Ficathon Blues

I've just received my story seeds for the Legend of the Five Rings Ficathon III, and judging from my experience with the last one, it appears that I am truly a sucker for this kind of punishment.

Fortunately, I've got till the end of February to submit a finished work. That means that I'll probably have even more days to goof off before attempting to cram a month's writing into the span of six hours. (Ha, ha. Seriously, though, I've already started on a couple of concepts.)

The bad news is that the others decided to get a lot more creative for this one. My seeds are as follows:

1) A day after a kobune voyage begins, two passengers who have shared intense emotion (good or bad) discover that the other is on board.

2) A monk spends weeks meditating on the nature of Rokugan whilst travelling in the Burning Sands and is dying of hunger and thirst. Does he accept the aid of a strange traveller?

A "kobune", for those who aren't in the know, is the general term for a ship in the Legend of the Five Rings universe. "Rokugan" is the name of the pseudo-medieval Japanese empire that stretches across the peninsula, and the "Burning Sands" is the vast desert that cuts it off from the rest of the world.

There's normally an unspoken prize given to those entrants who manage to meld their two concepts into a single story. Seeing that one of these involves the sea and that the other involves the desert, it's obvious that somebody has it in for me. Unless I decide to come up with a character who has acid flashbacks that place him in both locales, I'm probably going to have to work with only one of these seeds.

I suppose that I decided to dig my own grave when I joined this friendly competition for the second time, so I guess I'll just have to see if it's comfortable when I finally lie in it.