"Radiation poisoning," Kimiyo said immediately. "Or cancer. Maybe she's getting cancer treatment, my… grandfather…" She trailed off.
"I was going to say it was something toxic she made, maybe she breathed some in or something," you suggested. Amara was looking really grim. "Babe?"
"I dunno what she's sick with, but I think she might be self-medicating. Opioids, maybe, OxyContin or something, that'd explain a lot," she said seriously. "Normally I'd say that would have come to a head a lot earlier, she'd have run out of money or gotten into trouble, but this is Brigid we're talking about. She could probably make whatever she wanted in exactly the doses she needed. She'd make a chart about it."
"... oh God, she's on drugs?" you exclaimed involuntarily.
This is such a 90s kid, D.A.R.E./Very Special Episode inspired reaction.
Radiation poisoning, cancer, and brain damage from toxic chemicals all get thrown about casually, but the option that gets a visceral reaction is that Brigid might be self-medicating in precise, controlled doses.
Remember, kids, drugs are evil! Only Bad People do drugs! Someone doing drugs is The Worst Thing!
Because
1) Remembering where you dropped the radioactive mines is important
2) Why are you using radioactive mines in the first place. The enemies are metal demons. Your friends aren't rad proof. Whose side are you on, anyway.
I was thinking those were less mines and more using stone to seal up enemies, some of whom were radioactive (either from some of the metal demons being radioactive now, or from getting particle beamed or whatever by magic science. Still dangerous, but less UXO styled.
I just don't see how someone this reluctant to take sides in geopolitical conflicts can end up ruling the world, even notionally, even if we imagine some cataclysmic global disaster that destroys all existing political institutions.
This one I could see coming about as a result of magic spreading throughout the world. Eve has mentioned that other nations kind of lose their entire shit, call the military, and fuck everything up when the Butterfly Knights get involved. If they're the first, and the strongest, but not the only magic users in a decade or two, then there would need to be some kind of organization to prevent magic war crimes and mind control and assasination, and a lot of people would probably try to pick that fight rather than let the Butterfly Knights handle it, or even roam free when they could be a threat. Given Andy calls the current time "the dark ages," then it's entirely possible there was either a cataclysmic loss of information, or the phrase refers to a period absent the powerful and frequently beneficial powers of light magic.
This is such a 90s kid, D.A.R.E./Very Special Episode inspired reaction.
Radiation poisoning, cancer, and brain damage from toxic chemicals all get thrown about casually, but the option that gets a visceral reaction is that Brigid might be self-medicating in precise, controlled doses.
They have some ability to handle most of this, especially as a team, the magic healing light kiss in particular feels like it would be pretty useful for radiation poisoning. Drug use in controlled doses would also be fine, but given she has what appear to be crippling memory issues the self-destructive tendencies like most of the other Butterfly Knights, and is also badly hiding her condition from the people who care about her, I wouldn't really put any stock in her taking controlled doses.
This is such a 90s kid, D.A.R.E./Very Special Episode inspired reaction.
Radiation poisoning, cancer, and brain damage from toxic chemicals all get thrown about casually, but the option that gets a visceral reaction is that Brigid might be self-medicating in precise, controlled doses.
Remember, kids, drugs are evil! Only Bad People do drugs! Someone doing drugs is The Worst Thing!
The thing about drugs and especially opioids is that even if you start out precisely controlled, it might not stay that way. It is very possible she's a junkie by now.
I have to agree. Especially given that we know he was doing tasks to prepare for Eve's eventual ascension and he called the current times the Dark Ages. Which with how its pretty clear that Eve isn't going to actively try and take over the world, kinda implies that the current world order needs to collapse for Eve to take over.
Its pretty clear the narrative is setting up a rug-pull about Eve being the future Queen, it could be that the timeline got altered when she used her sword to cut Fate. But that has some awkward implications about Amara so I suspect that the reveal is going to be that Andy is actually setting up some sort of mass societal collapse.
Its pretty clear the narrative is setting up a rug-pull about Eve being the future Queen, it could be that the timeline got altered when she used her sword to cut Fate. But that has some awkward implications about Amara so I suspect that the reveal is going to be that Andy is actually setting up some sort of mass societal collapse
The tiny cat poked his head from the edge of the bag.
"You're just as smart as the Queen said you were," he said. "I know that Fate has chosen its champions already, so I suspect you are right. Your necklaces are gateways to power, but they amplify what is already inside, rather than granting something you did not have."
