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>

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I love it!

Ooh, I like this opposing view and the play on outsider/insider perception.

(So.... ehm, my friend and I have been watching Fate: The Winx Saga to make fun of it, and... well, here you go.)

Tecna is floating, drifting between worlds, trying to find a way to go home but not having much luck- until she suddenly hears someone say something very familiar: “Bloom, don’t!” Tecna grabs on to that voice tightly, she follows the echo of it until she flying high above a building, and then closer, through the halls, until she finally ends up in a room filled with five people.

The world rights itself and Tecna stands and looks around: “This is stupid Bloom,” the voice from before says, and now Tecna sees it belongs to a tall, dark-skinned woman, who is talking to an angry-looking red-head.

Tecna tries to get their attention, but they ignore her even when she waves her hand in front of their faces. Frustrated, Tecna goes to the other occupants in the room, but they also seem too focused on their activities to pay her any mind.

It is only when Tecna stands directly in front of the blond woman admiring herself in front of the mirror, and the woman continues like nothing has happened, that Tecna realizes that they can’t see her.

For the first time Tecna really looks at the room and it’s occupants. The first two girls are still arguing about “Bloom’s” activities (something to do with a so-called “Burned One”). In front of the mirror, the stately blonde turns from side to side, a constipated look on her face. The last two occupants are a dark-haired girl lying on the bed with headphones on, and a pale, heavy-set woman who is coaxing a nearly dead plant back to life, using what looks like plant-fairy magic.

A suspicion starts to form at the back of Tecna’s mind- that tall girl had called the red-head Bloom: and she supposes the girl herself does somewhat resemble Aisha (and she is even wearing work-out clothes), and that blonde in front the mirror could be Stella: she seems to be self-involved enough. The girl with the headphones- Musa? A bit of stretch, but possible. But the one by the plant doesn’t look like Flora at all, even though she is clearly using Flora-like magic, and where is Tecna herself?

As Tecna watches, the mirror versions of Stella, Musa and Flora are also drawn into the conversation between not-Bloom and not-Aisha, all seeming to take an entirely different side, and Tecna slowly gets more and more appalled. Why is the Bloom-girl being so self-centered and moody? She doesn’t seem to care about anyone in the room beside herself. The Stella-figure seems completely uninterested in the conversation yet all too willing to offer her opinion, and the Flora-figure (who Tecna learns is called Terra) seem nice enough, but is constantly talked over. And did not-Musa just say she was an empath? Musa?? At first Tecna thinks that alternate Aisha, at least, seems responsible, but it becomes increasingly clear that she is much too focused on not-Bloom’s activities, not seeming to have much of a life of her own.

But the worst thing about it all is that none of them really seem to like each other; so much so that Tecna wonders if they are even friends at all.

Tecna backs away and reaches back out to the multi-verse: whatever this universe is, she is quite sure she doesn’t want to spend any more time in it. She’d rather take her chances in the in-between.

oh this is gorgeous. i love how much they're not saying, and how skillfully they both feel each other out to see if this is a person they can put their trust in. thank you!

thank you so much! i looove the phrase 'with the empty scale of beatrice's heart between them'

Sometimes Jiang Cheng missed the war.

Not the war part of the war (he wasn’t an idiot), but the simplicity of it – the Wen sect was the bad guy, and anyone opposing them wasn’t.

During the war, no one would tell him his brother was a villain for using an unorthodox cultivation style, and he wouldn’t have to think about the Jin sect’s thinly veiled power grabs while they funded Lotus Piers’ reconstruction, and gave his sister her happily ever after.

Hee! (And an excellent call forward to when they meet Zaphod) Poor Arthur, the whole thing keeps happening to him.

The story lives! This is excellent.

I also really like the idea that in 50 years time, grandson's granddaughter will be reading it to her grandchildren and there will be further alterations.

Glad you enjoyed it!

Oh Paddington. (I can see this in cartoon form complete with voiceover. You've caught it perfectly.)

Hee! She's not wrong. :)

Thank you very much :)

This is so Darcy. It's adorable.

heeeee, cute! i do love their little spats, and i get the feeling this is a long standing debate. i wonder what their stances are on fry accompaniments.

