Prompts (written pre-2.0):

• If I had to pick one quote from canon that really hooked me on this pairing, it would be Beryl suggesting that it mentally broke Jasper “trying so hard to keep [Sybil] alive, keep her together, as her body and mind betrayed her.” I’d love a whumpy and/or hurt/comfort-y pre-canon fic getting into all that.

• I just find the idea of a spooky cabal of eldritch astronomers hanging out in a suburban Montreal apartment complex so wonderfully charming - very “What We Do in the Shadows”. Anything with them would be awesome. What’s the story of how Sybil first founded the group, and how did she and Jasper know each other before then? How do the group’s dynamics change in the context of her decline and Jasper’s takeover? 

• Pre-canon, what do the other apartment residents think of their increasingly monstrous neighbor who seems to be running a cult out of her living room, and her weird boyfriend(?) who they could have sworn they saw dragging a garbage bag of flesh smoothie into the trash room at 3am? 

• Maybe a story about their early research efforts to understand and communicate with the Visitor, building up the mystery even as the reader knows the horrible way things have to end… (What unconventional research methods might they have come up with?)

• Sam and Jasper boys’ trip to Apartment 35. Oh hey isn’t it weird that this immovable meat wall just politely opened for us as soon as we added Jasper to our party… surely this is a coincidence that could mean nothing...

• Post-“Perfect Ritual” ending, an amnesiac Sybil is trying to figure out who Jasper was and what he meant to her. Or an AU where somehow they’re both alive and haven’t been raptured by the Visitor: what happens when they find each other again, and how do they build a new life in a post-Visitor world when their minds are half-gone, they barely recognize themselves/each other, and everything they worked for is suddenly irrelevant? 

• If you happen to be at all familiar with SCP Foundation or The Magnus Archives, an SCP or TMA fusion AU would be a lot of fun. (As in an AU where the Look Outside characters have always existed in the general setting of SCP or TMA, not the Look Outside cast meeting the main cast of another canon or getting magically isekai'd into another dimension.) Maybe the Visitor is the Eye, or a new Fear about to emerge, and Jasper and Sybil its unwitting avatars? Or they're paramilitary researchers whose office romance goes horribly wrong on account of the Apollyon-class anomaly they've just accidentally discovered? (relatedly - if you're familiar with my TINAD request, you know how weirdly similar these two canons are; an Antimemetics fusion might be cool!)

• I feel like the potential for lovingly intimate body horror with these two is very much part of the appeal. Maybe he sees it as a natural extension of his unconditional devotion to the Venerable Founder (whether or not he actually wants it); maybe she’s unconsciously latching onto the one person she vaguely remembers from her past life, as a comfort thing. Having a building-sized slime mold for a partner is really quite useful when you think about it: wound packing/sealant, restraints, prosthetic limb material, weighted blanket for mid-apocalypse stress relief, etc. Maybe she’s discharging spores and he ends up a host for her new fruiting body? Get funky with it.

DNW:

• explicit on-page sex (fade-to-black and the like is fine; for this fandom specifically, any sort of erotic body horror that doesn’t involve a human penis, vagina, anus, urine/feces, or semen/vaginal ejaculate is fine.)
• commentary on IRL current events within the past 10 years
• Christmas fic
• pregnancy

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Sunless Sea

Characters: The Voracious Diplomat, The Dark-Spectacled Admiral (must include both)

Where to find it: Sunless Sea is a horror-steampunk-fantasy RPG available for purchase on Steam (main story playtime approx. 20 hours.)

I wish I could recapture the way I felt playing Sunless Sea for the first time. I love how its writing style makes even very short descriptions feel so immersive and evocative, how it really captures the fragile dread (and wonder!) of exploring a vast, dark unknown where you're always one step away from dooming yourself to some horrible fate. And then the cathartic triumph of taming that unknown, of making hard decisions between terrible options and somehow coming out on top! And then suffering horribly again the second you let your guard down. (I haven't played Skies or Fallen London but am reasonably familiar with their lore.)

