hs_olympics | BONUS ROUND 4

Bonus Round 4

Mobius Double Reacharound FST - Revisited

Hi shippers! Welcome to Bonus Round 4! Bringing back a favourite from last year! (Sorry for the delay, we're very busy!)

Here’s how this is going to work: somebody will submit a selection of 3-6 songs without comment. Then somebody else will come along and create a companion fanwork to fit the soundtrack!

Rules

If you are submitting a soundtrack: submit only the track listing and download or youtube links. The idea is that people should ~interpret~ your selections!

You are not allowed to fill soundtrack prompts with your team's ship, nor are you allowed to fill your own soundtracks. (Filling your team's soundtracks is okay!)

Soundtracks count for 5 points each, for a maximum of 100 points per team.

Fills may be in whatever format you choose (except FST, of course) so long as they link the songs by mood and/or lyrics in some kind of narrative.

Post your fill as a comment to the prompt post, using the title format described below.

This challenge will run until 11:59PM EST August 3rd.

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 per team: 30 (per entry)
Entries 6-10: 20 (per entry)
Entries 11-15: 10 (per entry)
Entries 16+: 5 (per entry)

All scored content must be created/assembled new for this round.

We would prefer that any questions about this challenge or anything else in the HSO be emailed to us at homestuck.shipping AT gmail!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

1)Brand New Colony - The Postal Service
2)IAMX-Mercy
3)Lay Lady Lay-Bob Dylan

((I'm so sorry I don't even know HOW I got this-!))

The table is set for two. He’s sitting alone dressed in his princely best; his finest suit, by now torn and stained and almost completely ruined beyond all repair, and on second thought perhaps he should have changed into it after he set the table. Maybe then he wouldn’t have had to fight in it, to clear his way here in it and get it all spattered and flecked with rotten blood (and other things, things he really doesn’t want to think about right now). But the table is set and the food is waiting, a strange little oasis in this wasteland the world has become. A paranoid haven in the mess of raided Dumpsters and trashed ruins of formerly majestic skyscrapers. The streets of Chicago stopped being safe long ago, but for now, the revenants are leaving the table and its lone occupant alone.

And she comes, as he always knew she would. Their greeting isn’t friendly, isn’t warm, is barely even cordial. Yet when she draws near, he could almost swear he smells something aside from the rot and terror—it’s a scent that’s wholly her and makes his whole world want to weep in relief. She’s still alive.

“Eridan,” the girl with the single eye and the fierce glare says. She wears a dress of tattered blue which clings to her, accenting everything while giving none of her pain away. Wwear your best, he’d told her on the invitation. And it had been pretty damn hard to carve that much on a twice-dead revenant’s body, so it’s nice to see that for once she complied.

“Wriska,” the boy who carries himself so regally and returns her glare with one of his own replies. He’s in violet as always, so that together they’re two spots of colour against the muddy gorey backdrop of grey. Whatever colours the world had in mind have been covered and recovered and ignored long ago as desperation trumped beauty.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she snaps, dropping all pretence of cordiality—though, he’s pleased to notice, she takes the seat he pulls out for her in a mockery of chivalry. “Hell, I shouldn’t be here! Why the hell aaaaaaaam I, fish-boy?”

He shrugs. She's right. The only person he should depend on out here is himself, and he knows absolutely nothing about her that sets her apart from any other stranger. She's probably considered knocking him out for the clothes on his back and whatever's in his pockets at least three times already, and he can't allow himself to act as if she owes him something for what he’s done to help her. Because really, he’s done nothing. So what if necessity forced them to fight back-to-back for a bit? So what if he’s saved her life three times over (and she’s returned the favour just as much, if not more)? Neither of them should be here, and yet they both are. “I brought food,” he says instead.

His clothes are dirty but his hands are as clean as any can get in this madcap world as he tears off a hunk of vaguely recognisable meat for her and hands it over. “Here, I’we been hangin’ onter this for a couple days now-wuh. Should still be good.”

She shakes her head, but takes it anyway. “God, you’re a crazy fucker, Eridan. Know that?”

“I’m a desperate fucker, Wris,” he corrects her, and is rewarded by a startled blink and a renewed glare as he fumbles with the buttons at his shirt.

She curls her lip in disgust, but tears into the meat with the kind of ferocity that makes him think she’s not used to having food just given to her without a fight like this. As well she should be, now. “I’m not that kind of girl; take it somewhere else, idiot. Thought you’d have learned that by now.”

