#sarcasm writes

AO3 Anything, AO3 series, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Chapter 16, Chapter 17, Chapter 18

This is my story for the 2021 Storytime! Big Bang! @ts-storytime Thank you to @ben-phantomhive-trash, who is the artist I was partnered with for the event! They created this fantastic art!!!! I love it so much I can't even.

Thank you to PunkRock for helping me figure out the shorts characters and other plot things. Also thank you to AryaSkywalker, Thembo, and Carrotflowerking17 and the Big Bang 2021 discord for additional help!!!!

This fic is an alternative entry point to my (In Other Worlds) Series. This fic happens at the same time roughly as Millennia, a companion novel. You can read this fic and then check out the rest of the series, or check out the series and then read this.

Also, I don't use Janus's actual name throughout the fic for thematic and narrative reasons. You'll see. I hope that does not put you off too much. Consider it part of the angst.

Clarification of general warnings and pairings, minor spoilers

I added the tag unreliable narrator, but I will clarify that the narrator is not actively lying to the audience. This tag relates to Janus's memory issues and the uncertainty resulting from that. tbh I would not worry too much about the events being untrue, and more be concerned about these being Janus's imperfect recollection of events.

I think this fic is a bit more violent than Millennia at times, hence I added the archive warning for violence. I still feel like a teen would be fine reading this, so I am keeping the rating Teen and Up. This fic focuses the most on what I dub psychological horror (angst, mind control, memory issues, consciousness, nightmares, etc.). I also tagged this story with disassociation, and content in this fic may resemble derealization and depersonalization.

If you think I should warn/rate this fic differently, I am happy to hear feedback and reconsider.

I tagged this as Remus/Janus, but like, ya gotta squint. Mostly banter and being soft. I love romance, but I have a hard time writing it. Could be seen as platonic too.

HINT 1: KEY.

HINT 2: "kind of" not "kinda"

CHAPTER START

NAME J. D. Dedrick ID 25:35--25:44 / 51:09 ALIENRACE Dūcesnaca OCCUPATION Robotics Researcher

Chapter Warnings cybernetics, missing/artificial limbs (eye, legs), forced medical treatment/experimentation, amnesia, depersonalization/derealization/dissociation, unreliable narration, psychological horror, swearing Chapter Characters Janus, the Dragon Witch, Virgil (not by name)

He could have been anything. When he looked inside his own mind, he dug through darkness. Memories like ashes, the particles filling his lungs were all that were familiar to him—and those only felt like nothing. No fragments, just a fine powder.

He woke up to yellow in his eyes, stinging and unfocused. Lights beyond the veil flickered. He saw a figure move; he looked small. After a brief glance into the world, he began to drown. He threw everything into the yellow encasement, and after an agonizing struggle, the rush of acceleration threw him to the ground.

When the air touched his face, black fireworks exploded in his hazy vision, and the first memory he had was gone.

He woke up again, like a corpse left in the stale air for vultures: beaks plucking out his skin piece by piece. His vision blurry and halved, he stared up at the birds breaking his body into bits.

Reports say he was involved in a huge space crash. DRACANA has generously sponsored his artificiality.

That sounded like a lie. That sort of blatant untruth where there was no connection to reality tied to it. Everything his senses told him felt unreal, everything except the pain that grounded him like a shot duck.

Whispers like gossip broke into his mind between droughts of consciousness. His senses were pieced together and broken apart, like pieces of clay in a kiln shattering. Memories of vultures and lab coats glued together by agony floated through space until eventually he was awake.

Probably just one of her business rivals

Dei’dra—he knew her name—loomed over him, to his right. He could see nothing to his left. The light stung, he squinted and blinked his eye. He could feel nothing on the left side of his face. Dei’dra smiled at him.

“Wake up, dollface. Didn’t think you’d make it, but you pulled through.”

He did not know where he was. He did not know who he was. All he knew was that this woman was Dei’dra, the Dragon Witch, and he hated her.

“Well, he seems to be doing well. Might as well put him under and move onto the next stage.”

He lived out his days creating sand sculptures in his mind. He saw himself running in place, downloading skills and targets and concepts. The sand would blow away each day, leaving him with nothing to remember them by.

