Storystream Quest
Storystream Quest is an ongoing, mutable, interactive story, with an overarching meta-narrative and real-world prizes.
Which is a bit of a mouthful, and probably doesn’t make much sense.
Let me try again.
Storystream Quest is a series of tiny collectable stories, linked by an overarching meta-narrative, and containing puzzles, riddles, and clues, with real-world prizes to be won.
Hmm, I’m not sure that’s much better.
Well, basically it’s a series of episodes of an ongoing story.
With me so far?
Good.
You can read the episodes below, on this part of my website. You can also buy the episodes as eBooks or NFTs.
Then - if you have purchased a particular episode (or got if for free during one of my giveaways) - you can interact with that episode, for example getting something to happen differently within the story, spawning a new version of the story where new things happens, where events unfold differently, or where new characters or events come into the story.
It’s getting confusing again, isn’t it?
This bit relates to the real world prizes. You can win them by unlocking puzzles, riddles, and being creative. If you prompt a story to change in a certain direction, and that direction unlocks one of the secrets of an episode, then you will win a real world prize (the main prize being a beautiful golden ring, as described in the first episode).
Hmm. Maybe that makes some sort of sense. Perhaps it’s best to just start reading, and see what happens…
Any questions, leave a comment below of shoot me an email!
Which is a bit of a mouthful, and probably doesn’t make much sense.
Let me try again.
Storystream Quest is a series of tiny collectable stories, linked by an overarching meta-narrative, and containing puzzles, riddles, and clues, with real-world prizes to be won.
Hmm, I’m not sure that’s much better.
Well, basically it’s a series of episodes of an ongoing story.
With me so far?
Good.
You can read the episodes below, on this part of my website. You can also buy the episodes as eBooks or NFTs.
Then - if you have purchased a particular episode (or got if for free during one of my giveaways) - you can interact with that episode, for example getting something to happen differently within the story, spawning a new version of the story where new things happens, where events unfold differently, or where new characters or events come into the story.
It’s getting confusing again, isn’t it?
This bit relates to the real world prizes. You can win them by unlocking puzzles, riddles, and being creative. If you prompt a story to change in a certain direction, and that direction unlocks one of the secrets of an episode, then you will win a real world prize (the main prize being a beautiful golden ring, as described in the first episode).
Hmm. Maybe that makes some sort of sense. Perhaps it’s best to just start reading, and see what happens…
Any questions, leave a comment below of shoot me an email!
Episode ONe: The Power Badger
The opening part of this story can be found HERE.
And then...
And then...
The evil robots stared hopefully at her.
Chloe stared back, unimpressed.
“But…but in our defence,” began Franox the Unworthy, his metallic voice buzzing and fizzing as his fried chest board sparked, “in our defence, we are actually evil.”
“We were programmed that way,” added The Zapatron ingratiatingly. “I mean, it’s not like we wanted to take over the ship and turn everyone into cyborgs.”
Chloe raised an eyebrow, and glanced meaningfully around the bridge.
The six of them - Chloe, her badger, and the four remaining evil robots - were stood amongst the carnage and mayhem. Lights flashed amongst panels of broken instrumentation, smoke rose from monitors. The ship shook dully as another fuel stock exploded.
Then there were the bodies, of course.
There were lots of bodies.
Micro Tim O’Hare - the smallest and (Chloe suspected) nastiest of the evil robots - learnt forward and whispered something .
“OK, so some of us wanted to take over the ship and turn the crew into cyborgs,” admitted The Zapatron reasonably. “But most of us didn’t.”
“I mean,” added Tomothy Ironside, the forth and final surviving evil robot, “you’ve killed almost all of us. Couldn’t you…you know, just let us go?”
The evil robots all looked at Chloe with renewed intensity.
Chloe sighed. This was embarrassing.
She turned away, gesturing her badger to draw close.
“What’d you reckon, Dave?” She asked.
It wasn’t that she didn’t know what to do.
She knew what she was meant to do.
What she was meant to do, in fact, was destroy all the robots. Technically, she should have done that before the crew were killed. But then, the crew had turned out to be on a mission which could - generously - be described as ‘genocidal annihilation of a peaceful indigenous population, prior to the arrival of human colonists’.
She hadn’t been the Power Badger for very long before she had worked out that stories had a funny way of hiding aspects of themselves from you. It was important to dig, she had found. There was always more to the story. There were always other dimensions, other points of view…
Chloe’s badger shrugged. It wasn’t really called Dave, but Chloe had decided he had to have a name. No hero worth her salt had an animal sidekick without a name. And she had always liked the sound of Dave. It was a cheerful sort of name.
