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
In the shop
There is a table with a sign saying
<strong>Free Sample:</strong>
Take one
On the table there is a fridge with a range of liquids. Also on the table are various magical trinkets including costumes. What would you like to take, or would you like to buy something?
Written by catprog on 10 April 2003
Other
You decide to get something else. But what?
Written by catprog on 13 December 2005
Play the VR Game
You find a pair of vr googles.
You put them on and you find yourself in a game, but which one?
Written by on 06 August 2005
Adventure Game
For a moment, you sit staring at the computer screen. The game loaded so quickly, that now you’re waiting in of an opening screen. The pixels quickly formulate themselves into the backdrop of an open field on all sides of you. The faintest motion of wind rustling the thick landscape of grasses ripples across your vision, but even as the distant landscape formats with the loading page, nothing but the field is there. You shift your head, turning your gaze within the virtual reality of the game to check to your sides, but find only more of the same rippling landscape there as well. The same, golden shade of grass sprouted up from the Earth on all four sides of your body.
Eyebrows knitting together, you try to figure out what is supposed to be happening. “There’s nothing here” you mutter, considering trying to remove the goggles you’d placed on until you notice a selection screen. “Choose your character” flashed as fading white letters in the distant backdrop of blue sky. You read it, though you’re not sure what character to select or even how to do that.
You eyes scanned over everything again, noticing that a sign had been added to the game off to the left, font sketched into its surface: “Random.”
Written by Picklessauce69 on 08 December 2015
Random
Stepping forward with a shrug, you approach that sign, deciding to make the choice of making no choice. As soon as your foot completes that single step forward in the direction of the sign, the entire game starts to re-pixel and shift around you.
“W-wait, I wonder what the options were? I didn’t even look around!” you think, but even as you try to turn towards the opposite direction, the field scene is rapidly disappearing. The blue of a fresh sky is starting to materialized, but it’s darker with gray clouds seeping across the surface of sight. Then, like bricks, the ground falls into place around you. A dark shade of fog seems to be fading into the landscape, bleeding in from the edges while crisped, faded grass droops off from stalks in front of you, mimicking the same field you had been standing in seconds before but now drastically different.
Instantly, your gaze tries to swing around full circle to see what all there is in the new, materializing world in front of you. The grass spreads out from where you stand, rushing towards the edge of the landscape in the same dulled shades of dead, lifeless plants until at the very edges to your right something new formulates. Stiff, needle-less pine trees edge the circle of the field. You squint, zooming the camera there to where the field melds into the edge of woods. Taking a few, short and tentative steps forward, you examined the line closer to see that the trees were not only bare, but blacked up their entire height. The arms that remained on the dark trunks were cut short, stubby and looked fragmented. The edge of the forest, without the proper filling of trees, looked sparse and naked. Through the space of the trees in the front row, you could see deeper into where the grass ended and a coarse, sandy texture coated the ground.
“What is that?” You wondered, squinting before suddenly it clicked. The black coating on the trees, dead limbs, drooping and crusted grasses; everything was just dead, it’d been burned.
“There’s been a forest fire?” you thought, suddenly feeling an urge to glance over both shoulders to check for any lingering damage. Though, suddenly, when your gaze returned to the tree line, time began to speed up. Before your eyes, you started to feel a tight whoosh as everything fast forwarded. In the vague distance, you could see the rising motion of trees growing, but the patch of forest here remained dead, too dead to flourish again. Instead, you watched a year go by with the barren black forms remaining steady and imposing over the Earth. The sharpness of the black and the ash fade into the landscape though, turning burnt into merely dead as age wore away at the wound.
“What’s happening!?” you thought to yourself, trying to look for any game options. The idea that time was escaping so quickly sent an uneasy tension down your entire frame. You just knew something wasn’t right, but no matter where you looked as everything rushed by, no options presented themselves.
“I’ll just take the goggles off!” you thought, but when you moved your ‘arms’ all that moved were your arms in the game as though real life was just a strange memory... or was it?
