adventure

Fortune Underfoot: Part Two

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(reading time: 1 hour, 14 minutes)

Jones

After roaming haphazardly for an hour, Jones directed Maggie towards the area where they had found the food store; he still wondered about that glint of robot skin. With no home and no job, the small mystery turned his curiosity into a ravenous school of piranha. It was a ridiculous riddle to waste time on, as if someone died in the middle of a joke and left him no punch line. It was better to investigate that though than pick up where he left off before settling in Brightside. Continue reading →

Fortune Underfoot: Part One

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

(blurb)

Behold the United States after an economic apocalypse; inflation has run wild.  Life is nearly choked out by mountains of coins and dollars in the breeze.  Crazed robots, rogues with coin-shooting guns, and many other strange things roam.  One man,  a rare surviving specimen of optimism, journeys across the wasteland of wealth in search of a place good enough to be his home.

fortuneunderfoot

(reading time: 1 hour, 13 minutes) (reading time for entire novel: 7 hours, 20 minutes)

An average of thirty six thousand dollars was crushed under his feet with each step. Technically they weren’t feet, just metal imitations which carried him across wastelands of currency with a speed no real feet could. The patented feet were attached to large square pads that acted like snowshoes, preventing their owner from sinking into stacks of money or getting caught in credit card landslides. His imitation heart ran at full capacity, so sincerely that a real heart would be put to shame. Continue reading →

Regular Romp #23: KLS and KWS: Drop Outs

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Regular Romp is an interactive fiction activity over on our Twitch stream where I ask a regular a series of questions before turning their answers and a corruption of their username into a short story.  Stop by twitch.tv/blainearcade if you’d like to participate.

starring

Klskws

(The adolescents and children held in the RVR facility have been there so long that their methods of communication have drifted away from the language practices of the world they were stolen from. At times it can be difficult to catch their meaning, given the preponderance of acronyms in their speech. This record provides helpful notes to clear up the issue.) Continue reading →

Captain Rob Sinks: Part Six

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(reading time: 1 hour, 9 minutes)

The Swap

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Red raw hands, some with spots of black frostbite, rose toward the sky in exultation. The starved men and women of the Greedy Old Mop flooded out of the smelly yellow caverns of the Winchar Straits and into the melt crater Ice Master Shuckr had predicted.

They spread out under the florent and frolicked like rabards in heat, jumping about and slipping onto their tailbones. The crater was massive, nearly a valley unto itself, and had a very round shape. Metallic trees and shrubs dotted the sides, a few even bearing rainfairies. Walls of ice, only occasionally stained with rings of the yellow flammable compounds, curved and rose on all sides. At its center there was a blue lake: a pocket of isolated sea that likely connected to the rest of the Snyre by a few narrow tunnels. Continue reading →

Captain Rob Sinks: Part Two

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(reading time: 1 hour, 38 minutes)

Enough Stock for Soup

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Veer Keystonr could not see much of anything from his place at the bottom of the lifeboat. He could only trade information with the other bodiless members of the Calcitheater Rob had rescued. (Blaine’s Note: Veer is a skull we mentioned earlier, recognizable by the iron crown bonded to his head. He tutored Alast in arithmetic when he first joined the crew. In fleshed life he was a human ledger, and his memory for numbers seems to have only improved since then.)

“It was Qliomatrok! Can you believe it?” one of them muttered. Continue reading →