extrapenguin

I'm

ExtraPenguin and this is my Yuletide letter. Contains: Children of Time, The Luminous Dead, Thrawn Ascendancy, and Uplift.

Navigation:
Likes
DNWs
Children of Time
The Luminous Dead
Thrawn Ascendancy
Uplift

Likes

Same-sex relationships, especially F/F.
Narratives of reconstruction: fixing something, whether that be a country, a piece of equipment, a relationship, or a person. (Examples: Nirvana in Fire, Zuko's arc in Avatar: the Last Airbender)
Journeys of discovery, whether the discoverers be the characters or the reader.
Redemption arcs. Rehabilitative justice.
Narratives where something happens; plot. External conflicts. Casefic.
Comedy of Errors -type things.
Crack taken seriously.
Untitled Goose Game crossovers of the type where the goose comes to visit the canon.
Alien settings: Dyson spheres, ringworlds, planets tidally locked to their red dwarf stars, artificial habitats on otherwise inhospitable planets, planets with large axial tilts, planets that are actually moons of gas giants, etc.
Engineering, especially of the sort that keeps civilization running – sewage, maintenance, transport etc – plus fault analysis and infrastructure design stuff.
Characters expressing caring for each other by feeding each other/giving each other tea.
Established relationships.
Good mentor figures/teachers who have their students' best interests at heart and succeed.
Class issues and other tensions between origins and current presentation (eg. alien whose species is considered monsters in disguise as a human).
Worldbuilding!
Weird physics.
Tea.
Competence porn.
Enthusiasm in general.
Xenobiology, aliens, very alien aliens.
Loyalty, loyalty kink, people loyal way past the point of reasonableness.
Loving descriptions of small details/of how systems run; insertion of Shown Their Work details.
Happy endings.

I like both shipfic and gen. If you're choosing between something you think the characters would do in a situation and something on my likes list, please err on the side of what you feel is right for the characters and story in general.

DNW

Setting change AUs (eg: Hogwarts AU, Coffee Shop AU) (exception: In Space AUs of canons not already In Space are fine)
Christianity, mentions of "sinning".
Humiliation, especially public.
Incest, including foster/adopted relationships.
Stories about motherhood.
Unrequested het between humans or humanoid creatures. (Dolphins are fine, spiders are fine, people having parents is fine, the fabric of society being canonical and het-enabling is fine.) (Ar'alani/Thrawn is also fine.)
Requested characters being presented as/rendered utterly helpless; the "damsel in distress" trope; woobiefication.
Stories about mourning unwelcome changes to/realizations about the body, with "body" defined broadly, (ex: acquiring a disability, infertility, weight gain) and the associated grief/angst.
Stories about mourning a dead person.
Stories where the characters have never loved or could never love anyone but each other, incl. soulmates, demisexuality, single-target sexuality, etc.

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Getting up to speed on the canons

Children of Time: Series of 2 books: Children of Time and Children of Ruin. You could probably write some of the prompts based just on the first book.
The Luminous Dead: Standalone novel.
Thrawn Ascendancy: A trilogy of which one book has been published: Chaos Rising.
Uplift: Series of 6 books and a sequel novella. For Creideiki and Hikahi, you can probably just read book #2, Startide Rising. Chissis and Tkett are from the novella Temptation, though you'd need to read books #2 (Startide Rising), #5 (Infinity's Shore), and #6 (Heaven's Reach) to properly get it.

Children of Time series - Adrian Tchaikovsky

Any: no characters
I am really into the worldbuilding for this! Please write me all the worldbuilding about spider society or the stomatopods or the species mentioned in the epilogue. Original characters welcome. It turns out I'm really into uplifting creatures into sentience.

Stomatopod culture! How did the stomatopods make first contact with the spiders? What do they think of their spider neighbors? What to they think about space and the humans that came from there? What ocean-things weigh on their minds and occupy their collective cultural consciousness?
More spider adventures! What adventures did the Portias, Violas, and Biancas get up to? I was particularly charmed by the one who stole the antenna from the ants.
Other abandoned terraforming projects! We see one unintended success state and one failure state – how else could the terraforming projects fail? Something like Solaris, or a multi-sentient species-kill-species world, or something where the virus did not quite work as intended and there were even more unforeseen consequences? Something where the virus ends up making everything look more like Ediacaran biota due to interaction with alien virus-equivalents? Go nuts!
The epilogue to Children of Ruin mentions a number of other Earth-descended societies (the collision of corvid genome and alien catalyst, the other children of the Rus-Califi virus). What was first contact like with them? What kinds of societies do they form?
The epilogue also has a society of children of Earth discover alien ruins! I'd love something about exploring the ruins. Or the ruins of some other aliens, discovered earlier in the timeline?

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The Luminous Dead - Caitlin Starling

Gyre Price
I absolutely loved the caves and caving and the sheer horror of resources running out and feeling like one is being watched. I enjoyed Gyre as a protagonist, bitter and desperate and willing to do a great many things but with a moral core. Em worked very well as a narrative foil for her, both women driven to extremes due to the fact that their mothers left, and thus consequently understanding each other well.
Porn: yes. Gyre should keep her suit on. However, the suit probably has some functionality that can be diverted for such things, right? And Em would no doubt be completely up to it. Porn likes here include breathplay, bondage/remote control of the suit, nipple & clit stimulation.

