What If? Writing prompts for famous Authors

Urabrask Revealed

Let them go.
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Five well-known authors are presented with a writing prompt they feel strongly compelled to write out. These authors are J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Mary Shelley, H.P. Lovecraft, and Frank Kafka.

The writing prompt is "a cadet participates as a captain in the Kobayashi Maru Scenario". The authors are aware of context and backstory, namely the Kobayashi Maru scenario being a stress test to see what potential captains would do when faced with a no win situation.

What would each writer put to paper?
 
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Erwin_Pommel

Well-known member
I feel like Lovecraft will have a guy breaking down and losing his shit at how impossible it seems to get a positive answer, Tolkien I feel like will do something similar to canon or he'll just accept defeat and focus on the post-test mind on the guy as a sort of callback to his WW1 days.
 

Laskar

Would you kindly?
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I feel like Lovecraft will have a guy breaking down and losing his shit at how impossible it seems to get a positive answer, Tolkien I feel like will do something similar to canon or he'll just accept defeat and focus on the post-test mind on the guy as a sort of callback to his WW1 days.
Spot on.
I haven't read any of the other author's works, so the following is based on a pop-culture osmosis understanding of their work and a quick wiki-walk.

Kirkaesque:
James K. is a officer training for the bureaucratic and opaque Starfleet, and one day he is ordered to report for a medical exam. As he attempts to locate the infirmary on the campus, James is informed that the order is in error, and he is supposed to report to the Koyubashi Maru test. There, he is presented with the choice of charging into the Neutral Zone and starting a war, or leaving a cruise liner full of civilians to die.

He chooses to save the civilians. Moments after he makes his choice, something shorts out and the simulation breaks down. The holodeck running the simulation can't be fixed, so more cadets are brought in to simulate the civilians and the Starfleet Academy's commandant plays the role of the Klingon antagonist, ordering James K to fix his uniform before boastfully declaring war on the Federation.

After the simulation is over, James K. is arrested for high crimes, but he is not told what he is being charged with or who ordered him to be arrested. He is assigned a sickly, bedridden Judge Advocate General, who guesses that James is under arrest for callously letting civilians die in the Koyubashi Maru. When James corrects him, the JAG guesses that James is going to be court-martialed and jailed for being willing to start a war with the Klingon Empire over a bunch of nobodies.

James reluctantly thanks the JAG for his advice, has a quickie with the JAG's hot nurse and then wanders through the Academy campus in search of someone who can tell him what the Hell is going on. A fellow cadet guesses that James K. is suspected of sabotaging the holodeck to abort the Koyubashi Maru simulation. An instructor muses that James K. is under arrest because his uniform was not in order, and the Commandant takes the uniform code very seriously. An Academy administrator of some obscure stripe suggests that James must surely be under arrest because he did not show up for his physical. When James protests that there had been a mistake, the administrator flatly states that the Academy does not make mistakes, and the paperwork is never wrong. This is in spite of the fact that James just saw the administrator returning documents that had not been correctly filled out.

Then the JAG's paralegal (Who is hot, and who he has sex with) informs him that there was a thick stack of forms that James was supposed to sign before he took the Koyubashi Maru Test, and if he fills them out now, the charges might be dropped. At the bottom of the stack is a non-disclosure agreement that prohibits James from talking about the Koyubashi Maru Test with his fellow students. For breaking this clause that he had never signed, James K. is taken to the Academy's detention facility and summarily executed.

Franz Kafka is some depressing shit, yo.
 
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Husky_Khan

The Dog Whistler... I mean Whisperer.
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Not sure, how he would write this Star Trek prompt, but I have some idea how he would do other prompts set in say Dark Souls or something

Honestly having Kirk cheat his way through the Test seems like a pretty Robert Howard way of solving the issue. I doubt he'd have his protagonist opposed to the novelty of a no-win scenario but after failing it twice, cheating to win sounds like a way he'd develop his characters original thinking and INDIVIDUALISM and contrarianism. Whether he wants Starfleet to be a deuteragonist or not would show whether he's praised for his original thinking (as in TOS) or condemned for it (as in NuTrek) but what is known is that Howard would heartily approve of Kirk banging an exotic green skinned Orion maiden to gain intelligence on said test so he can properly hack it. ;)
 

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