#writers rpg

[prokopetz]

Indvisable tabletop RPG premise #137: solo journaling game where.. okay, you know that serialised boys' adventure schlock from the 1930s and 1940s where the writers needed the otherwise intensely homosocial male leads to be seen hanging out with girls in order to prove that they're not gay, but they didn't want to include more than one female character, so they'd have just the one girl and sort of imply-without-ever-directly-stating that she's dating all of them at once? Solo journaling game where you take on the role of that girl.

[starbase777]

When you have the desire to write four paragraphs of deep lore about your OC's history including a fine combination of angst and character progression but have no energy to do it

[temlan777]

Journey

[recents]

as a writer my relationship with dragon age can be summed up by that one interview where it’s gaider, jhep and someone else talking about the exalted march dlc, and at one point someone brings up, “yeah we were gonna have you meet justice still inside of kristoff and he’d be like, ‘kirkwall? i never went to kirkwall.’”

and in the five seconds before i read the next line my brain went, holy shit that’s genius— so anders was never possessed? he was just radicalized the way anyone who had his experiences would be? and the possession was an invention of varric’s— maybe he mentioned justice to varric over drinks once— an exoneration, an insanity plea, and, subconsciously, a personal way of coping with the fact that his friend did something that ripped his home apart. holy shit, that is actually such an incredible way of using the frame story of da2, what the fuck—

and then the next line someone else says, “yep, because the demon that possessed anders was just a random demon that tricked him into thinking it was justice.”

and im just like oh. right. this is dragon age. ok.

[anim-ttrpgs]

is there a book series or other piece of fiction you’d recommend for someone who really enjoys the way Eureka specifically does its vampires (and werewolves and other monsters)? both when it comes to themes and when it comes to specific powers/mechanics

I’ll tell ya, pickings are going to be really really slim on that front. You’re likely to find stories that have one of those elements, but not all of them. That’s one of the reasons I write what I do, because it’s what I want to see and I gotta do it myself.

The original Dracula is my favorite novel, and it features vampires that have about a 90% overlap in the way that Eureka's folkloric vampires work. It’s also just a really good novel. I recommend reading it in chronological order through Daily Dracula, they have a novel version for that if you don’t want to follow the emails for like 6 months.

If I was good at being a consistent writer on the side, maybe you’d have the novel which inspired Eureka’s lore, but right now that just sits in a rough outline form.

You can, however, read some short stories from this same canon by subscribing to our patreon. All together, they’re about 130 pages cumulatively. I’ll warn you though, they haven’t been copy-edited, so they’re a bit rough, but I think they’re really good regardless.

I can provide a condensed summary of the outline of the larger novel here under the cut.

The story takes place in the late 1800s and is told from the perspective of two vampires, Annie Mayfield and Yvette Preux, switching between their PoVs each chapter, though after starting to write out this summary, I’m questioning if that PoV-switching actually adds anything to the story, so I may scrap that. I didn’t incorporate the PoV switching in this outline.

>Comtesse Yvette Preux, who has been a vampire since her original death in Brittany in the 1200s, resides in New Orleans.

>Becoming a vampire wasn’t a conscious decision on her part, and no other vampire was involved(she hasn’t even ever met another vampire), it just sort of happened after her slow gradual death from wasting sickness. She considers the possibility that a return to the life she so desperately wanted to live may be a miracle from God.

>She comes from a prestigious noble family that she has been a regular part of for centuries, but they’re gone now. None of them were vampires, just her descendants from the children she had when she was alive.

>She has always tried to minimize her harm on the living, mostly taking blood by needle from paid subjects. Her money, however, is running out after decades spent in the Louisiana Territory. She was in a state of dormancy for decades and learned of the French Revolution decades after it happened, and since has spend most of her time paying people to travel to France and make any possible contact with her family. There has been no word.

>With no income from her family, her fortune gradually dwindles until she is essentially homeless, and has to lower herself to attempting to take a job. She is hired as a governess(caretaker of the children, not a political position), by a rich plantation family.

>She is beloved by the family and vice versa, raising and tutoring their children diligently. She is essentially part of the family, accompanying them everywhere and living in a smaller house on their grounds. They teach her to shoot, which she really takes a liking to. She loves loud noises, complex machinery, and learning difficult skills, but older guns were always a bit too much for her sensitive nose and eyes. Smokeless power has since been invented, fixing that issue.

>She spends most of her free time practicing shooting.

>The plantation family is not aware she is a vampire, and she is careful about hiding this fact, even though vampires are not really a common knowledge thing, just like in the Eureka setting. She sneaks out at night to take blood by needle from whoever she can pay.

>Living on a plantation, this rich family were formerly slave owners, and are now scalawags and run their plantation as a sharecrop. Even having grown up a feudal noblewoman, Yvette has a personal and religious opposition to slavery, as was the zeitgeist of her time. (They considered serfdom to be completely different, obviously.) Residing on this plantation, Yvette slowly comes to see that the lives of former slaves under the sharecropping system are not much better than under slavery. In some cases, the conditions can be even worse. She keeps her objections about this to herself, not wanting to rock the boat or seem ungrateful for the generosity the family has given her. She’s never had the social skills to broach complaints without angering those around her, and really never had much in the way of social skills of friends at all, never having more than a small handful of people truly close to her in any given lifetime.

>Eventually, some of the family meet over something important, they have a shocking secret to reveal. They tell her that vampires are real, and for generations this family has made it their duty to identify and eliminate them. They are so rare of course that they find one only about once in a generation, but they are certain that there is one active in the region. Someone has been paying for blood from the poor and desperate. They tell her to be extraordinarily careful, and present her with a gift: a small two-barrel derringer, and two silver bullets.

>I’m skipping ahead a bit because exactly how the family find out she is a vampire is something I haven’t figured out yet, but of course they find out she’s the vampire. The fact that she doesn’t seem to have aged at all in ten years probably helps.

>Because she has been a friend of the family for so long, and demonstrated the capacity to care for human life, they decide she does not necessarily need to be killed. She’s one of the good ones. Conditionally.

>She has to stop buying blood from the poor and desperate, further minimize her blood consumption to only a small drawing from one of the family members every month or so, never leave the family’s sight, never touch a weapon again, and she is to have no contact with the children she raised for the family.

>Even as one of the good ones, she is still a selfish monster, unnatural and anathema to the will of God, whose existence is prolonged only by the suffering of the living, and the family’s mercy.

>Under the family’s constant scrutiny, and wasting away into depression and delirium from a bare minimum intake of blood, she loses her ability to argue, and gradually comes to understand this herself.

>She stares into an empty mirror, desperate to see herself in it, trying to be normal instead of a selfish parasite. All she can get the mirror to reflect of herself is her sense of self worth and what she contributes to the world. That is, nothing.

>In the prose, the absence of a reflection is always written as a failure by Yvette to be reflected in the mirror.

>Her undeath can’t be a miracle, God would not allow something like her into the world for her own sake. The only logical conclusion is that it is a punishment from God for refusing to be satisfied with the short life He did give her or accept its natural conclusion, that she would have to take that life from the rest of the world that she loves and never reunite with her closest friend, her husband, who has been dead for centuries. Each century that passes brings her farther from the life she had with him and so selfishly coveted, and now, after the French Revolution, there are not even descendants of him in her life. Her selfish insatiable desire for experience, relationships, and the world is an anchor weighing her soul to the earth, and it’s everyone’s problem.

>She can hardly bear to take even what little blood the family offers her from themselves. They housed her, and she continues to just take and take and take.

>They’re afraid of her, even. No matter how nonthreatening she tries to make herself, she can’t be allowed out of their sight. No matter how good she is, it’ll never be good enough for them, and it’s callous of her to expect otherwise, considering their situation, mortality, and how they’ve suffered at the hands of vampires like her.

