birchbow

[birchbow]

Since we're talking about antagonists we like I'm very happy (in a pit of despair, absolutely soaked in dread) that Cerahi is around again in the Gamhaloz verse. Certainly one of the men of all time.

Lollll this is fun to hear because I think honestly what I got to show in Scriptured Verse is a lot more true to what his character would normally be! In "canon" PoF we see him in a state of extremis, trying to make a time-sensitive play and increasingly frustrated and upset when it continues not to work--normally he's much more of a slick manipulator.

...Like. Have you ever heard of the ScientoIogy concept of "find their ruin" where to get somebody inside and get hooks in them you dig hard to figure out what in their life is broken or causing them pain so you can set yourself/your church up as a saving grace? His specialty.

[birchbow]

i still love the behemoth so fucking much i'm rereading the fic to look at it again

Honestly??? Correct I love that big bastard.

[birchbow]

Chapter 17: INTERMISSION III: Sweet Poison ((M: coercion/manipulation, dubcon intoxication+moiraillegiance))

Summary:

Your name is Gamzee Makara, and you guess you’re a motherfucking pailtoy now. Grand Highblood and his matesprit like to call you around sometimes; pleases them greatly how you take punishment, pleases them most motherfucking deeply to cause you hurt and then toy around with your pusher and make you soft and weeping for them.  You can’t say you’re of a mind to fight it, either.  Feels so damn motherfucking good. But in the end, they’re flushed for each other. And not for you.

OKAY I think I got all the Halore/Kurloz/Gamzee AU thoughts out of my system for now lol. Had to inject some drama in there first though!

[birchbow]

The original chapter 2 glossed over some fun scenes that in retrospect were both fun concepts I didn't flesh out enough and also good for showing time progression. That's my excuse for how 6,700 words can turn into 12,000. And I'm sticking to it.

Tangentially related: hoping to finish and clean up a chapter of Scriptured Verse today. 👍 We'll see if I can manage to focus long enough to nail an ending onto this chapter lol.

Oh hey so @ whoever's on, I've been chewing for a hot second over going through PoF and

xenoing things up

fleshing out the earlier chapters, since the first chapters were posted in comment threads on dreamwidth and therefore very brief

This is half notification post and half informal poll to find out if anybody absolutely hates that idea lol.

[birchbow]

im rereading some of pof, and i wanted to know if you have any thoughts about the logistics of drone season with regard to the distance throughout space the empire has expanded to at this point in your worldbuilding? considering that the drones need to travel all the way from alternia and back every time, is it slowing them down to travel that distance? can they move as fast/faster than the spaceships? in the original comic it ended up being a real problem that they had gone so far away from alternia because of the empress's psionic horror-terror lusus link and i feel like there must be so many other ways for that to become an issue while the empire is still so inextricably linked to a planet that they're so far away from.

Oh yeah, the space empire thing for sure makes the logistics tricky, and also contributes to how Gamzee in Pof explicitly had never experienced a drone season despite being the troll equivalent of like mid-twenties! I'd imagine by "present day" in PoF the empire is honestly straining the trollish reproductive system pretty far to the breaking point by how far it's spread, and the mother grub would (I would imagine) have to have a lot more drones out and traveling than ever before just to keep a steady delivery of genetic material coming in when the drones are having to travel insanely far to get to where they're going.

RE: travel speeds and other logistics, I'm honestly going to leave that unspecified! I know enough to know that I know basically nothing at all about space travel. But I imagine drones as persistence predators of a sort! They're not going to sprint after a troll, they're going to let pheromones and exhaustion do the work for them. If a troll's stupid enough to use up all their energy running, they're not going to have energy for fucking when the drones catch up, and then they're doomed for the cull anyway! So the problem sorts itself out. :)

[birchbow]

CHAPPELL ROAN

Edinburgh Summer Sessions (26.08.25)

[birchbow]

my ass will see a cunning older man with the kind of heartrending trauma that could burn down cities and a younger man who holds a devotion toward him that could tear apart whole landscapes and it's instantly over for me

[birchbow]

YES YES YES. OBSESSED with how Halore's little boob window is showing the WHOLE TIDDY lmaoooooo obsessed also with Gamzee staring at them like 👀💦💦 like yeah. Correct lmao. I've been chewing on another chapter of this AU and this has got me just itching to work on it again. So: a taster for y'all. :o3c

--

You turn a corner, and you have to back up fast before you run into a figure a little broader than you and a couple inches taller.  Plain-face motherfucker in wader court clothes, but the sign on his collar’s a shade like yours, and when his eyes meet your stare they match.

“Oh, fuck,” you say, and turn eyes down from him in respect.  “Shit, kin, sorry, you need paint?”

He’s quiet a second, then he sighs a little.  Says, “...It’s been a long time since I wore paint. I’ve seen you before, haven’t I.  Brother…?”

