9ofspades:

quiteahufflepuff:

writing-prompt-s:

The librarian recommends you a book – you start to read it, and realize it’s about you

This as a love story tho.

I just woke up but I’ll turn my attention to this later today hopefully

That is an amazing idea, so I took you up on it.  

You get run over by a bus on 66th street today.

You stop in your tracks, one foot already on the pavement.  Cautiously, you back up onto the sidewalk, and take a ridiculously roundabout route around the street of your death.  When no bus hits you, you breathe a sigh of relief.  Crisis averted.  

New words appear on the page:  Despite surviving to live another day, you failed to notice the love of your life walking past you, the love who will never see you again.

You whirl around.  The most beautiful man you’ve ever seen is looking back at you, a puzzled frown on his face.  

“Sorry,” he says.  “I just thought… you seemed familiar, for a moment.  Like we’d met in another lifetime, and a lifetime wasn’t enough.”  

You glance back down at the pages.  You have a failsafe now, and you can check the results of your options before making decisions.  It’s pretty great – you’ll never have to be indecisive again.  

After your near-death experience, you run into the man who may someday become your husband.   You feel an immediate, overwhelming attraction to him and ask him out before he disappears from your life.  

“Yeah, I felt something like that, too,” you tell him.  Well, if getting dating advice from a book that somehow knows your future counts as ‘like that’.  It’s a bit of a stretch, but you’re not technically lying.  “Hey, if we’re long-lost buddies or something from a century ago, you, uh, wanna catch up?  If you’re not busy, we could grab coffee…”

The corners of his eyes crinkle when he smiles.  He has a dimple on the right side.  

“I’d love to,” he says, and you don’t need the book to tell you what to do next.  

9ofspades:

9ofspades:

writing-prompt-s:

A depressed guy moves into a haunted house with 7 demons, each corresponding to a deadly sin. But, they’re all trying to help him get back on his feet; Pride helps with self confidence, Lust helps him get laid, etc.

“Sloth called me in to deal with this,” Pride said quietly.  “What’s wrong, Laurel?”  

Laurel cracked open one eye, and quickly closed it.  “Nothing,” she said unconvincingly.  She felt Pride shift from his perch on her bed.  “Don’t wanna get up,” she added, mumbling.  

“Sloth said to tell you that you don’t have to,” Pride said, again in that gentle voice, as if he were trying to coax a skittish foal.  Laurel supposed that wasn’t too inaccurate.  “She’s not wrong.  You can stay in bed if you want to.  But I don’t believe you want to.”  

Laurel opened an eye again.  “Huh?”  

Pride smiled, the confident smirk of one who had faith, unwavering and unshakable, in the certainty that he was better than everyone else.  “Come on, Laurel,” he said.  “You’re better than this.”  

Laurel closed her eye and threw the blankets over her head.  “No ‘m not,” she said, voice muffled by three layers of bedding.  

She could hear Pride chuckling softly.  “Alright,” he said.  “Maybe not.  But you deserve better, don’t you?”  

Laurel hesitated.  She’d never heard this angle before.  

“Don’t get me wrong – bed is great,” he said.  “But that’s more Sloth’s area.  You’re a human.  You have to eat eventually.  Aren’t you hungry?”  

As if on cue, Gluttony’s heavy footsteps sounded outside her door.  “Hungry,” she said, through a mouthful of something.  “Starving.”  

“Gluttony!”  Pride’s voice turned charming and oily, like a prize show host.  “What’d you bring me?”  

“Baked a carrot cake,” Gluttony growled in her low baritone.  “Downstairs.”  

Slowly, Laurel peeked out from her makeshift burrow.  Gluttony stood just inside the door of her bedroom, in a pink frilly apron, one large, oven mitt-clad paw holding a plate on which stood, trembling, the world’s thinnest slice of carrot cake.  She inhaled slowly.  The scent of cinnamon and sugar wafted through the air.  

Her stomach made a noise like fifteen bears.  With their legs caught in bear traps.  

“Thought so,” Pride said smugly.  Gluttony walked over and handed him the plate, along with a tiny fork; he carefully balanced it on his lap, bracing it with one hand.  “What do you say we head downstairs?  Don’t bother changing – Sloth will be happy to see you wandering around in your pajamas.  Vainglory’s coming over today – he can bring you some nice clothes, if you feel up to it later.”

Laurel stretched a hand out for the cake; Pride quickly held it out of reach.  

“Ah,”‘ he said.  “Get out of bed first.  Come on, now.”  

Note:  All other demons are humanoid.  Gluttony is gargoyle-shaped.  Sloth is a cat.  

9ofspades:

writing-prompt-s:

Write a love-hate story between the monster under the bed and the monster in the closet.