Between bouts of black unconsciousness, he saw grey, and white, and pale pink, brown, and blue. Abstract shapes morphing into creatures that prodded at him. Cold metal seething, machines twisting his body together like crochet. He gave nonsense names for some, not even names consisting of words, just pure thoughts.

Slowly, he lost sight of the sand in his brain, yet the grains still dripped from his ears when he shook his head. He became a part of reality. Or perhaps he became part of a hellish dream.

Darkness huddled in the damp sides of his eyes, danger snapping at his bruised joints and soles. Deep inside his chest, his heart damned, words mixed with intuitive instincts, daring his body to live beyond the yellow veil.

Stage One of Project $DEE has been completed.

$DEE was not his name. It was what he was called. One of the words that would echo in his brain. Dee. Dee. Dee. Like a rhythm, like the beeping machines. Like the ringing of the heart monitor. It was embedded in his ears. Baby words jumping around, forming pictures, babbling him into nothing.

Dee, his brain still a desert, started to make better sense of this reality he lived in. He could control his body sometimes. He could move his arms. Or what was left of his limbs. Or what they had lent him.

The second picture in his brain, the one after the yellow veil: it was the artificial lights on Lab C’s ceiling. Grey illuminated by white, he stared up at the square tiles and textured glass, like undulating waves of melted sand.

With how long he was locked in place staring up at this picture, he memorized it. He could close his eyes at any moment and picture it in its exact detail again.

“Time to get up, Doll-face. It’s time for your first mission.”

He saw Dei’dra’s face again. He felt his restraints loosen and break away.

His first mission was not all that glorious. He was lanky, unused to moving in his body. He was a wall of meat. Disposable. He followed a trail like a zombie. He barely spoke to the team he was placed in. He remembered their orders regarding him.

“He’s still pretty out of it. Give him some good experience, but we’d like to keep working on him so bring him back in one piece.”

Dee felt like a puppet, simply put. Some machine inside him aimed his cannons and lasers. He stood in place, shooting at targets. He was guided by an invisible leash by the team he was assigned to. He saw sepia shapes. Blurs of bodies. All he could feel was the emotions in his gut telling him, repeatedly:

Youaregoingtodieyouaregoingtodieyouaregoingtodieagainyouaregoingtodiestoppleasestoppleaseyouaregoingtodiestopstopstopstopstop.

He was kept suspended in place while his body completed the mission. And then he was back in Lab C, mind clearer.

He was thinking in sentences now. He could monologue, like any great villain. That is what he had become, hadn’t he? Why a villain? Where had he learned that word? The more he sifted through the sand, the more words he could find he no longer remembered learning. They were just there, connected to nothing. No memory. No past life.

He kept thinking these words. And then he decided that since his jaw was not glued shut, he would give speaking a try. Garbled and slurred at first, he kept talking as much as they let him.

They made him run between ceilings of grey. They made him speak between illuminated square tiles. He practiced lines of a script. Subterfuge settled in his brain like a mirage in the distance between the settled sand.

He could walk on the unsteady ground once again. He could see. He could hear. He could experience the world around him. He gazed up at the ceiling but was interrupted by a splotch of dark violet.

Another blot. Another vulture. He stood there out of the corner of his artificial eye.

“What are you waiting for? Get on with the tests.” His voice sharp, cutting through his tongue.

This was an unusual time of day for tests. To say it was a time of day was generous. It was more like he would be experimented on for hours upon hours and then suddenly they would stop. Nothing to do but bask in the nothingness it brought.

At this point, Dee thought that he was done with most of the tests. He had his limbs. He had an eye, which he opened wider to get a better look at the violet blotch. Something about the blotch was connected to something else in his brain, but he could not quite place it.

“Well, whatever it is, get on with it, it certainly could not have waited until morning.”

It shuffled closer to him. Less of a blotch now. He could make out shapes. He could recognize his face now if he saw him again.

Air escaped his lungs, and then he said again, asking, “Whatever might you need from me today, doctor?”

The blotch was shaking. “If you are just here to sight-see, I am going back to sleep.” His eyes weighed heavily on his face, eyelids falling through his willpower.

“Are you… okay?”

No, I am not ‘okay’. I am ‘$DEE.’

