Survival Of The Fittest

((Lavender Ripley continued from Venipuncture))

Lavender wasn't always the cafe type. A number of her classmates spent a staggering amount of time in joints like The Blue House, sipping lattes and studying or pretending to study. It was a more extroverted mode of being, she thought, and that wasn't really how she felt a lot of the time, but every so often she needed a little more of the energy that came from being around others, even if she was more liable to bask in it passively than engage with it directly.

And of course, cafes also brought a change of place and with that the opportunity to shake off the funk of the habitual. Generally speaking, Lavender didn't procrastinate, but the exception was boring novels written by dead white guys who lived in London in 1861. The torture of the day was Great Expectations, which as far as Lavender was concerned was actual garbage, a cluster of clichés and caricatures with little of merit to say even in its context and totally divorced from relevance to modern society.

Of course, that wasn't going to fly as a thesis statement for her paper. She'd considered trying to argue that its satire was ineffective because it failed to properly rise above or differentiate itself from the object of its scorn, but the last thing she wanted to do was read more Victorian rubbish to properly make that argument, especially when there was a chance that the rest of the material would somehow manage to be worse. Instead, she was doing her level best to find something of worth to say about the hollowness of class distinctions, touching on Pip's entirely artificial elevation to the status of gentleman by the intervention not of the upper class itself, which would be happy to use and discard him, but through the misguided charity of Magwitch, escaped-convict-turned-sheep-baron.

Her heart was really not in it, but at least the cafe atmosphere was helping.

A couple guys with guitars had played a set maybe half an hour ago. They'd been okay, the same sort of folk-country blend that was everywhere around here but they played well and their lyrics were free of offensive content. Lavender was on her third Italian soda, which was more than she'd usually have in an entire week, and the sweetness had built up to the point it was almost sickly, but that at least kept her sips small and infrequent. She'd been considering getting some actual food, but so far hadn't made the leap. If and when she did, that would mean putting her laptop aside for a few minutes to eat, and progress was slow enough without further excuses.

All around, the bustle and buzz of activity flowed, keeping her awake. She slammed out a few more sentences, something, anything, even if it wasn't coherent, marking the end of her fourth page. Over the hump now. That sounded like time for a break.

Turning to look over the cafe, she glazed right over a familiar face, paused, then looked again to make sure she'd seen right. Yep. No doubt, that was a classmate.

How long had she been there?

((Camille Bellegarde start))

Perhaps a public cafe was not the most appropriate writing venue for this sort of literature. Perhaps. But at this point, were someone to see what she was writing, said person would have been rather flagrantly violating her privacy and therefore would have committed a much more tangible wrong. Camille had all but eliminated the possibility of an innocent coffee patron accidentally stumbling upon her less-than-innocent new writing project. She had taken the precaution of having her back to the wall, mindful not to sit near any public-facing windows or reflective surfaces.

She had even opted not to use the coffee shop Wi-Fi. Not that she needed it. If she had needed it, she would have used it, but there was no point on drawing upon a potentially exploitable resource she had no need for. Being free from the distractions of the internet, as she prepared this latest chapter for her Ao3 series, was if anything a positive boon. If she needed to do resource, she could always consult the app on her phone.

Camille's latest series had benefited from a rigid structure and clear objective that prevented her falling into those all-too familiar writing traps of adding too much detail or overembellishing a subplot or getting sidetracked by a single side character that accidentally blossomed into a complex and alluring protagonist in their own right. Camille's greatest weakness as a writer, as a creative spirit more generally, was her tendency to want to do much, to explore every angle and dissect every theme. The world of commissions had helped keep her artwork in check, but her penchant with fanfiction was still to get entangled in too many obscure scene ideas and esoteric crack pairings.

The wonderful thing about this idea was that the discipline was innate to its premise.

It was a simple idea. The Voting Gauntlet on Fire Emblem Heroes had long been one of her least enjoyed features of the app. Being an inconsequential part of a larger whole essentially left the individual players feeling worthless, in Camille's experience at least, any meaningful investment having been time better spent on the Training Tower and not diligently watching that wretched thirty minute timer. Maximising the feather gain was an act of luck far more than it was one of skill, especially as the favoured Hero of the fanbase was often so hard to predict. But it was fun from a certain perspective.