The Thing in the closet rattled the doorknob obnoxiously.  Ever so slowly, the door creaked open to reveal glowing red eyes, too close to the ceiling to belong to a human.  

From her position under the bed, June sighed.  May was far too dramatic.  It was unprofessional.  

May grunted.  A series of snuffling noises emitted from her snout as she pulled the door open wider to look around the room.  Her eyes illuminated the spiraling horns atop her head.  

There was no originality to her form, June thought.  There wasn’t a single component that hadn’t been outdated when the Hydra died.  June’s form, by contrast, was a work of pride.  She stretched languidly under the bed, flattening herself out some more.  

An abomination of oily black, June appeared to be a sinuous shadow composed of hooks, barbs, and blades of blacker-than-black.  It had been hard work mixing those pigments.  

“Where’s the babe,” May growled, and it took June a moment to realize that the monster was addressing her.  

She undulated, stretching tendrils of herself out lazily, probing the air.  No scent of any human.  

“Not sure,” she said.  “Maybe it’s on vacation with its parents.”  

May sneered, revealing two rows of razor-sharp fangs.  She lumbered out of the closet and seated herself on the bed, which dipped alarmingly, squashing June in the process.  

“You’re never sure,” said May.  “What good are you, if you won’t take this seriously?”  

June’s shadows complained a bit as she stretched herself even thinner, winding her way out from under the bed.  

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said airily, “I provide the brains and the scary factor.  What’s your use?  You’re too brawny for finesse, too cliched to be scary, too dumb to make plans, and, overall, too much of a knucklehead to be good company.  It would be an improvement the world over if you’d been assigned to an empty room.”  

May roared and leaped at June, who readied her blades to defend herself.  

The door opened.  

Instantly, the monsters returned to their posts.  

The tiny human failed to notice, gesturing animatedly to an even tinier friend.  

“That’s the baseball I was telling you about!” it said.  “It was signed by Babe Ruth!”  

The smaller human was significantly less interested, rubbing at its eyes with tiny hands and yawning.  

“That’s cool,” it said.  “Where ‘mI gonna sleep?”  

“You can share the bed with me,” said June’s human.  “There’s plenty of room.”  It sprawled its short limbs on the bed, taking up slightly over half the surface and demonstrating its point successfully.  

“Alright,” said the other human.  “Let me brush my teeth first.”  It grabbed a small stringed bag from the floor and headed to the washroom.  

May’s eyes made contact with June’s visual orifices.  June undulated her shadows in assent.  

Two children for the price of one.  They couldn’t afford to let their rivalries screw this up.  

2.   The Lioness

9ofspades:

“Your reign ends here,” she told
him.  “From tomorrow on, I will be queen.”  

“How can you ever be a real
queen without a mane?” the tyrant said scornfully from atop his throne, shaking
his own mane.  

It was a glorious mane – red,
auburn, like autumn, like fires.  Blinding.  

Which was why he didn’t see the
Chimpanzee swinging from a nearby tree.
She smashed into his head like a wrecking ball, knocking him off his pedestal.  

The Wolf mercenaries she’d hired
pounced, and the rest was history.  

@dropthedrawing

writing-prompt-s:

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse face off against embodiments of the Seven Deadly Sins

Pride was the obvious choice to go to war.  

The obvious choice, but not the right choice.  Ultimately, that was Sloth, who whined and grovelled and sued for peace until War gave up in disgust, and searched for more fertile ground for conflict.  You couldn’t wage war when one side was too lazy to fight.  

They needed to work together, though.  War was the only case where one of them could have taken a Horseman, and that was because War grew stronger as you did.  Besides, Wrath, Lust, Greed, and Envy were all terribly weak against War.

Famine soon hit, and Pride had his hands full taking care of the survivors.  In times of desperate need, humans conversely became desperate to pretend they were better off than they were, giving as generously as they could to prove they had more; refusing charity unless their children were desperate; glancing longingly at dumpsters and garbage cans before resolutely walking away.  Sloth helped, a little – you didn’t burn many calories when you were lounging around being lazy.  And Lust reminded them that there were other things to hunger for.  

That made Pestilence’s job harder.  Her original plan had been to spread the plague through the half-rotten food in piles of garbage.  She improvised, though, targeting the lovers and the lazy, until humanity was awash in disease.  

