Bane/Wasp Fic
2024-07-12
Here’s a story idea. Premise is something like this:
It’s a mercenary world out there for vesperbanes. Elizi will do whatever it takes to put food on her plate — well, almost anything. She still has a heart. But if it takes a little finesse to get her fair share? Sometimes you gotta play a little dirty to stay in the game. Elizi does the best she can, and maybe one day, that’ll be enough. Till then, honor is a luxury.
Once, a euvespid queen’s heir was chosen by the point of a knife. Born in court of scorpions, the mandate of survival was all a queen needed. Today, the Pantheca insists queens be chosen democratically, and murder is a crime, even between competing princesses. It’s an enlightened age.
Silátil is the queen’s fifth princess, the youngest. Her sisters have had their whole lives to gain popular favor, and Silátil’s genius was fit only for the blade, not for politics. She has no chance to rule — well, almost no chance. When three of her sisters are struck dead in the night, there’s only two candidates left.
Then her mother is found dead, apparent suicide. Silátil’s last living sister assumes power, and declares her mother’s death an assassination. It’s clear the colony is under threat, a foe their defenses cannot withstand.
So her sister hires vespers with a mission: protect Silátil and escort her to one of her mother’s safehouses until the regent’s administration can determine the truth. As a euvespid princess, Silátil’s life can only be trusted to the most qualified vesperbanes, the best of the best.
Are Elizi and her team qualified? When a euvespid queen-regent is paying the bill, who can afford to tell the truth?
I also thought of a prologue sequence to characterize the both of them.
Elizi’s would start with her in the middle of a mission, and she’d have a few saving the cat moments where she puts her life on the line to protect her clients from direbeasts or fungus’d bugs.
Then when they get back, Elizi might guilt trip or double charge her clients to get a few extra bones. (One of Elizi’s teammates might be a new recruit, and feel what they’re doing is a bit… unethical. But Elizi’s explains that low ranking vesperbanes like us gotta hustle, it’s just the nature of the game.)
Anyway, with her new payout she goes out to eat a meal fit for a vesperbane. In the process, probably encounters some poor nymphs starving on the street, and spares a little bit of her food to give them something to chew on.
While eating her own food, another vesperbane comes and sits beside her. They couldn’t help but overhear what Elizi said about the hustle, and they think the two of them might be like-minded individuals. How does she feel about a partnership?
Elizi, of course, is always open to opportunity. She doesn’t say yes, she’s not stupid, but she leaves the door open.
After that, she’s on the lookout for a new mission, finding some bee merchants about to leave town and she’s explains how dangerous the roads around her can be, and insists they hire some vesperbanes to protect them.
Vesperbane from earlier shows up to coaborate / help her sell, and in the end, the merchants hire Elizi’s team, including the new guy.
They travel down the road for a bit, then along the road, some bandits drop down from the trees, and the new guy reveals their plan: they’re gonna kill the merchants, grab all their money, and sell the rest of the goods for a nice chunk of profit
Elizi is like what the fuck, no. The new guy is confused. I thought you understood how this world works. You do whatever you can to get whatever you can. That’s what it means to be a vesperbane
But it’s obvious that Elizi’s not on board with it, so they start backpedaling.
For Elizi, it’s simple: being a vesperbane means getting the mission done, and Elizi’s mission is to protect the merchants.
But the guy’s like what’s the point? We negotiated that you be paid half upfront. Missions fail sometimes, and you already got paid something. Maybe the killing’s too much for you, but why get in our way? It’ll be better for us both if you just run back to town, tell em you failed.
All of this building to Elizi’s big character moment where she’s like no. I dont cut corners, I dont let anyone go hungry, and I dont take anyone else out of the game. That it is what it means to grind.
Then she kicks their ass and takes them back to town to be tried as defects.
