Three Sentence Ficathon 2022

[rthstewart]

This post is NOW CLOSED TO NEW PROMPTS!  PLEASE POST YOUR NEW PROMPTS HERE, IN POST 2!  Do continue to fill prompts here but please put all new prompts in Post 2.

 

Welcome to the Three Sentence Ficathon!

Here's a Friending meme!

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 at bit after about 2 weeks and especially once we open a new post because this one is approaching 4,500 comments.
• 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.

Here's my attempt at a text box that might go horribly awry.

<br /><a href="https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/172142.html" _fcksavedurl="https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/172142.html"><img src="https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/file/71907.jpg" _fcksavedurl="https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/file/71907.jpg" alt="" title="3 Sentence Ficathon 2022 Banner" /></a>




How long will it go?
The 3SF closes to new prompts on February 13, 2022. The entry stays open permanently and people post fills all year long.  (There were a bunch of new posts to the 2021 3SF this week!)

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 (and much more). 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, protect yourself, 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 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.

 

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



      

Comments

[ravenlilyrose]

Merlin, Merlin & Servants, all of the servants love Merlin

[dariaw]

Go to Merlin if any noble is cruel to you; he has ways of finding opportunities for you to work for someone else.

Go to Merlin if you want to know the best gossip about the knights; he is privy to their talk at all their drunken carousing.

Go to Merlin especially if you think that all hope is lost; it's not clear why, but he has a knack for making problems go away - as long as you don't ask him too many questions about how.

[ruanchunxian]

Narnia, Hilda the hen and her duck children, found family

How Fast They Grow

[edenfalling]

Hilda would never be wholly comfortable on boats, too conscious of the weight of waterlogged feathers, but it was worth a small battle with her nerves to see how happy her children were when she joined them in the middle of the lake, balanced in a coracle she'd purchased secondhand from a local Weasel family and equipped with a tablecloth sail since a paddle was dreadfully awkward to handle with either her feet or her beak.

"Mama, Mama, look, Tawny says she's going to fly, really and truly this time!" her daughter Glimmer shouted, beating her own wings (remnants of baby down still fuzzy around her new-grown flight feathers) against the water in excitement; "Come watch, come watch!"

As Tawny flapped and kicked her way across the lake, straining until an inch-thin gap opened between her belly and the water, then widened and widened until she was truly airborne, Hilda clucked to herself in satisfaction for a job well done.

[ravenlilyrose]

Merlin, Merlin & Knights, the knights all love Merlin (and have a healthy fear respect for him)

[schoolsasaint]

Honor Harrington, Michelle Henke & Calvin Henke, we'll meet again

A Night Full of Stars

[livewareissue]

Michelle looks out of the window, watching the Warshawski sails of her ship flicker like frozen lightning against the gorgeous chaos of hyper space.

"You would have loved to see this, Cal," she raises her glass in a silent toast to her absent brother, "always the dreamer, always working for a better world, you'd have loved to see us break the power of the Solarian League and harness it."

"I'll do it for you," she presses her forehead against the cold viewport, talking to ghosts, "and you can tell me what you think when we meet again."

[last_haven]

Final Fantasy IX, Vivi, just how did he become a father anyway?

[(Anonymous)]

The mist still lingers in caves and deep valleys, though its source is gone; it still gives rise to wild monsters, and it can still be gathered, as the books in Dali instruct, clarified and compressed into something new.

The place still scares him, with its tangled pipes and conveyers that don’t let him forget it was meant as a factory for weapons. He isn’t sure it’s right, making use of this knowledge and these machines – until the first Mist-born infant blinks bright eyes and grips his finger in a tiny, gloved hand, and he knows he’s brought something good into the world.

[schoolsasaint]

Honor Harrington, Michelle Henke, the night was dark with falling stars

No Stars in the Sky

[livewareissue]

Michelle gripped the sword, letting the sheath bite into her hand.

