Beth had only one reality at her disposal until that day. She thought she had many more, and she accessed them through her computer screen. She had enjoyed police procedural realities, sitcom realities, and realities that featured nothing but the creation of food that would only ever have one bite taken from it. Continue reading
fantasy
Chat-your-own-Adventure #1: Raw Man Finds the Time
Author’s Note: This story was written live on stream with the audience bidding tokens (earned while watching) 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.
Raw Man Reverse Siren Stone Skipper
The raw man walked out of his cave to scavenge for his morning breakfast. It wouldn’t be too difficult, for, just as it was every morning, the food was strewn about his home in messy clumps. He had heard it land, nasty rain, the night before. He was at the point now where the sound was soothing enough to help him get to sleep. Lots of splats and splurts meant he would eat well the next day. Continue reading
Twitch Stream Story: Precious Stones
A crab boat mostly. That’s what they were. Year in year out, through cold rain and driving cold rain. They brought up the crabs with nets, with chains, with cages, with hooks and bait. The things would scrabble against the metal and wood relentlessly, for the waters they fished were so relentlessly rainy that the crabs thought they were still under water.
It was raining again that day, and each drop had a sharp snowflake inside. Botir was on deck, manning the chains. He was an old man, he’d lost track of just how old, but his hands were still mighty leather. A tentacled horror could try to pull one of their lines and steal their catch, but Botir would yank it up to the deck, harpoon it, and eat out its eyes so it stopped struggling. Continue reading
Twitch Stream Story: A Sketchy History
Their family had lived in Raccoon Dive for more than two hundred years. Wendy wondered how old the name was, given that it made their northeastern mountain town sound like the bottom layer of an especially moist dumpster. She didn’t hate living there, but all the tourists sure hated visiting.
You could see the signs of it everywhere. Only a handful of people in Raccoon Dive even littered, so if you saw a candy wrapper, chances were you could guess the first, middle, and last name of the culprit. They had so few local sports teams to compete against that they won half their games based on absences and forfeits. Wendy was in tenth grade, so the place where she saw the most signs of their insularity was her school’s library. Continue reading
Twitch Stream Story: A Leak in the Crystal
Garret had encountered plenty of leaks in his life. He was barely out of his twenties, but the leaks were everywhere. Once, in school, some of the data over his grades had simply ‘leaked’ out of the computer system. He’d had to repeat a class over the error.
There was a camping trip when he was a teenager where he opened the cooler, which was his responsibility, and found the bag’s containing their caught fish and their picked berries had ruptured and mixed all their juices, most of which froze into a hideous slush. Continue reading
Twitch Stream Story: The Healthy Cousin
The electricity surged through his brain, speeding his recall even as it cauterized the loose flapping edges of his soul. The memories revolved around each other, spinning and picking up speed. He remembered losing his mother to cancer. His aunt. His best friend. There had been something in their water from the new factory.
He hated the year 1916. In his neighborhood at least, that was when the factories appeared in full force, like glaciers of garbage suddenly on the horizon. They’d eaten up the work, the sky, and then his family. Continue reading
Twitch Stream Story: Orkh No Move Two Space Back!
The piece was delicately cradled in the soft palm of the young dusk elf. Her name was Nystro, but her name mattered very little at the moment. To her the only name that mattered belonged to the piece. In her hand was a likeness of her species, its wooden legs rounded to look like the bottom of a column. Its face was placid, but she sensed worry from it. Worry over the name.
There were two more new pieces in the grand game hall that day. They were held in different hands. One was firmly held in the greenish grip of an adolescent orkh. Its teeth were expertly painted with mother-of-pearl powder, so it would glisten on the tiles of the miniature battlefield. It was crafted by Ancho, and he was very proud. It would bellow its name in the middle of the game, and draw gasps from every adult around. He would be a revolutionary. Perhaps his people would turn him over the fire that night as punishment, but something had to be done. Continue reading
Twitch Stream Story: Understuffed
Being on call nearly seven days a week was not working out for Miser Hank. Sewhole Hospital was extremely prestigious, and he had hoped for less of a workload upon transferring. His old hospital, Webtoe General, never made it into the medical scrolls. They had him sewing up splitting spell wounds and prescribing vitamins for lizard familiars.
Sewhole dealt only in human patients, magical humans of course, but even without patients literally crawling over his shoes he was still drowning in work. That was why, once he arrived home, a lovely little condensed apartment magically stuffed inside a fur coat pocket in a fashion museum display, all he could do was collapse against the door and groan. Continue reading
Twitch Stream Story: The Manual Descent
It looked exactly as it did on the page. Tyler’s eyes jumped between the book and the creature before him: lithe, faceless, and with countless ribs visible through its tight pale skin. Should he be surprised that it looked so similar? The creature was a mimic after all. That’s what the bestiary entry said.
Mimic
Class three monster
Arcane nature
Rare status
Possible drops: skin cloak, perfect mask +2, and shattering claws Continue reading
Twitch Stream Story: The Girl in the Bottle
His collection for the day included a purple cowrie the size of his pinky nail, the green tip of a crab’s leg (hopefully, wherever it was, it still lived), a forked shark tooth, and a yellow seaweed float that looked exactly like a lemon. Pembo was disappointed. What good was living in the village next to the world’s most bountiful beach if it couldn’t provide him with amazing specimens every single day of the summer?
It was the beach of Illustraya, the beach of the goddess with the fanciest clothes and the loudest giggles. Its color were spectacular, the stuff of legends. Sometimes even the sand wouldn’t settle for being white; huge streaks would dye themselves green, or red, or silver. Weeds from the other side of the world would wash up, murals painted on their Pembo-sized leaves by the striped merfolk. Continue reading
Blaine Arcade 