Prompt: the story of a boy and his cyborg shark that has robot legs, missile launcher fins, and devastating eye lasers.
It was life’s second chance at the process and possibly its last. Evolution the first time around was wholly organic, a thing of generations and mutations. The second time there was a brain on hand that could actually think things through. Continue reading
Prompt: he was just a kid.
It honestly was a humanitarian effort. It was supposed to help, at the very least, two humans in particular. Him. And me. I was what passes for a fresh adult these days, just starting my thirties and inheriting my parents’ old house while they finished work on their retirement home. I was single, but I had a good job, plenty of space, and I never was much of a dog person. (Something about them not having much color to their iris always creeped me out. If the eyes are the window to the soul then a dog’s are all fogged up.) Continue reading
Prompt: the story of a clipper-class airship called the Dusk Runner.
The great cities of mankind’s first and only steam empire had risen into the sky with brass spears and aluminum windmills. The airships used to see these towers, like a mineral garden sculpted from a dwarf treasure hoard, but they were no longer visible. The city produced its own clouds in vast numbers; they became a second sea obscuring the upper reaches of the entire empire. Continue reading
Prompt: a story with dragons and a ‘broken sky’.
All the warriors among all the birds had made their attempts already, and all had failed. Evidence of their failure was everywhere. Taravien lumbered forward, her legs splayed out to the side rather than directly under her, pushing aside the feathers like Autumn leaves. As a dragon she had two ways of walking and two ways of flying. Continue reading
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.
One Song Five Films Ten Books
One rarely wonders what exactly constitutes a deserted island. How deserted does it have to be? Free of people? Free of their buildings? Free of animals? Free of plants? Only a handful of them, true to the last grain in being deserted, have ever existed. This is the tale of the one off the coast of Nova Scotia. It was shaped like a femur and covered in white sand. For the longest time, there was nothing else. Not a feather. Not a sea shell. Continue reading
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
houseofdredd
There was a depth to mankind’s plans for the future that was poorly understood. Even its clues were well hidden, invisible within mundane darkness like the interior of a virtual trash can. Mankind saw fit to ditch the physical realm of its birth and transfer all intelligence to a realm of electricity and data. The most difficult part was the transition, where each human mind had to decided what to leave behind and what to rebuild. Continue reading
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
DarkhorseProductions
There were eight ships currently docked at the Tape Maestro station. Prod Darkorse had the job of knowing exactly how far each of them had traveled to get there. That was the easy part though, as each space-faring vessel trailed a giant cloth tape measure that terminated at their starting point. He knew that the drumstick-shaped golden ship had traveled exactly 6,569,435 indents to reach Tape Maestro. He knew the silver discus had gone only 302,649 indents. Continue reading
Prompt: While drunkenly setting up your avatar for a simulated world, you find a developer’s Easter egg and end up with the rarest character class in the game. There is only one: the village idiot.
I was at a point in my life where I was doing a lot of things drunk. It was like a game; how intoxicated could I be while still getting the task done and not getting noticed? I shopped for sweaters drunk. Hiked drunk. Even coded drunk. It’s very strange to look at a program written by an intellectually-meandering version of yourself. It’s like seeing a toy train’s tracks cross over each other a hundred times, and never in the same place. Continue reading
Prompt: A story about a murderer who wanted to be an actor instead, but was terrible at acting.
In this, the fifth entry in Cut from the Script, we will have our most volatile actor to date. As stated in the dedication, this book’s goal is to act as the credits to a film containing only the darkest parts of life, like sitting through a screening, staring at a black square the entire time, yet still feeling dread and depression after leaving. Continue reading
Prompt: Two prophets, sent by the same existing god, preach conflicting things.
Glam had, in the past month, aged out of the sympathy of most of his fellow villagers. As a life long orphan, some had told him he was an orphan even before he was born, Glam had relied on his boyish good looks and a few smears of coal dust on his neck to earn him a place to sleep. Sometimes a hay loft. Sometimes a guest room. Sometimes an apple tree and a blanket. Continue reading
Blaine Arcade 