Bonus Round 2: AUs

[referees]

Bonus Round 2: AUs

SASO 2015 is over, but this round is perpetually open to new fills (no new prompts).


This round is made for exploration of all those "what-if?" scenarios, like "what if my favorite sports anime was actually a spaghetti western?" or "what if everything was the same except everyone was actually a car?"


This round ends at 7PM on June 27 EDT. Countdown Timer.

RULES

• Submit prompts by commenting to this post with an alternate universe idea, along with a ship from one of our nominated fandoms.
• An AU could be a canon divergence, e.g. "what if [team] didn't win the Inter High in season 1, but [other team] did instead?", or a completely different setting altogether, e.g.s pop idol AU, coffee shop AU, superheroes AU, etc.
• Fill prompts by leaving a responding comment to the prompt with your newly-created work.
• Remember to follow the general bonus round rules, outlined here.

FORMAT

Bonus round shenanigans all happen in the comments below. Brand-new works only, please.

Required Work Minimums:

• 400 words (prose)
• 400px by 400px (art)
• 14 lines (poetry)

There is no max work cap.

Format your comment in one of the following ways:

If PROMPTING:	If FILLING:	If FILLING as a TEAM GRANDSTAND participant:
PROMPT: TEAM [YOUR SHIP] Replace [YOUR SHIP] with the name of the team you belong to, including Grandstand or Sports Teams Write it exactly as it appears on the team roster or your team will not receive points Place the prompt's relationship in the first bolded line of the comment. Including the canon isn't required, but it's nice. Visual example	FILL: TEAM [YOUR SHIP], [RATING] Replace [YOUR SHIP] with the name of the team you belong to Write it exactly as it appears on the team roster or your team will not receive points Replace RATING with the rating of your fill (G - E) Place applicable major content tags and word count before your fill (when applicable) NSFW FILLS: Post written/text fills directly to the round with clear tags. Please link to art/visual fills. You can include a small safe-for-work preview if you'd like. To place an image in your comment, use this code: <img src="LINK TO YOUR IMAGE" /> Visual example	FILL: TEAM GRANDSTAND, [RATING] Replace RATING with the rating of your fill, G - E, as explained in the rules Place applicable major content tags and word count before the fill, where applicable NSFW FILLS: Post written/text fills directly to the round with clear tags. Please link to art/visual fills. You can include a small safe-for-work preview if you'd like. To place an image in your comment, use this code: <img src="LINK TO YOUR IMAGE" /> Visual example

Posts not using this format will be understood to be unofficial discussion posts, regardless of what they contain. They, like all comments in this community, are subject to the code of conduct.

SCORING

These numbers apply to your team as a whole, not each individual teammate. Make as many prompts/fills as you want!

For prompts: 5 points each (maximum of 50 prompt points per team per round)

For fills:

First 3 fills by any member of your team: 20 points each
Fills 4-10: 10 points each
Fills 11-20: 5 points each
Fills 21+: 2 points each

All scored content must be created new for this round.

Etc.

If you're hunting through the prompts looking for what to fill, a good trick is to view top-level comments only.

Have a question? Check The FAQ first. If you still need help, feel free to contact the mods. Happy fanworking!

Comments

FILL: TEAM AOYAGI HAJIME/TESHIMA JUNTA, T (1/2)

[hapaxlegomenon]

This turned into an absolute monster. It still feels incomplete but I guess it’ll do for now. I love this prompt so much.

Word count: 3157 (entire work)
Warnings: Injury, emotional breakdowns, death, all the fun stuff you’d expect from a PacRim AU

On the worst day of Arakita’s life, the first Kaiju appears in San Francisco. The rest of the world is reeling from the attack, but Arakita is left near-catatonic from a career-ending injury. In a bitter twist of cosmic spite, Arakita’s elbow splinters and shatters at the exact same time as the Golden Gate Bridge. He’s on his knees screaming in synchrony with an entire country across the ocean.

He watches the Kaiju’s destructive week-long march from a hospital bed, too high on painkillers and poisoned with self-pity to do much else.