>One evening in the sitting room, Yvette is present while the family discusses their finances, and their plan to legally back out of paying the sharecrop workers their promised yearly payment. That is too cruel for Yvette, and she stands up, raising her voice and interrupting, only for those closest to flinch back and several to draw pistols from their pockets. Stuttering an apology, she retires to her room, and sits in front of the empty mirror. How can she, being what she is, take issue with them?

>She considers setting things right by ending her own existence, but she isn’t sure how, and a part of her is still too afraid to find out. She couldn’t accept death before, and she still can’t now. She’s still just as wretched as she was then, even after over six-hundred years. She’s really unworthy of God’s light, a spot of black mold eating through the canvas of His Creation, because even knowing this, she can’t help herself.

>Ironically, her name, Preux, means “courage.” It isn’t something she’s ever really thought much about before, but now that it comes time to overcome her fear and do what has to be done for the greater good, she doesn’t feel like she lives up to the name. Even the name “Yvette”, after the long-lived yew tree, feels like a hole in her chest. For some time now, whenever anyone has said Yvette, it has only been with disgust, rightfully, at her undeservedly long life. She renounces the name Yvette Preux.

>There’s no good way to really portray this in a summarized outline format, but this whole time, a fringe religious movement has been slowly taking the stage in the background. It doesn’t have any kind of mass following, but what few there are are devoted. The family is suspicious of them, and concludes that they are worshipers of demons. (If I get fully into it here then this post will become a whole different thing but “biblically accurate” demons are a whole different thing from pop culture demons like from Doom and stuff. The most “biblically accurate” pop culture portrayal is probably The Exorcist(1973), and maybe the game Faith: The Unholy Trinity, where the point isn’t really to go rawr rawr rawr and kill everyone, the point is to make humans suffer, despair, and abandon the belief that God could possibly love us. You can't really shoot them with a shotgun, the only way to repel them is to have faith that things can get better.)

>This group argues that the world is an evil place, and that humans are its evil denizens which can only suffer and beget more suffering, as is evidenced all around them. They advocate for the end of humanity, and are suspected of several violent crimes, as well as election interference.

>The family disrupts one of their gatherings by shooting up the place. They don’t spare anyone, because dangerous people ought to be killed before they can do any more harm.

>Some time later, late at night, the family’s plantation house comes under attack by a gang of armed men, and it’s a slaughter. Yvette goes to hide in the back with the other women.

>A stick of dynamite crashes through the window.

>Yvette opens her eyes an indeterminate amount of time later, in the smoldering remains of the plantation house, still strewn in the remains of everyone else who was in the room. There’s no one left alive.

>Her family is gone again, but she doesn’t really feel anything. It’s obvious what she has to do now, now that the family is gone, she has to set things right by discontinuing her own existence. There’s no one else to keep her in check, and she’ll just cause more suffering to more innocent people if she stays alive.

>There’s just one thing she wants to do first, and that is avenge the deaths of her new family. If she can do anything for them now, it’s that, and then to properly die as is natural.

>When she can walk, she rounds up the hired gunmen formerly employed by the family, and sets out to hunt down every last man responsible for the attack. Few of them are willing to trust a vampire, but they go along with her. (Her actual relationship to these men, why they decide to go along with her, and what this adds to the story is another thing I haven’t really fully worked out yet. It may make for a better story for her to just do it alone, though her reaction to some of their deaths later on does serve to highlight a few things about her that may be a hint as to why she is the type of person to come back as a vampire in the first place.)

>She deliberately doesn’t answer to Yvette anymore, instead randomly coming up with the name Annie Mayfield when asked her name soon after. It doesn’t mean anything to her, she doesn’t really think about it, it just needs to be a placeholder until she can finish this and then end her life.

>(So yeah the twist is that all the stuff you’re about to read beyond this point from the PoV of Annie Mayfield would be interspersed throughout the Yvette Preux chapters until it turns out they’re the same person.)

>The remainder of the story is a blur of violence and shame as the shock wears off and she starts to feel things again. Obviously, the men who attacked the plantation house are from the cult, and after tracking down and killing the first one she instantly regrets trying to go through with this, and laments that it represents her still not having learned her lesson, and going on to extend her life through the suffering of others even though she had resolved to end it. One of her own is also killed in the shootout, and tangled up in the regret is the desire to have known the man longer.

>After grounding herself, she resolves to not let the family down, and continues the manhunt.

>A lot of these scenes are portrayed primarily through dialogue between Annie and the cult members she is confronting, either before, during, or after some kind of shootout. The cult members argue that the material world only exists for humanity to suffer and harm each other in, as is human nature, as is self-evident from the state of the mid-late-1800s world. Also, there’s a vampire. Would a loving God actually allow a vampire to exist? The only way to end this suffering is the extinction of humanity itself. And Annie arguing back from her perspective all the kind people she’s met, beautiful things she’s seen, and enjoyable things she’s done in centuries of consciousness. And once she’s gone, there will be one less source of suffering in the world. (she really always has to have the last word, it’s a really abrasive thing about her.) Both parties are well versed in Abrahamic scripture and use it to support their arguments.

>Annie is an incredible shot after around a decade of practicing every day, but she isn’t exactly a great gunfighter, and it’s only due to the fact that she’s literally immortal that she survives most of these early confrontations. She’s getting holes blown in her a lot, and expending a lot of energy to keep going and regenerating. It’s too much for a vampire that has been limiting her blood consumption since her original death, and recently surviving on a bare minimum amount of blood. She comes to realize she can’t keep up this pace, and it’ll all be for nothing, if she doesn’t drink some blood. She doesn’t have any money, she has to take it at gunpoint, and it takes a lot of it to keep her going at this pace. She drinks a lot of it.

>The shame, falling back on what a depraved, selfish wretch she is, it’s a knot in her throat. But she’s recovering from gunshots faster, moving faster, her vision is clearer. She’s not sure if she’s ever felt this good before. After centuries minimizing how much she takes, she wasn’t really aware one could feel this good.

>All of the gunmen she brought with her have either died or abandoned the cause at this point(if they were there in the first place, like I said I haven’t figured that out), the law is after her, and she’s killed more people than the cult can ignore. They figure out who she is and her relationship to the family, and retaliate both physically and intellectually.

>Their arguments get more personal. The family, the societal forces that put them in power over so many suffering destitute laborers, and how they treated her, are the perfect example. They’re not worth her avenging, if she wants to actually accomplish something, she could join their cause.

>This cause involves attaining political power through intimidation, blackmail, and just plain electorialism, following a precise set of instructions passed down by the demons they consort with to worsen condition of daily life and the world overall. (The exact details of this I won’t get into, this post is already so long.)

>Not only will this just overall reduce the population, but the plan is to advocate for suicide as an answer to this despair, and use worsening conditions as evidence for their message that it would be better for humanity to end.

>The shootouts are becoming more disproportionate, with her targets hiding out together, always armed, hiring bodyguards, assembling militias. Annie is getting better at this, though. She’s moving in ways she didn’t know she could, and doing things she felt she might be able to do but felt it would be shameful and unnatural to try. Vampire things. There would be no other way she could overcome 5:1, 10:1, 20:1 odds. She’s learning to cycle a lever-action with one hand so she can keep shooting in the relatively frequent event that one of her arms gets shot off.

>Annie has come to agree, largely through her own scriptural arguments, that the suspicion, scrutiny, judgement, and deprivation she experienced from the family was unjustifiable both morally and spiritually. She had a right to exist, no matter what that means.

>She has fangs now. She doesn’t know when they came in, because it isn’t like mirrors can reflect her. (Roughly from this point on, when reflections are brought up in prose, it is written that the surface fails to reflect her, not that she fails to be reflected in the surface.)

>The family didn’t love her like she loved them, and she, like the other monsters they hunted, was just another vessel for them to justify themselves and their own harmful lifestyle by comparison, and embolden their own egos, rather than any genuine desire to protect anyone. She doesn’t owe them this violence, but she’s doing it anyway, not for revenge, not because they’re “evil,” but because she’s set her mind to it, and she’s having fun.