Looking at your arms, you suddenly realize the shifting of the time all around you has not left you alone. There’s a strange blur in the formatting of your skin. Everything looked jagged and unsettled as though the pixels aren’t put together, there’s spaces or gaps in the design of your figure.
Then, as you watched agape, your skin began to flake away. The familiar, pale tones of your flesh just dropped from view, in pieces while a dark, hardened brown began to fill in behind. Curved, overlapping pieces began to fill in the gaps on your arm’s shape. Perplexion knit your brows together as both eyes locked onto this transformation as one by one scales began to form on the outer curve of your arm. Then, thick and speckled flesh began to harden over the thin, plush texture of human skin. A reptile-like, hardened shell began to encase your skin, replacing it with an armor sort of finish up the entire length of your arm while the scales continued to work, overlapping step by step.
“A-am I going into battle?” Your eyes searched for some sign of combat, expecting the game to prepare you before something severe occurred. “Maybe it’s just equipping me-”
Your thoughts died when your fingers suddenly began to feel the same hardened, the knuckles seeming to break off the tips of each finger while the nails thickened and curved into black, arched points on the end of each shortened finger.
Claws.
“What is happening?!” you thought to yourself, madly trying to search the landscape for a clue, but no assistance is coming from the blank, dead space while the scales continue up onto your shoulder, forming massive, jutting spikes of the thick texture. The trees at the edge of the forest offer no assistance with their blank, black bark staring back at you- staring up at you.
“Wait-” You look down to see your perspective is rising. Your legs contorted backwards, dropping you over into a four-legged stance while your entire body feels the prickling of the scales dropping into place and seeming to meld into the skin there, thickening and adding to what you already have. At the same time, everything grew. Your eyes were suddenly swimming above tree level while your four legs splayed beneath you, slipping on the cold landscape with this new stance.
Your head still spun with confusion and frustration while a flurry of sensations swarmed your entire body. A sudden, yawning sensation hits your jaw, forcing it to part open wide before it hits your that your entire jaw is stretching until you see a snout jutting out between your eyes. You blink madly, confusion rapidly multiplying while you scuttle on the Earth with claws scraping down into the cold ground. Then, spotting a glossy, half-frozen puddle to your back you spin crazily. Then, angling your face down, you try to capture a glimpse of what’s happening to you.
What looks back at you stops your breath. Gone is your feature-less human form. Gone is the simple, bland stance of your two-legged, two-armed short haired character. Instead, thick slates of armored skin travel up your center between two massive, powerful legs covered in layered, small scales that drop down to the massive claws that you felt crunching into the Earth. Drooping, thick fur tufts out beneath the plates of natural armor down your chest. Massive spikes adourn each shoulder, dark gray against the backdrop of brown that is the rest of your form in varying hues. Then, your face is a lean muzzle of smoothed flesh. An array of scaled texture surrounds each eye, branching off into short antlers before massive horns curve out from around the sprouting appendages. Behind you, down your back, you can briefly can the tufts of similar dark fur and scales down your entire frame before a spiked tail waved behind with a single tuft of flicking, brown fur at the end.
“W-what?!”
“What am I?”
Dragon.
Written by Picklesauce69 on 10 December 2015
Villagers
You tilt your head, watching the long neck in your reflection tip. Your eyes narrowed, showing red around their pupils. “How is this-” Your thoughts were cut off with a sudden rush of noise from the woods. A rattling of overlapping screaming bursts out from the brush.
“Where is she?”
“We have to kill her!”
“No more burning our land!”
“We starved before of It!”
“Kill! Kill!”
“Never again will terror reign!”
“Where is the fucking beast!?”
“Over here! Look!”
The clatter of rapidly approaching feet exploded out from the treeline. The dull snap of dead twigs breaking echoed out along with their shouting until the first villager appeared, visibly, at the forest’s edge. He hefted up a flaming torch above his head with a spear in the other, the sharpened tip glinting once. “Here she is!”
