#witchyr app fic

[littlestsnicket]

@kuwdora and @sassaffrassa

i did a thing! what sort of thing? a my creative process is a nightmare and i like to write bits of things to throw at a wall and see what sticks and if it doesn't work hopefully i'll be able to canibalize it for parts Witchyr app fic sort of thing.

for the moment, yen has a post transformation body--because the experience of being physically changed to be more palatable to others is an important part of her canon character for me, but who knows if that's what's going to work best for medical device hacker!yen in this fic--but deals with chronic pain. she has a migraine here because that's the only thing i have experience with to write without doing research, and i'm not at the doing research phase yet.

this is all pre-geraskefer vibes, because my current idea is that i can use their developing relationship to try and anchor this story to keep it from getting totally out of control, but i don't actually know if that will allow me to explore the political/economic cyberpunk nonsense i want to explore. we'll see. (another potentially useful piece of context is that--while this is a cyberpunk story in my head--it has none of the vibes that the genre usually has, as it's kind of supposed to be about how close we are right now to the dystopian elements of cyberpunk so i wanted it to feel more grounded in our present, but this fic snippet is not at all any of that yet.)

fic snippet under cut (1.1k, oops that's probably my median completed fic length)

Geralt felt completely useless. He was a witcher; that made him the target audience, not a useful participant in trying to get this startup off the ground. He had been silently, with increasing anxiety, watching Jaskier practically vibrate with tension for about half an hour before Jaskier finally snapped.

“As the closest thing we have to an HR department, I have to know, are you one of those asshat engineers who thinks anyone not directly contributing code is a waste of space or do you have a problem with me specifically?”

Yennefer looked sincerely offended for a moment, but she schooled her features into a bored scowl. “You specifically.”

“Oh, alright then, we can work with that,” Jaskier replied with deceptive calm as he tipped his chair back on its hind legs until it creaked in protest. Yennefer started forward, not even leaving her seat, but it was enough to make Jaskier flail. He was only saved from sprawling across the floor by Geralt’s witcher fast reflexes. 

Jaskier fixed his attention back on Yennefer as if the incident hadn’t even happened, standing up but not crowding into Yennefer’s space before Geralt had even fully stabilized the chair. “Do you think I’m a spoiled rich kid? Because by the gods, have I got news for you. I am! And you can get the fuck over it or find someone else to bankroll this operation and deal with lawyers and tear their hair out trying to put together a fucking business plan— ”

“Jaskier,” Geralt interrupted softly. 

Yennefer, surprisingly, levered herself out of her chair and left the room.

Jaskier sighed, deflated. 

“You’re not…” Geralt trailed off, thinking of the kid that had stubbornly subsisted off ramen noodles so he could pay his half of the rent even though it had been the heyday of the Witchyr app and Geralt could have—had offered to—cover it. Geralt had seen Jaskier act like an entitled prick, used to getting his way because of who his parents were, but he was also so stubborn, dedicated, and kind.

“I try so hard, Geralt,” Jaskier swallowed audibly, “but that’s the point. I have to try and it won’t do anyone any good for me to forget that.”

Jaskier shoved his chair over so it clattered against Geralt’s and plopped back into it to slouch to rest his head on Geralt’s shoulder.

“Should I try to talk to her?”

“Hmm,” Geralt responded, indecisively.

“I want her to like me. I want her to let me help. I want her to know she’s not alone. But she makes it so difficult… Fuck, I am so tired.”

“When’s the last time you are a vegetable?”

“What?” Jaskier straightened up to look at Geralt incredulously. Geralt raised his eyebrows.

“I’ve been drinking the stuff. You know, the green stuff? That you mix with water?”

“That’s code for you don’t remember.”

“No, it’s code for I’m almost 30, and despite my miraculously youthful looks my body is not as springy as it used to be,” Jaskier smiled slightly. “It may also be code for I don’t remember.”

“I’ll make you dinner, would be good for you to eat real food.”

“May I invite Yennefer?”

“You’re paying for groceries, you can do what you want.”

Jaskier hummed, taking a page out of Geralt’s book.

“We’re all tired,” Geralt said, letting some of his own instinctively concealed exhaustion show.

