Castles of Steel - Lesbians Good, Imperialism Bad

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Lieutenant Arisukawa Haruna

Balance Stats
❁ • ❁ Work / Life ❁ • ❁
❁ • ❁ Warrior / Princess ❁ • ❁
❁ • ❁ Radical / Respectable ❁ • ❁

Tactical Stats
Gunnery 0, Navigation +2, Command +2, Technology -4, Personal -2, Strategy +3

Stress: 3​


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PLEASE READ THE QUEST RULES BELOW

You collectively vote on the actions of Arisukawa Haruna, the first woman to serve openly in the Imperial Akitsukuni Navy.

This quest is set in a universe which is much like our own circa 1910, but with different politics, cultural norms, and ideas about gender and sexuality, as well as some unusual and advanced technology in places.

We are using this quest to explore themes like breaking the glass ceiling, divergent outlooks on gender and sexuality, colonialism and imperialism, and the place of royalty.

Content Warning
This quest goes some dark places.

There is violence, often explicit, often unfair, often against undeserving targets.

There are not always good options forward. The protagonist is not necessarily a good person.

There is implied content and discussion of sexual harassment and assault.

This is a world where people are often racist, sexist, queerphobic bigots. Sometimes, even the PC and the people they are friends with.

Voting Rules

We will tell you if write-in votes are allowed. If we do not say that write-ins are allowed, they are not. This is to prevent people from unrealistically hedging their bets.

You may proposal other options in a non-vote format, subject to approval, on non write-in votes.

We will tell you when a vote allows approved voting. If we don't say the answer is no, pick an option. We like making people commit.

Discussions makes the GM feel fuzzy.

Game Rules
When we ask you for a roll, roll 3d6. You are aiming to roll equal or under the value of your stat. If you succeed, Haruna gets through the situation with no real difficulties. If you roll above the target value, Haruna will still succeed, but this success will cost her something or add a complication.

Whenever Haruna loses something or faces hardship from a botched roll, she takes Stress. The more Stress Haruna has, the more the job and the circumstances she's in will get to her, and it'll be reflected in the narrative. Haruna must be kept under 10 Stress: if she reaches 10 Stress, she will suffer a breakdown and the results will not be great for her.

Haruna loses stress by taking time for herself, by making meaningful progress on her dreams, and by kissing tall, beautiful women.

Meta Rules
Author commentary is in italics so you know it's not story stuff.

Please don't complain about the system or the fact we have to roll dice. We've heard it before, we've heard it a thousand times across multiple quests. We're not going to change it, and it wears at our fucking souls.

Just going "oh noooo" or "Fish RNGesus Why!" is fun and fine. Complaining at length because you didn't get what you want less so.

If you have a question, tag both @open_sketchbook and @Artificial Girl. If you only tag one of us, you will be ignored. Seriously, we both write this quest.

And yes this is an alt-history type setting with openly gay and trans people, ahistoric medicine, and weird politics. Just... deal, please?

This quest employs a special system called Snippet Votes. Please read this post for more information.
 
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open_sketchbook said:
i look forward to those megaposts. a lot.
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As with many things, they will come Eventually (tm) :V When they do, do you want typos in spoiler tags, or separately as a PM?
(also i guess 'megapost' might be overstating it? mostly just little things i noticed, like 'oh hey haruna almost always goes "men or women (or people)", this time she didn't, does that count as a typo?' and then realizing that nope she stops mentioning enbies when the subject is romance/relationship/politics based, which is a damn good subtle touch... also stuff like "running tally of every time the QMs Haruna go head over heels for tall women" :p (and also all the stuff with her being a helpless sub because i too have bias ;) )
 
typos can be pm'd but the rest of that sounds fascinating.

also yeah haruna being subby lol... kinda snuck up on us. one day i will write a character who isn't a subby mess, but today is not that day...
 
open_sketchbook said:
typos can be pm'd but the rest of that sounds fascinating.