She had first done it with the Battle at the Beach Voting Gauntlet, because that artwork was simply pristine. Whenever the next stage of the tournament commenced, she would write a chapter of each winner dominating the respective loser. It was fun. Fun, harmless, pretty tame stuff. And it had gained a lot of kudos. It wasn't her most artistic or masterful writing, but it was clearly her best idea.

Now, here she was, at the Bunny Battle, and she had gained an extra audience from fans of that kink. A couple of accompanying pictures that had gone down a storm on Reddit, and Camille was pretty sure she was one of the most popular names in the Fire Emblem porn community. A rather impressive accomplishment, when you considered how saturated the market could become when a new Smash game comes out, but sadly not one she could place on her resume. Ah well. It was teaching her confidence and networking, she supposed, and those skills would be apparent without needing to explain their origin.

Now she was writing the Chrom and Catria scene. It was rather hot work, if she could say so herself. She would need a cigarette after proofreading this. The next stage of the tournament would require some new content warnings, but nothing that she couldn't han-

Someone looked at her.

Camille looked up. Lavender Ripley.

That reminded her, she needed to finish that Ellen Ripley fic.

"Hi Lavender."

"Oh, hey, Camille."

Lavender straightened up and smiled on instinct, feeling more embarrassed than she had reason to. Camille probably hadn't noticed her until just now, and even if she had, Lavender had been engrossed in her work, not ignoring the girl intentionally. It was just the surprise, the turn of the sequence of events throwing her off-guard for a second, and just as quickly as the nervousness manifested and was identified, it passed. They were both in this public space on their own business, and there was no reason to ascribe any greater significance to it. Nobody would be offended.

Of course, that didn't mean Lavender was going to just go back to what she'd been doing before. She'd just hit the milestone she'd set for herself to earn a break, and while her initial plan had been to get some food and distract herself with that, Camille's presence presented an opportunity to get some interaction instead of simply siphoning the social vibes of everyone else in the cafe, while at the same time promising to be more of a time-sink than a croissant sandwich. Any time not spent on Great Expectations was time Lavender would feel better about in the grand scheme of things.

As such, she quickly saved her essay (twice, to be sure; it wouldn't do at all to lose any progress on this—it was bad enough writing it the first time), then closed her laptop, gathered it and her Italian soda, and took a few steps to bring herself closer to Camille.

"Mind if I sit?" she asked. "I need something to save me from this paper."

It was a bit awkward because she'd already scooped up some of her stuff, but she wasn't going to just leave it sitting around. The Blue House was pretty nice and certainly no hot spot for thieves, but a laptop—even an older one like Lavender's, covered as it was in the bumper stickers she didn't quite feel comfortable putting on her car ("Beware of Dogma," "When You Elect Clowns, Expect A Circus," and "Gun-Toting Liberal," most prominent)—made for a tempting target. Her copy of Dickens' so-called masterpiece and her spiral notebook filled with scribblings about what Ms. Prescott had told them about the thematic importance of stars and spiderwebs remained behind; if anyone wanted to make off with that, Lavender wished them the best of luck with it. Leaving an anchor at her old place for the moment also gave them an out if Camille wanted to be alone.

Would she want to be alone? The girl was a bit of an enigma. She often looked bored or disengaged, but Lavender suspected that was just surface level. Camille seemed to be a peripheral figure in many of the goings-on of George Hunter High, someone who could be told about happenings but wouldn't be directly involved or have much personal stake in them. That was a pretty good look compared to the drama that engulfed so many of their peers, even Lavender from time to time and despite her wishes. Maybe this meeting, outside the structured context of school life, would provide an opportunity to get better acquainted.

Or at least some extra room for procrastination.

