silveradept | AO3 Output: January-June 02023

We did it! Another six months of material, published and viewable.

No One Is Alone (3360 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Into the Woods - Sondheim/Lapine
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Baker/Baker's Wife/Cinderella (Into The Woods)
Characters: Baker (Into the Woods), Baker's Wife (Into the Woods), Cinderella (Into the Woods), Narrator (Into the Woods)
Additional Tags: Fourth Wall? What Fourth Wall?, An Influx of Stupid Princes, Battle of Wits, Spreading Mostly Truthful Lies, The Baker Is Trying (And Falling) To Stay Out Of It, References to Other Works, Careless Use Of Wishing
Summary:
Cinderella does her very best to convince the Baker and the Baker's Wife to move in with her. She finally gets her preferred living arrangement because predatory princes seem to be trying to get the baker's wife instead.
Cinderella has no idea at all about how that might have happened. None.

Into the Woods is definitely fun to write for, especially if you dive into the meta elements present, like I did here. Intently listening narrators, declared AUs from the beginning, and a happy triad at the end, after a parade of truly awful Princes coming through. The triad was a necessity (it's Holly Poly, after all), but it also seemed like a good fit in the end, at least for this particular version of the story.

Space Dragon Hijinks (3075 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Star Trek: Lower Decks (Cartoon)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Brad Boimler & Beckett Mariner & Sam Rutherford & D'Vana Tendi
Characters: Brad Boimler, Beckett Mariner, Sam Rutherford, D'Vana Tendi, Shaxs (Star Trek), the Dragon
Additional Tags: Hatching A Dragon, Mild Mind Control, Swear Censors Are Funny, Shaxs Gets A Battle, Lower Decks Creativity, Contraband Gone Wild
Summary:
Mariner's mood stone turns out to be a dragon egg. With the help of the other Lower Decks, they hatch the egg, but that only creates more and bigger problems. Can they keep a lid on the growing young dragon, or will the senior staff discover what's happened?

I found out about the Here Be Dragons exchange, and I love a good dragon story, so why not, right? The prompts from the exchange recipient suggested something funny with dragons in space, and a little bit of priority hijacking that would make things more interesting. In my case, because it's Lower Decks, it was also supposed to be a fair amount of funny (because that's how they'd do it) and I thought it turned out pretty well and in the vein of the show's ability to barely hold things together and still manage to come out on top.

Out There (1491 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Epistory - Typing Chronicles (Video Game)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Original Protagonist Character & Fox (Epistory)
Characters: Fox (Epistory), Original Protagonist Character (Epistory)
Additional Tags: Self-Doubt, Internal Monologue, POV First Person, The Last Decision, Cynicism, Resilience
Summary:
The next step is clear, but the confidence isn't there. Do I stay, do I go, and will I be able to handle whatever is out there beyond what I already know?

The first thought I had with this year's poetry fiction fragment was Epistory, the fox-riding game of memory. (Nanotale is a different story entirely, it's much more defined in ways that Epistory isn't.) Ravens, swans, birds, and the decision that every Epistory player has to make, to go beyond the desert into a space that leaves the origami world behind and returns to a place that is potentially much less welcoming. I feel like that decision could spawn all sorts of stories all by itself.

Standing Right Behind Her (1639 words) by silveradept
Fandom: RWBY
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Jaune Arc/Lie Ren/Nora Valkyrie
Characters: Jaune Arc, Lie Ren, Nora Valkyrie
Additional Tags: Past Jaune Arc/Pyrrha Nikos, Jaune Still Loves Pyrrha, Getting Together, V-Type Relationship, Unintentional Love Confessions, talking through your feelings, Season 7-ish
Summary:
Nora thinks she might have fallen in love with Jaune. She has no idea how to tell him this.

