spnfic: the game of god, 24 & 25

I completely forgot to post this here:

Title: The Game of God, 24 & 25
Author: Seperis
Series: Down to Agincourt, Book 4
Codes: Dean/Castiel
Rating: NC-17/Explicit
Summary: You can't win a war for humanity by sacrificing all of your own.
Author Notes: Thanks to nrrrdygrrrl and scynneh for beta services, with advice from Tkodami and MollyC and WarKittens.
Story summary from a comment by Infie.
Thanks to bratfarrar for the series name and summary from her sonnet Harry Takes the Field.
Spoilers: Seasons 5, 6, and 7

AO3 Links for Down to Agincourt:
Series: Down to Agincourt
Book 1: Map of the World
Book 2: It's the Stars That Lie
Book 3: A Thousand Lights in Space

AO3 Links for The Game of God:
All
Chapter 24
Chapter 25

Comments

[olanthanide]

1) I'm both deeply impressed and deeply envious you got this out in the middle of a pandemic. I am at the stage of mental health where yesterday I forgot that the plural form of leaf is leaves so my English plugin is clearly glitching (why brain).

2) I love that little comment from Teresa about reconciling the whole Earth thing with Hinduism. Let's face it, although admittedly a great deal of western apocalypse stories is heavily Christianity based for various reasons, when the stories DO include a POC their religion is either a non point or too much of a point (ho ho this person is Not Christian And Going To The Poorly Written Metaphor For Hell). Like...have these authors never had close friends of different faith before?

3) That comment from Zena about innate power makes me think about the scene with the Goddess Who Must Not Be Named and Not-Fried Castiel. I imagine getting his (metaphorical? metaphysical?) powerlines reconnected would be like spinal cord surgery, except through the entire length of his none corporeal equivalent of chakra pathways, with all the surgery and healing compressed down to an instant. Just...ouch. Good thing it's not his actual human body experiencing that because I don't think biomedically human bodies can handle that.

4) Ichabod Earth is so damned cute. I want to take her people watching with me.

5) Now I want to re-read the New Year's scene again. Nothing like a pandemic to want to revisit that feeling of "we've survived so far, we're going to keep surviving" and remembering that there can still be hope among despair. So...thank you.

[seperis]

Oh God, how did I not know you were reading this or forgot you were? Thank you!

I am at the stage of mental health where yesterday I forgot that the plural form of leaf is leaves so my English plugin is clearly glitching (why brain).


Roof does not plural to rooves. Native fucking English speaker, but I literally sat staring at it because I wasn't sure anymore. Rooves. Rooves.

I love that little comment from Teresa about reconciling the whole Earth thing with Hinduism. Let's face it, although admittedly a great deal of western apocalypse stories is heavily Christianity based for various reasons, when the stories DO include a POC their religion is either a non point or too much of a point (ho ho this person is Not Christian And Going To The Poorly Written Metaphor For Hell). Like...have these authors never had close friends of different faith before?

Thank you. I did research (for the Kali bits, which was super mixed, thanks SPN) and asked my coworkers who practice, but there's so much variation in how--even in our building--that I left it as a simple question. In text, Teresa lives with Sudha, Neer, and Raj, so she'd be familiar enough to know what to ask. (My hope is one day someone who practices Hinduism of any type writes an Agincourt fic that they let me use as story canon (and gently ask for information, since readers/writers tend to be invested).

That comment from Zena about innate power makes me think about the scene with the Goddess Who Must Not Be Named and Not-Fried Castiel. I imagine getting his (metaphorical? metaphysical?) powerlines reconnected would be like spinal cord surgery, except through the entire length of his none corporeal equivalent of chakra pathways, with all the surgery and healing compressed down to an instant. Just...ouch. Good thing it's not his actual human body experiencing that because I don't think biomedically human bodies can handle that.

...holy shit I love posting so much, this is right now the best part. I think you're the only person so far that made that connection! It's been four years since that chapter so I wasn't sure anyone would have it at the top of their head during first read.

