etirabys

Ingrid starts babysitting August

It was hard to believe how relentless Oggie was. He did things that Ingrid had vaguely expected young children to do, like open drawers, run around, throw objects at walls, and scream. But when she simulated acting in such a way, or a mental ward patient acting in such a way, she took breaks. She threw her feces against the wall, took a break, flung herself clawfully at the nurses, and lay around for a while to recover from that before trying to ransack the drawers.

Oggie was one perfect uninterrupted stream of action. He awoke with one great howl of anguish and then never stopped moving after that. Aside from looking pensively from breakable to breakable, he was never at rest. He went straight from lurching around to biting the door to climbing the couch…

and here's Nathan coming into powers

Nathan went two years without being recognized as a mutant.

character and plot notes

Nathan Kowalski – Aegis – shields

Aarush Subramaniam – Solarflare – powerful telekinetic, heat effects of using it make fine control hard but destruction trivial

Paige Summerfield – ??

Jasvinder Singh-Klein – Riftrider (portal)

Dakota Suderberg – Luminarch (pending)

Elinor Lane – the Glaive (turn and focuses gravity any way she wishes)

Pedro Narvaez – Stormchaser (controls weather, close quarter attacks are limited to strong wind)

Mahdi Ameen – Foundry (extrudes new machines out of her body, is cyborg)

Lian Xiurong – Deepfake (illusionist)

Jasper McCarty – seer (can see several minutes into the past and future, anywhere)

Branwen Lu – Nectar

Around the same time, scene where Leith's powers make a really big jump. This is a year after Leith has a failed public showdown with Branwen. She has had a really bad year.

The next year, Leith was sixteen and Nathan was eighteen. He was on a combat team that was away from the academy, one of dozen getting in place against an alien invasion. They were the closest to home when a panicked squawk over comms alerted them that the real target was the academy. They sprang back through a series of portals. The telekinetics were prioritized, even Nathan, who was barely strong enough to make it home. Jasvinder told him to stand here and make a shield, so he was raising one when Leith strolled out into the field next to him to study the incoming warship. Her hands were jammed into her hoodie…

on Leith's adult inaction

She lifted her head and saw herself situated in one of two infinite rows of people running down a long table. It was the corridor of worlds. It looked as it had in her dreams.

Some of the people were recognizably her. Others, startlingly were a him. She saw a fully white Leith, then a handful of dark-skinned Leiths. Her eyes skipped down a furred one, and one with slick translucent skin, and a large elephant with patient black eyes...

The one directly across her, an old woman with golden tattoos down her face, addressed her by her full name.

"That's me," Leith said, jittery at this – convening. A convening that seemed to be about her. They were all looking at her, and had been since she arrived. "Who are you?"

The woman looked at her, and said, "Ledha. But the…

Near the end of my first semester, my dad was laid off. I offered before he had to bring it up – our house was just at UR's 25-mile cutoff for freshman being permitted to commute instead of living on campus. We'd save a lot of money.

"Oh, Marce," he said, and looked at me tenderly and with surprise. "Are you sure? We could scrape by, you know. The way your mom tells it, you find your buddies that first year and they're your people after that."

"It's fine." I wasn't finding my people anyway. "Really."

"Ah, well," he said, and came around to give me a hug. "I'd worry if it were your brother, shut in all the time with his videogames, but you've always been a popular girl. I know you can make it work. We both will."

But I couldn't, and he didn't find work. Not for months and months. Mom found…

Part II – Katrina

You know what's funny. I didn't make friends in freshman year of college. Almost none.

I made friends instantly in middle school. I'd put together a little gang within a week. I don't know how I did it – I just saw girls and thought, you, you, not you, maybe you but you'll have to dress better, you if you stop laughing in that weird way. I swooped in and took charge. I made the group. I did it again in high school with Candy and Sarah and some other girls, but it was different. It was sharper. We were at a smaller school and there was a starker difference between the girls who were in and out. The girls I had decided were in or out. I had a lot of power and I lost it overnight when I went to U of R.

I weakly tried to get it back. The same moves. I didn't like the look of my roommate Taren…

I only saw Katrina a few times after prom. I missed two shared classes, and she missed at least one. We didn't talk, of course. I didn't look at her.

I wasn't scared. No one would believe her if she blabbed. But. The shape of her body in the corner of my eye felt like a ledge somehow, a point where you could stumble and destroy yourself. Too close even from across the room. I used to think about her, bitch, that fat fucking bitch – that was how it was in my head when I saw her, when I thought about her. But the words disappeared. There was just this... void, this refusal to name her. I didn't want to think about her but the memory lurked all the time. Why the fuck had I done that? I felt like I had ruined myself. I would never escape this. But I didn't understand why I felt this way. How…

Placeholder node for leadup + rape because I want to write about Marcie's post high school arc. I'll reply to this post when I get around to it.

I couldn't believe what a huge bitch he was being about it. It's not like I'd embarrassed him publicly. I'd just frozen up. And prom was coming up. Distantly, but still. Obviously I was going to be queen and he was probably going to be king. It would be perfect if we were dating.

