mrkm-25:

Fallout Fic Discord!

I’m in the process of building a Fallout Fic Writers discord server! There have been small groups like this in the past but I would love to get something (hopefully bigger) started up now.

Currently I’m looking for anyone who might be interested in helping get this set up and rolling. Reblogs appreciated!

Please reach out to me if this is something you might want to help with.

Fallout: Returning Home A/N (Ch 42-43)

So what happens when you write half a chapter and then come back to finish it 7 years later, is that you find you have new and different ideas. In some cases, it just means you have ideas at all, where you didn’t before.

This is what happened with this chapter. I was very, very stressed about what to do to introduce all the members of the household to Calista. I knew Petrus and Europa would be first - the slaves would be up earlier than the rest of the house to ready the family for the day. Ajax had already met her the night before, so that was one more slotted into place. But then who? Lavinia? Janus? Lexarius? Spes? Corvus?

It was absolutely a daunting task. I didn’t want them all coming down the stairs like the Brady Bunch to find and meet a new person. But one by one didn’t seem like a good read either. I originally wrote what I had of it simply because it was willing to be written, at least up to that point - I was actually working on this somewhere between the posting of chapters 15 and 16 (so right around this time in 2015, actually). There were a lot of snippets I wrote “ahead” like that, simply because if I wrote those it meant I was writing SOMETHING instead of staring blankly at parts that refused to be written.

So along comes me a few days ago wanting to get this going again, and I thought. Hm. There’s a good chance Lavinia gets up before her boys do. That means she would meet Cal first. Lavinia gets violent when she’s jealous. We need to take our time introducing her, Vulpes has to talk her out of the gun safe first, so to speak. How do we get Cal out of the house for a bit?

Why would Corvus, an adult, still be living at home with his adoptive Uncle? Let’s move him out. But if we move him out, there’s no valid excuse for Vulpes to keep Spes around anymore either. Let’s move them both out, into a separate home. And then have Cal start her day there.

It ain’t rocket surgery, but it sure as hell felt like it.

This also gave me significantly more opportunities to have Cal and Spes interacting, another place Cal can spend some of her time at Fort City, and much easier ways to get her and Corvus the ability to have private conversations. Win, win, win.

The only thing it sacrifices is the scene where Vulpes explains Calista to Lavinia. We get to see its aftermath at the end of chapter 43. Unfortunately it means a lot less show and a lot more tell about how precisely “buckets o’ crazy” Lavinia really is, but I think there’s already so much going on in these chapters that adding that heavy action there would make it just overpowering.

I might still write this scene and post it in Stories for the Road. We shall see.

There are a few things that happened in the writing of these chapters that I am immensely proud of.

The biggest one, I would say, is the editing I did to the scene where Europa is meeting Calista for the first time. Initially I had Europa and Vulpes being much more familial in their interaction. Almost like a grandmother in the scene. That was how it had been written in 2015. But Europa is only a handful of years older than Vulpes himself, and is still his slave.

Now, I am writing it that he is far kinder to his slaves now than he used to be - but we have to remember that this is still the woman that before (and occasionally even while) Vulpes had Sylva he would bend over his desk or bed and take his frustrations out on. I remember one scene in particular where he’s sitting at his desk and she is on the floor, leaning against his leg with her head on his lap like a dog. He’s absolutely raped her before, he’s likely beaten her as well, and before all of that she belonged to the previous head of the Frumentarii - a man I’ve called Cerberus. And that’s the man that cut out Petrus’ tongue to keep him quiet. So it’s not exactly likely he was particularly nice to her either.

I’m trying to keep her in a balance of still having that ‘snap to it’ response without being fully afraid of Vulpes now. He has both Lavinia and Spes to sleep with, and she does what she’s told well enough that he has had no reason to want to punish her in many many years. But that does not erase the trauma she’s dealt with. So a good bit of editing made their interaction much closer to that of employer/employee than anything else. This is the dynamic I would like to maintain for Vulpes and his slaves from here on out. Maybe not anyone else’s slaves, if we see them, but definitely with his own.

He has also, to put it bluntly, run out of energy and interest in abusing them. He’s never been particularly cruel to Petrus. He’s had no reason to be. Europa though… has seen some shit.

In that editing I said to myself “I want him to be a changed man, not a different man.” And honestly being able to tell the difference is something that came from a lot of personal growth (and trauma) I’ve had in the last year or two. I’m glad it paid off somehow? If nothing else, it helped this scene a lot.

Another thing that took a lot of work was finding the lost voice of Corvus. I’ve got two scenes written that Corvus is in with Calista (for future chapters, again old writing from 2015). And I’ve written scenes with discussion of him and his behaviour as well. So I needed to make sure that when I wrote him in chapter 43 I didn’t upend all the work I’d done to build his character already. It took a good couple of hours to find all the scenes I needed to reference and then read them, but I’m pretty convinced I’ve done it.

Corvus is a character I am really fond of. He’s got that classic Inculta trait of family is everything, but also the issue that the Brothers don’t want this orphan in their family to begin with. It’s going to be a good bonding point for him and Cal - the simple fact that they’re Incultas that certain members of the Inculta family want nothing to do with. For a family so focused on family, they sure do have a lot of drama.

In going through and writing these new chapters I’m also trying to keep up with the other parts of the series. I’ve begun adding more to A Lake of Ashes (which actually has another 20 chapters, and is technically complete, but will need to be edited as the plots get modified along the way), and will only add chapters to it as the related material in RH is posted. They will stand side-by side until the end of RH.

I will also continue to post in the V6 Files, and try not to go past what’s current in RH either until V6 runs out of content. From here on out V6 will be far less smutty and far more plotty. One important thing to note however is that with V6 I am placing the chapters in chronological order by timeline, but that does not in any way mean I am writing them that way. Right now anything I write for it will get slotted in to wherever it should be in the timeline, so “new” chapters might not be the most recent one chronologically. In this case, I will update the chapter summary of the 'last’ chapter in the list to say what chapter to go to to read the new content, since I don’t think it will update correctly to show you that chapter automatically.

I will also likely be adding more Ghoul stories as we go (to Don’t Go Gentle into that Good Night).

Blessedly, at least Memoriae is a completed work. I do not plan to revisit it with the possible exception of maybe doing some editing at some point, but that is very low priority at the moment.

So all in all, we are making progress again for the moment. This story comes to me in fits and bursts, even though I have a massive outline/timeline to work from and know how the story ends. It’s the getting there that keeps changing. Only yesterday I had an idea that seriously changed how certain things will happen to reach the end of the story that made them make far more sense. So hopefully the time this is taking will be worth it!

Goodmorning Sugar

Idk Some fallout horses

sewingpatches:

So close… yet so far

Files can be found here

Printed kit found here

Assembled and lighted. Needs weathering and a panel to hide the wiring

So close… yet so far

Files can be found here

Printed kit found here

Just ordered this on Monday and it’s already here

Kinda just grabbed whatever wasn’t bank breaking and looked right enough in color. This meant that the blue isn’t the correct weight and I’m not sure yet if that’s a bad thing…

Got an event in July at good old Good Springs that requires me to get my shit together and make my descendant’s vault suit!