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highadrenalineexchange 2025 has wrapped, and so I can reveal what I wrote! Although I think it would be pretty easy to identify this one. For one thing, I had a great deal of trouble reigning myself in from making it my second TGE fic in a year to be about "why the Ethuveraz needs trains and how it might go about getting them." (Perhaps I should make this and Amber part of a series titled "Ethuverazheise Train Cinematic Universe"!) The request was for Idra, Ino, Mireän, and Maia, and I had trouble getting all three of the kids in--Mireän only appears in passing--and I'm still not quite satisfied with how I managed to tie together Idra and Ino's plots. It is very much Ino's story, with the others mostly there to support her (except for the bit where Idra is all HI HERE'S WHY WE NEED TRAINS!) But my recip liked it, so that's good.

And my usual beta for TGE fics was unable to do it because of the time crunch, so I had NOBODY to double-check my pronoun usage, which is always nerve-wracking for TGE fics. I was still fixing things an hour before the collection went live.

Title: A Winter's Visit
Author: Beatrice_otter
Fandom: The Goblin Emperor
Written for: DontStopHerNow in High Adrenaline 2025

At AO3. On Squidgeworld. On tumblr. On Pillowfort.

Cousin Maia was very good with children, and very affectionate with them. More than that, he held very different views on the proper place of children than most others in the court. Thus it was that, unless the duties of the court required his presence in the early morning (which very seldom happened), he had breakfast with all the children in the Alcethmeret nursery old enough to reliably feed themselves without assistance.

When Ino had been seven, it had been wonderful. She had delighted in the attention, felt very grown-up, striven to be worthy of it, and the severest punishment her nursemaid Suler needed was a threat to keep her in the nursery of a morning instead of at the Emperor's breakfast table.

( Now that Ino was nineteen, it was a very different matter. )