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hs_olympics2012-06-10 01:02 am
hso_mods) wrote in hs_olympics2012-06-10 01:02 am
Entry tags:
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!
PROMPT: TEAM Dirk<3Equius
Davesprite<3Jade
Body horror/Comfort
Re: PROMPT: TEAM Dirk<3Equius
FILL: TEAM JAKE<3JANE
Sometimes the differences aren't at all blindingly bright. Because during that first year out of three, apart from the digital feathers and warm orange skin like tropical sunset drinks, you sometimes would forget that he wasn't Dave. Same sense of humor, same coolkid front, same porcelain mask tinted with orange to cover up everything that he was on the inside.
And then there were times when it would slap you in the face, hard and mercilessly, but you would not flinch away.
He's a game construct, a guide for players to follow down the rabbit holes and cross the chessboard to victory. He has codings, wireless internet connections linked to the fibers of his brain like additional receptors to the ones already in the cortex. A living, breathing computer.
And just like computers, he has bugs, and more commonly, viruses.
It's not the first time it's happened; boredom induced internet browsing of what was left of Earth's network and servers is sometime commonly used to pass the time. But this is the first time she's ever seen him hunched over in pain like this, agonized whimpers leaking through clenched teeth as a break in the spasms and violent heaving that has wracked his sprite body for the past half hour, over a cool toilet in a cramped bathroom, occurs.
It's a strong one; what is left of you that is a sprite tells you that much, and before your very eyes it hacks into his coding and it starts to break him down, pixel by singular, breathing pixel.
You keep him grounded with firm hands and massaging fingers on his shoulders, keep from truly slipping into the panic that you fear might be building up inside him as what keeps his hands solid begins to break apart, drifting from defined fingers to blurry squares and he loses his grip on the rim of the toilet and sinks to the floor, shedding feathers that disintegrate into sunset dust. He might've started crying at some point, as you kneel beside him all night, rubbing his shoulders and running your pale digits through his fine hair, but if he did, you knew better than to call him out on it.
His system recovers and quarantines the virus after an agonizing, sleepless four hours, the data that composes him pulls back together upon rebooting and you murmur 'It's OK Dave' over and over again, as everything begins to look OK indeed, and you squeeze his completed, glowing orange hand tightly once again now that it's not in danger of coming apart in a flurry and burst of pixels and sunburnt plasma.
Davesprite let's out the longest, heaviest sigh Paradox Space has ever seen, shuts his eyes as you croon to him, and you both spend the next day curled on the couch, sprite tail coiled around you carefully, and you both marathon a sitcom John had left lying around in his home.
Re: FILL: TEAM JAKE<3JANE
Re: FILL: TEAM JAKE<3JANE
Re: FILL: TEAM JAKE<3JANE
Re: FILL: TEAM JAKE<3JANE
I'd never really thought about the electronic side, wow~ Thats brilliant!
Re: FILL: TEAM JAKE<3JANE
I thought it best to share it here~
Thanks again for the fill!
Re: FILL: TEAM JAKE<3JANE
This is GLORIOUSLY BEAUTIFUL OH MY GOD
THANK YOU!!
Re: FILL: TEAM JAKE<3JANE
FILL: TEAM ALPHA!DAVE<3ALPHA!ROSE
--------------------------------------------
“Hydrogen, helium, and a lot of silicates,” she says at last with her eyes closed, the readout glowing above her palm.
“Showoff,” he says to let her know she’s right. “What about carbon?”
“Trace. Scroll down. There is a little but less than the metals.”
“Huh,” he says, having largely exhausted his knowledge of what he was supposed to be made of. He reaches out and scrolls down the list, which has been facing him. This was a courtesy on her part: as though he would be able to make sense of it. “Am I radioactive? Like, do you need a stack of lead aprons before you start feeling me up.”
She takes her hand off his wing, reminded, which was not what he meant. “No. I mean, yes! Very. But I am too so I don’t think we need to worry about it.” She has flipped the list around and is frowning at it. “Oh, I missed the pure strontium, it’s probably important, though I got all the isotopes…”
The projection is transparent; through it he can still read, backwards, the entry currently highlighted. %Sr: 1.201 x 10-9. “Yeah,” he says, straight-faced. “Can’t think how. Sloppy work, Harley, slipshod.” This rolls off her like mercury off a duck’s back, as usual. She’s not even listening; she’s comparing the first list, kept in her head, with the one in her hand. This second list is projected by her wristwatch computer from data sent from her spectro-ecto-scope, which she fed one of his feathers a half-hour ago before beginning her own review, by hand. Recently she has taken to doing chemical analysis by inspecting one atom at a time, for fun. She counts the protons on her fingers: flick-flick-flick-flick-flick, sudden fist, flick-flick-flick-flick-flick. Mendeleev would plotz.
