Recommendation - Formicea

 

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/47590/formicea

The swarm.
A unitary force of countless entities.
Nightmarish creatures from the darkest depths.
All working towards a greater purpose.
Simply fulfilling their role in a complex system.
Abducted from the world I know I am now forced to become a part of this.
Forced to help these horrors to increase their power.
However, they are not mindless killers.
There might be a way for me.
I could influence them from the inside.
To prevent that anyone has to die.
To protect the ones I love.
Maybe I can adjust.

If not for the eggs.

ChoiceScript Stories

Sitting quarantined in Fiji, what else is there to do but check out some videogames, especially my favorite kinds of interactive fiction. I discovered that there is a coding language called ChoiceScript which can be used to code in particular these multiple choice games. I discovered this through playing a number of games made by the company Choice of Games.

I discovered there is a site of free amateur written games coded with ChoiceScript. When I get back and assuming time permitting, I would love to code up one. Here are a few examples:

Mind Blind

https://dashingdon.com/play/wildelight/mind-blind/mygame/

After Dark

https://dashingdon.com/play/daleko/after-dark---first-demo/mygame/

Recommendation - Keep Breathing

 

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/28948/keep-breathing

Keep Breathing follows lung cancer survivor Eury as she returns to her sleepy hometown, dreading coming home to her parents and the complicated past that still haunts her. Even with every amenity afforded to her by modern society, Eury has a hard time staying alive. But when the townspeople are driven insane and begin attacking one another at random, Eury is cut off from everything and everyone she holds dear, and left with a dwindling supply of oxygen.

Hardships and heartaches, bloodshed and violence, once she’s through it all, will Eury be able to Keep Breathing?

Recommendation - Only Villains Do That

 

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/40182/only-villains-do-that

Summary

While waiting on an Akihabara train platform one day, ordinary high schooler Yoshi Shinonome was suddenly plucked from his normal life in Japan and whisked away by a beautiful goddess to Ephemera, a world of magic and adventure, to serve as her Hero and drive back the evil Dark Lord.

This is not his story.

Standing nearby at the moment Yoshi was isekai'd was a man named Seiji - a rude, cranky, misanthropic musician who was not at all pleased to find himself also snatched up and transported to Ephemera by the goddess's wicked sister, Virya.  According to this self-proclaimed Goddess of Evil, the whole fantasy adventure thing was a game she and her sister played to stave off the boredom of immortality, and since the good goddess, Sanora, had picked her Hero...well, Virya needed a Dark Lord. 

A grown man with his own career and ambitions, Seiji has no interest in playing.  Unfortunately for him, the call to adventure was not a request.  Now, he must conquer Ephemera and defeat the Hero...or Virya promises to make him beg for the release of death before granting it.  Playing along for his own survival, Seiji nonetheless is under no illusions who his true enemy is, and it's not the naive young would-be Hero from his own world.

Placed in an impossible position, Seiji must make enough progress toward world domination to keep his sadistic patron goddess off his back, but not so much that he can't strike an accord with the forces of Good and convince the Hero Yoshi that it's the goddesses who are their mutual enemy.  Forced to embrace Evil without being too evil, Seiji walks the razor's edge, building his forces and biding his time till he can get revenge on the goddesses and be free of them, his only certainty that he will not be getting out of this with his hands clean.

A Dark Lord's gotta do what a Dark Lord's gotta do.

Ongoing Webnovel: Goddess of Computation

Ongoing Webnovel: Goddess of Computation

There's not much description of the looks of the characters in the web novel but here's an image to spice your imagination who is a goddess of her own - Tessa Fowler.

Since last September or so, I have been writing the online novel Goddess of Computation. Though I stopped for a few months earlier this year, I have picked up at least a weekly update since August 2020. Check it out when you get the chance!

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/27016/goddess-of-computation

Synopsis

Doing a coding assignment last minute, Ada Newth, a computer science student, fell asleep and woke up in a different world where she was informed by the System that she was randomly selected from an infinite number of universes to be a Goddess of Computation.

