hs_olympics | BONUS ROUND 5

BONUS ROUND 5

Bonus Round 5

Tales from the Road

Hey, shippers! HSO is winding down, so we thought we'd take a look back at the journey, so to speak. With that in mind, this next bonus round is going to be roadtrip-themed! Give us a little taste of your characters' life on the road, whatever form that takes.

Rules

Submit prompts! Prompts should consist of one ship (friendship/gen is fine too!) and a location. This cannot be your team's ship! This round we will not be giving points for prompts.

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 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 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!

Bonus Round 5 is now closed!

16/08/12 Comments are unscreened again, for the sake of comments on fills. No new fills are being counted for points.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Jane<>Kanaya

Emerald City (Oz)

OH GOSH this is lovely, what a beautiful rendering of the northern lights and karkat and jade and marshmallows!!!!!! It makes me so happy :)

Can't have a swordfight without a field of wheat.

Edited 2012-08-10 06:24 (UTC)

So cute! Their faces are great, haha.

"I never thought I'd find you in this part of town!" Feeling this to be insufficient, she adds,

"Hem, hem."

Roooooose. This is adorable!

This is gorgeous!

Major gore warning!
---------------------------------------

He perches on the lip of a mushroom as big as a car. This wiry kid with fancy orange kicks, dark wash jeans folded up at the cuffs and frayed regardless. He taps his toes in time to the teal pulse of the dendrite sky, blood flowing in rivers through the forest all around you. You don't know what this place is, only that you shouldn't be here. You shouldn't exist. And neither should this kid, sitting up there with his shirt all stained and sodden with seeping red blood, headless with his severed head cupped between his palms in his lap. Both of you should be dead as doornails but you're awake despite it.

His lips are blue, but his eyes track over to yours anyway when you step up next to the mushroom. He's two feet above you. You've got a perfect view of his shoes, the soles barely worn, like he's been pacing the same two rooms for his entire life with nowhere else to go. You've got a sword through your chest and a hole through one lung, pints of blood stained dark and warm all down your back and the rear of your beat up jeans.

The head in his lap blinks once, looking you over before he hums and says, "Now this I didn't expect."

Which is funny, because that was exactly what you were thinking. "What are you? My kid double?"

He shrugs, shoulders of his decapitated body shifting. The triangular shades folded over the neck of his bloody shirt catch the teal light of the funky sky. "I'm thinking it's more like the other way around. You're some alt version of me. But I'm some alt version of me anyway, so it's not that important to sort out the details."

You've heard a lot of nonsense since you died and woke up in this nightmare sideshow of shifting realities, but never from your own mouth. "So you're not you."

He rolls his eyes without managing to change his expression, and if he were anyone other than you, you'd think it was because he'd lost function in his face. But that's just how you look without your shades. Expressionless. Building eternity just behind your eyes. "What, you haven't gotten the whole information special concerning how death and multiplicity works out here?"

"I've gotten it, just haven't had the pleasure of meeting a different version of myself before."

He nods, which is awkward because he needs his hands to do it, and it doesn't pull off nearly the calming effect you figure he was going for. "All right, that's fair." Then he frowns just the slights bit, staring at you almost judgmentally. "What are you, fucking thirty?"

"Twenty nine," you say too fast, a tinge of hard tone to it. Not thirty. One year away, but not yet. Or never, considering you're dead. A sword through the chest was a hell of a way to dodge that bullet. "What are you, twelve?"

"Fifteen," he says almost as fast as you had, annoyance under the surface. And that's fair. He doesn't look twelve. None of Dave's baby fat around his face, just the right hint of maturity to his features. God, he looks like you. He is you, but you haven't looked like that since—

Since Dave.

This is the kid you would have been without Dave. You don't know how to feel about that.

"Whatever," he mutters, scooting closer to the edge of his gigantic blood mushroom. He cups his head between his palms and lowers it, resting his elbows lazily on his knees. You can see the spine and gaping trachea in his severed neck. "Dirk prime is still running around alive somewhere in paradox space. I'm from some timeline where Jake pussied out and didn't kiss my severed head in time. Shit sucks, but what are you gonna do?"

"Jake?" There are a thousand questions you could ask, but you decide that's the one that will mess with him the most.

Another awkward shrug. "I like him."

You smile, a tiny thing. You remember Jake Harley, sweeping through Houston like a force of nature, connecting you with Roxanne and Jane and Jane's straitlaced son that looked a little like him. Jake was older than you and attractive in all the ways that caught your attention the most. You imagine a young version of him chatting up a young version of yourself, and all the myriad ways you'd fall for him. "Little too late at this point."

"So what are you?" he asks, changing the subject entirely. "An old version of me where the game went on too long?" Even as he says it you hear the hint of skepticism in his voice. You're something from another universe entirely, and he's not exactly ready to accept that. He can deal with dead versions of himself, dead versions of his friends, but an entire remix of the track? That's outside his control, and you've never liked things that you couldn't find some way to bend to your will.

"If you're talking about SBURB, I've never played it. Got dragged into Dave's session. Died."

"Dave," he whispers, lips blue and far too pliable to move the way they do. "Dave Strider?"

