Trick Or Treat 2021 Exchange Letter

[skazka]

Treat likes:
- domesticity scenes and material culture, even in less-than-domestic situations!
- mutual caretaking and h/c
- characters learning new skills or new things (about each other, their environment, their powers, etc.)
- monsters! werewolves, vampires, ghosts, revenants, mummies, etc.
- road trips
- trans characters in stories that aren’t centered on transphobia or inner turmoil (even if they don’t “need” to be trans for the story to work, I love it, and maybe especially then)
- character studies and introspection, role reversals
- queer identity and self-discovery, trauma recovery, disability
- funny jubilant failsex, missing scenes, comedy
- PWP, post-intimacy pillow talk, any kind of relationship vignette
- enemies-to-lovers or rivals-to-lovers, crusty characters warming up, cold-hearted baddies with one exception

Trick likes:
- "came back wrong" -- undead revenants, hauntings, or just straight-up coming back from the dead or a near-miss with death leaving the person or people significantly altered
- cannibalism! grody vampires, subsistence cannibalism, weird gestures of affection
- serial killers (the fictional kind rather than true crime RPF)
- ghosts, poltergeists, gothic horror, revenge from beyond the grave
- major character death
- wound fingering, injuries and bruises, scars
- dubcon and noncon, power plays, power imbalances, hatefucking, sex work AUs
- nightmares and dreams (with or without supernatural dream invasion)
- necromancy, misuse of magic, bad vibes
- enemy ships between enemies who stay enemies or at least mistrustful for the duration of their conjunction; pet sociopaths; characters doing terrible things for their love objects
- dysfunctional relationships, obsessive unbalanced love, emotional and sexual repression

Feel free to mix and match between these two categories and to take all prompts given as suggestions to get the gears turning. For text-based/audio-based canons feel free to take any angle with character appearances that appeals to you; I’m a newcomer to TMA as a fandom and there in particular I’m not wedded to any appearance headcanons. (Exept maybe that Peter has a beard.)

Smut likes:
- size differences (both size/weight/physique and in the dick department)
- partially-clothed or mostly-clothed sex
- oral sex, handjobs, frottage, intercrural
- characters who kink on violence (gunplay, face-slapping, beating the hell out of each other or getting beaten up, etc.)
- impotence/erectile dysfunction
- casual fuckbuddies, sex for comfort, friends with benefits
- funny goofy fail!sex, dramatic dysfunctional fail!sex
- historical sexual practices and meeting places, cruising, queer subcultures
- fancy clothes and dressing/undressing
- angsty whumpy noncon/dubcon, conflicted manipulative dubcon
- class issues in the bedroom
- younger characters as sexual initiators/sexual aggressors

Art likes:
- B&W and grayscale art, soft/muted colors.
- Visual pastiches of other art styles -- Edward Gorey, Aubrey Beardsley, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Goya, midcentury magazine illustrations, etc.
- Historical/setting AUs where the characters get to show off new clothes/settings/gear.
- Hairy chests, legs, and pits. Men's legs and butts.
- Historical clothing and uniforms.
- Tarot motifs.
- Skulls! Skulls, skulls, skulls.
- Macabre/Halloweeny imagery. Your absolute bonkers-est symbolism.
- For ship art, size differences and smaller characters taking a more dominant role (whether that's topping or in any other sense).
- Art of characters beaten up or scarred.
- Portraits/bust-style art. (Literal marble bust-style art in the case of HBO Rome and BBC Ghosts… and maybe TMA? Who knows.)

A lot of these canons deal in some way with gnarly subject matter and I'm fine with any level of darkness or non-darkness with those canon elements. I like unhappy endings, fix-it fics, and anything in between. If you're interested in an even wordier take on the tropes/kinks I love, my previous exchange letters are here. Feel free to incorporate ships into any of the prompts below if the given possibilities strike you.

DNWs: DNWs: self-harm, eating disorders, child sexual abuse, unrequested incest, PIV sex with transmasculine characters bottoming; sexual assault of trans characters. I don't want to receive explicit fic involving characters under 16.