The trouble is that she's barely passing her first class and now she's meant to be a Goddess? Worse, she can't understand why she's needed in this world where the technology level is about equivalent to that of Earth's Middle Ages. Clearly, most people can barely read or count and even the other gods are of no help. In fact, most of them are rather dangerous idiots. If she can't convince them to help her change the status quo, she'll just have to gather her allies and followers and make some major changes to the system.

Literature: Retribution of Tears

Retribution of Tears

First Published: 25 MAY 2011 / Last Edited: 12 DEC 2019

Her soulful violet eyes blurred with tears as she stood on the edge of the seawall and gazed outwards at the turbulent waves below. Cupped in her two small hands were the broken jagged shards of a crystal ball. In the next second, with her mind already set, she knew that everything would change. She imagined herself plunging into the dark turquoise sea below her, forever erasing all traces of the broken shards of her and her memories. Yet, even in what she thought would be most likely the last moments of her life, she secretly longed for someone to save her.

As swift as a silent arrow, a memory flashed by in her mind of her inhumanity a moment ago. She hesitantly shifted her gaze from the waves to the shards in her hand one last time. Scarcely several dozen heartbeats ago, these shards piercing into her soft flesh didn’t exist. Her former lover was alive and well. He looked too well, she had thought. At this very spot, she had accused him of betraying her trust.

He had mocked her and said that she deserved it for believing him. He said that he has slept with other women all during the relationship. His barbed words jabbed relentlessly into her fragile heart and he did not appear to care. She realized that he had thought she was the type of girl who lacked a sense of self-worth who could be easily deceived into falling “in love” with a charming guy. In truth, she feared being in love with anyone since she feared what would happen.

She had fallen into his trap of lies so easily and revealed to him everything about her. She thought that opening her heart would lead to a buildup of further trust but it had the opposite effect. Before she opened up, anyone could see that between the two of them, she had more potential – writing incessantly and publishing her works in well-known journals. On his side, since he quit school, he has worked at a coffee shop as a barista for the last year and didn’t have the faintest inkling of where he was going in life. He seemed fine with his situation and she wasn’t going to push him to change.

After she revealed her secret to him though, he started to distance himself from her. He didn’t reveal his heart and she could only guess that perhaps he thought she was delusional and insane. She had told him to never make her cry since looking at her eyes when she was crying could transform him into glass. He had laughed at it and became quiet when she kept insisting that it was true. She thought that meant he believed her but now she knew that wasn’t the case.

His schedule suddenly seemed busier. They saw each other infrequently and he cancelled on several dates. The final straw was seeing him kiss a girl in front of his apartment. This was the unlucky encounter from trying to surprise him with a visit. The two didn’t noticed her and she had hurriedly departed before they saw her. Later, she called him to ask him who that girl was.

That was a week ago though it felt like a lifetime. They had agreed to meet at this spot today. A year ago this was the place of their first date. She came thinking that he wanted to meet her here to apologize and ask for her forgiveness. Instead, he came to mock her openly. She had tried to not cry but the tears still pooled out. Once they did, she couldn’t stop herself and could only watch helplessly as his body turned into glass. Her retribution of tears was swift and deadly. He could barely shout before he was completely gone. The shore wind was strong and blew his glass form over the seawall where it shattered against the rocks below. The only remnant was his eyes that flew like tiny pearls from his head to land miraculously in her open hands.

She steadied herself for an end to this life. He was a cheater but she was a killer. Now seemed like the perfect poetic end. She took out a mirror and gazed at her reflection held within, the last visages in her vision herself at her worst. There was barely a moment of regret before she toppled over, the second glass statue to fall into the waves that day.

[Story] Bug Priest

Originally written on July 7, 2015, this story was updated on July 24, 2019.

Bug Priest

Bob sat up in the hospital bed. He had just woken up yesterday and didn't plan to sleep his life away. His head still hurt like hell but at least he could feel the pain now. From what the doctor told him, he was in a coma for about a few days after the accident and couldn't feel anything.

