Three Sentence Ficathon

[rthstewart]

UPDATE! EDIT!
 We're running into the Dreamwidth comment limits so all new prompts should be posted here Keep responding to and filling already posted prompts here, but all new ones should go to the new thread!

Someone did this banner for me a couple of years ago.  It's great, isn't it?  If it was you, please step up and take a bow!
It was st_aurafina!   Thank you again!


caramelsilver ran one last year on Livejournal and I did two over here a few years ago. We'll keep it open until January 31, 2019 which should give everyone time to play a little. This is a delightful part of the online fandom community.


What is the 3 Sentence Ficathon?
This is a challenge where you answer a prompt with a fic consisting of only three sentences. It's open to all fandoms and you can post and answer as many prompts as you like, as many times as you want.

What do I do first?
You post prompts! When posting a prompt please format it this way:

fandom, character(s), prompt word/sentence.

Only one prompt per comment please.  So, for example,

Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi, I don't like sand."

What else?
You answer other posters' prompts in three sentences (or more if you can't stop yourself) and fill as many prompts as you want, as many times as you wish. If you see that a prompt you loved has already been filled, go ahead and fill it again! Multiple fills of the same prompt are allowed and even encouraged!  (We get really fun stories going this way).

Can I still post if I need more than 3 sentences?  Or should I just abuse grammar in ways the English language never contemplated?
Yes.  Yes.


But I'm not a member of Dreamwidth
No problem. You can comment anonymously or through open ID

Can anyone play?
Yes! Please signal boost this to your flist, followers, and any other places you frequent. Come one, come all!
The more people who come and play, the better!

Can I spread the word? 
Yes, please.  I'd love to create a nifty banner with an embed code but I fail at it.  So if you create one, I'll post it and everyone can use it.

How long will it go?
Tentatively, we'll close it on January 31, 2019. 

Are there any rules about cross-posting?
Nope, you can post wherever you want, whenever you want. A lot of folks collected their responses together and posted them on AO3 under the 3 sentence fiction tag. 3SFs are a terrific prompt for remixes and could be helpful for Yuletide bears, too.

What about spoilers, content warnings, triggers, pairings, ratings, tags, and squick?
I thought about this.  It wasn't an issue the last 2 times I ran this but times change.  In my experience, this typically gets too big, moves too fast, and the stories are too short for content warnings and ratings. You should assume spoilers are fair game and that the initial poster and responder have opted to use no content warnings or tags. I've found personally that I can skim by stuff that, from the prompt, I can tell isn't my favorite flavor of delicious cake. Use your best judgment and be prepared to skip over things that aren't your thing.


And here, have some icons!










I'll start things off...

Edit to add on 12/18/2018 Please check out this update here. And this friending meme if you're so inclined here.

Comments

Mutually Assured Destruction (Homestuck)

[edenfalling]

"So, cards on the table, anything said here will never leave this room, blah blah whatever," Terezi said as she dropped carelessly into a chair opposite Rose in the meteor lab's library. "What bullshit side effect did you get as the booby prize in the Seer package?"

Rose eyed her counterpart warily, then figured she might as well share; after all, if a fellow Seer (and occasional Dave-wrangler) couldn't understand, who in the multiverse possibly could? "Mood lighting," she said. "Appropriate to whatever sort of drama or nonsense is about to occur, occasionally with individual spotlights to pick out specific people's intentions or states of mind. It's annoying, distracting, and has caused Kanaya to assume I have some idiosyncratic form of color-blindness. You?"

"Text boxes," Terezi said, folding her arms on the table and propping her chin on her crossed wrists. "Did I ask to get constant peeks at people's shitty internal monologues, complete with non-sequiturs, tortured rationalizations, and a slew of intrusive thoughts I could have gone my entire life without knowing? No I did not. Did I get them anyway? Yes I did. They don't even have the decency to smell appetizing; the backgrounds are a particularly stale shade of yellow."

