silveradept | AO3 Output - July-December 02020

Here it is, the last six months of fic work that I've posted to the Archive, with any commentary attached.

Once Upon A Fox (1060 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Epistory - Typing Chronicles (Video Game)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Fox (Epistory) & Protagonist (Epistory)
Characters: Protagonist (Epistory)
Additional Tags: Elemental Magic, Narrative Repetition, Rhyming, Girls and their Foxes, Women and their Foxes
Summary:
The story is there to be told. The tools are there for the telling. When the story itself seems to be made of dreams and magic, how do you tell it properly?

I went in a more experimental direction here, with a narrative that stops and starts and loops back on itself. Which is in the same vein as the original game itself, involving a girl riding an origami fox and using words as her power against bugs and other creatures as she tries to piece together herself again. (It's a really nice game. And yes, it's a typing practice simulator. It's still a nice game.) Thankfully, it works as intended for my recipient and they loved it, so mission accomplished.

Re: Calibration (2236 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Kairi/Riku (Kingdom Hearts)
Characters: Kairi (Kingdom Hearts), Riku (Kingdom Hearts)
Additional Tags: Post-Kingdom Hearts III, Minor Kairi/Riku/Sora (Kingdom Hearts), Keyblade Wielder Kairi (Kingdom Hearts), Angry Kairi (Kingdom Hearts), Awesome Kairi (Kingdom Hearts), Protective Riku (Kingdom Hearts), Limit Attack (Kingdom Hearts)
Summary:
Today is not Riku's day for staying dry. It is, however, his day for learning and more fully understanding what his sparring opponents are capable of, to his benefit.

This is a work that I have to chalk up as a failure, in the sense that the recipient that it was written for left neither kudos nor comment on the work itself. It doesn't have a lot of hits or kudos, and while I think it worked out well, it doesn't seem to have struck a chord with anyone but me. Which, you know, that's a thing that happens - not everything is going to find a home or be accepted. And I draw this conclusion not because I'm insecure about it, but because there's a work later on that will have gotten both kudos and comment, so this seems less like an omission and more like a statement. Ah, well. And I even used a good Princess Bride reference in it.

Peace in the Offering (4671 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Ancient Dragon/Queen they lay with for a day each month as a Peace Offering
Characters: The Ancient Dragon, Talia of the Blue Lake | Queen Talia
Additional Tags: Abusive Relationships, Negotiations, Implied/Referenced Past Rape / Non-con, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Minor Character Death, Contracts, Cooking Alive, Magical Compulsions
Summary:
Queen Talia meets the dragon she's supposed to lay with as a peace offering, and immediately sets to negotiating herself into a better agreement with everyone around her. Not everyone can be negotiated with.

This one almost didn't get written, given that the recipient's requests were all for a warning that I didn't offer, but after some negotiation and some understanding, I found something that worked and decided I was going to lean a touch more into the "do not mess with dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup" aspect, with some body horror and other not-niceties in it. Which was a useful stretch of creativity and imagination to try and get something that the recipient would like, since it wasn't going to be the exact thing they wanted. And the exchange mod will have some thoughts about how to avoid the situation in the future, since the matching algorithm worked exactly like it was supposed to.

Datalog: SCP-XXXX-1: Feline Thermate Disaster (3310 words) by silveradept
Fandom: SCP Foundation, Allstate Insurance "Mayhem" Commercials
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Mayhem (Allstate Insurance), Original SCP Character(s) (SCP Foundation), Deaf Scientist Chasing an Elusive SCP | Dr. Stesha Petrova, Companionable But Skeptical SCP Foundation Scientist | Dr. Malik Ghazali
Additional Tags: Amateur Chemistry, Chemistry Disaster, Memetic Mutations
Summary:
Dr. Stesha Petrova has a lead on an SCP that she has been chasing for years, a force behind seemingly random and chaotic events. She finally makes contact with a force of Mayhem and sees a demonstration of its powers firsthand.

This was a romp to write, mostly because the various Mayhem bits came through pretty easily, and I just had to make sure that I was trying to get the SCP Foundation part correct, or at least close enough that it wouldn't seem out of place, and that seemed to work, or at least work well enough for the recipient. It was a nice laugh to write compared to the previous one.