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Fandom: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch
Character: Stefan Butler

Treats:

- Anything fun with 1980s British pop culture or the gaming world of this era — interactive fiction is a big love of mine, so any references to interactive fiction gaming of the era, 1960s-1970s vaguely mind-expanding SF writing, etc.? Great.
- Colin shows Stefan a good time, with or without psychoactive enhancements. I love the imagined retro playground version of the 1980s the show engages with in San Junipero and I’d love to see Stefan (alone or with Colin as his shitty psychopomp) explore British music and counterculture circa 1984.
- Stefan getting comforted, getting laid, and just having a good/terrible/sad/filthy time. You have carte blanche here to ship him with anyone you like (Stefan, Kitty, Stefan and Kitty, his dad, his therapist, his boss, Jerome F. Davies’ ghost, etc.) and the tone doesn’t need to be fluffy to count.

Tricks:

- A what-if or alternate ending for the game that’s on the darker side of things — murder, mayhem, occult goings-on, Cold War espionage, anything you want to throw into the mix.
- Anything tying Stefan’s fate more closely to that of Jerome F. Davies — I loved the parallel thread of a SF writer’s relationship to his own work taking a fast train to nightmare-town, and I’d love anything where Stefan’s fears and preoccupations as reflected in the game’s canon endings are connected in some way to Davies’.
- The game’s parallel and in some cases mutually exclusive plotlines reward obsessive re-playing (at least in my experience) but it was hard while playing to shake the sense that there could be some version of Stefan stuck with the consciousness of all these timelines at once and really unhappy about that. So I’d love any horror or darkfic you choose to write using the game’s elements of unreality, alternate timelines, and paranoia.

Ship-wise, I ship Stefan/Colin and Stefan/Colin/Kitty, and I’d be down for darker takes on Stefan/his dad, Stefan/Dr. Haynes, or Stefan/Jerome F. Davies.

Art prompts:
- Stefan is awfully pretty and also awfully miserable — I’d love any art of him from his various bad endings, looking bloodied and sweaty/haunted/under compulsion/not so mentally well.
- Music-inspired art or art inspired by the atmosphere of any of the songs on the game’s OST, the list of albums Colin gives Stefan to check out at the record store, or your favorite early 80s jams.
- Art illustrating your favorite ending of the game or an imagined ending that might have happened. I’d also love anything that visually evokes game artwork of the era (either in-game computer graphics or the aesthetics of fantasy TTRPGs and gamebooks) with Stefan featured.

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Fandom: Dune Series - Frank Herbert
Character: Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen

Treats:
- AU where Feyd-Rautha succeeds in offing the Baron and the new promotion in rank thrusts him into a position he doesn’t entirely expect. I love the absolutely bananas corrupt space politics of the Dune universe, and really consider this a blank check for anything dealing with politics, bureaucracy, court intrigue, schmoozing, or political farce.
- Feyd-Rautha is fostered on Caladan under the authority of House Atreides for handwave space-politics reasons. (If you can make any actual space-politics reasons why this would be remotely plausible, you are a hero, but feel free not to specify and let it just be one of those weird far-future space politics things that go more or less unexplained. Kanly Made Them Do It?) If you want to combine this with a variant on the Paul/Feyd BG-Wanted-To-Make-Them-Do-It theme already present in this fandom, I love anything where Feyd is already plenty damaged from his time in House Harkonnen and it’s anybody’s guess if better influences around him will allow his merits to find less nasty exercise.
- Feyd spending quality time with his doomed concubines. RIP Feyd-Rautha’s concubines.

Tricks:
- Feyd spending quality time with Piter De Vries. Either actively doing stuff where the oversight of a twisted mentat might be desirable, or just more corrupt decadent court bureaucracy with his creepy uncle’s creepiest henchman.
- Back-from-the-dead Feyd — a ghost, a ghola, a DNA relic in the psyche of his unnamed offspring by Margot Fenring, or good old came-back-wrong-because-of-reasons. There’s a lot of people whose lives would be made just that little bit more difficult by the extra-late na-baron still hanging around, not least of all Paul’s, and I love that. (I can also imagine Feyd-Rautha himself might not be too happy about being brought back against his will.)
- Clearly the relationship between Feyd-Rautha and the Baron is not particularly healthy even by the standards of the Dune universe — I love the insight into their relationship they get with Feyd’s botched assassination attempt via poisoned slave boy (which demonstrates that he clearly knows where his uncle’s tastes lie) and if you want to explore that more it’s dialled in for darkfic. He owes his status to the Baron’s plotting and seems to know that he’s too valuable to bump off just yet, but he also has ample reason to hate his uncle even apart from the Baron’s transparent sexual attraction to him. What kind of lessons in politics does the Baron teach?

