....AND GO! The Ficathon Begins!
Mar. 7th, 2012 10:58 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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karathracelives
This is a prompt-driven GENERAL fanfiction battle revolving around Kara "Starbuck" Thrace.
General fanfiction may include allusions to romantic relationships, maybe even employ romance as an element to illustrate a larger theme, but, romance, or the lack of it, should not be the point of focus for the story.
Action-Adventure, Friendship, Humor, Angst, Comfort, all of these are good categories to explore. Kara could lead a mission, make a sacrifice, exact revenge, solve a mystery, confess a secret, come to a decision, teach a student, go on a quest, reflect on a mistake, celebrate a victory, learn a lesson, question an order, save a life, or roll the hard six (just to name a few options). The possibilities are endless.
For previous examples, or just some great reading material, please check out the previous two ficathons:
The First Kara Thrace Gen Ficathon
The Second Kara Thrace Gen Ficathon
The Fic Battle closes March 31 at 11:59 PM EST.
Please title your entries as such: Title, Prompt(s). (i.e. Shining from the Ashes, Dogtags, Regrets) **You don't need to use prompts however. Any Kara Gen Fic is welcomed!**
Fic can be posted in the comments in their entirety up to about 850 words (LJ’s limit is 4300 characters) or can link back to your own journal for longer fics.
Please be sure to “reply to this” for each ficlet when leaving feedback. Do not comment with anything but entries and feedback please.
A masterlist of stories will be posted on or around April 1.
PROMPT LIST IS HERE
Have fun! Enjoy! DO OUR KARA PROUD!
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Sometimes You Gotta Roll the Hard Six, roller derby
Date: 2012-03-12 04:36 am (UTC)Kara “Starbuck” Thrace, jammer for the Delphi Derby Dolls, thundered as she barrelled around the curve of the rink. The blockers at the back of the line, Margaret “Racetrack” Edmondson and Marcia “Showboat” Case, immediately parted ranks, their teammates following suit, and Kara sped through, gaining on the opposing team. In grey shorts and shirt and dark grey helmet with a red stripe, the girl was massive, at least six feet tall with arms so long she had a wingspan of nearly four feet. The Mangala Marauders were new to the league this season and Kara didn’t even know the woman’s name, just her nickname: Scar. Purportedly, she’d gotten it because of all the injuries she’d dealt out to opposing players back in the Caprican West league.
Kara pushed harder to overtake the blocker. Two more points and the Interplanetary Flat Track Derby championship title would be theirs! If she could pass her, she’d have no problem taking out Kendra “Razor” Shaw, the Marauders’ jammer. The girl was tiny, and worse, a thinker. Kara’s quicker reflexes and total lack of reluctance to use brute strength would be no match for the petite brunette.
Her right knee twinged as she lengthened her strides and Kara grimaced. Her old pyramid injury had been flaring up more and more frequently lately. The Derby Dolls were the defending champions, and there was no way in hell, Kara was letting that title go. She lowered her head, star panty pointing toward the polished wooden rink and accelerated, deliberately ignoring the twinge that was threatening to turn into a flare. Maybe she was getting too old for this shit.
“Hey, Cap’n,” she heard a second later and Kara looked up to find the distinctive blue-striped helmet of the Dolls’ pivot, Louanne “Kat” Katraine, gaining on her right side. The rookie was quick, her feline nickname bestowed for her ability to stealthily approach an opponent rather than her last name, as most assumed.
“What the frak are you doing, Kat? Get back in the line!” Kara yelled.
“Cap, put me in. I can totally take her,” she insisted! “That bitch won’t know what hit her!”
Kara groaned and rolled her eyes. Kat was a hothead, always spoiling for a fight. Ambitious too. She’d been nipping at Kara’s heels for months now, even though she’d only started skating last year and spent more time shining the floorboards than she did on her skates until a few months ago. She was a quick learner and she had talent, which is why she’d moved up the ranks to Pivot, but her ego still outsized her skill. Of course, Kat, however, thought she was hot shit and she’d been gunning for the Jammer spot, clamoring for Kara to hand over her panty in nearly all of their recent games. Fat chance of that happening, Kara vowed, grimacing as she put more effort into her stride.
The kid kept up though. “C’mon Starbuck, I can get her. Gimme a frakkin shot!” Kara didn’t answer, and Kat started up again, her eager tone replaced by a sneering one. “Hell, you know I can catch her and that’s why you won’t put me in! You’re just afraid I’ll show you up and everyone here’ll see that Starbuck ain’t the hottest brawler in the league anymore!”
Seething, Kara angled her body just enough to hipcheck Kat hard as she broke away and kicked in the burn. Scar was in her sights and a second later, she was within striking distance. Kara frowned, Kat’s words still echoing in her head. Frakking bullshit. So the kid had outscored her at drills last week, and now she thought she was a godsdamn superstar. Kat didn’t understand it took more than speed to be a star jammer. You needed timing and experience, she thought as she sidled up next to Scar. You needed to know exactly how and when to attack for maximum advantage. Scar shifted into Kara’s path to obstruct her, collision was imminent. And you needed...
A new frakking knee joint. Tendons groaned, as the massive blocker knocked her down, Kara falling too fast to prevent landing on her bad leg.
Click for the full fic (http://taragel.livejournal.com/205820.html)
Offerings, Gaeta, PSD
Date: 2012-03-13 05:51 pm (UTC)He hardly notices at first.
But two days after his delightful experience in the portside airlock, Felix Gaeta has to count his socks twice. Yes, there's 13 instead of the usual 12 neatly rolled balls in his footlocker, the extra wedged between the straight rows. He assumes its a laundry mixup and plucks them out, unrolling them and looking for initials or other identifying marks, but finds none. Felix frowns and debates bringing them back to the quartermaster for approximately 15 seconds, before dropping them and shutting the footlocker with a bang. Socks are in short supply and he's not feeling especially charitable these days anyway.
