Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
oh my fucking God imagine if, during the scene where Ed explains the plan to Stede in 1x09, it had gone like:
Ed: I’ve got to go mug a guy for a dinghy Stede: oh, ok Ed: you know what…? it can wait a minute Ed: *climbs into bed with Stede and cuddles him*
IMAGINE THEM
IN THE BUNK BED
ED SNUGGLES UP NEXT TO HIM
STEDE’S BRAIN GOING 10 MILLION MILES AN HOUR
IMAGINE
(plus imagine chauncey sneaking in and seeing ed and freaking the fuck out and leaving. or maybe ed punches him idk. anyways. they can run away together 💖)
[ID: a screenshot of a comment from reddit, with no username visible. The commend reads: This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me either. Setting aside the question of whether gender/sex is assigned or observed at birth, the gender I was assigned at birth was ‘boy.’ The gender I have now is ‘man’. Boys and men have different gender roles, and few adults identify as boys anymore. From this standpoint, every adult has a different gender than the one they had at birth. End ID]
Framing “girl” and “boy” as separate genders from “woman” and “man” is such an amazing take. it’s a framework that accommodates and explains so many trans experiences. Some trans people never were their AGAB. Some feel like they were their AGAB, but that that changed (usually when puberty hits, which is when you start “becoming a man/woman”. The accepted societal path is that girls grow up to into women, and boys grow up into men. But some girls grow up into men, and some boys grow up into women. This guy was a boy who grew up into a man, which generally works out pretty well for people. Some boys and girls grow up into people who aren’t men or women, even! It’s like this random cis guy skipped right over transgender 101, 102, 201, etc. and stumbled directly into Transgender Nirvana.
I’d like to hear people’s thoughts and headcanons on what Cardassian cash looks like. I think that a lot of the time, Cardassian leks are electronic, but I’m writing something where I need there to be cash. In previous fics, I’ve talked about ‘coins’ for making small purchases, but for this, I am using both smaller and bigger denominations. I don’t want to just default to something that feels Western and 20th century, and I’d quite like to hear whether someone else have thought of this.
Here are some possible angles, to get your gears grinding:
What kind of denominations are there?
What shape is the physical money in? Are there different types for different
What material is used? Is the material significant, in terms of value or symbolism?
doing some off the cuff spitballin here
cardassia is meant to be a desert planet, so i’d think plant life to make paper or notes would be scarce, or considered quite modern
very little water, so water heavy crops like cotton would be out
i think metals or precious stones would be fairly realistic, espec with forced labour mines and camps etc
some societies used shells as currency but I’m not sure how much coastline Cardassia has?
bone as a form of currency would be cool. collectable coins made from the kneecaps of your rivals 👀
I may have more thoughts later, but first thought for materials, for maybe the larger denominations, is obsidian.
Another thought, knowing they essentially stripped and sold off their own relics, maybe their coinage is of various metals melted down.
I feel like they would have the Union insignia on one side and? Not sure about the other side. Plants, animals, those stars Garak talks about in ASIT?
Ooooh obsidian! I like that.
Regarding the thing with melting down various metals: in modern times, cash is symbolic (at least most of the time - I don’t want to make generalisations). While a pound coin is worth one pound, it’s not worth one pound. As an object, its actual material value is lower. It’s the same with paper money (which is not paper anyway). On UK banknotes, there’s a phrase that reoccurs. On the £10 note, it says ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of Ten Pounds’. Originally, banknotes weren’t the money themselves, but could (theoreticallY) be traded for the actual money. While this is not the case anymore, that same relationship exists. If we go further back in history though, the material of the coin really mattered. A silver coin was worth what that amount of silver was worth. Even in antiquity, the minting mattered, of course, and one reason was that sometimes, you’d dilute the metal. That, in turn, could lead to inflation, because if people found out that a certain coin was not actually the metal it purported to be, they would want more of the coins, as they were worth less.
Economic history has never been my strong suit, so there are some nuances here that I’m probably brushing over. My point is that depending on when we’re talking, this approach might be more or less likely. If you’re operating under the assumption that the coin’s material value is its monetary value, then creating an alloy would be a bad idea, because you’re messing with the value. Also, I should mention that melting down metal objects was not uncommon. This is why it’s more uncommon to find really old metal objects, because they get melted down. Nowadays, though, melting down metal objects for the material value is less profitable, because if you have an old object and you want to fence it, that’ll give you way more money. If they don’t have that sense of material value = monetary value, then selling coinage to private collectors might be more profitable.
Apologies for the length of that! What can I say other than I’m a history nerd?
This does lead to an interesting question though - maybe I’m wrong to assume that the Cardassian economy is centralised? Maybe it’s lots of different coinage, some older, some newer, floating around in a grey market, and some people will pay you electronic currency for physical currency, which could be seen as a type of money laundering. I imagine that the State would like to have as much control over currency as possible, but I imagine people would find a way of also trading without the State getting involved. That might just be because it’s easier, but it could also be for dissident activities, illegal enterprises etc. Perhaps people simply use what’s available - old currency that nonetheless is recognised by people to have value.
this reminds me of a concept in one of my older fics, where you had the monetary currency of lek, but a secondary favour currency of dharhma. like if you do something for someone else, they could give you dharhma to indicate they owe you a favour.
