kubernetes_writes | Yuletide 2024 Dear Author Letter

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.)

Fandom-specific DNW: While I don’t care whether you mention her kids or handwave them out of existence, please don’t explicitly confirm them dead. (FWIW, my headcanon is they’re alive in witness protection somewhere, and Marion did the same thing to them that she did to Adam.)

[ back to top ]

The Employees - Olga Ravn
Worldbuilding

The Employees is a sci-fi novella (approx. 30k words), available on Amazon/Bookshop/wherever you get your books. You can find a Yuletide promo for this canon here.

I read this book the day after last Yuletide’s signups closed and have been waiting to request it since. I love its gorgeous, lyrical prose — how it turns on a dime from detached clinicality, to insane horror, to a raw, profound expression of empathy that will then proceed to live in your head rent-free for months, and back again. I love how its fragmented puzzle-box-y format invites the reader to take an active role in piecing the story together right alongside the Committee, and how that format highlights its themes of alienation and corporate absurdity, and how its world feels so richly layered and lived-in despite the short space the story has to develop it.

There’s so much the book leaves unexplored, or only vaguely alludes to, and that all creates a lot of room in the sandbox for fanwork to play around in. Pick one of those unexplored or vaguely-alluded-to things and tell me more about it!

What’s going on back on Earth with Lund and co., or elsewhere in space? How’d humanity get to this level of crazy-advanced space travel as early as the 22nd century? What is Homebase planning to do with the objects the Six Thousand Ship is collecting? What are the objects, anyway?

What do the dynamics of human-humanoid relationships, platonic or romantic, look like? How do the subtle differences between their lived sensory experiences of the world influence their personal lives? (On the ship, or on Earth, or elsewhere. Feel free to make up your own characters, or take, for example, the third officer and his lover, or Cadet 14 and her friend who refused to rat her out?)

The committee responsible for collecting the HR statements that make up the book’s structure is fascinating to me. Even if we don’t get to hear much from them, they’re present in every interaction we see in the book, the not-necessarily-impartial window the entire story is filtered through… and then, at the very end of the book, we learn that they’re humanoids pretending to be human, responsible for making sure the truth survives for posterity amidst a human-humanoid civil war. Who are they? What’s their perspective on all of this, on being pulled towards both sides of a conflict, when they’re not in full view of their corporate overlords? What was the leadup to their decision to “submit themselves for cleansing,” and what happens to them in the aftermath?

I want to know more about the child holograms. It’s interesting to me that the humanoids seem to get them too. Are they sentient? Tell me more about the absurd experience of raising a fake child in the depths of space, knowing full well that your child will never grow old and even if they did you’d never live to see it.

What happens to the final eight humanoids? Do they die together while exploring New Discovery? What happens to them after they wake up, rebooted, presumably back at Homebase - do they ever find each other again? Or do they somehow manage to avoid the biotermination altogether - in the aftermath, what do they want to do next, and what happens when Homebase sends reinforcements to New Discovery to collect the ship and its cargo?

This is a particularly fun canon for epistolary fic of all flavors. Pastiche of the canon format is something I’d love to receive (although I’m equally down to receive a fic written in a normal format!), but so is literally any other kind of epistolary thing you can think of. Corporate found documents? SCP-style writeups of the objects? 22nd-century Wikipedia? Go wild.

[ back to top ]

Scavengers Reign (Cartoon)
Kris, Fiona
My gift must feature one or more of my chosen character tags (giver's choice)

Scavengers Reign is a 12-episode sci-fi animated TV series (total runtime approx. 5 hours), available for streaming on Netflix (in the US, UK, Ireland, and New Zealand). You can find a Yuletide promo for this canon here.

Definitely the most underrated show I've watched in the past several years. I'm so obsessed with its bonkers speculative biology and body horror, its gorgeous Ghibli-esque animation, how it manages to strike such an effective balance at the individual scene level between evoked feelings of dread and wonder, its themes of transformation and finding meaning amidst horror and the awe that the natural world inspires... I love all of the show's main cast and their interwoven arcs, but I’m specifically requesting the two minor characters I've been thinking too hard about for almost a year now & really wish there was more fic about:

Kris 

Mean women! Give it up for mean women!! I really enjoy her hyper-pragmatic, calculated efficiency, her control-freak tendencies and the possessiveness with which she effortlessly dominates her crew. I find it very compelling how, in a story that's all about how your physical environment and your connection to the natural world changes your character and values, she is trying so desperately hard to avoid that change (and yet maybe it happens anyway, despite her best efforts). Anyways, the show left me wondering where exactly all of that came from. 

How did Kris become Kris - what was the colony she comes from like? How did she first become acquainted with Terrence and Barry, and what did the trio’s working relationship look like before Vesta?  Who or what shaped her view of the world? (Feel free to go wild with OCs here, including if you want to give her a relationship with an OC — I headcanon her as being into women, but any gender is fine.)

That ending scene of Season 1 left me with so many questions, and it rankles to know that we might never get an answer to them. (And as both a Kris enjoyer and a whump enjoyer it was also really iddy to me specifically.) What was the leadup to it? What happens to Kris in the aftermath, alone and half-dead among mysterious cultists? Does her path cross with the Demeter crew again?

I found Kris treating Azi as Terrence’s replacement goldfish weirdly compelling. Platonically or non-platonically: what if Azi took Kris up on her offer? What if she didn’t, but was forced to leave with Kris (and potentially Barry) anyway? What if the shuttle took off without either of them? (Or, really, any Kris/Azi mutual-manipulation, enemies-to-lovers, forced-to-work-together-to-survive, etc. situation is going to be right up my alley. I simply cannot resist toxic butch4butch psychological mind games.)

Fiona

I just think she's neat and I wish we'd gotten to know her better. We only ever see her filtered through the unreliable, often biased perception of others — the memories Hollow weaves together to get Kamen to do its bidding, the seeds of her personality and spirit that might still live on within Levi — and I’m curious about what kind of person she actually was. (While I’m okay with a fic about her and Kamen — because I guess that’s the path of least resistance, no? — I’d really appreciate if the fic focuses heavily on her, as opposed to Kamen, if that’s the route you go.)

Tell me more about what her life was like before the Demeter, or on the Demeter before the crash. Besides what we see in canon via flashback, what went into her decision to follow Kamen into space, and what did she leave behind? What were her dynamics with the rest of the crew?  I'd love to read about her relationship with any canon character you'd like.

How much of her, exactly, is in the Levi units? Levi says that Fiona "put a lot of herself" into them — while this could certainly be meant figuratively, an interpretation that's at least partly literal could be interesting to explore. Where does Levi end and Fiona begin, can Levi communicate at all with the parts of themself that are Fiona, and does Levi's fusion with Vesta's mycelial network complicate things? (As a side note, I'm good with whatever pronouns you'd like for Levi.) What else did Fiona design beyond the Levi's, and did any of it survive the crash of the Demeter?

AU: what if she survived the crash of the Demeter? I just think it’d be really fun to see how she would have fared on Vesta, either alone or with one of the canon groups - Azi and Levi (mechanic / roboticist / robot trio!), Kamen (divorce court!), Sam and Ursula, or even Kris and co.

Also: while I have no idea how Kris/Fiona as a ship would work in practice, writing this letter has made me weirdly fascinated by the prospect, so if you have any ideas to that end — I’d love to see what you come up with. Yuletide: inventing new and exciting rarepairs since 2003!

Fandom-specific DNW: Kris/Terrence or Kris/Barry; Kamen being portrayed as a good husband prior to the crash of the Demeter.

[ back to top ]