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Dear investigator,

Hello! Thank you so much for taking the time to write for me. While I’ve included prompts for each fandom in case they're helpful, please don’t feel constrained to them if they aren’t working for you, or if some other plotbunny really inspires you; I am a genuine believer in Optional Details Being Optional and will be very excited to read whatever you come up with. <3

Casefic-specific likes:

• Hurt/comfort, whump, and caretaking of all sorts. Any sort of case centered around our protagonist(s) getting hurt, sick, or otherwise put through the wringer will be right up my alley. Maybe they get kidnapped? Maybe a routine case/mission goes horribly wrong and now they're struggling to make it out alive? I love the catharsis of a character stoically enduring all sorts of nasty stuff only to collapse and be taken care of when the mystery is finally solved and the adrenaline runs out.
• Unreliable narrators. Give me a case where our protagonist’s perception of what's going on, or their memory of what's already happened, isn’t as it seems! I love reading about altered mental states, which ties in nicely with the hurt/comfort bullet above.
• Heists, thefts, characters going undercover, all sorts of espionage and Spy Stuff.
• Fic that Gets Weird With It (if you’re ever worrying “is this fic concept too weird?”: the answer is no)
• Casefic where the case facilitates a deep dive into some unexplored corner of the canon’s worldbuilding, or that one background plot detail that never came up again
• Psychological mind games
• Organizational politics and bureaucracy
• Casefic as a vehicle for character/relationship study
• Horror (psychological horror, body horror, supernatural horror, cosmic horror - all the horror!)
• Genre/trope subversions
• Competence porn: people being clever and capable and doing what they're good at, and applying their skills intelligently in unconventional ways/settings
• People using logic & reasoning from first principles to deal with a situation / investigate a problem
• Dramatic irony: love the juicy tension created when two characters have completely different frames of reference for what’s going on in a given situation, and they’re unwittingly talking past each other…
• Engineering & systems, especially the kind that keep things running behind the scenes: maintenance, security, logistics, fault analysis, infrastructure design, etc
• Dread, paranoia, the subtle building realization that something is terribly wrong

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

• #FreeBart2K25!! I’d love to see Dirk and co. break her out of Blackwing, or her breaking out herself (with or without Ken’s help — I’m good with him getting a redemption arc/secretly having been good all along OR him actually being a card-carrying evil asshole) and in the process bringing a new case to the agency’s doorstep.
• More holistics! And more Blackwing, for that matter. I’m a huge SCP nerd and in that vein I’d love to see more of how and why Blackwing operates. Why did the projects start, and what are they leading up to? Where did the kids come from?
• What happens to Friedkin post-S2?
• Dirk on a self-discovery journey — what was his past/family like before Blackwing? What might have happened at Blackwing that he no longer remembers? How does his connection to the universe really work in practice?
• Dirk or Bart getting whumped!
• Anything that captures the show’s telltale “seemingly-random insane chaos that somehow all perfectly connects at the end” vibe, and reality generally being out to lunch.

DNW: explicit on-page sex (fade-to-black and the like is fine!), pregnancy, crossovers


Disco Elysium

• Anything about the pale!! A routine case complicated by the presence of pale? A case set on an interisolary airship mid-flight with all the pale weirdness that implies? A look into how the government deals with the pale? Harry and Kim having to deal with weird memory/perception issues caused by pale exposure? A case set many years post-canon as the pale apocalypse is slowly consuming Revachol? I find the pale so interesting and I’d love to see it explored in any capacity.
• The genius loci that is La Revacholiere, and how Harry might interact with it on a case
• Kim getting whumped
• The RCM dealing with the leadup to, or fallout of, Le Retour

DNW: explicit on-page sex (fade-to-black and the like is fine!), pregnancy, crossovers


The Penumbra Podcast
Beyond the events of the first two seasons, feel free to draw inspiration from OR entirely ignore/contradict canon from Seasons 3-5 as you see fit. I just want these two solving crimes (and maybe also doing a little crime on the side) together so bad. Post-canon is probably the easiest route here, but I’d also enjoy a casefic set during a canon-divergence AU (maybe Juno and Nureyev reconciled somehow post-S1 before the Curemother job?). Or TBH I’d be perfectly happy with a fic set at some nebulous point in time where there’s no good canon-compliant reason why they’re working together; go ahead and get handwavey with it.

• More about Hyperion City/Mars. (What happened to all those people who disappeared at the end of Season 2, and what might the aftermath of the THEIA takeover look like? What goes down in the Cerberus Province aside from it being your standard wretched hive of scum and villainy?) Or about the galaxy at large! Or Dark Matters!
• Nureyev’s past with the Brahman resistance.
• Them going undercover and Nureyev assuming one of his trademark ridiculous aliases.
• I love seeing Nureyev whumped so any sort of case involving that would be a delight.