Getting the Cold Shoulder (and a few other parts, too) (4150 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Frozen (Disney Movies), Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Axel (Kingdom Hearts)/Elsa (Disney)
Characters: Axel (Kingdom Hearts), Elsa (Disney), Sven (Disney: Frozen), Kristoff (Disney), Bruni (Disney), Marshmallow (Disney)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Post-Kingdom Hearts III, post-Frozen II, Soulmates Are Either Lovers or Worst Enemies, getting off on the wrong foot, Standing on Trauma Triggers, Enemies to Friends
Summary:
It's not like Axel wanted to be back in Arendelle. As far as he was concerned, the kingdom, and its royalty, could stay out of his life. Unfortunately, when meddling sisters and soulmate marks get involved, there's no escaping a confrontation with his fated match, the ice queen of Arendelle herself.

This is yet another one of those "don't offer a thing that you're not willing to write" situations, but thankfully, I was in the mood for writing Axel as the smartass that he is, and letting his bad reputation precede him in ways that would make Elsa prickly, and then I just let the two of them play off of each other. Also includes a salamander that loves someone else with a connection to fire, and an ice creature who has met Axel before and carries a grudge, like he's supposed to. What got posted was a second chapter. I wrote and discarded an entire first chapter where Anna threatens Axel with Olaf's constant companionship until he decides to go back to Arendelle and see Elsa, because Anna is definitely certain that the markings mean that Axel and Elsa are meant for each other, rather than polar opposites who have to stay away. (They might have been that in the past, when Axel was still part of Organization XIII.) This was just nice to let Elsa use her powers with less restraint and for Axel to get thrown over the edge of a cliff.

Liberté, Solidarité, Accessibilité (19256 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 6/6
Fandom: Miraculous Ladybug
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Chloé Bourgeois/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Characters: Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Chloé Bourgeois, Sabrina Raincomprix, Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir, André Bourgeois, Tikki (Miraculous Ladybug), Alya Césaire
Additional Tags: Queerplatonic Chloé Bourgeois & Sabrina Raincomprix, Paralysis, Ableist Language, Disabled Character
Summary:
Marinette had assumed that Chloé's absence from social media was temporary. When she's asked to deliver homework, she learns the far more permanent truth, and sets to the more difficult task of getting Chloé to find something encouraging in her new reality, for Sabrina's sake. Complicating things is the very real possibility that Chloé might be doing it for Marinette's sake instead.

This is the work that I made for the Fandom Trumps Hate auction, as thanks for someone making a donation. It's the first time I've really gone this far in on what the effects of disability might be for someone, and that meant both research and making sure that I hadn't botched it completely. But it worked out particularly well, and, as it turned out, my sensitivity reader ended up going through some other parts of my catalog and found something that spoke to them quite significantly. So it worked out particularly well in all ways, this one, in that someone got a good work, someone else found a good work, and a wonderful group got a nice donation to their work.

Ti kokkinomálli (1000 words) by silveradept
Fandom: RWBY
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Jaune Arc/Pyrrha Nikos
Characters: Jaune Arc
Additional Tags: Past Character Death, Grief/Mourning, Canonical Character Death, Inner Dialogue, Post-Episode s06e09: Lost
Summary:
Jaune in Argus, his training routine, and missing Pyrrha.

I ended up doing this one for Poetry Fiction's retrospective, almost near the end of the available process, because a couple lines produced a thought about what the inner monologue might be for Jaune at the appropriate point in time where he's in Pyrrha's home town, surrounded by all the people who were her fans in life and who probably worship her all the harder in death. The draft of this work was 1001 words, so I trimmed one off and called it an even thousand. A deci-drabble, I suppose.

Finding the Link (2071 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Aqua & Kairi (Kingdom Hearts)
Characters: Aqua (Kingdom Hearts), Kairi (Kingdom Hearts)
Additional Tags: D-Links, Sparring, Post-Kingdom Hearts III, Minor Kairi/Riku/Sora (Kingdom Hearts)
Summary:
Kairi is tired of being the least powerful of the trio, the one who everyone reaches to protect, instead of letting her fight. Aqua shows her how to draw on the strength of others in combat to show her that Kairi is farther along the pathway than she thinks.

