The heck? I hecked up. I hecked up. I hecked up. I hecked up. I hecked up. I hecked up. I hecked up. I'm so sorry. I'm heck.
Where am I? Where have I been, what am I doing? Uhh... well basically, Tumblr took over my life and with Tumblr comes a whoole bunch of distractions. I may have gotten myself introduced to five plus different fandoms (Off the top of my head, Merlin, Fire Emblem, Attack on Titan, and Dangan Ronpa, but I know there's more...) and will probably leave the Smash fandom soon after smoke and mirrors is completed. I know, you guys will all miss me, right? /sarcasm haha. I had meant to type something really grand and verbose, that involved a sinister camping trip in the woods, but in the end didn't because I couldn't see any such way to end it and my writing are not s0 gud rite now lolll. Plus, the more time I spent procrastinating writing these results, the more I just didn't want to do it even though I had people begging me to release the results (Cam, namely, who I have been avoiding because shame prevents me from talking to him. I AM SO SORRY CAM, I LOVE YOU BUT I CANT TALK TO YOU WITH A GOOD CONSCIENCE UNTIL THIS IS OVER.)
###
It was a dark and stormy night in some generic room that had a computer and keyboard, and Lady Paprika was trying to avoid clichés like the plague on her computer or something. Fortunately being a kick-ass writer, she was doing pretty well. After all, she hadn't written in some time, so her writing skills weren't exactly the sharpest tool in the shed. But all's well that end's well, right?
"Or uh, the way the cookie crumbles," a voice, decidedly male, said.
Lady Paprika jumped to her feet, and whirled around, staring at the squat man who had just spoken. "Who the hell are you?"
"Oh, that's nice, you did write about me, you know. A long time ago. In a far off galaxy. I can never correctly remember how those opening lines go... Mama mia, it's Wario, remember?"
Lady Paprika just stared at him in confusion. She put a finger to her chin and began to tap it, resisting the urge to hum the Jeopardy theme song as she thought about it. "Nothing rings a bell."
Hi's face turned pink and his eyebrows furrowed as he regarded the short girl. "You're kidding, right? You wrote about me this year, not even six months ago! I mean," and here his voice dropped to a mutter, "It wasn't the greatest thing and it was totally inaccurate but..."
Lady Paprika tried to think past all the lemons she had read these past few months. It was really hard to remember because a lot of details were fuzzy. She was just remembering something about octopi when she heard an insistent banging at the door of the super duper generic room, which made her flinch. Since it was a dark and stormy night, she couldn't help but feel a little unnerved. She shut her eyes, willing the sound to go away, but it continued. Eventually, she heard a muffled voice.
"Paprika, I know you're in there!" The voice sounded irritable. Like that dialogue tag really even needed to be there.
"Who is that?"
He rolled his eyes. "That would be the angry mob of people that participated in your contest."
"Wait, what?" Lady Paprika asked. "I hosted a contest?"
He slapped a pudgy hand to his forehead, but before he had time to explain the details, there was a loud crunch, followed by a bang. The next thing, Paprika knew was that there were suddenly nine beings in this generic, unnamed room, and all of them looked a little more than miffed.
Lady Paprika stared at all of them, trying to put names to their faces but utterly failed. There were two identical-looking little blond boys with pudding-bowl haircuts, two totally hot blond male elves in skirts and tights, some tiny yellow rodent with electricity flying from its red cheeks, an extremely tall and powerful looking woman, an even taller, dark man with a hooked nose and a cape, a light pink puffball with luminous sea-blue eyes and a man wearing a helmet and a skin tight jumpsuit with a holster at his hip.
All of them looked like they wanted to kill her. Lady Paprika gulped. "Did I do something to piss them off?" she whispered to Wario.
The woman, who looked the angriest of them all, grimaced. Her hands balled on either of her sides, she said through gritted teeth, "You. Didn't. Announce. The. Results."
"The results to what?" Paprika asked. "And um, pardon me, but who are you guys?"