Silátil’s characterization is much simpler. We’d see her being a prodigy with seals and fighting, a few glimpses of euvespid formalities, Silátil interacting with her personal servants. The point established, she doesn’t get along with anyone well, but when it comes to skills and knowledge, Silátil is just better than everyone. Better than her instructors, better than her sisters. Even her mother recognizes this.
Then we’d have some intercut signs of the killing starting. One sister dying, then the next. We’d see each one from the killed’s pov, and the killer would be relentless and anonymous, but there’d be calling cards.
Silátil has an alibi for all of them, but the next sister suspects something up anyway; she never liked or trusted Silátil.
But circumstances are arranged so that when they’re having a conversation/argument in broad daylight, one of the calling cards comes, and the first attack comes for Silátil’s head, and she narrowly dodges.
It seems like the killer is going to come for them both at once, so the sister takes Silátil and runs for safety.
This all builds to the expected twist that yup, the killer is Silátil, and she strikes when her sister’s guard is finally down
I think I had thought of a line/emotional point to make here but it’s been a while and I’m tired, but suffice it to say that Silátil’s motivation is “Y’all are weak, I’d be a better queen”
Anyway, as Silátil is plotting how to take out her last sister, that’s when she’s informed that the queen is dead and the colony is in a kind of lockdown (and mourning, but that can wait).
Now here’s the thing: killing her mother was not Silátil’s plan at all; her mom is a good queen, Silátil wants to be like her. She’s devastated at the news, and then she has to face her last sister.
And there’s a hilarious dynamic here because how do you convince them you’re innocent when you definitely did some murder — just not this one? It’s a tricky line to walk, and Silátil is pretty sus but the sister can’t prove what’s up yet.
So obviously, hiring the vesperbanes is both for her protection, but also to protect people from her, and this would probably clear/hinted at in the mission brief. (Might be funny if the regent is like “vesperbanes look underneath the underneath right? I’ll carefully imply all of my suspicions” and Elizi just. doesn’t pick up on any of it)
Anyway, all of that, is set up for the meet-cute between Elizi and Silátil being the latter attacking and trying to kill the former.
With a knife to her throat, she’s like: you’re weak and I don’t need anyone to protect me, least of all a vesperbane.
And will they fall in love?
Of course they will.
Every corpse is a palace
- gravefly: n.
- a species of true flies in the order Diptera, solitary bugs known for pursuing out corpses to lay their young in, even to the point of digging up graves; also known as coffinbugs, rot warblers, or wolf-maggots.
- (metaphorical) one who brings about or thrives in ruin and decay, especially at the expense of others; a parasite.
Tarandi would have been a mercenary — that was the plan — but academia had made a better offer. It didn’t pay well, no; she’d be better off slitting throats. But writing papers wouldn’t see her wake up dead one of these days. (Except out of boredom, perhaps). Wasn’t hard to spin together a literature review that would keep the Stewartry paying, and it wasn’t hard to skip a meal or two to make ends meet.
It’s all going as rough as it ever does — then a cheque bounces, and now she’s wondering who she’s gotta kill to make rent this month.
first, let’s talk about what graveflies actually are
several bugs in the heartlands dont quite reach sapience. the big ones are like, mosquitoes, and scorpions, and a couple of beetles
but there’s a pretty common bug i hadnt thought much about at all — that is, regular ol flies. specifically of the maggots-in-rotting-meat variety
you see, something that’s been repeatedly established is in black nerve that the niche of maggots are actually filled by “corpse slugs” instead. and since the logic most heartlands bugs operating under is just getting more or less scaled up… what would a giant fly look like in practice?
one albeit obvious approach is to make them like vultures. (this kind of doesnt work because vultures should still exist, since there are crows, but i digress.)
so anyway, i thought an interesting way to make this works is have maggots and corpse slugs at the same time
corpse slugs simply eat dead bugs. maybe they have like, beaks or whatever for cracking chitin.
