hiredpencil

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Gearing up for Artfight! What team are you on? Drop me a follow for suprise attacks ;) https://artfight.net/~Diggy

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Rb to give gender euphoria to the person you reblogged it from

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Rb to give gender euphoria to the person you reblogged it from

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An illustration for my @homestuckpolyswap piece Rope Buddies

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Just Blood

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I love it so so much

An ancestor office AU, for @hiredpencil for @homestuckpolyswap 2025.

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(( ooc - incredibly long infodump below the cut about how helmtech works in this verse / my fics / my headcanons! warning for body horror and all that stuff :3

This is half a rewrite of something I wrote up in discord ages ago when working on Shadows fics, half new writing because I'm changing some stuff.

Ok so I think what canon timeline helmsman, in my interpretation of the shit, had, is what I'm calling zero-interface type.

Zero-interface, as the name implies, doesn't involve any interfaces between the biotech and the dude. It's just the… well I don't call them biowires in my fics, but those things. They're not organic creatures, more like biotechnological flesh cables. Probably grown in a lab or something.

They're basically structured like electrical cables, but flesh. The outer surface has a texture somewhere in between rubber and tendon. A little bit springy but very tough. It's basically a layer of protective cladding. Artificial skinlike material that's extremely resistant to electricity, temperature, cutting, crushing, burning, melting, basically everything. It's the only part that's fully pink… maybe it's got fuchsia troll DNA somewhere in it for the toughness? And then a lot of the internal structure of the cables is just more insulation that also provides stability, and maybe also some synthetic muscle fiber so the cables can reposition themselves when needed. Then in the center you've got the actual synthetic nerves. Those are more fragile, though still a lot tougher than organic nerves. Through the length of the cable, the nerves are pretty much bundled in the center, but when it reaches the end they spread out more, becoming roughly evenly spaced - think lamprey teeth. At least for the peripheral nerve override cables. The central nervous system integration cables have a more clumped in the center layout at the ends, because what those do is burrow into the spinal cord. Peripheral override cables pretty much take over the nerves and hijack them, replacing sensory input with ship data. Central integration cables actually integrate the central nervous system into the ship. The headpiece (which I'll get into more later) and the top two spinal cables are what connect the brain into the ship's computers, while the rest of the spinal cables take nerve output from the spinal cord (what would have once sent signals to the muscles and stuff of the body to move) for controlling the ship. Also, there's probably a few cables that have peristaltic transfer tubes inside, for removal of waste, transferral of nutrients, filtering/replacing blood, everything else needed to keep the body alive.

Zero-interface installation is pretty simple: apply cables directly to skin, for the most part. The ends of the cables exude a little bit of acid that melts the skin underneath, and then the lamprey-teeth-like synthetic nerve points burrow into the skin. Because there's no interfaces directing the growth of the things, they just grow directly and organically into the body, spreading and branching, to connect to as many nerve branches as possible. (And, because there's no need to surgically install ports beforehand, a typical installation involves as many cables as physically possible, pretty much entirely covering the limbs in cable up to a certain level. Probably only stopping at elbows and hips because going further would take up too much space with the sheer mass of cable.) Oh, and the acid also basically fuses the end of the cable to the skin beneath it.

On the one hand, this results in extensive integration, making the combined ship/troll pretty much a single entity. On the other hand, well, exactly that. The sheer amount of synthetic nerve growth within the body means that removal from the helm is essentially impossible. (Sure, surgically removing all of it from the peripheral nerves would technically be possible, but with synthetic nerves growing directly through the surrounding flesh, the limbs would get super duper mangled. And that's just the peripheral nervous system - zero-interface gets so deep into the spinal cord and brain that over enough time the synthetic nerves start branching on a micro-scale, and then a cellular scale, and pretty much start replacing brain cells with their own.

What Shadows!Tunes has is a 1-interface rig. So called because it's got one layer of interfacing in between the cables and the body. The first step of 1-interface installation is the interface - surgically installed ports. They're made of a weird slightly-organic metal stuff, maybe it's got nanomachines or something. I like nanomachines they're a fun excuse. Basically they like root into the body on a very small scale, not very far but enough to lodge them in real good. These roots aren't organic like the synthetic nerves, so they don't integrate on a cellular level, just physically. It anchors it firmly enough to stay in despite any tension on the cables (1-interface is the most likely to have a large amount of tension on the cables, due to using fewer of them than 0-interface without allowing freedom of movement) but also results in damage to the surrounding tissue, on account of the roots going through skin and muscle and all that sorta stuff. In addition to the tissue that's removed to expose the nerves and install each row of ports in the first place.

