#tri-tober

[lost-technology]

Vash in Vector [IMG ID: Vash the Stampede from Trigun, mid-Trigun Maximum manga style. A young man with hair that is half-blond, half black with blue-green eyes and a big weird red duster coat. He is in profile looking off into the distance against a blue sky with stylised clouds. / END IMG ID] Drawn for Tritober Draw Challenge. More than a day late. October 1 Prompt: Vash the Stampede Do you want to know how to torture yourself? Do you really want to know how to torture yourself as an artist? You pick out a program that you are teaching yourself that's close to a program you barely used (only used for logo design and things of that nature) and you decide to do a whole darn picture in VECTOR just to play around with the freehand tool. Gah! This took me forever, lots of messing up on getting shapes right / to close properly and even finding the color palettes and sliders to play with! Vector drawing in CorelDraw 2021, exported to PNG.

[trigunfanart]

There are not one

not two

but three[see chart below] art prompt events going on for Trigun in the month of October. [I couldn't find the og link for this chart because the tag is so full of art already]

October belongs to Trigun, I'm sorry I don't make the rules.

[squibb-y]

TRI-TOBER DAY 2; STAMPEDE

[lost-technology]

Nameless Leviathans

Tri-Tober Fanfic shorts Prompt 28: Death Setting: Any / All canons, but more of a Trimax vibe Summary: When he was a child, Vash was fascinated by the concept of whalefalls.

Prompt 28: Death Nameless Leviathans When Vash was a child he and his brother absorbed data like sponges.  Being that they were not human children and grew at an accelerated pace, Rem could barely keep up on educating them.  As such, she allowed them access to many different archives and young Vash loved nature documentaries.  They told them of animals and plants (flora-type, not him-type) that existed on Earth, those still living and those long gone.  For two weeks straight he was talking his twin’s ear off about whalefalls.  Rem said that there were no whales left anymore on Earth by the time SEEDS disembarked.  Vash had cried about it.  The abyss of the ocean remained, with creatures that Humanity probably would never discover because deep space was actually easier to navigate for them than the deep sea of their own world, strangely enough.  In any case, Vash had a little obsession for a short time about how the death of an elegant creature fed many more creatures just as elegant – or very ugly, depending on one’s judgement - and created the basis of an entire ecosystem.  They were worlds unto themselves, populated by beings which had never known the whale while it was living, but had it to thank for their existence.  In his life on Noman’s Land, Vash would gaze out from a cliffside upon one city or another crafted from SEEDS-fall.  He’d watch people work from ships’ rubble, to villages, to entire cities as the decades wore on – all of them, every major population-center was the picked bones of an ancient star-faring beast.  People lived and died within the shelter of these miniature ecosystems in the dry abyss of the deep desert.  The ships were nameless to the people who’d formed their lives there after a century – They became the cities, new things and too unknown to thank.  Rem had become stardust and that’s probably exactly how she’d have it, save for the fact that she’d wanted to live longer – too young, she was too young…  Vash had outlived her age many times over, never got to see her face adorably wrinkled or her hair turn silver…   Nicholas D. Wolfwood – he had also been far, far too young, half his life stolen from him from the beginning.  He was thanked and he was known, at least – his friends and his orphanage children visited his grave marked with its weapon-tombstone and Vash swore he could feel him sometimes when he turned around.  The voice in Vash’s head whenever he thought he was doing something dumb that cried “idiot” had Wolfwood’s voice now and there was no changing that.  Vash learned where Legato was buried.  The grave was left un-marked because those that did the job did not know who he had been.  There were many nameless bones in the desert and according to the story he had told, he had once been nameless.  He was an elegant beast to have defeated Vash in the end, a shadow in the man’s heart as large as any abyssal creature and like Wolfwood’s voice, that shadow would always stay.  Vash purchased a piece of pristine scrap from a town that still subsisted on an outer hull.  He insisted upon using the tools himself to craft it into a headstone and to etch the name “Legato Bluesummers” into its face.  He tied it to a strong toma and lugged it all the way back to the lonesome grave.  The dead deserved to be named, whether the name was old or new and even if only someone’s killer cared that they were remembered.  In Noman’s Land, there was death and there was life and the world moved on.

[squibb-y]

"They just can't get my nose right!" wHOO give it up for day 3 of tritober y'all (I say, on day 8)

[lost-technology]

The Benefits of Apocalyptic Stories

Tri-Tober Fanfic shorts Prompt 30: Hope Setting: Any / All canons Summary: Vash's favored book genres would surprise people.