Ship-wise, Feyd-Rautha is my little black stillsuit dress character for these books and I would love fic pairing him with Paul, Irulan, Jessica, the Baron, Piter, or literally anybody else

Art prompts:

- CLOTHING PORN. Obviously the 1984 evil bikini outfit is iconic, as are his miniseries fits, but I would love any illustration of his outfits and appearance from the first novel or let your mind run wild and free with other space-clothes inspirations. If you really feel like indulging me I’d love character designs and outfits inspired by different historical eras or aesthetics.
- Arena scenes or any illustrations of Feyd’s gladiatorial misdeeds — don’t feel pressured to draw action scenes or anything like that if you’d rather not, I just think his gladiatorial wardrobe is sick as hell.
- Gratuitous tarot symbolism? Gratuitous tarot symbolism. Or just Feyd-Rautha lounging around looking sullen, treacherous, and questionably clothed.

Fandom-specific DNW waiver: Canon-typical child sexual abuse and incest for Dune are just fine, and all incest pairings (Baron Harkonnen/Feyd-Rautha, Feyd-Rautha/Paul, Paul/Jessica, etc.) are fair game. I’d prefer no explicit sex involving parties under 16 years old, but mentions are fine.

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Fandom: BBC Ghosts
Character: Pat Butcher

Treats:
- Pat finally gets to let his scout leader event-planning instincts take control and he introduces his fellow ghosts to a new pastime, or alternately, the first time the gang encounters the various ways of passing the time we see them engage in in canon.
- Another organization or group takes up Button House for meeting space and Pat gets deeply invested. (Community theater? Hobby club? Sports team?) I’d love either Pat as a spectator or taking part in the action with Alison and Mike’s assistance. What if one of his former scouts is in the mix?
- Some scenes from early in Pat’s tenure at Button House — I love his moments of conflict and camaraderie with the Captain, but I’d love to see any of those early encounters with his fellow ghosts. The moments of melancholia the show touches on around the afterlife are a lot of fun for me, so if you opt to take this to a sadder place I’d love that too.

Art prompts:
- Honestly if you’re up for it I’d love to see art of a specter as cheerful and innocuous as Pat in the style of Edward Gorey, or the spookiness illustrator of your choice. I’d love to see the other ghosts rendered in stylized ways too but the contrast between Pat’s arrow-through-the-neck morbidness and his generally sanguine disposition is delightful to me.
- Draw Pat in the clothes he talks about wishing he could wear, or else just in something that makes you laugh. I love his retro dad sensibilities and I’d also love to see him wearing the clothing of the other ghosts’ eras or a completely different era.
- Pat having a wistful moment! Make Pat sad. While he generally has a fairly good tempered disposition, I still love his moments of melancholy, especially around seeing his family move on without him.

Character: Kitty

Treats:
- Kitty gets to catch up on some scandalous piece of media from her living days, or with Alison’s assistance she finally gets her hands on the final installment of a piece of fiction or a poem she never got to finish while alive. I love her reading habits in canon (romantic and also a little naughty) and I’d love to see her find new spicy literary diversions.
- Button House gets a visit from a historian of the 18th century (amateur or pro) who’s specifically interested in reconstructing the facts of Kitty’s life as a tragically short-lived Georgian heiress — is the attention flattering, disconcerting, or both? Maybe a historian of fashion, or women’s history, or the lives of black women in Britain? Kitty is such an earnest sweetheart and I’d love any appreciation for her from the living world or a focus on her own time period.
- What was her entry into ghosthood like? We have some pre-Georgian ghosts in the current Button House crew, as well as those we haven’t met who’ve already been sucked off ascended to a different plane — what was her adjustment period like?