“You should kill them,” commented Dave the badger, with a complete lack of whisperyness. “Obviously.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Chloe, rolling her eyes. “I thought you’d say that.”
The thing was, the robots really were evil. Chloe had seen what they had done to the crew. No one deserved that kind of intensely-unconsented biomechnical modification. Not even genocidal pre-colonists.
Well, maybe the captain had deserved it. But definitely no one else…
And yet…
“Look,” said Chloe, squeezing her eyes shut tight, and trying to massage the headache out from behind her brow, “if I let you go, will you promise not to just go off and be evil somewhere else?”
“Of course,” said Frank.
“Absolutely,” said The Zapatron.
“You got it,” said Tomothy Ironside.
“Meh,” said Micro Tim O’Hare noncommittally.
The other evil robots glared at the tiny robot.
Micro Tim O’Hare looked like he was going to protest, then sagged.
“Fine,” he squeaked. “I swear.”
Chloe nodded. She was pretty sure this was the best she was going to get.
It had only been a couple of months since she had first plunged off the cliff, since she had first learnt that not only, a) was there a huge and mysterious cosmos lurking behind the normal, everyday world she had spent her whole life within, but that b) she was some kind of semi-powerful entity within this weird place. Not that time passed with anything approaching normality here. She had given up thinking about time in days. The real unit of time here was narrative cycles, though of course something like time was passing. She was at least reasonably sure of that.
A couple of months - but already she felt like she had been doing this job for a thousand years. It felt like years since she had worked out that no job ever worked out as smoothly as one might think. As smoothly as whatever power it was that imbued her wanted her to think, she supposed. And that was another weird thing - where did her power actually come from? What had created that power? And why - this was the really odd thing - did the power seem to want her to behave in certain (usually unhelpful) ways?
So many questions.
She made a mental note to pay more attention to them, to try and force the Universe into giving her some answers.
Awkward questions demanded awkward behaviours. That was the way she saw it, at least…
“Right,” she said, opening her eyes and coming to a decision. “That will have to do.”
The evil robots sagged, relief evident in every inch of their shiny, metallic bodies.
“Thank you!” sighed Tomothy Ironside.
“You won’t regret this,” promised The Zapatron.
“Won’t I?” asked Chloe. “No, don’t answer that. It’ll only upset me. Now, just head over to that flashing portal thing, and…”
Chloe gestured towards a section of the bridge, which promptly dissolved into a flashing portal thing.
“…bugger off,” she finished, with some relish.
“Thanks, m’am,” gushed The Zapatron. “You are truly a great leader! May your line flourish! May the name of the Power Badger be ever spoken with respect! May…”
But Chloe did not get to find out what else The Zapatron would wish on her, because at that moment something flared in the corner of her vision.
She turned.
It was a flashing portal thing.
Another flashing portal thing.
And it wasn’t empty.
It held a woman.
A woman who looked familiar.
Disconcertingly familiar.
The woman stepped forward.
Chloe froze.
The evil robots froze.
Even Dave the badger looked momentarily wrong-footed.
“Hi,” said the woman. “How’s everything?”
Chloe blinked.
The woman was…her.
Well, sort of her.
The hair was different, longer and darker with a flash of red dyed in the centre. The face was a little gaunter, a little more weathered; and a long, pale scar snaked down one cheek. And the clothes…
“Oh,” said Chloe. “You look…fabulous.”
The other her really did look fabulous. She had never thought she would be able to pull off leather trousers, let alone a tight purple sleepless vest with luminous highlights. Not to mention the tattoos. So many tattoos. And yet…
“Thank you,” said the other Chloe.
There was a pause.
Chloe sighed.
“Well, to answer your question,” she said, “everything is pretty damned weird. Even more weird than usual. I mean, I’ve seen a lot in the last two months, but I’ve never come across another me. And…”
The other Chloe lifted up a forestalling hand.
“Never mind,” she said firmly. “Rhetorical question.”
Chloe frowned.
She was beginning to think she didn’t care much for this other her.
Not at all.
She was just wondering if she should lift her hand and blast the other her with mysterious energy, when the other her moved first.
“Argh,” said Chloe, as mysterious energy flashed around her. It was quite painful.
Before her hair could more than singe, Chloe gestured upwards, pulling a protecting field of highly mysterious energy around her, and shutting off the attack.
Hah, thought Chloe. Try to smite me with mysterious energy, eh? Just see where that gets you…
The other her smiled.
It wasn’t a nice smile.
