hidden_variable

Dear Yuletide writer,

Thank you so much for writing for me! This will be my third Yuletide, and I’m excited to be back. I’m hidden_variable on AO3 as I am here. My account is set to accept gifts, and I’d be very happy to receive treats.

General likes (in no particular order, and not an exhaustive list): humor (especially nerdy science or math puns); witty banter; teamwork; parent-child relationships; sibling relationships; friendships between characters of disparate backgrounds; slow-burn romance; magical or supernatural phenomena approached in a “scientific” way (experimenting to figure out the rules); characters being highly competent in their own areas of expertise (and also being tested in areas where they aren’t so competent); casefic/mysteries; solving problems/defeating evil based on intelligence and research (as opposed to physical prowess).

General DNWs: E-rated sex or violence, dark/hopeless endings (but see canon-specific notes for Face in the Frost), death of requested characters (deaths of OCs, or mentioning deaths that occur in canon, are fine), unrequested ships for requested characters.

If you already have an idea you want to write about for one of these canons, go for it! I’d rather receive something you’re excited to write than something that exactly fits one of my prompts. Having said that, below are some of my thoughts and ideas for each of the canons I’m requesting, in case you find them helpful. Some of these are longer than others—this reflects the amount of time I had available and the amount I was able to copy/paste from previous requests, so a shorter request doesn’t mean I’m less interested in that fandom. I’d be very happy to receive a gift for any of these requests! I’ll put them in alphabetical order by title here.

The Face in the Frost - John Bellairs
Requested character: Prospero


Currently there is zero fic for this book on AO3, so I will almost certainly be thrilled with anything at all you might come up with (as long as it respects my DNWs). But here are a few thoughts:

This book is extremely fertile ground for crossovers. Its world clearly has a very porous connection with our own. The very first sentence of Chapter 1 reads “Several centuries (or so) ago, in a country whose name doesn’t matter, there was a tall, skinny, straggly-bearded wizard named Prospero, and not the one you are thinking of, either.”  Which begs the question: so what about the one we are thinking of?  Did this Prospero ever interact with/influence Shakespeare’s Prospero, or Shakespeare himself?  And there is no such disclaimer attached to Prospero’s friend Roger Bacon: should we conclude that he is the Roger Bacon we’re thinking of? I’d love to hear more about any such connections.

If the boundary with our world is porous, it’s not hard to imagine that the boundaries with other worlds might be the same way. Bellairs considered The Face in the Frost his attempt to write something along the lines of The Lord of the Rings, with Prospero as his answer to Gandalf. (See this review for more background.) So, what if Prospero crosses paths with the actual Gandalf, or possibly a party of hobbits/dwarves/elves/whatever his world’s equivalent may be? On another note, I can absolutely see Prospero and Roger Bacon hanging out with some of Bellairs’ other characters: Roderick Childermass, Florence Zimmermann, Jonathan Barnavelt… That group could have an amazing tea-and-cake party/poker game. Or, what if Howl or Chrestomanci pops in through a portal, Dorothy takes a wrong turn on her way to Oz, or Alice’s looking glass sends her through Prospero’s magic mirror? What if Harold Postmartin discovers some of Prospero’s writings in a dusty library somewhere? I mean, you can go nuts here. Any canon mentioned in my journal or included in my AO3 bookmarks is fair game, or feel free to ask via the mods whether I’m familiar with a different fandom that sparks an idea for you.

