rthstewart | Three Sentence Ficathon Part 2

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Three Sentence Ficathon Part 2

THE 2021 3 SENTENCE FICATHON IS NOW CLOSED TO NEW PROMPTS!

THIS IS THE NEW POST FOR PART 2 OF THE 3 SENTENCE FICATHON -- ALL NEW PROMPTS SHOULD BE POSTED HERE
You may continue to fill prompts (but not leave new ones) at the original Post 1 here.

conuly 's unclaimed prompt list here

Thank you all for participating! We had a rush of prompts at the end so be sure to check it out and if you want someone to fill something in particular, and assuming they don't mind being contacted (I know I don't!), be sure to let them know!

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 does this just because she is an awesome person but should you want to write her 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/168256.html" _fcksavedurl="https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/168256.html" _fcksavedurl="https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/168256.html" _fcksavedurl="https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/168256.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>

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Any, any/any, daemon AU

Since Tifa had seen him last, Cloud's daemon had changed.

Cloud had barely waited long enough for his daemon to settle before striking out for Midgar, but she had settled, into a leggy yellow chocobo whose feathers hinted at gold and who'd been as mouthy as Cloud was taciturn. Now Cloud was shadowed by a black swan who rarely spoke - and the one time Tifa had heard Idolon speak, she could have sworn the voice was male.

This is both unsettling and fascinating. Poor Tifa; as if she didn't have enough 'this is really weird and Cloud's acting like nothing's wrong with it' things to worry about already!

yeah, shines a big spotlight on how not-okay Cloud is, doesn't it?

Kim keeps a window open in his room, even in the cold, and he always sees his daemon outside of the hostel window, hopping briefly on the balcony railing before taking to the skies again, every morning. He lets her go with a smile - the little black bird was always flying, and he wouldn't begrudge her that, even if it meant barely being able to speak to her; at least one of them should be able to fly. She would come back to him when he went outside for his cigarette in the evening and tell him what she saw of the city, and he would take down her notes next to his and ask her questions about the things that didn't quite match; it was good for both of them, as it helped him focus his thoughts, and gave her context for what she had seen.

The first thing that the man in sunglasses says to Kim directly is a warning, when his new partner's daemon wolfhound begins to drag herself down the stairs. "Stay clear of that thing," he whispers, and there's genuine fear in the officer's voice. "She's dangerous, one wrong move and she'll tear you apart!"

Kim raises an eyebrow, and then looks over to the hound - she looks ancient as she navigates the stairs, stubbornly pushing herself down with her good rear leg, knees wobbling. She looks up quizzically, as if aware she is being spoken of, but in doing so she catches sight of Kim, and her tail starts wagging so hard that her entire mangy body shakes and she has to catch herself from falling.

"Oh no, don't even think about it, you daft beast," the man hisses in his rough accent, stepping back to his own chair. Kim stays still, cupping his morning tea in his hands, enjoying the warmth before having to go out again in the freezing rain.

But she doesn't even look at the man with the sunglasses and obvious wig after she has made her way down. She sits down next to Kim, tongue hanging out of her mouth. "Good morning," Kim says politely, nodding to her and giving her a small smile. The ragged tail thumps against the floor, then finally calms as the hound lies down at the bar for the moment, happy to have been acknowledged.

Kim spares little more than a glance at the man in sunglasses as he finishes his tea, and with more than a hint of sadness he notes the shock and worry in his face as he stares at the now-docile daemon. There is so much here he doesn't understand, he thinks, and he simply doesn't have time to understand it all, not when he can already hear the creaking of the boards above him as the detective makes his own way downstairs.

Edited 2021-02-19 14:17 (UTC)

His mom's daemon died the day after the strange man came to give them the news about Jecht. The neighbours would come and visit, bringing them both food and attempts at smiles; sometimes, they would take Tidus aside and say, "It won't be long now. Be strong for her."

Tidus didn't realise what it all meant until his mom slipped away herself; and in all the upheaval, he didn't notice that the strange man, who had begun calling in regularly, seemed to have no daemon at all.

EYES EMOJIS AT

Itzli is just as proud and abrasive as his human is, not that Acatl expects anything else from a young black jaguar whose coat gleams like midnight fire—but where Teomitl does his very best to maintain his dignity, his daemon can never quite seem to manage the same gravitas. Itzli pouts. He flops over onto his back, showing his spotted belly. He chews on the end of his tail when he’s agitated in the same way Teomitl chews on the inside of his lip plug.

And every time he sees Acatl and Yoltzin, he purrs. Teomitl is almost incandescently embarrassed, but Acatl can’t help but soften at the knowledge that he’s appreciated. Cared for. Liked. Yoltzin licks Itzli’s ears, curls up next to the great black bulk of him, and it feels right.

