#this might be too niche I don’t see anyone Victoria posting

[whitefeathers]

I need Victoria Neuman carnally rn she’s so bad LOOK AT HER

MDNI, cw: face sitting, mommy kink, sexual neglect

Image her absolutely smothering your face with her pussy while she types away and does work she says is too smart for you to understand, be a good girl and do what you do best and serve mommy, yeah? And she doesn’t wanna cum, she just wants to feel your tongue lapping at her while she works, licking up over her clit and ignoring your own needy cunt bc mommy knows best :((

[tanadrin]

Reordberend

(part 21 of ?; first; previous; next)

(BTW, as of this update, Reordberend is, by my count, a little over 45k words long, putting it in the territory of a shortish novel. That also makes it one of the longest SF stories I’ve ever written. It’s not the most popular thing I’ve ever posted on Tumblr, but it has gotten a steady trickle of notes. Knowing there are people out there who enjoy your work, even if it’s fairly niche, is the best motivation there is to keep writing. Thank you for reading!)

Katherine Alice Green The Guest Room in the Village Hall The High Settlement McMurdo Dry Valleys ANTARCTICA

to Dr. Eunice Valerie Gordon Trinity College Dublin Dublin 2 IRELAND

Dear Dr. Gordon,

I am writing yet another letter I won’t be able to send, which, I realize might make me seem like kind of a crazy person. The only defense I can plead, I guess, is that the perpetual darkness of the winters here does funny things to you if you’re not used to it, and I’ve had a lot of down time lately that I need to do something productive with. I have already written to my parents, to a couple of friends, and to my cat, which leaves only you. And these letters seem to have a way of focusing my thoughts, so maybe it’s not an entirely useless exercise.

Where to begin? Well, first of all, I’m alive. That may come as a surprise. It occured to me not long after I was marooned here that perhaps nobody knows that. No one has come looking for me, and why would they? If any rescue parties did go looking for the Albatross, I doubt they’d come this far south. Not in winter. But I did in fact survive the ship going down. I don’t think anybody else did. The Dry Valleys People didn’t find anyone else on the shore, alive or dead. I try not to think about that too much, but, to be honest, it still has me kind of fucked up.

Oh, that’s the other things. I’ve made contact with the Dry Valleys People. I am, as the return address indicates, currently living with them. They have welcomed me, rather reluctantly, and I’ll be able to remain at least until the first sunrise of spring. This was not necessarily a widely popular decision, and I’ve come to learn that the political situation among the DVP is rather complicated. They have always guarded their isolation and their independence, and they’re keen to keep guarding it in the future, but there are some among them who worry how long that will really be possible. I think this is something Dr. Wright foresaw, and tried to warn them about in the letter he sent with me. But as you might expect, this is something a large part of their community doesn’t want to hear or even think about, and my presence here is definitely fraught.

As for my original mission… well, it’s an unqualified success, despite the difficulties. I’ve learned a lot. The language, to start with. You won’t believe this, but they speak Old English here. No, not thee and thou and maketh yon Old English. Not Chaucer, even. Older. From their books and what they’ve told me, their ancestors used the West Saxon dialect of Old English, as spoken about the year 1000 AD, as the basis for the language they taught their children. Dr. Wright knew this, of course. That’s how he was able to communicate them and win their trust; he showed an affinity for the same history and the same long-term perspective they cared about. If it seems weird that a bunch of people would move to Antarctica, forsake almost every modern convenience, and deliberately teach their kids a dead language that would be useless in the wider world, well, all I can say I guess is that humans have done a lot of weird shit for a lot of weird reasons throughout history. I think I am beginning to understand why the ancestors of the DVP did what they did. Some of them have tried to explain it to me, but there is a gap in our worldviews here that is difficult to bridge.

One of the DVP that I have befriended is a poet named Leofric. His sister, Leofe, taught me the language, but I’ve learned a lot more about their literature from him. It’s primarily an oral literature, although they do write some of it down. They like long, semi-narrative poetry that draws heavily on the imagery of the natural world, and I would say that it owes something to the ancient Anglo-Saxon poetry they keep in their books, except that, of course, the environment here is nothing like the environment of England one thousand years ago. But there are still some poetic traditions they have inherited from those earlier examples. For instance, their world is harsh, and unforgiving, and from a certain angle looks like a world in decline. The ancient English (so I am told) were surrounded by great Roman ruins they spoke of as being the work of metaphorical giants; here, they have the ruins of two hundred years of scientific and industrial exploration of the Antarctic coast. And their world, too, is enclosed by a vast cold sea, although this one has penguins in it at least.

