hekateras

Hello dear creator and thank for looking at my letter! :3 This letter is split into a copy of the sign-up details (for convenience) and fandom-specific prompts.

General likes
- whump and hurt/comfort. I prefer action-heavy whump and badass whumpees over whump that leans heavily into victimisation and helplessness
- Meetcutes and meet-uglies: characters who will end up as friends or lovers meeting under the worst circumstances or hating each other at first sight
- Relationships forged in fire, bonding over trauma, codependency, friendships and romantic/sexual relationships hard to categorise in terms of whether they're a good thing or not. Relationships as questionable coping mechanisms. When characters can't quite say what they are to each other except "someone important"!
- Relationships turning on a dime: strangers becoming allies, meet-uglies, a former enemy becoming the only one you can trust, "enemy of my enemy" trope.
- Reveals of every kind: identity, power reveals, etc! Any kind of dramatic story beat where relationships rapidly switch polarity or gain new context
- Dramatic, adrenaline-fuelled, high-stakes action. Characters in danger!
- plotty Gen fic, missionfic, casefic, pre-slash or pre-relationship, slow-burn vibes
- Robots, androids, cyborgs, artificial beings
- non-sexual intimacy
- intimacy that is sexual but not directly about sex (e.g. pillow talk, lazy mornings after, characters just fooling around in bed)
- Genre blends, such as putting something IN SPACE, or a touch of urban fantasy
- competency kink, identity kink, trust kink
- fluff with a touch of grimness or bittersweetness
- cloak-and-dagger, cat-and-mouse, spies, secrets
- wild nature, birds, rats, creepy crawlies, Cool Plants
- the aesthetic of ruin and tangled industrial locales
- Format: unconventional or experimental formats such as IF or drabbles and drabble sequences, 1st, 2nd, 3rd person POV

General DNWs
Gore, noncon, heavy crying in the context of physical whump, kidfic, noncanonical incest or underage, pregnancy of POV characters, focus on needles or surgery (especially cutting and IVs), focus on IRL modern era geopolitics, eye horror/trauma

NSFW likes
- I prefer levels of explicit detail typical for the M rating!
- Oral sex, handjobs or frottage and half/fully-clothed sex are great!
- For penetrative sex, if prep is called for, I prefer prep to not be a huge focus
- UST-ridden scenes that are only metaphorically sexual (e.g. reaching inside someone's mechanical parts to repair them...!)
- characters feeling conflicted, "but I shouldn't"
- Non-formalised BDSM or dom/sub dynamics
- Consensual but not safe or sane
- The Eroticism of the Machine
- not inherently kinky things (e.g. cyborg robotics repair) being written and perceived by the characters as something uncomfortably kinky

NSFW DNWs
Omegaverse, scat, watersports, bloodplay, rimming, fisting, stuffing, noncon (dubcon A-okay!), most kinks that would fall under degradation or humiliation (I would not consider light submissive behaviour to be this), bottoming angst as a major part of the story

Art likes
Different art styles, from realistic to stylised to pixel art or manga cover vibes, organic and sketchy styles, mixed media art. Dramatic poses, contrasting colours, hair, flying cloaks and coattails, wings, giving characters beautiful wings for no reason and with no explanation, just do it.

Art DNWs
Graphic sex, eye horror, needles and things going into skin (cyborg augments are ok)

