hekateras

Hello dear writer and thank you for writing for me :)

My Sign-Up

General Likes
Shenanigans, Situations(TM), situationships, banter, fluff with grimness or bittersweetness, UST, pining, meetcutes, meet-uglies, whump, vulnerability, personality clashes, conflict and overcoming differences, missionfic, rescues, canon-divergent AUs, setting change AUs as vehicles for character study, sex as a vehicle for character/relationship study, forced proximity tropes like being trapped together or on the run, characters having hidden depths, escaping from danger

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 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

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Letter-exclusive section

Yuletide challenge opt-ins:
Interactive Fiction
Yumadrin Madness Invitational (drabbles)
Two For One (crossovers & fusions)
Wrapping Paper (art)
Unconventionyule (unconventional formats) (opted in for specific fandoms!)

My General Exchange Letter has additional likes, DNW elaborations. art likes

My AFIRB page on the app has previous requests for many of these fandoms with prompts you're welcome to take inspiration from in addition to the ones in the letter

Onwards to the fandom-specific section :)

Invisible Inc (Video Game)
Requested characters: Any in tagset. (But who's in the tagset, you may wonder? Basically all of them.) 
- Canon promo!
- First meetings: meetcute, meet-ugly
- I love it when characters who don't care about each other that much wind up in situations where they cannot help but care a little
- AUs where something is different (e.g. roleswap, or superpowers, or coffee shops, or alternate first meetings)
- Underestimated agents being terrifyingly effective in the right circumstances (yes this is about Banks and Xu)
- Any agent dealing with their coworkers' messy romantic drama
- Central being Done(TM) with any of them
- Literally anything involving the drama of captured, presumed dead (but really alive) and rescued agents: the moment of capture, or the moment when central operations finds a lead on them, the moment where they're tracked down and sprung free, the (potentially very reserved and reluctant) hurt/comfort on the jet
- Free hyperspecific prompt for you: an MIA agent is presumed dead when the agency gets misleading/incorrect intelligence that says they were moved to one of the corporate HQs... shortly before Incognita nuked them from orbit
- Post-canon exploration of how the agency recovers and continues its operations
- My favourite ships are Dr. Xu/Decker, Dr. Xu/Sharp, Decker/Internationale, Olivia/Rush, and Prism/Shalem 11, but you can write any ship you like if you feel the inspiration