Looking around the room, he saw that he was by himself. It looked like an ordinary boring hospital room. There was a pile of fresh flowers and some get-well cards on the table next to his bed. He was too tired to read any of them and frankly he didn't care to since most of them contained the same platitudes. It's funny how people who don’t care to talk to you for years suddenly feel an urge to check up on you when something bad happens to you.

Bob shook his head. Now's no time to get riled up, he thought. He tried to remember what caused him to be in this state but he still couldn't remember. All he remembered was taking a walk near his house late one night and the next thing he knew he was here. He was told that a neighbor of his found him collapsed unconscious by the side of the road. The ambulance came and took him to the hospital where he was in no better state until yesterday.

The police told him it probably wasn't a robbery. There wasn't anything taken from him. His wallet, phone, and money were all there. The hospital did a battery of tests on him but so far uncovered that he was just perfectly healthy. Apparently, he has just mysteriously collapsed and just as mysteriously woken up a day later.

[Story] Farmer Brown and the Cow

via GIPHY

Farmer Brown and the Cow

Farmer Brown woke up feeling mighty fine. It was a bright sunny day outside. The cows were mooing, chickens were crowing, and the birds were chirping. There isn't a day better than hearing nature's calls, he thought as he got up from his simple wooden bed. He didn't brush his teeth or comb his hair since milking the cows gotta be more important than personal hygiene.

The eggs and bacon on the table were still warm when he got to the small table. Guess his wife thought of him this morning before she left for town with her friends to do the kind of shopping that only females like. Might as well eat the food or else they be going back to the chicken and pigs as their feed, he thought. Farmer Brown chewed his food deliberately and slowly. It'll be nice to have a glass of milk but there ain't any milk around until he goes and milks the cows.

That's right. He gotta milk the cows. He gobbled up the rest of his food and walked the twenty steps or so to the outdoor pens where the cows were kept. They seemed awfully quiet today though they knew what was gonna happen. Farmer Brown thought it a bit strange but thought nothing more of it.

After he milked the cows, he fetched his shotgun. There were still a few cows left but those are the old fat ones that's eating up more grass than making milk. They gotta go and maybe their bodies can fetch at least a fair price for their meat. His gun was just itching to do the trick.

The sun was shining and the birds were chirping. The cows weren't going to go anywhere and neither would he. Farmer Brown decided he's just gonna sit down and appreciate the fine scenery for a bit to catch his breath. He found some shade under an oak tree near the biggest fat cow. He put his head down and breathed deep to regain his breathe. He looked up a minute later and saw the big cow. She was the first to go. Her name was Bessie and she used to be a prize milk cow. Now she's just a lazy old bum who doesn't make any milk but instead spends a lot of her time eating grass and fooling around with the younger cows doing things only cows would do.

[Story] Romance at the Bagel Shop

First wrote this story back in ~2008 as a joke. This has never been posted before so whatever you see is the original drafted back when I was an undergraduate. Not intended as the rating of R but you decide.

Romance at the Bagel Shop

           

            It was like any other Saturday when Sharon walked into the bagel shop. She had the job for a few weeks now and work as always was quite boring. She got along well enough with her coworkers but she found them almost as dull as the taste of the bagel she ate every Saturday morning. There was little expectation from her that folding fermented edibles for most of the day would be exciting but at least she had thought that she could pass her time by chatting with some of her coworkers. She was wrong. Since she couldn’t strike a decent conversation with them, she stuck with her personality and made witty remarks. But this didn’t help either for every joke she made convinced them more that this girl was weird and should be avoided.

            Most of the day passed like the dreary norm. Customers came and went without a care for the boredom of the employees. Though she has been there only a few weeks, she had realized by the third time that the customers thought the workers at the bakery as dry as the food themselves. Sharon got more attention than most but they were mostly from pubescent teenagers or overweight college kids. A few times she saw scrawny nerdy college kids glancing at her. They were generally too shy to look at her directly. Once she had been stared at for a full ten minutes or so by a fat bald guy that must have been the age of her father sitting by the window slowly chewing his sandwich. That was the most attention she had ever gotten at the bagel shop and it was also the creepiest thing that she had ever experienced in her life. Luckily for her, he was not a regular.

