#meme prattle

Now his blinking eyes looked like he was about to cry, but he managed a slight smile and nod before turning to his bag. While he gathered his bits of paraphernalia in the bag, Aurelan carefully recorded their notes to a disc and turned off the equipment, sticking the bright purple disc in her pocket.

Sam already knew his way through the upper levels of the facility, though he'd only gone through them all once. But even in a dense forest, he never lost his way, much less a well-constructed Federation starbase. En route, he told her that his last meeting had been with Dr. Disii himself, the Andorian commodore who commanded the entire science base, and Disii had promised to tell him personally when they had any news. Sam wasn't wholly sure that the commodore would allow Aurelan into the conversation, honestly—Disii hadn't declared anything secret or outright forbidden Sam from mentioning Dr. Kirk's death, but Sam had gotten a very strong impression that Starfleet didn't want too much chatter until they'd figured out what was going on, and they didn't have a real outpost anywhere near Tarsus IV. Even good news, if somewhere there was any, would take a few days to percolate out.

It had been more than a few days now, almost two weeks.

"Oh, we'll think of something to tell Dr. Disii," Aurelan said, squeezing his arm. "I'm not going anywhere."

Sam smiled again, not quite as weakly, and straightened his soldiers as he led them towards Conference Room C, the two of them weaving through increasingly crowded halls. Aurelan hadn't seen so many operations uniforms all at once since the Academy—of course, they had engineers and other technical people here, but it was just a lot more red than she usually saw. Not gold, at least, but bumps still rose on her arms, every instinct on edge.

She kept her hand on Sam's arm as they evaded officers rushing past the conference room, her progress through the final hall slower than three full floors prior to it. Still, she did her best to scrutinize the rushing operations officers as surreptitiously as she could, taking in their headsets and hushed, urgent conversations in too many languages for the universal translator to handle. They glanced curiously at Sam and Aurelan on their way past, but no more, focusing on whatever they were saying, to whomever they were trying to contact, on their way to wherever they were going.

Communications, Aurelan thought. Not engineers and technicians. Odd.

She was used to analyzing data, precisely and efficiently, and all the data converged on a single clear trend.

The concept art of Ebonhawke from Guild Wars 2: the stronghold of Ebonhawke is tightly bound up with my favorite character from the whole series, Gwen Thackeray, and my favorite people I still have super intense feelings about, the Ascalonians. Also, um, to be very normal about it, I'M SO EXCITED ABOUT GUILD WARS REFORGED AND GOING BACK TO MY 20-Y-O ASCALONIAN CHARACTERS HOLY SHIIIIT

Empress Theodora: I've always loved Theodora's presence in the painting as well as lavish paintings of Byzantine figures in general.

I screencapped the bookmark because it was such a ... typical experience of fanon (Austen mentions very little about anyone's coloring in Pride and Prejudice and literally nothing about Darcy's, so my fandom crime was against a completely baseless fanon). I'm always deeply tempted to respond to every tantrum over blond Darcy with "I did it to attack you personally" (though I never have), which is very me as well.

The assassination of Julius Caesar: I was born on the ides of March and have been delighted about it since I discovered what that meant as a middle schooler. BEWAAAAARE

My Tolkien books: classic Anghraine essay writing set piece :P

Elizabeth and Darcy 1980: it's my favorite P&P adaptation and I've always loved how both Garvie and Rintoul light up in the engagement scene.

Secret of Mana was the first video game I fell in love with, and also inspired me to start writing my own stories, which became a long-running project that is still my main original fic one. Also the game ruled.

D&D spell book: figuring out formatting for my dissertation was a nightmare, but naturally I used that knowledge as God intended, for the most organized D&D cleric spell book.

Tiny Anghraine: gpoy

Looking at Kirk's chair from my favorite iteration of the Enterprise, the ORIGINAL, with my OWN EYES as a Kirk girlie (gn) is such an experience, all the more as I live in Washington... I had to keep pulling myself away to keep my nose from touching the glass/my body from ascending to another plane of existence.

Byzantine fashion: it rules.

The Peace Arch: I grew up in Blaine, with the Peace Arch as the emblem of the town and my school, getting taught to memorize the Canadian provinces and "O Canada" as well as the US states and "The Star-Spangled Banner" etc, and was baffled that I was supposed to feel some solidarity with people in Florida and New York that I wasn't supposed to feel for friends and acquaintances I actually saw and cared about in British Columbia. Growing up in high school during the Bush administration and its awful, asinine jingoism while living on one of the main border crossings into Canada enormously influenced my entire concept of the world tbh.

Cascadia flag: this is from the era of "fuckyeah[whatever]" blogs, but I stand by the sentiment :)

The piano harp: playing the piano is one of my most purely self-indulgent and expressive hobbies; I'm a very repressed person IRL in many many ways and the one thing I've never wanted to develop into a disciplined skill rather than vibes-based expression was music. My parents scraped together enough money to buy my piano in a chance encounter with a piano hoarder when I was a tiny Anghraine some 30 years ago, so I could learn on a real one instead of a tiny keyboard; much later when they had better jobs, they got it fully refurbished and it turned out to be a quite nice upright grand over a century old, with the original paint on the full-size harp inside and with a lovely rich sound, but it's been out of tune for a long time and I haven't been able to vent my feelings upon the keys for ages :(

Canon quotes for my Austen toxic yuri pairing of ultimate destiny

Bellingham Bay: Bellingham is the nearest city to where I grew up and I spent a lot of time there: J and I would go to the mall (or Fairhaven, the bougie but very cool old part of town) as teenagers to have something to do, Blaine didn't have a hospital and I had terrible asthma and spent a lot of time either at St. Joseph's or the Asthma and Allergy Center, I did a program in high school that let me go to college in Bellingham in lieu of my senior year of high school and used to wander around the city and spend hours in various bookstores and coffeeshops after class, he went to college there and I'd stay at his apartment, my family did all our shopping we couldn't do in Surrey or White Rock in Bellingham—the city and the bay and Mt. Baker are very much the face of "home" to me.

Between the Mountains and the Sea: this was a cover I made in MS Paint (lol) many years ago for my Gondor fanmix, and I included it because it's hard to overstate how deeply I love book Gondor in Lord of the Rings or how much it influenced me as a fantasy-loving teenager writing original SF/F fic. (It's also probably one of my favorite fanmixes+graphics I've ever made, but I included it for GONDORRRRRR feelings!)

Triss art: I've never played The Witcher games or watched the show and I don't know anything about them; I happened across the art many, many years ago and was startled by how perfectly the art matched my sense of one of my original fantasy protagonists, especially given that I'm not super visual. So that's there to represent the original project, which I've expanded into an interconnected set of novels / novellas / short-stories / world building etc since I was a kid.