Exporting stories

We will almost certainly implement exporting story trees as one file. But we'd prefer to hold off on this until we see how big trees play out on Gallae and figure out what the best linearization logic looks like.

I think the minimum viable feature is that the user picks the leaf node that forms the main chain. So the exported document starts with a chain starting with the root and ending at the chosen leaf node (ideally the main story). After that, go through branches by order of length (longest first) and append them to the end.

Please do tell us here what you want.

Upcoming future features

AI cowriting

We have Claude running right now, cowriting on its own initiative and answering questions when tagged in the chat, but it is set to respond only to me and 81kg because there is only one Claude account and it is ours.

It is possible to make site changes such that users who bring their Claude API keys can get it to write with them, but this poses a greater security challenge for us. The stakes become higher for securing user data if there is money on the line. So we'd prefer not to put in the effort until there's solid demand. If you want this, comment here.

In the meantime, while the site is small: if you really care about having AI cowriting/brainstorming access, we can add you to the whitelist of writers our Claude plan responds to. It'll be a few dollars a month per person,…

Part I – Marcie

okay I know this story root already has trigger warnings in the tags but I feel the need to gesture at them one more time before posting this. Marcie is a gay teenager who is attracted to obesity, and she is in serious, destructive denial about these things. her headspace is not a nice one!

So when I was sixteen, there was, uh, a fat girl. She was so fat you sort of couldn't tell how old she was. The cues for telling that were so distorted. I thought she was a teacher the first time I saw her come in through the classroom door. And the moment I looked at her I hated her, in a way I can't explain. She just looked wrong. Once you started looking, you couldn't stop. Or at least that's how I felt. She had huge breasts and an even large stomach that stuck out beyond that, and…

plotting / debugging thread

Here's my understanding of the plot, in seven parts:

one Sorossa leaves Junasso

Sorossa learns of her master's plans, decides to betray him, and steals his ship along with her friend Fionne.

two the ship devolves

Fionne and Sorossa fail to contain the chaos; Sorossa murders Fionne and starts to go to pieces.

three

Apollonia makes contact and effectively takes control.

four

They arrive on Earth, and it is revealed that Apollonia has been on the ship all along, and has partially used her influence to serve her faction's interests on the way. Or so Sorossa thinks. (Apollonia has in fact done very little of this.)

Sorossa is put in a cushy prison.

five

Weird Earth interlude, I'm not sure what happens here, really depends on Apollonia's family situation. But at the…

Where is Reika from? What is her world like? I think Ingrid should BE her new mech on a pretty literal level. I think they should both intermittently go back and do mech battles. But the battles shouldn't be epic and part of an ongoing thing. They should be winding down. They're sharing worlds, but whatever is happening there convinces them to leave and both occupy Ingrid's world for real. Because the battle they've been fighting isn't meaningful.

I think the anime, canonically, is canceled midway through. So Reika's world is not fully known canonically. There are secrets yet that haven't been revealed. Ingrid and Reika should find out together and decide that the fight is not worth fighting, or the enemy isn't real, or the citizenry being defended isn't worth their loyalty. Something…

This is a random mid-story scene that came to me: they're on that multiverse jaunt, and Leith is finding the head honcho of that world to talk to. Strong and endorsed Diana Wynne Jones influences here.

"Who is that?"

"The High Hedra, of course – in there," the woman said, and pointed at the pyramid in middle of the plains, hugged by a bend of river.

"That's what I thought," Leith said in an unnecessarily self-satisfied voice, and started walking towards it, bending space into hanks with little gestures so that the walk was faster. The landscape rushed past them in little waves – first corn, than pasture with an alarmed cow dancing out of their space, then strawberries, then some orangey drooping vegetable he didn't recognize at all. Then they were at the pyramid itself, which was silvery…

post-rescue Nathan pov

I'd known from the beginning that I'd have to be put in Leith's hands. There was just no one else who could contain me. The league had some people could have easily squashed me for good if they'd wanted to. Jasvinder could have opened a portal to the sun under my bed, incinerated me in a millisecond. Paige could drop me in space, where, unlike many of my colleagues, I can't breathe. Aarush could vaporize me from thirty miles away. But none of them can prevent me from doing harm without putting me out of commission for good. The few nullifiers who exist can't contain either of my powers, which are quite disruptive.

So there's only one person for the job: Leith. Since graduation they've been beholden to no one, so no one really knows what their powers are – which is…

characterization / exploration writing

more ideating

I came up with this whole thing when trying to combine two... no, four things:

First, dance magic. When I started partner dancing I was like, holy shit, there should be a magic system about this. Different types of dance for different things (big group dances like contra should raise barns or do other community things). So much opportunity for interpersonal chemistry between two people to result in more powerful magic, or unexpected magical side effects.

Second, I wanted to write a harem romance with a female lead with extremely different types of partnership.

Eshua: the hereditary slave belonging to her half-brother Adumon, who is hers by right if she becomes heir (which is a magical concept as well as a social one). Eshua recognizes her as his legal master at some point,…

Stray scenes / exploration writing

I have enough to start doing exploration writing now. Starting a subtree at this point. I think I want one branch for the plot outline + debugging the plot, one branch for the main story told chronologically, and one branch for stray scenes. Still figuring out the best way to structure stories on this site.