Art prompts:
- Kitty’s canonical dress is absolute costume porn for me (Georgian dress is my favorite rn) but I would love to see her in other 18th century outfits, especially others with the same purple-and-pink color palette. Riding habits! OTT mantuas! Fancy caracos! Zone-front gowns! Fabulous 18th century loungewear and undress are also great. (Bonus round: Kitty in men’s clothes! She would make a fabulous trouser role.)
- Kitty in Neoclassical art-inspired poses, out in the garden or lounging around Button House. (If you want to include any of the other ghosts or Alison and Mike, please do! Kitty, Alison, and Mary as the Three Graces?)
- Gothic heroine Kitty swooshing around Button House and environs after dark with a candelabra! It can be a RL scenario from her own life or a highly dramatique and scandal-filled amusement as a ghost, or something else. (Kitty’s own Northanger Abbey experience?)

Fandom-specific DNWs: I don’t want to receive smut for this fandom. Relationships of all stripes and canon levels of background sex and romance are a-okay, but nothing raunchier than the show’s TV-14 standard in the onscreen sex department.

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Fandom: The Green Knight (2021)
Character: The Scavenger

Treats:
- Gawain finds it in his heart to treat the Scavenger with more courtesy and the ensuing morally ambiguous adventure gets a huge wrench thrown in it by the Scavenger’s presence. Whether this alters the trajectory of the poem and the film’s riff on it or turns into an entirely different Arthurian mishap is up to you.
- Assuming he’s not dead by then, what might the Scavenger get up to in Gawain’s doomed-king future timeline? Part of me wanted to see him again out there at the head of some peasant revolt (and maybe losing his head in the process of that) but really anything set during Gawain’s reign would be great.
- What’s the Scavenger’s relationship to the other two thieves? (With their little cat-eared hoods! I don’t want to say catboy AU, but.) With his necklace of gold rings, he seems to be fairly well-off by battlefield scavenger standards — again, assuming he doesn’t get bumped off before then, does he intend to cash in? What’s his idea of opulence like?

Tricks:
- I’ve seen people speculate that the Green Knight’s axe finds its way out of the Scavenger’s possession by less than savory means, namely the Knight encountering him and taking it back. (Potentially out of the Scavenger’s cold dead hands.) What might that encounter look like? I love the film’s heavy, decaying nature imagery and I’d love anything that touches on that.
- More of a trick for Gawain than the Scavenger, since he seems like he has a pretty good time outwitting haughty knights and divesting them of their treasured possessions, but I’d love some creepy, atmospheric Scavenger->Gawain noncon or dubcon, or at least more faux soothing face touching.
- The Scavenger as a Mordred riff! TGK 2021 plays as fast and loose with what we think of as Arthurian canon as its original contributors each did independently, so feel free to mix and match, composite, layer, and riff on anything you like there or come up with some whole new disastrous purpose for the character. (Maybe in potential!king!Gawain’s court?)

Art prompts:
- Tarot motifs? Tarot motifs.
- Anything with the Scavenger and the Green Knight’s axe — it seems to bring out something more than a little wicked in him the moment he lays hands on it, and I love the wild greenery that accompanies it.
- The Scavenger deserves a good wardrobe change — show him in somebody else’s (probably stolen) attire, or give him something nice to wear, whether hewing to the accurate medieval side of things (I’d love to see him with a hood) or incorporating the film’s symbolism and fantastic elements.

Ships-wise: I ship the Scavenger with just about everybody (Gawain, the Green Knight/Bertilak, his fellow thieves, Essel, Arthur, Lady Bertilak, etc.) and I’m down for anything here.

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Fandom: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Relationship: Mike Crew/Jon Sims

