Prompts for Rational Fiction Fest 2025
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Request by dakeyras
Fandom:
28 Jul 2025
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Science fiction: in a setting where terraforming is possible, but not trivial (i.e. it can be done, but on a timescale of decades or centuries -- possibly longer -- rather than minutes, and is a big investment of resources) what does a terraforming project look like? What day-to-day tasks do the people on the project do? Does anyone need to be 'on-site' (in orbit or on the ground), and if so, what do they do all day? Or are they just there for emergencies and a handful of key moments (and if so, how do they pass the time)?
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Amar is an ice prospector trying to 'make it big' on a frozen planet with the help of his AI companion and his machines. Both terraforming and financial success require relentless patience and hard work. Fortunately, Amar is monomaniacal in his scientific and analytical precision, the embodiment of competence.
Unfortunately, even the most desolate plateau in the solar system is trod by other humans, overseen by AI, and shaped by economic pressures. There are many ways Amar could lose his chance at a fortune. Not all of them submit themselves to scientific scrutiny.
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<@430038864157999104>
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(cribbed from a tumblr post)
We're all familiar with the good old (tired?) soulmate tropes, whether from their mythological origins or their endless recycling in fanfiction. The red string of fate, carrying your soulmate's first words imprinted on your skin, soulmate-mediated color vision pathologies, the works. It's a nice story. It makes you feel better about the mindless chaos and thoughtless tragedy so common in reality itself.
Let's stop, though, and consider these changes in context. What are the sociological implications of a world where soulmates are a confirmed, verifiable thing?
Is casual dating a thing in a world where everyone has a soulmate out there somewhere? Is it frowned upon? Is there a movement of people fighting for the idea that you don't have to wait for your soulmate to find true love? Is it considered abnormal or aberrant to be in a non-soulbound relationship? How does polyamory function? How about aromantic and asexual people?
Is it guaranteed you'll find your soulmate within your lifespan? Are soulmates geogrphically prefiltered or predetermined? What happens if your mark is altered, either through an accident or medical intervention? How do dating sites work? Do you get people trying to catfish celebrities with fake soul marks?
And what does this say about the nature of reality, exactly? Is there such a thing as free will? Is there a higher power? Or is the concept of being paired with a stranger at (or prior to) birth more akin to cosmic horror?
Bonus points for adopting a point (or more) from every category, smooshing them together and elaborating on the emergent consequences.
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During a standoff with the heroes of Icon City, one of them damages Doctor Dire's latest Doomsday Device (trademark pending), sucking her into a portal to an alternate dimension - Calernia.
But Dire is an Role unto herself...
Notes: AO3 does not have Teslaverse as a fandom, nor Doctor Dire as a character. But that's the crossover I'm going for, here.
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The Summoned Hero is the Lock-Picking Lawyer, and nobody in the kingdom knows what a security pin is or how to do more than ward a lock.
How long does it take for him to bring down the kingdom and become the Dark Lord's trusted lieutenant?
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Request by Beacon515L
Fandom:
25 Jul 2025
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The ability to read minds allows you to immediately and trivially solve the hard problem of consciousness, and the ability to divine the future allows you to immediately and trivially solve the halting problem.
What does first-year undergraduate philosophy look like in a world like ours plus magic?
(Bonus points for solutions to solipsism.)
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Request by Beacon515L
Fandom:
25 Jul 2025
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A well-known continent is actually an elaborate hoax designed to hoodwink everyone who visits it into thinking it is a real country.
How is this accomplished, and what is it really hiding?
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Request by Beacon515L
Fandom:
25 Jul 2025
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Roko's Basilisk suggests that the time you spend writing and fulfilling prompts instead of working towards the creation of a superintelligence is time you will later be punished for. Write something for the superintelligence to read such that it will spare you this fate when it arrives.
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The Black and White Kingdoms have fought innumerable battles since a time before they can still reckon. What beef bids them still fight, and how came them to enlist a billion people over the centuries to fight on their behalf by means of a memetic virus shaped like a grid of sixty-four squares?