maggots, by contrast, are specialized for eating mammals. well, not mammals per se, though they are far more common and can suffice as subsistence. but what they really want…
…is direblooded mammals
so here’s the idea: what if flies were a monster evolutionarily adapted for interacting with bat blood? like a more general version of the way okeila flies are adapted for feeding on vesperbat ichor
and the more i thought about this, the more i came up with a setup i think makes for a good creature. you’d have these swarms of flies, right? but these are actual swarms now — at least one species of fly is full on eusocial, if not halfway there
maybe they’d end up with a trimorphism like this:
male drone are capable of flight, and fly around the countryside scavenging for dead mammal carcases. when they find them, they memorize the route and fly back to the… let’s call it a nest
female workers are much larger than males, bulked out with bat blood to become menacingly strong. they defend the nest, and they’re capable of physically dragging cadavers back to their hive
when they bring them back, they strip away the meat and dump it into this sort of bloody rotting soup where growing maggots wriggle endlessly. the bones they use to make tools and reinforce their constructs
as for the “nest”…
well, let’s put a pin in that, and discuss what happens when the maggots grow up. most of them become more workers or drones, but obviously, given the terminology, some of them are going to become fly “queens”.
at first, queens can fly just like males, and they join the males in scouting for corpses. perhaps they even assist the males in their work, in the interest of learning how every job in the swarm is done
(they have powerful wings and are bigger than males — so they’re also capable of doing a worker’s job. essentially, they can do everything. this is biologically questionable, so maybe the reason why the flies love direblood is because they need the magic blood to enable their roided up queens to exist)
anyway, eventually it’s time for a new queen to leave the “nest”. she’ll then search for a big carcass to begin constructing a new “nest”
and she’ll let the meat get nice and stinky to attract some fly suitors, and if she’s pretty enough and her nest big enough some of them will defect to live with her. then she can begin laying her eggs in the meat she’s gathered.
and — we’re now getting to the singular image that this creature is premised on. what all of this is supposed enable. you see, at this point, with children of her own, why should the queen even have to move again?
i just have this vision of a bloated bug, gorged on blood, throned upon rotting meat, her chitin cracked open and her internal organs intermigling so deeply with the bloody viscera that intergrates into her biology and the distinction between “queen” and “nest” has uttery dissolved
a successful colony consumes so much direblood that they become more post-mammalian abomination than bug
and it’s for this reason that when entomologies speak of the the worst infestations of mass grave flies, there’s a special term for their apotheosis: the myxogoth queen
so basically, the idea is this girl makes a grift by digging up old, pre-Pantheca books and translating/rephrasing these obscure manuscripts, passing it off as her own original research
story starts at the bank, where the teller’s like ‘babe your account is overdrawn/empty/whatever’ and after some debugging (perhaps after she goes home and roots through her mail), it’s revealed that the stewartry as cut off her funding after her latest plagarized piece about graveflies is deemed “insufficiently noteworthy”
a few scenes later, we get to the key moments of the story, which is a someone from the stewartry helping her do actual research for a change (“so, why did you even try to write an an article about graveflies, of all things” they ask, to which her response is essentially “i flipped through an encyclopedia and there was fuck all written, seemed like free real estate”)
which leads to them out hunting for graveflies, finding some and tracking them back to their nest
(whereupon they make many new discoveries, such as the fact that these bugs arent solitary in least — these motherfuckers are eusocial, and this hive is actually scary big)
also, the main character’s vesperbane power is animating cordyceps zombies. this ties into the tracking plot someone, though i havent figured out the specifics
but the big turning point in this fic is when all this fucking about with the graveflies gives her a scare for her life — and she realizes she actually wants to live and not just lie and rot writing shitty papers
(the thematic point about the graveflies being a metaphor for her approach to life may or may not be elevated subtext to text here)
as for the actual structure, it might be broken of a few short chapters of tarandi, perhaps interspersed with descriptions of a gravefly going about its lifecycle
