short stories

Twitch Stream Story: Gooperson

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Prompt: The mad genius woke from his cryo-sleep, groggy, his mind fading from consciousness every few seconds, and emerged from his lair.  He looks out and sees a utopia ripe for the picking.

It wasn’t a very dignified rebirth. Dr. Larry Gooperson spilled out of the cryogenic pod and collapsed onto a flowing floor of living wood. He sputtered and spat, expectorating globs of the blue nutrient fluid that had remained undigested. He held one hand up, before even lifting his face, expecting his robotic assistant to hand him a towel or a steaming beverage. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: Never to be Unearthed

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Prompt: A young female forced-to-be-leader of a great army struggles to come to terms with her fear of power and being the greatest leader ever.

The antique computer banks were their greatest possession. They had no water source, no reliable farming, and no livestock. The only thing their mobile town could do was crunch the numbers for everybody else who couldn’t keep their machines dry. They were the town of Flopheart, they were on the giant worn tires of an age gone, and they were led by a girl barely out of her teens: Rusher Larn. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: One Easy Payment of Everything you have

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Prompt: A young adventurer discovers a cave they’ve never seen before, but it’s not empty; there’s a bed and a working kitchen. Who lives there and why?

Every single inch of her great-aunt’s backyard had been explored by the time July wound down, all except the one gully protected by the belligerent thorn bush that had somehow sewn its thorns, like caltrops, for a hundred feet around it. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: His Stars are Born

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Prompt: A dialogue-free story, rich with memories, of the sufferer of a mysterious ailment of the future while they are in quarantine.

One personal item was all they would allow. Many considered his an odd choice, but they couldn’t talk to him anymore, ask him why he picked something so reminiscent of his condition. All communication had to be done through written messages, and only when absolutely necessary. Continue reading →

Chat-your-own-Adventure #21: Explodactive

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

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.

Thisskelicious                           Explodactive                              Bumpawhumping

Larson forced his bent car door open and stumbled out to examine the damages. The damages to his person were more than mild, as a stream of blood overtook one of his eyes. He leaned against the crinkled hood and rubbed it away before putting one hand over the laceration. Continue reading →

Minesweeper Fiction: Session 8

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

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

A world lies in ruin, its debris drifting on a bottomless sea. Its remaining people, from all places and periods, have one chance of survival. One world will take them, but they must make the journey on their own. Between the two lies the minefield: a vast varied expanse of debris both magical and scientific. Salvation is on the other side.

Three figures emerge from the fog of their sputtering world: Rowlen the interspecies Olympian, Duid, squid and rival of Rowlen, and the Dying Light. They see the minefield before them, knowing little, and walk forward. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: The Falling Fossil

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Prompt: A history book sends its reader 1000 years into the future.

The library was restricted to anyone under the age of eighteen. It wasn’t just books that were kept there, but all sorts of anomalies. They called it a school because there many thins to learn there, but few people outside the facility understood what that really meant. The things you learned there could change you, even making you into a different person altogether. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: The Grave in her Dreams

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Prompt: In a world where every mind inhabits two bodies, one during the day and other during the night, we follow a young girl as she tries to deal with the death of her other self.

She couldn’t see; it was too dark. That was never supposed to happen. Things only ever got dim, only ever got orange or purple as the sun set. The sun always went down but she never saw the moment it vanished. That was the moment of transition. That was the time when she put away her day eyes and broke out her night ones, like peoples of old switching spectacles. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: Venom or Drown

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Prompt: A woman with thalassophobia is trapped in the ocean with a large aquatic animal.

The exact shape of the vehicle, or the specific nature of their foe, she never saw. All Veronica knew was that she’d been captured, along with hundreds if not thousands of other people, by strange machines, and forced into a small box. At the moment her box was suspended upside down in a row of others, hanging out of the open bay of some flying vehicle. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: The High Jumper

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Prompt: A modern day vigilante takes revenge on the system that screwed him over.

Drowning. No, not drowning. Dreaming. This was all just memories. Bubbles belched up from the black bottom of his mind. It wasn’t even the right time to sleep, but he couldn’t control when he did it anymore anyway. His body slept whenever it felt like it, and his mind wandered about drunk and angry. Continue reading →