silveradept | AO3 Output for January-July 02022

This output Is late, because some of the things that were going to go in this got delayed significantly from their original reveal dates. ("Everyone who participated and wrote a gift gets a gift" is a correct and proper rule, but it does sometimes cause delays.)

So, here we are again, six months' work of works and their commentaries.

Dream Lovers (Because Otherwise, You'll Dream Alone) (3289 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Witch/Young Couple
Characters: Moderately Embarrassed Man Looking For A Curse-Breaking Witch | Asher, Woman Who Lives By The Gospel Of Raffi | Mary, Shop-Keeping Witch With A Slightly Sentient (And Very Smug) Shop | Sophia
Additional Tags: Dream Sex, Not That Sexy Sex Scene, Polyamory, Lucid Dreaming
Summary:
Sophia's customer wants to understand his lover better, which seems straightforward until she's pulled into a lucid dream with him and his lover to try and break a curse set on them by another witch.

For some reason, even though I was trying to get to something that would resemble a good sex scene, the characters refused to help me out with it, because, as they eventually told me, the problem was with the sex part. And so, instead of trying to fit things where they wouldn't go, even with a lot of lube, I went with the awkwardness and the interference and things not going very smoothly at all, and this is what happened. I feel like it worked reasonably well, even if it does mean that I haven't really written a lot of explicit anything. (Or, at least, what I would consider explicit anything, despite what previous-me put as warnings for their works.) I think the humor and the snark in it works out fairly well. (And that naming the witch Wisdom has its perks.)

Four Very Lucky Hacks (2844 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Final Fantasy I
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Red Mage/Red Mage/Red Mage/Red Mage (Final Fantasy I)
Characters: Cheery and Optimistic Red Mage | Galen, Nervous and Slightly Fearful Red Mage | Julian, Brash and Lusty Red Mage | Octavian, Mostly Sensible Red Mage Team Leader | Augustine
Additional Tags: Crucial Cameo By A Black Wizard, Killer Robots, Victory By Luck Still Counts, Banter, A Jolly Holly Poly Treat
Summary:
High above the planet, four Red Mages attempt what would be unthinkable, defeating the Fiend of Air. Even though they have already knocked off the other three, they might believe their luck has finally run out as they encounter both the Fiend and a piece of old technology still programmed with its original intent.

Unlike the last two years for Holly Poly, I did not get assigned the person with the 4xMage requests as a recipient, but I couldn't not finish the trilogy, as it were. I think this one, while still full of humor and wit, has many more serious moments in it than the previous two do, given that the characters have to fight both Tiamat and avoid WARMECH and there's a lot more tension and danger in doing those things. That, and mechanically speaking, Red Mages don't have access to BRAK, the insta-kill spell that worked on Tiamat the first time I used it in the NES game. They do have access to BANE through the Bane Sword, I believe, but that hits at a much lower insta-kill rate than BRAK, so I had to have someone else help them out just a bit, a Black Wizard who does have BRAK and gets lucky on his cast. It was a treat, but I'm not sure it went over as well as the assignments of the previous years did. Still, challenge complete!

The Letter and The Lady (3053 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Lady of the House/Male Secretary
Characters: Lady of the House, Male Secretary - Character
Additional Tags: Epistolary, Letter to a Stag Magazine, Secretarial Puns, Authority Differences
Summary:
The recounting of a tale about a Lady who sought a secretary for his manual skills and enjoyed the stroke of his pen.

For as much as I tried to make this one work and stuff it full of puns, it doesn't look like it gained a lot of traction with the audience other than the one it was written for. Which is not a condemnation of the work, just that the style I chose and the subject being something like letters to a stag magazine (or vaguely Victorian-Edwardian Penthouse/Playboy Letters) aren't the popular things right now. *shrug* I feel like it was a good work and that it accomplished the task set to it while maintaining at least the stereotype of the narrative of more popular works like the Comfortable Courtesan or the Time Machine.

