An epic poem about an ancient king, presented in the original with extensive annotations. Full translations are going to be legitimately tricky; it's long, it's gorgeous, and the poetic form is pretty strict and doesn't adapt well to the rhythms of other languages, but the writer keeps doing this thing where the rhyme scheme and meter highlight underlying thematic connections between different lines—anyway. The plot begins with an introductory section where the king is going around doing atrocities in a very badass ancient-legendary-figure sort of way, right up until a random peasant girl lights him on fire with her magic powers and he immediately falls madly in love and drops everything to beg her to marry him, then spends the next two-thirds of the poem gradually lightening up on the atrocities front, partly because he has now realized that peasants are people and partly because his wife keeps arguing with him and occasionally threatening to light him on fire again, which he always responds to with a confused mix of fear, adoration, and occasionally anger. The queen's power to set fire to her husband is depicted very obviously and straightforwardly, discussed in the text and the dialogue; the king's reciprocal power to have his wife executed is left completely to subtext and implication, only barely hinted at by means such as using epithets for her that emphasize her fearlessness whenever he gets angry. Accompanying notes explain that the poem is an allegory for real historical events, with the queen standing in for the entire Phoenix archetype, which did appear during that approximate historical era and did have those approximate powers and did have approximately that effect on ancient kings' tendency to oppress people although the exact mechanism was obviously very different.

Extremely well-researched historical fiction detailing the life of a high priestess of the River Kingdom who, by contrast to most high priestesses of the River Kingdom, did actual politics instead of spending all her time managing the movement of water. One gets the impression that the author wishes they could spend all their time managing the movement of water; lovingly detailed descriptions of River Kingdom plumbing and water management take up a solid third of the book, intermingled with plenty of inner monologue from the high priestess and lots of interactions with very well-fleshed-out side characters. An appendix carefully distinguishes side characters for whom there is historical evidence (and what that evidence covered) from side characters the author made up (and the census data and contemporary sources from which they extrapolated those characters' likely traits). An additional appendix tries to explain the context of the Ondine archetype so the aliens can properly appreciate it, but the author admits that they're not very good at explaining this sort of thing and recommends some other reference material to interested reader.

Porn about masochists with access to magical healing is its own entire genre but here is a widely acclaimed example, in which a [sadist who lives by themself in a castle they designed and built using magic] (this is a two-word phrase in the author's native language) gets an unexpected visitor and falls in love with them despite being sort of shaky on this whole 'human interaction' concept. Neither of them has much of a clue how to pursue a healthy relationship, but they are both highly motivated to figure it out, and they make it to the end of the book having successfully reinvented most of the basics from scratch and settling into a life together full of art and luxury and wholesome, loving, extremely gory sex. The climactic scene involves the introverted-sadist-architect breaking into tears about how much they love their partner and needing to be wrapped in blankets and snuggled until they calm down. The two of them are the only characters in the entire book, unless you count the introverted-sadist-architect's house as a third character, which you very well might given how much screentime it gets. The back of the book has a collection of author-approved fanart of the castle, added so the aliens can get a sense of the architectural styles involved that words alone would have trouble conveying.

A duology of very long fantasy novels, which turn out to be collectively about 40% appendix by pagecount. The appendices cover worldbuilding, conlangs, and a set of six different detailed maps of the world, each from the perspective of one of the major nations involved in the plot, all of which have subtle disagreements with each other on matters such as which landmarks are important, what they are called, and who owns them. The plot consists of a ragtag yet lovable ensemble cast, thrown together by circumstances beyond their control which accidentally leave them the only people in the world capable of saving it from a cataclysmic threat, having breakdowns about how they're not ready for this and then going ahead and doing their best anyway. In the end, they pull it off by the skin of their teeth and with rather more casualties than any of them are comfortable with. The second volume has a long denouement consisting mostly of our heroes leaning on each other and their friends and loved ones to help them cope with all their realistically-described trauma once the crisis is over; the last chapter concludes when they're all psychologically stable again and leading healthy, thriving lives, and the epilogue shows a bittersweet scene of the six of them holding a private memorial ceremony together ten years later, after which they are going to attend a massive celebration being held in their honour on the anniversary of their success.

A work of interactive fiction, in which the player's character appears wandering in a starlit desert with no memory of where they came from or how they got here. After finding and exploring a nearby ruin, you eventually stumble upon a talking statue of a beautiful winged person, and although the statue is very shy at first, eventually you can coax enough information out of them to realize that they're some sort of powerful magical being who has been horribly abused by people using them for personal gain. You, too, can horribly abuse them and use them for personal gain; or you can use them for personal gain in less gratuitously awful ways that they still pretty clearly find traumatizing; or you can try to befriend them; or you can try to befriend them but in a sex way; or you can ignore them and try to figure out a way to escape the mysterious magical ruins by yourself. The descriptions of the statue's reactions to trauma are uncompromisingly realistic; the descriptions of the statue's reactions to genuine friendship and love are heartbreakingly sweet. The story has multiple possible endings, depending on your relationship with the statue and on whether you choose to escape the mysterious ruin or not, plus the implicit non-ending of simply never deciding to take an ending option; it is only possible to remove the statue from the ruins by force or with maximum trust levels, and if you do it by force the statue crumbles to dust as soon as they cross the outer wall.

A queer romance novel between a professional book reviewer and quality consultant and an author of series of progressively more meta fictionalized book reviews, ranging from simply publishing multiple reviews of the same book to writing reviews 'written' by the characters featured in that or other books. The main plot consist of a series of fights, make up fucks, mysterious symbolic journeys throughout a temple and a dare for them to swap places - avoiding muddling meaning and creating meaning through questions, rather than answers. 

The process of writing is lovingly detailed, and is the performance anxiety of making something for the world to see, while the reviews are mostly only covered in snippets and asides - though there's a few links to conjectured completed reviews attached in the normal publication version from the fanfiction community, but there's a lot of missing moments and oddly jumpy resolutions around the visits to priestesses - often coming out with a wildly different view of how to handle things and a new infusion of sex drive. 

A book about a VR system that replaces dreams with a multiplayer incredibly porny RPG world, where everyone has signed up for nigh-unbounded kink for as long as they dream, within the parameters they've set. Though the sex scenes make up about half the book's length and are clearly intended to be fappable, the rest of the book is a very clearheaded examination of the importance of consent, of the balance between not letting your dreams become reality and preventing yourself from self-modifying to hurt yourself when you are too tied up in your self-image. 

The mechanics of the game are clearly detailed, and the footnotes include a series of references to machine-learning papers proving the approximate balance of the combat system and of neurological studies of some of the more exotic pleasure induction techniques described, detailing why they're likely theoretically possible and relating them to exotic techniques available today. 

A space opera television show built around uplift efforts - with the primary conflicts being odd religious and cultural concerns barring the path, emergency worker burnout, and a series of related mysterious aliens who intervene to ensure 'cosmic balance' through both direct attacks, negative space wedgies, and even political campaigns implemented in a wide variety of systems, with an order of secretive priestesses constantly helping the cast out despite their secular origins and purpose. The technology and logistics are rendered in painstaking detail (especially in the secondary materials) and the whole show is built around the frustrations in project management, and conflict mediation under stress and sleep deprivation, though the cast never seem to want to stop helping, persay. 

There's also a lot of drama about the difference between corruption and 'skilled negotiation' across cultural boundaries, involving a number of exchanges of gifts and courtesies that are often very similar between missions that are treated very differently in the different worlds they help.

Nearly all of the perspective characters are femme amongst all of the works, oddly enough.

Pigeon's first batch of fiction is from the Grapeverse. The epic poem is obviously losing something in translation - she has been briefed that the aliens have magic beyond reflections, which otherwise would be the most exciting thing about this. Nonetheless, the feeling she has is that this is something deep, with memory and investment behind it - perhaps it's a shirasanmi* of a kind for Phoenix; she's not quite clear on what an 'archetype' is, but it seems to be something similar to a reflection? If this was translated properly it might produce some interesting results. She sets it aside to show to Snowblossom later; it seems diplomatically important. 

The historical fiction based on moving water around... There's a part of her that's deeply fascinated with the engineering problems, and a part of her that questions what possible practical use it could be, and part of her that appreciates the character building and interiority, and part of her that feels like the book is not really about much. (All these parts have names and personalities of their own, but we're simplifying a bit here.) The further insight on "archetypes" is interesting, but she's definitely going to bring the epic poem to Snowblossom first and just mention this in passing. Though it is nice to see that the aliens have Earths too. 

The porn about sadists and masochists is... intriguing. She is not personally into that kink but it's well-written enough and building so much on a fundamental idea of good communication and work in relationships that the romance doesn't suffer much. She doesn't understand what's up with these aliens and their associations with architecture, but the story is engaging and well-written and would probably find a mass audience. She sets it aside in her personal collection, and keeps reading; the liturgical implications aren't really significant here, so there's not much to talk to Snowblossom about. 

The very long fantasy novels start off promisingly enough, but she's not really into fantasy, and she has enough complicated politics in her life already, thank you. Aliens also have territorial disputes, how surprising. She sets them off to the side only half-read, and doesn't get to the ending. (Eventually one of her junior readers encourages her to take the time to read the whole thing, and the ending makes her cry. But in her first cut she doesn't get there.) 

The interactive fiction... Oof. Beautiful. Really makes you think. She takes the befriending-but-not-in-a-sex-way route, and decides to leave the game unconcluded, staying close with the statue in the place where they're comfortable. She doesn't understand why people would play the other routes - okay, no, she understands why people would have sex with the statue, people are horny, but personally she feels it's more heartfelt if it's more selfless on the part of the player. It is mildly annoying that it assumes only one self for the player character, but she can't expect aliens to be like her. 

*Soul-record, in practice a combination of a will, a eulogy, and a personal mythology with specifically defined rites of remembrance, generally written by the person in life or their survivors. It is a daily ritual for the Sanctified to select a shirasanmi from the vault and publicly perform one of its rites, thereby representing symbolically the wishes of all the unremembered. 

Meanwhile, a continent away, Crystal is looking at the exact same section of her data dump, covering the Grapeverse books. 

The epic poem is probably only publishable as a historical curiosity or as Grapeverse mythology; it clearly suffers in translation. Maybe it could go into an anthology of some form? Hmm, the effect of the magical powers being actually real is an interesting twist. It's perhaps not mass-marketable, but a professionally-produced slim volume for those interested in Grapeverse culture could be worth something. She sets it in the maybe pile. 

The water management political thriller obsessed with plumbing has some mass-market appeal in Eravia - Eravians enjoy learning how things work, especially if there's a plot attached - but sales in Anadyne would probably be weak. Maybe pile. 

Ooh, alien erotica! And it's S&M. And extremely well-written, wow. It's a crammed market, but between the quality of this one and its alien origins, there's potential for a smash hit. The architecture focus is a little distracting, but given it's alien fiction it adds an exotic sense of place to the whole thing. She'd better get on this one quickly; she sets it in the definitely pile.

... And her ARC of the alien erotica can quietly go in her personal collection. She got this job because she has good taste, damn it. And when she has some time away from these books she'll be able to give it the, ah, attention it deserves. 

Fantasy is not her specialty but this next duo are well-written. The stakes are personal and real, the worldbuilding is well-thought-out, and it treats all the costs realistically and seriously. That's a winning combination. It's still clearly alien given the lack of any reflections and the fact that the friends don't end up in a polycule at the end, but that lends it a charming simplicity to some degree. It is, however, quite long, and some people might lose their focus on it before getting to the ending. Fantasy readers are more likely to put up with longer books, though, and quite a lot of this is appendix. Perhaps an abridged version? Maybe pile. 

The piece of fiction with the statue is very sweet and precious and will make a lot of money for whoever gets the distribution rights. Yes pile. 

Overall, this is a much better slush pile than she usually has - then again, she hasn't worked in imports before. It's different when you're working with books that have already been published.

There were some issues with format conversation, but the translators did the best they could manage with the lack of smell!

A tale for young workers about a new mushroom farmer who is very unhappy with her* job and desperately wants to change it and become an explorer, but feels like she must stay in her current job for the good of her hive! The story details her becoming less happy and satisfied, until she eventually makes new friends in her fiction-reading group who encourage her to tell the hive-manager that she’s unhappy and wants to switch jobs. She does this, and becomes much happier, and finds a new valuable type of fungus for the colony, that is eventually used to make a new kind of antibacterial. It is clearly written with a moral lesson to tell people about your problems and not just tough them out.

A very complicated political novel with around 600,000 words, featuring nine diplomats from three different hives navigating a tension-filled debate about the morality of executions, while also trying to make the most advantageous trade deals, with several backroom discussions between every combination of hives at different points, embarrassing interpersonal drama, and a tremendous amount of dramatic irony.

A rules and lore book for a tabletop RPG, featuring several books of additional content based on other series, and a wide variety of different powersets. Nearly three hundred different personality traits are listed in the original alone, all with various mechanical benefits and downsides. 

*Gender is very weird and confusing, but they’re just translating everything as she for now until someone thinks of a better idea.

Pigeon's second batch of fiction is from Hearthome (curiously similar name to Heart, that.)

The alien approach to spirituality in the book reviewer romance is quite interesting, with memory discontinuities not dissimilar to that experienced by some Reflections; it's relevant to faith, so her jotted notes about it go on the stack for Snowblossom. As a writing device, she's not much for the jumping around and implying things; it's a bit too obscure for her taste, and smacks of Deus Ex Machina in a couple places where the visit to the priestesses abruptly resolves a relationship issue. 

More alien porn, huh. And very... Creative. The VR system premise probably would do well in Eravia, but here it's just uncomfortable to replace dreams with VR. Sure, there are ecstatic cults who would probably appreciate this book, but she's not a member. The message is good, but like the other alien erotica it's just a bit too kinky for her. Aliens make weird porn too, film at 11. The notes on exotic methods of inducing pleasure, though - that's worth putting a bookmark in and bringing to Snowblossom as an offering to the Ecstatics, assuming these are safe for Heart's natives. Someone will no doubt be willing to volunteer. 

And then there's the uplift fantasy... Again, confirming that there are Earths on all worlds, people who do the dirty work. It's kind of nice to see the struggle portrayed. The science fiction lean isn't really her taste either, but she doesn't mind overmuch. The premise strikes her as distinctly Eravian here as well. It's not quite utopian, and it has more religion in it than she'd expect, but... Well, it's alien! She finds herself smiling a little. This one will go into her personal collection. 

Crystal's data dump has the same three books from Hearthome as well!

The meta book reviewer/professional book reviewer one would probably sell well in Anadyne, but resolves a little too much with faith to sell well in Eravia. The erotica content would probably move some copies, but it's not exceptional. Maybe pile. 

The book about the VR system is... very creative. That's a lot of kinks. The trouble with that is that it doesn't have a specific niche, it's just in general really kinky. A little something for everyone, she guesses. But there's a risk of squick, too, and she can't publish something that has ecstatic-cult pleasure technique instructions in the back - that would have to be cut out for mass publication, there's liability issues otherwise. Honestly, probably not worth the negotiations. No pile. 

The space opera television show isn't something her company can license distribution rights for, she works with print and hypertext. Based on an episode or two it's good though. She'll pass it along to a contact of hers in the television industry and maybe it'll see sales. She bets it'll sell well in Eravia. 

Now here's some genuinely alien alien fiction - the Antsfolk download, which is apparently based on colony dynamics? 

The tale for new workers is a bit simplistic, but the alien perspective makes it worth reading. It doesn't go into her collection though. 

She is SO DONE with complicated politics. She tosses the 600,000 word novel across the room before she even gets a tenth of the way through. Snowblossom can read it herself if she wants to know about the political lives of the Antfolk. 

The tabletop RPG sourcebook is a tabletop RPG sourcebook. It sure is detailed. She guesses personality is more important when you can only have one? Well, in any case this is neither politically important nor interesting, so she'll just set it aside. 

The Antsfolk download is less promising - the translation from scent is difficult in the first place, and the considerably more alien minds involved make the areas of overlap less obvious - but she'll read the three books provided anyway. 

The first one is alright. Seems like something you could put in an anthology of Antsfolk stories to illustrate their culture and attitudes. It's a bit simplistic, though; she doubts her readers would be held by it very well. Maybe pile. 

The 600,000 word political novel is both too long and too complicated for mass market. Skies just don't have the attention span for this kind of thing. Suns might buy it, but they generally have better things to do than read. No pile.

As for the RPG sourcebook... Well, it lacks any rules for making reflections, but the personality creation rules are quite complex and could be used practically for self-finding. Then again, in that market it's not really outstanding on any criteria save exhaustiveness. No pile. 

Ah well. Perhaps there'll be something more interesting in the next section of her data dump. 

A less complicated political novel, classified as “short,” with only 70,000 words and three subplots. In this one, one of the hives is secretly preparing to wage war on both hives and framing it on the other, and is thwarted when one of the ambassadors has a crisis of faith, which is detailed in full. She defects, tells the others about the evil plans, and gets lots of cuddles with her new friends.

A quasi-historical piece of fiction, where “history” means “complex spice trade deals,” “romantic? expensive gifts,” and “people are using spears to fight,” than any real attempt at accuracy. Features a moderate amount of politics, mostly centered around mutual-hostage-spy agreements and the spice trade, and a lot of people breaking down and getting cuddles.

A poem about the loveliness of sunning yourself on a summer day, and finally feeling warm, which is compared to the feeling that the point of view character feels when with their best friend.

This book is written and formatted like a strategy guide for a video game, but on deeper examination it is actually a cleverly disguised auto-biography about the real life of a professional cosplayer. It follows her journey from competition to competition, and goes into extensive detail on the gathering of materials, planning of patterns, assembly, testing, and final performance of each character, as a video game strategy guide would, with colorful diagrams, detailed illuminated tables, and plenty of imagery. It requires no prior knowledge of the characters she becomes along her journey, with the main descriptive passages weaving an instructionally-styled tale of getting into each character's headspace. Interspersed within these tales are the details of the cosplayer herself, the friends she made along the way, and several lovingly highlighted digressions (with photos) into occasions when she had particularly notable sexual encounters while in-character.

Here is a long series of science-fiction light novels, dozens of entries but each one readable in one sitting, set among the outer planets of the solar system in an alternate reality where fictional-super-genius-creativetechnologists command interplanetary fiefdoms each with their own extremely unique and in some cases very awesomeness-over-practicality creativetechnology spaceships. The books follow the adventures of a benevolent pirate faction called The Caregivers that uses cyberwarfare and advanced biohacking to find lonely repressed trans girls and remake them as inhumanly beautiful and sexual women with implausible levels of talent in seduction and in reverse-engineering rival faction's creativetechnology, who are then sent as infiltrators to find more recruits among the other factions as well as steal and repurpose ships from the least friendly factions. Each book follows a different newly-minted supersexy spacer girl, and begins with that girl's nigh-magical and wish-fullfillment-y transition in pornographic detail, with a different emotional angle each time. The series as a whole weaves together into a single serial narrative with girls from previous books playing a large role in the plot of subsequent books, and keeps this up long enough that one of the series main selling points is how it manages to juggle so many characters without collapsing in on itself, like the author had deliberately set out to displace the reader's entire Dunbar's-Allocation with an army of kind-hearted honeytrap space-prostitutes.

An ARG / dating sim about an 'administratrix dating system' spread throughout dozens of websites with a wide-variety of puzzles - ranging from algebraic and geometric intuition puzzles to pattern finding to esosteric science references designed to 'find you the perfect match' based off of a deep series of kink questionaries spread throughout the experience (and customizeable-to-the-route in a 'cheat screen' offered as a supplement for those who prefer not to play in that style) all integrated into a series of dating sim routes, with increasingly dramatic changes to the 'second skein'* - letting you romance the customized version of your character together alongside the native version. It's left ambigious how much the normal version of the character is a recreation or a simulation designed to accomodate those who don't want to 'really be a bad person', or how much they'd genuinely otherwise fall in love with you. There's a large emphasis on futadom and body worship in most of the routes, and a machine learning system that does a decent job of filling in between the pre-authored content, though it has a tendency to get a bit stale and 'slip' between the selves and lose coherency after long conversations or things too unexpected. It's still hauntingly realistic, sometimes. 

*lit 'second-weave-of-a-single-tapestry' - it seems to be a much more manual and cognitive seperation, based on hypotheticals and direct simulationism, sometimes aside from the creation of seperate emotions. 

A book about a telepathic non-binary couple travelling through time, discussing the reality of 'great man' history - watching the exact process of planes, several varieties of light bulbs and generators being invented, interspersed with dialogue and thought-commentary of the inventors and those around them before, during and after the inventions. It's written as a meditation on the flow of blame and credit, with a special focus on a plural inventor who has the debate about the subject in their own thoughts, adding another layer to the story. There's a few mentions in passing of the priestesses and sex as things that the main characters talk with and indulge in occasionally, but it's essentially safe for work and unreligious. 

A non-fiction book in hypertext about hypnosis, sensitivity and immerse-hallucination-induction, written in a fairly clinical style, with a couple of notes about when each of the techniques succeeds and fails in allowing reliable replication of the sort of behaviours exhibited by the real thing, and a few neurological comparisons and autonomic function tests, complete with a bunch of tables and questionares about why you are bothering with the research and 'how this pursuit will exalt you before your goddess', but is otherwise unreligious. There's a sample character or two written in for emulation, and a series of baselines and forum-records of people emulating them added in the appendixes. It's notated as the 'clean' version on the main page. 

There are two works so far from Iie*a, home of the neotenous, monogendered, largely aquatic race which have mostly by accident come to be referred to as the Joeys.

One is a song, apparently for children, about a young Joey who is implanted with a lover (executive-function-boosting symbiote, the more or less literal backbone of their society) and immediately sets out to adventure, leaving his dozen or so fathers behind, because he's desperate to do something interesting, not just make art and have fun as is approved of by society. Unfortunately, he is not very well suited to adventure; fortunately(?), he's self-deluded enough that he manages to convince himself at every turn that whatever disaster has just ensued is what he wanted. He loses his possessions fairly early, but reasons that he wanted to experience the world on his own merits. He makes several friends and drives them away with his terrible luck and inability to own up to mistakes, but convinces himself that they were the cause of whatever disaster latest befell him. Eventually, he falls in battle against a shark he had convinced himself was threatening a nearby village, which is actually a farmer's beloved pet; he goes to his grave convinced that he is a hero dying before his time, and when the spirits of the deeps show him his life and ask his regrets before letting him drift out of reality, he cheerfully claims none. The spirits state that he is the only man who has ever died happy, and that on balance, more people should lie to themselves if they want to enjoy life.

The other is a lightly annotated collection of poems by a fry afflicted by a terminal illness which meant he would not live long enough to be implanted with a lover, and chose to spend his brief existence writing about what life meant to him. It's stylistically shaky, not as polished as one might expect from a professional, but it's certainly more than might be expected of a six-to-ten-year-old equivalent. His tone shifts almost schizophrenically between bitter sarcasm and raw fear-anger-suffering and appreciating small joys in life, not only between individual poems but between stanzas or lines within the same poem. One of the better-regarded poems swings wildly between apologizing to his fathers for bringing them pain and railing against them for not smashing his eggsac with a rock when they realized the suffering he would experience. The poems deteriorate stylistically as his health declines, until his final poem, which he transcribed through a Morse code equivalent after seizures had taken his speech and motor function: i am filled with words i cannot say i fear the end no end my pain is not your pain beloved fathers love me let me leave you

Oh, there's more to the Antsfolk section.

Not another political novel. 

She gets further into the second one before setting it down; again, a little too much politics for her, though the unrealistic handling helps some. Spears, huh? Ants with spears. What a strange image. 

The poem is sweet and cute and simple. She'll share it with Snowblossom and probably kiss her about it. 

More Antsfolk books. With how the last batch went, she's not optimistic. 

Alright, this political book is a more reasonable length. The politics seem a little more simplistic though, and the market for that is more interested in complicated plots. Do they have anything complex but short? She sifts through the slush pile a little more to see if there's anything she's missing. 

The spice trade one is pretty good. A little popcorny, but the trade deals are grippingly twisty. She could see a future for this one at market. It might misinform some people about Antfolk history, but that's not her problem. Maybe pile. 

The poem isn't a standout. Is this from an anthology of some form? A collection of antfolk poems might move, but she's not a magazine publisher; single poems aren't really her business. 

Another set of books. This one is from... Homerealm? 

At first she thinks the first book is a strategy guide and she almost puts it down, but then the gimmick becomes clear and the book opens up into a tell-all biography. It's stylish and clever and gosh those are nice photos. With stories. 

It's a good thing she's doing this in her personal rooms and her staff work remotely. She's seen some interesting stuff produced by ecstatics in her time, but this kind of reflection-inhabitation-while-cosplaying-for-the-purposes-of-sex never really gets old to her, and the strategy-guide gimmick is entertaining and amusing and did she mention the pictures are kind of great. 

She's going to read this one together with Snowblossom. It's... illustrative. And she's very lucky to have it. 

... And this second one is going to absolutely shatter Snowblossom and make her a gooey, gooey mess. The aliens are just like us. It's enough to make you believe in a higher power. 

These books from Homerealm are all standouts. The cosplay guide is excellent on multiple levels - it's a coherent story, it's presented with a wonderful gimmick, the porn is hot and compelling, and it's like the aliens know how to soul-draw - it's a great guide on how to develop reflections. The whole package just works together wonderfully. She puts it on the Yes pile. 

As for the series of light novels, it'll absolutely decimate the 25% of the population that are trans, so that's a clear winner. Short, readable, very wish-fulfillment-y, all ties together into a larger world - people will be buying it for their polycules, it's not going to be a massive investment, it'll sell like hot cakes. Yes. 

More works from Hearthome are next on her list. The dating sim ARG is... well, it's clearly adapted to a different kind of generic player than you'd find on Heart. It falls a little flat for her since those aren't her kinks, but it's clearly well-written and has a lot of effort put into it. She appreciates the girls with dicks, at least, but this one won't be going into her private collection. 

The aliens are plural! That's a welcome surprise. Snowblossom must already know, but she doesn't share everything she hears instantly. The discussion of blame and credit seems mature and interesting. Priestesses are pretty important to Hearthome, huh? She finishes the book and sets it aside to discuss with Snowblossom later. 

The text on hypnosis is - well, holy shit. She doesn't know how this nonfiction book got into her download of fiction, but it's clear the aliens have new techniques in the area of soul-drawing. This is actually dangerous material, she knows people who would try this and get a psychotic episode - but it's very worth discussing. She actually phones Snowblossom about this one to inform her. (Yes, she knows. Yes, it's impossible that we could censor it. She's already told the careholds to prepare.)

Hearthome's ARG is fun, but too complex to reimplement in whole on Eravian technology for a large audience. Between that and the choice of kinks, it doesn't get the greenlight.

The history and plurality book is interesting, especially because of the different experience of plurality involved. She gives it a cautious maybe, with a note to discuss it with the other scouts at her company and determine if it's sufficiently exotic to sell well. 

The non-fiction book is unexpected, and looking at the contents, dangerous. She's going to kick that one upstairs to her boss and not think about it too much.

The works from Iie*a are next. 

The song for children has a weird moral, but it is at least satisfyingly alien. It's a bit sad and a bit silly. She's not really sure how to feel about it. 

... The book of poetry she has to put down because it's too sad. And then go cuddle one of her girlfriends about it. And cry. That's... That's a raw blow. Ow. 

Suffering is a constant, huh? She had hoped it would be better than that. But still... There's something - she doesn't want to say human - but meaningful, in that connection to one's fellow hurting being. 

Her girlfriend reads the rest of the book to her, and they cry together, and they hug, and they hope a lot that they'll have long lives and be remembered well and forever.

Iie*a's works aren't promising, coming from such a different species, but it's worth reading what they've sent. 