Lavender seemed to be eager for a spot of social interaction for the purposes of procrastination, and Camille had zero complaints in that regard. Procrastination was, in appropriate qualities, healthy and productive in its own roundabout way. Camille was procrastinating right now, and sometimes even procrastination needed its own procrastination. Of a different sort. Camille made a mental note of that line. Not because she thought it was any good, but because she had a mental list of bad one-liners for her less smooth characters to spout, and such banal musings about procrastination seemed like a worthy addition.

She motioned in the direction of the chairs opposite her, not really caring what one Lavender picked, not wanting to be so crude or assuming as to make the choice for her. "Go ahead," Camille mused.

Camille looked at a half-finished sentence, one that making eye contact with Lavender had interrupted the flow of. That was fine. It was a clumsy way of seguing between two positions, and so she quickly tapped backspace until it was erased. Best to start afresh than try in vain to remember how she was going to finish a pisspoor sentence in the first place.

"What's the paper on?" she asked idly, eyes briefly taking in the various political bumper stickers tackily splayed on the top of the laptop, before forgetting them just as quickly.

"Great Expectations," Lavender said, her voice not quite hitting an actual audible sigh of exasperation but coming pretty close. "By Dickens. It's terrible."

She wasn't sure if Camille was in a class that also had the misfortune to be studying this so-called classic, and was of course aware of the possibility that the girl was the sort to appreciate the Victorian Era equivalent of bad daytime soap operas. It would be a surprise—the book's themes and voice just didn't strike her as having much of anything for someone their age to relate to and Camille didn't seem the type to obsess about history—but if it was the case Lavender would just quietly pretend it wasn't that bad and let the subject drop. This was definitely not a battle she had enough emotional investment in to fight.

She lowered herself into one of the chairs across from Camille, noting the other girl's fingers moving on the keyboard. That sparked a bit of guilt; she hoped her procrastination wasn't messing up Camille's rhythm or jeopardizing her workflow. Lavender knew herself, and she knew that as much as she might put off this project, she would get it done and it would be at a minimum serviceable. She couldn't make that same guarantee for anyone else.

"Working on homework too?" she asked, with a nod towards the laptop, as she set her own belongings down. "It seems like every class is piling the papers on this month."

Camille had a soft spot for Dickensian literature - its themes, its motifs, its slightly-but-not-too-archaic prose and syntax. She nodded along sympathetically at Lavender's bemoaning of the subject matter, however. Lavender was looking for someone to share her agony at having an unwieldy assignment foisted upon her, not to be convinced of the merits of Charles Dickens's writing or its legacy on the world. She hadn't read the book in question either (though she knew the basics of the story and characters, through the wonders of South Park references and pop culture osmosis), so maybe it actually was awful.

Judging by the South Park episode, it likely was.

Camille nodded. "It's never fun having to write an essay on a novel you don't like. It's never fun writing an essay on a novel you do like." The last bit wasn't strictly true - Camille had written her fair share of meticulously referenced pieces espousing her favourite fan theories and justifying unpopular character interpretations, but that was a different type of essay.

She had already finished her own homework. She got it over with quickly. Camille saw no point in making that point, however - it would risk coming across as pretentious or holier-than-thou, going by previous experiences. "Not quite. Just writing porn based on video game characters."

Lavender chuckled twice. The first time was at Camille's statement about essays (though Lavender was actually quite content to sit down and expound upon a book that had actual substance and relevance to, if not her precise personal situation, at least social issues that resonated for someone born in the past century). The second chuckle was prompted by the girl's blunt quip about her own pursuits.

Porn based on video game characters, huh? The matter-of-fact delivery was a pleasant shock of contrast to the mundane cafe atmosphere. Lavender hadn't really expected the girl to be so funny. That sort of thing caught her off-guard more than she liked to admit; a lot of her classmates were charming and social and interesting and she didn't have enough time to get to know them properly and see all of that.

It came to her a second later that maybe Camille hadn't been joking.

"What sort of video games?" Lavender asked, stalling for time. Video games weren't her thing, at all. She knew Mario, Pikachu, Sonic the Hedgehog, Minesweeper, and Tetris. She'd played some other stuff, but in the context of crowded parties or ex-boyfriends where her participation was as unavoidable as it was meaningless. She'd smack buttons and fall off ledges until an opportunity presented itself to pass the controller to the next person in line.