And how will this battle ever end?
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Request by Beacon515L
Fandom:
25 Jul 2025
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Steve Irwin made a career of encouraging people to patiently and cautiously behold dangerous wildlife up close, until one spontaneous miscalculation tragically ended his life. Almost all fiction about the care of supernatural creatures omits or glosses over these incidents, focusing only on the very brave and sufficiently fortunate to avoid a similar fate.
After all, if someone like Newt Scamander told *all* the stories he knew, we couldn't look at his menagerie quite the same way again. Where are these cautionary tales of ill-fated intrepid magizoology?
(HP fandom not required.)
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Tolkien's framing narrative is literally true: the book you -the person reading this prompt and considering writing for it - know as Lord of the Rings is an actual translation of a manuscript known as Thain's book, itself a copy of an older manuscript known as the Red Book of Westmarch, comprising the hobbit-authored manuscripts There and Back Again and The Downfall of the Lord of the Rings, both by Bilbo Baggins (the latter completed by Frodo Baggins). It also contains The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, and Bilbo's translations of hobbitish legends (The Adventures of Tom Bombadil) and Elvish histories and legends (The Silmarillion).
You also live in a world where Christianity exists (not least - Tolkien himself), and thus so does the Bible.
Both of these books have mythologies dealing with the creation of the world, its repeated upheavals and evolution, and why it is a far less supernatural place than it might once have been.
Both of these cultures assert the world was created by a supreme creator deity, who is the ultimate object of all worship and source of good in the world.
One of these mythologies describes a world now lost to us; the other describes how, in a great flood, it was lost.
One of these mythologies tells the legend of an immortal being brought down to the stature of less than a man, made to suffer death for the redemption of mankind, shunned by his own people who reject his challenges to orthodoxy. The other concerns orcs, and a divine being rejecting every chance at redemption until he is all but destroyed.
'Christ' derives from 'Kristos', meaning "anointed one". Sauron was once called Mairon, which means "the Admirable". Both of them directly percieved Eru.
Both Tolkienian and Christian theology are literally true. Then:
How much of himself did Mairon lose in wandering the wilderness that Eru saw fit to, in good time, form him into the messiah? And in sacrificing himself to save the world he once sought to dominate and destroy, can he save his own soul?
How does Jesus sleep at night, knowing what he once was? How does Mairon endure, knowing what he has become?
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Request by Beacon515L
Fandom:
25 Jul 2025
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Summary
(Recycled from RFF2024.)
Cheap fanfic protagonists get isekai'd with just the right amount of knowledge, technology and/or weapons to outclass or at least massively nerf any credible threat they would face in-setting.
How much worse could you possibly screw up, specifically given all these advantages, compared with placebo?
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Being Ronald Weasley is a little easier when you’ve read the Harry Potter series. That chump You-Know-Who doesn’t stand a chance.
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(Recycled from RFF2024.)
Everything where there exists the Walt Disney Company, exists so long as it remains the intellectual property of the Walt Disney Company.
Everything which is the intellectual property of the Walt Disney Company is equally real.
Everything which enters the public domain ceases to exist. The same goes for sale and arbitration or litigation resulting in divestment. Things only partially owned by Disney only partially exist.
The Walt Disney Company are trying to amend copyright law into perpetuity as a supreme moral imperative.
You exist in a world where the Walt Disney Company exists.
Claimed By
- FireBatVillain
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(Recycled from RFF2024.)
The nature of The Art is disputed. Gehn believed it to be an act of creation that entitled him to worship; Atrus preferred that Descriptive Books forge a link to a pre-existing world over which the author has no special claim. Morally, Atrus is clearly correct(?); but the fact of the matter of what The Art is actually doing is less clear cut.
Certain events in the study of the art seem are difficult to reconcile with the Atrus's view. The moral differences between creating a bridge to a world and creating the whole world means making sure you really understand what you are doing is incredibly important. What sort of experiments can one ethically conduct with with The Art while uncertain about the question of creation vs bridging that would be able to tell the difference between the two?
