Awards & Contests The First RPF Drabble Extravaganza! CONCLUDED - Come Congratulate The Winners!

OOC: Yeah bonus prompts! I can't believe we never did a comp like this before.

---

[blockquote]
"Ooh, shiny!"

"Skip!" bellowed the Training Sergeant. "These aren't toys! They're [i]thermal detonators[/i]...the most powerful-"

"Hey Skip, go long!"

"Wanna see me juggle?"

"What's this button do?"

"DEVIL SQUAD!" screamed the Sergeant. "ATTENTION!"

The troopers slouched in their seats.

"Chill out," yawned one.

"Fine," growled the Sergeant, breathing deeply, "Time for live practice." He reached for his helmet, and tried to slip it on his head. It didn't seem to fit.

"Did you put something insi-"

BOOM!

"Stang," muttered Skip, picking at his teeth with a vibrodagger. "To think he was always telling [i]us[/i] not to lose our heads."
[/blockquote]

 

Olive-green helicopters whup-whupped over verdant jade forest canopies, heading towards the lush green plains in the distance, then after the treeline, the motley collection of lime tents that made up MASK.

Marsupials on the ground moved inside the billowing tents to scrub up, or looked up at the descending aircraft, awaiting the Wallaby War casualties.

The lead chopper landed, and the first of the Mobile Army Surgical Kangaroos braved the billowing dust to hop up to start the triage, elongated jaws chewing busily, as she, by thumping her muscular tail, sorted those likely to survive, from those too far gone.

---

OOC: Aw drat, I missed the cut.

 

I wouldn't be averse to bonus prompts either! This has been a lot of fun!

---

Alex sat up. She looked around.

"Oh."

"I'm sorry, Alex." The woman crouching next to her held out a hand. "Time to go."

"I didn't-" Alex scrambled to her feet and looked back. "There wasn't enough time! I need to say goodbye!"

"They already know." The woman's hand is cool in hers, and her smile is beautiful and sad. "You never needed to say it. Now you have to go."

The light's already coming, and it's so dumb but Alex can't help it.

"Oooh." she breathes, as what happens next... happens. "Shiny."

 

?So you have a baking blog?? he asked.

?Yeah. I talk about the recipes I bake, how I made them, and put up pictures. Mostly the captions are, ?Oooh, shiny,?? she replied.

His heart jumped. He?d always liked Jewel Staite as Kaylee, the cutest mechanic in the history of the galaxy. ?Okay, I?ve got to ask: have you ever seen Firefly??

?No, but my sister and dad liked it. Why? Was it good??

That was when he knew that this date was going nowhere fast.

Sadly, this is a true story and it happened to me last Friday.

 

"Could you try not sling that slim over us Scorch?"

"But Boss its like a badge of Trando-honor! Plus didn't Vau tell us to share?"

"When it comes to this I think I'ld rather pass brother."

"Your just jelous I had to save your shebs Fixer!"

"Shut your traps, the mission isn't over yet."

"Yes Boss."

"Oooh Shinies - coming from two oclock, big ones."

"Scorch, no shiny-badges."

"But their sooo shiny."

 

Yeah sorry Sithy, the Mask prompt ended about ten-odd hours before your entry. Remember to refresh.


100 Words: Ramza, Wing, Trieste

Commentary: An amusing mix of drabbles this time! Lots of doomed people out there thanks to shiny things. Ramz's universe(s) went bye-bye, Wing's poor sergeant... Livi, I'm reminded of Death from The Sandman. She was nice, too. Trieste ... I lol'd. Mitth, ahh Trandoshans, never the sharpest crayons in the box.

Winner: darthramza, for catastrophic destruction resulting from shinyness. Mmm, catastrophic destruction.

---

[b]Scoreboard:[/b]
Livi-Wan: 8
Winged_Jedi: 6
darthramza: 3
DarkLordoftheFins: 2
Trieste: 2
Sith-I-5: 2
s65horsey: 2

[hr]
Annnd... as we are nearing the end of the Drabble Challenge, [b]Double Rounds[/b] will now commence!

Over the next four days, there will be two prompts each day. As with all previous prompts, you may post responses to one prompt, or both, or none; it's up to you. If you answer both prompts, please label them clearly, or I'll just guess and you might not like the results.

And of course please don't write two drabbles for the same prompt! Don't write one gigantic 200-word drabble to answer both prompts, either.

