#tocm snippets

Bien sûr!!! Ça me fait très plaisir, merci!!! 🥰

🧐 Do you spend much time researching for your stories?

You have no idea how much!! 😭 It feels like I'm doing much more of that than there are words and time put in actual writing of the story sometimes. I learned the most unlikely and disturbing of things for my stories, fics or original!!

The fun part of it is that I actually learned for real how to forge blades and tools with a smithy friend and other ultra cool things I hope I'll never need to use one day… or else it means that the world has gone to shit. 😰

🤩 Who is your favorite character to write?

I have answered this one here already, but I'm going to elaborate quite a bit. Sometimes, when I write a character, I have a clear picture of who they are and how they behave in general but I love to let them surprise me here and there as the story goes on. I hadn't planned for Vivian to say this, or do that… and now I have to deal with the consequences of her actions or comment that I was totally unprepared for! Or Ela had the strangest of ideas (like she usually does, though… but that's not the point!) about how to deal with a situation that involves at least 5 new characters with their own agenda! And suddenly, I have hours of replanning a scene (or entire string of scenes) to do, or worse — you never were supposed to go there! Why have I been looking at derelict brick factories and antic models of sniper bullet's wounds for two days straight, Ulrik?!?!

It feels a little like being a GM in a very wild game of tabletop RPG with absolute savage players. I'm sorry @hathorik 🤣 I understand how it must be for you to have @fatesrpg and me to manage in a game now, hahaha 🤡

🤲 Would you please share a snippet of a wip?

Of course I would!! Thank you for asking!!! 😊

CLING CLANG! In one swift move, Din and Elara jumped to their feet, blaster aimed at the door. No more sound was coming from the hangar now but an overwhelming sense of danger and alarm was already gripping him by the throat. That metalic falling sound came from near the ship, so he had to check…

Oya! 👀💕

From episode 9 —

And for episode 10, hmm… it's still a big pile of scene-by-scene notes at the moment, so let's see if I have at least quotes or something like this to share…

Ok no, I don't. The few I have ready are all full of spoilers so, let's say that, in this one, there's a Hutt character, so this chapter will contain bartering, trolling and insults…

👀...

Hello Anon!!! 👀 Thank you for this! It was hard to find some that were light in spoilers. 👍

🧱 angst!

"We may need to change our plans…"

" 'Cause we still have no news from Neal ?! I—I don't know why he…" She shuddered. "Maybe somethin' happened to them o-on a run and… and that's why even Jein isn't calling me back ! Maybe I made her sad and…"

Her voice quivered with a wince and she buried her face in her hands, her hair catching a few crumbs of the half-biscuit she was still holding in her fingers.

"I want them to be fine…"

Her muffled moan made Din’s heart sink. He stroke her arm up to her wrist and he felt her muscles relax under his fingers. She let her arms fell onto the table. Then, Din slipped his hand into hers. He couldn't tell her the same thing he'd told her when she'd started worrying about not hearing from her parents, couldn't tell her again that comms just struggled sometimes to get through the holonet and reach their recipients... So he said the only other thing he thought would ease her pain, if not her grief.

"If we still have no news from them after our stop on Denon, we'll go see her first thing as soon as we land…"

Elara drew a trembling breath in. With his free hand, Din plucked the crumbs from her hair and she held his gaze through the visor.

"You'd like that ?"

Her eyes were red with pent-up tears that she sniffled before nodding.

🧸 fluff!

Motion at the corner of his visor, on the side of the child and Elara, caught his attention; the child sat up with a grumpy little squeak, one ear lower than the other. With his thumb, Din smoothed the light fuzz bristling on his head, and the child blinked slowly at him with his big, sleepy eyes. For the sake of this little one, Din hoped that the theories of Cornell's colleagues were the right ones...

A slow, pleased chirp followed the passage of his fingers over his wrinkled forehead and he closed his eyes, his small hands squeezing the edge of his long sleeves.

"You look like you could sleep a little longer," Din told him softly.

"Woooo…"

The child’s protest made him smile. Ears low, looking somewhat sad, he watched Elara sleep, her nose buried in the crumpled blanket, before getting up and waddling over to Din's leg, to which he clung with both hands on the fabric of his pants to squint at the datapad screen.

"I was about to take a break from reading," Din said. "Want to drink something from the galley ?"

🧨 suspens!

👓 + 🐥

👥 + "Mando"

🃏 : ALIEN SPEAKING.

Well, you're packing a punch! (lovingly) 😁 Ok, you deserve it. 💕

So, this isn't any less complicated to pull up without heavy spoilers, but let's try this!

🍽 + 🔫 a snippet with both food and Din in it!