Prompt 30: Hope The Benefits of Apocalyptic Stories Vash the Stampede bought books whenever he could find them.  He also availed himself of libraries, signing under an assumed name and had several cards registered all around the world.  He tried to get cheap-printings – flora-pulp paper from Geoplants was rare, shed worm-skin decidedly less so.  He read all kinds of things.  Stories of magic and dragons were favorites, as were tales of pirates sailing water-seas that he could only imagine – fantastical tales that were great escapes.  It would surprise anyone who knew him, though, that one of his favorite genres was dystopian and post-apocalyptic fare.  His friends would all tell you that the “idiot” had an unrealistically utopian mindset and did not know that when he was camping alone in the desert or riding in boredom on a transport that quite often, he was reading about some hardline government with brutal edicts and the people that fought against it, people running from zombies or characters trying to survive in a world obliterated by massive weapons.  He had in his own collection in the duffle-bag, tucked under the Narnia and the Tolkien (the dragons and magic stuff), a copy of “The Red Canyon Games” (supposedly an updated version of something that had existed once on Earth), “Return of the Living Dead in Dankin,” and a series called “Fallout: July,” which was something of a HIGHLY fictionalized version of actual history.  One might wonder why he would take interest in reading stories like these when his own world was built upon a great disaster and seemed to always be on edge of tearing apart at the seams.  He might smile and laugh and tell you that some of these stories were very silly, the type of apocalyptic and dystopian events that were not happening and were unlikely to happen (he’d never seen zombies emerge from any graves, for instance, and he’d seen plenty of graves).  He might also tell you that as hard as the real world is, some of these stories were set in harsher worlds, and so they reminded one to be grateful.  The truth was, they reminded him of hope.  Reading about characters surviving some of the very worst trials – settings both realistic and utterly preposterous – made him feel a little better. Those characters found reasons to keep living. They kept on.  They survived.  He still saw Rem in his dreams sometimes, even after he’d started losing count of the decades.  He would ask her how the people in his reality could get up every day and go on living in such a dry, violent and mean world.  She would tell him that he was becoming an old man before his time and speak of blank tickets with unwritten futures.  And when he’d wake up in the middle of the night, he’d sometimes turn on a light or light a lamp and go back to reading something he was in the middle of – a world where the slate had been wiped clean and the characters trudged through the impossible to reach for an unwritten future.  People everyday were capable of creating the worst nightmares – but also the most beautiful dreams.  He was grateful for the authors of these tales.     Even if he was just reading of characters in some dumb story trying to fight off zombies…  If they could survive that, he could survive another day of roaming the desert and dodging bullets and the fists of modified cyborg train-people.

[lost-technology]

The Skull

Tri-Tober Fanfic shorts Prompt 26: Legato Setting: Trigun Maximum Summary: People wondered where Legato's shoulder-skull came from. They assumed it was a first kill. It was an entirely different kind of trophy. Warning: Deals with Legato's Trimax backstory, this means mentions of non-con and graphic violence.

Prompt 26: Legato The Skull The Gung-Ho Guns had theories about the real human skull that Legato wore on his shoulder.  They were little guesses, things said to shoot the shit when they were taking shots of whiskey in their downtime, waiting for the gods to move.  The Gauntlet had a belief that it had belonged to Legato’s sister.  He swore he heard him mention having had a sister once, although he couldn’t recall when.  The Mine thought that Legato was just pretending to be more badass than he was and had just found the skull amid some of the ancient spacecraft wreckage out in the desert.  Most thought it was a trophy from Legato’s first kill.   They couldn’t have all been more wrong.  Legato treasured that skull, but he had not slain its former owner.  Not at all.  The piece was a holy relic, a gift from an Angel, given to him the day he’d been given a name.  For as much of his childhood as he could remember, he was the Caged Boy, the Toy, the Dog.  His memory blocked how he had gotten to his “hometown.”  He felt a sense of abandonment and loss, but day to day life was the true Hell.  He was fed on scraps – crusts of bread and spoiled meat.  Occasionally, he was bathed and dressed up in fancy clothing to share a dinner of finer things with a high-paying client that demanded it.  He learned what he’d had to do.  Beatings for “messing up” were frequent, as were beatings as part of the appeasement of those that paid his owners to use him, as well as other creative tortures that got them off.  The Caged Boy could have given into despair, but instead he learned from the tortures he suffered.  The fantasies he had of visiting what he had received upon his captors and the indifferent townspeople who knew of the youth who suffered for their dubious paradise were steeled into a resolve.  He wanted nothing whatsoever to do with sex, but the violence would be glorious.  He discovered the Threads and worked with them.  The first experiments were on little animals that entered his filthy confines.  He’d managed to puppeteer a few drunk drifters into town who “went missing” by the time he was done with them and were not missed enough for their remains to be found.  His master plan, however, had ended in failure and the chief of the gang that owned him, the utter pig who’d had his way with him on the regular had it in mind to do it to the death.  As he was about to commence, he fell in neat slices, like thick deli meat, but fresh with pumping blood.  A Thread deflected micron-thin blades that were sweeping in around the boy like the winds of a hurricane.    The entire town was leveled to a sea of blood and the Caged Boy felt a joy he’d never felt before.  The very first thing he did, before he’d noticed the Angel, was to pick up his owner’s head and to marvel at the clean slice through the neck that had left enough oxygenated blood in the brain for the bastard to still live.  The boy happily played with the head, carefully showing the man the sliced chunks of his body, pulling on the ears, poking the eyes, pulling on the hair and jowls and doing anything and everything else he could do to torment the awful creature before the brain finally succumbed.  He was still conscious when the boy picked up a shard of broken glass and started flensing out the skull.  These days, the head was now dead, clean and old.  Its empty eye-sockets would witness the end of its species.   Legato’s skull had been a gift, a blessing bestowed by a superior being. 

