SanpaSazzaro contest entry

The door burst open, startling Jane. But she was not surprised; Frank had entered her burrow like this many times before. Instinctively, she tried to bend her left ear towards the sound; but then remembered that her ear muscles, tired by age, no longer allowed her to do this effectively.

“Hey, Jane, look!” cried Frank excitedly, barging through the door. “I registered us in a contest!” Jane could hear he was waving several sheets of paper as he did.

Jane resigned from the dish she was washing. She knew all-too-well Frank wouldn’t let her do anything until he had told her what that was about.

“A contest?” she echoed, as she dried her hands off.

“Yeah!”

“And this contest is for…?”

“For a limited time, I’ll be able to do anything I want with my Deviant Art account.” She could feel Frank staring at her as she hung back up the towel with which she had dried her hands. She knew he knew she was listening, but the pause made her feel bad about it anyway.

“That is,” Frank continued, “if I win. Hopefully that’ll get me–”

“What do we have to do?” sighed Jane, unable to take the guilt-trip anymore, and walking into the next room to meet him.

“Well,” said Frank, as he looked through his papers, “the contest puts us in the desert for four hours.” He said nothing more for a while. Finally, Frank found the sheet he was looking for: it was a sketch he had made of two mice, one male, one female, dragging themselves to the top of a sand dune. The mice in the drawing bore an uncanny resemblance to him and Jane.

“Well, that’s nothing we haven’t done before,” Jane answered in a bored voice.

“…at the end of which we will discover…” continued Frank, as if he had been interrupted by his own actions. “…that the only source of water is guarded by a shape-shifting, 40-foot dragon.” He pulled out another sketch that showed a large dragon lying down in front of an oasis. The dragon was drinking the water using a gigantic straw and holding a book in his other hand. The book’s cover showed some kind of biomolecule. “We need to get to the water to enter.”

Jane crossed her arms. She was not liking this at all. “You have a plan, I hope,” she told him.

“…yeah, well, the thing is, if he so much as notices me, he’ll probably turn into a big cat or something and that will be the end of it all.” Jane was even more upset by the fact that he kept fiddling with his papers as he said this. He must have found the one he was looking for, because he went on, “…but if he notices you,” he said, pointing at Jane with his free hand, “he’ll no doubt turn into a hulking male field mouse and start complimenting you on your beauty.”

Frank showed her another sketch. It depicted Jane and her neighbor talking leisurely while leaning against a palm tree.

“Why are you using Justin to represent the ‘hulking male field mouse’?”

“Uh… no reason. The point is that, while he’s distracted with you, I sneak past and fill the canteen, thereby fulfilling the requirement and entering us into the contest.” Frank held out the last page, which he hadn’t used yet. Jane took it and notice it had a dragon watermarked at the top – the same dragon Frank had used for his sketch.

Jane read, attentively. These were the rules for the contest.

“So,” she said, without looking up from the paper, “you’re going to leave me alone with this, and I quote, ‘pervert’, while he hits on me, so you can make your Deviant Art profile page pretty?”

“Yeah! Simple, right?”

Jane stared at Frank with very narrow eyes. When she noticed his expression didn’t change, she thrust the paper into his chest. “Dream on,” she told him. But Frank was too busy trying to catch the paper before it fell to the ground, to realize Jane had just left him, alone, in her burrow, lost in bewilderment.

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Links: [contest rules] [contest results] [image background] [Frank (character in image background)] [Jane (character in image foreground)]