Twitch Stream Stories Redux #2: Cheater Wings

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

These stories were written live on stream based on prompts provided by the viewers. They have been edited, with this second more in-depth edit occurring much later, but not meaningfully rewritten or expanded so as to preserve the spirit of the exercise. Sadly, the prompts themselves were not recorded until many stories in.  Sometimes the prompts were silly challenges, or quirky thoughts, or dark ideas, or utter nonsense.  I did my best each time.

If you enjoy this, please check out the other activities from the stream. If you would like something longer and much more thoroughly planned, simply investigate my more traditional work at the top of the page.

Cheater Wings

prompt provided by Simlover48

The altar to the Earth god Gohees was buried deep in the ashen forest, surrounded by trees that had looked an inch from death for six thousand years. Fineesh’s path to it would normally have been fraught with danger, but she was there in her capacity as the Earth-friend.

And not just the Earth-friend, but the peacekeeper for all the other gods as well. She was water-friend, fire-friend, air-friend, and Earth-friend. She could show no favoritism, only respect. Gone was the age where the arguments of the gods sundered continents. Now they used one human from every generation as their friend.  Fineesh, a girl of fourteen, was but the latest. Continue reading →

Mysterious Americana Catalog: ‘Hon’

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

M-A-C (12): ‘Hon’

Category: doohickey

Collection Date: (REDACTED), 1986

Collection Location: (REDACTED), North Carolina

Collection Report: M-A-C (12) has a recorded collection date, but no associated report, despite it being the most well-known of the Catalog’s myriad items. That is due to it being featured on the cover of five consecutive issues, just prior to the discontinuation of all cover images.

Picked up from the entryway of one of our collectors’ facilities, and always stored in such a place to discourage it from fleeing, ‘Hon’, as it is called, is a tawny welcome mat three feet and five inches across. It bears the phrase ‘Come on in Hon!’

When insufficient foot traffic passes over Hon it will move about on its own, seeking affection, a state in which it has been witnessed running, jumping, crawling, and placing itself in laps in an apparent demand to be stroked.

This behavior cannot be recorded, as any attempt to move it by force while under surveillance results in a tide of insects emitted instead (those typically living under welcome mats like millipedes, (REDACTED), and wood lice), despite there being no possible source for them.

Current Collector: ‘Brigadoon’: The MAC private museum, gallery, and war room, senior rank

Notes from Collector: “Hon is the mascot of the Catalog, insofar as there can be one. As such his only home is Brigadoon, the largest collection in existence. Visiting hours are never. Get used to it. You want to meet the mat? Get senior rank, get the scars to match, then give us a call. Don’t forget to lose the phone number.

Current Status: active

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Twitch Stream Stories Redux #1: The Ninth Tentacle

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

These stories were written live on stream based on prompts provided by the viewers. They have been edited, with this second more in-depth edit occurring much later, but not meaningfully rewritten or expanded so as to preserve the spirit of the exercise. Sadly, the prompts themselves were not recorded until many stories in.  Sometimes the prompts were silly challenges, or quirky thoughts, or dark ideas, or utter nonsense.  I did my best each time.

If you enjoy this, please check out the other activities from the stream. If you would like something longer and much more thoroughly planned, simply investigate my more traditional work at the top of the page.

The Ninth Tentacle

prompt provided by DarkLordofSheep

Jeremy’s can hit the water with a splash smaller than he would’ve liked. Its bubbling green contents leaked out into the lake while he leaned over the edge of the kayak to watch the guppies that had scattered on impact.

“You shouldn’t litter,” Stephanie chided him, pulling her pale blonde hair back into a ponytail in case he tried to get the bigger splash he’d sought.

“Who says I’m littering? The can’s in there… but maybe I’ll fish it out. It’s only littering if I leave it there.” The guppies failed to investigate the bobbing can, perhaps scared away by Jeremy’s snaggle-toothed grin.

“How are you going to get all the lightning chug back then?” Ryan asked, referring to the bubbling caffeine concoction leaking out. “I don’t think the fish want it.” He grabbed the paddle and turned the orange kayak just enough to grab the can himself. “This is my aunt’s cabin and I don’t think she wants any hyperactive fish jumping out of the water.” Usually the quietest of the three, Ryan felt emboldened by their position in the middle of the lake. They couldn’t ignore him out there, especially since the trip was his idea in the first place. Jeremy’s only idea was to invite himself. Continue reading →

Heirs of Cain: Venus in Quarantine

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

Severin Molochi is in love with a goddess.  She’s not the kind found in a church, or that you can take with you to church for that matter.  She’s of the old, muddy, animal line of Cain: those who gained power in the world’s first murder.  Just as Severin and his goddess Wanda are settling in their new home, setting up her future dominion, her jealous siblings come calling, but they’re not after her.  They want every gods’ most valuable asset, the mortal chosen as the conduit between them and the people, who in this case happens to share her bed.

Heirs of Cain, a gothic horror fantasy erotic thriller novelette series, continues here.

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 27 minutes)

Heirs of Cain

Venus in Quarantine

After the thirtieth entry or so I realized what was so familiar about the process; it was as if these unsuspecting people were being added to a menu, complete with their prices, and the intention was to serve them all to a solitary but reliable customer who would appear out of the dark and damp at the same time each day without the ring of a doorbell, like a fox fed once and then forever entitled.