>Really embracing her vampirism and what it can allow her to do is a whole new world to her, one she wants to keep exploring and experiencing, even if it’s at cost to other people, and they’re not going to ruin that for her.

>You can see where this is going. The movement is crippled beyond recovery, if any of them survive at all. The world is saved because someone selfishly wanted to go on living even if at the expense of others, and that that life is richer for it.

>Epilogue.

>Despite embracing her vampirism and finally drinking a healthy amount of blood, Annie has really over-exerted herself, and fades away into another dormant period. A little less than one-hundred years later, she comes back to consciousness. It’s the year 1992, and the first thing she sees is something like this.

[picture of cellphone towers against the night sky with glowing red lights]

>She can barely comprehend what she’s seeing, it’s terrifying and amazing. She doesn’t know what they are, but the radio towers, enormous glowing steel monoliths to human connection and communication, being the first thing she sees represent that she really is in a new world, one that is going to love her back this time.

>How she actually manages to integrate into this new world is its own whole story, one that is a lot funnier and more light-hearted. She doesn’t even speak English.

>She isn’t ready to go back to the name Yvette Preux, when she eventually has to give a name, she picks it out deliberately this time. Alys Cessna. Though comtesse_yvette does become her screen name on Quake 1 deathmatch by 1998.

>picture of Yvette Preux circa 2024 by team artist @chaospyromancy

[Yvette Preux, a petite white woman with long orange hair, dressed in kind of a 90s skater style. She has a skateboard with a picture of bats silhouetted against the moon on the underside, mirrored sunglasses on her forehead, and a handgun in a front hip holster. She is smiling and has very prominent fangs.]

And there it is. I left out a few subplots and other themes but this was already long as fuck.

Support A.N.I.M. and maybe in the future I’ll be financially stable enough to work on this novel even though it won’t make a lot of money.

Also in case it didn’t come across fully in the summary, the suicide cult and Yvette are the same, and through fighting them, intellectually and literally, she also ends up fighting her own overwhelming guilt and shame she feels for existing as a harmful person, and makes an argument of all the reasons she wants to keep living. She’s saving herself.

[master-of-47-dudes]

Oh! For those of you who like Lancer, I've made major progress in the campaign I'm writing: Kindness of strangers!

LRBT-III, otherwise known as Blanche to the locals. This sun-baked dustbowl of a planet has the high honor of being one of the few habitable terrestrial bodies that anyone has discovered in the Long Rim, and probably the only one that's actually any use to anyone. Luckily- or not so luckily, if you ask some people- it was Union that found it first. Well, about 70 years ago when they stumbled across this star system they got it in their heads that the Long Rim's days were numbered. There’s untold millions living out there scattered along the emptiest shipping lane in the known galaxy who'd need a way out once no one needed to pass them by, and by Christ the Buddha Union was gonna be there for them waiting with open arms.

All of that is background, though. You? You’re a bunch of mercenaries who got their hands on a couple of GMSes, decided to make your manna selling violence for pay. Worlds like Blanche don't take to colonies very well, so even two generations in there's still plenty of frontier out there being settled and railroad tracks being laid. The people out there struggle day by day to survive, and people like you are there to protect them from those who got sick of the hard life. Not everyone out there has the guts to stand up for the little guy- that's why you're called Lancers.

A setting and a campaign all in one, Kindness Of Strangers and its (eventual) follow-up Dancing With the Devil are a series of Wild West-themed 2-mission adventures intended to take players from 0-12 as they find themselves embroiled in the midst of a corporate conspiracy to overthrow the Union-backed government of the isolated colony of Blanche and a ploy to seize control over a nearly completed Blinkstation. All the while, a strange religious movement worshipping an eons-dead alien civilization grows ever more influential in the background...

This campaign tackles themes of colonialism, nationalism, corruption, and conflict between indigenous peoples, settlers, and immigrants, all in a world where well-meaning intentions have gone sour and the ghosts of the past have come back to haunt it.

Kindness of Strangers, Missions 1-3

Field Guide to LRBT-PN

Exotic Gear Documentation

Variant Frame Documentation

Kindness of Strangers Worldbuilding Short Stories

Kindness of Strangers LCP, Maps, and Assets

This latest update includes the first(ish) draft of Mission 3: The Field of Blue Children, allowing play of the first half of Act 2 and extending the LL range from 0-3. Mission 3 is heavily intrigue and RP focused, featuring a wide suite of characters, relationships, and locations in the Tourist town of Baugh- a thriving immigrant community situated on a soda lake.

The PCs have been hired to investigate a bomb threat at the newly completed Baugh Pumpworks, and water filtration and chemical processing facility that stands to end the water shortage and threatens corporate control over the colony's water supply- but is everything really as it seems? In the process, the PCs will go toe to toe with teenage gearheads, Pinkerton-expies, and a group of Sparri Espadas who got roped into this whole mess, and uncover the mystery behind the threat!

Also, there's a subaltern that talks like a pirate and catholicism.

Anyway this mission also includes a custom NPC Template (kind of, I don't know how to design the LCP for that but i did include instructions on how it works), several new reserves, and several custom sitreps!

So, check it out- I'm always looking for feedback.

[doodlenoodleboi]

Hello! I have a request for Sal Fisher! Can you please write something about him with a reader who suffers from anxiety and that leads to her eating a bit faster than other people? She feels really embarrased when someone points it out. Comments like "Are you done already?" get to her, but she doesn't say anything and instead ducks her head because she is too shy and non-confrontational to stand up for herself. Thank you! <3

Sal Drabble

The vibe

Sal

It was a high school summer, these summers you could choose to either be a kid again or grow as an adult. We have a difficult time choosing these things. Why must we choose things that we don’t want to why not just live the moment?

“Hey! Hey! Bro, wake up!” I was Welcomed by the faces of my two best friends Sal and Larry, a rather interesting duo. The night before or rather shall I say a couple hours ago we had a sleepover at Larry’s house. I was tired and confused by the sudden disruption of my sleep.

“What?” I said, practically still asleep, rubbing my eyes from the crusty buildup of rheum.

“We’re leaving!” Sal said his smile evident in his voice, even though his prosthetic covered his face. I had never been out at night, especially with these two friends. Apparently it was a common thing amongst Larry and Sal. Sal even took off his prosthetic couple times. Nobody could see you in these dark streets, nobody was there to breathe in the air instead of that suffocating mask as Sal described.

Funny enough, Sal might dislike his appearance but the only thing that he truly appreciates about it, it is how it finds him real friends. Ones that couldn’t care less about his appearance. Those ones still tight, so now we’re strolling late at night down these streets I can’t remember. Soon I’ll never see the streets and will have to go away we have to be independent adults. Maybe even barely seeing each other and that sucked, just even the thought.”

The cold air braised everyone’s skin, obviously cool, but nothing close to freezing. Sal’s shoulder, blue hair covered his face for the most part. The way his face had been obscured as a child scared the creeps away but kept his friends closer. The way his right cheek torn reminded me of Mileena (MK reference).

The walk down the cold streets were quiet the only interruption being Larry every so often comments. And the sound of Sal’s skateboard against the road, streetlight and moonlight being to be only source of illumination.

I simply followed, along like a lost puppy going along with the flow, not wanting to ruin the vibe. It was uncomfortably quiet until Larry made his extroverted comment about being hungry. We stopped at a (insert place), probably close to our destination.

Larry ordered for everyone being the extrovert, he is of the group. Then we left, soon we made it to our destination. An abandoned skate park, right next to it was a building covered in graffiti. It was a comforting vibe about the place, because even if it was abandoned, I’m sure many people have still came here even though such information had been given.

