Ca1ypso0 - Ca1yps0

Pinterest, my savior. The brainrot for The Archive Undying is so severe, but there is so little fanart I've taken extreme measures.

Songs of Origin was crazy /pos

something quite yuriful happening here

anyways for people who didn't see the last post, this is my hc for alistair's mother: an alice who got caught in wonderland once the portal closed and has to contend with being stuck there forever and raising her young child there... so she's complicated with it 😌 and since I'm playing by eah rules where we're generations deep she and the cheshire cat (kitty's mom ver.) Are at this point similar aged so they're best friends in a way...😊

"I'm here. I am alive, and I am with you, and I will continue to be- until you are dead, and I go too."

:)

I had a vision…

Me and the 3 Xurkitree fans cheered

get microwaved you prick

So The Archive Undying is one of my favourite books of the year (and I've read some truly spectacular books) for many reasons. One of them is the descriptions of food in it. I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about the spices that Sunai uses and the teas they drink, so I can feed my obsession with the book in more ways?

OHOHOHO 1) thank you, 2) i also am a complete nut about good food descriptions in fiction so here, for your indulgence, some answers to your questions + some extra notes:

Sunai's nomadic existence means he will squirrel away whatever he can get his hands on, but for that curry in the first chapters I was imagining a spice mix that he whipped up at some point when he had access to a full kitchen to snitch from. That curry still kind of sucks because he doesn't have much to build it from. What he WANTS is veg, protein, and aromatics, and all he has is maybe some dried veg (if we're being generous) + maaaybe some dried soup base + some coriander and cumin and chili and the dregs of a mix to pull together with water and pour over rice. DISAPPOINTING.

Tea is v popular in part because it's kind of a luxury -- all agriculture in non-AI cities has to make the most of whatever space is considered safe enough to actually cultivate en masse, and you're generally going to prioritize sustenance over tea. So as a consequence there's a ton of variety in tea, bc you get people growing all sorts of personal projects (tea plants, herbs) as well as foraging in the wilds (if they can get away with it).

Khuon Mo's cuisine is fruit and seafood-forward; chili is popular but used more as an accent than a fundamental flavor; favored starch is rice; edible flowers for formal occasions/rituals (funerals, marriage, coming-of-age, etc.).

Veyadi absolutely would have just bitten straight into that onion if Sunai hadn't stopped him.

he’s got rejection sensitivity

I just finished TAU and I loved it! The fact that the empire has AI that isn't corrupted is super interesting and makes me wonder what makes them special. I know you probably can't say much about it, so I can't wait to hopefully learn more about them in the next book.

Maybe something you can talk about: while it seems common for salvagers to travel from city to city, what about the average non-salvager? In addition, is there much immigration between the Harbor and the Empire? Is there a formal system of citizenship within the cities/nations?

OH HEY GLAD TO HAVE INDULGED YOU and i can answer a number of these questions! the absence of corruption in the empire is something i will indeed hold my tongue about though :P

travel between city-states is extremely uncommon, and is generally only done by professionals or folks experiencing some manner of duress. alternatively, a number of downworld caravans still exist and travel through the wilds between city-states as a matter of course.

there is little in the way of immigration between harbor states and the empire, though it certainly happens now and again -- there are even post-harbor aigatan communities within the empire! immigration away from the empire is most uncommon, as the empire is in many ways the most civilized place on the downworld, in terms of technological sophistication and access to resources. or at least, that's how it's been for the past few generations. things are getting a bit, uh...unreliable.

citizenship as a system used to vary more when more AIs were actively in charge of their city-states. now folks more commonly have either harbor or imperial citizenship, with a large number of people having neither, officially speaking.