#upliink

Man I don’t think even he could tell you. A lot of them are in alternian and he can’t speak or read or write in that language but it’s all very confusing and upsetting especially when they seem less like memories and more like messages

Hmmm... yes.

But not for the reasons you think! Sollux likes his job okay. He gets to do cool stuff with computers and schematics and airplanes. The system is horrible but he has a decent relationship with the individuals he works with -- the scientists and engineers, his own CO, his physician, they all get that captor’s got a bum deal and they do what they can to make life easier for him.

So it’s not that bad for him, relatively speaking. He’s got a job he’s cool with (because he was conditioned for it), a cool place to stay (that he can never leave), a free education (but no degree). Of course it helps that the alternative for him would be either going back to live in the district or neutralizing his psionics with medication to live with humans and he’s not really down for either of those, so it would take something pretty serious to change his mind

Thanks! :D

For the first question, I will answer you in detail because that is a plot thread I’m abandoning in the rewrite. Family is kind of a recurring theme in Nuclearstuck, from Dave and Rose’s hard times growing up to that Horrible Thing that happens to Gamzee in bomb-ass pussy. Basically, the idea that Family is Hard but also in the dystopian situation these characters are living in Family is a Privilege (for humans). Trolls are hatched and registered in the districts and raised by nursery staff. Obviously canon trolls don’t raise their own young, but again this is more about separating the kids from the adults to more thoroughly assimilate them.

One way I was going to address this in Upliink, kind of mirroring Gamzee’s disastrous pregnancy in original Nukestuck, was with Roxy getting pregnant. She was planning to marry her baby-daddy to keep up appearances. Her refusal of a drink when she visits Sollux is kind of a nod to that. This would cause issues with Sollux, since he’d put it together waaaay before she ever told him, and stew on it and get pissy and passive-aggressive about it. He’s all fucked up knowing that any lil’ caterpillars he’ll ever have will probably be funneled into the military just like him (toying with a concept of high-powered psionics bein in a breeding program where they get paid if they produce psionics, and then again if their offspring enlist). It would also create some interesting tension between Gamzee and Dave when the fics reconnect, since Dave really wants to be a dad but Gamzee is absolutely not here for raising human wrigglers after what happened to his

But yeah! I decided to abandon that plotline ‘cause i thought it was kind of unnecessary. Also, the original dynamic I wanted to have for Roxy and Sollux was rivalry/antagonism/UST but they’re afraid to act on it because they could get in trouble. After developing these characters more, I prefer them in a kind of touchy, volatile blackrom where they care for each other a lot and understand each other pretty well but can suck at communicating about the stuff that matters and also they’re screwin’ like rabbits.

A little! I actually have that whole fic sketched out and I want to revisit it. I’ll probably rewrite what little I have done. Since Carla (nuclearstuck’s creator) isn’t really in the fandom anymore, and is working on creating an original concept out of what they’ve already finished of nuclearstuck, the main fic probably won’t be finished and the little things we’ve planned of having the two fics sync up have kind of fizzled out.

Basically, nuclearstuck came out of what I think was supposed to be a one-off Gamzee<3

The whole reason I developed Sollux in the AU was because he wasn’t part of the main story and Carla and I wanted to do some RPs in the AU. So I asked them how psionics would fit into the boundaries of nukestuck, and they had some ideas about the bureau of troll affairs, an organization that exists in the AU kinda-sorta masquerading as an advocacy organization but p transparently having their own gotdang agenda as a superpowered police force, using them to reverse-engineer alternian spaceflight technology

Which was a brilliant idea, but then we got to thinkin ok, the bureau is great as a scary fictional organization with unlimited resources and no accountability, but do you know what is an even scarier organization with unlimited resources and no accountability that exists in real life??

So that is where I got the idea (that and, at the time, binging my ass off on some X-Files) to create a military conspiracy story about stolen alien technology being harvested, studied, and tested in the total absence of ethics, seeing’s how trolls have little in the way of human rights, especially trolls who have signed their lives away to service.

Upliink is about how, with the gap between human technology and troll technology rapidly closing, modern science is approaching the point of fabricating new technology based off the alternian stuff. The problem is they weren’t really prepared for how much of the tech is organic, so they still have to use psionics to power it, and they still have to harvest a lot of components from alternian spacecraft to make everything work. This causes Problems.

The military is also trying to keep a lid on this research, because if the bureau sniffs it out there’s the whole shitstorm of who gets to have ownership of any technology that comes out of this research. This also causes Problems.

Soooo Upliink is about Roxy, a tactical networks engineer, and Sollux, a test pilot, and their respective roles in these developments. Neither of them know the full extent of what’s going on, they just do what they’re told, but when testing a new flight system that seems to be light years ahead of anything the military has developed before leaves Sollux with nightmares and flashbacks that aren’t his, they start to piece together that there’s a lot more going on than they’ve been told.

So yeah, I don’t want to dump a lot more detail in this particular ask since it’s something I definitely want to revisit as a fic. I’m trying to work more canon characters in there who don’t appear/aren’t mentioned in the main nukestuck series (which is amazing and everyone should read it).

:girl next tiem im bringin scissors :gill who you tellin 38(

been in a car for like a week decided to draw some girls

had an idea for a little story about these two a while back but for now just drawin meenah gettin her hair did

a nice TA saves sollux captor's butt

later she might touch it

the fanfiction

my fantroll dakham as a kid with some concepts i had in mind about something something nuclearstuck au something something small groups of trolls living secretly in subway tunnels and catacombs something something not assimilating into human culture

also i just wanted to draw a weird looking little troll kid with bug arms and exoskeletal plates that havent molted off yet