Aside from the language, the founders of the DVP don’t seem to have intended to recreate medieval English society. There are no kings. There is a semi-formal system of village headship by seniority, but the social hierarchy is very flat. Marriage, inheritance, and choice of occupation all take place on fairly egalitarian terms, and their strictest taboos surround the sharing of labor and resources, not sexuality or religion. I wonder how much of their customs are the result of gradual cultural evolution, or some deliberate effort at creating a planned community. There are lots of funny Utopian experimental communities out there, but most tend to fail after a generation. In a way, this one couldn’t fail, because they had no way to leave Antarctica. They had to make it work. Is this what a real utopian project looks like after six or seven generations?

But honestly, one of the most fascinating aspects of the DVP is their material culture. As you might expect, their day-to-day existence is profoundly shaped by the environment they live in. Their houses are all heavy stone, designed to trap scarce heat, and arranged around the village halls as a windbreak against the dry katabatic gales that sweep the McMurdo Valleys clear of ice. Despite this being one of the driest locations on Earth, it’s still a better habitat for them than the glaciers of the Antarctic lowlands, or the rough, icy terrain of the mountains--here, you can actually build, and you don’t need skis and snowshoes to get around. But, as a consequence, much of their most important infrastructure is underground.

I don’t know if the ancestral DVP brought the right tools with them or if they scavenged them once here, but they have accumulated a small stockpile of laser borers, ultrasonic chisels, and crystalsteel digging equipment that they use to carve out underground chambers in the hills as meeting places and ritual sites. But they don’t do their agriculture there; that happens in networks of buried trenches just below the villages, where they grow cold-resistant mosses and lichens to supplement a meat-based diet, and what seems to be a form of genegineered fibergrass they use to weave their clothing and tapestries, and to make books.

Their art is very beautiful. Their coats, books, and tapestries--even their stone carvings--all depict elaborate lineate forms of plants and animals, inherited I suppose from ancestral memory, since none of the organisms in question are found in Antarctica. They also make images depicting the mountains, of course, and the sea, and the animals that live on the coast; even some of the coastal settlements, as seen from far off. They’re often abstracted, but these images are geographically grounded: they’re not just “generic mountains” or “generic coastline,” they’re specific mountains, specific coastlines, and they add up--if you are exposed to them every day of your life growing up--to something like a conceptual map of all of Victoria Land. It seems that if you dropped an average adult DVP individual anywhere from Oates Land to the Queen Elizabeth Range, they could probably find their way home, even during the dark months of winter.

(Oh! And the dark months! You’d think they’d be depressing, but I never imagined in my life I would see such a sight as the aurora australis, or even the clear polar stars! I can’t describe it to you. Maybe Leofric could, if I could do justice to his verse.)

They’re very communitarian, and great emphasis is placed on making sure no one goes without, but the price of that is, apparently, extremely elaborate dispute-resolution mechanisms; for a culture without courts, government, or attorneys, they are remarkably bureaucratic. Each physical object seems to have its own laws attached to it. Some may be shared by all objects of that type--for instance, if you need an electric firestarter, you always go to the house windward of yours to ask if they have one. If they don’t, you go to the next, and so on; firestarters pass from house to house, as needed, but only in one direction. Other objects may have completely unique rules. There is a knife with an elaborately carved handle meant to be used only by left-handed people. I don’t know why; nobody I asked knew, either. But that was the custom, and it was scrupulously obeyed. As a rule, the more elaborately decorated an object, the more particular the rules associated with it, but the elaboration of the object doesn’t seem to connote anything about the rules. It only marks it out as somehow special. The rules themselves are transmitted orally. All of these rules at bottom are about making sure that resources are evenly distributed--making sure nobody has to walk too far in bitterly cold weather to find a firestarter, for instance--and even the ones that don’t make sense now probably were created for good reason. For instance, the southpaw knife. Their knives for carving meat all have handles that curve in one way, to help separate flesh from bone, and I suspect that one is the result of a left-handed steelsmith getting fed up with with tools he couldn’t use very well. The blade is that of a carving-knife, though the handle attached to it is straight. The handle was probably later replaced when it broke, and somebody needed the knife for a different purpose--but the custom attached to it remained the same.