“Oh, Chloe,” said the other her. “So predictable.”
The other her shifted her gaze.
The evil robots looked back.
Suddenly, Chloe thought they looked very small.
Very small and very sad.
“But…” The Zapatron started to say.
Fantastical energies flared.
The evil robots did not so much as scream. There was no time.
Then the light faded, leaving only four smouldering stacks of molten metal.
The other Chloe looked triumphantly around the bridge, taking in the carnage, the wreckage, the complete lack of remaining evil robots.
“There,” she said. “You’re welcome.”
Chloe blinked.
She felt…
She felt surprisingly upset.
The evil robots had been evil…but she had decided to forgive them. To give them another chance. She had promised them a second chance, kind of.
And now…
“What…have…you…done?” she said.
Her voice sounded very dry.
The other her smiled. This smile was even less nice.
“What you should have,” she said.
Chloe glared.
And glared.
And then…
And then she was running.
She was sprinting as fast as she could, straight at the other her. All thought of mysterious energies was forgotten. She was acutely aware of her nails and her fists, though.
She thought she might be able to do something interesting with those.
She leapt, she hurtled through the air, she…
She saw the other her lift a careless hand.
On the hand, a ring sparkled.
A pretty ring, set with three sapphires, the largest of which was surrounded by a scattering of tiny diamonds.
Chloe wasn’t sure how she knew, but somehow that ring was important.
The mysterious energy which flared around her this time was different. It felt…weird, somehow. More weird. Over the last couple of months, Chloe had gotten used to wielding mysterious energy of cosmic significance. There was a certain taste to it, a certain flavour.
This, however…
“Ugh,” she managed, the sound squeezed out of her as the red-purple energy sizzled, compressing her, holding her tight.
She couldn’t move.
Not an inch.
Cautiously, she tried to doing some mysterious energy-based zapping of her own.
It didn’t work.
“Now,” sighed the other her. “That’s better. Just hold still, would you?”
Chloe tried desperately not to hold still.
She failed.
The sapphire ring flashed and hissed, waves of power rolling from it and over Chloe’s screaming muscles.
“Um, excuse me?” put in Dave the badger.
The other Chloe turned, and looked momentarily amused to see the huge badger paw hurtling through the air towards her.
Dave’s paw froze.
“Oh, darling,” said the other Chloe. “You don’t think I’ve forgotten about you, do you?”
“Pth,” managed Dave the badger, his face going red with effort, which is quite impressive thing for a badger to achieve on account of all the fur.
The other Chloe’s magic ring presumably worked on badgers just as well as it did on humans.
“I’ll never forget about you,” the other Chloe went on, in a voice that sounded especially venomous. “No, not after the way you treated me. Not after the lies. The betrayals.”
Chloe tried to use this brief interlude as a distraction in which to wriggle free of the force that bound her, but this didn’t work on account of the mysterious force being just as strong as ever.
“Good,” said the other her, turning her dark eyes back to Chloe, and examining her in much the way a bird of prey might examine a small rabbit, crouched and shivering far below. “Where were we? Oh, yes. Extracting the thing which is…mine.”
There was no movement. The other her still stood, arms folded casually across her chest. There was no movement, and yet Chloe felt something slam into her mind.
It was like a worm, a snake, a grasping hungry mouth, slobbering over the inside of her thoughts, crawling through the centre of her being, sucking at the very heart of her.
Basically, it was highly disgusting.
Chloe tried to scream.
And then…
And then the invisible hand twisted, and it was as if a catch had been undone in her soul. A torrent of images, of thoughts, of feelings came flooding through her.
Images, memories: her mother, her sister; her father (before he had gone, of course); the little dog she had had when she was a toddler; the smell of cut grass when her grandfather had mowed the lawn; her first day at school, and her grandmother, laying in the hospital bed, when she got sick. Right at the end, the last few hours before she was gone. And Chloe watched the old woman lean forward, remembered the smell of her, the warmth. The feeling of those old, slight arms as they hugged her tight, and those words, the words that were whispered to her, the words she had forgotten for so long. And…
And then with a feeling as if all the breath had been knocked from her, the mental force was pulling back, reeling away from her - and it was ripping something with it.
Something glittering and precious.
Something that had been buried so deep and safe that Chloe had all but forgotten it.
The other her had stolen something.
Something…something Chloe could no longer remember.
Chloe felt sick.
She felt sick and broken and undone.
And angry.
Most of all, she felt very, very angry.
“There we go,” said the other her, and though the woman’s voice was casual, Chloe could hear the excitement bubbling just beneath the surface. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“What…what did you?” gasped Chloe.
