hualian au role reversal?? where top paranormal investigator!hua cheng falls in love with 800-year-old ghost!xie lian
This is such a good concept?? I don't have the TGCF cred to do it justice, but let's see....
Hua Cheng's a leading expert in paranormal investigation because he's good at what he does -- thorough, efficient, and ghosts just seem to respect him? But also, he's got the cool, dark, mysterious persona. He rides around on a motorcycle. A majority of the ghost hunting community has had at least a small crush on him at some point
Lesser known fact: Hua Cheng has been a history nerd since childhood and the fall of the now-obscure Kingdom of Xianle is his Roman Empire. He comes across a haunted sword from this period... and eventually, it becomes apparent that the ghost attached to the sword is the last crown prince of Xianle. (Who was Hua Cheng's childhood crush, but the ghost doesn't need to know that in any hurry.)
Xie Lian has a lot of unresolved issues (Guilt™️) that have him stuck in the mortal plane. Included in said guilt is the death of one of his young but very loyal followers, who died protecting the prince. (Who is similar in a lot of ways to Hua Cheng, but Hua Cheng doesn't need to know that in any hurry, either.)
He Xuan does recovery dives at shipwrecks and works with Hua Cheng frequently when he comes across cursed items. Maybe this is where the Xie Lian sword was found.
There is definitely voluntary possession/body sharing that happens at some point in this AU, in some perilous scenario that requires it. Or not so perilous. Just recreationally. Who knows. Why not both
FAVORITE COLOR: Purple 💜 Blues as a class are probably second and those tend to feature much more in my art....
LAST FILM: It might have been Interstellar a month or so ago? First time watching it. 8/10
LAST SHOW: I guess it was an episode of Journey to the West (1986) this weekend, but that was a one-off.... I'm very not good at watching or finishing shows! The last show I watched in full would have been Dead Boy Detectives at the end of last year, I think, and I'm still technically working through Interview with the Vampire (but it's been a good while since I've watched an episode) (this is a me issue, not because of the show)
I know it's not part of this template but I sometimes see it on these things so I'm going to also mention LAST BOOK because I'm excited that I just finished Babel by R.F. Kuang! It was very good, also the first full, physical book I've read for fun in years so 👌
SWEET/SAVORY/SPICY: Probably savory! Sweet would be second, and while I don't dislike spice, my tolerance is just not very high lol
RELATIONSHIP: Nah lmao. Too busy right now!
LAST GOOGLE SEARCH: I don't store my search history but the most recent tabs from a search that I still have open are about Appalachian ginseng! Did you know there's a native North American ginseng species and that there was a robust international export industry of ginseng out of Southern Appalachia for a while, to the point of overharvesting? I think that's neat. (The plant, not the human impact.)
Tagging @scribbled-anecdotes @heyholmesletsgo @treemaidengeek and anyone else who'd like to :)
Rules: make a new post with the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous and tag as many people as you have WIPs. People send an ask with the title that most intrigues them, then you post a snippet or tell them something about it!
Oh boy, are there a lot of WIPs. With a lot of interesting names, as a window into the process. A lot of songxiao. A lot of variation in how much is written/how serious I am about actually finishing things.... I'm going to keep things limited to WIPs I've updated within the last year:
3chen drabbles
Better run king!
Celestial XXC/DnD AU
Chengsu
Combs
Come Back Alive
CSSR lives
Free Dad 2
GLASS YA
IN DIRE YICHENG WHERE WE LAY OUR SCENE
Interrupted
I Should Live in Salt
JC_XXC
Ladyhawke AU
Last Words of a Shooting Star
Leaving
One Day
Qingsu
t4t songxiao
Vampire AU
Violating ethics standards
WAKE UP
Wen yuanxiao
I am absolutely not tagging that many people, so @bitterfrosts @heyholmesletsgo @wifiwuxians (and anyone reading this who cares to), feel free?