The song for children is interesting from a cross-cultural perspective; its moral is interestingly inverted to what she'd expect, or else more subtle than she'd expect for children. It's probably not publishable, but it's certainly worth having read. 

The book of poetry... Goes firmly on the Yes pile. People need more reminders to care for what they have. And this raw, hurt energy from somewhere far away - that means something. It'll sell. And be remembered. She wouldn't be surprised if there were a sect created in the fry's honor. 

A realistic mystery novel for adults involving the murder of one member of a company's internal policies board. A witness claims to have seen someone dressed as a certain employee and sharing her fur color standing over the body. The main investigation dives into seeking out other people who might dress similarly and who have similar fur colors, as well as the exact internal policies of the company and whether or not the employees would have a reason to protest against them, and whether or not anyone would have a personal grudge against the particular victim. In the end, the case is cracked when the witness is revealed to have an undiagnosed form of colorblindness that widens the suspect pool, allowing them to find the actual killer. The killer is revealed to have been attempting to have a civil discussion about a certain company policy, but constant insulting needling from the victim led to them snapping and escalating to murder. Their sentence is partly decided on with input from the deceased's family, and in the end a short jail sentence and therapy for those violent urges are the final conclusion. Interestingly enough, at no point is someone deliberately framing the first suspect suggested as a hypothesis.

There is also a version of the above novel that's intended for younger readers. Several of the suspects are removed from the plot to shorten the book, although the main forensics and investigation methods are still described in detail. The main plot difference lies in the ending, where the murder is framed more as a fight gone wrong, and much more detail is given on the need to control those impulses, as well as methods for doing so.

A nonrealistic fantasy culture-clash novel for all ages about two species, both somewhat distinct from grayliens, where one group is obligate carnivores and the other herbivores. The book focuses on a herbivore ambassador to the carnivore city, and alternates between surreal illustrations that the herbivore is telepathically transmitting back home, narrative from the perspective of the ambassador's host as they try to be a good host, and various records of the minutes of the council meetings on each side. The herbivores are generally presented as overly paranoid and hypervigilant, with the ambassador constantly distorting the actual events as something horrifying, although there are also some hints that the carnivore host is being overly positive about some things themself, and the two slowly get to understand each other better and better. The climax involves the herbivores nearly declaring war on the carnivore city when they believe their ambassador has been murdered, and the carnivores preparing for war due to an unintentional insult, but by now the host and ambassador have become fast friends/romantic interests (it's not entirely clear and could go either way) and manage to stop the war from erupting. The last scene is the herbivore ambassador carefully trying a meat dish, a callback to a previous discussion about the two species having an omnivorous common ancestor.

A soft and sweet book about learning to love as your gender-concept slips into place, framed around a blessing from a dream of being able to go just that little bit further in transition. There's a lot of detail in the hormonal adjustment process, and a lot of saccharine cuddling as the main character learns how to indulge in the softer things in life. There's a bit of a fetishitic focus on her breasts improving, but mostly it's just about the simple joys of dresses fitting and being what you dreamed to be, all told in a journal telling about her life, in love and in her job writing. 

A series of rapekink webfic featuring mindbreak and increasingly exasperated and tired insults from the original self of the sex slaves you make that's designed to be short and sweet enough to each be playable in a single session. 

An rpg system designed to model inventiveness and value drift in mad scientist superheroes, based on a 'statement of principles' and a 'foundation of the self' that seems oddly related to the hypnosis book. 

Joeys confer amongst themselves and decide that they are going to send some further works, these ones having been positively received. (A smaller contingent wails that the aliens are gonna figure out that the Joeys aren't actually cool.)

Several variants on the theme "two brothers fall in love and have an unhealthily codependent relationship which is obviously kind of terrible for both of them but is equally clearly scratching some kind of itch for the author"! These vary from "comically unhealthy" to "darkly, horrifyingly unhealthy"; several of the latter involve the pair inducing metamorphosis into wights, the next stage of Joey life, which is viewed as approximately the ultimate taboo. These works contain a lot of lovingly described sex, though it's not always lovingly described in a way that makes it hot per se; funny or outright distressing is almost as common, and works often don't have a consistent bias towards one emotional register for sex scenes.

A book centered around the internecine drama of a family of Joeys that really shouldn't be raising a child together! Some of the fathers aren't even speaking to each other, though they present a unified front to the outside world. As their fry grows, the fathers' relationships break down further, and the kid grows up faster than he should; he ends up climactically yelling at them for a while and going off to live on his own until he's old enough to get his lover. (This is seen as incredibly impressive; apparently the executive dysfunction treated by the implantation of a lover is normally so crippling that a Joey without one should not expect to be able to get out of bed most days without the help of his fathers.)

A fantasy series featuring a lovingly designed magic system which this margin is far, far too narrow to contain. The magic-users form secret societies within normal Iie*an society, distinguished by their extensive use of body modifications to alter how they are perceived so they can do different magic. The main plot is that various threats to Iie*a are being fomented by an equivalent secret society of wights, and the good magic-using Joeys must thwart them. Gradually the story grows more and more complex and morally ambiguous, and by the end of the series it's much less pro-Joey anti-wight and much more "people can convince you that things are good or bad for amorphous and meaningless reasons; it's not your job to have a self-consistent moral compass, it's your job to know what people want to get out of convincing you that something is good or bad".

Next up is a section of data dump from the Grayliens. 

Ooh, a mystery! Her favorite! 

It's interestingly straightforward compared to what she's used to - and in some ways that makes it twistier, since it doesn't obey the usual genre conventions. The colorblindness is a nice little surprise. The focus on rehabilitative justice is interestingly modern. 

She skips the version for younger readers - she's not interested in reading the same book twice.

The carnivore/herbivore one is more politics why must they keep sending her political novels. At least this one is less realistic. And the emphasis on differing realities is interesting and new. Okay, she'll give this one a try. 

(She reads it all, and smiles, and sets it aside to show to Snowblossom. She does politics as a passion, she'll appreciate the alien view on cultural clashes and alternate perspectives. The meat dish ending is a little overly optimistic and weird, but that just makes it interestingly alien.)

The Grayliens' data dump is up next. 

The mystery novel is pretty decent, with intriguingly different genre conventions. The colorblindness might strike some readers as a little unfair, but it makes sense as a twist - things like that do happen in the real world - but of course eyewitness testimony has never been really reliable, so it's reasonable for the witness to be mistaken... It's not a standout, but it seems like it could be publishable. Maybe pile. 

The childrens' version of the mystery novel leans a little on its moral, but she could see it having a market in Eravia. And it's the first alien childrens' book she has here that seems suitable for import. She'll put it towards the top of the Maybe pile. 

The culture-clash novel will sell well. It's interesting and optimistic and enjoys its multiple perspectives, which is a popular device but an interesting handling of it from an alien culture. The illustrations will also offer some excellent alien flavor to it. It goes in the Yes pile. 

More books from Hearthome. 

The sweet book about learning to love as your gender-concept is cute, and the constant focus on "oooo boobs" is sillyfun. She sets it aside to show Snowblossom in her spare time. It's not unique, by any stretch, but it's nice to see from aliens. 

No thank you on the rapekink erotica. Not her kink. 

The RPG system is cute. It's clear that the techniques of self-hypnosis and so on that hearthome uses are deep into culture if they're writing RPGs about them. She knows some people in Eravia who'd be into this. Maybe she'll share it later.

The Hearthome slush pile is pretty tall, isn't it?

The transition semi-memoir is pretty standard. There are a lot of people telling stories like this, the market is pretty glutted. This one doesn't look like a standout, but it is from an alien culture so it'll probably move some units. Maybe pile.

The rapekink webfic... Is hot, and interestingly subverts the genre conventions, but it's a niche interest, and it would probably hurt the reputation of her publishing firm to publish something nonconsensual, even if it is somewhat self-aware. She forwards it to a friend of a friend who works in niche erotica with a heads up. (It is later published and gathers a small fan following, but is hardly considered great literature.)

The RPG system looks to be based on the same hypnosis techniques and so on as in the nonfiction book. Again, let's kick that upstairs to her boss. 

More works from Iie*a. Hopefully they aren't so sad as that last poetry collection. 

The unhealthy-codependent-relationship-dramas are kind of unsettling to her, as a genre. Who wants to read about bad relationships? She guesses someone's probably into it, particularly the more slapstick ones, but honestly none of these really appeal to her. She's going to move on and try not to think too much about this.

The family drama is uncomfortably real, again. It reminds her of some problems her polycule's had - not to the same degree, obviously, but... 

She ends up reading the whole thing, and smiling at the fry who manages to escape the bad environment and live on his own. It's a bit of a bittersweet ending, but it seems to have been worth her time. She probably won't read it again, but she doesn't begrudge the time she spent. 

The third one is more politics but she reads enough to determine that it's very much Snowblossom's taste in morally ambiguous confusing political magical worldbuilding. She sends it to Snowblossom with a note that it's something she'd enjoy.

(Snowblossom is still busy with the very long series of light novels from Homerealm, please call back again later.)

Iie*a has more works in the slush pile. If they have anything like that collection of poetry she'd better read this quickly. 

The codependent-bad-relationship books have little market on Heart, unfortunately. They're clearly technically competent and effective, but nobody wants to read about this level of dysfunctional relationship. With a sigh, she sets them in the No pile. 

The dysfunctional-family-drama, though, is sufficiently "light" that it would get a market. It's clearly a more 'serious' book, sharing that same aesthetic bent towards darkness and complication that the collection of poetry had, but it's ultimately resolved with a bright spark for the future, and the family dynamics are real enough to make people think seriously about their own relationships. She'll put it in the Yes pile. 

The fantasy series is complicated and morally ambiguous and deeply technical - Sun reading material, clearly. For Skies it might be a bit dark. Still, she thinks it'll get good pickup among Suns - politics is ever one of the more interesting subjects for readers, when it's handled well, and again, the alien angle will probably sell well. Yes pile. 

Submissions from the somewhat uncreatively named Planet overall seem very... Nerdy? Practically every submission has multiple sections that divert into rants/rambles/long explanations of some Cool Thing, often with diagrams and references. Some of them have skip to page X if you don't want to read this at the start of those.

Three early ones:

A war novel that is prefaced with a long statement that war is bad, actually, and if two large organized forces were going to war with each other in real life and not simulations and games something has gone deeply wrong. It follows the perspective of an infantryman in a ground campaign as they organize, deploy by truck, and then engage the enemy in tactical action, with occasional zoom-outs to logistics and large scale strategy. The two combatants' reasons for fighting are never actually defined and the book doesn't touch on trauma or dealing with violence very deeply. It ends with each individual small unit getting fed up with fighting and ignoring orders to advance until a de-facto peace has emerged. Overall it's relatively focused on weapons and tactics, not plot, though all of the squad members are fleshed out, a jokester, a quiet-competent-one, a dreamer, a hovering mother-hen of a leader, and so on. It has good slice-of-life, if not much overarching plot.

A story prefaced with a warning that this is psychological horror: A man wakes up inexplicable magic powers (teleportation, object creation, and miscellaneous others) and immediately goes to get scientists to test them, worrying he has gone crazy. Then a voice in his head tells him he wasn't supposed to do that, and he wakes up on the same morning with the same magic powers. He loops for a long time, trying lots of different activities until the voice makes a cryptic comment and resets him. Any attempt to do science gets him reset. He gets increasingly frustrated and demanding and slowly stops being able to enjoy the powers due to feeling a lack of control. At first sightseeing and games and consensual sex, then more destructive hobbies and less consensual sex (conflicting because it generates feelings of control but also deep guilt), and eventually as he concludes he is being maliciously simulated he starts attacking everyone and trying to destroy the simulation. The last sentence in the book is the mysterious voice saying, "Okay, I think we're done here. Goodbye." -- Also included, about a dozen fanfictional endings/extensions to this story, all of them fixfic and most of them hurt-comfort and none of which the original author endorses.

A long episodic series with an elaborate magic system involving meditation and rituals. There is occasionally a pause in the story while readers can vote on an important choice. The protagonist is an empathetic idealist in a deeply flawed and clearly called out as flawed world- There's corruption, criminal gangs, oppressive laws, slander and lies all treated as terrible injustices. The protagonist's idealism is slowly worn down by the harsh world and people taking advantage of him but the readers keep choosing to look for the best in people. Eventually, however, they vote to try something especially risky and the protagonist dies. The series switches perspective to a prominent rival, who finds the protagonist's research materials and uses them for her own ends. For a while she keeps saying to herself that she wants to change the world for the better... But never actually doing so because it doesn't feel safe. Only when she has a son does she - and the readers, who voted on emotional moments - realize she was living comfortably, benefiting from a corrupt system. Though it places them both at immense risk she starts fighting back against injustice and corruption. It's ongoing.
 

Planet's submissions! 

Pigeon has a look at the war novel, decides it's not really her cup of tea, and sets it aside. Realistic war and violence makes her uneasy even when it's portrayed as ethically wrong. The modern era is hopefully better than that. Hopefully. 

She is not interested in a psychological horror today, thank you for the content warning! She is a small soft Pigeon and does not prefer to read scary books. 

The long episodic series is interesting and again political. Politics really is a multiversal constant, huh. The quest format is familiar, though it's rare to see published things in such a form. The on-the-ground perspective seems to be common to works from Planet. She sets it aside before getting to the interesting part. (One of her sub-readers takes it and heartily enjoys it and bemoans the lack of an ending.)

Planet's submissions are next on the slush pile. 

The war novel doesn't really have a market. Military tactics are generally regarded as a grim necessity on Heart, something resorted to when all else has broken down, and aren't generally considered something appropriate to read about. She puts it in the no pile. 

The psychological horror is interesting. It's a niche market but psychological horror is the most broadly-known kind. The gradual slide of the protagonist into madness from the interference of the mysterious voice and the mysterious powers is... disturbingly similar to real psychotic symptoms, actually. That makes it gritty and realistic. She calls a contact in the Genre department and passes on the manuscript. It's later published, and gets a small but devoted following who produce some fanfiction from the perspective of people affected by the protagonist's attempts at control. Some of it ends up being horror-erotica. Hopefully the original authors do not mind. 

The long episodic series is incomplete, which is a strike against it, and arranging the voting across worlds would be a logistical nightmare. Unfortunate; it looks realistically developed and deep and interesting. She sets it in her personal collection and also the No pile.

A novel about a video game designer who has angst about all the video game ideas he has but will never actually implement, because having a cool idea and actually making it reality are two extremely different things. His emotional journey follows metaphorically along the development of two different games, with peeks into the actual process of game design or programming or art, but most of it centering on character interactions as the protagonist tries to find his place in the team. He has difficulty separating work frustrations from his nonwork time and spends a lot of time dwelling on it. He worries about being overly familiar or too distant or too demanding or too passive about his work and friend relationships. Over time he makes better friends with his coworkers, some of whom remain distant or leave, and learns to accept most of his issues.

A drama told entirely through forum posts complete with avatars, usernames, timestamps, and edit histories. A clique of friends forms an interest group on the internet for a made-up MMO video game. At first they enjoy the small and slowly growing community, but then an event in-game makes their forum explode massively in popularity and the original founders are unsure what to do about it. There is much drama about bad behavior on the forums and how much moderation/oversight is too much and ten page debates on minor changes to the posted rules and complaining about the developers' changes to the MMO. It's largely played for humor rather than politics. The whims of the internet. One of the group is caught getting advance tips on upcoming changes from a game moderator, and this is seen as a massive scandal and immense violation that everyone is upset about - that seems less political and more like a stock trope? Eventually the original friend group splits on a strong disagreement about whether develop their own offshoot of the game. To cling to the past nostalgically, or move on?

A novel about a team of a dozen terraforming engineers, set after the heavy lifting of adding oxygen and correcting the temperature and so on is done. They're responsible for building up ecosystems. There's lots and lots of nerdy detail about nutrient flow and niches and metabolic pathways and mutation rates and isolation of clades and stability-against-extinctions, but its well contained to footnotes and appendicies. Every member of the team has a distinct personality type and their own favorite forms of life they try to squeeze into as many different places as possible- For example, one woman is quiet and calm in private but plays up an almost megalomaniacal personality in public, except during crises when she goes deadly serious. She is very fond of snakes, and tries to put snakes in as many places as possible on the new planet. It's tightly paced and dense with character interactions and comes to a satisfying end with people moving into the new planet and admiring the wildlife.

More data dump from Planet.

The book about creative angst is a familiar topic and a really played-out one. She's not really interested in this random dude and his interpersonal worries. Might be better with a female protagonist? Probably not.

The epistolary drama is good because it doesn't take the politics seriously. It's fun; she laughs a few times at the antics of some of the posters getting tied up in knots about little things. And the final question - whether to hold on to the past or not... Well, that makes her think about the split between Eravia and Anadyne, and how the two nations have their independent characters despite their shared past. She makes a few notes on it to share with Snowblossom, and recommends it to the committee for broader reading. 

The terraforming-engineer novel is amusingly dense. It's a good thing she's an Earth, most Skies would either drop this from boredom or drift off into footnotes land doing their own independent research and never come back to the book. The writing is solid, though she ends up rolling her eyes at the thickness of the appendices. She finishes this one, but doesn't recommend it to the council for further reading - it seems more Eravian, in her eyes. 

Crystal continues reading books from Planet as well. 

The book about creative angst has been done to death. Nobody reads these anymore, the genre ended after A Watchmaker's Heart. She doesn't think this one surpasses Watchmaker's Heart. Next. 

The epistolary drama is lifelike and gripping, though it has less use of multiple-alias-accounts than standard for the genre. It's light and fluffy and interestingly political and the humor is solid. It's a little bit everyday to be a good example of "alien fiction", though. She files it towards the top of the Maybe pile. 

As for the terraforming engineers, it's technically dense enough to appeal to people's special interests, while not letting the details get in the way of the characterization and development. It might be a bit too technical for Anadynes, but as an Eravian novel it'll sell like hot cakes. She puts it in the Yes pile with a note to prioritize Eravian distribution and only negotiate for Anadyne rights if the initial publication is a success.

An collection including seven novels, three books of short stories, four series about the most popular alternate universes, a collection of poetry, half a dozen epistolary books, and an annotated book of music scores. An additional eight powersets, 412 character traits, and new faction-loyalty and relationship mechanics for a previously mentioned RPG are included, all inspired by this series. The base series is about a worker, named Halru, who is taken as a war-prisoner by a rival hive as slave labor and is forced to care for their grubs. Two of her limbs are cut off, and she generally has a terrible time doing awful labor under threat of death. Her best friend, Terilu, sets off on an extremely dangerous and ill-advised quest to rescue her, which at various points includes having a riddling contest with a dragon to gain fire breathing, bargaining with a Fairy Queen to gain wings, fighting a variety of creatures, secretly training under five separate rival hives to become a master of all five styles of spearfighting, and generally becoming a really powerful and dangerous warrior. She then rescues her best friend, and they return home, only to find themselves dealing with complex social dynamics now that Halru is maimed, which means that she is lower status in Semi-Generic!Fantasy!Past world. They cuddle a lot, talk about their feelings, play around with various power dynamics, and become lifepartners.

An included note says that while slavery and treating maimed people worse is something that happened in the past, they definitely don’t do it in the modern era, because that’s horrendously unethical.

More Antfolk stuff.

Aww, an alien romance-or-close-enough. It's almost a fairy tale. Very classic fantasy. The slavery predicament is interesting, and the aftermath of the quest is well-realized and real. She guesses that this is sort of a politics thing, but honestly it's focused enough on the character drama that she doesn't really mind. She doesn't explore the alternate universes and expanded universe materials, but she does finish the series. 

The Antfolk series about Halru and Terilu is clearly a popular franchise back home, and it seems reasonably adaptable - people wanting to get to know the Antfolk would want to engage with something like this, surely? She puts the main series books on the "yes" pile after reading the first one.

A doorstopper novel. It's about first-contact between two continents each with their own separate and fully-developed magic system. Each side is written in a way that assumes deep familiarity with that continent's magic system, without anyone in the story there just to have things explained to them.

Despite this, the initial character introductions of the prince of one land and the princess of the other, and the way their internal conflicts relate to the implausibly straightforward political stakes distracts from the reader's confusion until the pivotal scene where the first common thread between the two magic systems is discovered by the two protagonists who have just met for the first time. From there, the story dives into a developing science-romance between the two protagonists where they dig into each other's magic system, having the basics and the underlying principles explained to each other such that both systems are steadily demystified for the reader.

One discovery of a major shared fundamental law leads to a long, magically-facilitated sex scene which kind of gradually and sneakily slides back into the science when they turn to studying the interactions between the sexual components of their respective systems.

Just as they start to see a way to unify the two magic systems in a way that'll unlock de-aging, teleportation, and general shapeshifting (capabilities that neither system had alone), via an orgy-ritual they both just invented, their respective kingdoms spring on them that they're to be married to each other as part of the political alliance. Now, at this point they are quite fond of each other and would love to stay together, but the problem is that the marriage is partly a magical thing that the alliance will depend on, that will shatter if the vows are not upheld, and the vows are based on pre-magical family structures and demand exclusivity. This is, obviously, a major obstacle to the orgy-ritual that would unify the magic systems, and if they have to wait and train someone new to lead the ritual then the current plan-outside-their-control to establish trade will go ahead, wasting immense resources and many many lives. There is a scene where they do the math on this together, and exchange shocked horror at exactly what it would cost both economically and in human suffering if they allowed the marriage to happen.

The ultimate climax of the book is a convoluted plot to fake the magical aspect of the wedding so that they can go ahead with the ritual in secret without breaking the alliance, but when they finally begin enacting the orgy-ritual one of the participants, it turns out, has sold them out, and the two of them are torn from each others arms, figuratively speaking, as the two governments decide to take-their-ball-and-go-home.

There is a sequel hook in an epilogue as two disguised strangers meet in a tavern, then reveal themselves to be the prince and princess, both having assumed new identities to escape their respective governments. Here it is revealed that the orgy-ritual actually worked, instead of being successfully interrupted, and the book ends with the pair of them casting the first spell in the new combined magic system to transform them both into entirely new bodies that no one will recognize.

It's a different day, now, and a different self fronting for Pigeon; today she's Thyris*, a former Reflection of Amethyst from Watchmaker's Heart. This particular self of hers really likes fiddly obsessive details, so the magic systems from this latest book from Homerealm really hit the spot. Pigeon is still annoyed about the politics, but she's further back in her head right now and doesn't get to call the shots. Thyris has no such allergy. 

The porn is nice, too.** She curls up with her book in a blanket nest and casually masturbates to the climactic orgy scene; she's a little disappointed when it gets interrupted in the middle, but oh well, she flips back to the earlier sex scene and that settles that. 

She's still in the mood to read afterwards, so she decides to go back to a couple books that Pigeon didn't give a fair shake because they were too heavily Politics.

A very complicated political novel with around 600,000 words, featuring nine diplomats from three different hives navigating a tension-filled debate about the morality of executions, while also trying to make the most advantageous trade deals, with several backroom discussions between every combination of hives at different points, embarrassing interpersonal drama, and a tremendous amount of dramatic irony.

This one's enjoyably twisty. It is, however, very, very, very long. She only gets about halfway through it*** before Pigeon has to remind her that she has to actually eat lunch and she would like to read more than one book today. Reluctantly, she sets it down and doesn't get back to it till a few days later when she's fronting again. The backroom dealings remind her of the more fun parts of her job, honestly.

A less complicated political novel, classified as “short,” with only 70,000 words and three subplots. In this one, one of the hives is secretly preparing to wage war on both hives and framing it on the other, and is thwarted when one of the ambassadors has a crisis of faith, which is detailed in full. She defects, tells the others about the evil plans, and gets lots of cuddles with her new friends. 

She reads this one in the afternoon and enjoys it a lot. It's less complex than the other one but still satisfyingly crunchy. The resolution is a bit simplistic but otherwise she likes it. 

A quasi-historical piece of fiction, where “history” means “complex spice trade deals,” “romantic? expensive gifts,” and “people are using spears to fight,” than any real attempt at accuracy. Features a moderate amount of politics, mostly centered around mutual-hostage-spy agreements and the spice trade, and a lot of people breaking down and getting cuddles.

This one's a bit too fluffy and light for her, actually. When she reads politics her tastes tend towards the ridiculously complex. The spice trade deals are good though; it's fun to get some insight into an alien economy. She thinks for about a minute about the possibility of some kind of complex resource-allocation agreement for everyone in Eravia, then shakes her head and dismisses it. Not politically realistic, not for Heart's inhabitants. The Earths would be even more strained than they already are. 

There was also one other thing that Pigeon said a hard No to, but she should probably give her a warning ahead of time before trying that one. (Pigeon gets the hint and clears out of co-consciousness.)

A series of rapekink webfic featuring mindbreak and increasingly exasperated and tired insults from the original self of the sex slaves you make that's designed to be short and sweet enough to each be playable in a single session. 

She plays one of these before bed as a sleep aid. It's a little morally questionable, sure, but the insults are actually really fun to listen to.****

*A diminuitive of "Amethyst." She goes by the equivalent of "Ris" casually.
**Thyris has a significantly higher libido than Pigeon, among many other differences between the two.
***Thyris is a very, very fast reader.
****Thyris, like many people on Heart, is a sexual sadist.

Meanwhile, Crystal is evaluating the doorstopper fantasy novel from Homerealm. 

It's pretty solid. The worldbuilding is deep and cleverly revealed, and the erotica components are well-integrated. It might be a bit long, but the erotica components will help to hold people's attention. And the politics will attract the Suns, who'll share it with their polycules. This one goes on the Yes pile.

A series of dialogues between a woman (who's implied to have wide-ranging spiritual powers) about the meaning of pleasure, desire and 'the original self' and a wide cast of characters - including several scenes where she interrogates the minds of people deep into domme and sub space, people experiencing orgasm, people dreaming while being sexually stimulated and more, interspersed with occasional citations from the more prosaic research into the mind present in hearthome. There's a climatic scene where a domme confesses earnestly that she doesn't care at all about her wife at the height of her passion during her neglect scene, before showing off an intimately detailed hurt-comfort middlecare scene and the rest of their 20 year anniversary together as lovers. It's suprisingly non-judgemental about what the 'real' self-involved is, and is framed to let the audience find there own answers. 

A novel about sex-sports in the style of 17776. 

A book about a magical girl in a mundane, equal-gender-ratio-society with a unique power that lets anyone become a magical girl, so long as they hold out hope in their heart that they can be themselves most through the strength of their feminine spirit. There's a series of kaiju attacks, but they're treated as a distraction at best from the project of facilitating as many people getting the transition as possible into immortal beings. 

The periverser offerings include:

Nonfiction

An anthology of memoirs about several people who work in distressing-undesirable¹ professions:

• A daycare custodian who had an accident that caused them to lose their sense of smell. This was extremely distressing to them for the first month, due to the loss of taste and ability to enjoy food! The silver lining made itself apparent quite quickly when their friend mentioned on social media that a local daycare was in need of a distressing-undesirable specialist custodian and they discovered that their anosmia meant that they were markedly less put off by toddlers' bathroom accidents. They still needed to get used to the visual and textural aspects, but their quality of life increased once this hurdle was cleared.
• A surgeon who kicks² on the kind of medical imagery that most people are extremely distressed by. They used to feel like a bad person for their fascination with this imagery and with the notion of cutting into people, but a professional rubber duck³ brought up the idea of taking the distressing-undesirable exposure tests, which they passed. They still felt awkward while going through training, but has by now found a sense of community with their colleagues, who admire their attitude and ability to find fascination in daily work.
• A dentist who doesn't have a particular fascination with distressing-undesirable imagery and is simply much less squeamish than most people! They had a little bit of difficulty early on in their career because while a lot of their patients were put at ease by their casual, upbeat demeanor, some were put more on edge for an already stressful activity. This was mostly fixed by the dentist asking questions before appointments intended to gauge patients' overall mood and what they would respond well to.
• A construction worker who has a much higher tolerance than average for cold weather (and a corresponding much lower tolerance for hot weather). They particularly enjoy getting waved at by the subset of people who walk past sites they work at who tend to wave at construction workers, street sweepers, and other people who work outside.