"Honor, Honor..." her head bowed and she brought her hands up, pressing the hilt to her lips. "Honor your name and Honor your life - it's all I can do now."

[last_haven]

Hadestown, Orpheus/Eurydice, this time, they get it right/fixfic happy ending

[little_lady_d]

The trouble was he couldn’t look back, no matter how many times they climbed together, step by silent step to the surface; the trouble was, by the time they made that climb, it was too late to stop her wanting to fall in the first place, and he never understood why.

“I’ve been telling you what’s wrong,” she shouted, “and you keep saying it’s all sunshine and roses — you’ve got one hell of a voice, Orpheus, but you never listen —“

This time, he put down his harp, and he said, “Eurydice, I’m listening.”

[ravenlilyrose]

Harry Potter/Queen, any Hogwarts students, Freddie Mercury dies the first year Harry is at Hogwarts - how do the students react when they find out

Harry Potter/Queen, any Hogwarts students, Freddie Mercury dies the first year Harry is at Hogwarts

[notoriousreign]

Everyone in the room could hear Hannah Abbott’s shout from all across the vast Hall and once the reason for it reached everyone at the Gryffindor table, it was the first time Ron and now Harry had seen Fred and George go dead silent.

“Who cares about some bloody Muggle singer dying?” Draco’s voice carried over too and he was no fool who was afraid of his classmates but when everyone was shooting you a hideous glare you knew when to shut up.

“I’d like to think they named me after him,” Fred sniffed, as if his parents even knew who Freddie Mercury was, but he was so upset that nobody corrected him—
that man was such a good singer that even Hogwarts students would remember him.

[raisedbymoogles]

Breath of the Wild, Link & at least one Yiga, The Great Hyrule Bake-Off

No Accounting For Taste [Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild; Yiga Clan, Link]

[reverse_changeling]

"I saw the Chamption eat a frog. Just, straight up a live frog."

"I saw them eat a raw cucco leg."

"Wha - how didn't they get sick?"

"Oh they got sick, all right. Went right back to eating it the next day."

"All the sleeping must've messed with their head."

"That's nothing." said the third member in their cell, "I saw the Champion eat a rock."

"No! What are they, a Goron??"

"I refuse to believe it."

"Believe me or not, they put a whole rock on a plate. With a little garnish and everything."

The three Yiga Clan soldiers shook their heads as they watched the Champion decorate a cake, sweet scent drifting through their hiding place.

[syrena_of_the_lake]

Any Shakespeare play, Puck, "it could be worse" "...it's worse"

[silveradept]

"The hardest part about being a spirit of mischief," Puck says, "is that humans have a tendency to make so much of it themselves that I cannot do much but speed it along."

"At least you have not been chained to a single person while he sulks and moans about all he has lost," Ariel snaps, "but at least it's been quiet around here."

"Is that before or after the murder attempt that's about to go down?" Puck says, sheepishly, before Ariel curses and disappears.

[syrena_of_the_lake]

Enchanted Forest Chronicles, any character, the reappearance of the Frying Pan of Doom

[syrena_of_the_lake]

Galavant, any, derring-don't

1. 2. 1, 2, 3, 4

[word_devourer]

"You can't say something like derring don't and expect me to believe it's not about to turn into another song."

He grimaces as the ambient music begins to pick up, and then shrugs in a 'yeah, well, it's not like you're wrong' kind of way.

"Are you at least going to join in on this one?"

[raisedbymoogles]

FF7R, Jessie, "we are living in a Materia world, and I am a Materia girl"

[anonne]

Other actors were said to blow their wage on a payday night out, but Jessie knew she had made the right decision. She could feel the red ball glow with energy, fizzing against her palm. Now to find a place for it, perhaps some combat clothing to slot it into; it would come in handy someday.

