#grayintogreen

Let's start with The Seven. They're the masterminds behind a lot of what's going on. The current members are Ashley Allard, Jayne Merriweather (both co-leaders), Gabriel Ferreira, Obann (idiot who doesn't know what's going on), Jourrael (geas), and Zerxus (geas).

Gabriel's reveal as a member included some background about the Seven:

His mother's line was a family of Tharizdun worshipers, much like the Merriweather family. Given that pattern, and that Yves Allard was also a worshiper, it's safe to assume the entire Allard family is as well, which explains Ashley's involvement.

But Ashley's the one running the plan about interfering with stuff, not Yves!

Presumably Ashley still plans to get the Laughing Hand, just not yet.

So that would be their Seven members. And they wanted to delay Cognouza's return! They did this by getting Lucien away from the Somnovem and interfering with the other Tombtakers gathering the crests.

Ashley is the one that ensured the MN would find a way to get Lucien away from the Somnovem because he put Twiggy and the Happy Fun Ball in their path.

Ashley's the one that intervened with Tyffial in Aeor, and (presumably) had Jayne (and maybe Obann) inflict a geas on Tyffial, Zoran, and Otis.

Jayne was personally invited to Yves Allard's party in OUADYA and knew Obann's plan for Yasha.

Oddly enough, Ashley wasn't at the party. He wasn't invited?! Some kind of falling out maybe. Ashley had a brother, so maybe there was some family strife that got resolved with murder so he could get the Blade of Broken Mirrors.

Ashley being the unfavorite Allard would explain SO MUCH about his need to lead and have everyone's attention.

But, anyway. At the same party, Jayne pissed off Molly to get him to go feral...

and kill Yves Allard...

and/or to get Molly to lose control and let the Somnovem take over? Or was that a test?

So the Seven know how to trigger Molly for sure. But to what end? When do they plan on making that shit permanent?

Gabriel also kept an eye on the Mighty Nein for Ashley while the group was in Darktow.

And Jayne checked in on the Somnovem after Lucien's rescue to ensure they were feeding off of the chains at the fane they had broken when they first escaped to the Astral Sea.

So the Seven are manipulating the Somnovem and the Nein, and they're waiting for some specific time to try to get Cognouza back. We just don't know when, nor why Molly would be useful as the Somnovem's puppet. Maybe they just want a body separate from Cognouza and the Nonagon's body has some specific use.

That's all we know about the Seven for now. They're behind everything and have some timeline they're working on.

Next is Shadycreek Run. There's a few loose ends there that need tying. First, when Lucien was 5, before the Dougals were killed, thugs showed up and offered 1,000 gold for Lucien.

Now, I thought it'd be the Jagentoths at first, BUT once the Dougals were murdered and the thugs took Lucien to the Jagentoths, Reese commented they could get 800 gold for him. They didn't have a buyer lined up!

So it couldn't be that the original buyer was from or went through the Jagentoths. It must have been that they heard about some buyer and decided to get some quick cash by taking Lucien by force, but they couldn't find whoever the original buyer was. So SOMEONE ELSE wanted Lucien as a kid and didn't get him.

Later, when Lucien, Cree, Tyffial, and Jurrell are caught by the Jagentoths, Ionos bragged that he found a rich buyer for him on the coast.

Which is where Yves Allard's estate was! We know Ashley is too young to have been plotting this scheme since Lucien was a kid (which would have been behind the 1000 gold offer), so it probably wasn't Ashley's plan. Thus, it might have been an older generation's plan. Yves? Probably not, since he was off having a party and being useless. Another Allard then!

And that brings up another thing: why would Jack Mardoon adopt Ophelia? C'mon, that was just too weird.

And it seems awful convenient that the Mardoons have a no kid policy. That means Lucien would have HAD to be left behind.

But Ophelia went through with it, leaving Lucien with the Dougals, and pretty much anyone else in the Run would have sold him in those instances above. It seems that plan fell through.

But the Allards were on the coast if that's actually true. So who was their contact in Shadycreek Run?

This brings us to Rowan.

At the Court of Nightmares party, Jester ran into a weirdo that stuck out just a bit too much!

