Subject: My own Prompt response
Author:
Posted on: 2020-06-26 18:20:43 UTC
So one of the things I'm challenging myself to do this time around is to come up with at least one prompt early in the month and have written a response to it by the time I put the Prompts onto the Board. And so, here is not only my response to Prompt 1) but also an introduction to a new character and Agent I have been working on.
Nova
Editing because I forgot to do the link properly facepalm
So, I've mentioned them on both the Board and on the Discord and got a decent response on both, so I'm bringing them back. Way it works is this, each month on the last Friday of the month I'm going to put up a post on the Board with three prompts. Yeah, that's basically it. If you want to reply to the Prompts, go for it. It doesn't have to be beta'd, you don't need Permission, heck if you want to write about OC's with no relation to the PPC go for it too. And don't worry about a time limit, mostly because there isn't one.
Anyway, the three Prompts for this month are:
1) A Character does something they haven't done in a while
2) "What do you mean I haven't been paid?"
3) "There's a reason why the two of us don't do Karaoke."
Nova
... that your Prompts more than doubled the number of PPC stories posted to the Board in 2018. So it definitely had an effect. :)
"More than" is because I haven't finished filing them yet... so far, 2018 has more stories published than '02, '07, '13, and '17 onwards, and it's rising fast towards '05, '14, and '16.
It's still less than half of what '08 and '11 produced, but, y'know. Baby steps.
hS
That's actually made me speechless. Good to know I'm able to do my part to keep the stories flowing.
Let's see what we can do with 2020 :p
Heck, broadly speaking 2020 has been a pretty bad year. Why not give it something good. :)
Decided to do prompt 1 with a couple of my agent ideas because technically when this happens one of them hasn't cooked in a while. Sorry if it's not that good.
Riley wandered slowly through the corridors, admiring their generic greyness. Following her was her Salamence, who she had recently given the name Avion. It had been a few days since a pair of agents had saved Avion from that binch Tatiana, who thought she could just run off with him and turn him all green and sparkly. Luckily, with the help of a pair of agents, they’d managed to get him back. Now that she had a bit more personality thanks to a culture implant, Riley was excited to start exploring other worlds and save them from more sues. She just needed to find her new partner.
Riley was sure she’d never quite learn how to navigate HQ. The response centres didn’t seem like they were arranged in any sort of order. The fact that she was apparently looking for RC number ei+1made said search even harder. After what seemed like an eternity, she finally made it. She returned Avion to his pokeball, as she had very quickly learned that trying to squeeze a large blue dragon through a doorway that size would not end well.
She knocked on the door, but after a few minutes with no response, she carefully pushed it open. On one side of the room, presumably her partner’s side, there was an incredibly messy bed covered in plushies and cushions. The walls were covered in posters of various characters, presumably from some other shows. Most of the characters seemed rather sinister. Next to the bed was a desk and a chest of drawers that looked like it had been hurriedly stuffed with sheets of paper. The other half of the room was relatively plain and undecorated. Presumably that was where she was going to stay. At the end of the room there was a door to a bathroom and a hole in the wall covered by a curtain.
Riley heard someone pacing up and down in the room behind the curtain. There was also a ticking noise in the background. She headed over to the curtain to introduce herself when the ticking suddenly stopped. There was a ping, then an explosion.
As the smoke cleared, she could make out a figure in the next room holding what looked like a cake. They seemed to have a pair of pointy things on their head. They looked like Skitty ears, but rounder and black. They also seemed to have a tail. The figure seemed to sniff at the cake.
“Yes! This is perfect!” the figure exclaimed, “This cake will be so delicious, so sublime, it will capture the hearts of millions, and finally allow me to take over the world! Fwahahahahaha!”
Riley decided not to interrupt them and stay where she was. Someone had told her that DoGA agents could be a bit unstable at times. She watched as her partner walked across the room. Now that the smoke had cleared a bit more, she could see the room looked like a mix between a kitchen and a science lab. Her partner, who she could now see had longish brown hair and was wearing a labcoat, strode over to a stove.