She was only too glad that the day was over. Since the manager was out today, she had to close shop. Suddenly, there was the clinging of bells as she heard the door open.

            “We’re closed for business,” said Sharon without looking up as she wiped the last table.

            “Can’t you take one last customer?” she heard a pleasant sound drift over to her. It sounded like chimes tinkling from an ocean breeze in midsummer. It was melodious and contained a certain feminine quality. Yet, it was definitely not feminine.

[Story] Girl Born in 2039

Originally submitted for a Tec Prize which was via the challenge site Herox.com, I put it here for anyone to read. I did not win but it was a good experience.

Girl Born in 2039

I had lived a privilege life. The only nightmare that I ever saw was in virtual reality games and when they became too horrifying I could always disconnect and watch a comedy. It took the end of the world to snatch the veil from in front of face. I felt and saw for the first time what most of my fellow humans endured almost every single day – a society where the amount of money not only determined your social status but also your health and basic human rights. I laughed sadly as I dug into my pockets and pulled out the only money I had which was barely six dollars. A US dollar was mostly worthless these days so unless I steal again I would die from hunger.

The start of the downfall of my life began surprisingly enough on graduation day. The beginning never anticipated a tragedy. The year was 2057 and I was about to graduate from high school. I live in a world where we have virtual reality worlds, artificial intelligence, personal flying vehicles, self-driving cars, quantum computers and full-body tissue engineering. This is not to mention the space hotels in low earth orbit which even the average middle class citizen can afford to spend a few days. It was even cheaper than flying to Fiji sometimes. The first fully underwater city off the coast of the United Arab Emirates has also just been built last year. We, China, and Russia all have permanent settlements on the moon though a trip there was still beyond the price tag of most folks. We don’t have a presence on Mars yet but we do have an advance research base. I do feel that this is a wondrous time to be alive.

Literature: Retribution of Tears

Her violet eyes streamed with tears as she stood on the edge of a seawall holding the broken shards of a crystal ball. In the next second, everything will change. She imagined herself plunging into the dark turquoise waves below her, forever erasing all traces of the broken shards of her and her memories. Yet, even in this last moments of her life she couldn't help but cry out for someone to save her.

A memory flashed by of her unforgivable action a minute ago. The shards held in her hands piercing into her flesh were literally the remnants of her former lover. At this very spot a moment ago, she had accused him of betraying their trust. He had given her a look of derision tinged with fear and laughed and said that she deserved it for first betraying him. He went on, heedless of the pain which his words like tiny barbs dug into her heart. He had thought she was the type of girl that he liked, one who will relish having a man around to protect her from this dreadful world where cute girls often fall into the laps of perverted devious men.

Instead, after she revealed herself to him, he had found himself to be utterly redundant. She was more capable of taking care of herself than he was. He had slowly started to draw away. But that wasn't the last straw. That was a week ago when he saw that she had the power to transform people into perfect replicas of glass when people saw her cry. That was when he knew that he had to get away to wake himself up from this unexplainable insanity. So it was just good fortune that he met someone that day who happened to be someone actually normal and wasn't able to take care of herself, so of course what happened just happened.

She had tried to hold it in then but couldn't. She had cried with open eyes and watched helplessly as her retribution of tears twisted his body into glass. The wind blew then and this form had toppled over shattering against the wall below. The only remnants were his eyes that flew like tiny pearls from his head to land miraculously in her open hands at that very moment.

A proper end for her has always been on her mind and she was always ready to execute her demise. She took out a mirror and gazed at her reflection held within, the last visages in her vision herself at her worst. There was barely a moment of regret before she toppled over, the second glass statue to fall into the waves that day.

Literature: Flight of the Dandelion

 
This is an allegory of the battle between the immortal dream and the temporal world. Every dream has an associated cost. Saints hardly ever marry; to reach aspirations, they have to sacrifice worldly concerns like individual love for a greater love. For better or worse, I'm no saint but being an idealistic dreamer at times, I'm hoping to capture some of their spirit in this simple story:

My scholar's robes swished back and forth across the stone floor giving off a silent display of impatience mirroring my mood. The pendulum chime at the corner of the workshop showed that there's still ten minutes to the hour but that seemed like an eternity to me.