One of the blond elves stepped forward, his nose lifted upward in a rather arrogant way. "You mean to tell me that you don't even know who I am? Everybody knows who I am, fool." He seemed haughty and displeased at the fact that Paprika seemed to have no clue who he was.
The other blond elf spoke in weary tones, "I bet you're only acting like you don't remember any of us because you don't want to announce the results. Typical move for a hypocrite who makes so many promises but fails to deliver. Well," and here he let loose a long-suffering sigh, "I can't say I shouldn't have see this coming."
"You hosted a contest," one of the blond boys said in clipped tones. "The contest said to write about any character they wanted doing something or acting out of character. You said you'd get the results out soon but it's been more than three months since you said you'd do it, and nothing has happened. Not very dependable are you?"
The rodent stepped forward, "Yeah," it sneered, completely throwing Lady Paprika by surprise. There was an evil spark in its eye that unsettled her. Plus, it could talk. Where she was from, rodents couldn't talk. "You made nine authors twist us all out of character and since you haven't really ended the contest, we've been this way for the whole time."
"Don't you know how annoying that is?" the other blond boy said, looking as equally deranged as the mouse. He looked like he'd been to hell itself. "I mean, not that I'm fuckin' complaining man, but - no wait, I am fuckin' complaining, bitch."
Lady Paprika looked startled by his harsh tone before she felt a burning prickle at her eyes when she just realized something. "Don't cry," the man with the helmet said, sounding a little tone-deaf. "That Lucas has been insulting me all day. Something about how I speak too loudly. I think that's because I'm deaf though." He sat down with a quizzical frown on his face.
The pink puffball nodded solemnly in agreement. She hadn't said a word since coming here, though she looked like she was bursting to say something.
"I'm not crying because he insulted me, I'm upset because the rating of the story has to be bumped up to an M. Have you been to the M-rated section of the Smash section?"
"Wow, breaking the fourth wall. That's new," the tall woman spat.
The man who claimed he was deaf stared at her as if in wonderment. "Where's your ribbon?" Everybody ignored him.
The dark man with the cape, who looked very intimidating to Lady Paprika let out a giggle, turning pink at the woman's words. "Good one, Samus! You're so smart!"
The woman - Samus, as the dark man had called her - glowered at him, prompting him to quail under her furious gaze. "I don't need your coddling, Ganondorf."
"Since when did you care about the rules? If you did, you would have announced the rules by now," one of the blond boys - the one who seemed cold and indifferent as opposed to deranged - addressed Lady Paprika.
Lady Paprika sat back in her seat. "I honestly, really don't remember a contest at all," she said, after some time. "And I'm sorry I left you this way, it wasn't my intention but how can I announce winners if I don't even know what your stories are about?"
"Excuses," mumbled one of the elves.
"Lies!" Samus spat.
"Really horrible writing," agreed Ganondorf. "I would hate for anybody to read this."
"I'm sorry, it's just been a really long time!" Lady Paprika said. "I don't think I have time to really read these stories again, but if you'd like, you could give me a summary? And then I can announce the winners based off which summary I like best?"
"This sounds like a bad idea, because clearly, my story was the best and you won't be able to figure that out if you only read the summary," one of the male elves said.
"Link, stop being such a braggart," Samus barked. "Or I'll stun you."
"Yeah," Ganondorf agreed. "Everybody knows that Samus's story was the best, anyway." The soppy look he gave Samus made him look less intimidating. Lady Paprika had to bite the insides of her cheeks to keep a straight face.
"What was yours even about?" Lady Paprika asked, to keep herself from staring at Ganondorf's face, whose face was now lit up in a wobbly smile.
"I'm glad you asked," Link boomed, smiling dashingly, and assuming a heroic stance. "It contains a tale of true love, of my courage and bravery. You see, I am the Hero of Twilight..."
"So am I," the other Link responded. "And yet, my tale is full of despair, for I was driven to do something so drastic because my King ended up being corrupt..."
The first Link coughed loudly. "It's quite rude to interrupt. As I was saying, I am a true hero..."