The cables are usually installed after the ports have had time to heal and root into the skin. The structural section of the cables fuses to the inside of each port, and the synthetic nerves connect to the exposed nerves without having to grow through any intervening flesh. This type of connection allows for some removability, but not very easily so. It is easy to actually get the ports and the cables to separate, using the right uhh, enzyme or chemical trigger or whatever, which makes the cables separate from the metal stuff and detach from the nerves. However, because there's only so many points of connection for each nerve branch and the nerve itself is generally only exposed rather than fully laid open, installation and uninstallation usually result in some nerve damage as the synthetic nerves have to sorta dig in to get the needed connections. (Well, I say installation here, but when the cables are in place it's irrelevant whether the nerves are damaged or not, so any damage from them going in only becomes apparent when they come out.)

Also, the insides of the ports often get kind of… weird… once the cables are removed. The metal of the ports sort of grows into the support structure of the cables (this is part of why some of Tunes' cables initially couldn't be removed all the way down to the top of the ports) and has to be filed down after a typical uninstallation. (This is a very careful task as it's done so close to the exposed nerves, and it's not good to nick those or get bits of metal in there.)

Now, that's mostly for the peripheral and spinal stuff. The central nervous sytem integration, or specifically the brainstem and brain, is a bit different. The… sort of goggles looking bit, actually has two functions. There's the psionic power extraction/channeling, and the brain stuff. (All the like, bits like straps that go over the top of the head and stuff, that's that.) Focusing on that second one for now. Canon timeline helmsman's is fully 0-interface, with the thing itself having synthetic nerve roots that bore through the skull (with the help of some acid again) and grow into the brain, integration just as extensive as with the peripherals.

Tunes' head bit is sort of a modified 0-interface, with synthetic nerve tissue introduced through thin slots cut into the skull and through the base of the horns, and that integrates into the brain and then connects to the actual cables with a sort of interface in the strap bits themselves. Meaning the headpiece thing isn't meant to be removed, and would stay on after a normal uninstallation, just the cables would be disconnected from it. This means that a helm who's been taken out of one ship and put into another would be able to adapt quickly if the ships were similar enough, since their brain is already set up for that sort of ship, but a transfer to a significantly different ship would mean a long adjustment period while the stuff in their brain literally rewires them. Also, the actual straps themselves are the same pink stuff as the cables, which is why they leave scars when removed, as they sorta fuse to the skin.

The headpiece thingy also handles the psionic extraction/channeling functionality. Tunes' had little bits of the same material as the straps to hold his eyes open, while canon timeline helmsman's eyes are just kept open by the flow of extracted psionics. (Like putting your thumb over a fire hose… or more like your eyelid over a fire hose. You just couldn't.) Idk how the actual psionic extraction works, maybe it's like a battery where connecting stuff that needs power makes the power automatically flow? Idk I'm a computer scientist not an electrical engineer. It also prevents the helm from voluntarily using their psionics to fuck with things within the ship. Also, it causes constant bleeding from the eyes, sort of proportional to the amount of power being extracted. The blood can start coming out of other orifices if it's really a lot, but by that point you're practically edging burnout. (My HC is that psionics start bleeding when they're forcing out more power than they can naturally/easily access, but in the helm they're always bleeding a little bit, even if it's not as much as that, because the power is being forced out.) Oh yeah and also forcible psionic power extraction Hurts. Having all those cables in you already hurts (unless you've got a double-interface (see below)) but the extraction adds more onto it. Although the nice thing about essentially being a ship is that you can focus on the part of yourself that's ship, and try to ignore the bit that's flesh and in more pain than you ever knew was possible.

Havery (an OC featured in the Shadows fics, who's pretty much the only voluntary helm, and not affiliated with the empire, and designed her rig herself) has like, double-interface. She's got the regular cables, but with an interface on the ends, and that connects to a similar interface on her ports - which actually contain synthetic nerves that're grown down directly into her body, like the 0-interface. This gets the combined advantages of being both removable and having high integration, although it's more fragile than either of the other ways, so the cables can't support her weight. Her like, head thing, is sort of similar - the goggles with straps part is removable (it's made of modified cable material that doesn't attach to her skin) and she's got extensive artificial nerve growth throughout her brain, all connected to lil connecty bits that connect to it. Because she's helming voluntarily, the psionic extraction isn't by force. It does technically have the capacity to do that (except that it doesn't physically hold her eyes open) but because she's in control, it basically just helps her pull out more power at once if she needs to, so she doesn't have the constantly a little bleeding thing.

