The 2025 Prompt Nominations Post: "I haven't seen you like this before, not in 800 years."

[brightknightie]

As discussed, we're playing challenge-style, and we'll elect a shared pool of 3-5 prompts (maximum 30 words each). Each story (minimum 500 words) must use at least one elected prompt.

When to nominate: By Friday, March 14, 11:59pm Pacific Time.

Who may nominate: All FK fans! Readers as well as writers are invited to nominate and vote! Nominations are not a commitment to play.

How to prompt:

• Definition: For our game, a prompt is a word, set of words, phrase, sentence, question, stanza, lyric, trope, canon reference, etc. meant to inspire an FK story.
• Success: We'll likely get the most from prompts that can flex across different interpretations, while also being specific enough to spark reactions.
• Limits: Up to 3 nominations per person. 1-30 words. If a quotation, include a citation (not part of the word count). You may re-nominate 1 unused re-run prompt from a previous year among your 3. No vulgarity, incivility, that kind of thing.

How to nominate & elect:

1. Nominate (March 8 - March 14): Reply to this post with up to 3 prompts you'd like in the game. You may post all in one reply, or each in its own reply.
2. Vote (March 15 - March 21): On the to-be-posted poll, number all the prompts from your least to most favorite.
3. Calculate & announce (March 22 - March 23): Any prompt that gets 25% of the 1st-place votes outright wins one of our slots. Then, the prompt with the fewest 1st-place votes is eliminated, redistributing its votes to what was the 2nd-place preference of its voters. Repeat until 3 prompts each have 25%+ of the votes (or, as far as I can see in the rankings, the final 4-5 would reach more players than the final 3).

Stories come due no later than May 24 on the AO3 and start releasing on May 26.

Questions? Advice? Please share!

Comments

[senmut]

1. Light up, light up / As if you have a choice / Even if you cannot hear my voice / I'll be right beside you, dear - "Run" by Snow Patrol

2. We may shine, we may shatter, we may be picking up the pieces here on after / We are fragile, we are human, we are shaped by the light we let through us - "Glass" by Thompson Square

3. All of a sudden in a wink of an eye / A Cadillac sedan passed us by - "Hot Rod Lincoln" by Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen

[celli]

I wrote it with the pen of mirth and the ink of melancholy. - Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

Danger midwifes the heart's spring. (Aubade on a Ghost Hunt by Traci Brimhall)

Tuck a knife with my heart up my sleeve - “Lilith,” Halsey and Suga

[pj1228]

1. Murder never expires
2. Modern technology can be a nuisance
3. Nick is shot in front of his partner

Up to 3 nominations per person

[brightknightie]

My apologies for the confusion! It's up to 3 nominations, total, per person, this year. Which 3 of these (or others) would you like best...?

Re: Up to 3 nominations per person

[thefruitbat]

Sorry, I misread. I'll change it. :)

1. Alternative Universe
2. Blast from the past
3. When Friday 13th is not just a date

Re: Up to 3 nominations per person

[brightknightie]

Thank you! No problem at all.

Re: Up to 3 nominations per person

[switchbladeeyes]

I had "blast from the past" on my list of potential prompts lol

And #3 reminds me of the premise of one of the FK list wars back in the day (Forever Friday the 13th).

[switchbladeeyes]

1. Heist

2. Transition

3. But what do you really want?

[dlyt]

1. The antique hairbrush still held tangles of fine golden hair.
2. A lucky break, a chance meeting, and a friend in need.
3. Keeping secrets

[senmut]

1 is calling for a father daughter fic...

[dlyt]

Not necessarily, although that may be the first impression, and could inspire a great story. However, there are a number of blonds in canon … 😏

[brightknightie]

Just for the curiosity:

I've been trying to look up the history of hairbrushes for this, but while the internet is full of evidence for hair combs dating to Paleolithic times and being common in Classical civilizations, the first modern hairbrush began manufacture in the 1700s, and is often claimed to have been a new invention then (for use on human hair being new, supposedly inspired by brooms) at that time. All the easily-found online references to hairbrushes being found in Egyptian tombs seem to go back to a single blog post about hair care, and not to any museum or Egyptology site.

If we elect this prompt, I may look into consulting better resources more directly...

[nicholas_lucien]

1. Songfic

2. Surely LaCroix has other hobbies than bothering Nick... (current or past hobby)

3. "Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy." - G M Gilbert

[havocthecat]

I have two prompts, and I put the inspiration I was hit by as separate paragraphs. The inspiration really is unnecessary for the prompt, but I wanted to share it with you, brightknightie, and the fandom. One could be a bit darker, one is a bit lighter in my mind, but, er, all of them depend on the author:

Prompt 1 - Reverse AU*: Vampire/human status switch. The vampires are human and the humans are vampires. What's the reason for that? Creator's choice.