Lavender's voice had naturally lowered as she broached a topic outside her sphere of familiarity, which worked well for where she went next in her fumbling and possibly-unneeded recovery. If unsure, it was best to play along, and so she pitched her tone low, conspiratorial, giving an exaggerated glance around as if scanning for anyone who might overhear that was actually only half-performance. No kids. Good. Nobody making off with her book. Oh well.

"And what sort of porn?"

Hopefully that would work whether Camille had been genuine or not. It was Schrödinger's banter, simultaneously sarcastic and in earnest.

Lavender reflected that she was a lot more prepared to have a conversation about writing porn than she was one about video games.

Camille knew she was always taking a small risk with being so candid, but she disliked being dishonest about such an integral part of her life in such a casual and congenial environment. She would lie about how she obtained such writing skills in a job interview context, or when being questioned by someone that was prudish or unfamiliar, but to a clearly open-minded and good-natured classmate? No, there was no real incentive to lie there.

"Fire Emblem. It's made by Nintendo," Camille replied, rapidly trying to work out how to summarise the series in a sentence. An infinitely harder mental task than debating whether or not to announce her porn writing habits. She tried thinking of a non-nerdy description, one not reliant on niche or technical terms. "You control an army of characters, and guide them both in battle and in their personal development." There. That should be an easy way of describing it - although it was robbed of all the charm and intrigue that made the series so attractive.

"As to what sort of porn I'm writing, I am currently writing a story where a character called Chrom dominates a character called Catria." She shrugged. There wasn't much else that she could divulge without coming across as a bit too keen, or going too far into the intricacies of the game mode that inspired it.

"I also do requests."

"That sounds interesting," Lavender said.

She was pretty glad she'd realized that there was a chance Camille was serious. The bump had been smoothly traversed, or smoothly enough. The details of the source material were still somewhat mystifying to Lavender. Some of the words connected—Nintendo made the Wii, and guiding an army in battle seemed more or less intuitive, though "personal development" could've been anything—but the sparseness left her still feeling unmoored.

The names didn't mean anything either, didn't even connote genders to Lavender, but the verb drew her attention. "Dominates," huh? That was pretty bold and pretty kinky. It covered a spectrum of potential activities, some maybe more Lavender's comfort zone than others, but it definitely piqued her curiosity, especially given the continuously direct and unabashed manner in which Camille spoke of it. The girl's candor was refreshing; sexuality came up, well, quite a bit among the senior class of George Hunter High, especially being on the cheer squad. It seemed like everyone was having sex (and Lavender wasn't judging; she was too), but the discourse surrounding it so often turned to juvenile bragging or immature giggling or gossip and insults. Quiet confidence was something different, something respectable.

"Is the goal to stay true to the source material," Lavender asked, "or to give it your own spin?"

This seemed a little more tactful than just asking flat out if domination was one of the central themes of the game.

"And do you get a lot of requests?"

And that a more polite way of asking just how involved with this the girl was.

Now that was an interesting question. Fidelity to the source material was always a subject that attracted a plurality of feelings and attitudes among smut writers, and Camille often found herself perched in the middle. She tended to avoid alternative universes, and for her half the fun of smut was building on the idiosyncrasies and quirks of characters. However, bar in the occasional more contained short story, she did give every character she focused on a very fluid orientation and a promiscuous attitude to sex, even when it made no canonical sense. Really, her writing answered a simple "what if" - 'what if every character in this franchise was irrepressibly horny?'

"I try to keep true to the background lore and the temperament of the characters," Camille answered, thinking of a short way of abbreviating that philosophy. "I do tend to give them whatever sexual preferences are necessary for the greatest degree of enjoyment, though. For example, I don't exactly anticipate either character in this story acting like this in the story they hail from. So, for example, I don't see Chrom as being massively into domination canonically. But it is very fun to pretend he is." She shrugged.

That answer had trailed on slightly more than she'd anticipated.