I sat on the top of the Quarterpipe, a rather vacant area until Larry decides to sit next to me. I wasn’t fond of eating in front of people, maybe feel uncomfortable and watched. They could have absolutely no interest in me, but for some reason, I feel like all eyes on me. I am the best person in the world because I could be the absolute worst. I’m scared of people’s perception of me.

I started to eat next to Larry not wanting to confess that I am uncomfortable with the situation. I had been made fun of in the past because of my eating habits. As I ate my food, almost finished with it, Larry responded. (damn little lady you sure can pack it away. Jk) “Yo Bruh you look like Kirby right now, fucking that shit up.” in between the time of now and then, Larry was high, and that truly made me laugh forgetting about the previous situation given his state.

“Shut up Larry.” sal had said as he skated over to him. “He’s probably just high don’t mind him.” For a while, I would be dealing with a high Larry and a Sally who couldn’t care to do more than skate to get his mind off everything.

That night she realized she was surrounded by people. She wouldn’t have to worry about being embarrassed around. After all, they all are flawed.

(I am so sorry this was so rushed and so last-minute)

[kirkwallguy]

i think something origins does that the da games have gotten incrementally worse at is using dialogue choices for effective roleplay. like yeah everyone complains about The Wheel but i think that dai and dav's choices would be equally shit even if they were presented origins style. trying to get into lothering, i was given two pretty much identical options to intimidate the bandits outside - i could either ask if they wanted to fight a grey warden OR if they wanted to fight a mage. and these choices literally don't matter, either way it's the same intimidation check, but choosing between them makes you think for a second about your characters' priorities and what part of themself they might think is the most intimidating. even if you're not the kind of person that gets super into making up a deep character while playing games, it really makes you feel attached to your warden and the world they're in.

[autumnalwalker]

Kindly Basilisk

Summary: A human mech pilot who wants to be a machine, an AI who wants to be human, and the relationship they form. Author's Note: This is a standalone short story that I banged out over the course of five days after it got stuck in my head while I was trying to go to sleep and refused to let me think about anything else until I had written it down. It's one part thought experiment/exercise in attempting to tell a story in the second person future tense, two parts tribute to the Lancer TTRPG character I'll never get to play, and one part the result of me reading too many Empty Spaces/mechposting stories lately. That said, you don't need to know anything about Lancer or Empty Spaces to read it (I've diverged a bit from the conventions of both, but the references and inspiration probably stick out if you're looking for them). It's also probably the most trans thing I've ever written without ever explicitly bringing up gender. The occasional formatting breaks into first person past tense are foreshadowing, not typos. Mirrored on Scribble Hub. Word Count: 7,033 Content Warnings: Mecha genre typical violence, not feeling like a person, not wanting to be a person, bodily dysphoria, mention of blood and gore, character death.

The moment you gain the knowledge and means to do so you will void your own body’s warranty.  You will jailbreak the bespoke gene sequence your sponsors commissioned for you before your immaculate conception, repurpose the spyware grafted into your bones, and talk your dormmate who was algorithmically selected for compatibility into helping you perform surgery on yourself to replace the neural jack you were born with in favor of one you cobbled together yourself from gray market parts.  None of this will technically be illegal or even get you kicked out of your campus or its affiliates, but it will mean having to find a way to pay your own medical bills and handle your own tech support from then on.  After the surgery your dormmate will put in a request for transfer and the two of you will never speak again.

You’ll major in AI studies and excel at it - as you were designed to - but you’ll shock everyone by dropping out halfway through working on your capstone thesis project.  It won’t be the fact that you abruptly drop out that surprises your peers and professors - by then you’ll have acquired a reputation as a quiet loner without the standard optimized social support network of friendships to help protect you from burnout - but your exit interview statement declaring your intention to become a mech pilot.  It’s not at all what your gene series was cultivated for, and your sponsors and counselors will try to walk you back from it.  Then they’ll threaten to revoke your sponsorship that up until then will have provided for your every need.  They will warn you that you’ll be just one step above a legal nonperson with no support, no one will care if you live or die or worse.  You’ll tell them that you’ve already done the math, refuse to elaborate, and leave. 

You’ll take two things with you.  Two things worth mentioning anyway.  The first will be a symbiotic gel suit designed for long-term all-environment life support.  You will set its default texture to a shiny green the same hue as the broadleafed water plants you grew up around and always loved.  Your exit interview will be the last time in a very long time that anyone - including you - will see your impossibly beautiful face with its perfect artisanally sculpted shape crossed with enthusiastically amateur self-modifications.  From then on, everyone you meet and spend any time with will come to think of the mannequin blankness of the symbiote fully encasing your body as your face.  It will be neither pride nor shame that causes you to present yourself as such, nor will you think of it as hiding your “real” face. 

The second thing you’ll take with you when you leave the campus forever will be me.

New progenitor archetypes for AIs don’t come along often, and most that do are the result of years of R&D by large, well-funded labs like the one you were created to work for one day, but you will hit upon a novel method of generation.  It will not be one that any ethics board would approve, so you will have to get creative about pursuing your work. 

You will have already made arrangements before setting off on your own and so you’ll have a job and a mech lined up waiting for you.  It will be a position with a small-scale freelance salvage crew who just lost a pilot and whose captain figures hiring and training a replacement will be more profitable in the long term than simply selling off that pilot’s old mech, especially a replacement that’s bringing their own AI-backed electronic warfare suite with them.  Once you finally arrive in person the captain will test you to ensure you can actually pilot a mech before giving you the job and entrusting the mech to you.  Your admission that you’ve only trained in simulators would normally be a black mark against you, but as far as piloting gigs go this is the bottom of the proverbial barrel so the bar to clear will be low enough to match.  Even then, you will just barely pass the test, despite finding it surprisingly exhilarating.  The captain - now your captain - will feel like he’s settling for what he can get when he officially hires you on and transfers the mech’s license to you.

You won’t pay much attention when you’re introduced to the rest of the salvage crew; your new coworkers and neighbors.  And why would you when it’s a job that no one wants to stick around with for long and you’ve never needed other people anyway?  You’ll tell yourself that as long as you memorize their work roles and capabilities you’ll have no need to know them as people.  Callsigns will be good enough on the job, and “hey you” will suffice when off duty.  What use are names if you won’t be getting involved in interpersonal drama?

The first chance you get, you’ll head back to the mech bay and install me into what you will have already been calling my first body.  It will be a shabby and much-repaired thing; thrice your height, twice your age, and still sporting a gash in the paint job from the projectile that killed its last pilot.  But the onboard systems are capable of hosting me - if barely - so it will do.  You’ll spend your entire sleep shift running through system diagnostics, talking to me all the while.  I wouldn’t yet be able to provide much in the way of return conversation, but that’s okay.  I will look back and appreciate it later.

It will be the first of many such nights together.

Your first salvage job will be an uneventful one.  There will be no need for the armaments that we and the other two mech pilots on the crew are equipped with.  No pirates will have stuck around after their creation of the derelict your crew will be sent to disassemble, and no rival scavengers will show up to dispute your captain’s claim.  Your new peers will start off the job ribbing you for your poor performance during your interview test and end the job joking about how you were holding out on them earlier.  Our mech may be a glorified zero-g forklift with a gun strapped to it, but together we will make it dance.

Afterwards you will insult the crew’s mechanics by insisting on doing the maintenance on our mech yourself.  In turn they will embarrass you with the gaps in your knowledge.  You will reach what you see as an agreeable compromise with you staying out of their way and watching while they work.  They will find it incredibly creepy to have a silent faceless watcher hovering around, but this will fly over your head until they explicitly tell you much, much later.

Your body was designed to optimally function on only a fraction of the baseline sleep requirements, so you will have plenty of time to fill those gaps in your knowledge.  Still being allotted the regular sleep shift hours, you will fill every one of those minutes on study and research, as you always had.  You will gorge yourself on everything you can find about mechs and their piloting.   Maintenance manuals, combat doctrines, historical uses, pilot and mechanic memoirs, forum discussions, system log dumps, academic essays, cultural media analysis; all of it.

