BONUS ROUND 1: THROWBACK PROMPTS

[a1c0bb]

In this round, we'll be using prompts from last year's bonus rounds! You can either come up with a prompt based on the previous themes, fill a prompt from previous bonus rounds, or fill a prompt that's been posted this year!

Here is the tag with all the previous bonus rounds!

Fills can be in any format, and you can fill your teammates prompts, but you cannot fill your own prompt.

You can post as many fills and as many prompts as you want!

for your prompt post title, please use the following format:

PROMPT: TEAM [TEAM NAME]

for your fill post title, please use the following format:

FILL: TEAM [TEAM NAME]

If you're filling from a 2023/2024 prompt, please link to their prompt in your post!

To participate, reply to this post!

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Fill: Team OCs

[hamaonoverdrive]

Prompt: (Competition) Deathgames
Ship: OC/OC (Gale/Kei)
Wordcount: ~1k words

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The woman across from you doesn’t take long to make her move. Kei catches the card that the machine flings at her and files it into her hand, making no hesitation as she plucks the card next to it and places it in the discard pile: a nine of spades.

This card won’t advance your hand. You do your best to hide your disappointment.

You flatten your cards into a singular stack and awkwardly shimmy your arm in order to tap on the table, the signal for the dealer-machine to deal you the top card of the deck. The movement would feel natural were it not for the restraints on your upper arms and the intra-venous needle planted securely in the crook of your elbow.

This isn’t an ordinary card game, something that has been impressed upon you after a run of losing hands that cost you well over a liter of blood. You steady your shaking hand as best you can as you pick up your new card from the table.

The king of hearts. This might be useful.

While you’ve stared down death at least a dozen times by now, exsanguination is an unfamiliar specter. Sure, it’s one of the simplest ways to kill a regenerator like you– no blood means no medium to carry regulatory cofactors to the site of an injury, after all– but unlike the world of violence that you have inhabited for so long, it’s just so clean. There will be no point proven through torture, no painful tithe excised from your body, just the quiet embrace of permanent sleep.

Not that you’ll be falling asleep in the immediate future. Your heart throbs in your brain, an adrenaline induced th-thump th-thump that tethers your mind to your meat.

Teetering on the precipice of hypovolemic shock, you feel more alive than you have in weeks.

You shift your focus back to your opponent. She is seated with perfect posture, her cold eyes turbulently darting back and forth as she gleans any information that she can through your behavior. Any bit of information could give her an edge, which was undoubtedly why she chose to deny you this opportunity by making her own move so quickly. With two clear paths you can take, you simmer on your decision about which card to discard.

You have another king in your hand and haven’t seen any others make it to the discard this game, so it seems likely that you could fish a third one from the deck and complete the meld. But this leaves you at risk: you don’t want to leave expensive face cards in your hand if your opponent finishes their hand faster than you. Although you also have the queen of hearts, so going for a straight isn’t out of the picture. But what do you think is in Kei’s hand right now? What are the odds that she holds your winning cards?

You flip through the cards in your clammy hand, fwi fwi fwi fwip, rotating them from low to high, then high to low, and then back again. The king of hearts stares back at you, his face ever-stoic as blood streams from the self-inflicted wound on his head.

Wait.

This train of logic is exactly what the woman sitting across from you would do. This is exactly what the woman sitting across from you wants you to do.

Kei’s hand gripped your jaw, her coarse fingers forcefully tilting your head upwards to meet her gaze. As deep as you looked in those eyes, the only thing you saw in them was your own reflection. Even as her fingers dug in with alarming intensity as she threatened to break your jaw, all you saw in her face was an empathetic mirror of your own despair.

This woman is a cerebrat, a mentally enhanced cyborg who thinks natively with floating-point precision. She may as well be half-machine; You won’t beat her at her own game if you couch your strategy entirely in statistics and efficiency.

Kei’s hand intertwined with yours, fingers sliding down the back of your glove and stroking the back of the cybernetic hand. The strokes became taps, a series of bits that travelled the length of your extended nervous system and unfurled in your brain like a flower: a secret moment shared between the two of you.

You know this woman in more depth than you would care to admit. This is not the first time that the two of you have fought over the scraps of others, and, despite the alleged finality of this game, it is unlikely to be the last.

Kei’s hand at your throat, pressed down on your trachea. You scrambled to fight back, hand fumbling as you reached for your knife and planting it squarely between her fourth and fifth ribs. You could barely discern how much this affected her before you start to lose consciousness.

This is not about the game. This is about your relationship.

In your long-standing contact with this woman, you have fought to the death many times. But now, at this playing table, the game is different. It is no longer cat-and-mouse: the two of you are on even footing, and your willingness to throw yourself into danger is a weapon as much as it is a survival tactic.

You rest your hand face-down on the table and look up to challenge Kei’s gaze. You can’t help but find a moment of comfort and familiarity in that face, tracing the contours of elevated cheekbones and thick eyebrows that you have stared down at least a dozen times by now. A flicker of something catches your attention, a hint of Kei's own emotion leaking through her stoic mask. You blink. The expression takes you a few seconds to parse because you haven't seen it come from her before now: fear.

This is it, huh?

With a steady hand, you tuck the king of hearts into your hand and place a different card in the discard pile.