The Web and the Void

In a vague attempt at organisation, I'm creating a collection of links to all my fiction.



( Collapse )

Sometimes to a quite ridiculous degree. For instance I wrote Bad Decisions for an MCU movie that came out this year, and in general I'm rather happy with it. It's not one of my top tier stories, but it's in high second tier I'd say. And in the few weeks it's been viewable, it's got 71 kudos (and an amazing comment from my recipient), which I'm more than happy with. 

Last night I put up Breathe in the Summer Air (You Are the Sand Between My Toes), which is a Kate/Yelena fic for the Hawkeye tv series, who had some fun interactions in an episode on Wednesday. And, well. Again, I'm not unhappy with the fic, but I wouldn't say that it's quite as good as Bad Decisions. In less than 24 hours, it's gotten over 500 kudos which is... Well, I'm certainly not complaining, but I definitely wouldn't say that's commeasurate with its quality.

Looking at my stats page, my fic with the highest kudos (as opposed to the fic with the highest kudos on my account, which was written by Louisa and definitely earned its 816 kudos the hard way) is a Jessica Jones fic which I seem to remember was also written very shortly after season 1 dropped and probably benefitted from a similar effect. (If not quite to the same extent.) The one after that (and now the new fic) is a Person of Interest fic that mostly benefitted from being written fairly early as regards interest in the specific pairing, back when it was purely subtext, but not from dropping at any specific point in time. (And, honestly, was a more solid fic than either Bad Decisions or Breathe.)

So, yeah. If you're looking for kudos, there's definitely something to said for capturing the moment.

My gift this year was A Certain Brightness by FictionPenned, a neat little Genya/Alina Shadow and Bone fic about an alternate slant on their first meeting.

I did manage to make something of a better showing this year, even if I still wasn't as productive as I might have liked. Quite a few short fics, bt still only 18.5K in total.

My fic for my assigned recipient was Perchance to Dream, a Tally Craven/Sarah Alder Motherland: Fort Salem fic, wherein Tally has a dream - or possibly not - just after the end of season 2.

I volunteered to write this fandom shortly after having watched season 2 with a variety of pairings with what turned out to be a certain amount of hubris. I had problems coming up with an idea for any of the requested pairings that consisted of more than a scene, so I only ended up writing a 1.6K fic for my recipient, which I feel a little guilty about. Still, they left a nice comment. I hope they weren't disappointed.

Coming and Going is a Natasha/Peggy MCU fic, specifically set in the Captain Carter What If verse. Peggy witnesses Natasha seducing a female target on mission and can't get it out of her mind. Which is ridiculous, right?

While I don't think this fic is bad, per se, I do have various problems with it. If nothing else, I've been idling noodling through a much longer fic with the same pairing which I started to write, but got 3K into before realising I wasn't going to be able to finish it within the time limit. There's also a vague sense of dissatisfaction that made it hard to enjoy the quite lovely comment the recipient left me.

Ugh.

Bad Decisions is a Katy Chen/Xu Xialing MCU fic. Katy's never been good at making good relationship choices, and XIaling's hot. Besides, she's Shang-Chi's sister and it's probably a good idea to try and build bridges. Yeah, that sounds good.

I got distinct disaster bi vibes from Katy in the movie and XIaling definitely checked her out at one point, so I decided to set this post movie and in between Katy and Xialing's dance around each other and genuinely mutual interest, also deals a bit with Shang-Chi and Xialing's remaining issues. This is probably the fic I'm happiest with overall, probably helped by the fact that this is by far the longest fic at almost 10K.

Such a Perfect Day is a Wanda/Agatha MCU fic that draws upon both WandaVision and What If. Wanda's having a perfect day. Wanda's also occasionally having her life drained by Agatha. She's not sure whether she deserves it.

I'm not unhappy with this, even if I was fairly sure it wasn't going to have much of an audience. I did contemplate gifting this to havocthecat who had requested this pairing, but she specify no grim darkness in her DNWs and... I wouldn't say it's massively dour in tone, but it does involve a marbled universe and a distinctly Bad End for that universe, so in the end I chickened out and gifted it to Louisa. She likes all my fic, so she's a soft touch.

Words Pressing Like Fingers At The Inside of My Mouth, a Harriet/Desiree The Nevers fic. It's not that Harriet isn't feeling it. It's more that she wants to say it in her own time, not just because Desiree's power makes her.

This was the shortest of all my fics this year, basically revolving around how the two of them navigate the situation when one of them has a power that can make you blurt things out when you're in the grip of strong emotion. It isn't bad, but I'm not sure my strengths run to fics of this length.