She realised the force that held her was weakening. She could move her lips, she could breathe freely once more.
“Just took something that was mine, pet,” said the other her absently. “Nothing more, nothing less.”
“Yours?” hissed Chloe.
“Yes, yes,” said the other her, a slight frown forming on her face. She glanced towards Dave the badger, looked as if she was about to say something, then shook her head.
Instead she stepped backwards, lowering her hand and the glinting sapphire ring.
“Well, why should I explain myself?” the other her muttered. “That’s your job, I think. Right Dave?”
The rage that flowed through Chloe was like a living thing.
She did not know what the other her had taken from her, but it was something precious.
She knew that much.
“You…bastard,” she managed.
“Darling,” laughed the other her. “You have no idea.”
“But…” Chloe started to say.
Power flared, and abruptly the other her was falling backwards, vanishing into a swirling vortex of highly mysterious looking energy.
Then the other her was gone, and Chloe was alone with her badger.
The force that had bound her vanished, and Chloe stumbled forwards, falling to her knees.
“What…” she muttered. “Who the hell was that?”
Dave trotted forward and nuzzled at her.
“That,” said the badger at length. “Was someone bad. Someone very bad.”
“I kind of got that impression,” muttered Chloe.
The room felt unstable. Her body felt very weak.
Then a thought occurred to her.
She frowned at Dave.
“You know her,” she said. “Who is she?”
Dave had the grace to look sheepish.
“She is you,” said the badger. “Another you. A you…a you who did not pass the test. Who was deemed…unsuitable to carry the mantle of the Power Badger.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Chloe demanded. “Why didn’t tell me there was another me prowling around? Some horrible, vindictive version of me hell-bent on finding me and…”
Chloe froze.
Suddenly, she understood.
“She took it,” she said.
Her voice sounded dry, dead.
Dave said nothing.
Experimentally, knowing what would happen, Chloe lifted a hand. It looked very small, somehow.
She concentrated, trying to send a blast of highly mysterious energy hurtling across the bridge.
Nothing much happened.
A few sparks hopped across her fingers. A mildly mysterious disk wobbled in the air for a few moments before fading to nothing with a sad pth noise.
“It’s gone,” she said, so softly she could barely hear her own words.
The Power Badger. The mantle of power that had - apparently - been passed down her line from one ancestor to the next. The power that had come to her.
And which she had now lost.
Forever.
She felt like she could cry, though she suspected screaming might be somewhat more gratifying.
“Not gone,” said Dave the badger at length.
His voice was soft, too, but Chloe heard anger vibrating there, too.
Anger…and determination.
She looked up.
“What do you mean?” she demanded.
“She took your power,” said the badger evenly. “She took most of it. She couldn’t scrape it all away, though. There’s a little left. Clinging to the inside of your mind.”
Chloe snorted.
Much to her chagrin, a few flashing sparks zapped out of her nose and sparkled for a few seconds before fading to nothing.
“Right,” she said. “A tiny residue. Great. That’s so useful.”
Dave fixed her with his large, badgery eyes.
“It’s not much,” he said. “But it might be enough.”
“Enough?” demanded Chloe. “Enough for what?”
“Oh, snap out of it princess!” shouted Dave, rolling his eyes.
Chloe blinked at her badger. She had forgotten he could be so…well, so horrible.
“That’s very helpful,” she said sarcastically. “Thank you for that.”
“So you’ve had most of your power stolen by a deranged version of yourself,” mocked the badger. “Oh, boo-hoo! Oh, isn’t life hard?”
“Look, if all you can do is…” Chloe started to say, but the badger cut her off.
“You’re the Power Badger,” the badger glared at her. “You’re not some little chit of a girl. You’re not some…some victim.”
Chloe said nothing.
There was nothing to say.
Annoyingly, her badger was right.
“So…what the hell are you going to do about it?” growled Dave the badger.
Chloe took a deep breath.
She looked at her badger, long and level.
“Get it back,” she said. “Get it all back.”
The badger smiled at her. Grimly.
“Attagirl,” the badger told her. "And?”
Chloe smiled back.
She imagined her smile was not so nice now, either.
“Smash that bitch into the dust,” she said flatly. “Into narrative particles so small they’ll float through the Storystream for all eternity. Right?”
“Right,” said the badger.
Chloe felt herself relaxing.
Something had been taken from her.
Something precious.
Something so precious, she had almost forgotten who she was.
But her badger had reminded her of that.
It wasn’t about what had been taken from her.
It was about how she was going to get it back.
She brightened.
