[Fic] "The nerves in patterns on a screen" -- Homestuck

Summary: Aradia and Sollux have been borderline non-platonic friends for a while, but neither has had the courage to take that last step and ask if the other is also feeling pale. Then Aradia has a run-in with her neighbor's robots and ends up with a psionic burnout headache at the most inconvenient time. (3,000 words)

Note: This story was written for Cotton Candy Bingo Round One, in response to the prompt: headache.

[ETA: The slightly revised and extended final version is now up on AO3!]

( The nerves in patterns on a screen )

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Ye gods and little fishes, that story took WAY longer to finish than it had any right to. But victory is mine!

"The nerves in patterns on a screen" is part of my Alternian Nights continuity. It obviously comes after Romancing the Sky, wherein Sollux and Aradia meet, and (slightly less obviously) comes before Raiders of the Deep Caverns, wherein Aradia has had her radiocarbon analyzer for a while, but I'm not completely sure of its relation to the other fics. Probably it's roughly contemporaneous with Scourge of the Sea, maybe set a perigee or two later.

[Fic] "Skies of Summer" -- Inception

Summary: Ariadne knows she can build a dream; she folded Paris on top of itself, after all. But translating that first success into a reliable skill is a little trickier than she expected. Ariadne & Arthur friendship. (1,875 words)

Note: This story was written for Cotton Candy Bingo Round One, in response to the prompt: clouds.

[ETA: Now crossposted here on AO3.]

( Skies of Summer )

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So yeah, that happened. :-)

(Ariadne won the challenge, by the way. Arthur had to make the potato salad from scratch, which was tricky since he only half-remembered his mother's recipe, but it turned out all right in the end.)

one cloud feels lonely

My life is very overwhelming right now.

Okay. First things first.

We finally know what's going on with the smoke shop... more or less, anyway. Mr. Speakerphone and the landlords could not come to an agreement over the lease, and we are closing in early July. (Possibly late June if we sell out our remaining stock faster than expected.) We should be eligible for unemployment, since we're being let go rather than quitting. I don't know what this will do to my health insurance, or to my company pension -- which is tiny, but still, it's worth something. I will be calling our parent company's office on Monday to ask about those details.

I have started to fix up my resumé, and will email it to Vicky soon for her to look it over and give me some advice. I will also start job-searching as soon as I get a reliable internet connection.

Yeah. About the internet. First of all, I am posting this (and the previous two fic posts) from the library because something has gone wrong with either my neighbors' router or my laptop. I can kinda-sorta get online, but the connection is slow so as to be 95% useless, and half the pages I try to access time out before they load. My neighbors are away for the weekend so I can't do anything on that front until they get home, to my great frustration. But even aside from that, they are moving out of Ithaca soon -- probably in mid-June. So I will need to either make an internet-sharing deal with another one of my neighbors, or just give in and get my own personal connection, which would be more expensive but possibly simpler in the long run since I wouldn't be dependent on what happens to a router in somebody else's apartment.

I will have to look into that this coming week as well.

And get serious about applying to college, because that will make me look a lot better on job applications. There's a big difference between "some college, then I quit" and "I am in the process of finishing a bachelor's degree," you know? So that's another big item on my to-do list.

...

Can I get off the world for a few days to process all of this? Please???