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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She has enough money to dower herself and her sisters three times over, money she earned with her own hands, which she knows Eloise would find the true triumph.

Penelope cannot use it to buy dresses or to fund good works or even bestow some upon Marina: tt must sit, unused, growing dusty, shine fading; the comparison to a spinster is not too far out of reach. Still, it is something, to send her words to a printer and know that in the vault, the piles grow.

"So it is not merely gossip," Eloise says, and Perscitia sniffs.

"It is really very simple; the allowance was made in Queen Elizabeth's day that women could become captains; it is legal."

The look of horror on Lady Bridgerton's face is in direction and absolute opposition to the dawning delight of possibility on Eloise's.

Ohhhh, I really like this!

Later, Alucard could not have said what it was, why he threw his lot in with a magician who thought he was the answer to a prophecy and a bitter, sarcastic drunk whose entire family legacy was built on hunting those like him.

But there was a streak of honor in Trevor Belmont that blazed as bright as the sun, hidden under layers of drink and self-preservation; he possessed a bone-deep desire to protect people and, despite his background, seemed only inclined to fight Alucard if he posed an actual threat to other humans—something Alucard had no intention of doing.

And so, far sooner than he should've and against his better instincts, Alucard found himself trusting a hunter with his life and, much more dangerously, his heart.

Ange’s had enough of the snide comments and sidelong glances so she makes her way up the ugly stairwell no one in this posh apartment building ever uses, hiding her breath under the echo of her own footsteps.

She’s planning on going for a little midnight walk up here, just one short step and she’ll join her family after twelve lonely years, but then the witch appears and explains that her family needs her, not on this game board, but way back when, on the board she never got invited to.

“It would take a miracle for you to land on your feet from way up here,” Bernkastel says, swishing her tail restlessly, “just as it will take one for me to find a Fragment where you’ll all be together, but as the last Golden Witch you're the only one who has a chance,” and Ange feels rather like an injured bird under a predator’s claw, but she still accepts the Witch of Miracles as her guardian.

"Would you like a refill on your caf, general?" Poe asked with a dopey smile on his face.

Finn couldn't help but return it. "Thank you, general, I'd love some."

Rey groaned into her morning meal. "Can you please hold off on the disgustingly cute stuff until after breakfast?"

until i put on the mask (of my own face)

The superhero scene in Town is kind of like an hidden world in itself, one that lightly overlays the real one.

Most people with powers are just themselves. They're magicians, or warriors, or deviant scientists, but they're open about it. Or else they go the other way and hide truly, keeping their strangeness and strength under wraps.

If you're a superhero, you don't do either of those things. Or perhaps a better way to put it is that you do both. You take a new name; you wear a mask. (Perhaps a costume too, though that's not really necessary. Masks, after all, are a very effective disguise.) You don't let anyone see the everyday truth of you, the awkwardnesses, the flaws. You grandstand. You do great things. (Or terrible ones. Some prefer the mask of the villain to that of the hero.)

In the mask you're someone else, living your own Golden Age, in a world with simpler rules. In the mask you're brave and strong and while an enemy may physically beat you up, nobody can really touch you. Not where it hurts.

That's why Laodemus likes it. The world doesn't need to know about his insecurities. He looks the part of a big, dramatic, cheerful strongman, so that's what he'll be, El Técnico in flamboyant red and blue and gold, someone better than ~~the guy who's been trying since forever to get his parents to just look at him—~~

—see? That's just kind of pathetic and sad. Nobody wants to know about that. Least of all Laodemus himself. He can choose who he wants to be, and he chooses to be someone who doesn't have those kinds of feelings.

It all gets a bit shaky, though, after he meets—and subsequently teams up with—the Angel of Fortitude and the Clockwork Guardian.

They're really something, those two. He wouldn't work with them if they weren't. It's not just their powers; the Angel's geomancy and army of monsters and mutation-inducing ichor, the Guardian's venomous spit and summoned barriers and mechanical genius. It's how well they use them—how clever they are about it, and how much they want to be of help. It's the way they'll never back down from a challenge and never let a problem go unfixed if they can solve it. They're just good kids, both of them. He cares about them a lot. But.

There's an etiquette to superheroics, to teamups and rivalries both. You never take off your mask, literally or figuratively, and you never try to look behind anyone else's. To Laodemus that's a comfort. But the Angel and the Guardian aren't nearly so good at keeping kayfabe. For them, the secrecy chafes.

They try, of course. (Like he said, they're good kids.) They really try. But then they'll let something slip. Blurt out some too-raw feeling. Drop a detail in conversation without noticing how alarming it sounds. And each of them worries when the other does that.

The Guardian explains, fidgeting, that she "really should not be outside my...my home, at all—I'm not allowed, it wouldn't be proper", and the Angel can't hide his horror and confusion, hands twitching like he wants to reach out to her, like he would be doing so were it not for how his palms leak corruptive blood.

