Caffeinated Otter

Bunny

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 22:34:00 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

Prompt from the late, lamented making_up_mech_pilots on Cohost — Mech Pilot who will make shadow puppets with their Mech's floodlights

After two days of knife-edge tension, stepping your machine slowly and delicately through the ruins of a dead world, seeing distant glimpses of the enemy mech slip in and out of your gunsights too quick for a targeting fix — and presumably just as fleeting in the enemy ace's, because no way in hell you're perfectly evading their attention — someone up top makes a bad call, either unforced or as a desperate fallback strat, and nukes the local pingate.

Aside from abandoning you down here, cut off lightyears from anywhere, the EMP burns out just about every embedded computer in your mech, leaving it a hunkered, lobotomised sculpture, frozen in temporary cover with its top-mount sensor cluster ducked behind the shell of some industrial building.

After quietly shitting bricks, you follow the drills from the procedure manual. Try all the self-tests. (Nothing.) Try a reboot. (Nothing; she's very obviously dead.) Locate, prime, and yank the pullcord switch for the emergency canopy release; explosive bolts destructively opening her up one last time, for you to shove away the now-blank HUD glass and crawl out through the cage of gas struts and plumes of acrid smoke.

There's a whole block of training about what you can strip out of a downed mech, how and why, to survive on a hostile world with no supply lines until help comes. (It always says until, in the training, never if.)

You'd been trying to reacquire the enemy for three hours before the bang, and there's no sight or sound of them now, so you start assessing what is and isn't fucked beyond usefulness. There's an emergency fuel cell generator encapsulated behind each kneecap's armour plate; you wrestle one out, start buzzing out any onboard systems dumb and foolproof enough to have survived.

As evening falls, you manage to power on one of the shoulder floodlights, keep sweating through unloading everything you can. When the enemy finds the mech, you have to assume, they'll torch it or blow it up; matériel denial.
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and the other always lies (VI)

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 15:35:58 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

At the bar, a very pretty martial type, her wide hips clad in tight leather trews and a brace of knives strapped to each thigh, is chatting to Falchionette; making lots of eye contact, laughing often and smokily, and running a fingertip slowly, caressingly around the rim of her wine cup.

Halfway across the taproom, seated at a rickety table, Vanya rests one elbow on the table, chin in her hand, and stares.

"Why are you ogling, Vanya," Goncho Ninefingers says wearily. "You've seen plenty of people try their luck with Nette."

"Well," Vanya says, and licks his lips. "Well, it's every man's fantasy, isn't it?"

"What," Goncho says. "Nette?" and casts a dubious eye across at her. "I suppose her arse looks alright—"

"Oaf," Vanya complains. "Two questgivers!"

"...What," Goncho says.

"Two questgivers!" Vanya repeats, earnest and slightly hushed. "You know. You know—"
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Daemon (XVII)

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 22:39:15 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

Prompt from the Cohost make_up_a_wizard account — wizard who came from the moon

"Hey! What's the holdup!" Southbridge bellows, leaning out of the window of Sarah's SUV. The simmering, honking wall of traffic ahead neither moves nor answers.

"If you want to interrogate the traffic jam so bad, get out and walk until you find out," Moiré grouses, slouched down in the front passenger seat.

"Don't be grumpy with me just because the local fairies are starting to recognise us," Southbridge tells her, kicking the back of her seat.

"Who answered May I take your name? with You can have a DNS address! and gave them 8.8.8.8?" Moiré snaps.

"C'mon," Southbridge wheedles. "What is this, the twelfth century? Who even tries GIMME YOUR NAME, SUCKER these days?"

"You got a fairy vaporised by Google," Moiré says. "No shit they see us coming, now!"
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Teatime

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 17:46:48 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

Prompt from the Cohost make_up_a_wizard account — wizard who is trying to use their fire cantrip to make tea

"Now, young magister," Neve says in the calming, unflappable tones of a good personal valet, entering the library, "what's all this?"

Emeraldine the Lustrous immediately puts her hands behind her back with a sheepishly perturbed expression, as though she's still only knee-high and hiding the evidence of a purloined biscuit clutched in her fingers. "Ah!" she says. "You're back!"

"Indeed," Neve says. "And so, it appears, are you. I rather thought I understood that you'd be staying with the Forsythe-Odinsdottirs for the duration of my annual visit to my dear mother?"