also yeah haruna being subby lol... kinda snuck up on us. one day i will write a character who isn't a subby mess, but today is not that day...
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Oh yeah it was actually pretty interesting seeing like...when she met Aiko and Aiko made a joke about being a sailor under Haruna's command and it made her 'feel things', and its like...well now we know she wanted to be the sailor under Aiko's command ;)
Also, probably won't actually write this up in the megapost, but just wanted to let you know a lot of the gender/sexuality/etc roles you (and @Artificial Girl and other gayaverse QMs of course) have come up with have influenced some of my 'i'm bored without anything at hand to read, lets idly worldbuild a setting i will never make use of :V" stuff, since it seems like you'd be interested in it, or at least in hearing that your AU-queer-systems inspired similar worldbuilding :)
In particular the main Orcish Not!HRE in my fantasy worldbuilding has an even more entrenched version of the 'separate het/gay/lesbian/enby marriage systems that don't conflict' setup; the noble families for example being less "Ruler + spouse(s)" and more straight up "Ruling polycule": there's the main king+queen (generally solely/almost solely political, tying a lesser but still influential family within the same realm, with gender-preference for succession law varying on the kingdom/duchy/etc), yes...but also the Queen's wife from their times in the Religious Cavalry Orders (much more likely to be romantic...but since those orders are filled with noblewomen who either themselves become queens/duchesses/etc or else lead the powerful and independent Orders...always a political plus), the King's Husband (somewhere in between, tending to be with similarly powerful rulers and similar to silk marriages here where they would be apart but still 'tied', so oft political...but with some more 'absence makes the heart fonder' leading to them developing romance-via-longing-letters), and of course the Royal Advisor Enby (which much like in your stories would have originally been completely divorced from romance, serving as an actual 'neutral' advisor, but there have of course been scandals where the Advisor is actually...romantically involved in the Polycule??? gasp :p )
 
i love writing poly stuff and i feel free to be self-indulgent in quests because like... in greater culture, and on SV, monogamist heterosexuality (and in SV's case, chaste lesbian romance as written by cis men) is so profoundly the default that even if every single one of my stories was queer poly nonsense, it would still be different.

haruna, being a lesbian with no interest in men and no real cultural touchstone for polyamory that doesn't include them, is the closest to this norm in this respect, which is part of the reason we kinda go out of our way to make sure we write Haruna's attraction to women the way we do. we don't want it to seem at all in the pattern of "schoolgirl romance" yuri stuff that kinda tends to infect a lot of the portrayal of lesbian characters and relationships in the SB/SV space. haruna likes tall, strong girls because her sex, like every other part of her life, involves a lot of weird power dynamics. haruna has messy and unwise attractions to women. she lusts, she makes poor decisions, she sleeps with prostitutes, hooks up with girls at bars and parties, contemplates infidelity, and is left profoundly lonely and longing by separation. haruna isn't in yuris with a girl that makes her heart go doki doki, haruna fucks.
 
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open_sketchbook said:
and in SV's case, chaste lesbian romance as written by cis men)
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Hey now, be fair...there's also "somewhat creepy lesbian romance as written by/for cis men" :V

(but yeah...i don't write, and for that matter as one of those cis men i wouldn't trust myself to be all that unique in romance writing (aside from i guess actually having submissive guys?), but a lot of the fun one of my best friends and i get out of watching shows (especially old anime like Naruto, since she decided she needed to have her Naruto phase a decade later than the rest of us :V) is coming up with self-indulgent headcanons to replace all the boring sameness in relationships, so i'm definitely with you on that one)
 
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4-9: The first day.
  • Threadmarks
    • You were still fuming internally. Privately, you let yourself imagine trying to pull some strings to get this man reassigned to the front. See how he liked it! Of course, no matter what strings you pulled that probably wouldn't do much. He was Army, for one--you could see the little rank pinks on his collar that denoted him a lieutenant colonel--effectively a commander in naval terms, if you remembered correctly. Plus he was a doctor, not the kind of man they'd put in command of a battalion or regiment or company or whatever it was that the army used. A squad? Not important really. So you sighed instead. You'd just have to be a good patient and prove that you didn't have any war neurosis or anything of the sort.

