cavvyiswriting

[cavvyiswriting]

Seeing a bunch of writing posts lately like “it’s okay if you only wrote a couple hundred words today :))”

As someone with a full time job, diverse hobbies, and a commitment to proper rest/self care, I would amend that. It’s okay if you don’t write anything at all on MOST DAYS OF YOUR LIFE. You’re still a writer if you’re passionate about creating stories and putting words on paper when time allows. Life is busy and full of possibility, and that’s beautiful, actually. Kill the hypercapitalist productivity demon in your head.

[cavvyiswriting]

It was... beautiful. In the way she knew it always would be.

The last drops of synthetic petroleum dripped from the flamer's nozzle. Her large, blood-soaked power armored fist slowly softens, dropping the weapon to the ground with a sharp crack, as the concrete beneath buckles and cracks.

The city around her burns. It was called Barlow, last stop on the I-15 between Timp and the traders of Zion canyon. A bustling hub of trade, families finding peace from the wasteland behind the makeshift walls. It had seen the White-Legs come and go. The Sundancers saw no divine aid in their campaign to burn their walls down. Not even Caesar, and the former might of his Legion, could break little Barlow.

Tomorrow it is to be nothing but ash.

The smell of arsenic from the water distillation was the only smell noticeable through the smoke. Mothers clutch their children and run for the gates of the city. The men foolish enough to have opened fire on the walking tank were little more than charred bones, or cowering and running in fear.

Her years here, all the memories, now little more than smoke and ash at her own hand. She knew she would not be a hero, she'd killed too many people now, she was more monster than the beasts that roam the Wasatch.

All this, to watch that slave market she'd spent so many years chained, naked, standing upon. All this, to watch it burn to cinders.

Writing Prompt #2986

It was the sort of melancholy that brought a steady stream of tears to her eyes, despite the smile that tugged at her lips.

[cavvyiswriting]

"Yes, Kushtaka." The UIB agent said in a stern monotone, "You've done your job, now pretend it never happened."

That line, "Pretend it never happened." The last thing the UIB agent had told her.

It haunted her, all these decades later, even after her retirement. Even if she didn't answer to that callsign anymore, going by her civilian name, Omi. Subconsciously she began biting her nails, an awful anxious habit. Looking out the window of the craft, she sees Evergreen, the sprawling cosmopolitan city that lay shrouded by mist in the quiet valley. Surrounding it are lush green forests of conifers and meadows, the peaks of the trees poking up through the fog. Atop the nearest mountain a large communications tower reaches up towards the heavens.

Behind her eyes, fire. The fire that once burned all these forests and Evergreen to the ground. The fire that choked the misty valley with acrid smoke. She'd never planned to come back to Hercynia, not after sending those Lancers to their deaths.

She shuddered, seeing their faces with each blink. They were heroes, Lambda-Tau.

But at what cost?

The ship lands and Omi slowly picks up the casket-case next to her. Her body not what it used to be, each joint and muscle aching as she rose from her seat.

Cool mountain air flooded Omi's senses as the cabin's pressure equalized, her ears popping. Her boots shake softly as she walks down the steps onto the landing pad where it began for her favored squad 40-odd years ago.

After a too-grueling walk into the entrance plaza of Evergreen, leaving the aging veteran sore and out of breath more than once, she laid eyes upon it, the memorial.

A statue, large enough to make Karrakin nobility green with envy, memorialized her squad, Lambda-Tau 4.

Kodiak, Knower, Hocus, Sugarpea, and Faraday. Their features delicately engraved into marble. You could see the facade of bravado on Kodiak's face. Sugarpea and Faraday's love immortalized in their stone hands clasped together. Hocus' care as she holds her NHP's casket. And Knower, the mechanical juggernaut of a being, standing clear and tall above the others, even as a statue.

This was the first time she'd seen them, since their military funeral. They may've been mercenaries more than soldiers, but they served Union, and for it, they earned the proper burial on Cradle.

Omi holds up the small securecasket she'd carried all the way from the UIB headquarters on Cradle. In a raspy voice, lacking any of her old commanding presence, she says quietly to the NHP, "See, Caprica? I told you they'd put you on the statue, too."

Prompt #1,280

"So we… what? Burn the whole place down? Move on? Pretend it never existed? Pretend it never happened?"

[cavvyiswriting]

The aging Lancaster strode over the planet's surface, kicking up innumerable pounds of ash and dust with each step. The pilot, an old, tired warhorse of a Lancer stood atop his trusty steed, scanning the distant horizon of the ashen plains.

In nobler times, he might be likened to a knight.

