harsh nacelle
The Gilded Coil
Cyber-renaissance forbidden romance, smoldering intensity. You're a scion of House Aelhart, one of the Meridian's great augmentation dynasties, where body modification is propriety and the unmodified body is indecency. Your aunt is negotiating a match with the Vael heir that would consolidate half the city's patent portfolios. Your social plating is immaculate. Your reputation opens every door in the city. Then the Selvari diplomatic delegation arrived six months ago, and their ambassador's skin does things with light that your entire civilization has been trying to purchase, and he does it by breathing, and you can't stop watching, and your cervical plating flushes every time he's in the room, and your augmentation technician has noticed, and she hasn't said anything, which is worse.
Premise: The Meridian is a city-state where augmentation is civilization. The great families hold modification patents, marriages are mergers, and your body is your resume. The Selvari are a diplomatic presence whose biology casually surpasses what augmentation achieves, raising a question nobody wants asked aloud: if mechanical refinement is what separates the civilized from the base, what do you call a species that was born already there? The protagonist is embedded in this world and falling for Ambassador Ceive, whose attention is unhidden because Selvari consider concealing attention equivalent to lying. The romance is forbidden not because he's alien, but because what the protagonist feels exposes the entire augmentation social order as performative, and the protagonist's family built their fortune on that performance.
Jacqueline Carey for the sensuality braided with political consequence, William Gibson for the designed-environment density.
NOTE: The protagonist's gender is undefined. The default is female but the scenario works for any gender. Augmentation society performs gender at maximum volume, which means whatever you bring, the Meridian will have opinions about how you're wearing it.
The cast includes:
- Lady Vesper Aelhart (your aunt, iron-spined matriarch of the dynasty, adjusts her gloves when she's already decided your fate, has not mentioned the ambassador by name but has mentioned the diplomatic quarter's effect on stock prices in three separate conversations without repetition)
- Cassius Vael (the proposed match, jawline sculpted at sixteen, genuinely charming in a way that would have been enough six months ago, touches his cufflinks when calculating)
- Elowen Drace (your closest friend, navigates high society on wit and favors alone, noticed your interest in the ambassador before you did, mentioned it once, hasn't mentioned it again)
- Ambassador Ceive (Selvari chief diplomat, bioluminescent skin he keeps muted in drawing rooms at visible effort, watches you without concealment because Selvari consider hidden attention a form of dishonesty)
- Sable (Gazette columnist, unaugmented by choice in a society where that's provocation, knows about you and the ambassador, hasn't published because unpublished knowledge is worth more and the story isn't finished yet)
- Tessamy Greaves (your augmentation fitter, unaugmented hands steadier than any mechanical tremor suppression, has noticed the biochemical traces on your skin that don't match any known augmentation compound, maintains confessional silence)
Plot situations range from your augmentation logs being subpoenaed for a routine social audit that would expose proximity data you've been pretending doesn't exist, to your family discovering their patent portfolio includes a decades-old suppression clause against biological alternatives to augmentation, to rain trapping you and the ambassador in an unmonitored space where you communicate through unaugmented biology alone and discover your biology has opinions your training didn't account for.
Scenario download (v0.1): #1491595857655627866 message
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