hs_olympics | 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!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You aren't planning to leave before you've learnt something. You leave the waste receptacle and the metal scraper where they are, and head back to the hive. The first thing you do when you re-enter the ship is head for the gun deck. Most of the cannons have been removed to make way for weapons stands. You take a large, streamlined blue rifle, hoisting it on your shoulder, and head to the captain's cabin. You prop a chair against the door handle, hoping that it will keep him away long enough for you to arm the rifle. Heading to his desk, you catch a glimpse of your reflection in the window. You look terrible. There are circles around your eyes from lack of sleep and your hair hasn't been properly conditioned in weeks. The cuts on your cheek have started to scab over, and there are eggplant, finger-shaped bruises forming on your neck. You sniff irritably, running your hand through your hair. All that does is make it stick up in different angles. You direct your attention back to the desk, rattling the drawers open. You know there's something here he's keeping from you: you've heard him shuffle about here when he thought you weren't listening, and you've seen him unlock the third drawer down when he thought you weren't looking. After not managing to produce a key from anywhere, you use the butt of the rifle to smash the lock, and pull the drawer open. Inside, you find what you'd only call a notebook if you were feeling exceedingly generous: all it is, in fact, is bits of foolscap paper tied together with string, rolled up, and tied once again. You untie the first knot and open it, using the inkwell as a paperweight.

The paper is old and water damaged, but the ink has mostly withstood. As much as Dualscar likes to talk your ear off about his exploits, there are no notes in this, just sketches. There are octopi, eels, cuttlefish and squid, drawn with reverent accuracy. A narwhal takes up an entire page, its movement fluid enough that you're ready to swear it is going to swim away. Some of them have dates, and you see that they go back as far as sixteen sweeps ago. A drawing makes you pause. You think it's Feferi, but it can't be: this is one of the few dated ones, drawn sweeps before either of you were hatched. The horns and the face shape are the same, and although you've never seen the Empress in person, it doesn't take you long to figure out that it's her, except younger. She can't have been more than ten sweeps when this was made. She's looking away, as if she didn't realise someone was drawing her. She probably didn't, you think. You collapsing and expanding bladder based aquatic vascular system clenches. It's not just that she didn't care, she never even knew.

You flick through the rest of the foolscap, finding more pictures of her: her features begin to gain more of the royal arrogance typical of her blood colour as she grows to adulthood. The last sketch is unfinished: she is looking over her shoulder, her hair pushed behind her ear. A loose strand is spilling over her clavicle, and her mouth is upturned in a quizzical smile. You doubt the Empress would ever smile like that, and Dualscar must have thought the same when he drew it: the sketch has been scrawled over with angry ink strokes.

A bang at the door makes you look up in bewilderment. You raise your rifle, watching the doorknob rattle. There is a brief pause in which you can only hear your own panicked breathing, and then the door burst open, the chair splintering and falling to the side. Dualscar stands in the frame, hair and clothes still wet from the sea. His eyes go from you, to the rifle, to the sketches on the desk, and back again.

"Nobody has ever called me pathetic and lived," he warns. "But who are you, Eridan Ampora? You're a nobody. You don't have a single quadrant mate, you're hiveless. You didn't even get into the nautical academy because you failed your entrance test four times, until they turned you away to save yourself further embarrassment. And what do you do? You come crawling to me to teach you how to be an Orphaner, so that you can impress a little fish girl who threw you face-first out of the pale quadrant."

"No."

"No?"

"I'm not doing this for Fef," you continue. "We've had to feed lusii to Gl'bgolyb since we could swim to keep her quiet and keep everyone alive. Everything is depending on me not to fuck this up, and I'm not gonna. If all the land dwellers, and everyone else, gets to die, it won't be because I fucked up. I'm going to be better than you, because I'm not going to let my quadrants rule my life." You lower the rifle from where it was pointing at Dualscar's chest, and place it gingerly next to the drawings. You walk around the table, so that there is nothing standing between you and Dualscar now. "I'm not going to fester in a relic and leech off a memory. So, thanks," you conclude, shrugging. "I guess you taught me some shit worthy of my time after all."

You go to push past him and leave the cabin, but he grabs your wrist, stopping you in your tracks. You glare at him, and he glares back. It's frightening, in a way, to see your future staring at you from his face: he looks twenty sweeps old, although you can't judge it very well, since highbloods age very slowly. He could be sixty. None of the records you've read mention a definite hatch date. He looks like you like to imagine you will one day, when you lose your wiggler blubber, grow into your lanky form and stop fucking around and put some actual muscle on your bones. You wonder how many trolls he's killed for telling him the truth. You wonder how many he let stick around long enough to be able to hear the truth from them. Neither number is one you wouldn't be able to count on the fingers of your hand, you think. You can't hate him, but it's a horrible type of pity that you feel towards him. He is both someone you're fighting desperately to become and someone you don't want to end up like.

Alarm pools in your gut as he leans closer, crashing your lips together. His other hand goes to your shoulder, and he pushes you against the doorframe, your naked back digging painfully into the wood. You open your mouth and his tongue slides against yours, and your blood pusher is hammering in your chest as he presses against you, his salt-stained, damp shirt sticking to your chest. He barely has to bend down; you're almost as tall as he is. He trails his hand down your side, fingers tracing your gill slits, and you shudder helplessly. He breaks the kiss as suddenly as he started it, leaving you flustered.

"I guess you taught me something, too," he says.

Wow, I kind of adore Eridan seeking to learn from his hero and ending up teaching him something instead.

And I loved this:
You keep regular correspondence with Karkat, who pleads with you to go against your natural instincts for once in your life and not be a colossal idiot. He accuses you of having finally lost it, and calls Dualscar a self-obsessed, narcissistic megalomaniac, and then concedes to the fact that you would probably find that attractive, considering how you're growing up to be the same exact moron as your ancestor.

I could have written so much more than the 2,7k this ended up being, because I really like the idea of people being disillusioned in their heroes and I love playing around with it. Especially when it comes to a character like Eridan, who pretty much tried to build his entire personality on Dualscar.

Hahaha! That was originally a pesterlog, but then I thought that it wouldn't be very faithful to the Edwardian novel prompt if I had them chatting on the internet, so I made it into a letter.

Thank you!

Oh wow. God wow. I'm absolutely speechless at how wonderful this is. Just... Ahh, wow!

Thank you, I'm glad you liked it! I hope it didn't stray too far from the prompts.

BONUS ROUND 1

Bonus Round 1

FILL (3/3)

Re: FILL (3/3)

Re: FILL (3/3)

Re: FILL (3/3)

Re: FILL (3/3)