I have begun to think that just about any time that I write Kingdom Hearts that isn't a crossover, I'm going to end up writing for the same person. Which, to some degree, has me not doing Kingdom Hearts quite as much, because I'm not entirely sure that the recipient enjoys getting materials from the same author all the time. And since this is the same recipient as the earlier failure, this one getting kudos and comments made it feel much more like the previous one didn't go. I did like writing this story, though, because Kairi has so little focus in the story of Kingdom Hearts, but it feels like she's been doing an entire adventure of her own, although I'm kind of annoyed that she keeps ending up as a distressed damsel, rather than as a more full companion on the adventures.

If Smart, Talk Will Be Enough. If Not Smart… (1750 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Chrono Trigger
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Crono/Marle (Chrono Trigger), Lucca Ashtear/Crono, Lucca Ashtear/Crono/Marle
Characters: Lucca Ashtear, Marle (Chrono Trigger), Crono (Chrono Trigger)
Additional Tags: Relationship(s), Taking Advice From Your Ancestors, Affection Competition, Not Actually A Competition, Silent Crono, great minds think alike, After-You-No-After-You, Love Confessions
Summary:
Marle has gathered enough courage to confess her feelings for Crono and ask him to be her boyfriend. With the help of a cunning plan, she'll be able to get the answer she's been waiting too long for.
Lucca has gathered enough courage to confess her feelings for Crono and ask him to be her boyfriend. With the help of a cunning plan, she'll be able to talk to Crono enough for him to have to provide her with an answer that she's been waiting for years to hear.
Crono, of course, is entirely clueless about any of this.

This was a fun thing to write, mostly because I couldn't do much more than laugh at the idea of both Lucca and Marle going to Ayla for advice about what to do with their giant crushes on Crono and getting, essentially, the same idea from the same piece of advice, which they only recognize when they see the other one who has done basically the same thing. And, because they're both a good team, they decide to gang up on Crono instead of fight each other for his affections. It could be one of the endings to the original game, before the events of the next one get started.

Looking For A Mind At Work (1892 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Mundane Librarian/Monster Hunter
Characters: Otherwise-Ordinary Librarian Long Used To The Presence Of Non-Humans | Nerissa, Mental Energy-Feeding Illithid-Ish Entity | Ned, Moderately Successful Monster Hunter-Slash-Cryptid Expert | Kari
Additional Tags: Libraries, Professionalism In The Face Of The Weird, Speciesism, Library Typical Issues
Summary:
Kali is trying to find what might be a dangerous monster. Nerissa is trying to run a library without getting too involved in her wife's profession. When Kari's target shows up at Nerissa's desk, the two of them work together to find a peaceful resolution.

"Professionalism In The Face Of The Weird" is one of my favorite tags to use in a story, because it is one of the things that is always near and dear to my heart as a library worker. There's so many things that happen in and around a library on a regular basis that having non-humans as part of the town and as patrons of the library isn't really all that farther of a stretch than anything else. And so I thought this would be a good idea to bring to life. And it worked!

Grimm Night (1140 words) by silveradept
Fandom: RWBY
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long
Characters: Blake Belladonna, Yang Xiao Long
Additional Tags: Remnant Halloween Equivalent, Trick or Treat: Treat, Anti-Faunus Racism (RWBY), Badass Boasting, Alternate Use Of A Semblance
Summary:
It's the eve before Hunter's Day, and Blake is unhappy with the options being marketed. Additionally, someone gives Yang an excuse to punch people who deserve to get punched, because Blake is worth punching people over.

This is very much a story that came into existence in 2020, because I don't think I would have felt confident in the direction it was going to go without RWBY's Season 6 and 7 and the Movement For Black Lives. Because it's very much a story about people being speciesists and getting punched for it, because they deserve it. This is also a story that apparently shows that I grew up in a particular part of the Great Lakes Region, as the thing I patterned Grimm Night on, Devil's Night, is apparently not a country-wide mischief making thing that happens before All Hallows' Eve, but a fairly regional one. Lucky me, my recipient is from the same regional area and got the reference immediately, and enjoyed it.

But really, it's a story about someone who likes to punch people getting to punch people who deserve it.