Tricks:
- I love Jon suffering, and love Mike’s inventive relationship to the powers and themes of The Vast — for these two I would be happy to read anything where Mike torments Jon a little or a lot, either under his own steam as punishment for Jon’s intrusiveness and insolence, or as a result of external factors. (Noncon and dubcon are very welcome here in addition to physical/psychological torment; I prefer a version of Jon who’s ace or somewhere on the asexuality spectrum, but if your own headcanons run contrary to that, feel free to write whatever you like.)
- What if the two of them encountered one another in a different context? Mike’s more, uh, proactive relationship to the Leitners and to the forces he encounters via them is really interesting to me, and it seems like it might lend itself to him crossing paths with Jon earlier in canon or under altered circumstances. Obviously the archivist role is already eating up most of Jon’s time by #91, but I’d love something where they meet under more mundane circumstances (maybe on a date earlier in canon?) but Mike’s connection to the Vast still intrudes, or one or both of them still has ulterior motives.
- Daisy shoots Mike as she does in canon, Jon helps bury him… and Mike comes back. He can have survived the shooting by mundane means or supernatural ones, or have had some kind of “came back wrong” resurrection scenario… or something else, but it puts him and Jon back into reluctant proximity and maybe more.

Art prompts:
- Art illustrating Jon and Mike’s encounter in episode #91 would make me really happy — how does Jon look from the outside when he’s getting blasted with Mike’s Vasty terrors?
- Both of these guys in the company of some shady books! Forced to face something messed-up as a reluctant team, fighting over a tome, or on their way to a-Leitner-made-them-do-it scenario?
- Some kind of chance encounter between Jon and Mike or a scene of domesticity between the two of them as partners — we don’t get too much of the world outside the Archives and overtly creepy locations like old wax museums and theaters but I’d love to see both of these guys being their scarred, haunted, occult-bedeviled selves on the train or in the grocery store.


Ship: Peter Lukas/Martin Blackwood

Tricks:
- Peter’s approach to isolating Martin from his colleagues is so delightfully dreadful for me, and I’d be thrilled with fic exploring that territory still further, once more with sexiness. Nobody involved in the Lukas family’s doings is really non-malevolent but I really enjoy Peter’s comparatively more affable (and funny) presence even as he furthers his family’s awful agenda.
- Martin ends up going full dark!Martin by whatever means (full enthusiastic surrender to the Lonely, other malignant external influences, getting won over by Elias, or just being a morality-swapped AU Martin from the start or one who spirals downward instead of growing via character development) and Peter Lukas finds himself entirely thrilled. (Or not — if you choose to write Martin nonconning/dubconning Peter Lukas I would also be all for it.)
- Anything kinking on all the differentials and power dynamics between them — age, wealth, employment, power, supernatural fuckery, and more — or transplanting those dynamics to a different historical context. I love the 18th and 19th century historical bits of the Institute’s history and I’d love to see these two in a Victorian, Edwardian, or interwar AU still working for the archives in their respective (sometimes shady) capacities.

Art prompts:
- Not gonna lie, this is a fandom where I love smutty art and art of romantic clinches as a showcase for different writers and artists’ headcanons of what these characters look like. I’d love anything filthy you want to draw with these two. (Or with any other requested pairing that isn’t BBC Ghosts, but in particular these two, I simply believe that Martin should be wickedly railed and/or wickedly rail others.)
- Martin being menaced by or loomed over by Peter, even if Peter is on his best behavior and really being as innocuous as possible. Alternately, Peter in a position where the tables are turned or where Martin has figured out how to get back at him the way he spites Elias by destroying Archives documents. I love seeing everyone’s various headcanons of what Peter Lukas looks like so please go to town there.
- Scenes of these two in the physical space(s) of the Lonely. I love Martin’s struggles there in s5 but if you choose any other way to depict the Lonely or any of the other fears, I would love to see them.

Feel free to include references to canon relationships, including all stages of Martin/Jon, as well as any background pairings of your choice.

Fandom-specific DNWs: headcanons about Peter/Elias having been repeatedly married and divorced; Jon having a particularly active sex life. (Feel free to write as much dubconning and nonconning of Jon as your heart desires, or Jon voluntarily making exceptions for whatever reason as long as it’s notable as an exception for him.)

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Fandom: HBO's Rome
Character: Octavian

Treats:
- Any kind of missing scene content during the timeskip or the periods where Octavian is away from the onscreen action of the show — I’d love any scenes of him putting his military theories into practice, practicing Roman realpolitik, building allegiances, making nasty bargains, etc.
- HBO!Octavian has opinions about contemporary literature and poetry, and I want to hear them. Canon plays fast and loose with late Republican poetics, so don’t feel too wedded to the historical timeline if it gets in the way of your fun — any way you want to have Octavian interacting with his gossipy, venomous, and raunchy contemporaries in the literary world would make me very happy.
- More scenes from Octavian’s transition to public life and public responsibility under Caesar’s canny campaign of nepotism. This is one of my favorite parts of the rise of the historical Augustus and I wish we’d gotten to see more urban politics, public entertainments as a public service, and quiet tutoring in statecraft.