But not now, not here. Here, he was to be an unthanked savior working for an IOU. Inside, his once battle-ready Lancaster has been refit for travel, now seating far more than she was ever made to. In the cramped seating, mothers shushed their confused children, young couples tried to plan an uncertain future, and those who had lost too much to bear mention lost themselves in cheap drink. Bo was lost, and he needed to get every civilian to FKM extraction sites as soon as possible.

They called the right man, of course, he always bragged his Lancaster could outpace a charging Nelson in a dead sprint. He wasn't called for this lie, though - he owed favors to several people, and he was the only Lancer nearby with a mech capable of seating this many people. And he was getting old, he needed the Manna.

Not that the House of Dust could pay, their whole planet was slowly being eaten out from under their very feet. Three separate cities have been lost already, and would lose the rest in time. But it didn't bother him that he'd see not a single credit of Manna. He took a long, slow drag from a hand-rolled cigarette, the paper slowly burning away to ash and drifting off as it neared his lips.

The old man coughed so hoarsely he thought he'd find his lung in his hand. He thought back on his youth, all the missions he'd been on. And silently made peace with the fact this one would be his last. An unrecognized hero that likely wouldn't make any history, but is still the hero he dreamed of being as a boy.

And between him and his Lannie, he couldn't be happier.

Writing Prompt

Dystopian Road-trip 

[cavvyiswriting]

What was once an immaculate SUNZI pattern-group frame collapsed into a broken heap on the floor of the Pegasus-class ship's storage bay. Salvia remained trapped inside.

The brilliantly incandescent figure made of unidentifiable white gemstones stood at the far end of the chamber, slowly striding towards the containment pod. With every step the figure shimmered, the edges around its silhouette blurring as if it were a flaming ghost, flickering in and out of perceivable reality.

Its voice a threat, every word an omen, it spoke. "With this, my apotheosis, I rip the very nature of your world in twain so I might return to my own."

Salvia looked on in horror through the view-screen of her decimated mech. The only survivor among Chimera-1, all other Lancers dead and gone, the last witness to see the self-actualization of the Eidolon Bellerophon.

"I alone am unique, no other clones or copies of me left. I am all that remains. I am to become a god among my brothers. I conquered the Pegasus. I've slain the Chimaera. I shall ascend to Olympus." The being's voice echoed between Salvia's ears, ringing like a bell and cracking against her skull like a war drum.

With a light touch, the door to the containment pod seemed to disintegrate. Slowly, the being's facsimile of fingers grazed along the smooth, cylindrical object. As the light began to fade from Salvia's eyes, her face losing color, she saw Bellerophon crush the metallic object as big as her head into its palms.

In the next fraction of a second, in a blindingly bright flash no one saw, the Pegasus was removed from existence.

So was the nearest planet.

And the next, and so on.

Until all that was left of that solar system was a black hole the size of a marble.

“You’re quite confident for someone about to die. Do you really think your life is worth so much? That you’ll be some sort of martyr?”

“… No. Whether I die or not, they still hate you…. My death may not matter, but yours? Yours will.”

[cavvyiswriting]

The mech dragged its own nearly-destroyed body into the repair bay, sparking wires and oil spilling out behind it as the decimated legs grind and scar the concrete beneath. The smoldering boilers on its back leaking molten polymer, volcanically creating new growths on its damaged body. The signs of battle covered its mechanical body, burns, mud, bullet holes, blood.

The pilot walked alongside their mech, stumbling and limping, being so well-attuned to their mech came at the price of feeling out of place in their "real" body. Who's to say which body they consider real anymore.

The mechanic wiped some sweat from her brow, not knowing how to comfort this pilot, "You're lucky we got sent the repair specs alongside the printer instructions... It'll-"

"He." The pilot interjects, sharply. Clearly, the mech was a "he," to this pilot.

"He'll be fine in just a couple days, okay?"

She didn't understand these pilots, the mechs were just big machines. Killing machines, sure, but machines. They didn't really have personalities. Maybe some of the good ones have a COMP/CON unit, but certainly nothing they can get here on Sanjak.

Not easily, anyway.

"What's the point of having me fix things if you're just gonna go and break them again?" 

[cavvyiswriting]

On the one hand, using "they" for a broad, indeterminant third-person pronoun when writing essays is grammatically correct, accurate, reads more cleanly, and needs to be normalized in academic spaces

On the other hand, "he or she" artificially inflates my word count and I really need this A

[cavvyiswriting]

OOC: My girlfriend is in need of food because her family is fucking awful, she's trying to make it through college and has no way to make money

I implore you to share if you can't donate, but any donations are immensely graciously accepted, even a dollar would be making a huge change in not only her life but mine

[cavvyiswriting]

national elections so fucked someone's out to become king of the franks

[cavvyiswriting]

in other news, writing fanfiction still takes a lot longer than i expect it to.

[cavvyiswriting]

Mariane turned around in her vent shaft, gazing down at Beatri from the opened grate.