When the Kaiju is rotting in the American dirt and Arakita is finally released from hospital, he moves to a tiny industrial town as far inland as he can get and works on rehabilitating his ruined arm and coaching the local sports teams. The teenagers he coaches are in awe, obviously feeling incredibly lucky to have a (former) professional athlete in their midst. He tries not to blame them for the bile that sours in his esophagus whenever they ask about his baseball career. His elbow heals – slowly, but his physical therapist assures him he can still use it, that it’ll get better with time, and he chews down his scripted dose of painkillers every morning like clockwork. He starts a menial job at the local factory – small town high school sports coaches don’t get paid much. Who knew.

Like everyone else, he watches in Live TV terror as the second Kaiju decimates Manila and, then, later, when the next hits Kabul. Like everyone else, he realizes that this isn’t going to stop.

He’s felt half-dead since the day of the first attack – since he blew out his elbow – so he’s not overly concerned about his own probably-imminent death-by-Kaiju. It’ll be a relief, more than anything.

But not everyone shares his half-apathetic-half-suicidal view on life, so they start fighting back. They create the Jaegers.

Arakita has no intention of joining the Jaeger program. He doesn’t even approve of it – all they’re doing is wasting everyone’s money, killing their test pilots, and giving false hope to a world of people who are all going to die. Whenever his kids’ parents ask him his opinion, in small-talk undercut with the stench of their desperation for optimism, he scoffs. It’s never going to work. They should all just make peace with their lives and be ready for when the next Kaiju or tsunami hits Japan.

So of course, when a serious-looking man with the thickest eyebrows Arakita has ever seen shows up out of nowhere and says “Arakita Yasutomo, I am Fukutomi Juichi. I represent the Japanese division of the Jaeger Program,” Arakita laughs in his face and slams the door. His elbow twinges and Arakita swears at it and does not expect a return visit.

Fukutomi doesn’t give up, though. He knocks on Arakita’s apartment door every day to ask him to consider enrolling in the inaugural class of the Jaeger Program’s Pilot Academy. They could use a man like him, Fukutomi says. They need his athletic reflexes and drive. They know about the injury to his elbow – here Arakita has to refrain from spitting in Fukutomi’s face – and it won’t be a problem. The Jaeger joints are hydraulically assisted. He’ll operate left hemisphere. His disability won’t hold back the future of humanity’s victory over the monsters in their seas.

How very benevolent, Arakita thinks, with no small measure of sarcasm.

“I’m given to understand that you coach several of the high school athletic teams,” Fukutomi says on the fifth day. “Don’t you want to protect your students?”

Arakita calls Fukutomi all manner of colourful names and slams the door violently. He sinks onto the floor with his arms wrapped around his head.

The next day, when Fukutomi rings the doorbell, Arakita pushes past him with a duffel bag holding a few changes of clothes, a few toiletries, and enough pain meds to keep him going for three or four months and says “So are we going or what?”

Fukutomi is apparently imperturbable and takes this development entirely in stride, pulling out his cell to call for a ride. In the six days Arakita has known him, Fukutomi has never once changed his expression. Not even when a helicopter descends suddenly from fucking nowhere and lands on the lawn outside Arakita’s apartment. The surly bastard.

Enrolling in the Jaeger Program’s Pilot Academy is worse than Arakita thought it would be. First and foremost, because Fukutomi dumps him in a barracks room with a schedule and then disappears into the giant military complex. He’s not in any of the classes, he’s not there at mealtimes, and Arakita feels a little bit cheated that even after investing a week of his life in some shitty small town in the mountains and dealing with Arakita’s constant if variable verbal abuse, Fukutomi apparently has no time or interest to see Arakita anymore. It grates on Arakita, that he hears Fukutomi’s name throughout the complex – his father was one of the founders of the Jaeger project, apparently, and that explains why Fukutomi has such a seemingly prestigious position at such a young age – and sometime he sees Fukutomi from afar, but they never speak. He stares at Fukutomi, and sometimes he catches Fukutomi staring back, and he thinks, come here, you asshole, come here and talk to me already.