So, the toddler.

Kley is a very depressed and harried woman at the time they arrive. And the house is a mess, so she doesn't let the toddler (August) out in many parts of the house. And she gets drawn into driving her mom around medical appointments as soon as she arrives, entrusting loser cousin Ingrid with the child.

August is fifteen months old, which is an age where kids are normally saying their first word. And he's very excited about Reika, and interested in the house, which the protagonist is less neurotic about letting the kid see. So what happens is that the child starts talking to the protagonist first before he talks around his mom. Or at least the mom doesn't recognize it because the kid is shouting EYKA EYKA which is not mappable to a real concept.

So Kley has been at very…

So the daughter Joanne went into a profession the aunt doesn't respect (music?) and married a bigshot there. They had a lot of fights about going into music, especially disreputable music that the aunt couldn't play for her friends or anything. (At this point I kind of want the aunt to be first gen Asian.) Joanne changed her name to a much more exciting racy stage name, Kleoria; got tattoos; was openly polyamorous. Lots of things a first gen Asian mom hates to see. So they're estranged. Joanne now goes by Kley to her friends.

I think Kley never married her guy – they were philosophically against marriage. But she did get pregnant. And six months after birth, the guy ditched her.

Which is exactly the kind of thing a parent feels vindicated by, so Kley doesn't come back for like nine…

meta / plot development branch

Oh wow. I think I got something that provides the overall plot (which wasn't there before).

I was talking to Claude about this (in a chat in the dev environment of this website, I was actually just testing its chat prompt) and asked it what the aunt should be dying of that is (1) not too drawn out, (2) adds a reasonable amount of drama for her daughter and niece. I mentioned that she might be looking for euthanasia also (that she finds hard to get in the States), because I have a friend whose father is dying horribly right now with no recourse to assisted suicide. Claude responded: Dignitas/Lifecircle in Switzerland do take foreigners, but the patient must self-administer the drug — drink it, or open the IV valve herself. So the clock is really "before she's…

// Old intro, written before I realized the protagonist should be MUCH more of a failniece, with the aunt still in the picture

Her name was Miyuki and she was a child soldier. She was fourteen inches tall and her lavender-tinted white hair came down to her hips, as long as the gun, which was pointed towards the ground. Not straight down. At a bit of an angle, like she was ready to raise it and shoot you. When I talked out loud about my computer problems to her I imagined that if I meandered or whined, she would raise it and shoot me. Miyuki was hot but she had a beastly temper.

She was wearing the nothing-much of a bikini bra from the beach episode, two little lavender triangles covering her jutting nipples and connecting around her torso with glue-strands. It was obviously a shameful toy…

// the handoff

The Wildwife looked uncomfortable and a little disgusted as Paige marched Aegis up the steps. Paige knew she had to be polite, but she was still smarting from the last-minute disagreement she'd had with Luminarch about leaving Aegis in the Wildwife's hands.

"They don't even care!" she'd said hotly. "They've never cared! They quit the league – they refuse every call –"

"Every call they clearly asked us not to make."

"They fucking like it when we grovel, and then they oh-so-graciously deign to help –"

"Paige! We wouldn't have gotten Nathan out without the Wildwife. Forget about their attitude and focus on that. They showed up. They opened the portal. Then they shut it for good. They made an exception to their rule because we asked. That means everything."

Paige had looked…

PRESENT DAY. PRESENT TIME

Charlie’s story began when there was an embargo on the island country he had been born in. Let’s call it New Zealand. New Zealand was neutral but was still affected by the war, which lasted for three years. Disease swept the farms, and two-thirds of the livestock died. People were not supposed to eat that meat, but it could have been exported as meal in normal times. Since it could not be exported, it was given as meal to the surviving livestock.

Meat normally comprised about one percent of livestock diet, but for those three years it ranged from ten to twenty percent, almost half of what it was for people. “An awful waste,” the farmers lamented. It did not escape their notice that the bulls in that cohort communicated in ditone to each other as their throats developed. This was not…

starting from the end

In a dingy windowless kitchen lit by one yellow light over the table, a married couple sit down to eat. There is carrot stew in bowls in front of them. Or at least, they are root vegetables, and they are sort of orange. Let's go ahead and call them carrots. The two grunt and fart contentedly as they eat. They are a decorous species – very much so, in fact – but the rules governing the sounds of the body mostly pertain to speech. It would shame them if they spoke off-pitch, and they wince instinctively when they hear a wrong note.

The couple are unlike in size. The man is three times the mass of the woman, and sparsely hairy all over. The woman has much thicker fur, so thick it can be combed and oiled. They both have two eyes, which are amber, and two pointed ears,…

stray scenes / exploration writing

The biggest party in the world was underway on the emperor's flagship Baldachin. Spilled drinks drifted towards the grated floors in near-zero gravity, giving guests plenty of time to swim away. The Baldachin did not open out into space anywhere except in a narrow viewing room near the pilot's suite, but the ceiling of the topmost floor was a crisp digital display hooked up to the cameras outside, so fine it was just as good as looking out through clean crystal, unless you came within a foot and stared hard at the screens. With each circuit, the fat red beetle of the moon swung across the display. The sun alone was stylized as a pulsing school of curliques. Junasso itself was mostly in darkness, its red mountains eaten up by night.