After the four double rounds, we will have Something Special for the final drabble prompt. As for that, you guys will just have to wait and see <s>because I haven't decided yet</s>. ;)

[b]And The Next Prompts Are:[/b]
[blockquote]#26A: Sword
#26B: Arrow[/blockquote]

 

OOC: This feels like it finished earlier than before! Posting though it won't count.

---

Ooh, shiny.

Steady on fellows, you are getting a bit intense there.

?Threepio, what did you say to them??

?Hello, I think. Unless I am very much mistaken, Master Luke, I do believe they think I am some sort of god.?

You are very much mistaken. We just note that you are a bit shiny, is all. What? Ah, no, I stand correctly. Apparently, we do think you are a god. Whoa whoa whoa whoa, you want to build him a chair? Why don?t we just throw in a table, maybe some bookshelves, build him a drokking library?

 

It's probably because I'm posting the new prompts in the morning (my time) rather than at night - I was falling asleep without posting the next prompt, which is embarrassing - so the entire cycle has gone askew by about 12 hours. Do you guys want to go back to the night-my-time prompt timing? I figured it didn't matter as each prompt is still up for 24 hours, but I'm not writing drabbles.

 

I think it's time we got some Anglo-Saxon poetry all up in this contest. This is for both Arrow and Sword.

And please don't tell my Old English tutor that I wrote this or he'll laugh his head off forever.

---

[i]
Hige sceal the heardra, heorte the cenre,
mod sceal the mare the ure maegen lytlath
Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, Spirit the greater as our strength lessens.[/i]
- From [i]The Battle of Maldon
[/i]
Quickly they joined, the battle breaking
Like wild waves on the cold cliff
Sword spat sparks on broad shield's binding
Arrows like rain dealing death in the dawn.
Fierce is the iron bone-biter, life-drinker
A man's calm courage as he faces his death.
Who remembers the conquerors now?
The blood-soaked soil has long been green.
Still, ghosts they remain, ceaselessly clashing
For glory and gold and the love of their lord.


[hr]

I don't mind keeping to this posting schedule- whatever's convenient for you, [b]Xany[/b]!

 

A:

?How is it going, Algy?? Fred asked, swinging around a sword he had just picked up from the smithy.

Algernon stared up at him from a mountainous stack of forms. ??How is it going?? I am filling out hundreds of forms because you destroyed 14 universes!?

?Oh, cheer up. This universe is not so bad. I mean, check out this awesome sword I bought!?

?Which reminds me. You should probably stop swinging that thing around like a moron, or you?re liable to hurt someone.?

?Nonsense. What could possibly-? And that was when he hit the disintegrator ray on his belt.

---

[b]B:[/b]

?Well, well, well, what [i]do[/i] we have here?? the man in green asked.

?Look,? Fred replied, ?I told your men. I am not from around here. I am on my way back to town to give Algernon this stack of forms to fill out. I sort of? disintegrated his old ones. Accidentally.? An arrow whizzed by his head. ?I see you all are also not fans of disintegration. We could probably become fast friends.?

?Robin Hood has no need for your friendship, rich man!? the man in green laughed, pulling an arrow from his quiver. ?Now hand over your money.?

[b]OOC:[/b] I've decided that if Fred is going to keep showing up, I might as well give him something resembling continuity.[face_tongue]

 

A: "What's the deal with the flaming sword guarding the Garden of Eden at the end of Paradise Lost? It just feels like Milton threw that in to try and make up for the fact that this sucked so badly and was so ridiculously hard to read," one of the harried English students furiously studying for the Final complained to his study group.

"No, it makes total sense," a precocious student piped up, "I mean, what's the coolest weapon ever? A lightsaber. Well, this was the closest that Milton could think of way back in the 1600s."

The blasphemy was shocking.

OOC: Also based on a true story.

---

[b]B:[/b] "This is going to bring a ton of business in!" the proprietor said to his wife.

"It's silly, dear. We're in the middle of nowhere. This isn't going to do a thing," she replied.

"Just watch and see!" he said confidently.

With a mighty heavy, he brought the plugs together and the giant red neon arrow, pointing directly at their roadside diner blinked into life.

"People are going to come from all over!" he said.

Not three seconds later, the UFO crashed into their diner, leveling it. Finally, the aliens had found [i]some[/i] direction to free parking on this planet.

 

OOC: If possible, going back to the earlier timescale would work for me, as DRL means that after 1-4am British Time, is my golden time to either post something I created earlier in the day, or create and post right then, and still just make it.

---

[b]A:[/b] They met in the meadows, three hundred bare-chested Spartan warriors on one side, muscles glistening; facing the cloaked Mitch Nifesta.

?This is SPARTA!? Bellowed the Warrior King.