I have a lot of canon divergence ideas! Gyre finds Em's mother's corpse?
At Camp Four, instead of emptiness, Gyre comes across a very alive Eli?
Due to Tunneler presence, the cave's collapsed/Gyre for other reasons can't take a route she takes in canon, and has to go exploring in the cave system?
Or, more about the Tunnelers! If you have always wanted to write a worldbuilding infodump about Tunnelers, please do. What do they eat? What do the researchers do with the data they got from Gyre's encounter? What sort of stuff has Em collected into her company's archives?
Why did Gyre feel the call to go deeper into the cave? Was it just psychological things, or the cave? Is it common to all caves, or just this one?
After going offworld, does Gyre still feel a pull to caves, either in general or the one she visited in specific?
The claustrophobic feeling of Em being the only person Gyre can interact with, and the dark F/F possibilities therein.

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Star Wars: Thrawn Ascendancy Trilogy - Timothy Zahn

Thrawn
I love milSF and space opera and tactical geniuses who're bad at politics but trying to do their very best to defend their country despite being loathed by politicians. I like the odd aliens and the various multi-species, multi-polity organizations like the Pathfinders' Guild and the fact that they have multiple trade languages and potential translation issues. I also enjoy physics, so if you're inspired to write a Physics Apply to Space Battles AU, go for it.
Porn: yes. Please dom Thrawn into a puddle. Porn likes here include breathplay (hands on throat), knifeplay (nothing requiring medical treatment), hair-pulling, and bondage. Suggested ships are Ba'kif/Thrawn and Ar'alani/Thrawn.

A canon-typical adventure would be cool! Thrawn in charge of his own first command, running into some pirates? Him and Ar'alani/Samakro/whomever on a diplomatic mission gone awry? Qilori gets hired as Thrawn's ship's navigator-for-show and leads them into trouble out of sheer spite?
Thrawn is part of a team that's been tasked with intelligence gathering re: some threat (Yiv? Jixtus? someone else?), but the threads point back to the Ascendancy – and Thrawn was tasked with finding co-conspirators... (Does he report it to General Ba'kif? Does it connect somehow with high-level politics? Does he ask Ziara to come and investigate with him ~~so he can have someone talk him into the suspects' art galleries~~?)
Thrawn's on a ship that runs over a hyperspace anomaly and gets tossed somewhere else in the Chaos. How do they find their way back?
Somewhere in the void of space, there is a Big Dumb Object (something monolith-like? a weird, sentient spaceship-like thing? an utterly indescribable piece of cosmic horror?) that Thrawn runs across. He decides to investigate.
Thrawn passing art-divined stratagems to others in non-shoot-y contexts. Accompanying Ziara to an Irizi event, analyzing the collected art so she can maximise the scandal? Evaluating a potential high-ranking traitor's office for Supreme General Ba'kif?

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Uplift Series - David Brin

Any: Creideiki, Hikahi, Chissis, Tkett
My very favorite dolphins! I love the setting with its "and even the kitchen sink" attitude towards space opera worldbuilding eg the five different means of FTL travel, and the fact that the universe is vast and wondrous and has umpteen billion alien species in it. Pragmatic Hikahi and Creideiki the wily philosopher were the standout stars of Startide Rising, and Chissis and Tkett, both mad in their own ways, were of Temptation. I'm grouping the Chissis and Tkett prompts and the Creideiki and Hikahi prompts together, since they're sort of different cast herds, but the pre-canon prompts in the Creideiki+Hikahi set should work just as well for any subgroup – feel free to mix and match. WRT hetships, Creideiki/Hikahi and Chissis/Tkett are both OK, as are the & variants of both.

Chissis, Tkett

Chissis and Tkett were the outstanding stars of Temptation for me! I'd gladly read more of their adventures exploring Jijo, maintaining things in the face of entropy, Tkett doing science (and founding a scientific journal just to get a place to publish it in?), and Chissis clawing her way back to sentience!
Is the Buyur plan simply what they said it would be in Temptation, or is there yet another layer hidden there? Do they have things hidden on Jijo beyond the things mentioned in Temptation? What was the method to their choice of things to leave behind?
How does being stuck on Jijo affect Trinary? Do the alien shores mean their favorite imagery in Trinary changes? Their favorite wordplays? Their views on art
What's it like to be mad in a completely unique way?
What else is there that lurks in Jijo's depths?

Creideiki, Hikahi
Note: Please don't dwell on Creideiki's head injury. It's okay if he has it, but I don't want a fic that's All About him having a head injury and how he copes with it – I'd prefer fic about his adventures instead.

I'd love to see more of Creideiki & co's galactic escape adventure! How do they reach Earth?
Does their escape adventure/some training cruise of Creideiki's go through E-Space, and perhaps yield them with some new knowledge of how E-Space works? Or do they actually encounter a mad sentient who prefers it to other modes of hyperspace travel?
Are there still Progenitor relics to be found? Did the Progenitors all unifiedly disappear one day, or did they gradually fade out? Does their find in the Shallow Cluster lead them to another set of clues, or did Creideiki's hunch to investigate the Shallow Cluster come from some prior experience with Progenitor relics?
How did Creideiki and Hikahi first meet? (I do ship it!)
Do they stumble across some (illegal) Uplift process? Or a failure/"failure" of an Uplift process?
What's it like to think in Trinary all day? What does a Trinary courtship look like? What are Creideiki's and Hikahi's (and Chissis's and Tkett's) favorite wordplays?
Do they have some additional encounters with Galactic bureaucracy, either before or after the whole "everyone wants to murder Earthclan" thing?

* Hands and fire?
      Hands and fire!
* Use them, use them
      To leap higher!
* Dreams and song?
      Dreams and song!
* Use them, use them
      To leap-long! *

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