This is more of a skill swap than a power swap, but I figure if building flying armor counts as a superpower, Natasha and Clint's skillsets should as well. :)

-----

The Red Room had a specific ideal to which they trained their agents -- deceptively lovely, flexible, able to wear any mask and get close enough to kiss a target and steal his secrets as well as his life -- but while Natasha excelled enough to live, that pattern always felt like somebody else's coat, too baggy in the shoulders and tight around the waist. She prefers to work from a distance and in the shadows; steal impersonal documents, snap photos, plant microphones; send an autographed bullet from half a mile away. The idea of touching other people's skin, feeling their breath against her ear, makes her own skin crawl like the memory of a dozen spiders wandering over her while she lay paralyzed and desperate not to scream, and it's a rare person who can pass unharmed through the sphere of empty space she carves around herself with her dead-eyed stare.

The US Army was much more interested in snipers than infiltrators, but sometimes what you want isn't what you need, and Clint's always been personable when he puts his mind to it, not to mention good with accents and languages and mirroring what other people project onto him; you pick up those tricks pretty quick as a runaway, and even more so in the entertainment business. He's still a sniper on paper, but the moment he catches wind of SHIELD sending out feelers, he makes a play for a different line of work -- something where he can look the people he kills in the eye and know that they have a faint chance of turning the tables, walking away while he bleeds out on the floor. It's probably just as unethical to betray a cultivated trust, but he's been doing that for most of his life and it's a rare person who can coax him to peel off his masks and show the awkward, half-forgotten shape of his true self.

They make an odd pair, the sniper and the seducer, but nobody at SHIELD would dare to pull them apart.

After sixteen years at the BAU, it was hard to even imagine what not seeing mutilated bodies on a daily basis looked like, not to mention not having to follow from afar as her friends kept getting caught in dangerous situations and nearly dying, or being shot and almost dying herself. How was she even able to live like that for this long, when she was always the squeamish type and abhorred violence? As much as she missed working with her friends and she knew she did a lot of good there, she was ready for some peace and quiet.

Emily would never forget what had to happen for her to become the Unit Chief at the BAU, it casted a shadow that was hard to overlook, what happened to Hotch tainted the position in a way that perhaps it could never recover from. She had her ambitions, she always had, but they would never be above the people she cared about, and over the years the BAU had become her family, she worried about them more than she did herself. She didn’t refuse the job, it would have been worse for everyone to have an outsider come as lead, but everyday she was reminded of why she had the job.

Edited 2021-02-28 04:34 (UTC)

Spencer wondered if somehow it was his fault, if there was something he did that made him keep finding himself in these situations, aside from his line of work, since more often than not he seemed to be the one to get himself caught by angry unsubs who wanted to make him not only their next victim but a special one at that.

He should probably be trying to escape, do something to help with his own rescue, but he was exhausted, he could barely feel his arms from how tight they were tied around his back, and he lost so much blood that even staying awake was a challenge.

Maybe this time there was really nothing he could do, no way to escape, maybe this was the time all he got to do was watch through monitors, not knowing if he wanted his team to show up to rescue him or if he would rather they stayed far away from this obvious trap, just knowing that whichever the case, he was powerless to influence the outcome.

Bait

Slow and steady, his blood kept travelling down his arms, all the way to his fingertips before dripping on the ground, its moisture coming almost as a comfort to his shafted wrists, although it was still far from enough to help him get released.

He tried counting the drops to keep track of the volume, not because it gave him any hope that he would be rescued in time for that information to be useful, but because it gave him something to focus on that wasn't the possibility that his team was walking into a trap.

Knowing that he would likely die there didn't hurt near as much as being used as a bait to kill the people that he cared about the most.

Bait

Spencer saw them coming through the screens, left there to taunt him by the long gone killer, saw them walking right into the house, too fast for their own good, too desperate to find him.

He heard the click of the bomb activating behind him, and knew that meant only a few seconds until detonation, and could guess that it was enough to destroy half the block, enough to kill most people he ever cared about, and who were only there because he was careless enough to get caught again.

He tried to scream a muffled warning, but it was too late.

Bait

Spencer wasn't expecting to get caught, and he never even thought of coming up with an excuse, so when he was accused of counting cards, he said the first thing that popped up in his head, which happened to be, "I don't do math in my head."