Not that I confirm or deny or whatever, just how interesting! Interesting. But one day we may discuss if it proves relevant. It'll be--might be--awesome.

Note my subtlety.

Ichabod Earth is so damned cute. I want to take her people watching with me.

Can't lie, I do, too.

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it!

[olanthanide]

LOL in case you missed this somehow, DtA is rec'ed EVERYWHERE fandom & fandom adjacent - blogs across various platforms, wikis, podcasts. There're a bunch of us who have never experienced a single SPN episode (and have no desire to, thank you) who're just avidly following along like this is an original web novel and getting accidentally traumatized by hippofucker. (None of us will ever be able to look at a hippopotamus the same way again. You must be very proud.)

I'm guessing the other parts might be professional hazard? There's a part of my brain that keeps tabs on the plants mentioned (good choice of crops for apocalypse garden; surprisingly few mentions of corn given Kansas; is someone raiding the abandoned orchards for scurvy-prevention reasons?) and the weird medical situations that are happening (horrified mental screaming at what must've been done to make THAT pregnancy and birth possible; IMMENSE morbid curiosity about content of Cas' medical record).

(I have also spent far too much time contemplating that situation about the ability of the software (brain) to compensate for the limitations of the hardware (eye), since our current medical interventions nearly all occur at the hardware level. After some thought, I've concluded that software intervention is theoretically possible, but we need to be more advanced than like, deep brain stimulation and I have no idea how we can DO the software training without contamination from hardware adaptions because biology.)

[seperis]

OOoh, the upgraded vision thing? Yes. I partially treated it as the 4K/HDR problem and what brains do now with blindspots, but with Cas's true form acting as secondary source, basically giving the brain more information in a form it can translate.

I do think vision could be improved immensely by approaching the problem from the software level.

My grandfather is a photographer, digital and old school, as in until his seventies he had a darkroom, too. He always had the best equipment--he was a wildlife photographer for the state--but the best of any picture came out in the darkroom and later, on the computer. If I treat the eye as a camera of variable quality, my grandfather is the software did the work of making it happen.

I appreciate this hugely because I can't do that, and it's not a matter of physical vision; you give the best camera on earth and a laptop with photoshop, I'd create a surprisingly high quality bad polaroid. That's not a hardware problem; the mechanics of the eye aren't that different between us. That's his brain, which is taking the raw information of the eye, seeing the shading and light and angle and fuck knows what, and doing something I can't. What I can't do with his ridiculously expensiev equiptmen and programs and darkroom, he could do with a goddamn eighties polaroid.

(His stuff is hanging in public buildings all over the state and used to be in magazins and someone quilted one--quilted a forest scene, I kid you not--for a quilting competition. And won.)

I am interested in your thoughts on it if you care to share. My son has the same kind of ability as my grandfather--he is also an artist, sketching and chalks, mostly, but also digital and very good amateur photograph--so I use him and my grandfather as reference on hardware versus software.

Next comment for--the rest of that since that kind of threw me.

[seperis]

LOL in case you missed this somehow, DtA is rec'ed EVERYWHERE fandom & fandom adjacent - blogs across various platforms, wikis, podcasts. There're a bunch of us who have never experienced a single SPN episode (and have no desire to, thank you) who're just avidly following along like this is an original web novel and getting accidentally traumatized by hippofucker.

Are you kidding? I mean, I know you're probably not but--I don't know what to do with it. I'm still surprised SPN fans got into it; it's super long, but worse, I wrote for an audience I knew would be limited.

To wit: 1.) people who like re-reading a lot since many things won't make sense without context but on initial read you just have to go with it (dealbreaker for many and I don't blame them), even more things change dramatically once you find out the actual context, some you realize are outright wrong (extremely frustrating ,total dealbreaker), and none of the characters are reliable narrators even when they aren't lying to themselves (and one pov character is clinically depressed and his worldview is skewed horribly and paranoia doesn't help. He's also a giant asshole and it's calculate and deliberate: not helpful). 2.) readers who are into or will go with experiments (aka Book 4's compressed timeline covering about seven days which should work out to a little over 100K words per day. Yeah).