Then, around the first man filled in the followers. More torches flicker bright blotches of red against the fading pale gray of the sky, especially when cast down into the shadows of the standing trunks. Spears glint among pitchforks and assorted ‘weapons.’
“Shoot her down!”
“No more fires!”
“She burned down our homes!”
“Kill her!”
“Kill the baby!”
“Kill her child like she did ours!”
“Her? Her? Who is she?” you thought to yourself, frantically shifting away from this crowd until your foot bumped into something on the ground. Gaze dropping, your eyes land onto the smooth, faintly speckled surface of a massive egg. Its shell is a creamy shade of tan, speckled through with green and blue overtop. The villagers are continuing to scream, shouting constantly at your while your head spins with their noise.
Their footsteps rushed closer. The sharp spike of the spears tapped into your side, jabbing and bouncing back from the layered scales. Then, a sudden blast of white rushed through the air before ice smashed into your side. Splinters of frozen debris sprayed backwards from your flesh as the energy of the blast rippled painfully through your frame.
“W-what the-?”
Another, sudden explosion of paint burst through your opposite side before you could react to the first. A sharp, spreading sting shot through the entire length of your torso as though you shoved your tail into an electrical socket. You thrashed your entire frame, throwing yourself away from the direct blows while your head ducked down to see that one of the townspeople, hidden towards the back, had their hands raised up as sparks of blue and yellow danced at the fingertips like a miniature version of the Northern Lights brewing before BAM! Another balled blast of energy smashed into your side, but this time you watched it fly over the expanse of field from where it launched off that person’s palm.
“Magic!? This land must have magic?” you thought to yourself, quickly trying to figure out how to escape from this approaching crowd. Your side is pulsating where the bast have hit you. The shouting filled your entire brain with the echoing shouts: “Kill her! Smash the egg! No more fire! Kill the dragon! Kill! Kill! Kill!”
Distantly, someone in the back of the crowd coughed and spat out a hollering call, “If only we had a dragon born!”
To which the crowd responded, “Shut up, Carl!” with such a deep strain of anger their voices ebbed through the mass as if they were one.
“How am I supposed to get away?” you think frantically, looking down to where the egg is nestled atop a thin layer of the sparse, pokey grass within a shaped nest of rocks to hold it upright and safe. Your eyes tracked down its curve, imagining something curled within its walls.
“Without the egg... I could just run...” You glanced back to where the far edge of the field meld into more woods. “In there, the wouldn’t be able to run after me well. It’d at least slow them down...”
Another blast, ice crackled out from your skin. A bite of the cold attack chilled down through your body.
“But, can you leave a living thing? Your child to die?”
Something inside of you in clenching, hiding, burbling with distress at the mere thought of leaving the egg alone and helpless. The villagers are still shouting, crawling up the sides of the stony nest. Their spears are thrusting through the cracks, trying to strike at the shell.
“What would the do to it?”
Kill her! Smash the egg! Avenge our children! Kill hers!
Their calls echo through your mind. Vicious images of the egg smashed, a frail form spilling into the grass beneath the tips of the spears. The grass, crunched and flattened and smeared with blood and shards of broken egg...
Could you leave the egg to escape more easily?
Written by Picklesauce69 on 12 December 2015
I can't leave it! There must be another way!
“No way! I can’t abandon a helpless, growing being!” You stamped one foot, with determination, down into the shards of the rocky nest. A chunk broke away and dropped into the crowd of attempted climbers who stumbled back, shouting with confusion and anger.
“But how to escape?” You racked your mind, scanning the edges of your vision. Desperately, you hope for a new clue to materialize. You entire body shudders with growing distress, pain ebbs down your form, your wings twitched and flexed with shock-
“Wings!” With a burst realization, your body reacted by thrusting the wings out from their folded position so they entirely unfurled, sending loose, dead grass flipping away in a gush of wind. Grappling with careful talons, you clutch the egg within a tight hold and lift, pumping the strange, new appendages to lift and fly.
