Corrupt Combustion is currently a series of lore post and story summaries, notes for an ambitious potential Murder Drones fanfic that takes serious inspiration from Jujutsu Kaisen.
How would I pitch it?
Sometimes, dead drones explode. The technical term is absolute combustion. Oil burns, light flares, heat spills out—but there’s more. It’s all wrong. Not tongues of flame, but holographic lines of aberrant code. The hands splay and the screen flashes, radiating an alien shape with three prongs. And the dead come burning back to life.
The gates of Cabin Fever are open, and the dead roam the frozen wastes. Above it all, Nori Doorman caries the whole world on her shoulders. Yeva and Alice are nothing but insects in her shadow.
But who is the sun? And what moon could eclipse it?
Deadlocked & Thrashing 2024-02-11 notes for the MD/JJK AU 5.9k words
The gates of Cabin Fever are open, and the dead roam the frozen wastes. Nori caries the whole world on her shoulders. Yeva and Alice are nothing but insects in her shadow. But who is the sun? Welcome to the the Corrupt Combustion AU. This is the backstory of an important character -- and it's not who you think.
Combustion Overview 2024-03-05 notes for the MD/JJK AU 5.7k words
Sometimes, dead drones explode. The technical term is absolute combustion. Oil burns, light flares, heat spills out -- but there's more. It's all wrong. Not tongues of flame, but holographic lines of aberrant code. The hands splay and the screen flashes, radiating an alien shape with three prongs. And the dead come burning back to life.
False Power, False Demise 2024-03-06 notes for the MD/JJK AU 6.4k words
From the outside, Adam was an unremarkable worker drone, retiring from the WDF to take care of his daughter. Then his core ignites. He rises to the highest ranks of the Wheel Group. Then he sacrificed himself to defeat a serial killing zombie. That is all Doll knows about her father's fate. The truth is so much more complex.
Nori's Average Tuesday 2024-04-07 Or: the Fearsome Rootkit Incident 4.0k words
Alright, so I think I might have an idea for where exactly Corrupt Combustion should begin. It'll open on a vision of surreal, dreamlike imagery. A drone is walking through a garden of nightshade flowers, each wreathed in twisting lines of purple code. Vines and chains snake through the garden, while all around them mingle the corpses of humans and drones.
Uzi's Villain Arc 2024-04-15 notes for the MD/JJK AU 2.7k words
Like other rough drafts in this series, this post was written on discord, in the context of infodumping to someone who was pretty fluent in a lot of details of Corrupt Combustion that haven't been articulated in full posts yet. This post in particular suffers from being in conversation with details of Uzi's background and arc that haven't yet been covered.
Regarding Branch Predictors \[WIP\] 2024-05-20 notes for the MD/JJK AU 2.8k words
Today I thought about where black boxes come from, and what exactly branch predictors are for, and I'm going to make it your problem.
Lobotomy Corruption 2024-06-22 notes for the MD/JJK AU 3.5k words
I've had a lot of thoughts about how Tessa fits into CC. I haven't yet completely worked it all out, but here's my notes. Revised on 2025-08-07. Here's what I'm thinking: Tessa's little found family weren't just random dumped drones. They were specifically solver drones, found wanting in the company's evaluation and discarded. The researchers lit their cores, saw their combat potential, and went "Nah, y'all dogwater."
Compression & Extraction 2024-06-28 notes for the MD/JJK AU 15.2k words
So, we'll start with a quick recap since it's been a while since I talked about Corrupt Combustion. Bear in mind that even when we cover the established timeline, a bunch of things are going to be retconned--- I mean, recontextualized."
The Fundamentals of Corruption 2024-07-09 notes for the MD/JJK AU 3.4k words
Let's take it from the top once again. Computers are haunted. Computation is fundamental to reality, and there are certain patterns of computation that when executed, trigger unpredictable effects. physical speaking, 'unpredictable' translates to an increase in entropy, or even more basically, to heat. Which is to say: bad code will literally fry your machine.
Fixing the Uzi Problem 2024-07-17 notes for the MD/JJK AU 1.7k words
First, we're ditching the existing DollZi breakup plot (the one described in Compression & Extraction), way too sudden. And I'm finally settling on a premise where Doll & Uzi are these weirdly intense loners with no other friends; everyone's intimidated/freaked out by them. At first, Doll igniting her core genuinely seems like it's not gonna change anything between them, but Lizzy courting Doll is Doll's first taste of popularity.
Repair, Slither, Retcon 2025-01-11 notes for the MD/JJK AU 2.1k words
It's been a little while since I hit this beat, hasn't it? I wouldn't say I'm back in the swing of things, but I spent today thinking about Corrupt Combustion, and I have a few disorganized thoughts to articulate. I'll be jumping around a bit not, a whole lot of connection between them all. (And of course, I don't want to share all of them right now, or what the significance of some potentially puzzling things introduced here. Suffice it to say I have things planned for Beau and a future antagonist, and the groundwork it's being sneakily laid here.)
Top Secret Mom Lore 2025-01-14 Explaining SOME of Doorman Nori's abilities 2.6k words
As you may have noticed, I've been thinking about Corrupt Combustion again. In general, I like keeping cards close to my chest --- certainly, I'd like for there to be big reveals if I ever write this story For Real --- but I've been wondering what the utility of that really is, when the project is this disorganized, and the people who read it are as much brainstorming partners as they are proper readers.
Notes on Nightshade 2025-08-07 notes for the MD/JJK AU 2.7k words
Yesterday, I thought about CC Zero — i.e. the prologue focusing on Triss & Amda. This meant figuring out what actually happened in Cabin Fever Labs. See Lobotomy Corruption for prior thoughts. Nobody remembers what happened in the Sorting Algorithm. The “Nightshade Incident” is classified, and everyone’s memories are scrambled. Of course, it’s not a perfect forgetting. The memories are still there, suppressed, and occaisionally, they reassert themselves as something coherent.