“Exactly, she’s tired too.” Jaskier stood and followed Yennefer through the door.

“Yen?” Yennefer’s back was turned as she stared out the window in the tiny reception space with the perpetually unmanned desk. She had been hugging herself, trying to force herself to breath, but had to steady her hand against the windowsill when she startled and the sharp movement made her vision spot. Her migraine was so bad at this point it didn’t even hurt.

Jaskier reached a hand out towards her. It hung uselessly between them for a long moment before he shoved it into the pocket of his jeans.

“What?” she snapped.

“Geralt decided I needed a break, and I’ve decided you need one as well. He’s going to cook dinner at my place.”

“And?”

“You should join us.” Jaskier’s smile looked hopeful and Yennefer had no idea what she had done to deserve this, neither the kindness nor the irritation.

He studied her intently and then nodded. “Good, you can meet us there in…,” Jaskier raised his voice and Yennefer wanted to drive a fork through her temple. “Geralt, how long will it take us to get groceries?”

Geralt pushed the door open and looked at Jaskier with poorly concealed fondness; Yennefer didn’t understand why he bothered. “If you’re involved, at least 45 minutes.”

“Ok, well, you have my address. Geralt will text,” Jaskier gave Yennefer a stern look like he was daring her to object. He flexed his fingers and wandered back into the other room, presumably to gather his things.

“You don’t have to,” Geralt said in a tone that Yennefer thought might mean he didn’t want her to eat dinner with them, but he was so bloody hard to read sometimes.

“No, it’ll be nice.” It would not be nice, but somehow, even though it shouldn’t, going back to her apartment or staying in their tiny office space on her own seemed even less nice.

Geralt frowned at her with careful thoughtfulness. “Any dietary restrictions?”

“No,” Yennefer smiled ruefully, “that is the only way my body has been remotely cooperative.”

Geralt nodded, a frown still maring his expression. She wondered if he could smell how much pain she was in or something. She didn’t know much about how the mutagen enhanced witchers worked, but it was one of the cybernetic sensory enhancements available to higher level witchers now.

“You cook?” Yennefer asked, surprising herself with a sincere desire to know more about Geralt.

“Hmm. I can follow a recipe or execute on Jaskier’s vision. He’s a good cook but only—you’ve met him.”

Yennefer laughed at that; she could picture Jaskier walking out of a war zone with an oblivious smile and a perfectly golden crusted beef wellington. Laughing turned out to be a bad idea though and Yennefer had to fight through a wave of nausea.

Geralt had taken a few cautious steps toward her by the time she could focus on her surroundings again. 

“May I?” he asked. Yennefer made a vague affirmative noise even though she had no idea what he was talking about. His hand pressed against the base of her neck through her shirt. She had no idea what he thought he was doing, but his hand felt impossibly warm, and that warmth was energy she could channel into nudging all the muscles she was involuntarily tending to relax. Probably, Geralt had been around long enough to have a basic idea of how magic worked and knew exactly what he was doing.

Hollowed out weariness rushed in to replace the pain, but she knew it would be futile to try and sleep. Dinner would probably help.

[kuwdora]

January 20 - i don't think this is even remotely on your active WIP list (or mine) but i think about it all the time: share something about the Witchyr app! (or puppetskier if you don't have anything you haven't talked about already) @littlestsnicket

Ahhhha, you are correct. The the modern Witchyr AU is not on my active WIP list. I have too many WIPs…For those who missed it, I wrote over here what it would look like if witchers and sorceresses were living in a modern gig economy and had a bullshit app platform and late stage capitalism awfulness. Lots of character details and how witcher signs would get adapted in a modern context, things about Triss and Regis. How I might do Ciri and Emhyr in a mdoern context. I wish I had a Witchyr snippet for you, mayoho, but alas I think everything that I had is already on that post. I didn't work on this mostly because I'd been more interested in working on my yennskier and geraskefer stuff and wrestling my Ciri feelings into a fic.

