Yuletide reveals
Jan. 6th, 2026 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraYuletide! I was neither travelling internationally nor moving house this year, so I signed up with enthusiasm, got my assignment, and then played video games (mainly Blue Prince) with all my spare time in a completely unhelpful fashion until I was right up against the default deadline and starting to panic.
Mostly this was me procrastinating, but there was a little bit of assignment angst; I’d matched on Dungeon Crawler Carl again, and I’d offered Carl, Katia and Donut. I specifically didn’t offer the AI because this mainly seems to get people wanting Carl/AI (which rejoices in the ship name aiCarly :D) and I really don’t want pairing fic for Carl, either reading or writing. However although my recipient only nominated Carl, they obviously do like this pairing and indeed prompted for it. This meant I dithered a bit about whether to attempt it, how to do it, etc etc, but this was not their only prompt and they did mention outsider pov and playing with formats and in the end I stopped trying to do the AI and went for that.
The title, a riff on Wallace Stevens, came to me early on and was great apart from the bit where I only had three segments written by the posting deadline and would need another ten to make it work. I therefore moulded these into a story under a modified title, added the first part of the framing sequence, posted this for the work deadline as a functional but brief story, and then reread the entire DCC series, fixing each segment as I went and writing new ones (obviously I am a terrible example when it comes to deadlines and if you are a Yuletide mod please ignore this entire discussion :D).
Deciding who to do for each book pov was fun. Mrs Parsons was an early pick for opening book 1, with Bea as the closer, and I really wanted Katia in book 4, so you get her character arc at two points, from her and then from Louis' pov. I wanted noncrawlers as well, which got Signet (and her writers' room), Gary (with bonus AI), Fire Brandy, and also Mordecai (I dithered about where to put him in but there's a lot going on in Butcher's Masquerade so it worked well there). I couldn't decide between Imani or Elle but when it ended up being Bedlam Bride Imani worked better for a character pov that needed to be about Carl. And I also wanted villains with complexity, so Lucia Mar and Quan Ch. I was slightly startled by the number of character tags I ended up using.
I’d thought that book 7, which was the turning point, would be the longest piece, and as I was going through the first draft I just wrote three or four lines of Prepotente fuming in prison to see if I could get his voice, and then did the rest of the sections before skimming This Inevitable Ruin. At which point I re-read the lines and realised they were infinitely stronger if I didn't add a whole bunch of text, yay.
A pinch hit for Blue Prince came up while I was hastily working, and while it went very quickly, it meant I’d checked the app and seen the other Blue Prince requests, includingthefourthvine’s. I went back to DCC, but the prompts nagged at me, especially the one about new upgrades for rooms. On a quick writing break run through Mount Holly (the house in Blue Prince), I ended up staring thoughtfully at what look like doggy doors on the back of the Kennel and it occurred to me that you could combine the Kennel (contains dogs) and the Patio (spreads gems) and spread puppies all over the house.
After that I made random notes whenever another room occurred to me, finished the DCC fic (almost - I wrote the second half of the frame sequence three different ways and didn’t like any of them) and wrote the Blue Prince treat on Christmas Eve, allowing for a suitably festive battle with formatting on AO3 arrgh why can I never get the spacing right although at least swapping to rich text helped with most of it. I then wrote the final final version of the DCC closing frame sequence a whole hour before reveals, after present and stocking opening but before cooking Xmas dinner. I was probably highly guessable by anyone who read my previous DCC fic due to using the same chat skin but I really didn't have time to sort another one!
Both works have been pretty successful for me in Yuletide and I had a lot of time to read fic, so all around an excellent experience.
13 Ways of Looking at a Lit Fuse (4100 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dungeon Crawler Carl Series - Matt Dinniman
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Carl (Dungeon Crawler Carl), System AI (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Katia Grim, Growler Gary (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Princess Donut (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Louis Santiago, Firas Zaman, Beatrice (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Miriam Dom (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Lucia Mar, Imani (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Prepotente (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Quan Ch (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Mordecai (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Tsarina Signet (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Fire Brandy (Dungeon Crawler Carl)
Additional Tags: POV Outsider, Karaoke, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Chatlogs, canon compliant up to the end of book 7, Ethical treatment of NPCs
Summary:
Blueprints (the we're going up up upgrade remix) (1127 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Blue Prince (Video Game)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Simon P. Jones (Blue Prince)
Additional Tags: terrible puns, Puppies, Yuletide Treat, adventures in drafting, hey I found a bunch of blank upgrade disks
Summary:
Mostly this was me procrastinating, but there was a little bit of assignment angst; I’d matched on Dungeon Crawler Carl again, and I’d offered Carl, Katia and Donut. I specifically didn’t offer the AI because this mainly seems to get people wanting Carl/AI (which rejoices in the ship name aiCarly :D) and I really don’t want pairing fic for Carl, either reading or writing. However although my recipient only nominated Carl, they obviously do like this pairing and indeed prompted for it. This meant I dithered a bit about whether to attempt it, how to do it, etc etc, but this was not their only prompt and they did mention outsider pov and playing with formats and in the end I stopped trying to do the AI and went for that.