Eclosion (3904 words) by AlexSeanchai, silveradept
Fandom: Miraculous Ladybug
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Characters: Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth, Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir, Alya Césaire | Lady WiFi
Additional Tags: Identity Reveal, The A+ Hiring Practices of Gabriel Agreste, Not Season/Series 04 Compliant, Marichat | Adrien Agreste as Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng, Designer Marinette Dupain-Cheng, Butterfly Marinette Dupain-Cheng, Community: poetry_fiction
Summary:
(that is: the emergence of an insect from its pupa case.)
Adrien, it's Marin—Mariposa— (Madly clumsy, he remembers her stammering.) —I need backup until Chat Noir gets here. Chat Noir and Ladybug. I don't know where Mayura is or if Hawkmoth has any other tricks or— You're home, right?
Do not underestimate the cleverness of your enemies.

This one, however, I am rightly proud of, even though it's probably more my ego at my cleverness than the resulting work. As I put in the author's note, this year's Poetry Fiction prompt was a fragment from Sappho, whose poetry mostly survives as fragments, and I had marked the Shiny Bits (a collection composed of works marked "unfinished and abandoned" and the good bits that have been written get posted) version of Eclosion as something I wanted to work with (because alexseanchai's work sparkles and shines, seriously, go read it), so I thought it would be a good idea to take a fragment of a work and, inspired by a fragment of a work, make something complete. That it's in the Miraculous Ladybug megafandom means that there's been a steady kudos and comments flow from it since I posted it early on in the year. And, because it's at least half-Alex's, that means the people who are eyeballing their work also get to see a little bit of mine with it, so it's probably getting to a wider audience than I would get by myself. (1000+ kudos on a throwaway premise (a different work than this one) just shows that trying to predict what the audience wants is a fool's errand, write what you want.)

I still think Alex's part is better-written than mine and what carries the story.

Indigestion (3044 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Welcome to Night Vale
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Cecil Palmer & Khosekh
Characters: Cecil Palmer, Khoshekh (Welcome to Night Vale), Original Night Vale Community Radio Intern
Additional Tags: Canon-Typical Night Vale Intern Death, Discussion of Cat Yak
Summary:
Khosekh has hairballs. Also, news, weather, and the Community Calendar.

I went into this one with a simple enough premise, given how much some of the local cats have been decorating the carpets with, scaled it up to appropriate level of peril and danger for Welcome to Night Vale, and then wrote it out in the textual form of an episode, as best I could, so that meant the menacing pre-theme statements, the links to the musical parts, the Community Calendar, the Weather, a ridiculous ad that I had way too much fun sticking the tagline onto at the end, and the post-episode note in the style of the credits of the show. A lot of the comments that I've received have been complimentary of the style and the voice on the work, which makes me happy, because I was trying hard to write in Cecil's narrative voice.

Harper and Weaver Two (6217 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Audiva/Menolly (Dragonriders of Pern), Menolly & Tenna (Dragonriders of Pern)
Characters: Audiva (Dragonriders of Pern), Menolly (Dragonriders of Pern), Tenna (Dragonriders of Pern), Cameos from Uncle and Timareen
Additional Tags: First Kiss, Gather Festivities, Toss Dancing, Sneaky Fire Lizards, Wing-Woman Tenna, Audiva Has A Lovely Singing Voice
Summary:
It's Gather Day for Audiva, and Menolly is leading the musical festivities. Menolly asks Audiva and a Runner friend to sing for her, but it soon becomes clear that Menolly would like more than to hear Audiva sing for this Gather.

So, after reading Sympathy for Anton Ego later on in the year (well after I had written this piece), I realized that I already had an example of the kind of antifan that osteophage was defending, the person who is invested in a fandom or a thing enough to want it to be better than it is, and to want those who play in that fandom to be better than the shortcomings of the canon. Having spent more than half a million words doing a close reading of Pern through all of its phases, I have a fairly detailed portrait of the Pern I would have liked to see, and it's that Pern I draw upon when I end up writing fic for it. The setting was too strong for the authors that attempted it, and I feel like I wouldn't do much better if I tried to do something novel-length or otherwise. It also helps, however, that I have the benefit of having read the entire amount of what's available, rather than only a partial amount of it, and therefore my Ninth Pass fic can reference things created in the Third Pass series that Todd was the primary writer on. That can sometimes really come in handy when you've written Menolly/Audiva and Audiva can't remember quite clearly the lesbian dragonriders and their activities that happened so many Turns ago.