The remaining necklace I have is the Amethyst Fritillary of Butterfly Heart. The Queen spoke of her as a great and powerful warrior, fearless, noble, and true to the last."
The Dark Queen was silent for some time. Then she said that there could be no second chances, not for one like her, and with a heavy heart, Butterfly Ward brought the sword down, parting the veil between worlds. The Dark Queen was banished back into the shattered lands of the Realm of Shadows, and the world was free.
Then, taking up the broken Strands of Fate, Butterfly Ward rewove them as Sage had taught her, remaking the world to be as it was. She restored to life all who had perished, and mended what she could with the frayed cord. Her Prince Rose joined her in the task, and then her Sage, and many hands made quick work. Not all the damage could be undone, not all wounds could be healed, but much that would have been lost was saved.
But if we're going forward with the idea that the future Andy is from didn't have the rewriting of fate... Yeah, I can see the fallout of all those deaths leading to an escalating disaster that would have Butterfly Spark and Butterfly Heart die in battle while Butterfly Ward ended up as Queen due to the situation going that bad.
just for fun, i want to explain how deep the research rabbit hole tends to go for me
okay so, my outline for this section included the following things i needed to hit in this scene:
Eve and Kimiyo go get borger to show we're back in the US
We see rebuilt San Francisco to get some alt history stuff in
They get home and we expound on this point with the news.
So when I started working, I went, alright, let's find a burger place. I spent about an hour researching burger places in San Francisco using various restaurant website doohickeys before settling on Burger Joint. I selected it over other options because it wasn't too out of the way, it was plausibly a place Eve knew about because it was relatively close to the route I'd earlier plotted between the house I chose as a location for her apartment and the location of the bookstore she used to work at, and the logo and imagery fit the needs of the scene very well. As a bonus, the place didn't survive COVID, so it acts as part of the shockingly-recent-period-piece thing that the story is going for.
by the way: every single location in the story is either real, or modeled on a real place. I have addresses for every place every character has ever lived, went to school, and worked. i did year-by-year income estimates for their parents based on the careers i chose for them that i could compare against living costs and pick plausible places for them to live and i literally don't know if that will ever come up.
the iyazaka Eve and Kimiyo went to? real place. it's called fujishima. it was on the route for their walk back; i picked it for the same reason Eve did, because i noticed the lantern as i did my walkthrough on Google Maps, which i do for every place the characters go. i figured out their 2014 prices and Kimiyo's opinion of the place from translated reviews.
the place in San Francisco Eve compares it to? real. the park? yeah its amishiro park. the FamilyMart next to the park? oh well it's not on google maps so i guess it's- psyche actually, it's real but it got replaced in 2015, which is why i described it as looking kinda run-down. i spent 45 minutes researching the chain. the puppy-themed makeup bag is real and you used to be able to buy it; it doesn't look like it exists anymore but there's a bunny one now.
the throwaway comment about Eve being unable to see Kimiyo's college because the imperial palace is in the way from their perspective? yeah its because it's a real place that i only found out after i'd selected it that Naoko Takeuchi attended.
when Ward did her rooftop run? i drew a line along her actual direction of travel along rooftops on a snip from google maps. the scene on Tokyo Tower? happened entirely because i realized i could see the building i designated was Kimiyo's apartment from that point on the structure in Google Earth. i emailed an archetecture company to get information about what the inside of Minato City Hall looked like pre-renovation and i barely used any of it.
now i gotta do it all over again for Oxford lol
However, this presented me a problem. The plausible transit routes home from Burger Joint are pretty much a straight line to their apartment at the far end of Outer Sunset. I needed to figure out how to get them to go north so they could see the part of the city being rebuilt. After going over my character notes, I decided this would be a good place to establish the fact that Amara, being the perfect Princess Charming she is, can of course cook, is great at it, and loves to cook for Eve. If she's making something specific but is missing an ingredient, she could give Eve a sidequest that might plausibly have her going out of her way.