[vialethe]

Narnia, any, The Narnicles of Charnia AU

Charnia, always summer and never festival time

[cofax7]

Tumnus hustled Lucy along a dusty alleyway, through a courtyard, and down a flight of stairs, moving as if they were being watched, although Lucy saw few figures on the streets of this humid ramshackle city, and those only robed figures at a distance, who kept their heads down as they passed in silence.

At length they entered a dim room and Tumnus closed and latched the door behind him, being careful to close the shutters before striking a light to an odd old-fashioned looking oil lamp on a rickety table.

"First," he said in a whisper, "Tell me--did any cats see you?"

[schoolsasaint]

Person of Interest, Bear, haircut and a steak, two pets

Person of Interest; Sameen Shaw, Bear, The Machine

[presumenothing]

"Seriously?" Shaw asked the general air, incredulous, but gave Bear a generous helping of pats anyway after removing the pair of scissors carried carefully in his mouth.

Whoever who thought AIs were gonna lack a sense of sarcasm (or the ability to communicate with dogs) had clearly been out of touch with reality, an oversight Shaw would be all too happy to rectify with percussive maintenance.

(At least the Machine pinged her phone next with a notification of food delivery scheduled just past noon, which was damned right; if she was going to the trouble of actually trimming her hair there had better be steak for her – and Bear – later.)

[schoolsasaint]

Arrow, Nyssa/Sara, seaside sun

[dariaw]

Nyssa traced her thumb across Sara's cheek, wiping the water off her freckles as they stood, dripping from their swim.

"You'll get burned in this heat, my love," Nyssa said, as Sara's skin was already turning pink.

"Best part about heat," Sara said with a smirk, and kissed Nyssa, pulling her down onto the sand.

[raisedbymoogles]

Sekiro, Wolf & Kuro, flying kites together

[syrena_of_the_lake]

Any, any, self-insert only you are a horrible goose

FFVII

[(Anonymous)]

"Hcccccccccch."

Palmer paused, watery gaze wobbling down the long carpeted corridor, left to right between the ornamental pillars. "...eh heh heh. Just the wind," he told himself uncertainly, and took a steadying sip of his buttered tea. The cup clattered lightly against the saucer as he set it down.

"Hccccccccccccccch!"

He froze. There, where only an empty corridor had been before, was a ghostly shape in the dim hallway lighting. Broad wings spread; a narrow head lowered slowly, sharp beak opening wide and black eyes gleaming; Palmer faltered, and took a half-step back.

The goose charged.

"HOOOOONK!"

[raisedbymoogles]

Sekiro, Wolf & Divine Child, spotting dolphins

[schoolsasaint]

Control, Jesse Faden & Ahti, I see molds of green, and molds of blue

[schoolsasaint]

Assassin's Creed, Claudia Auditore, taking care of business

[astrogirl]

Disco Elysium, any, one single memory

[last_haven]

Labyrinth, Sarah and/or Toby, came back strange after their trip to the Labyrinth

Labyrinth, content warning for fae imprisonment mention

[senmut]

Toby has been saved, and Toby is a normal child with normal wishes, making his parents very happy, yet… Sarah is not.

Her father notices it more than his wife, but then he has known Sarah, and Sarah's mother, for far longer.

When Sarah passes the hall mirror, her father could swear the reflection makes a face at him, just as her mother's had, and he wonders if he can bind his daughter in iron and truly hold her.

[astrogirl]

Good Omens, any, you can learn a lot from books

[kingstoken]

"How did you know that was going to work? The whole salt circle around a vengeful spirit thing?" asked Crowley

"Yes, well, you can learn a lot from books."

"This bit from some antiquated tome?"

"Um, much more modern actually" said Aziraphile, as he pulled a book out from under all the papers stacked on his desk, showing Crowley the cover, which had the title Supernatural in bold and featured two hunky men.

"Might have to make an exception and actually read that one."

"I might let you borrow it, but first, I have to escort this poor lost soul to heaven."

[harmony_lover]

A Discovery of Witches, Jack & Father Hubbard, I promised to keep you safe