YURI SHIPPING OLYMPICS 2024 - BONUS ROUND 7

[a1c0bb]

For this round, we want to see prompts that are based on settings or locations! For your prompts, please provide a location or setting. It can be as specific or as abstract as you want, and can be in any medium you prefer!

POINTS - BONUS ROUNDS
For prompts: 10 points each (maximum of 150 prompt points per team per round)
For fills:
First 4 fills by any member of your team: 100 points each
Fills 5-10: 50 points each
Fills 11-20: 40 points each
Fills 21-50: 30 points each
Fills 51+: 25 points each

Comments

PROMPT: Tokusatsu Yuri Ships United Front

[baradhiblue]

Another Toku classic: something's up at the abandoned warehouse.

FILL: Team Anime/Manga

[hopelessgemini]

There are five or six SDC warehouses in Vale no longer in use. Winter makes a habit of checking them whenever she’s in the area, both to deter local thieves from trying to break in and look for remaining Dust, and because she’d feel some kind of immense shame if she didn’t. She supposes it’s just a natural consequence of being raised the way she was. the entire world seems to try to fall apart when she doesn’t have both of her hands clasped around it, keeping it together.

Today in particular, she’s passing by one of the oldest — a little ways away from the docks in downtown Vale, built long before Jacques took over the company — when she hears the gunshots.

She likes to do these checks by herself, in secret, so there’s no one to call. Dust knows she’d never hear the end of it if anyone found out she was still looking at her family’s business decisions out of some kind of twisted obligation. She considers it for about half a second before a second round of gunshots go off, and then she runs.

Permission to carry weapons is limited specifically to students, active Huntsmen, and military personnel in Vale. This could mean very little — she’s heard of a string of Dust robberies from Weiss before, after all — but it’s still worth approaching with some kind of decorum intact. Most people know who she is, and after all, the most logical explanation she can come up with is drunk students sneaking into the first quiet place they can find. It happens a lot in Mantle, even with the strict discipline Atlas Academy drills into each cohort.

Still, Winter runs. Maybe it’s that unsettling sense of loyalty; maybe it’s the deep unease that crawled down her throat the moment she stepped foot onto Valean soil. It doesn’t matter, really. What matters is that she remembers the layout of the warehouse from when it was in use well enough to creep in through a side door reserved for smoking breaks and follow the sound of laughter to one of the first floor walkways.

She stops underneath the walkway in question, keeping firmly to the shadows of old crates. There are three people above, two women and a man. One of the women — a girl, really; she can’t be more than a year older than Weiss — is handing Dust cartridges to the man, and the man is packing them into a rifle. The second woman is watching, hanging languidly over the railing like a cat, the picture of idle amusement.

(Winter finds herself tracking the way she raises a hand to prop her chin against her palm, cataloguing the lazy spread of her smile, and has to shake herself out of it. This is serious.)

The man — boy, really — starts firing the gun again. Dust sprays out over the gap between the walkways, and the two kids burst into startled laughter. So it’s exactly what Winter thought it was, students being nuisances, except —

Except for the woman watching the two of them. She looks nothing like a student, nothing like anyone Winter has ever seen before. And before Winter can say anything, can try to get a closer look, she says something quiet to the girl and walks away, vanishing from sight.

Shit. She should have acted sooner.

Well, it doesn’t really matter. She’s tired, and she wants to go home. Getting rid of two idiot kids will be enough to deter all three of them coming back, at the end of the day. Winter waits until the sound of footsteps over metal has faded away before she turns to move, following the shadows up to the door she knows will take her to the first floor.

And she gets two steps in before she walks straight into the woman from the walkway.