    "Yes sir, of course sir."

    Most of the rest day was… dull. Very dull. Mostly you sat in your room (they provided you a room, of course. Even if you couldn't lock it from the inside and there was a small sliding door for someone to peek in through) wearing the hospital clothes they'd provided and writing letters home. One for mother, of course, assuring her that you were in piece. Another for Aiko, where you poured out your feelings and how much you missed being near her. How you hoped to see her again soon. That you were in hospital, but that it wasn't serious (no details--they said the censor would wipe out any mention of war neurosis) and that you should be recovered in about two weeks. You thought about letting loose your anxieties about whether or not she was sleeping with the bespectacled girl but… that wasn't proper. And wouldn't do, in any case. Not in a letter someone else was likely to read.

    Dinner was filling, but bland and sleep took a long time to come to you as you tossed and turned, staring at the ceiling and wondering how you were going to manage the next two weeks. There was nothing for you to do but wait and after what seemed like years of moving at a breakneck pace, you weren't sure you knew how to actually do that.

    ---

    You awoke to a rumble, artillery, or maybe aircraft engines. Voices, people moving, a commotion. You bolted up, pulled on your uniform, looked for your belt before you remembered it was in the armoury. No matter, you were an officer and you had your duty.

    You passed by a window, and there you saw the situation. A motor-ambulance being unloaded. An orderly passed you, clearly in a hurry, but you stopped them a moment.

    "How can I help?" You said, gesturing out the window.

    He looked at you, sighed, smiled, and indicated back to your room. "You can get some rest. We have everything under control. Please, don't worry about it. You're a patient, remember, ma'am?"

    You wanted to argue, to push back, to push past them and offer your services… but you had a feeling that would make things worse, so you headed back to your room, shut the door, and stared at the wall a while. You didn't feel hungry yet. You didn't want to walk around the garden or go to the common room and play board games with strangers. You wanted to work.

    The nurse who met with you was a woman, which surprised you a little. She wore modified version of the usual medical uniform of the navy and wore rank which indicated she was a Petty Officer of the Women's Naval Reserve. That… was not something you expected. You'd thought they'd all be at home manning typewriters and doing figures, and that the nurses would be working on hospitals back home. But here one was, overseas (kind of). She smiled at you as she sat down across from you in one of the comfortable chairs in the ward's common room, sequestered a little from the rest of the occupants by virtue of being tucked into a corner. You felt a little jolt inside of you, a tug on your heartstrings. She was a few years older than you, you thought, and had fine features, dark hair. A picture of Akitsukuni beauty. You hadn't seen another woman (well, except Min-Seo and that weird foreigner) in what seemed like an age. Maybe that was why she was here: to help the spirits of the men. Even just smelling her simple perfume seemed to reinvigorate you--she smelled like home. Like Aiko.

    "Good morning, lieutenant. I'm glad to see that you seem to be doing well. I'm Nurse Miyoshi."

    "I wish I had something more to do," you said, sighing. "I feel… useless just sitting here."

    "I got that impression from your notes." She said. Like the doctor, she had a notebook. "Maybe think of it as leave?"

    You'd tried that, but leave was different. Leave was a time to get your life in order before putting it on hold to go back to sea. This was something else, a suspension of everything, like time itself being made to stop for you and only you.

    "I usually have something to do on leave." You said. Like Aiko. Ha. Or the freedom to choose what you did and where you went, at least. "I prefer working."

    "The doctor is a little concerned that you've been surrounded by men for so long, actually," she said with a smile. "He says you might be becoming a bit more like Western women if you lack female companionship." Which meant 'too masculine.' Something else that stupid doctor was getting wrong, you were sure. You had met several Western women and if they were masculine you hadn't particularly noticed. Of course they did like short hairstyles in the military but their military women were some of the most attractive (and the tallest, now that you thought about it). That pleasant diversion of your train of thought was interrupted by the nurse.
    "Er, lieutenant? You got a bit distant?"