This system of sharing is, if anything, even more scrupulously observed when there’s a windfall. We went on a salvage expedition a month ago and brought back some much-needed supplies, and they spent days working out what would go where, first to each village and then, once we got back to the High Settlement, each house in each village--and even then, this was just what went to who first. Anything that’s not a finite supply, like food, will get passed from house to house. Leofric tells me that a few years ago, a whale--an entire blue whale, actually--beached itself to the north, and they had to have a weeklong assembly (on the beach, next to the whale, natch) to decide what do with every scrap of meat and bone. They still talk about the arguments that went down at the Whale Parliament sometimes (for which their word is hwaelthing, by the way. Literally it means exactly what it looks like: “whale-thing.”). Funny thing is, they also very carefully manage arguments in these discussions. That’s not normally the case--if two people have an argument and what to physically fight each other about it, that’s considered their business. But when it comes to disputes about food or metal or tools, everybody is very keen to show how Not Mad they are, even if they’re actually seething about it on the inside. And if voices get raised, people get hustled aside, and the whole matter is dropped completely until everybody has a chance to calm down. This looks like a system that was either deliberately designed to keep fights from breaking out and feelings getting permanently hurt, or one that sprung up after some nasty experiences of actual fights. I suspect the latter. It’s all very informal, but there’s a lot of social pressure that enforces it. The price for division and discord in an environment this hard to live in would be death, and I think all their social institutions are built around that reality.

I will admit, this has not been the easiest experience. I mean, there’s the almost dying part, and the part where all my cybernetics are broken, and I had a bad bout of something flulike a few weeks ago and almost died again, but I don’t actually mean the physical hardship. It is a more isolating experience than I thought it would be, being the lone outsider in such a close-knit community. Everyone knows everybody and everything, except me. They all have their own jokes and stories and long-running feuds, and they can communicate a great deal to one another with just a glance, and I’m left wondering what just happened when everybody laughs at something, or a fight breaks out. I have struggled sometimes to learn the language. I mean, I’ve had no other choice, and it’s amazing what you can learn when your survival depends on it, but even now I still sometimes find myself struggling to communicate ideas, or staying silent even when there is something I might want to say, just because I can’t find the words. It’s infuriating not being able to express yourself well, and maybe for good reason I sometimes think they all see me as this hapless idiot who almost got herself killed, who they have to put up with until the spring as a result.

Okay, I mean, I kind of am that. But I am also genuinely interested in their society, in the DVP as individuals, in their stories and their history. But I feel like the best I can hope for is being kind of a mascot. Or a well-meaning but dim-witted pet. A Labrador or something.

Not that I haven’t made friends. I would say Leofric is a friend. The salvagers--Eadwig and Andrac--they’re friends. And I seem to have won at least the grudging toleration of the ones like Aelfric who initially wanted to leave me to die. But sometimes I think I’ve made a connection, somehow bridged the unbridgeable gulf between my life experience and the world of the DVP, only to find out I’ve done no such thing. I thought Leofe was a friend; but now she’s not speaking to me, and she’s left the High Settlement for one of the other valleys. I don’t know why, and the others just shrug when I ask them.

Ugh. This is turning into whining. Now I know I’ll never send it. Sorry. It’s been a long day. It’s amazing how tired you can get when your muscles can’t rely on your augs to help them do shit.

