Dear Spacer

[extrapenguin]

I'm ExtraPenguin, and this is my space_swap letter!

For this letter, I have taken a slightly different tack! For some fandoms I have separated out General Adventure Prompts, which are more focused on external plot, and character-specific prompts that are focused on emotional dynamics and/or inner growth – or just character specific. Please mix and match to your heart's content! I've also mentioned which unrequested characters I most enjoy in case you want to write something with an ensemble cast. If I'm requesting A/B and B & C, feel free to write something that's A/B & C; likewise, if I'm requesting A & B and B & C, I'd be happy to receive A & B & C.

Navigation:
Likes
DNWs
Children of Time series - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Knights of the Old Republic
Star Wars: the Old Republic
Star Wars Clone Wars & Prequel Trilogy
Uplift series - David Brin

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.
• Journeys of discovery, whether the discoverers be the characters or the reader.
• Redemption arcs. Rehabilitative justice.
• Narratives where something happens; plot. External conflicts. Casefic. Action/adventure.
• Comedy of Errors -type things.
• [record scratch SFX] So You're Probably Wondering How I Got Into This Situation: the fic
• Madcap adventure
• 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 infrastructure design stuff.
• Failure analysis/unraveling the causes of catastrophe, e.g. "why did the plane crash?" (yes, I like Mayday and Admiral Cloudberg)
• 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.
• 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)
• Christianity, mentions of "sinning".
• Humiliation, especially public.
• Unrequested incest, including foster/adopted and master/padawan relationships.
• Motherhood (childcare etc) as a woman's sole or main motivation or purpose.
• 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. Bit part OCs in het relationships are also fine.)
• PIV sex.
• 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.
• Requested characters dying.
• Stories where the characters have never loved or could never love anyone but each other, incl. soulmates, demisexuality, single-target sexuality, etc. (Exception: soulmate-bestowing geese/geese bullying characters into getting together with someone is okay.)
• Alternate character origin story AUs (e.g. always a Jedi Maul, never a Jedi/slave Anakin, etc)
• Jedi bashing, Jedi Council bashing (see note under KOTOR)
• People speaking Mando'a
• Tatooine Slave Culture fanon

Getting up to speed on the canons

Children of Time: Duology consisting of two books, Children of Time and Children of Ruin. You should be able to write about the stomatopods and other terraforming projects just based on the first one.
Knights of the Old Republic I & II: Two video games. Available natively for Windows and Mac, with II also available for Linux, cost about 10€ each the last time I checked. Available on GOG and Steam. Screenshot LP for I, all game dialogue for I, screenshot LP for II, all game dialogue for II. Time to completion should be about 30-40 hours each.
Star Wars: The Old Republic: A MMO. You can get the class stories (incl. Sith Inquisitor and Jedi Consular) as a free to play player – they take about 30-40 hours too, I think. For the requests with Zash, Talos, and Yuon Parr you can do with just the class story. For Acina, while you do encounter her after Makeb, you need the KOTET expansion, for which you need to subscribe for at least one month – 13€, last time I checked.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars: 133-episode TV series; episode length 25 minutes. It's owned by Disney so streaming options are probably country-dependent.
Star Wars Prequel Trilogy: Three ~2h movies. Can probably be streamed somewhere.
Uplift series: Series of 6 books and a sequel novella. For Creideiki, you can probably just read book #2, Startide Rising. For the worldbuilding prompts, you probably also want to read books #5 (Infinity's Shore) and #6 (Heaven's Reach) plus the novella Temptation.

Children of Time series - Adrian Tchaikovsky

Listen: I am a sucker for uplift narratives. I love the spiders, but I also love the sheer potential of the universe exposed to the Rus-Califi virus. Spider society as born from pre-sentience spider behavior was great, and I'd love to see how other species form societies, as well as the steady rise to sentience.

Stomatopod History & Culture

• Tell me anything! 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?
• Do they get included in the space project at some point? Perhaps after the octopodes have been integrated?

Other abandoned terraforming projects

• We see one unintended success state and one failure state – how else could the terraforming projects fail? Go nuts!
• 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?

Corvid-alien hybrids

• The collision of corvid genome with alien molecular catalyst was mentioned in the epilogue of Children of Ruin and not elaborated upon at all, but it sounded super cool. How much did the alien molecular catalyst influence the corvid society?
• Can they survive in environments other Earthlings cannot? Do they have different amino acid needs?
• What was first contact with the spider society like? Do they behave like the humans who're part of spider society would expect them to behave based on cultural memory?