“Yes! Thanks to my absolute genius, I prepared the chocolate ganache while the cake was in the oven, maximizing my efficiency!” they halted their monologue to laugh again before continuing, “Now, all I need to do is pour it on the cake!”
About half a minute later, the chocolate pouring was complete. Her partner moved the cake to a minifridge that seemed to only be big enough to fit the cake in it.
“Okay, hopefully I can clean this all up before my new partner gets here. At least this time the DIA patrol didn’t bust in here thinking I’m planning to blow up HQ. Wait…”
Her partner seemed to finally notice Riley standing in the other room. She flung the curtain aside dramatically, before eyeing Riley suspiciously.
“You’re not from the DIA, are you? You certainly don’t look like it…”
“No, I don’t even know what that is! I think I’m your new partner?”
“Oh, right! I got so caught up in baking a welcome cake for you I forgot you were coming!”
Her partner’s expression turned from one of suspicion to a friendly smile.
“Agent Melody Smith, pleased to meet you. So, what’s your name?” Melody said, offering her hand for Riley to shake.
“I’m Replied,” Riley replied, shaking Melody’s hand, “Oh, I mean Riley!”
“Well, it’s nice to meet you. Where do you come from?”
“Pokémon. I’m not quite sure where exactly.”
“Oh, cool! Do you have any pokémon?”
Riley responded by sending out Avion.
“Cool! A Salamence! I’ve never seen one up close before!”
Riley and Avion exchanged awkward glances as Melody spent the next minute or so enthusing about how strong it looked and rambled on about taking over the world or something.
“So, where do you come from?” Riley asked.
“Some original story or other. I was in the middle of making a superweapon so I could take over the world, but then it blew up and I ended up here.”
“In your world, does everyone have…” Riley gestured towards Melody’s ears and tail. Melody sighed.
“Yup, I’m a catgirl. No, that wasn’t normal in my home universe,” Melody grumbled, “No one ever takes me seriously! But I’ll show them. I’ll show them what I’m capable of. I’ll make them regret rejecting me! When I’m ruling the world with an iron fist they’ll be the one’s begging for ME to accept them! Fwahahahahaha!”
“Erm, okay…”
“Well then, the cake needs to cool down a bit, so how about I tell you about all my favourite characters from these posters?”
“Yeah, sure-”
“Great! So this one over here is Black Hat from Villainous and his lackeys…”
It's quite short - only two hundred and fifty words - but it feels right at that length.
Tiger stood at the bottom of the old oak tree and sighed. It seemed like forever ago that he’d last climbed it. He’d never expected to be here again, but here he was. And there wasn’t much he could do about it.
He placed his hands against the rough bark of the tree and slowly stretched upwards until he could hook them around the lowest branch. This was the hardest part: getting off the ground. He took a deep breath and pulled himself upwards, scrabbling with his legs and clinging tightly until he was able to swing his leg over the branch.
That done, he was soon standing carefully on the branch and looking around to work out his next move. How had he done it before? It was just a step round and across to the next branch, and then he could claw his way further up… yes, that was it. There.
Only a few minutes later, he’d reached the spot he always used to sit in: the splitting of a large branch into two, high enough above the ground that he couldn’t be seen from below. He made himself comfortable and stared up at the bright pattern of leaves and the deep blue sky above.
A bird was singing higher up; he listened to its happy song and wondered how these little details could be just the same when everything had changed, when he was barely the same boy who’d climbed this tree only a few months ago.
For the first prompt, a bit about Liz and Avery. Not sure how canon it is, but if events conspire to not knock this out of the timeline I'd say it's dubiously canonical.
It isn't PPC-related, but an idea is an idea. It's a response to Prompt 1, specifically about two of the supporting characters in a Pokémon Mystery Dungeon-based fic I've been working on.
Though it's more slice-of-life-y than anything else.
How many prompts should I use? One? Two? Fifty?
But if you want to combine two or more prompts into one bit of writing go ahead.
If you want to do fifty you might have to wait a while given I'm only going to be doing three a month...
... which Prompt 1 has given me a new angle on. We'll see whether it works out; I'm hopeful.
hS
Thanks for the prompt, it's always fun when ideas just appear inside your head. Steven and Wallis have a karaoke night here
here.