"Ah," Emeraldine says sheepishly. "Such was the plan!"

The fact that young, aristocratic wizards are in such dire need of oversight is the reason why Neve is assigned to Emeraldine, and for her annual several-day-long debrief by "Mother" — a deep and secretive department within the intelligence service. The magister should have been safely ensconced with the household of Florence "Bunny" Forsythe-Odinsdottir, and that worthy's own minder, until Neve's return.

"Very good, young magister," Neve says crisply. "Is there any need for me to arrange some token of condolences for the Forsythe-Odinsdottirs? Perhaps I should take note regarding future seating arrangements, if there's been some spat or falling-out between you?"
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Prima Nocta (VIII)

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 09:53:25 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

The fearful crowd gawping at her from a safe distance is the furthest thing from Xyphia's attention; she has work crews to direct and ground stability to monitor, the relentless gush of magical power to keep corralled to relatively safe channels, rapid revisions to the work schedule to make, communicate, and oversee.

Far from her attention, that is, until Gerda, shrieking, elbows her way violently through the front rank, and Xyphia has to hastily ensure she's not running too much magic through her own person, lest any spark over and — well, who knows what. And Robin would rightly never forgive her, and probably demand some kind of satisfaction, and—

"Robin!" Gerda shrieks, as Xyphia flinches a little from the noise and fuss, hastily wedging, tying off and divesting a dozen streams of control. "Robin!"

A dreadful possibility occurs.

"You're not hurt, are you?" Xyphia blurts. "I thought I caught everything — I thought—" and has to stop, mouth puddled again with blood, wincing and grimacing and reluctant to be so uncouth as to spit it out in front of a lady. She glances frantically at the discarded remnant of her robe, over yonder on the ground, out of reach; pats her pockets frantically with the hand not clutching her impromptu staff, searching for some surviving handkerchief or rag to wipe her lips.

Robin arrives, barging through the gap in the crowd which Gerda already carved, and skids to a halt. She stares at Xyphia wide-eyed, mouth screwed up in an uncertain way, and goes a little pale; and Xyphia belatedly considers that she's in quite a state of dishevelment, and as much as a fellow wizard would understand, it might to a less comradely onlooker seem unprofessional. She tugs worriedly at the scorched sleeve of her undershirt, looks wretchedly at the handful of brittled fabric that comes away in her fingers, and then, making the best of things, does her best to discreetly empty her mouthful of spit-diluted blood into the scrap and surreptitiously fling it away behind her.

It leaves her hand dismayingly smeared. She chances a glance at it, hides it behind her back, and wipes it as inconspicuously as she can on the back of her skirt. No doubt that's already filthy enough to obscure the evidence.

"Robin!" Gerda wails, in lieu of any more articulate complaint, tone distressed, and before Xyphia can begin to apologise, the big woman firms her jaw in response, squares her shoulders, and steps forward.
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Gyre (III)

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 22:40:44 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

Tristienne's chin rests upon her chest, in the darkness of the hood. Her hands fall by her sides in perfect relaxation.

The programming pod is a dim almost-lacuna, a drowsy dreamstate in which her brain, rewiring, conjured incoherent visions, lights and colours, symbols, hallucinations. She thinks she remembers fragments of it — her uncle, snarling, pushing her beneath roiling water with hands at her throat. Zeule, impassive and funeral-garbed, dropping closed a casket lid above her. Birds which became blades which became birds. Her body dissolving to seafoam, the cold wind blowing through her. Eidetic flashes of the complete technical specification of her new destrier, her houndframe, her Merlin-body of memory alloys and programmable matter, with its reactor and 6DOF thrust vectoring and panoply of guns.

She'd thought smartblades were beautiful, sword and swordmaster become one in speed and sensation. She'd had no idea what it meant to become one, weapon and wielder, wielded, welded. She'd had no idea of clarity, celerity — of beauty.

Her armour, now, has no suite of commands to simply open. Its polycomposite surface is all the more effective for replacing, not merely surrounding, fragile flesh; its embedded sensory web as fine-grained and sensitive as a palm, a sole, a tongue, across each square millimetre of it. The bulbous eye-domes of the sleek hardshelled hood hide not just her upper face, but docking connectors and transcranial maglinks and its own integrated sensor suite. It's nothing like the richness of eyes her mech-flesh has — but neither as limited as the pearly light-starved legacy jelly orbs inside her face within it.

