End of Arc 2

Hi everyone, Tabbycat here!

Well that happened… 150k+ words, slightly shorter than act 1 but what a lot went on…

We’ve had the hostile aliens get an actual name, we’ve found out who’s behind the council’s machinations, started the fight back and had new arrivals - even if Defia and Aricia haven’t actually joined the inner circle, they’re both clearly drifting that way. We’ve also seen the aftermath of the wedding, Naera’s uncertainty and Dustin really coming into his own as a leader of more than just his own ship.

On the bad side - I’d hoped to write a lot more interludes after the reduction in chapter release rate, which then… never happened. Mostly, that’s because I’ve been far, far busier with work than I expected over the last few months along with chapters just taking longer to write for a variety of reasons mostly to do with various stress things because gestures at the world in general. So. Where does that bring us in 2026? Well, the good news is that most of my stress has gone, and while I haven’t managed to do any of the extra chapter stuff I wanted to, I’ve not missed a chapter - which honestly, I don’t think I’d have been able to do without the reduced posting rate.

Those of you who are eagle-eyed (or just read a lot) may also have noted in this time that I’ve been writing for [The Gamer] - though most of my writing for that was done before the above mentioned stress and so I’ve been burning my buffer there too; I’m aiming to get both here and there built up over the next few weeks, as work pressure drops off and I’ve got less personal life stress for a bit… but we’ll see how we go. As long as I can keep up my 3-4 Ambassador chapters and 1 gamer chapter a week I’ll be happy, but it’d be nice to have a decent buffer for both so that I could for example take a week fully off from writing. No doubt if that happens, then like Terry Pratchett I will probably return having written twice as much as usual :P

So, what happens next for Dustin and co? Well, we’ve got an epilogue chapter or two coming over the next week, and I’m planning on doing one of my comment reply threads at some point in that time… and then we launch into the new arc - “Into the machine”. Plans there include (in no particular order): Dustin getting back to his original mission of making friends as humanity’s allies start to coalesce and try to fight back against the Durathisian takeover, the conflict with the Fractals growing in scope as the cluster reacts to the actions of the Solar Ascent and her crew, and more. Defia and Aricia’s inward drift will be resolved, we’ll see more from Mallow (the crew’s pet is doing very well, just so much has been going on we’ve not had a chance to see how they’re doing…), and there's a few more people who may or may not end up joining the ship…

As always, thanks for reading!

Tabbycat