I threw on a few scenes from Uprising to try to recapture Hermann’s voice (because honestly, I was not letting him be as difficult a person as he actually is in fic) and I gotta say, the moment where he pulls out the Kaiju blood and Precursor!Newt is all “Is that Kaiju blood?” is fucking hysterical because it’s clearly the Precursors being like 

um

Is that ours?

And you can tell they’re so pissed and taken aback but they gotta play along even though they’re super bad at it and just terrible at pretending to be Newt. Like, the only reason they’ve gotten away with it this long is because 1) they’ve stayed away from people like Hermann who know Newt, like they are genuinely freaked at the prospect of being within 100 feet of Hermann because they know he’s the one person who could sniff them out and 2) because “alien possession” as an explanation is a genuinely batshit insane thing to figure out. 

So I had a random thought about Alice and how Hermann must view “her” and it kinda plays into/powers a lot of The Prisoners’ Dilemma / Kidnapping AU but it still applies to canon so I figured I’d talk about it here.

– Newt says, “you can finally meet Alice,” in Uprising, which implies that he’s mentioned her to Hermann before.

– Hermann is clearly upset and gay about the very existence of Alice, but brushes off the mention of her immediately.

– This leads to the inevitable conclusion that he avoids thinking about her or discussing her. And this means, tragically, that Hermann, at some point, tried to do “the right thing”, so to speak. 

Oh, not the really right thing, societally, which would be to stop being a petty bitch about Newt’s “girlfriend” regardless of whether he and Newt had a relationship, and actually accept the dinner invitation (which was almost certainly a trap). But he at least doesn’t do the “wrong” thing which would be to relentlessly cyberstalk and track down every flaw about this witch who stole Newton. 

– Because if Hermann had gone looking for information about “Alice”, things like her resume, her alma mater, or even just her picture, chances are he wouldn’t have found anything. 

– Which would have raised every alarm bell and a ton of questions about who the fuck is “Alice” and maybe got him digging enough to do something sooner.

Because frankly there’s just no way that petty, nosy ( “Please excuse him, he’s a Kaiju grrrrrroupie.”) Hermann Gottlieb didn’t cyberstalk the fuck out of “Alice” unless he actively chose not to do so because he knew it would be his very bad instinct to do so. He tried to do the right thing and oops, may have doomed the world in the process. 

Unfortunately, I made less progress than I hoped for on the Kidnapping AU / The Prisoners’ Dilemma ch. 3 last night BUT progress of a different sort was made. 

I realized there were some scenes from 2025 – the year Newt and Hermann were actually together, that I had in my head but which weren’t very clearly sketched out. Sometimes it can be evident in a narrative when past events are not fully understood by the author and so are referred to even by the characters in vague terms. So I decided to go back and not just write the day Newt asked Hermann to marry him, but also the day Newt received the offer to work for Shao, and the day that the possession truly set in (though I may separate those two a bit, I had them as the same day for dramatic presentation purposes but realized it does strain credulity somewhat that it all happened at once). 

I also realized there’s a bit of dialogue from waaaay later in the story between Hermann and the Precursors that I was sort of excited to write right now, but that I feared I’d be less enthusiastic about once I finally got there because it’s quite far off within the story. I don’t want to lose my steam on it, so until about 2 am I wrote a VERY rough, exposition-y take on that conversation that I can hopefully edit to be more dramatic and exciting later, but that kinda also fleshes out my thoughts on how those two characters interact. It helped me nail down too things like “What does Hermann want from them?” “What do the Precursors want from Hermann? What do they think of him? What does their plan look like at this early stage? How much do they really understand humans? What are the gaps in their knowledge and how do they feel about those?” All this invisible shit that the author needs to have down solid or it makes the dialogue and story become wishy-washy and vague, but that may not be explicitly stated in the text.

Overall it worked out to be about 4,000 words over the last couple days ;P So that’s cool.