Mollymauk Week is taking place from 24th to 30th June 2024 and you are invited to take part! All fanworks are encouraged - art, writing, cosplay, meta, etc! Check out the prompts - and please share!
Please use #mollymaukweek2024 or tag this account so I can find your posts!
The prompts for 2024 are:
Day 1: Summer or Pride
Day 2: Truth and Lies or Class Swap
Day 3: Threeleaf Day or Romance
Day 4: Gender or Peacock
Day 5: Glory or AU of your choice
Day 6: Masquerade or Friendship
Day 7: Transformation or Sun and Moon
Feel free to interpret the prompts as you wish and be as literal or as abstract as you like. Creativity is encouraged, as is use of whatever medium you desire!
You can create works for any of the prompts, even combine prompts. No pressure, just do what you want/can!
Other PCs, NPCs and Molly's alter egos, Lucien and Kingsley, are of course welcomed (especially for romance and friendship prompts) - as long as works created are relevant to a Mollymauk themed event.
If you're unsure of an idea you have, please feel free to ask! :)
Ending Molly week with a WIP ! I've been working my best over the past few days to churn this out, but ran out of time and decided to put it up as a WIP that I'll take more time to finish properly rather than rush to finish it today.
This has been so much fun though, I love this purple tief <3
A bit of a shame to be ending Molly week with what was easily my least polished week, but I still think it's a cute one! This one was very much me forcing myself to use brushes I never used before to force myself out of my comfort zone- and it definitely had that effect!
If I have the time and energy I will definitely try to pull something together for the last two days, I had another AU Of Choice Idea I might tie into the Transformation final day. But all and all this was SO fun to take part in and if I can't get one more piece up I can't wait to take part in next years! I love this purple tief.
@mollymaukweek
Day 6 of Mollymauk Week - Another hybrid, this time the Masquerade & Friendship prompts. Enjoy Simon and Molly gossiping like hell about the other attendees
Written for Mollymauk Week 2024 - Day 5: "AU Of Your Choice"
Summary: In the cramped neon world of 1980s Los Angeles, where hopes and plans are in a perpetual state of reincarnation for every amateur band, knowing how to fall and get back up is a life skill. Mollymauk knows and embraces this, but he also never managed to turn quite as mean as the city he calls home. Which is how he ends up babysitting the latest batch of particularly strange musicians that wander into his bar with amps and a dream.
Rating: T
Words: 10,018
Excerpt:
Molly is cloistered in the back room, eating some of Adelaine’s onion rings (which deserve their storied reputation) and flicking through a stack of demo tapes. There’s a lot of them. Yorda gets them from hopefuls all the time— dropped off, shoved through the overnight mail slot, left in a crate out back that’s supposed to be for produce deliveries, or even sent through the actual mail by people with more faith than good sense. Some of them have the band name and track listing in careful printing in black marker, others are scrawled on in blue ballpoint that’s half run off from some brush with the elements. At least one is cracked up the side and liable to only survive one trip through the tape player.
“Anything good?” Yasha asks, stepping into the back room to join him. She immediately comes to lean over his chair and steal an onion ring.
Molly points to the growing pile at the edge of the rickety card table. “That’s the ‘No’ pile.”
She glances at the rest of the table. “Where’s the ‘Yes’ pile?”
“Where indeed.” He hits the Eject button on the small, faded blue Sharp stereo that gets hauled around The Nook to blast out poorly recorded raw audio when it’s time to set up new bookings.
“Hm.” Yasha takes another bite of her onion ring and leans on the back of his chair, reaching over to pick through the discarded tapes. “I might have something interesting.”
Molly looks up from trying to decipher one tape where the name is way too long and also looks like it was written from the passenger seat of a speeding car. “Yeah? What do you got?”
“The next big rock band, apparently.”
Molly snorts. “It’s LA. Everyone here is the next big rock band if you ask ‘em.”
Summer in the Marrow Valley was not entirely pleasant. Despite the open fields and the easy breeze funnelling down silver capped mountain peaks, the Valley itself was too wide and too unruly to benefit from glacial streams or the heavy shadows of the forest. The open, long grasses of the wild fields sang with summer insects crawling through shade and shadow to reach the heat; passing carts on roads that overgrowth threatened to consume kicked up dry dusts and rocks too leave empty dips and dangerous gaps that would catch the unwary wheel; the only shade in miles of farmland was set miles away from the road in dark, wild copses of trees too old or too new to be much of a venture for any local farmers.
Not that there were many in the open wilds.
Cards fluttered through Mollymauk’s hands with a practiced ease as the cart dipped and rocked. Chatter wrestled with the buzzing cacophony of insects hidden in the grass and the heat was almost, almost unbearable in the mostly-opened wagon they had kept with them for so much of their journey. Half of it was shaded with a weather-oiled tent stretched tight over makeshift staves, to offer a reprieve from the maliciously cheerful bright summer sun.
His tail and feet hung off the back of the rocking wagon to drag through the grasses that had grown in the space between the wheels of a thousand carts trundling through the Valley roads. He could feel how warm the grasses were where they tickled at his tail, only marginally shorter than the wilds to either side with the overgrown sun-kissed grass and wild wheats.
