Aurora's Sundry Notes

To everyone: merry Christmas, happy holidays, or just nice last Friday of December, whichever feels the best for you! This year has been a long, difficult one, but I hope we all can find some hope and comfort, whether in connection to the midwinter holidays or something else.

I am well, and well-fed, and things are peaceful here.

Also, it's Yuletide! I got a lovely This Is How You Lose the Time War story as my gift fic. I'm also very pleased that I didn't default the challenge, despite December having been a mad scramble for me scheduling-wise (I'm not great at time management). I'm even fairly pleased with my story.

But anyway, here's my gift fic! I love love love how the author has fleshed out the human story behind a few lines of a letter in the book; it's like the other side of the broad birds-eye view of time and life that our beloved rival time agents have. It complements the canon wonderfully.

Thus We Braid Strand 6 to Strand 9 (2308 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Red (This is How You Lose the Time War), Blue (This is How You Lose the Time War), Original Characters
Summary: and our glorious crystal future shines so bright I gotta wear shades, as the prophets say

Yuletide reveals were yesterday, so here are the fics I wrote. Yes, fics in plural - this year I succeeded at writing two short treats for Yuletide Madness as well.

For my assignment, I had The Wayfarers again, but this time with a request that finally allowed me to write a Rosemary/Sissix sex scene that takes joy in the interspecies aspect of it. Also I had a really chocoholic phase when I wrote it, in case you can't tell. Luckily it seems to have worked, based on the comments.

Excellent Dessert (2767 words) by AuroraCloud
(for Mosca)
Fandom: Wayfarers Series - Becky Chambers
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Rosemary Harper/Sissix Seshkethet
Characters: Rosemary Harper, Sissix Seshkethet, Dr. Chef (Wayfarers Series)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Food, Alien/Human Relationships, Chocolate, Sex, Explicit Sexual Content, Frottage, Hands, Tails, Female Characters, Alien Character(s), Alien Biology, Canon Lesbian Relationship, Touching
Summary: The Wayfarer is in space again. Sissix needs touching. Dr. Chef has made a new dessert based on an old Human recipe. Rosemary is happy to test its supposedly aphrodisiac effects with Sissix afterwards.



Yes, I like putting in lots of tags. (Also, let's not speak of the fact that I altered the title several times and accidentally typo'ed this title as "Excellent Desert" without noticing it until several hours after the reveals. *facepalm* Luckily I did notice it and fixed it. There is quite a difference between the words dessert and desert.)

Both of the Madness fics I wrote were entries into new fandoms for me, hurray! Which is very understandable in both cases as they're very new fandoms. In one I even wrote the first fic for the fandom, which is rather exciting.

An Evening in the Garden (698 words) by AuroraCloud (for st_aurafina / st_aurafina)
Fandom: Moonbase Theta Out (Podcast)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Roger Bragado-Fischer/Alexandre Bragado-Fischer
Characters: Roger Bragado-Fischer, Alexandre Bragado-Fischer
Additional Tags: Pre-Canon, Fluff, Established Relationship, Gardens & Gardening, Dogs
Summary: Alexandre has been working on his garden. Roger brings him hot chocolate.


Yes, this is the first fic in the fandom! It's thanks to st_aurafina's enthusiastic recommendation of Moonbase Theta, Out, that I discovered this lovely queer sci-fi podcast drama, and when I read her request I really wanted to write something. Several of the prompts were enticing and I would have loved to write for any of them, but I ended up choosing the one where I could include dogs. And also make Roger and Alex happy because they deserve it. (I did my best to not make it obvious that I know little about gardening and have trouble keeping plants alive. I love the idea of gardening very much, however!)

And I wrote my first fic for This Is How You Lose the Time War! It was bound to happen sooner or later, I am so in love with this book. This story pretty much wrote itself when I just gave myself some time at the keyboard, and I've had lovely feedback for it, especially considering how small the fandom. I've even seen it recced twice! (Also, I got to write a dog again!)

A Letter in her Smile (750 words) by AuroraCloud (for jibrailis)
Fandom: This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Blue/Red (This is How You Lose the Time War)
Characters: Red (This is How You Lose the Time War), Blue (This is How You Lose the Time War)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Touching, Tea, Dogs, Kissing
Summary: After so many letters, how to speak?



Finally, thanks to all my lovely betas who were available at such a short notice because I'm always ridiculously late finishing my stories and their edits - I shall add beta credits in the story notes tomorrow!

Yuletide has been live for a few days now, and I'm very pleased with my Yuletide. I got not one but two fabulous gift fics this year! I'm ever so pleased with them. I feel so privileged. Here, let me share both of them with you. There are also lots of other brilliant fics in the archive, most of which I haven't had time to read yet (especially since I'm suddenly reading Penumbra Podcast post-S1 fics, help me) but I'll try to write rec posts soon!

The main gift I received is for the Imperial Radch books, post-canon, a lovely Seivarden-centric fic where Seivarden has angst and Ship takes care of her and helps Breq take care of her, and there are lots of cameos from other crew members, and it's so true and emotional and good.