AU ask game: Yi City peeps in space! What are they doing? 🤔
What are they doing indeed! There are so many ways to answer this prompt.... I'm going to go with a scifi setting with manageable interplanetary travel, in the vein of Star Wars or Star Trek (without the same major institutions). There are other alien races, but solely for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to say our quartet here are all human.
Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan are technically merchants, in so far as the work takes them all around the major trade routes through space. But they're not concerned about getting rich; Song Lan manages trade agreements and sales so they just have enough income to keep going, and their profits mainly come from wealthy markets where people won't miss the money. (Xiao Xingchen would give away their stock if someone in need asked him nicely).
Their focus is instead on helping people along the trade routes, especially in far-flung planetary systems that get less traffic and are a little more lawless. They offer aid, cheap food and resources, and useful equipment that might otherwise be hard to come by. They try to keep a low profile, but they're still wanted by several parties for interfering with their jurisdictions' affairs (powerful gangs, corrupt rulers, that farmer who owned the sand beast they killed because it was terrorizing the nomads on the Sand Planet, and who had ever heard of someone keeping one as a pet).
Other members of the MDZS cast exist in this world, too, but they're in more central places and positions of power, members of the Intergalactic High Council or whatever. By and large, they don't bother coming out to the fringes of Civilization.
Xue Yang is a mechanic on one of these far-out planets, and songxiao bring their ship to him for maintenance and repairs, and he doesn't ask too many questions. (Well, he'll ask to be annoying, but he doesn't actually care about the answer, or so he says, and will work with them regardless.) He runs his own operation and does good work for as sketchy as his shop might look. He gets business from some customers with pretty fat wallets, and a lot of that money does not come from savory places. But he keeps his nose out of people's affairs and the business keeps coming.
A-Qing is a street kid (as usual) on one of these distant planets; could be the same one Xue Yang is on, and she annoys him but will still hide out in his shop when situations get sticky. She stows away on songxiao's ship one day :) They only find her when they're far away from her planet, and then they have to outmaneuver some thugs in a drawn-out cat-and-mouse pursuit through an asteroid field or something and then lie low for a while. And. Well, A-Qing lives here now
rules: share the first line of your last ten published works or as many as you are able and see if there are any patterns!
Tagged a little while ago by both @heyholmesletsgo and @bitterfrosts !
Since I only have a couple works up and published, I am going to bend the rules a bit and include a few soon-to-be-published stories as well 😬
Summer is not yet come, but the sun burns hot, and the air is thick with moisture. (on the wild nights, who can call you home?)
The moon is high, the inn is filled with bright light and laughter, and Xiao Xingchen only wants to be gone. (if this were my last glimpse of winter)
The world is covered in white. (on a clear day)
Someone likes to kick things off with a description of the setting!!! Not the back-to-back 3-clause-sentence combo too lmao. And obviously, it's all songxiao. ✨
And then, for what's still cooking:
"Do you think she'll be able to find her way here?" (taste of home)
Modern diaspora songxiao w/ A-Qing, which will be in the 2024 MXTX Food Zine! Projected release in November.
The little farmstead is peaceful as the day winds down. (shiver the whole night through)
A little scene from the same folk horror/historical fantasy AU as wild nights that I'm going to put up around Halloween, just to get it out there.
A-Qing knew that she should have stuck to the woods, but in the end, her stomach got the best of her.
Still untitled and very much WIP songxiao Ladyhawke AU. No estimated date, but it's one I'm excited about currently. :)
Still a little bit of scene description, but I'm glad to see I'm varying it a little more with my hooks lol
My couple usual go-to people have already been tagged, so anyone who would like to do this next can!
Last song: most recently listened to was "Einstein's Idea" by Johnny Flynn. However, the last song I intentionally sought out instead of just shuffling through was "Love Rhythm" by T.U.B.S, because I was in the New Year spirit LOL
Favorite color: purple
Last book: last book I bought was Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner.... Otherwise, it would be listening to Dracula via the Re: Dracula podcast in the fall, if that counts?