Tricks:
- Much to the disappointment of his apparent philosophical stance on religion and spirituality, Octavian gets haunted as fuck by the ghost of someone he knows (perhaps somebody whose death he had a hand in) and tries his best to remedy the situation by whatever means he knows. Antony, Servilia, and Caesar all have very different possibilities here but feel free to pluck from anyone in the cast or the historical record who bites it at any point — this can be mined for humor or for serious scares and/or melancholy, I love all of it.
- Show!Octavian can notably be a cold and cruel little shit, both as a boy and as a young man — I’d love an outside POV or a moment of self-reflection on one of the moments of calculated nastiness we get in canon, or another event that thrusts him and his companions into contact with his capacity for evil.
- The tables turn in Octavian’s war with Antony, and Octavian is the one facing imprisonment and death — what’s his response to a dramatic change in fortune, one that doesn’t appear readily reversible? Octavian facing a pragmatic Roman suicide seems fully possible (and I’m 100% down for that as long as it’s tagged) but I’d also love to see him try to bargain, manipulate, and brute force his way back into a defensible position.

Art prompts:
- Octavian all covered in blood in his priestly robes circa Triumph is one of my favorite images of the show and I’d love more art of him in priestly dress and/or absolutely soaked in blood.
- Sulky teen Octavian in domestic situations — I love the little household moments we get around Atia’s estate, from incestuously charged toenail-painting to domineering dinner preparations, and I’d love any little scene of aristocratic Roman life.
- Honestly, Simon Woods’ Octavian is very very handsome and I would love to see him get roughed up and dirtied, or at the very least in a rough and ready military context with his pals and peers.

Ship-wise, I ship Octavian with absolutely everyone — Livia, his mother, his sister, Caesar, Antony, Brutus, Titus Pullo, and Vorenus for that matter; if you can get Cicero in there, so much the better. Any ship content whatsoever for this little monster would make me so happy; consider this carte blanche.

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Fandom: A Warning To The Curious - M.R. James
Character: Paxton

Treats:
- Other scenes from Paxton’s bicycling around England, either eventful or uneventful — I love the tweedily haunted world of M.R. James’ stories and I’m familiar with just about all of them if you want to write any crossovers with characters meeting or other encounters in Jamesian locations.
- Perhaps Paxton’s ghost ends up reluctant guardian of the reburied crown, relieving William Ager of that duty. How does the landscape of Seaburgh change, even if he himself does not? I’d love to see him encounter some Original M.R. James Protagonists of later eras, especially women.
- I’m shameless and I would love fic with poor rabbity Paxton spending time with the narrator and Henry Long — my id says “let Paxton have a gently melancholy three-way with two middle-aged men before he dies” but they can also play some golf.

Tricks:
- There are many valid readings of this story’s chronological location, but I’d love anything that contextualizes Paxton’s search and ensuing sufferings in light of the First World War — grief, loss, trauma, national myths, or anything else you like. Is Paxton a conscientious objector? A veteran?
- Paxton’s ghost ends up having to fill Ager’s place… and it’s really really bleak and creepy, either for him or for the next person who ends up encountering the crown and its guardians. What happens when the next war rolls around?
- Paxton escapes Seaburgh, but his doom still pursues him. How far might Ager’s wrath follow him?

Art prompts:
- Any art of Paxton in Seaburgh — I love the fact that he’s traveling by bicycle and I’d love to see more of the landscape of Seaburgh around him or him in traveling clothes.
- Art incorporating the imagery of or depicting Paxton’s gnarly death. (If you’re not comfortable drawing what sounds like a fairly gory way to go, no worries, but I’m happy to receive blood/gore/body horror.)
- I’m a simple soul: Paxton with the crown! Paxton with the crown’s guardians! Anything indicating the historical significance of what he’s excavated and what kind of doom lies in store (or doesn’t) for him.