BONUS ROUND 1

[hso_mods]

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

1. 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.


2. Look through the prompts and fill whichever you like!


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


4. 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.
PROMPT: TEAM [YOUR SHIP]
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.
FILL: TEAM [YOUR SHIP]
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!

Comments

PROMPT: TEAM JADE<3KANAYA<3ROSE

[true_red]

Jade <3 Vriska: Sea story, Post-apocalypic

FILL: TEAM JADE<3ROSE

[myerfly]

[This ended up being kind of mid-apocalyptic instead, I hope that's okay! oAo]

You wake up with hermit crabs in your hair.

This isn't the first time you've come to with the ocean lapping at your cheek, you think to yourself as you sit up, slowly, blinking the salt crust out of your eyes. This isn't the first time, but it never stops being disconcerting. You glare at the grass lower down on the slope of the hill you're sitting on, barely visible through a good foot of flotsam-choked water. It waves back and forth in the pull of the surf, mocking you. This could be you, it seems to say. This could be you next time. What terribly ill-spirited grass. You stick your tongue out at it as you clamber to your feet, trying in vain to brush the mud and wet sand off your long canvas skirt.

Finally upright again, you idly stretch your back as you turn to assess the damage. You've always prided yourself on your ability to look on the bright side, but even you have to admit that this time the outlook is pretty darn dismal. The high spire of your house, an outline of ivory against a stormy gray sky, is far, far too close for comfort. You were much higher up the hill when you drifted off than you had thought. As you finish un-stiffening your back and start working on your waist, twisting slowly from side to side, you look back at the sea's murky waters and frown down on them. Slowly but surely -- far less slowly and far more surely than you would like -- the ocean is eating your island. Try as you might, you can't really find a bright side to this development.

Finally finished limbering up, you turn and face your watery aggressor full on, stance square and hands on your hips. Bright side or not, nor by hail nor sleet nor oceanic apocalypse is a Harley beaten. That was your Grandpa's motto. One of his top mottos, in fact, right up there along with "never take the easy way out of the temple, for the booby-trapped passage is the one with the crystal skull", and "always take care when letting small children dual wield flintlock pistols". You're not quite sure about the applicability of that last one. But in any case, the point is that a Harley never stands down, and you're about to give the ocean a good what-for, just like your Grandpa would have wanted.

Only not really, because yelling insults at an encroaching body of water is probably a little too silly even for you. Actually, the real reason that you've been standing in front of this ocean like you're ready to fight it, or possibly a bear, all comers welcome, is because you've been discreetly keeping your eye on what looks like a slick black seal's head bobbing on the horizon. Only you're quite positive that it only looks like a seal's head, because it's close enough now that you can just make out the two slim orange curves of its horns, barbed at the tips, rising from its crown. You've seen this head before, many times out of the corner of your eye upon rousing from unexpected naps on the ever-advancing shoreline. It always disappears just out of sight before you can get a good look at it and its curved orange horns.

This time it's not disappearing out of sight. It's getting closer.

You don't flinch as the girl with the horns draws closer. Because it is a girl; she's close enough now that you can make out her face, bluish-gray with pointed, chattering teeth, framed by the sodden curtain of her long tangled hair. Her swimming stroke is efficient but unrefined; you're a little surprised that you hadn't been able to know her as a person from its splashes, from far away. When she finally stops, she's far enough out still to be able to stand in the submerged grass and still be in the sea up to her hooked nose. Not quite far enough out that you can't avoid having to firmly decide not to be bothered by the flickering yellow of what should by all rights be the whites of her eyes.

Once stopped, she stares at you in silence. You're having none of that.

"Hello!" you call out, voice clear as if you're mostly unperturbed. Fair enough; it's mostly true. "Are you a siren?"

"A what?" she calls back immediately, lifting the bottom half of her face out of the water to talk. You're almost bowled over. You'd expected either more silence, or a slithery fairy's voice. Instead she sounds like Mean Girls.

"A siren!" Unexpected voice or not, the perturbation gauge is still hovering near empty. "You know! A sexy death mermaid lady who sings sailors to their watery doom. I was thinking that maybe you put me to sleep?"

"Are you asking if I'm a seadweller?" Siren Lady does something funky with her eyebrows, you think she's trying to look offended. "Do you see any gills on this neck, hornless? Please. As if someone as great as me needs such a lame, obvious advantage to be master of the high seas!" She shakes her head in what you assume was supposed to be a hairflip. Her hair's too soggy for it to really have any effect, though. She looks sad about that for a minute. But then her jaundice-y laser gaze turns back to you. "I did put you to sleep though."

"Okay," you say, not missing a beat. "Why?"

"Uhh. To test my awesome powers on humans? Duh?" She seems to have sorted out the whole eyebrow-raising thing, because that was a pretty perfectly executed arch. "What else would a totally superior being like myself want with a puny earthling like you?"

Suddenly, two plus two equals four and a light bulb goes off. "Ohhhhhhh. Are you a troll?"

"No, I'm Space Sasquatch," Siren says flatly. "Of course I'm a troll, dumbass. Gray skin? Horns? More beautiful than all the humans on your planet combined?"

"Oh, cool! Okay. I've never seen a troll before, so I wouldn't know."