Last movie: Family Pack/Loups-garous, and I know the target audience is children. But I was still not very impressed
Last show: Doctor Who! A few weeks back, I finally got around to watching the first of the new David Tennant/Catherine Tate specials before the Ncuti Gatwa season
Sweet/spicy/savory: savory today
Last thing I googled: uhhh "lizard fashion dracula" because I needed to confirm how the quote went for a joke
Current obsession: probably just songxiao as like, a baseline. Carrying them and A-Qing around in my pocket for emotional support in these trying times
Looking forward to: also visiting family out of town this weekend! For Lunar New Year celebrations 🐍
Tagging: @mistyfrostflower @shuangdaozhang @treemaidengeek @flamingwell @scribbled-anecdotes if you feel so inclined :)
DJ IS BACK WITH ANOTHER AU IDEA! SL has inherited a ranch from his estranged relative and has absolutely no idea what to do with it OR how to tend to horses. include as many characters as you please >:)
Alright for this AU ask we're having a songxiao Hallmark movie because I've never actually done something like that before
Song Lan is a lawyer at a big city, high power law firm. He went into law hoping to further efforts for climate justice, conservation, etc., before repeatedly finding that most environmental law positions are about helping big actors find loopholes in environmental policy to keep getting away with things. So now he's in, like. Contract law, and it's fine, but not something he's very passionate about, and the firm he's at keeps him too busy to think too hard about it.
He inherits this ranch from some distant, distant relative he's never heard of? Song Lan thinks it's a scam at first, but the paperwork all looks legit. He's friends with Lan Xichen (from college, now a music professor) who tells him to take a much needed break after this most recent big case and check it out. Recurrent minor role as the supportive friend from home who encourages the main character to go out and live a little.
White Snow Ranch is a small operation in a space that once housed a much larger business. Luo Qingyang is the foreman who keeps things running, and she lives on site with her family. Xue Yang is an unreliable stablehand who hasn't been fired yet because he's got such a knack for fixing the machinery around the ranch. He has a side gig that pays him way more per hour doing survey work for Jin Oil, who have been trying to buy up land in the area.
White Snow has a handful of horses at any given time, breeding and selling to local buyers. Some of the other space in the stables gets rented for people to board their own horses. A-Qing is one such boarder. She's a teenage girl who wants to Win The Rodeo This Year. She's the one who does the most to teach city slicker Song Lan how to ride and laughs at him a lot.
Her older brother, Xiao Xingchen, is the kind and attractive large animal vet who makes calls to farms and ranches across the county. He's an environmental activist on the side. He's a pest to the oil companies and corporate farms that keep snatching up land in the area, and the office of Jin Oil's CEO have multiple numbers from him blocked. Romance arc naturally commences.
Song Lan is getting pressured to sell the ranch from pretty much the moment he arrives. Instead of folding (because what is he going to do with a ranch), he (with Xingchen's help) talks to the locals and looks into the sales of land to Jin Oil. And what do you know, the company has been doing subtle but illegal things with their contracts that have been shorting the landowners. Through Hallmark magic, they can press charges, beat the company, and get some kind of a win for he locals in about a month with no retaliation. Because love, hard work, and justice always win, forever (i.e., the 90-minute run time)
Seventh point because I've already accidentally gone over and that's that Song Lan transfers ownership of the ranch to Mianmian, since practically, this is already her gig, which gives her more freedom to make some more radical business decisions and rejuvenate White Snow. They start raising bison in addition to horses as a species restoration effort, for one thing. Maybe they use some of the space for solar panels or wind turbines as a clean energy thing, and maybe Xue Yang keeps that running smoothly. Song Lan keeps doing law stuff with a more environmental justice lean and he and Xiao Xingchen move in together. A-Qing achieves her rodeo dreams. Happily ever after, roll credits
songxiao (and others of your choice) search and rescue mission in dangerous snowy mountains AU >:) i don't know you know i listen to too many pastas - DJ
So this got away from me. Badly. Here's some creepy mountain rescue:
Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen do SAR work on a volunteer basis in the mountains near their home. There's a lot of tourist traffic that comes through, a handful of popular ski resorts. Visitors tend to underestimate how dangerous these mountains can be, so SAR missions are unfortunately kind of frequent.