The anthology is accompanied by some (appropriately labeled) pamphlets used in the distressing-undesirable exposure tests. The imagery starts out relatively tame and ramps up in graphicness as the test goes on so that applicants can be sorted by when they tapped out.

A textbook about the care and breeding of motherbeasts⁴. It has a brief history-of section but mostly focuses on the day-to-day practicalities, behaviors, and lifespans of the motherbeasts.

A book for children about popular pets, such as goldfish, pigeons, rodents⁵, and rabbits! Each animal group gets its own section on the history of that animal, its temperament and behavior, its care and breeding, and fun activities you can do with your pet! The history parts have lots of pictures and illustrations of the domesticated pets' wild and historical counterparts alongside the modern domesticated instances, the care parts have straightforward descriptions and illustrations of how the animals mate, and the "fun activities" parts are split between practical jobs animals can do (messenger pigeons!) and cute anecdotes (training your goldfish to swim through hoops for treats!).

A history of economics and how different cultures adopted money before the periverse, in an impressive feat of coordination, did away with money entirely. This is widely regarded as one of the best things to happen to humanity, alongside the existence of motherbeasts and the invention of the internet.

Fiction

A setting bible⁶ for a world divided into the material (normal mass governed by the laws of physics) and ethereal (magic, souls, minds). There are several types of sapient creature, such as vampires (ex-humans who can't produce ether on their own and must feed on the ether of others, the most effective way to do so being to drink blood, since humans' material bodies are bonded to their ethereal bodies, or souls), zombies (subset of vampires that eat flesh instead and gain a corresponding boost to physical strength), fairies (creatures that are entirely ethereal), angels (Really Powerful creatures that are entirely ethereal), and constructs (creatures that are entirely material). There's a weak masquerade but not much in practice actually stops interested humans from learning magic, particularly if they know how to summon fairies to teach them or if they have a natural talent for sensing the ethereal.

A novel about children for children where a preteen group of friends has extremely perilous adventures solving mysteries and fighting monsters! None of the protagonists actually die in this one but every member of the friend group comes pretty close in different and exciting ways. 

A novel about children for adults where the highest stakes are "the protagonist is nervous about an upcoming piano competition because what if they make a mistake." It's full of detailed descriptions of home life where all four of the protagonist's parents take very good care of them and make good food and take them on fun activities - each parent has different hobbies and interests that they're delighted to share with the protagonist (and not too disappointed if their child isn't up to an activity on a particular day). The parents are all able to attend the piano competition, and even though the protagonist makes a minor mistake towards the beginning of the piece they aren't disheartened and manage to finish the piece without freezing up.

A prism⁷ set in a magic system where the protagonists are on opposing sides of a divide between the light-mages and the dark-mages. Much of the story is powered by the fact that light-magic and dark-magic are fueled by opposed aspects of one's self and personality, meaning that while the protagonists may share a basic underlying personality and template attractors, different parts of their self have been encouraged and harnessed over the course of their lifetime.

¹Catch-all term for certain professions, particularly medical ones that involve performing surgeries or dealing with nasty bodily functions, construction work, anything that involves being outside in inclement weather conditions, dealing with smelly garbage, particularly spoiled food, and anything else that would be dealbreakingly uncomfortable or unpleasant for the average person. Many Earth professions are split into work that normal people can do and something you'd call a distressing-undesirable specialist for: a custodian does routine cleaning of dust and spilled soda every night, while a distressing-undesirable specialist comes in on a case-by-case basis if, for instance, someone vomits on the floor.

²Like a kink, but non-erogenous.

³A kind of counselor who can give advice, but mostly just listens to their clients as they talk themselves into solutions that they possibly already knew on some level.

⁴A piglike, non-sapient animal that has the magical property of being able to accept genetic contributions from one or more humans and create/gestate a baby that is the offspring of all the contributing humans. It carries its young separately from human babies - both male and female motherbeasts are able to gestate human babies, but only female motherbeasts are able to carry motherbeasts.

⁵There are So Many Kinds of domesticated rodents.

⁶A popular genre in the periverse is "extremely thorough writeups of how a setting works." There's no plot; just descriptions of the SFF elements (the periverse doesn't draw a strong distinction between "fantasy" and "science fiction," so there's a term that covers both magic systems as well as things like the warp drive), alternate histories, types of cultures present, and so on. Typically setting bibles will also have descriptions of how the characters and/or plots of other media properties would alt into the setting in question.

⁷Extremely popular genre where alts meet each other. There are several subgenre: more earthficcy ones where the protagonists discover their althood after a lot of amusing-in-hindsight personality clashes, more magical ones where alts know they share a (usually telepathic in some way) connection but live far away, and ones where several sets of alts of different people meet up through multiversal travel.

Thyris is still in front when they get to another data dump from Hearthome. 

The book about the meaning of pleasure and desire is obviously devotional and ecstatic. She sets it aside to share with Snowblossom; she's already pretty satisfied from yesterday's adventures in reading. 

The novel about sex sports is hilarious. The commentary is slick, the scenes are hot and silly by turns, and the distance of the robotic narrators really sells the human-interest angle. It's heartwarming. She devours it in the morning and cuddles up for a while just thinking it over in her head, about the power of the sentient spirit and how sex brings people together and all the rest of it. This one goes on her personal pile to share with Snowblossom in their free time. 

The magical-girl transformation book is a bit tropey, but she likes the genre. December probably would like to know about it but it's not a high priority. She smiles a little at it and sets it aside for sometime in the future. 

More books from Hearthome. 

The ecstatic book is going to be a bestseller in Anadyne, no question - the Ecstatics finding contact with a second tradition in the same vein on an alien world? Absolutely it's going to be a smash hit. Yes pile. 

The novel about sex sports is also a winner. Heartwarming and hot, just like Skies like it. Yes pile. 

The magical-girl transformation book... Is a bit overdone. It's interesting to see it from another world, but it's not something that doesn't have an equivalent here. Maybe pile, towards the bottom.

Next up, a catalogue of fiction and nonfiction from the Periverse. 

The collection of biographies is interesting but she's a bit too squeamish for this kind of thing. (She tests herself on the distressing-undesirable pamphlets and doesn't score particularly remarkably.) Yes, she's a sadist, but. 

She is not particularly interested in reading a textbook, even if it is about magical multiple-person-baby animals. Those will probably be popular on Heart for those who want to have children, but personally she's far too busy and not particularly interested in the idea. 

She's not personally interested in pets, so she gives that one a miss as well. 

The Periverse did away with money? How on earth do they allocate labor then? This just raises further questions!! She sets the economics history aside to discuss with Snowblossom.

The setting bible is interesting, but she was looking for a story, not just several hundred pages of dedicated worldbuilding. 

The children's novel is fun, though the plot's a bit simple for her as an adult. Still, she skims it. It's not bad. 

The piano-competition novel is interesting. It reads like a Sky's passionbuilding as a child working with their familycule. It's cute and soft and recognizably in the "cutiecule" subgenre, though it's rare to see books featuring children in that genre. More frequently they're extremely fluffy running-romances. This one is notably short on sex, probably because of the children, which is an entirely reasonable artistic decision given that it's saying something about the way that people develop and grow early on, though it loses some spark because the child is unlikely to remember any of this when they grow up.*

This particular prism is a thoughtful meditation on the differences between interpretations of the same Reflection, as expressed through fiction. It's really, really weird that an alien species that wasn't even plural came up with this! What the heck! (Or are they actually plural and nobody told her?) 

*Most of Heart's natives have very little lasting autobiographical memory of their childhoods; it's considered standard for childhood memories to begin in the teens. 

Crystal is looking at the submissions from the Periverse as well.

She doesn't generally deal with nonfiction, however...

The collection of memoirs might sell, or it might be too uncomfortable. Bottom of the Maybe pile. 

The textbook on motherbeasts is absolutely going to have a market. People are going to want to know about alien magic that could potentially give them many-parent children, that's not even in question. Yes pile. 

The books about popular pets are fine, if alien. There sure are a lot of them. What's wrong with just having a cat? Maybe pile. 

The history of economics is sure to be controversial, what with the abolishing-money, and that means people are going to want to buy it. Yes pile.

The setting bible would be better if there were a story or even game mechanics associated with it. As it is, unlikely to see a market. No pile.

The children's book is pretty solid as a children's book. Daring! Adventure! Mystery! Any kids who are interested in aliens (which would be all of them) would love to read this. Yes pile. 

The novel about children for adults is interestingly alien. It feels a little like nothing really happens in it, but then she knows Skies who'll eat this kind of thing up. Top of the Maybe pile. 

The prism she parses as devotional literature for the first hour, and then she realizes abruptly that it's not an alien religion at all, just an alien genre. And the aliens aren't even plural! What the fuck! This one is going to create a massive buzz because of the way it's so similar and yet so different. Top of the Yes pile. 

An doorstopper alternative history of electronic music written by a mother-daughter pairing, with extensive footnotes and side-chapters about the subjective experience of listening and the history of cochlear implants. 

A book about the joys and sorrows of a food afficianado moving between the worlds of industrial food production, dadaist-consumption-experience-artist, running a 'mom and mum' store and probabalistic novelty generation circuits and everything in between, with an affection for the process of creation and how that changes when the scale of the production and the experiencers changes. 

This is the absolute first piece of fiction the krissan show off. It opens with a lengthy forward, describing how it's the oldest full written work they have preserved. It was written in a personal cipher (very common in cave writings even after the invention of reading). 

(There's a note that the translated work being submitted is a work of fiction expanding on it, though with more of an eye to faithfulness to the original than normal. This is traditional for retellings of this story. Also, the base story is broadly considered untranslatable, because the author's personal cipher was nongrammatical, with individual symbols sometimes referring to entire other stories that have been only shakily reconstructed, and a very complicated network of annotations.) 

The submission, in addition to the translated story, includes high-fidelity pictures of the original novel in the extensive cave system it was written in, high-fidelity images of the symbols directly translated into a two dimensional medium with colors standing in for position on the z axis of the original symbol. (The author seems to have used the natural unevenness of the walls and chiseling as part of the cipher). It also includes a history of the author, as best they can construct from legends, archaeology, and what the author wrote about themselves.

The author lived well before the first permanent structures were created. The cave system in question is only accessible for a few days a year. The author was trapped when the water outside rose early, and survived due to supplies passed over by people from outside (who also repeatedly tried to rescue the author despite the great danger; the author journaled this with a wish that they would stop and an expression of deep gratitude that they continued).

The author also attributes their continued sanity to the people outside, who came to the river bank to sing and dance and call out stories across the divide, and new people traveled from far away as they heard of the author's predicament to bring joys of their own. The author during that year wrote what's almost certainly the first novel, though of course stories existed before this, and they have older, shorter writings preserved still. The story and the author's notes and journals fill nearly every inch of the massive cave system - walls, ceiling, floor, with only a narrow strip to walk in - and the translation itself is well over a million words.

The story can be at its briefest summarized as such:  

The story is written in the style of a fable, about how at first the only things in all existence were the stone people, who spoke only in a slow, endless drone. They told the same history over and over, and they were reborn as they died, and time didn't yet exist. But a reborn stone at some point discovered 'before' and 'after' and therefore grew bored and restless.

They traveled through the currents of history to find the dead stones who lived beneath all other history. They found that the dead had become fire, and spoke to the flames. They expressed a wish for excitement and motion, but angered the fire through rudeness, and so they were cursed to always run. 

The youth becomes the wind, and every time they slow, the fire eats at their feet. They run over the entirety of existence and up and down the histories, destroying the droning histories of the stone people, and from wind's racing mind comes a world of color and motion. Wind grows terrified of stillness and ran ever faster, and the world moved faster with them. Obstacles sometimes appear and force them to slow down briefly, causing great pain. The story goes into detail about the world and the legends they run through, and how the world runs faster with the wind as all things chase it.

The story then introduces a second full character, a youth who runs alongside the wind and tries to warn the wind to slow down. The wind is too afraid, and the youth perishes from trying to keep up, causing the wind to slow down in grief. The wind can't stand the fire, though, and speeds back up - causing the cycle to repeat once, then a second time. For the third youth, the wind slows before the youth can die, even though this burns them.

The youth travels with the wind, and convinces the wind of the value of dreaming as people do. The youth swears to carry the wind while the wind sleeps, so the curse will be satisfied. The wind trusts the youth and sleeps - and slows, and dies in the fire.

The story shifts to the youth, who is revealed to be water, another stone person who went before the fire and wished for rest, and was cursed to burn if they went too fast. Water tricked wind, because water had been too weak to force the world to stillness. The world is both water and wind, so wind going quickly burns the water even if water doesn't run alongside.

Water realizes the world is quiet without wind, and regrets their actions. Water begins to run, speeding up the world until wind can exist again, and then confesses. Wind tries to run away from their emotions about this - again causing water to burn.

They realize they love each other, but neither can stand the other's pace for long, and existing in the middle is a constant agony - as is seeing the other's pain. They begin swinging between speed and stillness in step with each other, the least painful solution.

The story then details the new world birthed from their love. A new people of both stillness and speed arise and run alongside water and wind, offering love and distraction from pain. There's a few just-so stories woven in here, detailing how water and wind create the modern krissan out of the people, granting them twins and the power to dream worlds into being and creating the seasons.

The story then segues into recounting oral histories of the krissan, clearly tied to the cycle of wind and water.

 

The story ends with the author's present day, and with a signature - "As the wind runs because the wind must, and the water finds stillness because the water must, I write because I must."

Following the translation is a collection of books on the subsequent history of the novel - the invention of reading as the story of the novel spread and people wished to know it (this is based in legend but believed to be credible), the formation of the Temple of Writing to guard the cave, the development of the Festival-City of Weaving Knowledge first around the Temple and then moving to another location nearby to avoid visitors disturbing the site… Also a massive amount of linguistic notes and archaeological notes and 'how did we reconstruct all these stories anyways' notes. 

All told, there's over three million words worth of things to read. (There's a note that it's very tempting to try to read this in a single month, but the krissan really suggest taking at least three months, unless the aliens are fast readers of course.)

(There's an additional note that they have a lot of shorter works if this one is, uh, way too long to really test if people are into krissan works.)

A fantasy novel set in a world where nothing makes sense, every culture has their own superstitions and all the superstitions seem to be true at once, even contradictory ones. The central protagonist-pair is an asexual man and a trans woman (who manages to use magic to transition, kind of as a side note, roughly halfway through the story, it's not a major focus). The dynamic between this core pair is strong- They're deep and carefully thought out characters. They take lots of notes on local superstitions and travel to new places together and pretend to be husband and wife (or at least a polycule-core-pairing) in most places they visit because lots of places have helpful superstitions about couples. The pretending-to-be-married is held out as a metaphor for not fitting into society, it's kind of awkward. The two are intimate friends, just not in a romantic or sexual way. They avoid danger on the roads and make friends and enemies, and try to do science to superstitions. They eventually piece together that whether you believe something will work has a strong influence on whether it will actually work, and people's superstitions seem to be getting more and more grim and hopeless. They are horrified by the implications and form a secret conspiracy to try and spread more positive, hopeful spiritual beliefs, starting a spiritualist healing cult that has a good initial reception. It stops there with a clear sequel hook.

A narrative-focused-minimal-mechanics video game where the viewpoint/protagonist character is the captain of a magical flying trade boat in a fantasy world. There's a lot of attention paid to ancient navigation methods, to the weather, to food and water preservation, to translation and contact with unfamiliar cultures. Sometimes these issues are handwaved with a new magic item, but not always. Most of the game aside from the nerdy details is about meeting exotic cultures and navigating cultural differences (and the different clever solutions to basic living problems like chores or disease that the different cultures use). You can very easily get into trouble, offend the locals and get worse deals or even get kicked out, if you approach things trying to be polite and friendly the same way in each new culture. There is also the side-plot of accumulating lots of extra characters, romantic partners or just friends, usually with one or more nonhuman features on a mostly humanoid body, like harpypeople, goatmen, catgirls, merfolk, etc. You have to figure out how to alter the ship to accommodate them before you can pass a certain relationship level. You can pick the genders of the side characters and it doesn't seem to change much about them, just a couple of lines and the picture and animations. There are too many side characters for any of them except a couple to be especially fleshed out, so they tend to come across as somewhat flat aside from the color of their home culture. The game is sex-scenes-optional, with a friendly, romantic but non-sexual, and sexual path for each companion.

A book about TRAINS, BOATS, AIRPLANES, and ROCKETSHIPS! Its framing device is pretty minimal, the book almost seems to be a textbook in disguise. Or at most, a collection of short stories about what particular vehicles mean to particular people, light and cheery and hopeful and excited. The various characters and their jobs or reasons for being on a train, boat, airplane, or rocketship are pretty clearly mostly set dressing in favor of rambling nerdy rants about how these various vehicles work and what tradeoffs are made in their design and the historical value of particular models and the lovingly researched process of engineering them (with historical context included in the scenes of old-timey engineers discussing things) and what a difference having excellent vehicles makes to individuals in a society and the various situations in which design mistakes happened and a long rant that somehow diverts into tax policy about how much more efficient trains are than cars and much lamenting on how rockets are way too expensive for everyone to get to ride on one.

Looking at the books from Hearthome...

Thyris is not in the mood for several thousand words of alien electronica today, unfortunately. 

The epicurean tell-all is clearly Ecstatic work again, or perhaps just Sensate. It's alright. Some of it is just weird, honestly. She sets it aside pretty quickly as well.

More works from Hearthome, these ones looking to be nonfiction.

The history of electronica is interesting but perhaps too niche to publish on Heart. It gets put in the middle of the Maybe stack. 

The weird food art book goes in Maybe as well - the various perspectives are an interesting gimmick, but it's just kind of weird overall, and not in a very saleable way.

Thyris opens the package from the Krissan. It's huge, there must be a lot of works in here... 

... It's the oldest preserved Krissan novel. And a reading guide. 

One million words of story and two million words of interpretation. 

A spark kindles in her bones. It's early in the morning still - the previous two works from Hearthome didn't take long to set aside - and she has at least a million words to read. Important words, deep words, words that speak to history - 

This is the definition of her job. It's more than her job, it's her lifepath, her vocation. Keeping her Snowblossom up to date on the important things is what her skills are for. 

She opens the heavy paperback edition, and begins to read...

Meanwhile, Crystal looks at the massive Krissan package, looks at the recommendation to read it over three months, and sets it aside for evening reading later in the day. Sure, it might be lucrative, but it's an absolute monster of a doorstopper. If it's really important it can wait a little.

A coming-of-age story set in the late medieval period. An apprentice bloomer is unsatisfied with his home and his apprenticeship, and his Hidden* is in a gang. (One of the other apprentices is as well, probably, but uses a different name and the connection is overtly ignored.) They're eventually caught causing property damage, and one of the adults who catches him invites him (and just him) to a mystery cult's rite - he attends flippantly and uses the same name as for the gang, which is suggested to show he's unserious and attending mostly to avoid the inviter turning him in. The cult, Children of Daedalus, reveres an ancient, possibly-mythical inventor and emulates him, with many ceremonies being collaboration trying to create new technology, though this is more going through the motions than actual science or innovative engineering. Gradually he stops being flippant and engages more honestly with the rites, and as he is more invested, his dissatisfaction with the rest of his life reduces. As a milestone showing his maturity and admitting to deception, he holds a paper funeral** with most of the cult present and is re-introduced to them with a new name, chosen from a list of cult pseudo-saints. The final scenes show him achieving journeyman status in his apprenticeship and celebrating during three successive meals - dinner with his peers from the bloomery, lunch with his family the next day, and then a private dinner with his initial sponsor from the cult and another sponsor-sponsee pair he's become close with.

*Not well explained by the translator, who clearly considers it too obvious to bother going into detail about. Careful reading shows this is a persona or name kept separate from the others; the protagonist initially has two other personas, one for home and one for his apprenticeship, but these aren't kept separate as strictly as the Hidden is.

**Not explained beyond noting the etymology, which is a contraction from the words for 'paper funeral' in a now-dead language.

A collection of folktales about the Wandering Man, a traditional folk hero. The Wandering Man (usually but not universally male) usually says he is a merchant or a message-carrier, but sometimes claims to be a tinker, mason, or minstrel; he always has enough skills to make his claims seem plausible. The wanderer brings down evil lords, catches murderers, exposes frauds, and in more fantastical stories banishes evil spirits, prevents unnatural plagues, and stops vampires, werewolves, and trolls. However, while he always leaves things much better than he found them on net, these stories are almost never purely positive. He leaves ruined farmlands, broken homes and barns, and clashing communities in his wake, and in the more severe cases, often causes deaths or maimings. Every story ends with him leaving, usually with the community shouting curses at his retreating back despite being grateful for his accomplishments. Many stories include young people admiring him and assisting him, but many of these become the most furious cursers by the end of the tale. A common way communities are left in furious disarray by his actions is exposing the connections between the several faces/personas prominent or controversial members have, breaking the boundaries between home, work, and hidden - frequently breaking apart a village's local mystery cult or a town's private hobby clubs.

Story marked as fine literature; it covers seven hundred years, and everything is funerals - either the participants in a funeral or a paper funeral, or newspaper obituaries about either kind. The funeral customs vary, with a casket or urn of ashes for true deaths, but they are substantially outnumbered by the paper funerals. Each paper funeral has somewhere from three to twelve people, at least three of them with speaking parts, reciting the funereal rites for the name that has been laid to rest, with at least two people splitting the first person portions of the narrative - "I lived and shone brightly and believed in my righteous cause..." (insert some statements about said cause) and at least one person taking the role of the present, welcoming in the new name and persona into their newer home, guild, or in later centuries social/interest club. The background events show radical changes in the political structure of the area several times, and it becomes increasingly suggestive that several of the people holding paper funerals have in fact lived for many normal human lifetimes. It never becomes totally clear why they live so long, what they hope to achieve, and whether any of them have died a true death by the final pages of the novel.

Two days later, Thyris has finished the Krissan's story. She has read for around twenty hours* in the past two days, barely pausing for food or sleep, all of her time dedicated solely to the Krissan's first novel.

Unfortunately, she cannot read the original. But it's being preserved. The Krissan have the right idea. That's good. This is clearly part of the shirasanmi** of the entire Krissan species, just from the wisps of context she already has. There will have to be an official response from the Sanctified to having this shared. But she needs more context - 

Well, there is another two million words to read. 

She reads them. It takes her another four days.

*Thyris reads at around 800wpm. 
**Soul-record, in practice a combination of a will, a eulogy, and a personal mythology with specifically defined rites of remembrance, generally written by the person in life or their survivors. It is a daily ritual for the Sanctified to select a shirasanmi from the vault and publicly perform one of its rites, thereby representing symbolically the wishes of all the unremembered. 

Pigeon is speechwriting in her head while Thyris reads. She jots notes during meals, writing, compressing, trying to distill the essence of the story to something appropriate. The introduction is obvious enough, but she can't misrepresent the Shirasanmi of an entire species. 

It's too important to share. Someone else might get it wrong. 

She writes the version she feels is right, in the tradition of Krissan storytellers before her. Snowblossom will have to improvise from her notes, of course, she has to have her own version as well - but she can't read the whole original, not and run the damn country at the same time. It would take months, and this needs a response now, before the publishing companies get a hold of this. She and Snowblossom have a tense conversation about the timescales late at night on the third day. This is in a sense the first real first contact they've had, the first piece of an alien species' soul they've found. They can't risk someone other than the Sanctified being the first to respond officially.

(Crystal is still only 200,000 words into the original story. It's clear enough that it's important, but she still has very little clue of where this is going or what it really is.)

A working group has been put together to curate a collection of some the Union's most significant or impressive works. These are some of the selections they've made for fiction. (The form of the submission is a box containing paper books, naturally.) Excepting the book of lies, all are certified for accuracy*.

A fantasy novel in which people have physical 'souls' which record their memories, instincts, and parts of their personalities. Moreover, it is possible to 'eat' the soul of a dead person and gain some of their memories and instincts. Since this is transitive, and most souls are eaten after death, some small part of most people lives on for hundreds or thousands of years after their death, although transmission is lossy. The story who follows a young monk and his life in a monastery (which is equal parts academic and spiritual). One day, returning from an errand, he discovers that the entire monastery has been slaughtered by an errant monster. Alarmed, he hastily eats as many of the souls of the dead that he can before they expire, almost one hundred in total. This is many more than most people ever consume, and for the rest of the story he is afflicted by mysterious visions and impulses. In the aftermath of the massacre, he travels to the nearest military outpost to report the attack, only to discover that they too have been overrun. Soon learning that a large group of monsters have penetrated civilization's defensive lines and are now heading inwards, towards populated areas, he sets off for the nearby large city to warn them. Along the way, the intuition borne of the souls he consumed helps him narrowly avert disaster several times, and he comes to trust it. After reaching the city, he helps organize its defense, and distinguishes himself. After the crisis is resolved, he is recognized as an exceptionally wise and resourceful leader, and accepts a position on the city's ruling council.

A memoir written by a woman who grew up as a member of one of the last isolated primitive tribes of the great river forest. When she is a young woman, a group of Hadarite missionaries arrive, bearing gifts. Once they learn the language, they tell stories of faraway lands, vast cities, great wealth, and an incredible amount of knowledge about the natural world. Most of her tribe is skeptical, but she, ever curious, listens to them with rapt attention. After a year, they depart. She chooses to accompany them to the city, leaving her old life and family behind. Over the next several years, she attends a school, and learns a great number of things---the knowledge of more than a thousand years of civilization—very, very fast. The book describes in detail her thoughts and inner experience, and what it was like for her life and view of the world change so much so quickly. She seems to have found it both overwhelming and exhilarating. During her time in the city, she also comes to grips with an entirely foreign culture, and the book recounts various stories of misunderstandings or confusions on her part or on the part of others, not used to people with her background. These events are not only humorous, but also offer a deep look into both cultures, and the unstated assumptions and beliefs that underlie them. (This book is popular in the Union for its rare perspective on Hadarite culture, and the curators expect that, for similar reasons, it will be useful to help other worlds understand that culture.) The increased comfort and security available to her in her new life is also a significant change, although she seems to find this less important than what she's learning. After studying for several years, she returns home to visit. After so long, and dressed in foreign clothing, they do not recognize her at first. When they do, they welcome her back, and ask her about her travels. She struggles to recount the most magnificent things she's seen or learned, but finds it difficult to communicate why they mean so much to her when her audience lacks the background knowledge to understand. In her time away, she has grown accustomed to Hadarite culture, and must make an effort to remember what it was like to be so different, to know so little. Realizing that she cannot go back to the life she once had, she departs for good. It is a bittersweet farewell. She returns to the city, begins a career as a biologist, and (as described by the afterword) eventually makes several significant discoveries and is acclaimed as one of the greatest minds of her era.

This book isn't fiction, precisely, but it's definitely not nonfiction either. The most common religion on Olam, called Hadar, is centrally about truth. A fringe sect (allegedly) believes that the best way to learn truth is to be exposed to lies—the trickier the better—examine them, and learn from them how to overcome illusions. This book, written by a member of that sect, is one of the most acclaimed examples of what are known as 'books of lies'. Not everything is a lie, of course, or else you would be able to reverse them and consistently discover what the author really thinks. Instead, the book is a careful mixture of truths and falsehoods, some more obvious than others. It combines various arguments about philosophy, psychology, sociology, and history into a strangely persuasive theory of everything. This book is clearly labeled as not-reliably-true, and the included advice recommends reading this carefully, treating it as a challenge to discern which parts of it are true and which are false, and avoiding drawing any strong conclusions from the text, even if you're pretty sure you've got it right. The curators have included an 'answer sheet', containing the priesthood's best judgments about which parts are true and where the deceptions lie (although it is strongly cautioned that they could have missed something). It is strongly recommended not to distribute these answers, except to a small group of sanity-checkers who will be in a position to notice if your extra-dimensional civilization has a special vulnerability to any of the deceptions contained herein. If used in accordance with the provided instructions, the curators expect this book to be much more valuable as a learning exercise than it is dangerous.