“If you keep hiding in there, darling,” Mollymauk called back as cheerful as the hot sunny day; “you’ll never tan.”
“I do not want a tan,” came the reply from the magician nestled in among the packs and plunder stored in the cart. Trinkets jostled around Caleb Widogast in the shade, heavy coat and scarf finally shrugged off to the mingle with Mollymauk’s multicoloured cloak.
“You could at least come out and read in the sunlight.”
“It is plenty bright in here.”
The cart rocked and Mollymauk smiled as he cut his deck with one hand, the other planted on the wood beneath him so he could turn and look at his magician curled in a sulk in the depths of the shadows with Nott the Brave curled against him and far better hidden between the packs.
Mollymauk forced a card to the top of his deck by touch alone and offered the draw to Caleb. “Let’s see what the cards say.”
The fan of cards was difficult to maintain in one hand. It was tightly packed and hard to pull from; the easiest cards were the ones Mollymauk wanted to see in the other man’s hands, anything else would require a little more effort to dislodge. He twisted in his seat— drew his knees up and worked his way around until he was facing his mark with a stunning (practiced to perfection) and charming smile of earnest pleading for some form of entertainment— and offered the tight fan of cards again. Practice and a hundred hundred shows had made him predict which cards the man would go for. The cards he wanted were loose and easiest to pull, made obvious with little shifts Mollymauk could pretend were due to the rocking cart and rough road.
Eye. Travel. Bond.
Your eyes will hurt, you are going places and enjoy the road. Enjoy the company you have around you.
Caleb did not close his book as he indulged the game and drew three cards that required some effort to pull from the pack. Mollymauk’s tail flicked through the grass in annoyance though his smile never faltered. “Nice of you to finally indulge me, magic man.”
“I always indulge you, circus man.”
“I wish that were true. We would have so much more fun together.”
Bond. Dream. Magician.
The hot summer breezes filled with a fresh wave of insects singing to the clear sky as a murmur of small birds pulsed and danced like a living cloud to swoop down and pick off the tiny creatures brave enough to crawl up from the shade. The cart rocked rocked as his mind raced for an answer. A story to tell that would look like he had intended this draw.
Caleb Widogast did like to make things difficult.
Luckily, Mollymauk knew that he was a fantastic liar. Spinning a new story with a smile and the right cards, he knew that he could at least make this unexpected pull a believable story to appease his wizard.
“You need to socialize more.” That was a nice, clean read. “Forge some bonds! Do things!”
Mollymauk shuffled the cards with a smile, as the magician before him gave a disinterested hum.
“If you do—“
“Let me guess, all my dreams come true?”
“Well it won’t hurt.” The sun beat directly down on to Mollymauk’s back, tail curling and coiling through the grass they trundled over in this rickety wagon with its makeshift shade. “Dream is probability, the endless future ahead of you. All those things you don’t want to tell us you want.”
Another unimpressed, disinterested hum from his target.
“And of course you. The magician, toiling away with equally endless creativity and inspiration.”
“So these cards—“
“Yes.”
“Want me to return to my studies.”
“Mr.Caleb, it is a beautiful, sunny, summer day. You should try to enjoy it.”
“Perhaps,” Caleb said as he scooted back to where he had been nestled in among the bags and coats, “I will when it is less sunny. Ja?”
“I’m going to throw you in the nearest river. Just so you can have some fun.”
“Please do. Zemnians are not meant for this sort of heat.”
Mollymauk smiled and gathered up the three errant cards. He stood long enough in the cart to catch sight of Yasha talking to Beau as they trailed through the grass at pace behind the cart, eyes open for trouble. He stood rocking with the cart, deck in hand, as he tried to decide what he wanted to do. The easy, heat pressed silence had been fine for a few hours, the noise of insects and birds and the creaking cart enough to fill the void as the sun climbed through the clear blue sky. But now the sun was at its peak, and there was nothing of interest in the endless stretch of green fields save for his cards and his friends.
“Will you sit down before you fall?”
“That almost sounds like you care about me. I’m touched, Mr.Caleb.” He grinned down at the man who was a nice shade of red in the shade and hurriedly turning back to his book. “I’m going to look for a river so we can camp tonight with some fresh water. Care to help?”
“No.”
“Suit yourself.”
Mollymauk kicked up a scattering of dust from the road as he dismounted the cart and meandered to the overgrown side of the road opposite Yasha and Beau’s half-hearted scouting. There were sharp stones and the half-forgotten edges of fences hidden in the unkempt fields— open wilds where some distant farmer relinquished a claim that was too far from their homestead to manage. Remnants of idle fields and diminished herds gave way to paths cut through by grazing deer and meandering travellers hoping the map was right about some road or other closer if they just cut through a field here or a forest there.
He could glance back to the cart and see that Caleb had left the shelter of his little shaded space to read in the brighter light like Mollymauk had suggested. And blushed a beet red when their eyes met and Mollymauk couldn’t just bite back the grin and wave. He would stretch his legs for a while longer, before he returned to the cart with some outlandish tale he knew no one would believe, but let him carry on with it anyway.
And the sun would keep on overhead until the day gave out and the road was illuminated by the soft, strange starlit glow of fireflies in the grass.