?[b]Yeah, but its hardly a Kodak Moment,[/b]? opined the twi?lek, currently in what academics would call, his ****-taking Phase.

300 fighters drew swords. Mitch dropped his hoe, his body shaking as he concentrated, Force-ripping half an acre of hoed sod from the pasture behind him, bringing it over his head in a green and brown tsunami, and slapped it down.

?[b]He who lives by the sword, dies by the sward.[/b]?


[hr]

[b]B:[/b] Alien
Aliens
Alien 3
Alien: Resurrection
Alien versus Predator
Alien versus Predator: Requiem

And now, the most anticipated film of the year

Alien versus Robin Hood

 

We'll go back to the old timescale, then. So there's another ~10 hours on these prompts... get your drabbles in!

 

OOC: This is now my all-time favorite drabble.

 

Really?

Does it work because you get to imagine your own scenes?

 

Continuity is good, even if only a semblance thereof.


100 Words: Ramza (twice!), Trieste (also twice!)

Winners: darthramza for Sword, and Trieste for Arrow. Although serious honourable mention goes to Livi for the poem! Seriously impressive Old English poetry is impressive, if a little, uh, over my head.

---

[b]Scoreboard:[/b]
Livi-Wan: 8
Winged_Jedi: 6
darthramza: 4
Trieste: 3
DarkLordoftheFins: 2
Sith-I-5: 2
s65horsey: 2

[hr]
[b]And The Next Prompts Are:[/b]
[blockquote]#27A: Justice
#27B: Mercy[/blockquote]

 

The robes weighed heavy upon his shoulders, and sweat formed beneath the greying wig.

His fingers, clutching the gavel, trembled.

Centuries of legal history gathered like stormclouds at his back. The public gallery hung upon his every utterance.

This, this, was what it meant to dispense justice.

"Allow me to sum up," he began. "The cow escaped the vehicle, ran into the street, entered the shop, climbed a stairway to the second floor, turned on a water tap, thereby flooding the premises, and promptly crashed through the ceiling?"

"Yes, your Honour."

The Judge sighed. He hadn't signed up for this.

---

OOC: From [i]Cameron v Hamilton's Auction Marts Ltd[/i]- a genuine case in Scots law.

 

I was with those psychopaths when they reached the compound. I saw the battle, brief as it was, and I was watching as the survivors surrendered, and emerged from their huts unarmed, hands raised.

The Devils grinned. They seemed excited by the idea of flesh-and-blood prisoners. "Never fought Seppies who weren't droid," said one of them.

"Sit!" they ordered, laughing. The prisoners bowed their heads, and sat.

"Kneel!" They kneeled.

"Crawl!" They crawled.

"Beg."

"That's enough," I said to Skip. "Get your squad in line."

He stared back at me.

"Yeah," he murmured, eyes glazed. "You're right. Shoot 'em, boys."

 

A: "Robin Hood, do you know why you have been brought to this courtroom?" the judge asked, a stern glare on his face.

"Well, I think it has something to do with stealing paper from that Fred guy over there." Fred waved at the bench.

"What? No! Theft is hardly important - this is a medieval society, theft is commonplace. No, we speak of a much graver crime ? redistributing the wealth!?

?But that would be? SOCIALISM!? Fred gasped in horror.

?Mr. Fred is precisely right ? it is, indeed, socialism, which is worse than murder and theft combined. The penalty is death.?

---

[b]B:[/b] ?All of that paperwork, you destroy it all, and then you tell me that the replacement paper got stolen by a? how did you phrase it??

?Terrorist,? Fred replied.

?Terrorist.? Algernon stood up from his desk. ?Fred, do you remember the day we met??

?Of course I do! It was a crisp autumn day. The sun was setting on the horizon, and you were watching it. You looked so -?

?Don?t finish that sentence, we?ll get in trouble. Fred, for the sake of humanity, I?m going to kill you now.?

?No! Please, spare me Algy!?

?? Oh, Fine.?

 

So, er ... not a popular prompt? Or perhaps Double Rounds is a bit much?

Anyway we are fast approaching the end of our Drabble Extravaganza! Only three more days to go.

100 Words: Impressively, every single one of the four drabbles submitted this round were exactly 100 words long.

Winners: I thought long and hard about this, because it seemed to sort of defeat the purpose of having Double Rounds in the first place , but I'm going to have to award both wins to Winged_Jedi. Much as I love the adventures of Fred and Algy, Wing's drabbles simply fit the prompt better (though, in the case of Mercy, was chillingly not what I had in mind...)