(There are other books of lies, designed to be deceptive taking into account that you expect to be deceived, those are much more dangerous and the curators thought it best not to send any to other worlds just yet.)

A book of post-post-apocalyptic speculative fiction (set on Olam) in which, in the aftermath of an improbably dangerous plague that killed most of the population, the survivors rebuild civilization. It follows seven characters from all around the world, of various ages, genders, and social roles, over a period of several decades. In this period, substantial recovery and reconstruction takes place, and isolated lands come back into contact with one another. Many decades of separation—and varying consequences of and reactions to the plague and its aftermath—cause the already distinct cultures of these various lands to diverge further. When characters from these separate populations meet, they are struck by the differences between them, and seek to understand each other and draw together despite those differences. The book focuses most on its examination of the cultural and economic consequences of the plague, and contains several appendixes detailing the timeline of events, how the economic and cultural conditions changed over time, and why they changed in those ways. The plot, in comparison, is rather straightforward and unsurprising.

*'Accuracy' in this context, seems to be related to how safe it is to draw conclusions about the world from a work. In the case of fiction, it mainly has to do if the work's implicit or explicit models of psychology, sociology, economics, biology, etc. are accurate.

Snowblossom announces a press conference. And a week to the day after the Krissan share their story with the Senior Reader, she goes live on air to read it to everyone in Anadyne who will hear their Sanctified speak. 

Pigeon, as Snowblossom's speechmaker, has had to cut the one million word original to less than seven thousand words so that it will fit in one hour. They can afford to stretch the press conference a little with introductions and conclusions, but the attention span of their listeners is only so long. Even for this.

It's a small press conference. Snowblossom has restricted the audience to senior press members she has good relationships with and a few high-ranking members of her staff. No-one here will dare interrupt their Sanctified, even if she speaks for an hour. 

In a fit of spiritual fervor, Snowblossom discards her notes moments before the press conference. She knows the story. She's going to tell it her way. 

"I have invited you all here today," she says, "to read to you a piece of the Shirasanmi of the Krissan, who did entrust it to us as fellow-minds, not knowing if we would know it for what it was, or acknowledge how significant a gift they have made to us. This story is the oldest surviving Krissan novel, the birth of long-form storytelling for a species that lives with stories. It is enshrined even today in the Temple of Writing in the Festival-City of Weaving Knowledge. It was written originally on a cave's walls by someone trapped there with nothing left to do but storytell. 

The original is over a million words long, in its translated form; so I will have to adapt it, to this brief moment with you, the people of the great nation of Anadyne, who came here expecting a routine reading before bed. Tonight I am afraid I will have to be lengthy..." 

She looks up from the microphone, runs her hand through her hair. 

"No. I think I will have to be brief. Because I will not tell this story the Krissan way; I will tell it my own way, and I am far more a poet than a storyteller. And I would hate to bore you all."

She takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders. 

"First was stone, empty, thoughtless, 
in void and no-time, life in darkness, 
ever-born, ever-dying, circular and still.

One stone knew, 
separating past from future, 
and so was motion born. 

Stone saw the stillness 
and sought southwards, 
seeking something swift. 

Beneath the bodies 
of countless unliving ancestors
Stone found Fire,
Consuming and kind - 

Stone asked fire, 
"Make me quick, 
make me breathless,
make me wild, 
make me free. 
I want to do something. 
I want to be something. 
I want to be other, 
more than a Stone." 

And Fire was pleased, and granted them blessings - 
Gave them their lightness, their grace, their haste - 
But Fire also said: 
"Here is my price:"
"You can never be still, Stone who once settled - "
"Now you are Wind, and should you stop, you are mine."

Wind fled from Fire, 
and out into the world, 
and the world knew motion,
as Wind once knew now -

And Wind fled, and fled, 
and sought and flew and quested
and the world became more, 
that it now knew Wind and Earth.

Wind could not be stopped. 
When it stopped, it burned. 
But then came a runner,
the first of their kind.

Runner was fast, but not like wind.
Runner wished to catch the wind. 
Runner asked Wind, 
"Please, slow your blowing,"
"Please, run with me." 

But Wind could not stop. 
Runner fell behind. 
The world fell behind. 
Wind was empty, 
lost like before, 
when Wind was Stone. 

There was no change for all its changefulness. 
Only Runner was new. 
And so Wind slowed, 
and burned, 
and tried to know Runner.

Runner promised:
"If you will slow, I will run with you."
"If you stop, I will carry you." 
"Then you need not burn." 

Wind slowed. Wind learned. 
Though it was painful, 
Runner was worth it. 
They ran and blew and struggled together. 

Finally, after timeless time, 
Wind stopped, 
curled close to Runner,
and slept. 

And in Runner's embrace, 
Wind burned to ash. 
For Runner did not run. 

Runner was Water, 
a Stone wishing for stillness,
Fire-asker, second-cursed. 
The faster Wind ran, 
the hotter Water burned.

But without Wind, Water
was lonely as Stone.

In time, Wind returned. 
Movement in stillness.
And Water knew - 
They were one as two. 

And so they run together. 
Now stopped, now moving, 
now laughing, now crying, 
never free of Fire, 
never whole, 
and yet whole enough. 

Their children were the Krissan.
Their passion, the world. 
Their story, I have told. 

Like fire burns, wind runs, 
Water stills, and the Krissan write, 
I remember." 

Snowblossom leaves before anyone can ask her a question.

An alternate-historical novel set after the Zadian Theocracy has been overthrown by revolution, following the revolutionary committee trying to set up a new government.  We have several characters pushing for new theocracies (but disagreeing on which religious sects to favor - a few of them still agree with the Zadians' teaching just not the strictness of their practices), some other characters advocating a more secular aristocratic-democracy, and others who want each town choose its own course.  The book majors on their debates and their interaction with the city around them.

(The author's brief prologue explains that in actual history, the Zadian Theocracy was overthrown by foreign armies some time before this book was set.)

A historical-fantasy novel set in the late Middle Ages (before the rise of global trade, the translator's preface explains), where magical elves kidnap some novice Historian-Monks, and they must use their historical and philosophical training to resolve the elves' political dispute and convince someone to bring them back home.  Along the way, they convince two elves to take Historian-Monk vows and set up their own Elven monastery.

A historical novel set during the Barren-Power war, about two (fictional, the author explains) people arrested for treasonously passing secret information to the Barren-Power army.

(The translator explains that the Barren-Power war was Ev's last major war, about a century before the present.  It was started by the Barren-Power ideology, which condemned abstract philosophy as useless, advocated whatever led to success, and saw successful dictatorship as its own justification.)

One person did it out of cowardice when they temporarily conquered his town; he's horrified at what he did and can't imagine how to atone.  The other person felt that a stronger Barren-Power movement would push the world out of their suboptimal equilibrium; he agrees he did wrong but thinks it was worth it.  We follow their psychological and religious journey while under sentence of death for treason.  The first person finally forgives himself and begs to be kept away from any similar situation; the second person finally trusts in God and other people to handle the situation.

In the end, both their sentences are commuted to lifelong vows as Astronomy-Monks.

(The Ecumenical Astronomical Monks also send their complete tables of supernova and pulsar observation, with a letter from the Abbot-General of the order expressing his wishes for profitable exchange of nonfictional knowledge.)

A Basillian coalition has assembled and distributed a collection of novels to share with aliens!  It also includes a note, which clarifies the following:

-that each of these works has been chosen for both being popular and being a central example of a popular genre,

-that derivative fiction and alternate timelines are welcome,

-that if the aliens would like a copy of the setting bible for the shared settings they'd be happy to send one over, 

-that they appreciate comments of all sorts.

A fantasy novel about an extremely convoluted civil war. It begins with the government, framed as the good guys, in an ongoing conflict with a group trying to overthrow them. The protagonists are not initially particularly affiliated with the government but all have personal issues with the group trying to overthrow them, and are talking about how to best oppose that group, with "joining the military/law enforcement" only one option being considered. They discover a ~vigilante group trying to oppose the anti-government side somewhat extra-legally, and join up with them. As the story goes on, more and more groups, defined primarily by which group they hate, emerge, as does more and more information about the motives and aims of the various groups. Eventually the protagonists conclude that while the original bad guys are not potential allies, their aims are morally better than the aims of the government and the group they joined up with. They create their own secret group, which primarily infiltrates the other groups and recruits from their membership. They then manage to assassinate, or persuade other groups to assassinate, and otherwise pull strings such that the leaders of most of the other groups are dead, and their agents are in control of most of the groups, at which point they reveal themselves, and restructure the government to align with their aims. The people they are at the end of the story would be morally abhorrent to the people they were at the beginning of the story, but the government they instantiate aligns with their aims at the time of creating their secret group.

A story which takes place in a world with a very complicated magical system. The magic system has several different forms of magic, many of which have sub-forms. They are culturally and legal classed into "dark" and "light", with use of "dark" magic being seen as Evil and socially unacceptable. While a large portion of magic types classed as "dark" are harmful or exceedingly dangerous, many others have been classed as such due to a variety of cultural and legal influences. The protagonist begins as a young mage apprentice, learning from a Wise Older Mage who treats these categories as absolute and as a magical truth. Because non-Mages don't know much about magic, he accepts what he is told, and does not dabble in dark magic. Over time, as he learns magic and goes on various small adventures, he starts to meet other mages and realize that some of them dabble in dark magic without succumbing to evil. Eventually, he is sent alone to a great magical library to find and make a copy of a book for his master. While he is in the magical library, he takes the opportunity to read various other books on magic, and quickly learns that the classification is not an innate magical truth but instead a judgement made by mages based off of various things. Thus disillusioned, he decides to learn more about dark magic, and in addition to the book he was sent to get, he secretly makes himself a copy of a how-to book on one of the more harmless types of dark magic. He takes the book home with him, and studies it in secret, taking great care to never let his master see it. Eventually he reaches the point where in order to learn more he must begin to apply his magic practically, and begins to sneak out to practice.  One night while he is out practicing, he is seen by a passing mage, who instead of turning him in, offers to help teach him. The mage happens to live nearby, and begins to teach him ongoingly. The mage does not stop with the contents of the book the protagonist had found, but continues to teach him more and more dark magic, though he sticks to the more innocuous stuff at first. They enter into a romantic and sexual relationship, and slowly the other mage pushes him to be more and more self-interested. Meanwhile, the protagonist is often tired during the day, due to being up all night training, and is evasive and distracted with his master, leading to tension between them, and eventually the master mage tells the protagonist to take the rest of the season, and the season after, for himself, and to come back to resume his training afterwards, as it is clear he cannot learn more at this time. The protagonist, thus released, moves in with the dark mage, and steadily delves deeper and deeper into dark magic. The dark mage encourages him to practice his magic on nearby townsfolk, and to focus on taking what he wants and not on good and evil, and the protagonist quickly finds this comes far more naturally to him. He eventually learns enough to be considered the other mages equal, and suggests they go off travelling, and the story concludes with the protagonist and the dark mage travelling the continent as evil dark wizards, feeling happy and fulfilled.

A novel set in a popular shared soft sci-fi setting, which features aliens and spaceflight and very little concern for the scientific possibility of these things, but no magical powers, nor magical powers by some other name- all of the impossibility lives in the tech. The novel clearly expects the reader to be existingly familiar with the setting. The novel focuses on a young woman who lives with her girlfriend, and does not seem to have other friends and datemates. She's clearly dependent on her girlfriend in a few ways, living in an area with no public transportation despite being frequently unable to drive, and cannot afford housing on her own. Over the first half of the story it becomes increasingly apparent that the girlfriend is emotionally abusive, frequently cancelling plans with the protagonist in favor of other friends or datemates, and never cancelling in favor of the protagonist, lying to the protagonist about all sorts of things, making promises she never intends to keep, and, several times throughout the story, begging the protagonist to promise to never leave her shortly before confessing to gradually worse and worse atrocities. Throughout the same time the sex scenes gradually become less and less consensual, culminating with the protagonist physically shoving her girlfriend off her, after which her girlfriend claims she didn't realize the protagonist wasn't into it.  Up until this point the girlfriend had been employed and the protagonist had not, instead living off of her savings. Shortly after, this dynamic switches, with no reason given, and the protagonist slowly begins to make friends at her new work. She spends more and more time away from the house, which enrages her girlfriend, and eventually begins dating another girl at her work. This relationship is much healthier and allows her to realize her existing relationship is abusive, and she begins the tedious work of figuring out how to move out of her and her girlfriends shared house. At the end of the story she lives in a small apartment alone in a city, still dating the girl from work, though it's now long-distance, and has friends and other datemates in her new city.

Another novel from the same setting as the relationship fic, but during a different time period. At this time, the setting is ruled by an archetypal Evil Empire, with the Evil Empress passing down all sorts of laws allowing for slavery of various alien species, censoring all sorts of content, banning criticism of the government, and sanctioning multiple genocides. The protagonist, a 15 year old boy, starts the story as a member of the Imperial Navy, but quickly realizes that the Empire are the bad guys, and drops out to join the Plucky Rebels. The Rebellion generally have good values and good aims, opposing slavery, censorship, genocide, and large states- a set of things which the narrative treats as a completely natural and obvious set. The Rebels suffer a large number of setbacks, and several lesser protagonists die, but they win the day and overthrow the Evil Empire, killing the Evil Empress. There is a minor romance sub-plot, featuring 4 characters, at least 2 of which are dating at any given point, ending with all 4 in a happy relationship.

Some time later, once all the hubbub from December's reading has died down, Pigeon once again takes her role as Senior Reader and continues on her stack of books. She's got somewhat of a backlog. 

First up, the submissions from Planet. 

A fantasy novel set in a world where nothing makes sense, every culture has their own superstitions and all the superstitions seem to be true at once, even contradictory ones. 

Ah, an all-beliefs-are-true one, she's seen this concept before. The ace representation here is very modern. The fake dating is an interestingly novel trope, and does a lot to illustrate the not-couple's outsider nature. The "twist" is predictable, but oh well. And of course what you do in that situation is found a better religion, she's glad the Planet people have the idea of sects down.

A narrative-focused-minimal-mechanics video game where the viewpoint/protagonist character is the captain of a magical flying trade boat in a fantasy world. 

This one is very relevant to Eravian-Anadyne relations, despite their shared heritage. It's so strange to think that there are people out there who don't believe in anything! But adapting to how other people think and understand the world is the foundation of politics. (Thyris agrees from Co-Consciousness.) And this one isn't all complicated plots and backroom dealings and the boring kind of politics, it's the core idea of trade and diplomacy, understanding what others value. And that's good. The companions are a little roughly sketched and as a result the sex scenes are poor by her standards, but then that's not really the focus of this one. She puts it aside in her personal game collection for when she's feeling like something happy and thought-provoking. 

A book about TRAINS, BOATS, AIRPLANES, and ROCKETSHIPS!

Awwwwwwwww, someone has a lifepath-vocation! Transportation is not a common vocation on Heart, but she's known one or two people who are into it. This book is clearly not for her, but she really appreciates its existence. She sets it aside for now.

Crystal has also been run off her feet. She happened to catch Snowblossom's broadcast, recognized the book she'd started from the poem that was broadcast, and then a large number of things all happened very quickly. 

The Krissan's work is now in the middle of its first print run in Eravia, and she's finally back to scouting again. Like Pigeon, she has quite a backlog. 

A fantasy novel set in a world where nothing makes sense, every culture has their own superstitions and all the superstitions seem to be true at once, even contradictory ones. 

She's seen this premise before, but the book works well on the strength of its character writing. Top of the maybe pile. 

A narrative-focused-minimal-mechanics video game where the viewpoint/protagonist character is the captain of a magical flying trade boat in a fantasy world. 

Solid. The politics are deep enough to attract Suns while not being complicated enough to deter Skies. The character writing is a little shallow, but the loads and loads of characters makes up for that to some degree. And they're all romanceable. The erotica content isn't a standout, but it'll move units. She puts it on the Yes pile. 

A book about TRAINS, BOATS, AIRPLANES, and ROCKETSHIPS!

This one won't be popular, but those who'll want it will Need It Now. Though the audience is relatively small, their hardcore nature means sales should be solid. Yes pile. 

Next in the backlog is a series of books from Piecemeal. 

A coming-of-age story set in the late medieval period.

Ooh, alien devotional work! Though the religion is clearly fictitious, this shows a lot about Piecemeal religious practice. They have mystery cults too, huh? And based around a Great Reflection as well, though she doesn't see any true Mirrors being held up to it. Which is interestingly alien! The difference between personas and Reflections eludes her for a while, but the consistent characterization of the apprentice eventually clues her in that there isn't necessarily plurality going on here. The leading-of-multiple-lives is very familiar to her, of course, and not really worth commenting on. 

A collection of folktales about the Wandering Man, a traditional folk hero.

This one is clearly a Shirasanmi of a Great Reflection, though a somewhat sinister one. It seems like the people of Piecemeal have an inclination towards transformation for transformation's sake. She sets this one aside to speak to Snowblossom about, somewhat troubled by the implications of there being a large following for this Wandering Man that would presumably seek to emulate his behavior. Hopefully it's different for Piecemeal's natives. 

Story marked as fine literature; it covers seven hundred years, and everything is funerals - either the participants in a funeral or a paper funeral, or newspaper obituaries about either kind.

This is a really interesting epistolary format! It's a little less clear and resolved than she prefers, but the depth of it is impressive. The idea of transformation and leaving the past behind is very strong here, reinforcing her idea that Piecemeal's natives are perhaps sequentially plural rather than simultaneously so? It's quite thought-provoking, and also provides a lot of context for Piecemeal's treatment of death. She sets it in her personal collection and also makes some notes to share with Snowblossom. 

Crystal has a look at the works from Piecemeal as well. 

A coming-of-age story set in the late medieval period.

This one is both solid and alien. It'll need an introduction with some cultural notes written for interpretation's sake, but that shouldn't be too hard to arrange. Yes pile.

A collection of folktales about the Wandering Man, a traditional folk hero.

Alien religion will sell well in Anadyne, and this particular one will also sell well in Eravia, since they love to talk about religion's dark side. It'll be controversial, but it won't hurt her publishing company's reputation. Perfect. Yes pile. 

Story marked as fine literature; it covers seven hundred years, and everything is funerals - either the participants in a funeral or a paper funeral, or newspaper obituaries about either kind.

Educated people in both Eravia and Anadyne will want to read this one for the cultural context on Piecemeal. It's a little dense for Skies, and the ending is, well, a non-ending, but...

Okay, maybe she's convincing herself out of this one. Maybe pile, in the middle. She'll sort out her thoughts on it later. 

Next up is the dump of books from Olam. 

A fantasy novel in which people have physical 'souls' which record their memories, instincts, and parts of their personalities.

This one is highly disturbing! Eating people's souls is weird and concerning, and the fact that the transmission is lossy if souls are repeatedly eaten makes eating one in the first place a crime! What is with these aliens! Plurality does not work like that!!!!! Why would you EAT THEM?!?! She finishes the book in an increasingly high state of alarm, particularly with the part where the person with a hundred souls becomes a leader over people and this is just treated as normal!!

(She takes a deep breath and reminds herself that it's fiction. Still, alien morals are weird. It's just obvious to her that you'd preserve the physical soul as long as possible without eating it. Eating something like that is a fundamentally selfish act that destroys the record, WHO DOES THAT??? Maybe in time of dire need when you need that specific person back, but a HUNDRED SOULS? Because they were THERE????)

Eventually she calms down enough to read another book. 

A memoir written by a woman who grew up as a member of one of the last isolated primitive tribes of the great river forest. 

Now that's an unexpected twist. Stories like this are old histories on Heart, not modern and fresh. She devours the memoir and sets it aside for Snowblossom to read as well. The Hadarite culture is interestingly different from both Anadyne spirituality and Eravian skepticism, having a blend or harmony of both. There could be a lot to learn from each other. Assuming they don't eat people's souls. (She's kidding. Hopefully.)

This book isn't fiction, precisely, but it's definitely not nonfiction either. The most common religion on Olam, called Hadar, is centrally about truth. A fringe sect (allegedly) believes that the best way to learn truth is to be exposed to lies—the trickier the better—examine them, and learn from them how to overcome illusions. This book, written by a member of that sect, is one of the most acclaimed examples of what are known as 'books of lies'. 

A devotional work! From a recognizably-Storyteller sect, too! She has to send this to Liar. She'll be happy to match wits with an alien civilization. ... But she should probably run that idea past Snowblossom first. In any case, this is not something she should personally be reading, since she's not a Storyteller. 

A book of post-post-apocalyptic speculative fiction (set on Olam) in which, in the aftermath of an improbably dangerous plague that killed most of the population, the survivors rebuild civilization. 

Another culture-clash novel. It's realistic, sure, but a bit boring. The prose doesn't exactly leap off the page. She sets it aside before finishing it. 

Crystal reads the books from Olam as well. 

A fantasy novel in which people have physical 'souls' which record their memories, instincts, and parts of their personalities.

This one goes firmly on the No pile as soon as the premise becomes clear. She does not want to be involved in a diplomatic incident today, thank you. 

A memoir written by a woman who grew up as a member of one of the last isolated primitive tribes of the great river forest. 

By contrast, this one goes firmly on the Yes pile. The outside perspective is greatly illuminating for Hadarite culture. People who want to know about the Hadarites will snap it up.

This book isn't fiction, precisely, but it's definitely not nonfiction either. The most common religion on Olam, called Hadar, is centrally about truth. A fringe sect (allegedly) believes that the best way to learn truth is to be exposed to lies—the trickier the better—examine them, and learn from them how to overcome illusions. This book, written by a member of that sect, is one of the most acclaimed examples of what are known as 'books of lies'.

She is not going to be publishing alien devotionals from a Storyteller sect in Eravia, and even in Anadyne that kind of thing is... "mischevious", let's put it that way. It could hurt her publishing-house's reputation, so that's a no. 

A book of post-post-apocalyptic speculative fiction (set on Olam) in which, in the aftermath of an improbably dangerous plague that killed most of the population, the survivors rebuild civilization. 

This one is just dull and uninteresting. She has a feeling Olam just writes better nonfiction than fiction. No pile. 

Next up is the dump from Ev. 

An alternate-historical novel set after the Zadian Theocracy has been overthrown by revolution, following the revolutionary committee trying to set up a new government.  

She was wondering when she'd get a sectarian-conflict book. They're pretty popular on Heart. This particular book from Ev would probably be considered social commentary if it were published today on Heart, what with the debates on spirituality and governance that are happening all throughout it. She makes detailed notes to share with Snowblossom. 

A historical-fantasy novel set in the late Middle Ages...

More politics. She swaps to Thyris for this one; Thyris enjoys it, but feels like it's a bit simplistic for her taste; prisoners like this are unlikely to be able to have much of an influence on politics in the real world. There are exceptions, but in general it's rare. 

A historical novel set during the Barren-Power war, about two (fictional, the author explains) people arrested for treasonously passing secret information to the Barren-Power army.

The Barren-Power ideology is highly concerning to both Thyris and Pigeon. It sounds like the worst kind of cult, the kind that uses people up and demands service through violence. In the last hundred years there are some equivalents on Heart, but nothing that has managed to acquire significant force, not since the Modern Reunification. The fact that they apparently had a major war about it is not comforting. 

Both Pigeon and Thyris try their best to set aside their worries, and instead read the story. The notion of a singular God is foreign to them - perhaps the author is talking about the Harmony, but it really sounds like they're talking about one. The notion of execution for this sort of crime, particularly when the guilty party was coerced, is somewhat queasy as well - the last execution on Heart was again before the Modern Reunification. Perhaps on other worlds you can more cleanly separate the guilty from the innocent; it would certainly be easier when a criminal doesn't share the same body as others. 

The commutation is reasonable enough, though on Heart it would have been something of a political football if this situation had happened historically. But then that's neither here nor there.

(The Ecumenical Astronomical Monks also send their complete tables of supernova and pulsar observation, with a letter from the Abbot-General of the order expressing his wishes for profitable exchange of nonfictional knowledge.)

Pigeon consults with Snowblossom briefly, then with a Sensate librarian; he sends back the current year's nautical almanac for Heart, as used by Sensate navigators to calculate lunar distances and thereby their longitude. (And double altitudes for latitude, and so on.) He also includes in the package a good-quality ritual sextant and a reflecting artificial horizon with a small bottle of mineral oil. While in the modern era there is GPS, the ritual role of celestial navigation is still strong among the Sensates on Heart. 

Crystal continues reading as well. 

An alternate-historical novel set after the Zadian Theocracy has been overthrown by revolution, following the revolutionary committee trying to set up a new government.

This one has biting political commentary dripping from it. It'd probably be quite popular, but on the other hand it's a bit of a brave publishing decision. She calls her boss, then one of her contacts in the industry who works at a publishing house more known for critical commentary and political books. They'll have the reputation to stand behind this. The book goes in its own pile, to be handed over later; she and her boss will charge a finder's fee and the publication profits will go to their allied publishing house. 

A historical-fantasy novel set in the late Middle Ages...

This one doesn't really make the grade for political fiction. The fantasy elements are kind of perfunctory and the plot is kind of unbelievable. No pile. 

A historical novel set during the Barren-Power war, about two (fictional, the author explains) people arrested for treasonously passing secret information to the Barren-Power army.

She needs a history textbook from Ev. People need to know about this. Failing that, she'll recommend this book to her boss. Yes pile. 

(The Ecumenical Astronomical Monks also send their complete tables of supernova and pulsar observation, with a letter from the Abbot-General of the order expressing his wishes for profitable exchange of nonfictional knowledge.)

This is not a scientific publishing house, so she's not interested. No pile.

Last in Pigeon's backlog is the set of four novels from Basilland. 

A fantasy novel about an extremely convoluted civil war. 

UGH POLITICS 

Thyris comes forwards again, and reads. The ongoing moral development/backsliding (it's not entirely clear which, which is a lesson in itself) of the main cast is really portrayed well. The work raises interesting questions of identity, morality, and political realism - is it ever reasonable to use violence in pursuit of political ends? Is assassination and manipulation a reasonable means of acquiring power? - and it's also just a ripping good read. The complexity of the plots is great, the web of lies and promises is realistically portrayed. The Storytellers will love this one. She puts it aside into her personal collection (which is on a different shelf from Pigeon's personal collection.)

A story which takes place in a world with a very complicated magical system. 

Now this one is interesting. Again, is this a villain protagonist? Well, it's arguable that they've crossed a line by the end of the story, but the point at which that happens is well-blurred by the events that take place throughout. The personal journey and the moral journey are pleasingly opposed. She kind of wants to read the sequel. She kind of wants to write fanfiction, honestly, but she doesn't have time for that right now... Anyway, it raises satisfying questions. The fact that at the end these villains are unleashed upon an unsuspecting populace doesn't really bother her - after all, it's only fiction. (Pigeon quietly objects from back in headspace, but she is a small soft birb who should not be exposed to harsh realities.) 

A novel set in a popular shared soft sci-fi setting, which features aliens and spaceflight and very little concern for the scientific possibility of these things, but no magical powers, nor magical powers by some other name- all of the impossibility lives in the tech. 