Betrayal at Krondor (Video Game)
Requested characters: Gorath, Owyn (gift must feature one or more)
- Fixit where Gorath lives!!! I think it would be interesting to see him try to finish his mission of achieving some kind of peace where the moredhel don't get completely shafted in terms of territory. Feist really compared the geopolitical situation of the moredhel to the forced displacement of the Native Americans and then did basically nothing interesting with the parallels he put in there on purpose! But fanfiction can do better <3. Anyway I think it would be hilarious to put Gorath, Owyn, James, Locklear, Liallan and Prince Arutha in the same room/tent/neutral ground location and see what happens.
- Character conflict, character contrast! Getting to understand each other better
- Underestimating the other in some respect and then learning better
- Gorath vs. His Past, also Gorath vs. wanting to save his people who do not want to be saved (or not with his methods of peace and bitter reconciliation), Gorath vs. his ex wife
- Owyn vs. not truly fitting in with the institutions for mastering magic (but mastering magic anyway)
- I would love to see Owyn getting a moment to really shine and come into his own. I love that he fails to thrive in structured magic education but becomes an incredibly powerful magician while solving riddles and fighting murderous Nighthawks, moredhel, and Timirianya snakepeople cultists, there's something there about the way rigid forms of learning can be restrictive and close off possibilities for innovation, especially given how recent the practice of Greater Path magic is on Midkemia. This was obviously never going to happen in the books given the chronology of when what was written, but at one point during the Serpentwar Saga, Pug comes to the galaxy brain realisation that Lesser Path magic and Greater Path magic are really the same thing and you can master both, and I always thought it should have been Owyn to unlock that through the sheer power of determination, learning on the fly, and breaking the rules that never worked for him in the first place.
- Gorath's Returning at Elvandar but treated narratively as a weird, concerning and kind of messed up thing as it should be (I will spare you my usual hot take essay on why Returning magic is actually brainwashing). It's hard to think of a character who would be more hurt by a magical change that means he abso-fucking-lutely can never ever go home again because regardless of his personal politics or decisions, he is now visibly one of the Enemy. Realistically I feel like that would break him, and in light of that, the canonical MCD might almost have been a mercy? Anyway, this could be super involved or something short and sweet and h/comfy involving Owyn being increasingly concerned that Gorath is different/off somehow.
- I would also love something focused on Gorath interacting with James  - they interact fairly little in the game, but what's there is so promising, especially James being forced to trust Gorath so quickly despite his mistrustful nature! I'd love something that focuses on more of this dynamic, especially since James has Great Uprising Trauma (to put it glibly) as the war and the trip to Armengar and the escape from it was such a major event in his teenage years. They were on opposite sides of the same conflict, possibly on the same battlefield at some point, and that's so juicy to me.
- And speaking of trauma, BaK is set 10 years after that whole deal, which is like... a month in dog years elf years. I've always wanted to see something about the miscommunication and lack of understanding between the party members based on different perception of time. It's not that Gorath isn't naturally moody and taciturn because I'm sure he is, but, like, arguably still being in mourning from the war that decimated his people probably doesn't help.
- The game drops the lore morsel that Gorath might be half-human (?!!!) on one (1) random gravestone and if you feel like doing more with this, you're welcome to!
- Gorath/Owyn as an incredibly fraught situationship. I feel like Gorath is one of those characters so used to self-denial (he grits his teeth and reaches out to his worst enemy to achieve his vision of peace while accepting this means most of his family now wants him dead, for crying out loud) that it would take colossal amounts of plot contrivance or extraordinary circumstances to make him budge from that position of "There might be a connection here but I am not going to do anything about it." I would enjoy seeing those extraordinary circumstances or plot contrivance! :) Actually, if you want to make it super gutpunchy, you could even combine it with the "Gorath's Returning portrayed as wrongful brainwashing" prompt above.
- But honestly you can do whatever. This game is very special to me on a personal level and I've accumulated a lot of ideas for it in decades of hyperfixation, but honestly I'll just be happy to get new fic for it!

The Changeling - psychomachia (Original Works fic)
Requested characters: Worldbuilding, Alder, James, Feldspar (gift must feature at least one)
- Link to canon
- I would just love to see this world explored: fairy court politics, city politics (especially the whole magic vs. technology struggle, the exclusivity between augmentations and Changes)
- Feldspar & James becoming thick as thieves
- Relationship-centric Alder/James where they figure out the new status quo!
- I just think it would be sexy if James saved Alder from a silver bullet or something like that.
- James testing out his powers! also what James gets up to when he's on the Edges and how that works

Neuromancer (1984 novel)
Requested characters: Henry, Molly Millions, Wintermute (gift must feature at least one)
- I would love post-canon stuff (maybe something with a One Last Job plot, where Wintermute gets the team together again and maybe it's disastrous or maybe it's just weird)
- Canon-divergent AU would also be fun! You're welcome to bring in (e.g.) inspirations from the screenplay plot elements if you want
- One of my favourite parts of the novel is chapter 4 and the entire infiltration of Sense/Net with Molly on the ground and Case assisting while sharing her sensorium. It's just so tight, so actiony, so satisfying to read. Molly is a scene-stealer no matter what she does. I would love more of this.
- I would also love some of the exact opposite: I love the trope when characters are forced out of their comfort zone and into the other character's, forced to do each other's jobs. Maybe Molly isn't necessarily going to be a matrix jockey, but she could be in a similar operator/comms/tactical support/eye in the sky role while Case is the one who needs to do something physical with his squishy non-actiony cyberspace hacker body. For example, maybe they get bad intel and the locations of key objectives for a job were actually switched around.
- Case/Wintermute and Case going full transhumanist if you know what I mean. (Okay, I actually mean "tackling the question of what sexual orientation and attraction even means outside of meatspace", which is not exaaactly the same thing as transhumanism, but...)
- I would love to see a lot more of Wintermute and Molly. What is their dynamic like? She at one point makes fun of Case for not being more curious about AIs, but how would she deal in that actual situation?
- Molly Millions: The Early Days of being a razorgirl would be great.

