hso_mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hso_mods) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
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 ROSE<3ROXY
FILL: TEAM SLICK<3<SNOWMAN
***********************************
She floated in space. Her hair, let loose from its usual bun, spread out like a many-tentacled beast with a mind of its own. She may have appreciated the irony of this - a lowblooded slave, mimicking the horrorterrors of royalty - if she had ever cared about that sort of thing.
The Handmaid had never cared about much, really.
She had long since learned to ignore the burning in her lungs that would have spelled death for any other troll. It was a background pain, uninteresting and unimportant. She knew she wouldn’t suffocate because she knew she couldn’t die. Any further dwelling on it would be pointless.
Besides, the pain was an acceptable trade-off for the slightly decreased unbearability of her existence that floating out among the stars lent her. Doing nothing out here was at least preferable to doing nothing in her small sickly-green cell. Assignments from her employer were the only breaks in the interminable monotony, and she hadn’t had an assignment in hundreds of sweeps.
She considered finding a nearby planet and wreaking some havoc there, just for something to do. In the end she decided against it. Maybe later.
After all, she had all the time in the universe.
***
Her Imperious Condescension stood on the bridge of her flagship, staring out through the floor-to-ceiling reinforced-glass windows and into the inky depths beyond.
There were whispers that she was getting old. That she was getting desperate. They said that she was trying to keep hold on an empire that would not be hers much longer. Rumors spread, telling of a young Tyrian back on Alternia, who would inevitably wrest from her the trident and the crown.
The Condesce paid them no mind, except to occasionally execute those she found spreading such rumors.
She wasn’t going anywhere. The Condesce was quite fond of life. She would hardly let go of it any time soon. Certainly not with so many stars out there left unconquered.
Those stars, after all, were hers. Maybe not yet, but in the end, they would be.
She had time. She could wait.
The Condesce looked out at the stars and laughed.
***
Something was moving in space.
Normally, the Handmaid would have taken no notice whatsoever. Though from any terrestrial standpoint the void beyond seemed frozen and unchanging, from millenia of experience the Handmaid had learned that it was really a rather active place. Everything was in constant motion: moons orbited planets, planets orbited stars, stars spun and rotated around the centers of galaxies. Stars exploded, pulsars whirled, galaxies hurtled and crashed and cannibilized each other.
Celestial obejcts were always in motion. They gave the impression that they weren’t because they were also always silent.
The Handmaid liked that.
They were also always very, very far away from each other.
This one caught the Handmaid’s attention because it was suddenly very close.
The Handmaid knew this stretch of space. She knew many stretches of space. Not all of them. Space was a big place. But she knew this one and knew it was empty, empty for light-years in all directions. Nothing was supposed to be here.
She spun around, focusing on the movement. It was too far away to easily distinguish from the speckled background of stars, but the preternatural clarity of deep space gave just enough of an edge that the Handmaid could see that it was red. Bright, deep, violent red.
The Handmaid flickered, blue red green, and warped away.
***
She reappeared an infinitesimal fraction of a second later, only several thousand miles away from the moving red thing. From here she could see it up close.
She recoiled the second she realized what it was.
It was a starship. The most famous starship in existence. Every troll, even the millenia-old time-traveling demons of destruction, recognized this starship.
Even if it were somehow to slip their minds, the name was emblazoned proudly on the side.
The Handmaid was staring at the Battleship Condescension.
In the far, far back of her mind, a tiny flicker of emotion turned on. As much as could be possible in her current state, she was taken aback.
When her employer sent her off on an assignment, he gave her free reign to kill and destroy just as much as she pleased. But there had always been a few rules, and one special rule drilled white-hot into her mind: she was never, under any circumstances whatsoever, to harm Her Imperious Condescension.
The Handmaid didn’t know why, but it had never mattered. She was not curious. She did not wonder. She did not ask questions. She did what she was told by her employer and rained a holocaust over everyone else. And over the course of her life, she had never come close enough in contact with the Empress for even that rule to affect her.
But here she was now, nearly face-to-face with the only other troll in the universe who experienced a similar functional immortality.
The Handmaid felt no sense of kinship with the Empress. No sense of belonging, no feeling of finding a kindred spirit.
What she felt, as she watched the Battleship pass, was a slow-building, burning rage.
The Handmaid had been a slave for her entire life. She had been hatched and raised for no other purpose. She had spent her whole life either imprisoned in a cell, or floating in space, and she remembered, with [perfect clarity, every single second of it. Her only breaks were to do her employer’s bidding, and she had come to look forward to them, to desperately snatch the chance to get out and do something, anything other than just sit and wait and tear her mind apart from the inside. She relished the death. Relished the destruction. Because her only other choice was to sit, and think, and slowly, torturously, drive herself mad.
She had lived for thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of lifetimes. She had outlived species. She had outlived planets. She had outlived some stars. Her employer kept her immortal, and made very sure that is was impossible for her to die. She knew. She had tried, so many times, to find a way out of this hateful existence, and the fact that she was still ruminating on this was very clear proof that she had failed.
It had never, in her entire life, even occurred to the Handmaid to consider her immortality a gift.
The Empress, though, with immortality, had inherited everything the Handmaid would never have. She had power and freedom. She ruled an empire that spanned hundreds of planets. Anything she could ever want, she could, and did, easily get. For the Empress, immortality was a gift, the best gift she could ever ask for, the easiest gift she would ever receive.
The Handmaid hated her.
The Empress would never have to tear open her veins and paint the walls of her cell, just to try to cover up that horrible green for a while. She would never float alone in space for sweeps because any other option was a fraction more unbearable. She would never have to get creative, gouging out her own eye with a spoon to try to stab her own brain because anything else that might be possibly used as a weapon had been taken away.
When the Empress looked out at the stars, she laughed.
The Handmaid suddenly wanted to cause great harm to the Empress.
She was more than capable of it.
And, now that she had a chance, and a reason, the rule rose back into her mind.
She considered it, briefly.
But she was the Demoness of death. She killed who she wanted. No mortal laws had ever stopped her, because there was no punishment mortal arbiters of justice could inflict on her.
If her employer wanted her to follow a rule, he had to enforce it.
And the Handmaid was already living in an unadulterated personal hell. There was literally nothing that he could do that could make her life worse.
When she reached that conclusion, her decision on a course of action was really quite easy.
She shimmered, blue red green, and warped onto the Battleship.
***
The Condesce walked down the halls of her ship. Lost in thought, she barely heard the telltale swish of displaced air that announced a preternatural arrival.
But she heard the snarl, and the sparking of magic. She turned around.
A wild demoness, a blazing, brutal legend with no conscience and no law, stood facing her. Her black eyes were livid; her tangled mass of hair crackled with red and green flame.
Many trolls didn’t believe in the Demoness anymore. The Condesce had lived long enough to know what fools they were.
Slowly, she smiled.
Re: FILL: TEAM SLICK<3<SNOWMAN
Thank you so much!