[lost-technology]

Wasteland Ways

Tri-Tober Fanfic shorts Prompt 17: Leather Setting: Any / All canons Summary: A bounty hunter shoots Vash's toma out from under him. It cannot be saved, but it can be used.

Prompt 17: Leather Wasteland Ways Vash pitched forward, tail-over-head, as his toma groaned and fell out from under him.  The bastards that were after them had gotten a hit.  What a time to be out of ammo and called on his bluff!  What a time for neither he nor Wolfwood to want the girls involved! What a time for Vash to get SHOT, AGAIN!  Meryl reined her steed back the way they’d come, guiding by leg, both derringers out.  Milly called after her, telling her to come back.  Wolfwood grunted.  He’d been out ahead and he’d promised Needle Noggin that he wouldn’t unleash Hell upon such a small band of pitiful losers who weren’t even worth the trouble, but the moment he’d seen his friend fall and lie still in the sand, all bets were off.  They were easily scared away once they’d actually seen the amount of firepower they were up against, but their boss’ hunting rifle had taken a casualty.  “Vash!”  Meryl cried in relief as she watched the red-clad gunman pick himself out of the sand.  He brushed himself off.  He was fine, free of any fresh holes.  His toma, however, was thrashing.  Wolfwood rode around them as a guard while Milly dismounted her own bird and skidded to her knees in the dirt to help Vash divest the wounded animal of its tack.  Vash held the creature’s head in his lap as he helplessly pawed over the sucking chest wound the poor thing had.  He made sssshing noises and told the bird what a good toma she'd been while shaking and silently weeping.  This wasn’t treatable.  The animal made a high-pitched wheezing sound as it kicked one last time and relaxed into Vash’s lap.  The group watched in silence for a long time as Vash stroked the toma’s feathers.  Milly went to a saddlebag on her own toma as Meryl held it and withdrew a long hunting knife.  “Hey, big girl, what are ya doin’?” Wolfwood spat out.  “What we do on the farm when we lose an animal,” Milly said simply.  Her voice was unusually subdued.  She knelt beside Vash and put a hand to his shoulder.  “I’m sorry, Mr. Vash,” she said.  “But we can’t just leave her here.  The worms will come and… we’re running low on food…and…and…” she choked out, “And your boots need repairing, and Mr. Priest’s shoes and all our belts.  Mr. Vash… my family taught me to never let anything go to waste.  Don’t worry, I’ll deal with it.  You can go sit by Meryl and look away.”  Vash looked at her thunderstuck for a moment before saying; “No… I’ll help.  She was my bird, I should help take care of it.”    Vash tapped the heel of one of his boots sharply upon the ground and two halves of a knife formed in the toe.  He tapped it again and ejected the knife. Meryl and Wolfwood did not know what to make of it – the two most gentle, peace-loving and blood-averse members of their little group doing a quick field-dressing of a toma.  That night around the campfire, what meat could be salvaged was smoked into a rock-hard jerky while their big farm-raised girl and their ancient-eyed, weary wasteland wanderer who wore an air of having had to do things like this in the past scraped out a toma-hide to be made into leather for repair-purposes or trade.    It was meticulous, grisly work to clean off a toma-skin and both of them were crying the whole time.