"Cut the crap, Link," the electric yellow rodent said, a slight smirk on its face. Lady Paprika really couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl even with its squeaky voice. She edged away slowly. "I'll tell you what that idiot's story is about. He brags. In his story. The whole time. The whole story called The Ladies Hero by writerluber, isn't even really about him. It's about Ike who hates his whining just as much as we do and finds out that he's not the only one whose sick of it." The electricity in its eyes crackled with such ferocity that Lady Paprika had to wonder how such a cuddly little animal turned out to be so... creepy.
"That's not true!" the boastful Link responded. "Don't listen to that Pichu! Have you heard about zero written by Tune4Toons? It's the weirdest thing, and the ending isn't even happy!"
"It's not supposed to be happy, dumbass," Pichu shot back. "And besides," it said, its face breaking into a sly smile. "I did end up getting what I wanted after all."
"Do I want to know what it was about?" Lady Paprika asked more to herself than to anybody else.
"It's essentially a character study," one of the blond boys interrupted, slightly irked that things weren't running as smoothly as he wanted. "Pichu takes a Pokemon Trainer to see a doctor - in this case, probably Doctor Mario - and along the way, we get to see the "miracles" that Doctor Mario has performed on his patients. The miracles reflect the character's deepest desires, but most often end up twisted or not what the person wanted in the end."
The other blond boy groaned. "Fuckin' gross, if you ask me. There's incest in there, y'know. The author was probably a sadistic thirty-year old motherfucker who lives in his mother's basement and doesn't even have a girlfriend."
"Like you're one to talk, Lucas! And actually, the author is a small, cute teenage girl," Pichu defended. There was a silence following his words as the rest of the Smashers contemplated his words. "She writes a lot of dark stuff in her spare time." As if that explained everything.
Lady Paprika muttered quietly under her breath, "I'm starting to see how where she got her inspiration for Pichu's characterization." Aloud, she then addressed one of the blond boys, "And what about you?"
"I went through this really weird quest where I went to hell and back," the one with the deranged eyes said. "Aptly titled Lucas's Job by Warrior of the Healing Flame. I was supposed to do a job for Samus here in response for ah, shall we say sexual compensation, but things just got out of hand, and lord knows how I even got out of it alive."
Lady Paprika frowned. "That sounds really interesting, but I don't really get it."
Lucas smirked devilishly. "Well best we not get into it. I guess you're just as stupid as you look, anyhow. A disappointment really, considering the contest's results probably won't even be accurate if we have a dunce for a judge."
Lady Paprika opened her mouth to tell Lucas exactly what to do with his mouth once he shut it, but before she could begin, Samus grumbled, "I thought we were telling stories? Being here is making me sick."
"Yeah," Ganondorf chimed in, casting an anxious look at Samus. "Me too!"
"Well then why don't you tell me your story?" Lady Paprika tried not to show how frustrated she was starting to become.
"In A Beast's Kiss by Time Cutter, I kissed Pit. The end."
"You kissed Pit?!" Ganondorf said, looking crushed. "But why?"
Samus frowned. "What do you mean why? I'm always having a bad day, okay? People piss me off for no damn reason. I saw him, he wasn't pissing me off, so I kissed him. Although, I'm really not sure if he kissed me back..." her voice trailed off as she contemplated this thought. "Maybe I should kill him for that."
"Ah, but wait. I don't understand, Ganondorf," Lady Paprika interjected, addressing the tall, dark man. "You don't seem to be the type to fall so... uh, deep and fast for a woman?"
Ganondorf's face seemed to break again into tears. "I'm usually not... but that's the way FullmetalWizard1995 wrote me in The King of Desperation. She made me fall for such a fair vixen. It's one of my heroic flaws in the epic, you know. In the story too, I never win the fair maiden's heart. It's a tragic tale," he finished.
"Aren't epics really long poems?" asked Captain Falcon aloud. He seemed to be having trouble keeping up with the conversation but at times when people spoke slow enough for him to read their lips - such as Ganondorf - he seemed to pick up on the conversation again.