That said, I feel like this is a really solid "filling the cracks" kind of story, in an in-between time from Apprentice Menolly to Master Menolly, and I got to bring Tenna, who only appears in the short story Runner of Pern, into more fullness of herself and also as someone who Menolly would make friends with, since Tenna's canonically punched out a Lord Holder's son for being a jerk. And the toss dance, and the harmony of a song, and flirting and a confident Menolly and a worried Audiva. It really settled well for me, this piece, and I think it's one of my better offerings of the Pern I would like to have happen.

As for the melody and harmony for the song that works, while I never really had a complete conception of how it would go, I kind of imagined how someone might have built the round and the melodies of some video game songs where repeating patterns build on each other to create a full song, or when artists loop themselves, building each part on top of each other, until they've become their own backing band and backup singers and then sing the song on top of themselves. (And they take less time than Ravel's Bolero does to reach their climax.) Menolly's canonically a genius composer, so I kind of handwaved the technical aspects of it so that she already knew how it was all going to fit together, based on who she got to sing with her, or who she will get to sing with her, so that it all sounds beautiful.

Feast Day (4010 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Mirrim (Dragonriders of Pern), Original Weyr Harper | Rowena, Original Runner | Sella, Original Weyr Headwoman | Alaina, Path (Dragonriders of Pern), Other Weyr Characters
Additional Tags: Mentioned Mirrim/T'gellan, mating flights, Life in the Weyr, Dragonrider Politics, Gender politics
Summary:
Rowena is trying to keep her eyes on the dragons and figure out if she's going to get her lessons in today or not. Path diverts her from her usual routine to help Mirrim work through some of her issues around mating flights.

And speaking of Pern, I ended up writing two of them in a row in this sequence. Again, with the perspective of how people who aren't dragonriders deal with things that dragonriders experience regularly. By happy accident, I apparently named the protagonist harper after Rowena Morrill, one of the cover artists for the series, and set her to the task of making sure everything goes well with her students and charges when a mating flight breaks out. Which sends her to Mirrim, who is, as usual, not feeling very secure in her position in the Weyr and needs to be distracted from an anxiety spiral. It's not quite as lore-anchored as the previous one was, but I feel like it does a good job of giving us more perspective of how the rest of the Weyr works while the dragonriders are doing their things.

Then He'll Be A True Love That's Mine (2070 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Scarborough Fair (Traditional Ballad), Scarborough Fair - Simon & Garfunkel (song)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: True Love (Scarborough Fair)/Singer (Scarborough Fair)
Characters: Singer (Scarborough Fair), True Love (Scarborough Fair), Original Courier (Non-Speaking)
Additional Tags: POV Second Person, Song Lyrics, Young Love, Impossible Tasks
Summary:
Tell us a story of spices and tasks,
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.
A question left fallow that an old lover asks,
"Will he be a true love of mine?"

I'll admit, much like my recipient, I was more familiar with the Simon and Garfunkel version of the song, but since they mentioned it, I wove it in as best I could with all of the other lyric from the more traditional ballad to create a backstory to the song that would make its impossible tasks seem like a normal progression of something, rather than their original intent of being a back-and-forth of impossible tasks asked of each other. Both songs helped greatly in getting the framing of the story well and bringing it to a nice conclusion. I think this is also the first story I've written that's second-person narration and not epistolary, even if there is a note at the end that's been written to someone.

The stories that sort of come into existence and write themselves easily often have a cohesiveness to them that the ones I have to piece together lack. I tend to like the ones that write themselves cohesively better, but many of the ones that have been scratched and sewed together are just as good in the statistics, and they are often enjoyed by the recipients all the same, which is the actual goal of exchange writing.
Work-Love Balance (1062 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Characters: Megaera (Hades Video Game), Zagreus (Hades Video Game)
Additional Tags: Minor Megaera/Thanatos/Zagreus (Hades Video Game), Post-Credits Setting, Escape Cycles
Summary:
After one of the endless escape attempts, Zagreus asks Megara about how she can keep her work separate from the rest of her existence. Meg chooses to tell him about himself instead.