They made hounds, in the War of Barbarity. But that was long ago, with long-ago tech and mores. The ritual is antique, a pantomime show of ritual humiliation: she is wheeled in like equipment, like a savage thing in need of restraint, manhandled on an upright two-wheeled trolley. Transit bolts locked into her at four points to stop her simply stepping off; the fat, stiff cable-bundles of programming jesses looped high above the trolley's handles to sink into their sockets on either side of her thoracic spine. The subject — now rendered object — is defaced, de-faced, by the hood; made bestial, made hound, by the implantation of vicious ceramic canines, top and bottom. Others wear the hab's colours; she is newly, glossy, unpersoned insectile black.

But whatever the onlookers see, Tristienne sees an empty, vacuous shell of an event; meaning assumed only by rote habituation. She is not humiliated; she is not restrained. She belongs, fiercely. She is returned home.

"Your bodyguard," her uncle smirks on his high throne, to his wife, to Tristienne's charge, into the charged and horrified silence of his court — "perfected for your service."

Perhaps they think she cannot see, that she does not observe. That she truly is hooded, or that her tipped-down head averts her new gaze. Tristienne can see the heatmap of his body, see the way his heart speeds with the flush of petty triumph his overborne malice brings him; sees his renewed feeling of virility and power. She cannot help but see. But her attention is not for him, nor for his restive courtiers and their baulking at the terrible gesture she constitutes.
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Prima Nocta (VII)

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 19:37:36 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

From the Cohost prompt account make_up_a_wizard — wizard who can't stop, now that it all finally makes sense

"Oh, ah," Xyphia says, in the worried tones of someone with a towering armful of glassware who's just reached the conclusion that the wobbling is going to inexorably turn into a catastrophic collapse, and there's literally nothing they can do to stop it — "piss!"

There are teams of elementals in the tunnels, rockwyrms in the ground, Xyphia herself standing in the street to help coordinate everything; after a couple of weeks of careful initial tests, she gave the go-ahead for a full-speed run of tunnel some half-hour ago. An unobtrusive district-sized scrying circle, painted out in strategic circumferential sigils on backstreet walls, is focused back through itself to put the works themselves clearly into her mind's eye; and suddenly, with total clarity, she's hit on the answer to some puzzling discontinuities in her readings. Under the cathedral, sealed away from routine magical perception, there are secret chambers — either forgotten or purposely unmentioned to her; and not merely a few of them, a sprawling labyrinth.

It would have been extremely handy to know beforehand, while she was exactingly working out how to carve new holes under the district without anything collapsing. She's not sure whether the ground's shiver is perceptible to anyone not so attuned to it, though she's sure that cats and birds are startling to it; but magnified by precarious height, she sees the cathedral's needle gently sway, like a blade of grass.

If it comes down — when it comes down—

She does not even have time to complete the thought, if she is to forestall it. Within her mind, she seizes the delicate, immaterial control structures of the scrying circle and rips them away, leaving the crudest possible instrument: a containment ring, a pool of power, and a wizard.

"DOWN TOOLS!" she bellows at her workforce.

Power, but not enough, not for what she needs. She punches the circle downward into a cone, a proboscis; the city's on a line of natural power, that's why there's a wizard's tower here to begin with. Tapping into it ought to be done carefully, to yield a measured and manageable flow.
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Daemon (XVI)

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:26:27 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

"Where do you keep getting these shirts from," Sarah says, looking at the maidbot, who's wearing one that reads I'm here to sweep dishes and do your mom and on the back, And I already did her dishes.

"The internet!" Southbridge says happily.

The maidbot wordlessly plays a chunky-pixelled four-frame animation on her LED-matrix faceplate, of blowing and popping a pink bubblegum bubble.

"SOUTHBRIDGE!" Moiré says thunderously, somewhere outside the house.

"What?" Southbridge says, startled and affronted, looking all around and then at Sarah. "I didn't do anything! Like actually didn't!"

Moiré stomps in, and points an accusing finger at the maidbot.

"Some fucking spambo—" she starts, and the maidbot sullenly mutters something.

"He's what?" Moiré says murderously.
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First Aid Kittens: Headcanon

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 11:25:35 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

From the Cohost Making Up A Villain prompt account — Villain who meow meows

"Yesssss," a loudspeaker on the wall hisses, slightly crackly, all prurient ogling glee.