Rowan is another name for the mountain ash, a tree that is native to Ireland and grows red berries that look like eyes. That's a little too convenient. Plus the Allards (Ashley and Yves) have names derived from trees! Ashley-> Ash and Yves is another word for the yew tree, which ALSO has red berries. Coincidence? I THINK NOT.

So let's figure out where else we might have seen Rowan. Rowan's appearance was unique because of asymmetrical bangs...

and gold eyes.

Caduceus also had a vision of a gold figure with antlers (very fey) near where his family was turned to stone.

And both of those are similar to Solana, who was the quartermaster on Gabriel's ship.

And again, Gabriel was tracking the Nein for Ashley. Now, granted, Rowan was a half-elf, whoever was at the Menagerie had antlers, and Solana was an eladrin. But you know what other fey-related race often has metallic skin/features? CHANGELINGS.

/tinfoil hat

If so, Rowan could be anyone who has gold motifs. That is a LOT of people, admittedly. Fjord, Nott, Cree, Chance, and a few others have been described as having gold eyes. But maybe they need to be hazel. The only person seen up close enough to be sure was Rowan so far. Maybe we'll get a closer look at others.

And since there's a gap in Shadycreek Run, I bet Rowan (or IS THAT THEIR REAL NAME..?) was the contact in the Run for the Allards. Which means they would have been responsible for Jack adopting Ophelia. So Rowan has to be older and have some connection to the Allards, but probably NOT Yves since he wasn't doing anything.

SO Yves probably also had a sibling. MORE ALLARDS! But what happened to that one? Maybe the same thing that happened to Ashley's brother.

the beauty of writing in aos verse, and why i decided to write in that verse instead of the far more popular and (let's be honest) better-written prime universe, is because it's a sort of canonical au already. for better or worse, those movies were UTTERLY unconcerned with what was and wasn't canonical so far as timelines and personality choices. so i could cherry-pick the elements from both universes, and fanon, that were useful and appealing to me. i think the big difference is that tarsus iv and what happened there (and in my heart i do believe it was eating fascists in both timelines) made tos jim gentle and it made aos jim hard. i was in the mood to go hard and i was also more comfortable with aos jim (i'd known him longer), so aos was an easy pick.

as far as the elements i chose...there are quite a few scenes from tos that made me believe in my heart, jim kirk had eaten bad people and not been sorry about it. i made a clip compilation for anyone who's curious - the one starting at 2:45 is what zapped the idea into my head like lightning. among these are the rope aos jim uses to strangle people with in gambler's knife, the tendency to jump people from behind, the willingness to bargain himself away if it keeps other people safe, his cool head under danger, and his sometimes being a little weird about food/hunger. i was inspired by tos but more comfortable working in aos, so i had to transfer those elements over to a different jim

the episode itself ironically had a lot of stuff i wound up dropping. the plot goes like this (don't ask why i can recall it all without looking it up...):

jim's friend tom calls him to planet q to see a guy in a play he suspects of being kodos the executioner. he is later murdered, and we also find out that of the nine survivors of tarsus iv, several others have been killed prior to this episode's beginning.

for gambler's knife, i kept this without the murder: tom on planet q was was a perfect catalyst, and i also kept kodos as an actor so i could crib some dialogue about it from the original tos episode that i loved: "i'm an actor; i play many parts." / "you're an actor now. what were you 20 years ago?" i don't remember why i didn't kill tom! ironically, i think it was because i thought it was too sad to have him die after all that.

that being said, there are a lot of scenes from the actors performing plays in the original episode, in part because it was a what's called a bottle episode (very few sfx and props to save budget), which i dropped because it wasn't useful - kodos being an actor in gambler's knife was more of an easter egg than anything. in aos, it's only been 12 years since tarsus iv, not 20, and i think jim would have recognized him immediately.

hence the firing on him right away. i said so in the author's notes, i borrowed that opening from this fic, because it is the only scenario i can possibly believe. the shooting, and the scene where jim confesses to spock and bones about the cannibalism, were the first scenes to pop into my head.