"I... Uh... I think the vents are made big enough to accommodate ARAR units, specifically."

Beatri glanced down at her large HVGSR suit, chuckling softly.

"No chance they make them big enough for Mynahs."

Mariane looked down at her lover for a moment, thinking. She needed to get Beatri into her little vent hidey-hole, but there was no way the MNHR could fit into the ventshafts. Until, she had an idea.

"Wait right there for a minute, I think I know how to get you in."

Mariane turns and races through the vents into her modest non-regulation abode. She begins tapping the walls, rapping her knuckles on each segment of ducting and insulation. She continues her examination of the walls until one sounds more hollow than the others.

"Bingo." She triumphantly mutters to herself.

She leaves her makeshift home and returns to the grate above Beatri, who is still standing there dutifully waiting for her girlfriend's return.

"Well? What'd you find?"

The ARAR, ever hyperfixated on the tasks at hand, gets right down to business. "You have a map of the caves surrounding Gericke, right?"

Beatri raises her arm, showing off the Gen 3 NavMod installed in the forearm of her suit, "Of course, all the Mynahs do."

Gracefully, Mariane drops from the vent and lifts Beatri's much larger arm to give her a view of the maps of the natural cave system Gericke-13 is built into. She saw exactly what she was hoping for, a small section of cave that the mining crews didn't use led right behind the ventilation system. The very same section of vents that Mariane inhabited.

With as much of a smile as the deadpan ARAR could make, she looked up at her girlfriend, "Feel like doing some digging?"

Prompt #608

How do you even fit in there?

[cavvyiswriting]

Everyone could see it.

How she walked.

How she carried herself.

She was built for war. Not ceremony.

She was in the capital city, she was on Heimat.

And she refused to remove her armor plating.

She marched in time, and scores, legions of lesser Soldatin - Starling, Storch, Gestalt, it didn't matter - followed her every step to the letter.

The Song of The Glorious Eusan Nation blared over the Heimatan street, leading up to the National Volkskammer and Revolutionäre Residenz. The formidable structures looming over the street, the gas giant Carcosa behind them causing a shadow to be cast over the parade street.

National Citizens one and all lines the parade route, cheering for those they thought to be great heroes in the never-ending war against the Imperial dogs.

A military parade. And she was leading it.

Who better than a Falke that had survived the front-lines of Kitezh? That had witnessed the massacre of countless young Imperial Gestalt soldiers? That had overseen the taking of numerous footholds for The Glorious Nation?

She was a hero to these citizens. But she'd witnessed enough to know that she was no hero. She'd been complacent in enough brutality to know she wasn't one of the "good guys." She'd bloodied her hands enough to know she was the villain in more stories than she would ever be the hero.

And that's why she carried herself like this.

Marching at the front of the parade, surrounded by armed Kolibris, her six radiant spears at the ready.

At any moment she knew someone would realize she didn't belong here.

And she would be ready to bloody her hands once more.

Like a soldier.

29.1.24

She's not from here.

[cavvyiswriting]

reblog if you’ve read fanfictions that are more professional, better written than some actual novels. I’m trying to see something

[cavvyiswriting]

Those "Show things to a victorian child/medieval monk" memes, but SIGNALIS

I really, REALLY need to know what would happen if you made a Kolibri unit listen to Femtanyl.

[cavvyiswriting]

"Well?"

Her commanding voice echoed through the compounding chamber, every step made it seem longer and longer.

"The light at the end, can you see it?"

Her detached voice haunted Devyat. No one told her the fringe terrorists playing Revolution throughout the solar system had this kind of power.

The walls of the chamber continued to warp and bend around her, seeming to fold out on itself. With every blink the walls were a new material. Wood. Marble. Steel. Flesh.

"I am a super weapon, a walking extinction, you are an ant hoping to kill a god."

Devyat, as she sprinted through the hall - her hooves clanking, squishing, clanking, with every step - began to see the light at the end become bigger.

Idis, able to see that Devyat hadn't moved an inch in the entirely ordinary room, grew tired of playing with her target and stepped over, radiant spear in hand. She brought the golden weapon over her shoulder, and just as the light became brightest to Devyat, Idis' divine radiance pierced through her titanium skull like a knife through wet paper.

15.4.24

Can you see it?

[cavvyiswriting]

It me!

The robot girl of the day is Mynah from Signalis!

[cavvyiswriting]

It's been a minute since I posted!

I've been brainrotting insanely over Signalis, and have been writing lots of fanfiction for it! If interested, link to follow.

Schutzstern is a lovely romantic story between a Starling and a Eule.

Schutz, a stressed out STAR with too much on her plate, finds comfort in Käthe, a Eule who knows just how to press all her buttons.

Currently a work-in-progress, 3 of 5 chapters completed as of posting this!