Despite his fatigue, Steirdrar could not sleep. The conversation he had had with Agent Ket over dinner and later drinks kept making rounds in his head, all the things he had learned about the Eskel-Zai and everything he had shared about himself with her cataloguing into neat compartments.

"I'm not clanless; I'm a clan of one. QWERTY, though, ae wants to be clanless." That information surprised Steirdrar. "But you don't?"

Steirdrar returned from the successful mission, uninjured aside from a few bruises and a road rash, to an immediately tensing intelligence department. Everyone who was on shift looked at him with expressions of fear or concern. Now what?

Steirdrar heard snickers and murmurs about formality behind his back before he had even left the office, the nosiest not having bothered with any kind of discretion in their hunger for more gossip material. Whatever. Maybe this would give people something other than his past actions to talk about.

QWERTY set aers tablet down once Beyari returned to the loungeroom after seeing Commander Urrang off. "It turns out the next harvest from the Plucker tree is yours."

QWERTY remembers aers first boot and going through the identity selection program. Name — aers first name, Lora, based on aers serial number, LO-12-1 — preferred pronouns in gendered languages — ae always sounded lovely — and so on. It was followed by the initiation program, which acclimated aer to the world and aers basic functions.

<the rant about why this story is almost a day late>Boy, oh boy, was this story an insanity to work on. I was on the road yesterday, so my writing time and energy were less than half of my usual, and by the time I finished the first draft, it was 11 PM and 1221 … Continue reading FFM 2025 11: Conclusions

Beyari grinned as she sat down at her tablet and opened Kohar's message. The text section read, Bay, you gotta see this. She shook her head and played the video.