#general dynamics

So, I vagueposted about but don't think I ever shared that many months ago, an anon who was also an Ottawa public servant messaged me privately (I'd been unsubtle enough in my tags - it's a big employer), and we chatted for about a month on tumblr, exchanging job classifications but somehow never names, before discovering, by some tags I left on another "devil's sacrament if the devil is Ottawa not fanfic" post on tumblr, that we in fact live extremely close together in the same neighbourhood.

Obviously we had to go get drinks, exchange real names, and become friends! We moved to discord, and after another few weeks she added another local public servant friend who she had convinced to read HRPF/GD. Obviously, the name of our discord chat is Interdepartmental Meeting, because we are like that. There may be a mcdrai public service not!fic happening. Who can say!

Anyway, we've all got drinks a couple times and had on the books for at least a couple months a dinner for August 18th, scheduled around the many summer vacations and conflicts etc. The expectation was General Dynamics would be LONG DONE by then and we could discuss the whole thing! Without me being constrained by spoilers!! But as the date crept closer and it became increasingly clear that we'd actually picked the day GD would be finished, the dinner got rebranded as a wrap party (and was actually a big reason why I did make the last push to get both Epilogues out yesterday. Can't miss my own wrap party.) There were jokes about celebratory banners etc.

Readers, there was no banner. Instead, they'd lovingly crafted a three course dinner menu around the meals mentioned in General Dynamics:

Note they had to sneak in a third wine pairing option THAT DAY as Connor drank rosé the Epilogue (part II).

Oh, they also translated it into French because again, Canadian public servants. Apparently there were deep translation debates on how to capture the double (triple) meaning of the title for Chapter 31 ("Resigning") in particular:

This is one of the coolest and most thoughtful and creative things someone has ever done for me. 🥹🥹🥹 Also, dinner was delicious, we had a fantastic time talking GD and HRPF and occasionally other things. Meeting local fans of my fic and turning them into wonderful actual friends wasn't on my bingo card for 2026, but man, am I ever grateful it happened!

How it’s going:

So now I ask all of you:

F-16 Aggressor