So at this point, I opened my writing notes document and started doing research to determine what a good choice of meal might be that would require a specific ingredient which might involve going out of their way. This involved trailing through several recipe websites and examining ingredients for ones which were plausible for requiring a trip that wouldn't be a quick detour to a random grocery store along their return trajectory.
which is how i settled on... a shrimp dish! i found a recipe i thought looked neat, was light enough that it fit Kimiyo's post-burger-coma requirements, and it required cilantro, which further googling informed me was the kind of ingredient that people who get persnickety about cooking will go out of their way to get fresh from specific places. I located a plausible grocer in operation in 2014, so alright, here we-
Hey wait, whats this about some people hating cilantro because it tastes like soap to them? i wonder if that would affect my characters? oh hey, look at that, the OR6A2 gene variation that causes that is most previlent in people of East Asian descent, so there's a pretty good chance Eve or Kimiyo or both have it. lemme just add that to the character notes, and time for my fallback option of miso-glazed salmon to take them up into Japantown, where construction diversions could plausibly take them through the new part of the city.
and after all this? all this research?
i still fucked up inexcusably.
see, fucking whoops, i didn't know that 5-over-1s are actually super uncommon in California because of construction regulation around earthquakes. welp! time to pencil in a note to either fix that in edits, or mention regulation shifts in passing as a result of the aftermath of 2006. lesson learned; if im going to make fictional building choices in the location, i should look up building regulation in the area and the politics around it
Given how much research you're doing, the pace you're writing at is nothing short of phenominal. Over in the story I'm doing, I'm pretty much going loosey-goosey cheaty choppy on everything and relying on quick wiki skims for anything I actually have to look up.
You're doing fine. Also I do love these little looks at the process
You had a piece of a Lamenta sealed in epoxy as a paperweight… somewhere in the apartment. You weren't sure if it was a good idea to have pieces of evil metal just lurking in everyone's homes, but nothing terrible had happened yet, so it was probably okay.
...I wonder, now... is exposure to that part of why their metaphysical armor/costumes look decayed, not just from years of feeling their group fall apart and as if they've abandoned their roles (like I was assuming was the symbolism)? And did Brigid accidentally ingest some of it? 🤔
"I still think you should just go full Death Note with that thing," Amara added. "Start working your way down the list alphabetically and I bet people would elect you Queen before you got to C."
I know writers that have been able to temporarily go faster like Eotyrannus, Zoat, Aeridinae Lunaris, and Failninja. When the inspiration bug bites they can do a chapter a day for an impressive amount of time, Zoat kept that up for what had to be years, but all of them eventually slowed down to a much slower speed than 3 chapters a week. Well, Failninja is a bit more recent and they're still pumping out daily chapters, but they'll probably crash any day now. So yeah, like you said, open_sketch is doing great.
You said there will be two more Knights?" Eve asked, and Andy nodded.
"At least two. One of the necklaces is the Sapphire Zebrawing; I do not have it and do not know where it might be, though I know it belongs to the bodyguard of the Queen herself; I can only assume that Butterfly Shine is guarding the young Queen now, where-ever and who-ever she is.
All, save for their wise advisor of course, were shocked by the revelation that Butterfly Ward was herself destined to become the Butterfly Queen; he knew from the moment he saw her owing to the immaculate radiance already evident in her bearing even then.
So either Andy was lying then (and given that Esme at least appears to have committed suicide due to isolation and trauma if he knew where she was prior it's extremely damning) or he was lying later. And by structure I think he was lying the first time.
So either Andy was lying then (and given that Esme at least appears to have committed suicide due to isolation and trauma if he knew where she was prior it's extremely damning) or he was lying later. And by structure I think he was lying the first time.
Just to give a sense of scale to people who haven't delved into the arcana of the publishing industry, a typical published novel is somewhere from 80,000-120,000 words long. It varies a lot from author to author, from genre to genre (like how romance tends to be shorter and fantasy tends to be longer), but that's the ballpark. Someone steadily writing 10,000 words a week could publish two novels a year even after making a bunch of major edits. Erika is fast. DragonCobolt, among others, is fast fast.
see, fucking whoops, i didn't know that 5-over-1s are actually super uncommon in California because of construction regulation around earthquakes. welp! time to pencil in a note to either fix that in edits, or mention regulation shifts in passing as a result of the aftermath of 2006. lesson learned; if im going to make fictional building choices in the location, i should look up building regulation in the area and the politics around it
Okay, kinda missing the point here, but from what little cursory research I just did to figure out what a five-over-one even is a concept, there don't seem to be any earthquake regulations that prevent the construction of these buildings in california? The concept was pioneered in LA.
The key regulation that caused the whole 5 over 1 deal is a fire safety one, a revision that allowed wood framed (much cheaper) buildings to be up to 5 stories tall. That's present at the time in California.
