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
A passphrase comes to mind.
The memory strikes you: the first scalding breath of air to revive a drowning man.
“Men grip a snake’s tail,” you say, still feeling the words stamp over and over your tongue.
“A changer has none,” comes the reply, the past echoing through it in harmony with its own singing. Strange, and welcome. You had thought you might wander through the deserts of your memory all the rest of your days. Take the water where it’s given. “My dear, dear companion, we thought you were lost! Weeks ago… When the usurper, curse her, seized the throne. I have only been searching for your corpse, impaled on another black fauchard along the traitor’s mile to give its sweet breath to the flies. But none of that! You are here; there is yet hope for us.”
“You say you thought me lost: I could not be more lost. I do not know my name, or yours. They have branded me with silver.”
He comes closer, his eyes widening pupils near as black as your dark, peeling back the layers of murk to see your crucified naked body, and a forehead glinting silver. Kaum, changer beast. You are marked. With the silver in you, you will never again melt your bones like taffy and fold skin into paper cranes, tigers, hares. You are left in this soft, crumpled shape, unborn for the rest of your days. And who, who are you?
The man’s mouth is working as he searches about your eyes- eyes of unknown colour, face of unknown shape.
“You are Sphinx,” he says. “Sphinx, leader of the Royal Cabal. My leader- I am Lammergeier, the vulture of the high rock.” You see the effort working away at the corners of his mouth as he tells you what you ought to know- realising no authority will guide him to the havens of the past- and you are not quite too lost in the sounds of your own name to remark on it. But Sphinx- you remember her. The monster-woman. So sure in her might.
“How long can you stay?” you ask. “Do you have the key?” It is unbearable that he might leave you here with no light- in the forgetting dark, where the silver might rob you even of ‘Sphinx’.
“I was… Not well known,” he says. “A spy, an informant in the enemy camp. You have seen me before, but briefly. I had thought I was the only one to survive, when Jormaga took her brother’s crown. I stayed where I was, deep in the Black Duchess’s personal guard. But I took a post in the dungeons when they took the palace, searching for any remnant of the Cabal, my siblings in blood. I have the key. I can get us both out.”
“Then quickly,” you say, not letting hope infect you, not yet. “Use the belt knife. Take the accursed seal out of me.”
He pulls the short blade from its sheath, hesitating over your forehead.
“That was an order, man!” you bark. The tone of command is familiar- like swallowing a ribbed worm, letting it distort your throat to its own patterns, hearing it speak with your voice.
He does it. It is a sweet pain, as he works the knife under the silver-alloy bone pins and pries out the pure silver plating, skimming the skin first to let him see the metal. He is careful never to touch it with his bare hand. You think he is surprised, perhaps, that the silver does not char away your skin- that all you get is the blisters, white and soft and corrupt, and the agony. The memory does not return with the silver gone- let it be too early to tell.
“How long do you have?” you ask again.
“Until the shift change,” he says. “Soon.”
You order him to release your manacles and he finds a key. It is blessed relief as you fall to the bare rock floor, all the strength out of you, silent only to spare your lieutenant your groans.
What will you do?
Written by ouroboros666 on 23 July 2016
Change your shape.
Becoming the Sphinx is harder than your body recalls it- the muscle remembering, the mind hesitating, and both of you fearing to take up again a shape that was lost. But the change is a song- a high octave of release- as it shudders through you.
Your spine shivers as if brushed without warning, and you feel the soft dimpling of your internal tissues as the tines of your rib cage splay and round out, shaping the deep bellows chest of the lioness. Falling to the floor now, letting come what will, you know the moment when your arms-forelegs buckle in to your flanks and snap-recurve, shoulder blades driving hard through red meat and skin to crest above your ribs. Your hind legs contract, skirting your belly, thickening with sprouting fibrous muscle. The tail of yours- that boneless thing- stiffens, the sane muscle rolling the caudal vertebrae in a tight whipcord cosh, tufting a little with black hairs at the tip- the point to an exclamation of you, you, you. Prairie-yellow hair slides rough from all you pores.
Above the thin flute of your breastbone, your eyes stretch to dark cat’s almonds in your human woman’s face. You, goddess of the sands: the Sphinx. The symbol of the betrayed king’s nation. His herald. His glory.
You have changed.
What now?
Written by ouroboros666 on 27 July 2016
The end (for now)