graveexcitement

Dear Yuletide Author,

Hi! I'm Grave (ao3 user

graveexcitement). I'm excited for this year's Yuletide! Thanks in advance for writing for me. I hope one or more of these prompts inspires you, but optional details are optional; feel free to ignore the prompts or only use part of them if a different idea strikes you!

Do Not Wants:
-Non-con. (To clarify: I don't want non-con but I like some dub-con, like sex pollen or other mind-altering substances.)
-Bathroom kinks (watersports/piss kink, scat, etc.)

General likes/favorite tropes:
I may not put some of these into my request-specific prompts, but if you want to jump off one of these tropes instead of or in addition to using the specific prompts, that's cool too!

-Time travel/time loops
-Telepathy
-Mind-melding
-Bodyswapping or bodysharing
-Bickering/bantering
-Canon divergence/For Want of a Nail
-Soulmate AUs (especially if they're somewhat "messy," like if there's multiple types of soulmates (platonic, romantic, maybe even enemy) and/or different kinds of soulmark mechanisms, like some people have "first words" and some people have "sharing dreams" and some people have "their soulmates' lies are written on their skin" — or anything else weird/messy you come up with!)
-Cuddling/snuggling/falling asleep together
-Hurt/comfort (especially sickfic)
-Humor

Smut likes/favored tropes:
In general I don't tend to think of prompts that are all that explicit, so my fandom-specific prompts probably won't have any smutty prompts, but if you do want to take it in a smutty direction, I'm down!

I like:
-mind-altering substances (alcohol, recreational drugs, sex pollen, aphrodisiacs)
-mating cycles/heats
-telepathy/mind-melding
-light bondage
-xeno
-tentacles
-impregnation/breeding kink

Non-kinky/vanilla smut also fine, don't worry.

My requests:

The Order of the Stick
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Zero Escape

The Order of the Stick

Where to find it: You can start reading it right here!

There's so much that I love about Order of the Stick: the amazing plot, the humor, the rich characters, all conveyed with stick figure art (the quality of which increases significantly as the comic goes on.) (Side note, I have read Start of Darkness, so feel free to incorporate info from there if you wish.)

Fandom-specific DNW: Binary-gendered pronouns for Vaarsuvius. They/them, ze/zir or other gender-neutral pronoun sets, or just "V" and "V's", are all fine with me.

Requested characters: Vaarsuvius, Redcloak
I'd be interested to see Redcloak needing to work either with the Order as a whole, or specifically with Vaarsuvius — either Redcloak finally turns on Xykon, or circumstances demand they temporarily ally. I'd love to see antipathy turn to grudging respect. Bickering/bantering and humor are always welcome!

Maybe Redcloak or Vaarsuvius time travel (mentally or physically) to their youth; unfortunately, the only other useful person old enough to have been alive at the time is Vaarsuvius or Redcloak. (Or maybe they both time traveled? Stuck in a time loop together?) Spell goes wrong, and they swap bodies, or form a telepathic bond?

Shipping welcome, I'm always down for enemies to lovers. A soulmate AU could be fun, I'm sure Redcloak would be horrified... (I also like platonic soulmate AUs, or soulmate verses where there are multiple different kinds of marks — romantic, platonic, enemy, etc.)

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Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

Where to find it: It's available on Good Old Games for fairly cheap!)

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is probably my favorite strategy game of all time. The eerie atmosphere, the stark ideologies, the completely alien world... I love it all.

Requested character: Planet
Planet! I'm fascinated by the Planet hivemind; the interludes where your faction leader dreams and speaks with Planet are some of my favorite parts of the game. I'd love anything looking at how Planet thinks and feels, how it struggles to understand humans and yet reaches out to them. What motivates it to reach out? What does Planet experience when the Voice of Planet secret project is completed? I find this alien consciousness fascinating and want to read more.

Optionally, feel free to include your faction leader(s) of choice; my favorites are probably Deirdre, Santiago, and Zakharov. For instance, what if Santiago embraced mind worms as the superior battle force; how might she handle a closer relationship with Planet? What if Deirdre joined Planet's hivemind herself (pre-Transcendence)? If you want to ship Planet with a faction leader, please feel free to explore that; go weird and wild. Worldbuilding about Planet, its mind, and its lifecycle also welcome!

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Zero Escape

Where to find it: It's a trilogy of visual novels available on Steam. The first two games are bundled on Steam as "Zero Escape: The Nonary Games," and the third game is sold separately as Zero Time Dilemma.

Zero Escape is one of my favorite games — "eclectic cast of characters are trapped in a location and forced into a death game" and time travel shenanigans? Sign me up!

This section will have spoilers for the second game, Virtue's Last Reward.

Requested characters: Dio, Kyle Klim
I'm interested in a fic exploring the similarities between these two: they're both clones, created to serve a specific purpose. Dio is desperately chasing his assigned purpose, while Kyle attempted to avoid his. They also both have some flavor of parental issues. So, anything exploring this, and/or their reactions to realizing that they have some things in common, would be interesting!

Other ideas: Kyle has to travel back in time, and for some ungodly reason Dio has to come with. Or maybe they're trapped in a time loop together? Or they form the world's most unwanted morphogenetic bond (possibly complete with them remembering the timelines where they've killed each other).

If you want to take this in a shipping direction, I'm down. Enemies to lovers is tasty, especially with telepathic/morphogenetic bonds involved, and I think a soulmate AU could be interesting here, in a "oh my god my soulmate is HIM? Fuck off" way. (I also like platonic soulmate AUs, or soulmate verses where there are multiple different kinds of marks — romantic, platonic, enemy...)

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I hope you are inspired by something in this letter! Good luck, and have fun!

Sincerely,
Grave