Behind Ganondorf, Lady Paprika saw one of the Links shake his head vigorously and mouth, "It's actually really funny!"
But before Lady Paprika could figure out more, Samus said, "Call me maiden and vixen one more time and I swear my next line of dialogue will be written in caps lock!"
Ganondorf cowered. Lady Paprika suppressed a cringe and immediately said, "No need to do that." Privately, she felt like the only way to prevent that would be to quickly get the judging over with. She bit her lip and stared at the remaining characters who all looked slightly agitated and then sighed in defeat. "I apologize for my behavior. It's inexcusable that I left you in such a state. If we're going to do this right, I'm going to have to get a better summary from each of you. So who do we have left?" She scanned the room, and her eyes stopped at the pair of elves and twin blond boys. "There's something I don't understand. Why are there two of some of you?"
"Different authors decided to write about the same people," the Link who looked devoid of emotion said. "So you get me and him with different personalities. Same with the two Lucases. It's a hassle if you ask me."
Lady Paprika almost felt sorry for the other Link who looked so washed out against the rest of the characters. She wanted to ask what had reduced him to almost nothing when the other Lucas, the cool and poised one who had been quietly simmering for some time, cleared his throat. "I'm ready to confess."
It was a strange choice of words, she thought. Link would have to wait. "Go ahead er... Lucas," she said, nodding at him.
Was it her imagination or had his lips tightened? "I killed somebody dear to me." And instantly like that, the atmosphere of the super duper generic room changed.
She was sure he regretted it, but all he said was, "It had to be done. She... witnessed something she wasn't supposed to see." He swallowed. "If Starship Artisan hadn't written... if it wasn't... if Nana had just walked home quicker or more slowly, I wouldn't have done it. I wouldn't have!" his eyes flitted upward and Lady Paprika could see the calm in his eyes shatter before her very eyes into a thousand different pieces. "It was Just Business!" he yelled, his right hand clenching and unclenching reflexively.
Nobody was arguing anymore.
The horror in his eyes prompted something to ghost within the outskirts of Lady Paprika's memory. Her eyes flickered around the Smashers once more. Each one of them was suffering, that much she knew. They were so uncomfortable in their current skins and all it had taken was Lucas's outburst for Lady Paprika to realize how awful of a person she had been for making them wait for so long. Her eyes landed on Link. His face was perfection; exactly the kind of handsome hero you thought about in fairytales except for the bone-weary expression that had lived an exhaustive life, stuck between the line that bordered the unemotional and the sheer insanity that long hours of waiting eventually led you to. Insanity to do something extremely unheroic.
And suddenly she knew.
"I remember," she announced. "I remember everything." Because she did. She remembered finally what she had forgotten so long, who had won, who hadn't. She pointed at Link. "You tried so hard to better your nation before you murdered your own prince because he turned to corruption."
"He was a jester. A fool who played the game the wrong way," Link said. "Not a prince. I doubt he saw his own death delivered by one of his own pawns."
"The Jester's Game," she said, "by MessengerOfDreams." She remembered his story well because it had given her a tough time to place. "Third place."
She turned to Jigglypuff. She knew of two types of people who went down to their executions; those who went meekly and those who went with all the fight in the world. But Jigglypuff was a third kind. "And you can't speak, because you were separated from your daughter and your King was too stupid to figure it out. So he executed you and you never got to sing in the form of a quiet protest." She felt her throat tighten at this. She knew how much Jigglypuff liked to sing, liked to talk. "Your story was written by GoldFountain. Dissonance, right?" Jigglypuff did not say a word but her luminescent eyes seemed to affirm Paprika's question. "Second place."
Finally, she faced Captain Falcon who probably couldn't keep up with what was going on. It was strange that while all the rest of the Smashers writhed in discontent at their current fortunes, Captain Falcon seemed extraordinarily at ease, so painfully human, that Lady Paprika loathed to announce the final result. She knew she had to - the rest of the Smashers needed to regain their original personalities, but she much preferred the contentedness in Falcon's eyes. She was so used to seeing him ostentatiously dressed, flamboyant in his movement, and loud. This quiet, serene Falcon was something she'd miss. Somebody who preferred traveling on his own to the crowds, who was probably thinking at this very second, about a beautiful a woman wearing a red ribbon in her hair.