First Aid Kitten Bobtail — forty minutes into navigating a labyrinthine warehouse-sized villain trap, and newly staggered out of a contraption that doused her in freezing water — glowers up at it, mouth grimly set, refusing to say a word.

"Come on," the loudspeaker coaxes. "Say something cool. Do a one-liner! The First Aid Kittens are always good for a quip."

"I hope they put your ass away somewhere you only get to watch Seinfeld reruns, Fandoom," Bobtail says through gritted teeth.

"Yessssss!" Fandoom hisses.

"The fuck do you want, you tasteless Whedon-dialogue junkie? Well, that just happened!" Bobtail mugs an Eh? Eh? face, doing jazz hands for a second. "Get bent."

"Poor little soggy...pathetic...wet...angtsy...miserable...meow meow," Fandoom says, with deliberate and malicious relish.
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Kingbreaker (I)

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 14:19:25 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

In Eisgriff, there is nothing but the ice and the ice. The Iron Czars rule the ice and combat the ice, and the people beneath them suffer, and the world forever turns, everything in its accustomed place.

What the Czars do not care to admit is that their deadly omni-mutual standoff against each other, and the de facto defence network it forms, occupies only part of Eisgriff. The further north one goes, the deeper into the cold, the more the landscape itself becomes unruly. To admit they do not rule all of it, they would have to admit they cannot; they would have to admit that they do not have the ice entirely suppressed.

They would have to admit fear.

The terminator of their territorial control exists on no maps — none they would suffer to exist. But there is a northernmost extent of their towers, and beyond that belongs to nobody; a country blanketed in permanent snow and threat, surveilled by the alleged formless intelligence beyond the edge of all cartography, geological in scale and pace, which would prefer the world entire locked in ice forever.

The people in this hostile place are few, and the Czars deny their existence because they are the only ones in Eisgriff to live free. They are barely able to live at all, and the Czars permit trade to trickle through to them solely because they form a useful bulwark: the bulk of their supplies come from hunting the leviathans of the ice, enormous creatures said to have hearts of iron-dense ice, enlivened by the malice of the ice. Keeping the beasts' numbers down prevents them from coming southward, removing a chore from the Czars' own slates.

These horror-hunters' collective intelligence on the shifting migrations and uncanny evolutions of their quarry comes together in an annual meeting of their wandering bands atop the Mootcrag, an ancestrally traditional wind-raked plateau, central to the region of Boryl. Over the span of some weeks, arrivals trek over the treacherous wastes to those defensible heights, mingling, preparing for the Moot.

Strangers are not a common sight, but it's not unknown for some desperate souls from the Czars' domain to flee in this direction. It's no easy life to choose; but no Eisgrievan is soft. It's therefore not unheard-of for three unfamiliar figures to enter the plateau lookouts' sight, to follow the trail markers up the winding way to the Mootcrag itself, and to join the largest crowds the snowfields ever witness amid the tents and communal fires.

"This is all wrong," Hro Long-Finger croaks sullenly behind their beaklike mask, hood up and chin down.
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Shoplifter

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:29:50 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

Prompt from the Cohost spy_thief_assassin_who account: Thief who just wanted a chocolate bar from the vending machine inside the Imperial Palace

"What are you in for, then, prettyboy?"

The cabin is dark and smells of tar and salt and fear. It rocks in time with the water's restlessness beneath the ship; the whole ship flexes and creaks in time with the dip of the oars. There is none of a trireme's usual noise and business, because the whole ship is a huge floating automaton, rowerless. If not for its deadly black-painted silence, it might be thought simply a marvellous toy for kings to impress one another with.

Within the close confines below decks, in a cabin with a bolt on the outside of the door, are a fair-haired youth and a woman perhaps a decade older. He is seated on the edge of his bunk, pale-faced, clutching the edge as if that grip will save his life; she lounges full-length on the other, arms beneath her dark and close-cropped head, eye half-shut in relaxation. Her question hands in the air.

"I volunteered," he says, after a long pause, making her finally turn her head toward him with a glint of interest.

"Aye," she says, "they'll do you for that, for sure. What's a palace eunuch want on a suicide mission for the Empire?"