But I need to find a way to bridge that gap. I mean really bridge it. Because I feel like I’m starting to understand something the DVP aren’t ready to hear. Their ancestors came to Antarctica at a time when the rest of the world wasn’t much interested in it. It was a wasteland, so sure, let’s treat it as an international, shared territory. Nobody goes there but scientists and the occasional tourist. And during the Collapse, not even that--Antarctica was truly empty for the first time in a hundred and fifty years when the ancestors of the DVP came to its shores. But it isn’t anymore. And it won’t ever be a real wasteland again. Every year the mining consortia move a little further down the Transantarctic Mountains. Every year a new outpost pops up on the coast, more ships come to Port Alexander, more icebreakers cut through the polar sea. Antarctica is warmer now that it’s been at any time in the past. Heck, without some global warming, I don’t think the Dry Valleys would be habitable. But that means more exposed rock, more open ground to build on, more people coming to the continent to work on the mining platforms or the offshore factories, and one day, I think, they’re going to come here.

What will the DVP do when that happens? This isn’t North Sentinel Island, which nobody ever goes to because there’s no reason. There’s gold in the hills here--the DVP make jewelry out of it--and maybe other precious metals, and you could build a geothermal station on Mount Erebus and power a small town, if you wanted to build some autofactories. The Antarctic Authority exists to promote “science and industry,” but with a big emphasis on industry. And by science they mostly mean, like, watching penguins bone and building telescopes at the South Pole. Not soft stuff like anthropology. And certainly not protecting three valleys full of cessionist oddballs whose parents had an unreasonable fondness for dead languages.

I think Dr. Wright knew this. I think maybe he tried to warn the DVP when he was here, but back then the danger was even further away. And it’s hard to get people to pay attention to danger that seems far away, even if it might be an existential threat. And when dealing with that danger would require you to completely change the only life you’d ever known… well, that’s a hard sell. The DVP don’t really like change. I can’t blame them. But one day things are going to change here, and if they’re not prepared for it, it could get really ugly, really fast. It’s one thing to shut yourself away when the world is ignoring you. It’s another when the world comes knocking.

If I think I can persuade them, I’m going to talk to the elders here, Aelfric and Wulf. Some of the DVP have had very fleeting contact with outsiders before me. I think one of them should come with me in the spring, as a sort of emissary. I’m not sure who they should talk to, yet. Maybe the Authority. Maybe somebody in Port Alexander’s local government? Or maybe we should just try to tell their story directly to the world. That might bring the DVP more attention than they’d like, but better a little good attention now than a lot of bad attention later. I would have asked Leofe--she’s smart, she’s tough, she could handle the culture shock--but that’s not an option now. Something to think about, anyway.

Well. I hope this letter finds the imaginary version of you well, my love to the imaginary family &c, hope the undergrads aren’t giving you too much trouble this year. If for some reason you do find this letter--like I freeze to death on my way to the weather station in September and they find this document on my corpse--please forgive my stubbornness, my insistence on going on this stupid trip, and any worry I’ve caused you as a result. And if I really am dead, please tell everybody I died doing something badass, like, I dunno, fighting a polar bear. I guess those are extinct and they never lived in Antarctica anyway, but something along those lines. Make it good.

All the best,

Kate

[117--087]

‘Halo: Allegiances’ - Outline

I’ve kind of had fanfiction on the brain lately, so I thought it might be a good idea to at least type up an outline for the novel-length story I've had in mind for years but will never be able to actually write...

It all started with the question of: “How to do the ‘fake engaged/married’ trope w/ John-117 & Kelly-087?”

But soon spiraled into: “Hey this could be something that 100% works with canon & also explores some really interesting/niche concepts you don’t see in most official Halo stories.”

(I have exactly zero names for any of the secondary characters so far, so apologies if this is hard to follow because of that.)

Basically, here is what I have so far:

Middle of the Human-Covenant War, Spartan-IIs are in their early-mid 30′s, post-Operation: HEMORRHAGE (i.e. that one time Kelly infiltrated a Covie fleet and destroyed it)

J&K are called to meet privately with some UNSC Top Brass & ONI Spooks

Turns out there’s a mole in ONI, and they’re leaking top secret plans for weapons to the Insurrection - MJOLNIR specs included

All attempts to identify and stop this person have proven unsuccessful, and ONI can’t waste any more resources tailing/interrogating everyone on their staff

So it’s been decided that J&K are to go on a blacker-than-black-ops mission to an Insurrectionist Stronghold on a hollow-asteroid (v. similar to Eridanus Secundus) where some of the info leaks have been traced to and is also suspected of being a smuggling depot