The Red Strings Club (Video Game)
Requested characters: Brandeis, Donovan, Akara-184, Worldbuilding (gift must feature at least one)
- 3-hour and change-long cinematic Let's Play
- Pre-canon, especially Brandeis and Donovan first meeting. Brandeis having that special drink at the bar for the first time. How long did it take Brandeis, Freelance Hero and Definite Lawbreaker, to trust Donovan? What about vice versa?
- Pre-canon: that time Donovan's interactions with Proxyma got him with broken knees and an implant-rejecting virus
- Post-canon fallout or fixit, for example Donovan's grief or him trying to do something about Akara after all, maybe teaming up with Proxyma? Or ultimately deciding to do nothing?
- Canon teases at Akara/Donovan but doesn't go further than establishing Akara's weird obsession with him. Feel free to take it further!
- The supernatural: Between Gost's whole thing, the soul nodes, the Numen, and Donovan's apparent inability to leave the Club (which is downright implied to be immortality of some kind - he can win a game of Russian Roulette and apparently looks quite a bit younger than he is), Red Strings Club leans more towards urban fantasy than most cyberpunk media, and that's so unique and fascinating. I would love to see something that delves into this a bit more and recreates that feeling of uneasy wonder in the midst of a high-tech world.
- Proxyma's hacktivism: that group is so intriguing and we see so little of them. Brandeis seems to be on friendly terms with them, but not officially part of the group. I'd love to see anything involving them pre-canon, or even trying to come to terms with things post-canon. A post-canon exploration of Proxyma reacting to the climax of the game would be super interesting - feel free to make your own call on what choices were made by the player there.

Blackwell Series (Video Game but this time point-and-click)
Requested characters: Rosangela Blackwell, Joey Mallone (gift must feature at least one)
- Please feel free to retcon the series ending or otherwise run with an everyone lives!AU if you want! Joe can be alive or still dead, whatever you like.
- This fandom feels perfect for a casefic told in a mix of formats: for example, Rosa and Joe solving another ghost case as told through a mix of emails, scrapbooks and journal entries, a conspiracy board (could be as simple as post-its), in-universe instructions for some kind of ghost-summoning ritual, complaint form (probably about Rosa, LBR, but maybe about someone she's investigating), etc.
- I would love a plotline where Rosa actually tells a human friend about her whole thing and they believe her. Or maybe she could make friends with another medium
- I would particularly love IF! There's something so satisfying about IF fanfics for a canon that's already interactive media :)
- It would be fun if Joe could use the computer. (If you're going with post-canon fixit, maybe he either gets resurrected or stays a ghost but gets a power-up and is able to physically touch keys if he works for it.) Imagine all of the above, but with Joe.

There Is No Antimemetics Division (webnovel)
Requested characters: Eli Moreno, Adam Wheeler, Marion Wheeler, Worldbuilding (gift must feature at least one)
- link to canon
- Honestly I would just like to have more fic filling in the TINAD blanks. The TINAD verse is ripe for various kinds of interesting lost media, much of it often implying that the sources got disappeared by antimemetic anomalies
- Unconventional format would be so fun here. I would love the discovery of new antimemetic anomalies (past or present timeline) as documented through various formats like interview transcripts, journal excerpts, classified documents, spreadsheets (more on this below), maybe even in-universe creepypastas!
- Spreadsheets and expense reports: some tie-in stories in the TINAD verse have personnel expense reports come up as one of the clues that the Division is slowly shrinking/being eaten. I love drama told through dry bureaucracy and the creeping horror of understanding what the numbers mean, and I'd love more of this.
- 'and we guard the little fire' by kubernetes: this is great. I would love to have more exploring this addition to the world: fic remix, scientific documents or attempts at publishing findings about this. More broadly I'd love to see more 'natural' phenomena around both antimemes and antimeme countermeasures (i.e. information storage and record-keeping) and attempts at classifying them.
- I would love to see more about existing canon antimemetic agents or a cool new one you come up with! As far as I'm concerned, the Worldbuilding character is carte blanche for you to explore whatever part of Antimemetics Division history or operations you like :)
- The Alastair Grey Kill Agent story is still one of my favourites for a reason. The dawning horror of finding out just how many other people it's killed, and everything they tried to do to survive, is amazing. I'd love to see more of that same flavour of storytelling, maybe told through unconventional writing formats like journal entries, post-its, a conspiracy wall in a Vegas Room, etc.

