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
Make a racket. You need to find out your circumstances, and perhaps someone will hear.
You thrash every part of you that will bend and snap, crying out without words and hurling your body back against the wall, using the give of your spine. The pain is nothing to what haloes the silver plate in your forehead.
There are footsteps, just audible beyond the roaring of blood and ice crackle in your ears, and you feel you are reeling them in with your writhing, each new exertion a hook you drive into the soles of those feet and pull tight. The steps stop, a blurred echo to the sound that suggests- yes- they stand just there, in front of your cell, throwing out a loose ball of body-sound that smatters over your unshapen ears. You hear the click of a lighter. Somewhere on the unimaginable other side of the wall- the wall the bars, now visible, trickle away into- a torch has sighed and flared.
A key scrapes then clicks, and a portion of the bars swing inwards, the shadows uncurling and scrabbling away over your not-human face like the feet of rats, running on bodilessly when they are plucked at the ball joint. There is a long moment before two bare feet pass the threshold.
You look at them, look up. A slight body in a loose red tunic lobstered with dark boiled leather plate cupped by steel pauldrons. A lean face, youthful but half-hidden by salt-and-pepper hair, falling in snaky, faintly mottled coils to the blocky metal shoulders.
What now?
Written by ouroboros666 on 19 July 2016
You don
You know this man for your jailer, and a hatred as wild as howling spills through you as you recall some of what was. Yes- you, imprisoned for steering dappled yearling goats and soft-headed sheep from the fringes of their pasture as wolf, sometimes cattle as bear or lioness- burnt from your manse in the high grasses by one-skinned men with silver shackles to seize you as you bellowed and flickered between shapes, searching, searching in the ruins of your thousand-year home.
After that, there is no thought.
“Sir, sir- I am not well-“you say, dredging a scattering of the human tongue from the same place that lets you converse with beings of air and sea- to you, the humans are the only beasts in the world, their civilisation a thong that lashes your back, sometimes the yoke that shackles your tribe.
He comes closer, his coarse human face bored even searching for signs of alien disease.
Your weak tail swings out, the vertebrae cracking together in a sheet of pure kinetics, momentum that flickers across the kneecaps of the manling and brings him down. You snap his neck neatly on the backswing, just as his red human mouth asks “Wha-?”
The tail threads clumsily through his keyring. Those fat fools: a chimera can always find one more limb.
What next?
Written by ouroboros666 on 24 July 2016
The end (for now)