This one is kind of uncomfortable in its grittiness, but at least it has a happy ending. It reminds her again of some of the worse cults - the small ones where some petty Sun lords it over a polycule of three or four unhappy Moons. At least those don't tend to last long. At least this book ended alright. She probably wouldn't have been able to deal with a tragedy here, the stakes are too personal.  

Another novel from the same setting as the relationship fic, but during a different time period. 

This one is really too simplistic for her, and the inclusion of "large states" in that list of Bad Evil Things sure makes her raise her eyebrows! Hopefully these aliens will be able to see that the Anadyne Union is good for its people even if it does rule a whole continent. Hopefully. (She makes note to raise this with Snowblossom.) She sets it aside unfinished.

The last of Crystal's backlog is finally here. 

A fantasy novel about an extremely convoluted civil war. 

This one is pretty deep and gritty. The Suns will love it, but they probably won't recommend it to their Skies. Maybe pile. 

A story which takes place in a world with a very complicated magical system. 

Ooh, interestingly dark and deep. It might bruise the sensitivities of some readers, but the plot is solid enough to carry. Yes pile, though towards the bottom if publishing order starts to matter.

A novel set in a popular shared soft sci-fi setting, which features aliens and spaceflight and very little concern for the scientific possibility of these things, but no magical powers, nor magical powers by some other name- all of the impossibility lives in the tech. 

This one... Hurts a little, but in a good way. It's very realistic in its handling of abuse. This is a book that needs to exist in the world. Yes pile. 

Another novel from the same setting as the relationship fic, but during a different time period. 

This one is a bit too simplistic and cut and dried and the alien morality is a little bit off. No pile.

A surprisingly gripping docudrama novelette about a financial scheme, with a foreword written for alien publication explaining Planet politics briefly. Apparently on Planet, their governments tend to - overlap a lot? For example, if you live in a city you'll likely be under the authority of a transport authority that runs transport for a whole region, a local orderliness group that is an odd combination of law enforcement/health services/emergency response, a building and food service code organization that covers half the continent, and a tax-administration entity that covers the entire world. But every political organ in Planet has in common an extreme 'openness'. Every major decision, all their finances, meeting recordings, and many other things are public and available for anyone to look through, and people do carefully comb through it for signs of corruption and incompetence. There's a long tradition of political units just... Being ignored if they lose the public confidence. Consequently, politics is a very stressful job that often just consists of not breaking anything that already works, and in general moves pretty slowly.

The work itself is a light dramatization (with notes on where it departs from reality) of this one time that it turned out a very expensive ecological intervention that the World Impact Tax had been funding for over a decade not only didn't work, but was actively counterproductive and was ruining a large ocean biome. It had been based on bad science that was obfuscated by a clique of researchers and owners of relevant industries, with the obvious conflicts of interest of money and prestige. The dramatic tracking-back of the bad science plus accusatory court scenes and bungled attempts to cover the whole thing up further makes up the meaty part of the book. When it ends, the scientist cabal and everyone who went along with it were shamed, public confidence in WIT was shaken, and they started a deep rework of their anti-corruption practices, led by the woman who was the main force in uncovering the bad science.

Crystal has enough books, now. In fact, she has too many books. Her Yes pile is huge; she looks at it and sucks air through her teeth, knowing that they won't be able to get the licenses for all of it. 

She goes through her pile of books and makes a shortlist. There are twenty-five in all, from twelve different universes. She writes up tags for each of them, notes the universe of origin, and provides a short summary of each.

1. Grapeverse [Erotica, S&M, Character Drama, Relationship-Building, Consensual Kink, Fantasy]

Erotica novel about a sadist architect and his masochist learning to build a healthy relationship. Features healing magic, alien architecture. Alien focus on architecture detracts somewhat from the storyline, but the writing quality is such that this is mostly just exotic. 

2. Grapeverse [Interactive Fiction, Branching Storyline, Erotica, Choose Your Morality, Relationship-Building]

Small-scale interactive fiction where you befriend or abuse a magical statue. Optional sex scenes. Very sweet and realistically portrayed.  

3. Homerealm [Nonfiction, Autobiography, Strong Gimmick (Video Game Walkthrough), Cosplay, Alien Culture, Erotica]

Autobiography of an erotic cosplayer, styled as a video game strategy guide. Exceedingly clever; features both visual and written erotica. Hot. 

4. Homerealm [Light Novel, Series, Science Fantasy, Erotica, Transition Literature]

Genius biohackers work for the flowering of all trans women into beautiful, free, sexual beings. Heavy on erotica; each LN is readable in a single sitting. 

5. Homerealm [Fantasy, Hard Magic, Political Thriller, Strong Plotting, Erotica]

Prince and Princess interweave sexually-tinged magic systems to develop new abilities, opposed by their respective advisors. Clever plotting device to introduce both magic systems and the political situation. 

6. Iie*a [Poetry, Anthology, Autobiography, Tragedy, Value of Life, Shirasanmi]

Poetic autobiography of an alien child with a terminal disease. Unpolished, but heartrendingly sad. 

7. Iie*a [Family Drama, Dysfunctional Family, Serious, Thought-Provoking, Hopeful Ending]

Alien family tries and mostly fails to raise a child; child eventually becomes fed up with dysfunction, leaves. 

8. Iie*a [Fantasy, Series, Hard Magic, Complex Morality, Serious, Thought-Provoking, Alien Aliens]

Alien magic-users fight taboo-violating enemies; conflict becomes gradually more complex and morally ambiguous. Deep.

9. Grayliens [Fantasy, Political Drama, Alien Art, Culture Clash]

Obligate carnivores and obligate herbivores treat with each other, and narrowly avoid war thanks to a pair of diplomats. Awkward ending. 

10. Planet [Hard Science Fiction, Character Drama, Strong Characters, Vocational Literature, Terraforming]

Terraforming team has slice-of-life adventures developing an ecosystem. Heavy on scientific detail. Likely to sell well in Eravia. 

11. Planet [Interactive Fiction, Survival, Trade, Politics, Fantasy,  Lots Of Characters, Erotica, Harem-Builder]

Interactive fiction where you command a trading ship in a fantasy world. Realistic cultures, many characters, optional sex scenes. Characters are a bit flat, but there are a lot of them.

12. Planet [Vocational Literature, Alien Culture, Transportation]

Alien vocational literature about several modes of transport (trains, boats, planes, rockets). 

13. Hearthome [Devotional Literature, Alien Religion, Erotica, Ecstatic]

Alien devotional literature that's clearly from an ecstatic sect. Consists of a series of dialogues with a (implied) Great Reflection. 

14. Hearthome [Erotica, Heartwarming, Comedy, Sex Sports]

Immortal aliens develop ridiculously complicated, dramatic and hilarious forms of sexual sport. Commentated by fictional robots. 

15. Periverse [Nonfiction, Informational, Textbook, Alien Biology, Animal Raising, Many-Parent Children]

Textbook on how to keep and raise motherbeasts, which are capable of acting as artificial wombs drawing from many people's genetic material.

16. Periverse [Nonfiction, Alien Economics, Controversial]

Alien economic history textbook on monetary systems and how the Periverse phased out money, to great acclaim from its citizens.

17. Periverse [Children's Literature, Fantasy, Mystery]

Children fight monsters, solve mysteries. Mostly included for breadth purposes and because it'll likely sell well.

18. Periverse [Prism, Fantasy, Alien Aliens, Alien Culture, Not Devotional]

Several alternate-universe versions of the same people come into conflict over magic. Alien genre of personality-examination literature eerily imitates Heart devotional art. 

19. Piecemeal [Historical Fiction, Alien Culture, Alien Religion, Mystery Cult, Coming-of-Age]

Teenager is inducted into a mystery cult that changes his life for the better. Features strong alien culture; will need cultural notes. 

20. Piecemeal [Alien Religion, Shirasanmi, Devotional Literature, Controversial]

Collection of myths about a complicated and sometimes dark Great Reflection known as the Wandering Man.

21. Olam [Nonfiction, Memoir, Alien Culture, Culture Clash]

Woman raised in an uncontacted tribe records her introduction to Hadarite culture. Strong, unique perspective on an alien culture. 

22. Ev [Historical Fiction, Alien Culture, Devotional Literature, Dark, Alien Morality, Controversial]

Criminals sentenced to die for treason during a desperate historical war undergo a spiritual and emotional journey as they contemplate their imminent deaths. Sentence is ultimately commuted to life. 

23. Basiland [Hard Magic, Complex Morality, Villain Protagonist, Deep, Fantasy]

Magical apprentice gradually slides from a restricted, narrow life into a happy, but selfish life as a villainous dark mage. 

24. Basiland [Relationship Drama, Realistic Abuse, Dark, Happy Ending, Soft Science Fiction, Dark Erotica]

Woman is abused by her girlfriend, gradually comes to realize she's being mistreated and moves out. Dubiously consensual erotica scenes, but very realistic in its handling. 

25. Antfolk [Fantasy, Series, Heroic Literature, Alien Aliens, Disability Literature, Action, Realistic Characters, Hurt/Comfort]

Person is captured, enslaved and mutilated by opposing polity; story follows her legendary rescue by a friend and the aftermath. Long-running popular series on its native world.

She sends the list to her boss, presses her phone to her heart, and prays for a moment, wordlessly to no goddess in particular. 

Thyris comes forwards for the Planet docudrama again. It's really interesting to see the web of lies fall apart; it reminds her of some exposés on cult practices in the past few decades. Journalistic and governmental integrity is important everywhere, huh?

She sets it aside to discuss with Snowblossom later.

Crystal's already sent off her shortlist, but it would be remiss for her to not keep reading. She can collect a new stack or two. 

Her next book up is from Planet, the docudrama. It's political stuff again - pretty solidly written, though, you can really feel the anger and betrayal. She starts a new Yes pile and adds it to the top of it.

Crystal's boss, Silver Rose, is currently in a meeting with an author to discuss edits to its* unpublished manuscript. She checks her phone when she gets the alert, nods to herself, and continues the meeting. This is important, but there's no need to be discourteous about it.  

Once she and the author have agreed on the appropriate edits, she opens the shortlist.

She sighs. Of course Crystal has sent her too many books. This is going to be a headache. 

She retires to her private office, a small, cozy space with an overstuffed armchair, a small desk, and a pile of blankets,** makes herself comfortable in the chair, puts on her headphones with some light trance music, and places her laptop on her lap. 

Let's go through this shortlist more seriously and cut. Is anything obviously dubious?

#9 is noted as awkward. Cut. She wants to avoid anything potentially politically incendiary - she cuts everything with the "Controversial" tag, despite the possibility for sales. Too high a downside risk. Once the alien cultures are more seriously approached then it'll be safe to publish things like that. Let's have a look at the ones that aren't books next - two interactive fiction, three series. These ones are larger commitments. #8 from Iie*a is a series and not an obvious winner - cut. The other two, from Homerealm and Antfolk, she'll keep in contention. #2 and #11 are up for consideration now... Neither is an obvious cut candidate. Alright, let's look at the nonfiction then, since it's a bit out of their wheelhouse. She can see why Crystal recommended all of these, they're strong and unique... But the textbook on Motherbeasts from the Periverse, #15, is an animal-raising textbook, no matter the fact that it's about magic, and the number of people on Heart who willingly handle animals other than cats is very low. It probably wouldn't recoup the costs of the license. It can be cut. 

Alright, let's go by genre now and look at which areas are crowded. Erotica first, that's a crowded market and anything that hopes to succeed in it will have to be top-quality.

Fully half of her list has erotica elements. Sounds about right. Let's look at this carefully. 

There are two works of erotica from the Grapeverse - the S&M novel and the interactive fiction. Then there are three from Homerealm - the erotic cosplayer's autobiography, the transition literature Light Novel series, and the hard-magic political thriller. One from Planet - their interactive-fiction trading sim. Two from Hearthome - the Ecstatic devotional literature and the sex sports comedy. Lastly there's the hard-hitting abuse novel from Basilland. 

On a closer examination, the two pieces of interactive fiction and the abuse novel don't really fall into the "Erotica" genre even if they have erotica elements - they're not centered on the sex, they just feature it as a natural extension of their themes. She'll set those aside for the moment and come back to them later. So in the primarily-erotica genre they have the grapeverse S&M novel, the three pieces from Homerealm, and the two pieces from Hearthome. All of these are high-quality and competitive in the modern market, but she can't have half of her alien novels be erotica - she estimates she can publish maybe ten alien pieces, a dozen if she really stretches and works hard hours. So something is going to have to go. 

What here is the most obvious winner? That would be the Ecstatic devotional literature. Contact with an alien religion with common values will be a big seller. Alright, so she'll publish that one. She can afford to do one or two more in this category... The first runner-up looks like it's the erotic cosplayer's biography on the strength of its gimmick. It's also nonfiction so that gives some breadth in the space. 

Competing for the third and final slot, that leaves the series of transition-literature light novels and the political thriller from Homerealm, the S&M novel from the Grapeverse, and the hilarious sex sports novel from Hearthome. The obvious losers here are the political thriller and the sex sports novel - neither is really primarily erotica. She might come back to them later on the strength of their other qualities, but they don't get an erotica slot. 

That leaves the Grapeverse S&M novel and the transition literature Light Novel series. Neither of them are perfect. The S&M novel has a weird obsession with architecture, and the series is, well, a series. If she wants to go for breadth of worlds published, that argues for the S&M novel, since Homerealm already has the erotic cosplayer's biography on the stack, but if she wants to go for writing quality then that argues for the transition erotica. 

Quality first. She has to publish things she can stand by one hundred percent, and the Grapeverse novel just doesn't hit that criteria for her. The Light Novel series gets a slot, and the Grapeverse S&M novel is cut.

Alright, looking at the remaining unsettleds, there's a bunch of relatively dark or serious books. Let's put them up against each other as well. We have the heartrending Iie*a poetry anthology, the dysfunctional family drama from the same world, and then two books from Basilland - the villain-protagonist morality play and the realistic abuse story. 

It's pretty clear that the poetry anthology has to be published, practically as a moral duty for her. It'll sell, and if it doesn't it's still worth having tried. It'll probably win awards. Overall it'll be excellent for her company's reputation. 

#7, the alien family drama from Iie*a, and #24, the realistic abuse drama from Basilland, are clearly up against each other - they're so similar in themes that it'd be silly to publish them both at the same time. She would say that the realistic abuse drama wins, here. #7 is cut, and the abuse novel... goes back on the pile to consider. It might be a little controversial. But it says something very important...

She sighs, and looks at the two remaining books in the category. The villain protagonist book is morally complex as well and quite thought-provoking; it can stay for now, but it's not an obvious publish. Same to the disability-handling antfolk series. ... Actually, she's already committed to publishing one series, so that's a slight strike against the antfolk series. But it's not quite fatal. She'll come back to it. 

Let's look at the books she hasn't touched yet and see if there are any clear winners. There are six left. Olam-uncontacted-biography, Planet-Terraforming-Adventures, Planet-Vocational-Literature, Periverse-Children's-Book, Periverse-Prism, Piecemeal-Mystery-Cult-Coming-Of-Age. The uncontacted-biography is a clear winner; it gets moved to the publish list. So does the Periverse Prism - it's just such a strong look at an unexpected confluence with an alien culture.

The remainder get sorted in with the leftover books from earlier. There are nine candidates left and four-to-six slots remaining. She needs to cut at least three. 

Looking at the tags on her books to publish, it seems like she already has two fantasy novels. That's a strike against anything remaining that's fantasy - the Periverse children's literature, the Planet trading video game, and the Antfolk series. The antfolk series already has a strike against it because she's already publishing a series, so it falls off the bottom. 

There are three works under consideration from Planet - two pieces of devotional literature, and the trading video game. She wants to publish a diverse set of books, so let's only keep one of those three. The book about transportation and the video game are clearly weaker than the terraforming novel at this stage - they're both cut. She'll publish the terraforming novel as representational of the world. Similarly, Basilland has two pieces; the abuse novel is clearly stronger than the villain-protagonist one, so it wins and the villain-protagonist one is cut. 

There are three works remaining under consideration - the Grapeverse interactive fiction, the Piecemeal Mystery-Cult novel, and the Periverse children's mystery. Ideally she should only negotiate for two. The Periverse already has a work on her publishing list, so that cuts the children's mystery (which is also fantasy anyway.)

Her final list for negotiation looks like this: 

2. Grapeverse [Interactive Fiction, Branching Storyline, Erotica, Choose Your Morality, Relationship-Building]

Small-scale interactive fiction where you befriend or abuse a magical statue. Optional sex scenes. Very sweet and realistically portrayed.  

3. Homerealm [Nonfiction, Autobiography, Strong Gimmick (Video Game Walkthrough), Cosplay, Alien Culture, Erotica]

Autobiography of an erotic cosplayer, styled as a video game strategy guide. Exceedingly clever; features both visual and written erotica. Hot. 

4. Homerealm [Light Novel, Series, Science Fantasy, Erotica, Transition Literature]

Genius biohackers work for the flowering of all trans women into beautiful, free, sexual beings. Heavy on erotica; each LN is readable in a single sitting. 

6. Iie*a [Poetry, Anthology, Autobiography, Tragedy, Value of Life, Shirasanmi]

Poetic autobiography of an alien child with a terminal disease. Unpolished, but heartrendingly sad. 

10. Planet [Hard Science Fiction, Character Drama, Strong Characters, Vocational Literature, Terraforming]

Terraforming team has slice-of-life adventures developing an ecosystem. Heavy on scientific detail. Likely to sell well in Eravia. 

13. Hearthome [Devotional Literature, Alien Religion, Erotica, Ecstatic]

Alien devotional literature that's clearly from an ecstatic sect. Consists of a series of dialogues with a (implied) Great Reflection. 

18. Periverse [Prism, Fantasy, Alien Aliens, Alien Culture, Not Devotional]

Several alternate-universe versions of the same people come into conflict over magic. Alien genre of personality-examination literature eerily imitates Heart devotional art. 

19. Piecemeal [Historical Fiction, Alien Culture, Alien Religion, Mystery Cult, Coming-of-Age]

Teenager is inducted into a mystery cult that changes his life for the better. Features strong alien culture; will need cultural notes. 

21. Olam [Nonfiction, Memoir, Alien Culture, Culture Clash]

Woman raised in an uncontacted tribe records her introduction to Hadarite culture. Strong, unique perspective on an alien culture. 

24. Basiland [Relationship Drama, Realistic Abuse, Dark, Happy Ending, Soft Science Fiction, Dark Erotica]

Woman is abused by her girlfriend, gradually comes to realize she's being mistreated and moves out. Dubiously consensual erotica scenes, but very realistic in its handling. 

She checks over her list, decides she agrees with her own decisions, and goes to start making phone calls.

*It's nonbinary.

**Having office blankets is just standard, on Heart. 

The rights holders are happy to let the publishing rights go! They can talk about other editions later if this works out, if you'd like? It's traditional within the sect to write your own items, and there's a good number of different translations and annotated version that could be adapted if there's an appeal to that. 

They mostly just want for a substantial chunk of the proceeds to local charities for transition or inter-world biotech research and development.  

All of the working group's submissions are old enough not to be subject to any intellectual property* provisions. Silver Rose's firm is welcome to publish it, although they won't have exclusive right to do so unless some weird quirk of Eravian law lets them do that. And of course they, and anyone else, can produce whatever translations or modifications they like.

*'intellectual property' is a term that would almost never be used in canaanite, 'information-royalty-gratuity' would be the more literal translation.

The Grapeverse interactive fiction author is looking to maximize availability of the work to diverse audiences. If Silver Rose is planning to ask for any sort of exclusivity deal here, she had better be prepared to make the case for how that maximizes availability. Otherwise the author is not too bothered about details, though there might be something that's standard on Heart that sounds very weird to a grape, or for that matter vice versa; grapeverse publishing contracts, for reference, generally balance the proceeds from sale of the work between the author and the publisher in some fashion.

The translator-pod of the poetry collection seems somewhat surprised to be contacted, but they confer amongst themselves!

They want the book available, is the main thing. They're not sure how large-scale capitalism works, but even if it turns out they have to put the poetry behind a paywall or something, they want to be sure that people can read it if they care enough. It would be ideal if the full text were available online and Silver Rose sold physical copies and [merch | paraphernalia | idols]* for people who liked it enough, but they recognize that this could be a dealbreaker, which would reduce exposure, and will accept if instead she merely provides copies to public libraries, which they have heard of and which seem like a fairly reasonable innovation if you can't get all the way to anarchocommunism due to weird alien bullshit.

* Apparently these are linked concepts, and the main thing provided by the closest Iie*an equivalent to a publishing house.

The contract negotiation with Hearthome goes easily enough; Silver Rose is familiar with riders like this on devotional works, and feels that she should be able to make a profit even after charity's cut. 

Damn, the work from Olam is public domain. It's still worth doing a print run if she can contract with the translator, but she can kiss her exclusivity goodbye. She calls them next.

As soon as the Grapeverse author makes it clear that availability is their highest priority, Silver Rose drops the exclusivity part of the contract. The profit-sharing scheme is not unfamiliar to her. Overall it's as expected. 

The Basillian author is somewhat concerned about handling of the larger timeline; Silver Rose assures them that printing rights for a single book does not imply a series contract, and manages to secure a proper exclusive deal for the novel. 

Silver Rose accepts the stipulations of the Iie*a translators' pod, since publishing the poetry collection is more of a reputational move for her anyway; she'll do a limited-edition print run and publish the electronic edition for free on the company website. 

Homerealm's concepts of ownership and authorship are... fluid, compared to Heart's. She's eventually able to hammer out contracts with both the translator and the original author for publishing rights on Heart with the understanding that derivative works should be treated lightly and that the liscense should not be used as a weapon. (Protective stipulations are written into the contract.) She's not able to get an exclusive deal, but it's good enough to publish with. 

The author from Planet, however, is much more reasonable. He wants merchandising; Silver Rose knows better than to try and merchandise an unknown property, so she offers to let him contract seperately with a Heart merchandising platform for those rights. He accepts; she takes a slightly higher unit price into the bargain, but walks away satisfied with an exclusive publishing contract on Heart. 

That just leaves the Periverse and Piecemeal authors. She calls them next.

(Translations were done by staff of the Union Diplomatic Corps, which is generally unwilling to agree to any exclusivity unless Silver Rose can make a persuasive case that it's necessary to maximize availability.)

The author of the coming of age story (titled Reinvention, in its original language) is happy to negotiate rights - they have a summary of local copyright law (as distinct from the many other polities nearby, though it probably has some implicit assumptions that Eravia doesn't share) and a form request for Eravian law. The standard proposal for their home-state would give the publishing house twenty years of exclusive rights in Eravia and nonexclusive rights for a century, plus permission to sell onward nonexclusive rights to publish in other polities and the right to be notified and given a chance to negotiate exclusivity if another party is contracting for publishing rights elsewhere. Also included is name and contact information for the author's preferred bordercross* to route the contract through.

*This is a combination Paypal/foreign-exchange service/arbitrageur/polylaw negotiator/general financial-legal intermediary, a highly necessary industry for the fragmented city-states and alliances which Piecemeal contains that would otherwise make friction costs enormous.

Silver Rose gives on exclusivity for her contract with the Union Diplomatic Corps for their translation. It's too bad so many of these works' authors are primarily concerned with availability.

The contract for Reinvention is actually a longer length than she's used to working with - copyright terms on Heart, by international treaty, are only twenty years before the work enters the public domain, so it's not legal in Eravia to take a hundred-year nonexclusive-rights contract. That dealt with, the rest of the proposed contract is reasonable to her.

The negotiations with the Periverse are refreshingly straightforwards - she's able to get exclusivity for all of Heart. 

Now it's time to actually publish. 

The alien fiction already has plenty of buzz, so marketing can be minimal. As for presentation... It feels right to her to go with something reserved and understated. Hardcover, definitely. This is a historic event, the first publishing of alien work on Heart. She wants to present it as faithfully as possible - and that means not adding anything to it, nor taking anything away. She could contract with the original artists for the covers of the works on their home worlds, but that would slow her down and no doubt add expense. 

So. Simple black books. Silver frontispiece with the name and title of each on the front. No slipcases. That format will still look good a hundred years from now. It's not flashy, but then she doesn't need to be very flashy to get sales with this quality of work. Word of mouth will do the work for her. And the unornamented style will make her books instantly recognizable in the sea of publishers trying to appeal to the eye.

She commissions one sketch for the front cover of each book from an artist she's used before, simple linework in symbolic forms, nothing garish. She's particularly fond of the stylized Joey for the collection of poetry. It feels right. 

She finally hands over the final documents to the typesetters.

She clasps her hands over her chest, close to her heart, over the necklace she wears, and prays quietly to her Keeper that she's been a good girl.

(She and her Keeper spend the rest of the night snuggled up in bed, doing aftercare on her job.)

The population of Heart notice the free poetry anthology first, never one to miss a good deal on something worthwhile. It goes viral almost immediately, the link to the publishers' website quickly making it to the front page of many mainstream blogs. The site strains under the load of visitors, but holds.* The news picks it up within the hour, and then the servers finally gasp and die. 

However, in that hour there have been many thousands of downloads of electronic editions, the poetry anthology has been mirrored a dozen times, and the word has gotten out that these books are available in stores. 

All of the alien books sell out pretty much immediately, even the public domain works. Bookstores are slammed with callers asking if they have any on back-order. Scalpers relist their first editions at hair-raising prices. Articles about the scalping run in the press. In general, it's a circus. Local coffeeshops and parks have a sudden infestation of people doing public readings of the alien books, which draw crowds.** People abandon their jobs just to listen to a live reading, not even to get a hold of one of the books!

There is a little bit of crime - people trying to snatch books, primarily - but generally people are satisfied with the public readings and the gatherings remain peaceful. One woman in Eravia is rather badly beaten for trying to snatch a copy of Reinvention in front of a crowd, but fortunately recovers. 

The reactions to the individual works start to filter in.

6. Iie*a [Poetry, Anthology, Autobiography, Tragedy, Value of Life, Shirasanmi]

Poetic autobiography of an alien child with a terminal disease. Unpolished, but heartrendingly sad. 

This book is the focus of most of the readings, since it's been freely distributed to everybody's phones and each poem is short enough to speak in a reasonable amount of time. The spoken-word poets of Heart compete to put the most passion and emotion they can into it. The best and worst performances are distributed online, and are a major source of more people finding out about the alien book release. People cry. People write response poetry, most of it not very good. An anthology of good-quality response poetry spontaneously materializes within 24 hours, though it's only published online. (Silver Rose snatches up the contract to publish it in hardcopy, stealing from next month's budget.) Everyone is shaken by the strength of the aliens' art. Everyone thinks to themselves, "if the poetry's this good, what else is in these books?"

4. Homerealm [Light Novel, Series, Science Fantasy, Erotica, Transition Literature]

Genius biohackers work for the flowering of all trans women into beautiful, free, sexual beings. Heavy on erotica; each LN is readable in a single sitting. 

Every single club for gender diversity abruptly acquires a copy of the first published Light Novel in this series. (And in many cases, the rest of them as well, despite the difficulty in finding an original data dump from Homerealm.) Most of these are pirated, in the spirit of I'll-buy-it-when-I-can. You can tell which clubs are good clubs because they have hardcopy editions. The best clubs have official hardcovers.*** The first light novel is read aloud in public places and there's some controversy about exposing children to the sexual content in it, but general opinion is that This Is An Exception, Aliens Are More Important. It quickly becomes confusing on the internet which stories are official and which are fanworks; a wiki is founded to catalogue them all, and crashes the free wiki hosting architecture. 

2. Grapeverse [Interactive Fiction, Branching Storyline, Erotica, Choose Your Morality, Relationship-Building]

Small-scale interactive fiction where you befriend or abuse a magical statue. Optional sex scenes. Very sweet and realistically portrayed.  

