Stars and Steel

Maybe they can make a difference. Pull that chain. Be the spark. Fan the flames. Deliver some jolt, some spike of Hope into the world. Not out of any sense of obligation, not because they have any inkling that they will see the results. Hell, this might be a suicide mission, except both of them have failed suicide missions in the past. They came back with eyes open, still breathing, hearts still beating, refusing to simply give up and die just because someone else wills it.

This thought, and the too-familiar smell of the labs, creeps down his spine like electrified ice-water, and he grits his teeth against the visceral urge to punch down.

Or to turn around and shimmy back. No, no. They’re here. They’re committed.

“Me too, man.”

The T-junction ahead roars with fans. To the right and directly in front of them, mesh and filter-shrouded blades whip and whir, a rattling drone loud enough to obfuscate any warping or popping their knees on the metal might impress. It’s loud enough to drown out any hope of conversation too. Damn it.

Kunsel threads his arm back behind himself, bends his elbow, and signal-gestures to the left before taking the turn as gracefully as one can in a four-by-four box. At least the standard construction is consistent, sharply squared off and supported underneath with struts strong enough to hold them, likely strong enough to hold whatever monsters might escape from their containment. It’s vital to have a working ventilation system, after all, if one intends to use it to pump suppression gasses into an enclosed space.

Cue a glance up directly above, where tanks - like recessed scuba cylinders - are banded, bolted, and linked together with pipes and wires for remote control. Kunsel ducks his head and slopes further forward, army-crawling on his forearms and spread thighs rather than hands and knees. He figures Zack will get the picture, and it affords him a little more room to gesture two fingers down, clenched fist. Stop where I’ve stopped.

Quicker, practiced, he skitters forward to the other side of a grated hatch and then rolls over, folds flexibly, and ends up facing Zack, peering down below. The shaft has passed either through or above one of the blocky prefab pods, and is somewhat misaligned, providing a split view.

There’s the peek of a toilet and sink on one side, and then the broader section of the ventilation panel reveals… amber light, interspersed with flicker-glows of blue, a computer server, a monitor with a weirdly fetal-looking screensaver. Maybe that’s just the angle on the desk. The main lights are off, and it appears to be unoccupied at present.

Lucky them.

He demonstrates the thumb screws on his side of the vent panel. Easy enough for both of them to undo and lift up, aside, and then drop down one after the other.

Floor level. A plush carpet cushions their feet.

It looks like the office of a tenured executive professor with decades upon decades of plaudits, richly appointed. Shelves in immaculate order border one wall, filled with dozens upon dozens of hard-bound volumes, a luxury in the digital era, contrasting the standard filing cabinets. Display cases in glass and wood hold items of curiosity - specimens floating in formalin, hermetically sealed jars of two-headed serpents and bizarre fish-creatures, a zolom egg, embryos identified only by arcane labeling systems…

And a preserved human arm. Left arm, by the looks of it, skin pale under display lights. The wing tattoo from wrist to tricep must have been exquisite in life, deep black with painstaking black-feathered details.

The specimen holding bay, visible through its reciprocal mirror, was recently occupied. The smears on hard-point restraints and the angled slant of an examination table are still shimmering red.

“…well, this fucking place never gets less creepy. You wanna get the hard copies? I’ve got his computer.”

Any variation of disgruntled noises he makes as blue light crosses into his purview is lost to the roar of the spinning fan blades. Once the grate is lifted, Zack touches down after Kunsel on three points. At a glance, the office might have looked astonishingly mundane– not so much once the menagerie of scientific collectibles comes into play. 

“Hate it, hate it, hate it,” Zack growls, hunching his shoulders and staring too long at what must ostensibly be a human arm while the hairs on his neck stand on end. A perfectly normal arm as far as he can see, save for the intricate inkwork beneath the skin. Why the self-purported man of science himself might feel the need to save this particular arm or even put it on display in the first place, Zack can only imagine. This one feels less like a curio and more like… a morbid trophy.

That isn’t even the worst part about this place. He is keenly aware of Kunsel’s presence next to him when he goes stock still and his breath catches in his throat. The sight on the other side of the thick wall of glass is intimately familiar to him, and Zack wrangles with the flash of panic that briefly keeps him rooted in place. Voice. Focus. Back to Kunsel.

Looking through the bookshelf and cabinet is perfect, because it keeps his back to the slab of steel looming behind the mirror like a bad memory.

“Right. Yeah. On it.”

With a roll of his shoulders, he takes an exaggerated step towards the nearest row of shelves filled with multi-colored tomes. He runs his finger along the top of the books on the way to the metal filing cabinet situated at the end of the shelf. Most of the books appear to be purely decorative. Textbooks covering various topics on the nature of microbiology, genesplicing, and phylogenetics. Zack stops, hovering two fingers over a row of first-edition copies about the Planet’s history. A few with a focus on the Ancients in particular. There is a small gap between the last book, Decline of the Cetra and History for the Modern Midgarian. 

Interesting.

He does another quick pass before deciding to move on. The real trouble would be figuring out which of these ethically questionable gems to take back with them. Anything worth keeping in an unlocked cabinet couldn’t be that Planet shattering. Zack cards through the file folders after he slides the drawer out on its track to skim through titles.