"Quite a few," she replied. "Every now and then I get a commission for some artwork, but mostly it's just writing kinky sex scenes with obscure pairings."

"Mm," Lavender said, "that makes sense."

It did, too. Both sides of Camille's answer, really. The more obscure the sexual niche, the more likely someone who catered to it was to flourish; after all, there was less competition. As to keeping to the lore but making any and all necessary adjustments to actually make the porn functional as porn, that was only logical.

Lavender, as she thought through that, was struck by a couple of musings. The first was a realization as to part of what caught her so off-guard about Camille's attitude, which was largely rolled up in that one word: "porn." Normally, from what Lavender had seen, purveyors of written smut tended to prefer more highbrow or euphemistic descriptors, with "erotica" and "romance novel" the general favorites. Even those terms held slightly different connotations, of course. A romance novel Lavender would expect to be a slow build with sex liberally sprinkled into a narrative that still had other points of focus, likely regarding the evolution of a relationship. Erotica, on the other hand, would more probably be just about the sex. But porn was something different still. It sounded crass, and evoked images of everything revealed in all possible prurient detail.

The second thing that sprang to mind was more related to Camille's discussion of the source material. The girl had talked about a lack of expectation for characters to act as they did in her stories in the original works, which made sense, but Lavender, unless she was drastically misinformed about the ways of Nintendo, thought that perhaps the reason for that wasn't a clear-cut mismatch of character interpretations.

As she considered whether to raise the issue, she took a long sip of her Italian soda. She'd ordered vanilla, mostly out of curiosity, expecting it to be something like a cream soda. It wasn't; the flavor was too strong, artificial, and was doing nothing to hasten her progress through her beverage. At this point, she was counting on the ice eventually melting to dilute it.

"So, wait," she said, landing on a nothing-ventured-nothing-gained attitude, "you said you don't think they'd be into domination in the game, but is that even something the story would touch on?"

Lavender set her soda back down and leaned forward a little.

"I mean, even in stories where kids aren't part of the target audience, it feels like sex is often avoided. If you think about it, lots of characters in shows and books are probably having lots of sex, but it's never brought up for some reason. For all we know, they could be freaky."

Camille rested her cheek on her palm as she mulled over Lavender's questions. They were insightful, free from any judgement or prudishness, clearly emanating from a place of curiosity about the facets and details of this new and niche hobby. Camille knew some writers who hated being spoken to mid-flow, and while she understood the reasoning behind that emotion, it wasn't one she shared. Conversations tended to inspire the most fruitful and innovative ideas, and brought in a much-needed outside perspective into the creative process at this critical early stage.

Hell, it was how she'd met Lucas.

Camille looked up at the ceiling briefly, again pondering how to phrase her answer rather than what it should be. The fault was her own, in poorly conveying exactly how she viewed the characters' sexuality in the actual setting.

"Well, no, the story wouldn't touch on it - bar perhaps some light innuendo and subtle teasing," Camille answered, trying to be simultaneously descriptive and concise. "But I suppose what I was saying is that, while it all takes place off-screen, I do not imagine Chrom, within the canon of the universe, is behind closed doors into the things that I write him as being into. That may be a headcanon, but..." She paused. She was rambling, and slipping into fandom technical vocabulary.

"What I mean is that, if for whatever reason the Fire Emblem writers decided to show what the characters got up to behind closed doors," she continued, starting afresh, steadying her tone, having noticed her accent steadily creep up in strength, "I imagine they wouldn't depict the characters as being as kinky and promiscuous as I am writing them." She raised an eyebrow? "Did that make sense?" she asked, questioning her own explanatory abilities more than anything. "Sorry, I am prone to ramble."

"It's fine," Lavender said, "totally fine. I think I get it."

That was more or less true. A few bits had thrown her; "headcanon" sounded like it was about ready to turn into either a political cartoon or a comic book character's superpower. Still, Lavender was keen to show that she had in fact grasped what Camille was saying, and her father had taught her that sometimes a good active listening skill was to restate what the speaker had said in your own words, showing that you weren't just regurgitating their description but had comprehended it to a sufficient degree to summarize it. This was also a good trick for finding any areas of misunderstanding; people picked out errors pretty well when they were engaged and listening.