PROMPTS SECTION

Invisible Inc - Fandom Promo here

Post-OMNI story about agency recovery or tracking down more MIAs and trying to make it in the new world!
Take the two agents you like best and give them a missionfic
Take two agents you like and show them meeting prior to working for Invisible Inc. Bonus points if they're at each other's throats or trying to stop each other, I'm a sucker for 'worthy opponent' dynamics. ('Annoyingly persistent PITA who refuses to get lost or die' will also do!)
Take the agent you like best and show me how they got recruited and what their adjustment to agency life was like
All the Canon divergent AUs: "What if this agent worked for the corps", "What if this formative event in this agent's life went differently", etc.
A deeper exploration of the advanced tech the agents use in the infiltrations and any physical or psychological effects it might have. The game suggests they're neurally linked to each other and the Operator for tactical purposes; what does it look like? Do they share visuals, sensations, pain? Or is it more like a very advanced radio? Or potentially both depending on the needs of the situation?
Missionfic/heistfic: A tense blitz tactics infiltration in the style of the game, perhaps? You could have a focus on problem-solving, e.g. the scouting and investigative part of the mission - trying to suss out which guards are where, where the target is, and how to circumvent obstacles and make a clean getaway. Alternately, a focus on the emotional stakes: deciding when to call it quits and get out, or making the call of abandoning an agent, disobedience or conflict between an agent and command, etc.
Alternately (or maybe in addition to), something more heist movie flavoured: maybe less of a tactical assault team vibe than the in-game missions and more of a focus on the job prep, gathering intelligence prior to entering the field, subverting security in advance (planting bugs? Phishing? Social engineering? Disguises?) You could also make the heist target more esoteric and fancy than what we see in-game: for example, a tech trade fair, a CEO's mansion with valuable art, etc. I'm equally excited about the agency at the height of their operations, pre-raid, or post-raid, trying to deal with a post-Incognita-takeover world and rebuild their operations at the same time from almost nothing, so that every new job really has to yield some profit as they don't have the resources for complete duds, or even worse, losing people
Pre-canon: Decker (back when he's still a K&O Chief of Security and working for the corps) trying to track down one of the other agents. Internationale, in her freelancer saboteur days? Banks? Gladstone herself?
- If you're looking for inspiration on what could make for a fun hook or core concept for a missionfic, I've found it super helpful to take inspiration from extra difficulty and mechanic mods and/or think of a fun scary new security measure the corps could have and show the agents running into that.
Tracking down a missing/captured agent! Could be pre-canon or after the OMNI mainframe, when the agency is actively rebuilding.
Something deeply personal to one of the agents: Tying up loose ends? Shalem trying to track down a lead related to his mother? Banks trying to fix things in her formerly besieged hometown again?
A more classic spies and espionage story involving an undercover agent infiltrating a corp for a prolonged amount of time. For example, Prism, who has the wonderful in-game ability of using holographic disguise rigs!
What if Central got a lead that Draco and/or Rush, who she believed lost when the PEIA fell, are still alive and held prisoner somewhere?
A tense whodunnit involving a (real or suspected) leak of intelligence from the agency, and Central (or someone else) trying to get to the bottom of which agent might have betrayed them. Maybe set shortly before the raid, if Incognita leaking information to the corps is discovered in advance? Could be canon-compliant (in the end, she's able to keep it a secret) or a full canon-divergent AU (if they figured out what Incognita was up to before she tipped off the corps, how would it play out?) Could even go classic for this one and start with a dead body (an agent who had an "unfortunate accident" in the field because they were getting too close to the truth? Enough to make e.g. Decker or someone else paranoid about how much trust they're putting into the AI?)
Basically anything I prompted for this before

Betrayal at Krondor

Odd friendships, characters reluctantly building trust, cultural differences, "light is not good" and "dark is not evil" tropes when applied to the moredhel and eledhel, fish out of water trope (whether it's Gorath in the middle of a bustling human city or Owyn struggling to stay alive in the Northlands), subtle/understated whump and angst.<br />
"Missing scene" style things set during various points of the story.
Pre-canon, such as what Gorath went through before he decided that warning the Kingdom was the only way to stop this war, him having to fight his own kin to make it to the border, etc.
Post-canon, focusing on Gorath during the fallout of the events under Sethanon.
In the universe lore, dark elves and light elves are essentially cut from the same cloth, what would this look like explored in depth with regards to Gorath? I've always thought there was something deeply sinister about The Returning and the way it's written in the books (REF did not agree with me pfft </3.) It feels a bit like brainwashing doesn't it? A forcible change of allegiance, and for what? If it flips a magical switch from "evil" elf to "good" elf - putting the baggage with that entire concept aside, which we shouldn't TBH - then Gorath kind of seems like a shitty recipient for that sort of thing. He's already doing an unimaginably selfless thing by going the path of the greatest resistance to try and prevent another war; in what way does "Oh you've magically turned into an Eledhel and can never go home to the Northlands because they will try to kill you on sight even more intensely, enjoy being Good now and living in our magical forest where territorial disputes with humans are not a problem, because of magic (✿◕‿◕)" help anyone involved? Would you like to explore this idea a bit more and finish my drawerfic- er, I mean explore the idea of Gorath on Timirianya being a little off after what he goes through in Elvandar, or a completely canon-divergent take on what happens when he goes to Elvandar? )
The Great Uprising was only ten years ago, in recent memory - James and Locky were barely teenagers at the time, while Gorath witnessed an engineered massacre of his people and his clan, thrown into the grinder to power the false prophet Murmandamus. The story never quite unpacks all this baggage between them, and barely addresses the aggression of the moredhel in the context of them being a displaced people driven to the Northlands by the Kingdom's expansion, but what if it did?
Owyn is one of the more dangerous people in the Kingdom by the time the game is over and none of the others quite know what to do with him. As per the lead game writer, [the sequel that never got made] would have "continued the storyline about Owyn's eventual rise as the magical advisor to the Kingdom of the Isles (to be told over two games) serving in a capacity as both magician and spymaster".
Gorath & Owyn vs. Gorath/Owyn... I can't say whether I ship it or not without writing a whole damn essay, and nobody wants that. Suffice to say I would enjoy a & story but I also welcome a fic that sells me on this ship.
I no longer recall if this is part of the (messy, novelisation-included) canon or something I decided was just plausible in canon, but consider: Pre-canon, teenaged Jimmy the Hand directly caused the deaths of many of Clan Ardanien, specifically. (The evidence for this goes as follows, IIRC: During the Kingdom troops retreat in A Darkness at Sethanon, he rigs the cellars of Highcastle to explode on the moredhel troops after the Kingdom troops have cleared, and elsewhere - in the game? in the novelisation? who knows at this point - Gorath recollects that he managed to keep his clan from the worst of the damage of the meatgrinder that was Sethanon, but they suffered heavy losses after that, which feasibly could mean the Highcastle incident... anyway, whether I totally hallucinated the canonical basis for this or not, it would be fun if, during canon, they found out how close they came to meeting that day! :')
Last prompt but not least, ending fixit! :') While the tragedy of the ending is incredibly impactful, one cannot escape the feeling that Status Quo Is God (and more to the point, fitting the game's plot into the timeline of existing books) was a major factor in it. But from the perspective of Kingdom vs. Northlands politics, it would have been incredibly interesting if Gorath had, you know, made it, right?
So, Gorath!lives AU: Gorath & Cullich meeting again, Gorath, Liallan (who seems to assume leadership in the Northlands now) and probably Pug, Arutha, maybe Jimmy & Locky, certainly Owyn, being involved in the kind of tense peace talks that would not have been possible prior to all this

