Out of 72 votes, 2.8% of you liked both the "Most Frequent Word" and "Only One Color" ideas each.

8.3% of you liked the "Constellation" idea.

16.7% of you liked the "Progress Bar" idea.

And finally, the runner up for my next fic at 31.9% of you of the 72 who voted (wow 72 of you is absurd to me) is "Impossible To Lie" which will be the fic I write after the winner, which was:

21st Century AU!

With 37.5% of you voting for that. I have already started to work on some bits of the next fic, and I might as well give you some details now since I have a couple of them ironed out.

So, what's gonna be in this fic? Well, obviously MB and ART are gonna get sent back in time to somewhere between 2010 and present time. There will be no distinct year, but there will be references to events that happened in real life. I am actually writing this fic with a friend, too! So there will be a collaborator once his AO3 account is given to him. (He is also going to be one of the main characters of the story, and actively watch me write. I told him he gets ONE [1] 9/11 joke, so, yeah, there's gonna be that in the fic somewhere too.)

It's going to take me significantly longer to get this fic written than I thought it might, seeing as I have had a bit of writer's block with Media Trope recently. (It's kind of gone. But that's the price to pay when you start a stream of consciousness story.) I intend to have the whole story written before I post it, just in case I want to change anything beforehand.

That being said, my posting schedule is going to be a bit wonky. I have picked up more hours at my job because I am attempting to save up money for a rather big step in mine and my partner's life. In the mean time, if you haven't already, you should go read my fics on AO3!!

In order of posting:

SoulmateExperiment.txt

Media Trope

Orion's Belt

I appreciate everyone who voted on the poll, and everyone who reads my works. It helps keep me going to read your comments and see the kudos. (And the amount of hits. Dear stars, you guys eat this shit up.)

Some pretext: I have a google doc with all my Murderbot ideas in it, its where I workshop my ideas and write. I have a few others I could write (BTW Orion's Belt was a spur of the moment idea, it wasn't on my list) and I'm debating on what the next story should be. So, I want your opinions.

Here's two options, whichever one gets the most votes on the poll down below I'll start writing after Media Trope is complete.

Idea 1

MB and ART get sent back in time like in one of their shows to 21st century Earth and have to figure out how the hell to get back while also not getting noticed by the humans. (MB has to hide all of its metal parts entirely and ART discovers the our internet.) MB ends up watching a lot of the science fiction media and comparing it to the media it has in its storage. I'm labeling this idea as 21st Century for now.

Idea 2

Another soulmate AU. I have a decent list of soulmate AU ideas from here on Tumblr that I could work with. Some have already been done and others haven't, but its one of my favorite tropes (besides isekai ofc)

Here's some of my favorites.

-The most frequent thing your soulmate says to you is written on you. ("Little Idiot")

-Will only see shades of your soulmate’s eye colour until you meet. (This one seemed really interesting because imagine MB not knowing blood is red and thinks its coolant is blood so it just assumes all blood is blue)

-It is impossible to lie to your destined soulmate. (For obvious reasons this would be funny.)

-Each soulmate pair has a constellation, and the constellation that you perceive to be the brightest is pointing towards where your soulmate is. (This one is my favorite)

-Progress bar of how close you are to your soulmate. (Except instead of a progress bar it's a percentage system like Risk and Threat Assessment)

Lemme know what ya think here!

Orion's Belt is COMPLETE!! 6 full chapters are all uploaded as of earlier today. I had a lot of fun writing it, and I will be back with more of Media Trope in the coming weeks. It's getting to some very important plot points, and while I have no clue when it will be complete, I have a rough understanding of what is going to be happening.

If you have seen some of my older posts here on Tumblr with the artwork of my characters, you should keep an eye out for some works I might start posting about some of them. (They’re likely to be way better written and absolutely hilarious.) I'll post here on Tumblr too when I upload them! For now, I wanna say thanks for the support. I wouldn't have started posting if it wasn't for the love and support on my first two works.

I've noticed there's been an increase in TMBD fans on my tumblr. Honestly, I wasn't really expecting this. I mean, I expected a few of you but I wasn't exactly expecting there to be more than 2 or 3.

That said, I have a new fic for y'all, if you haven't already found it. There's 3 chapters of Orion's Belt already posted, and this one is about Three.

