Obscure & British Commentfest 2018
7 May 2018 10:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thisbluespiritWelcome to the Obscure & British comment fest V! Last year didn't happen for various reasons, but it is now back. And it would be wearing a hat if it could. \o/
This is a comment fest for any tiny/small(ish)/medium(ish) British fandom and open to all fanworks.
If you've ever loved any British fandoms, find yourself too obscure for most fests, or you're busy wondering why there's still no Emma Peel in all this Avengers stuff, you're in the right place. Come on in and help yourself to a cup of tea and a crumpet. Also you should make prompts and fill them.
Rules & Guidelines
This commentfest works in the same way as most comment ficathons, although all kinds of fanworks are welcome. (Fanart, icons, fanmixes, vids, or whatever your creative mind can come up with or prompt for.) Just leave your prompt and/or browse through other people's prompts to see what you can fill.
1. Be polite - no bashing or shaming of anyone, or any prompts, characters, ships or fandoms! Thank you.
2. One prompt per post, please use format: Fandom(/Fandom), Character(s)/Pairing(s), prompt (i.e "Spooks, Tom/Ruth, apocalypse AU"). You may repost prompts from previous years (or even from elsewhere, as long as that's okay with the other fest/comm/whatever).
3. Post fills as replies (or links in replies) to the comment containing the prompt. Please format the subject line as follows: Fandom - Character(s)/Pairing(s) - Ratings/Warnings (if included). There's a fills thread at the start of the post. Please also link your fill here, if you can. (I will also start up a masterlist post as soon as we have some fills.)
4. You may fill your own prompts if you wish, and multiple fills are more than welcome. (No prompt claiming, please.)
5. For crossovers any fandom is allowed as long as the first fandom qualifies. (If it's a cracky multi-fandom crossover prompt, that's fine, too, though try and make sure there are always equal or more eligible fandoms in proportion to those that are non-eligible.)
6. Any other questions - there's a questions thread at the start of the post if there's anything else you want to ask.
7. Prompt, fill, away!
Eligible Fandoms
Basically, any rare to small/medium British fandom, no matter how odd, old, obscure, non-existent, random or how shiny and new or in what medium - anything that's not on the below list is fine. (Definitions of British are also fairly wide and hand-wavy - check on the questions thread if you're not sure.)
Non-eligible fandoms
ALL non-British fandoms are ineligible and the following fandoms are British but too large and therefore ineligible for this fest (although don't forget that you can prompt for any fandom as a crossover with an eligible fandom):
Chronicles of Narnia (all), Doctor Who (2005+), Downton Abbey, Harry Potter, The Hobbit (all), James Bond (Craig!Bond films), The Kingsman films, Lord of the Rings (all), Merlin, The Musketeers (BBC), One Direction, Primeval, Sherlock (BBC), The Silmarillion, Torchwood.
(RPF is welcome. Please use specific categories when prompting (e.g. history by century, and all actor/bandom RPF by individual series/film/band or whatever grouping seems most appropriate. In the spirit of the fest, please try and avoid RPF for non-eligible shows/v. popular actors like Tom Hiddleston & Benedict Cumberbatch, but as they turn up in less popular film/TV RPF, that's a guideline, not a rule.)
There's no closing date for prompts or fills - the fest will stay open until next year's post goes up. Once you've created a fill, you're welcome to crosspost it anywhere you like. (If you're posting to AO3, there's no collection for the fest, but there is an "Obscure & British Commentfest" tag you can use if you want.)
If you want to promote the fest, then thank you! Please do. You can find a selection of banners ready made with code here and rebloggable tumblr posts here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
You can find the previous fest (2016) here. Also: O&B 2015, O&B 2014 and O&B 2013. If you want to fill or repost a previous prompt, you may, although please also post to the fills thread on the current post.
ETA: The fills post is here
For those who don't have an Dreamwidth account or prefer to remain anonymous, anon commenting is on.
This is a comment fest for any tiny/small(ish)/medium(ish) British fandom and open to all fanworks.
If you've ever loved any British fandoms, find yourself too obscure for most fests, or you're busy wondering why there's still no Emma Peel in all this Avengers stuff, you're in the right place. Come on in and help yourself to a cup of tea and a crumpet. Also you should make prompts and fill them.