He put his tray on his bunk and sat down slowly to remove his helmet, which he placed next to him. With his eyes closed, he took a few slow breaths full of the appetizing smell of the stew. Yet, though he was hungry, Din didn't indulge right away; taking off his gloves, he ruffled his hair and scratched the back of his neck, head down, before running careful fingers over the cuts on the bridge of his nose and his lower lip. His fight with the rancor had left him with more bruises and wounds than Elara had taken care of, and these were slowly healing.

👓 + 🐥 a snippet with both the kid and Ela in it!

Elara let out a slow sigh, shoulders slumping.

"Well, if I had powers like you…"

In fact, she had to think about it for a few seconds — what kind of powers could she have dreamed of?!

"I… I think I'd like to be able to heal people too. I would have healed Din like you wanted to, instead of using that karkin' cauterizer on him."

She smiled to the child who was blinking, his toy clutched in his hand.

"Oh, about that ! I've missed on a lot of occasions to tell you this but… thank you, for healing me."

She bobbed her head, looking for words, but she didn’t find better ones than the simplests:

"I'm… I'm really grateful."

👥 + "Mando" a snippet with another OC talking about Mando?! (these are awfully specific! 🤣)

Traffic seemed even more dense as they approached and Din could clearly spot the debris of satellites and stations scattered all around and gathered out of the way by a swarm of small droids to the nearest shipyard station to be recycled. Holding the child on his thigh plates, Din bent a little forward to take a look at the comings and goings through the viewport. Duan's voice added itself to the console's bleeps and warnings:

"C'mon, Mando, help me get her on our course…"

He gestured Din to take Tesho's control wheel.

🃏 : ALIEN SPEAKING. ... well, something with an alien speaking, or someone speaking an alien language?! (I might even have both now that I think of it! 🙃)

But the quip wasn't to Sebhin's taste who barked in retaliation:

"Hasa nee cha, fierfek !"

Hello, Anon! Thank you for this nice little constellation!

This chapter of the story is especially laden with people gazing at and talking about stars, celestial bodies and other charts, so the difficulty here was to choose those with the less spoilery bits in them!

Here are your three snippets. 👀

"I loved it when we used to lay down in the grass or on the rooftop of my house to watch the stars."

Her soft voice, calm as well, pulled him from his tormented thoughts. He turned to her, straightening up and silent. With an open hand, raised to the black sky, she gestures to the stars as if to caress them.

"I was too young to remember what they looked like from up there before my parents settled on Varthen but you had seen them…"

She held his gaze with a smile. Din smiled too and, for a brief instant that tugged at his heartstrings, he would have wanted her to know it, to see it without having to guess it.

They have so many memories together…

"At this point, we’ll sure need another refuel, so we may stop a little longer. Depends… Denon is kinda busy. And then, it will be another thirty five hours before we finally reach Corellia."

He tapped on the screen, on the largest point above which a tag labelled the planet. Din took a slow breath in; he knew it was about to be a long journey but now, he was feeling nervous to have to spend so many hours stuck on a ship he wasn’t in control of.

Din doesn't like not being the pilot.

Elara raised a hand to touch a cluster of stars floating in front of her wide eyes and she smiled when her finger went through the rendering without disrupting it.

"That's the Kuar system you're tryin' to pocket," he informed her, even though she didn't ask, and Din knew she wouldn't have. "It's located on an historically significant hyperlane, the kind that made Coruscant think the Deep Core was worth exploring…"

Thanks @something-tofightfor for the tag!!

Rules: write the latest line from your WIP and tag as many people as there are words in the line.

Well, it won't be just a line... otherwise, it wouldn't make any sense!

"So, all that trouble's for you, Mando, hu?"

"Play nice, Gun…" Elara said, placatingly. "It isn't for him."

"Well, it ain't for you, I know that much!"

She let out a slow sigh, her hands momentarily leaving the unbuckling of the cartridge belt and, after a look shared with Din through his visor, she lifted the flap of the bag from over the child's head.

"It's for him."

Thank you for the tag, @something-tofightfor !!! 🥰✨

In case it's difficult to read on the picture…

But, for all answer, she charged, blade in her hand. The game ended here for Din; he parried the vibroblade with his left vambrace and closed his right hand in a tight grip on Sebhin's wrist, twisting it to make her drop her weapon.

Tagged by the lovely @pheedraws ✨ Thank youuuu!!! 💕

Tagging @hathorik (what about Leroy and Sizemore? haha) , @something-tofightfor , @the-blind-assassin-12 , @noonfaerie , @jerneblomster , @appalachianlich ... and who wants to share any kind of WIPs!!! No pressure, of course ✌️

A little bit from the upcoming chapter 4 of Lost and Found ...in which we discover that Elara has no form of authority with kids.