You are standing by a tree
There are 3 paths.
One appears to go to a jungle,
one appears to go to a cave,
one appears to go to a beach,
you could try and climb the tree,
there is a nearby shop you could go in,
or you could do something else.
So what's its going to be?
Written by catprog on 01 April 2003
You sit under the tree
You sit under the tree.
Suddenly...
Written by catprog on 21 May 2003
See? Keep moving or you get tranked. That's how the game is played.
Your relaxing moment under the tree is rudely interrupted by an abrupt transformation. You are hit by a tranquilizer dart, which turns you into a person with a tranquilizer dart stuck in their neck. It's an easy change. Of course, your train of thought gets about as far as "Oh good heavens, a dart of some kind. I'd betteeerrgmphqq," at which point the dart takes effect, and you slump under the tree like a drugged-up rag doll. A half-hearted twitch is all the moving you do for quite some time. Eventually, you wake up. When you do, you are...
Written by Zodiac on 27 January 2007
In a dungeon
You feel yourself plucked from your story - plotlines tugging then tearing- as a narrator’s fist uproots you, planting your wet soul in another’s timeline. You have history here- and then, gone…
You wake in pain. You are not screaming, because it is not the type of pain which will drive you to scream; it is the type of pain that makes you like an animal, nosing at the hurts and coiling in a foetal bundle to wait out the long night.
At your wrists and ankles, you feel a winter’s bite of silver gouging into soft flesh. You open your eyes just enough to confirm that you are being hanged by your hands and your feet against a dark brick wall, and that the shackles are dull silver, changer’s bane. Your world is a few square feet of dark, bounded by walls on three sides- you can smell the slick rot that coats them with your stinging-raw nose- and an illusion of space on the fourth. There will be bars. This is a dungeon.
Your body screeches at you- your skin sits wrong, too tight here, too loose there. A tight, hairless tail, like a newborn cub’s, hangs down between your legs. The silver has frozen you whilst changing. Into what, you no longer know.
The silver has robbed you of that. For the last and greatest pain of all is the pain nestled heavy in the stretched bone of your forehead, where bright ice fire traces a symbol inverted against the soft tissue below: all you know is kaum, the crested symbol of the abomination. You cannot even recall your name.
What will you do?
Written by ouroboros666 on 12 July 2016
Stay patient- bide your time
You wait in silence, counting out the minutes in a long and fleeing stream of consciousness. Every so often, you rotate your wrists just a little, enough to stop the silver burning through to the bone. But you are acting entirely on motor memory. You see no reason to fight it. Maybe everyone is born in the dark knowing how to count the minutes.
What are you waiting for?
Nothing. Waiting is a way to give yourself purpose. To forget to panic.
But you don’t know that. The voice that said those words was not your own voice. And you think you have forgotten too much.
You are about to let the silver tear into both wrists when you hear the noises, far away but moving closer. Then torchlight blooms yellow on the blank wall a few paces beyond your bars, and you hear voices, speaking some language you know:
“Filthy Witcher scum.”
“Not in front of the ladies, Teddy. All sweet asleep in their chains, they are. Dreaming silver dreams.”
“I tell you, it’s not right-“
You see three people walking slow into view of your cell- two of them heavyset guards, one a little smaller and paler, half-dragging, half-carrying the third. Your slitted eyes wince back. Red. As if she has been painted all over- red for newly dead- and is now being dragged down to hell. Muscle glistens in strips across the cheekbones of an unidentifiable face. Your eyes meet, her blue ones shining from the bath of red and yours- you wouldn’t know the colour of your eyes.
In a movement so fast you hardly follow it, she jams her fingers into the eye sockets of the left-hand guard and throws herself on your bars.
“I knew… I knew you were…”
You spit words past your half-grown muzzle, needing to know.
“Who?”
Loops of black fluid shoot suddenly over her peeled knuckles, spread wide like the broad blade of a razor, and punch through the throat of the guard who lunged at her. The other, the one she hurt, huddles on the floor.
“Revenge our lost duke! Revenge Antonius and your fellow Witchers! Live… Find the Monkshood… Revenge us both…”
She is staring past you, unseeing. The black fluid spools into the air from every abused scrap of her flesh, and worms between the bars of your cage, decaying them to black-rusted stumps. It mists into dark steam as it hits silver, but she shudders and pours out more, screaming and screaming as you find yourself freed.
Her blue eyes roll upwards, and she crumbles to dust.
Act quickly.
Written by ouroboros666 on 13 July 2016
