#the benin kingdom was in modern Nigeria btw

[shitpostingfromthebarricade]

i would love to hear about the scarlet welly boots and/or lesbian art heist

Scarlet Welly Boots was inspired by The Amazing Devil's "Welly Boots," with the premise being an epistolary of "letters" from Cosette to a deceased Jean Valjean keeping him appraised of things in her life and asking him the questions she never got the chance to ask. The story would follow her through the pitfalls of adulthood without a parent figure there to guide and her trials and struggles as she figures out who she is and makes peace with everything that happened.

Dear Dad,

I had my driving exam today.  I passed!  I’m so excited, but it’s weird, because it doesn’t seem like a big deal to anyone else.  

You’re dead now, so it feels petty and annoying to blame my current failings on you, but apparently most students in the US start receiving instruction from their parents from 16, if not before.  I know we took public transit and walked when we could, but we had a car — we had my car, even.  It never occurred to you to talk me through the things you were doing?

It's a premise I really wanna revisit and make work, but at the time I was deeply unhappy with how it was panning out and decided I would need to read more and grow as a writer before I was ready to handle it the way I wanted.

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Lesbian Art Heist had its first draft around 80% finished before I noticed a MASSIVE plothole that would require a total rewrite to correct for. I'd been writing it for a fic exchange (despite wanting to write the base premise since I first encountered it), and with the deadline looming I ended up abandoning it and drafting up Favour instead.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a fucking nightmare to smuggle things into for the same reason it’s a nightmare to steal things out of: the place is a glorified vault. When her father had organized the team to steal Degas’s Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, ninety percent of the plan had been causing enough confusion that Montparnasse and Claquesous could move the damned thing out to the main gallery and get it through a sky window without drawing too much attention. In the chaos, Éponine had managed to get Gueulemer to unwittingly help her steal a New Kingdom Egyptian collar from storage that, with any luck, won’t be missed for several more months, and, much more regrettably and almost as an afterthought, one of the Benin Artifacts from where archivists had already packed it up.

Her ears still ring from the phantom pain of Cosette’s anguish that Éponine hadn’t known that the Benin Kingdom was not located in the modern day country of Benin. Look, if six weeks of standing around in the Exhibition Room with them hadn’t told her this, maybe it’s the fault of the exhibit.

Her one saving grace in all of this, Éponine thinks as she takes the now-familiar route up the stairs to where an exhibit on 20th century American jewelry has now replaced the Benin Artifacts, is that they don’t seem to realize yet that they’re missing one of their artifacts. It had, of course, been the logic in the last-second swipe: already weighed, measured, and repackaged, no one would know to miss it until the artifacts were already on the next leg of their global tour, at which point museums would be pointing fingers at the movers rather than assuming it had never been there to start.

‘Germany only finally returned them four years ago!’ Damn, maybe not-Benin shouldn’t have been loaning them out so soon then.

‘You have to return it.’ Éponine thinks the fuck not.

(The plothole had to do with underground tunnels, I'm still Big Mad about it.)