Rose raised her eyebrows. "Do I want to know what my text box says at the moment?"

Terezi countered with another question: "How masochistic are you feeling?"

"I see. Then I won't mention your lighting effects, either," Rose said. "On an almost but not entirely unrelated note, have you Seen anything useful about our arrival in the scratched session lately?"

Terezi dropped her face into the gap between her arms. "Ugh. No. You?"

"Alas, no."

Terezi made an indecipherable noise of frustration and the ambient purple light over her shoulders shifted further toward gray, darkening and desaturating in a mix of anger and depression. Then she lifted her head and grinned like she didn't have a care in the world. "Great conversation, very productive!" she said. "If you tell anyone--"

"You'll hang me? But why? We haven't spoken in days," Rose said.

Terezi's grin didn't change, but her lighting shifted a few points back toward full saturation. "I knew there was a reason I like you. Also, ask Kanaya on a date already. There is only so much mutual pining I can stand to read."

She swept out of the library before Rose could muster a reply.

Re: Van Helsing (Syfy)

[candlesinthewell]

I don’t know the fandom, but I enjoyed this a lot, and I really like Scarlett. She seems practical and not easily shaken, and I hope she makes it out of this situation OK.

and, knowing her luck, would probably also need them to stab a shark in the face along the way.

Lol, this is great.

Re: Mutually Assured Destruction (Homestuck)

[sholio]

This is so cracky and yet so amazingly appropriate to the canon. I love it. :D

To War (Greek Mythology)

[kalira]

Aite fled the crumbling temple, cackling, and darted hurriedly behind her Uncle, who stiffened at the wind of her passage and whirled in time to catch Athena's blade on his own.

"You want a war with me? You have it!" Athena thundered, turning sharply on her heel and storming away.

Aite giggled, pressing her face against Uncle's shoulder. "Do you think," Ares said, chuckling, "she will ever realise that is exactly I want, which they always give me?"

Aite is a minor goddess, Eris' daughter, of mischief, delusion, folly, and ruin.

[candlesinthewell]

Ooh, that is lovely.

Re: Mutually Assured Destruction (Homestuck)

[candlesinthewell]

Amazing.

Re: Adverse Working Conditions (Homestuck)

[candlesinthewell]

I love this. It’s so very Kanaya.

Re: SCP Foundation

[candlesinthewell]

LOL, yes, good.

Fill: MCU

[ernest]

“Check!” Erik said triumphantly, but he frowned at the look on his old friend’s face. “…What is it?”

“Oh, nothing, just that I’ll let you take that one back if you want, because I’m just such a generous soul.”

Re: Fill: FFVII

[candlesinthewell]

This is fantastic.

Fill: Biblical

[ernest]

Her husband’s G-d may provide for them, but even if that is so, He is not her home, at least not yet, so she turns so her heart can bid farewell.

She ought not have looked, for at the sight of a beloved place fated to burn, her eyes release all the tears they might have shed for the rest of her life.

The saltwater dries instantly, leaving only salt, and forever after everyone will say it was her refusal to turn from wickedness, and not her devotion.

Shadows (Hellsing; Alucard/Seras)

[kalira]

Seras stirred and twisted suddenly to face the door, eyes narrowing as she bared her teeth and then-

"Master?" she said softly, eyes fixed on the thicker shadow that befuddled even her senses as a tingle ran through her.

A low laugh and something that was possibly a flash of a fanged smile and possibly only a trick of the shadows, and then Seras was sure she was alone - she wasn't sure if she was happy or not, she wasn't even sure if Alucard had really been there, watching her.

Re: Anybody Want a Drink? [mythology/Hadestown, Persephone]

[candlesinthewell]

This is really excellent.

Re: Kindnesses to Fae (The Dresden Files (books))

[candlesinthewell]

Hah, this is great. Harry really does have a knack for stumbling into solutions that make his problems worse, doesn’t he.

