You are standing by a tree
There are 3 paths.
One appears to go to a jungle,
one appears to go to a cave,
one appears to go to a beach,
you could try and climb the tree,
there is a nearby shop you could go in,
or you could do something else.
So what's its going to be?
Written by catprog on 01 April 2003
You sit under the tree
You sit under the tree.
Suddenly...
Written by catprog on 21 May 2003
See? Keep moving or you get tranked. That's how the game is played.
Your relaxing moment under the tree is rudely interrupted by an abrupt transformation. You are hit by a tranquilizer dart, which turns you into a person with a tranquilizer dart stuck in their neck. It's an easy change. Of course, your train of thought gets about as far as "Oh good heavens, a dart of some kind. I'd betteeerrgmphqq," at which point the dart takes effect, and you slump under the tree like a drugged-up rag doll. A half-hearted twitch is all the moving you do for quite some time. Eventually, you wake up. When you do, you are...
Written by Zodiac on 27 January 2007
In a dungeon
You feel yourself plucked from your story - plotlines tugging then tearing- as a narrator’s fist uproots you, planting your wet soul in another’s timeline. You have history here- and then, gone…
You wake in pain. You are not screaming, because it is not the type of pain which will drive you to scream; it is the type of pain that makes you like an animal, nosing at the hurts and coiling in a foetal bundle to wait out the long night.
At your wrists and ankles, you feel a winter’s bite of silver gouging into soft flesh. You open your eyes just enough to confirm that you are being hanged by your hands and your feet against a dark brick wall, and that the shackles are dull silver, changer’s bane. Your world is a few square feet of dark, bounded by walls on three sides- you can smell the slick rot that coats them with your stinging-raw nose- and an illusion of space on the fourth. There will be bars. This is a dungeon.
Your body screeches at you- your skin sits wrong, too tight here, too loose there. A tight, hairless tail, like a newborn cub’s, hangs down between your legs. The silver has frozen you whilst changing. Into what, you no longer know.
The silver has robbed you of that. For the last and greatest pain of all is the pain nestled heavy in the stretched bone of your forehead, where bright ice fire traces a symbol inverted against the soft tissue below: all you know is kaum, the crested symbol of the abomination. You cannot even recall your name.
What will you do?
Written by ouroboros666 on 12 July 2016
Make a racket. You need to find out your circumstances, and perhaps someone will hear.
You thrash every part of you that will bend and snap, crying out without words and hurling your body back against the wall, using the give of your spine. The pain is nothing to what haloes the silver plate in your forehead.
There are footsteps, just audible beyond the roaring of blood and ice crackle in your ears, and you feel you are reeling them in with your writhing, each new exertion a hook you drive into the soles of those feet and pull tight. The steps stop, a blurred echo to the sound that suggests- yes- they stand just there, in front of your cell, throwing out a loose ball of body-sound that smatters over your unshapen ears. You hear the click of a lighter. Somewhere on the unimaginable other side of the wall- the wall the bars, now visible, trickle away into- a torch has sighed and flared.
A key scrapes then clicks, and a portion of the bars swing inwards, the shadows uncurling and scrabbling away over your not-human face like the feet of rats, running on bodilessly when they are plucked at the ball joint. There is a long moment before two bare feet pass the threshold.
You look at them, look up. A slight body in a loose red tunic lobstered with dark boiled leather plate cupped by steel pauldrons. A lean face, youthful but half-hidden by salt-and-pepper hair, falling in snaky, faintly mottled coils to the blocky metal shoulders.
What now?
Written by ouroboros666 on 19 July 2016
Go insane.
You let the silver take you. Borne high and rising on the hurting tide of it, you slip the shackles of your mind at least, though some dim awareness, some silver-locked little prism of thought that does not go, sings out to the surging silver seas that the body they claim is manacled. Pinioned. Even the fact of it is absurd. Pinions of a gull, driving flight feathers home into flesh, as if you could take wing. Pinions. Pinioned.
This then your existence. You live, and live, and live till you are full of it. Sometimes, often, or always- how are you to know?- you are hooded, though silver paints the inside of your skull in great gaudy canopies nonetheless, and then- at those times, maybe- liquid food and dribbles of brackish water are forced down your throat. Sometimes there is more water: they throw harsh pails of it over you, silver rusting down your back and congealing slowly as the wet dries. Sometimes there are sounds. Perhaps they are yours.
After a while, you notice a darkening. It starts when the open bars are bricked over; only a narrow slot is left for food, water, pushed through now and then onto dirt, just within reach of a hairless tail, when it amuses you to eat and drink. Mostly your vision is hemmed and traced with silver, flowing down and down, creeping from your forehead to your torso and carving bright rivulets through and over your slack legs; occasionally, you dream that water, silver-tinged with everything else, sluices past your manacles and flows away down a narrow drain, untouchably far away at your feet. A ragged mat of silver shrouds your filthy body to your waist. You notice it when the silver leaves you bubbles of air in its snail-track conquest of your flesh.
Sometime after the bars are bricked, the pain forgets itself away: becomes as much a part of you as skin and nails. You are bloodied with your silver.
The hand that slots the food in is smaller. Slender fingers tapering to silver-gilt points. Or perhaps you imagine that. The sleeve is red. You cannot quite look at it, nor quite look away.
Then one day you are changed. Or changing is beyond you. You are no more a changeling, a creature of many skins. You will never be bird or beast or bright fish again. The silver has seared out the change in you. But you are no longer silver. The cell of self balloons up through sheets of silver. Tolerant. A disease has become its host. The oppressor becomes the oppressed. And you shift the shape of the manacles at your wrists and ankles, almost-not-quite as you used to shift your own shape.
Not sane, but spent- different now- you huddle to the floor and weep silver tears from your silver-burnt face, pushing a long, silver-nibbled finger through a silver-edged channel that pierces the loose muscle of your thigh.
The silver in the cell flows and re-forms- the seal melting at last from your forehead- and forms chisel tips that drive into the joins in brick and expand there, cracking the fourth wall till it splays out in boulders of worked stone, jacking apart the close-packed bars.
You crawl from your prison, both of you in ruins.
What now?
Written by ouroboros666 on 20 July 2016