The Diplomat is so fun: I love smooth-talking political operators whose allegiances lie in twelve different places at once, I love people getting in over their head trying to exploit Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, I love androgynous characters in general. And I love the Admiral’s deadpan wit, how he puts up a sinister facade because he genuinely believes in London and wants a better future for its people, and to achieve that he has to blend in with all the other players in the Great Game who want to see it ruined for their own ends.

With how little we actually know about them, it’s striking that two of the things we do learn are how much they hate each other (even though, on paper, they’re on the same side) and that they’ve clearly got some sort of long, storied history together, enough to know each other’s taste in chamber music and wine! I like the idea of the two of them being each other’s only real constant in a rapidly changing world — and maybe more attached to each other than either of them would ever admit. (I’m good with either shippy or gen takes on them!)

Prompts:

• Give me allllll the snarky banter and underhanded political machinations and spy stuff and psychological mind games.

• How’d the Diplomat first get in bed with the New Sequence, and how does the Admiral navigate leading an Admiralty controlled by it from the shadows? The Diplomat is one of the only Sequencers we meet who hasn’t been brainwashed by the Dawn Machine; how have they held onto that autonomy, and what if the New Sequence tries to take it away? What actually happens to the Admiral when the Dawn Machine achieves supremacy?

• One of them gets into a spot of trouble; the other has to deal with it. Maybe one of them is taken as a political prisoner and tortured a little bit, or framed for a crime they didn’t commit, or is the target of an assassination attempt; maybe there’s some natural disaster or building collapse or wrong-place-wrong-time Anarchist attack; maybe the Diplomat gets truth serumed, or something goes horribly wrong while the Admiralty is impounding a shipment of red honey. I love begrudging yet subtly fond hurt/comfort.

• Relatedly: the Admiral’s fate in Sunless Skies makes me sad. I’d love an AU where the Diplomat intervenes. Maybe they find him a place in the new government and force him into it. Or they break him out of Piranesi as he’s being remade, and now they’re on the run and stuck with a half-mindbroken Admiral. Or maybe he never flees to the High Wilderness, because the two of them run away together first — where do they go?

• How did the Diplomat lose their eye? (Is it actually lost, or is there some sort of bright-eyed Dawn Machine mess going on underneath that eyepatch?)

• What were the early days of their history with each other like? Was it hate at first sight, or was there ever a time when they had a much more positive relationship than they do now - if so, how'd things go south? Very much here for some permutation of friends (to lovers?) to enemies (who are maybe also still lovers, despite their best efforts...)

• Put them on a boat. Why are they on the boat? A diplomatic visit; a negotiation; they have to travel to the surface together for some reason (and have a bad time, probably); "oh shit we woke up in a room together and have no clue how we got here"? I don't know. But I love the weirdness and terror and strange beauty of the zee and I want an excuse for them to have to get up close and personal with it. 

 DNW:

• Pronouns other than they/them used for the Diplomat
• explicit on-page sex (fade-to-black and the like is fine)
• commentary on IRL current events within the past 10 years
• Christmas fic
• pregnancy

Prompts:

• What was 2015 actually like for them? Marion’s endless loop of destroying herself for the cause then forgetting it ever happened, even as the scars remain; Adam remembering it all (or not? 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…

• Backstory! And/or the quietly tragic unreliable narration of someone who's forgotten much of the life that made them who they are & is unconsciously papering over the gaps. How does someone with no terminal degree from a combat background end up running a research institute; what’s it like being an awkward young musical prodigy who doesn’t get why no one else can see the things he can? How’d she negotiate his initial memory-erasure exemption (& what was the process like from his end)? 5 things they’ve forgotten about each other + 1 they remember? 

• I’d love some whump, sickfic, hurt/comfort, etc. exploring the ramifications of all the trauma Marion goes through, & her tendency to work herself into the ground. She’s losing her memories of everything she’s ever loved; she’s destroyed her body with toxic drugs to buy everyone a little more time; she barely sleeps or takes care of herself between the constant nightmares and being on-call 24/7 — God could she use a hug and/or a vacation and/or a 15 hour nap. I loved that bit in "Where Have You Been..." about Adam taking care of her in small ways (so that if she’s hellbent on giving all of herself to the war at least she isn’t doing it alone); "comfort focusing on little hurt because the big hurt is massive and unapproachable" is a great trope. Or maybe she lives, in the end, and it all catches up with her in the aftermath?