There are also plenty of things to explore within The Face in the Frost itself. For example, how and when did Prospero come by any of his many bizarre household items, particularly the magic mirror that may at any given moment be singing, making sarcastic remarks, or broadcasting a 1943 Cubs game? What if Prospero and Roger Bacon take a trip together just for fun, rather than to defeat a dark wizard: where would they go and what would they see? What if a local farmer or aristocrat requests some magical help? Is there a minor mystery he can solve, possibly through raising the ghosts of chrysanthemums or some other ridiculous spell? Or just show me Prospero using magic for his own mundane purposes: cooking, cleaning, gardening, home repairs…

On a somewhat darker note: we know from canon that Prospero has some history with the dark wizard Melichus, but we find out very little about Melichus’s background or motivations. How did Prospero and Melichus come to study magic together? What were their lessons like? Was Melichus always interested in evil magic, or did somethng happen to turn him in that direction? Clarification about DNWs: I’ve listed “dark/hopeless endings” as a general DNW. I recognize that if you go with the idea of digging into Melichus’s background, there are almost certainly unpleasant things to be found. While I’m not interested in, say, an AU where Melichus takes over the world, or something that’s just unremitting angst and horror with no lighter moments, I’m fine with exploring some darker themes here, and with an ending that leaves Melichus as the terrible person he canonically is.


Kairos (O'Keefe) Series - Madeleine L'Engle
Requested characters: Meg Murry O’Keefe, Kate Murry
Note: It’s fine with me if you want to pick one of the two as a primary focus (e.g., writing about Kate before her kids were born, or writing about Meg’s adult life without her mother’s playing a major role).


A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door were some of my favorite books growing up (and continue to be my favorites of this series by far). I very strongly identified with Meg’s math and science nerdiness as well as her social awkwardness. I love that she’s such a prickly, stubborn character who can be fiercely loyal and brave in defense of the people she loves. I like her tentatively developing relationship with Calvin in these two books. I also really enjoy the coziness of the Murrys’ family life in their big old New England farmhouse, with stew cooked over a Bunsen burner and midnight cocoa in the kitchen.

Prompts/ideas:

• One thing that struck me on a recent reread of the series was the fact that the later books make basically no reference to the events of the earlier ones. This is not a case of “kids must keep their magical adventures secret from parents,” given the central role Meg’s father plays in the events of A Wrinkle in Time. But we never see Meg talking to her parents about the cosmic/supernatural goings-on in A Wind in the Door, or connecting them to her experiences in the previous book. So I’m wondering: after the end of A Wrinkle in Time, what kinds of conversations did they have as a family about what had just happened? Did Alex tell Kate where he had been and how he was rescued? What about the twins? What kind of cover story did they give out to the neighbors about Alex’s long absence and sudden return? What about Alex’s fellow researchers or administrators on the tesseract project—does he reveal to them that he succeeded in traveling to other planets and has met intelligent aliens? What are the consequences of revealing this, or, conversely, of choosing to keep it secret? I’d love to see any kind of family discussion about this (with the whole family or subsets), or Meg’s interactions with her classmates and teachers when she goes back to school.
• Kate Murry is a character I’d like to know more about. I think it’s awesome that she, like her husband, is a high-powered scientist—but what’s the story with her home lab and apparent lack of paid employment? How did she come to make that choice, and how does she feel about it? What was her science career like before she had children, and does she ever want to return to that? How does she cope with the lack of interaction with other scientists—does she ever attend conferences, have a long-distance collaboration with someone, etc.? Also: in the early books of the series, she’s a biologist, but in Many Waters (which is in many ways a very weird book, and probably my least favorite of the series), she’s inexplicably transformed into a particle physicist. Feel free just to pretend that never happened, but if you want to lean into that and explore it—what led her to make such a major change of field? What difficulties did she encounter in the transition?—that would be great, too.
• Because the adolescent Meg is such a great character, I find it very disappointing that she basically disappears in the books that take place when she’s an adult (which mostly focus on her daughter Polly). From the little information we get, it looks like her scientific interests have mostly been subordinated to family responsibilities—it would be interesting to explore the parallels with her mother’s choices a generation earlier. We hear about Calvin’s biology research, and there are a couple of vague mentions that Meg is helping him with the math side of things, but I don’t think Meg so much as speaks a line in any of those books. What’s going on with her? What is her relationship like with Calvin now that they’re both adults? What about her relationship with Polly and her other children? Does she want to pursue more research of her own, and if so, what kind? Feel free to go AU here—I’d rather not break up Meg/Calvin, but they can make different choices about kids and careers, or encounter different circumstances. I’d love to see them encounter some aliens or have some other sort of cosmic adventure in their adult lives.