Oh, and if you're wondering that is a genuine fic they vacationed to. It ends with Kylo Ren and Rey performing "Grease"
So one of the things I'm challenging myself to do this time around is to come up with at least one prompt early in the month and have written a response to it by the time I put the Prompts onto the Board. And so, here is not only my response to Prompt 1) but also an introduction to a new character and Agent I have been working on.
Nova
Editing because I forgot to do the link properly facepalm
Andronikos is not only openly consorting with xenos, and planning to use their technology (which makes him a dangerous radical even amongst the more liberal elements of the Ordo Xenos), he's also cheerfully agreed to work for an organisation he openly admits to finding in the Warp. The Ordo Hereticus are not going to take that particularly calmly - and given that his new bosses are psykers, I think even Malleus are going to want in on the action.
None of which is a complaint. :)
hS
To be fair when I first came up with the idea for Andronikos he was originally going to be a Puritan from one of the Minor Ordos, but then I realised that that would never work, both within the bounds of the PPC and with the character that I wanted to write, hence the new one being a Radical from the Ordo Xenos.
I feel I should point out that he hasn't cheerfully agreed to anything, at the time of the Prompt in-verse he's viewing his stay within the PPC as an alliance of convenience at best until he can work out what he can do to get back to the Imperium.
My impression is that a lot of them would be reaching for the big red Exterminatus button by now. The fact that he's curious and willing to live and let live while he studies the place makes me like him and want to see him figure it all out.
Been doing a bit with my FicPsych lot recently, so now I'm wondering who he might safely and effectively talk to if he wanted to. Half of them are weirdos, and the other half aren't baseline human. ^_~ Hmm, he could probably deal with Nathonea, though. She was a normal human before she got Borgified. He'd probably find all of that interesting, and she's one of the more experienced nurses.
Parwill's another possibility, being a normal human well-versed in sci-fi continua, but IDK if xir agendered-ness would sit well. At least in the Horus Heresy, it doesn't seem like the Imperium is bothered about sexuality and such, but I don't know if that's changed by the 41st millennium, what with attitudes toward anything that might be a "mutant" being a lot more fanatically rigid.
One apostrophe error:
> it’s form of messaging
should be the possessive "its" rather than the contraction of "it is."
Fun read!
~Neshomeh
...that sounded weird, but seriously, I think you captured very well what goes through a racist person's mind, and how natural it seems to them that their own race be superior to others. While most real-life racists nowadays aren't as open about it now that society's finally realized that all skin colors are equal, the racists of the past certainly were, and your agent's situation is more analogous to the latter than the former. Can't wait to see more of Andronikos!
Without wishing to drag us all down with heavy topics, and realizing you may not be American and thus this may not impact you as much as it does those of us in the States, I must point out that claiming society has realized everyone is equal in the current climate of worldwide protest against systemic police racism is extremely tone-deaf. It absolutely sucks to realize we haven't actually come that far, but we can't be blind to it if we want to fix it. {= )
~Neshomeh
By "society," I meant "a large enough group of society that I could grow up honestly believing that only the villains on the fringes of society thought that all skin colors weren't equal (and I can forget that racism is still a major problem in society, if only for one post)." Basically we've gotten to the point where most of the major politicians (who aren't appealing specifically to Trump's demographic) are at least paying lip service to the idea that all skin colors are equal, because to do otherwise is to blow up your own political career.
Hope that clarifies.
I feel incredibly betrayed by my education right now. We were taught that the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 70s more or less fixed racism at the highest levels, right? And yet, here we are again, like almost nothing has changed.
Because almost nothing has actually changed. The villains aren't gone, they just got better at hiding until recently, and now they don't feel like they have to anymore.
When I think about it, it makes me angry. I totally understand not wanting to be present with that anger all the time—I'm not great at sustaining high-energy states like that myself. But we can't forget, either. That's how the bad guys keep winning.
~Neshomeh
But I get what you mean once I read your post.
Andronikos will change and will grow, but at this point in time he's still fairly fresh from the Warhammer 40k universe where his viewpoint actually falls on the more radical side of the scale weirdly. But thanks for the comments.