Two works came out of the Poetry Fiction prompt this year. This one was the second, because I keyed into "being able to see the future and still remain standing" and "believe in narrative," and both of those apply really, really hard to team JNPR, and then again to JN_R, and ultimately, to Jaune, Nora, and Ren themselves, as by this point in time, they know the truth about Remnant and the world-spanning dispute that's the cause of all their problems. And they're still at it, surprisingly enough. To some degree, that has a lot to do with Jaune still chasing his ideal of being a hero for everyone (which really, really, backfires on him in the Ever After, not that I knew that when I wrote this.) But the team has been through enough at this point that Nora thinks of Jaune as hers, even though she isn't willing to admit that to him yet, because she has no idea how he'll take it, and being the orphan who needs friends, Nora's not going to risk it. So she does it without realizing he's there instead, and this Jaune, at least, is smart enough to stay quiet until he's acknowledged.

Almost A First-Name Basis (760 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Torchwood, The Sandman (TV 2022)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Death of the Endless/Jack Harkness
Characters: Death of the Endless, Jack Harkness
Additional Tags: Flirting (Poorly) With Death, The Many Deaths of Jack Harkness
Summary:
Jack's idea of how charming Death finds him is different than her own, but just because she's Death didn't mean he's going to refrain from flirting.

Candy Hearts Exchange ran in the place of Chocolate Box this year, and I ended up getting a match between Death of the Endless and a man who has been chasing death for a really long time. Because it's Jack Harkness, I knew full well that would involve a large amount of flirting with a supposedly anthropomorphic concept, and that all kinds of hilarity would be involved in how much she is uninterested in him and his flirting. Even if she's also somewhat amused with his persistence at trying anyway.

SuDocs T 22.8:2313/2014, Warehouse Artifact Accession and Cataloging Pocedures (1495 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Warehouse 13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Claudia Donovan & Helena "H.G." Wells & Myka Bering & Pete Lattimer & Steve Jinks
Characters: Claudia Donovan, Helena "H. G." Wells, Myka Bering, Pete Lattimer, Steve Jinks, Artie Nielsen
Additional Tags: Warehouse Procedures, Artifacts (Warehouse 13), Snark In The Footnotes, Warehouse Cataloging and Inventory Systems, The Care of Useful Artifacts
Summary:
The official Warehouse procedure for cataloging and storing artifacts, most recently revised, with additional commentary from the principals, who often take the opportunity to drag Pete. (He often deserves it.)

Worldbuilding Exchange this year meant I got to go back to Warehouse 13, and build an in-universe document about how things get brought into the Warehouse and assigned a place to be. Which also means I get to liberaly sprinkle references all throughout! The title was the hardest part of it, because while the Superintendent of Docments classification system is pretty well-known, I had to dig on several different pages to find the right header to the document. T 22.8 means it's a document generated by the Internal Revenue Service, and since Warehouse 13 nominally operates under the guise of the IRS, that's what all of their documents would be classified under. Also, AO3 mangled the footnote links to the footnotes and back, and a significant amount of the humor is in the footnotes, so you may need to have the work open in two tabs so you can swap back and forth easily between document and footnotes.

Frau Lavillant's Doll (1887 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Miraculous Ladybug
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Characters: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir, Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Rose Lavillant
Additional Tags: Rope Bondage, Marionette Bondage, Aftercare, Safeword Use, Magical Mechanical Marvels, probably not canon compliant, Rope Top Rose Lavillant, Post-Reveal Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Summary:
Adrien has the opportunity to play with a marionette like no other, a modem marvel of engineering, an irreproachable beauty.
He's nervous, she's nervous, but they want to do this.

Have I recommended kittens_and_spitefic to you yet? It's a great community for when you want to get prompts or fill them, with the specific idea of people filling prompts to spite a straw-person who is absolutely against what the poster would like to see more of. So, in this prompt, it's about someone taking the word "restrain" wrong to assume it means physical rope or other such things. Because I have a need to be clever, this is also a story about restraint in addition to being about the use of restraints.

Inu-kusa-ta, Or: A Dog In A Grass Field, That Is To Say: A Cat (4737 words) by silveradept
Fandom: 絵猫と鼠 | The Boy Who Drew Cats (Mukashibanashi)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Boy (The Boy Who Drew Cats), Monk (The Boy Who Drew Cats), Nekomimi Shrine Maiden, Cats (The Boy Who Drew Cats)
Additional Tags: Calligraphy, nekomimi, Eldritch Architecture, Questing For Enlightenment, The Fairy Tale Is Happening In The Background
Summary:
Joji is trying to study for his civil service exams, but more importantly, he's trying to draw a cat that doesn't run away from him before it's completed. Study sessions with a calligraphy master and encounters with a mysterious shrine maiden might help.

