BONUS ROUND 5

[hso_mods]

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

1. 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.


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 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 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.

Comments

PROMPT: TEAM JADE<3KARKAT

[oxfordroulette]

Aradia<>Sollux
Louisiana

FILL: TEAM JOHN<3ROSE

[para_normally]

"What the shit is this?"

"Sollux, don't be a baby. It's just fried catfish." Aradia shoves the newly-delivered plate back toward him with a clatter. Its smell fills his nose all over again and nearly overwhelms him, a cacophony of cayenne pepper and butter and cream and fish. Potatoes, too. His nose wrinkles. He's still refining the skills Terezi has painstakingly taught him, and the black void he'd become used to is now painted in faint, blurry watercolour, pale salty yellow clouds. The stark white glass beneath the meal creates a sort of completely fucking inappropriate halo around the slop. All around them, the metallic clink and scrape of forks and spoons mingle with a flood of human voices ringing in his ears.

He knows he's cringing, and thinks she makes a face at him in return. "You know, you've always kind of lacked a sense of adventure, so here is as good a place to start as any," she informs him.

"A sense of adventure." He puts his hands to his temples. "AA, I can't eat this. Can we please just fucking pack it up, pay, and leave?"

He thinks he smells her frown and roll her eyes. But all he wants right now is the droning hum of machines and a keyboard he knows by touch alone. Maybe an energy drink and some cereal, too. He is hungry.

Her chair squeaks on the hardwood floor, then warmth tinges the space around him and the scent of cranberry pricks his nasal passages. She's close. "Sollux," she says quietly, but with a laugh in her voice. The fried catfish is on her breath now, that and a smorgasbord of other things she's somehow shovelled down in an hour, but it's more tolerable that way. "If you're serious, then sure. But it's not like you to just clam up and not even give this human food a try." She pauses. "Well, maybe it was before... everything... but it hasn't been lately! You're falling back into old habits." Now he's sure he smells a furrow in her brow, despite her light tone.

He stays silent, and she sits back in her seat. Guilt rises in him somewhere, even though every other part of him wants to fight it. She's right, he guesses. He should be fucking better by now, now that the voices in his ears are only of the living, not the dead, and it's not like he hasn't known forever that he wouldn't go blind. Or like he minds being blind. They've only been here for an hour, and at the very least, he'd have to be a colossal dickwad to disappoint her.

He'd been quiet too long. Behind him, an accented voice (the accent sounds sort of similar to that insufferable prick's, but the voice is female) gradually becomes louder, approaching the table where they sit. He hears Aradia shift in her seat, and knows what she's going to do before he smells it.

She starts to raise her hand to get the waitress's attention.

He reaches out and catches it mid-journey.

It startles him almost as much as it does her, but he's sure he wants to stay here for a while after all. He tries to smile reassuringly. In a moment, Aradia's own smile returns, cranberry mingled with coconut. She lowers her arm, and with a flourish presents the dish once more, her grin widening.

This time, he takes a breath and picks up the flash of metal he smells at his left side, feels its end to confirm its status as a fork. He spears a chunk of fish and tastes it. It's much richer than anything he's used to, spicy as all hell, in no way anything like the sweet and processed foods he's used to... but, he notes, not bad.

"How is it?" Aradia asks excitedly.

He swallows, manages a genuine smile this time, and means it when he says, "It's okay."