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hs_olympics2012-06-10 01:02 am
hso_mods) wrote in hs_olympics2012-06-10 01:02 am
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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 DAVE<3JADE
FILL: TEAM KARKAT <3 NEPETA
The world is always full of messages, and around the middle of the game, you hate everything for not giving a warning about her - crackling sparks and choking smoke in her mass of red hair, snakes set to rattling when she laughs. You never should have agreed to be dealt in; you should have known, somehow, to take this woman's measure more than the other players'. But the light shining through the saloon doors never dimmed when she walked in, and at the one end of the bar the morning's wildflower bouquet kept up its fight against the heat of the day.
The woman doesn't have tells - or truth be told, she has every tell in the book. The rest of the table started off playing complacent and indulgent about her presence, but every wildly expressive move she makes gets used with each hand, no matter what she was dealt or what she plays.
Their table is gathering a crowd though it's hardly past noon and most everybody's neck-deep in their labours or taking a break from the heat of it. There are even some kids, and Aradia's normally stern about keeping them out. This card-playing woman is a pure entertainment, wild where she's just sitting in her chair. She grins, she bounces in her chair, she adjusts her hat and theatrically shakes out her sleeves to show them empty, she spins her guns and nearly upends her glasses into her mouth when she drinks. Nothing gets her down. Oh, sometimes she curses and tenses, like she might just be stuck - but what if she's putting it on? What if she has yet another perfect hand? But what if it's real?
You start to play seriously. You also have a smile that can't be shifted, but there are enough folks watching who know enough to nudge a neighbour and point out how you played with more smoothness in your motions. That has cost you a couple of games at times. It hides your heart working like a piston, though, and you can't fault yourself overmuch.
The woman stays the same. It wouldn't be possible for her to act more overconfident, even if she probably is picking up that you're on the metaphorical ropes. Her mouth looks as viciously victorious as before, she still twirls her pearl-handled pistols every now and again. You glimpsed bigger guns lurking under her men's jacket. Every player started cheating long ago, but you can't get a handle on all her tricks. The way she eyes you, it's probably the same for her. You wish she'd shoot blue streaks of lightning from her eyes and have done with it.
Aradia makes encouraging gestures when she passes with orders, peering over shoulders to follow the state of the game ... which, soon enough, she's doing with a slightly different kind of interest as she takes silver coins and crumpled bills to stuff into her pockets. She hands people their drinks and food and takes two lots of money - one for payment, and...
People are starting to bet on who's going to win this game.
You're the fastest draw in the West. People laugh when they hear that, because you know you have a boy's face and hardly look like you've even seen a gun up close, but they only keep laughing when they don't have to play cards against you. You eye the woman.
"I didn't catch your name, ma'am," you say, and the noise all around hushes. The crowd knows who the real players are. They're watching the two of you, now. And they still don't see when you hide a card up her sleeve.
You knew she'd be able to follow it. You think she might even be nearly as fast as you.
"Serket! The name's Serket! What the hell game are you trying to pull? Focus, damn you!" she yells, and ups the bet she'd laid on the table.
"I still put my money on Tavros," Aradia says in an undertone as the people went back to full volume, and she wasn't close to the only one. Serket turns around to gape at her in particular, though - turns back to her cards - and then turns back to Aradia. "As if!" She huffs and fluffs, and after two turns shoots a couple of cards of her own up your sleeves. The cards nearly fly between them, and they remember their own hands and each other's, deducing what's left of the hand for the other players. Both of you close in on them. You eye the bets racking up all around - and you keep an eye on each other.
You're too cool to have much in the way of tells, which is something that really makes people laugh. Especially when they're called David Strider, but technically he is too cool to laugh, so there. You're a grounded soul in a way that most people have difficulty with understanding, and you'll smile no matter the hand you're dealt. What does she find when she turns her attention to you, fully or slyly? No new warmth in the atmosphere, nothing sharper about the taste of the drinks, the music no clearer or more rhythmic.
The two of you play out the final round and conclude with your cards spread in a fan on the table before you. It is probably a sound move to keep looking at each other instead of the cards - it distracts the watchers from thinking you two might have thrown the game - so it's just as well you're not looking away. You don't know which of you won, and she probably doesn't either.
Her sneer is, basically, terrifying. You tip your hat, she sneers worse and puts her boots up on the table - weathered and knocked about - and you stand up and gesture to Aradia. "A drink for Miss Serket, on me," you call out - oh Lord, she didn't have a ring, did she? Would she? You get whistles and backslaps as you make your way to the bar.
"Aradia," you whisper to your old friend. "Hey, those bets you collected..."
"Of course you're getting a cut," she says in an undertone, nodding you towards the back, and you turn and give Serket a nod too. It makes no difference as she's already coming after you. The light feeling in your feet and the dread tightening your stomach as all just you, and the world has nothing in particular to say about it. For all that red hair, scowling, and the men's clothes, Serket's not ugly.
Splitting the money in front of all these people would be asking for a fight. Aradia makes a show of talking to you and Serket, swirling about with the drinks twice as much as necessary, and underneath all that manages to give you a gander at what she's putting in his cashbox for the afternoon. She does most of the talking too, which you have to listen to carefully to realise it's a negotiation for how the money's getting split. She ends up with eighteen per cent of her own - Serket raises it from fifteen from the goodness of her heart, she insists, too loudly - and then Aradia gives an outrageous wink at finding out how you two had played everybody else.
"And our share, Serket - a fifty-fifty split, I think, sounds good," you say. Eighty-twenty, Serket doesn't say, and you're surprised. You smile a little shame-faced at her. The two of you shake - she smiles back and you wait, for some stupid reason, for a crack in her face - and then you both slug back your drinks.