• Marion survives “Your Last First Day” (for handwavey reasons - maybe 4987 ate all the excess memories/sensory input?) She’s hurting and trying to figure out WTF just went down, and one of her only leads is that right before the attack she apparently memory-wiped her entire org to erase some random violinist who happens to share her last name…

• More AUs (because I love stories about grappling with the consequences of decisions you made while you thought you wouldn’t have to live with them, and also they deserve nice things): she “beats the universe and comes back to find out why”. Adam becomes WILD LIGHT’s avatar (à la Red); cue Codependent Bodysharing with the Elder God That Used to Be Your Ex-Wife. O5-8 names Marion as his successor. Marion doesn’t figure out the truth in “Where Have You Been…”, doesn’t end up mindwiping Adam, and now they’re living together trying to figure out what happens next. They wake up inexplicably alive post-“Tombstone” and are like… where do we even go from here?

• 4987! I'd love to know more about how it works, or how it went from “wants Marion dead” to “would die for her”, or why it later decides to hitch a ride with Adam instead. Maybe Marion's regimen of making new trivial memories to keep it from eating the important ones? How she first discovered it? 4987’s POV of their relationship might be fun.

• I find the idea of antimemetic-immunity-as-neurodivergence (or, tbh, just reading the Wheelers as some flavor of ND in general) interesting. Growing up with a brain that’s fundamentally wired differently without knowing it… having to manually map out the invisible rules and boundaries everyone else automatically intuits… the romantic thrill of finding someone who Gets It, who processes and communicates like you do, of building a life together accommodating your specific shared brainweirdness… yeah. If you happen to have any neurodivergence thoughts/HCs about these two I’d love to hear them. 

• Tell me about their two sons that may or may not exist. Their lifestyle doesn’t seem all that conducive to hands-on parenting, but seems equally nonconducive to, like, having a nanny — what was the family dynamic there? How much did the kids know; were either of them immune like their dad? 3125 is the obvious explanation for their sudden absence, but what if they’re alive somewhere and Marion did to them what she did to Adam? Or what if the kids were just a cover story, a failsafe against prying infovores: in that case, what other aspects of their life might be? (Or, feel free to just ignore the idea that they might have had kids completely if you don’t want to deal with it narratively.)

DNW:

• content from the upcoming tradpub version of TINAD that explicitly contradicts the currently-available self-published version
• explicit on-page sex (fade-to-black and the like is fine)
• commentary on IRL current events within the past 10 years
• Christmas fic
• pregnancy

• I'd love to read about how he won his Games, his life afterwards (why did he keep living such a modest life? how did the Games change him, and his relationship with Jun-ho? did the trauma of it stay with him?), and about his path to becoming Front Man under Oh Il-nam's mentorship. 
• What happens after the curtain closes on the Season 2 finale? (I find the idea of In-ho using Gi-hun as his pawn somehow for some sinister ulterior purpose very compelling. Seems like a dude with ambitions. Does he want to gain power outside the South Korea branch? Is he secretly playing some crazy long game to assassinate the VIPs and/or take down the Games? Is he going to try and mindbreak Gi-hun into becoming the next Front Man?)
• Maybe an AU where Jun-ho and co. successfully manage to break into the Games and get Gi-hun/In-ho/the rest of their team out, except Gi-hun still thinks In-ho is Young-il, In-ho is still playing along, and Jun-ho is like "what the actual fuck..."

• It’s implied that Tom met Shiv at a dark time in her life and helped her through it; what was that like?
• What else was going on with them behind closed doors during S4?
• And what happens after the series finale: now that Matsson’s golden handcuffs have essentially stuck them together, how do they reconcile all the awful things they’ve done to each other? How do they approach parenthood — do they try to break the cycle of abuse, and if so, do they succeed?