A big thank-you to zipzipskins for their critique! Without his input I would never have known about all the glorious and creative ways I had been spelling basic words wrong (and of course there was other stuff like themes and prose and shit but that's boooooring…)
My prompts were CONSTRUCT and MASTER. I wanted to both use the words both pretty literally- she has a constructed body and a constructed plane and is the master of both- but also in the marginally less obvious senses- she has had most of her identity constructed, which she willingly assented to, until there was almost no division between what was her identity and what was her masters' will.
Anyway! Another Ironband piece, set about a decade before Ocular Haze and filling in a touch more detail about the bandcity of Emtu-Rafich. They have jets, for example. The jets have strained relationships with physics.
For the loreheads, this details the attempt to curb Emtu-Rafich's growing sphere of influence on the bandcities around it by the parahuman sect of the Kharaptei, who take the "biomechanical" part of the sunless world's ubiquitous augments and go a bit more… "bio" with it, if not in material than in form. They are unique in being one of the few factions that do not use a designated drone caste. Instead all have worker augments. They are also not very subtle with their diplomacy, apparently.
Their bandcity was rendered largely uninhabitable by a supposedly accidental cascade failure of life-support systems during their sequestering after two years of siege and bombardment by the Combine City.