And her name was Wanda Blasphemer Pelts. My Wanda. My whole world, to have her tell it and me experience it. She did not permit me what used to be the most basic knowledge of position spatial and chronological, which still prevented a precise understanding of both my location and the year, but I knew that she and I had recorded three months of paradigm-gnawing history together, written in an ink of sweat and a sensual but possession-gnarled hand, our bodies intertwined like two pages stuck together, the words of experience on her, still wet, transferred messily to my blank by rapturous spineless contact. Continue reading →

Update on my Choose-your-own-Adventure

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Greetings all.  This is just a quick update on my one and only gamebook: Through the Bottom of the World: A Choose-your-own-Speed-run.  It’s a novel length romp through a fantasy land, but each path is only about as long as a short story.  Every decision gets you closer to one of many wildly different endings, some complete duds, some mastery of reality itself, and some in nooks and crannies between all that.

This gamebook is heavily infused with the format of video game speed running, with the protagonist usually on a quest to complete her life as quickly as possible (a handy time is provided at chapter’s end).  A fresh edit has just been completed, so I’m reposting the introduction to maybe catch a few new eyes.  The whole gamebook is free to read, same as all my other work.  So forge ahead and pick a path in the lands of Shook and Cain!

Through the Bottom of the World – beginning

Invoke the Bloody Mouth (finale)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 37 minutes)

When the Year is not Kept

And the Clutch of the Sig-neagle Shreds an Old Wrong

Shortly after the Battle of Knowledge Extraction came to a disappointing close, peace settled into the surrounding lands. To many it seemed the situation could grow no more extreme than the Trojan Horse laying siege to the fear-full lion’s city, fangs and claws crossed with metal weapons utterly forbidden elsewhere.

No matter which way it went, there would be no repercussions afterward, for there was one corner of the Wild Trinity on each side of the conflict, once again demonstrating its structural stability. There had been times where Vissovis the Golden Fleece had been involved in minor conflicts along with his siblings, and those had not stressed the grand relationships either. Continue reading →

Invoke the Bloody Mouth (part nine)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 2 hours)

When the Year is not Kept

And the Details are Hammered out with Veteran Hammers and Baboon Nails

She does not arrive without her procession. She does not arrive without her elite foot soldiers. She does not arrive without their support beities. She does not arrive without her support beities’ human slaves.

This brings with her a great many creatures, big and small, and necessitates quite the space for them to make and break camp. When considering Staircase, the front of Staircase since it could not be approached from any other angle, the nearest such space was a bowl in the Earth, into which the flesh-dense vines had grown and blanketed. Now they would serve as natural bedding for the forces of the arriving Assaulquus, the Trojan Horse, the Wild Trinitarian of war. Continue reading →

Invoke the Bloody Mouth (part eight)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 3 minutes)

When the Year is not Kept

And the Rainbow Climbs Color by Color

Finally the marmoset Ellapock came of use to the travelers, after it became apparent that Hygenis’s general knowledge of the layout of the land would not be sufficient to find Staircase. Both humans had pictured a towering city, with Loric imagining all the more aggressively thanks to images from the bottomless book of places with names like Dubai, New York, and Tokyo.

Instead they were met with forests taller than anticipated, and uneven rocky paths that often dropped into pits, which did little to stop the trees from taking root but much to stop their feet from finding comfortable traction. Hygenis’s mental map had kept everything flattened in two dimensions, and she grimly revised their time of arrival by several days once they encountered the hazards, meaning the Babeloons, or the Sig-neagle, or even the Scion, whose fate remained unknown, might catch up with them. Continue reading →

Invoke the Bloody Mouth (part seven)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 45 minutes)

2036 is the kept Year

And the Ducks Expand Immeasurably in Dignity

Yes, they walked into the sky. To parcel their daily trip out more than that, they walked from their frolicking fountain across a red carpet, with many onlookers, and into an elevator that then closed its doors and escorted them gently to their penthouse in the sky where they would disembark and wait to do the whole thing again the following day.

This was the march of the Peabody ducks, as they had marched since the year 1933. It consisted of one male, a drake as they are called, and his five accompanying hens of drabber color. While the feathers upon his crown were a bright, nearly iridescent, green, like the felt on a billiards table spruced up for its first date, he was sometimes not the center of attention. Continue reading →

Invoke the Bloody Mouth (part six)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 19 minutes)

When the Year is not Kept

And the Best Strategy is Blind

Compassleaf was in tumult when its latest visitor arrived on the wing. He’d seen such chaos in a supposedly civilized place before, but only when the lord of the town had decided to disband it in light of his own approaching death. The end result had been a raid of all its shelters by wild beities: a cascade of blood and competing theft that shredded what it stole more often than it didn’t.

Things in the Scion’s city weren’t as bad as all that, but the air was squirming with short tempers and frustration. So many birds came and went with urgent perpendicular paths that they were colliding midair and fighting. Local songbirds suddenly possessed of fierce pride and determination, despite their cargo rarely being anything more consequential than love ballads between blossoming romances, fought claw to claw with much heartier crows. Continue reading →