rthstewart | Three Sentence Ficathon 2021

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Three Sentence Ficathon 2021

We have now opened a new post, for new prompts! Please leave all new prompts there. You may continue to fill existing prompts here. If you didn't get a prompt filled here, feel free to post it on the new post!

Welcome to the Three Sentence Ficathon!
2 Feb. 2021 See important edit below regarding where to find unfilled prompts.

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

What do I do first?
You can start 3SF by posting 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."

Open ended and anthropomorphic fills are popular too, such as:

Any, Any, "I don't like sand."

or

Earth geography, sand, "I don't like humans very much, either."

What happens after that?
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

I'm really overwhelmed by all the prompts and how much there is and how fast it goes. I can't read 1,000 prompts and fills. It's too much.
I hear this a lot and it keeps a lot of people from participating. The 3SF is big and it moves fast, especially at first. I get overwhelmed, too, and I'm hosting the thing. With 2020 and 2021 sucking so badly you don't want something that's supposed to be fun cause you anxiety. I have a couple of suggestions for managing the 3SF volume.

First, really, you don't have to read every prompt and fill on every page. You can start at the last page of this and just go forward, or back a page or two. It's fine.
You can come and go as time and energy allow, you don't have to participate the whole time, and it drops off quite a bit by mid-February.
Even after the 3SF and new prompting end, people fill prompts all year long.
You can fill an already filled prompt and you can can leave a prompt that's already been prompted before. People do it all the time.

Always make sure you're looking at top-level comments only, not threaded. That helps a lot. Your screen should look like this.

But shouldn't I read everything to see if someone already prompted the same prompt I want to leave if someone already filled it?
No. Prompt as many times as you want, as much as you want. It doesn't matter if someone prompted the exact same prompt. Go ahead and prompt again!

I left a prompt and no one filled it. Can I prompt it again?
Absolutely!

Can I spread the word?
Yes, please. I generally fail at creating banners and embed codes but if you create one and make it really idiot-proof, I might be able to post and share it. Feel free to cross-post this entry. If you create your own banners or icons, let me know and I'll share!
Please share the 3SF with your followers, friends, and any channels and comms you are active on. I'll post on fandom calendar, Tumblr, and Twitter, but I don't have many connections in other spaces such as Discord.

How long will it go?
The 3SF closes to new prompts on February 28, 2021. The entry stays open permanently and people post fills all year long.

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 and archive warnings, triggers, pairings, ratings, tags, and squick?

I thought a lot about this. It boils down to reader beware. In my experience, this typically gets too big, moves too fast, and the stories are too short for content warnings and ratings to even apply. It is too big for me to moderate in this way. You should assume spoilers are fair game and that the initial poster and the responder have opted to use no content warnings or tags. This means AO3 content warnings for dubcon, violence, canon character death, underage, etc. COULD be present. I've found personally that I can skim and scroll 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. In this format, the obligation is on you, the reader, to protect yourself from triggering content.
Some posters do include warnings and spoiler tags in subject lines or include spoiler space, but they don't have to do so.

Why is 3SF split among several posts? That seems confusing.
It is confusing and we always lose momentum once we have to move to a second post. The reason is because at 5,000 comments to a single post, DW installs a human test CAPTCHA, which is a pain for users. So, once this entry gets to the upper 4,000 comments, I open a new post. If you've been waiting until things slow down to participate, when we open a second post is often a good place to join.

If I have questions, what do I do?
I'm rthstewart everywhere, here, Twitter, Tumblr, gmail and AO3.

A special thank you to

conuly .
Last year, Conuly started logging all unfilled prompts.
This year's (2021) unfilled prompts are here.
Last year's (2020) unfilled prompts are here.

Conuly asks that you not reply, as they want to be able to edit and add more prompts to the list.
Conuly does this just because they are an awesome person but should you want to write them fic in thanks, you can find a birthday wish list here.

Here is the 3SF 2021 Friending Meme to show of your new DW account.