"The same." And you shrug and look off into the stinking bloody forest, rivers of clotted red streaking through the pink-leafed trees under the pulsating teal brain sky. Everything's alive here. It makes you sick to your stomach, but looking at your butchered younger self makes you feel the same. And you'd always had a thing for guro. "Although I figure the Dave you know is about my age and famous as all hell."

"Yes." He squints at you now, then scoots off the lip of the mushroom cap to land heavily on his feet, orange sneakers scuffing in the teal light. He's barely taller than Dave is. He holds his head in his hands and looks you over, his gaze sticking on the ugly wound through your chest that's still gushing blood. It'll probably gush forever just to look fancy. "So this is what I turn into in your alternate future? Famous but still dead in shitty shoes?"

"Don't knock the shoes," you say. He's got a snotty smirk on his face and you realize—a little uncomfortably—that you want to kiss it off. You reach out and clamp a hand over his shoulder, turn him into the woods. "Why don't you show me around instead."

Maybe he gets the hint. Maybe you've spent so long around Dave that you've forgotten not to underestimate a kid as sharp as yourself. Either way, he shrugs and leads the way, looking back once to make sure you're following.

Mindfang <3 Dolorosa

Braavos, Volantis or anywhere across the Narrow Sea

whoa look at you foxy lady, rockin' this ship off it's gross smelly socks

"What are you, fucking thirty?" / "Twenty nine,"
"What are you, twelve?" / "Fifteen,"

BEST.

In lots of ways, it's a beautiful city. It's hot and it's humid, and the towering grey buildings can get suffocating, but the Marquise marvels at the ocean when she can see it, at the closeness of Singapore's neighbouring countries. It's almost as if she can reach out and touch the sandy beaches of Indonesia or Malaysia, and that in and of itself is something like a miracle to her. So many times her companion has to sigh and tug at the wide brim of her sunhat ("Pirate hat, you mean!") in order to get her attention and drag her away from the grainy beaches of the East Coast.

The memory that isn't theirs takes place during a strange celebration that involves very loud celebrations and replays of the same song over and over again. The first time they heard it, the jade troll sighed contentedly, humming along. Mindfang, on the other hand, snorted dismissively and dug right back into the flaming red crustacean drowned in a burning sauce that made her face flare a vivid blue. The peppery tasting "crabs" would later give her very bad flatulence, but Mindfang would never for the life of her admit it.

Floating aimlessly in their bubble of borrowed contentment, it's easy to get whatever they wanted. Even a room in a high-class hotel at least a hundred storeys above ground, even fluffy sheets and hide-scalding hot water. When Mindfang flailed desperately in a tubful of hot water, the Dolorosa sighed a drawn-out, long suffering sigh and hoisted the panicking troll out of the "boiling" water, her scrawny build belying the post-mortem strength she possessed. Mindfang immediately plastered herself to the jadeblood, screeching dramatically about the horrorterrors scheming to steam her to death. All her lover says in reply is that she wouldn't taste good steamed, roasted, grilled, or otherwise cooked and not alive. This is followed up with a breathy "I would know," and a shocked Mindfang. For once, it's her who's stunned into silence, and she barely gives the other time to cool down the bath to a few shades warmer than ice cold before tackling her in the bath and kissing her hard.

After a bath that was supposed to cleanse them, the two trolls engage in a childishly comforting gestures of stripping the pure white blankets and sheets from the bed and piling it on the uncomfortably brown floor, lying entangled and half-naked and not caring, not much. The Dolorosa clung on to her once-master who, once upon a time, had a starboard painted red and a port painted purple. The sky outside their windows explodes with celebratory fireworks. Burying her face in the other's hair, Mindfang began to sing along with the faint strains of music from the happy celebrations below.

"...and when it feels this right, you know that it's love at first sight..."

>:) Whoops~ Guess I was a little slow. Double fill~!

Tourist in the candy kingdom~

:'D Ooops. I really need to be faster about these things to avoid the double fill.

"Hey, bro?" You say it into your communicator, even though he's standing right next to you. Your hands are almost touching. He's watching the rooftops. He doesn't even turn towards you.
"No names in the field, Robin."
He shoots the grappling hook again, and he's off.

"You asshole, your name isn't fucking Bro," you say as you follow him, get up on roof level, jumping and climbing and doing some sweet ass flips just for the hell of it. Today is just a recog mission, which means don't be seen, which means boring stealth uniform and the works, no fucking flips, Robin - but what's supposed to go down is supposed to go down several blocks from here, so if someone sees you? Call it preventative measures against crime. No one fucks with Robin.

He's waiting for you behind a gargoyle. You creep across the roof to croach down by another one, the one on the corner, probably.

"Hey, little man," he whispers, and you almost fall of the roof. Holy engorged dicks, Batman! You get to safety behind a particularly hideous gargoyle, and whip out your communicator again.

"Bro, what the hell?" You ask.
"Earlier you seemed like you wanted to talk about something," he growls. "According to Roxy we have probably 14 minutes to kill before something goes down. Talk."

Well, this is new. You glance over at him, he's still crouched behind some godawful stone creature, staring intently at the ground below you.

