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 recognise him.
The dull strands of his hair part a little as the two of you breathe the same air, revealing the fringes of white puckers, symmetrical across both cheeks. If you were to touch those cheeks and push back the locks that capture them, you know you would see pale craters of scar tissue where some long blade was driven through at right angles to the jaw, each of the central holes patched by a sewn-on cup of leather to enable the king’s- your king’s- executioner to ask for last words, and sometimes- surely- to eat.
The memory hits you like a mailed fist to the throat- a shock too great for pain.
The Dragon’s eyes meet yours- his are inimical acid-spot green, the swollen pupils leaving the colour as only the corona of a fat moon in eclipse.
There is a moment when your heartbeats collide.
Then he speaks, pleasantly- a slight lisp the only sign of the splinters of sound escaping between the stitches on his face. “Sphinx. Spymaster. Shapeshifter. Creature of many wiles. What an easily anticipated surprise you are, friend. I could have had your head, you know. The Usurper thought it might please me, cement my loyalty. Oh, my dear, she doesn’t know me as well as you did when you recruited me!”
“You refused, I take it?”
“No: I have my mouse-poor little reputation to think of. I said I wanted to torture you. She was willing, of course: it saves her a job, and there’re none more familiar with the blood arts than me, everyone knows. We’ll see, hmmm?”
You want to flood questions- fill the hole where your past lies, pull the knowledge of it from those red, red lips- but some half-forgotten self whispers: No weakness with the Dragon. So you ask him about treachery. It’s a safe bet that there was treachery: treachery, backstabbing, and a lying, honey-tongued Dragon who lived through it all, grinning his split-cheeked grin at the Usurper Queen’s side.
“Treachery? Whose? King Vivek’s? Jormaga is crowned queen, so your poor decapitated king-“
You feel the way he rolls the long word up and spits it at you. “You?”
“- is automatically an instrument of high treason. Usurping the throne-“
“It was you?”
“…Yes.”
Those are the last words your hot lips will allow you to shape, before fever sweeps away all the curtains of your mind and you remember what is now lost, and once was not. The Dragon did not step back as he concluded, and you are snapping now at the limits of your pinioned arms, inches from his pulsing throat: it might as well be miles; no doubt he knew the distance when he saw no need to flee.
He is speaking again, quickly, disturbed- a whisper, The Dragon is never disturbed- but the sounds of his mouth tumble into the sounds of his body and twine with the heartbeat you bare your teeth for.
“He would have died in any case, Sphinx: there were a hundred men to do what I refused to do. I needed her trust.” He stops, and the pause leaves the heartbeat alone, a tired thread jerking and relaxing, thin through your cell. You hang from your wrists a minute or more, and he whispers- the tone of it synchronising strangely with the whisper of your past- “I took from him the cleanest of deaths.”
“No death is clean,” you say, tonelessly. “I am glad it was your arm he died with, and your warmth the last he felt.” You do not remember King Vivek, but you remember the feeling that was him, the presence that was him and now is not.
Then the Dragon unlocks your manacles, and you both stand.
What now?
Written by ouroboros666 on 21 July 2016
The end (for now)