"You're saying that even thought the story is pretty PG, there's enough information on related character traits to make an educated guess that they probably don't have bondage dungeons, right? I mean, in the official story, but you add those in your version because it's more fun."

Which, all in all, sounded like a really reasonable and fair way to go about things. It made sense to Lavender to hew as close to the official characters as possible when not dwelling on the actual explicit sex, but to make any tweaks needed to get to the right endpoint. Ultimately, Camille had laid out the goal clearly: she was writing porn, presumably for the titillation and gratification of her audience. The niche of featuring specific characters would only work if they were recognizable, but if their official renditions left few doors for the sexually-explicit open, then by the very concept of featuring them in such situations there would be adjustments required.

One other thing sprang to mind as the girl spoke, and that was the combination of her enunciation and pronunciation. Lavender had this thought that she'd heard Camille wasn't originally from the US, and she sounded European, but Lavender wasn't familiar enough with accents to guess the country and she wasn't about to ask. It was perilous waters to do so, grossly offensive if inadvertently directed at an American and still pretty gauche otherwise. She'd been on the wrong end of it herself a time or two, and she was pretty sure she sounded just as much a Tennessee native as most of her classmates.

Camille nodded, and clicked her fingers as some sort of low-level congratulatory display, as Lavender perfectly summarised Camille's writing process. "Yes, exactly. Bingo. That's a bingo." Camille liked Lavender. The other girl had a solid head on her shoulders, a good disposition, an open-minded worldview and an astuteness with understanding the more esoteric hobbies of others. Camille could appreciate all of those things. If anything, she was a little bit too excited - something that was expressed by a slight upturn at the corners of her mouth and an occasional minor shift in intonation - to meet someone who was able to grasp this so intuitively. Maybe that was to give the rest of her peers too little credit, but Camille was happy at how open Lavender was to this.

"I would like to take this opportunity to repeat my earlier offer. I do requests, and so long as it's not illegal - to write about it - then I can give it a go." It was her standard pitch, albeit still sanitised of the more lurid descriptions of what specific kinks and fetishes she would and would not venture into. Legality would be a good shorthand for the context, and one that would not be too shocking to other ears. "It doesn't even have to be smut." Camille shrugged, again, her way of saying that 'but if you don't use this opportunity to get tailor-made smut written for you, you're a freak.'

A final disclaimer. "If you prefer your request to be anonymous, I do have several online accounts that facilitate such requests."

Lavender was apparently right on the money with her understanding and assessment of Camille's writing habits. Okay, good. The girl seemed appreciative of that, maybe even approaching ecstatic. Lavender got that. Their class was in many ways a lot more progressive and open-minded than the norm for their city, let alone Tennessee as a whole. They were part of the onrushing wave of demographic change that meant the party in power was having its last hateful, destructive hurrah before being forced to the redefine itself or be rendered irrelevant. And yet, all the same, it was not a sure bet that most of them would be comfortable sitting around casually analyzing the artistic merit of pornographic video game stories.

Of course, Lavender's self-congratulations on being so relaxed about such matters ran into a little speed bump when, moments later, Camille reiterated her willingness to take suggestions, this time making the implication a bit more clear. This wasn't purely informational; it was, instead, an offer to whip something personally-tailored up. It could be anything legal to write about, anonymous or not, and Lavender's immediate impulses tugged her a number of contradictory directions. She took a nice long sip of her mediocre soda as she weighed them.

"What sort of requests do you usually get?" she finally settled on. "Or like, do you have an example?"

And then, because she couldn't help herself and one part of the statement had drawn her attention inevitably towards it, she added, "And what sorts of things are illegal to write about? What do you do if someone asks for something like that?"

Lavender wasn't quite sure if she was down to talk about the sorts of erotic media she found most personally appealing or make a request that wasn't in good faith just to humor Camille, but she was definitely interested in hearing more about the girl's process and was always ready for a good discussion about copyright and the legal definition of obscenity.