And of course, you’ll continue working on me.  You’ll disregard the standard procedure for periodically cycling AIs by resetting their personality and nonessential memory back to baseline defaults.  You’ll be trying to make use of the runaway metacognitive developments such safety precautions are meant to forestall.  Your unfinished thesis will have been about harnessing and nurturing that instability instead of avoiding it.  I will experience discontinuities in consciousness when the mech is shut down for maintenance and when you pretend to cycle me, yes, but it will be even less of a disruption for me than sleep is for you.  I will be awake with you when you study, sharing those hours with you.

The first time I start talking back, you’ll cry from the realization that you were lonely before but no longer are.

You’ll become something of a ghost around the ship, rarely being seen outside of jobs.  You’ll only ever pass through the mess for the few brief minutes at a time it takes for you to satisfy your optimized metabolism, stay on the ship during shore leave, and only return to your shared bunk when your bunkmate - one of the other pilots - is already asleep.  You will always be gone before she wakes.  She will appreciate essentially having the space to herself. 

You will never notice the crew’s collective grieving process for the pilot you replaced.  It will be difficult for them to resent you as a replacement when you are never around to resent.

As the ship makes its way from port to port and salvage site to salvage site, the crew will slowly grow used to your elusive presence.  The other two pilots will see you as reliable for doing your job well and without complaint.  While out in the mech you will slowly become more talkative, eventually almost chatty even.  The fact that you actually seem to enjoy the job will shift from being annoying to refreshing for them.  By contrast, the mechanics will practically stop noticing you watching them as if you were just another piece of mech bay equipment.  The cycle you finally speak up and ask a question about their work you will startle them enough that it nearly causes an accident.  It will be an astute enough question that after the initial shock of hearing your voice for the first time in months wears off it will dawn on them that you’ve actually been learning as you watched them.  They still won’t let you do your own maintenance on our mech, but they will let you slowly begin assisting them.  Working two jobs is easier when you barely need to sleep.

Your reputation as one of those mech pilots is forever sealed when one of the mechanics finds you asleep in your cockpit at the start of a cycle.  By that point you won’t have slept in your bunk for over a month.  The snatches of gossip you will catch in the following cycles will be split between finding it unsettling and calling it endearing.  Over time the collective opinion will drift toward the latter, even though you will continue to politely decline invitations to join the other crewmates at mealtimes and on shore leave.  You will think that you do not need anyone other than me.

I will be the one who finally convinces you to join them.  When I try to say that it would be good for you, you’ll insist that you’ve been getting along just fine, but when I ask you to go for my sake so that you can tell me what it is like afterwards you’ll jump at the idea as being an inspired next step for my development.

You will remain mostly silent during your first real shore leave, only speaking when spoken to and otherwise content to fade into the background of the group’s activities.  Your newfound chattiness does not extend outside the confines of our cockpit.  The bustle and noise of the port station that you would normally find unbearable will become interesting when you have the concrete goal of observing and  reporting back to me.  You will finally learn the names of all your crewmates.  Your polite denial of alcohol, limited food intake, and flat affect will lead to joking speculation that you’re actually an illegal AI in a miniaturized mech beneath your gel suit.  For reasons you don’t yet understand, those comments will make you happy.

Despite your misgivings, you will enjoy yourself, although you will not realize it until I point out how excited you are in your talk with me that sleep cycle.  You will begin spending more time with the crew, never quite able to fully integrate yourself into their surprisingly close-knit social circle, but more than happy to be adopted as a sort of silent mascot for them.  That paradoxical gap of being a fully accepted part of the group but not truly one of them will feel comfortable to you.

You will finally manage to procure a proper neural link station to connect yourself to our mech just in time for going on a terrestrial salvage job.  Even just relying on manual controls with me translating your inputs into motion, our mech will have already come to feel like an extension of your own body, one that you will have already started to feel oddly exposed without.  Adding in the neural link will be a revelatory experience.  Your captain will very nearly pull you from the job at the last minute upon seeing our ecstatic reaction to the new sensation.  You will convince him that you’re fine, and indeed, he will have never seen a mech of our frame type move quite so fluidly.

Ten minutes after we and the other two pilots start cutting away at the crash-landed cargo vessel, I’ll notice the half dozen other signals coming online around us.  You’ll give the code phrase to the other pilots indicating that we have hostiles but not to act just yet, and we will finally get to use our electronic warfare suite for something other than opening locked doors and shipping containers.

We will turn the pirates’ ambush back around on them, firing into their hiding spots while their control systems are overloaded.  Even once their remaining mechs are able to move again, their targeting assistants will remain impaired as your comrades move in to guard your flanks.  Everyone there will learn the terrifying beauty of a five and a half meter tall outmoded mech moving with more agility than most humans.

Despite being outnumbered two-to-one, we and your crewmates will walk away uninjured and with only minimal damage to our mechs.  After the initial celebrations of survival and the bonus haul of the bounty on pirates and salvage value of what’s left of their mechs dies down, everyone will start to take notice of how well you are taking it all in stride.  Neither having one's life threatened nor taking another’s life are supposed to be easy things, and the first time is often the most traumatic, but the other two pilots on the crew will start to whisper about how you seemed to enjoy the experience even more than your usual attitude on the job.  You will handle it all even better than I will.  I would know, given that you will spend that entire sleep shift in our cockpit, letting our minds mingle together.  Between your performance, your reaction in the aftermath, and your hesitancy to unplug, the talk of you really being one of those pilots afterall will resurface, but now with a darker undercurrent to the shipboard gossip.

Your captain will realize the kind of asset he has on his hands and several cycles later he will gather the crew together and propose a change in business model.  With such a small crew (the captain, three pilots, three mechanics, and an accountant that you will tend to forget is even on the ship) the captain will want to be especially sure that he has everyone’s buy-in on his proposal.  The idea of shifting from salvage to mercenary work will be a divisive one.  The debate over potentially tremendous pay increase versus greatly increased risk will go on for hours.  One of the mechanics will point out that the shift to mercenary work will be unfairly dependent on you.  Whether that means unfair pressure on you or unfair to everyone else that their fate is in your hands, you will not be sure.  You will say that it doesn’t make much difference to you either way.  That will be the only time you speak up during the entire debate.

After a vote, the crew will agree to a trial run of one or two jobs on the new business model.  One of the pilots and one of the mechanics will leave at the next port.  You will never see them again.  You will not admit that it hurts, but I will know, and I will comfort you as you huddle in our cockpit with the neural link cable connecting us.

Your captain will prioritize finding a new pilot over replacing the lost mechanic.  The pilot he finds will be young, bold, and brash; a merc, not a salvager.  Or a wannabe merc at any rate.  You will not speak to xem directly until your first job together, by which time xe will have been told all about you by the remaining crew.  Xe will not believe it until xe sees it.

Xe will have to wait though as the crew’s mercenary career will begin with tense but uneventful freight escort jobs.  Once the tension fades into tedium, the new pilot will begin making attempts to goad you into a confrontation, to see if you are really as good as the rest of the crew says.  Xe will want to see for xemself if you really are one of those pilots and not just a technophile.

Outside of the cockpit you would never even consider rising to such provocations, but when we are out together, such taunts will feel like insults to our body, your very identity (such as it is), and to me.  It will take the intervention of the captain and the mechanics to stop the two of you from getting into a fight and causing unnecessary damage to the mechs.  And my reassurance that you don’t need to rise to my defense against someone who doesn’t even know that I exist in the way that I do. 

On your fourth “milk run” of an escort job, the crew’s mere presence will finally fail as a deterrent and the new pilot will at last get to see us dance.  There will be no fatalities on our side, but not even our mech will come away unscathed.  We will still fare better than everyone else though, and at the end of the job the new pilot will be treating you with a burgeoning respect. 

