#azzandra

Pour one the fuck out for the darker-timeline Storm King AU and specific the long Agatha story Not A Hero, which I really thought, at the start of the year, that I might resume work on in order to present some sort of finished work for the official 20th anniversary of the comic in November. Instead, I got re-obsessed with Tolkienia, and did literally nothing for the anniversary.

“Hiiiyah!”

The spider’s head disappeared in a flash of swords, and a woman with green hair kicked the body away. She remained crouched for a moment, wary, then tucked one of her blades into a sheath on her back and tugged Agatha into a sitting position. “Hey, you all right?”

“Um.” Agatha gestured to her legs, still bound in webbing.

“Right.” Snk went the sword, and the silk fell away like…like silk, but not the sort from a spider as tall as Agatha’s waist.

ok new ask game what mutual am i

A Vulcan Adopts a Cat

by @azzandra and @bartfargo

[To view the original piece, go here.]

[For more works by Azzandra, go to her AO3 here.]

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[The voice of the Narrator was provided by @phinnsy.] [The voice of T'Pen was provided by Brittany Carlton.] [The voice of Shelter Employee 1 was provided by @navox-the-weary.] [The voice of Shelter Employee 2 was provided by @lapis-liberalis.] [The voice of Vulcan Coworker was provided by Breck Wilhite.] [The voice of Human Coworker was provided by Christian Jasper.] [The voice of Vulcan Commander was provided by @mezzoprime.]

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Hi there! Short answer: Yeah, pretty much, haha.

Long answer: There was a LOT about the story that morphed as I started to tell it - Dom, Astele, and Erion weren’t supposed to survive their encounter with Hssiss, Sivin wasn’t supposed to return to the Jedi, and the whole story was supposed to be wrapped up in four or five chapters.

But then I started incorporating more and more of my already-standing (and almost entirely unposted) lore and worldbuilding into Opening Dialogue, and it just got away from me. Initially I wasn’t really intending on delving as deeply into politics and governmental shenanigans since, you know, four-ish planned chapters wouldn’t have been enough. I thought at first I’d just name-drop a few of my other characters, casually mention things like the Tribunal, and just leave it as an open question what any of it meant. Just to enrich the story a little. I didn’t actually think I’d let much of this extra lore see the light of day, to be honest.

When I first started writing Opening Dialogue, it was actually my first foray back into the realm of publicly posting about OCs in... around ten years, I think? And while I’ve been a huge Star Wars fan since... well, pretty much almost since the original trilogy came out on VHS, haha, I didn’t really interact with the online SW community at all once the internet became a thing. I’m not sure why, but my fandom experiences online tended towards other fandoms. I was badly burned by one of those different fandoms many, many years ago when it came to posting stories about OCs in a canon universe, and as a result I’ve shied away from it for a very long time.

But I’ve never stopped creating. I just haven’t shared much of any of it before. So I have this massive compilation of lore and planets and species and characters and side stories and worldbuilding just... sitting on my computer and in notebooks, and once I started incorporating little bits and pieces just to give a story more flesh, it... seriously got away from me, and I pretty much had to take it seriously and delve into it all-or-nothing, or just end up gutting the whole story.

So here we are. I really would love to go back into older chapters and refine them more, fix some of the old plot holes and make some of the references more streamlined. But I think I’ll save that for when the whole thing is actually done. Or at least... this major arc. I plan to keep writing a lot of side stories involving characters that have played smaller roles, and things of similar nature.

I have a feeling that was someone else’s headcanon originally... although I can’t remember whose? Back when I wrote Euphrosynia’s Jäger I was headcanoning Maxim as Mechanicsburg born and bred, but the idea of him being potentially a Russian noble came up somewhere. Based, I think, on his name being Russian and his having a bit more of a chivalric bent than the average Jäger.

It seemed like an interesting starting place rather than a definite headcanon. Having been prompted for Maxim’s past it gave me a potentially interesting story in how someone from that kind of background could wind up a Jäger.

When life gives you oranges, make orange juice…?

Sell out and get that sweet sweet establishment dough.