the deep moans round with many voices

The Palestuck archive de-anoned this morning (...wow, that was fast?) so I guess I get to tell you which fic I wrote now instead of waiting for Wednesday.

And Carry On: Kanaya helps her Empress through the aftermath of an attempted assassination. Kanaya<>Feferi. (1,400 words)

My recipient was oriflamme, who asked for the following things: 1) post-game John<>Rose piecing each other back together; 2) dysfunctional Eridan<>Vriska (with a side-order of longsuffering relationship-adviser Karkat); or 3) Kanaya<>Feferi as they try to wrangle a violent empire with only each other to trust. Option one only really interests me in the larger context of beta kid OT4, and while I think option two would be hilarious, I dislike Eridan in ways that make him difficult for me to write, so I picked option three... which kind of led me to implicitly kill all their other friends. Oops?

The story as written and posted is only one half of my original idea, but I couldn't find a coherent way to introduce the other potential plot thread (it involved details of the catastrophe that killed their other friends, something about orbital bombardment of Alternia to prevent Feferi from making it off-planet after she kills the Condesce, leading to an 'oh shit we accidentally killed the Mothergrub' moment of horror, and Kanaya's been on a quest to find a hidden and non-destroyed planet where she can hatch the Matriorb, and she and Feferi are having Emotional Issues about being separated and whether Kanaya should go fulfill her duty as a jadeblood or whether staying with Feferi is more important) not to mention it had nothing to do with Kanaya as bodyguard/fashion adviser, so eventually I chucked that aside and stuck to the assassination attempts and sense of existential political futility.

Also Kanaya was totally meant to be channeling Darth Vader's aesthetic and ambiguous relation to military hierarchy, but I don't think I got that onto the page. *sigh*

Work on "Guardian" is suspended for a week or so while I fulfill my Palestuck assignment. Exchange deadlines wait for no person!

But I kind of like doing these little updates, so I'm just going to talk about Palestuck for a while. :)

My recipient made three prompts. One ship and scenario just failed to grab me. The second is something that I'd be moderately interested in reading but am pretty sure I'd mangle horribly if I attempt to write it. The third, however, is my darling wonderful precious, yes it is, yes it is! *cough* Ahem. Anyway, my chosen prompt will require a fair bit of world-building (yay!) and I seem to have completely free rein over what other characters and elements to include (yikes?), so Thursday will mostly be for intense background brainstorming. I already have a few vague ideas, but I need to thrash out something that will stand up to basic logical scrutiny and also have some hooks for me to hang a plot and character arc on.