(to top)

Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic I & II

I really enjoyed the reveal and companions' reactions to that. The potential for identity stuff/doubting one's recollections is super cool; I'd appreciate a chance for Revan to yell at the Jedi Council.
Revan preferences: Light Side-ish, or at least not the "kicks puppies for fun" type of darksider. Pragmatic. Charismatic. Competent. Please ignore the Revan novel and SWTOR.
Exile preferences: Inscrutable and mysterious, including to herself. Ideally Light Side-ish. I liked the canon tone! Meetra Surik is an acceptable name, though please ignore the rest of the Revan novel and SWTOR.

Other than the requested, I also like T3-M4, Juhani, Jolee, and Bao-Dur.

Adventure Experience Prompts

• Missionfic of something unknown, either during or after canon. The tomb of a Sith Lord? Some political snare? Has Czerka regrouped to threaten the Ithorians again?
• Post-canon fic with the Exile and her followers/students reforming the Jedi Order
• AU in which the Jedi Council thinks Yuthura should join Revan in her quest to find the Star Maps. Do they need to go look for an extra Star Map after the canon ones prove inconclusive?
• They land on an island – only to discover that it's actually a mat of carnivorous floating vegetation anchored to a volcano by a tree
• Post-canon exploration of the Uncharted World.
• Or a smaller mishap, like them ending up in the rakghoul-infested sewers of Taris by accident and having to find their way out or something.

Female Revan

• It is a lovely day on Korriban and Revan is a horrible goose
• Revan takes people/a different set of people with her to face the threat in the Unknown Regions. (Please ignore all of The Old Republic. Feel free to disregard as much of the rest of the EU as you wish.)
• Revan having a long and hard conversation about the memory wipe stuff with the Council
• The Dantooine Council made all the Revan Decisions on their own, without consulting the main Jedi Council on Coruscant. Revan sics Coruscant on Dantooine and watches the evisceration
• Revan gets her memories back on Taris and decides to troll the fuck out of everyone on Dantooine
• Mix and match with adventure prompts as needed!

Female Revan/Yuthura Ban

• Revan and Yuthura going on a grand mission of slave liberation!
• I love the redemption/"was Sith, now no longer" thing they have in common. Did Yuthura recognize this was Revan? What did she think, when the Dark Lord herself told her to return to the Light Side? Did she have a crush on Revan with her mask and helmet?
• Revan takes Yuthura with her to face the threat in the Unknown Regions. (Please ignore the Revan novel and all of The Old Republic. Feel free to disregard as much of the rest of the EU as you wish.)
• Mix and match with adventure prompts as needed!

Rakatan ruins

• Tell me everything about them. What do they feel like in the Force? Are they avoided or used?
• What sorts of things did the Rakata build monuments for?
• Are any of them filled with Rakata, Force-blind, resentful of the fall of their Empire?
• Relatedly, were there any monuments built about their loss of connection to the Force? (Warnings, trying to reconnect somehow, etc.) How did they lose the Force?
• Feel free to bring in any Rakatan ruins shown in The Old Republic!

(to top)

Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic

SWTOR! I got into the MMO in Feb 2021; the Sith Inquisitor was the first character I played and I have mine current with all content (so no need to fear spoilers). I liked the [electrocute] options and the hilarious quantities of sass and snark, as well as the focus on ancient mysteries and Sith archaeology. Like, seriously, write me a fic that is just the Inquisitor investigating Rakatan ruins and I will be ecstatic. Please refer to the Inquisitor as Darth Nox/Occlus/Imperius if set at an appropriate place in the timeline. My personal Inquisitor is a Zabrak, but I like the other alien options as well.

On the Consular side, I really enjoyed the Tython/Coruscant bits of ancient archaeology and going through Belsavis for Hallow Voice! My Consular is a bit more recent, but I've done the class story, and I have another character current with Republic-side plot. My Consular is a Human, but I like Zabraks and the "Imperial" (Chiss, Rattataki) aliens as well. Please don't call the Consular the Barsen'thor in narration. Please no DS Consular.

I'm not really into Zakuul or Valkorion family drama.

Other than the requested characters, I like:
Inquisitor: Zash, Bessiker, Pyron, Xalek
Consular: Qyzen Fess, Nadia Grell, Hallow Voice, Lhunu

Adventure Experience Prompts

• Maybe a visit to a Sith Temple at some point in the timeline – ancient artefacts for the defeat of the Republic/Empire?
• Visiting Ziost and its Sith tombs before the Cataclysm? Visiting Ziost after the Cataclysm? How much has survived, buried beneath the soil?
• Investigating Nathema before or after the re-greening?
• Or something more war-related – I'm all caught up with the story, so use stuff as recent stuff as you want.
• They land on an island – only to discover that it's actually a mat of carnivorous floating vegetation anchored to a volcano by a tree
• Gree bullshit. Another hypergate open on Asation because the Terror from Beyond decided to come eat everything again? Something up on Ilum?
• Archaeology field trip to some ancient temple! Sith space, neutral regions, wherever. Just the requested characters doing archaeology together.
• Or a smaller mishap, like them ending up in the rakghoul-infested sewers of Taris by accident and having to find their way out or something.