Here, have some icons and banners and let me know if you've created your own!

text box you can try to cut and paste

<a href="https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/166704.html" _fcksavedurl="https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/166704.html" _fcksavedurl="https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/166704.html" _fcksavedurl="https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/166704.html" target="_blank"><img src=" https://imgur.com/f3B21LX.png?2" _fcksavedurl=" https://imgur.com/f3B21LX.png?2" _fcksavedurl=" https://imgur.com/f3B21LX?2" _fcksavedurl=" https://imgur.com/f3B21LX.png?2" alt="" /></a>

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Wu Xie stands in front of the stone wall, rereading the words engraved there, sure he must have made a mistake - soulmates are a legend, a myth, a scientific impossibility - and yet the signs insist that only two souls who agree to be bonded can pass this point.

He looks at Xiaoge, whose eyes are locked on his, answering his question before he even knows he's going to answer it; he supposes it was inevitable, it always has been. They step forward together, placing their hands on the cold stone simultaneously, and Wu Xie can feel a burst of heat through his body, strange yet familiar, terrifying yet comforting.

He can hear Xiaoge's voice, deep inside his mind, telling him that it will be okay, that they'll be okay, that they'll be together, forever.

He smiles as the stone wall shifts and lets them pass. Together.

any, any, witchcraft is a family art

aaaaa thank you I'm so happy you liked it :DDDD (also i might have some new headcanons here cough)

It had been quite a commotion when the contents of the students' cauldrons exploded with a loud bang, shaking the basement classroom with such intensity and causing all of the third-years to duck beneath their desks as bright red globs of tomato sauce flew across the room, sticking to the walls and dripping slowly down as if they were rivulets of blood.

After Madame Pomfrey finished treating the remaining students for any minor burns suffered in the incident, she turned to the Headmistress with a shake of a her head and sighed, "I really do think we should reconsider the decision to ask the House-elves to teach cooking classes at Hogwarts, Minerva."

Minerva McGonagall nodded her agreement, adding, "At least I can tell Miss Granger we tried her little experiment; unfortunately, it seems hiring a good cooking teacher is as just as difficult as finding a new Potions Master."

I wonder if Xucoatl ever did meet Eustace, after he was Un-dragoned...

LOL it really is the perfect lullaby for Marshwiggles.

Paging

wingedflight This calls for witchy Jill.
Also, uhhhm, there's my Witches of Spare Oom series

Given the way that Letty blasted down the door of Mrs. Lefay’s shambling, decrepit Somerset home and how they leapt in brandishing their iron rods, Polly had hoped (a little) that there might be more of a fight (which goes to show that Polly Plummer still had a great deal to learn about being a Witch and that she was very fortunate to have the very wise and cautious Letitia Ketterley (though everyone called her Letty) as her teacher). Mrs. Lefay’s magic wasn’t powerful enough anymore to counter two young and very strong Witches but, as Letty well knew, it was always better, when dealing with the Fae, to be prepared for the worst and hope for the best.

Mrs. Lefay hadn’t moved to defend herself or her home, which meant, Polly supposed, that her magic was either weaker even than they had thought, or, as Letty had warned, that she was just biding her time to do something that might not be precisely wicked but could certainly be very dangerous and even catastrophic to everything around her (Letty knew from terrible personal experience with her sister Mabel, her brother Andrew and those Rings that, while Mrs. Lefay wasn't precisely evil, she also just didn't think or care about things like virtue or consequences (which is a different story for another time)). So forewarned and armed, Polly held tightly to her iron and cautiously followed Letty into a dusty, smelly sitting room.

Mrs. Lefay was rocking in a squeaky chair; she was very round and her face from the front was almost square and her claw like hands were gripped around a horrid, miserable looking cat she forced to sit in her lap (the cat’s name was Lance and as terrible as the things were that he did, he certainly did not deserve this fate, though that is also a story for another time).

Letty was very dashing in her long, billow coat and she pointed her iron at Mrs. Lefay and announced very grandly, “On behalf of the Witches of Britain, I’m charged with enlisting you in our ancient battle against the Fae. You may come quietly and aid us, or…”

“Or be imprisoned? Again?” Mrs. Lefay croaked. With one arm tightly around the cat, she used a bone headed cane to pull herself up from her chair. “That’s not much of a choice, but at least it is a choice.”