Inspiration, but not part of this prompt - Could be Nat's cure in Fever had some, ah, unintended side effects. Could be the universe is totally different from the start, and Schanke is the vampire cop, and Nat is the vampire nightclub owner, with Cohen (or Stonetree or Reese) the vampire sire, while Nick is his human partner and Janette is the human coroner. These are only examples; there are obviously many possible permutations! Is mortal LaCroix a good dad to his beloved daughter Divia? Did vampire cop Schanke get brought across by his sire Myra, who was brought across by her daughter Jenny? The permutations! The changes! The possibilities!

Prompt 2 - Games Vampires (and Mortals) Play: What do our most beloved characters do to while away the nighttime (or daytime) hours?

Inspiration, but not part of this prompt - How have games changed while our vampire characters whiled away their eternity? What games have humans introduced them to? Has the Schanke family ever enjoyed game night and invited Nick over? What happens when Nat and Janette sit down for a friendly game of cutthroat Scrabble? What happens when Lacroix shows up? But, like, for a friendly game. Also, and inevitably: Has there been a long-running Dungeons & Dragons campaign that inevitably gets derailed by Nick's quests for humanity and which vampire is the DM? (Yes, I went there. So sue me.)





*I believe this is a throwback challenge to the FKFIC-L or FORKNI-L lists, but also it's an absolute delight of a prompt and I think it's time to bring it back. Possibly again. I believe I prompted this many years ago for an exchange run of a fkficfest.

[brightknightie]

I hope that some folks did read and absorb the inspiration you shared! As mod-me, I should try to encourage more conversation about prompts; just because the prompts themselves need to be a practical size doesn't mean that they need to exist in splendid isolation from context and brainstorming.

Speaking as not-mod-me:

Many scenario prompts of older vintage/style were much more daring (and demanding) than many prompts today. It's strong and stirring to have more of them among the typical quotations and phrases. They widen the window through which we see the story, and by association stretch the potential of even the tamest other prompts.

If I, personally, were tackling "vampire/human status switch," I imagine I would start my brainstorming with a scenario a la "Curiouser & Curiouser" or "Stranger Than Fiction," embedding the scenario inside a frame so that I could have my canon and eat it, too. Another angle might be some kind of "Freaky Friday" situation... or even a bleak dystopian horror where everyone in the world switches for a day/night for Reasons and then switches back and all the vampires are dead because they were slaughtered as humans and the switched-back survivors would block it out of memory entirely for the trauma and have mysteries and mourning (and PTSD) on their hands the next day...

Regarding games, I felt that I saw the D&D game scenario coming from at least a sentence away. ;-) That could be incredibly fun! :-) Does Lacroix insist on being DM (for the power), or does he refuse to be DM (for the real power)? Does Janette have to be DM because she is the only one who can manage? I might personally glom on the Schanke household game night with guest Nick, though, for sheer delight in first-season vibes. Or maybe Natalie starts a game night with her niece because she wants to be close to her but doesn't know how and games are a thing she thinks of and she wants so to do something, and maybe it works and becomes a lifelong thing and is very sweet... Yet the prompt is aiming for the lighter side. We definitely deserve a few "downtime episodes" -- canon never delivered those! And how do you learn who a character really is, if you never see the character left up to her or his own devices? (I mean, except for Nick occasionally mooning around the loft unable to sleep waiting for the sun to set...)

Thank you! :-)

[havocthecat]

I do hope that brainstorming happens publicly, or more availably! One thing that I didn't think about was that, now that this is not an exchange scenario, we don't really need to keep our stories secret. We can talk about them and build excitement.

It's a bonus of the prompt format, really.

[greerwatson]

1. People have an annoying habit of remembering the things they shouldn't. — Christopher Paolini, Eragon

2. The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future. — Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance.

3. I look to the future because that's where I'm going to spend the rest of my life. — George Burns

[calliope24]

1. I'm going to tell you something that you don't want to hear.

2. I have a newsflash for you--appearances can be deceiving.

3. Life is full of wonder, love is never wrong--Melissa Etheridge, Silent Legacy

Brightknightie's nominations '25

[brightknightie]

1. "I feel like I'm comin' home / These are better days" -- Bruce Springsteen, "Better Days"

2. a journalist on a mission

3. found among the second-hand books