Some of the documents were purely archival; datasets or sequences that had been analyzed long ago littered with chicken scratch notes scrawled in the margins and a dash of angry, red marks. 

Now for the alphabetized sections. Finger over thumb, he looks through each header’s contents. Minutes tick by. Boring, gross, boring–

 ‘Regulation of apoptosis,’ ‘Petri net modeling of biological networks,’ Slowing the rate of senescence in non-human tissues,’ ‘Accelerating mako-osteoclast activation and development of new limbs.’ 

The standouts. At least, the papers he could understand enough to single out.

One last check. Zack flattens out a palm along the sides of the drawer, feeling for any unusual grooves or catches that might unlock a hidden panel. No luck. Plucking out stapled notes from several file folders of interest, he stacks them up then thumbs to the back of the drawer for an empty folder to stash them in. After the folder has been tucked under his arm, Zack rearranges the folders into some semblance of their previous orientation before sliding the drawer shut.

Quiet and the hum of HVAC, the regular sounds one might encounter in an insulated office far from the hustle and bustle of the main science floor. It is almost out of place. Almost, given the macabre decor all around them.

Kunsel's fingers skitter across the keyboard. His eyes flit from screen to screen, as if at speed he might absorb all of the information at their disposal.

There is too much, and the set of his jaw reveals just how that sours on him.

"…what the hell," he whispers as the screen flickers green with scrolling text, then black, then vivid with color, with moving images.

And again he utters his disbelief.

Taut.

Horrified.

As though he expected anything else given the Professor's inclinations, given what he himself experienced before the Plate - and the world - came crashing down.

He should be looking at a corpse on the viewscreen. Flayed, flensed open from ribs to waist, on a slab that collects and sluices fluids away, the figure is nevertheless not still.

Whoever it was, whatever it has become, should not be alive, but it moves.

Part of it moves in ways it should not move.

Crystalline spires grow from lines of symmetry along the victim's jaw and temples, outer arms, outer thighs. They glimmer in the bright white surgical lights, facets reflecting with each twitchy shudder.

More disturbing, the exposed organs move. Squamous, slow, like constrictor snakes coiling around an item of prey they slither, lit from within as much as from without, blue-green veined with red pressing to membranes stretched flesh to flesh. It is so clear and so visceral that Kunsel can practically smell it, and yet he cannot look away.

"That's-"

Breathing feels like swallowing glass.

It's a familiar shape. Too familiar. And the timestamp on the corner flickers second by second.

"-that's a live feed. That's downstairs."

Blinking is a bad idea. The image will be seared into his brain forever, limned in cold sweat. He has to gather himself, has to focus, and that manifests in a rapid-fire rasp.

"It was linked out through a sim-project. There's info on all of the Firsts in there. Scans of them. We knew Sephiroth was in there, but this looks like... I don't know."

Kunsel glances down to the copy progress on his fob, shaking his head. He has ideas. Too many ideas. None of them are good.

Freyja of the Turks!

I made this sketch ages ago and decided to color it because I'm on a kick of refining/coloring really rough sketches so here we go let's ignore that I can't draw guns!

Kunsel: The natural reaction to these type of situations is to stress, so that means I can stress.

Zack: No! Act normal.

Kunsel: Normally, I stress very much.

Zack: FOR FUCK’S SAKE, KUNS.

Kunsel: AND NOW WE’RE BOTH STRESSED.

Cloud: I think killing a titan would fix me.

Kunsel: You want to be isekai'd so bad you look stupid.

Sephiroth: What are these words?

Genesis: Don't ask.

Running out of room, running out of time...

Back in the day, before fan fiction was mainstream and even encouraged by creators… This was your “please don’t sue me, I’m poor and just here for a good time” plea.

I have zero problem with fanart/fic so long as the creators aren’t making money off of it. It is someone else’s intellectual property and people who create fan related works need to respect that (and a solid 98% of them do.)

The remaining 2% are either easily swayed by being gently prompted to not cash in on someone else’s IP. Or they DGAF… and they are the ones who will eventually land themselves in hot water. Either way: this isn’t much of an excuse to persecute your entire fanbase.

But Anne Rice went off the deep end with this stuff by actively attacking people who were expressing their love for her work and were not profiteering from it.

The Vampire Chronicles was a dangerous fandom to be in back in the day. Most of the works I read/saw were hidden away in the dark recesses of the internet and covered by disclaimers (a lot of them reading like thoroughly researched legal documents.)

And woe betide anyone who was into shipping anyone with ANYONE in that fandom. You were most at risk, it seemed, if your vision of the characters deviated from the creators ‘original intentions.’ (Hypocritical of a woman who made most of her living writing erotica.)

Imagine getting sued over a headcanon…

I think Supernatural (and Misha Collins specifically) was when that wall between fandom and creators started to break down. It’s a relatively new thing.

I remember going to a Merlin panel down in London and a girl sitting next to me asked the cast about slash and I thought she was going to get kicked out!