"I'm not a—!" He stares at her, wide-eyed, then scrabbles one loose sleeve of his robe up far enough to show an incomplete tattoo sleeve. "I'm a novice under Master Vedang—"

"Trainee inkman," she says, raising an eyebrow. "Suicide missions won't do much for your career; wouldn't you rather learn to grow a beard?"
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Acquisition with Appropriate Levels of Caution

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 13:30:01 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

"Ah, you just think everything's cursed," the thug says airily, reaching for the ancient falcata embedded in a crumbling, fleshless skull underfoot. "It's like taking your little sister along adventuring. Oh no! What about bedtime! What about mud on my dress! What about Mama! What if it's cursed!"

"You oaf," the nine-souled polywarlock says through her teeth, both arms wrapped around the thug's meaty bicep and heels dug into the cave moss in an attempt to drag her arm back. Being weedy and bookish, she's struggling; red in the face at the suspicion the thug's hand is hovering inches from the hilt only because she's laughing at her, and could move forward to grasp it at any second she chose.

"You said that about the amulet we found in Blenchwold," the thug points out. "And the arm-ring in that ruined temple. And that chastity cage with all the runes on it...which was ominous, I'll grant you. And the—"

"And how often have I been right?"

"That rash could have been from anything!"

"You put on the stupid amulet and got brainwashed to serve the Sunken Serpent!"

"Pfft," the thug says, a stupid grin all over her face. "I don't remember that—"

"Because you were brainwashed and you don't remember any of it—!" the polywarlock grinds her teeth, knowing she's been baited. "You're forever missing four months of memory! You got a sinister tattoo!"
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Monologues: Podenco (VII)

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:11:46 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

Prompt from the defunct Cohost account making_up_a_villain — Villain who has the cutest yelp

"Don't shoot the messenger—" John Shift begins, leaning around the office doorway, phone in hand.

Glitz drops her fork into the plastic container of wilted salad in front of her, folds her arms, and glares. "It's about the goddamn puppygirl," she guesses flatly.

"Well," John hedges. "Maybe? The cops called it over. Asked for, quote, the animal-freak expert—"

"I will replace every one of your coffee orders for ever with nonfat pumpkin spice lattes," Glitz seethes.

He holds his hands up, looking wounded. "Their words, not mine! Anyway, they say they've got two possible supervillains in some kind of violent dispute downtown—"

"Great. Dipshit slapfight," Glitz says sourly, rummaging on her desk for her badge. "With extra puppygirl—"

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Responsible Ownership

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 18:24:01 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

Originally presented as a Bluesky thread.

RECLINING HOUSEWIFE: Well, it was Bob's idea originally. He wanted a guard doll, something — you know. The way men do. Something big and macho and excessive. Like keeping a gun in the house, sort of hoping one day there might be an intruder and he could be his own action-movie star and kill them—

RH: So we got a combat doll. [PENSIVE] I find it shocking, now, how blasé we were about all the training advice. But people are, aren't they?

RH: It was so loud. Scared the postman. But so obedient, and so tolerant with the children! You'd walk in and it would look so — violent, but that's how they play, you know, if it hadn't been playing it would have warned the kids off, snapped at them or something, or — well.

RH: Of course it was our fault. Like dog owners who don't bother to understand what it's communicating, don't maintain its training, and...confuse it. Smear its idea of what's expected of it, ambiguous or shifting expectations, then get mad at it for trying to meet where you're at—

RH: Bob was — I don't know what it had done to tick him off, but he was yelling at it, and he must have grabbed at it, and—

[LONG SILENCE]
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The Head of Empire (XXIV)

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 23:14:55 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

For hours the sky rains fire and metal, munitions and glass and meat — still screaming for the descent's duration, or mercifully predeceased. The naval networks are in a state of confused emergency, the warships at dock locked into panic-protocol scorched-earth paranoia: convinced that someone has masqueraded as the head of the Empire sufficiently convincingly that nobody else can be trusted not to be suborned.

They fire on each other until, mutually denying the ability to undock and disengage, they perish together, palace-sized conflagration-corpses collapsing from docking pylons to the shattered fields of the naval yard.

Timni misses much of it. When she rouses, it's in a makeshift field hospital, struggling up through the thought-strangling wisps of sedation, as though her consciousness has been immured in soft packaging for transport. Her hands are bandaged; she can hear only basso warbles that stand in for the experience of sound. She is aware that her body has been pummeled, that it is experiencing pain, in a way severed from the normal experience of pain's distress; the effect, she presumes, of opioid painkillers.