"Never seen one?" For some reason Ms. Troll From the Deep seems to find this incomprehensible. "Do you live under a rock? I've seen you on a computer, okay. That's real cheeky, human, not ever looking up anything about the better class of lifeform. There's really no excuse for that kind of insolence."

"Oh, no, I definitely know about the alien invasion and all that stuff!" You're finally getting a little disconcerted given the fact that she seems to have watched you without your knowledge, but hey, you do use your lunchtop outdoors a lot, so you guess that's explicable at least. "I've just never seen a picture of a troll before? My Internet is censored, I think. I get text, but not images..."

"Wow, okay, so I don't care about that on account of having zero interest in your life," the troll girl cuts you off, trying in vain to brush a tangle of wet hair out of her face. She seems to have claws instead of fingernails, yellow-orange like her horns and her sclera. So weird.

"Well, fair enough," you say, still jovial. It pays to be polite and friendly with guests, even if they happen to be planet-flooding alien invaders. "But uhh, that does make me wonder. Why did you come over here to shore, then?"

"I told you already," Troll Lady sneers, making a big show of rolling her eyes. It seems like everything she has to say has to turn into some big dramatic action. You wonder if it's any more effective when she's not completely waterlogged. "I'm using you to practice my powers! You make a good dummy, dummy. Very good at falling asleep. I'm sure that useful life skill is gonna get you far!"

"No, no, I heard that." Jeez Louise, this girl is really larger than life. You wonder if she's any more subdued among friends. You wonder if she has friends. She seems kinda hard to deal with. "I know you made me fall asleep with your powers! I've seen you come around before, so that's what you must have been doing then too, I got that part. I was just wondering why you came to shore today, though?"

The troll girl blinks a few times at this, staring at you nonplussed. You wonder if she heard you.

"I mean, only swimming by seemed to work fine before. I, uhh, fell asleep all those other times too, and for the same amount of time I think? So why..." You trail off. Your visitor is still silent, but at least she looks like she's thinking about an answer now. Her alien face is unreadable. But finally, after a few minutes, she looks up. Way up; past your face and up to the sky framing your house behind you.

"There were clouds here," she says, in a funny sort of voice. You realize after a second why it sounds odd; it's the first thing she's said since she got here that doesn't feel like it's meant to insult you.

"Clouds?" you say when it doesn't seem like she's going to go on. You look up as well. There are clouds, all right -- the same angry gray clouds that have been threatening to rain all week. Nothing out of the ordinary. But when you look back down at your troll girl, she's looking at them with a strange expression on her face. She looks... what on a stranger you'd call confused, but on a friend, almost lost.

"Not these clouds," she says at last, lowering her head again and making another unfruitful attempt to toss her hair over her shoulder. "White ones, on a blue sky. They don't show up anywhere else."

"I'm sure there are white clouds on blue skies all over," you point out. But you think you might know what she means.

Sunny days with scattered clouds -- white on blue, as far as the eye can see -- have always been so strange here, ever since Grandpa died. They always make you feel so off, so out of place. Not sad, exactly, but wrong, somehow. Like you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing. Though you can't imagine what else for you to do there could possibly be.

You were kind of half-hoping that the strange troll girl would have something more to say about the clouds, but apparently not; with an ungraceful splash, she pushes herself back into deeper waters, treading water where her feet can't touch.

"Oh, you're going?"

"Might as well," she answers briskly, all the uppity swagger back in her tone of voice. "I forgot, but humans are booooooooring. This was a waste of time."

"I see. Do you live around here?" You don't know why you asked that.

Apparently it was the cold that was hampering her eyebrow manoeuvers before, because the quirk she gives you is once again picture-perfect. "Who wants to know?"

"I was just thinking," you say, and then swallow to give yourself time to figure out what. She's quirking both her eyebrows now. You notice for the first time that one of her yellow-whited eyes seems to have multiple pupils. So weird.

"I was thinking," you decide, "that it might be nice if you came around here again. When the clouds come back."

She stares at you.

"We could probably both use some company."

She keeps staring, long enough for you to start trying to count all those pupils you can't believe you missed in that eye. But after a few minutes, she shifts her gaze into the middle distance, and gives one long slow nod.

You smile at her in response, but she's already turning to go. "Wait!" you call. You have once last question. "If you're going to come back... would you mind telling me your name?"

She stops her stroke at that and treads water, facing away from you still. You think you hear her mumble something into the waves with a lot of syllables, ending in "-indfang".

"What?? I didn't catch that!"

You make as if to wade into the water after her, but with a sudden whirl, she turns, and looks you full on in the face once more. Yep, she definitely has seven pupils in that one eye. That makes eight over all. Like a spider.

"It's Vriska Serket."

Or a scorpion.

"I'm Jade!"

"I know that!"

You smile. "It was nice to meet you, Vriska! Until next time?"

"Yeah, yeah," she says, turning around in the water again. But before you lose sight of her face, you think you maybe possibly catch her smiling, too.

It doesn't take long for her to swim out from the shore. As you watch the retreating back of her head, with its slim orange horns rising up to their barbs, the stormy sky above finally begins to make good on its long-running threat of rain.

You watch her go until you can't see her anymore, not even to mistake her for a seal.

You were sure, as you watched her matted black head swim away, that she had hermit crabs in her hair.