A few days after that he grabs his shower kit only to find his old dull razor replaced by a sharp new one. Its plastic handle is pink, and Felix wonders for a half second if this might be some kind of primitive hazing ritual, a dig at his sexual preferences. It's never been a secret, but the military has always retained a streak of closed-mindedness about certain things, and Felix hasn't gone out of his way to make his personal appetites public knowledge. After a moment, he looks around, half-expecting childish taunts to ensue, but his few rackmates that are awake seem to be entirely uncurious about his discovery, simply going about their own morning preparations. He pauses for a few more seconds, then grabs the razor, an old half-formed Gemenon saying suddenly drifting through his mind. Something about counting the teeth on a gifthorse, but that's not exactly right, and it occupies his brain all the way to the head, the provenance of the object forgotten entirely.
The unexpected gifts continue—soap, protein bars, other small notions easily overlooked. Dee starts teasing him that he has a secret admirer, and he wonders fleetingly if that Pegasus CO, Hoshi, could be the one behind the presents. He’d traded a few glances with the man in the CIC yesterday as they were changing shifts, and there’s definitely something interesting there. For the first time since before they settled on that frakking hellhole of a planet, Felix feels something besides numb acceptance.
Continued at my LJ (http://taragel.livejournal.com/205854.html#cutid1)
Nightly Tidings
Date: 2012-03-18 11:16 pm (UTC)Ok, just realized that I'm not sure how to properly link, so hoping this is right:
http://mserrada.livejournal.com/35826.html#cutid1 (http://mserrada.livejournal.com/35826.html#cutid1)
Five things that happened in six hours or two months
Date: 2012-03-20 02:48 pm (UTC)1. Kara chose
In her dream, Kara watched her mother's death. In life she had never gone back to her, had been too afraid to see what dying looks like. A soldier faces death all the time but you don't look at it, you don't sit there and face it and hold its hand. If you do you might remember that it is, in fact, coming for you.
It wasn't the last death Kara didn't see. Forty billion people had died back on the planets, and their bodies were already cleared off the streets by the time she walked on them. She never thought about her aunt, or her cousins, or all her childhood friends. It was better not to imagine their bodies strewn across the city.
But in her dream, she didn't run away. "I'm not afraid of death," she said. Not afraid of seeing it, not even close. She knew that she would watch her friends dying, over and over, as the centuries passed. It was an inevitable consequence of her decision not to die.
2. Kara saw Earth
The planet was green, rich and beautiful, with lush valleys and fertile plains. It was probably the best home humanity could find. It also belonged to someone else. She saw them in their bands hunting and she saw them gathering berries and breaking stones into tools.
She wasn't quite human anymore, she knew this because of what she had chosen. It was a completion of the process her mother had begun, burning away her flesh to make her a god. These people had no god, none had come from Kobol for them. She wondered if that was why they had summoned her.
Fire was in her and she gave it to them from herself.
3. Kara saw Earth, again
Her body led her to the place the Thirteenth Tribe had lived, fought and died. She watched her viper fall and crash. One small loss, a small part of what had happened here.
There was death here, but she wasn't afraid of it. She walked through ruins of destroyed buildings and saw bodies strewn among them. This was the place they had come from. This was the place they were coming to, humans, Cylons, all of them. If you destroy your worlds you get a destroyed world. The gods wouldn't want it any other way.
She wasn't afraid of death, so she looked, and she saw it. Soon the Fleet and the Cylons would see it too.
4. Kara chose, again
If Earth was to be found by the Fleet, Kara knew, it would have to be by humans and Cylons together. Earth that was had been a Cylon planet. Earth that would be belonged to another people, and Kara had given them fire, and she wasn't going to lead anyone there before she was convinced that neither the Colonials nor the Cylons were going to do them harm.
Since defeating the Cylons was not going to be possible, that would mean some kind of treaty. That would mean Cylons would have to live.
She wondered if being a soldier made it too easy to forgive. People kill people in war, it's a thing that happens. She thought about Scar the Cylon raider, a soldier like her, dashed against an asteroid. She saw it, like she saw the Earth the Cylons had lived on and lost.
5. Kara returned
Taking on humanity was more difficult in its own way than shedding it. There are things a mortal mind can't remember. Pain blocks out memory. Only some of what she saw could be remembered.
The fears came back as her body formed. She missed Sam. She missed Lee. She wanted Bill to knock her over and call her a cancer, because at least then she wouldn't be alone with herself and her memories. But she knew how to find Earth.
She felt blood and skin and tissues form, so fragile, so ready to die. But it was never her own death that had scared her. She would see many more deaths all around her. She decided she might just be able to handle it.
The Galactica was small in the distance, lonely and desperate. She pulled the flesh of her body around her, then the metal skin of her viper, as she neared it to bring it home.
Re: Five things that happened in six hours or two months
Date: 2012-03-20 03:02 pm (UTC)Re: Five things that happened in six hours or two months
Date: 2012-03-20 05:03 pm (UTC)Re: Five things that happened in six hours or two months
Date: 2012-03-21 04:58 am (UTC)I also really like the way time plays or doesn't play in the snippet form. Very nice.
Re: Five things that happened in six hours or two months
Date: 2012-03-21 12:40 pm (UTC)I've been needing to write this for a while and was struggling for the right structure. I'm glad it worked for you.
Re: Five things that happened in six hours or two months
Date: 2012-03-21 01:30 pm (UTC)Lovely!
Re: Five things that happened in six hours or two months
Date: 2012-03-21 01:52 pm (UTC)