The plan is for J&K to openly acknowledge they are super-soldiers and their “cover story” will be that they have actually deserted the UNSC, they’ll have 3 ½ weeks to get the job done (i.e. investigate the base, find The Mole - capture or kill them, get out)

The two of them were chosen because they have the longest operating history together out of everyone on Blue Team, ONI will take care of the necessary document-fudging to keep this all under wrps

John isn’t a fan since S-IIs aren’t really equipped for undercover work like this, but ONI justifies it by saying their knowledge of the UNSC & MJOLNIR will make them too valuable for the Innies to not want to take advantage of it - as well as the fact that no one would suspect them of all people of being spies

Kelly suspects this is also some kind of perverse “test” by ONI & the UNSC to see what sort of “applications” the Spartans have outside of more regular combat (ofc she is right in the end)

John also remembers the Victoria mission and what can happen if/when the enemy has enough intel on the Spartans’ gear, so he relents to go along w/ it

They are dropped off at neutral UEG site, wrangle a ship, get to the base on the asteroid, surrender themselves without a fight, and are brought to The Leader of the people there

J&K give their spiel about how “they are tired of being the UNSC’s dogs” and so on, but no one seems to be 100% buying it - so Kelly throws in at the last second that she and John are lovers and couldn’t be together as they were in the UNSC and that is another primary reason why they ran away

Her deeply personal/sentimental plea tips the scales and J&K are allowed to stay, though with some security restrictions, until The Leader is fully convinced they can be trusted

Note: from here, things can go two ways...

- If I were to go the “my personal headcanon” route, J&K would already be in a clandestine romance and this would just further explore their established feelings for each other in a new setting

- Or I could go the “100% canon compliant” route and make it so this story establishes they have some-unspoken-thing but nothing concrete until this scenario forces them to confront that

Neither route changes the overall story much, but it would be a factor in their conversations about their situation and how/how soon the romance content is executed

J&K settle into their new roles (mostly manual labor: mining, farming, cargo transport, etc.) and start poking around the base for clues as to who The Mole is and why they funnel their info through here, as well as details about what goods are being smuggled

They become acquainted with the citizenry and it becomes clear v. quick this isn’t so much an Insurrectionist Stronghold as it is a self-sufficient refuge for anyone looking to get away & be safe from the wars going on r/n

The Leader himself is actually an honorably-discharged UNSC soldier who has no political leanings whatsoever and doesn’t support military efforts on any side, he’s just a good person trying to help people but feels he can’t do that within The System as it is r/n

The Mole is just a smarmy guy/low-level ONI stooge who has a corrupted Covenant AI he stole from from a lab (ONI found it in some Covie wreckage and were just going to destroy it after they had finished messing w/ it & he faked its termination record)

He found a way to use the AI to contact some Jackals and has brokered a deal with a Shipmistress to trade info, weapons, and resources under the UNSC, Innies, & Covenant’s noses

The Mole moonlights at this base as a know-nothing civilian but is also working behind The Leader’s back to sell classified UNSC info & use the base as a thoroughfare for Insurrection contraband (basically this guy thinks he’s a Halsey-level chess-master & is trying to play everyone he comes across to his own personal enrichment/advantage)

Note: this guy won’t be terribly sympathetic, as I feel this story will have enough moral complexity and ambiguity via the other characters that he doesn’t need to be

The Shipmistress herself has grown disillusioned with the Covenant & doesn’t believe in The Great Journey, but doesn’t desert either out of fear of reprisal by the Prophets against other/all Kig-Yar - so she just keeps a portion of the extra supplies she is trading thanks to The Mole for herself and her crew

J&K have their own misadventures trying to adapt to socializing with “normal” people, some of whom are friendlier than others, as well as act like a “normal” couple

They deal with dancing as a for-fun activity, John has a bout with social anxiety, while Kelly faces becoming too comfortable with the art of deception and also reflecting on why she stays a Spartan and if it is truly worth it

All this on top of how simply being able to openly express and explore their feelings for each other kind of throws them for a loop

They’ll also have to confront some of their own ingrained beliefs about what the UNSC and Insurrection actually are to people outside the conflict, and see firsthand what it is like to not be aligned to either side (a v. foreign concept to them)