The Grapeverse interactive novel is promptly ripped and distributed widely, along with the digital editions of the books. Again, the failure of the publisher's website leads to a lot of I'll-buy-it-when-I-can. Those who aren't attending public readings of the books stay home and play. The general opinion of everyone is that the sex route is best, though the sadists appreciate the capacity for evil in this one. An incredible amount of [my-favorite-reflection]/Marble**** fanfiction is written within 24 hours, often S&M flavored. Many people spontaneously develop reflections of Marble. Fanart is also popular, mostly imagining different visions of Marble and her ruins. 

The reactions to the rest of the books, being longer, take a little longer to come in. The reading parties stretch, people ordering multiple cups of coffee or passing the book around to rest their voices.  

There is one book that has a bit of a different reaction, though -

3. Homerealm [Nonfiction, Autobiography, Strong Gimmick (Video Game Walkthrough), Cosplay, Alien Culture, Erotica]

Autobiography of an erotic cosplayer, styled as a video game strategy guide. Exceedingly clever; features both visual and written erotica. Hot. 

As the gimmick of this one becomes obvious, as does the presence of pictures, many of the public gatherings around it go a bit... sideways. Someone recommends going somewhere more private so that the pictures aren't shown off in public, a few other someones put up money to rent a large cuddleroom at the local il'ka*****, it turns into a bit more of an intimate gathering, the porn gets everyone horny, and, well, things proceed along those lines given charismatic Suns and their tendency to acquire new polycule members in the oddest of places. There are only three reports of outright orgies, but a lot of people leave early in pairs or trios or foursomes. A few people manage to lose their books in the process; a post on social media about someone looking for their book because they were distracted by IRL sexy goes viral. There's not much fanwork, though; most people seem to have the opinion that canon is good enough and also it's weird to write fanfic about an alien who actually exists and might not be okay with it. (Some people argue that obviously she'd be okay with it. There are internet arguments. A small Sensate sect that already focused on cosplay adopts the author as their Great Reflection.) 

Another similar book gets a different reaction yet again. 

13. Hearthome [Devotional Literature, Alien Religion, Erotica, Ecstatic]

Alien devotional literature that's clearly from an ecstatic sect. Consists of a series of dialogues with a (implied) Great Reflection. 

A lot of people don't believe this one is really from aliens. Some people in Eravia close it and set it aside. There's a fistfight over whether the reading should continue or not, in one case. Meanwhile in Anadyne, people are having spiritual experiences and praying in public****** and fetching pillows for the book. The erotic content isn't considered marked in a spiritual work, but the incidental hypnotic content whammies a few people during the live readings, and the spiritual depth of the book produces a new sect overnight dedicated to its teachings and the mysterious Great Reflection described within its covers. Many people report being asked questions in a quiet woman's voice following this book's release; there's a small spike in psychosis admissions to the careholds.

It's around now that Silver Rose is called by a reporter wanting to interview her about her work on the books. She accepts. By good fortune, providence, or sheer blind luck, her interview comes on just as people are setting their books aside for a moment for a collective lunch. Speaking on the phone to a reporter, her words are carried on the radio to fully a quarter of the population of Heart.

*Silver Rose bought the heaviest-capacity temporary-load solution she could find on short notice, spending all of her remaining budget for the month. 
**In any ten of Heart's inhabitants, about four will have done a similar public reading before and be actually good at it. 
***Most of the printed copies are improvised coil-bound editions made on a public printer and binding machine. 
****The universally-accepted fanon name for the statue girl. 
*****Like a cross between a hotel and a kink club, but unmarked to visit for adults. More or less the Heart equivalent of a pub with rooms above it, except alcohol isn't served. (Most Heart natives hate the taste and don't care for the effects either.)
******This is considered extremely gauche, on Heart; prayer is intimate and private and not shared with others besides your polycule. 

Transcription of the interview on Radio Eravia follows:

RE: I'm here this afternoon with Silver Rose, the first publisher of alien fiction on Heart. Today the world has been taken by storm by reading parties for the ten pieces of alien fiction that Silver Rose is responsible for bringing to our world; people are cutting work to listen, bookstores are slammed, and I'm told your website's gone down as well despite the measures you've taken. What's your reaction to the chaos today, Silver Rose?

SR: It's beyond my wildest hopes. Obviously I don't condone any of the violence that's happened, but as a publisher I always pray that the works that pass through my hands will find people who care about them and brighten someone's lives. Seeing people drop the rest of their lives to experience something I helped bring to this world is humbling and wonderful.

RE: It's practically an informal holiday out there. Are you planning to participate?

SR: I prefer a quiet life, honestly. This interview is kind of surprising to me, even though I know rationally that people are going to be interested in how these books came to be on Heart. As a publisher, usually I'm invisible - nobody knows me, they just know the work that passes through my hands. The authors are the ones with the fan clubs. So if I go participate, it'll be quietly and anonymously. You might be able to spot me from my big silly grin. 

RE: *laughs.* I'll keep an eye out! Are you planning to publish more alien books?

SR: Assuming these ones sell well, yes! So that's pretty much just a yes, at this point - I've already received reports that most of the physical editions are sold. 

RE: Speaking of selling alien books, when is your site going to be back up? 

SR: I've bought a new hosting package against the advance sales of the books, and the technicians say the site should be back up within a few hours with a lot more capacity. Please wait patiently! There will be an announcement when the site returns. 

RE: I've heard that some people are turning to piracy during the period of unavailability. What's your opinion on that?

SR: I get it, I really do, you want to read it now and participate in this great historical moment. You say to yourself you're going to buy it later. It's understandable. But you have to keep in mind that if you don't buy it, the people who write and distribute these things don't have an incentive to bring you more. So please, I don't mind if you pirate a temporary copy, but please actually buy a digital edition when the site comes back up. I promise to use the funds I earn to bring you more. 

RE: Do you intend to prosecute any piracy that happens? 

SR: I don't believe in punishing individuals for that kind of thing. As for the distributors, well, I can't promise anything. I'm bound by my contracts with the authors to act to preserve their copyright, and part of that is shutting down any illegal distribution I become aware of. 

RE: What about the public domain works? 

SR: Obviously you can do anything you want with them. None of my contracts there are exclusive; I expect fan translations to be pretty fast. 

RE: Since the hard copies are largely sold out, how long until the next print run?

SR: The initial setup - making the press plates and so on - is done now, but there's still quite a lot involved with making several thousand copies of each of these books. I expect the first physical editions of the second print run to be available in about a week. They'll be hardcover too, the same binding process as the last batch.

RE: Do you plan to release paperback editions? 

SR: For anything that sells out its second hardcover print run, yes.

RE: Do you have a favorite book from the set you've published?

SR: It's so hard to choose! I think I like the biography from Olam the best - it's such a clear depiction of an alien culture in a way that makes it very clear and obvious how it functions. It's a kind of nonfiction that's only really possible to see in the modern era because of the contact with the aliens. And it's a rare nonfiction book for me, I generally publish fiction so the nonfiction stands out more to me.

RE: I'll have to see if I can find a copy! I think that largely wraps up the interview. Is there anything you'd like to say to the world while you have the airwaves?

SR: Keep reading, keep loving, keep working to find your lifepath. It can lead you to places you never expected to ever go. 

RE: Thank you, Silver Rose. 

SR: Thank you.

Audio clip:

Dramatic music swells. "What's your reaction to the chaos today, Silver Rose?"

"It's beyond my wildest hopes." *anime sparkle noise*

EXPLOSION, distant sirens, "Oh god my leg, my -" (Audio cuts out like the microphone just got knocked down) 

An animatic of the audio meme is created with a fan interpretation of what Silver Rose looks like. (Long, flowing silver hair, big flowing gilded coat like the one the Sanctified wears, but black with villain spikes on the shoulders.) Silver Rose is shown from behind overlooking a city with sirens in the background and rising smoke; she doesn't speak, just turns towards the camera in four sketchy frames and flashes a huge goofy grin and a peace sign. (She's wearing a domino mask that hides her face; nobody actually knows what Silver Rose looks like in real life at this point, and it's kind of beside the point.)

People mill around and finish eating. There are lines for the bathrooms. Eventually, the readings resume, raggedly and scatteredly - but nobody puts down their alien books. There's still a thrumming energy, the kind that would normally be found at a really good convention or festival. Everybody* wants to hear the aliens' fiction. 

Gradually, people get deeper into the longer books, and the first groups reading longer works start to finish them in the afternoon. Spoilers get taken extremely seriously; a few trolls try to post them to social media and get almost immediately platform-banned for a week. Around now the publishers' site comes back up, and a truly staggering number of electronic editions are sold using the more robust architecture. It uses a queueing system; people wait on their phones while listening to readings. Silver Rose makes back her hosting fees in the first hour. 

More reactions come in.

18. Periverse [Prism, Fantasy, Alien Aliens, Alien Culture, Not Devotional]

Several alternate-universe versions of the same people come into conflict over magic. Alien genre of personality-examination literature eerily imitates Heart devotional art. 

A lot of people skipped the introduction to this one and think it's alien devotional art. Nobody prays in public over this one, though a few people develop reflections from it. The dark/light personality magic concept gets picked up almost instantly as a Shirani** tool and a huge number of people do dark and light versions of their favorite reflections.*** Some confused people want to talk to the alien sects that are devotional to these particular Great Reflections and possibly join, if only on the internet?**** 

24. Basiland [Relationship Drama, Realistic Abuse, Dark, Happy Ending, Soft Science Fiction, Dark Erotica]

Woman is abused by her girlfriend, gradually comes to realize she's being mistreated and moves out. Dubiously consensual erotica scenes, but very realistic in its handling. 

This one has a lot of people stressed out! The reading parties around it get gradually tenser, the crowd hanging on the speaker's words in every sentence. A lot of these groups skipped lunch. The more intense abuse scenes result in a lot of hugs even between strangers, and the eventual hopeful ending releases a lot of tension. People cry. People internally swear to get their own physical copies. A lot of people are treacherously turned on but keep it to themselves in the crowds; some really dark sadistic erotica gets written where the abuse goes even further before the protagonist eventually escapes. There's some debate about whether to ban it because of Alien Relations but the idea of censorship gets fierce "no" responses and the moderators drop it. People ship the protagonist with all their favorite broken birds.***** Continuation fic gets written. 

10. Planet [Hard Science Fiction, Character Drama, Strong Characters, Vocational Literature, Terraforming]

Terraforming team has slice-of-life adventures developing an ecosystem. Heavy on scientific detail. Likely to sell well in Eravia. 

Everyone loves Snake Lady, though they can't really relate to her wanting to actually put real snakes everywhere. Animals are cool but you wouldn't want to live near them. The official merchandise plushies sell out, the snakes almost instantly; sales of shirts and mugs and so on are slower, but they eventually sell out as well. The terraforming detail nerdsnipes hundreds of Eravians and a fan wiki goes up once the wiki hosting software recovers. In Anadyne the appendixes and footnotes are generally skipped, while in Eravia they're generally read in full. A lot of Eravian atheists have what someone from another world might call "spiritual" experiences****** about the multiversal love of science and technology shown in the work.  

21. Olam [Nonfiction, Memoir, Alien Culture, Culture Clash]

Woman raised in an uncontacted tribe records her introduction to Hadarite culture. Strong, unique perspective on an alien culture. 

This one is a little less popular, but those who read it quickly grow to appreciate the protagonist and a small Sect forms around her as a Great Reflection overnight. A lot of people want more contact with Olam and especially the Hadarites. The wiki that collects information about the aliens is slammed with traffic viewing the page on Olam. Fanwork is quiet; again, there's a general feeling that it's weird to write fiction about real people, and the historical context on an alien world makes it really hard to do your research properly, which discourages people further. Everyone who's actually read it wants to represent Hadarite culture accurately. There are a few related pieces where someone writes themselves visiting the Hadarites, but nobody really reads them. 

19. Piecemeal [Historical Fiction, Alien Culture, Alien Religion, Mystery Cult, Coming-of-Age]

Teenager is inducted into a mystery cult that changes his life for the better. Features strong alien culture; will need cultural notes. 

Everyone is interested in alien religion, and the Anadynes are enthusiastic about it. The use of many names and identities is recognized as a Storyteller tendency of the Piecemeal aliens, and a few sects try to open diplomatic overtures. A major sect reflecting real and fictional inventors announces a performance of one of the described rituals in the book this evening, and gets a crowd of lay visitors participating, some of which go on to actually consider themselves Children of Daedalus as part of their spiritual identity. Continuation fics are popular. 

Supper comes around, and most of the groups have finished their first book. Most of them disband at this point, going their separate ways satisfied with having shared something significant, but a decent chunk (maybe a quarter) have a second book to read and decide to do so. These smaller, hardcore groups keep cafes open late into the night as they read more alien stories aloud; most places are willing to stretch their hours for the historic event, especially considering the crowd is paying. Most of them finally stop reading when everyone is too exhausted to parse the book anymore, late around three or four AM in the morning. Contact information gets exchanged for a couple of these groups, and people decide to meet up again and make a book club of it. People want to share access to their physical editions, and the festival atmosphere was lovely, and these people are cool and they want to meet them again...

Eventually, the immediate historic moment passes.

*The people who genuinely aren't interested are going about their jobs and generally continuing their daily lives. There's actually a good number of people (maybe as large as 50%) who have already read crappy translations of alien fiction and aren't that interested in more, or who aren't really into writing, and so on and so on; but they're not the ones who are participating in the reading parties. Heart's natives love conventions and festivals and this is a really good excuse, so a lot of people get roped in, especially since this is a genuinely historical moment and everyone wants to say they were there.
** Lit soul-flowering; the process of deliberately developing a Reflection in your own mind and distinguishing them from their original source. 
***Dark!SnowRose (chaotic gremlin) and Light!SnowRose (sweet bookworm) get a silly RPF selfcest fic written about them, but it doesn't go viral or anything, it just sort of exists.
****There's nowhere near enough alien internet access bandwidth yet to make this practical, but they sure are trying. 
*****Look it up on TVTropes.
******Heart's natives are generally quite prone to hypnotic phenomena and deep, moving emotional experiences. While spiritualists go out of their way to make these things happen, they're generally considered "normal" and not necessarily faith-based on Heart.

Silver Rose is having an interesting month.

First there was the fanmail to the publishing house. She was in no way expecting that she would get even one letter, but there's been a deluge. Nobody can get access to the alien authors directly right now because there's so little bandwidth, so she's the closest thing to someone responsible for the works on Heart. And people want to express their affection and happiness and joy. She hasn't dared to read any of it, so it's all stacked up in her office at the company. She's not coming in to work; people understand, and the company is ticking along quietly without her.

Then came the accusations. Some people are apparently unhappy about her decision to go with an Eravian artist for the front covers of the Heart editions. They feel that the original alien cover artists have been snubbed. She gives an interview explaining her reasoning and that it was solely a business decision intended to give the books a unified feel, speed publishing and make them recognizable; that produces a wave of defenders, but some people aren't convinced. There are flame wars on the internet. She hides in her house, doesn't go online and snuggles her Keeper a lot. 

She can't hide from taxes, though. There's a government letter in her mailbox informing her that she's stepped into Required Divestment (RID) territory with her recent personal profits. She is permitted to keep enough in investments to make her polycule set for life* and then the rest is to be taxed. RID legislation allows her to earmark her taxes for her personal causes (from this whitelist here) since she's considered to have materially contributed to the prosperity of Eravia and the world; she allocates a quarter to public art programs (noting to prioritize literature) and the rest to healthcare (noting to prioritize psychosis and cancer). She could probably do a better breakdown but she's kind of STRESSED right now, okay? 

An old photo of her from a company retreat gets posted on the internet, and then taken down, and then posted again, and then taken down again. Nobody actually recognizes her in her day to day life but then she isn't really venturing outside her house. Her address doesn't get published, thank all the goddesses.

People email her business email offering high fees to speak at the new alien book conventions. She turns them all down. She can barely look at her own fanmail, she's not going to be able to speak in front of a crowd. 

Weeks pass, and gradually the intensity subsides a bit. She feels safe to venture outside her house again (on her Keeper's arm, just in case.) She gets recognized and asked to sign a book. She does, because what else do you do in that situation? Her crappy signature gets posted to the internet and goes viral. More requests for her to speak at conventions come in. (She still turns them down.)

She looks at the huge stack of fanmail, and hires someone to sort through it on her behalf. She writes a form letter** that gets used for most of her responses. A few pieces of mail want to know how to get started in publishing as someone like Snow Rose; she writes personal responses to those ones. She has also been sent a ton of merchandise and fanwork for the alien books; she displays a couple of the best pieces and donates the rest to a local fanclub. 

The donation proves to be a bit of a mistake, because then the fanclub knows she's close by and starts sending her letters asking her if she'll drop by to see what they've done with the merch. She confers with her Keeper; she gently encourages her to try it. 

She's not so sure about that. 

*She was already close, as a top exec of a major publishing company, but now it's Official. 

**Dear Fan,
Thank you for your appreciation of the books that I published. I don't personally feel that I've earned your time; the credit should go to the alien authors who actually wrote what I helped bring to Heart. I'm honestly overwhelmed by the outpouring of support, so I'm afraid I can't write you a personal letter, but I hope this reply will bring a little happiness to your life. 

- Silver Rose 

Meanwhile, Crystal is having a great month. As the scout responsible for finding the alien books she gets a small finder's fee (less than a percent) on every sale. Normally this just gives her a small pay bump, but Everything She's Scouted Has Sold Out, and is likely to keep selling out for the rest of her lifetime. Plus her company stock has become ridiculously valuable overnight. She sells her membership in the company to a qualified fan who wants to start in publishing, and retires. 

She also gets a few pieces of fanmail, mostly from people who've actually worked in publishing and know the process. It's worth replying to them, so she does. 

Things are a little weird with her Earth for a bit - she has to reassure him repeatedly that it's okay for him to quit his government job, and write up projections of the sales to come, before he finally agrees that he can retire as well. But her polycule will be okay for at least twenty years. That's good enough for her. She wants to spend time with the people she loves. Scouting was a great job, but she'd rather have lazy days with lots of sex. 

The second printing gets published, and sells out. The public domain books' sales slow, but don't stop. SIlver Rose's publishing company goes through an interesting month as much of its senior staff sell their company memberships and retire, but enough staff are still onboard to keep the company printing money. The remainder of Crystal's scouting list is sold on to a second publishing company as the original one focusses its remaining capacity on the alien books it already has the licenses for. 

Fan conventions for the alien books continue, in both sacred and secular forms. An author interview comes back across the divide from Piecemeal and is messily devoured by the fans. Silver Rose still doesn't make a convention appearance. 

Elm turns over the flash-chip in two of his fingers, and plugs it into his computer. 

A list comes up, short descriptions of two dozen works. Then, in a second window, a data dump, with flags on the files marking them "yes", "no", or "maybe." 

He takes a deep breath, and stills his trembling fingers. He mouses over to the data dump, and scrolls. 

More alien works, unread by anyone on Heart. 

And a list from someone on his level, a fellow scout, who's already marked the first quarter or so of the file. 

He's going to need to go over everything again. Make his own decisions. Most of the good stuff will already have been pulled from the start of the file - ten of the works marked LISCENCED, the books everyone's already read - so it's time to start reading the data dump. There has to be more of the same quality, and he's going to find it. The work will continue. Heart won't be satisfied with only ten books. 

What more is in the slush pile?

Here's a crossover fantasy series about a group of 64 young adults from a wide array of settings who wake up in a sapient, magical library-slash-academy and are trapped there. The characters each bring some form of magic or powers from their respective worlds. They are tasked with surviving for four years so they can "graduate" and return to their respective worlds with new and more powerful magic. The academy itself is hostile, and produces a variety of threats both environmental and active each year. However, the primary challenge is the end-of-year exams, which test the students on magical knowledge (in particular, each other's magic systems,) and which pass only the top 50% of the class each year; the bottom half are turned into books by the library. Dead students are treated as having gotten a score of 0, so students are incentivized to kill each other to increase their chances of passing each exam. The magics brought by the various characters are not at all balanced against each other, and the characters also vary greatly in competence, but beyond these factors, it is difficult to tell which characters will die or fail and which will survive; some characters get more screentime than others but there are no clear primary protagonists. A fair amount of sex is implied but it occurs offscreen, and pairbonding is not a focus; everyone is too busy not dying. Death-school-magic-system-analysis-many-setting-crossover-fantasy is a popular enough combination of tropes to constitute its own genre. This series is an exemplar due to the variety of novel magic-and-power-classification systems studied and invented by the characters, a few of which are groundbreaking by Auderan standards and many of which are refinements of popular classification systems, and which have since entered common usage. The settings and characters involved are not actually from other works; the team of authors who worked on this series took great pride in its originality and scope, and there's a perceptible aesthetic that holds across the diverse settings. There are numerous appendices expounding on the settings and their magic systems. At the end of each novel, this information is included for all of the characters who have died, to minimize spoilers in the intended reading experience.

Here's a fantasy novel about a young wizard who steals a fallen star and embarks on a journey to return it to the sky. The protagonist is targeted by the setting's magocracy, who want to get the star back and exploit it for its magical properties. The protagonist's primary character traits are his curiosity, impulsiveness, and creativity. The star is sapient, and is depicted as naive, intelligent, alien, and adorable. The deuteragonist is a girl who has run away from a family of genetically modified mercenaries with superhuman physical abilities but drastically shortened lifespans. She joins the protagonist and the star on their journey and lends them her acute tactical intellect, her abilities in combat, and her well-honed paranoia. The deuteragonist never expresses vulnerability in an obvious way, but there is a lot of adorable cuddling and casual handholding. The featured magic system centers around sacrificing knowledge to evoke magical effects: to perform magic, a wizard focus on some area of their understanding of the world and figuratively "burns" it to power the effect. Efficiency of knowledge use scales with specificity, accuracy, and relevance of the knowledge used. Overdrawing on knowledge is easy and potentially disastrous, as it can not only undo years of study, but in extreme cases erase fundamental intuitions about the world that can't be easily relearned, such as a wizard's instinctive understanding of heat or gravity. This is played for horror, and depicted as one of the most awful things that can happen to a person ever. A central element of the setting is that anyone at all with significant scientific knowledge can perform magic, potentially to great destructive effect, and so the magocracy has outlawed literacy and study of the natural world among the populace. The novel ends with somewhat abruptly with the main characters overthrowing the magocracy. The characters dealing with the resulting chaos, implementing a better way to deal with the dangers of magic, studying sufficient astrophysics to return the star to the sky, and studying sufficient biology to save the deuteragonist from dying in her 30s is implied to be the plot of one or more sequels. This novel is notable for having been written by a particularly young author, whose style is a bit unrefined in a way that many Auderan readers find refreshing. It's also an example of a work with less heavy magicbuilding.
 
Here's a series of relatively short novels about magical girls whose powers each revolve around conjuring and manipulating some class of ordinary manufactured objects, and who must fight monsters that appear in extradimensional fake nightmares to survive. The protagonist's powers are themed around measuring instruments. Her conjures aren't very scary in combat, but each magical girl has a mental power as well, and hers is highly potent: anything she can perceive with her senses, she can perceive with absolute precision, and she can also move her body with perfect precision and imagine distances and motion in space with precision. Early in the story, she is mentored by a magical girl who can conjure springs in arbitrary states of compression or tension. Before meeting the main character, she had been acting conservatively and laying low, but she takes on more monster fights to support the protagonist, as magical girls depend on dream marbles dropped by the monsters for sustenance. In the third chapter of the first book, she dies, and this spurs the main character on to be more self-reliant and agentic despite her offensively weak powers. Besides the necessary conflict with the nightmare monsters, there is a lot of conflict and combat between magical girls over hunting territory and the limited supply of dream marbles. There are around 20 magical girls who are introduced at various points with interesting powers. The most prominent characters besides the protagonist are a sadistic cleaning supplies-themed magical girl who fights with devastating gases and corrosive industrial cleaning agents, a happy-go-lucky balloon-themed magical girl who can conjure arbitrarily pressurized balloons which create pressure explosions, and a recordings-themed magical girl who acts as a mastermind and foil to the protagonist due to her similarly potent mental power. The second book revolves around a conflict with the sadistic cleaning supplies girl, and by the end the protagonist wins her over by outsmarting her in their cat-and-mouse game and begins to pairbond-date her. The third book revolves around the two of them taking care of and training the balloon-themed magical girl, whose power initially appears useless; there are clear parallels with the beginning of the first book. The fourth book is implied to escalate the conflict between the protagonist's party and the recordings girl mastermind, who has been exploiting other magical girls for dream marbles, but it hasn't been released yet. 

A bildungsroman about a teenage girl who desperately wants to be an ICU nurse but cannot reliably perform tasks which those around her occasionally observe to require much lower executive function than being any kind of nurse; she spends much of the book struggling to reliably perform a set of household chores which have come to represent her difficulties in her mind, culminating in a nervous breakdown at the climax of the book, after which she spends a lot of time in talk therapy coming to terms with her limitations and her options. She spends part of the time she is dealing with her frustration experiencing the urge to self-harm, which she resists. Her problems are at one point exacerbated when she overhears her parents commenting on how if she just set her standards lower then she would be fine, which she resents and resists. 

A romance novel set in a world where everyone is magical beings who have a very specific body type which is probably the author's fetish; it includes bird wings and bug eyes and unconventional arrangements of body fat. The book is about a boy and a nonbinary magical being spending about the first third of the book in will-they-won't-they relationship development and then the latter two-thirds being adorably romantic together and supporting each other as they work through their personal issues. 

An educationalfictionpiece about a pair of engineers in a science fiction setting who have to fix the space station they live on using a lot of technology that is postulated to exist, the workings of which aren't gone into excessive detail about but the mechanics of working with which are; they use complicated calculus to determine what the problem is and how they should fix it, and probability theory to determine how likely various possible solutions are to work, and various other fields of math to handle other aspects of the situation, and also to solve non-crisis-related problems during slower parts of the book. It is mentioned offhand at several points that the two engineers are queerplatonic metamours both married to a botanist but the botanist doesn't get a lot of screentime and the book focuses much less on the romantic aspects of the situation than with the engineers' friendship and the space station crisis.

A traditional isekai novel, with the main character having an even more traditional harem aura, with the main focus of the book being after the "Demon Lord" was defeated of the endeavour of trying to transmit the body of literature they discovered, and the awkwardness of going through the publishing industry with a relatively fixed product. It's very focused on the experience of loneliness after the rush of a simple love, and wistfully wrought. 

The seminal work of the temple - the words of the goddess incarnate, or so they say. It's considered tradition, back in hearthome, for those who aspire to divinity* to avoiding reading sections of the book, and rederive the rest with the imprint** of the light left on them through their studies. It depicts a woman, never described save in her beauty and grace, who studied each and every craft with of the world. 

She studied oratory, and swept nations off their feet, and spun a new theory of persuasion and learning-virtue-internalization***, and then left the field to her students, for there were things that simple words alone could not solve. 

She studied music, and formed an institution of art, appreciation and communion through wherever she went, and left the field for her students, for there were higher harmonies in the world then those of simple song. 

She studied mathematics, and brought an age of reason and comprehension and cooperation and left the field for her students, for there were things higher then merely knowing of the course of nature. 

She studied science, and brought a world of miracles and marvels and left the field for her students, for there were things higher then that which even she could casually explore. 

Throughout, there's constant dialogues about the nature of virtue and value, texts of adoration and admiration, in and out of the bedroom, in each and every field of endeavour. It's considered to be the definitive work of morality, emphasizing the virtues of service, exaltation of the self through doing things impressive and grand for what you are and what you've been, of the importance of charm and the value of concordance, of ensuring each creation is something that will follow the purpose of it's design.  