Unusually, a call goes out for a girl from the mountains (A-Qing) who had gone out to meet up with some friends when a freak snowstorm hit, and she hasn't been heard from since. A little volunteer squad heads up the mountains and fans out, but their communication devices are on the fritz after the storm. As a pair, songxiao come across evidence of a rock slide, revealing a cave, where the sparse, possible-A-Qing-trail they've found stops. Honestly, a pretty good place to take shelter from the snow in an emergency, so they're hoping their girl's in there.
They have to move some rocks, but they squeeze into this cave, or maybe more of a crevice that sprawls forward into the darkness. And the uncovering of the cave is a new development, right? The rock slide moved a LOT of material to unblock the entrance, those rocks had been undisturbed for a very long time, and while comms are working, the guys confirm that no one at base has heard of any notable caves here, not even Nie Mingjue, whose family has lived in the mountains for generations. So as they push through the space, pressing up against the walls, it's weird to see markings carved into the stone. There's been enough water erosion and lichen growth that it's hard to make out any of the words, but there are odd symbols, too. Are they curse marks? Protective sigils? Sealing glyphs? Innocuous cave art...? It's a little creepy, but there's one of A-Qing's gloves on the ground, and hearing no response when they call for her, they have to press onward.
Eventually, the cave opens up into a wider space, and A-Qing is there! She's slumped against a wall, unresponsive but alive, and Xiao Xingchen immediately clambers over the debris at the entrance of the space to administer first aid. Meanwhile, Song Lan clocks their surroundings, and, uh. Well, the sigil work is heaviest right at the entrance of this cave-room, then stops abruptly. There are... broken chains amid the debris on the ground? And that dark slickness on the walls, seeming to seep out of the stone? That can't be blood, right. Right? Song Lan has a Very Bad Feeling About This™, but Xingchen doesn't want to move A-Qing until she's stabilized. And brilliantly, the snow's picked back up something fierce, night is falling (wasn't it around noon when they got here?), and they're only able to let base know that they're alive with A-Qing at these coordinates, assuming the message actually went through before comms dropped for good. So, far out in the wilderness as they are, overnighting in the blood cave is very unfortunately looking like the best option available. Even if Song Lan can swear he hears the echoes of a high, metallic laughter as the wind blows outside.
Xiao Xingchen is leery about the situation, too, but he devotes his attention to A-Qing. She's been cold, but not dangerously so, and there's no evidence of significant injury, but she didn't leave the cave when the first snow storm passed, and she's been basically catatonic since they found her. Xiao Xingchen is glad Wen Qing was off duty today and not now stuck in this mess, but she'd know what to do in this situation. At least Song Lan's agitation at being trapped in the cave seems to be settling, as he's quieted down and stopped pacing around. And. Well. A scene to close out this point and this post, warning for possession:
Around nightfall, things change. A-Qing stirs, slowly rousing from her stupor. She doesn't respond to Xiao Xingchen's explanations or his questions, just glances around the cave with flitting, anxious eyes. A long time passes. A-Qing's lips move, but it takes a few moments more before the words form into a question of her own. "Is he gone?" she whispers roughly.
Xiao Xingchen blinks, puzzled. "Is who gone?"
"Is who gone?" Song Lan's voice echoes from the other side of the room. It's the first he's spoken in a while. He sounds calm. Oddly so.
A-Qing's eyes widen as she focuses on Song Lan, turned away from them, beyond the light of the lantern. She grabs Xiao Xingchen's sleeve.
A chill runs down Xiao Xingchen's spine. He puts a hand around A-Qing's arm. "Zichen?"
Song Lan turns back toward them, but he doesn't quite look at them. His eyes, unfocused, gleam for a moment. He tilts his head slightly. "Zichen?"