I was one of the ones who got a love letter from Anne Rice’s lawyers. Bear in mind that up until that point her publisher had encouraged fanfic and worked with the archive keeper (one of my roommates at the time) to drum up publicity for upcoming books and so on.

I could tell such tales of how much Anne screwed over her fans back then. The tl;dr version is that she and her peeps would use fan projects as free market research and then bring in the lawyers once it was felt Anne could make money off of it herself. (Talismanic Tours being one of the most offensive examples of this.)

But where fanfic is concerned not only did we get nastygrams but one of my friends had Anne’s lawyer trying to fuck up her own privately owned business which had NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING ANNE RELATED. Said friend was a small business owner with health issues who wasn’t exactly rolling in money, so guess how well that went?

On top of that when yours truly tried to speak out about it I discovered that someone in Anne’s camp had been cyber stalking me to the point where they took all the tiny crumbs of personal information I had posted over the course of five years or so and used it to doxx me (before that was even a term and in early enough days of the WWW that this wasn’t an easy task) and post VERY personal information about me on the main fandom message board of the time. Luckily for me the mod was my friend and she took that down post haste, but it was still oodles of fun feeling that violated and why to this day I am very strict about keeping my fandom and personal lives separate online.

Hence why those of us in the fandom at the time who still gave enough of a shit to want to keep writing fic DID keep writing fic, but shoved it so far underground and slapped it with so many disclaimers they could’ve outweighed the word count of War & Peace. It wasn’t just for the purpose of protecting fic but for trying to protect our personal lives as well.

My favourite bit I read from one included the idea that you weren’t allowed to have any explicit content, of which anything queer, no matter how tame, was included, to “preserve that innocence even Imperial crew members must be imagined to have”.

Yeah. The same Imperial crew members who helped build the Death Star to commit planetary genocide.

(It’s one reason Sinjir Velus, while I still have some issues with him, feels like such a delicious ‘f*** you’.)

Later on, they were apparently persuaded to ‘allow’ fans to write slash, provided in ‘remained within the nebulous bounds of good taste’.

The OTW Legal Committee’s mission includes education, assistance, and advocacy.

We create and post educational materials about developments in fandom-related law on transformativeworks.org and on archiveofourown.org.

We assist individual fans when their fanworks are challenged, we answer fans’ questions about law relevant to fanworks, and we help fans find legal representation.

We partner with other advocacy organizations and coalitions in the U.S. and around the world.

We advocate for laws and policies that promote balance and protect fanworks and fandom.

And much more!

Back then, this could include anything from the ship they didn’t like (look up the ship wars from Potter fandom. The feuds were horrendous and hateful) to something as simple as a g-rated slash fic because “this of the children”. Hell, when strikethrough happened on livejournal, it was everything/anything which - sadly - also included a lot of fantastic support communities for queer kids and SA survivors and the like. All because the site decided to crack down on ‘lewd’/‘deviant’ content and didn’t pause to think what else might be tagged under queer and SA content.

A lot of the writers in a lot of the fandoms I was in included content warnings for slash because if people felt spiteful or hostile when they stumbled on it, they could report it to fic hosting sites and have it taken down for any number of excuses. I lost fics on fanfiction.net because some big weirdo deemed them as inappropriate and had their friends all report it at the same time.

Zack: That's because I have no regard for my own personal safety. You can ask Kunsel.

It physically pains me to see people post awesome fanfiction to tumblr and nowhere else. Tumblr moves so fast! By tomorrow people who didn’t look in a tag at the right moment won’t know it existed. By next week even people who did read it won’t be able to find it back to reread. Finding anything on tumblr via search function is practically a fluke. For all intents and purposes, your hard work has a halflife of about a week at most.

PUT YOUR WORK ON AO3 WHERE IT CAN LIVE ETERNALLY, I BEG YOU

People who come into that fandom in a month, a year, even a decade will be able to find your work!

People can bookmark it!

People can rec it to others!

People can reread it into infinity! (and people like me can do that and comment every time!)

You can get comments & kudos until the endtimes because people will keep finding your work! (seriously I still sometimes get new people finding and loving my work from ~2013)

And best of all, people can SUBSCRIBE to your work so they will get email about new chapters and stories! (I’m seeing people do manual ‘Tag you in the next chapter’ lists and seriously, physical pain, this wheel has already been invented and it is rolling beautifully)

PLEASE LET ME BOOKMARK YOUR FIC I BEG YOU

“But I need an invite for AO3!”

Yes, and the waiting list is currently 2-3 days. That’s hardly worth not doing this for, right?

“But I only read fic, I don’t post it”

here is a post on why having an account just to read fic is also very worth it!

Lately I’ve been the tumblr person who jumps onto people who post cool fic to tumblr and going HEY HAVE YOU POSTED THIS TO AO3, YOU REALLY SHOULD, HIT ME UP FOR AN INVITE CODE and I hereby invite all you fellow fic readers and posters to join me into spreading the good word.

its @steeleidolon's vincent :3

Kunsel: Oh sure, let me just load my "tap into every security camera in Midgar" app.

Kunsel: *taps the screen*

Zack: You’ll need a kettle, coffee beans, and the secret ingredient…