Flash Fiction Contest: THE GAUNTLET (Closed)

Gauntlets are awesome, very metal and pack a punch! Those who pick up the glove and enter THE GAUNTLET must be prepared to be smacked around if they want to emerge victorious.
The prompts are arranged according to brutality: they get more challenging with each previous one completed. Your arbiters are already placing bets on how far each of you will make it before you have to be scrubbed from walls and ceiling! (Not the floor – we have sawdust.)

But if the judges approve of your word-wrestling skills, ah – now we are talking.


Because fame, glory, fancy honorifics and gloating at the corpses of the fallen is fun but doesn't impress the teller at the bank as easily as hard points and core memberships, we also have PRIZES!

    FIRST PLACE gets:

• 1500 points from Community Relations, handed out by doughboycafe
• 6 months Core Membership, handed out by doughboycafe
• 200 points from BeccaJS
  
• Feature by akrasiel
• 1 critique from squanpie
  
• 1 critique from neurotype
  
• 1 critique from BATTLEFAIRIES

    SECOND PLACE gets:

• 1000 points from Community Relations, handed out by doughboycafe
• 3 months Core Membership, handed out by doughboycafe
• Feature by akrasiel
• 1 critique from squanpie
• 1 critique from neurotype
  

    THIRD PLACE gets:

• 400 points from Community Relations, handed out by doughboycafe
• 1 month Core Membership, handed out by doughboycafe
• Feature by akrasiel
• 1 critique from squanpie
• 1 critique from BATTLEFAIRIES

    SPECIAL MENTION receives:

• 100 points from Community Relations, handed out by doughboycafe
  
• Feature by akrasiel

    EVERYONE gets a Game of Thrones honorific depending on their ranking!

AS FOR THE RULES:

To prevent being fed to the dogs (and then have the dogs fed to the dragons), honour these RULES as if you were Ned Stark looking at a thing that required serious honouring:

1. The challenges must be taken in order, so no skipping any.
   
2. Follow the challenge's specifications to the letter.
   
3. Link to your finished works in this journal's comments.
   
4. No submissions after the deadline: September 30th.
   

JUDGING will proceed in a very logical way: all works done to satisfaction will be compared by our panel of desensitised warlords and pedantic nobility, awarding points based on the impact, skill and overall result, on top of a flat bonus of ten points for every finished challenge.

THESE WILL BE YOUR CHALLENGES:

1. ZOMBIES OF THE VICTORIAN AGE (1000 words or less.) Make clear to the reader without explicitely stating the year or place that the story is, indeed, taking place in England under Queen Victoria.
2. ORIGINAL ORIGIN (700 words or less.) Choose one feature or phenomenon of the world around us that you will explain the origin of in a fable-like tale or legend. Include something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.
3. MINER DETAILS (1500 words or less.) Spin a tale of harrowing danger and drama occurring in a mine. Pick (haha) a four-syllable word you will use eight times, and a eight-syllable word you'll use four times over the course of your story. Also, all of your characters are dinosaurs.
4. THE ADVENTURES OF PERSPECTIVE MAN (Triplet word counts, only: 555, 777,...) In your story, it is revealed that the protagonist was the monster all the time. Somehow incorporate each colour of the rainbow and all names in Disney's 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'.
5. A JOURNEY OF DYSCOVERY. (707 words, exactly.) In this dystopian story, your main character(s) tread beyond the borders of their home and find it is not as they were told it was. One of your characters is not human, you must at least provide three instances of slang you invented for the occasion and none of your sentences starts with a vowel.
6. BREV UP (6 words, exactly.) Write a six-word-story about something abrupt. None of your words may be of equal length, and you must include the word 'so'.
7. NOT TO BE (300 words or more.) From a robot's perspective, write a space horror story without using any form of the verb 'to be'.
   
8. ONCE UPON AN A-B-C (12 lines, minimum.) Write a modern-day fairy tale that is progressively lipogrammatic: your first line will exclude one specific letter of the alphabet, your second line one extra, and so on.
   
9. FIRST SHALT THOU TAKE OUT THE HOLY PIN... (555 words, exactly.) Write, in Elizabethan English, a Fantasy adventure in second person, simple future tense, put to rhyme. Make sure your first sentence is pangrammatic, i.o.w. uses each letter of the alphabet at least once. This story must only be two sentences long. Include three different types of cured meats and a Monty Python quote, as well.

That's it, folks. Shields up, visors down - the Gauntlet begins...



Many thanks to neurotype, akrasiel, BeccaJS, squanpie, and obviously doughboycafe for standing over the cradle of the first Gauntlet ever,
and knowing grins and winks go to The-Monoblos, brennennn and ObsydianDreamer, who shall be your judges alonside yours truly.