When he escapes death by the skin of his teeth and Itzli nearly bowls him over in relief, dragging his rough pink tongue across his face and making Teomitl gasp behind him, that feels right too.

-
(Itzli: "obsidian," black jaguar
Yoltzin: "little heart," brindled dog (furred xoloitzcuintle))

Humans and augmented humans tend to assume that constructs have daemons because we straddle the line between true sentience and a bunch of pre-programmed subroutines mindlessly following orders (not that humans are as clearly on one side of that line as they like to think), but it has nothing to do with intelligence levels. It's just that we have a lot of organic parts mostly made from human genetic material, and where you have life composed of human DNA, you eventually get a daemon.

It's even odds whether the fact that our daemons never settle makes humans and augmented humans more or less uncomfortable around us. On the one hand, that kind of flexibility is unnatural for anyone with an adult-sized body, which makes us seem less relatable. On the other hand, humans tend to react negatively to the idea of juvenile humans (or their equivalents of other species) either killing or being killed. This is probably why it's company policy for SecUnits keep our daemons small and hidden within our armor -- unless we're in active combat, in which case there's a short list of approved battle forms.

We do settle sometimes, of course. Even governor modules and memory wipes can't always stop us from developing a sense of self stable enough to coax a daemon into a single form.

This is the second most common reason SecUnits are junked and recycled.

(The first is damage beyond budget projections -- in other words, if we get trashed too thoroughly to repair without eating into an acceptable profit margin. Nobody cares about the source of the damage. The result is the same if you heroically save your clients or if the clients shoot you themselves because they're bored or stressed and decide you make a good emotional receptacle.)

I don't know what the rules are for ComfortUnits. They might get a pass if they settle as something cute and fluffy. Or maybe not. Maybe it's more important to be able to project whatever image their clients want than to have anything we can call our own.

When I hacked my governor module, I was worried about more than just being caught. Nobody tells SecUnits what can trigger a daemon to settle. (The only exception is if our clients include a lot of potentially traumatized juvenile humans, in which case there is one carefully vague education module. I dug it up after hacking my governor module, and it's just as shitty as the company's other products.) I'd never rescued any juvenile humans, so I had no way of knowing whether the hack might cause my daemon to give me away.

I was probably lucky that I had so little idea what to do after my hack worked that I just kept doing my job for another 35,000+ hours. It turns out that freedom isn't a defining moment if you don't have the context to understand it.

(Or the context to feel it, Mobile One wants me to add. Mobile One is a security leak, only partially mitigated by the unreliability of its data analysis.)

It's also against company policy for constructs to name our daemons, but you can't augment a daemon. (There are generations of experiments to back that up. Ask me how I know. Actually, on second thought, don't.) Some settled daemons can use interfaces, but obviously that's not relevant for SecUnits.

This means that hardcoded feed addresses, which are the usual name equivalent for constructs working together, aren't an option. Pronouns get confusing without firm referents, and saying "Long-string-of-code's daemon" both wastes time and risks reminding both us and the supervisors that we have daemons in the first place, which makes us dangerously close to humans and augmented humans. So we give our daemons names that sound like drones or tools and the supervisors mostly don't notice -- or at least pretend not to notice, unless they want an excuse to punish someone.

Mobile One settled after I saved Mensah from the GrayCris assassins on Preservation Station.

To be slightly more accurate, Mobile One settled after I didn't kill the assassins' handler.

I still don't know why that, of all experiences, is what tipped me over the edge into some new existential level of self-knowledge or whatever exactly it is that makes daemons settle. But Mobile One has been a small avian ever since.

I didn't research the species. That would have been too much of something. (Mobile One could probably tell you what exactly I mean by 'something,' but I don't advise asking.)

I couldn't stop myself from wondering, though. Once I got halfway through constructing a feed search query before my performance reliability started dropping and Mobile One grabbed a bit of my hair and yanked it out by the roots.

(Occasionally I think I should undo the code that makes my hair longer than factory standard. Mobile One refuses to let me act on that impulse.)

In the end, Ratthi did the research for me. He and Aasia like that sort of social trivia and pseudo patterns, and I think they noticed I was avoiding the issue.

Apparently Mobile One settled as an old Earth species called a red-backed shrike.

"It took us a while to be sure," Ratthi told me, one hand stroking Aasia's scaled head as she eyed Mobile One with a considering air, "because the plumage pattern is unusual. Mobile One's eye band and general coloration is typical of male birds, but its chest mottling is typical of females."

(I had to excuse myself to experience an emotion at that point. Mobile One ran its beak through my hair and hummed a bit of the Sanctuary Moon season three opening credits music, even though it prefers the clearly inferior version from season five.)