“Makara,” you say.

“Brother Makara,” he repeats back to you, like he knows the name, thoughtful. When you glance up at him, he’s giving you a considering look. He does look familiar—you look at him, and to where he’s walking, and realize all in sudden and embarrassing rush where you know him.  Feeder Travye’s kismesis.

It is my birthday and my present to myself is rereading my favorite chaptersof @birchbow ‘s It Rang Like Scriptured Verse

[birchbow]

trying to find something to draw to let the inspiration out but because it's almost dawn all that came out of my pen was Grand Threshecutioner "Big Naturals" Vantas and his flat-as-a-board boyfriend.

[birchbow]

Do you ever get sidetracked imagining potential future scenes and scenarios with no thought for context or how you would get there. Anyway I'm putting our boy in Situations

[birchbow]

This project is taking me FOREVER, but I need to scream about how cool it’s turning out!!! This is by far the most ambitious tablet weaving band I’ve ever attempted and I’m not done yet!

Faces, capricorn symbol, and juggling club patterns designed by me, font is the unical designs by Linda Hendrickson.

if you know what I’m making fanart of - what were you doing at the devil’s sacrament???

[birchbow]

I JUST finished a reread of POF so u posting that u might spiff up the older chapters has me in the DIRT

sldkfjsd oh noooo haha. Listen. Listen. You gotta love where you came from. And early work is valuable. But also, the first several chapters of PoF were written in dreamwidth comment threads, with a very limited wordcount and formatting I had to manually html into the file, and also more importantly were written by like. Me but a decade ago.

I've done some occasional pick-throughs to edit phrasing or dialogue, but there are scenes I wish I'd given more weight and time to, and whole scenes I skimmed over and didn't write at all that I now am like "but those seemed fun and also important". So the concept of going through and embroidering and tuning things up is VERY diverting. to me. U///U

All that said, this is all private word document stuff right now, so don't go starting all over from the beginning lmao. If/when I get things to a point I'm updating the early chapters, I'll make mention over here so people don't get jumpscared by like. New shit. XD

[birchbow]

Lmao a low-stakes experimental shot at the first chapter (8,700 words) has produced a smoothed out and embellished version of uh. 12,900 words. This does in fact completely track.

Oh hey so @ whoever's on, I've been chewing for a hot second over going through PoF and

xenoing things up

fleshing out the earlier chapters, since the first chapters were posted in comment threads on dreamwidth and therefore very brief

This is half notification post and half informal poll to find out if anybody absolutely hates that idea lol.

[birchbow]

Oh hey so @ whoever's on, I've been chewing for a hot second over going through PoF and

xenoing things up

fleshing out the earlier chapters, since the first chapters were posted in comment threads on dreamwidth and therefore very brief

This is half notification post and half informal poll to find out if anybody absolutely hates that idea lol.

[birchbow]

i've been rereading pof, and i was wondering how exactly the abbatoir's whole thing works? have there always been two of him or did that happen later on somehow? the character is really interesting and i like the concept, but i can't think of any real-world equivalent to what she has going on so im kind of confused about it.

Oh no yeah no lol there's very much no real-world equivalent to what he's got going on. It's very intentionally like. A very fucky and completely alien identity and gender situation--and in fact, his vibes are intensely strange even for other trolls. A mind with two bodies! Constantly conscious of and in full control of both. For that matter, she doesn't have a visible sign, except for a simplified shield and sword on his Bastion and Blade bodies respectively, which would also strike trolls as uncomfortable and weird.

As for how she came to be that way, I will decline to answer! (Not least because I haven't actually decided between the several answers that I'm juggling as possibilities, haha)

[birchbow]

I don’t think this is confirmed in canon so: is Meenah far sighted or near sighted? Or is it an entirely different issue only an insectoid species would have? It’s so funny to me that an immortal dictator who has magical healing powers needs glasses (as a glasses-user myself lol)

I want her to be far-sighted specifically because I find the image of handing the god-empress of a multi-galactic war empire a report and then watching her hold it out all the way at arm's length to read it. So SO funny.

[birchbow]

How big do you picture the drones to be? Bigger than Kurloz?

I mean it's definitely closer than most other trolls, but yeah, I think they have him beat by at least a head, and are probably quite a bit beefier and much more thickly chitinous/armored. I'm picturing like. Horrifyingly too big to be in a ship, squeezing and scuttling down passageways. Big enough that it takes sturdy metal/architectural fortification to keep them from just tearing the door down to get to you if they want. When we see one of the Condesce's new artificial drones fighting Dirk, its hand is big enough to wrap around his whole torso--since those are artificial robotic drones, not the original mother grub's, we have to take it with a grain of salt ofc, but it seems pretty indicative!

Drones big!!!