That took Lust and Sloth out of the equation, and so Wrath and Gluttony stepped in.  Wrath forcibly quarantined the infected, yelling at the populace to get vaccinated, to take all necessary precautions, to wear their bloody gas masks already, keeping everyone in line with ferocious energy, harnessing everyone else’s righteous outrage to keep would-be offenders in line.  Gluttony reminded the sick to keep eating, to ensure their IV drips were functional, while Wrath encouraged them to keep fighting.  Gluttony worked on the healthy, too, pushing them to eat nutritiously, to get their daily quotas of vitamins, to stay strong and healthy so that they could easily fight off the weaker diseases, if those came for them.  

Death was still around, though.  Had always been around, would always be around, lurking just around the corner from today.  No one could have beaten Death alone.  

So the Seven joined forces, Wrath shouting her fury at what Death took from everyone, Envy pointing out how unfair it was that some people got to live longer, Gluttony and Greed and Lust extolling the beauty of life and how much more there was to live for.  Pride and Sloth did what they could, which wasn’t much, and otherwise stayed out of the fight.  

It wasn’t today.  It wouldn’t even be tomorrow.  But maybe one day, for all their sins, all their weaknesses, their combined forces would drive away the Four Horsemen once and for all.  

writing-prompt-s:

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse face off against embodiments of the Seven Deadly Sins

Pride
was the obvious choice to go to War.  

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, he’d say, and not one who heard would
doubt him.  He filled their hearts with
something better than happiness, better than peace, and…

And
their opponent didn’t care.  Nothing
Pride’s forces could do would touch it for long.  It took many forms – a shadowy, flickering
army; a land pocked with trenches and mines; a colossal humanoid figure made
from a hundred cannons.  No matter the
form, it shrugged off losses with ease; if they won, it retreated for a day and
came back stronger; if they lost, it laughed and grew stronger still.  

“We
may need to rethink our strategy,” Pride said quietly to his six allies.  It was as close as he could get to admitting defeat.  

“Of
course,” said Envy smugly.  He ran green
fingers through his hair.  “You couldn’t
possibly have done it.  An army like that
needs someone like me to lead
it.  Why should you be the only one
allowed to command an army?”  

That
stung, even if it was idiotic.  Typical
Envy.  

“Don’t
be stupid,” Pride sneered, falling
back into old habits – they brought out the worst in each other, he and Envy – “you’re
the last person who should be up
against War.  You’d play right into its
hands.”  

“Have
you guys considered opening up peace talks?” Sloth interrupted before Envy
could swell up further.  Envy deflated
like a punctured bullfrog while Sloth continued, “It sounds like the reasonable
thing to do.”  

“The
convenient thing, you mean,” Envy
said scornfully, looking down at her.  Sloth
was in human form for today, but that didn’t mean she’d stopped stretching out
on the floor the way she did as a cat.
The hard-backed chairs here were uncomfortable for her – sitting upright
required too much effort.  

“No,”
Pride snapped automatically.  “No peace
talks.  Why would we ever do that?”  It wasn’t like he couldn’t win this.  He could
do anything he put his mind to, and it was simply infuriating how the other six
kept ignoring this obvious fact.  

“We’re
not gonna let this fucker bend us over and fuck us,” Wrath snarled, still
pacing back and forth beside the long table.
“We’re gonna keep fighting until we pound it into mincemeat.”  She pounded a fist into her hand for emphasis,
flames crackling in her long red hair.  

“I
agree with you, Pride,” Greed said in the soft, oiled tones of someone
accustomed to doing business.  He was in
male form for today.  “Wrath and Envy
should be kept far from the battlefield.
The enemy would be strong against them.”

From
the floor, Sloth mumbled something in agreement and closed her eyes.  

“Are
you offering to assist me, then?” said Pride, trying to keep his tone neutral,
to keep hope from rising in his voice.
But Greed shook his head.  

“Too
many wars have been fought for greed,” he said sadly.  “But perhaps Lust or Sloth—”

“Remember
Helen?” Lust murmured.  They were
androgynous today, and no less attractive for it – full lips gleamed soft and
invitingly no matter the lighting, while their eyes twinkled like the downfall
of aspiring angels.  

“So
that’s out,” Sloth sighed.  She flopped
an arm over her face.  “And don’t look at
me, either – I don’t have the energy to fight a war; I don’t even have the
energy to stay awake in these meetings.
I’d just surrender as soon as it seemed like the enemy wouldn’t have us
tortured to death the moment I did—”

“Wait,”
Pride said, realization dawning like the most beautiful sunrise he’d ever seen –
“that’s it!”  

…

Normal: “I watched this cool show/consumed this cool piece of media and now I’m reading fanfic so I can enjoy the characters/setting/plot some more.”
Advanced: “I read this fanfic that seemed to soak all the beauty out of life and concentrate it into a single piece of art, and now I’m watching the show/consuming the piece of media it’s fanfic of so I can enjoy the characters/setting/plot some more.”