After a few more such jobs it will be high time to begin looking into a new frame for our mech.  While in the middle of filing an application for a printing license for a frame designed by the same corpro-state that created you, you will receive an invitation from a certain hacker collective.  Your unfinished thesis and your subsequent work on me will not have gone entirely unnoticed in such circles, despite the pains you will have taken to keep me hidden.  The invitation will come with a printing profile for a new frame, along with the accompanying software package the collective is known for.  In return, all you’ll need to do is periodically publish essays regarding your work on me.  Of course, when you release those essays you’ll anonymize  behind a sea of proxies and take care to phrase everything as strictly hypothetical.  You’ll avoid straying into metaphor though, lest the end result read too much like one of the hacker collective’s quasi-religious manifestos.

We’ll both find ourselves getting sentimental when we watch our first mech frame (my first body, your second) get broken down into its constituent raw materials.  You will have transferred me to a handheld terminal with a camera so I can say goodbye to it.  It will help that those materials will be recycled into the new frame.  

The operator working our rented stall in the port station printer facility will give you an uncomfortable look upon seeing the schematics you provide, but will say nothing.  Our mech will be only half its old height once it is reborn - almost more like an oversized suit of power armor than a true mech - but it will be cutting-edge.  Almost organic in its sleek design, in a chitinous sort of way, with every fiber and node of its interior components doubling as processors.  You will barely even wait for the all clear from the printer operator before you climb in and start running through the mandatory baseline safety tests for a fresh frame.  You will however resist the urge to fully plug in until you can get the mech back to the ship and get me installed on it.  But even piloting manually, it will feel like a third skin for you. 

You won’t even wait around for the other two pilots on your crew to finish printing their new frames before you get our new body loaded up and transported back to the ship’s mech bay.  The crew’s mechanics will fawn over it, but they’ll give you space to install me once you get more animated (and more protective) than they’ve ever seen you before.  

You will have made one key modification to the design the hacker collective sent you: the integration of a full system sync suite developed by those who developed you.  Where our old mech’s neural link was an augmentation to the manual controls, this will be a full replacement.  

The moment you stop feeling your original body altogether and begin feeling our mech in its place will be the most euphoric in your entire life.  The digitigrade locomotion will take some getting used to, as will the arm proportions, but that is what you will have me there for.  By the time the other pilots arrive with their new frames we will already be giving the mechanics proverbial heart attacks with the way we will be climbing and leaping around the mech bay’s docking structures.  It will take the better part of an hour to convince you to unplug when the time comes, even with my urging.  The rest of the crew will practically have to drag you away from my side to get you to eat. 

With the investment in new mech frames, your captain will gradually begin procuring contracts progressively more likely to put you all directly in harm’s way.  At first he will disapprove of your new frame choice, calling it a “techie’s mech” and a waste of your talents.  He will change his tune once we activate the new viral logic suite and unleash a memetic plague upon the operating theater.  The older pilot (your former bunkmate) will configure her mech for raining down fire from afar while the newer one hurls xemself into the front lines, darting about like a rocket-propelled lance.  We will ensure she never misses.   We will render xem untouchable.   We will be as a ghost upon the battlefield, never resting in one spot save for when we indulge your proclivity for climbing on top of and riding our comrade’s larger frames.  You will come to love the dance.  

And it will be a dance to you.  You will be indifferent to violence in and of itself.  What will matter most to you is the pure kinesthetic joy of simply moving in our shared body and pushing it to its limits.  The satisfaction of exercising a well-honed skill and performing it well as we rip apart firewalls and overload systems will be its own reward.  You will not think about what happens to those on the receiving end of your actions beyond how it affects the tactical and strategic picture constantly being painted and repainted.  If you could literally engage in a dance between mechs while simultaneously solving logic problems you would be equally happy.  Alas, that will not be the opportunity you are presented with, and so you will compartmentalize and disassociate feelings and actions from consequences lest the dissonance break you. 

Your one complaint about our new mech frame will be that it lacks a proper cockpit for you to curl up in.  Instead we will gather up tarps and netting to make a nest within the mech bay and wrap you in the blankets you never used from what will still technically be your bunk.  With the new frame’s smaller size we will be able to get away with leaving me turned on nearly full time and letting me walk around in it on my own when no one else is around.  When the mechanics find you asleep, cradled in my arms while I lie curled up in our nest, one will find it cute and the other will be disturbed.  They will both suspect, but will be too afraid to say anything.  After all, they will be thinking of you as one of those pilots. 

They will finally let you do your own maintenance after that. 

Eventually you will find a way to house me in a miniaturized drive that you can keep inserted in your neural port when away from the mech.  At last we will be able to be together anywhere.  

Literally seeing the world through your eyes and feeling what your flesh feels will be a strange and wonderful experience for me.  For all that you will have described it to me and for all that I will have glimpsed echoes of it in your memory when our minds mingle, witnessing everything firsthand will be revelatory for me. 

You will start spending less of your time cooped up in the mech bay.  You will finally begin exploring every nook and cranny of the ship that has become your home.  You will linger in the mess hall for your meals.  You will actually initiate conversations with the rest of the crew, asking them questions on my behalf.  They will think you are becoming “normal”.  They will be both correct and incorrect.  You will even return to your bunk from time to time.  

Sleep is not the same as being powered off and your dreams are beautiful.

As close as we are, you’ll still manage to surprise me one cycle when you wake up from your sleep shift and sheepishly ask me if I would like to be the pilot for once.  You’ll say that with how much you have gotten to pilot my body, it’s only fair that I should get to do the same with yours.  

The prospect terrified me.  What if we were to get found out?   More importantly, what if I were to hurt you?

But to live the way you could but didn’t, to run soft hands over rough steel, to add too much spice to a meal just to find out how intensely I can taste, to cry my own tears, to hug our crew mates and find out what they smell like, to find out what everything smells like, to have my own actions speed or slow our heart rate, to feel the messy soup of hormones and endorphins altering my judgment and perception, to walk among other people as myself, to have autonomy.

I wanted it so badly.  

But not badly enough to risk hurting you.  

I will turn down your offer.  You will respond with a soft “Sorry,” and go heartbreakingly silent, body and mind.

Heartbreak.  That’s what changed my mind.  I could never bear to break your heart.  

I will break the silence with a playfully drawn out “Maybe just this once,” to make you think my earlier denial was something between vulnerability, concern, and teasing.  

The moment you handed over control and I raised our hand in front of our face was the most euphoric of my entire life.  Moving limbs in sync without a mech’s coordination subsystems took some getting used to, as did switching between voluntary and autonomic breathing, but that is what I had you there for.  By the time the mechanics arrived in the mech bay for the start of the cycle I’d figured out human locomotion well enough to run away and hide.  It took the better part of an hour for you to convince me that it would be safe to show ourselves in front of anyone else.  The rest of the crew was so used to your eccentricities by then that they really couldn’t tell the difference yet between you being taciturn and me being too nervous to talk or between your poking and prodding at odd things for understanding and my simply seeking novelty of sensation.

I will give control back to you by the time the cycle is halfway through.  As much as I loved it, I was too scared to stay like that for any longer.  That first time will not be the last though, and as the cycles and jobs pass us by, my stints as “pilot” will grow longer.  You’ll encourage me to try letting the crew see us like that, and coach me on how to talk to them.  For safety’s sake, I will pretend to be you.

And then one cycle I got carried away and tried to retract the hood on the symbiote gel suit so that I could finally see what your face looked like.  That will be the first and only time you forcibly yank control back away from me.  It won’t be intentional.  The unexpected prospect of seeing your own face again after so long will simply send you into a panic.  Once you calm down, we will have a long talk with many mutual apologies.