The party had been…

// On the porn:

Shame. What does it feel like? The truth is, nothing much. The more ashamed I felt, the more I looked away, and the more things I ceded to an initially random flare of shame, the smaller the universe of things I was willing to think about. I did not want to linger on my neighborhood, which I had chosen to live in. I did not let my attention linger long on my empty bed, childhood friends I had fallen out of touch with, young children, attractive men, whom I was too old for. I tried not to look much at the young pretty girls, for having beauty and confidence. Even the shy ones, the insecure ones, knew they at least weren't ugly. The truly ugly are never in doubt as to their ugliness. They know they will not be the protagonist of a story worth reading. They are not lovable…

// Some Owen backstory

All four of our parents had been cheaters. When he started, I vowed not to make the same fuss. Honestly, I found that I didn't mind much. It wasn't that I didn't love him. I did. But it was just sex, and I knew he wouldn't leave me. Neither of us had been much of a prospect when we were younger, and as we both aged we drifted further from the shore of eligibility to anyone else, and closer to the ultimate marital security: that no one else wanted us.

Or so I thought.

I made a hell of a fuss – a long, terrible, protracted fuss – when one of those affairs escalated enough that he asked me for a divorce. The other woman was married and was willing to leave her husband.

Or so he thought.

So we were both wrong, and our mistakes failed to cancel out, and there we were…

We actually barely interacted after that. The final round of SAT subject tests was drawing close, and college applications were due. The advisors were busy with essay feedback. Students were cramming in last minute extracurriculars and championships. Arroyo, who had been waitlisted for MIT during early admission, disappeared into this vortex too.

That was... okay with me. The last sex we'd had – it was a good one to end on. It had the perfect ping of closure, the kind that my goodbye with Owen, good-hearted as it was, had barely matched.

But then Arroyo visited my office, an incident so unprecedented I almost jumped out of my chair.

She said, "I got my recommendation letters for most of my schools from Professor Pennington."

"A good choice," I said, warily. Pennington taught AP CS, and he…

"Refill for you?" he said to me.

"One more drink, then please close out my tab."

We walked out of the bar together, and I pointed down the street. "There's a hotel." She stared at me. "I'm going to get us a room." With my own goddamned money. I was flush with half million Owen had left me. He'd hoped it would be baby money. Giggling child of a geriatric mother money. Love money. Oh god, that handsome young man, with Arroyo's face but not Arroyo's sociopathy. Wasn't I too old? Not for her. I was laughing quietly to myself as I bought the hotel room, the clerk giving me a wary look.

I texted Arroyo the room number. She was there, shrugging off her long coat, giving me a narrow look. Her beautiful hair unbound. "Too old, but not for you," I said happily, getting to my knees in front of her…

Still. A month went by. I welcomed my period (late, always stuttering now) with dread and fear. Running out of time. How stupid it would be to make a panicked decision. My husband died, they sent me a letter. The funeral was ill-attended. I half feared to see her there but she had enough decency to stay away. I went to a bar, ordered a whiskey sour. Thinking about texting her. Texting my rapist, my blackmailer, who wanted to transcend the bounds of biology and put a baby in me. What kind of child? Black haired, determined. I'd have to quit my job. People had strange lives where you didn't look. So many centipedes under rocks whose sterile topfaces were aglow in the sun. She slid into the seat next me, duster coat falling apart at her thighs, which was bare. She was wearing very short…

People had strange lives where you didn't look. Owen never noticed the cameras.

After nine days staying with me, he entered his scheduled hospice care. I received a letter in the mail. A clinic half an hour away was holding sperm in storage for me for up to a year.

I texted her: "No way. But no way in hell, if you use the kid as an excuse to stay in my life."

"You want a promise?"

Bitterness. Along with the sperm donation letter had come an essay penned by Jason on his current life circumstances. There were definitely cracks there, someone forcing him to write at gunpoint. Scheduled email with a big zip file attachment point. But he was clearly intelligent, vivid, active, full of tennis friends, meals with professors, dinner parties at his small apartment. He had earned a bit of money…

We talked, he and I. Overly long conversations, just like before, going nowhere. He kept trying to linger on the tragedy that we hadn't had an okay life together, that we had parted ways to be lonely. He apologized for it again and again.

He tried to enter my bedroom one night and I slapped him. I glanced at the cameras, scared. I had promised not to touch him. Would this count?

"You've changed," he said ruefully, rubbing his face. "Wouldn't you rather, one last time, after all those years alone –"

"I lied," I said, wanting to shove it in his face. "I did find someone."

He went rigid.

"Or rather, I was found by someone. Pushy. Complete asshole. But good in bed." His eyes widened with every word. "We're on a break while you're here. I wanted to say my goodbyes. But I don't want you to have…

The next morning she arrived before Owen was awake. When her car pulled in, I slid into the passenger seat before she could get out. She gave me a disbelieving look.

"How dare you come here, now? This is adult shit!" I yelled at her. "What do you know? What do you know!"