    "Oh, forgive me. I'm flattered but I, ah… I'm spoken for," you said after a moment of trying to decide how to respond to that last bit. Fraternization between enlisted and officers was strictly prohibited, besides. Though you weren't sure if that applied to the WNR.

    She laughed. "Oh spirits, that's not what a meant. I mean, firstly, regulations, secondly, not really my preference, and thirdly, I just meant somebody to talk to."

    "Oh," you said awkwardly. Right. Some women were straight. "Forgive me, I, ah. I overstepped."
    "It's alright. It's not the first time I've been turned down," she said with a laugh. "And you didn't propose to me as soon as you woke up and saw me, so that puts you in the top ten percent of my patients."
    "Oh!" You actually laughed that time. "Men have done that?"

    "When you're the first woman they see after months at the front, some of them say some very interesting things," she admitted. "More importantly, I wanted to see if you wanted to just… talk. About your experience at the front. Your personal life. Anything you want, really. It doesn't have to be related to the war or even the Navy."

    What was there to talk about other than the war or the Navy? They had been your life since you were a teenager in one way or another. You hesitated. Opened your mouth, then closed it again. The front? What would she understand about it? Or about being on a submarine? Or anything that you had done? It felt like there was a yawning chasm between your understanding of the world and hers. Though. There was one thing, you realized.

    "Well. That girl that's already spoken for me? She's…" You took a breath, felt your heart flutter a little. "She's so smart. She's going to university in Tokei for electrical engineering? She knows so much about radio waves and currents and all these things I just don't understand. Can you believe that? It's…"

    "My little sister is overseas right now, training to be a doctor. A doctor. Because she wanted to be like me." The nurse said. "They have women only medical schools there! Not like here where you'd have to fight to get into one."

    "It's amazing, but even if they hadn't let her in, she would have done something amazing, I just know it." You were utterly convinced of that. A woman could and would do anything a man could do, but Aiko could do more than that.

    "She sounds like quite a girl."

    "The only thing I regret about this job is that it takes me away from her," you admitted. It felt raw to say that you had regrets about your position that had worked so hard for. You'd never said that to anyone. You'd never thought that. But it was true.

    "The loneliness is the worst part," you continued, surprised that the words were still coming out of your mouth. "You're surrounded by men and it's not like they're bad people? They're good people for the most part. They all do their duty and I couldn't ask for more of them. My men--my men have done things I wouldn't have thought I could have asked of them in every command I've had." Your voice broke a little and you hated it, tried to force yourself back into an aristocratic evenness.

    "But it's not the same." Miyoshi said quietly, encouraging you to continue.

    "Right. I can't… I can't talk to them. Even my peers on the… I was on a submarine before this. Best posting I've had so far. I had friends. I was doing important work. But you can't actually talk about anything of importance, about anything personal. Just work and the war. Stories about shore leaves. Things that aren't actually important. And then I wonder if the things I want to talk about are actually important? Or if talking about it might just make it worse? How stressful the whole thing is, you understand? The way your heart just gets squeezed tight in your chest when you're being shelled. Or how exciting and terrifying it it is when somebody's shooting at you. Or just how alone you feel even when you're in a small tube with forty people."

    "I don't quite understand your experiences," Miyoshi said with a sympathetic smile. "But I think that maybe those are things you should talk about with them. We encourage all of our patients to talk to other veterans about these things, since they're often the only people who really do understand."

    "I just… I worry, a lot, that maybe they don't feel these things, you know?" You confessed. "That… maybe that's..." Maybe you couldn't do this. Maybe they were right. No. No, you could. You had to. "...That I only feel these things because I'm a woman. That maybe I am more prone to this kind of thing because of… of my gender."

    "Lieutenant," her voice grew serious, though not stern. "Every man I've talked to about their experiences has had similar things to tell me about being in combat. If I wrote down what you told me and mixed it up with all the other notes we have from patients, no one would be able to pick yours out of the pile unless it was complete happenstance."