It was blatantly untrue, but in his defense, counting cards should hardly be considered math, it was just too easy to keep track of the cards that had already been played and so which ones were more likely to be played next, and he could hardly be faulted for having a good memory.

Unfortunately his excuses didn't land as well as he had hoped, but at least he escaped only being banned, and not getting a beating.

Kirk never knew how to deal with the gossip when he faced it - which happened far more often than he was willing to admit -, unlike Spock who could always remind the gossiping party that this line of questioning was highly inappropriate without uttering a single word, so it was no surprise when he fumbled his declaration for the official record of the mission, by probably revealing more than he intended - including the particulars of his bisexuality that were frankly irrelevant, since a preference for women never kept him from having occasional relationships with men -, managing to contradict himself at several points - if he had never encountered the rumor before, then how could he know what Spock’s response to it was -, and finally, being unable to add a single denial to his, well, denial.

In his defense, Kirk always found it hard to deny his feelings for Spock even when he thought there was no hope of them ever being reciprocated, and after the V’ger affair he would proudly proclaim to the whole Federation that he had managed to melt a Vulcan heart, if not for Spock’s concerns about privacy, and the general sentiment that couples shouldn’t be in each other’s chain of command, since after the time they spent apart and that Kirk himself was away from the Enterprise was enough to teach him that their place was together and on that ship.

Well, perhaps he hadn’t ruined things just yet, there was always a chance that people would skip over the footnotes completely just to get to the meat of the action, or maybe they would take his words at face value - his not entirely earned reputation as a lady’s man could help him there -, he just hoped he wouldn’t have to tell Spock he might as well have confirmed the gossip about their relationship in the official reports.

The radiation ate away at his body, melting his flesh, breaking his tissues, burning a pure white light on his retinas that was the last thing that he would ever see, but it couldn't sever his bond, couldn't keep him from dragging himself to his true north, and it had mercifully kept his hearing and his voice, giving him one last chance to say goodbye.

He crawled as close as he could, resting on the glass that separated them, knowing that this was the closest he would ever be to Jim, that this would be the last time they talked, that it was too soon and he couldn’t even touch him now, as much as he wished it more intensely than he had even done in his whole life.

In his final moments, he regretted all the things he could never say to Jim, almost enough to ignore the crew around them and say them now, but he was held back by the same reasons as always, and so the only thing he could do was press his hand against the glass and hope that through their bond he could show one last time all the feelings he could never voice.

Kirk placed a hand on the sealed casket, knowing that even now he couldn't touch him, Spock hadn't… his body hadn't been cleared of the radiation, the massive dose would persist on his system for years to come, making it dangerous to even attempt to transport him back to be buried, so he would get the burial of the explorers of old, released to the vastness of space to forever drift, or until he was caught in some gravitational force and burned in an atmosphere or by getting too close to a star, a fitting end for someone who had dedicated his life to going where no man had gone before.

"Thank you, Spock," he said aloud, fighting back the tears, although he didn't know if he meant for giving his life to save the ship one last time, or for all the years of companionship, that he hoped would have lasted so much longer.

In this situation, it would be easy to simply be angry for what he lost, but he was too tired to be angry, tired of the anger and desire for vengeance that caused this situation, so all he had was sorrow, and gratefulness for having been lucky enough to find his other half, even if it had been taken from him.

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Three Sentence Ficathon 2021

Re: Fill: Xena: Warrior Princess, proofreading

Re: Fires, Walls and Halls

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Re: Umineko, Beatrice & Battler, Spoilers for Episode 5

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Re: Princess Bride AU

Re: Princess Bride AU

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Re: Captain America 1, Steve/Peggy

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

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Mirror, Mirror

Criminal Minds, Penelope, Peace and Quiet

Criminal Minds, Emily, Heavy is the head that wears the crown

Criminal Minds, Spencer, Bait (part I)

Criminal Minds, Spencer, Bait (part II)

Criminal Minds, Spencer, Bait (part III)

Criminal Minds (pre-canon), Spencer, Counting cards

Star Trek The Motion Picture, Kirk/Spock, About those rumors

Star Trek The Wrath of Khan, Kirk/Spock, Final Words Unsaid (MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH)

Star Trek The Wrath of Khan, Kirk & Spock, Gratefulness