logistically, this wound up influencing a LOT of how the rest of the fic played out - jim and kodos having a tense conversation in adjoining prison cells, spock and bones having the opportunity to insert themselves in affairs because jim is legally stripped of his power, the cell being able to burn human flesh (injuring both jim and kodos, though the latter posthumously). i had a tough time with logistics in this fic, and i'm glad i stumbled onto the jail thing by accident, because keeping my setting and scope small really helped me keep this fic neat and tidy, which is not usually the case for me

then jim attempts to seduce kodos's daughter lenore, who in this timeline is in her early 20s, to get more information out of her. in the end of the episode (spoilers), it turns out that it is lenore, not kodos, who is responsible for the murders - she knows about her father's past and has taken it upon herself to use the traveling acting troupe as a cover to silence the last nine witnesses. this horrifies kodos, as he is tortured by guilt for happened, and she was the "one thing in my life untouched by what i'd done." he tries to stop lenore from killing jim with a phaser, and in the struggle, she accidentally shoots and kills kodos instead, and then goes mad, talking to him like he's still there.

this i left out because the vibe is a little weird with the two of them both trying to seduce the other under false pretenses (the dialogue is...not great lol) and also because in the aos timeline lenore is still a little girl, but i did keep the idea that lenore finding out about what her father did might go poorly for her - jim taunts kodos with that possibility in the penultimate scene of gambler's knife, which is why kodos commits suicide to escape that kind of scrutiny. it is also for lenore's sake that kodos is trying to silence the last witnesses in gambler's knife - he's worried about what happens when she gets older and starts asking questions. it's a little bit of a weak motivation, but kodos is slightly less complex in this fic.

the reason for THAT is: this episode is actually about nazis! the original series often tackled political and ethical issues of its time. this episode was, metaphorically, discussing the trials of escaped nazi war criminals. see: kodos being an elderly man, tortured with guilt, and someone who used eugenics to determine which colonists lived and which died. the shadow of ww2 was much larger and closer back in 1967. that was not really the point of this particular story and it's also a little above my paygrade, which is why i went with a less complicated kodos: he's an evil person through and through, but he truly loves his daughter and would die to protect her from his own history.

so, in a way, i kept kodos's daughter ultimately being his demise, and his demise being somewhat self-inflicted. that said, leaving lenore mostly out of this fic is probably the biggest change from the original episode, but she was one of my least favorite parts of that episode anyway - though i have to admit the plot twist was good.

during the episode, attempts are made on the life of a crewman named riley and on jim himself (they both survive). bones and spock attempt to figure out what's going on. jim is very secretive about it and gets angry when confronted, because he wants to keep his personal affairs private and because he is reluctant to accuse kodos of a crime so terrible without being absolutely certain.

i ultimately dropped most of this because jim recognizing kodos instantly cuts out of a lot of the back-and-forth about "IS that guy guilty?" he's guilty. i also dropped riley from the fic, though he was in the outline stages. he's a popular character in fanon (he and tom are the only ones of the "tarsus nine" we actually meet onscreen), so i wanted to work him in, but in the end a plot with him getting killed or almost killed took away from the point of the fic, which is actually mostly the flashback sections. i wanted more than anything to show the circumstances under which jim would buckle and start eating fascists, and the lack of remorse he would have. riley had nothing to do with any of this, and kodos doing anything to him would mean i would have to get him out of that cell, which is just too much trouble, so i ditched riley except for a few mentions in the flashback scenes.

this is also why tom features so heavily as jim's sort of sidekick/brother/child - riley normally occupies this place in fanworks because he's so very young, but i thought tom worked better because he's the oldest after jim, which means they're closer in age and maturity levels.

i DID keep jim getting extremely pissed when his affairs were pried into, because it felt right, but he relents a little more quickly in gambler's knife because from the inside of a cell he has less options. you see what i mean about the jail thing influencing logistics

so my process kind of went like this:

i know i want jim shooting kodos on sight and i know i want the flashbacks (with the fun gimmick that the flashbacks are in present tense and the present-day sections are in past tense until kodos dies) and i know i want jim confessing about the cannibalism to spock.