 So this was another con we got to attend electronically, which is just as well - given how uncertain the COVID situation is, even if we'd been willing to travel, I don't think we could have guaranteed being able to travel to the US months in advance. It did mean that we missed out on seeing various of our favourite people in person for another year, but we got to play with some of them at least.

Slot 1 - Further Information Is Not Available Here (GMing)

People who have read my previous reports may remember that we ran another game called this in 2013. It's set in the same universe, and we did use some of the background fluff that we came up with for that game, but it was with completely different characters and about a different situation. As before, it's about time travelling universe hoppers who have about 6000 years to play with. The plot this time was focussed around two things that came up in character creation - I told one player that you couldn't create clones with time travel powers, even in the high tech end of time, then another player wanted to play a shapeshifting clone timetraveler, the only survivor from his batch.

Aha, we thought. This sounds like a plot to us.

It ended up being part of a plot from a group from beyond the End of History, beyond the point which time travelers can't travel back from, where apparently reality and history is coming apart. Naturally, the people who've managed to survive in this half existence want out, and the existence of the shapeshifting time traveler was basically the most successful part of an organic probe they sent back.

Despite a few opportunities, there wasn't any combat - the players ended up just talking with everyone and making nice, including helping a science team from the future adjust to the current conditions so they can survive without tearing a hole in reality.

It was enough fun we might have to run another game in this universe at some point.


Slots 2 and 3 - Snakes and Ladders 

This was a pair of short adventures that were in the same universe and had the same characters. The first game was us, as recognised members of the royal family the King could easily bully into doing his bidding, being sent to investigate why an Amber embassy to a nearby country has disappeared. It turned out the king was sacrificing people with any blood connection to the royal family of Amber in a nasty magical ritual. (Which, given they're not a celibate lot and have been around for hundreds of years, is a surprising amount.)

My character was Gwen, a shapeshifter of surpassing skill, who had been doing her best to push the bounds of shapeshifting as basically a postdoc aiming at becoming the equivalent of a professor. Unfortunately, the particular bound she had been pushing was the large form problem - basically when you change into something too large, your reactions necessarily slow because of the time it takes for signals to tarvel down nerves. She'd come up with a system where a network of sub-brains could approximate what she'd do, more or less, at least until her actual consciousness could make decisions. She went off to an out of the way world, and spread herself out over a few square miles. Unfortunately, despite being fairly out of the way, some of the locals attacked part of her, leading to a defensive reaction. Basically, the local part of her swallowed them and used their biomass to spread a bit further. Which led to escalation, more swallowing, more growth - which also contributed to it taking longer and longer for her consciousness to be able to come to a decision, and eventually led to her swallowing the world.

Basically, she accidentally Annihilationed a world. Whoops.

Eventually, she managed to sort herself out to the extent of budding a human body off with her consciousness, more or less. The problem is that various memories from the people she'd absorbed were mixed up in there, despite her best efforts, and caused something akin to a mental breakdown. So she abandoned her academic career and headed off home to Amber, to try and piece herself together. (And incidentally causing a lot of pain to the people she's closest to, like her mother, since she's got a lot of memories that aren't quite right.)

Anyway, she had some skills that were useful in the investigation, but mostly she was still fairly subdued, despite it being a year since she got back. There was a part when a magical effect temporarily influenced her, altering her thinking, and after that was quickly broken she had a brief panic attack, because not thinking like herself is one of her things. On the bright side, she managed to help the queen, who had been magically compelled by the king so many times that her mind fell apart when the enchantments were removed, because rebuilding minds is something she has a lot of experience with now!

Also, apparently the princess recognised my character, despite the fact that as far as my character remembered, she'd never been to the country before. Which was more than a little worrying. She never did get to the bottom of that.

The second adventure was investigating dreams all of the player characters had started getting. We eventually managed to track down the source, an amazingly powerful cousin who had seen her grandfather kill her father in front of her when she was five, had subsequently been locked in a prison, and certainly at the moment was kind of stuck in the mindset of a five year old, despite being amazingly powerful. She'd been used by some people, including the now deceased king from the first adventure, and she'd reached out to us in dreams, because she felt like we were 'safe' relatives. Luckily, all of our reactions were to help her, which is just as well because Gwen became instantaneously immensely protective of her and an enraged super skilled shapeshifting who can excrete anaesthetic gas is never a good thing, especially in enclosed quarters.

The game ended with the cousin being rescued and Gwen is currently planning on taking her on a tour of worlds well away from anyone else who might want to use her - and specifically her family, because her cousin is immensely powerful and very vulnerable to manipulation from the vipers nest her family can often be. (Sometimes, they're even worse than academics!) She's helping her cousin put herself back together again - again with the relevant experience - but also she feels like a person again. Maybe not the same person, but not just a sad ghost of someone anymore.