“Do I LOOK okay? Yeah sure, I am right as rain, having a grand old time—feeling peachy, even.” At this point, the words just spiraled off his tongue and through his teeth. The blotch made a sound, and Dee’s frustration grew, the pain of today’s tests ricocheting in his body.

“If you aren’t here to run another one of your little tests, then just get out. Go tell your superior, or better yet, go tell Dei’dra to go fuck herself and leave me alone.”

00010010

<<Project $DEE has been recovered from his failed mission and sent to Lab C for repairs.

Virgil jumped through many hoops, like a dog, to be there—to stand in Lab C again, standing over project $DEE, again. Perhaps, Virgil knew that out of anyone at DRACANA, Dee was the only one besides himself that was close enough to her to know the truth and have the desire to spill it.

Virgil could not look away. Dee had no left eye to look back. His cheek, his eye socket, part of his forehead, it was all chiseled off. Broken apart, shattered, body in mismatched pieces, a ragdoll.

Virgil rested his limb down beside Dee’s head. A root slithered behind his neck, hoping to see if Dee was still there. And he was.

Virgil did not know what he was looking at. It was like a completely different language to him. It was easy for him to connect to computers and even alien plants he encountered occasionally. He was familiar with how information was structured. With humans, or other humanoid aliens or animals, connecting to them was not compatible. Virgil could sense all sorts of things, but he could barely make sense of any of it, normally, but…

Barren.

Virgil’s fingertips were cold, like in a dream, where he closed his eyes and saw Dee standing beyond. He could hear rustling from nowhere, like in a desert night. Virgil could not feel patches of his body, so immersed in Dee’s sensations and thoughts. One moment he could see the desert clearly, each grain of sand countable. The next he is stuck in a black firework-filled void of consciousness. A disembodied voice spouting nonsense.

Virgil felt weak, his mind dozing, tearing its way through, pulling itself forward, dragging its actions onwards. He felt encased in a yellow fluid, a slop, a transparent mush. In moments of silence, Virgil could hear a scream ring throughout his mind, like lightning through a tunnel.

Virgil felt miles, millennia, away, from anywhere, from anything. He could not find his body, or any being.

Virgil dug into the void, claws digging into maroon mud, grains filling every crevasse of his hands—he had hands, real hands, humanish hands. Not his own. Virgil gasped, perhaps aloud with the outside world as its witness. Virgil crawled, each movement of his limbs audible, aching throughout the tiny threads that sewed himself together.

Virgil dug, dug, dug, dug, dug. Repeating, repeating, a glitch, a buffering screen. Static and boxes of RGB.

Oh, this was more familiar. And Virgil was sitting. He was sitting next to Dee still, but he was talking to the AI inside his skull. It was glitching. Code rambling. Errors falling. Virgil could not do much for whatever organic organism made up Dee’s other half. The fractured lies beside him.

Virgil could help him though, perhaps indirectly. He could troubleshoot code.

00000001

While Virgil was a cascade of vibrant violets and deep and dark purples, Andy and Anton were mirages of black and grey. Andy was like a dullish evergreen. Anton was like a night sky, full of stars as his skin glittered in the light with freckles of crimson and violet. Virgil was like a sprouting zwartkop, a black rose, with bright maroon petals reaching high towards sunlight.

They lived together in a small apartment-like home on the planet Aerth. This was a temporary arrangement.

Virgil was but a small sapling compared to Andy and Anton, yet they all shared many physical traits. They were not only of the same species but were all propagated from the same being. Andy was the oldest of the three, but Anton was close to his age. Virgil was still a small sprout.

Andy was lucky. He had lived for a long time—millennia, even.

This never stopped him from worrying about death, especially since he had watched Aerth slowly become worse, more dangerous, as tensions between other species on his planet grew, and his own planet caught the eye of others.

So, it hurt, tangled the cords inside of his chest and rippled throughout his body—it hurt that he knew that Virgil was not so lucky. That the conflicts of this beautiful planet would consume them both.

Anton entered their home loudly, interrupting Andy’s thoughts, and Virgil trailed in behind him. Virgil’s hand was wrapped around one of Anton’s fingers—oh Virgil was so small, and Andy felt like he was buzzing. Virgil looked up at Anton, scrunching his face, silently communicating with him, talking about his day.

