ValleyShrike

Non-Astrophage AU, set in the future as humanity has commodified everything it can. You want access to power and water, you have to pay a monthly access fee and then pay high rates for the small amount you're alotted that are increased during peak hours that most people use them. Want real meat? You have to pay a service to every business along the supply chain to get 8 oz of red meat to you. Insect based protein is cheaper but it tastes like vitamins and grit. You want an education? Oh sweet child, you have to pay premium fees to just get access to information/books and then you have to pay fees to each author/hoarder of info for each piece of media you access that has a time limit on that access. If you manage to get a degree of higher education, you have a yearly fee to keep your degree 'active'. Fail to pay the fee, you might as well never have went to college. The gaps in the economies have become chasms, people are existing in booths that house up to 4 people for up to 8 hours for a lot of money most don't have. If you can't make money, you can't even get access to basic human needs. Stratt grew up in a commune that actually owned land and educated her from media they owned and acquired through illegal hacking methods. They played games with corporate states, supplying them with fresh crops in exchange for information and inalienable copyright access to information they traded to raise money for their projects in corporate sabotage. Stratt's communal parents paid for her madly expensive education as a historian so she could climb up in academia and the sham of politics that runs the world. She writes papers and consults with politicians on how increase their social score and increase engagement with their social propaganda media. She makes deals with the devils her upbringing violently opposed. She's building a house of cards, gaining influence, becoming someone the greedy corpo types use and trust. The entire plan is to get Stratt into the world of greed and pull off some kind of Fight Club ending where she destroys the systems that keep the paywall on information, infrastructure, and influence. A reset of information and who has access to it. She's got the contacts, the information, the money everything. She just needs some bored keyboard cowboy to implement it and take the fall for it. She sifts through recommendations from her contacts. She comes across a recently paroled bio-terrorist who hacks on the side when he isn't protesting the killing of the earth.

It's Grace, of course.

heyheyhey everyone i said there was a different piece i wanted to post last update, but i didn't post it. well here it is. i wrote it just last week and the feelings are still a bit fresh, but it's interesting getting something off my chest right away instead of waiting to touch it up. i liked how i wrote this at the time. i think being ugly fits it well. so, minimal editing. see below vvv and goodbye

and better

tags courtesy of @rainydaydecaf, @jackdaw-sprite

tags courtesy of @blockcat-safari

The thing is that ABSOLUTELY would happen if Owen was 10% more depressed and apathetic than in canon. Like you know he was a total mess going into that grave, and he probably just spent a couple hours cleaning up in the river before finding the other townsfolk. If he didn’t bother with the cleanup step… yeah.

.

By the nature of their upbringing, Cleo was not familiar with traditional family dynamics. They had their mother who was... well, Cleo could admit she was perhaps not the archetypal maternal figure, but she did go by the title. Even so, Cleo was fairly sure that what they felt towards Morcant’s human ward was not parental affection.

Siblings, maybe?

But human siblings didn't usually have 60 years between them, which kinda left an aunt-nephew bond, and Cleo was nobody's aunt.

All that really mattered was that they were family, in that kinda nebulously fucking weird way that overlapping vampire covens tended to be. Cleo's mother was good friends with Abolish's... whatever Morcant was, and that worked for them. They didn't need to put a label on it, because everyone who knew them, knew what the connection was.

Or, at least, that was how it had been.

"How do you two know each other?"

The other newcomers to Oakhurst had watched the unexpected reunion with the kind of blatent curiosity that could be expected for an eighty-something pensioner and a maybe-butler being on easy speaking terms.

"We're family," Cleo said, because the best way to lie was to tell a kind of truth.

"Distantly related, or...?" fished one of the strangers.

"Cousins," Cleo supplied. Once you got past the inner ring of familiarity, pretty much every relative was a cousin of some distinction. "Myself on my mother's side, and Abolish..."

She faltered, because Morcant hadn't so much adopted Abolish as acquired him, but she suspected that was the kind of answer that didn't fly well with mortals.

"I was employed," Abolish said.

Cleo snorted. "What? You think my mother and Morcant didn't just accidentally send us both to the same dead-end town? Shocker. I might need to sit down."

Abolish looked down from where he was fixing up the roof of Cleo's temporary home. "You are sitting."

"This is a protest sit. It's different."

"If this is about the cousin thing–"

"Oh, I'm furious. Low profile, my mother said. Don't attract any unnecessary attention, she said." They took a long draught of the town's first meagre attempt at brewing, and grimaced. "Fucking employed."