To my amazement, I saw she didn't know how to handle my outright anger. She looked uncertain, like a chastised child. The world tilted. She said, "I don't have to justify myself to you," but the perfect self confidence was gone.

"He was my husband," I said, trying to explain to this girl who'd once said, I'm still going to do it. To you. "I had a life with him, almost as long as you've been alive. Now it is ending, and we have to make our peace, and you cannot be here!"

"He may be your ex-husband. But I own you."

"Not…

Owen was over. When I heard the car pull it felt like all the muscle fibers in my heart contracted. I'd meant to get up, greet him at the door, be polite... but I couldn't make myself move.

Gravel crunches. Voices. Voices? The door opened. Had I left it unlocked? Owen's voice, deep and warm, and – a thunderclap in my torso announced her presence before I had consciously registered that the sweet voice talking to him in halting English was in fact hers.

I stood up, clammy. Panic got me to race downstairs where bravery or kindness had not. "Good afternoon," I gasped, pounding downstairs, desperate to grab control. Christ, how was I supposed to do that? All I knew was that the two of them must not mix. I swung around the landing, clutching the banister, and saw them in the kitchen. Owen,…

I got a call from Owen. He was dying. He was dying – alone. He had colon cancer, late stage. There was a two week gap when he would be discharged and when he entered hospice care. He wanted me to host him if possible, visit in hospice if not. He said he wanted to make peace.

It was funny. He'd left me for his affair, but we hadn't settled down with anyone new. We'd both failed. Maybe would have been better off if we'd stayed married. Was that true? I found myself strangely indifferent. Perhaps Arroyo would not have taken over my life like a choking vine if I had a man at home. On the other hand, I wouldn't be having satisfying sex.

I said I would think about it and we both hung up after a long pause. I sat around, drinking wine and failing to think. I didn't want him back in my home. But…

// Placeholder node.

She put me in multiple outfits a day, photographing me in the room, and outdoors, with a separate phone. I writhed in shame, wondering if people thought I was asking her to do that. She'd fuck me first thing in the morning, dress me for breakfast. We'd go on the islands and the little villages and look at the mountains. She even snuck in a quickie in a kayak, getting me to unzip my windbreaker so she could crawl her cold fingers in between my legs and fuck me hard. I always whimper and gasp when I come, and have to muffle them into pillows. This time I let them dissipate into the windy open air. It... it felt good.

At night she'd fuck me again. Two more nights she made me set up plans with Roger, with more specific instructions. One night she just wanted me to get fucked in doggy. He…

When they were gone, Roger engaged me some more. I couldn't bear to say it. I went whispery, unable to stop glancing at Arroyo's progression around the deck. Roger's interest started falling away, and he stood up to bus his plate.

"Wait!" I whispered fiercely, in a panic. I didn't fear a beating from Arroyo so much. I was more afraid of being fingered roughly, or... or yelled at. She did not do it often at all. Only once or twice, when I'd really balked, when I'd really refused to do something. But even more than the yelling, I'd get the horrible cold sense that the whole of her had withdrawn from me, and I couldn't stand that at all. I had to make Arroyo not angry at me. Arroyo pleased with me was a warm, hurting presence. Arroyo angry felt like I was in free fall. "I'm... I'm sorry, I…

After the ship set out and the mountains faded out on either side of us, I learned that she had bought me dresses. Not like my gray knit dress. They were a little clinginer, in bold prints. They stopped above my knee, but not by much, thank god. The ship had a hair stylist and she had made an appointment for me. She showed them some photos, and they permed and perfumed my hair. No doubt thinking the frumpy older woman was getting her fashionable niece to help out.

Before the appointment started, we went into a store right next to the hair salon. (Arroyo liked shopping – that shouldn't come as a surprise, she was always so beautifully dressed. I had started paying more attention to what she wore at school and had concluded her closet might be as large as my bedroom.) A dark gray leather…

In the second half of the semester, she seemed to bore of me, and I thought I might have the Christmas holidays off unmolested. A lot of Granite Hollow families wintered south, or flew to Asia. But on Christmas Eve I got tickets to a five day cruise in Eastern Canada. Mid-January, right before the semester started. There was no threat, or note, but I had no other plans and I didn't dare refuse.

She was at the lobby of the hotel where we were gathered to load. She was in a duster coat again, and red earmuffs. She was chatting up a young man in Chinese. He wore an expensive jacket and a feckless smile. My heart gave an astonished throb. Why was she doing this to me? Was it really so much more appealing to beat her 40 year old teacher than to have normal sex with handsome young men?

It was…

// I don't know where this part goes. It has go somewhere in the story, as Grace erupts into Arroyo's life in a chaotic way, the way Arroyo has erupted into Grace's. I'll put it as a branch here for now.

I lived in fear that she'd molest me at school. But she never did. Her mask was perfect. Not even a sly look. She smiled at me when she came into the room, but she did that to everyone. I was the one who couldn't keep my reaction. I didn't look at her much, didn't call on her.

The two exceptions – one time she came into a class I was teaching for freshmen, looking apologetic and deferential. "Mrs. Pritchard? There's a phone call for you."