For 1:
As a reader, this is my platonic ideal of the Perfect Read; fun of first read, fun of re-reading, then double fun of re-reading because I got new info and holy shit, that means this is actually this. Then I get to go back to the beginning and find New Things again; I live for books and series that will do this. (By the way, this is even more fun writing: I had no idea!)

This fic--which would already be limited to people who are into all those things like a lot--also says 'and we're going to do this over nine books and about 2.2 million words' at last horrifying check.

(Granted, most didn't know that, but to be fair, neither did I; once I started using spreadsheets and bookmarks and built a bookmark add-in for Word and a horrifying number of macros (that also helped me get a promotion at work), the only real notice I take of length is how long it takes Word to open the document; when I need to check something, I check the spreadsheet, find the Day, and jump to that part of the doc and therefore don't scroll; current chapters are in a separate doc and are put back in after posting and live in editing because there's always something. I know word count between bookmarks, so the story in my mind is a max of 30K words at all times, according to my spreadsheets' maximum word count between two contiguous bookmarks.)

And my presumptive audience would (in my wildest fantasies) be the type to discuss shit and ask questions and argue (sometimes, with me). A lot of the story has been edited and re-edited in later parts after reading speculation threads so I could keep the story on path and not lose anyone in the fictional wilderness, which as a reader is super annoying and not to be tolerated. I want to surprise readers or shock readers, but never both.

(I have notes made by specific commenters in my spreadsheet, which is a massive benefit that is responsible for so many near-misses; the comment threads in Book 2 and 3 were goddamn prophetic in telling me what and where I needed to edit and even rewrite to keep everyone going in the right direction. Battle of Ichabod is only the biggest example and would not have been nearly as effective (or easy to follow, or good) without those early comments that indicated what where they were now and how to get them where I wanted them to go.)

So no, I didn't know this had spread--uh, anywhere outside the fandom. THIS IS SO COOL. I'm really writing too much here, but honestly--I can't get over there are even more people like me who are like "so that shit made no sense but this only makes me more determined to discover wtf is going on".

(None of us will ever be able to look at a hippopotamus the same way again. You must be very proud.)

Honestly, I want 'Creator of Hippofucker' on my tombstone. Like, short of solving hunger and achieving world peace (maybe), I can't imagine anything more awesome I could contribute to this world but maybe the sheepapodes. I want TKodami's art displayed at my funeral and a stuffed sheepapode in my coffin. It's beautiful.

[seperis]

I'm guessing the other parts might be professional hazard? There's a part of my brain that keeps tabs on the plants mentioned (good choice of crops for apocalypse garden; surprisingly few mentions of corn given Kansas; is someone raiding the abandoned orchards for scurvy-prevention reasons?) and the weird medical situations that are happening (horrified mental screaming at what must've been done to make THAT pregnancy and birth possible; IMMENSE morbid curiosity about content of Cas' medical record).

Corn
I need to check my notes from early betas, but one of the problems I learned existed with the problem of industrial farming was seed; only the heirloom types would reproduce themselves, which is part of the reason I created Dina in Ichabod as head of agriculture and an organic farmer: so would have access to/know about/know where to get heirloom corn, wheat, etc and how likely they would or could, especially if the border would only supply industrial farming-type seeds (which they paid out the ass for).

So after a lot of research and honestly some guessing, I selected for heirloom wheat being available and only industrial-farming corn, so their corn--which they had to use heavily at the beginning for survival along with a lot of begging and trading at the border--is now much smaller in favor of crops they can reproduce themselves. With the trade alliance, they can think bigger than subsistence.

