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No fucking way I found my little rubber fetus

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do not. respond to my doylist criticism with a watsonian explanation.

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Thinking about how Yukari occasionally visits the outside world

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凍つく

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I'm in awe of how we ran historical revisionism on the civil rights movement so bad that people truly believe it was quiet self-sacrifcial non-disruptive christ-like activism that forced progress and not — like — the incredible economic pressure of boycotts and outbreaks of illegal civil disobedience

Yapping to the choir but eughhh it burns me up girl effective protests have to be loud and inconvenient for change to happen because silent cries die in the dark that's the entire pointtt

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Year of the snake.

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I want all animals to become sapient enough to produce art specifically because I want to see what sort of sex homunculus caricature each species would create if given the ability to draw

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yoooo guys these wings my dad made look INSANE i can’t wait to try them tomorrow

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Cave Space

The mechanic’s shop was the loudest and dirtiest place I’d seen on this space station so far, and somehow that was comforting. All the ritzy retail stores and elaborate restaurants tried to look as fancy as possible, even the cheap ones. But this place felt honest and straightforward. It had bare concrete floors and the kind of shelf displays that didn’t bother with signs to actually explain what you were looking at. A real mechanic would know.

I had no idea, but I was just here to help haul things. Blip and Blop might have been a better choice if the things in question proved to be heavy, but they were off wrangling jumbo tubs of food and medical supplies with Eggskin, and anyways we had the big hoversled this time. It would probably be fine.

Mimi was talking fast with an employee about manifolds and vents and lots of other words, waving a couple green tentacles while he stood on the rest. The employee was the biggest Heatseeker I could remember seeing, which was still only mid-rib-height on me. He reminded me of the short gym guys from back home, able to build muscle in every direction but up.

A box thumped onto a counter near me. “You here to help lift and pull?”

I found an older human woman grinning at me, wearing a tank top covered in grease and long white hair held back in a ponytail. Also the kind of arm muscle that said she yanked engines out of spaceships for fun.

“Something like that,” I said with a smile. “Gotta make sure nothing falls off the sled.”

She waved a hand. “Ah, we’ll strap it down for you. There’s enough ramps around here to cause problems if we don’t.”

“I bet,” I said, thinking back to the last time I’d chased something important down a hill. “Don’t want to risk any explosions or chemical spills.”

“Or slamming a gear shaft into the side of a building,” she agreed. “There was a bit of a mess the last time someone was sure they didn’t need their stuff tied down.”

I winced. “Ouch.”

“Yeah, it’s standard procedure now,” she said, opening the box to pull out multiple smaller boxes, all labeled with arcane terminology and numbers. They rattled as she stocked them on the shelf under the counter. “If they’d asked me, it would have been standard from the start, but what do I know? I’ve only been doing this kind of work for decades, on more planets than I care to count.”

“Sounds exciting,” I said as she finished stocking. “I haven’t been out here all that long by comparison, but there’s always something new to see.” A glance around the shop took in rows of alien technology, a Heatseeker with scales painted silver, and one of those centipede-like people whose species name I didn’t remember. I was pretty sure they were looking at a jetpack display.

“Oh sure, plenty of weirdos out here,” the woman said easily, ripping tape off the box and flattening it. “Though it’s easy to tip over from marveling at the wonders to feeling the kind of intense homesickness that you get when you’re light years away from home.”

“I suppose so.” I’d been pretty lucky on that front, since my alien coworkers were friendly sorts who made me feel welcome. But there were times when the sheer amount of empty space between me and Earth was a little too much to think about.

“You’ve got to find ways to remind yourself of where you come from, and take pride in it,” the older woman said with a pointed finger, like a grandparent giving career advice. “Recreate bits of home while you’re far from it.”

I thought back to the potted plants and sun lamp in my quarters, kept high enough that the cat couldn’t chew on them. “I like to think I do that,” I said. “Do you have a preferred method? Classic Earth songs, googly eyes stuck in funny places?”

She barked a laugh. “Ha! Nothing I’d admit to. But I’ll show you my current favorite touchstone to humanity.” She dug in a pocket.

I stepped closer, curious, as she pulled out something palm-sized. She rested her elbows on the counter and held it up, framed by splayed fingers with appropriate drama.

It was a rock, smooth and shiny like it had been polished by a river and then by a thick layer of varnish, and it was covered in minuscule handprints. All in earthtones, like a cave painting reduced to pocket size: some in silhouettes like tiny hands had pressed mud or ash against the cave wall, and others shadowed by color like the prehistoric artist had chewed charcoal and spat it carefully around their fingers.

(I’d done that in school one day, with one of the cool teachers, who taught us the basics of humanity’s oldest style of airbrushing. It was incredibly messy and trickier than I’d expected. It gave me renewed respect for the artists from eons ago whose artwork had survived into modern times.)