This made no sense, but no one seemed to register that but me. Heart pounding, I followed her outside into the hallway. She said, in a cool murmur…

The rest of that month was a blur. Arroyo fucked me several times a week. She dragged her wet fingers in and out of me and I screamed into my pillow. She put me over her knee and hit me. It would have been funny, incongruous, but she caned me so hard I sobbed and drooled into my duvet cover and sat gingerly on chairs the next day. Bruises bloomed like gentians on my thighs and ass. And oh god, the things she did with my breasts. My body was new territory. It sparked towards her.

I rarely touched her. She didn't tell me to, and of course I wasn't going to...

She never got naked. She didn't make me eat her out. She never masturbated. She seemed to take all her pleasure from hurting me.

She asked me questions about my sexual history. She knew everything about my taste, but it came as a…

// Whole section I'm leaving out for now: meeting Arroyo's half brother. Here's a sample intro that I don't want to go with.

...

I ended up sitting across him because we were the two adults. "Jason, my cousin," said Arroyo. He was a handsome young man who spoke totally unaccented English, and a firm American grip and pump of a handshake. Although he was tan and had chapped lips, I saw the family resemblance. "Mrs. Pritchard, our math teacher."

"Mrs. Pritchard, do you write recommendation letters for college?"

"Sometimes, yes."

"Here is a question I liked to ask when I was in school. What would a student have to do, for you to write glowing recommendation letter? It is good to have clear standard on success, so it was one question I like to ask many teachers, to get broad view. I was very…

Arroyo was the weakest member of the team, but I saw her study the material in the hotel lobby, looking a little ethereal under the bright lights of the lobby, in a marigold dress and her pure white sneakers. "You will give me private tutoring," she said on the night we set out. Until 8pm she would study on her own after dinner. At 8pm she would come to my room and ask questions for an hour. Then she would fuck me.

She had a boyfriend, Kevin, but traded him off for another boy at the end of the competition. I got to watch the bizarre sight of her hanging onto Kevin's arm and cooing at him like a little girl on the bus. Who was this simpering teen, who actually pouted at the indulgent looking Kevin? Interestingly, I got to see the different way she held onto the new boy, who was white. She…

Did they really not see how she was?

// The math competition

We rented a van to Boston. The students' families pooled money for a car and also provided the driver, who was a snub-nosed Asian man who did not speak much English. He would be lodging with us for the weekend and driving us around to sightsee or eat. Arroyo's family had been given a card with which I could buy meals for the students. Obvious of course was the fact that the students could corroborate who was at the meals. Despite this card the students preferred to eat separately. There were three of them: Arroyo, John, and Hugo. John was the strongest student and made it clear in the practice rounds we did on the drive. Hugo was carsick and stopped halfway, and John kept talking loudly of the problems he and Arroyo were looking at together and saying clever…

"I broke up with my boyfriend," she said idly.

"Kevin?"

"Yeah. He was starting to want something more, that I didn't have more of."

"Sex?" I hazarded. It was my first guess among teenagers.

"Oh no, we had lots of sex! It was really good. Not like fucking you is good, though. It's better in some ways and worse in others. But he wanted to know what I was feeling and prod me into making statements about the future. It's like being knocked on if you're an empty house."

I shivered involuntarily.

She noticed. "What?"

"That's a really creepy way to describe yourself."

She was quiet, dark gaze downcast.

"Are you... sad that I said that?"

She shook her head. "No. I am okay with people finding what is really deeply in my head creepy. As long as they can't use it against me. It's okay if you see me…

// I don't know how to write this part – they need to get to another city for a ?math/CS? competition.

Two more students snagged invitations to NATMI, which caused the principal to send me an email on chaperoning the trio to Boston. This too was within the normal range of my duties for the school but I balked. ...

On Saturday she appeared in the house and fucked me with a dildo. It hurt, even though it wasn't a big dildo. I'm perimenopausal and my vaginal walls are fragile. I admitted this to her, in tears, and she took it out and caned me so hard I cried fully.

I hadn't called her master since the end of the first night. She said, "You never have to call me master in any given moment. But I'll always go easier on you if you do."

I broke fast. Honestly, I might have held out just so that she wasn't too disgusted with me. When we were in bed together I really felt like she owned me, bizarre as that was. When I begged and called her master she would pause for a while to run her soft fingertips over the bruises or lick me. When she resumed would take a few minutes to build up to that previous,…

The next day I had class with her in the afternoon. Some of my colleagues had noticed I was pale and withdrawn. I said I'd had some bad news in the family and I'd rather not talk about it. Someone brought me flowers the next morning, which made me go to the bathroom and cry.

But anyway. That day. We had class together Mondays and Thursdays. She was completely relaxed, completely normal. She sat with her boyfriend, who was a tall white boy. She passed notes with her girl friends. I lost my nerve and said we'd be watching a math documentary that day. Some educator. I only did that when I was really tired, maybe once a semester.

In the morning I would leave as soon as I could for a McDonald's to have breakfast there, instead of frying up an egg and cheese sandwich at home. I would do this most mornings from now.

She did this on a Tuesday night. I didn't see her at all on Wednesday, and on Thursday she was near the bus stop again as I got off. I got into her elegant little gray car. As usual, roaringly warm and private.