Once Upon a Fic is fun, because getting to reimagine fairy tales means getting to let your creativity out in a big way, and with stories that are usually in the public domain, so there's less worry about someone coming back around to be annoyed with you for playing with their characters. I like the story of The Boy Who Drew Cats, and in this particular version of it, I came across the idea pretty early on that it wasn't just drawing cats, but that this particular Boy also had a situation where every time he drew the word "cat," it also came to life, so he had to learn how to embellish those ones as well. And, eventually, he can embellish just about any character set with tail and ears and it will come to life as a cat as well. I struggled a bit with writing this one, until I hit upon the realization that I could use repetition of the idea of learning nothing to guide the entire story until it became an almost Zen realization that "nothing" was, in fact, the lesson to be learned, and how to be comfortable with nothing. It's only loosely connected to the source fairy tale, rather than tightly woven, but the elements are there, and it progresses, mostly in the background and Joji's dreams.

Tea and Stories (3450 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: RWBY, The Tea Dragon Society (Webcomic)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Blake Belladonna & Hesekiel
Characters: Blake Belladonna, Greta (Tea Dragon Society), Minette (Tea Dragon Society), Hesekiel (Tea Dragon Society), Erik (Tea Dragon Society)
Additional Tags: Minor Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long, Minor Erik/Hesekiel (Tea Dragon Society), Minor Greta/Minette (Tea Dragon Society), Not Volume 9 Compliant, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Tea, Mentions of Rinn and Aedhan, Crossover
Summary:
Another Volume 9 alternate world, where instead of going to the Ever After, Blake went to the Tea Dragon World. Minette and Greta find her and bring her to the tea shop. Hesekiel recognizes another weary adventurer and offers rest and tea.

Even though we know where the void between the world goes now, thanks to Volume 9, when intoabar came around, I wanted to go back to the well of "drop a RWBY character in a different world entirely, see what happens." I set up the options so that Blake would have to deal with characters that had similar features that she did, and the Tea Dragon world came up as the match. I like the way things flowed here, with more ease and Blake being mostly stunned about the place she's ended up in, along with a certain amount of "aww" at Greta and Minette's relationship (and some of Erik and Hesekiel's, too), even though she's also impatient to try and get back to her own relationship, even if she's not fully articulated it to Yang yet at that time. (She will, it'll just take time. And possibly a situation where she has to admit it.)

Work with the Ensemble You Have (2683 words) by silveradept
Fandom: Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Menolly & Tenna (Dragonriders of Pern)
Characters: Menolly (Dragonriders of Pern), Original Cabin Caretaker | Lorena (Dragonriders of Pern), Tenna (Dragonriders of Pern)
Additional Tags: creative solutions, Holder Girls Cabin
Summary:
Menolly has been set the two of getting the paying Holder girl students to put on a concert. She's got them mostly figured out, except for one who seems to be interested in causing maximum discord at the worst times. Talking it through with a friend gives her an insight she hasn't noticed before.

I have written many, many words about the shortcomings and failings of the Dragonriders of Pern across all three official authors so far, so when it comes up, I'm ready to grab the wrenches and the screwdrivers and go to town with some fixing. It often involves Menolly, because Menolly is the character most people remember fondly and as someone who is worthwhile and emulatable, at least in her Harper Hall trilogy days. And I really like Tenna as a character, even though she only appears in a short story, because she's the kind of person who can put on a dress to get close to someone, because she's a pretty girl, and then punch them out for endangering her with their recklessness. It's basically a headcanon of mine that Tenna and Menolly have a fast friendship and they do a fair amount of planning and plotting together when the opportunity arises to do it. And that Menolly, by virtue of being one of the few women in the Hall at the time, does much better with all of her students because she does silly things like listen to them and figure out what accommodations they need.