Chapter Text
The Avespi Domestication Guide
Written by Sesuva Acastrum, 29th Bloom, She/Fae
Adapted by Irizziti Acastrum, 7th Floret, She/It
Translated into Terran Standard by Tahlia Orfeo, She/Her.
Welcome to the floret transcription of the Avespi Domestication Guide.
Now normally this kind of textbook would be written in affini for affini, an encyclopedic manual which would prove an essential text for any who now reside in and around the Avespi-Protectorate. However my dearest floret requested a copy and while it was adorable to watch her nose scrunch up as she read she confided in me that it was simply too much of a struggle. Though perhaps it can still serve a purpose for those of you who want to tease your florets who need some intellectual humbling.
After some careful consideration and a lost bet with my floret I have decided to allow her the honour of transcribing this new addition to the works of Sesuva Acastrum. She is being such a good little typist for me and please ignore any and all spelling and grammatical errors that she makes in the process of being vineeee ff=uu=ccewkkkkkkddd come on dear you can do better than than. Apologies just had to test the limits of her stenographic abilities under the rapturous delight of her mistress’s divine touch.
In any case we should turn to other matters, namely a brief explanation of the contents of this delightful document as well as some matters of history.
Translator’s Note
After reaching out to The Lady Acastrum I was delighted to be given not only her blessing with my translation project but also a series of interviews with her. These interviews were instrumental in making the following work translate well into Terran Standard, if I were to directly translate it from the original Av-Affini, plenty of the terminology would be difficult to parse. After all, the first edition was written nearly a century before the Terran Protectorate was established and the Human Domestication Guide was published.
This does not only extend to the language used but also the fact that this text will be written with humans in mind and as such may use pre-Compact Terran terminology, chronology and turns of phrase to streamline the text for its intended audience.
Additionally as part of my agreement with The Lady Arcastrum, I have signed a TT-561-E – or as it is more commonly known, a “Whimper Contract”. Any and all relevant typo’s and errors in the additional text which were created as a result of the author’s euphoria or lust are to be translated to their closest understandable equivalents. The Lady Arastrum wanted to be sure that each moan and titter from her floret was recorded across any and all translations of this work; it's cute. But that is enough of a preamble from me, more translator notes may be peppered throughout this text if and when they come up but there are options to hide them if that is your preferred reading experience.
What is an Avespi?
Well that is a remarkably difficult question to answer out of the gate, we have an entire guidebook ahead of us and you want to condense it all into a single subheading? I know I said you could take some liberties with the format pet but really? Couldn’t you think of something better in that cute and empty and empty and emptyyh and emmm0optttyu and emmmpmoitt tfreefwmiopkwefpmip[mefw OI w.
Sorry about that I may have gotten a tad carried away there, don’t worry, a top up of Class-M is all I needed to turn my little dolly back into a good little typewriter. Right, I suppose that the question does merit an answer even if it is a tad distasteful to compress it so thoroughly.
Translator’s Note
Much of the initial translation for this section draws upon references to animals only found on Aü'tkcha and colours only visible to sophonts with cones that perceive the ultra-violet spectrum. As neither is a common basis of knowledge for humans, The Lady Arcastrum reviewed and allowed me to write a new description based on Human culture and terran fauna. However she did request to directly edit the second paragraph to be more in line with her own thoughts.
The avespi are large mammalian xenosophonts reminiscent of many species of mega and micro bats in regards to their basic aesthetic but have plenty of unique traits which will be detailed later in the text. They come from a culture which prioritised dominant and submissive roles similar to the Affini Compact but with a callous level of disregard for most of the submissives of their species. A cruelty which the affini compact has certainly corrected.
Avespi are adorable in most every conceivable way, they are adorably obsessive and if you are lucky enough to become one of their obsessions they will shower you with gifts and anything they think you would enjoy, though if you ask me the most enjoyable gift they give are their adorable smiles.
A Rough Timeline.