Rules & Guidelines
This commentfest works in the same way as most comment ficathons, although all kinds of fanworks are welcome. (Fanart, icons, fanmixes, vids, or whatever your creative mind can come up with or prompt for.) Just leave your prompt and/or browse through other people's prompts to see what you can fill.
1. Be polite - no bashing or shaming of anyone, or any prompts, characters, ships or fandoms! Thank you.
2. One prompt per post, please use format: Fandom(/Fandom), Character(s)/Pairing(s), prompt (i.e "Spooks, Tom/Ruth, apocalypse AU"). You may repost prompts from previous years (or even from elsewhere, as long as that's okay with the other fest/comm/whatever).
3. Post fills as replies (or links in replies) to the comment containing the prompt. Please format the subject line as follows: Fandom - Character(s)/Pairing(s) - Ratings/Warnings (if included). There's a fills thread at the start of the post. Please also link your fill here, if you can. (I will also start up a masterlist post as soon as we have some fills.)
4. You may fill your own prompts if you wish, and multiple fills are more than welcome. (No prompt claiming, please.)
5. For crossovers any fandom is allowed as long as the first fandom qualifies. (If it's a cracky multi-fandom crossover prompt, that's fine, too, though try and make sure there are always equal or more eligible fandoms in proportion to those that are non-eligible.)
6. Any other questions - there's a questions thread at the start of the post if there's anything else you want to ask.
7. Prompt, fill, away!
Eligible Fandoms
Basically, any rare to small/medium British fandom, no matter how odd, old, obscure, non-existent, random or how shiny and new or in what medium - anything that's not on the below list is fine. (Definitions of British are also fairly wide and hand-wavy - check on the questions thread if you're not sure.)
Non-eligible fandoms
ALL non-British fandoms are ineligible and the following fandoms are British but too large and therefore ineligible for this fest (although don't forget that you can prompt for any fandom as a crossover with an eligible fandom):
Chronicles of Narnia (all), Doctor Who (2005+), Downton Abbey, Harry Potter, The Hobbit (all), James Bond (Craig!Bond films), The Kingsman films, Lord of the Rings (all), Merlin, The Musketeers (BBC), One Direction, Primeval, Sherlock (BBC), The Silmarillion, Torchwood.
(RPF is welcome. Please use specific categories when prompting (e.g. history by century, and all actor/bandom RPF by individual series/film/band or whatever grouping seems most appropriate. In the spirit of the fest, please try and avoid RPF for non-eligible shows/v. popular actors like Tom Hiddleston & Benedict Cumberbatch, but as they turn up in less popular film/TV RPF, that's a guideline, not a rule.)
There's no closing date for prompts or fills - the fest will stay open until next year's post goes up. Once you've created a fill, you're welcome to crosspost it anywhere you like. (If you're posting to AO3, there's no collection for the fest, but there is an "Obscure & British Commentfest" tag you can use if you want.)
If you want to promote the fest, then thank you! Please do. You can find a selection of banners ready made with code here and rebloggable tumblr posts here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
You can find the previous fest (2016) here. Also: O&B 2015, O&B 2014 and O&B 2013. If you want to fill or repost a previous prompt, you may, although please also post to the fills thread on the current post.
ETA: The fills post is here
For those who don't have an Dreamwidth account or prefer to remain anonymous, anon commenting is on.
Sapphire & Steel, any original elements!!
Date: 20 May 2018 10:41 am (UTC)Re: Sapphire & Steel, any original elements!!
Date: 20 May 2018 12:04 pm (UTC)Not So Much Awry, S&S, Original Elements, 1713 words
Date: 3 Jun 2018 05:11 pm (UTC)There’s nothing much left inside it – only marks where signage has been taken down in the hall way and a box of office oddments that is all that remains of the last business that occupied its ground floor. In the floor above, a telephone sits in a bare-boarded room. It’s been cut off. There’s nothing else of note.
There’s very little left in it to cause trouble, and yet it is.
“Well?” says Iron.
Emerald lowers her outstretched hand and shakes her head.
“How long has it been abandoned? Empty.”