The villagers fell away, stumbling beneath the gusts and current of the wind. The magic energy is still blasting behind them, shooting into the wings. You tremble in the clouds, but hold steady until you’ve breached the edges of the town. Then, you flew onwards until the forest is all that blanketed beneath you and the crags of a mountain top attract with the similarity they had to the first nest.
Settling, exhausted into a new perch, you settled the egg into a notch gently before curling awkwardly around it with one leg dangling off the cliff. Just as sleep pulls down your massive eyelids, you can’t help but think, “How will I change back?”
As sleep takes over, you remember the town’s wizard- his blasting shots of magic. “Perhaps, magic is the way...”
Written by Picklesauce69 on 14 December 2015
Search
When the sun rises the next day, sending orange melting overtop of the peak where you’re resting, you began the search for a wizard. Leaving the egg nestled safe within these utmost slices of the mountain top, you dove downwards through the air with the rush of the biting, fall air around your snout and rippling down over the armored form of your flesh.
Hidden into the base of the mountain, you find a bustling town. There, you hid within an edge of the mountain with one eye peeked out from around the rough edges as clumps of men marched out from the mountain’s side, hauling wagons of stone and minerals back towards the center of town.
“A working town? Having a wizard? Not likely...” You shift towards the east, heading away from the quiet town in search of something more... magical. The day bleeds away from you rapidly until the sun is sinking down in the opposite perspective from where it rose that morning. Quickly, that day led into another and another and weeks had passed.
Each town that appeared hopeful, at the first sighting of a dragon, launched full scale attacks. Those with wizards possessed serious threats to your safety, no matter how small the town. The magic attacks that followed you, fleeing into the air left pockmarks in your thick armored skin. Days would have to be spent, curled and tucked away, to let the injuries heal before flying over the next down to repeat everything again.
As the egg grew, so did its weight in massive proportions. Carrying the egg from place to place became nearly impossible, exhausting to the point of taking days merely for traveling across the surface of the expansive, nordic landscape.
Winter began to blanket everything around. White, powdery snow spilled down from every mountain top. Your search is never-ending, constant and so are the attacks.
Finally, you slip up. You flee too eagerly from a town situated at the base of a mountain. A single, beggar child spotted you disappear into the cave where your egg waited, safe. He sold the secret of your safety for a night in an inn and a roll of bread. The next morning, the sun bled onto the sky as both your eyes opened to find a militia spilling from the mountain’s edge into your home. Swords glinted while the swirling build-up of magic began to spark of not one, but two wizard’s fingertips tucked back behind armored men.
Your tail curled around the egg, instinct driving your body to shield the young, but there’s no escape route. The first energy blast hits your throat, the second, of ice smashed into the flesh weave of a wing.
“Charge!” A pot-bellied man bellowed, lunging forward with a broadsword flying in front of his steps. You tensed, flicking him away with a tail so that he skittered across the cave’s floor into the men, who all swarmed around to keep him for flying from the edge.
“It’d be so easy to send them flying...” you realize, a tinge of fright and guilt burbling within your gut at the thought. “Why were they so stupid to climb up here?”
A sudden, building chanting catches your attention as you turn your gaze to see the wizards holding hands. A sparkling seductive energy built between them, rapidly sending a hum into the air.
“What are they doing?” you thought frantically, unsure what difference it made that two wizards were here now, cooperating.
“Can they do something special alone?” you think moments before your limbs start to feel heavy. You picture heavy weights tied to every joint, hauling them down to the floor of the cave. You try to rise up, finding the motion itself excessively hard. The chanting tickled your ear.
“The spell! They’re casting some sort of trap!”
“If I don’t kill these men, those wizards, they could kill me!”
“Should I kill these people? Burning them would be... easy enough, but I’d have to act now before this spell reaches my jaws!”