i also know what i DON'T want. i had read literally hundreds of tarsus iv fics and i was getting tired of a few of common tropes. i did not want to depict the genocide itself because it felt a little exploitative/edgy to me - hence the line "there's no need to talk about the killing, everybody already knows about that." i was chastising some of the fics i didn't like a little bit, lol. i also did not feel a great need to give every one of the nine survivors complex backstories and personalities, because at that point i was not an OC person, and it felt like making up OCs

so then i get to my first question: do i include bones? i need spock because i need jim to be weird about the touch telepathy and jim needs someone to confess to, but i wanted to keep things simple. in the end though the dual nature of these two characters and their constantly clashing viewpoints were too valuable to give up; i just wish i'd gone with an ot3 sitch instead.

second question: how do i get jim out of the cell? easy, spock and bones can do it, and that gives them a reason to be involved

third question: what's happening in the present day that gives us an excuse for jim to tell this story via flashbacks? this was the hardest thing to figure out. i kept trying to adapt the murder plot from the original episode and it just wasn't working, so finally it got dropped. there's nothing kodos can do from inside the cell except try to get out of it - which is how i hit on the blackmail idea.

the flashback sections, which were the biggest point of this, had written themselves in my head by this point. as i worked, every time i had an idea for them, i'd write it down in the outline. i didn't have to stop and figure out much except a few logistics insofar as how much edible meat a grown man could produce and how they could cook it without alerting soldiers with smoke from a fire and whether or not nine kids could eat it before it spoiled. stuff like that. (i actually do a lot of worrying about logistics that tends not to make it into the writing itself but I NEED TO KNOW IT MAKES SENSE. i spent WEEKS going back and forth about it with my friend who helped me edit.) when it came time to plan the flashbacks properly, i had a ton of bullet points with ideas for scenes. i just had to put them in order.

i struggled awhile over whether or not to name the vulcan. the other characters have names in canon, but i hate naming OCs, so i left her unnamed, and it wound up kind of working thematically. she and tom are more or less OCs too but it wasn't so bad since they're foils/echoes to spock and bones - they are logic and emotion, twisted darkly. in a way. actually, one of the parts of this fic that took lots of work was making the rest of the kids feel real enough to matter to jim with how little i myself was invested in them and how little screentime they got.

normally when i imagine fics the ending is one of the first things that pops into my head, but i went back and forth on the ending to this one a LOT before i finally settled. i knew i wanted kodos to die because that's tidier narratively, and i decided pretty early on that he'd have to kill himself since i couldn't figure out a way for jim to do it, but i didn't know why or how, and i also didn't know whether or not i wanted jim to eat or attempt to eat his corpse.

i really, REALLY wanted kodos to use jim's own knife to take himself out, but no matter which way i turned it i just couldn't get the knife in the cell, so i wound up saying they both had the same knife, which actually fucks way more when you think about it - they've both been carrying the same burden of their time on that planet all these years.

i decided to go with jim wistfully wanting to take a bite out of that corpse rather than doing it or attempting to do it because i didn't want to get too edgy. it works better if he ate people only when he had to because it uncomplicates it for him, makes it almost righteous. mostly though i wanted it to end it quickly, and anything where jim stopped to eat kodos or try to get back to his body after they'd stuck him in the morgue or whatever was just dead weight.

but the absolute HARDEST part was figuring out what would make kodos kill himself in his cell. jim and i sort of realized together that it's the scandal of a trial, the public scrutiny, that's the ultimate fear here. he's blackmailing jim with telling the whole world jim is a cannibal but meanwhile he himself - and as a result, his daughter, the only thing he actually cares about - is about to be put in the public eye for much worse. jim in aos is a public figure because of the death of his father. everyone knows his story. and growing up like that is what led him to the hell that was tarsus iv. so what jim (unintentionally) did was convince kodos that lenore's future would be better without the trial. and the only way to get out of the trial is the gambler's knife! it sort of fell into a cool parallel on accident - they both used that knife when they had no other options to kill someone and escape a no-win scenario.

i'm pretty sure i rewrote that scene a million times. it turned out to be one of the best parts of the fic though, even though originally i was just in it for the flashback scenes. fwiw, he also successfully suicide baits MULTIPLE computers in TOS, so it feels right.