Tactical Breach Wizards (rounding things off with another Video Game)
Requested characters: Dessa Banks, Rion (gift must feature all)
- Link: a great Let's Play that showcases the story very well
- Rion & Dessa as the ultimate worsties <3. I would just love to see more of these two and their weird odd friendship(?)
- Idea: something post-canon, maybe teaming up to track down and someone else (another member of the gang in trouble?). They both have "Team Ruthless Asshole who cares about people to a point but will cut the Gordian Knot" vibes and I love that.
- Alternately, Rion & Dessa teaming up to be a terrifying team of... hitmen for hire? hitmen with a mission? hitmen helping out Sabin's revolution by taking out key targets?
- Their whole vibe of bonding over poisons: basically more of that please. Also these two comics by waterdroid are generally incredible and also nail how I see them. You're welcome to bounce off them, for example, Rion just mercilessly making fun of Dessa's crush on Jen
- All the AUs! but particularly things like roleswap and allegiance swap and other kinds of canon divergence. What if Dessa ended up on Liv's team while Rion started out as working with Jen and Zan? Or what if they both worked for Liv? (Liv would probably be unstoppable for good, TBH). Or maybe even a canon divergence that leads into the same broad timeline as canon, wherein Dessa rezzes Rion after his attempt to betray Liv. Maybe Dessa was considering walking away from Liv too but only saw an opportunity to do it and survive after Rion makes his move first.
- The vessels! I feel like Dessa giving Rion her vessel, or vice versa, would possibly take multiple business months of trust-building, but I want to see it so badly. What powers would they grant? What would it take to trust each other with it?
- You're also more than welcome to bring in additional members of the gang (or Liv's gang). You are also more than welcome to include or allude to romantic ships, such as Jen/Banks, or Liv/Banks (maybe in a darker timeline AU where Banks was on her team full and proper), or Jen/Sabin or Banks/Sabin.

Some thoughts and commentary. I apparently posted seven works for Yuletide, five in the main collection and two in Madness.

Main

Memories of Glow
Fandom: I Was A Teenage Exocolonist (Video Game)
Commentary: It feels fun to write for a kinda shiny new fandom (new for me). I'm glad my assignment was fairly open because it gave me a chance to slightly vent my feelings about the endings/plot of the game haha :P It was a pretty lucky match because while the idea of writing about a more mature cast appeals to me more than writing about the cast as teenagers, so the post-canon prompt was right up my alley. I'm not quite happy with it, though... I keep thinking that the Sol & Sym argument and falling out would have been stronger if it were actually a scene in the story rather than alluded to, but I also think it might have taken over the story if I went that route... Yeah I'm of two minds here.

Mousetrap
Fandom: Thief (Video Games)
Commentary: This is a canon I was extremely obsessed with as a teenager, we're talking wearing closet cosplay to school levels of obsessed, it influenced my fashion choices at the time levels of obsessed. Had a ton of fun writing this even if I feel the concept I briefly sketched out probably deserves to be a lengthier fic.

Performance
Fandom: Invisible Inc (Video Game)
Commentary: The Pinch Hitter who filled my request also requested the fandom I got them into and I posted a treat for them because I couldn't let someone request my favourite niche obscure canon without making them something... I figured this out before author reveals, but after posting. Lol. Anyway, F&/F relationships and whump for all! Not the kind of thing I usually get to write for others.

Unlikely Constellation
Fandom: Citizen Sleeper (Video Game)
Commentary: Treat I wrote for a friend who deleted their sign-up but who's had this canon and ship eating their brain for the past months. Weirdly this is probably the one I'm happiest with as a fic that works as set-up but also stands on its own.