Darth Acina/Female Sith Inquisitor
I like Acina! I like the opportunity here for Empress/perhaps-loyal Right Hand, with the Inquisitor (Nox, Occlus, Imperius) the head of Ancient Mysteries and being a nice and loyal Imp, sure, but they're Sith, there's always that "well what if she betrays me?" thing in the background. If you want to write an AU where someone else is the Outlander and the Inquisitor remained in the Empire, playing politics and potentially getting Acina the throne: go ahead!

• Acina's the questgiver for the Dread Seeds mission, so something with Acina going along with her new colleague on the Dark Council to capture all the Dread Seeds and stop the Dread Masters?
• Actually, Acina and the Inquisitor dealing with the Dread Masters story arc, Explosive Conflict to the Dread Seeds to Oricon to the Oricon ops. Just – that.
• Or, once Acina is Empress, some rival (Vowrawn? Ravage?) has established a base somewhere, time to go in with her right-hand woman to eliminate them?
• Mix and match with adventure prompts as needed!

Talos Drellik & Female Sith Inquisitor
I like Talos! He is great and 100% suited for the archaeology bromance.

• Talos getting more of those archaeology experiences that made him quit the Imperial Reclamation Service and run off to the Inquisitor's ship!
• Honestly just. Archaeology. Write me Talos and the Inquisitor nerding it over artefacts and I'll be a happy penguin.
• Mishaps with the ancient Sith/Rakatan/Gree artefacts and having to deal with them.
• Mix and match with adventure prompts as needed!

Female Jedi Consular & Yuon Par
I like the whole lineage ensemble of the Consular, Master Yuon, Nadia, and Qyzen.

• I liked the holocron hunting on Tython – more of that, maybe, coupled with some philosophical discussions?
• Mishaps with the ancient Sith/Rakatan/Gree artefacts and having to deal with them.
• Master Yuon visiting the Consular's ship after the Consular's achieved Masterhood.
• Any and all master-padawan schmoop.
• The Consular asking Master Yuon for advice on teaching Nadia.
• Archaeology of the Rakatan stuff on Belsavis or Voss stuff, either during the questline or after the situation's been resolved.
• Mix and match with adventure prompts as needed!

Syo Bakarn & Female Jedi Consular
There should've been at minimum a hug at the end of Corellia.

• I really wanted some sort of extended conversation after Corellia. I get Syo wants to hide in a corner forever, but he's a Jedi, he can't let his shame rule him forever.
• Syo seems to have been grooming the Consular as his successor for years. What sort of assignments landed on her table as a padawan because he wanted to give her the chance to prove herself?
• Them figuring out how to deal with the issue of the Children of the Emperor who had no clue about the sleeper personality.
• Just ... post-canon reconciliation, in whatever form you can give.
• I also got feelings about the First Son when he went all "I stand unique among all other men in the galaxy. Why must I be destroyed?" so, uh, if you want to include a redemption/happy ending for him as well, go ahead.
• Mix and match with adventure prompts as needed!

(to top)

Star Wars Prequel Trilogy & the Clone Wars

I really enjoyed the prequels in all their ridiculous glory, especially the lightsaber fights and the sense of a sweeping world and the Jedi and the Jedi Temple. I love the space wizards and their vaguely Buddhist philosophy and telekinetic powers. I really like people figuring out their place in the universe and helping others on their journeys. So here are a bunch of prompts for a variety of Jedi. I also love slash, femslash and milSF! I'm also not fussy if you end up writing a PT-era fic even if we matched on TCW or vice versa.

Characters I like, other than the requested: Plo Koon, Maul, Adi Gallia

Note regarding the Jedi: Please no Jedi bashing or Jedi Council bashing. They can be acting on bad/misleading information, but I'd like them to be well-intentioned and not be on a mission to be petty and rude to Anakin Skywalker. Canon-compliant fic is 100% fine, but please nothing set in or after a canon-compliant Order 66.

On how to deal with Padmé: you can set your fic in an AU where she and Anakin never got together, they broke up offscreen pre-fic, or just never mention her.

On the Shmi requests and stories about motherhood DNW: Anakin's allowed to exist and be present; just give Shmi something to do that is not parenting him and motivations beyond "must raise child". (Idle thoughts à la "I hope my son's doing well" or "I'm glad Anakin isn't around to get caught in the splash damage of what I am about to unleash" are also okay.)