“I suppose we’re on a quest, then,” she observed.
“Damn right,” agreed the badger.
“Good,” said Chloe. “I always fancied being on a quest. Always thought I’d be good at it.”
“You will be,” observed the badger. “I’d stake my fur on it.”
A thought occurred to her.
“I’m going to get myself that ring of hers, too,” she observed. “You see if I don’t.”
The badger smiled at her, and said nothing.
Chloe looked around the bridge one last time, taking in the shattered instrumentation, the smoking remains of the three evil robots.
“So,” she said. “Any ideas of how to begin?”
Dave the badger smiled.
“I do,” he said portentously. “Several, actually. Though probably its best to see if we can get one of the major Powers involved. The Sheriffs, maybe. After all, we need all the help we can get.”
Chloe nodded.
A few more sparks drifted out of her nose.
She thought she probably had enough power left to make a mysterious portal to somewhere else in the Storystream.
A small mysterious portal, anyway.
“The beginning, huh?” said Chloe. “Right.”
She concentrated.
The quest had begun.
To be continued…
Chloe stared back, unimpressed.
“But…but in our defence,” began Franox the Unworthy, his metallic voice buzzing and fizzing as his fried chest board sparked, “in our defence, we are actually evil.”
“We were programmed that way,” added The Zapatron ingratiatingly. “I mean, it’s not like we wanted to take over the ship and turn everyone into cyborgs.”
Chloe raised an eyebrow, and glanced meaningfully around the bridge.
The six of them - Chloe, her badger, and the four remaining evil robots - were stood amongst the carnage and mayhem. Lights flashed amongst panels of broken instrumentation, smoke rose from monitors. The ship shook dully as another fuel stock exploded.
Then there were the bodies, of course.
There were lots of bodies.
Micro Tim O’Hare - the smallest and (Chloe suspected) nastiest of the evil robots - learnt forward and whispered something .
“OK, so some of us wanted to take over the ship and turn the crew into cyborgs,” admitted The Zapatron reasonably. “But most of us didn’t.”
“I mean,” added Tomothy Ironside, the forth and final surviving evil robot, “you’ve killed almost all of us. Couldn’t you…you know, just let us go?”
The evil robots all looked at Chloe with renewed intensity.
Chloe sighed. This was embarrassing.
She turned away, gesturing her badger to draw close.
“What’d you reckon, Dave?” She asked.
It wasn’t that she didn’t know what to do.
She knew what she was meant to do.
What she was meant to do, in fact, was destroy all the robots. Technically, she should have done that before the crew were killed. But then, the crew had turned out to be on a mission which could - generously - be described as ‘genocidal annihilation of a peaceful indigenous population, prior to the arrival of human colonists’.
She hadn’t been the Power Badger for very long before she had worked out that stories had a funny way of hiding aspects of themselves from you. It was important to dig, she had found. There was always more to the story. There were always other dimensions, other points of view…
Chloe’s badger shrugged. It wasn’t really called Dave, but Chloe had decided he had to have a name. No hero worth her salt had an animal sidekick without a name. And she had always liked the sound of Dave. It was a cheerful sort of name.
“You should kill them,” commented Dave the badger, with a complete lack of whisperyness. “Obviously.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Chloe, rolling her eyes. “I thought you’d say that.”
The thing was, the robots really were evil. Chloe had seen what they had done to the crew. No one deserved that kind of intensely-unconsented biomechnical modification. Not even genocidal pre-colonists.
Well, maybe the captain had deserved it. But definitely no one else…
And yet…
“Look,” said Chloe, squeezing her eyes shut tight, and trying to massage the headache out from behind her brow, “if I let you go, will you promise not to just go off and be evil somewhere else?”
“Of course,” said Frank.
“Absolutely,” said The Zapatron.
“You got it,” said Tomothy Ironside.
“Meh,” said Micro Tim O’Hare noncommittally.
The other evil robots glared at the tiny robot.
Micro Tim O’Hare looked like he was going to protest, then sagged.
“Fine,” he squeaked. “I swear.”
Chloe nodded. She was pretty sure this was the best she was going to get.
It had only been a couple of months since she had first plunged off the cliff, since she had first learnt that not only, a) was there a huge and mysterious cosmos lurking behind the normal, everyday world she had spent her whole life within, but that b) she was some kind of semi-powerful entity within this weird place. Not that time passed with anything approaching normality here. She had given up thinking about time in days. The real unit of time here was narrative cycles, though of course something like time was passing. She was at least reasonably sure of that.