That is a more defined, answerable query: “Six months, three weeks and five days. A small scale employment agency occupied two of these rooms. Upstairs was a flat – that has been empty for three years and ten days. Downstairs, a small printer’s. No. Designs. Business card designs, I think. They left eighteen months and twelve and a half days ago. They left nothing behind. Nothing that should have disturbed anything here.”
Iron shifts impatiently. “Well, there must be something. We’ve already heard the echoes. We have to search it again – find what we’re missing.”
They search the house once more, from attic to basement: Emerald starting at the top, Iron at the bottom and meeting in the middle, on the stairs.
“The attic,” she says. “I felt the disturbance far more strongly there.”
He gives a brief smile; a quirk of his mouth, a glimmer in his eyes, and no more. “The basement. It… feels wrong.”
“In what way?”
Iron stares back at her. “The dust of the years. The people. Longer ago than any of these businesses. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is something that’s needed taking care of for a while.”
“You think that’s why none of the new people stayed?”
He nods. “But it is only a feeling.” He gestures to her to pass, and she sets off down to the basement while he proceeds on up to the attics.
Downstairs, in the basement, lit only by the light from the grimy window, shadowed by the railing outside, Emerald finds an intruder. He’s under the sink, fiddling with the plumbing.
She grins suddenly, misleading dimples showing, and she waits for him to notice she’s there.
Oh, I know you’re there, he says and slides back out to beam up at her. Mercury. They’ve sent them a technician. Things must be worse than they’d first thought.
He picks himself up and dusts his suit down and heaves a sigh. “Did you hear the echoes in the pipes?”
“The water pipes?” says Emerald. She can almost see it now. “And the wiring?”
He nods eagerly. “Yes. And there’s an antiquated bell system – not even electrical. And talking of electrical, I’m surprised they let them get away with the state of this place. It’s not like that upstairs. Look at that light switch.”
It’s brass, darkened by time: an old fashioned tiny knob to press down, not a safe, modern switch.
Emerald closes her eyes, and remembers. “It’s like that in the attic, too.”
There are ghosts in the basement. Or echoes if you prefer, but it amounts to the same thing. Echoes and remnants of the people who spent their lives in the dark corners at the bottom and the top of the house. Here, tears fallen unseen into the sink with the washing up suds. Laundry day. Stitching by lamplight into the night to get the mending done. No time for themselves. And the bells ringing. Always the bells ringing.
“Yes,” says Mercury, leaping across to the bells. “It’s here. It’s them. That’s the focus. They’re disconnected now, but the system stretched across the house. It never gave them any peace.”
He climbs onto the worktop and stretches a hand out towards them. “I can feel it from here.”
One of the bells rings.
Mercury looks at Emerald. “Oh, seems his lordship wants something.”
Emerald bites back a laugh. Iron? Come down here – we’ve found the focal point.
We? he says, and she can feel his instinctive wariness even at this distance.
Come down and see, she says. There are ghosts in the basement.
Irons stands at the top of the stairs leading down to the basement room. “Where are they, these ghosts?”
They can’t see them, only feel them, sometimes hear them: a bell rings, the sound of footsteps crossing the room, a clink of china, a waft of cold, and the feel of despair. No wonder the other humans didn’t want to stay. It’s more pervasive this way than if it was an obvious haunting.
She can, if she closes her eyes, almost see them: so many over the years, working all hours, sleeping in this cellar and in the bare attics above. Isolated, away from home. Lost in the dark.
“Find them,” says Iron, sitting down on the top step and watching her. “I can feel them here again. I can’t see them, but you could.
She looks up at him, and he leans his head against the painted iron banisters. What he’s suggesting is dangerous, of course, but the only way to see all of the pieces of this puzzle. Emerald breaks more easily than some others of her kind. Sometimes that’s an advantage, but there’s always the worry that not all of her will make it back, or that something else will get inside her in the process. And it hurts.
“Wait, wait,” says Mercury, brushing dark hair out of his face, equally dark eyes sharp and bright with his idea. “See this bell – the largest? When you want to come back, keep your focus on it and I’ll lead you.”
Emerald nods, but she casts one last look at Iron. “What do you feel now?”
“Anger,” he says. “And time rides in on the back of that.”