She has missed much, but not all; the lighting flickers, the floor trembles, and the building's fabric bleeds plumes of dust from its internal stress fractures, showering from the ceiling in time with the intermittent distant fire of ship-to-ship weaponry.

A medic swoops; makes a clumsy sequence of common pilot hand-signs in her view, in the brutally limited vocabulary intended for such disasters as no air, the hampered mobility of a survival spacesuit, and no means to speak but line-of-sight.

"I'm deafened," Timni croaks, to forestall it, "and there's a battle, about which I should remain calm and not leave. Stay in bed, probably." She clumsily makes to already contradict that last. "I was," she begins, and pauses; "someone may have brought me here?"

This might be an unwise thing to say, if anyone knows or suspects a connection between her Very Sun and the sky-falling catastrophe outside.

The medic says...something, excitedly, and visibly wavers over conveying even the least of it through gestures intended to convey only such to-the-point sophistication as Follow! or Stay! or Suit air low!
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The Head of Empire (XXIII)

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 23:00:23 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

The world sunders.

It takes too short a time for Timni to directly perceive; a solid rod of osmium, sheathed in layers of synthetic diamond, launched by a miniaturised short-throw, recoil-compensated, high-g mass driver, punches point-blank through the porthole, through the encapsulated air sealed within the room, through the Empress, and impales a forearm's length into reinforced military bulkhead at a spot a scant armspan beside her.

It is not merely loud. The shockwave drives her violently against and across the wall, gives her an instant beating to easily rival the worst she's suffered before, slams against her eardrums like the end of the world.

She can barely perceive the layers of alarms that go off, but at least some of the warship's audiovisual screams are in a language she knows in her bones: Hull breach!

The Dollmaker's metal mouthparts tear at her hands, trying to escape her grip and fulfil its mission; and at the window, the almost-entirely-murdered version of the Empress dangles, looking at the fist-sized hole she's made, its surround of radiating and concentric fracture-lines. She must unmagnetise one armour-clad hand; swings away from that point of release like a sudden pendulum, as if to fall, and then on the reciprocal journey brings her mailed fist around like doom's own hammer. The porthole's transparent metamaterials spark and flicker under her strike; chips of it rain across the room, fractures spreading.

The impaled Empress inside the room spasms wildly, pinned to the bulkhead. Most of her head is gone, cored, impact-shattered and crumpled into the wall's surface, the hullbreacher round square through one eye. Whether she functions still, or is merely in the autonomous failure-throes of a broken machine, Timni cannot know.

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First Aid Kittens: Vibes

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:20:13 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

"Are you really a shelter cat," Merlot says in a casual tone, over weekend brunch.

Socks narrows her eyes at him over eggs Benedict. "Yeah," she says. "Don't remember anything before it, when I was a girlkitten, and then—" she shrugs. "They gotta educate you themselves, if nobody adopts you. But it's not school, there's no standards, so it's all — y'know. Weird homeschool vibes. And a lot of shelters were a Catholic thing, back in the day."

"To instil virtue and chastity in the licentious cat-beast," Merlot drawls.

"Yeah," Socks says shortly. "So." She saws off a chunk of English muffin with greater violence than strictly necessary, and glowers at him. "What's the thing about Fluff that you keep chickening out of saying to me?"

He gestures evasively with his mimosa, mumbles, and tries to act as if that's cleared everything up. Socks pointedly extends her claws and drums them on the table.

"She'd be very angry with me if I said anything," he says finally.

"She's always angry with you."

"She is, thank you for noticing!" He twitches his ear, face serious. "But she'd be very angry; there's a difference."
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First Aid Kittens: Trick

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 23:06:13 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

"Is this your card?" Merlot slurs.

"No, that's yours," Socks says, pushing at his hands. "Put that away, you can't be flashing a black Amex around this part of town!"

"Who's going to mug me when I'm parading around in the delectable company of the First Aid Kittens?" he says smugly.

"Most of the First Aid Kittens!" Socks tells him. "And your sister would help just for an excuse to punch you."

"You wouldn't mug me for my Amex," Merlot declares loftily.

"That's why Sandy makes fun of me for being sheltered," Socks mutters, wrestling the credit card away from him and stuffing it in the pocket of his blazer.

Merlot gasps, loud and comically theatrical. "Sheltered?" he says in a stage whisper. "You mean — you're a rescue?"

