Full Story: Deep Below · 10:36pm Oct 28th, 2023
Hey pones! Just a quick blog post--I always promise to release the non-pony stories that I've written as part of my Patreon for interested parties to read. One of those was Deep Below, a novel-length Splatoon story I've been writing over the last year.
This story follows Cole, one of the last human survivors woken from stasis into a world ruled by ink instead of flesh, where the desperate struggle for survival that overwhelmed humanity has been replaced by a thriving, vapid culture of inklings in constant conflict with their octarian enemies. Cole soon becomes an inkling herself, and must adapt to life in this strange new world--ultimately discovering the truth of what happened to her kind, and whether the others sleeping in her bunker should be revived at last.
Cole's first friendly contact with the new world is Cerina, among the first ocarians to leave the violence of the turf war and join inkling society on the surface. But that society isn't ready to accept her yet--it still treats her with suspicion and disdain, refusing to see her for who she is. In Cole Cerina soon finds an inkling with a similar past--someone too young, who spent a lifetime devoted to a desperate, brutal regime. Between the two, they might just build a life together.
I've been releasing the story on Patreon for a year now, but at long last it's complete. I wanted to make a version of the story available for anyone to read, without dealing with the truly awful user interface of patreon. For its full release, I've given up the working title for its proper release name Vestige. Here it is:
In another world, we would have genfic for sharing stories like this. Without it, I had to get a little creative. But writing this story was a joy--a cross between science fiction, mystery, and a little romance. It's been sitting on my shelf for so long that Splatoon 3 released and made all the worldbuilding and answers to in-universe mysteries this story provides completely non-canon... but it's fanfiction anyway. Considering how awful Nintendo did answering these questions in the third game, I think I'm happy with how it turned out.
If you'd like to try an awesome inkling TF story, there aren't a lot of them out there. I hope you'll try mine.
Woo—and I cannot emphasize this enough—my.
Hey Starscribe do you have a some kind of webpage for each of your finished stories I can find to download your amazing work easily. It’s kind of a pain to dig them up in patreon and your blog here.
Downloaded and looking forward to reading.
These look very interesting.
Really enjoyed that story. I looked forward to reading a new chapter every weekend!
Maybe you could put it up on AO3, that one's really good for posting stories from any fandom
I personally have written quite a lot of stories on there, but no horsewords yet so there's nothing I can crosspost over here
Oh, I’ve always been interested in seeing a story set in Splatoon’s surprisingly complex world, and with a human perspective no less! I look forward to taking a look at this.
I've been off the Starscribe bandwagon for a while, but a Splatoon fic seemed like it would fit your style well.
It was a very cute romance story. I giggled a bit while reading during a show shift at work.
Overall, it fit my expectations well. There's several tropes that seem to be ubiquitous to your work, and this has all of them. Human male transformed into female alien? Check. Ancient lost civilizations? Check. Magitek? Check. But sometimes a comfortable story is more needed than a profound one. And it's been long enough since I've read your work such familiarity wasn't stale.
The slice of life content was comfy as well. And the romance was cute, wholesome, and realistic. Thanks for not choosing enemies to lovers plot #47. Sometimes we need to see things we can relate to in our lives, not pure fantasy.
Overall, a nice treat. Will it be up on fanfiction.net, with Mew Like Me?
Oh, and the hinted-at but never spoken pun that Inklings are genderfluid made be groan for half an hour.