Today was to be the start of a glorious period of my life; it is also the end of a long painstaking period of my life. In the season of life, I will have passed into the glorious state of summer where the blue sky and white clouds will give me boundless freedom. This is not allegorical for today I will have finished the Dandelion.

Five years of ingenuity and hard work and we have finally done it. Our shared dream of flight will finally take flight, if you'll excuse the pun, once the last component arrives and the ornithopter completed.

DONG! DONG! The ding-dong of the pendulum was punctuated by the opening of the door. In came the most intelligent if not also most beautiful lady in the known world. Her blue and purple robes gave an air of impatience as she approached.

Ciela reached into her robe and held out a sparkling gem. It shone with an unnatural brilliance that even the glass mirror in the sunlit room failed to match. I realized that I knew what it was and exclaimed, "A soul catcher!"

"Indeed," Ciela corrected. "With a worthy soul soon-to-be in place I can finally fly."

"Don't you mean we?" I laughed and said. "No need to be egoistical at this stage."

"There was no mistake," Ciela said with eerie calm as she slowly approached me.

When I saw the knife it was already too late. There was a silent slash and then I saw my reflection in the mirror falling. That was me with my throat cut, my mind thought with alarming disbelief. I struggled to ask why but what actually came out was a bubble of blood and spit.

"I have always loved flight more than I loved you," Ciela replied guessing my inquiry. "And you are a worthy soul for this dream to bear fruit for out of all in the kingdom, I have seen that only the soul of you or I are fit to power this flight."

I tried to say that I would never do the same to her but once again nothing came out. She guessed my thoughts and continued, "If you say you'll never do the same to me, that's only because you're foolish enough to willingly throw away an immortal dream for temporal love. Know that whatever love I felt for you never for a fraction of a second could compare with the love I felt for what's up there."

My life was slipping away and there was nothing I could do. My last thought which never found voice was "I love you and always will". She must have sensed that for when she turned away there was a hint of sadness and the trace of a tear.

Literature: Smoking in Solitude

I gave my following thoughts some embellishment; in other words, I lied about certain parts to make it more interesting from a writer's perspective. Still, it is true that I often find music to be directly linked to my train of thought. I wonder if most people find that to be true as well?

Solitude is nice. I was smoking a cigarette on my front porch while waiting for the water in my pot to boil. My headphones resonated with Trinah's "Every Day" while I exhald puffs of smoke. I really don't like smoking. That's why I had to drive home first and drink some caffeine first. I didn't have coffee at home so I had to do with tea. It's close enough to the lyrics and feel of the song.

At the moment, as I'm standing there quietly with the ember of the end lighting up in front of me, there's just the feeling of this moment as part of a larger picture. I'm part of a scene frozen in time. I thought of the scene in Waking Life where Caveh Zahedi and David Jewell were talking about the holy moment. Since I used to watch the movie about every other day I guess relating life to Waking Life still comes up pretty often in my mind.

David Jewell is definitely not the greatest poet alive, I couldn't help but think. Too much pretentious repetition, I thought pretentiously. Still, some of it can be oddly catchy which is why I glance over his stuff sometimes. Like "which way. this way. that way. left way. no right way. find a bright way. and then a night way". I have no idea what it means but maybe someone can rap it.

I tried it and decided that I sounded very lame. This is better left to bling bling professionals with too much money and time on their hands.

The ends of the stick were curling up like a wounded caterpillar. I mildly flicked it and watched absent-mindedly as the ashes fell down the railway onto the first floor. There was no one there so nobody yelled at me. The primary advantage of living upstairs is that gravity is typically on your side.

