CYOA brainstorming: The Island (Candid version)

What is this?

Island CYOAs were (are?) a fad on /tg/. I know of almost a dozen, and I come across a new one every so often. The idea behind each of them is the same (you find yourself on a spooky island thing, GO) but they differ in the options that they give. They also differ in how many options you can pick before you have to start taking penalties.

This one is not particularly forgiving.

Shelter: None
Companion: The Necromancer
Artifact: The Amulet, Possessed Sword
Covenant: Abominations
Nemesis: Fear and Madness, The Other

Oh, and The Other gets some choices too, dang it:
Shelter: Gypsy Caravan
Companion: The Other (a different one), the Blackbark Faerie
Artifact: The Sarcophagus
Covenant: Island Guardians
Nemesis: The protagonist

So what have we got here?

Our protagonist has been displaced to some horrible Otherworld. It matters not whether it's an actual island or not, though we'll refer to it as such for convenience's sake. It's a very dangerous place, inhabited by all kinds of horrible things. There was apparently a magi-tech kind of civilization based here, but it's anyone's guess what happened to them.

Perhaps the Island got them. It has a will of its own, certainly. And it's out for the protagonist's blood.

To that effect it has also plucked up two of the protagonists friends. Perhaps the protagonist's appearance here is a fluke, but theirs was certainly not. They have been told that the protagonist is a very, very bad person now, and that killing zem is of the utmost importance. Letting zem live will do nobody any good, but will mean the deaths of millions.

It may hurt them to believe it, but they've been thoroughly convinced that ze's somehow gone down a bad road.

The statuesque servants of the old civilization are at their disposal. The faeries of the Island, who may be connected or have simply moved in after the original inhabitants left, are responsible for conveying the Islands orders, and one of them is accompanying the protagonist's friends to help them on their quest. They are traveling with other humans (who, unlike the faeries, are definitely latecomers to the Island), who are not noteworthy for their combat skills but know the roads of the Island. And one of them has slight precognitive abilities that should be of help.

Should they die by anyone's hand but the protagonist's, the Island will be able to revive them.

But the worst thing is... our protagonist can't be totally sure that they're wrong. The protagonist has fallen in with some potentially bad company, an amoral necromancer whose reason for tagging along is unknown, and has explained the situation to the protagonist. The necromancer is definitely not popular in these parts, though, especially among the undead (of which there are many). And... there are horrible Lovecraftian monsters that like you. Which is probably not a good sign.

Finally, the protagonist is in possession of a thinking sword. It can steadily improve the protagonist's skill over time, but it is also the source of a growing compulsion to kill. The amulet, which confers both physical and mental health, is keeping its influence at bay, but the amulet will be effective for only so long.

Idea: Once a Slavetrader, Always a Santa Claus

Cast your thoughts back to the last ice age, for it is then that our tale begins.

Fairieland, you see, is a very cold place, a veritable winter wasteland. Its inhabitants don’t deal very well with heat. It is for this reason that the Good People aren’t so common in modern times, but back in the bad old days they flitted in and out of their Grand Doors to our world (and to many other worlds as well, but for those we humans neither had nor have no concern).

Poetry: Schicksal der Götter [Christian/Norse mashup]

This poem at Fictionpress
at Archive of Our Own

"Fate of the Gods," or Ragnarok. A fusion of Norse and Christian apocalypses.

This is a ljóðaháttr poem, a form characterized by alliteration, lifts, and caesuras (here denoted by "|").

It draws heavily on the Völuspá for the course of events, more so than the Bible.

The Journeymen [D]

The Shifting Spirits

The Shifting Spirits are liars who are the sole survivors of a now-dead realm which was torn apart by outsiders— or they themselves are outsiders who have learned to coexist with Creation— or they were exiled from a prosperous series of timelines for their grave crimes— or they have achieved time travel and are working to ensure that the course of events which led to their existence will come to pass— or they are the servants of the Powers Major. Their forms are as fluid as water and revert to solidity with a thought, taking on any form which they would like.

