#diehellarache

Cix peers over his shoulder, holding her hair out of her eyes. “Why is there a gum wrapper in your book, Rust? A gum wrapper and a... dead Martian beetle?”

“I've been trying to find that out for about an hour,” Rust says. “I found someone's scrapbook in the library and Tertiaire-5 made me take it. She said it's probably a Hunter's. Asaamu, do you recognize it?”

So this chapter of the fic was 50% “let’s fuck around and write some goofy friend interaction” and 50% “let’s fuck around with worldbuilding through ephemera”

Most of the characters we see are tinkerers or journalers or creators of some kind, and so many quests come up in the form of “o we found this mysterious scrap of knowledge let’s hunt down the rest” I like the idea of just, like, people leaving even innocent mysteries around. a romance novel someone used as a commonplace book for conspiracy theories and anatomy studies! why not!

Asaamu unfolds a paper flower made from a receipt. He flips it over to find a drawing of a psion's jawbone and a theory on Cabal machine intelligence, and frowns down at it. “Nope, but there's a lot of people who keep this sort of thing nowadays. If you put it back they'll probably come pick it up eventually.”

Cix squints. “Wait, The Exo's Reefborn Lover? What kind of a scrapbook is this?”

“The deeply weird kind,” says Rust's Ghost. He hovers overhead and shines a point of light down onto the pages. “See, half of this person's notes are bizarro theories about Tower cafeteria food and half of them are yelling about the book's ignorance of exo anatomy.”

Asaamu sits up straight. “Exo anatomy, you say,” he says, and something in his voice makes Cix turn to him and say, strangled, “Don't you dare.”

“Don't I?” Asaamu asks, grinning hard. He holds the book away from Cix and starts reading from it in a booming voice:

“Encephal-2 held Artyomov to herself, even as Artyomov reached for their gauntlets. 'Surely the Queen can spare you for an hour,' she said – no, this part's boring, we can definitely do better, oh yes here we go: Encephal gazed at her lover with eyes shining with electric charge, and Artyomov's eyes caught that fierce blaze and returned it threefold. Encephal felt like that look was burning her up, her circuits overheating, her cooling fans unable to keep up. She took Artyomov's hand in hers and guided it down, down to the secret places she'd never shown anybody else–”

DID I WRITE THIS ROMANCE NOVEL SCENE BASED OFF MY EXPERIENCE IN TRANSFORMERS FANDOM? DEAR READER,

obviously lmao

the Destiny setting has both magical blue space humans (called Awoken) and robot people (called exos), and listen! what’s better than this! what’s better than romance novels!!!

“I'm going to kill you,” Cix mumbles from behind him, face sunk into her hands.

“Is it accurate?” Asaamu asks. “Tell us, Cix, did–” he checks the spine “–Beatris Chriqui, of hallowed name, get this right?”

Every Time I Mention A Throwaway Character I Give Them A Sephardi Name, the first law of my writing

Rust looks back and forth between the two of them, lost.

“Someone,” Asaamu tells her, “had an excellent night with an exo of our acquaintance. I was just hearing all about it.”

“It was one drink when you bailed on us, I'm going to kill you,” Cix says, and throws the open bag of cococherries at him.

And That’s Friendship

Destiny is set like 700 years into the future and a few times it’s mentioned in canon that a lot of the fruit people eat is just, like, batshit crossbreeds (there’s a line in canon where someone looks at a list of products and goes like, kiwicumber, ok that’s standard, pineapple, THAT’s a weird combination, never heard of that before), so I had fun making my own.

These characters are all Mine OCs and they all pop up again and again in my fic -- I wrote Asaamu a romance with a big bug alien and Rust just turns up wherever I can slide her in.