Dear Yuletide author,

[baloonworld]

Thanks for signing up to this, and I hope that my fandoms are ones that bring you joy to write. Also sorry for the terseness of the prompts- I found out that this challenge existed with 12 hours to go, 8 of which I had planned to spend asleep.

Things I like include

Characters behaving with professionalism,
Bureaucracy,
Best Practice,
Health and Safety
Caring about forgotten details (you signed up for a "rare and obscure fandoms" fic exchange so you presumably love something that most people overlook too)
Existentialism
Diversity and Inclusion (ideally as a respected framework for living your life by, but it could be struggle for the characters to engage in, and I wouldn't say no to just seeing some representation of under represented social groups in the fic)
Due Process - Justice is a messy business that is not best served by lone wolfs and action heros. They should know when to hand over to the professionals. (If your justice system ameliorates the failings of the real world ones, that would be a lovely piece of escapism)


Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

This was the reason I gave up on sleep to get my application in. I love Markers. I wrote the only Markers fic on AO3 before this challenge. I may be a little enthusiastic.

I'm more into the report as a setting than I am into the characters in appendix F5.1. Use them if they inspire you, but I'd be happy to see anyone discover the site. Presumably if the Markers work, they will be discovered many times, and then left well alone. Equally, if the Markers are raised, it might be before the WIPP stops being used, so people could actually work under them for decades.

I'm happy for you to take inspiration from the work of the Human Interference Task Force too; it's not the Markers report but it is the spiritual successor, and it does have the Ray Cats, which are pretty awesome; I'm not going to be precious about canon :)

Looking at other dear Santa letters, one generally has to go into the porn you do or don't want to see, which would not have occurred to me in this case. If you manage to wedge anything recognisable as human sexuality into the shadow of the Markers, I will be pretty surprised. Go for it.
But please no porn-without-plot where "This is not a place of honour" etc. is used as demeaning dirty-talk.

If you go for the cross over idea I suggested I'd like it to be with something I'm at least vaguely familiar with- see my AO3 account for fandoms I've written in, or HG Well and Jules Verne both did quite a lot of "exploration" stories. In the absence of being able to talk to you its quite hard to work out details like this. I'm sure it'll be glorious whatever you come up with.

The Thrilling Adventure Hour
Carlysle is always hilarious, but we mostly only see him when he's embarked on some gloriously overwrought plan. I'd love to know what he's like the rest of them time. Does he have any relationships which aren't based on thralldom? is there anything he cares for other than his own image? Does he have even the slightest idea how ridiculous he is?

EAH
By this point I was really tired, so I'm not sure what I was thinking.
I love how forced the puns are, and I giggled at the egregious stupidity of the high-healed ice skates- how many people injured themselves with them? Did the school issue warnings? Ban them? I'd like to see something from the staff side of things- what professional training do they receive, do they argue over approaches to education? do they go on teacher training courses? Is there an education quality inspection regime that they suffer under [in the UK it's Ofsted, I don't know where you are from or what your version (or the EAH version) would be called. ]? Do they grumble in the staff room about changes to the curriculum? Annoying students?


Ta,

Slant