In the year 2461 the Affini Compact had begun to fully sink its vines into the north-west quadrant of the Milky Way, a zone of the Perseus arm which had gone all but ignored by the native starfaring sophonts of the galaxy. The outer Perseus arm is filled with young bright stars which makes it an ideal location for dyson ring construction and a short but scenic route for an interstellar cruise but little else. The radiation which permeates the region severely limits the number of potentially habitable planets, even after terraforming.
Because of this we planned around the zone as more of an access point for the rest of the galaxy, a pitstop on their grand adventure to domesticate the Milky Way. That is why it was such a surprise when we reached the outskirts of the Heart Nebula and found a graveyard of ships floating in empty space.
Each and every ship they found was an oddity, not only for their location but the fact that each was disabled and destroyed without any sign that a weapon had been used against them. I hesitate to go into any more detail than that for a text intended for floret consumption. I’d hate to upset my darling little ttyufieofppppoppp mmmmmmmm hhhh~
In 2462 we managed to find a pair of these ships in the middle of a dogfight near a local star, though it looked more like a dance at first glance. Neither ship seemed to be opening fire on each other and yet the life signs in the slower ship were showing the sophonts inside were near death. We leaped into action and managed to board the ship before any sophonts within succumbed to the strange weaponry.
That marked the first contact between the Affini Compact and what was then known as the Avespi High Dominion. An adorably ironic name considering what would become of the sophonts, ah I am getting ahead of myself.
The pacification of the ship marked the start of both the Avespi Cotyledon Program and the Avespi Domestication Campaign or as the Avespi insisted on calling it at the time, ‘Rsitskiiia-Yyskaani’ – roughly translatable into Terran Standard as The War of Cultivation .
The Avespi High Dominion had managed to colonise a handful of star systems within their sector of the Perseus arm but compared to the compact it was equivalent to a grain of celestial sand. If scale was the only factor the Dominion would’ve fallen before the week was out but unfortunately it took much longer. This however is not the section to go over such things, I shall return to a more basic timeline. In the first year of the Campaign the compact struggled to rescue more than a handful of ships, it was demoralising but we of course persisted.
In 2466 the Diospyrous received a communication from an Avespi warship known as the Szvitterro, that in and of itself would not be odd – the cuties did so love to tease and taunt us during the whole campaign. The intriguing fact came from the fact that it was not an Avespi that sent the message, it was an affini. A colleague and dear friend of mine, Mangifera Sorritarri, 32nd bloom. She had managed to infiltrate the Szvittero under the guise of being captured and from there slowly pacified the crew with the use of addictive xenodrug infused fruits.
The discoveries attributed to Mangifera as well as the work of all aboard the Diospyrous marked the turning point of the campaign and in a matter of months the Avespi homeworld of Zrikillis was fully under the Compact’s care and the Avespi Domestication Treaty was signed by the five Arch-Domina of the High Dominion. It was the fastest time in all my blooms that I had seen a domestication treaty signing turn into a florgy, sometimes I pinch my core for not scooping up one of the Arch-Domina for myself. SHhhhhhh mmmy little scrivvnaAAAaaaa jssst kkkeepp typiinngg gooodwjido[qwiojhq D[.
fFFRrom thereeee the. From there the Avespi High Dominion folded into the Affini Compact Avespi Protectorate in a matter of days, and the only reason it wasn’t instantaneous is simply because the final High-Domina refused to sign until she came and by the everbloom Mangifera refused to stop edging her.
The last and most interesting part happened next, in the weeks after the signing of the Avespi Domestication Treaty nearly every Avespi in the compact began to undergo a strange yet adorable metamorphosis. Avespi are hermaphroditic and in the wild would undergo a physiological transition when they were claimed to the service of a dominant within their own species. We anticipated that our influence would not affect this but as it turns out, there are few forces more dominant in this universe than the affini.
During the cotyledon program we had noticed their hermaphroditic nature but we had only anticipated a transition to occur if and when they became a floret. We did not expect the entire Avespi species to… well you’ll see. For more information on this please see the subsection on The Great Avespi Forcefeminisation in the chapter detailing their Physiology.
In the following years the Avespi have flourished within the vines of the Compact so make sure that if you are in a part of space they frequent your affini comes equipped with plenty of tasty berry grafts.