A couple of months - but already she felt like she had been doing this job for a thousand years. It felt like years since she had worked out that no job ever worked out as smoothly as one might think. As smoothly as whatever power it was that imbued her wanted her to think, she supposed. And that was another weird thing - where did her power actually come from? What had created that power? And why - this was the really odd thing - did the power seem to want her to behave in certain (usually unhelpful) ways?
So many questions.
She made a mental note to pay more attention to them, to try and force the Universe into giving her some answers.
Awkward questions demanded awkward behaviours. That was the way she saw it, at least…
“Right,” she said, opening her eyes and coming to a decision. “That will have to do.”
The evil robots sagged, relief evident in every inch of their shiny, metallic bodies.
“Thank you!” sighed Tomothy Ironside.
“You won’t regret this,” promised The Zapatron.
“Won’t I?” asked Chloe. “No, don’t answer that. It’ll only upset me. Now, just head over to that flashing portal thing, and…”
Chloe gestured towards a section of the bridge, which promptly dissolved into a flashing portal thing.
“…bugger off,” she finished, with some relish.
“Thanks, m’am,” gushed The Zapatron. “You are truly a great leader! May your line flourish! May the name of the Power Badger be ever spoken with respect! May…”
But Chloe did not get to find out what else The Zapatron would wish on her, because at that moment something flared in the corner of her vision.
She turned.
It was a flashing portal thing.
Another flashing portal thing.
And it wasn’t empty.
It held a woman.
A woman who looked familiar.
Disconcertingly familiar.
The woman stepped forward.
Chloe froze.
The evil robots froze.
Even Dave the badger looked momentarily wrong-footed.
“Hi,” said the woman. “How’s everything?”
Chloe blinked.
The woman was…her.
Well, sort of her.
The hair was different, longer and darker with a flash of red dyed in the centre. The face was a little gaunter, a little more weathered; and a long, pale scar snaked down one cheek. And the clothes…
“Oh,” said Chloe. “You look…fabulous.”
The other her really did look fabulous. She had never thought she would be able to pull off leather trousers, let alone a tight purple sleepless vest with luminous highlights. Not to mention the tattoos. So many tattoos. And yet…
“Thank you,” said the other Chloe.
There was a pause.
Chloe sighed.
“Well, to answer your question,” she said, “everything is pretty damned weird. Even more weird than usual. I mean, I’ve seen a lot in the last two months, but I’ve never come across another me. And…”
The other Chloe lifted up a forestalling hand.
“Never mind,” she said firmly. “Rhetorical question.”
Chloe frowned.
She was beginning to think she didn’t care much for this other her.
Not at all.
She was just wondering if she should lift her hand and blast the other her with mysterious energy, when the other her moved first.
“Argh,” said Chloe, as mysterious energy flashed around her. It was quite painful.
Before her hair could more than singe, Chloe gestured upwards, pulling a protecting field of highly mysterious energy around her, and shutting off the attack.
Hah, thought Chloe. Try to smite me with mysterious energy, eh? Just see where that gets you…
The other her smiled.
It wasn’t a nice smile.
“Oh, Chloe,” said the other her. “So predictable.”
The other her shifted her gaze.
The evil robots looked back.
Suddenly, Chloe thought they looked very small.
Very small and very sad.
“But…” The Zapatron started to say.
Fantastical energies flared.
The evil robots did not so much as scream. There was no time.
Then the light faded, leaving only four smouldering stacks of molten metal.
The other Chloe looked triumphantly around the bridge, taking in the carnage, the wreckage, the complete lack of remaining evil robots.
“There,” she said. “You’re welcome.”
Chloe blinked.
She felt…
She felt surprisingly upset.
The evil robots had been evil…but she had decided to forgive them. To give them another chance. She had promised them a second chance, kind of.
And now…
“What…have…you…done?” she said.
Her voice sounded very dry.
The other her smiled. This smile was even less nice.
“What you should have,” she said.
Chloe glared.
And glared.
And then…
And then she was running.
She was sprinting as fast as she could, straight at the other her. All thought of mysterious energies was forgotten. She was acutely aware of her nails and her fists, though.
She thought she might be able to do something interesting with those.
She leapt, she hurtled through the air, she…
She saw the other her lift a careless hand.
On the hand, a ring sparkled.
A pretty ring, set with three sapphires, the largest of which was surrounded by a scattering of tiny diamonds.
Chloe wasn’t sure how she knew, but somehow that ring was important.
The mysterious energy which flared around her this time was different. It felt…weird, somehow. More weird. Over the last couple of months, Chloe had gotten used to wielding mysterious energy of cosmic significance. There was a certain taste to it, a certain flavour.
