Okay, wow. There is a lot happening here and while I got the gist I'm definitely gonna need to reread it a couple times to figure out how all the pieces fit together.
Overall, I'm surprised but kind of in love with the fact that Ferrous took the effort to reassemble Taylor's life before swapping back. I definitely wasn't expecting that as the direction for the story (or that the PRT/Wards would be so on board with it,) but it says a lot about the kind of hero Ferrous is and her personality. At the same time, I'm incensed that she would throw away that entire memory. WHY!?! Don't do that, Fer! You have enough holes in your brain already. There's other ways of getting the point across. (Words, for example. You wrote a whole letter already. Just add a line that says "no take-backsies.")
It was fun to see everyone's reactions to Ferrous the goof. She must be absolutely frustrating to deal with, and goldfish is a perfect moniker, but everyone was also super kind about it. D'aww.
I do like this Sophia a lot, and I'm looking forward to seeing her more.
I'm glad you explained the nicknames, because I couldn't figure out who B-bomb was supposed to be (I was looking for Wards, and didn't even consider Battery. Also didn't consider that Browbeat might have been included in girls night if he was actually Madison, so at least I didn't jump to any conclusions?). I also somehow did not clue into Mare being another animal name, and was trying to figure out if Soph was calling her "nightmare" (endearingly).
I don't know who the kill-on-sight order was for in the newscast. There's a few options, but this is AU enough that I don't feel confident in picking one. I did, however, appreciate ruinous/harmonious, awesomeness, and a variety of other nods to cosmere canon.
Important Note: I remain very confused about the body count from the previous cliffhanger.
I am again fighting not to give spoilers. I don't want to say too much on some stuff. A lot of stuff. I'll stick to some of the things that are less-important. The kill-order thing at least isn't meant to be a huge mystery. Bad wording, maybe. It's not any one person, because multiple Case-53s got mistaken for them. It's a class of persons. Does that make more sense? If not I should maybe reword it a little. And yes, we're firmly AU, timeskip-era AU even, but, if this makes it easier, we've already seen all the major canon things that are ever going to be relevant. Don't worry too much about, I don't know, the Butcher or the Three Blasphemies or Deputy Director Renick showing up to cast the world into eternal darkness or anything.
Yeah, I like Ferrous as a character. There are some things in her 'prologue' that might read a little differently now that you know her slightly better. Don't judge her too much yet. We're still going to see more of her, and more of Taylor, which also factors into all this. She's got a good heart. It helps that she didn't really have a normal trigger. She's basically a Cauldron cape, except even they're usually kind of messed up if they're seeking or hiding that. And yeah, lol, she would be a handful. I love F-copper as a concept and so she does too. She saw 'M/S protocols' and thought, 'Oh, that must be something for Missy and Sophia, I don't need to worry about that!'
The earlier chapters read a little differently to me, knowing her, seeing that she was this girl, and then everything fell apart. It makes me feel even more bad for what I've put Taylor through, along with literally every other person in her life, but it's all necessary, honest. I reiterate, there is a happy ending. Not for everyone, at this point, clearly, but that's been the case since the first scene.
As regards the PRT/Wards accepting it, well, Ferrous has some advantages there. She already knows the people and she already knows the procedures, however silly she enjoys acting. She even has some advantages over Taylor, in that she can, for instance, truthfully say she had nothing to do with certain events to anyone with a bullshit plot device Tinkertech lie detector. She might not be able to cite a Stranger rating, but that just means it's working!
Dean* being a clownfish made me laugh. Maybe a little obtuse, but if you look up facts about them you'll get it. I worry I'm going too overboard with those jokes sometimes, but I like Taylor/Ferrous being clueless about a lot of stuff. Like yeah, we really need to solve the mystery of who Skitter's girlfriend is, and what even is a bisexual, anyway? We've already seen their karaoke duet, by the way, in [Trueself 2:1.13: Ferrous]. I enjoy them bonding over Taylor's half-remembered emotion sight. More on all that later.
I thought 'B' and 'husband' would be enough for the Battery link. Current and former Brockton Bay Wards only. Sorry, Miss Militia. You're allowed to bring wives and girlfriends. Emma goes with Ferrous, actually. Assault in a frock does not count for girls' night, he found out to his cost. That setlist does exist and it makes some of this stuff more explicit, I suppose. Actually, I'll just include it. I'm trying to move past having shame, even for shameful things. I do wish there were more canon Brockton Bay Wards to play with, but I guess they must all transfer away ASAP or possibly die.
The Cosmere references are always fun. I'm better on the Mistborn stuff because I've looked at a lot of junk on the wiki and messageboards checking to see if things I'm thinking of are possible, and I guess they just stuck in my mind better, but a lot of the books are honestly only vague memories for me by now. Things just randomly connect up in my brain sometimes. Like I barely remember Elantris at all, but Alec thinking Taylor was too skinny turned into something about those bone knights (Dakhor users, I just looked it up). I got a couple of the really bizarre Misting/Ferring names in, which I'm happy with. Oh, one that's not really possible to see any more is in Rioter. I wanted to get in something about Allrianne by using a typo, 'all rian nearly,' which is even more hideously tortured than Taylor herself in that chapter. It ended up as just 'all ran,' which maybe just barely works depending on your pronunciation?
I love Missy and Sophia, besties for life, so much. They bond over making fun of 'Shadow Stalker' running across the rooftops, doing shitty parkour, listening to nu-metal on her shitty Zune. Missy got into the music ironically, and then semi-unironically, and now, her most tender secret, fully unironically. They meet up for lunch in a park halfway between their schools, which is why Taylor couldn't ever find Sophia in Seeker. You will not see what's going on inside Sophia's beautiful mind until her interlude, and that is sadly a ways away.