And this was that same thing, made small enough to carry around the galaxy, a tiny reminder of home. “That’s fantastic,” I breathed.

“Isn’t it?” she asked, rubbing at the shine. “I got it from a traveling artist awhile back. If I was in a different line of work, I’d sell clothes with this pattern on them. It’s the kind of thing that makes other Earthlings smile.” She stood up and put it back in her pocket with a wink. “Not like googly eyes, but still good.”

“Yes, still good!” I agreed, smiling. I would have liked to talk more about it, maybe find out where that traveling artist had gone, but Mimi was wrapping up his conversation. A door opened to admit a trio of Heatseekers carrying a huge cylinder that was probably destined for somewhere in the guts of our ship.

“I’ll get the tie-down straps,” said the woman, rummaging under a different section of counter.

“Thanks,” I said, though I don’t think she heard me. The air was full of talk and the sound of clawed feet on concrete. I hurried to take up a position by the controls of the hoversled, making sure it stayed locked in place.

The team worked quickly, and in no time they had it strapped down well enough that it wouldn’t budge even if the gravity cut out completely. (Which had better not happen; I’d had more than enough of that kind of nonsense at the last station.)

Mimi processed the payment, tapping a screen with one tentacle tip and thanking the employees for having this whatsit in stock. I got the impression that it wasn’t the one he’d actually come to get, but it was better in some way or other.

“Thanks again!” I said as we tugged the sled toward the door. I waved at the other human and she waved back, two hands signaling kinship briefly across the room. Then she took her flattened box into the back and I stepped out into the artificial sunlight, looking for signs leading back to the spaceport.

The gravity behaved, and the ramps were no trouble. Blip and Blop were there to help unload the thing. I asked Mimi if he wanted three people to maneuver it into wherever it went, or if I should go put the hoversled away.

He was busy climbing inside of the cylinder with a flashlight, for whatever reason. “Nah, not enough space for everybody,” his gravelly voice echoed. “Let me just — really? Another one?” A faint squeak sounded like he was rubbing a tentacle against the side.

“What is it?” I asked, bending to look inside. Blip and Blop crowded behind me, a jumble of curious muscles and silks.

Mimi grumbled, “This is the third engine part that I’ve gotten with these annoying marks. All from different sources, too. If I ever find out which finger-having species is doing it, we are going to have words.”

Deep inside the cylinder, in a spot that likely would never have been seen by anyone but an agile mechanic, was a patch of handprints. Mimi had already smeared the ones made in grease, but the others looked like they might have been paint. All in earthtones. A cave painting in the depths of a spaceship.

Blip and Blop chorused, “Not it.”

I bit my lip to hide a smile. “It’s a mystery.”

~~~

Inspired by this excellent artwork by @letmeinimafairy! It deserved at least one story, if not several.

~~~

These are the ongoing backstory adventures of the main character from this book.

Shared early on Patreon! There’s even a free tier to get them on the same day as the rest of the world.

The sequel novel is in progress (and will include characters from these stories. I hadn’t thought all of them up when I wrote the first book, but they’re too much fun to leave out of the second).

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大・東方展2024 MAIN VISUAL

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How equal can a society be if some fundamentals are unusable by a third of the population? You can learn a lot about a world by looking at the little details, especially in furry settings!

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The issue here as far as I can tell is that visual novels, at least in the past, are not marketed as their closest equivalent (books) but as games, a medium that as one its basic touchstones has interactivity. You're not a (semi-)passive consumer of what's going on, you're part of what's going on, even if that ocassionally just means "I walk over to that person and they talk at me as the script dictates".

"Pressing A for 20 hours" is seen as an issue because it strips that layer of interactivity from the story. Books get a pass here because anyone who has heard of a book gets that that's what you do. I imagine they'd get similar shit if they were marketed in video stores as "theater of the mind movies" instead of what books - it's an issue with the setting where they are presented, not the medium itself.

Can this be fixed without wrecking the income of VN makers? I'm not sure. Selling them somewhere instead of steam is probably not the way to go - an established market of many millions is just too juicy a target to ignore (if anyone has sales numbers I'd be interested, since I'm just going off conjecture here). Maybe time will fix the problem, as more VNs like DDLC and the Coffin of Andy and LeyLey with mass-market success come out and the whole thing gets normalised.

It's actually kinda mesmerizing how the popular sentiment around visual novels is that they simultaneously have no gameplay, and also are too hard to get into.

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"Cute Aggression" starring Jack, Alfredo, and a cat we all know is orange.

Wordsmithing by @ecmsquared on Bsky (who you should absolutely hire to make your comics awesome)

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白い旅人