This, however…
“Ugh,” she managed, the sound squeezed out of her as the red-purple energy sizzled, compressing her, holding her tight.
She couldn’t move.
Not an inch.
Cautiously, she tried to doing some mysterious energy-based zapping of her own.
It didn’t work.
“Now,” sighed the other her. “That’s better. Just hold still, would you?”
Chloe tried desperately not to hold still.
She failed.
The sapphire ring flashed and hissed, waves of power rolling from it and over Chloe’s screaming muscles.
“Um, excuse me?” put in Dave the badger.
The other Chloe turned, and looked momentarily amused to see the huge badger paw hurtling through the air towards her.
Dave’s paw froze.
“Oh, darling,” said the other Chloe. “You don’t think I’ve forgotten about you, do you?”
“Pth,” managed Dave the badger, his face going red with effort, which is quite impressive thing for a badger to achieve on account of all the fur.
The other Chloe’s magic ring presumably worked on badgers just as well as it did on humans.
“I’ll never forget about you,” the other Chloe went on, in a voice that sounded especially venomous. “No, not after the way you treated me. Not after the lies. The betrayals.”
Chloe tried to use this brief interlude as a distraction in which to wriggle free of the force that bound her, but this didn’t work on account of the mysterious force being just as strong as ever.
“Good,” said the other her, turning her dark eyes back to Chloe, and examining her in much the way a bird of prey might examine a small rabbit, crouched and shivering far below. “Where were we? Oh, yes. Extracting the thing which is…mine.”
There was no movement. The other her still stood, arms folded casually across her chest. There was no movement, and yet Chloe felt something slam into her mind.
It was like a worm, a snake, a grasping hungry mouth, slobbering over the inside of her thoughts, crawling through the centre of her being, sucking at the very heart of her.
Basically, it was highly disgusting.
Chloe tried to scream.
And then…
And then the invisible hand twisted, and it was as if a catch had been undone in her soul. A torrent of images, of thoughts, of feelings came flooding through her.
Images, memories: her mother, her sister; her father (before he had gone, of course); the little dog she had had when she was a toddler; the smell of cut grass when her grandfather had mowed the lawn; her first day at school, and her grandmother, laying in the hospital bed, when she got sick. Right at the end, the last few hours before she was gone. And Chloe watched the old woman lean forward, remembered the smell of her, the warmth. The feeling of those old, slight arms as they hugged her tight, and those words, the words that were whispered to her, the words she had forgotten for so long. And…
And then with a feeling as if all the breath had been knocked from her, the mental force was pulling back, reeling away from her - and it was ripping something with it.
Something glittering and precious.
Something that had been buried so deep and safe that Chloe had all but forgotten it.
The other her had stolen something.
Something…something Chloe could no longer remember.
Chloe felt sick.
She felt sick and broken and undone.
And angry.
Most of all, she felt very, very angry.
“There we go,” said the other her, and though the woman’s voice was casual, Chloe could hear the excitement bubbling just beneath the surface. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“What…what did you?” gasped Chloe.
She realised the force that held her was weakening. She could move her lips, she could breathe freely once more.
“Just took something that was mine, pet,” said the other her absently. “Nothing more, nothing less.”
“Yours?” hissed Chloe.
“Yes, yes,” said the other her, a slight frown forming on her face. She glanced towards Dave the badger, looked as if she was about to say something, then shook her head.
Instead she stepped backwards, lowering her hand and the glinting sapphire ring.
“Well, why should I explain myself?” the other her muttered. “That’s your job, I think. Right Dave?”
The rage that flowed through Chloe was like a living thing.
She did not know what the other her had taken from her, but it was something precious.
She knew that much.
“You…bastard,” she managed.
“Darling,” laughed the other her. “You have no idea.”
“But…” Chloe started to say.
Power flared, and abruptly the other her was falling backwards, vanishing into a swirling vortex of highly mysterious looking energy.
Then the other her was gone, and Chloe was alone with her badger.
The force that had bound her vanished, and Chloe stumbled forwards, falling to her knees.
“What…” she muttered. “Who the hell was that?”
Dave trotted forward and nuzzled at her.
“That,” said the badger at length. “Was someone bad. Someone very bad.”
“I kind of got that impression,” muttered Chloe.
The room felt unstable. Her body felt very weak.
Then a thought occurred to her.
She frowned at Dave.
“You know her,” she said. “Who is she?”
Dave had the grace to look sheepish.