I hope it was coming across that they are platonic, by the way. I wasn't trying to imply anything else. They met when Missy was barely 11, and it's not like Taylor/Emma where they were the same age. There's just, yeah, no. This Clockblocker truly is just kind of a pervert. I--wait, no, sorry, Taylor--really am/is telling this story for a purpose, though. A lot of the character development is just sketches, purposefully, and you've already seen a lot of it, because I sneakily sneaked it in before Our Taylor ever actually met them. I've been trying to make most scenes have some kind of function, for the whole story, and not everyone or everything fits into them.
I love Havoc, too, and she will never even appear on screen. She's learning to read from Shakespeare folios. That's where she got her name. Real Brutus-heads will get this. She's friends with Sophia too. She has an Arctic fox she calls Fawkes! It reminds her of Lisa, except it talks a more reasonable amount! I am so sorry.
This is probably one of my favorite chapters in the story overall. It's got some of my favorite scenes. The two with Emma especially. Ferrous-verse is a cute place. It's very positive, or at least the way the Taylors are seeing it is.
This is maybe the only chapter I'd say is almost purely positive. I seem to torture Taylor in some fun new way in every other one. More of that later. Ignoring the dangling plot hooks, this is that other part I thought would make a nice ending. There are a lot of very important clues hidden in it, though, yeah. What I'd say is one of the most significant lines in the story is in here, and there's a 0% chance you can guess it yet. Or maybe ever. It shaped the whole direction of this part.
You'll get some more information about the Magnet situation next chapter, now that we've left the Real World. You may regret wishing on this monkey's paw!
Oh, yes, the kill-on-sight order now makes sense. I was thinking of a particular person, but if it's a group then it isn't hard to identify. (I wasn't sure that the Echidna event had occurred in the Real World as well, which was also a barrier to figuring it out.)
I've yet to reread this chapter or the earlier ones to see how things land differently, but I'm sure I'll find more perspectives to appreciate after meeting Ferrous and after realizing that Taylor is actually telling this story purposefully.
"Husband" should definitely have clued me into B-bomb being Battery. That was a reading comprehension failure on my part. The clownfish nickname matches now that you point it out, but I'm too used to Sophia having a more combat-oriented mindset to assume she'd make that sort of reference. I was thinking more in a "hiding in a dangerous anemone to protect yourself" direction.
That Allrianne reference is way too subtle. I never would have seen it. I'm glad you are having fun with that sort of inclusion, though, and I'll be on the lookout for more as I read through. I can think of a couple that I recognize in retrospect, if I remember the wording correctly.
Okay, good, re:Noelle. I've amended that scene slightly anyway. I'm not going to bother explaining (or, more accurately, inventing something to explain) why that all played out the same in Ferrous-land. The idea is that the timelines are basically identical until the events of Rioter, even if that doesn't make a huge amount of sense with Coil not being so preoccupied in the Ferrous one.
My vague thought is that Ferrous being a second gold shadow is actually the product of Taylor's shard (which I guess is QA still just because she's a cutie and I want her to be in the fic) latching onto a discarded Coil timeline from when she triggered (she was the unlucky half of a trolley problem, if that isn't clear by now—it's not ever going to be made completely explicit in the story, because everyone involved in the in-universe reason for the story has that backstory as common knowledge, and I think it's both not super important and possible for the reader to piece together from hints in the story if they care). Or possibly Taylor is the discarded timeline? I'm pretty sure this isn't how Coil's power actually works, per WoG, but I like the idea.
I think most of the references are pretty obvious, really, if you're looking for them. I only pointed that out because I know it's so indecipherable. Speaking of, 2:2.16 is an acrostic. Some of the less ridiculous ones I remember liking offhand are Alec saying Taylor is 'zany' for pulling his hovering trick instead of sitting on poor Lisa's precious $900 white couch (using far-superior iron and overhead girders, it is an old industrial building after all), and Alan calling her 'lifeless' when she's extremely anemic and colorless, which was actually a complete accident that I only noticed immediately after I'd written it. There's a Goldmember reference in Lisa's first interlude that I liked, considering the Augur context, but that's not really the same. Keeping the pop culture stuff period appropriate has been fun too, although one regret is that I never really got in any weird Earth Bet differences for that, besides the ones I stole. Tried a few times, never felt right. Everyone has a very current portal to Earth Aleph media. Maybe that's Sophia's influence too, somehow. Oh, and there's a Ferring one in Lurcher 1.1 that I'm sick of now because it's one of the first things I see when I go to check something at the start.
God, I can't wait to show more Sophia. Wait until you hear what Taylor Actual's animal namesake is. It was another one of those accidental things at first, but it made me laugh when I (eventually) noticed it. It helped shape Sophia's character. You might be able to guess it already, but probably not. There are a lot of later reveals that might make you reinterpret some things—sometimes a couple of times, I have had fun with that also—and Sophia is a big one for me, because I accidentally did it to myself.
The speculation on what's going on is giving me life, honestly. The plot in this goes some slightly strange places, I think, and a few things are deliberately a little misleading on top of that. I'm not sure it's all going to make total sense before the ending notes, again, but I have tried to make it more obvious this time.
Stopping myself from writing too much is a problem. Clearly. The struggle has been running it through the Taylor-filter to keep the story pared-down.
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ccstat on Chapter 9 Wed 19 Nov 2025 10:16PM UTC
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therewolf (fatsafices) on Chapter 9 Thu 20 Nov 2025 06:38PM UTC
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ccstat on Chapter 9 Fri 21 Nov 2025 02:16PM UTC
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therewolf (fatsafices) on Chapter 9 Sat 22 Nov 2025 09:47PM UTC
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