kubernetes_writes | Casefic exchange letter

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