John ends up unintentionally winning The Leader’s total trust (thanks to a lucky series of questions), and it becomes increasingly odd that no one has approached the Spartans yet for inside information about MJOLNIR nor can they find any actual smuggling going on via the people on the base

At this point the people on base who have taken a liking to J&K throw them a small “welcome to the community” party that is also doubles as an “unofficial wedding”

J&K use their smarts to start narrowing in on the trail of The Mole - who upon their arrival has been suspicious of them (but also lulled by their cover story) and has started to make plans to close up shop here just to be safe

Up to this point The Mole has only managed to steal & decrypt and bits and pieces of blueprints for MJOLNIR systems - a full workup on the armor is what the Innies want and they are considering terminating their smuggling operations through him entirely unless he can give them their prize

At the same time the supplies The Mole is trading with the Shipmistress, either personally on a private spacecraft or via unmanned probes, are starting to be noticed as missing among the people on the base

The Mole doesn’t know how to safely back out of his deal with the Jackals, so he ultimately decides to desert ONI entirely and strikes a deal for quick escape with the Insurrection by promising to get them the full MJOLNIR specs

The AI in his possession comes to realize its human handler’s whole scheme is collapsing and is still loyal to the Covenant enough (due to its unstable mind) that it sees this as a chance to finally return to its “true masters” - so it alerts the Shipmistress behind The Mole’s back that he is planning to renege on their arrangement without compensating her

In a rage the Shipmistress makes to attack the asteroid base and strip the place

Meanwhile one Jackal on her crew is still a devout believer in The Great Journey in private, and can no longer ignore her “heresy” and actions against the Covenant’s overall orders - so he alerts some high ranking Elites to what she has been doing

Basically everything hits the fan at once after this…

J&K finally lock in on how The Mole has been working with the Innies, which also fully exonerates the civilians on the base of having anything to do with the stolen MJOLNIR specs or the smuggling

Since his final transmission of the MJOLNIR plans is stopped by J&K, The Mole is contacted by the Innies who have had enough and they cut ties with him

This is turn leads to The Mole realizing J&K are actually working undercover

The Shipmistress and her crew storm the base looking for The Mole and don’t care if they have to waste any other humans that get in their way

The Mole then finds out the Covenant AI sold him out, and destroys it

The Elites that were tipped off are hot on the heels of the Jackals, looking to kill or capture them for their transgressions against the Covenant

So the base is completely under siege with J&K + The Leader having to take charge of what few people here that have combat experience in order to get all the civilians out

Plus J&K also have to not let The Mole get away in the chaos too

The Mole comes across The Leader (who was making a final sweep of the base for stragglers) at the same time J&K reach The Mole

The Mole exposes J&K as agents of ONI, while they in turn expose his attempts to play everyone else

A Mexican Standoff ensues

The Leader ends up taking J&K’s side (duh) and helps them apprehend The Mole

They escape, and the Shipmistress decides to cut her losses and retreats with her crew as well

The Elites destroy the asteroid base for good measure

The Leader is upset over how he was deceived, but is also reminded by J&K that his goodness is still a strength and that he still has a responsibility to his group - he’s also grateful for how J&K helped him save his people

The Leader understands he is still a rebel in the eyes of the UNSC but refuses to compromise his morals - he leaves too in the hope of settling elsewhere with his people and continuing their way of life (at least until the UNSC & Innies get their heads out of their butts)

J&K return to UNSC space w/ The Mole and their mission a success - in the end they have to reflect on everything that happened and what it all might mean for them in the future as teammates/best friends/lovers

ONI Spooks discuss the operation and conclude that while their objective was certainly accomplished, it is best to keep the use of the Spartan-IIs centered on open warfare (for now at least - mwahaha)

The Shipmistress is on the run and is contacted by someone claiming to be an emissary for The Banished - they offer her and her crew a place among them as privateers, she accepts

The End!

...Phew. I understand all that is probably A Lot™ to take in, and of course it is still seriously lacking in “connective tissue” to fill in the gaps in the story. But in my head it all comes together and I really just wanted to share the gist of it with you guys. Particularly since the title for it just recently fell into place and got me excited thinking about it. Any questions, comments, or feedback on this idea for a never-to-be Halo book are most welcome. :)