As for the puppetskier story Coin Operated Boy. I can’t recall if I mentioned this... But at one point when Shani was with Jaskier at the Department of Supernatural Phenomena, I almost went off on a tangent about an item Shani finds on a a shelf. Something that is the equivalent of Big Mouth Billy Bass....which I don't know if this is an American novelty toy that people have heard of.... but it's That Talking/Singing Fishhead. I would've given it some kind of Oxenfurt spin since they're right next to the ocean and all. Be an item that Mortimer confiscated from previous students who used it to troll other students and/or maybe cheat on exams. Maybe it could record messages. I started thinking how maybe Shani would repurpose it as a study tool lol. @sassaffrassa listened to me go nuts over an unimportant detail like that. It did not make into the story because I needed that chapter to end sooner rather than later, ahah.

January posting meme + claim a date - prompt me.

[littlestsnicket]

- finally finished neuromancer and have feeling and feel like the best use of those feelings is to commit to taking an honest stab at writing the witchyr app fic, even though there’s no direct relationship between those two things. (there’s a lot of indirect relationship between those things.) (what if i made ciri and AI?!? what if i did that?!? oh no, i think this has potential. not what this fic was really supposed to be about, but it needed to be about at least two more things than it was initially supposed to be about. and that and geraskefer would make two. and i was considering hitting more structural beats of the witcher books and, like, if i keep going down that path, this is like… perfect. the thing i was most hung up on was ciri and her relationship with emhyr/geralt/yennefer/being an exploitable resource with disputed ownership and deniable free will and shit… this really could work. aaaaahhh! just had this idea while writing this post, will have to loop back to it.)

- only a few sentences, but i wrote words of the jacques has feelings about his siblings fic. but i sort of know how i want to tell the story so that’s actually huge progress.

[littlestsnicket]

- witchyr app fic will need real plot. i don’t think i’ve done real plot since that one time i had to write a murder mystery for english class in high school. but i can do this. it may take me like… a truly unreasonable amount of time, but i can do this!

- trying to scale up and down simultaneously so i have a vague idea where this is supposed to go but also divide it into small enough chunks for me to actually write. i’m going to do a sort of prequel/set up story where geralt and jaskier have to deal with the immediate fallout of geralt not completing the contract to kill dudu. and then it also needs to achieve a coherent setting and set up how geralt is tied to ciri. that’s probably going to be the hardest part. this is a doable, achievable thing though, that will have enough of a resolution to be satisfying in case i fail at writing the larger story. even if it doesn’t get to any of the things i’m really excited about. (the lodge of sorceresses as the most messed up VC!!)

- also need to figure out what a truly sapient AI looks like when written by someone with a degree in computer science but absolutely no knowledge of that sub-specialty. also need to like… establish the right level of futuristic technology and cybernetics (and what does that look like written by someone who tests medical device software for a living?)!

- i have a beginning for the story written (almost 2k of geralt and jaskier not talking about their feelings in a coffee shop) but i’m not going to share it yet because i suspect when i reread it, i’ll have to remind myself ‘mayo, you did not forget how to write, you exercised an extraordinary amount of willpower to not waste time fussing with word choice instead of moving forward, and that is a good thing!’ but also people probably don’t need to see it. i think i am happy with the content though. and i’ll definitely go back and edit relatively soon, cause writing something of this scale will need head-pats and validation that comes through sharing bits of it

[littlestsnicket]

sprint review wednesday! 2/2 tasks completed last week! and i read way more than half of harrow the ninth, i have less than 100 pages left including all the extra stuff at the end, i think that’s about 40 pages of actual story left.

idk about the tasks for this week. i am not feeling it in a specific ‘my brain has been consumed by tlt but in a private non-fannish way’. but i do want to push myself to stay in the writing habit. so going to write something. anything.

(also what i ended up doing last week was rereading the disparate scenes i had written for the witchyr app fic idea i stole from @kuwdora and adding a bit of silly geraskier conversation. which is… i’m not writing that. doing it justice would be like a book series and i’m not saying i would never do that, i would in fact like to be someone who did that, but that is not at all on the list of things i intend to buckle down and actually write any time soon. but ugh i do really want to write a story where it’s cyberpunk themes with all the 80s/90s trappings pulled out so it looks like a version of what we might think 2030 would look like now, where we’ve solved some things and other things have gotten worse. idk i yearn for a very specific sort of sci-fi that i think would be easier to write myself than try and articulate sufficiently. kuwdora’s idea was already too big and i’ve gone and made it so much worse :D )