It is frankly a surprise to him that he misses his legs more than his dick, but although he would as a matter of form deny it, the former saw more use. The thudding, maddening solidity of running, the scuff of a sneaker turning a corner and almost an ankle. It was a liability once. He used to imagine jumping and never landing, like, every kid does.
When he jumped into the kernelsprite he emerged in a new skin, like a snake: he’d prefer to have the scar on the heel of his hand back, the pockmark above his brow. It even straightened his teeth, which he finds kind of patronizing. His voice and, when he has occasion for it, his laugh are harsher, a crow croak. (“Do you think you have a bone in your tongue?” Jade says once out of absolutely fucking nowhere. “No,” he says after biting it, baffled.) His breath no longer fogs a window. Anything he eats or drinks is apparently incinerated. Jade’s hypothesis is that the water molecules in his blood are assembled on an as-needed basis at the wound sites.
His lower half ends in a long wisp of cool fire that he can pass his hand through; as he moves the hand up there’s an increasing weight, a drag, a profoundly uncomfortable sensation where his stomach used to be, or perhaps still is. Pressure on or up into the no-man’s-land between ghost and flesh increases this to a pulverizing nausea instantly recognizable as the feeling of being kneed in the nads. This is encouraging: perhaps he still has them.
When he sleeps, which entails consciously setting a timer and clicking yes somewhere behind his eyes, settling down to a level that nearly touches the floor, and fading to 75% opacity/saturation, he doesn’t think he dreams at all: but Jade says he gestures and lashes his tail sometimes, like Bec in his sleep chasing things. “You watch me sleep, Miss Universe?” he says sardonically, and to his surprise, she glances away. “I just know where things are,” she says, the understatement of the year.
His sprite knowledge is by now largely obsolete.
Once she has the ingredient list she begins the wing the next night. There are diagrams and notes all over the floor, highlighted in lime-green: supracoracoideus, scapulotriceps, other shit that sounds like dinosaurs. “It’ll still work if I don’t read the manual, right,” he says, hovering above her as she rolls up her sleeves. “Lazy,” she says, and then “Yeah, you can be ignorant if you want. Just sit still.”
That first night she never touches him: her hands drift in a pattern above his back, mirroring his intact wing, and a translucent skeleton forms from the marrow out. She calls atoms and they come. Heel, sit, stay. After an hour she says her eyes are blurring but that the hardest part is done. He eels out from under the armature and comes around to look at it, and it shimmers and vanishes. “Hey,” he says, surprised, but she says “No, it’s fine. I just saved it as a file. I didn’t want it lying around where things could bang into it! It’s pretty fragile at this stage.” This with perfect assurance, like she’s a fifth-generation feathery asshole spare parts artisan.
In a few more sessions the .wng is close to finished, one feather drawing other feathers into existence, like a seed crystal. Past a point it seems almost to build itself and they spend most of the time talking, while she keeps an eye and a few fingers on the construction. She has made more wing than necessary, so that it will overlap with the remnant he has.
She is inspecting the place where this remnant is attached to his back, pushing it gently back and forth, asking him to tense it or relax, when she curls it into an odd position and the sharp shaft of a sheared feather pierces into a raw muscle, open to the air. He could have managed the pain if he had expected it, it is hardly like losing the wing: but he hisses and clutches at her and his hands are claws, talons, plated like armor and curved like fangs, and two claws sink into and almost through her narrow forearm, which for an instant is a dog’s sinewy leg. For a long second they flicker and crackle between human and animal, guilt, antipathy, fear, and he is horrified to find, when they stabilize, that he can feel the fading presence of a phantom beak, weighted for a strike, though he doesn’t think he ever had one.
There is a hole, where there was a sword, where there was his heart, but something in the region is battering nonetheless. “Shit, Jade, I’m sorry!” he says, aghast, when he can. Her dog-ears are flattened back and her face is expressionless, her eyes dry. “I didn’t know we could do that,” she says after a pause, sitting down, her palm pressed over the punctures. “Are you OK,” he says, at a loss for how else to apologize. His hands turned back clean and that’s almost worse. “Yeah,” she says and takes her hand away. It is not a sight to reassure. A bubble of blood rises and bursts in one of the holes. She licks the area clean and sucks at each wound, stilling it, before turning, wholly unselfconsciously, to spit: unselfconsciously, except that the gobs of bloody spit vanish before they hit the floor. But when she looks up she is almost smiling.
“God Tier, remember!” she says. “Watch.” She holds out her arm and without thinking he takes it, one hand supporting her elbow, the other holding her wrist with the delicacy of remorse. Inside of five minutes her fine brown skin has closed over like water. He has not touched her before. He gives her wrist a squeeze and lets go, against the danger that she should be the one to move first.
“I’m sorry too,” she says, “for hurting your wing.” Her ears are back up; perhaps it’s all right. He used to imagine, in Austin, that if he were in the same room as her, he’d always be able to tell what she was thinking: but it’s not like that at all.
