hidden_variable

I received an amazing Yuletide gift this year, for Madeleine L’Engle’s Kairos (O’Keefe-Murry family) series. I completely failed to guess that it was by cahn, but it makes perfect sense now that I know. (The Naming part is particularly apt coming from someone who knows what my real name is. :) This is everything I wanted from this prompt: Meg’s thoughts and feelings as an adult, explorations of alternate paths her life could have taken and a cosmic/science-fictional adventure for grownups.

known now in part, to be known in full (7155 words) by raspberryhunter
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Kairos (O'Keefe) Series - Madeleine L'Engle, Austin & Murry-O'Keefe Families - Madeleine L'Engle
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Meg Murry O'Keefe, Polly O'Keefe, Kate Murry
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Multiverse, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Choices
Summary:

Meg realized that the woman seemed very familiar. She had glasses and shorter hair, but otherwise looked very much like Meg herself; indeed, almost identical. "Hello, who are you?" Meg asked.

"Margaret Murry O'Keefe."

Meg blinked. The woman also had her voice. She said slowly, "That's... a bold claim. Who do you think I am?"

"Margaret Murry O'Keefe, of course!"

This year there were many things I wanted to write for Yuletide–in addition to my own assignment, which I was quite excited about, there were at least three other requests that caused specific ideas to start churning in my head. So I kept my assignment story to a reasonable length and got it done early Ha ha ha, no, obviously not, I kept to what is becoming my established Yuletide pattern and wrote a 15k DWJ story. The recipient was interested in a post-canon story about the University following the events of The Year of the Griffin. I had great fun both with writing the academic satire parts and constructing the plot. This was the most intricate plot of anything I’ve written so far—not that it’s hugely complex, but it did take some effort to keep all the moving parts working together. I tagged it as a casefic, which I wasn’t completely sure was legit—there’s no murder, and while there is a theft (even two thefts, sort of), that ends up being kind of incidental. But there is a mystery to be resolved, or actually several mysteries that end up being connected.

Part of the Furniture (15145 words) by hidden_variable
Chapters: 7/7
Fandom: Derkholm Series - Diana Wynne Jones
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Blade/Claudia (Derkholm)
Characters: Claudia (Derkholm), Blade (Derkholm), Elda (Derkholm), Myrna (Derkholm), Policant (Derkholm), Melissa (Derkholm), Umberto (Derkholm)
Additional Tags: Worldbuilding, Case Fic, magic in academia
Summary:

As Claudia, Elda, and their friends begin their second year of study at the University, Blade accepts a temporary teaching position, and is asked to investigate a strange outbreak of academic dishonesty. Meanwhile, a gargoyle is behaving extremely rudely, and one particular bar stool has gone missing from the buttery.

Writing this story, as with my other long DWJ stories, felt like pulling on a loose end from the canon and just feeling more and more string unwinding. In this case the loose end was Wermacht–I remembered that he was transformed into a bar stool, but couldn’t remember how that was resolved, which turned out to be because it wasn’t. I also knew I wanted to do something with a magical version of ChatGPT. I came up with the hiring committee scene very early on, but I was stuck for a while on what Policant should recognize in the fake application letter to alert him that it was based on his own unpublished work. The “magical substrate memory” concept was (very loosely) based on the debate about whether or not it’s possible to recover information from objects that have fallen into a black hole. It was very satisfying to bring all the plot strands together at the end. I actually woke up on Christmas Eve with the realization that I’d created a major plot hole, but I was able to fix it in time (though possibly there are other plot holes that I missed!).

On Chet’s name: on my exams at work recently, I’ve been giving some questions asking for a critique of ChatGPT’s answer to a physics problem. I usually present the problem as being the work of a “mysterious student” who asks for feedback, named something like Notta Chatbotte or Chet G. Pitee. I briefly toyed with the idea of calling Gertrude ‘Notta,’ and giving her and Chet the last name Bott, but I restrained myself. You’re welcome.


I did manage to write one treat as well–for a non-DWJ canon (Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory), which counts as a major stealth move coming from me. I found hamsterwoman’s request about Avicenna as a Lord of the Rings fan really compelling, to the point where ideas about it would pop into my head at random times while I was at work or driving, etc.--I actually made some notes for this fic before I had even started working on my main assignment.

The Path of Most Resistance (2363 words) by hidden_variable
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Some Desperate Glory - Emily Tesh
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Avicenna (Some Desperate Glory), Yingli Lin
Additional Tags: Brief canon-typical homophobia, much lower than canon-typical levels of violence, which is not to say there is zero violence, Lord of the Rings fandom (not a crossover)
Summary:

Avicenna reads The Lord of the Rings. He has some thoughts.

I initially got stuck on the question of how Avi first comes across the book, and the idea of him actually finding a physical book really appealed to me–he finds a treasure in a dark secret cave! And it’s an artifact of a lost civilization! But then I had the problem of explaining why a physical book would be on Gaea at all, because it really doesn’t make any sense in practical terms. I was noodling around thinking about what kinds of physical books might plausibly exist in this post-apocalyptic space station, and I realized it does make sense for them to have some kind of emergency repair instructions as a hardcopy backup in case the computer system goes down. Then when I later figured out how to exploit this concept for plot purposes at the end of the fic, it was one of those moments of total writing glee–the other such moment of glee here being, of course, when I gave Lin the Gandalf quote.

A funny bit of meta irony here: I own not one but two physical copies of LOTR–one is a fancy hardcover illustrated edition that my parents gave me as a gift, after my childhood paperback set literally fell apart from being read so many times, and the other is a cheap paperback with a movie tie-in cover that I got for myself in grad school. Despite this, I ended up also getting an ebook edition of LOTR for the purpose of writing this fic–firstly because all my books spent a large portion of the Yuletide season in boxes due to moving, and secondly because I wanted something that would be easily searchable, since there’s no way I would have had time to do a full reread. One of the first things I did was to search LOTR for the word “wisdom”: 57 results, but the one I ended up using in the story (“he who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom”) is probably the most obvious one. I almost used “The Path of Wisdom” as my title, but then I found a physics metaphor to replace it.