---

[b]Scoreboard:[/b]
Livi-Wan: 8
Winged_Jedi: 8
darthramza: 4
Trieste: 3
DarkLordoftheFins: 2
Sith-I-5: 2
s65horsey: 2

[hr]
[b]And The Next Prompts Are:[/b]
[blockquote]#28A: Chaos
#28B: Harmony[/blockquote]

 

Combo again! This time from my own very painful experience

---

"Fifty-nine, fifty-six, fifty-seven, [i]yarn over[/i], one, two, three, four-"

"So I said to him, if he wanted it so badly, he'd have to pay for it-"

"-eight, [i]place stitch marker,[/i] nine, ten, eleven, twelve-"

"-wouldn't believe how much these things cost, honestly, and we went to the shop and they said-"

"twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-fooooour, keep going it's looking goooood-"

"Fifty quid! And I said, are you serious?"

"Fifty?! No way!"

"Fifty, fifty-one-"

"How's the lace knitting going, by the way?"

"Wait, let me- SOD IT."

 

A: The swirling vastness of infinity stretched out before Dr. Disaster on every side, and, indeed, in a few sides he could not quite comprehend. The death of his universe had sent the devious doctor spiraling into the infinitely full and yet unending emptiness of the cosmic stream. Universes lived and died around him in shapes of alien geometry so twisted that they would make mens? minds boil. His molecules collapsed into atomic couplings that in turn mutated into breakfast omelettes. He tried to nourish his hunger with them but found them impossible to grab as they morphed into permeable turnips.

---

[b]B:[/b] Having decided that Algernon probably needed a little space, Fred set out for a stroll in the countryside. The sun shown brightly in the sky, waves of endless green grass flanked him on every side, birds were singing, grazing cattle were mooing idyllically, basically nature was being a class act, all the way.

?A fellow could get accustomed to this sort of thing,? Fred sighed, as he laid himself down in the cool shade of a peach tree. A single monarch butterfly slowly fluttered by before perching itself on the brim of his hat. ?Yessir, he could.?

The assassins attacked.

 

They call UEFA football ?The Beautiful Game?.

But you know what was a beautiful game?

The Chaos Engine, on my ORIC-1 home computer. Alas poor Oric, I knew him well.

Storyline involved a mystical land corrupted by the creation of this titular engine, which regularly pumped out monstrous creations for the player to defeat with a pair of chosen adventurers, who basically shot up the screen in eight potential directions.
You shot a monster generator to knock it out, but it was pumping monsters at such a rate that you could barely find time to focus on the damn thing.

 

100 Words: Ramza x2, Sithy

Winners: darthramza for Chaos, which is also a sort-of retroactive win for every drabble he's written to date, because everything Ramz writes is whimsically chaotic in some manner or another. Livi-Wan for Harmony - first the presence and then lack thereof.

---

[b]Scoreboard:[/b]
Livi-Wan: 9
Winged_Jedi: 8
darthramza: 5
Trieste: 3
DarkLordoftheFins: 2
Sith-I-5: 2
s65horsey: 2

[hr]
[b]And The Next Prompts Are:[/b]
[blockquote]#29A: Paragon
#29B: Renegade[/blockquote]

(I COULDN'T RESIST OKAY)

 

HELL YES

---

[b]Paragon[/b]

"Come on, you bosh'tet!"

"Problem?" Shepard walked up behind Tali and peered over her shoulder. The Tupari machine glowed innocently at her.

"This stupid thing is broken again! I was promising myself a snack once I'd finished the main engine and it ate all my credits!"

Sheoard frowned, then turned to the nearest terminal. "EDI?"

The ship's AI flickered into life. "Yes, Commander?"

"Use my command override on the Tupari machine in the Engineering breakroom."

EDI's hologram disappeared and seconds later the dispenser spat out a pile of Happy Turian bars. Shepard grinned as Tali squealed in joy and gathered them up.

"Enjoy them, kiddo. They're on me."

[b]Renegade[/b]

"Come on, you bosh'tet!"

"Problem?" Shepard walked up behind Tali and peered over her shoulder. The Tupari machine glowed innocently at her.

"This stupid thing is broken again! I was promising myself a snack once I'd finished the main engine and it ate all my credits!"

Shepard frowned.

"Stand back."

Her fist hit the machine like a hammer, cracking the display and sending a cascade of candy bars skidding across the breakroom floor.

"Thank you, Shepard!" Tali knelt down and started to gather them up, but she was stopped by the Commander's hand.

"What are you doing? I got them out. They're for me."