Slots 4 and 5 - The Kids from Powers Street

Most of the first slot was spent making up our characters, who were all kids at high school in 90s small town Oregon. Amusingly everyone who played a girl decided that their character was a lesbian, and in particular my character was the younger sister of another PC who was bitterly resentful that everyone assumed that she was a lesbian just because her big sister was one of the two out lesbians at the school. (She was, which just made it even worse.) She was also a jock and a little way into the game gained the power to dematerialise like a ghost. She was also the most reckless of the PCs and tended to dive into everything first.

Apparently the first time the GM ran this game, the PCs got very caught up in prom drama, but in this game we focused more on the alien probe that had landed nearby and had taken over a couple of students to get them to send a message back that Earth was open for invasion. Which we stopped. Yay!

Post game head-canon for this game was that at some point my character would pin Louisa's - an annoyingly perky, nice and understanding goth - against a locker and kiss her then stomp off, which Louisa's character wouldn't see coming despite the fact that she got telepathy. Amusingly, relatively few of my characters tend to end up being attracted to Louisa's unless it's something we've decided ahead of time, but apparently this was an exception.

This game was a lot of fun, run by someone we've run games for before (including slot 1 this year). She's an amazing player, and we're always glad to see on our list, but apparently she was a little intimidated about having us as players. (Whereas, honestly, we were fairly confident that we'd have a good time.)


Slots 6 and 7 - Nova Mundi: Impact!

Here we played people in the modern world who were all top tier players in Nova Mundi, a MMORPG. A hotly awaited update is released and we all wake up in the world, in our main characters' bodies, along with seemingly everyone else who plays the game. There was a little bit of a learning curve as we had to figure out how to use our abilities - not to mention even once we'd found out, remembering which set of gestures activates a spell is difficult when you're being attacked in real life by a monster - and exploring the world, and how the MMORPG rules interact with the world. Which was definitely not perfectly!

For instance, computer controlled characters now had free will and at least one person from Earth very quickly started dating one. (Not a PC, but a person from Earth nonetheless.) On the down side, all bought food didn't have taste implemented, though we did manage to figure out a workaround - if you took the raw ingredients and cooked them properly, they did actually have a taste. So some players with burger flipping skills from the real world suddenly found themselves in demand.

As top tier players, especially once we'd practiced our skills in our new bodies, we also got involved in the plot - a trail of clues which led to a dungeon raid that if we beat it would give us a key to either go home or access more worlds. There was also a subplot of a monster invasion, and players who defected to the monster faction either in hope that was the way home, or because they were griefers. We finished the raid, then defeated the monster invasion and had the choice about whether to return home or unlock more worlds.

My character was never going home - she was a closeted trans-woman working a dead end retail job who in no way had the money to transition. So finding herself in a female body that actually felt right? Yeah, not going back from that. In the end, after the epic battles, only one person did end up returning - a cis-guy stuck in the opposite situation, a female main that gave him dysphoria.

This was a fun popcorn game, a nice low energy way to finish off the con, and gave me many World of Warcraft feels, even though I've never been a serious MMORPG player.

( Collapse )</div>

( Collapse )

 We've never been to Ambercon US before - as opposed to Ambercon NW - for mostly monetary reasons. We've never really been able to afford more than one trip to the US each year. (Also the amount of holiday would be a little prohibitive as well.) But this year, thanks to COVID and the power of virtual cons, we managed to attend the con slots that fit within our time zones. (The slots that went on to 4 or 5am would have taken some acclimation time of moving our body clocks.)

So, in the end, we got to attend 3 games (though one game carried over two slots).

There Someone in my Head...
The basic setup is that we've all retired from the family game of politics and infighting, and retired off to our own perfect worlds. And then your doubles turn up, and start turning everything upside down. My character was basically a teenager in Amber terms who had a massive argument with her mother and surrogate big sister, ran off to find her own world where she could play (basically) King Arthur, then as she grew up over the next almost two centuries, had a chance to discover that she wasn't really interested in just playing the wandering hero, and that she could build, liked doing that, and also wasn't really suited to lead so much as direct. Certainly at some point, she meant to go back, but never really got around to it. Then her double, a version of her with all the subtlety of a brick armed with automatic weapons, turned up.

She was less than impressed.