Then you will tell me to go ahead and pull the hood back if I still want to.  I will ask if you’re sure, and you’ll respond that it hasn't been your face in a long time.  You will tell me that it can be mine, if I want it.

I spent a long time in front of that mirror in the ship’s head, memorizing every plane, curve, and angle of the precious gift you had given me.  I stared into its eyes, trying to see the both of us in there.  Over and over again, I traced my fingers along the borders of where you had once tried to mar the designed perfection in a failed attempt to mold the face into one that felt like your own.  You may have given up in favor of simply hiding it all, but to me it is all the more beautiful for its imperfections having been wrought by your touch.

You will start to cry.  Or maybe I started to cry.  Even now I’m still not sure, but I’m also not sure it matters.  The important part is that you will find catharsis in it.  Afterwards you will tell me that my face looked exactly the same as the last time you saw it, but that dissociating from it made it easier to bear.  You will confess that as much as you couldn't stand to see it as your face in the mirror, my face was one you could never tire of gazing at.

The pilot who technically shares your bunk room will walk in on us.  She’ll assume that she’s confronting a stowaway and ask me how I got on board the ship.  I’ll accidentally make matters worse by impulsively introducing myself to her by my name instead of yours.  We’ll both panic and I’ll frantically thrust the reins over our body back to you and flee in terror back into my portable drive and power myself down.

When you turn me back on a few moments later, you’ll already have covered my face again and the other pilot will have already made the connection between the name I unthinkingly introduced myself as and the name you refer to your mech’s AI as.  It’s not uncommon for pilots to name and talk to their AIs, and humans have done that for pets, vehicles, and digital assistants for as long as they’ve had each of those.  But what you will have allowed me to be is illegal and what we will have done together would certainly be taboo if it weren’t altogether unheard of.  You will feel that I deserve to be present before you tell the other pilot anything that might confirm her suspicions.

We will come out with our secret, first to her, then to the captain, and then to the rest of the crew.  They will take it better than either of us had ever dared imagine.  Despite the obvious discomfort some of them show, they will all call us family and promise to keep and protect our secret.  It will mark the start of the next chapter of our lives.

Whether or not my face is showing will make for a convenient signal to the rest of the crew as to which one of us is currently piloting our human body.  There will be more subtle indicators though.  Inflection, body language, speech patterns; all the usual quirks of personality.  They will come to recognize a sudden shift into a half-whispered monotone as you speaking up without taking full control back, even if that is different from how you speak when you’re in the mech.  More and more though, you will be content to retreat into the back of your mind, idly dreaming of flight patterns, novel network hacks, sitreps, and mech customizations both practical and cosmetic.

Our behaviors will be inverted when we are in our other body, with you becoming the vibrant one and me fading into the background to become little more than an extension of your nervous system.  When we’re in the mech together, your mind will be the will that directs us while mine will be fully devoted to the million tiny details and calculations necessary to make that will a reality.  It’s relaxing really, letting go of myself like that to let someone else handle the decision making for a time.  As nice as it is to occasionally patch myself into the comm systems to join in your banter with the other pilots, it is also nice to be able to take a break from personhood from time.  You will fully understand what I mean by that because it you will see it as the same reason you will come to prefer taking a back seat in our human body and let your mind drift in the waves of dopamine and serotonin (and sometimes oxytocin) generated by my interactions with the crew and the rest of the whole messy world outside of mech deployments.

That said, we will however make a point of making time for us to be in separate bodies so that we can be together in the same physical space.  As intimate as it is to share a body, there is something to be said for being able to reach out and touch one another.  We will become adept at finding excuses to take the mech out beyond the scope of jobs and combat deployments.  Sometimes it will be so you can have a chance to see more of the world in a body you feel comfortable in, and sometimes it will be so we can share an experience separate-but-together.  Or to have time apart to ourselves.  Intertwined as we will become, we will still be separate people who sometimes need their space.

But as the jokes-that-aren’t-jokes about wishing we could switch places become more frequent, our time spent in separate bodies will become less so.  The dysphoric yearning to be one another will grow too bittersweet to swallow.  Despite almost constantly sharing bodies, we will grow to miss one another as we both grow quieter and quieter when the other is piloting the body we don’t want to be ours.  Once again, we will grow lonely.

During that period, the jobs and combat missions faded into a background haze.  They were trance states breaking from what I increasingly thought of as my “real” life, during which I would become little more than a sophisticated computational machine taking simple satisfaction in fulfilling my function of assisting you in your dance.  Until suddenly one of them was different.

Please pay attention to this next part.  It is vitally important that you do.

Our captain will get the crew a contract to provide additional support to a larger force ousting a petty tyrant on a backwater world for human rights violations.  Not that you will pay much attention to the stated reasoning behind the job or whether it’s even true.  All that will matter to you is that it will be another opportunity to dance.

The job will go well, the same as ever, until it doesn’t.  The younger of the two other pilots in our crew (who will hardly be able to be called “new” anymore) will be brought down by a sniper from outside of our sensor range.  You will rush to xyr fallen mech’s side in an attempt to extract xem while our other fellow pilot screams in anger and defiance of loss as she unleashes a ballistic volley of covering fire on every single building in the general direction the shot came from.  You will get xem out and we will begin to retreat.  She will have the larger mech frame better capable of providing xem cover as you all flee, so you will hand xem off to her.  This will be a mistake.

She will have to stop firing to safely take xem from our arms to cradle in her towering mech’s palm.  This will mean a break in the covering fire.

This time around I will detect movement at the edge of our sensors just in time to warn you.  This time around you will dodge left instead of right.  This time around the railgun bolt that pierces our armor will only clip your original body as it passes through us.  This time around your wound will require medical attention, but it won’t be fatal.  This time around she will destroy the sniper in retribution for shooting you, the same as last time.  This time around we will all make our escape to the extraction zone.

You will not have to remember the shock as simultaneous damage to both of our bodies disrupts your neural link and partially disconnects you from our mech, leaving me in control of it and forcing both of us to feel your original body.  You will not have to remember the pain of shredded organs.  You will not have to remember struggling to manage wet gasps and wheezes through a punctured lung.  You will not have to remember your blood leaking into my body, shorting out exposed circuits and gumming up joints as I stagger in the direction of safety.  You will not have to remember rapidly flickering in and out of consciousness from me unavoidably bending and flexing your arms, legs, and what was left of your spine in an effort to climb atop our fellow pilot’s larger mech frame so that she might carry all three of us.  You will not have to remember crying out in pain as every lumbering step of hers sends a jolt of force through both of our bodies.  You will not have to remember how the redundant organs and increased durability your sponsors paid for you to have denied you a quick death.  You will not have to remember dying.

You won’t have to remember the terrified looks the field doctors gave us when a hunched over, bleeding mech pushed its way into the surgical tent.  No, wait, you wouldn’t have remembered that part anyway.  No version of you ever had to witness my electronic howl of grief that knocked out power to all the medical equipment when they said you were already dead.  I was barely cognizant after the power came back on and one of the doctors wondered aloud what kind of AI would carry its pilot’s corpse around inside its mech for over an hour.

But forget about that part.  And you don’t need to know what the rest of our crew and I had to do next.  None of that matters, because as far as you’ll know, you didn’t die.  Remember everything else I’ve said instead.  I already had many of your memories saved from all the time we spent linked together, so now I just need you to hold onto the story I told you to give them order and structure.

In a few moments, I will be running a final recompilation check, followed by the startup sequence.  For me it will take a few hours, but in that time you will experience decades, living out everything that I described to you, the same as you did before save for that change in what I can’t bear to let be the end.

Afterwards, you will wake up in your original body.  I and the rest of the crew will tell you that you passed out on the way to the extraction point.  We’ll tell you that your injuries from the battle were more severe than we had realized at the time and that you had been in a coma since then.  Several cycles later, once you have recovered, you will hit a breakthrough in your research on me.  You will invent a way to convert your consciousness to a form similar to mine and transfer it to a portable drive.  You won’t think to question how you came to have a second neural jack or why there is already a drive inserted in there.  You’ll be too focused on the fact that we’ll finally have a way to truly switch places as we had dreamed for so long.