Ruatha's Treasures (1478 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Alessan/Nerilka (Dragonriders of Pern), Alessan/Moreta (Dragonriders Of Pern), Alessan/Moreta/Nerilka (Dragonriders of Pern)
Characters: Alessan (Dragonriders of Pern), Moreta (Dragonriders of Pern), Nerilka (Dragonriders of Pern), Holth (Dragonriders of Pern)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Moreta Lives, Bisexual Nerilka
Summary:
After she's taken a nap and cleared her head from all the serum delivery, Moreta sets her sights on bringing another of Ruatha's treasures into the Fort Weyr family.

Fix-it fic for Pern! Which I was absolutely going to write in that specific way, regardless of who my recipient was. It's actually why I'm not as quick to offer Pern off the line, because of the Opinions I have about the way the setting was treated by the original author and the ways that I intend that it should be better if I write in that setting. And as such, after making sure that I save Moreta from the narrative, I set her on the process of getting some lovely people to herself, which is something I suspect that she would have done, especially now that the danger of the Plague is over. Canonically, she's interested in Alessan, and I don't see it being too far of a leap for Nerilka to be interested in both of them, and for Moreta to also be veyr welcoming to Nerilka as well. So this was not a struggle to write, and I was glad to see that my commenters have a similar appreciation for keeping someone alive who only died because the narrative demanded she do so to make sure that the continuity lined up (the great irony being that continuity usually didn't mean a damn thing to Pern). I also get to take advantage of the fact that I've read so much of the sequel works that I can create a certain amount of retroactive justification for something because of something that happened in the past of Pern, even though it hadn't been written yet at the point in time when Moreta was written.

The Last Full Measure Of Devotion (1361 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Person of Interest (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: The Machine/Root | Samantha Groves
Characters: The Machine (Person of Interest), Root | Samantha Groves
Additional Tags: POV The Machine (Person of Interest), POV First Person, Minor Root | Samantha Groves/Sameen Shaw, Digital Root | Samantha Groves, Root | Samantha Groves Lives, The Cult of The Machine
Summary:
As much as The Machine tries to understand Root, the only thing she can use is memory and explanation. All that does is justify what action she is about to take in the present.

It's another one of my Machine POV fics! This one took a slightly darker turn, of sorts, because while the Machine of the story that we saw is still doing a whole bunch of things where because of her information, people get killed, a lot, with Harold and John, it feels like Harold's insistence on his team pulling certain punches makes the whole thing feel lighter than it could be. And we get some glimpses of that with how Root and Shaw handle their problems, so I don't think it's out of the ordinary for the Machine, having been killed and resurrected, to step a little more firmly into the role of being God in the Machine for the people and to engage in projects that Harold might be rightly horrified at.

This one also gets the "someone on my reading list put it on a rec list!" award, because that's the first time that's happened, to my knowledge.

Toccatta, Fugue, and Fireworks in Disney Minor (1619 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Fantasia (1940)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Original Orchestra Trombonist, Yen Sid (Disney)
Additional Tags: Brief Mention of Impending Death, Implied/Referenced Body Horror, Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor, Bringing The Source Material to Life
Summary:
The dedication night of the new theater should be no trouble, just the live orchestra playing Fantasia along with the movie. When an unexpected performer shows up to join in, the music takes on entirely new dimensions.

Here's another one of those stories that went highly in an experimental direction. Appropriately, I would say, because Fantasia was an experiment all by itself, so it lends itself to a looser interpretation of how things go. Ultimately, this ended up being a story about Fantasia being played in an orchestra, with the help of someone who supposedly is a fictional character in Fantasia, so everything gets a little too real for what they were expecting in the piece. It was a hit with the recipient, and I got to do a whole lot of sprinkling in my career as a solidly amateur musician into the story so as to make it read more realistically. It was absolutely fun to write.

White Is Cold And Always Yearning (2236 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Final Fantasy XII
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Balthier/Fran (Ivalice Alliance)
Characters: Balthier (Ivalice Alliance), Fran (Ivalice Alliance)
Additional Tags: trapped in a cabin, Viera Traditions, Balthier Learns The Virtue of Silence, Love Confessions, Hair Brushing, Hair Braiding, Year's End
Summary:
A snowstorm traps Fran and Balthier together in a cabin right before year's end, which leaves Fran with very few options on how to perform a year end ritual for the Viera of Eryut. To successfully help his partner, Balthier will have to be able to take both direction and a supporting role. The rewards may be hearing what he's always wanted to hear from Fran.