Quina doesn't understand much of the ways of those outside the tribe. In a lot of cases, they don't want to. Outsiders, after all, do things like charging people money for food, as if nourishment wasn't the right of every creature on Gaia. Quina doesn't think it's possible to understand a mindset like that without being the worse for it.

But some things are the same across all tribes, and they think that Dagger's mute misery is not really so alien at all. A dead mother is a dead mother, regardless of culture or species; and as for fear of one's own power....well, that's something any mage has to face at some point, when they realise exactly how much potential for harm there is in it.

And besides that; the Way of the Gourmand is very clear on certain matters. A true Qu feeds everyone who needs it.

So Quina takes it on themself to give Dagger the food she needs; not just garlic-butter oglops, potatoes and pumpkin bombs, but guidance. She's horribly ignorant, not knowing even the most basic techniques, so they teach her as they would a tiny child of the tribe. How to tell good ingredients from spoiled. How to crack an egg without getting shell where it shouldn't be. And most pressingly of all, how to use that simplest and most versatile of tools, a basic chef's knife.

"Blade sharp," they explain, demonstrating just how sharp on the vegetables for tonight's stew. "Must be sharp—no good if blunt. Sharp knife only dangerous when you use wrong. No way to use blunt knife right. Sharp knife that cut what you mean to, that every cook need!"

(Learn your tools well. Keep them maintained. Understand them, and you can use them safely.

Outsiders are slow and foolish, as any Qu knows—but Dagger seems like she might, eventually, be able to get it.)

!!!!!!

He's just my perfect foil for something like this. I abuse him terribly. Thank you!

thank you! If you feel comfortable, I'd be curious if you came over from the Narnia head canon speculation on Tumblr. But don't say if you don't wish to! I've spent a lot of time in Narnia, so to speak and I and others have a lot of work. Bacchus is a very popular character, shipped frequently with Edmund, though he's a character I'll put with anyone, really. My own head canon is that Caspian is from a very traditional, patriarchal culture -- much as the Pevensies were, but they overcame a lot of their traditional prejudices and colonial assumptions in the first year of their rule. This does cause some interesting issues when they return to their old culture and really don't fit in as well.
Anyway, thank you for prompting! I love writing about these things!

Really? That's cool :) I saw P&P on

undeadrobins list of favourites and I figured it would just work with the prompt *shrugs* There can never be too much P&P in the world :)

Ahem. Again, Francie, you have your own story to write, but I've spent A LOT of time on Peter. Thank you for reading and writing!
Peter, to me, comes to Narnia with a lot of baked in assumptions, which he is deeply challenged upon in the first year of his rule. Edmund and Lucy have a far easier time of it. But the Narnians, in this vision, have a series of bonding rituals to bring the Queen or King closer to them -- Susan and Peter undergo this ritual -- I love not man the less but nature more -- and this becomes an important part of how they are able to embrace Narnia and not try to turn their new country into mini-England. It's precisely, an anti-colonial presentation.

Ultimately, Peter is not at all strait-laced in Narnia -- stern yes, but he deeply embraces the Narnian naturalism and ethos. However, he is also, always, very concerned with putting their "best hoof forward" and so with Susan is always very concious of hospitality, protocol, courtesy, and so on - this is something that Narnia writers frequently relegate Susan to with a snide aside that all she cares about are flower arrangements. So, I deliberately write Peter as obsessed with protocol observance as Susan. This is evident in a number of shorter works -- Culinary Diplomacy and Resting Capybara Face, among others.

When they return, uhhmmm, well that's what The Stone Gryphon is all about, a story premised upon what happens when four children from a white, patriarchal, colonial, hierarchical culture, spend a long time in a culture that is precisely NOT that and then return and bring those same values back. Though I often use sexual morays, gender and preferences as sort of a shorthand for these cultural differences, it's not limited to that.

In that (very, very long story) Peter has his own journey that is still not complete -- there's a certain moral maturity that he hasn't attained yet. He also suffers from a fundamental character flaw that, in always focusing upon his duty and what he thinks he should do and what others expect of him, he makes himself miserable and it takes a long time, and the love of a very non-judgmental person, to put him on the path Aslan's been trying to show him.