Half-way there and some ways more to go before all that's left would be smoke and ashes. Once this burns up, these thoughts would be burnt up with it. This moment is not eternal which is why my life is far from being a Haruki Murakami novel. I also don't interact with cats if I can help it and there's no weird metaphysics. His novels are ridiculously annoying in its melancholy but still oddly delicious in how it twists your mind. I'll have to switch to a different song like Space Cowboy's Falling Down with the Paradiso Girls to get my mind off of cats and metaphysics. Electropop has the consistent tendency to dropkick me in the head and knock me out into the real world. Wham!

Literature: On a Blue Day

Note: Just another exercise in dramatic writing. Just to let you know that I'm honest and will never go anywhere I shouldn't be, I never did any of this. All imagined in my mind and expelled henceforth from it!

I'm not in the library for its books or its "esteemed" educational value. I'm here for it offers me an expansive solitude that I can find little of elsewhere. This was the feeling I had even before I found a key to the roof top. I was in the elevator going up.

Second floor. The only person beside me in the elevator was a short girl with a large backpack. We were in a pseudo-comfortable silence. The backpack was pink. I glanced at her shoes. They were also pink. I turned away and silently counted in my head waiting for this pink monstrosity to leave.

Fourth floor. The door opened and the eyesore thankfully departed. I quickly punched the button to close the door before anyone could get in. Not that I could see anyone waiting in front of the elevator but you could never be too careful ensuring zero disturbance.

My current mood was an unstable system and the slightest perturbation may cause it to fall into the more stable mood best described as handling reality. Rare moods have to be preserved in a state of unstable equilibrium for as long as possible. It's like taking psychedelics once in a while to connect with the universe but doing that too much will seriously impair with handling reality. But regardless these rare moods must be preserved for how else could you experience the spectrum of your mind?

Sixth floor. Philosophical musings shoved aside, my mind returned to the practicality at hand. Leaving the elevator, I surveyed the area next to the stairs. No one in sight. Climb? Yes! My internal voice had to shout.

I went up and saw a door with a keyhole. Glanced back again and saw no one. I turned the key and walked out into the sun. The roof top was empty as expected.

I chose a boring day to be up here. No clouds. Just an aimless infinite blue. No wind. Just flocks of crows or ravens flying aimlessly. A slight breeze? Probably the downwash from their wings or more likely my imagination.

I sighed and walked towards the edge. Funny how there's no guard rails. If someone falls off though, they'll be all over it with regulations and whatnot. That's the funny thing about this country. One person's carelessness instantly means everyone else has suddenly irrevocably turned stupid.

I walked along the edge. If I fall off, there may be some interesting consequences. Quick images flashed through my mind like a film fast forwarded X16. I lose my footing on my next step and I topple over the side with a yelp. Good that I already have numbers prepared in my head in case something like this happens. Every floor is ~3 meters tall. There's approximately 7 floors making it 21 meters tall. Terminal velocity for a skydiver of around my weight is about 50 m/s. Obviously, I won't reach terminal velocity but how many seconds will I have? Every second my body is gaining velocity of ~10 m/s. This means I have about two seconds to think of anything in my last moments. This approximation isn't good enough, some part of me wanted to say.

I told it to shut up. Am I really going to squander my last moments trying to resolve the time of flight before I can no longer model myself as a rigid body or point mass? That's somehow comically absurd.

Third floor. Time does slow down in your last moments. Somehow I was able to think all that and I'm still just half-way there. The windows are rushing by at an accelerated pace. No one has noticed me yet. I hear the wind howling by. Maybe I'll suddenly sprout wings and fly. Will they be a mechanical contraption or magical? I spared a moment to ponder on which one I preferred. I decided that I'll go with both for redundancy. Saving myself should be a system with no single point of failure.

First floor. Sadly, daydreaming really doesn't help with developing powers in reality. The grey ground flew towards me mercilessly. I saw two people glowing white standing close to where I was soon to land with a crunching splat. They were smiling. Are they angels?

Odd, I almost did think I saw two glowing entities down there. I blinked. There were just two students there talking. I stopped my daydreaming on the edge of the roof. I stepped back and turned around. Either I have briefly entered the twilight zone or I really needed some sleep. Either way my mood was gone and this short venture was done. I went back inside and closed the door quietly behind me.