Neverwinter Nights: Mask of the Betrayer

Important: for the "All: Knight Captain and Companions" request, I would like something that includes (on some level) all of the potential companions that you can have in your party at the same time: so Safiya, Gann, Kaelyn, and either Okku OR One-of-Many. You do not need to include both Okku and One-of-Many in the same story (although that would be kind of sick) since by default you can only get one but not the other in a given playthrough!
A "spared Okku" story where the KC still becomes evil, or a "killed Okku" story where the KC resists the influence of One-of-Many and follows the 'good' storyline, or a mix of both! Lean into those morality struggles!
Spirit/dream realm shenanigans. Explorations of trauma, memory & identity loss. History repeating itself.
The game shows the way the Hunger affects the KC, but doesn't seem to go into whether the curse has any other effects on their personality/psyche. I mean, their soul is rotting in a wall somewhere! I'd love to see some version of the KC being subtly (or not-so-subtly) fucked up because of this and not knowing why until they learn the truth of the curse, and even then, will lifting the curse really free them from those feelings? How much of it is just trauma, at this point?
Whump and h/c welcome. Darkfic welcome. "Bad ending"/monstrous Spirit Eater stuff welcome. Tragic romances that end badly are welcome too. Want to write a heartwrenching tale of the KC eating Okku, being slowly corrupted by One-Of-Many and then eventually devouring the souls of all of their friends? GO FOR IT!
- As point of fact, feel free to go heavy on the monstrous Spirit Eater stuff in general, bad ending or not. It's just good drama!!!!
Random KC/Gann idea: I've always been tickled by the thought of the KC being attracted to Gann-the-Spirit-Shaman-constantly-hanging-out-with-spirits and not knowing if it's romantic/sexual in nature or the Spirit Eater being hungry
I like the idea that the KC got badly burned by Bishop and is now a lot more cautious in any new relationship. They sought YOLO-esque comfort in crisis when they thought they wouldn't live to see the next year once before and they regretted it. (That said, I don't have a preference for the gender of the KC in the story or requested ships)
Some of my favourite things about the story are the way the strings of fate tie it all together. The connection between you and Akachi, Akachi's companions and you. The way you end up retreading his footsteps, only partially by choice.
For the Worldbuilding nom, what about something that explores the life (and death) of a previous Spirit Eater, before the KC came along? 8) Since the KC canonically still has some access to the memories of previous Spirit Eaters, you could still connect this to the main plot if you wanted, such as tapping into a previous Spirit Eater's memories to overcome a situation