Ahem. Stopping now. Thank you again. I owe you a review!

You are so welcome! I really need to actually figure out how Xucoatl can meet Eustace, Dragon Eustace, or something. he's waited a long time for this!

thank you and I'm loving what all you're doing here in this fest.

thank you!!

Locked Tomb series, Harrowhark and Ianthe, "WHY ARE YOU FIGHTING THE PRIMORDIAL SOUP GODS???" "FUCK YOU!!!!"

"Then agaaain, they could have been talkin' about him--he is very pretty," Cabanela said grandly.
Alma snorted on her milkshake and studied her husband pushing Kamila on the swing and there was nothing but contentment there and she glanced at Cabanela in turn. Maybe the gossip only got the numbers wrong; she did after all, have two very pretty boys.

Oohh love it!! Loved all the description and the sort of understated face off, and the image of the both of them brandishing iron rods, amazing!

Oh my god, this is hilarious! I love it

She kissed him first -- knowing as soon as she did it that it was a terrible idea, but unable to resist finally carving out something fresh and wonderful out of the unending war, the tides that never seemed to be turning, the way that fighting and fighting left no room for gentleness, no room for breathing, and in the aftermath of this battle they had both again barely survived, she dove for Anakin and kissed him hard on the mouth.

She knew it was wrong, the way he kissed her back, his arms coming up and encircling her, his metal hand fisted in the fabric of her dress, and surely everyone was watching, everyone would see, that she'd finally given up on fighting a war against her feelings on two fronts.

Anakin tensed and they rolled on instinct, aware from the brup-brup-slam of blaster fire, and she realized he was laughing, and somehow she was too, her arms around his neck, feeling her heart pounding in her chest and his an answer, a daring escape.

thank you so much! i’m so glad you liked it. :D

I saw your reblog about unexplored Narnia wordlbuilding on tumblr if that's what you mean? It's definitely why I prompted this (and I was really happy when you decided to answer it!), and, uhh, at the risk of coming across as (even more) stalker-ish, this is actually ElementalRaven from ao3 : I saw that you hosted this and decided to check it out (and I am loving it, so thank you for that as well!)

The question perhaps was whether deserters were still Jedi -- the deserters certainly thought so, some believing that escaping the war was more Jedi than what their Order had become.

When Caleb ran, leaving Master Billaba behind, he was thinking of those people, of one of his master's friends who had come to her late one night and asked her to join them in walking away from the Order, and how she had considered for so long that Caleb had held his breath, listening in, before she declined.

He didn't know how to find them, but he knew there would be other Jedi out there, those away on single missions, those who weren't suited for war, or who had refused it -- the Jedi without the Temple, a fraction of who they had been, and he hoped, tearing through the brush and wiping the tears from his eyes, that they wouldn't all be so young and scared as he was, and alone.

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Page 142 of 222

Three Sentence Ficathon 2021

Grave Robbers Chronicles, Wu Xie/Xiaoge

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When Home Economics meets magic...

Re: Father Pan, Xucoatl, the five gods

Re: When the bough breaks

Witches of Spare Oom

Fill: Way of the Gourmand

Re: Homunculi Are A Hard Science (Final Fantasy IX, Kuja + Black Mages)

Re: Bacchus, Pomona, Epona Part 1

Re: Labyrinth: To Live Within You (Sarah &/ Jareth)

Re: Bacchus, Pomona, Epona Part 1

Re: Pride & Prejudice - An Ideal Wife - (Darcy/Elizabeth)

Re: Bacchus, Pomona, Epona Part 1

Re: Father Pan, Xucoatl, the five gods

Re: Father Pan, Xucoatl, the five gods

Re: Father Pan, Xucoatl, the five gods

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Re: Witches of Spare Oom

Re: When Home Economics meets magic...

only who is left (Clone Wars, Anakin/Ahsoka)

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Re: Bacchus, Pomona, Epona Part 1

some griefs so loud (Star Wars Rebels, Caleb (Kanan) gen)