Socks narrows her eyes, tail lashing.
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First Aid Kittens: Fighting Trim

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 22:32:24 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

Prompt from the Cohost making_up_a_villain account — Villain who collects hair

The First Aid Kittens are briefing over a diner brunch, Socks and Sandy happily demolishing stacks of pancakes. Fluff, seated square in a warm sunbeam, drowses over a black coffee.

"Why are they planning to hire magical girl security for a sheepgirl Pride event, anyway?" Whiskers says, stabbing a piece of bacon with her fork.

"Novelty villain," Bobtail says. "You know, one of the ones who pretty much have to hit predictable stupid shit, because otherwise they get nothing."

"What kind of novelty villain are they expecting to cause trouble at..." Whiskers digs around in the clutter of plates and cups and condiments for a flyer. "Ewephoria?"

"Wind Shear," Bobtail says drily.

Whiskers puts the bacon in her mouth and slowly chews, eyes expressively pained; Bobtail waits her out. Finally, after swallowing, Whiskers guesses flatly: "Because they can shear, like. Fast as the wind."
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The Head of Empire (XXII)

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:19:55 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

"No," Timni says in terror, stumbling back as if there's anywhere she can possibly go; "no, no — Effulgence, please, no, I will tell you everything, I will never lie to you, please, no, do not put the worm in my brain—"

Her babble-noises are, of course, beneath the Imperial dignity to notice. Timni, in some remove of her mind, some distant bubble of calm from which she can observe herself, cringes at her own unseemly panic and futile retreat. She is embarrassing. She is shameful. The Empress will back her against a bulkhead and hold the Dollmaker up to her face and it will violate her body and her brain and she will be broken and answer whatever is demanded of her and then, no doubt, she will die. And all will be as it should be.

Simultaneously, she fails her own Empress — her smaller, closer one, her Very Sun. And this was no doubt inevitable; Timni is wretched scum, and will die shamed and weak and treacherous.

She blubbers.

The Empress pauses, ever so slightly; the line of her indifferent gaze wanders to the side of Timni's face, staring beyond what's visible to the eye, into some secret data-realm. Finally she shows some expression, a thin, grim smile.

"I see her," says the ultimate ruler of the world — the Axle of Authority, the Worth of Coin, the Weight of Justice, the Measure of Vengeance, bearer of the Mandate of Heaven. "The vestigial pretender. She thinks to exert command authority over my naval resources, as though my will is less than absolute; is she so small now, so desperate, that she moves to fight me for your single, negligible life?"

And Timni, who only just swore not to lie to her, whimpers in thought-obliterating terror: "I am her Empire."

The Empress smiles. It is horrible.
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shot, chaser (V)

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 09:55:39 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

They hit a street market, where Antsy picks up a second bike helmet, saddlebags, and a set of leathers for Viola. The stallholder loudly gasses Antsy up — You take good care of your prettiest new girlfriend, boss! — leaving both of them flustered; Antsy clears her throat and leads Viola around afterwards, packing the bags with a couple changes of clothes each, a first aid kit, grey market toiletries, some odds and ends that Kandi swears by for on-the-job utility.

Viola is tired, cranky, subdued. She shrugs equivocally whenever Antsy checks with her for an opinion. That's okay; Antsy can do the decision-making.

It's why Antsy doesn't notice, at first, when the shopping's done, the new saddlebags are attached to the bike, and Viola's changed into more practical biking gear before they check out of the Happi-Nite; Antsy runs them over to the pharmacy, hands her the stack of prescriptions, and uses the burner phone to search for off-season, rural but not-too-rural cabins on short-term rental sites while they queue. If Viola grips the paperwork too firmly, if she finally speaks to the pharmacist in a weird flat tone: she's having a shit time, it's stressful, of course she's off.

It's only when they get back outside, Viola clutching the paper bag with her hormones in it, and Antsy says, "Everything okay?" that the other woman turns to her and Antsy realises, through the chinks in Viola's self-controlled game face, that she's seething with fury.

She takes half a step back, startled.

"I'm a good person," Viola says, eyes boring into Antsy. "I do everything right. I work hard, I follow the rules, I try to do better for myself. Do you have any idea how hard it is—"

"Whoa," Antsy says, holding her hands up: I surrender! "Listen, I don't think out here is the best place—"

"This isn't my prescription," Viola spits.
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Monologues: Henchfemme (VI)

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:04:47 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

Cohost spy_thief_assassin_who writing prompt: Thief who has been swapping things around

"So what did you get Podenco for National Puppy Day?"