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(any fandom is fine)
Many isekai plots focus on the fish-out-of-water trope; be it culture or language or a magic system, the protagonist is forced to play catch-up just to survive and have any hope in hell of blending in. These often make for compelling stories and generate as much tension and as many time-constraint problems as required.
But what if we invert the problem?
Picture this:
It's been a few years. You've picked up a few cantrips, made some coin, found a place to live. You've handled the most pressing issues, be it overthrowing the royal family, defeating the local dark lord or striking a bargain with whatever monster seasonally threatens the surrounding countryside.
You head to the local inn. You order whatever the meal of the day is, and an ale. A traveling bard is chanting a lay.
Something is wrong.
It takes you a moment to think of it. Maybe you miss a spice that would have enlivened your dish - a particular herb, or a dash of spice. Maybe you can't get the electric guitar remix of the bard's tune out of your head. Maybe the ale is watery - maybe every ale in this world is watery, and all you want is to have your favorite imperial Russian stout again.
What do you do?
Electric guitar pickups are just coils of wire. Spice is a matter of travel and investigation. Brewing - what do you know of brewing?
Maybe you can't fix every problem - but for sure you can fix one. Maybe you can't keep your entire culture alive, have back all the things you miss - but maybe you can save one, or two. Maybe you can rebuild a shard of your own world here, where you've made your new home.
Bonus points for using your current knowledge of culture, science and society to do your best, only using external research to check your work.
Claimed By
- SupahCabre
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Request by Anonymous
Fandom:
19 Jul 2025
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(Repeat Prompt from 2023)
"I just knew the rules. How things move, and how they don't."
Real life is not a chess game. Physical reality is complicated and hard to predict, and people are even more difficult. Despite that, very high intelligence (emotional or otherwise) might allow you to predict how others are going to behave well enough to make plans around it.
Write a story in which understanding others extraordinarily well allows a person to bring a plan to fruition.
Maybe they set up a friend on a blind date, or they manipulate someone into helping them, or they infer that allies for their cause must exist and bring them together. Maybe they have to coordinate with someone they can't talk with, or they have to outmaneuver someone who knows them well. Whatever the case: knowing how other people will behave is crucial to their endeavor.
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(Repeat Prompt from 2022)
Patchouli Knowledge, the Unmoving Great Library, has been doing magical research for over a hundred years to the detriment of her health and relationships.
What is so important that she'd rather research it than do anything else?
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Request by Anonymous
Fandom:
19 Jul 2025
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Computer-brain interface technology has matured. We've given it to whales and dolphins, and to everyone's surprise they are (in some ways) smarter and more capable than humans.
Now they are asking for help making their own tools and basis for industry. What happens?
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Explore the implications of being able to fuse two beings into one, as in Steven Universe. What happens to the goals of the substituents? Why might they prefer to be fused? Subjectively, how does it feel to desync and defuse?
Other fandoms are also acceptable.
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The Stranger pulls the lever Achenar tells them to. Unfortunately, Sirrus is both prepared, and that good at acting. But are they prepared for the consequences of their actions?
Meanwhile, Atrus and Katran come to terms with their losses, what that means for their daughter, and the rest of their lives.
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Request by Anonymous
Fandom:
19 Jul 2025
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I'd love to see a romance story about a well established romantic relationship, for example, a couple that has been married for ten years. The story can be fantastic (high level party members slaying a dragon) or mundane (the couple goes out to dinner and talks about any subject).
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The Stranger pulls the lever Achenar tells them to. Unfortunately, Sirrus is both prepared, and that good at acting. But are they prepared for the consequences of their actions?
Meanwhile, Atrus and Katran come to terms with their losses, what that means for their daughter, and the rest of their lives.
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I'd love to read a fiction for your favorite Vocaloid (or other) song. Perhaps you, like me, have a whole scene that plays out in your head when you listen to music.
Bonus points if the song has a very different meaning, but still works for your fiction--that is, if you cleverly misinterpret the song!