I finally made a Hades fic, despite having played several escape attempts much before that point. It worked for me to write this as Zagreus still not understanding his role and his relationships in the same settled way that Meg does, and she tries, in her own way, to get him to understand. He doesn't (and he won't for a long while), but they both get to express some affection for each other before Zagreus decides to run from his feelings again. I'm glad this one went over well with the recipient. (I got an OH HELL YES, so clearly it worked.)

Reference Sketching (2052 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Calvin & Hobbes, My Little Pony Generation 4: Friendship Is Magic (Cartoon 2010)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Calvin (Calvin and Hobbes), Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes), Pinkie Pie (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic), Rainbow Dash (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic)
Additional Tags: Anthropomorphic Ponies (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic), Anthropomorphic Hobbes (Calvin & Hobbes), Walk Into A Bar, Aged-Up Calvin
Summary:
Calvin goes to an anthro bar to gather some reference sketches for his latest commission to make fun of the newest vapid boy band and meets one of the house comedians, her Wonderbolt friend, and possibly even one of his intended victims.

intoabar is always good for stretching my creative impulses, and I often use it to try and set up ridiculous situations just so that I have to figure out how to actually make them work. This year was no different, as I ended up having to figure out why human Calvin would be in a bar where he could meet Pinkie Pie and what they might talk about once Calvin had established he wasn't going to get thrown out. Comic art, clearly, and making fun of boy bands. There's also the temptation of making references to things that fans might recognize, especially in a work that's already going to be either funny or cracky in the premise. (Diane's baked good specialty, for example, or the fact that a wolf asks for a banana…) It worked just fine for me, and I got to stretch my brain again. (These are the kinds of works where the fact that they have kudos at all is delightful, and are probably the ones where I have the greatest change of accidentally creating something that everyone really enjoys and passes around to others and creates a hit, entirely through the ridiculousness of the premise.)

The Gambit of the Musk Ox (7195 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 4/4
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Child Superhero & Their Concerned Supervillain Nemesis
Characters: The Misquoted Prophet | Clive, The Herpetological Terror | Valerie, Cyber-Decker | Marcus, The Magister of Death | Colleen, The Refined Brute | Thomas, The Iridium Fist of Justice | Gerald, The Mysterious Superpowered Child
Additional Tags: Megacorp Setting, Power-Sharing Agreements, Quirky Miniboss Squad as Protagonists, Parental Replicates, Superheroes, Supervillains, Daring Acts of Heroism
Summary:
Clive finds an unauthorized child on the battlefield and uses his resources to try and determine why the child is there at each of their encounters.
I had a lot of fun coming up with the names and abilities of the villains in this story, who end up being very helpful in their way, for selfish and personal reasons, naturally. There were a few spots in the work where penguins got thrown and then we came back to figure out how to do it properly and connectedly. I may have also thought about the greater-scope villain in relation to how a lot of greater-scope villainy in our times is perpetuated by the people who are in charge of megacorps, and that's without the "And That's Terrible."

The Alchemist's Apprentice (2077 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Doctor Who (2005)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: The Doctor & Bill Potts
Characters: The Doctor (Doctor Who), Bill Potts
Additional Tags: Cinderella (Fairy Tale) Elements, Magical Mentor, Making A Deal With A Magical Being, Fairy God...Doctor?, Bill Potts Is Still Sapphic, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale
Summary:
Bill is chosen by an eccentric old man to go on an adventure with him, and offers her the chance to study the strange magic he uses as his student.
Sure, I riffed a lot on the beginning of the first story where Bill meets Twelve in the canon, but it works so well for a fairy tale sort of opening, and especially with the idea of Bill being adopted in the canon to generate a Cinderella-esque backstory for her. But mostly, I really wanted to let Twelve and Bill play off each other, with that beautiful snark they're both known for delivering at each other and their surroundings. And sneak in whatever bits I could about it being Doctor Who and references to other things as well, because that's half of the fun of writing The Doctor and Companions.