"What would you call it?"

"I would avoid calling it anything because it's none of their damn business." She admitted defeat on the ale. Even getting drunk wasn't worth that. "Why did Morcant send you here? Correction," they added, "why did he say he was sending you?"

"Family business."

"Is that, like, 'family business,'" and they made the quotation marks somehow audible without any helpful gestures, "or actual family business?"

"Actual."

"Oh."

"And there was something about a cure to vampirism."

"I knew it."

"You?"

Cleo shrugged. "You know my mother. She doesn't explain anything if she doesn't have to."

"She sent you here to mess with Morcant," Abolish translated.

It's actually pretty easy to tell when you put the creator map next to the original map!

Abolish may not have burnt the whole forest down, but he DID make traveling between Town and the Castle inconvenient for higher-level vampires, since they no longer had decent cover anywhere near the path.

It's possible that the big on the right was clear-cut by someone, but the forest is a lot denser than these maps make it look. I'm more inclined to believe the fire spread there unless we have evidence otherwise.

For example, I originally thought that the area around Ren's house may have already been somewhat cleared previously, since, y'know, his house is there, but it turns out Abolish gives before and after photos in his video showing that area burning down as well:

It's worth noting that the map is BIG. It doesn't look like a whole lot on an actual map, but when you're actually loading it in-game it feels much emptier. He did quite a lot of damage to the environment lmao.

Anyways, here's a little map to show the exact burnt areas, for fun!

First thought was that it would bring the number of lives Doc could save down to two but thinking about it, Martyn could take Pearl's spot and be the one to throw the holy water and then be turned by Apo. Assuming you could get Ren to agree to the plan, you could have 3 humans leave Oakhurst. (and Martyn can follow Apo home)

yeah, would've saved me a headache if the cause of martyn's death was foreshadowed in any way shape or form...

really interesting scenario! god can you imagine how exhausted everyone would be if they had to shuffle around the plan... I think the tension would be hard to sift through... and of course people would be mad at apo :( but I think if everyone locked in then they could do some more planning. funnily enough, martyn actually has a note about being able to take pearl's place:

but I think with the knowledge that martyn can't leave human without killing apo, that might change his stance and he may volunteer to take pearl's place. ren would be hard to convince for sure... I think that would be a big problem. especially if like. ren's thought process is that martyn has vampire blood in him already, so maybe he's just telling ren to get turned because of the darkness already inside him :( best case scenario (not for doc obviously. my "I need that doctor to live" agenda is crying out in anguish) they somehow convince ren, pearl ren abolish get turned and cured. I do like the thought of pearl getting to be human when she obviously doesn't want to be a vampire and never gets the chance to grapple with that in canon after being turned.

Like he died before he even got to go on the mission, he never even made it to the launch pad, and yet his preferred method of ending the mission is exactly was what allowed Rocky and Grace to finish it..

Maybe there would have been some nitrogen aboard anyway or they could have science-d some up, but having several tanks there and ready for them to breed nitrogen resistant taumeoba all because of DuBois will never not make me want to sob

(not to mention having that quantity aboard allowed Grace to rid the ship of the leak easily without too much stress of resource management, he had the gas to spare and flood the ship with)

Anyway there is so much tragedy in the Hail Mary crew that didn’t make it, but something about them haunting the narrative and being a part of the completed mission in the end never fails to make me feel genuinely sick

Their sacrifices would have meant something anyway, their bravery and willingness to die to save earth can never be forgotten, but the tragedy of them never getting to make the mission feels so wrong, and yet, they were there the whole time, in the extra coma slurry that kept Grace alive, in the nitrogen that created a life form that would save two worlds, Project Hail Mary crew I love you, you did not die for nothing

Grace: *Retroactively freaking out about Doing A Misogyny™*

Legundo poisoned Fernsfield.

I think my brain may be imploding a little

THINK ABOUT IT I’m sure this has been said before, maybe I’ve read someone else post about this specific thing and forgot but

Put Apo in a time loop and have it revealed to her a few loops deep, let them be forced to face the perpetrator of their greatest trauma, she ate raw pig meat as a HUMAN and said she’d EATEN WORSE and Legs did a massacre that left people cannibalising each other so make Apo have to come to terms with how her present is Legs’ past, bonus points if in previous loops they grew really close and/or Apo went to him and told him what was going on AND THEN IT BLOWS UP IN HER FACE ohmygod

Didn’t feel like waiting for December.

Crunchy gif version under the cut (WARNING, FLASHING LIGHTS)