Ciao and good evening, one and all. I don't know why I put that seeing as its only early afternoon as I write, but whatever. You're here to enter a contest, not to quibble about the time.

By the way, you *are* here to enter, right?

I hoped that that little bit of egotism on the summary might be unusual enough to get people interested. Presumably it worked if you're reading this. So anyway, now that I have you here...trapped and helpless...your assignment is:

To write a fic for an ALTERNATE PAIRING!

Pairings which are NOT allowed:

MasayaXIchigo

KishXIchigo

IchigoXRyou

LettuceXRyou

PaiXLettuce

PuddingXTart

In fact, let's leave Pudding and Tart out of this altogether. There's nobody else of a suitable age for them. Any other pairing is allowed.

Criteria:

Spelling and grammar. These are absolutely essential to me. Your fic won't stand a chance if it is riddled with errors. Use spell-check, proofread, saying your lines out loud and thinking, 'does this make sense?' Get a beta if you need to. And remember: if a new character begins to speak, you need to start a new paragraph.

Quality of writing in general. Does it flow? Does the mood come across? Is your description always apt?

The difficulty of the pairing. For example, I would say that MintXZakuro only just counts as alternate, whereas PaiXIchigo, for example, could never work in my opinion. So a well-written and believable MintXZakuro would beat a PaiXIchigo where the only reason they're together is because the author says so, but if you can write PaiXIchigo plausibly, and make me believe it could work, then that will beat a safer pairing. I'll leave you to decide for yourselves which are the safe pairings and which are the far-out ones :P.

Enter by leaving a review or PMing me. Some of you will probably need a bit of time, and a few chapters (though oneshots are allowed), to persuade your characters into their alternate pairings, so I'm giving you till the 1st of May. I don't like to make the deadlines *too* long, otherwise people tend to forget. And I want you to have something down by the 5th of April (my birthday!), just to keep things moving.

Good luck!

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WHOOOPS! The prize!

I will write the winner a oneshot about the character or characters of their choice. It doesn't have to be a freaky alternate pairing this time, it can be whoever you want. And you can choose the scenario too, like romance or an epic battle scene. A word of warning, though: my Kichigo reservoirs are completely dry, and to ask for a lemon might be pushing your luck. Don't get me wrong, I like a good lemon, I just have trouble *twitch* writing *twitch* them *twitch*.

So yeah. Have fun.