Then you put down the glass, hop off your barstool - and hightail it out of the saloon like a jackrabbit come within an inch of a bear-trap snapping shut.
Serket screeches in outrage in the next instant, and where anyone else might be embarrassed, she comes after you.
You make it outside through the people, round the saloon and to the post where your horse is tied up. She'll probably have no compunction about yelling at you in the dusty noonday of the high street, but as long as you can get on your horse—
Serket strikes a shoulder like a rifle butt into the small of your back, and you splash and thump into the horses' water trough. With a nearly painful twist you scramble around so you can see her next move.
There are the sparks. Finally, like it felt all along, there's fire framing her sneer, licking at the air from the tips of her flyaway hair as you look up.
"Nobody cheats me!" she announces. "You really want to be nobody so bad?" She looks angry - and impressed - but like she's really determined to be angry, and her hand is on her gun.
The thing is, you're in water.
"At least, uh ... it's more like, I made you cheat you?" You hold up a placatory hand and she looks at it like she'll slap it away as soon as she finds a sledgehammer ... which means that she doesn't notice your leg coming around to hook on hers and yank her off balance. Right into the trough with you, and you dunk yourself so there's space to get her gun and her head in the water.
She pushes up spluttering, harmless and ridiculous and teeth bared - and the water around you both heats. Steam starts to rise like smoke.
The lady does not stop. She probably doesn't ever stop, you could well believe, and you gape at her in horror and admiration.
She shoves herself out of the trough. "What? It happens!" Her colour goes high under her freckled, brown-burnt skin. "Damnation!"
You hold up your hands in sincere appeasement. "I don't even have the money. You saw, it's all back there." You gesture back towards the bar. She doesn't look. "And, as for playing in the way I played ... I knew we'd get a better cut, doing it that way. You, uh. You clearly could match that kind of play, I could tell, so I thought..."
"Thought you'd make a fool of me?" The sneer doesn't work as well now, even with the steam. "Or..."
You wait - you get what maybe you're waiting for. Her smile feels like a new performance, for all that it has the same swagger to it.
"A partner?" Serket says.
"I, uh ... ride alone?"
"You sure about that, mister, or is it just a thought you maybe had when you woke up this morning?"
"I, uh. I ride alone. Although, you know, ma'am, you play a mighty good game, and... If we had to play again, fair and square...?" You grin enticingly.
"Then you'd go down faster than—!" One hand smacks into her other palm. She looks to be knocking herself off course, with the smallest grimace. Then Serket makes her smile brilliant again and says, "Faster than I can dance. I love to dance. Think you could match me on that?"
You look at her. You look around the horse yard and high street.
"Don't be smart with me," she snaps. "No, not now."
"This is, uh, one of probably very few places where they'll let a white lady dance with me..."
She hoots with laughter. "If we're looking for a place where I'll get called a lady, then no goddamned way do I know of one." She's lit up. She's hopeful. She hasn't killed you yet. "I have a friend who's got a place open to any kind of dancing, just about. He plays a mean piano. The food's not bad."
You make a helpless gesture. "I thought that, maybe, you wanted to get even for my trick."
"Maybe I really thought that too. But I guess today's your day for being persuasive, huh?" The compliment feels, somehow, like a challenge. People don't believe you when you say you like challenges. Maybe even when you don't know what on Earth the challenge is even for.
"Tell me your name. Let's introduce ourselves properly, lady and gentleman." She holds out a hand to help you up. You are soaked, on your back, the horses are starting to look you askance and the lady still wants to dance.
You put your hand in hers and say, "The Toreador."
Her grip firms slow and sure and too tightly, and her eyes narrow. "Yeah, well. Consider this your lucky day. You have just met Scorpion-Sting Serket." She hauls you up.
"Oh, that's a good one," you say, grabbing your hat from the water trough, and then you realise. "Oh! The Scorpion, oh, wow!"
She does like that you've heard of her - the grin's back for a second before she speaks. "Yeah, well, you think you're surprised? I thought, having done some asking around and investigating, that I was looking for a game with a real player, a man come over the border from way down south ... a guy named Tavros Nitram."
"That, ah. Well, I don't think it's as impressive. And, you know. You agree, with a great kind of name like yours."
The flattery tells as easily on her face as a hand of lucky cards, but she tries really hard and makes a sour expression. "People, I have been told and told, are not a game you can win at. I'm thinking it's best to make a deal here, where you and me, we go by the much less loaded names of Nitram and Miss Vriska Serket."
"Well, if there's playing involved ... maybe it's best to win alongside people, after all, right? Vriska," you add, in a way that's probably embarrassing.
"Oh, don't think you're going to get away with that all the time!" she says, smiling radiantly. "Convince me first."
You take a few steps away to make space to give a slight bow, taking her hand as politely as possible - she moves it into the gesture - to kiss the back. You've always wanted to do that. And you grab a flower as you straighten to offer to her, deeper blue than her eyes, just as pretty - might as well do this properly.
"Holy shit!" says Serket. Says Vriska, eyes wide. "Flowers grow where you walk?"
"It has been, at times, known to happen." You wipe the mud off the bottom of the stem while you're at it, and offer it again. "I think having a liking for gentle things, and nature, and ah, friendliness ... doesn't mean that, uh, I can't have what most people would call, ah. You know. Fun."
Which you didn't mean the way it sounded. Not exactly, or precisely, or at least not mostly. But this lady is no lady, after all, and takes only a moment to overcome her shock and then grabs you round the shoulders, hearty as a cowhand with the first fistful of money for the month. You should split up until you go dancing; leave them wanting more, is what you've been told by knowledgeable sources. Her hand's warm, though.
There's nothing here telling you to stay - flowers turn to the sun, not to a fire - but though you still almost think there should be, there's nothing to say you should go. The two of you will have to make something out of this match all of your own.
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