Mistuned Play
Fandom: Betrayal at Krondor (Video Game)
Commentary: This is the fandom I joined AO3 for... (R "no fanfics allowed" EF can eat me) Last year or so I discovered the app, saw that there had been people requesting this in the past and I had missed it, and went noOOOOOOO. When I saw this in the Yuletide requests this year I knew i would be writing something for it no matter if I got it as an assignment or not. The mini-challenge prompts were a little too good, I would have loved to do something with more visuals or with the IF prompt, but plain fic is better than a grand unposted and unfinished VN or whatever. Anyway, this is my oldest fandom, period. It significantly rewired my brain and you can't even recommend it to people today because who wants to play a 90s sandbox RPG with 90s graphics and lots of reading? No, it's just us 90s kids-and-older together in this little pit.... Anyway I might have made myself ship it, oops

Madness

Fresh Hell Dating Simulator
Fandom: There Is No Antimemetics Division, SCP Foundation
Commentary: I had to. There was zero anonymity here given that recip and I have DM'd about this very concept, which was a prompt I had for the CYOA exchange a few months back, oops. I really enjoy the TINAD verse and would love to write a more intellectually meaty contribution to it sometime given how many feelings I have about it, but for now, enjoy interactive fic where you flirt with your crush, who is currently in the process of saving you from a hellish finger abomination. :D

Guns & Resilience
Fandom: Heineken "Pride & Prejudice" Commercial
Commentary:
I would have loved to do a ton of Yumadrin drabbles and write more things for five minute fandoms this year but this drabble for the first one I watched had to be good enough. I really enjoy writing drabbles for the inherent restriction in scope. Really puts your back to the wall and makes you figure out what the most economical way of telling a vaguely satisfying narrative is. And I love writing something pretentious for a canon that's just goofy fun :D

Spotlight on my own gifts

lay it at your feet
Fandom: Tactical Breach Wizards
Commentary: A fantastic slice of post canon for TBW fans featuring some referenced past/whump, spot-on character voices and the tentative untangling of extremely complicated feelings between Jen and Dessa. Also has Rion being stupidly cute with Jen's cat.

and we guard the little fire
Fandom: There Is No Antimemetics Division, SCP Foundation
Commentary: I basically just need everyone to read this who has even a passing interest in Antimemetics Division or SCP stuff or ancient science and mysterious underground labs. It deserves to be another Tale in the continuity. I have already sent this to everyone I know who is even vaguely into TINAD. I will be intermittently hassling people to read it if they haven't already. Everything about this is just so dang cool and hard-hitting.

This was my very first Yuletide and it was kinda like discovering a big party next door. :D I've been making things in fandom for nearly two decades and in the past I've done a single-fandom exchange (Good Omens Holiday Exchange, for those familiar). Somehow I only heard about Yuletide last year, and was in time for nominations this year, which is ridiculously overdue considering I always seem to end up fixated on things with tiny or nonexistent fandoms. (Yes, Good Omens was tiny before the TV show!)

Let's have some stats.

Stories: 6 (2 assignments, 2 treats, 2 Madness treats)
Total word count: 15397
Fandoms:
The Last Unicorn
Road Rovers
Darkest Dungeon
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Invisible Inc
FAQ: The "Snake Fight" Portion Of Your Thesis Defense

If there's one thing I'm proud of with this exchange (besides starting WIPs and actually completing them within a reasonable time, godammit), it's my range. Like, damn, I really ended up writing an OG-flavour TLU continuation and OG-flavour episode!fic for a 90s children cartoon and also sapphic horror and some vaguely homoerotic frenemies nonsense, most of it within days of each other.

Here are the stories.

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Gift spotlight
Agency in Chaos by ?????????? MossyMossbird - Invisible Inc
This fandom was the fandom I was desperately hoping to get for Yuletide. It's the reason I signed up. And I got a delightful crossover between it and a different cyberpunk game I recently played and wrote fic for. I have no idea if the author saw my post in the crossover mini-challenge thread, but they nailed the vibes. Author, I am so grateful you offered it and so glad you got matched to me. Sorry I spammed your comments section because I got so excited I forgot the Edit key existed.

Post-reveal edit to this post: AAlkdja;lgjd;l this gift was written by a close friend and I had no idea because they're newish to fic-writing and have never written anything in this style before, I have been BAMBOOZLED