You could buy your food with lek, but if you wanted something unique or coveted, you could go to the seller and say “I have dharhma from This Higher Up Official, I will exchange it for your item”. and instead of THUO owing you a favour, the THUO now owes the seller a favour
and ofc having dharhma for certain officials is very useful - if you need to get someone out of jail, or want to be approved for new buildings, or if you need to be introduced to someone else, you could cash in your dharhma with the person that issued it and that person would be legally bound (within reason) to comply
I’ve recently binged both bbc and cbs ghosts and been a little obsessed with it but anyway it’s given me an idea for a ds9 au with the same premise, namely ghosts: cardassia.
now imagine. it’s months after the finale and julian has been working with the relief unit on cardassia for some time. sometimes he visits garak (for lunch? because they got together? who knows) in his garden shed but lives with the starfleet unit. one day he has a minor accident with the power grid or something that leaves him clinically dead for a lil bit but it’s ok, the miracles of starfleet medicine etc. etc. he goes back to work the next day and doesn’t notice anything, but then he goes to visit garak (who doesn’t know about the accident) and finds him surrounded by a gaggle of oddly dressed cardassians. he asks about the visitors. there are no visitors, says garak. he doesn’t know about them. because they’re ghosts. and they’re staring at him, wide-eyed, shocked that he can see them.
there are nine of them, and they are, in order of death:
a hebitian woman who was something like a farmer. she’s kind and religious and wears very colourful clothes. she fell from a tall tree when picking fruits.
a hebitian man who died about 1000 years later, when the first invaders came after the climate catastrophe. a scientist. he was murdered by them.
a 20-something man, a child of the invaders, who died because of the awful conditions of the planet that were unkind to everyone. there’s only a 30-year gap between his and the previous ghost’s deaths. they don’t like each other.
the housekeeper of the very first tain who built the very first house on that land. died of an accident in the kitchen. she’s a very no-nonsense woman and will criticise your manners.
an artist who was staying in the house for some reason. nobody really knows how they died and they won’t tell, probably because it’s embarrassing. they’re kind of a romantic and all about aesthetics and appreciation of art and beauty.
a gul who was a friend of one of the tains. died of a heart attack or some such. he’s older. he’s very into the military propaganda and all that but during the dominion war he was very anti-dominion and a fan of damar, thank you.
enabran tain’s great-grandfather’s brother. the gul knew him as a child. he was a lawyer who died of an illness. he also buys heavily into the system and the state propaganda. he has a sense of humour which is kind of annoying at times.
a young politician who was too pro-democracy and anti-bajoran-occupation for everybody’s liking, so tain invited him over and killed him himself. he was a supporter of the oralian way. he gets along with the hebitians and the artist most of all, but also with mila, who likes him and is sorry for tain and for having to clean up his body.
mila garak, the newest ghost.
at first julian doesn’t want to believe that they’re really ghosts and thinks it has something to do with the accident, but then he remembers the incident with dr crusher and the candle ghost, which every cmo knows about because it impacted the fuck form policy, and other weird things he’s seen or heard about, and concludes that it might not be impossible actually. plus they’re all speaking kardasi and he reckons that if they were in his head, he’d hear english, if they were telepathic entities only he can see, he’d hear english, and if they were any other sort of entity, he’d head ut’d english, so clearly they must exist, be cardassian, and go unregistered by the ut. he grabs a tricorder and finds some faint energy readings that aren’t normal when he scans them. so that’s it, ghosts exist, apparently… and they can be very opinionated.
garak doesn’t believe him at first but then julian starts telling him all sorts of stuff related to the time in the basement and even his childhood, supplied to him by the ghosts and most definitely previously unmentioned, and horrified that they’d just tell him all that, he concedes (mostly because he does know about hebitians and the oralian way teachings, and the idea of spirits and afterlife aren’t as foreign and ridiculous to him as to most others). so now he knows he lives with nine ghosts, and one of them is his mother. he’s mostly glad he can’t see them, but it unnerves him all the same because they can see him.
julian is a bit unnerved as well, but he does get used to them (and other ghosts he now realises he sees everywhere else) fairly quickly and sees them as eccentric friends who can tell him interesting things about history and garak when he lived there, much to garak’s dismay, and most of whom listen to him and need him to do things for them so they’re less bored. some need time to get used to him because he’s an alien, but they come around too eventually. he speaks the language, which is appreciated, and clearly cares about the cardassian people if he’s there to help, and mila’s elim loves him, and did they mention he’s the only one who can see them and make things interesting? so he’s alright. if they could get used to the idea of being ghosts and being ghosts together with two hebitians whose existence was erased from the history curriculum, well, they can get used to a human. for him, it’s chaos at times, because they love to talk and argue and it makes it hard to focus when he’s there and they’re around, but he’s patient and listens to them in turn, actually talks to them, and, being used to garak’s nonsense, knows how to deal with them if need be. so that’s fun. and, being a doctor and wanting to help people, he gets them to talk about things, sometimes, in an effort to help them move on. they don’t, or not any fast at least, but he can try, eh?
a doctor parts skin with a careful touch, turns a tumor into shadow, and seals his patient once more with black threads.
a teenager buys black pills from the pharmacy, swallows one, lies back. they find themselves shrouded in darkness, and for the first time in a long time they sleep well. in the morning they wake under their covers, safe and warm.
a parent casts a shadow over their child, whose body overheats quickly. with the shadow protecting them, the child can walk safely under the sun, fearing neither sunburn nor heat stroke.
light moves swiftly, but darkness is everywhere, and all connected. white magic transportation moves its passengers at dangerous speeds; it’s black magic which harnesses the everywhereness of the dark and turns it into the safest and most efficient transportation known to life.