Most citizens of Hearthome think of themselves as being, amongst other things, partially her, distilled and diluted both, the mortal remnants of the goddess who's light shall shine upon all of creation, in time, and the priesthood and much of the executive power of the goverment is designed around a complicated process around ensuring alignment to the will of the goddess, both in service and soul-self.****

There are millions of versions, each made throughout years and years as a matter of utmost devotion, but the methods work, they will tell you, and the words here are amongst the truest and most divine*. 

There's a series of footnotes and side resources for those who are known to have certain psychological reactions to it! Psychosis is a known problem, and these things are known to help and cancel out most of the spiral in the vast majority of people who would otherwise suffer from it, here's some resources and meditation methods in case other sources of value become suppressed that can help you work through that. 

*Lit "Alignment-with-Her-Guiding-Light". 

**A phenomenon considered deeply related and intertwined with 'plurality' but notionally distinct, as part of something more profound then mere identification or identity, but participation in the ideal. 

***lit. 'indoctrination', though the entire process is intrinsically voluntary and has a very positive connotation. 

****lit. 'self-beyond-revelation', upon which there are not further truths to derive that would modify the conclusion, the results and essential nature of the thing being described. 

A thick fantasy novel about a humble schoolboy in a time loop trying to save the world from an apocalyptic magical threat, with a central looping character whose willpower focus is - to save everyone, all their stories, all the people he doesn't know and will never know - because their loss is simply unacceptable. The magical powers rely on depth of emotion and willpower, and though he constantly attempts to save the world the stress and isolation of looping leads him to despair. He notices himself growing less powerful as he gets wearier, and has a crisis of faith. Will he really be able to save the world? What's the point, if he keeps deleting a year's worth of memories from billions of people? The loop would end if he simply saved as many as he can and fled the planet - a million, two million perhaps. His friends, who he knows far better than they know him thanks to the looping, can't seem to reassure him or understand what he's going through. He could just give up... But that would condemn countless others to oblivion, and break something that should never be broken. That would be *giving up*. He prays, a concept of desperation and even foolishness to Planet. He thinks and thinks. He cries and wallows in his emotions. And eventually, he hits on an insight that lets him bring others into the loop, but only his closest friends, one per loop. After that things seem to slowly get better, as if victory is inevitable - the light at the end of a long tunnel, distant but visible. He's - honestly kind of more miserable than before, subjecting his friends to the same torment, even as they reassure him that this is what they want. Even as the reality of the end becomes clear again and again. Several times, the narrative and tone build up to a great climax - spending a lot more detail on this particular clever solution and why surely we will win this time - only to be forced to loop again. And again. And again. Until, only halfway through the work, nowhere near where one would expect the real climax and in a scene paced just like the past failures- He succeeds, escaping the loop and stopping the world-ending dark miasma before it can consume more than a single city. The rest of the book is devoted to fleshing out side characters' arcs and the main cast's healing and rehabilitation. The final scene is in the same place as the very first scene - a flower garden on a ridge, looking out on a bustling city full of people going about their daily lives, with the boy looking melancholic towards the sunset.

Further selections from the working group (likewise certified for accuracy) include the following.

A romance/coming-of-age novel. This is an extremely common genre in the Union, but a very important one; the curators felt they had to include one acclaimed example. This book is more than a hundred years old, set in the Union of that time. It alternates perspective between the two main characters, a boy and girl who meet as children, become friends, slowly fall in love as they grow older, get married as young adults, and build a life together. Romance, as depicted in this story, is primarily composed of friendship, trust, and some understated lust, which culminates in joyous, certain-as-the-sun-rises love. This is not to say that they don't have disagreements, but all are resolved amicably. There is some explicit sexual content, almost entirely after they get married, but it's considered to be moreso pornography-that-makes-you-cry than pornography-that-makes-you-aroused. Their comings-of-age include of course increasing knowledge and sexual awakening, but the story also places great emphasis on seizing one's agency and the way the couple grows into each other, simultaneously adapting to their relationship and the world around them to together form an integrated whole.

A fantasy epic set in a very high-magic world with a long power ladder (and ensuing chaotic, complex power dynamics). The magic system works in such a way that it is possible (albeit difficult) for even the lowliest mortal beings to ascend to great power (and for even the greatest to be usurped). The story follows a woman of great ambition and deadly cleverness. After the spillover of a battle between two mid-level entities destroys most of her hometown, she becomes determined to gain the power necessary to control her fate in a chaotic world. The first act tells the story of her quest, the trials she undergoes, the stratagems she employs, the people she meets, the fantastical locations she visits, the entities she slays. Most of her victories are the result of her intelligence and strategic acumen (or, perhaps, her lack of mistakes). Notably, she does not at any point use deception to get ahead, although there are plenty of situations where it seems advantageous to do so, and several occasions on which she would gain from dishonoring agreements she has made. The second act begins as she nears the peak of power. At this point, she becomes more contemplative, stepping back from her schemes to gain power that she might think about how to use the power she has gained. She comes to realize that, despite the unending struggle and change, the nature of that struggle is constant. ("What did you expect? That you would climb to the top, seize power, and find waiting for you a switch to flip and fix the world? This world runs in cycles of cycles, and if it were easy to break them it would have happened already. When everything changes, nothing changes.") So she seeks a way to undermine those patterns, to make way for a world which is less chaotic and truly different. But—she decides—despite the constraints of the ecology they all participate in, everyone makes their own choices, and there is no reason it is impossible for them to make different ones. In the third act, she brings her vision into reality, persuading and bargaining for people to change their behavior, to work together to build something better. The costs of her honor are repaid many times over, as she alone has the credibility to make this plan succeed. What makes the difference is helping others to see the truth, to recognize the fundamental stupidity of collectively choosing to create a world rent by conflict. Over many thousands of years, the forces of coordination creep forward, and eventually overcome those of conflict. Peace at last.

A slice-of-life/comedy with tactical elements, which follows a group of six teenage boys, who have long been friends, as they decide to form a kravmabid* team and play together. At first, they aren't very good: unskilled, uncoordinated, and prone to blunders. As the book goes on, they learn from their mistakes, get better, and eventually become one of the better teams in the region. The story focuses most on the camaraderie and friendship between them, as well as the humor they share together and find in their situation—despite numerous losses, they do not become dispirited, instead joking about their ineptitude. The incompetence only enhances its effectiveness as an ode to boyhood friendship. Almost as an afterthought, the story offers detailed insight into the tactical dynamics and competitive landscape of kravmabid—the narrator often describes the characteristics of skilled play as an ironic contrast to what the boys are actually doing—as well as what it feels like from the inside to slowly get better at something by experimenting and learning from your mistakes.

*This is a sport on Olam, combining hiking, navigation, tracking, archery, and martial arts into a sort of multiday wilderness wargame. It was originally developed for training soldiers, and has since evolved into a more fun recreational activity. Play is dominated by maneuver, team coordination, stealth, and tracking.

An inside-view novel (set on contemporary Olam) from the perspective of a man who is a narcissist. He is often inconsiderate, and treats the people close to him poorly, but is exceptionally good at justifying his actions to himself. Since the entire book is from his—often warped—perspective, readers may initially believe that he is in the right, and underestimate the depth of his shortcomings. Eventually, he upsets someone in a way, and to a degree, that he cannot explain away, and for practically the first time is actually confused about why they feel as they do. He carries this confusion with him for several weeks, ruminating over it until he is eventually forced to conclude that he is responsible, and has very deeply fucked up. This triggers a long process of introspection, and attempts to change. Slowly, haltingly, with great difficulty, he is able to see through some of the illusions that have afflicted him, and comes to understand himself and others better. He repairs some of his relationships, and at the books end, makes a heartfelt apology to the person he has wronged the most (their reaction is not shown).

There is a certain someone who has been reading alien books and not sharing.

She makes a pointed comment to Snowblossom between meetings of the Council of Reflections, and would you look at that now she has a flash-chip in her hand. 

Wonderful. 

Now, officially piracy is not condoned by the Anadyne government and it's a serious crime to leak confidential diplomatic documents, however.

Obviously she can't entrust this to any random staffer, and it would be foolish to just dump the whole thing to the net. She doesn't have enough time to analyze the whole thing personally - she has duties - but neither is she stupid enough to potentially cause a diplomatic incident that might be traced back to her. And letting it lie fallow is a crime against the Four Knowings, which is the kind that counts. 

Fortunately, she has contacts.

Here's a crossover fantasy series about a group of 64 young adults from a wide array of settings who wake up in a sapient, magical library-slash-academy and are trapped there. 

Death-battle genre, that's a blast from the past. The massive-crossover-but-not-really is kind of strange - on Heart you'd just use public domain characters - but sure, whatever. This one seems like it doesn't have a real protagonist, which is a shame, because it means the plot sort of meanders and doesn't really... go anywhere. He gets that that's kind of the aesthetic, but this genre was a fad on Heart and he doesn't really judge that it has staying power, despite the magic-building. No pile. 

Here's a fantasy novel about a young wizard who steals a fallen star and embarks on a journey to return it to the sky. 

The deuteragonist of this one, on the other hand, hits a particular Great Reflection pretty much squarely on the head. Abusive parents, supernatural abilities, paranoid, competent, slow to let down her guard. The shortened lifespan is an interesting inversion of how that one usually goes. The alien star is also really cute and protection-worthy. This should sell. Yes pile.  

Here's a series of relatively short novels about magical girls whose powers each revolve around conjuring and manipulating some class of ordinary manufactured objects, and who must fight monsters that appear in extradimensional fake nightmares to survive. 

Oh, this one is in conversation with - wait a second, aliens. He was about to say that this is obviously inheriting from that one anime with the lich magical girls, but the aliens don't have that, surely? Spooky coincidence. The ordinary-object powers and the sadistic magical girl in the second book will sell well, even though she's kind of played for horror. That's kind of expected, given the source m- He'll just shut up now. Yes pile.

A bildungsroman about a teenage girl who desperately wants to be an ICU nurse but cannot reliably perform tasks which those around her occasionally observe to require much lower executive function than being any kind of nurse...

This is a pretty frank look at the plight of many Skies. It'll be sympathetic to a lot of people. The alien talk therapy is distinctly Eravian in style - in Anadyne there'd be spiritual counsellors involved for this sort of thing - but it's a good look at the way aliens do it. This package doesn't seem to have come with a world label - he'll have to talk to his boss about getting that sorted out. Yes pile. 

A romance novel set in a world where everyone is magical beings who have a very specific body type which is probably the author's fetish; it includes bird wings and bug eyes and unconventional arrangements of body fat. The book is about a boy and a nonbinary magical being spending about the first third of the book in will-they-won't-they relationship development and then the latter two-thirds being adorably romantic together and supporting each other as they work through their personal issues. 

Okay, you do you, author, but nobody here is attracted to that description.* It doesn't stand out to him as being particularly quality for its genre; there are a lot of works where people go through will-they-or-won't-they for a while before settling into romantic life. No pile. 

An educationalfictionpiece about a pair of engineers in a science fiction setting who have to fix the space station they live on using a lot of technology that is postulated to exist, the workings of which aren't gone into excessive detail about but the mechanics of working with which are; they use complicated calculus to determine what the problem is and how they should fix it, and probability theory to determine how likely various possible solutions are to work, and various other fields of math to handle other aspects of the situation, and also to solve non-crisis-related problems during slower parts of the book. It is mentioned offhand at several points that the two engineers are queerplatonic metamours both married to a botanist but the botanist doesn't get a lot of screentime and the book focuses much less on the romantic aspects of the situation than with the engineers' friendship and the space station crisis.

The aliens are polyamorous. Yay! But otherwise this is a textbook in disguise, a genre that many Eravians love but that'll go over like a lead balloon in Anadyne most likely. It's also weird how this "marriage" thing is apparently nonexclusive - not analogous to Keeper/Kept, then. He'll put it in the maybe pile for now. 

*All generalizations are false.

A traditional isekai novel, with the main character having an even more traditional harem aura, with the main focus of the book being after the "Demon Lord" was defeated of the endeavour of trying to transmit the body of literature they discovered, and the awkwardness of going through the publishing industry with a relatively fixed product. It's very focused on the experience of loneliness after the rush of a simple love, and wistfully wrought. 

Cute, but not competitive. It's creative-angst genre and it's not Watchmaker's Heart. It won't sell. No pile. 

The seminal work of the temple - the words of the goddess incarnate, or so they say. 

This is so above his pay grade. He'll flag this to his boss and get them to bring it up with the diplomatic corps. He sets the book aside and keeps reading.

A thick fantasy novel about a humble schoolboy in a time loop trying to save the world from an apocalyptic magical threat, with a central looping character whose willpower focus is - to save everyone, all their stories, all the people he doesn't know and will never know - because their loss is simply unacceptable. 

This would be Devotary work - as in, devotary work for a Devotary sect - in Anadyne. It's strong even for that. You can really feel the misery and pain dripping off it, and the ultimate anticlimactic success is wonderful and clever. The after-tragedy is well-written and the characters are firmly fleshed out and the stance that "Everyone deserves saving" will be immensely popular. Yes pile.   

A romance/coming-of-age novel. This is an extremely common genre in the Union, but a very important one; the curators felt they had to include one acclaimed example. 

Awww. This one is very adorable and also well-written. There's a lot less sex than there would be in a Heart equivalent, but that just makes the few scenes that are there hit harder. "Marriage", again, seems to translate roughly to Keeper-and-Kept, but less of a D/S relationship? The alien culture is oddly shared between worlds in some ways. This one should definitely find an audience. Yes pile. 

A fantasy epic set in a very high-magic world with a long power ladder (and ensuing chaotic, complex power dynamics). 

This is a sweeping epic, and rarely for the genre, actually justifies the scale. This story can't be told at a smaller scale, it has to work with organizations and leadership, and it's a very interesting meditation on truth that's in conversation with the Storytellers in Anadyne. It's also just a ripping good read. The themes are deep, the action is strong, the plots are cunning. The protagonist is similar to a few Great Reflections and will appeal well to people searching for their enra.* He sees a definite future for this one at market. Yes pile. 

A slice-of-life/comedy with tactical elements, which follows a group of six teenage boys, who have long been friends, as they decide to form a kravmabid team and play together.

This one is also very cute. The main characters being all boys is unusual, and worth taking a look at; the team sport is a little bit weird, being as it is adapted from warfare, but then archery is quite popular on Heart so this will appeal to the people who do that as a foreign culture's approach to it. The ineptitude of the team helps to keep it light and reduce the comparisons to real war. Overall this has potential. Yes pile.  

An inside-view novel (set on contemporary Olam) from the perspective of a man who is a narcissist.

This one could be useful to a few people Elm knows. He quietly folds that thought away; what's his critical reaction? His critical reaction is that the unreliable narration is done well, the redemption arc is clever and will appeal to the public, and the seeking-of-truth is going to be popular in both Anadyne and Eravia. There is some risk that it'll be taken as a commentary on Liar, but then he's Eravian and not Anadician so he can publish that kind of thing. Yes pile.

*Lifepath or vocation. 

A second batch of stories come from Piecemeal, identified as being picked by the author of Reinvention (who clearly has gotten advice from some PR people)

A hubris-paean story is set in a pocket world, the Black Below, outside the reach of the tyrants of the universe, hidden in the shelter of three immobile gods of secrets and bindings, life and health, and curiosity and paradox (respectively). The surroundings of the life god have been conquered and monopolized by an immortal aristocracy who (very politely) execute anyone who lives beyond their dictated maximum lifespan, a law which they all cheat by giving up their names (but not their identities or social ties) and permanently joining the half-ghostly eternal council that advises the nominal ruler. A daughter of one of these rulers is offered true immortality like her father and his line, but defies them by giving it away to a rival country's admiral purely to spite her father and his ways, and they slowly assemble a team of revolutionaries from many backgrounds, unified in their desire to overthrow the ghost councilors and their figurehead, and spread life eternal to all the world, and then to take the fight to the tyrants above. They fail, and the epilogue shows them dispersing across the pocket world to hide.

A second part shows a new protagonist learning of the attempt, which had been imperfectly suppressed from public attention by the aristocracy. They set out to find the lost revolutionaries and prepare a second attempt, learning from the failures and ready to try again. They criss-cross the Black, finding both the people and the relics of the first attempt, and making other allies who can harness the power of the other gods of the Black or advance technology for use against the tyrants. They find all the Seven Who Fell, who nickname them the 'New Marshal', but cannot rally them all to their banner; some were crippled by the loss, and the later chapters show the Marshal struggling to to re-ignite the spark of life for a few who have lost hope. The second book ends as a war council begins, the Marshal looking around at the faces of those they've brought together, and the fierce determination they've managed to impart.

Translator's notes state that this was an unfinished trilogy; the third part took long enough to write that fanfiction filled the gap, and the author ended up publishing their plot outline rather than writing book three herself. This was popular enough that it was a popular trend to do it on purpose, mostly within the hubris-paean genre. Reinvention's author notes that one of their very first writing projects was one of the many continuations of the Black Seven trilogy, but it's not work they are willing to publish because they were completely inexperienced and so the craft of the writing is shoddy. Neither author nor translator has any other continuation they are willing to recommend in its place, though there are a dozen public-domain versions which are prominent enough to be mentioned in the encyclopedia entry for the series.

This trilogy's first book, Night's Hand, starts as three intertwined superhero stories. A hooded detective called Shuffle tracks down crime across his city with a mix of detective work, mystically-accurate hunches, and disregard for propriety and law, tracking the structure of the criminal crews and publicly exposing the links between the 'Admirals' who lead them and their public personas as philanthropists. An ancient king wakes in the urban era and saves his city-state from several disasters; he rapidly rescues the passengers of a crashing ship before its engines rip it apart, holds up a breaking bridge with his bare hands while it evacuates, and fights a small army of 'metal men' - slightly-steampunk robots; he gives an interview as he tries to understand the way his country has changed since he reigned, and a newspaper calls him 'a royal waste of space, but also a royal absence of vices', and he picks up the nickname 'Royal'. A woman who calls herself 'Storm-Eyes' appears from a thunderstorm, flying through a cluster of cities tracking drug cartels and rigged gambling rings with her speed and supernatural senses, proving impossible to lie to and extremely difficult to deceive or mislead. They interleave as they each find links between the problems they face and an international network which seems to be run with someone who can influence the minds of those around them, and the three collaborate on a bust to roll up the network and catch the mastermind. As they restrain him, he shrugs and declares "I am just an instrument"; moments later his body goes slack and comatose, and starts to disintegrate before their eyes.

The second book, Sun's Crown, follows them as they try to find whoever controlled the 'instrument'; they find several other masterminds, all of whom disintegrate the same way, and others who control more armies of metal men. As they investigate, they find evidence that these conspiracies are older than they thought, and the further they look, the older it seems to be. They ultimately find that it is as old as Royal, and that the 'prophet' who has declared that the king would return in the future is weak with age but alive. He tries to make common cause, but to Royal's despair, Shuffle and Storm-Eyes are suspicious and successfully demonstrate he's a tool of the same conspiracy. The confrontation between them successfully convinces Royal mid-fight, and he turns to confronting his 'patron', who is maneuvered into bragging about his backers controlling all of history. They defeat him, but he vanishes like the others and they are again left with questions about who, exactly, they have declared themselves against.

The third book is Truth's Winds, and its cover does not give away the genre (because they have a nice matched set of books and don't want to spoil it from book one) but the title page unsurprisingly marks its genre as hubris-paean. The hero trio prepare for war, recruiting many more minor superpowered people. They descend into hidden foundations of cities the world over, ruins of ancient empires (which conceal outposts of their enemy much less ruined than they appear), and a base which is sunken inside a massive caldera, nearly sunk into the planet's mantle. Ultimately, they turn and ascend into space, purging first a base on Earth's moon and then the headquarters, a massive station disguised as a moon of Venus, where they find the human-like aliens who have been puppeting their civilization from its beginnings. Despite losses, they are victorious, and end on an optimistic note -  they are left with a wealth of advanced scientific knowledge, which they will be able to use to improve humanity's lives and to travel the stars.

A thriller/romance novel set during a cold war between two fictional early-modern states which had a brief but very messy total war when the monarchy controlling the region collapsed, about a generation before the novel is set. Their confederation-alliances have imposed strict demilitarization of the entirety of their border regions ever since, but they still engage in a cold war. The Meritocracy of Pernik is nominally minarchist, in practice oligarchic-plutocratic and controlled primarily by families who were lesser nobility or major guildmasters in the predecessor state. The Vratsa Citizenry is an idealistic direct/liquid democracy* with socialist tendencies which broke sharply from the predecessor's power structures. Also depicted is Ohridski Independent, a university-microstate which stayed out of the war and is neutral ground; the protagonists first met while both students attending the university. The two viewpoint characters trade off perspective, and each switch is made when they meet face to face, whether in the DMZ, in the university's grounds, or another neutral country. The Perniki is the daughter of an aristocratic family who transitioned into the capitalist class smoothly, but are old-fashioned and sideline her due to lingering sexism; she manages an internal affairs bureau and a private security firm for her family. She is not particularly loyal to her country but is attached to the privileges of wealth and status. The Vratsan is also from an old family, but is a committed partisan for the democratic ideals of his country. He is a known field agent, though his service record is classified; comments from his counterpart imply that she has seen the sealed record anyway, and that he is the most highly decorated agent they have.

The action chapters cover espionage, sabotage, and assassinations; the Vratsan side shows him committing them personally, while the Perniki chapters show her making arrangements for others to act or actively directing response when part of her agency is targeted. The meetings involve a lot of trading barbed comments and hinting at knowledge of each other's actions, frequently joking about offers to defect, but also reminiscing about their history at school and romantically-charged comments about each other's competence and accomplishments. There is also a varying degree of implication that they're having sex off-screen, ranging from "meeting for coffee in the afternoon, next chapter picks up leaving town in the morning" to "leaves their hotel room keys under the dinner check when they leave the table"; nothing is shown on-screen. The last few chapters break from the pattern by having a female-lead portion end when she is in the direct line of fire from an unexpected operation she thinks is the male lead - the remainder of the book interleaves the two viewpoints as she acts personally against a follow-up attack, and both protagonists realize they're possibly going to kill their counterpart by morning. She realizes the intended target is a corrupt wing of her family's private police, and when his actions start to blare a meeting of grossly corrupt silencing of whistle-blowers, she hesitates for long enough to lose control, and while she coordinates 'damage control', she's internally conflicted about whether she regrets failing or not. The final meeting has the male lead arrive at her personal residence; she congratulates him on successfully inciting a run on the bank that is the keystone of her family's holdings, removing most of their wealth and power. He accepts it half-heartedly and states he knows she was almost in a position to prevent it, and says that he's unsure whether he wants to apologize for putting her on the spot. She's non-committal, but with some heat declares that she's not going to keep the house much longer, with the power shifting as much as it is. He kisses her hand**, hands her a manila folder, and leaves. She opens it and finds a passport and set of documents tailored for her, along with tickets and itinerary for travel to a neutral country and a destination she recognizes as the barony of a cousin branch of the male lead's family who's maintained their title and holdings. A three-sentence epilogue describes a view from a window of the barony's seat, the warmth of a fire in the room, and a bedside table next to the window, where the passport rests on top of a rumpled blouse and skirt.

*The translator notes that this is a very flattering and somewhat anachronistic depiction of democracy for the time period; the sophistication of its mechanisms are unrealistic, as liquid democracy wasn't tried at this scale for another half-century, and most democracy in the time period was substantially more corrupt and dysfunctional, exclusionary, or both, than is seen here. The author is an ideologue for liquid democracy and other direct-democracy-family forms of government and has admitted she wrote the story partially as a vehicle for her views. However, it was well-researched; though the succession crisis and particulars of the secession are fiction, Ohridski Independent is directly based on a real historical university in the region, and like several other universities, its student government at the time is one of the known examples of small-scale attempts at liquid democracy.
**More overtly/standardly romantic than anything they have done on-screen at any earlier point.

A hubris-paean story is set in a pocket world, the Black Below, outside the reach of the tyrants of the universe, hidden in the shelter of three immobile gods of secrets and bindings, life and health, and curiosity and paradox (respectively).

This one is clearly in conversation with that one with the submarine capt- aliens, he really has to stop doing that. In any case it's been done, down to a lot of the details like the triumvirate of gods and the immortal ruling council that executes people who grow too old. Nobody's going to believe this one is from aliens. No pile. Not even considering the fact it's unfinished. 

 This trilogy's first book, Night's Hand, starts as three intertwined superhero stories.

This trilogy, on the other hand, is solid and original. The trio of superheroes are well-realized and the ancient king's confusion about the modern world is a nice character note. The secret cabal of aliens controlling the modern world from the beginning is a little... That premise doesn't really happen on Heart, because it sounds a bit too much like psychosis symptoms. He's pretty divided on whether that makes it original, controversial, or just unpleasant. The first two books are solid, but that ending... 

He marks the trilogy "Maybe" in the file and keeps going. 

A thriller/romance novel set during a cold war between two fictional early-modern states which had a brief but very messy total war when the monarchy controlling the region collapsed, about a generation before the novel is set. 

This one is like that one in the same genre with the time-travelers, but it's more grounded in a historical setting, and the tease and implication are going to inspire so much fanfiction. It's subtle, clever, and remarkably deep; it stands up to the comparison, it's clearly its own. The interplay of honor and ethics and love fighting each other in the female lead is carefully-drawn, and the world is well-realized and strong. This one is going to be extremely popular among Suns. It might be a little too subtle for the Skies, but the fanfiction will fill that in. Yes pile. 

The first Violet Ink hears of alien literature is a few weeks ago. She’s briefly told that interdimensional contact was made and packages sent over, and she writes a converter for an alien file format. She mentions it briefly to her polycule — her Kept, Fox Box, and two more Skies, Lively Ember and Black Cross — over dinner.

"Heard something interesting from the boss today. We've made contact with aliens."

"Yeah, there was a press release that got picked up on the il'ka's TV. Apparently contact's pretty limited still, but we're hopeful that relations will go peaceably."

"That's super cool. Was there anything more, X? I've been busy with the latest upgrades to Foxy's ears, so we've been in all day doing testing..."

"It was really small. Lots of speculation, obviously, but not much fact. They did say that it was more than one alien polity. The guess is that we're being introduced to an intergalactic community, but nobody knows for sure."

Foxbox's ears (which are mounted to her skull by an unobtrusive headband mostly hidden in her silver hair) perk up sharply and twitch. She grins and leans against Violet and kisses her cheek. "Super exciting."

Violet snuggles Foxy close, kisses the top of her head, and nods. "Very."

She turns to Liv, "No real details, though. I have some doubts about intergalactic, given that I've got a file format to write a converter for, but I haven't seen any more chatter than usual about mysterious lights in the sky, and I've heard nothing from Explorer's people about signals to analyze from the radio telescopes."

She takes a bite, chews, swallows, then continues, "Feels like it's more 'just around the corner' than that, like there wasn't an interstellar distance being crossed."

"Now isn't that an interesting idea. An alien file format, huh? So they've got computers. And we're getting digital data somehow directly..."

"They'd better not hack my ears."

X giggles. "Unlikely and you wouldn't expect it."

"I wonder if they have tentacles and squid eyes or if they have three nostrils or..."

(The polycule speculates for a while, both anxious and excited, and finally go to bed together for the night.)

The next time it comes up, Violet is working on a patch for a piece of server-cluster software, when she gets a message. The Sanctified is going to hold a press conference during the evening’s shirasanmi rights broadcast, two days from now. She looks up from her desk, turns to her Kept to check whether Foxy’s in a call or not.

And then just stops and smiles sappily, watching her ears twitch as she works on some paperwork for a client.

She rolls her chair over, wraps her arms around her, and kisses her on the cheek. “Guess what, love.~”

"You wanna fuck? You're in the middle of work, love, please don't let me distract you..."

But she's grinning.

"Tempting, but you're right, I do have work to get back to." She shakes her head, "No, the surprise is that the Sanctified is giving a press conference in the evening shirasanmi stream, two days from now."