[littlestsnicket]

i reserve the right to completely ignore the results of this poll but i thought it would be fun.

since i am ‘done’ (shhh, i submitted it but i’m still tweaking some sentence structure things) with the exchange fic…

[kuwdora]

January Posting Meme 2024

Lemme try and do this! Send me an ask/reply to post with a question or post idea and I will do my best to answer and share! ♥ fannish or real life stuff is all good! You can also ask about my WIPs or things I've read, questions from journal/tumblr memes, tv/film stuff, recs, video games, vidding, etc, etc. (someone ask me about my vid wips)

claimed dates:

January 1 -

January 2 - What was the first vid you made? What drew you to vid it, do you still follow the fandom, etc. - @collsssss

January 3 -

January 4 - What's your favorite beverage? @aurumcalendula

January 5 -

January 6 - how are your plants doing? -bironic

January 7 - What art form would you like to try that you haven't—or, alternately, what art form have you tried that you most want to work on? -@killabeez

January 8 -

January 9 - What are your favorite things about Dublin and Tessy? -@Elipie

January 10 -

January 11 - What your three favorite vids you've made (and why)? @aurumcalendula

January 12 -

January 13 - How do you feel about the upcoming Alien: Romulus movie and TV show? -jb_slasher

January 14 -

January 15 - if you made a painting embodying a character, who would it be? @sassaffrassa

January 16 -

January 17 -

January 18 -

January 19 -

January 20 - i don't think this is even remotely on your active WIP list (or mine) but i think about it all the time: share something about the Witchyr app! (or puppetskier if you don't have anything you haven't talked about already) -@littlestsnicket

January 21 - what's one of your favorite fandom related memories? -lyntergalactic

January 22 - What’s an underloved fic you loved in a fandom you don’t post much about? @sargassostories

January 23 -

January 24 -

January 25 -

January 26 -

January 27 - vid recs for @poetikat

January 28 -

January 29 -

January 30 -

January 31 -

[littlestsnicket]

@kuwdora i am NOT writing your witchyr app fic but, i think it should start with people realizing that Geralt has been quietly not actually completing contracts that he finds morally objectionable. He resolves the underlying issue, so he claims the reward, but someone finds out that he's secretly been relocating magical creatures that have been classified by the app as monsters but Geralt disagrees with the classifications. so he's banned from the app. Oh, and this comes to head when he refuses to take out Dudu, and he does what he's always been doing, but this is too high profile for someone not to notice...

and then he meets Jaskier sort of by accident (or maybe Toss a Coin is about Geralt in this verse too, so they're reconnecting after not having spoken since the original contract that inspired the song... so Jaskier knew from the beginning that Geralt was fudging his contract completion and even though it wasn't really Jaskier's intent and Geralt doesn't want that the song has been helping put people off Geralt's trail for ages.) (and I would want to use my other Modern AU ideas for Jaskier, where he's actually fantastically hereditarily wealthy, and I get to explore some of my Jaskier is an entitled prick but he does intellectually understand his privilege really well, but he's a bit too self absorbed to have really internalized it, but he does definitely have a sincere desire to combat exploitation how he can). And Jaskier is already starting a legal battle over being unfairly compensated for his intellectual property, but it's not going well.

and then they meet Yennefer, and decide to try to launch a competitor app, but they gradually realize (which they knew all along if they were being honest with themselves) that the system is fucked and they can't change it through competition.

but I think maybe something really tragic happens before that... like someone dies because they don't have the same access to tech that they would through Witchyr. And maybe Ciri gets involved at that point. AND they've been trying to poach Triss and Regis from witchyr, but the new app can't afford to pay them fairly.

[kuwdora]

😁

(also at some point i am totally going to message you about all the ideas i have for the witchyr app fic that both of us have claimed not to be writing. i am still thinking about it, and telling myself i am not writing it.)

awww, mayo!! you are definitely my joy to be around, too! and I DEFINITELY want to hear all about the witchyr AU we aren't writing!! just start with a drabble and send it to me!! and we can see where it goes! 🙌 also I'll leave fic crumbs so @sassaffrassa will follow along. 😘 Positivity meme