

Ø  This is a frolicsome look at humorous situations filled with funny people. Pretty much a full house in the laugh department.

 Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Series/City Watch Arc

Guards! Guards!

Men at Arms

Feet of Clay

Jingo

The Fifth Elephant

Night Watch

Thud!

Snuff

Raising Steam

Ø  If this were a game of CLUE, the answer would be Niccolo Machiavelli in Narnia with a Monty Python. Everything you think you know about books with dragons and trolls and dwarves and wizards is expertly ripped to shreds and reassembled as social satire that can save your soul, even if it turns out you don’t really have one. Do not be fooled by the Tolkien chassis – there’s a Vonnegut-class engine at work.

Ø  Caution: Ideas in the Mirror Universe May be Larger Than They Appear

Ø  The City Watch arc has plenty of thrilling action sequences. Some other of the fifty-million Discworld novels have less. Every one of them is nonstop adventure. Most of the adventure, however, takes the form of characters desperately trying to avoid thrilling action sequences.

Ø  Funny? Even though I’ve read every book in the series at least ten times, I still have to make sure I have cold packs on hand in case I laugh so hard I rupture something.