He slides his shirt off his shoulder, revealing a nasty-looking bite mark. “I need your help, Wris,” he says quietly.

And she screams and pushes away from him, one hand already on the knife at her side. “I knew it was too good to be fucking true!” she snarls, her eye narrowed in suspicion and hatred and… fear?

“Listen to me! I ain’t here to hurt you! There’s a colony out there. A human colony, somewuh-where. They’s wuh-workin’ on a cure, Wris, an’ I wuh-wouldn’t be askin’ you this if I didn’t think you’d need it too by now-wuh.” It’s news she wasn’t expecting. He can tell, because honestly, he thinks it’s too good to be true as well.

See, nobody knows how it started. It isn't like in the movies, and as far as he’d known, there weren’t any scientists working away, bound to create an antidote at the last conceivable moment. He isn't going to be saved. He knows this, and has long since accepted it, but he had to keep his ears open, especially with this bite that spells near-certain doom. Maybe that's why he never fretted as the others did, never treated the situation with the weight that it deserved. Maybe he knew it would all amount to nothing, and that he'd end up like this, hair plastered to his face, bones aching, relying on rumours and an unwilling ally to survive, no matter what he did.

Nobody knows how or why or when or where the revenants originated, but out there, maybe, someone knows a cure. All he’s got left is that hope, that someone can fix this—fix him.

“I’m fine,” she spits at last, but it’s taken a moment too long. He knows. And-

“No,” a third voice comes. A little slip of a girl steps from the shadows, her pale gold hair and shiny white half-smile a stark contrast to her dead lilac eyes or the way her arm hangs uselessly at her side. She’s dressed in black, the colour of death, and he thinks it suits her. Especially now. “No, you aren’t, Vriska. I should know—I bit you myself, didn’t I?”

And she keeps talking, as her appearance has stunned the two into an uneasy sort of silence as he reevaluates the equation of success with this new variable and she gets ready to run as fast and far as she can. “The creature's teeth barely broke my skin, as mine did yours, so it doesn't seem that the chance of infection is particularly high. And, it might just be the impression I'm getting, but as far as I can tell, my skin's yet to fall off in clusters, and I'm being perfectly coherent. Perhaps more coherent than before, actually, considering that no one else sees fit to talk right now.” It’s a reasonable point. Unfortunately, it’s probably not a good one.

“Oh, now I’m reassured, Lalonde, you fucking bitch,” Vriska snaps, her glare having found a new and completely unaffected target. “Because sure, infection doesn't happen that easily. That's why the majority of this fucking planet has become one gigantic heinous brood of the undead in less than half a year! Because it's a fucking complicated procedure that requires surgical precision, time and devotion. Noooooooow I'm convinced. Let’s all bow before the solution to all the world’s problems, shall we? One Rose Lalonde!”

Eridan’s greeting is a bit more succinct, if laced with just as much malice as hers. “Rosey.” That one word is filled with as much hatred as his tired self can muster, and her answering shrug takes all that hatred and returns it to them colder, stronger by tenfold.

“I don’t like either of you,” she says (the understatement of the century, perhaps), “but our chances are better if we work together. You know that. You’re… well, you may not be smart, and you may not be particularly rational, but somehow the pair of idiots you two are have managed to survive at least as well as I have. Therefore, it would probably be to all of our advantages if we worked together, at least until we got to this colony—yes, Ampora, I’ve heard rumours of it too.”

He shrugs, and holds out both his hands, a bit of his old wry grin returning. “She got a point. So… Let’s find this bran’ new-wuh colony, hope ewerythin’ wuh-will change. Giwe ourselwes new-wuh names, maybe.” He’s got a bit of a bad reputation around here. In his defence, it was only mostly his fault. Then again, he’s sure they’re equally as hated.

“God, you are suuuuuuuuch morons,” Vriska sighs, but something seems to have registered in her mind, and so she takes his hand reluctantly.

“Allies it is,” Rose agrees, and takes his other.

The table sits abandoned in the middle of an a street filled with wreckage and rubble and bits of gore, a lonesome picture of neglect, as the three figures who burn with such hatred walk together towards the horizon…

And hope.

BONUS ROUND 4

Bonus Round 4

SOUNDTRACK: TEAM KARKAT<3NEPETA

FILL: TEAM Eridan <3< Vriska