man the roman naming system will never cease to amaze me, and to show you what i mean i’m gonna talk about one of the baddest bitches to ever grace ancient roman history: gaius mucius scaevola
before i do that though i should probably explain how roman names work. basically you’ve got a first name (eg gaius) and a family name (eg mucius). now if you’re one rockin dude you might be given a super cool nickname (eg scaevola) to distinguish you from all the other boring ass bitches in your family, and you could then pass it on to your kids if you wanted
so how did scaevola get his nickname? well, way back in fuck-all bc, rome was getting attacked by these guys called the clusians, and our pal gaius mucius decided to sneak in and kill their king, lars porsena. unfortunately on the day that ol gaius did this, the clusian soldiers were getting paid, so porsena and his secretary were dressed up the same and gaius couldn’t tell which was which. so instead of coming back later like a normal person, he went ‘well fvck it’ and decided to murder one of them. turns out he murdered the wrong guy. WHOOPS. understandably porsena was not pleased with this and had gaius captured. however, gaius was one hell of a baller, because he was like ‘whatever, kill me if yov want, bvt some other roman will follow after me, cavse vs romans dont give a SHIT abovt dying’ and to prove his point he STUCK HIS RIGHT HAND IN A FIRE and just sort of stared at porsena while he roasted his own hand like anderson cooper with a mic at a trump rally, and i guess that freaked porsena out so much (which, fair) that he and his buddies packed up and left. after that, everyone started calling our buddy gaius ‘scaevola,’ which means LEFT-HANDED
so basically this dude saves all of rome’s ass by turning his right hand into an episode of gordonius ramsius’s kitchen nightmares, and rome is so thankful that they’re like ‘gaius mucius, you are one bad bitch and we’re gonna give you a nickname so everyone knows what a bad bitch you are’ and the badass nickname they give him is ‘lefty’
*rolling around on the ground like a LOLing thing*
You’re one of the very last humans surviving amid the apocalyptic wreckage of earth; your salvation comes in the form of aliens interested in conserving endangered species.
That’s probably all at once the best and worst thing you could have to say about our species. We were sitting on a powder keg—global warming, loose ice shelf, a supervolcano in Yellowstone, and fuck knows what political shit-throwing competition. Russia was surfing the hacker waves and North Korea was finally building successful baby-nukes. With borrowed engines. Probably from Russia.
It was a perfect storm all its own without any additions. But it all hung in the balance, and nobody really paid it much mind except in the moment every new bit of nonsense was achieved and announced.
One thing I’ll say for my species, we’re amazingly good at archival. Literally every single blasted event was reported, overreported, reviewed, turned, twisted, viewed from one point or another or yet a third, analysed, reported again, filed away for a week and then dredged back up again for a few more kicks to the corpse. Of course, when you’re trying to keep up with the vagaries of a seventy-year-old disorganised orange mop-haired husk, you have to step up your natural talent a bit, so in the last year or so it’s been something of a necessary obsession.
All this archival is a bit pointless without the internet. The old information systems—radio transmission and all that—lived the longest after our little Big Bang.
So when I say, it was an accident, that’s from back when we still had information at our fingertips. No one had the chance to twist it up yet or anything. Or at least I think so. It’s either a mark of the human condition that we’d go out in a massive flare of irony, or it’s my personal perception—either way I find the futility of it all morbidly appealing and I’m (one of?) the last ones here to tell the story, so my version is what you’re getting.
A ship wandered out into the middle of what was supposedly contested area because they were trying to outrun a storm and some freak accident knocked out their electronics—you know, like it did with those couple of planes a year ago? Shit, was it two years now? Whatever. A hostile power viewed the situation as a threat and fired off a little nuke. What’s a couple rads between friends, anyway?
Probably shouldn’t have hit Yellowstone. Fucked up their vector in a hurry, I guess.
So. For those (whoever’s left? I guess?) who don’t know, Yellowstone National Park was sitting pretty right on top of a damn supervolcano. Which is to say, there’s this absolutely giant lake of heated molten rock under a pretty thin surface. And we’d been talking for years about how the continental shelf on the West Coast of the United States was one day gonna fucking move, and we’d lose—heck, Japan and coastal states at least? And that could spark Yellowstone anyway?
Writing is a process that often undergoes heavy edits… that includes responding to feedback.
“I’M MAD THAT THIS FREE CONTENT IS NOT TO MY SPECIFICATIONS, YOU NEED TO FIX IT” has been many an internet reader’s rallying cry since the Eternal Summer began.
Every time a reader says to me “You (your health) matter more than a fic update” makes me feel both warm and fuzzy, like I am a person who matters! And like a minor miracle has occurred.
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