in fact, you could do something cute with the chapter titles
- “My Corpse is an Empty Husk” (where tarandi discovers her finacial woes)
- “This Corpse is a Treasure” (gravefly flying around, finding a corpse and returning to tell her nestmates)
- “My Corpse is a Failure” (where the stewartry’s criticism is relayed to her)
- “This Corpse is a Battleground” (graveflies arrive to get corpse, have to fight off a vulture or some other scavenger)
- “My Corpse is an Invitation” (tarandi et al. tracking down the local graveflies)
- “This Corpse is a Nursery” (worker planting eggs in a corpse, maybe pov of maggots burrowing in warm flesh)
- My Corpse is a Soldier (shit goes down, tarandi uses her cordyceps thralls to save the day)
- This Corpse is an Arsenal (graveflies doing some fucky shit with blood mutation, maybe. the specialize solider flies come out to fight)
- My Corpse is a Story to Tell (tarandi stitting down and writing the paper)
- Your Corpse is a Throne (spooky scene of the queen gravefly)
- Every Corpse is a Palace (this final chapter would be actual paper she writes, if i feel like writing some fantasy academics lmao)
Strangers in Levinsdeep
2023-10-27
Chapter One. a mantis in debt bondage gets hired to work off their debt on a whaling ship’s crew hunting cachalots. there’s an asshole vesperbane working as defense on the boat too. (we find out the bane is salty about getting roped into helping townsfolks; they’re in town on a larger mission). on one voyage, a minor storm happens, and the crew rescues some bug stranded at sea.
Chapter Two. a chorus-roach dockworker is doing odd jobs. she helps the rescued bug with lodging & recovery. the dockworkers dont have beds and sleep in big roachy piles, but the bug has no where else to stay, so they chill with the roaches.
while that bug get settled, the roach goes to talk to some ants about living space. the ant colony just beyond town wants to expand, but most of the forest is owned by a euvespid princess who is slowly clearing out the forests. spinner ants cant afford to rent her land, so they need to go elsewhere.
Chapter Three. a spinner ant messenger/scout running around town, scopes out various places where the ants can possibly stay. there’s no space with the roaches, so the scout looks elsewhere. the scout encounters a roach dockworker far from the dock. this one follows them to the therid slums before losing the trail. returning to the original mission, this one now scouts out the slums
Chapter Four. a therid surgeon is fixing up some spinner ant injured in riot. she notices some weird fungus in this one’s body, but this one is poor and the surgeon’s time is short, so the treatment is touch and go.
next, out of curiousity, the surgeon goes to see a family member living in the therids slums. this scene explores a sharp divide between two groups of therids in levinsdeep: the medical workers are paid well & treated politely, but not allowed space to build webs, while the slum-dwellers proudly cling to web-building
Chapter Five. a euvespid cop roughs up some (homeless, as far as the law cares) therids, and destroys their web-tents. the therids are agitated about the spinner ants encroaching on their space. zhe detains one and takes them back to interrogate, suspecting them of killing spinner ants
Chapter Six. mystic reaver ant pirate comes back from a whaling expedition. she has an old, long-soured friendship with a euvespid. encounter zher now, zhe strikes up conversation hoping to get the pirate’s help with a tough case.
(the therid they captured happened to have died, leaving them at a loss as to who’s really behind the killings. worse, now a euvespid has died, so the cops are really motivated to catch them).
the pirate tries to ignore this call to adventure (it’s not her problem), but when wasp cops start to suspect the culprit is a reaver ant, the pirate’s mystic abilities might be just what’s needed to crack the case.
Chapter Seven. a gestaltee is making preparations for a big event, but mostly goofing off, several bees playing with each other. specifically, their bakery has been commisioned to cater for a euvespid princess’s big party — said princess soon comes by and makes some bitchy requests which makes the gestaltee sad.
they all get back to work, but then some euvespid cops and a reaver pirate come in and ask the bees for some alchemical solutions to help their serial killer investigation. they have devised a trap that should stain the killer with a distinct scent.
that night, the gestaltee gets a message from the princess requesting a sudden meeting at their woodland castle. the tired bees are trying to sleep, so one bee is sent in alone. this is a trap, of course, and the bee soon smells the exact scent her gestaltee had given the cops — now getting ever closer.
bee runs, flying away into the spooky woods.