Fill: A Midsummer Night's Dream

[ernest]

Robin Goodfellow is composer, conductor, and critic of all the chaos in these woods. He is never done with pulling the strings, and negligence can be just as effective as meticulousness when it comes to making a mess for mortals he’ll never see again once he’s done with them. Goblin, lead them up and down!

Re: HPverse

[ernest]

This is a great ship, and a great fill! They're both so adorable, thank you!

Re: Avatar: The Last Airbender

[ernest]

thank you so much!

Hatoful Boyfriend

[reccyls]

"Cooooooo!?! Cooooo!" ("No pudding?! You dare to call yourself a respectable establishment without serving pudding!?")

"Okosan, please calm down, everybirdie's staring!"

[ernest]

no longer stalling but waiting to seize the moment
oh ouch, what a perfect way to describe his attitude. And that last sentence just aches!

Sometimes I Can Still Hear Her Voice

[ernest]

“I said I’d be back, didn’t you read my postcards?”

“They had naughty pictures, so I couldn’t.”

“Oh, for the love of – it’s a redwood tree, there’s not even any people in it!”

[ernest]

Academia, text/marginalia, here be dragons

I'm keeping up with the age-old TSF tradition of personifying concepts, and you can't stop me

[little_lady_d]

i will say i had a moment re-reading that where i thought 'you might say ... he's not standing still, he's lying in wait' and if shakespeare fandom hasn't done something with parallels between hamlet and 'wait for it' i don't know the shakespeare fandom. (death doesn't discriminate / between the sinners and the saints / it takes and it takes and it takes ....)

anyway. thank you! i'm always happy to make someone sad about horatio!

[ernest]

Look what I found!
I got to the end of the comic and started crying again about Horatio, and then I reread your fic and cried some more. Or in other words #YayHamlet

Van Helsing (Syfy)

[desertscribe]

"It might not be the best mood lighting in the world, but I've seen worse; hell, I've done worse," Jolene said, throwing a scarf over the room's only lamp and examining the resulting dim orange glow before turning to appreciate how the light caressed the curves of Sarah's face, from the hint of a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth to the slowly rising arch of her eyebrows. "At least this time it's an LED bulb," she explained with a wry laugh in response to Sarah's unspoken but very obvious request for her to elaborate on that last part of her statement, "so I don't have to worry about starting a fire like when I tried this with a halogen lamp back in college."

"You shouldn't be so quick to jump to that conclusion," Sarah said, no longer trying to hold back her smile, "because it looks like you might be kindling a fire," but when Jolene turned to check the lamp, Sarah caught Jolene's face in her hands and, with a mutter more to herself than Jolene of, "dammit, I was trying to make a 'this is hot' joke," pulled her in for a very welcome kiss.

Fill: Fallen London, an urchin taken in by the Foreign Office

[candlesinthewell]

They’re always singing here: old arias half-heard around corners, odd lines of lilting melody weaving through the air; it’s the prettiest thing she ever did hear, and they mean to teach her too, and so many other things besides – writing and maths and all the secrets of the city, or at least the ones that rich folk care about – if only she’ll forget that she was once a Fisher King, and remember only that she wants to be a diplomat instead. And she does want to, more than anything, but – it’s not even that she can tell there’s things they aren’t saying about this place, or what it means to be a spy in service to the crown; it’s the thunder’s low, warning growl outside her window at night, the wind that whispers and howls like language on the edge of sense, and it’s the way she’d known how to listen, once, and knows she could again if only she chose.

Out the window, then, and onto the roof, until she can make a run for a nearby pagoda – and leap – and catch the edge, kicking at thin air as she hauls herself up and over to safety; she shivers as the cold begins to sink through her linen nightgown, knowing she’ll miss the warm bed she left behind, and the music, and even the etiquette and baths and the stiff clothing – but somewhere out there on the rooftops, her old gang is waiting for her, and she can hear Storm’s song calling her home.