Sunless Sea

Tireless Mechanic/Captain: I am very weak for the Mechanic's hyper nerd archetype and would love to see more of him and the Captain... such as more Exchange A Secret Smile-style interactions, stolen moments -- or, alternately, a whimsical and wacky courtship! Canon is very straightforward about "propositioning" your officers, heh, but I would love to see some pre-relationship flirtation (or interactions either party is convinced MUST be flirtation, but isn't quite sure), banter, that kind of thing.
Soap Opera at Zee! A story that focuses on one (or more!) Officer romances, maybe with some jealousy or love triangle nonsense thrown in. What if the Zee-Captain had a lover in every port, so to speak, or a string of lovers, and this made the Mechanic more determined to get their attention... ;)
Alternately, something delving into the Mechanic's backstory with the Fingerkings or otherwise deepening and exploring his subquest! Especially for the & ship. I want to know how he got into that situation, how he found out about Hunter's Keep... but it doesn't have to be pre-canon! What if the Tireless Mechanic fell asleep? (Maybe something that happens while exploring during shore leave?) Gimme conflict!
Admiral/Diplomat: This begs for a plotty and emotionally complicated spy intrigue story. I do love spy stuff and intelligence work and conflicting loyalties and getting all cozy with your frenemy so feel free to lean into that as hard as you like :) Maybe something set pre-canon, relating to the events of the Fall of the Admiralty, the New Sequence, the Dawn Machine faction, etc? Or the opposite, exploring them trying to hold on to London as control over it passes to a different faction
The Admiral's and Diplomat's POV as they both vie for influence over an intrepid Zee-Captain (or perhaps multiple Zee-Captains)
Canon-typical adventures! I'm particularly fond of zee-monsters, shipwrecks, Irem, and all the esoteric ports with their own rules.
I have no preferences on the Zee-Captain's gender or backstory/allegiances/etc. Just run with whatever feels most interesting to you. You're also absolutely welcome to feature multiple Zee-Captains and/or horribly kill them off :)
I haven't played Zubmariner or Sunless Skies but you're welcome to include content from those games, or the larger Fallen London verse, if you feel it fits

Tactical Breach Wizards

Canon-typical investigation or heist/break-in would both be excellent! Or, y'know, both.
Dessa Banks and Jen Kellen trying to get their PI agency off the ground would be fun. A string of cases, a lot of which seem like a waste of their time, struggling to find one that actually pays well. Banks using her Unique Skillset for the investigation or maybe figuring out a business model where they can combine investigation and rezzing for a profit. IIRC we see from the epilogue that they offer the service of tracking down missing persons and even bringing them back to life, does this imply Banks at some point is able to rez people who've been dead more than an hour? (An hour is kinda limiting for missing persons purposes, after all!) Oh, and don't forget (optionally) the weird RST and slow-burn and trying to figure out if they LIKE-like each other, maybe. It's the first bit of normalcy they've had since the events of the game so there'd be an interesting adjustment period! Oh, and I'd love to see more of the Druid Mafia and/or Rion involved, especially the Dessa & Rion dynamic. They're just so fun.
Speaking of: What if Jen goes missing, and Dessa + Rion (or, alternately, the whole gang) wreak havoc to track her down? Or more generally them teaming up for some mission of personal importance that requires a more ruthless touch
Rion & Dall working together to have him assassinate the leader of the Chapel, as per one of his epilogue endings, would also be fun
Honestly, feel free to take any character, have them be kidnapped by bad guys (or otherwise mysteriously disappear), and have the rest of the gang track them down
Jen first unlocking her Craft! She's the only one whose details we never learn
Dessa's Death Door Dimension and its implied time wonkiness lends itself to all sorts of fun time travel shenanigans in fic. Would be fun to see the version of Dessa who gets warned by older Dessa in a dream actually try to traverse canon events with some amount of foreknowledge.
More generally, the existence of prophesized alternate universes also makes crazy possibilities fun to explore. I'm so here for Time Loop Fix-It in the form of a character trying to use their foresight to figure out how to escape this!
I would enjoy the canon-typical flavour of drama + whimsy humour, but I wouldn't say no to a more serious, pathos-filled tone, either.