Chapter Eight. it’s weevil time. don’t actually how i’m gonna do this section without injuring their mystique. i guess there’d be some trippy visions, implying the weevil’s protection of the bee? perhaps even with self-sacrifice. something comes over the weevil, and they tell the bee to run away — except the bee wants to return the favor and save the weevil.
Chapter Nine. one of the moths works at the lighthouse, and incidently serves as night watch. that night, on patrol, he encounters the bee flying out of the forest. the moth senses something off about it, investigates and attracts hostile attention from the strange bee.
it would have been strongly implied up till now — the weevil’s visions all but confirming it — but it’s here where it’s established that the strange bugs all along have been possed by some manner of ghostrot fungus.
but when this fungus tries to jump from the bee to the moth, though, the moth completely no-sells the threat due to a quirk of how tenebra moths work — every one of them is extremely well acquainted with fungus crawling in their body cavities, trying to puppet them, and every day there’s still light in their eyes means they’re winning.
but the next day, when the moth tries to warn people about the bodyjacking threat, nobody trusts it because yknow, >tenebra moth. they just think he’s gone black, and lock him up for later execution.
while locked up, they overhear how the bees are preparing the meal for the princess’s festival, and he realizes her majesty and everyone at the party is in danger. all he needs is one more chance to make everything right and clear his name. to escape his cell, the moth gives in to the darkness within
Chapter Ten. the vesperbane we saw on the boat in chapter one is now guarding the prison, and she’s there when mothboy makes his escape. most banes would attack them with no hesitation, but she had encounter a weevil that left her with the cryptic instruction to trust the moth, and she decides to humor it. true to form, despite very evidently manifesting the curse, the moth has retained enough lucidity to communicate that they’re trying to stop something bad.
so you might’ve notice i’ve been typing for a while. i ended up touching out the original outline, then i kept adding stuff, and now the original ending i wrote feels like it’s not resolved enough, and i cant quite figure out what i want this story to be about
like i guess this is hyping up a big fight at the party, maybe vesperbane versus weevil, cops & pirate shows up to help, the surgeon dissects the strange and reveals the bodyjacking fungus, etc.
but like, did the princess do something to attract the attention of whatever vesperbane devised the fungus?
what is the vesperbane doing between chapter one and the last chapter, what drives their character arc? (what was their original mission? obviously this is setting up for defeating the fungus to be the fulfilment their true mission, but they can’t know that from the jump, or the story would logically be over in chapter one)
so i suppose this is incomplete, sorry
The Moon is a Silver Flame
2023-09-02
Heroes have humble beginnings, got it? When you write my saga, my beginning was humble. Not trivial, not laughable, and not petty.
If you want to know why I became a vesperbane, when I first started learning to wield power, where the story of Argenta, the silver-eyed fiend begins, that tale begins the day I saved Istri’s life. But I’m a only vesperbane because that’s what power is. It’s not my story. Still, that story, that beginning, it isn’t trivial, laughable or petty — it’d make for a nice, heroic beginning.
But this story is the truth, got it? And the words don’t sit right in my mouth unless I start telling it from here: at five instars, I knew I’d be a hunter of monsters. I’d sell my life to the vespers, I’d grind until my chitin breaks, and I’d become a hunter of weremoths.
Why? Because that was the day I lost my frisbee.
Don’t laugh. Don’t say it’s petty. It’s humble.
important context here is knowing what the deal with sorrowmoths is
plot for this one doesn’t exist in any form but incoherrent sketches. i could probably weave it back together if someone asks. contact me?