Genre Splash #5: The Polish Wasp Conspiracy [B]

Continued from Wednesday. 

The boginki require hosts for their eggs. They possess a venom that paralyzes in small doses and causes cellular breakdown in larger doses, and they use it for its former effect after choosing a target. Captured and paralyzed, the boginka's victim is helpless to resist as dozens of eggs are implanted deep in the flesh. They will nourish themselves on their host, who will be sustained as the adult boginka regularly injects them with a nutrient slurry. The larvae that are the earliest to rouse themselves (and are the most fit) will make their way to the brain, which they will consume and... replace. They merge with (or devour, depending on how you look at it) each other and plug into the nervous system, between these two actions drastically increasing their intelligence. Very soon, they will begin secreting a counter to the venom in their host and be able to secure food on their own.

Genre Splash #5: The Polish Wasp Conspiracy [A]

Challenge: Wasp clerics of life and discord, chemical weapons, and conspiracies. In modern-day Poland.

They have been called by many names. Vampires, demons, even fairies. But in Poland, where the last of them live, they are called the boginki, the little goddesses. They are not human, though they may do a good job passing. They're more like wasps, to be honest. Pretty easily mistaken as wasps, actually, at least until they get too big. Just ignore the pure white color of their shells.

The resemblance is only incidental. Insects they may possibly be, but they're off some entirely different branch of the tree, its only extant members. While they once ranged across Europe and possibly further their numbers were never especially high. They were primitive in their way but intelligent enough to recognize that over-breeding was too likely to lead to their being hunted down (the shadows are only good for concealing you when the shadows are big enough to hold you) or outstrip the humans and leave them without hope for a future generation. Once upon a time their reproductive cycle was separate from humankind, humans made far superior hosts to the point that boginki that depended on other animals were outcompeted. Nobody knows exactly who first made the discovery that somewhere along the line there had developed some defect that prevented their offspring from maturing properly in non-humans, but enough time had passed that there were none who were not so defected.

Idea: Dimension-Traveling Fairy Warlords

The Fair Folk are a conquering people and have been for the many trillions of years that they have existed. They roam from world to world, sometimes exploiting the holes between universes (or even burrowing new ones). As factional conflicts break out the losing side departs for new grounds, and eventually even the winners leave for newer shores, abandoning a wasted world. They are in their third generation as they count it, each generation coming into its time only when all the members of the previous generation have died (which happens only through violence or, very rarely, illness). Whether they developed naturally or were created by others they have not revealed, and their civilization began in a tribal hunter-gatherer state that has changed little, adapting only as necessary to the demands of an empire that stretches across the world.

The Fair Folk appear to be attractive, androgynous members of whatever species the observer belongs to, looking slightly closer to whichever gender the observer feels most comfortable with. Each one looks the same as the next one but as the observer spends more time with particular Fair Folk they begin to acquire, to the observer, slight details that set them apart from the others.

They are able to interbreed with anything living, even plants, and these hybrid children are monstrously hideous. Not because they are more inhuman but because they are less so— their parents are so far beyond the bounds of what our minds can accept that we replace the sight with something else, but the hybrids are close enough that we can see them as they are. Hybrids, unlike their alien parents, do succumb to age, but even so they often live for hundreds of thousands of years.

Because the Fair Folk can only reproduce among themselves every few centuries (they can be considered hermaphrodites but only in our understanding, and really included many other sexes that only manifest in species of other universes, and eight Fair Folk are necessary for reproduction) but can reproduce with others every decade or so, they are quickly outnumbered by their hybrid spawn, which by the time that the world begins to get used up have greatly replaced the previous ecosystem (the Fair Folk aren't exactly picky).

• What if a world already controlled by one group of the Fair Folk is invaded by another faction that is leaving either a lost war or a territory with depleted resources?
• What would a single member of the Fair Folk do if it found itself separated from its peers on another world? Slow takeover? Seclusion? Try to summon its kin?