Status Updates From A Fire Born of Exile

Finally starting this! (We originally agreed to BR this in June, I believe 😂)

Huh. So, in this universe marriage is not bound by gender...but there is expected to be a "lesser" spouse, who is responsible for birthing and/or raising the kids (want to see how that works in a M/M household, but we haven't seen one yet). Therefore Minh going "No, I wanna have a baby mindship!" is a rebellious act on her part. I...well, it's interesting, I guess, but I can't tell if there is commentary here yet.

"Moon leapt...Quynh caught her avatar in her arms, the weight relayed by the perception filters. It felt as though she was holding something between a ship and a baby, heavy and metallic and trying to burrow into her chest. She...wanted time to freeze and be only this: Hoa by her side, her child in her arms. She wanted miracles, at a time when the Empire had scoured them all out of existence."

"In Hoa's world, there was so little space for hatred...It wasn't innocence: Hoa had lost that a long time ago...Hoa had seen the worst of what the world had to offer, and yet still chose to be upright. To stand, unmoving, in the centre of a universe that had wounded her again and again - and choose to be kind. Quynh couldn't imagine how much strength that would take. She knew she didn't have it, and never would."

Given that these personal bots, when they get any description at all, tend to be compared to metal spiders…I don’t know how I fell about them being involved in sexy times! Keep those away from my bits, thank you!

These ladies are being WAY too f-ing calm! I know it says Minh is bottling up the panic, but if I found 15-16 literal skeletons in the closet of an AirBNB, I don't know if you'd be getting "I think you should probably find another compound if you want to throw a banquet" until AFTER an initial shriek and/or "nope, nope, nope!"

OH! I see how the three storylines are going to come together. Because this HAS to be the same old ship Hoa is trying to fix!

Still trying to figure out how mindships work - in part because I haven’t seen them function as SHIPS yet! But they seem to be fit into human family trees (I guess based on who made them? Or do they actually use DNA from the person who commissioned them?), which is fascinating.

“Well, there wasn’t anything specific about her face, but it was…the way she carried herself - as though the entire world was an egg that needed to be broken open to release the hatchling within. The face of someone who’d gladly set things afire with a shrug. Minh realized she’d forgotten to breathe.”
LOL. Minh, you and I clearly sit up and beg for the same kind of FMCs! Also, was that egg thing an Utena reference?