Acrimony looks at Henchfemme blankly, awkwardly juggling a box of donuts and a cardboard tray of to-go coffees. "I didn't get her anything," she says. "I didn't — National Puppy Day, really?"

Henchfemme helpfully liberates the donuts. "Mhm!"

Acrimony puts the coffees down on the picnic table, straightening the tray's edges into alignment with the table's with excessive care, and shrugs.

"You're the one boinking her," she says.

"Boo!" Henchfemme says. "Is that the attitude you take to Christmas? It's like puppygirl Christmas!"
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Monologues: Podenco (VI)

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 15:15:52 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

"You okay there, Glitz?"

Glitz grumbles something over her end-of-shift beer, sitting at the end of the counter in the local off-duty costume bar, and John Shift takes the next stool and nods a I'll have my usual to the bartender.

"Missing the puppygirl while she's off our radar?" he says, gently nudging Glitz's elbow.

She gives him a deeply disgruntled look. "Did you know," she says sourly, "that March 23rd is National Puppy Day?"

"I did not know that," John says, settling himself comfortably.

"Someone who probably fucking does used my credit card details to donate a hundred bucks to a local animal rescue shelter," Glitz says, glowering at her beer.

John laughs, accepts his own beer from the bartender, drinks and laughs again. "Aw, man," he says. "I mean, that's an actual crime, Glitz, credit card fraud, you could—"

"A hundred bucks isn't gonna break me," Glitz says. "It's a fucking charity donation, John, for animal welfare — what am I gonna do, demand it back?"

"Aw, man," John repeats. "She got you good, huh?"

Glitz glares at him, then back at her drink. "She can have that one," she concedes grimly.

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First Aid Kittens: Merlot (II)

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 12:59:43 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

"Hello," a fancy lady in a crisp pantsuit says, holding out her hand to shake. "I don't think we've met yet; I meant to introduce myself when Fifi brought you to that gallery opening last month, but then she was wherever I wasn't, all night."

"I'm Socks!" First Aid Kitten Socks says brightly, shaking her hand. "You must be one of Fluff's exes!"

"Sasha," he woman says, grinning. "That obvious?"

You look more like a shark than sharkgirls do, Socks doesn't say. "She's got a type!" she says instead. "You look very fancy and very pretty!"

Socks has had a bewildering amount of practice at watching what she says, ever since being slumped on Fluff's couch with Fluff's feet draped over her lap, Fluff's gimlet eyes fixed on her like she was a catnip mouse in mortal danger while Fluff lectured her that virginity is a social construct and it didn't matter when or whether she had sex or whether she felt ready or any of it, only that she was happy—

Well, what if I'm not, Socks had said miserably, and Fluff had been silent for long, long seconds and then turned softer if no less terrifying and decided that Socks needed to get out more, then, and meet nice Fluff-approved people whose sex proficiency was sufficient.

At this point, it feels a lot as though Socks probably shouldn't ask for clarification whether that means Fluff can personally vouch for all the prospects she's casually dangled in front of her.

Also, Socks has met several people who are definitely Fluff's exes, usually while Fluff has unaccountably vanished from sight to take up smoking outside or have a two-hour conversation about Czech film directors with oh nobody you'd know or something. Fluff has a type, and apparently a modus operandi which involves never speaking to them again; which makes being left to talk to them in her stead feel fraught.
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First Aid Kittens: Merlot

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:39:33 GMT

(Also posted on my website.)

"What do you mean Fluff's not home?" First Aid Kitten Whiskers says disbelievingly. "Fluff's always home on a Saturday night. What else am I supposed to do, go to bed early?"

"People do lots of things on a Saturday night," Sandy says, shrugging.

"And we hang out at Fluff's!" Whiskers whines.

"Dunno what to tell you," Sandy says.

"What's she even doing?"

"Said something about introducing Socks to some nice people because she's worried about her virginity," Sandy says. "Look, I'll level with you, Organ Sentai Tummy-san was struggling to resist the dark whispers of the Mid-Afternoon Snack Ninjas and I didn't pay all that much attention—"

Whiskers looks horrified. "The fuck do you mean, she's — you can't just take someone somewhere to have their virginity taken care of like it's a OIL CHANGE?"

"They're called sex workers," Sandy says, narrowing her eyes a little.
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