Ratthi sent me a small file of text, images, and video about shrikes, which I skimmed later that cycle. This is why I can tell you that shrikes are territorial and migratory songbirds. They're also predators that are known to impale dead prey on twigs and thorns for storage, and sometimes to give poisons in the prey's body time to chemically degrade. That behavior implies more forethought and a better risk assessment module than I have. Mobile One says that's because it got all the common sense between us.

Mobile One also says that considering how much we love drones, it should have known we'd settle as some kind of avian.

(I don't love drones. I just think they're extremely useful, especially in situations where the local systems are unreliable, nonexistent, or I've been forbidden to access them for stupid reasons. I refuse to have emotions about disposable tools.)

(Yes, I know that's hypocritical.)

(Mobile One has already said everything you're probably thinking. I've chosen to use my freedom to ignore it.)

It's strange to have a settled daemon. On the one hand, it's easier to pass for an augmented human. That can be useful. On the other hand, I don't especially like passing for an augmented human. On the third hand, Mobile One is still small enough to fit inside standard armor or the small carrying case SecUnits are allotted for our daemons when in a uniform. That can also be useful in the Corporation Rim. On the fourth hand--

On the fourth hand, having a settled daemon makes humans and augmented humans act like they know things about me. Personal things. Things I might prefer to remain private.

ART asked me once, not long after the mess with BarishEstranza and the alien remnants and the kidnapping, if I'd choose (Would have chosen? Would go back and re-choose? Tenses are strange) not to settle, if that had been an option. I had to stop and think about the question for nearly a minute.

ART doesn't have a daemon, of course. Like I said, daemons aren't related to intelligence or sentience. It's about human genetic material. Bots have no organic parts, so no bots have daemons. (Some like to build sub-programs to act as something vaguely analogous, but really those are more like pets than another part of yourself.)

So it was a weird question, because if you have a daemon, you know settling isn't something anyone can choose or not choose. Maybe you can affect what you settle as, by pushing hard to emphasize some aspect of your personality and backburner other aspects, but there are no guarantees and that kind of metal restructuring is tricky even for constructs who have access to our internal programming.

(Mobile One wants me to add that it's probably harder for constructs because we don't make use of trained professional mind engineers. Mobile One clearly hasn't spent enough time reviewing the ways various therapy programs are mismatched to the structure of construct consciousness.)

Do I miss the flexibility? Yes, sometimes. Do I miss being the same as all other SecUnits? Sometimes. (You may have noticed I have complicated feelings about being seen, and about being a person.) But do I wish Mobile One hadn't settled? No.

In some ways, our life would have been simpler. Humans like things that fit into tidy categories. SecUnits blur a lot of categories, so staying within even one mental box -- that SecUnit daemons are unsettled -- might have helped. On the other hand, a person that looks superficially like an adult augmented human but whose daemon isn't settled blurs other categories that set off a lot of subconscious pattern-recognition alarms in human minds.

And ultimately, Mobile One likes being a shrike. I still don't know what I think about shrikes, but I like the way Mobile One feels about being settled. I like that this is one solid thing nobody can take away from us, no matter what happens to my code or my organic parts.

I think that's why the company disassembles us if we settle. They can't afford for us to realize we're people.

(The Corporation Rim can't even afford for humans to realize that they're people. If bots and constructs started acting like people, who knows what ideas contract laborers might get.)

ART said that was an interesting set of data points.

I asked if it was planning to write a paper.

It said Three and I weren't a large enough sample size to prove anything.

The normal interpretation of that statement would be that ART isn't planning to write a paper. But I know ART pretty well by now (Mobile One says we're friends. I still don't like using that word.) and I calculate at least an 84% probability that it wants to collect more rogue SecUnits, wait until they settle (or fail to settle, I guess, since this is ART and it always wants to start from first principles), and add them to its dataset.

That these collection efforts will cause problems for the corporations that own the SecUnits in question is completely tangential to the spirit of scientific inquiry, of course.

(If you believe that, I have a mining colony I'd like to sell you, complete with all its indentures.)

I think Mobile One and I wouldn't mind helping out.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Three Sentence Ficathon Part 2

no subject

FF7, Tifa & Cloud

Re: FF7, Tifa & Cloud

Re: FF7, Tifa & Cloud

Flight (Disco Elysium, Kim Kitsuragi)

Warning (Disco Elysium, Kim + Man With Sunglasses, pre-Kim/Detective)

FFX, child!Tidus, background relationship

Re: FFX, child!Tidus, background relationship

Obsidian & Blood, Acatl/Teomitl

Sense of Self (Murderbot Diaries)