Also, this isn't about the helm rigs, but still interesting imo - a few details about how the ships work. Spaceflight isn't through hyperspace or wormhole jumps or anything of that sort, just going really really fast through regular space. Psionic power sort of… lets shit ignore special relativity? Maybe it creates an Alcubrierre-drive type of bubble around the ship, idk. Probably not. This is homestuck not a scientifically grounded hard-scifi world, I can just say it make ship go fast. Because it's ignoring special relativity, it can go faster than the speed of light, but things work a bit different than sublight. With sublight space travel, you don't need constant acceleration to have a constant velocity - just accelerate to your desired velocity and then you can coast til slowdown time since there's no air resistance in space to slow you down. However, past lightspeed, the laws of physics themselves act like air resistance, so a helm has to constantly apply acceleration in order to keep the same velocity. Because of this, they can't get too fast - typical maximum cruising speed for the Helmsman (Shadows!Tunes and regular canon timeline both) is about 10 lightsweeps per hour (22ish lightyears per hour), but this is extremely painful for him, and impossible for other ships to keep up with, so the usual speed is lower than that. Psionic powers also enable sending transmissions at a speed faster than c - not sure how fast, but definitely faster than the ship can go. As a result of this, interstellar communication in real-time is possible, though only for psion-powered systems, so each troll-inhabited planet still has its own mostly-isolated internet. Also, while there isn't air resistance in space, there is a little bit of space dust and gas, which becomes a pretty big problem when you're going at speeds of crazy fast. To resolve this problem, helm ships have something called a "streamlining field" - basically a little psionic forcefield that surrounds the ship more closely than the shielding does (Shielding is also a psionic forcefield, but further out from the ship and less form-fitting, and only activated during combat situations. Or reentry, but big ships like the BC aren't meant for landing on planets.) and basically like… keeps it from stirring up the space it travels through. Small bits of gas and dust and whatnot pass along the streamlining and then are left exactly where they'd once been, with roughly the same velocity that they'd initially had. If the ship passes through a dense region, such as a nebula, the streamlining field ensures that it doesn't leave a ship-sized hole in the cloud of space dust. Probably does leave a little bit of disturbance in its wake though, nobody's perfect after all.

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[hiredpencil]

two of them

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[hiredpencil]

not to be tmi but i was so relieved as a teen when i figured out that my masturbatory fantasies and my actual sex life had literally nothing to do with each other, nor did they need to

i was terrified i was going to end up getting hurt but it turns out when you’re having actual sex with an actual person the things that do it for you can be completely different

i have had plenty of great sex that i’m still not going to fantasize about because when it’s just me thinking about it and not an actual person doing it, it’s not hot anymore

there are plenty of things that in real life are actually just uncomfortable and not arousing at all and i will never do them, but even if i’ve tried it and decided it’s not for me it’s still gonna show up in fantasies because it’s still hot to think about

i mean it sounds stupid and obvious but i spent years either trying to stop myself from finding things hot (spoiler it don’t work), or else letting people convince me that fantasies were talking the talk and obligated me to try walking the walk

[hiredpencil]

ive also been in the ancestor pit. the helmsman is who got me crawling back in the first place 😔😔😔

[hiredpencil]

why aren’t you scared of me?

why do you care for me?

[hiredpencil]

The you I knew wouldn’t recognize your own reflection, now.

[hiredpencil]

\o/

A bday pic I drew for @hiredpencil ! It's a scene from their debut novel, which you can find here!

[hiredpencil]

I'm in a really tight spot right now and I'm about to have to pay for one of my meds out of pocket ($50-$100+ depending on whether or not I can find a coupon). My dr office is just straight up ignoring me and I've been trying to get them to send the PA info to my insurance for a week and I'm going to run out in two days. If you throw some money in my tip jar and put your username in the note, I'll draw an animal or a pokemon of your choice like the ones above!

I'm also offering pride avvies if you'd like to get one of those, or if you can spare a dollar or two a month, I'd always love if you checked my patreon out.