Where the damaged wing is, when she finally tries to overlay it, she gets an error message: The file 0046732790172[…].dvs already exists. Overwrite copy or save as new? She has to click Yes, Replace, Are you sure? This cannot be undone!, Yes, monotonously, for each pixel, until several hours later 50% of the wing has been overwritten, at which point she is finally given the option to Overwrite All. This does not hurt, but it comes as a crawling wave, a wash of infinitesimal prickling, over the whole of the wing. It tickles unspeakably; he has to bite his lip to keep still. Anything healing itches.
At about the limit of his endurance there is finally a kind of jarring, reproving chime and Jade, starting, clicks Save Changes. His wing flashes and fades to baseline glow.
He knows how to do this; he learned from the animes. He’s had his head bowed, his wings half furled, altogether drawn-in, and he rises up to Jade’s eye-level slowly, knowing she’s watching, though he is careful not to check. Rose would appreciate this like no one else, and for a few seconds he misses her terribly, every one of her. When he’s reached the right altitude, he tenses the wings and with a starch-crisp snap flings them out to full extension, stiff and haughty, like a salute. He’s thrown his head back at the same time, and his arms, a little, palm-out: he brings his arms in and his chin down slowly, heavy-lidded, part Squaresoft villain, part archangel. He doesn’t know if the light’s right for her to see through his shades but it’s worth a shot: he tries to open his eyes suddenly, like with some kind of shining pinging noise.
Their eyes meet: she claps her hands together and, clasping them, grins. She is cute as a fucking button. “Oh, wow!” she cries, jubilant. “What a total ham you are!”
The hole from the sword takes a while to figure out. Jade fills it in twice – quick work compared to the wing – but both times, after a few hours, her work dissolves into cold fluorescent blood in his chest, and runs out again. She experiments also to see if she can restore him to a human shape, though they both know, sprite knowledge, it won’t work. When she tests the patch overlay on a few pixels of what would be his hip there’s a buzzing that rattles both their teeth and a paper-thin window shivers in the air for a moment: INSUFFICIENT SOFTWARE CHANNEL ENTITLEMENTS. Jade growls the thick low growl of a dog that outweighed her and he puts up a hand. “Not tonight, Josephine,” he says. “Told you, that’s for the closing credits.”
Neither of them have any idea whether this is true. He used to think that if they won, if it’s possible to win Sburb, to really finish, that he and his younger self would fuse automatically like Jade and Jadesprite. He used to think that this was the best of a bad lot of options: he’d forget nearly everything but he’d have feet, like the Little fucking Mermaid.
He would not give up his voice now, but then it may not be up to him.
Jade proposes that the problem with the sword is that a trace, a particle or two, of Bec Noir was carried with it, and remains somewhere inside him, a last malice. When this particle reacts with the construction she puts in it starts some kind of chain reaction that disassembles all the new bonds. She thinks there must have been similar traces on his wing, but that being more exposed they had been washed out; certainly the wing had bled him almost dry. She wants to try to get that contamination out, “like washing the glassware,” she says, “or, actually, sort of like picking up shrapnel with a magnet.”
“What does that mean?” he says, pausing mid-unwrap, one blood-soaked layer of gauze still stuck to his back.
She picks up on the apprehension in his voice: “Oh, no, not like a MRI!” she says, sounding shocked. This does not actually clear things up for him, but then she says, “No, look,” and picks up the apple juice he’d been drinking from, drops a pencil into it and screws the top on. (He was not done with that juice; this is sort of rude.) She tosses the bottle into the air and catches it without touching it, so that it hangs between her spread hands. She closes her eyes and there’s a span of wavering in the air between her hands, like a heat mirage or a slow river, and then she’s got his juice in one hand and the pencil in the other. The pencil isn’t even wet.
“Like that,” she says. “I know what one of them is made of, I mean they’re both pretty simple, and what the other’s made of, and then when they’re in the same space, I just pull, and…! But with you I want to just cancel it out, or take it back, because I’m part Bec too.”
He gestures for the bottle of juice, she tosses it to him, and he catches it left-handed. He turns it over a few times: no leaks, label still says everything it used to, looks fine. He unscrews the top, drinks it down, recaps the bottle and pitches it onto a table. He reinforces his poker face and yanks off the last strip of gauze.
“Welp,” he says, “go for it.”
She takes her time positioning her hands around him: then, without asking if he’s ready, she lets the current go, and he lights up like a wire loop held in a flame. If he has ever wondered what she thought about him, he doesn’t now. He is blazing from the inside out, flashes and flares of gold, orange, green, nearly blind with it, but he catches a flicker of her intent, abstracted, fierce face, her teeth set in her lower lip. There are tiny electric crackles in his chest where something is being burned out, painful almost to the point of ecstasy, purifying. The love coming off her is appalling. There is no living up to it. For a moment he is afraid he will dissolve, or evaporate. If he does, he thinks, she will boil him down and reconstitute him, molecule by molecule. He will be in her hands, wherever he is. There is nowhere else. He closes his eyes.