This journal will have the sort of thing I'd normally put in the description of the story itself. There's a lot I want to say about this particular story, however, and I felt that sticking it all in the description would be a bit much. More than the other things I've written, it has a tale of its own.

Portia is my oldest OC. She came into being sometime during my high-school days (I can remember thinking Portia would be a great name for her when we read Julius Caesar in English class.), so she's even older than Mataki by a few years. She played the same role then as the brown wolf does now, sort of an uber-big cosmic femme fatale. I envisioned her as something like the version that appears in Strange Attractor, although I think she came by her ability originally by growing too large and collapsing...you know, how people normally become black holes, I guess. When Mataki came along later on, she sadly took a back seat in my mind, and she curled up for a decades-long long cat-nap back there.

I'm not sure what woke her up. I mentioned her to a friend of mine once and tried a bit of roleplaying, so that definitely had her poking her head up over the seat and asking "are we there yet?" I got to enjoy her company again in my thoughts, and when I started sharing stories on FA, she dropped hints that she really ought to have a story of her own. I thought about what she might be and do now since Mataki had since usurped her place as the greedy too-big-for-anyone's-good character in my mind, and I decided it would be neat if she used her abilities to get rid of potentially dangerous space objects.

Two things finally got me to sit down and write it. The first was Anomalies of Scale, by Wendingo. It's a story very much in the vein of Strange Attractor, so if you like one, you'll probably like the other. Read it if you haven't! It stars a brown wolf instead of a black panther, though, and Portia's poking about a story got a bit more desperate after that. The second thing was this whole Covid-19 mess we still find ourselves in at the time of writing. Working from home with a very downsized workload, I suddenly had a lot more free time, and Portia finally said, "no more excuses!" so I outlined, then wrote.

I figured the story would be around 2000-3000 words, my typical length. Once I'd written the section where Portia does her thing to Tau Ceti I, I started to think about an ending, but I realized I couldn't leave poor Thaxter there with all his questions--that'd drive him nuts. I also wanted to try to come up with a (sort of) believable way one might actually turn into a living singularity, so I wrote the scene in the bar where Portia finally gives her origin. I've often heard writers talk about a story writing itself, and I sort of understood what they meant, but it really happened here! It fleshed her out quite a bit more, and I'm happy with the way she emerged. She had to be different from Mataki, and I found the difference--she's much more level-headed about her condition. Not that Mataki isn't nice most of the time (as a lot of you will point out), but man, she can turn the evil on when she's of a mind. Portia's more careful.

As to the tale itself, I'm the type that loves sneaking references into a story. There are quite a few here. Some are homages to books, short stories, and movies that have to do with cosmic demolition, and most people that aren't Portia or Thaxter are shout-outs to friends' characters. I'm also the type that likes to know if you found them, so feel free to put any guesses in the comments. ;)

Thanks for reading this far! I'm proud of how this story came out. If you haven't read it, and if this behind-the-scenes stuff piqued your interest in it, I'd be honored if you did!

Finally, a big thank you to Wendingo again and to Becky Cascane for all the inspiration and encouragement. You both rock.