Coming soon: Mus Numena (Patreon)

If you’ve been following me on Mastodon or Bluesky, you have probably seen me noodling around with titles, some story bits, and such. Here’s the official announcement: the next Patreon serial is Mus Numena, a near-future sci-fi novella* set on Earth, with humans.

And (ahem) mice.

Yes, this is what happened to the “dangerous robotic mice” prompt I mentioned on February 12th’s post. I figured this was going to be a short story, but as I kept noodling with it, well, it was clearly going to be bigger than that (insert obligatory macrophile growth joke). The story as it’s developing gives me dark satire vibes, with corporate greed leading to extremely bad ends (you know it’s fiction because that would never happen in real life, ha ha oh no). I am not quite sure of the rating level, either; at this point it’s barely PG-13, but it might gleefully jump into both sex and violence, so don’t read this as a bedtime story to young children.

While I’d hoped to get it going this week, I think it’s more realistic to push it off at least until next Wednesday; I want to get more chapter drafts finished, since right now, things feel fluid enough that the two chapters I have written so far might change. Once it does get going, though, it should be weekly, and keep us going for a while.

So stay tuned!

— Arilin

*I think it’s going to be “just” a novella, but…