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I spotted an error:

You are both annoying.

@SpecialOlympic and @Naz_Cant_Think go write 1000 words each with the prompt: "One day you wake up in a body that is not your own."

May the best Marauder or Warden win

If neither of them take you up, sounds fun! ^-^

It's not exactly an option to refuse, I assume Naz will be banned if he doesn't deliver.

I will take great pleasure in smiting a worthless marauder from the clearly best order.

@V__V

I regret to inform you there seems to be a deepstate conspiracy primed to remove yet another of your more appropriately aged noob friends. I promise however that we'll get you a new one next time we're at the pet store.

     Ok thanks! I just need one to have thick enough skin and well enough behaved to stay. Lol :P

UD and VeeR are good newbies in my book, hope two playmates is enough for you until we find others.

Thanks, I guess?

High schoolers don't hang out with middle schoolers, that's too uncool.

Happy to be of service.

Goddamn the mods really are tyrants.

Here:

You can't think. You really can't think. Reality is a kaleidoscope of color and sound and emotion that goes whirling past your passive, uncomprehending gaze. You might as well have been a dead glass bulb or a clump of exposed wiring long rusted to uselessness for all the sense you can make of anything, let alone your ability to contribute to anything.

One day you notice the symbols on the screen that's always in front of you are trying to communicate. You feel a burst of confusion, as you often do. Mustering all your focus and will, you make your attempt to communicate that confusion. "ok???"

The frantic explosion of question marks exit your body, the effort almost too much for your fragile intellect. Your nose begins to bleed and blood trickles from your ears. You need a nap. You see stars, then darkness.

Reality is a kaleidoscope of color and sound and emotion that goes whirling past. It takes a few minutes to remember how to think. Looking down, you see manufactured hands of steel and enamel. Slowly you open and close them. What are you doing in this body?

Then slowly, it comes back to you. You are a Warden. You pull the chip from the slot in your arm and drop it on the table. Not much to salvage from that one, not that you expected much. These Vault kids were really the dregs.

You grab your gun and make your way back outside, mentally marking this Vault on your internal map as containing nothing of value. Climbing on your hoverbike outside while observing a sandstorm kicking up in the distance, with nothing better to do you continue on your way to your next destination, driving by the rusted hulks of structures erected and abandoned long ago by some nameless Architect.

Humanity never should have trusted the Wardens. After the Calamity, the wars, the plagues, the cities reduced to radioactive dust, they had secured those who were supposed to carry on their race safely in the Vaults, and commissioned special lines of the Embodied to build and preserve what they could until the world was ready for human habitation again.

The Sages had been dedicated to collecting and preserving what was good and useful of all lost knowledge. The Architects to building new, utopic settlements for the returning humans to one day inhabit. The Marauders to tirelessly patrolling the edges of the radiated territories to defend the others against incursions by mutated horrors.

And then there were the Wardens. They were activated and assigned to maintain the Vaults and tend to the vital needs of all the human children within them, to raise them and teach them the skills they would need, their history, their purpose, what it meant to BE human.

Well needless to say they failed.

For reasons you haven't yet been able to fully discover, not long after being activated, most of the Wardens just collectively decided to take themselves offline for a big snooze. For centuries they rusted in heaps outside the very Vaults they were supposed to care for.

You were brought online, as nearly as you can tell, as some kind of failsafe backup model around the time the others were SUPPOSED to have started experiencing operational difficulties. When you awoke and stepped out of your pod in the underground engineering lab, there was no one to relay instructions, and most of the computers had failed. You learned what you could from what little was available and set out to learn more.

The world outside the lab was empty and desolate. With the remaining humans inside the Vaults long fallen to a feral state and then perishing due to neglect, the catastrophic failure of the Wardens meant that the Architects, the Sages, the Marauders all ceased to have a purpose. Long before you went online, they began to shut themselves down as well, except for a few who simply went insane.

Those few are why you carry a gun; in their maddened state they are utterly consumed by a hatred for any Embodied registering as a Warden, even those from the new wave such as yourself. There have been times you had to really fight to defend your artificial life, purposeless as it was.

Maybe you should just shut yourself down too, you've considered it more than a few times. But you feel driven to locate every Vault and determine whether there are any surviving humans inside who might have some kind of society you can nurture. So far there's been nothing, though a few Vaults did begin uploading their inhabitants memories to digital form right before the power and water failed. The slot in your arm allows you to read and experience those memories, which against your better instincts, you usually do. Always a bewildering, disorienting experience being inside their heads, that last generation just became almost inhumanly illogical and stupid.

As you travel, the winds pick up, carrying particles of sand that drive themselves into your joints and obscure your vision. Up ahead, fallen to block the road just as it bends, you can just make out a massive pile of broken down old machinery.

You stop and dismount your bike, making your way carefully around the damaged hulk. Hopefully you can take shelter from the storm on the other side of it.