DNW: explicit on-page sex (fade-to-black and the like is fine!), pregnancy, crossovers, canon compliant fic set during Season 3


Trigun Stampede
Plucky Journalist In Over Her Head and her Two Monster Boyfriends: it’s an excellent dynamic. Love the contrast between Wolfwood struggling with fresh, raw trauma/loss of humanity and Vash carrying the weight of two centuries of trauma that’s both scarred over and festered beneath the surface. And Meryl, the outsider, serving as the grounding force between them while maintaining her own agency, even as she’s gradually losing her naïveté about the world. I’m vaguely familiar with the major plot points of Trimax but have not read it (and am not familiar at all with the ’98 anime) — in the event of contradictions between Stampede/Maximum/’98, please stick to Stampede canon, but you’re welcome to otherwise draw plot elements from other Trigun continuities if you’d like!

• A canon-typical “monster-of-the-week”/“mystery-of-the-week” set vaguely post-S2 after the three of them have gotten back together again. Or the process of them getting back together again — maybe some amnesia shenanigans involving Eriks?
• A look at Meryl and Wolfwood post-S1. How are they coping in the immediate aftermath of July with the loss of Vash and Roberto + everything else they’ve been through, and what do they end up doing in the two years between S1 and S2? I’d like to think they stick together for at least part of it. Maybe Wolfwood comes home with her for lack of anything better to do, and winds up as her Watson helping her investigate her next story? What sort of trouble do they get into looking for Vash together?
• Anything involving Wolfwood getting whumped! He’s just so whumpable. I’d love a case that gives us a more in-depth look at the Eye of Michael, or his past with Livio, or a look at some of the other child soldiers the Eye produced. What’s really up with those vials?

DNW: explicit on-page sex (fade-to-black and the like is fine!), pregnancy, crossovers

My wonderful gifts:

The Assistant | The Employees - Olga Ravn 
Decades after canon, a scientist and her plucky assistant race to find a commercial use for the Objects before their lab loses funding — but not all is as it seems. Some really fascinating worldbuilding here; twisty fun from start to finish. 2.0k.

Final Maintenance Report | The Employees - Olga Ravn 
The last surviving custodian of the Six Thousand Ship prepares a message for their employers. Voicey and stylistically impressive and darkly funny and heartbreaking in all the best ways. 1.1k.

Memetic Fallout | There Is No Antimemetics Division - qntm 
Love in the time of cholera being slowly twisted into an entropic hole in reality. A really touching postcanon fix-it with a fun nonlinear structure and some cool in-universe documentation. 1.5k. 

Fresh Hell Dating Simulator | There Is No Antimemetics Division - qntm 
What if the hacking-an-eldritch-finger-monster-to-death-with-a-fire-axe meet cute from canon was a dating sim? This is so silly, and so fun, and filled with excellent puns, and random lines from it keep popping into my head and making me crack up. 2.6k, interactive fiction.

Some more recs:

Report on the Hal 9000 unit aboard the Discovery One | 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
A postmortem report on the events of the movie, investigating what caused HAL to malfunction — and uncovering some unsettling truths. Does very cool things with multimedia, from some wonderfully creepy visuals to inventing an entire programming language?? 3.0k.

Family Rules | Bullet Train (2022)
In the aftermath of the Shinkansen job, MI-6 takes Lemon and Tangerine's foster mother in for questioning, but she isn't going to give them up without a fight. A charming, delightfully voicey postcanon fix-it that made my heart do a bunch of funny things. 2.6k.

Amongst the Oranges | The Fall (2006)
Twelve years after the events of the film, Roy visits Alexandria at the orange grove. The fic I've wanted to read since I first watched this movie - such a beautiful epilogue to their story. 1.4k.

Parallels | Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self - Isabel J. Kim 
A teenage boy and his family get a Christmas visit from his clone. Lovely and heartwarming and also a fascinating exploration of how “instancing” would work in practice. 2.7k.

The Yellow Sine | The King in Yellow - Robert W. Chambers
The general premise of "The King In Yellow, but make it cyberpunk" was an instaclick for me, and the actual fic did not disappoint. So cool and so wonderfully creepy. 1.1k.

A Very Normal Day in the Life of a Polar Explorer | Rayuela | Hopscotch - Julio Cortázar
Went into this fandom blind, but all of the brilliant wordplay in this surrealist romp delighted me enough that I went to go check out the canon. ~2k, interactive fiction.