Written by Picklesauce69 on 19 December 2015
Attack the lot
“They came here! They challenged ME! I did NOTHING! I’m just trying to find help!” You bellowed out, hearing your voice escape like a groan before something sparked at the back of your throat. A sudden, explosive sensation burst from your mouth as flames poured out from between your teeth. The fire sent a cry through the group, sending several leaping off from the edge of the mountain while others merely flinched in fright- including the wizards. Then, your tail swept out and sent them tumbling down from your cave. In a package, the men tripped down from the edge, landing one by one with hard, dull splats at the base where their entire town waited, women and children witnessing as the husbands each landed broken and splattered in front of them.
The news of the gruesome scene seemed to ripple through the land. Finally, for the first time, the instant fear of a dragon entering someone’s town turned to true terror. Fear led men to gather in packs and attack, but terror? Terror meant towns boarded their windows or fled at the sight of a dragon miles away. No longer were attacks around every corner, but dead, empty towns instead.
Without the constant threat, a massive and suitable cave was finally located in the far corner where the snow fell the heaviest and the fewest people where there though, conveniently, wizards also frequented the dead land to practice their most explosive and dangerous spells, meaning that one by one, you began to search for one who didn’t flee at the sight of a dragon.
Finally, you heard word through the whispers grapevine of the country that a powerful wizard has emerged, claiming he can ‘understand’ dragons. You summon for him, etching out a scroll with a claw dipped in ash, but within the moon he’s set to arrive, the egg suddenly crackled. A massive gash jolted down its center as the tiny sight of a claw jutted out from inside.
Slowly, the egg’s wall- the so familiar creamy shade of blue and green speckles that you’ve carried through so many battles, that you’ve heaved up into your talons, that you’ve slept nestled around each night in cave after cave- those walls crumbled away into a puddle of shards on the floor before the tiny being inside began to claw its way out.
“What will happen to it if I’m a human?” you realize, sighting the wizard’s telltale twinkle in the air as teleportation begins to materialize. “Should I stay like this? To care for it? Or can it survive on its own?”
Written by Picklesauce69 on 21 December 2015
I can't Stay
“I can’t stay. I’ve been working all this time to change back...” You sigh, feeling a sudden weight of uncertainty spread over you at the decision, but the wizard appeared.
Garbled and strange, the wizard does have the basics of your unique speech copied. Laboriously, you tell your tale to him while behind, the egg continues to shred its walls down onto the rock floor. Just as you fell the spell settled over you, a head bursted forth from the yawning wreckage with two, massive eyes just watching as your scales drop away.
Captivated, shining black eyes watch the entire transformation as your tail seemed to meld into nothing. Your legs shrank at the same time as every scale dropped off like a clipped tail and puddled around you. Your skin felt tender and naked beneath, but your fingers slowly came into focus once again, simple nude sticks without the armor and claws of your talons. At last, when you stand on two legs, robed in the wizard’s courteous giveaway, you turn to see the human-sized ‘baby’ entirely removed from the egg with its massive eyes- the size of your fists- staring right at you.
Fear jumped into your chest. Uncertainty clawed at your throat. “What’s it going to do?” you think, a jolt starting your heart into a rapid pace until the child’s mouth yawned open wide.
“Oh god! Oh go-” A wet, sloppy tongue lapped up the entire length of your face before the miniature dragon started to pant and growl at you, tail lashing playfully behind it.
“You remember me?”
It can’t speak, but the yipping growls reveal that human or dragon, your bond with the being inside the egg wasn’t rupture with the change. That night, for the first time, you find yourself That night, for the first time, you find yourself the one inside the curled embrace of a tail. The next few days, that tail got thicker and thicker until the ‘egg’ had become a massive beast of a dragon, who looked to you like a child, full of love and respect.
And so, a dragon rider came to the snowy nation. With the inbetween of yourself as someone who could communicate with both human and dragon and gained the trust of both, a reverence fell to the pair, especially yourself, the one who raised a dragon.
Written by Picklesauce69 on 25 December 2015
The end (for now)