Now there is surely heirloom corn somewhere in Kansas, and there is the possibility that they could start trade with one of the tribes (Iowa, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, and Sac and Fox) in one of the four Native American Reservations in Kansas, that will need a lot of research on the tribes, the reservations, the people, the customs, what they would have had on hand to supply, if they would be willing to trade, and how open they would be to outsiders, which I assume 'not at all' on principle. And how to do that and not be a sensitive white liberal racist about it.

(But truthfully, in the context of this world, I just can't see them opening their borders for any reason until they've personally observed the Alliance operating for a while. It's likely the tribes in each of the reservations opened to each other already or are in the final stages of negotiation, so the Alliance wouldn't be necessary to them. Small trade delegations at Alliance towns during trade days I can see...while writing this, I started reading my notes and got lost in them and my typing follows. This happens with alarming frequency.)

Orchards
Like near Chitaqua, there were/are enough abandoned farms with orchards to get fresh fruit and yes, prevent scurvy; they preserve as much as possible and like dairy, it's rationed carefully. Ichabod's origin is a farming town--I used a town near me as a model to build the origin/history/exponential growth and what would still be there even now--and even in the '00s, it would still have some of the machinery and silos for storage, the stores specifically for farmers with farm-related paraphernalia, and farms being pretty close to the town limits, as in literally right outside them. Within the wall is two or three of those farms with fruit trees, though yeah, they're planting more as quickly as possible. With the Wall, their access is now unlimited instead of an expedition as well, which will help a lot.

Weird Medical

Oh God. Once I was done writing it, I tried never to think of it, but knowledge accrued from wikipedia and so many websites on pregnancy, childbirth, and all the variations just never stops sticking.

The development of Vera's professional style in formal records is a mix of a.) her time as a nurse then practitioner nurse--extremely professional, more observations and what was done, since her job was rarely deciding diagnosis and treatment and when it was, it was pretty much all common everyday stuff, b.) adhoc doctor--reads like a cross between a medical textbook (because sometimes she was reading while Cas sat their stoically resentful of injury) a historical record of an event (Cas's breakdown of the event surrounding what happened to him), and a genre medical novel (because she was new at making all the diagnoses and deciding all the treatments business and wrote down everything down because she'd be using her own notes as references and she couldn't afford to forget anything), and c.) personal asides on how the hell Cas managed to dislocate, sprain, fracture, or break this and that, and commentary on her patient's endless new ways of being difficult, because she's a professional but needed to vent.

As Cas discovers to his horror, this style is both easy to read--Vera wrote to assure she could easily read and understand everything she wrote on a glance--and terrifyingly informative. It also means that at this point, Vera can learn on the fly almost anything and improvises like no one's business and can teach others while doing the thing she's teaching without missing a step; she's had to argue with Cas during procedures so often the what and why and how (and keep her cool doing it, no promises once she's done) that she narrates and answers questions reflexively.

She's still not entirely aware that whenever she does anything in the infirmary at Ichabod, literally everyone not engaged with a patient whips out a notebook and starts taking notes because from their pov, she seems to only have to see a patient to know what's wrong, how to treat it, and all the steps between and adhoc tells them all about it end to end. They do, secretly, wonder if maybe she's a demigod in hiding.

[olanthanide]

My HYPOTHESIS is that DtA managed to hit the overlap of people who like mystery/ puzzle stories and and speculative fiction -- you know, the 2 genres where your options are either 1) go along with the flow and accept the narrative POV on faith or 2) (most of us) theorize our way through the entire reading experience and try to see if we can solve what happened before the author reveals it. There is also the fact that DtA has both an element of curtain fic and a kind of sincerity to its commentary on humanity that really appeals to a certain age group. Basically, you've found the people who like world building open sandbox games, you have built a sandbox, the word has spread, and so we totter in with our tiny plastic shovels and pails to either dig around (i.e. rampant speculation in the comments) or build sand castles (i.e. create fan content about DtA).

Am going to switch to messaging for the bio stuff because I'm FASCINATED and I think messaging might be easier for the back and forth of discussion.