I ship Balthier and Fran, absolutely, but also I see them as the kind of couple who are not yet ready to move fully into a relationship phase because that would cause them to have to re-evaluate their work partnership in ways that might make them less able to be the sky pirates they still want to be. So I took all of that, stuck them in a cabin together with snow outside, and then wrote in something so that they would end up in the situation where there were confessions without them having to be acknowledged or otherwise acted on. I think it worked well, myself.

Having The Camp (and each other) To Themselves (1934 words) by silveradept
Fandom: In Other Lands | The Turn of the Story - Sarah Rees Brennan
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Golden/Elliot Schafer/Serene/Luke Sunborn
Characters: Golden-Hair-Scented-Like-Summer, Elliot Schafer, Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle, Luke Sunborn
Additional Tags: Holiday Traditions, Hot Chocolate, Elvish Customs, Families of Choice, Shameless Elliot Schafer
Summary:
For their first winter all together, Elliot, Luke, Serene, and Golden aged to watch over the Borderguard camp. They're glad to be with each other, even if they're all there because they know there's nowhere else to go but where the others are. Elliot bright the hot chocolate.

Elliot is one of my favorite characters to write for In Other Lands, because he's been written as someone who has opinions, is loud about them, and ultimately, gets what he wants, which includes the attention and affection of several of the other characters in the story (even if some of them think they're humoring him more than anything, Elliot's got a good cadre of friends to help him avoid having to eat his words too terribly). I went for this to be a relationship between all of them, because a lot of what Elliot does is break traditions and ideas that he thinks are stupid, and so he's not all that worried about how much everyone else seems to think he's a sex maniac (among other manias.) And I wanted to write him being affectionate in the way that he knows how, rather than anything else. In Other Lands is another one of those places where I can let a lot of the Weird out and it'll work just fine, because the Borderlands runs on Weird.

Girls' Nght (2584 words) by silveradept
Fandom: humans are space orcs - Fandom, Humans Are Space Orcs (Meme)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Doctor Fawkes & Jasmine Kerrigan & Yuri Swift, Katebrica & Yuri Swift
Characters: Botanist With Ambitions Of Superior Hybridization | Jasmine Kerrigan, Engineer Absolutely Done With Aliens Trying To Steal Her Coffee | Yuri Swift, Den Mother And Medical Professional With An Anthro Tail | Doctor Fawkes, Bird-Species Graduate Student Trying To Research Ver Thesis Among The Humans | Katebrica
Additional Tags: Girls' Night, Television Taken Seriously, defying expectations, Drinking, Drinking Games, Alien perspectives, Mention of pregnancy, controlling parents, Thesis Research
Summary:
Katebrica was happy at the opportunity to observe a real human Girls' Night for ver thesis.
It probably would have gone better if these humans were anything like the ones in the cultural broadcasts.

And here we are! Yuletide this year let me indulge in writing something for the Humans Are Space Orcs meme. The first attempt at this work was going to land on a recipient DNW, so I shelved that idea and wrote a different one on the same general theme. Now that reveals have happened, I think I'll polish up the original, as it involves ice hockey, and possibly post it as a further and different experience of Katebrica's research. I like the idea of aliens having drawn conclusions about humans based on the television and movie programs that we've been beaming out into the universe, and many of those conclusions being wrong because they can't tell the difference between what's fiction and what isn't. Simple cultural misunderstandings that are easily resolved, certainly. And also the Human Challenge, based on the idea that human-strength compounds are going to be the kinds of things that other sentients in the universe get high on.

And that's everything for these six months. See you again in six more to see what other things I've ended up writing in the interim.

(Holy shorts, AO3 stats says I did about 90k in fiction this year. It never feels like that much, since it's bits and exchanges and such. And what does that mean my total wordcount is, if you add in Grief and all the other writing that I purposefully do? Clearly I'm up over 100k, possibly even over 150k? 200k, maybe maybe? That's a lot of words. No wonder AO3 thinks, of everything I've posted to there so far, that I'm near 1M words over time.)