Before you go reading it, though, let me tell you that this story was inspired by a reality shift that I had. (Maybe not inspired by, but its certainly following how things went.) A lot of it was in 3rd person, but I am writing in 1st person because there was a moment in the shift where I was indeed looking through Three's eyes and that was... something. Words cannot properly describe how it feels to observe the world via a SecUnit's processors. Everything is so much faster, and it's like having seven tabs open and looking at all of them at the same time. I agree with Murderbot that humans and augmented humans can't handle multiple inputs. (I genuinely had to shove myself back into 3rd person because that was A Lot.)

That being said, the feelings part was also very off-putting. It's very different than how we as humans feel emotions, mostly because it's so strong, to the point that its physical sensation. I've never felt anything like it.

That said, Orion's Belt is my attempt to quantify that experience, because I could not stop thinking about it. Three goes on a mission for data retrieval with MB and ART, and while on the corporate station where Three has to act as a distraction, it gets a bit distracted in turn with two SecUnits from the same tissue batch as One and Two. And, as it turns out, B-E used the same three tissue batches for all of their trio'ed SecUnits.

Orion's Belt is weirdly close to my heart, maybe because I genuinely felt what Three felt, or because it's such an interesting story that I experienced as some of it played out. Either way, I put Media Trope on hold while I write this story. It's shorter, I'm expecting to write 6 chapters and leaving it after that. (Oh and, BTW, this is my first time posting any type of smut within the fandom. It's currently being written, and my brain is throwing itself at a wall because I'm anxious it's going to be horrible.)

Media Trope will be back, but for now, go read Orion's Belt (linked above) and get the feels. It's not sad, but its certainly not quite the same as a happily ever after.

Chapter 10/18 of Recursive Systems: Alert Errors is now up (early, because I'm busy this weekend and I'm REALLY excited for this one).

Summary: “I can't wait til ART comes back, I have the feeling it's going to make everything dramatically worse,” said user @acmonblue on Chapter 6. Well!

Excerpt:

Three sends a nervous status request in the feed, and ART-partition is metaphorically trying to climb my firewalls like that might give it a better chance to see what’s happening inside me. My performance reliability is slowly sinking, my stress hormones are creeping upward, and my risk/threat assessments are fully backburnered because they can’t be trusted. (At this point, I might as well expect those things to be my new baseline and call it a day.)  Alert errors, I tell both of them. But everything is still functioning correctly. Keep going. This is a lie, I am very much not functioning correctly, especially since the alerts are coming faster and getting weirder, but I narrow my focus to the map-monitor at the front of my feed. Three starts pinging me every time something weird happens with my internal processes, which is every few seconds by the time we reach the entrance to the docks. I return the pings and try very hard to ignore the increasingly frequent alerts about low oxygen and contaminated fuel lines and other emergencies my systems are yelling at me about that are verifiably not true. We speed up a little more as we turn a corner and enter the open embarkation area. I notice a buffer statement is queued up and about to execute, and I cancel it, taking my voicebox temporarily offline for good measure. (It would have made me feel better if it was at least a relevant statement, like ‘please stand by, I need to verify an alert,’ but it was ‘this unit is at minimal functionality and it is recommended that you discard it.’ So that’s. Well. Anyway.) I am staying calm. I am so calm. (If I keep telling myself I’m calm, maybe I can trick the full body panic into looking the other direction, at least until I get onto ART. Almost there.)

Thanks @a-noble-dragon and @jamilas-pen for tagging me!

My answers are under the cut. Among other things, this brought home that I'm not great at tagging my works. Adding a review of tags to my to-do list...

Guess what I have!! I have DOODLES!! (More so sketches, but regardless. I will have a final of these sketches posted eventually)

If you've read my fic Media Trope, this might seem familiar, because I finally started sketching Human-Drone ART!! (Obviously, some design choices are subject to change and these have no color.)

I decided I might as well get sketches made up, and them my brain said "why not post them?" So here we are.

Also, for your consideration, how I imagine the Perihelion logo (in general, but I made this fic related, ofc.)

Hey!! Hi!! If you've read Media Trope and you're an artist, I would ABSOLUTELY love to see it. Tag me or somethin'!

(This is totally not me begging to see someone make fan art of my fanfic. Totally not like a dream of mine to have that happen or anything-)

Anyway!! The fic has been updated a few times since my last post about it! You can find the original post on my timeline. I am going to be making some artwork for it and making a series or collection or whatever it is (look, I'm still generally new to posting on Ao3. I use google for all my HTML formats) that's gonna have my official artwork. Just need to, ya know, actually do the art.