Still Left in Want of Mercy (3403 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Mercy of Kalr&Seivarden&Breq
Characters: Seivarden Vendaai, Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen | Breq, Mercy of Kalr (Imperial Radch)
Additional Tags: The rating is because Seivarden is Seivarden and has no filter, Lots of other crew members show up in small roles, Post-Canon, POV First Person, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Slice of Life, Tea, Artificial Intelligence, Helpful AI, Spaceship AI - Freeform
Summary: The Republic of Two Systems is about a month old. Seivarden is having yet another crisis - can Mercy of Kalr get her through it? Maybe, with the crew's and Fleet Captain's help.


I also got a treat, for Machineries of Empire, a Cheris & Jedao crackfic post-canon, where they go and try to have therapy, and it goes as well as you might imagine. It's a hilarious fic where the comedy comes from things that are mostly extremely plausible with regards to canon, and I loved it. Just the kind of thing I hoped for when I said I might enjoy crackfic in this fandom.

Therapy for Genocidal Generals (1753 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ajewen Cheris & Garach Jedao Shkan
Characters: Kel Cheris, Shuos Jedao
Additional Tags: Therapy, Crack, Telepathy, Yuletide Treat
Summary: "I'm Nirai Dia, and I specialize in couples with troubles. Why don't you start by telling me about yourselves and how long you've been together?"

"Two months," Jedao supplied immediately.

At the same time, Cheris said, "Eleven years."

The therapist's smile became even more polished. Cheris could practically see her filing them under avoidant man, codependent woman, check.

*

Thank you to UrsulaKohl and sigalit for beta reading this.

---

Btw, nothing to do with the above fic, but copying the information into the journal post reminds me again.... The AO3 character and relationship tags for this fandom are so weird. Why do they use everyone's birth names when it's clear in canon that when they join a faction, the faction name is their name (in place of family name)? And for the vast majority of characters, we get to know them by their faction names, and for most of them I wouldn't remember the birth names at all if they weren't in all the AO3 tags, because otherwise we see them maybe once. With Cheris a case can be made for her birth name, because that also ends up being used a lot, but otherwise... Don't really know who I should complain to, though. It's just so weird and it feels different from how things are usually done.

I mean, it's not like in the Anna Karenina tag, Anna Karenina gets called by whatever her birth name is just because we can discover it from somewhere in canon (it's been years since I read the book so I don't remember if her maiden name is explicitly mentioned, but her brother is a character in the book, so it's not exactly hard to figure it out). She's Anna Karenina. It should be the name the character is mostly known by / introduced to the readers as, shouldn't it? And for the Machineries characters, that's usually the faction name + personal name. Shuos Jedao, Kel Khiruev, etc. (And bizarrely, Kujen seems to be tagged only as Kujen even though we know his name is Nirai Kujen. It feels like whoever decides the canonical tags has decided the faction names are like titles, such as Mr. or Captain or something, but they're not, it's clear from the books that they occupy the same function as family names. Okay, end of digression.)

Yuletide reveals have happened, so here's mine! I was assigned Becky Chambers's Wayfarers books again, and I loved both my assignment and getting a good reason to reread the first book just at the time when I needed something like that!

Dreams With a Bowl Of Soup (2773 words) by AuroraCloud
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Wayfarers Series - Becky Chambers
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Dr. Chef & Ashby Santoso
Characters: Dr. Chef (Wayfarers Series), Ashby Santoso, Sissix Seshkethet
Additional Tags: Pre-Canon, Canon Backstory, Food, Interspecies, Developing Friendships, Friendship, Alien Character(s), Alien Cultural Differences, Beginnings, Brief appearance by Sissix
Summary:

While getting an imubot upgrade at Port Coriol, Ashby Santoso shares conversation and soup with a Grum who works at the clinic.The story of how Dr. Chef came to join the crew of The Wayfarer.

Thanks to _profiterole_ for looking it over again from the canon perspective, and I happily got a language/SPAG beta from the beta spreadsheet very promptly despite finishing my edits rather later than I expected. I still need to go and respond to all the lovely, lovely comments I've gotten to the fic so far!

Also, this is the first time ever I've managed to have a title before I started writing the story. I felt like that was worthy of mentioning, because normally titles are so hard for me.

Hello, dear Yuletide writer!

Fantastic, we share a fandom and characters! Great! I’ll be really happy for fic about any of these, as there simply isn’t enough. I try to provide lots of prompts and general likes and such in the hope that it helps you on with your writing, but you don’t need to feel any pressure to incorporate specific likes or use specific prompts. I’m always happy with either gen or shippy fic, and even if the request sounded like I’d prefer shippy, rest assured that gen is always wonderful and welcome, too. You can always modify or combine prompts, too, or take a shippy-sounding prompt and turn it gen or vice versa.

I’m listing my general likes, dislikes and DNWs, and then each request and some additional prompts and details for it. I first include the request as it was in the sign-up, and then provide some additional details. Except for the Count of Monte Cristo request, because it was already in a sort of a prompt list format, so I simply expanded it. (And included some gen prompts and ideas as well, because I realised after the sign-ups that I’d written the request with shippy assumptions.)

As long as you avoid my DNWs, feel free to create anything you like with these fandoms and characters, and I hope you will have fun writing!

( General likes )



( Do Not Wants and Dislikes )


Requests:

( Emma - Jane Austen )

(  Le Comte de Monte-Cristo | Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas  )

( Mansfield Park - Jane Austen )


( Wayfarers Series - Becky Chambers )