Until the Storm Recedes | Serious Weakness - Porpentine Charity Heartscape 
Being chained to a bed all day in your parents' vacation cabin leaves you a lot of time to think. You have until the storm recedes to find a way out. Fun and technically inventive, with a strong sense of atmosphere and a knack for building tension. 5.1k, interactive fiction. 

seams | The Substance (2024) 
Elisabeth locks Sue in her apartment… things get much worse from there. Brilliant, visceral body horror, and some deliciously weird character dynamics. 2.1k.

binary black holes | Taste - Sabrina Carpenter (Music Video) 
Vignettes from two immortal women’s centuries-long cat-and-mouse quest to kill each other, and the romance they didn’t expect to fall into along the way. Really fun structure, great chemistry, some truly striking imagery. 2.6k.

What Julian Doesn’t Grow Won’t Burn Him | Trailer Park Boys 
Julian and Ricky get fake-married in a madcap scheme to get Ricky a fancy new trailer to grow weed in. Delightfully fun - feels just like an episode of the show. 6.3k.

Turning a Sphere into Two Spheres | Turning a Sphere Outside In (Huggbees)
A kid genius and her dad work out the Banach-Tarski paradox, and also their family’s… deeply complicated history. Really good pastiche of the original; hilarious and educational to boot. 2.2k.

Dear Author,

Hello! I'm kubernetes on AO3. Welcome to my Oops! All Weird Sci-fi Horror signup. Congratulations on your great taste re: whatever tiny fandom(s) we ended up matching on, and thank you for taking the time to write for me!

While I’ve included prompts for each fandom in case they're helpful, please don’t feel constrained to them if they aren’t working for you, or if some other plotbunny really inspires you; I am a genuine believer in Optional Details Being Optional and will be very excited to read whatever you come up with. And while some of my requests are longer/shorter than others, I want to stress that I love all of these fandoms equally — everything I've requested is here because it's something I'd love to receive!

Major spoilers below for all of my requested fandoms. Also: I’m opting into the Interactive Fiction Challenge and Crueltide for all of my fandoms, and I love treats!
 
Quick fandom navigation links:
There Is No Antimemetics Division | Marion
The Employees | Worldbuilding
Scavengers Reign | Kris, Fiona

Some general likes:

• Acts of service (whether between acquaintances, friends, family, or lovers)
• Allusions (historical, literary, science, tech)
• Altered mental states: hallucinations, delirium, intoxication, induced fear, sensory overload / deprivation, memory alteration, mental breakdown, etc.
• Canon-divergence AUs (whether they make things better for the characters, much worse, or just weirder)
• Casefic / missionfic / “monster-of-the-week” / “day-in-the-life”
• Character / relationship studies
• Competence porn 
• Consequences of actions and choices
• Domesticity
• Dramatic irony / foreshadowing of future events in canon / subtle gut-punch moments
• Dysfunctional / messy / codependent / unhealthy relationships (platonic & romantic)
• Engineering & systems, especially the kind that keep things running behind the scenes: maintenance, security, logistics, fault analysis, infrastructure design, etc
• Fic that Gets Weird With It (if you’re ever worrying “is this fic concept too weird?”: the answer is no)
• Horror (psychological horror, cosmic horror, body horror - all the horror!)
• Humor / black comedy
• Hurt/comfort
• Learning to live in the aftermath: stories about people rebuilding physically, spiritually, and emotionally (and maybe getting messy and codependent about it along the way)
• Neurodivergence headcanons (demonstrated implicitly via the way characters think/act, rather than explicitly stated)
• Nonsexual intimacy
• Organizational politics & bureaucracy
• People using logic to deal with a situation / investigate a problem
• Psychological mind games
• Secrets: keeping them, letting them slip, trying to figure them out
• Sickfic / caretaking / convalescence / trauma recovery (heavy on the caretaking; love characters being taken care of. Needing help with basic stuff; being able to get by on their own & realizing they don’t have to; being out of the woods but still weak & exhausted; grinning & bearing increasing awfulness until the adrenaline suddenly runs out…)
• Stoic, hypercompetent, otherwise in-control characters approaching their breaking point
• The subtle, building realization that something is terribly wrong 
• Unconventional fic formats (nonlinear narrative, epistolary, pastiche, metafiction, CYOA / IF, found documents, etc.)
• Unconventional POVs (2nd person, outsider POV, multiple POVs, nonhuman POV, etc.)
• Unreliable narrators
• Whump >:)
• Worldbuilding

 

Re: my Crueltide signup - I’m perfectly fine with darkfic, ambiguous / bittersweet / unhappy endings, requested character death, etc. 