Citizen Sleeper

The DLC ending where you actively help the Greenway intertwine with the Eye: what does it look like many (many, many) cycles later? Having the station's electrical system connected with the root and mycelium network of the Greenway sounds like brilliant madness, what effects are there further down the line? I'm curious to see a station that is genuinely alive in some manner. (This could also be combined with the 'Sleeper merges with the Gardener' ending!)
I'm also very curious about the DLC ending where you actively help the Greenway intertwine with the Eye. What does it look like many (many, many) cycles later? Having the station's electrical system connected with the root and mycelium network of the Greenway sounds like brilliant madness, what effects are there further down the line? I'm curious to see a station that is genuinely alive in some manner. (This could also be combined with the 'Sleeper merges with the Gardener' ending!)
The Maywick encounter ends differently: Sleeper ends up being taken into custody along with Ethan (as co-escort? tag-along? prisoner?). Ethan very belatedly develops regrets and a conscience when he sees the even more ruthless way Maywick treats his prisoner
Sleeper's search for identity and getting an actual name, probably post-canon. Maybe they've been hanging on and surviving long enough that they actually start to accept that they have some kind of future here (which would be terrifying in a different way).
In the game, you encounter another Sleeper who is almost dead and never really make contact with them. I would love to see a second chance at this post-canon: Sleeper is well-established on the Eye when a new Sleeper escapee arrives and they have to deal with a whole new host of problems when trying to protect them (and have to weigh the risk of how much to stick their neck out for them, when alerting the corporations to the fact that they're still alive and out there also puts them at risk)
Feel free to take any of the endings and explore them more: maybe Sleeper's life after they leave on the big corporate ship, or Sleeper's new form of consciousness in the Gardener ending (do they remember what came before? maybe they track their old friends and try to help them out in some way, such as helping out Riko, or how they deal with the Flux or a similar threat to the Eye), or they leave with Bliss and Ankhita and continue their adventures elsewhere. Or they stay on the Eye and get locked in a tense struggle for independence against Castor

Crossover Fandom

Fusion where they were always set in the same universe: for Citizen Sleeper x Red Strings Club, maybe Sleeper runs into the Club on some big space station or corporate planet. Any character walking into the club to get information (and in turn be grilled for information by Donovan) would be really fun: maybe an Invisible agent is investigating a lead, or Sleeper is looking into the local crime groups to figure out who to get stabiliser from, or bounty hunters are looking for Sleeper, or Jen wants to sniff out how another PI works.
Sleeper (CS) gets a job at the Red Strings Club. I.e. they take in a very different android
I've long yearned for something involving the Red Strings Club team running interference with an agent from Invisible Inc. trying to do recon in their city. Or, AIs from the two different cyberpunk games butting heads! What if the Invisible Inc. tries to pull a job involving that bar and Incognita or their hackers run up against Brandeis and Akara-184?
The premise of Firefly but they're Zee pirates on the run from... the New Sequence, and perhaps with a complicated relationship with the Admiralty? Or the other way around? It could be so good!!!!

Original Work

Mistrust warring with attraction and a certain undefinable gravitational pull! What I love about these noir and cyborg-related ships is how they all suggest having an agenda and being at cross-purposes to each other and how much it complicates any feelings that might otherwise more easily be indulged. Character conflict is juicy! Character conflict complicating romantic relationships is even
Feel free to make it a little unhealthy - throw in a little blackmail or manipulation, a little pressure, a little push and pull
For the noir stuff: a snippet of a murder mystery or some other casefic flavouring would be great. The Homme Fatal is usually a client with a secret, can they be trusted? But you can also flip it on its head and have them come to the detective's aid when least expected
For the cyborg/mechanic I'd love something flavoured with transhumanism and navigation of awkward dependencies: both in the literal technological sense and social sense. Also welcome: ruminations on the human form (both literal and wink wink nudge nudge), ship-of-Theseus themes, and the theme of human(oid) ingenuity: as tight as corporate measures get, there will always be people finding shortcuts, tunneling through, jailbreaking things, jury-rigging things, cracking DRMs, increasing access... maybe some of them do it out of ideological convictions about freedom of technology and information, and some of them just want to turn a profit and make a living, or both, it's all good. In that same vein I love it when pragmatic and largely self-interested characters discover a cause and someone/something to protect, in spite of themselves. Some nice juicy low-hanging fruit would be an injured cyborg (who may or may not be an homme fatal who knows I don't make the rules) ending up at the doorstep of the other character in need for help.
For cyborg and cyberpunk-flavoured ships in general, regardless of the exact setting, I like a focus on gritty survival and ephemeral, mercenary relationships in the face of an overpowering, ruthless system. Moments of trust and connection, in spite of all that...
Don't feel like you need to stick closely to the implied genres: I would absolutely love some futuristic scifi!noir, or IN SPACE, or "19th-early 20th century but there are also cyborgs", or non-Western versions of these settings. Cyberpunk meeting fairytales, fairytales meeting noir, etc. Steampunk twists on the ships or alternate history settings are also welcome.
Feel free to mix the requested ships too while you're at it. A noir detective who is ALSO good with tech and repairs? A combat cyborg who is also an homme/femme fatale?
I love a good old-fashioned casefic/whodunnit that also has the investigating character discover truths about themselves or find romance!
Fairy tale retellings are great. Pick one and make it noir or cyberpunk or both...