    "Then--" You felt a surge of anger and annoyance. "Then why does the doctor thing that I might be more susceptible to war neurosis?" You had to fight not to raise your voice.

    "He's just being cautious. New situations, new patients… this is a very new field." She said. Then she looked around, as if somebody else might sneak into the room, and leaned a little closer. "Though, also, he's kind of just a bit of a prick. I think all doctors find women threatening or something."

    You smiled. "That'd explain why he looked so scared when I took his clipboard."

    Keep snippets coming if this inspires any. We have a lot so we're doing our best to incorporate as many as we can!​
     
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    • [] Haruna faces down what initially looks like sexism or something personal/political but turns out to be plain old unhealthy inter-service rivalry when trying to talk with one of the army people.

    I feel like the juxtaposition of something so normal and petty (but pervasive) with everything else she's routinely facing could be interesting.

    [] We see someone having a crisis of faith in at least some aspects of their shitty far right political ideas after experiencing the reality of war.
    [] There is an air battle visible in the distance. Some people gather outside to watch and pass around a set of binoculars. Some people want absolutely nothing to do with this and find it a traumatic reminder.

    A few little incidental scenes that could be neat.
     
    [X] Haruna gets in a fight. Not just a shouting match, but almost a full on fist fight with one of the veterans who has... Opinions about women's place in the world.
     
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    [] Haruna gets in a fight. Not just a shouting match, but almost a full on fist fight with one of the veterans who has... Opinions about women's place in the world.
     
    [X] Haruna gets in a fight. Not just a shouting match, but almost a full on fist fight with one of the veterans who has... Opinions about women's place in the world.
     
    Artificial Girl said:
    You guys know that snippets don't cancel each other out, right?
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    I really don't want Haruna to get into a fight. I think it's a really dumb thing to do and is basically equivalent to her getting one of the 10 stress penalties on purpose. I think it's out of character for her given her previous responses to stressful or angering situations. If it's not in her prior character to do, I don't want it to be a trait she gains.

    Getting into a brawl is not something an officer should be doing. It will be a black mark on her career and used to say she's not mentally fit. It would greatly extend her stay in the hospital.
     
    That was a really awesome chapter! Great writing!

    How about this:

    [ ] Haruna gets caught in the middle of a food fight.
    [ ] Haruna finally decides to play a board game, discovers miniature ship battles.
    [ ] Improbably, another officer at the hospital has a small collection of saucy Gallian novels.
     
    open_sketchbook said:
    in SV's case, chaste lesbian romance as written by cis men) is so profoundly the default
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    Oh, it is? Huh, I think I've only read one lesbian romance story on SV, but I'm not the most active reader. I didn't realize that it came up a lot.

    Artificial Girl said:
    Right. Some women were straight.
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    Hee. That nurse was delightful and supportive. She's almost as awesome as the doctor is an asshole (which is a pretty high bar).

    I want Haruna to confirm that guy soldiers have the same feelings, but I see so many ways it could go wrong.
     
    [ ] Improbably, another officer at the hospital has a small collection of saucy Gallian novels.

    Fun ones!
     
    Alright y'all, snippet votes are not actually votes. They are just structured that way to engage with the systems of the quest subforum.

    We're not going to write Haruna getting into a fistfight with another patient because 1) that's not the story we're looking at right now, and 2) I dunno if you know this, but there's not a lot of ways to write a fight between an unarmed man and an unarmed woman that is Fun and Cool rather than abjectly terrifying and that's not what we want to write right now. Haruna is not Black Widow and she's not going to fucking leg-lock some dude's skull. Haruna is a character who either avoids fights, or kills a motherfucker. Her methods of doing the latter are, in order of preference, a cannon on a ship deck, a team of men with rifles, a revolver, or a sword.

    Seriously y'all.
     
    [X] Improbably, another officer at the hospital has a small collection of saucy Gallian novels.

    I back this one to the hilt!
     
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