Prompt: A female assassin turns out to be a queen, hired by the royal family that stole the throne from hers.
“We got another letter from her,” Arch-Adviser Grackle said nervously, nearly wiping the sweat from his forehead with the envelope. He spoke in hushed tones, because anything louder might get his name written down inside one of those black letters with the gold writing. Continue reading
Author’s Note: This story is closely based on a nightmare I had, written up the following night and only modified enough to make some amount of sense.
…
At sixty-three it was the oldest thing out there, living or inanimate. The house behind it was only forty-two. Everything older was off in the dark trees, grumbling, bundling up for the whipping wind of the late November night. The device was ready for anything, having weathered plenty of Cayuga winters already. Continue reading
Prompt: A football player is the high school standout. All the teachers love him and he never gets in trouble, but none know his dark secret: membership in the mafia.
The big game was in its final quarter. It wasn’t the final game of the season, and the crowd was only half the size it would be if their team had the same record as last year, but it was the big game for Hans Allred. It was the grand finale of his collusion with the Allred crime family. Continue reading
Author’s Note: This story was written live on stream with the audience voting to determine the path of the story. The underlined phrases in the choice of three were the winning pathways. Stop by twitch.tv/blainearcade if you’d ever like to participate in our interactive fiction.
Burned over an Open Fire Musical Ice Caves Nightmarish Car Trip
The Vaatiqaat clan would not survive the ice age. They would never make it to the footnotes of natural history texts. Their bones would never be found; their clothes and tools would be completely obliterated by the encroaching glaciers near the shore. Even their symbol, stitched upon everything they wore and carved into the hilt of their weapons, the boar walrus, was an animal that would similarly become extinct from both the world and history. Continue reading
Prompt: A young necromancer exists in a world filled with fairy tale tropes. They set out on a quest to prove that dark magic does not make you an evil person.
Nothing would ever convince him that gratitude was not the appropriate response. Yes, Orkey Simth was still very young, just fifteen, but he knew right from wrong. He knew that undoing death was right, and one day the others would be convinced. Hopefully it was this day. He could smell something awfully dead inside the cave. It needed his help. Continue reading
Author’s Note: This was written live on stream, with the tone being determined by the numbers under minesweeper tiles. The audience could bid tokens earned in stream to reveal random tiles. A mine hit results in the death of all characters, unless they are temporarily saved by a lump sum of tokens. If characters make it to the end of the stream, they survive to be seen another day. Join us at twitch.tv/blainearcade if you wish to participate.
1-peace 2-alert 3-escalation 4-action 5-tragedy 6-world-changing
The pips have rolled again. The Minefield now connects the Trap to a new world. Three enter, seeing only a shredded sky in the distance: Egola the half-elf, Giml the half-dwarf, and Errant the detached time traveler. Continue reading
Prompt: What do Atlanteans think our world is like?
Miles below the Pacific ocean, on part of the ninety percent or so of the seabed that had never been sea with human or camera eyes, there stood a city of spires that spewed billowing clouds of boiling black chemicals. Life at the tips of these vents was nearly impossible, but polychaete worms and ghostly crabs and bacterial mats managed. Continue reading