“She is you,” said the badger. “Another you. A you…a you who did not pass the test. Who was deemed…unsuitable to carry the mantle of the Power Badger.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Chloe demanded. “Why didn’t tell me there was another me prowling around? Some horrible, vindictive version of me hell-bent on finding me and…”
Chloe froze.
Suddenly, she understood.
“She took it,” she said.
Her voice sounded dry, dead.
Dave said nothing.
Experimentally, knowing what would happen, Chloe lifted a hand. It looked very small, somehow.
She concentrated, trying to send a blast of highly mysterious energy hurtling across the bridge.
Nothing much happened.
A few sparks hopped across her fingers. A mildly mysterious disk wobbled in the air for a few moments before fading to nothing with a sad pth noise.
“It’s gone,” she said, so softly she could barely hear her own words.
The Power Badger. The mantle of power that had - apparently - been passed down her line from one ancestor to the next. The power that had come to her.
And which she had now lost.
Forever.
She felt like she could cry, though she suspected screaming might be somewhat more gratifying.
“Not gone,” said Dave the badger at length.
His voice was soft, too, but Chloe heard anger vibrating there, too.
Anger…and determination.
She looked up.
“What do you mean?” she demanded.
“She took your power,” said the badger evenly. “She took most of it. She couldn’t scrape it all away, though. There’s a little left. Clinging to the inside of your mind.”
Chloe snorted.
Much to her chagrin, a few flashing sparks zapped out of her nose and sparkled for a few seconds before fading to nothing.
“Right,” she said. “A tiny residue. Great. That’s so useful.”
Dave fixed her with his large, badgery eyes.
“It’s not much,” he said. “But it might be enough.”
“Enough?” demanded Chloe. “Enough for what?”
“Oh, snap out of it princess!” shouted Dave, rolling his eyes.
Chloe blinked at her badger. She had forgotten he could be so…well, so horrible.
“That’s very helpful,” she said sarcastically. “Thank you for that.”
“So you’ve had most of your power stolen by a deranged version of yourself,” mocked the badger. “Oh, boo-hoo! Oh, isn’t life hard?”
“Look, if all you can do is…” Chloe started to say, but the badger cut her off.
“You’re the Power Badger,” the badger glared at her. “You’re not some little chit of a girl. You’re not some…some victim.”
Chloe said nothing.
There was nothing to say.
Annoyingly, her badger was right.
“So…what the hell are you going to do about it?” growled Dave the badger.
Chloe took a deep breath.
She looked at her badger, long and level.
“Get it back,” she said. “Get it all back.”
The badger smiled at her. Grimly.
“Attagirl,” the badger told her. "And?”
Chloe smiled back.
She imagined her smile was not so nice now, either.
“Smash that bitch into the dust,” she said flatly. “Into narrative particles so small they’ll float through the Storystream for all eternity. Right?”
“Right,” said the badger.
Chloe felt herself relaxing.
Something had been taken from her.
Something precious.
Something so precious, she had almost forgotten who she was.
But her badger had reminded her of that.
It wasn’t about what had been taken from her.
It was about how she was going to get it back.
She brightened.
“I suppose we’re on a quest, then,” she observed.
“Damn right,” agreed the badger.
“Good,” said Chloe. “I always fancied being on a quest. Always thought I’d be good at it.”
“You will be,” observed the badger. “I’d stake my fur on it.”
A thought occurred to her.
“I’m going to get myself that ring of hers, too,” she observed. “You see if I don’t.”
The badger smiled at her, and said nothing.
Chloe looked around the bridge one last time, taking in the shattered instrumentation, the smoking remains of the three evil robots.
“So,” she said. “Any ideas of how to begin?”
Dave the badger smiled.
“I do,” he said portentously. “Several, actually. Though probably its best to see if we can get one of the major Powers involved. The Sheriffs, maybe. After all, we need all the help we can get.”
Chloe nodded.
A few more sparks drifted out of her nose.
She thought she probably had enough power left to make a mysterious portal to somewhere else in the Storystream.
A small mysterious portal, anyway.
“The beginning, huh?” said Chloe. “Right.”
She concentrated.
The quest had begun.
To be continued…
On to episode two...
A note on interacting:
You can find more information on interacting in the NFT and eBook versions of the episodes.
Basically, you can interact / manipulate a story / suggest an answer to a puzzle / suggest a way a story my evolve by commenting below.
You can find more information on interacting in the NFT and eBook versions of the episodes.
Basically, you can interact / manipulate a story / suggest an answer to a puzzle / suggest a way a story my evolve by commenting below.
Interact with StoryStream Quest by obtaining an NFT on Opensea or an ebook with the links below
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