The irritation quickly blossoms into an obsession that consumes Arakita’s thoughts and annoys the crap out of his roommate – which, honestly, Arakita considers just desserts, because Toudou Jinpachi is possibly the most irritating human being on the face of the planet.

The only thing that can manage to distract Arakita from his preoccupation with what is Fukutomi doing now and when will I get to talk to Fukutomi again is their training. It’s physically and mentally exhausting and Arakita’s had to up his medication just to be able to cope with the physical demands – the administration is surprisingly okay with Arakita being half-stoned most of the time. Toudou explains with an indignant sniff that it’s probably because Arakita somehow has among the top scores in their class.

Well, he’s always been a hard worker.

The drop simulations are something Arakita looks forward to and dreads with equal intensity. They’re far and away the most difficult part of their training, where they have to synthesize everything they’ve learned in their strategic training, their mechanical training, their physical training into one interconnected fighting style against the simulated Kaiju. The simulations don’t hold back – the Kaiju are just as terrifying as Arakita remembers them being from his hospital bed in Yokohama. At first, they fight solo, testing their reflexes and memory and hemispheric preference. Then, they’re paired up with another cadet – the first time, Arakita is paired with Toudou, which goes just as disastrously as expected. They’re both harshly disciplined and immediately reassigned to new partners.

Arakita and Toudou are not drift compatible, which, Arakita thinks, either of them could have told the instructors, had anyone bothered to ask.

Arakita’s new partner is a sleepy-eyed boy Arakita recognizes from their classes as Shinkai Hayato. They get along well. More than Arakita has ever gotten along with anyone, and he ponders if his newfound affection for Shinkai is anything more, but then Fukutomi walks by and it burns in Arakita’s chest and he realizes that, no, his esteem for Shinkai is nothing more than friendship. His feelings for Fukutomi are far less innocent.

Training goes on in this way for months. It’s a routine, now – argue with Toudou in the morning, attend classes, sit between Toudou and Shinkai and their other classmates at lunch, drop simulations with Shinkai in the afternoon, lusting over Fukutomi and more arguments with Toudou in the evening. Rinse, repeat. The Kaiju attacks, growing in frequency now, are a sickening interruption, during which everyone crowds around the monitors and watches their colleagues fighting for their lives – for everyone’s lives.

Still, nearing graduation, Arakita and Shinkai are among the top-ranked simulation drop teams in their class. 88% kill rate. They’ve only been killed themselves a handful of times – this is considered good odds. Fukutomi is always there, watching, writing things down on a clipboard, never interacting. Arakita yearns for Fukutomi’s acknowledgement, for his approval, but Fukutomi remains aloof as ever. He’s always separate, apart, with his father or the other administrators, or training alone in the gym. He’s like a golden idol, Arakita thinks, distant and beautiful and utterly unreachable.

Arakita and Shinkai are the first of their class to be assigned a Jaeger. It’s heavy and armoured and customized for their specific fighting style, and it’s the last of the Mark One models. They call it Wolfhound Demonic, a throwback to their nicknames in training. It’s exciting, because there is no conceivable way that getting their own Jaeger could not be exhilarating, but terrifying. Wolfhound Demonic is 85 meters of tangible proof that they’re going to have to go out and fight the real Kaiju soon. Their 88% success rate won’t matter when the Kaiju shows up that can push them on the side of the other 12%. Arakita notices Shinkai getting frazzled and ragged around the edges, but Shinkai doesn’t say anything so Arakita doesn’t ask.

He regrets not talking about it, later, two weeks before graduation, when Shinkai breaks. Their simulation is messy, they’d let the Kaiju breeze past the Miracle Mile and reach the city and they’d mishandled a mechanical problem, and when their Jaeger crashes into an elementary school and crushes rooms full of simulated schoolchildren, Shinkai snaps. He rips himself out of the simulation – Arakita comes out of it in a panic, watching Shinkai seize on the simulation stage, then holding his partner close when Shinkai starts screaming and babbling and tearing at his hair and the instructors and observers are crowding around and shouting for the medical staff.

That night, Shinkai Hayato is officially dismissed from the Jaeger Program’s Pilot Academy and Arakita is left without his co-pilot and best friend.

(end part 1)