"Actually I sort of wondered if you needed to talk," you say after a while. "You seem kind of out of it, man."
To be fair, your bro always seems kind of out of it, he dresses up as a bat to fight crime, for god's sake, that's about as healthy and normal as... dressing up as some ironic colorful abomination to help him out. And that's not even mentioning the puppets. But still. You arrange your legs into a slightly more comfortable position, take a look at your watch. Eleven minutes, probably.

"I was just... thinking."
"About..." you grimace to indicate that you're referring to your dead parents. He probably has some way to see your facial expressions far away and in the dark, that creep. Or maybe he can just plain tell. He sighs.
"No, it's not that it's. It's this guy, he's, wait, fuck, I shouldn't be telling you this." No guy problems in the field, he doesn't say.

"... Do you think about them?" Dirk asks, as if this just suddenly occurred to him. He's dropped the Batman voice. He's looking right at you. You give him a small smile.

"Do I hell. Never even got to know them, did I?"

He looks away.

"You are my family, man." And also Roxy and her kid, you guess. And maybe that guy who cleans the pool at Casa Strider.

"Great," he replies, as if you just told him you did the 100 pushups he ordered you to do, or some shit like that. "Let's go kick some criminal ass, and by 'kick some criminal ass', I really mean that we'll sit on our asses right here and do fuck all while some shit goes down."

"Love you too, bro," you say, and you know he can tell that it's ironic as hell but also totally not.

Vriska<3Terezi<>Kanaya<3<Vriska african safari group tour

AAaaah this is so good. The way you wrote Dirk just handling his head was really gross but well thought out. And the bit about Jake warmed my shipper heart UwU

John/Dave (any quadrant)

Moonside

Edited 2012-08-10 12:48 (UTC)

D'awww, this is adorable!

Lanta, put this somewhere so I can keep it, okay? Okay.

They had a time machine of their own, now, but it wasn’t enough. The thing was bigger on the inside than the outside and had had some redhaired young lady (human girl) occupying it; she’d said something about waiting for her doctor before the furocious purredator had picked her up and gently deposited her outside the door.

After that, the blind legislacerator had spent only moments deciphering the WHiSperiNGs of the so-called Void, grinning at her traveling companion as she seemingly randomly pulled and tugged and splorched (whatever that was) at the levers and wiggly things inside the blue machine.

Whistle. Tick. Bzzzt. Ding. Glorp. Pop. Splat. Chime. Toot. Puff. Tinkle. Bubble. Beep. Thud. Crackle. Whoosh. Hiss. Pffft. Whirr.

It was just the normal amalgam of sounds inside the blue, boxy machine with the extensive library and too-wet pool. Neither of the girls were worried. Well, they were, but not for the reason those observing them might have thought.

They’d been through the universe seven times over, following way too many obscure little clues which were all too plain to see despite one half the team’s lack of functioning eyes, and nearly broken the space-time continuum once. Despite everything, they still didn’t have an answer to the ages-old question, the greatest mystery ever and the one they’d come here to solve—

Where in the multiverse was Vriska Sandiego?

Jake/Roxy (any kind of relationship)

Limbo

Grandpa Harley<>Mom Lalonde
The Lido di Venezia, Venice, Italy

I know it's already filled but I really wanted to draw this one.

"Walk with me, Meenah?"

"Oh, fin... I don't sea why you couldn't just fly us there. It's faster that way..."

"And that's the reason why I chose walking instead."

bec noir <3< / <3 pm

location: the bitter end.

Aradia <3< / <3 Equius

on the way to his new dream bubble.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 22 of 30

BONUS ROUND 5

Bonus Round 5

PROMPT: TEAM KARKAT<3SOLLUX

Re: FILL: TEAM DIRK♥JAKE♥JANE♥ROXY

FILL: TEAM GAMZEE<>KARKAT

FILL: TEAM JADE<3KARKAT

Re: FILL: TEAM DAVE<3KARKAT

Re: FILL: TEAM ARADIA<>SOLLUX

Re: FILL: TEAM ROSE<3ROXY

FILL: TEAM DIRK<3JAKE<3JANE<3ROXY

no subject

Re: FILL: TEAM DIRK<3JAKE<3JANE<3ROXY

Re: PROMPT: TEAM DAVE <3 ROSE <3 TEREZI

FILL: TEAM DIRK<3EQUIUS

FILL: TEAM DIRK<3EQUIUS

FILL: TEAM KARKAT<3KARKAT

Prompt: Team Dave<3Karkat

Re: FILL: TEAM DIRK<3JAKE<3JANE<3ROXY

PROMPT: TEAM DIRK<3JAKE<3JANE<3ROXY

Re: FILL: TEAM [Alpha!Dave♥Alpha!Rose]

Re: FILL: TEAM DIRK<3JAKE<3JANE<3ROXY

FILL: TEAM Eridan<3<Vriska

Prompt: Team Terezi<3<Vriska

PROMPT: TEAM DAVE<3JADE

FILL: TEAM Jade<3Kanya<3Rose

PROMPT: TEAM KARKAT<3NEPETA

PROMPT: TEAM KARKAT<3NEPETA