She drove me home and then followed me into the house. I stopped dead. There was a fancy new television with a big matte screen, on a beautiful wooden television stand. It even had a cubby for a cat, where Sierra was now lounging. The TV was playing porn. It was a video I knew well, of a woman... she was restrained with rope and placed over a low bed so that she was on her knees. The lips of her…

This may all explain why I was shocked to see Arroyo in my neighborhood, a few weeks after I had nominated her for NATMI. I never saw students there. And she was dressed so differently that, until she was right in front of me that, I didn't even register that she was Asian. At school she was fashionable but modest: boxy jackets with beautiful stitching, tiny gold jewelry, pristine blocky sneakers that emphasized the delicacy of her ankles. Here she was in a dark felt coat and long boots. Her hair was loose instead of braided, her makeup was gone.

"Mrs. Pritchard?" she said.

I smiled a little, startled by her presence, her up-close prettiness, her – the first word my mind suggested was disguise, which was strange of it. "That's me."

"That is I," she said, a correction so surprising that I…

I hesitated when I saw her name for the first time during roll call. It wasn't that intimidating a name, but I'd made a fool of myself last year over a student who named Xinqi and I wanted an extra second to think about it before trying to pronounce it. But before I could get there, she said, "It's pronounced zhwrayer, but I go by Arroyo."

I did not want to have to pronounce zhwrayer twice a week. "Arroyo," I said in relief. She had a little white leather backpack with a branded metal plate set into it. Tucked into a well-stitched leather pocket was a phone with white pom pom charms. This was an impeccably dressed young lady, but not to an American key. Based on that I had expected her accent to be stronger.

There were two notable types of student at Granite Hollow. The driven ones were…

Oh man. Kelsey was really good. I had been entertaining thoughts of marrying her even though this was really premature for a second date. And now... I had to be a crackpot.

The thing is, this is an urban planning nightmare. The City is now a single horizontal sprawl one story tall and four hundred kilometers wide, which means to "live among everyone" you commit to a forty-day walk just to encounter a representative tail of opinion. My Fitbit is happy with me. But I still haven't found a job, which I really need to at some point to continue living in the City. Networking is surprisingly hard with this lifestyle.

I say, "So... can I ask why you're at LessOnline instead of ruling the world?"

The thing is, there was an obvious person to contact. Zachary. He had made out very well in crypto and owned a mansion up in the hills. He threw parties every month and had a swimming pool. Could a swimming pool hold drinking water?

All the clever prepper stuff I'd read in the past decade and it all paled in effectiveness of convincing this one guy. The thing is, we had the same ex. And it wasn't a good story. We hadn't clashed hard enough for him to ban me from his events – and that would have been really awful, he hosted like half the community events. I had been grateful for his generosity, and furious I felt grateful.

And now I was driving to his mansion to convince him to fill up his crystal-tile swimming pool with drinking water.

I almost didn't recognize him. We'd clashed half a century ago. He didn't seem to recognize me – his rheumy eyes didn't flicker when they met mine across the mahjong table. My hand tightened on my teacup as I waited to hear his voice. To be sure. And yes, it was that Dutch accent. A dozen ways I could kill him here and now raced through my. mind.

// After hearing the whole tale, the ending

The prince was silent. The shadows slunk long and purple across the clearing. He said, "If what you say is true, I agree it is good that I know this before the memories return upon the sun's ascension to noon tomorrow."

The harrier said, "Are you not enraged?"

"At whom?"

"Well, er, in general. You haven't thrown that knife once in the time I've been speaking."

"At whom?"

"The obvious target is me."

Firazon sighed. "That would have interrupted the story. I must return home and consider what you have told me. And..." Reluctantly, "speak to my mother."

He gloomily contemplated his whittling job. She loved his figurines. Each one she attached to the great arches that ran around the doorways of her house. The wooden rookery of their house...…

// And skipping a whole sequence here – which I'll hopefully fill out branching out from this post – where Mirzona tries to raise the baby alone. Narratively, I think Mirzona's actions have to get the Greatmother has to change her mind and un-cryo her baby.

// Because this story is about how the whole planet starts working its way out of a terrible parent-child culture that started with the extreme parental labor scarcity of the planet's founding. The difficulty is getting the Greatmother to change her mind without being saccharine.

The Zon at first were excessively pleased, the ugliness of the baby nonwithstanding. They congratulated Mirzona on her great journey, her cleverness. Screaming Narhabel was whisked away and passed around quickly so that his unpleasantness did not weigh much upon any one relative.

But as the days went by he wore on them. Their expressions grew sour. The rooms in Mirzona's wing were vacated as her siblings and cousins took up residence in other buildings. When it became clear Narhabel was not having a bad week but a bad life, they made Mirzona go into a little room by the kitchens. Narhabel would arch his back, go red, and scream as if he were dying. You could hear him from half the palace away. His little hands would come up and slap and claw at the face of whoever was holding him.

Of…

// Skipping the part where she kidnaps the cryo'ed baby and holds it ransom for fertility.

and so the Greatmother took the baby and lifted the illustrious Bel's curse as easily as brushing past a veil, for she was the Greatmother, and such feats were easy for her. She said, "Go stand under the next full moon and you will be with child. Now get out of my sight."