"Huh! It's gotta be the aliens, right, what else would it be?"

She nods and smiles. "Makes the most sense to me! I'd expect to have heard about an archeological dig that could turn up something spiritually-relevant here."

"I can't wait to see what Snowblossom has in store for us."

The day of the press conference, the girls snuggle up into a cuddlepile after dinner and queue the stream up on a screen.

Violet is awestruck. An Alien shirasanmi? The shirasanmi of a whole species of aliens who live with stories? She’s stunned. She hugs Foxy tighter in her lap.

And then Snowblossom puts the story to verse. 

Violet Ink has watched quite a few of Snowblossom’s broadcasts before. She can tell the difference between things prepared in advance and what the Sanctified comes up with in the moment. This is the latter.

This is a story that moved the Sanctified to gorgeous poetry on the spur of the moment, a beautiful and poignant tale that hopes all the brighter for the sharp sting of the sadness.

She spends a moment after the broadcast ends in a daze.

There's a moment of silence, then...

"Awwww, our Sun's all gone over Snowblossom."

"Anyone would be, that was beautiful. An alien shirasanmi... no wonder they've been being so quiet."

"This is really good news for contact, right? Right? Things are going well if they're enough like us to have shirasanmi!"

Vi blushes. "She's all clever and poetic and creative and smug about it and..."

She shakes her head to clear it, "My being justifiably gay for Snowblossom aside, yeah, X and Foxy are right. No wonder they've been quiet, and that sounds like excellent news for contact. People will go wild about this."

She pauses, a sudden idea striking her. "This is going to hit bookstores soon, and get sold out immediately. We've got to reserve a copy."

"Solid plan. Want to run over together and reserve one before the local closes?

Violet nods, reluctantly extracting herself from the snuggle and standing — but keeps Foxy in her arms as she does. "Definitely. Who all wants to go?"

"Obviously I'm coming but maybe let me get some clothes on first. Um, X, a little help here?"

X extracts herself from the cuddle and ducks into Foxy's room, returning moments later with an autumn-colored dress, panties and socks. She tosses them lazily at the bed.

Foxy kisses Vi and unhugs reluctantly to put on her clothes. 

Vi smiles fondly and kisses back as she sets Foxy down.

Foxy dresses herself hurriedly.

X smiles and picks up her purse from beside the cuddlepit. "I'll come with." (She's already wearing a plain black dress that reaches her ankles.)

"I'll stay home and guard the fort, you three have fun."

Foxy gets the last of her clothes on and pops up. "Alright, let's go!"

Violet finishes straightening her blouse and skirt (black-and-white print with a v-neck and pleated mid-thigh, respectively), smiling and watching her girls bustle into readiness, and then gives Liv a light kiss.

"See you when we get back, love."

"See you!"

The remaining girls bundle over to the door and get their shoes on, then start the short walk over to the local bookstore.

"It was really something to hear a story that deep from aliens. They're so similar to us! It's really amazing that they're like that. I wonder what the diplomats are getting to see right now..."

Foxy clings close to Vi's arm. "I bet there's a lot weirder of stuff to come. It's not a coincidence that the first announcement is such a good-news story."

"Anxious as ever."

"What do you think, love?"

Vi squishes her Kept protectively into her side as they walk, and hums thoughtfully.

"I think they're probably getting a pretty wide variety. It must be fascinating. On the one hand, this book is from only one species, and they're contacting multiple different civilizations. On top of that, most works in a given genre tend to range from mediocre to crap, with the curve really narrowing on the top end of quality. They're probably seeing a lot of stuff we wouldn't appreciate."

She tilts her head, purple curls bouncing to the side as she does. "On the other hand, they're going to want all of Heart to be behind them in whatever decisions they make about contact, and this announcement strongly hints that they feel positively. So they'll probably announce the best stuff, and that'll be what turns up in stores."

Foxy nods seriously, her ears bobbing. "Makes sense. Hopefully things go well."

"Whatever happens is pretty far out of our hands right now."

Vi nods, snugs both girls close, and they all keep walking.

Within fifteen minutes they reach their local bookstore.

The chimes ding as they walk in, and a woman with blue hair at the counter looks up from behind a stack of books. "Oh, hello," she says. "I was just starting to close up shop. Feel free to have a look around quickly or if you have something in mind I can help you out?"

She's wearing a nametag that says "Snow, she/her". 

Foxy looks at Vi.

Violet smiles brightly. "Hello, Snow! I wanted to talk with you about reserving a copy of a book you'll be getting in the next few days."

She blinks. "I haven't heard about any new preorders. Are you sure your information's accurate?"

Her expression turns sly as she leans in just a touch, one hand resting on the counter. "I'm extremely sure, Snow," she quietly replies. "It's a million-plus-word novel, and an alien shirasanmi, announced just minutes ago on the Sanctified's evening broadcast. If they haven't arranged publishing for it yet, I'm sure that's just because Snowblossom and her team spotted it before the publishers did."

X nods firmly. "We were all watching, I know it sounds crazy but it's real."

"One second..."

She pulls her phone out of her pocket and taps at it for a moment. 

"... Okay, yeah, you're not crazy. Huh. Aliens, who would have thought. Thanks for telling me, nobody tells me anything..." 

She runs a hand through her hair. "I'll put you down as first preorder, I agree that it'll definitely get published. No guarantees, obviously, but we'll probably stock it." She looks over at Vi and tilts her head, then looks over at the bookshelves to the side of the store.

"Hey Vi, I've been meaning to pick up a copy of Watchmaker's Heart, do you mind while we're here?"

"Oh, good idea, I want one of our own too. Grab one for us, X?"

She pops up on her toes and kisses Vi's cheek, then goes off into the bookshelves to look for Watchmaker's Heart.

Turning her gaze back to the cute clerk with a grin, she says, "Bet you a coffee you've got it by the end of tomorrow."

Snow's eyes flick to the necklace at Vi's neck, then she smiles and nods. "Deal. You know the local il'ka, right? Just down Hawthorn street a little ways?"

X comes back with a copy of Watchmaker's Heart in her hand, and sets it on the counter. "I work there, actually. I can take that shift if you're interested."

The corner of Snow's mouth turns up. "Sounds great to me."

"Perfect. Thanks, love." She kisses X on the cheek, then turns back to Snow. "What time do you get off tomorrow?"

"Right around now, I suspect. Maybe slightly later." She smiles archly. "We'll see." 

Violet's grin stretches just a bit brighter and sharper, and her eyebrows quirk up a touch in delight. "That we will." She taps her phone at the terminal to pay for the book.

"See you tomorrow, Snow."

"See you tomorrow. Maybe then you'll actually tell me your name!" She winks.

"Violet Ink," she replies with a smirk and a wink of her own, lingering just long enough to catch Snow's expression before turning and continuing out the door with Foxy and X.

There's a moment of surprise, then the briefest flash of a smile before Snow turns away back to her books.

The next day, around the same time, the chimes tinkle again as Violet walks back into the store. 

Snow looks up from behind the cash register and smiles. "Violet! - do you have a diminutive, is that okay? I've been waiting for you all day. You owe me a coffee."

"Oh drat. The book won't be here until tomorrow or the next day, and I'm cursed to take this cute girl out to coffee. What a terrible fate,~" she says with a warm smile, striding up to the counter in a copper sundress and strappy heels. "And you can call me Violet, or Vi if we're close."

She smiles. "Indeed, what a terrible fate." She steps around from behind the counter, and gestures to the door out. "After you. I've got to lock up."

Violet nods and steps outside, enjoying the summer evening air.

Snow steps out and locks the door behind her. 

"So, meeting the creator of Heartscape randomly at my job over a coffee bet was absolutely not how I expected my weekend to go." She smiles slightly and tucks her keys back in her purse. "Just so we're clear, I did notice that necklace, but given that - I'm guessing she's your Kept? - was right there and didn't stop you - that this is fine. I'm not... really good at relationships, but, well. I'm trying to get out more." She tilts her head to the side, and huffs. "Anyway. What's a safe topic - probably books? What do you read, generally? Creative-angst genre? Interactive fiction?" 

She's walking already, heading in the direction of the il'ka at a decent pace. Trees pass along the side of the path, shading the tram tracks down the center of the street. They pass a green-haired man drawing shutters over a small electronics store, and a woman with a necklace in the shape of a winged tree sitting at the tram bench and reading on her phone. 

Violet matches her pace beside her. "Yes, we have a delightfully open relationship in my polycule. We're all quite full of compersion, and I'm not sure Foxbox — my Kept, you read that right — and I even quite get how jealousy works, honestly. And Black Cross is obviously fine with it or she wouldn't have offered to take tonight's shift at the il'ka. And Liv comes home from shows bragging about people she's picked up." She laughs, shakes her head. "So yes, we're all very much fine with this sort of thing happening."

"Relationships... In my experience it's easy to be bad at them — or think you're bad at them — if you're with people who are wrong for you. But you're already taking the right steps about that and getting out more, so you're going to be fine."

She hums for a moment. "As far as books, well, in terms of media I love everything from flat text to voice-styled to interactive and more. Genres are a more interesting question. I quite enjoy creative-angst, but I think my favorite is probably nobledark exploration and adventure: things like the Bright-Bough Trade Guild setting, or the Lost Magi saga."

"What about you?"

Snow smiles. "I'm glad to hear it. Bright-Bough is one of my favorites too, especially the Acquisitions series. I haven't read Lost Magi but I keep meaning to get around to it, people tell me it's great. I like thrillers and stories about con artists, especially if they're not taken too seriously - Raven's Dance, Thirteen Pens, the Heist series, that sort of thing. It's so fun to try and puzzle out the twist, especially if it's about turning genre conventions on its head. The thing that I love about Acquisitions is the dancing around trying to pretend to be a native to the local universe until uh-oh the jig is up and in comes Bright-Bough and all the intelligence that's been scraped together by the agent suddenly comes into play."

"Oh Acquisitions is just great. Absolutely one of my favorites from the setting. I haven't read Raven's Dance or the Heist series yet, but I loved Thirteen Pens. That sort of twisty puzzle is so great. It really sounds like you'd like Lost Magi, too, especially the magic system."

"My friend recommends it based on the fact I liked Raven's Dance. Apparently it does a similar recovery-from-amnesia plot? And yeah, I really loved the twist for Thirteen Pens, the four different aliases being revealed to all be Whisper was stunning and I can't believe I didn't pick up on it."

"Same! I think one of the only things I like more than the awe at a really great twist that surprised me is the satisfaction at barely piecing it together before the reveal. And yeah, it does. Raven's Dance does that too?"

"Yeah, it's about this powerful witch with a lot of minions who fights this sorcerer who fights with mind magic and is prone to erasing people's memories - we don't figure this out till later, the book opens with her standing over this guy's body with a knife in her hand and no idea how she got there - but she's left specific instructions for herself in case exactly this happened, and so she has to tap-dance around balancing her various feuding minions' interests without giving away the fact that she's lost her memory and is basically making this all up as she goes along. There's a lot of hilarious scenes where it's clear she's figuring it out as she goes but nobody else ever quite catches on, it's great."

"Oh that's delightful. I'll have to pick up a copy!" She pulls out her phone and jots a quick note, then tucks it back into her purse.

"What's your favorite interactive fiction?"

"Hmmm, hard to choose. I think Spellbound, maybe? The one where you have a bunch of cursed girls and you have to either help "cure" them or help them come to terms with their condition, and you have limited resources so you have to make some hard decisions about who most needs their curse removed."

Vi makes an exquisitely complicated expression, awe mixed with sadness mixed with a memory of arousal. "Goddesses, that was a beautifully poignant ride. Foxy and I had post-tragedy sex about every route."

Snow blushes a little. "I, ah, good for you. I don't know why I'm blushing, I would've done the same if I, you know... had someone." 

She sighs. "Sorry, I don't mean to put a damper on the mood."

Violet shakes her head, smiling with a warm confidence. "Not at all, hon. For one, I overshare sometimes, and for two, a delectable cutie like you? You'll find someone, for sure. I like you, and I've only met you twice. You're clever, you're pretty, you're fun to talk with, and you've got great taste in media."

She reaches out and takes Snow's hand in her own. "Your finding someone perfect for you is just a matter of meeting the right people. Your finding dates is just a matter of talking about a book you like and flashing those pretty eyes at anyone who loves thoughtful, well-read cuties even half as much as I do."

And Violet lifts Snow's hand toward her face, bends forward a bit, and brushes a gentle kiss to her knuckles.

"I'm not that special, I-"

And then she's cut off by the kiss to her hand. A huge blush spreads across her face, and she looks away. 

"You - you have a Kept, you flatterer - what am I supposed to do with you?" 

She hesitantly pulls her hand away, and rests it against her breast, and sighs. "I... Thank you for your kind words, I do appreciate them, but it's hard for me to take you seriously when we just met yesterday. You - this is kind of an indelicate question, but you're totally an Ecstatic, right? I'm just not like that, I'm Storyteller, I don't - get the joy of sex or whatever... Like, I'm not a virgin don't get me wrong but it's just fun, I don't think it's... sacred or something. But having you... You're actually someone, and I'm not, and having you kiss me with Entreaty is just - I don't know how to take that, okay? Especially when you seem already quite taken."

"Not that specia—"

Her mouth snaps shut, her eyes close, and she takes a breath.

(A bronze glow shines very faintly in her hair for a brief moment.)

"Everyone is that special, Snow. You don't have to be someone important to deserve that kind of attention." She shakes her head. "That's part of why I made Heartscape in the first place, but that can wait until after clarifying this."

Violet takes a slow breath. "It's easy to mistake me for an Ecstatic, yeah. I'm Sensate, though, with a Storyteller lean. Sex... it can be sacred with the right people, but that's not why I was all fired up just now. I just can't see someone throw their own story in the trash as something not worth participating in, see someone treat themselves as not worth experiencing, and let that go unchallenged."

"Yes, I'm very taken. No, I'm probably not looking to expand the polycule tonight. But none of that has a single thing to do with how obvious it is to me that you're a lovely person who deserves good conversation, good coffee, good dates, and good sex, in the company of someone who is sincerely delighted by you."

"Tonight, that honor falls to me."

"... You're getting a little ahead of yourself there, aren't you."

But her hand snakes down and takes Violet's. 

"Alright. I can't promise that I'll be... everything you dreamed of... but I can't refuse that honesty of yours. And knowing you're not looking for something serious, well - it makes it easier and harder, and I think right now both of those things are good for me."

She looks up. "... oops, we're at the il'ka?" She laughs. "I totally spaced out. Let's have that coffee, okay? And we'll see where it goes from there. Ms. Sensate."

Violet blushes, but smiles warmly as she laces her hand with Snow's. "Sounds like a plan, Ms. Storyteller."

She grabs the door with her free hand and pulls it open, holding it for her date.

The front froom of the il'ka that Black Cross works at is warm and inviting, with a half-dozen small lounging areas and a bar that fills most of the remaining space. Patrons are scattered around, drinking coffee and chatting; a couple have laptops open on the low tables and are browsing the internet. There's a set of double doors to the right of the bar, which presumably lead to the back and thereby to the rooms.

Black Cross is at the bar, talking to a pair of men who are wearing matching necklaces; she waves casually and smiles.

Violet waves back, guiding Snow to a cozy lounging nook, and asks "What would you like?"

"A mocha, please." She reluctantly lets go of Violet's hand and snuggles into the cushions.

Vi nods, stepping away with a smile and swiftly returning with a pair of mochas, one of which she hands to Snow.

And they settle in and talk. They start with books, then move on to Heartscape and the work Violet did to implement it; the conversation slides to erotica after a while, as their cups of coffee run low. 

Finally, Snow digs in her purse, raises her hand and looks over towards the bar.

Black Cross comes over in a few moments, smiling slightly.

Snow flips open her wallet to show her ID. "I'd like an hour for me and Vi, here."

Black Cross checks the ID, nods, and passes Snow a small silver key. "Room 6, last on the right. I talked to my manager; your first hour is on the house tonight. Have fun, you two."

She walks over and holds up a bracelet on her wrist to the door by the back of the bar; it clicks once. She waits.

Snow looks over at Vi. "Shall we?" 

She offers her hand.

Vi takes Snows hand with a smile, and opens the door, leading her into the back.

There's a similar setup in the back, except the couches are covered with plastic, the people are wearing less clothing and are often snuggled up close to each other, and the ones on the internet are browsing porn. It still has the same quietly cozy cafe-like feel, though.

There's a small hallway in the back with three doors on either side. Snow unlocks the back right door and steps in, and the quiet noises of the rest of the il'ka fade a little. The room beyond is small, not much more than a closet and a bed.

She turns and beckons to Vi, a teasing smile on her face. 

Vi grins, follows her in, and shuts the door behind them.

And what happens after that, we'll leave to your imagination. 

This is a book review thread, after all. 

Some days later, Vi brings home her copy of the Krissan Shirasanmi. There's a small note in it:

Thanks for the confidence booster. 

- Snow

Foxy brings back the three-book set to the polycule's condo as the sun is setting and lets herself in. She's wearing dress as blue as the summer sky, with matching sandals. 

"I'm baaaaaack!", she calls.

X emerges from her bedroom wearing a slashed-up t-shirt and jeans. She rubs her eyes. "Please don't be so loud, I just got up..."

Foxy grins and bounces in place. "I got the books though! It's great! There's a note for you by the way Vi. Do you want me to read it to you? It's super cute."*

*Ordinarily reading a note intended for someone else is extremely rude on Heart, but since Foxy is Vi's kept, the assumption is that they have no secrets from each other.

Violet smiles and pads out of the office, kisses Foxy where she's bouncing in place, then kisses X atop her head and steps over to the espresso machine, starting on her nocturnal Sky's aftersleep coffee.

"Go for it, cutie. Anyone else want a coffee while I'm making X's?"

"I'll take one. I kinda expect a late night today, what with the new books." Liv stretches and smiles.

"The note says "Thanks for the confidence booster". There's a little heart. It's super cute. I didn't see Snow at the store but the clerk on duty had no trouble finding our preorder in the system."

"Thank the goddesses for good old bribery. Did you really need to buy that hardcopy, X?"

She nods firmly. "I was genuinely meaning to anyway, she just reminded me of it. I love having something I can turn over in my hands, you know?"

"Personally I don't see what's wrong with piracy, but you do you."

"That's adorable; I'm glad I helped."

Violet laughs and shakes her head at the argument, giving X her coffee and a kiss to the cheek, and then starting on Liv's. "You know I love piracy, Liv, especially when something's unavailable or overpriced, but paying artists communicates our love of their work, and we can afford it. Plus, there's something very aesthetically satisfying about hardcover books, isn't there?"

She finishes Liv's coffee, hands it over, and pulls the girl into her arms, leaning into her and meeting her eyes and smiling. "You and I both know I'd keep buying parts and building gear with you even if you couldn't pitch in on it at all, but don't the sales numbers for downloads on your tracks feel pretty damned great?"

"Yeah, fine, you got me." Liv snuggles in close against Vi. "And I mean, it got you laid, so.~" She chuckles. "Anyway, books! We have a little time before X has to leave for her shift, let's make the most of it."

She gives Liv a kiss. "Go get everyone snuggled up, I'll make myself a cocoa and meet you there."

"Alright!"

Liv immediately goes and hugs X, then pulls in Foxy, and the three of them head over to the cuddlepit and start getting comfortable.

And Vi's right behind them with a cocoa in her favorite thermos, snuggling into the middle and savoring the company of her loves. "Love you girls," she says with a happy sigh.

She pulls the first book onto her lap. "Okay. Let's see how far we can get before X has to leave for the il'ka."

And she starts reading aloud.

She has to interject when Stone discovers before and after, though. "Oh that restlessness is vividly relatable."

"For me, too. And one assumes Stone hadn't invented EDM yet. Sometimes you just gotta move, you know?"

Foxy giggles and settles her head onto Liv's lap. "I wonder if they'd even invented sex."

"Well, new Stones must get born somehow, right?"

"Could be magic!"

Liv nips Foxy's big furry ear.

She gasps, then blushes. "Whoa. Still not used to the feedback on these things."

Liv just grins.

Vi laughs, ruffles Foxy's hair, kisses the other ear, and then continues reading.

Foxy is the next to interrupt, when Fire is insulted and chooses to curse Stone to run forever. "That's different from the version Snowblossom read. I guess she was compressing. Kind of relatable to annoy someone and have it turn out sideways for you..."

Violet nods, kissing her Kept atop her head, and everyone squeezes Foxy tightly.

"Yeah," she adds, shaking her head, "I've had interactions go wrong like that, but never so harsh as that kind of curse."

A few minutes later, as Wind is running through the world meeting new things, Black Cross kisses Vi on the head and gets up. "Gotta go to work. Tell me how it went later, alright?"

She smiles fondly back up and nods. "Will do, X. Have a good shift, let us know if anything interesting happens."

Violet interrupts next, when she gets to the world running faster to keep up with Wind.

"Goddesses that's just a beautiful image. It reminds me of how much brighter and faster my world is with you girls and X in it."

She sighs warmly, tears prickling at the corners of her eyes, and squeezes Liv and Foxy tightly to herself.

"Awwwwwww. Yours." Foxy grins and settles in firm against Violet.

Liv smiles softly. "Yeah." 

They read on. Foxy tears up a little when the first Runner falls behind to his death.

Liv holds her close. "I think that's enough for today, Vi. I'm tired and I want to turn in, and it's clear our Foxy needs a break."

Vi smiles tenderly, snuggling both. "Good idea," she says with a nod.

She leans in and gives Liv a tender kiss. "I love you, my spark."

Foxy gives Liv a kiss too. "Big bed or little bed? I'd like to snuggle my Keeper tonight..."

"I'll take the one in my room, thanks." She leans heavily against Violet.

Foxy glances at her Keeper, and moving together as one...

They scoop Liv into their arms, carrying her off to her room and tucking her in tenderly.

"Sleep well, darling."

Liv curls the covers in around herself, smiles, and turns out her light.

A few minutes later, Fox Box flops back onto the main room's bed and holds out her arms for Vi. 

Violet climbs into bed, pulling her Kept into her arms and holding her tightly. "My precious treasure," she whispers into one of Foxy's ears, stroking tenderly along the fuzzy back with her fingertips.

Foxy trembles a little and snuggles in very close.

"... Thank you for everything," she says.

She takes a few slow breaths, savoring her Kept's presence in her arms, and kisses the top of her head. "Always, my love. Anything for you."

She squeezes protectively and starts humming a quiet lullaby, a tender smile on her face.

Foxy cuddles in close, closes her eyes, and is out like a light.

And Vi drifts off shortly after to the sound of her Kept's steady breathing, safe in her arms.

Around nine hours later, X lets herself back into the condo, tiptoeing so as not to disturb anyone. She checks her watch - not quite yet morning. 

She huffs to herself, sets her purse down on the kitchen table, gets out a large frying pan, and starts the stove. She dips into the fridge, gets out a carton of eggs, and cracks four into the frying pan, doing her best to do it quietly. The rest of the eggs can go back in the fridge.

She looks over at the espresso machine, checks her watch again. She sighs a little. The eggs are starting to solidify in the pan.

She pops some bread in the toaster and pushes down the lever. The eggs are just about done; she turns off the heat and leaves them for a moment. 

Crossing the room to the bed where Vi and Foxy are sleeping, she gently strokes one of Foxy's ears. 

Foxy stirs slightly, rolling her head, and blinks. "Mmmm... X?" 

She takes a breath, and then she kisses Violet full on the mouth. 

Vi instinctively kisses back, squeezing Foxy tightly, and then starts to wake up and parse the world around her.

"Mmmm, tasty cutie~. And is that breakfast I smell? Thank you, X."

She squeezes Foxy's ass and sits up.

In the background, the toast pops up with a loud beep.

"I'd better go get that. Can you two fetch Liv?"

Violet nods sleepily and climbs forward, sitting on the edge of the bed, hands back toward Foxy.

Foxy hugs up against Vi's back and wraps her legs around her waist.

And Violet scoops her hands under Foxy and stands, hauling her Kept up with her. A sleepy grin on her face, she tromps into Liv's room, and they flop onto Liv together, giggling.

"Rise and shiiiiine!"

Liv startles awake, and then bats playfully at her girlfriends. "Morning, you silly girls! What's up?"

"X is making breakfast, and then I bet we'll read some more before she goes to sleep."

"Cool." Liv sits up and pats Foxy softly. "Be there in a minute."

"Your eggs are getting cold!", calls X from the other room.

"Can't have that!"

Violet pecks a kiss to Liv's nose, then turns, pitches Foxy over her shoulder, and charges out to the kitchen cackling.

"Hey, watch the ears!"

X meets them in the kitchen with two plates, each one with an egg sandwich on it. She looks at the pair and rolls her eyes. "I can hardly pass you these while you're like that, now can I?"

Violet giggles and bends forward, setting Foxy into a chair and then sitting down next to her with an innocent grin.

X deals them their sandwiches, then gets down a couple tall glasses and pours each of them some apple juice. 

"So, good morning darlings. Not much to report from the il'ka, it was a quiet shift. How is everyone this morning?"

"I'm feeling pretty good. Snuggling Vi helped a lot."

"I'm feeling good as well. The rest of our reading was very poignant, and very worth snuggling about."

"Glad to hear it. Care to fill me in over breakfast...?"

Liv comes out of her room looking pretty bleary, and waves halfheartedly at X.

Violet nods, swallows her current bite of sandwich, and takes a sip of juice. "Wind swept the droning old histories away and painted them anew, brighter and faster, and the whole world sped up as it chased the Wind."

She sighs fondly at that thought. "Reminded me of how much more my life is with all of you in it."

"Awwww. Adorable." 

X gets the milk out of the fridge and starts making espresso. "I ate back at the il'ka. Liv, you okay to make your own breakfast?"

She rubs her face. "Yeah, I can manage." She goes over to the fridge, takes out a little tupperware container of oatmeal with raisins in, dumps it out into a bowl and sticks it in the microwave.

Foxy, meanwhile, is busily devouring her sandwich.

Vi blushes, finishes another couple bites, and then continues, "Then a new youth started running with the Wind, but Wind was afraid to slow down, and the runner ran themselves to death."

She squeezes Fox Box protectively as she retells that part.

"I got all teary and had to take a break."

"You know our Foxy, she's a delicate flower." Liv takes her oatmeal out of the microwave and sticks a spoon in it, then walks over to the table and takes a seat with the others.

"And you went and snuggled about it?"

Foxy nods.

"Super valid."

"So now that you're back, I think the obvious thing to do is to get in some reading before you crash, right?"

X smiles. "That would be nice, yes." She sets down the first espresso next to Violet. "Maybe after breakfast?"

Vi swallows the last of her sandwich and sits back with a satisfied smile. "Sounds like a plan."

She picks up her espresso and takes a sip. "Mmmm, one of these days I'm going to make my espressos as good as yours. I'm close, but you're still better. Thanks for all this, love."

X smiles. "It's nothing. I may not be the Earth here, but I like to pretend sometimes." She carefully sets a full demitasse down next to Foxy's plate. "Still, it's nice you noticed."

Foxy finishes the last bite of her sandwich, knocks back her espresso, and gets up. "Shall I go fetch the books?"

"Nope. I want to be snuggling you girls when we start reading again. Let's let Liv finish her oatmeal first."

She leans back and smiles, sipping slowly at her drink.

"Aw." Foxy sits back down and curls her tail into her lap and pets it.

X gets Liv her espresso, and then sits at the table as well.

And a little time passes as Liv finishes off her oatmeal. 

X collects the dishes and puts them in the dishwasher, and then it's time for more reading.

Foxy is naturally first onto the bed.

Violet is right behind her, stretching back into the middle and opening her arms for her girls to snuggle close.