stories

Twitch Stream Story: The Props Department

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Donut fired his weapon. Well, it wasn’t his weapon. None of this belonged to him, though it certainly felt like it did in the moment. It felt like it was his revolver, his badass vest and cowboy hat, and his actual wiry mustache. It took significant focus to remind himself that he couldn’t even grow a mustache reliably. It was more like trying to grow chia seeds in a sink drain.

Still, he felt masculine. The bullet, garlic-infused, left the gun and struck Strusse in the chest. He was a vampire at the moment, so he was forced to recoil in agony. Steam, rather pleasant-smelling steam, shot from his wound as he tripped over one of the giant noodles and sank into the spaghetti that Donut was also entangled in. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: Dinner Tolls

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Now you probably want to know when I lived, and you probably won’t listen when I tell you that it doesn’t matter at all. I know you’ll think me quaint anyway when I describe my family’s kitchen, which is the most relevant stage in my tale aside from the one other one.

You’ll judge me as soon as I tell you we didn’t have electric ovens or plastic stove tops. I did not even know what plastic was until after the events in question. In all honesty I would happily give that knowledge up for a handful of pleasant memories, seeing as plastic has been no help in the fields of meal-making. Continue reading →

Chat-your-own-Adventure #2: Satan and some Cold Tea

~ 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.

Mr. Rind                                                   Needles                                            Hairy Pit

You were never supposed to go to the house with the teal roof, at least not on Halloween. Every other day of the year it was fine. The little old lady or the little old man would answer the door, or get their mail, or harass their cat into coming back inside, without bothering a soul. The teal roof wasn’t even that menacing, until it was lit in just the wrong way in late October. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: The Frozen Address

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Humanity of all stripes was gathered around the giant monitor. It was an autumn day and they were sheltered from the biting wind as it crumbled leaves against the building’s glass wall. It was the Institute for Colonial Communication: a building that had been mostly without a purpose for close to a hundred years. Every so often workers would come in and update the equipment as technology progressed, and some of those workers, now quite aged, were there to see it take effect.

The colony ship had been launched one hundred and twenty years ago. Things went well on the journey, as well as anyone could hope hurtling through space at varying incomprehensible speeds. Communication was constant if uneven. Everyone knew it would end when they landed on GM1. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: Looks Like Rain!

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

They kept the Ricardos in absolute darkness in preparation for their appearance in the arena. They had to stand there, feet conforming to the neon footprints on the ground, and wait for the wall before them to rise. The whole family had been dragged into it: Mom, Dad, the teenagers Mark and Philippe, and little Selma who was just nine. Philippe was most familiar with this place; he’d seen it before, granted it was only in videos. He was surprised they didn’t snatch up their goldfish as well and put a stupid helmet and knee pads on it.

“Aaaaare we ready folks?” a voice asked through the wall, but it wasn’t asking the Ricardos. A crowd roared its approval, clapping their hands or slapping elongated balloons together. “Who wants to seeeee… some dirty laundry hung out to dry?” They roared again. “Let’s hope there isn’t any raaaaaaiiiiiiiiin!” The noise grew so loud that the Ricardos feared it would tear the wall down on its own. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: The Beetrayal of B’zz B’zozz

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

Bzzz bzzzzz b’zzz’zzzz B’zzzzz’

B’zoooo b’zzzz b’z’z b’ooo

Bzzz bzzzzz b’zzz’zzzz B’zzzzz’

B’zoooo b’zzzz b’z’z b’ooo

Z’booo z’zzzz zzzzz

It waz B’zz’z favorite hymn. It came from the eighteenth hex of the zcroll of wild. There were many zcrollz, written acrozz the hive’z generationz, their wizdom bazed on the honey the dronez brought back. The zcroll of the wild waz written by one Z’Boz Bz’zz: a beautiful bee with fur yellow like corn zilk and brown like the underbelly of a bear. B’zz knew what zhe looked like becauze her portrait waz carved in a hexagonal cell along the back wall of the zanctuary, where mozt of the hive now ztood. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: The Dawn of Fetch

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

The problems for Jetson started around the mid 1900s. He’d taken off like a shot straight out of the year 3500. God bless his owner for having such a hell of an arm. Jetson had bounded flawlessly through the debris of 3000, the socialist secret-less utopia of 2800, and even skipped across the surface of the oil-covered oceans of 2500.

The damn 1900s however, were full of people who had no idea what they were doing. They stumbled between philosophies and religions like they were hemming and hawing at a buffet. It was a century full of explosions both literal and figurative, and either of them could’ve distracted Jetson. The real problem with running through time was not getting distracted by the sad sights. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: Dear Ceri, Please do Tricks

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 3 Comments

There were only six modules left on the Neptune4 space station, currently orbiting Earth’s moon. Mankind hadn’t gotten much further than that, so their interests in space had branched out. There was one station run by genetically modified chimpanzees in order to test the limits of animal astronauts. That station, Bananabunch3, had been such an incredible success, despite one or two acts of ape cannibalism, that they’d branched out even further.

Bananabunch3 had been filled with hydroponic and botanical experiments, providing plenty of natural greenery to keep to keep the apestronauts healthy and sane. Neptune4 housed modified cetaceans, so it was full of perfectly balanced salt water and bobbing colorful toys. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: A Sketchy History

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

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 →