Scholomance - Naomi Novik
Requested character: Scholomance (i.e., the school itself, as a sentient building/magical AI)


The Scholomance itself is my favorite character in the series. It’s an amazing moment when the Scholomance reveals that it’s fully committed to saving “all the wise-gifted children of the world” if it can. It’s one of many trope inversions in the series—in this case, the trope of “AI turns on its creators and becomes evil” (or does something evil in order to carry out its well-intentioned mission). Instead, we have the AI taking its noble-sounding mission statement more seriously than its creators ever did.  I’d be very interested in anything you want to write about either its past or its post-canon future. You can read more of my thoughts about it in my Scholomance writeup, some of which I’m copying and pasting here.

The Scholomance has got to be an incredibly sophisticated magical AI. It got some initial “programming” from the wizards who first set it up, and perhaps it gets an update from time to time, but essentially it’s on its own to decide how best to teach and train several thousand magical teenagers.   How did the founders decide on what topics it should teach? Are its teaching methods programmed in, or did the Scholomance itself develop them through trial and error?  (I’d particularly like to see how it teaches math, if you’re into that sort of thing.) Was there tension between subjects that major donors or political bigwigs insisted on including, versus what the Scholomance thought was central to its mission? Later on, were there periodic updates to the programming to reflect advances in magical knowledge? If so, how was that accomplished?

Post-canon, there are clearly huge changes coming for the school; I would love to see more about how all that plays out. Now that there’s less need for tight security against mals, will there be regular communication between the students and their families outside? Will there be parent volunteers and PTA meetings? Will the Scholomance want to broaden its mission so that the curriculum is not so narrowly focused on surviving mal attacks, or will it be resistant to such changes? In The Last Graduate El made a throwaway comment about how someone with am affinity like water-weaving, which would be incredibly useful in the wider world but doesn’t have many anti-mal applications, would never survive graduation. Will they now have courses designed to help take advantage of that type of talent? Will they now consider bringing in actual human teachers—and how does the Scholomance itself feel about that? Also, are they perhaps going to start doing a teensy bit of outreach for incoming students from non-magical families, so that they’re not just suddenly zapped through a portal with no warning?

There are many possibilities for formats I’d enjoy here.  Something like minutes of the Scholomance Curriculum Committee meetings, or excerpts from a discussion group for parents, could work very well, but I’d also be happy with a more straightforward narrative format. I’d be happy to see interactions with canon characters, particularly some of the current enclave leadership—Li Shanfeng? Ophelia? Alfie’s dad? If you want to introduce OCs, either in addition to or instead of canon characters, that’s great too. I just want the Scholomance itself to be the major focus. 


Temeraire - Naomi Novik
Requested character: Perscitia


I read this series for the first time earlier this year, and Perscitia became one of my favorite characters as soon as she appeared. I’ve read a few excellent Perscitia fics, but the total number of stories featuring her is very small; I just want more! Tell me more about her career in Parliament: bills she sponsors, behind-the-scenes political maneuvering, the logistics of dragons giving speeches, voting, or physically fitting into the House of Commons. Show me editorials, letters to the editor, pamphlets (written by humans or dragons) supporting or opposing Perscitia’s candidacy or positions.

Or, give me a conversation between Perscitia and Temeraire, talking about math, science, politics, or some other topic of mutual interest. I love the set of of scenes when they first meet, when Temeraire tells her about the Pythagorean theorem and she goes on to prove a series of theorems of her own; more along those lines would be great. Maybe they hatch a plan to develop an education system for young dragons, inspired by the dragon schools Temeraire saw in China? Is there a dragon revolution brewing? Also, they don't spend much time together in canon, but I really like the idea of Perscitia being friends with Emily and/or Jane Roland. I’m here for any Perscitia content: show her accomplishing something momentous or just a slice of everyday life, as long as she’s being herself.