hs_olympics | BONUS ROUND 1

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bonus round

BONUS ROUND 1

Bonus Round 1

Genre-Mixing

Hey, shippers! Welcome to your very first bonus round proper--we hope you have lots of fun with it! This time around we're going to be asking you to mix it up a little--each fanwork posted for this round will be a mish-mash of two different genres, blended together in a delightful incestuous slurry to create an UNSTOPPABLE CREATIVE CONCOCTION--er. Or. Something.

Yeah, we're genre-mixing. That's what we're doing this round.

Rules

Submit prompts! Prompts should consist of two different genres and one ship. This cannot be your team's ship! These are worth 5 points each, for a maximum of 100 points per team.

Look through the prompts and fill whichever you like!

You may not fill prompts for your ship, nor may you fill your own team's prompts.

Fills should be posted as replies to the prompts which they are for, following the format below. They may be any medium.

Title Format
If you are starting a new thread, please use this format in your title.

Replace [YOUR SHIP] with the name of the team YOU belong to; please use the characters and quadrant, not whatever portmanteau or nickname you've come up with.
If your team name is not in this format and in the title we cannot guarantee that it will be counted.

If you are filling a prompt, use this format in your title.

Replace [YOUR SHIP] with the name of the team YOU belong to; please use the characters and quadrant, not whatever portmanteau or nickname you've come up with.
If your team name is not in this format and in the title we cannot guarantee that it will be counted.

Posts not using this format in the title will be understood to be unofficial discussion posts, no matter what they contain. They, like all comments on the comm, are subject to the Wank Policy.

Scoring
For prompt posts: 5 points each (maximum of 100 per team)

For fills (as stated here):
First 5 entries in each post: 30 (per entry)
Entries 6-10 in each post: 20 (per entry)
Entries 11-15 in each post: 10 (per entry)
Entries 16+ in each post: 5 (per entry)

All scored content must be created/assembled new for this round.

If you have any questions, please ask them at the FAQ post here, or email them to us (homestuck.shipping at gmail). Otherwise, we cannot guarantee that we will see them in a timely fashion!

Page 4 of 146

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Dave <3< John

Western + Musical

This is wonderful! Equius<>Nepeta member thanks you heartily.

Ship: Rose<3Karkat

Genres: Magic realism + high school AU

I really like your interpretation of this prompt! Good job!

How about Eridan<3Karkat

Dark Comedy + Fairy Tale

This is a popular prompt, apparently! I hope no one minds me getting in on it too. (Content warnings for, uh, zombies? and injuries/blood, and brief mentions of suicide.)

--

It’s been two hours since you left the liquor store; for every achievement you’ve been hit by another setback, and the image of broken bottles and splintered shelves hangs heavy in your mind like the clouds gathering ominously above the downtown skyline. Turning your coat collar up and glancing over your shoulder at the quiet street, you slip through the door of one of the more discerning of the city’s shady waterholes, surreptitiously bolting it behind you.

Lalonde’s at the bar, of course, one leg tangled over the other as though to root her to the stool, a half-empty martini glass in her hand. The bartender is presumably occupied elsewhere; you glance through the door into the back room and see a few heavy-set people huddled in a corner, but apart from that the place is empty. Convenient.

You lean insouciantly against the bar next to her, your arms folded across your chest. “Maybe I’ve got a job for you,” you tell her.

Roxy tilts her glass back and forth, her head on one side as though she’s not even registered your presence, and then downs what’s left of it in one. You raise your eyebrows. She spins the barstool to face you, swaying slightly, one hand braced on the bar and the other splayed across the trilby motif on your coat pocket, and says, “Hit me.”

“Lester’s missing,” you say, deadpan, “and his shop’s completely fucking wrecked. The fuzz says it’s suicide. He drank himself crazy, destroyed his storerooms, and offed himself afterwards. Something about the unbearable pressures of a life of ignominy.”

She frowns. “Bullshit. Lester was the comfortablest ignormin- ignor- crook I ever met.”

“Exactly. So I went and checked it out, and I found this.” You pull the clear plastic wallet out of your coat pocket and drop it on the bar in front of her. It’s cold as death, which is pretty appropriate- hasn’t got any warmer for being a couple of layers of fabric away from your skin. If you thought more about that it might make you a little uncomfortable, but you’ve got bigger fish to fry.

Roxy leans over it, squinting. “Is that a fninger?”

“Something like that.”

“Where’d you find it?”

“Out the back of Lester’s storeroom, kicked under a shelf. The back door was pulled off its hinges, covered in dirt, and the dust on the floor was full of bootprints. The cops got there before me, Rox, and I’m pretty sure they’re covering up something big. But I guess they missed this one.”

She reaches inside her skirt pocket, drops an assortment of instruments onto the table. Pushing out of the way a petri dish and what looks like a pH scale, she pulls on a pair of white latex gloves and peers through a magnifying glass at Exhibit A., decomposing human digit, biting her lip thoughtfully.

“This is old,” she says, turning it over. “Like… weeks, months dead? Maybe. Seriously old. And there’s dirt on it, kinda clay dirt they have north-west of town. But wet. New dirt, hasn’t died- dried, yet. Like someone’s exum- ex, uh- dug it up.”

“North-west,” you say quietly, “is where the cemetery is.”

You’re about to formulate another hypothesis when the finger starts wriggling.

Roxy yelps, jumps backwards in alarm, overbalances off the barstool- you catch her, but she’s dropped the finger and it’s hit the floor, dragging itself along like a jointed caterpillar, trailing grave mud behind it.

“What the actual fucking fuck,” says Roxy, steadying herself against the bar, her eyes wide. The finger’s flopping more like a fish than a worm, now, towards the door to the back room—

A horrible possibility occurs to you, and you don’t have time to verbalise it, because the heavy-set people you noticed sitting in the other room earlier are stumbling through the doorway, filthy and moaning, and one of them only has half a face.

“Oh, hell”, you murmur under your breath, taking in the torn, mud-spattered clothing, the decaying skin, limbs bent at unnatural angles, ripped and bloodless wounds, red-stained mouths.

You reckon you know what happened to Lester.

They’re slow, though, and still across the room from you. Your mind catches up to the situation, notes pedantically that maybe calling them people was incorrect, but the last thing you want to get into now is a discussion with yourself on the nature of human identity. You adjust your glasses.

“You up for a fight, Lalonde?” you ask, reaching behind your head to pull your sword from its harness at your back (if you’ve learnt one thing in this line of work, it’s that you can hide anything under the right trenchcoat).

“Like you even need to ask,” she says. You can hear the grin in her voice. When you glance over, she’s emerging from under the bar, locking the clip into an assault rifle that she’s slung over her shoulder. Christ, are you glad to have her around at times like this.

Because whatever’s going on-- well, you’re pretty sure this is only the beginning.