The Angel casually mentions that he never had friends as a child—"nobody ever wanted to try, they knew my dad would hurt them for it"—and the Guardian's clenching her fists, visibly biting back such protective fury that Laodemus has no doubt; if she ever meets the Angel's father, she'll strike the bastard down where he stands.

So of course Laodemus worries too, so much, and the conventions get a little bit harder to keep to every day. He wants to find the 'home' that the Guardian's being kept prisoner in and break it. He wants to know who the 'associates of my father' are that the Angel has implied are trying to harm him.

But those things can't happen without masks coming off, and when masks come off everything falls apart. They'd lose this, the freedom they both cling to so hard, the safety of anonymity. He'd lose both of them.

So he doesn't pry, and he keeps kayfabe, and he supports them as best he can. And he wonders when it will become too much. He wonders which of them will crack first.

And sometimes. Sometimes he wonders—

—if, when they unmask.

What if he did, too?

With the protestations long since dying upon his lips, and the heavy silences growing dreary, Kuja decided to speak to his - replacement? Enemy? Savior?

Of course the conversations were awkward, stilted, full of things unsaid - unsayable - and strangled sentences. Still, Kuja was well versed in controlling a conversation, of the way nobles would lay out words like generals with troops. With Zidane's sincerity the two gradually found the same harmony to their talks around the evening fire and the rest during the desert's hottest hours.

"I still can't believe it. I mean, I believe you! I do! I felt that myself when Garland.... Well anyway."

Kuja learned how closely Zidane came to facing the very same fate Kuja himself feared, and was still deciding between nurturing the strange wellspring of horrified empathy, indulging in the bitter envy of yet another thing Zidane was supposedly built better for, and acknowledging the howling agony of the much less violent, almost banal method he used for neatly avoiding that fate.

"Listen, if I cared for someone for four years and then had to pitch 'em to keep myself safe... I wish I could just, glue Terra back together, dredge up that geezer from that gulch you punted him in, and deck Garland in the face for making you have to choose that. Brothers shouldn't have to compete for favoritism, let alone your entire existence!"

Inelegantly said, yes, but the earnest indignity caused a surprising wellspring of warmth in Kuja. For the first time in many, many years, Kuja felt able to claim Zidane as brother once more.

Glad to please!

Aww! :)

Always happy to serve, even if it does feel like a knife in the back.

Like a kick in the teeth. Thanks for commenting.

I have to admit, those are my favorite as well.

This fantastic, but at the same time all I can think of is Sarah looking at this half changeling brother of hers and being like "hmm, I should probably talk dad into sending him to boarding school so he can be someone else's problem."

But srsly, I do love an unsettling Toby with magical powers.

I love this, but it also kinda reads that Artemis is straight up going to murder Callisto. Slow down, Artemis, that's at least, like, a third date outing right there. Ask Apollo for pointers, I'm sure he'll help.

But for real, thanks for the fill.

Artemis is straight up going to murder Callisto

only a little 😏

nothing brings estranged sibligs together like bitching about (and murdering) your shitty dad!

Awwww this is beautiful and I don't even know the fandom.

Peter doesn't get it. And sure, maybe there's a different way; scrambling, struggling, fighting for some miserable tiny corner of the world to call his. But Neal's the kid of a drunk mom and a dirty cop; he forged bus passes to get to school at seven, played pool in bars at eleven and was homeless at nineteen, and he's done - he shines and dazzles, he takes and he's seen, no matter the cost.

this is gorgeous!!

When Susan plants an arrow dead center of every target as she walks down the range, they say it's luck.

When she splits each arrow walking back down the range without breaking stride, they assume there's a trick.

When Lucy splits each arrow with a throwing knife and still has one left to kill any further protests on the matter, they shut up.

Years in the future, wiser, more self-aware, Neal will cringe at the memory (seeing only himself when Diana has her own battles), but somehow she doesn't call him out on his privilege or tell him to "toughen up". She listens to his miserable life story, doesn't mock him but instead acknowledges his grievances, she says "I'm sorry it's been like that for you," she says "I'm here if you need something."
She says: "You know you're so much better than this, Neal" - and for the first time, he wants to be.

oof, the last clause hits hard.

Thank you!

Nice! :D

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Page 62 of 222

Three Sentence Ficathon 2021

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Castlevania (Netflix), Trevor/Alucard, Tentative Trust

Umineko, Ange & Bernkastel [spoilers up to Episode 4, warnings for suicidal thoughts]

General

Fill: Chuubo's Marvellous Wish-Granting Engine, Laodemus + Entropy II + Lilimund

Final Fantasy IX; Kuja + Zidane

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Re: Final Fantasy IX; Kuja + Zidane

Re: Nirvana in Fire

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Re: Belonging (Labyrinth; Toby & Sarah)

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Re: Home (Naruto; Kakashi & Sakura & Sai)

White Collar, Neal

Re: Lost in the Flood

Susan and Lucy showcasing their skills.

White Collar, Neal&Diana

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Re: Maybe Less, Maybe a Little More (Anthropomorfic, Time vs 2020)