Table of Contents

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In progress (Note to selves, old locked TOC is here.)

Found Wanting: 9/11 interdimensional office politics with kinky queer romance. Here's the cover and blurb intro, and here're the character sheets. You can buy it as paper or ebook. COMPLETE!
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Infinity Smashed: YA portal fantasy about a teenage girl getting ensnared in 9/11 interdimensional immigration politics. Chapters uploaded one at a time as they get written and sponsored by fans on LiberaPay and Patreon.

The Girl Who Got Hit By Lightning: While helping her friend watch a birthday movie, M.D. Rawlins gets hit by lightning, advised by her imaginary friend, and her reality starts to unravel.

Found Wanting: Made Useful

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Summary: Grey is a stupid, silent monster who has only ever been good at one thing, and then she meets the PIN.
Word Count: 2200
Notes: Feel free to imagine the most hideous '70s fashions available. Jesus, I can’t believe this is the first time Andersen and Vicky finally come up. The movie being mentioned, the Golem: How He Came Into The World, is a classic of silent horror film from 1920 and thus is in the public domain. You can watch it here, and the golem looks like this. Content warning for implied child abuse and awkward (consensual) heterosexual sex.
Story Index

Made Useful

 

In 1966, when Grey is eight, she sees an old silent movie called der Golem on dollar day at the drive-in theater. The film is faded and flickery, parts seem to be missing, and all the text is in German, but none of that matters once the golem appears. Grey’s too young to know what that leap in her heart means, but when she sees the golem’s dress and bobbed hair, her strength to hold up a collapsing ceiling, she knows that’s who she wants to be. She wants to be the girl who saves everyone, the woman who holds up the world.

 

( But she will never get to be that girl. So she might as well be the useful monster. )

Found Wanting: 25 Years of Service

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Summary: Grey spends 25 years climbing the bureaucratic ladder, getting to know her coworkers (or not), and learning to get rid of people she dislikes by playing social dead weight.
Word Count: 4200
Notes: The cowboy record, in case you’re wondering, is Slim Whitman. The “yodeling horror” is probably his work best known to current-day audiences; it’s “Indian Love Call,” AKA the racist mind-blowing song in Mars Attacks! The other is “Secret Love.”
Story Index

25 Years of Service

 

Staying celibate isn’t a hard promise for Grey to keep, at first. She’s too busy trying not to wash out. Thanks to Vicky, she now knows that she can learn… but it still takes a while, and she can’t afford to lose this. Andersen is sponsoring her training; she can’t disappoint him.

 

( After all, where would she go? What would she do? )

Found Wanting: IndyGrrl03

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Summary: Bob hacks a douchebag and gets a new job in the process.
Word Count: 3000
Notes: I can't believe Neo actually taught me something that proved useful for worldbuilding.
Story Index

IndyGrrl03

 

I never would’ve touched the PIN if it hadn’t been for SpecialestAlpha.

That was the name I knew him by, back on alt.games.alienmenace. His gimmick: brooding secret agent alien hunter, desperate to find teenage girls to join the fight against extraterrestrials (and blow him). The group treated him like a pet troll, and for a long time, I saw nothing wrong with that.

 

( He is absolutely not based on a real person. )

Found Wanting: the Un-American Festivities Committee

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Summary: Bob tries to settle into the PIN, and is almost able to forget he's in a panopticon... until 9/11 and Diwali happen.
Word Count: 3290
Notes: 9/11 xenophobia ahoy!
Story Index

The Un-American Festivities Committee

 

For a shady government agency dealing with interdimensional migration, the PIN buildings didn’t look special or important. They were just another cluster of boxy beige buildings in their own strip mall on the outskirts of town. Health and Medical on one side of the parking lot, Communications and Operations on the other. Comm-Ops wasn’t any more exciting on the inside, except for the gigantic painting on the wall.

 

( I had to check legal records to learn that Arizona only repealed the sodomy laws between Bob's arrival and his partnering with Grey. )

Found Wanting character ref sheets

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Character reference sheets for the Found Wanting characters. Some of the notes are illegible, so I just transcribed all of them.

Art Gallery
( Bob, Grey, Pritchard, Larkin, and Jenny. )