Maybe it wouldn't work, she thought. Because he couldn't hear her say, "First place goes to Byoshi's Scintilla." He was deaf, after all. Presumably years of racing did that to you, or years of being somebody you had enough of.
But as she said the words, and everybody around her shifted in almost a sigh and she knew the spell was broken, except Captain Falcon. He still seemed the same. Was it possible that he had just been that way all along?
Who cared? It was just fine for her because they all seemed remarkably in character.
###
I WRITE SHIT OK. (I know, I didn't switch it to M-rating because in my experience, M-ratings are for squares [All my best work is apparently M-rated])
For those of you who skipped all the way to the bottom (as I often do), here's a rundown of placements:
3rd - Messenger of Dreams's The Jester's Game - For his excellent character study of not only Link (I chose Link for the results fic, because in my opinion, he was more fleshed out), but also Marth. The way these two characters broke down from their original characterizations to something far more darker was very believable, particularly the way MessengerOfDreams handles the explanation as well as the reasoning behind their slow deteriorations places him at number three.
2nd - GoldFountain's Dissonance - For her excellent storytelling. I particularly enjoyed the narrative voice that gives the whole story an dark fairytale vibe. The story is especially touching and dark and the motives behind Jigglypuff's choice to not sing is believable and resonates deeply. Especially interesting is the way GoldFountain's choice to create distance between the narration and therefore only shows Jigglypuff's choices rather than explain them which only strengthens this story. In my personal opinion, it was my absolute favorite. But first place isn't about what I liked best which is what took me a long time to figure out during the judging process... It's about who carried the prompt out the best. So first prize goes to...
1st - Byoshi's Scintilla- I do not think I have to spell it out (because it was totally obvious who would win), but in case I do Byoshi did exactly the goal of what this contest was about far better than I envisioned in the first place (and somehow forgot about in the first place). It's an honor to have her in my contest honestly, and I don't even know what the hell I'm doing as a judge because she's far more superior than I am when it comes to writing, so I shouldn't even be doing it in the first place. The point of the OoC contest was to show that each of these characters have the potential to be something real because real people often tend to surprise us with their actions that may seem uncharacteristic of who they really are. People surprise us by being something or doing something you never thought they would in a completely believable manner. Byoshi manages to convey this with her deconstruction of Captain Falcon and she does this with a nuanced approach of his character. Everything just seems to fit, making her a solid winner in my book.
Aside from the last three mentioned in the fic portion of the results, the rest of the fictions mentioned are not in order of placing. I kind of just stuck them in... randomly and without reason (not writing for a very long time, coupled with bouts of panicking because this was long overdue isn't a good combination when you're trying to write something).
It's often a cliché I feel when judges say that the competition is tough. Let me tell you though, it really was, regarding placements. First and second place took me a long time to figure out because while I knew Scintilla and Dissonance would take up the first two slots, I initially wasn't sure which one was going where (Interesting how both these entries dealt with sound or lack of it. God, but I loved them!), as well as third place with another entry that almost made it to third. I was actually considering tying them for third, but I thought that was unfair. So I reread both entries a dozen times before weeding out The Jester's Game as third place. It was almost impossible for me to judge and I often wondered if I made the right choice. Probably going to be the last time I really ever judge something on my own!
I had to actually give myself a few weeks to hold back and see if I was okay with how I chose these results and I am, although in the beginning I initially wasn't. I probably will never host a contest by myself ever again. It's too hard!
Congratulations to all the winners. If you are a winner, please PM me to claim your prize!
Thank you for all who participated! I really enjoyed reading all these contest entries because of how different each entry was from each other and how differently each of you chose to interpret the prompt! Expect in-depth reviews for each one of the entries, winners or not, over the next few weeks (or months... I've become complacent on this site hehe). Again, thank you so much!