This was... an alright game. Some of the problem was the slow start - often a problem with Amber con games in my experience - where we all started in separate places and had about half an hour of setup with each player before the game really began. With five players, that's two and half hours, more or less, and the game was only six hours long. So, as well as leaving most of the players nothing to do for a third of the game, that took up almost half the run time. On top of that, the game went in a very powers based way, helped by the fact that 3 of 5 players were built that way. I mean, I think I got to one main thing, and mostly discussed theories about what was happening for the rest the time. (It turned out that an alternate Amber was invading out reality.) This wasn't completely the GM's fault - there was warfare based stuff going on that we could have gotten in, and she did make a few attempts in that direction, but still, that didn't help.


Exeunt Florimel, Welcome to the Family Feud
This was a sequel to the game from last ACNW and... it was not a great game. Rather than have our characters actually do anything - especially considering part of the setup is that we all owe a queen a big favour - we spent a large chunk playing out how various NPCs teaching us how to use our new powers, with little threat and even less point. We didn't actually affect anything, and the only fallout was the slim effect our choices had on our characters. Which we'd already played for one game. The one saving grace for me was that it was during this segment that my character did the one semi-notable thing she achieved all game - saving a random group of water nymphs from a tyrannical river king. But it wasn't particularly hard. After we finally got past that, there was some stuff that only really affected a couple of other characters, and my character just wasn't the sort to get involved in that. And even if she had, there would have been literally no stakes for her apart from whether she lived or died, and she wasn't going to die.

The only good thing was that, being online, I could check out for large sections and no one would notice, which... Um.

The GM is talking about running a sequel, but we're currently not planning on playing again..


Boundaries of Infinity
The setup for this game was that there was a weird area of the far multiverse which had infected an explorer somehow, making them weak and confused. Teams from the various important courts were assembled and told to investigate.

The one real saving grace of the con. Even though various characters started off in different places, we started off in two groups, and the GM was very good about cutting between characters and keeping everyone engaged, even when we split off individually briefly. We were briefed with a clear aim, and it was basically cooperative, so it felt like we were always pushing towards something.

My character was a diplomat who actually turned out to be stunningly useful for her mystical skills, which I really wasn't expecting when I designed her. Checking out the explorer psychically and mystically revealed vital information about the infection. (And, despite getting immediately checked out, meant that she got infected way earlier than the other PCs. Whoops.) And being the best in the party with mystical sight was an unexpected gift that made me far more useful.

My only real regret is that the personal entanglements that I'd tried to set up - they were exes from different courts whose relationship had ended badly - never really featured onscreen, despite the GM being more than willing to have some set up there. Ah well. It's a problem with con games - you never know how personal interactions will pan out.

This year I got a really good Dead to Me fic, every version of yourself tonight. It expands on the cliffhanger at the end of season two - what is probably going to be the last episode ever - and takes a look at how the two leads' relationship might change in the aftermath, in a way that feels true to the characters.

Annoyingly, I was still feeling massively low on energy this year after the virus, and only managed a single medium length story, of just under 8K. Expectations takes place in the very post apocalyptic (and then rebuilt) world of Horizon Zero Dawn, filled with robotic dinosaurs and megafauna, where the lead Aloy was outcast from birth from her tribe and then through curiosity (and a smart phone earpiece) manages to go off and do great things. But given that she's visiting different cultures and has only viewed her birth one from a distance, she can get some things a little wrong. But who among us hasn't accidentally ended up courting someone we may or may not be interested in?

I did end up eventually getting a kudos from my recipient for this story, but no comment. So I guess I know at least they read it. Yay?

Louisa's gift this year was a fun little Captain Marvel fic, Drawn from Blue, wherein Carol meets Mine-Erva some years after the movie tending bar in New York. Her story this year was, unfortunately, the same person who I had as a recipient last year. As such, her expectations were calibrated to not getting a comment or kudos from them, and that was exactly what happened, because apparently flipflop_diva doesn't believe in that part of the exchange. Her story was another MCU fic, this one Natasha/Hope called Friends with Benefits which again tended towards the more fun end of the spectrum, told from Hope's perspective wherein feelings may or may not be caught in an existing arrangement.

So, unsurprisingly, the yearly con in Portland, OR did not happen in the year of the COVID. But they did manage to scrape together a virtual con across the same dates. A little compressed because they've got a UK contingent (including us) so they didn't want games running on too late given the eight hour time gap, but still. One four hour slot of Thursday 7-11pm, and two four slots on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, running from 5pm-2am were a lot of fun and a needed break after this year. We were still feeling fatigued after COVID, and given the limited time, we really didn't feel up to running anything this year, alas.

Maybe next year.

( Collapse )

 For an exchange that requires a story of at least 1K words, I just wrote over 3K of prompts. I feel like I might be doing this wrong.