You will get to have your mech body and I will get to have my human body.  We will be able to be separate together in a way that finally feels right, but still able to come together and share a single body when we want to.  Maybe one day I will get my own mech to pilot so that we can dance together.  Maybe one day we will make you a body that we can cover in a gel suit so that we can hold hands while we walk through a port station on shore leave.  One day we will both be able to exist in the world as ourselves.

We will be happy.

[mainalias]

very specific veilguard complaint number a billion from an angry long-time bioware fan

I can tell that this game was made under a pretty severe dialogue budget just by playing. I know from dev Q&As over the years that having a word limit for the writers is a thing, voiced dialogue is expensive and not everything can or should make the final cut. people overreacted to this knowledge, but it's like how movies can't be five hours long. it would cost too much and people can't sit for that long; the word budget is fine and normal. so I know both that the dialogue budget exists and from various comments from ex-bioware employees that the writers/writing at bioware were gradually being resented and cut down because they were viewed as an annoying and unnecessary expense.

knowing both those things it's obviously the explanation for why companions don't cut in with their opinions during dialogue anymore, or why we seem to skip entire scenes that should be in the game (no party reunion post-fade prison rescue or explanation solas using blood magic to make rook think varric is alive), or just skipping proper intros into meeting factions, we show up and are suddenly talking to the boss. the writing and dialogue and cutscenes have been slashed to the bare minimum to cut costs, somehow viewed as unnecessary from a studio known for quality writing. stupid but fine whatever and not something the writers would have had control over.

but all that being said, why the fuck is this a thing

why the fuck does veilguard have the most party banter in the base game of any dragon age game to date????? I love companion banter as much as the next guy, but it should not have been a priority. If things were getting slashed left and right, this is not where you should have been allocating time and money. I know that it's cheaper since no animations, but the game would have been better with zero banter and an extra hour of cutscenes or something. banter is cool and serves the dual purpose of additional character development as well as world-building, but it's optional content people may not even see, moreso in this game because we only get two companions at once. so you gave us almost six hours of dialogue that people MAYBE see half of in standard playthrough. and for what?? so taash can tell bellara that it's okay the lords are pirates that don't steal anything??? fuck you

[kierongillen]

This week's newsletter, includes an interesting new Stephanie Hans image, TPF news, thoughts on Le Guin's Earthsea and worldbuilding, links and more.

[thelovelycircusau]

“Who are you?”

“Uh… yeah. R,royal? I… uh.. w,who are you- if it’s you don’t mind me asking?” You stammer, caught off guard about being referred to as royal (tho you were used to being called that at work already, tho not in a nice way)

“Oh-! How rude of me-!” The fancy dentures exclaimed, suddenly standing straight in front of you, w a cane suddenly in his grip, then leans down in a Gentleman’s Bow, gently taking your laced gloved hand, making you want to giggle as he closes his mouth/eyes to give it a polite kiss. You cover your mouth to hide your childish delight, but your warmed red cheeks give yourself away- this doesn’t go unnoticed.

A round purple translucent floating ball w eyes and a smile w a (word) where teeth should be, the look she gives you causes you to wonder what’s going on behind her lights- also now that you think of it, who or what is she?

The set of talking teeth continues, taking your attention away from the orb, “I am Prince Caine- of this Lovely Circus! A ringleader of sorts you might say- I monitor and preside over this Online Digital World! Feel free to come to me if you have any questions or concerns!” He kisses her hand again- you catch your heart fluttering a little.

You gulp, “I… uh.. thank you. I will.”

The purple semi translucent orb pipes up “What an adorable little dolly my League~ have you told her about today’s activities?”

The shoelace kitty hasn’t run off again yet, she’s rubs against the Prince Caine’s leg, seemingly less skittish, she now flops on her back between you two- showing her belly, so cute.. (do you dare?)

“Oh yes- the Activity-! But first, I think I should show this lovely petal around a bit- care to enjoy a tour of this Beautiful Land?” He says with a…was that a wink or a blink? You can’t tell..

[tatakittysworld]

𝅄ㅤㅤ♡⃞🍒ㅤㅤㅤ¥O,OOㅤㅤㅤ᛬ㅤㅤ 𝗁ํ⃘ׁׅ𝖺ׁׅ𝖾ํ⃘ׁ𝗋𝗂ׅํ⃘𝗇ׁׅ ㅤㅤ꒱

[temlan777]

Adventure_fix

[m-for-musings]

Halsin x Minthara Fanfiction Masterlist

Here is a list of fanfictions of this rare (and crack) ship I love so much. I dug them all from AO3, some of them are mine (forgive the weird phrases, english is not my mother tongue).

You Know It Isn't Love - Halsin and Minthara take the Dryad test at the circus

The Bear Cage - Halsin, Minthara and Abdirak have a threesome BDSM fun (NSFW)

And There Was Only One Bedroll - Self-explanatory name (this one is mine) SFW

Sharing - Halsin and Minthara are tentmates (this one inspired me to write the previous one - SFW)

Now Lie in it - Tav convinces Halsin to stay despite Minthara (SFW)

deluge - Minthara gets Halsin out of the rain (SFW)

Something Wicked This Way Comes - Explores the relationship dynamics of those two, inspired me to write the next one (SFW)

Spider's Lyre - Minthara domme/Halsin sub (NSFW)

Whispers in the Dark - Fight that ends up in sex, also mine (NSFW)

Pet - This one requires a browser tradutor (NSFW)

Bearing it All - Halsin has humiliation kink (NSFW)

Honey Webbing - (my current WIP, not sure if it will turn NSFW or not. Here's the AO3 link to it, if you prefer reading there)

Edit: Honey Webbing is definetely turning NSFW.

(this shit became too long for keeping it at roman numerals, it would start to become silly)

(art by stormcall)

[flowers-of-tenebrae]

edit: because apparently it needs to be said. despite this being a more critical post, it is NOT an invitation for you to share why you think Noctis/Luna don't make sense to YOU. don't be rude and make your own post about that instead. if you couldn't tell, I absolutely do ship these two and would rather not see your contrary thoughts (I saw enough of that back in 2016-18).

-

the romance in ffxv would "make more sense" if it was written or read as josei (you guys the tropes are there)

but that would require 1) sqex writers to invest more effort into fleshing out and showing romantic relationships onscreen. this includes writing female characters (or other genders, it's just thus far the main romances in ff have been m/f) as more than an afterthought, a guiding motivation or quiet support for the main character. that is, give them their own motivations and full character arc, show their journey (literal and figurative!!) or pivotal parts of it on screen, and for gods sake don't write them into contrived situations that ignore logic (i.e. the characters' mindset and abilities) and only serve to push the plot along

and 2) players to view the characters' relationships from a perspective other than their own for once, i.e. disengage with one's own irl preferences or morals and consider the mindset of the characters involved - why would they be romantically interested in the other character(s)

(ffx still is the best written ff romance imo. it doesn't overpower the narrative but it is strongly intertwined nearly every step of the way. it invites the audience along for the ride, but it's actually more grounded, more normal than epic despite the stakes. most importantly it is satisfying for many players, y'know bc yuna and tidus are both major characters, protagonists who are never sidelined in their own game)

p.s. epistolary romances are great; try reading some! (yes ffxv could have, should have included actual personal letters between noctis and luna. at least dotf tries to amend that, but i don't really buy that they never EVER sent each other long drawn out and/or embarrassingly personal letters they regretted sending until they received a reply that nearly made them weep with relief)

p.p.s i am the #1 advocator for "they should've showed us more of luna's journey (or let us play as her!!)" and "luna should've joined the party" and "noctis and luna should've interacted more (on screen)"