Some general DNWs:

• AUs other than canon-divergence (i.e. I DNW setting-change AUs and DNW trope AUs such as soulmates, hanahaki, etc)
• Christmas fic
• Crossovers
• Explicit sex (fade-to-black and the like is fine!)
• Pregnancy
• References to real-world current events from 2016 or later
• Some body-horror-specific DNWs (that are somehow relevant to all my requests this year): Amputation of body parts other than fingers/toes. Things in an eye socket that should not be in an eye socket.

There Is No Antimemetics Division - qntm
Marion Wheeler

There Is No Antimemetics Division is a sci-fi/cosmic horror web serial novel (approx. 70k words), available for free online here. You can find a Yuletide promo for this canon here.

I’m so excited to see this book traditionally published. I love how it plays with memory and perception via its cast of unreliable narrators, and the themes it explores really resonate with me. (How much of who we are is our past experiences and relationships, vs. our innate nature? How much injustice / discomfort do we ignore, even tolerate, before we break, and why? How do we go on with our daily lives in the midst of unspeakable tragedy? Why do we tell ourselves “never again,” only to see the same tragedy repeat itself years later?)

Marion is one of my favorite characters ever — I love "blunt, hypercompetent, traumatized, constantly calculating, ungodly-amounts-of-caffeine-and-tobacco-consuming science hero who’s constantly being kneecapped by the narrative" types in general, and making her a middle-aged woman is a surefire way to have me banging down your door. I love her thought process as she’s triaging a situation or working through a difficult decision, and how she’s stoic and caustic and kind of weird and also a brilliant, respected leader who cares deeply about her people, and I’m kind of insane about her marriage? (What if you were the only person I’d ever met who thought in the same way I did, & we built a weird little life for ourselves as the world fell apart around us, & then we had to throw it all away in a desperate, doomed effort to keep each other safe. What if we were ride-or-die to a feral degree even after we no longer remembered each other. What if I went crazy.) Write her doing anything and I’ll be delighted.

• I’m always down for a missing scene, or some worldbuilding, or a casefic, or a character / relationship study. Marion is living in the ashes of a world she and her coworkers have mostly forgotten, and a life she’s mostly forgotten; I want to know more about that world, and about that life, and how she copes with the insanity of it all. What is her day-to-day when there’s no imminent crisis? How did she first get involved with the Division, and from there to where she is today? What was the Division like back when it was the leader of a worldwide Antimemetics Coalition; what other innovations like germs & Vegas rooms did they have? How does asynchronous research work? What is it like to grieve for something you don't remember?

• I’d love some whump, sickfic, caretaking, hurt/comfort, etc. that explores the physical/emotional ramifications of all the trauma she goes through - and her general tendency to work herself into the ground - further than canon does. God could she use a hug and/or a vacation and/or a 15 hour nap.

• What was 2015 actually like for her and Adam? Marion’s endless loop of destroying herself for the cause and then forgetting it ever happened, even as the scars remain; Adam remembering it all (except, potentially, what she doesn’t want him to? What if that wasn’t the first time she mindwiped him?) and trying desperately to hold her & their marriage together through the fallout as he starts connecting the dots of what’s really going on… I want more of that. (I want more of them in literally any context, tbh.)

• AU: I find the idea of her and Adam somehow making it out alive (or at least staying in each other’s lives longer than in canon) compelling - mostly because I love the “characters live with the consequences of decisions they made while they were sure they were going to die” trope. I’d love anything with them interacting post-"Where Have You Been All My Life", amnesiac or not. (Maybe she "beats the universe and comes back to find out why"; maybe she survives through the incarnation of వ and they meet in the apocalypse; maybe she just hasn't sent him away yet? Or maybe they’re just both inexplicably alive post-canon, feel free to get handwavey with it.)

• 4987! I love her eldritch purse poodle and would love to know more about how it works, or how it went from “wants Marion dead” to “would die for her”. Something about Marion having to create new trivial memories to keep it from eating the important ones, or how she first discovered it? 4987’s POV might be fun.

• Feel free to count WILD LIGHT as Marion, because tbh I’d read an entire book about WILD LIGHT. What does it feel like to be her — an amalgam of your own memories and someone else’s memories of you, a 3-D mind transposed onto a 5-D space? Maybe humanity rediscovers her years later, with explosive consequences? (Or maybe Adam ends up as WILD LIGHT’s avatar and Codependent Bodysharing with the Elder God That Used to Be Your Ex-Wife ensues.)

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