Virgil glanced around the home, and his face lit up when he saw Andy. He untangled his hand from Anton’s, tiny roots flying off into the air as they detached, and Virgil jumped into Andy’s arms.

Virgil, excited to talk about his day, could not speak his thoughts aloud. Instead, he communicated so many buzzing thoughts, sensations, and feelings directly to Andy, through the little roots that sprouted from across his body.

It was all over the place, quite literally, because Virgil was determined to cram everything he had learned that day through the tiny roots that sprung from his arms and head. Andy laughed, amused by his excitement—this small little thing was explaining this all to him like it was a new scientific discovery. Andy could not remember the time when the world was so exciting.

Andy cradled Virgil in his arms, but when he looked back up at Anton, he did not need any signal from him to see the dreaded news twirling in his eyes. Andy tensed, holding Virgil in his arms tighter. Anton looked down at Andy sadly, placed a hand on his shoulder.

<<We will need to move before they get here.

Andy was careful to not let the sadness seep through the many different connections he shared with Virgil. Yet all of Virgil’s new and exciting discoveries, his stories about the plants and the sky and the earth and his new friends, made him feel even worse—because he knew that he would have to leave them all behind. There were so many vines and flowers and bushes and people that he had known for many years—he had watched them grow and change and learn and discover new songs and words—but all that progress would soon be lost.

>>How long do we have here now? How much can we bring with us?

And maybe Andy had never been lucky. The constant migration, moving from place to place, he had to endure to ensure he stayed alive felt like a constant ache in his chest. Many people had to stay rooted in one place, and thus could not travel Aerth and survive like he could, but that could not stop the pain of leaving from tearing out his insides.

<<One labay

And that was urgent. Andy felt along the top of Virgil’s head, gently touching the small plants growing there. He ran his fingers through the trailing vines that fell over one of his eyes, purple pea-like leaves grew from the stems. He watched as tiny violet flowers glowed and buzzed, singing songs into Virgil’s ear.

They did not have much time to pack things, take seeds and cuttings of their favorite plants, but he would try, for Virgil’s sake. Virgil had grown rather attached to everyone in the neighborhood here.

>>One of these days there will be nowhere left to run to.

Andy took a moment to tune back into Virgil’s excited ramblings. He let himself picture the soft blue sky full of violet clouds. ‘that’s me,’ Virgil had said.

Andy could see through Virgil’s eyes as he ran through the field, chasing his friends in a game of tag. He could feel the excitement and joy spilling from Virgil in waves, but it slowly dimmed into a content warmth as Virgil began to doze.

Andy’s limbs felt rooted to his chair. His woody vines hardly paid attention to him. Veins flowed languidly, lulling his eyes downward, half-lidded. Tired.

He grasped Anton’s hand on his shoulder, squeezed it, before dozing as well. Anton slowly detached his hand and began to pack their things.

00000100

History and developments of environmental protection on Aerth: How war, economics, and technology have changed the perspectives on person-hood and value of anomalous alien species

Abstract

The planet Aerth was named by early humans when the planet was discovered soon after intergalactic space travel became feasible. It was nicknamed “Aerth” by combining the name of the human home planet Earth and the human word for aesthetic (from the human language English). The nickname has since remained as the common name for this planet.

The early humans thought the planet resembled their own due to the prominent number of “plant-like” beings. Many early accounts of the planet described it as “beautiful,” but humans were initially careful to avoid contact with the planet to avoid destroying its ecosystem. Early humans had a history of introducing different animal species from different ecosystems on Earth which resulted in the balance of such ecosystems to be destroyed.

The human scientists that studied the planet have long since discovered that on Aerth are many different species of electroplanta beings. Although the concepts of “plant” and “electronics” inaccurately described the fundamental biology of the planet’s inhabitants, the words remain to be the most accurate descriptors in human language.

In recent years, the planet Aerth has been mostly destroyed. Some islands and small continents are still habitable and some electroplanta have continued to survive. The scarcity of life on the planet, coupled with their usefulness in technology and electronics, has made the inhabitants of the planet extremely valuable on the DarkMarket, even though the smuggling and poaching of the species from Aerth has been made illegal by the TSUU.