The title, a riff on Wallace Stevens, came to me early on and was great apart from the bit where I only had three segments written by the posting deadline and would need another ten to make it work. I therefore moulded these into a story under a modified title, added the first part of the framing sequence, posted this for the work deadline as a functional but brief story, and then reread the entire DCC series, fixing each segment as I went and writing new ones (obviously I am a terrible example when it comes to deadlines and if you are a Yuletide mod please ignore this entire discussion :D).
Deciding who to do for each book pov was fun. Mrs Parsons was an early pick for opening book 1, with Bea as the closer, and I really wanted Katia in book 4, so you get her character arc at two points, from her and then from Louis' pov. I wanted noncrawlers as well, which got Signet (and her writers' room), Gary (with bonus AI), Fire Brandy, and also Mordecai (I dithered about where to put him in but there's a lot going on in Butcher's Masquerade so it worked well there). I couldn't decide between Imani or Elle but when it ended up being Bedlam Bride Imani worked better for a character pov that needed to be about Carl. And I also wanted villains with complexity, so Lucia Mar and Quan Ch. I was slightly startled by the number of character tags I ended up using.
I’d thought that book 7, which was the turning point, would be the longest piece, and as I was going through the first draft I just wrote three or four lines of Prepotente fuming in prison to see if I could get his voice, and then did the rest of the sections before skimming This Inevitable Ruin. At which point I re-read the lines and realised they were infinitely stronger if I didn't add a whole bunch of text, yay.
A pinch hit for Blue Prince came up while I was hastily working, and while it went very quickly, it meant I’d checked the app and seen the other Blue Prince requests, including
thefourthvine’s. I went back to DCC, but the prompts nagged at me, especially the one about new upgrades for rooms. On a quick writing break run through Mount Holly (the house in Blue Prince), I ended up staring thoughtfully at what look like doggy doors on the back of the Kennel and it occurred to me that you could combine the Kennel (contains dogs) and the Patio (spreads gems) and spread puppies all over the house.After that I made random notes whenever another room occurred to me, finished the DCC fic (almost - I wrote the second half of the frame sequence three different ways and didn’t like any of them) and wrote the Blue Prince treat on Christmas Eve, allowing for a suitably festive battle with formatting on AO3 arrgh why can I never get the spacing right although at least swapping to rich text helped with most of it. I then wrote the final final version of the DCC closing frame sequence a whole hour before reveals, after present and stocking opening but before cooking Xmas dinner. I was probably highly guessable by anyone who read my previous DCC fic due to using the same chat skin but I really didn't have time to sort another one!
Both works have been pretty successful for me in Yuletide and I had a lot of time to read fic, so all around an excellent experience.
13 Ways of Looking at a Lit Fuse (4100 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dungeon Crawler Carl Series - Matt Dinniman
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Carl (Dungeon Crawler Carl), System AI (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Katia Grim, Growler Gary (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Princess Donut (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Louis Santiago, Firas Zaman, Beatrice (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Miriam Dom (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Lucia Mar, Imani (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Prepotente (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Quan Ch (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Mordecai (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Tsarina Signet (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Fire Brandy (Dungeon Crawler Carl)
Additional Tags: POV Outsider, Karaoke, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Chatlogs, canon compliant up to the end of book 7, Ethical treatment of NPCs
Summary:
Carl, as others see him.
Blueprints (the we're going up up upgrade remix) (1127 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Blue Prince (Video Game)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Simon P. Jones (Blue Prince)
Additional Tags: terrible puns, Puppies, Yuletide Treat, adventures in drafting, hey I found a bunch of blank upgrade disks
Summary:
Simon proposes a few changes.