Adventure Experience Prompts

• All the weird Force bantha poodoo! Someone touches an artefact and oops, now there's a Force bond? Time travel to the KOTOR era/Revan turning up in the PT/TCW era?
• Discovering ancient Rakatan devices! Trying to figure out WTF happened with them! Anything dealing with the legacy of the Infinite Empire.
• A new Separatist stronghold has been discovered! Who's in charge? Grievous? A tactical droid? Some all-new non-droid General Count Dooku hired after one more disappointment from Grievous? What horrible trouble could befall our heroes this time?
• Someone gets kidnapped and potentially ransomed! One or more Jedi get sent to rescue/negotiate/pay the ransom.
• Completely by happenstance, they're at a location when Something Interesting happens, and since they're Jedi, the local authorities ask them to solve the murder mystery/high-profile theft/terrorist attack.
• Or the interesting happens to them! A large diplomatic event between two planets that attach supreme importance to pod racing, Separatists attacking someplace and the only their legion is close enough to respond, a bizarre Force Ghost starts haunting the Temple basement, etc!
• Or a smaller mishap, like them ending up in the rakghoul-infested sewers of Taris by accident and having to find their way out or something.
• They land on an island – only to discover that it's actually a mat of carnivorous floating vegetation anchored to a volcano by a tree

Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano (TCW)

• I like how Anakin's very protective of his padawan, even if Ahsoka chafes against it a bit at the start, and then grows to trust her, so: saving each other from trouble!
• Any and all padawan raising schmoop! I am 100% here for it.
• At Anakin's insistence, they get sent on a mission with as little to do with the war as possible. Tracking down an ancient Sith artefact? Sent to investigate ruins with a strong Force presence?
• Time loop fic where they only get out of the time loop when Palpatine dies despite their best efforts (Zillo Beast? regular assassins? shuttle crash?)
• Mix and match with adventure prompts as needed!

Anakin Skywalker & Mace Windu (PT)

• If you are aware of the Mace Windu Unfucks the Timeline tumblr post? That. I am 100% here for another take on that idea.
• Relatedly, anything involving Anakin as Mace's padawan.
• Anakin's mission assignments go differently (Padmé stays on Coruscant/someone else escorts her to Naboo), so he's part of the Geonosis rescue planning team with Mace.
• In preparation for solo missions, Mace takes padawan Anakin with him on a mission somewhere!
• Time loop fic where they only get out of the time loop when Palpatine dies despite their best efforts (Zillo Beast? regular assassins? shuttle crash?)
• Mix and match with adventure prompts as needed!

Shmi Skywalker (PT)
I have a huge preference for Force-sensitive Shmi. I also like it when she has more rough edges and despite doing her best to raise Anakin isn't just a saintly self-sacrificing mother.

• It is a lovely day on Tatooine and the Hutts are about to discover that Shmi Skywalker is a horrible goose
• Maul finds Shmi and Anakin first, and wowed by Anakin's power in the Force, decides to pretend to be a Jedi so he can take them on as apprentices. None of them have any knowledge of what a Jedi is beyond osmosis. It's glorious.
• Or a Jedi who isn't Qui-Gon Jinn is the one given the Naboo mission and thus the one finding her and Anakin. (Any of the ones in the movie, or just invent an OC.) What changes?
• Shmi is from a non-Jedi Force sect! What sort of Force traditions does she have? Does she teach any to Anakin?
• Or what if Qui-Gon freed Shmi as well/Shmi freed herself and left Tatooine with Anakin?
• Or perhaps the prophecy is slightly different and it is Shmi who is the Chosen One, to be trained as a Jedi?
• Or Shmi was, once upon a time, a Sith apprentice (to Plagueis? an ancient Sith of old back from the dead?) and ran as far as she could, but now the past is catching up with her...

(to top)

Uplift series - David Brin

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.

I've opted in to haiku series and in-universe poetry. I would love some trinary haiku, either as part of a fic or as a standalone piece!

Creideiki
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 et al's favorite wordplays?
• Do they have some additional encounters with Galactic bureaucracy, either before or after the whole "everyone wants to murder Earthclan" thing?

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?

Trinary

• What's it like to think in Trinary all day? What sort of poetic imagery is most popular? What sorts of things count as undertones of Primal that e.g. Makanee is worried about Brookida displaying?
• How did Trinary form exactly? (Dolphins finding haikus cool and just unilaterally to only communicate using them?)
• How does thinking in Trinary affect dolphin views of art? What are the images that are considered most poetic, and why?
• How often do they use Trinary to subtly or not-so-subtly troll humans?
• What does a Trinary courtship look like? What're dolphins' favorite wordplays?

The Whale Dream

• I'd love to see some sort of opening up of what it is and what it means, and how it's reflected in modern Trinary!
• Do our spacegoing fins miss the song of the humpbacks of Earth's oceans?
• How much of the Whale Dream is cultural and how much is ... not?
• Is the Whale Dream something found without, to be sought in the oceans, or something found within, carried with the fins to the ends of the galaxy?

Buyur plan for Jijo

• 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 are they?
• What was the method to their choice of things to leave behind? Was there one?

(to top)