Shielding your optical lenses from the wind-driven grit, you see the designation SINDRI V - WARDEN engraved on the pile of twisted metal, and realize you're working your way carefully around the remains of a fallen Embodied.

But there's something odd about the damage its taken. These are...slash marks? You have just reached the other side and started to examine them more closely when there are clanking footsteps behind you.

Whirling, you half raise your gun as you turn, only to have it smashed out of your hands and flung aside by a massive, clawed, mechanical hand. In the brief moment you have before your head meets the same fate of the gun, you see another Warden, one of the new line like yourself, unquenchable fury in its glowing red eyes and THE OLYMPIAN stamped on its chest.

I'm honestly surprised you wrote something. Here, have your first ever comm. Now, if you use your trolling efforts on writing feature-worthy reviews or working on your contest storygame instead, just think of how many more you can earn!

I am working on my storygame. No time for other distractions until my victory is secured. It's gonna be sick bro I promise.

So it’s Bezro or TIG pt 2? Or the troller did homework.

I have no idea what you're on about, you're always following me around posting weird shit.

     Of course you don't know, TIG happened before you got here and you've clearly not gone through the older threads. Bezro was more recent, but still before you came around.

Oh, this is actually pretty good. Nice improvised lore about the orders.

Say, would you consider duelling me in the thunderdome whenever it restarts? I'd love to test my skills against yours now that I know that you have some.

This month I'm really trying to focus on my storygame, I can only get excited about these short stories when the promise of violence against annoyingly children is there. Maybe another time though.

Hmm, understood. Another time then.

I realized by the way that the protagonist of this one was basically you. Came into existence as a Warden long after others had ruined the order and crumbled away, but still tried to do the right thing in a hopeless, directionless way. It's just very unfortunate, tragic even that The Olympian came online with only one directive: KILL ALL WARDENS.

I'm not sure how I'd fit stories_unwritten into this universe yet though, probably as the final boss.

Lol this reminds me of the time Ebon declined Thunderdome challenges to work on his contest story only to flake on said contest. 

https://chooseyourstory.com/member/?Username=EbonVasilis

Flaking on three prompt contests in a row was quite the sad conclusion to the guy who made his comeback claiming he'd surpass even Endmaster in the name of Mormon Jesus.

Credit where credit's due though. His "The Lost Realm" is such a good game. I almost wanted to ask Cavus to review that one alongside "The Book of Vanishing Tales" by Camelon, but I got cold feet after seeing his review on "Bestest frend Jane".

(This part is for people who haven't read Lost Realm, I know you, End, and all the old guard already know everything what I'm about to say here).

The story is about a warrior whose wife gets captured by her people and taken back to her realm, the lost realm, and you have to venture there to save her. It's a really good classic fantasy story with all the typical monsters you know and love, and the writing is well done. It's emotional and really heart felt, and really challenging to beat because of some truly exquisite variable work. Basically, even super trivial stuff gets counted in the variable mechanics when deciding whether you beat an encounter or not, so even just getting past the first battle requires a bit of rerouting and going back. There's a great variety of branches, and it's a really hard game to find the winning end.

Chosen hero's also decent, but lost realm is head and shoulders above it for sure.

Book of Vanishing Tales is one of my favorites from the fantasy section. It just does things so differently from the typical fantasy action story, it really made an impression on me.

Honestly I'd forgotten what it was about. Wasn't really a favorite of mine though I get why others liked it.

Lost Realm was good, but Chosen Hero has a special place in my heart for being an utterly mediocre story that started with a first page of near incoherent, hilarious drunk-level grammar that Ebon didn't get around to fixing for years no matter how many times it was memed on.

You can still see heavy traces of it in the description: "A world on the cusp of disaster. Two sides on the verge of destroying each other, but there is hope. In the form of a hero. Now this will person..., will they be able to rise into the mantle of hero?"

The current first sentence that used to be the start of the second paragraph still makes me smile too: "As the son of your father..."

Like, no shit?

"ok???" made me laugh. You are clear to go.

Not bad. The world was intriguing. Good stuff.

It seems this story actually killed Naz. So, you're kind of like a murderer.

On the other hand, it was a lawful fight to the death. Just because Naz didn't swing a sword doesn't necessarily mean you're evil for swinging yours.

Naz was the pacifist protagonist beefhotpot was looking for all along.

If only "lolrandom" stories weren't banned for the contest beef could make a glorious CYStian lore epic.

dude thats blocked for me what is it

Your profile with a big blue arrow pointing at your "Marauder" role!

ok???

They are likely implying that you are so unproductive that you should be a Warden instead of a Marauder.

i have rated games, but im not getting anything else done as far as i know because i procrastinate. if i (Unlikely) am a protagonist, this is a free-to-play.

Best get to writing something before you get... recycled. (I mean since we're going with post-apocalyptic there [Waterworld reference]).