Yes, she thinks: the people aren’t still here, they’re dead, or maybe some of them are still alive, but elsewhere. Nothing real is left here to help. The anger will only free something else.
Emerald faces the bells and closes her eyes.
She shatters into a hundred and more pieces, scattered across the hiding places of time. She manages, this time, not to cry out at the glass-edged pain within.
“This is house is ours now,” says a maid in black with a discoloured white apron over the top and wearing her much detested mob cap – the badge of servitude. “Ours. We paid for it in sweat and blood.”
Emerald ignores the maid: she’s not here. She’s not real. And, interestingly, Emerald sees that she is not dead – she is working still in this city, much older, with this past left far behind her now. What remains in the house is the dust and the anger, injustice and terrible loneliness that live in the walls. What remains is Time, as ever.
“No time,” the maid says, “no time. Washing day. They that wash on Monday have all the week to dry. Dinner time. Pat a cake, pat a cake. Clear it all up. Over again, over again.”
“Then let it end,” says Emerald. “Let it end.”
The maid only continues, fading into a voice. Emerald is elsewhere, in another fragment of herself, but the complaints and the refrain is the same, over and over.
She thinks about Mercury and the bell – she thinks about Iron –
The ghosts cloud her mind: they think of iron ranges, smoothing irons, iron pokers, iron railings like prison bars. Emerald has to stop and think of the bell, think of pulling all the pieces of herself back into one, back into the present –
Iron is still sitting at the top of the stairs. She thinks he looks pale, and she narrows her gaze, even as she re-forms and takes a deep breath, glad to rehabit her usual shape. Something in here is affecting him more strongly.
“Iron?”
“They’re very angry,” he says with quiet amusement. “There are more of them now – stronger. How do we get rid of them?”
Emerald pulls herself back together again. “It needs to end – all the work. A final end.”
All three of them look to the bells.
“That simple?” says Mercury.
Iron shrugs. “Try it and see.”
Mercury detaches the nearest bell and cuts the wire behind it.
“Really,” says Iron, “I’d have thought they would have sent Copper for something like this.”
Mercury pulls out the next. “Aha, yes, but he had to go and extricate Silver.” Mercury gives Iron a grin. “Again. Something to do with being stuck inside a grandfather clock this time. Or was it the other way around? You know what both of them are like. Anyway, since I am here, you might as well let me deal with it, even if it beneath me.”
“Stop talking about it and just do it.”
Mercury winks, and cuts another wire. “I’m capable of doing both. It helps. Distracts things. My, my, my, this is so very antiquated.”
He moves to cut the last wire – and falls.
“I don’t think it likes me.”
Emerald. Iron’s voice in her head is urgent in response to the attack on Mercury. If something wants to stop the technician, they need to stop it.
She closes her eyes and lets one small, sharp fragment of herself adrift again. It stings a little, but she finds the maid and holds onto her. Somewhere, in time or out of it, she knows that Iron is watching Mercury climb back up and detach the last bell.
Now.
She opens her eyes again, and knows the echoes have gone, taken down with the last bell.
Iron reaches her side, as Mercury hops back down from the worktop.
“You are complete again?”
She nods. “Is it done?” she asks Mercury.
“Oh, yes.” He pockets the last bell. “Better not leave that lying around.”
Emerald puts a hand to Iron’s arm. “And you?”
“I was only a little weighted down for a while,” he says. “Now, let’s go over the house to be sure – then we can leave it in peace.”
Peace here, Emerald thinks, is much needed and long overdue. “Yes, let’s,” she says, and laughs.
Re: Not So Much Awry, S&S, Original Elements, 1713 words
Date: 4 Jun 2018 01:19 am (UTC)Re: Not So Much Awry, S&S, Original Elements, 1713 words
Date: 4 Jun 2018 08:12 am (UTC)Re: Not So Much Awry, S&S, Original Elements, 1713 words
Date: 5 Jun 2018 12:38 pm (UTC)(Typo note: the phrase "Irons stands at the top of the stairs" has an s too many, I think.)
Re: Not So Much Awry, S&S, Original Elements, 1713 words
Date: 5 Jun 2018 05:23 pm (UTC)