Prone to random bouts of Enthusiasm

Will slip through your fingers

Even as the days drag on, molasses drops

Falling away

And you can't believe

It's been that long, wasn't it only yesterday,

Or perhaps the day before, but

It can't have been months, years, weeks,

Can it?

Surely you would have noticed

Before

The clock

Ran

Down.

Derelict Gods of The Northwest

I was looking up facts about Cormorants to find a title for this and found out about the liver bird a mythological creature from liverpool that is literally just a cormorant which I find kinda funny

so i knew this dude in high school, right, who invented a new kind of nuke and so naturally the government recruited him to work in Defense before he even finished college but then he went rogue about an ethics issue with refugee camps and became the most famous terrorist in living memory and died in a police shootout

so the invention that defines wwx here is a very special nuke because of the forbidden energies and iconic US crimes against humanity elements, and because the thing about bioweapons (top alt suggestion) that makes them so heinous is they can’t be tightly targeted, and keep operating on their own once unleashed and don’t need anyone to deliberately keep using them

which is a different kind of ethics problem than Wei Wuxian’s work has

also because the idea of terrorist yiling laozu walking around with a tiny Actual Nuke in his pocket making him too scary to confront has the best aesthetic

imagine him holding it up over his head and dismantling it, at the end, after he’s lung-shot but before they’ve finished him off. he could’ve taken them all with him.

jgy’s vice-president is Qin Su.

Lan Xichen is his Secretary of State.

Posthumously-five-star General Nie Mingjue was SecDef in a previous administration (and was in a leadership position in the Pentagon at the time of his death)

technically nhs’ appointment to a famously pathetic cabinet position has nothing to do with this, it’s just. normal nepotism.

Jiang Cheng is in a legislative role, i think, not the executive branch, because he’s a leader in jgy’s party/official power base but he’s not one of his, you know? they’re not close. they don’t like each other they just need each other as part of maintaining political stability.

So that would make him Senate Majority Leader of whichever party gave us President Jin (II), most likely.

how does jc have that kind of seniority in his thirties? don’t ask so many questions; jgy also shouldn’t be old enough to legally hold POTUS if everyone’s their canon ages. hush.

maybe the whole senate got blown up by agents of the confederated republic of west african nations or imperial poland or someplace during The War when our leads were teenagers so there are no old-timers, did you think about that

on that note yes this is a US where half the government being chinese-american isn’t remarkable; no i’m not developing that convoluted alt-history just for the bit. this is like firefly but the opposite.

having considered the suggestions I think probably Lan Wangji walked away from whatever his expected career path was, after wwx flamed out and he probably almost went to prison over it, only to be protected by his family’s influence and privately raked over the coals

(probably not physically maimed because this is not a martial sect. might have been severe medical abuse though.)

on paper he works for his family’s law firm, but he does like three cases for them a year (and some admin and mentoring) and the rest of his work is pro bono.

no one stops him because he could live quite comfortably on just his trust fund, which they can’t legally take away without getting him declared mentally incompetent, and any crackdown short of that + physical imprisonment

(which considering he’s not even Doing Anything Wrong would make them feel evil which they do not want to be)

would just result in his walking away to work for a nonprofit or something, so letting him do what he wants is less embarrassing than either of those, and better for everyone

he probably did adopt the kid found locked in a safe in wwx’s last known base of operations after the place had been shot up and firebombed, killing every other person in the building

i have no idea how wwx comes back to life in this scenario but considering modern US is a bit stricter than fantasy jianghu about ‘deciding someone is not a criminal anymore’ etc, him getting Good Ending with his guy after it all goes down may require nhs getting elected (or appointed as interim POTUS though that requires a hilarious number of extra deaths) and issuing him a Presidential Pardon for all of the treason and murders

(can’t be lwj per cql, because the appearance of corruption in that scenario is just excessive)

or alternately he was never convicted of anything due to being impossible to arrest alive and no one’s going to prosecute now

that’s a bit what happened in canon if you think about it

or he just adopts Mo Xuanyu’s identity and everyone officially pretends he isn’t That Famous Dead Guy

they can just be invalidated as candidates because they are convicted of The Crimes (this only happens because nie huaisang orchestrated it, of course; it is not realistic for the entire cabinet to get indicted)

i don’t want to convict Qin Su though, and i didn’t want to kill her

okay President Qin Su and VP nie huaisang; he’ll bag the next election cycle because she sure as heck isn’t running, after the experience of getting publicly outed as qualified to run the country on the super embarrassing basis of not having noticed her running mate and direct superior was super evil until after the Secretary of State stabbed him in self-defense on live TV

this is incidentally why Lan Xichen isn’t her vp instead of nhs. he isn’t being charged with anything, but we really gotta draw the line at tolerating Klingon Promotion in our representative democracy here. bad precedent.

1. A lot of dudes. Just a ton of fucking people from beginning to end of the process.

2. Ancient people weren't stupid, they just figured shit out the same way we do: fuck around until you find out.

3. We're gonna plan this out and it's gonna take ten fucking years, and you will cope.

4. Sticks and string are surprisingly versatile and can be used for a variety of purposes, like moving stuff and making sure things are even and go in the spot you wanted to put them in!

Twenty summers past.

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