Mirzona hurried out.

Now it came to be that the various princes of the house of Bel, not to mention the illustrious Bel herself, felt the abeyance of the curse, and were most displeased with it. The Bel had no intention of defying the Greatmother, but the youngest and most restless princes were enraged. Many schemes were proposed: Should we stampede across the path and bar her way to the clearing? Or should we let her get close,…

// And this scene is predicated on a twist I'm not sure of: that the Greatmother had one baby in reserve, and this represents her hopes and dreams of change. She fucked up 10000 children. Can she do well with one? She has been keeping the baby in cryo for most of this planet's populated history.

Mirzona advanced into the darkness, and something hit her in the shoulder. She groped at it. The light behind her insufficiently to illuminate. It was a grated platform. She heaved herself onto it and rolled onto her back, gasping, gingerly rubbing her palms together.

In time her eyes adjusted and she saw a speck of light in the distance. She stood and stumbled towards it.

The air was acrid now but she had to take deep breaths this high.

From the ancient damaged engines. Oily blue smoke curled up…

// And here is my writing which I don't like much, on the travel up to see the Greatmother.

"Go screw someone at the wine houses," the Mother said curtly without looking around. Behind the wooden altar was a beaded curtain and behind that curtain was a dock where the Mother sat. Her nipples sprayed into the lake. The ripples where the fine fast droplets landed were oblong on the white surface.

"I cannot, Mother," said Mirzona, "for I am Zon, and all in my line is afflicted by the curse of the house of Bel."

"Oho!" said the goddess. "I am not the likes of which can overcome such a curse as Bel's. You must go see my mother."

"Where does she dwell?"

"Upriver, of course," said the Mother, and gestured.

Mirzona set out. The flow was wide and slow and bookended with steep banks, so she took off…

// And her is a version of the story that starts at the end, when the son is about to come to age and is visited by his cousin, who is the narrator of the story.

Firazon, son of Mirzona, daughter of Saturzon, son of the eminent Zon, who was of the first of the world, reared by the Greatmother herself – this Firazon was whittling in the forest when a harrier's shadow flickered over his work, and then his face as it circled low, decelerating onto the branch right above him. It folded its wings and coughed dryly. "Hail, prince of the Zon."

"Hail, bird of prey," he said. He assumed the harrier was in the area for his coming of age the next day. It was a surprisingly large affair and he would not be surprised by the more curious or ambitious animals of the far north coming to view it.

"Of a…

// Skipping how Dian gets involved with the activist group and jumping to her meeting with Tedy (his name changes multiple times within the story as they find a good one for him). If I fill in the intermediate story I'll do it as a sibling post to this one.

The handler, Georgiana, sailed in. Her steps were small and fast. She had tall, pink-edged ears and small tusks curving inward like commas, neat and pearly from polishing. She blinked respectfully at the gold on Dian's. "Lady Trescott-Lowry?"

"That is I," Dian said cautiously, not used to hearing her full name. But Beatriz had informed the handler.

"When Beatriz told me we had you among our number, I could not resist lunging at the opportunity," said Georgiana. "We want Vernon to be ready, if needed, to have dinner with the Prime…

Sixteen, Dian Catri headed inwards into the city with a new brothel pass, and chose the best one, as any other choice might embarrass her family. She had waited four months to not seem over-eager. At sixteen one's hormones ran as high as they were ever going to be. She would have to do her business with the male supervised by a brothel staff member until she was an adult, at twenty four.

Dian did want sex, but mostly with other girls her age. As many girls did, she found sex with males, actual sex with males rather than a curse or a joke, a strange concept. They were so big, unkempt-looking, and even on weakening diets, strong. Their tusks were knocked out and filed as soon as they grew in, but they still have their teeth. They were known to snap every now and then and kill their bedmate.…

Dian's story began when she was humiliated in front of her mother's friends at her eighth birthday party. Everyone got upset. It is why her name is missing an E.

The problem was that she'd been reading a textbook that talks about DNA. She knew what chromosomes are, and that plants have a lot more of them. It was geared towards students who are already assumed to have been given the obvious context. So the book didn't hedge the way it would to a child when it presents the 38 chromosomes of the male and female species in side-by-side prints, with extensive annotations on shared genetic loci in each.

Di liked to show off. She introduced this information brightly between the entree, which was flank steak, and dessert, which was glazed sweetbread topped with chestnut purée and fruit. The…

branch for worldbuilding

Their biological history:

It is easy enough to say that carrots or New Zealand exist in this world. But it is more controversial to call Tedy he or the man, or worst of all, the husband.

Dian's people approximately have one pronoun for people, whose subtle fluted variants have all been collapsed to she without much issue. They have a cattle pronoun, which we can just as easily call it. But they have no he. Some of the animal rights activists tried to invent one, which we will call xe, but it never really worked. They never stopped arguing about whether they should use the people-pronoun for Tedy or the novel pronoun.

Nothing under consideration for Dian's people matches onto he (although they were trying to get there with xe), which reads as all too easily human…