"GOL'BURGER - Brighten up your day!"

Franchise restaurants are hard to maintain, especially when they become one of the most popular fast-food services in the country! Thomas Alden grew up enjoying Gol'Burger's delicious hamburgers and fries growing up. Now, he's an adult in his thirties that has inherited a seat at the Board of Directors and a significant amount of shares in the company. With this comes great responsibility as his decisions will affect the company's future.

As Al Ray, the Chief Executive Officer of Gol'Burger, gets older, the world begins to change drastically. The FDA is beginning to implement and enforce new standards of practices regarding quality of fast-food chains around the country, putting the company's future at risk. The Members of the Board need to think of new ways to adapt.

What will you do in this privileged position of power? Will you flounder, find a way to rise above the noise, or become a victim to the strange forces in the background of the company?

Submitted for EndMaster's Crisis Contest 

Original Publishing Date: August 1, 2024

Corruption, complacency and conflict has eroded the once great Roman Empire. Split into two, and then diminished to the Italian Peninsula, Roman citizens, Christian and pagan, believe that the world as they know it is about end. His Holiness, Pope Leo, previously drove back Attila the Hun, called the Scourge of God by most west of the Danube River. The world believed that was the end of the Hun Invasion. They were wrong.

Eight years later, Attila still continues his conquest of the world, now having subdued all of Africa and the Eastern World. With the sacking of Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire has collapsed into anarchy as the Huns and their subordinate tribes pillage and plunder the countryside. With no other obstacles in his path, Attila is once again free to attack the Western Roman Empire.

The alarming speed of the Huns' conquests and reports of new total war tactics terrify the west. Strange tales of hordes of vicious animals, warriors with the strength of ten men and demonic sorcery plague the imaginations of the Roman forces charged to protect what remains of the Empire. Before, reports of the Huns' savagery were already running rampant. Now, all forms of apocryphal tales are accepted as fact.

In a final desperate stand against the forces of darkness, the leader of the Christians, Pope Leo, has organized what remains of the bravest and most cunning soldiers of the Roman army to launch a covert mission to save the people of the West. There is no other way; Attila must be destroyed! Possessing otherworldly insight, Leo has been given he knowledge necessary to guide his chosen men, and you among them, to fight to the threat that seeks to end not only Rome, but the entire world. Will you defeat Attila's ambition to destroy the world, or will you be just another victim?

Update Notes:

Addressed the variable glitches that led to some of the content being blocked off. Fixed the issue and made some other edits.

France - Summer 1415 AD

The country of France faces a point of crisis. King Henry of England, fifth of his name and hope of the House of Lancaster, declares his intention to conquer France, stating it is the will of God. Charles, sixth of his name and known as the Mad King, is poorly suited to deal with the rising threat and relies on the strength of better men. To the shock of the French court, Henry and his army arrive safely in Normandy despite coastal defenses, leaving Henry to freely begin his siege of the port of Harfleur. Charles, furious and frothing at the mouth, threatens his lords into compliance to answer English aggression.

Command the destiny of Jean the Younger, heir to the Valois-Alençon dynasty. His father Jean the Elder, named the "Wise" and Duke of Alençon, is ordered by his liege to lead a portion of the French army to counter the English invasion. Little Jean wants to his father in action, drawn by the romantic, medieval desire to see the glory of battle. But, there is one problem: Jean is only a six-year-old boy! Nevertheless, he dreams of glory, being the son of one of the most powerful men in France.

Will you bind Jean's actions to history, guide him to a greater future or doom him to obscurity? His fate lies in your hands.

Author Number Five,

What is your opinion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict...if you were to write about it?

Stories_Unwritten, I'm never opposed to anyone on this site succeeding. In fact, if the storygame is as good as the commendations lead me to believe, I'm definitely down to read and recommend it. I of course take exception to how you've insulted some of the other Wardens who try to achieve and don't flake out, but I'll rejoice in your achievement regardless. Thank you for your contribution to the site.

It is rather impressive that one storygame managed to get 72 commendations.

Author Number Four,

I enjoy writing character dialogue the most when writing a storygame. What do you enjoy writing the most while making a storygame?

To hear is to obey.

@Will11

Finished my review of Phoenix Whip.

Anthraxus' Amblings

An Englishman, a Scotsman, an Irishman, a Welshman, a Latvian, a Turk, a German, an Indian, several Americans (including a southerner, a New Englander, a Californian, an Idahoan, an New Mexican, and a Kentuckian), an Argentinean, a Dane, an Australian, a Slovakian, an Egyptian, a Japanese, a Moroccan, a Frenchman, a New Zealander, a Spaniard, a Russian, a Guatemalan, a Colombian, a Pakistani, a Malaysian, a Croatian, a Uzbek, a Cypriot, a Pole, a Lithuanian, a Chinese, a Sri Lankan, a Lebanese, a Cayman Islander, a Ugandan, a Vietnamese, a Korean, a Uruguayan, a Czech, an Icelander, a Mexican, a Finn, a Honduran, a Panamanian, an Andorran, an Israeli, a Venezuelan, a Fijian, a Peruvian, an Estonian, a Brazilian, a Portuguese, a Liechtensteiner, a Mongolian, a Hungarian, a Canadian and a Québécois, a Moldovan, a Haitian, a Norfolk Islander, a Macedonian, a Bolivian, a Cook Islander, a Tajikistani, a Samoan, an Armenian, an Aruban, an Albanian, a Palestinian, an Isreali, an Iranian, a Greenlander, a Micronesian, a Virgin Islander, a Georgian, a Bahaman, a Belarusian, a Cuban, a Tongan, a Cambodian, a Qatari, an Azerbaijani, a Romanian, a Chilean, a Kyrgyzstani, a Jamaican, a Filipino, a Ukrainian, a Dutchman, an Ecuadorian, a Costa Rican, a Swede, a Bulgarian, a Serb, a Swiss, a Greek, a Belgian, a Singaporean, an Italian, a Norwegian and forty-seven Africans walk up to a nightclub.

The doorman scrutinizes the group one by one and stops their entrance saying, "Sorry, you can't come in here without a Thai. "

Congratulations YummyFood!

Congratulations to YummyFood for being the victor of our Second CYS Gazette Writing Competition!

YummyFood is the author of a few storygames here on CYS, most notably The Siberian. We can’t wait to see what he writes next! Check out his upcoming storygame for EndMaster’s Prompt Contest 5, which will feature the concept of joining a cult. Well done to you sir!

The Ghost Blimp by Will11

On the grey, cloudy morning of 16 August 1942 a lone swimmer waded out into the warm waves off Ocean Beach near San Francisco. He was astonished when a massive grey shape descended out of the fog straight ahead of him. It was a blimp, a massive airship with a small empty gondola beneath it. As the swimmer watched the airship continued to descend and drift inland. It hit the beach, bounced up and then struck a cliff, knocking loose a depth bomb that hung from the blimp: it fell down into the sand. The swimmer held his breath but the bomb didn’t explode.

Lighter, the airship gained height and began to drift over San Francisco, still leaking air. An excited crowd began following it and a quick-thinking photographer snapped a picture. The blimp began to descend again and finally gently landed on Bellevue Avenue in nearby Daly City. A crowd swarmed around the blimp as it continued to deflate. The doors of the gondola were latched open and a microphone attached to an external loudspeaker trailed from one. Of the two-man crew there was not a trace.

Policemen and military personnel quickly searched the gondola for clues. All three parachutes and a rubber life raft were found on board through two life jackets and a pair of smoke flares were missing. The radio and engine were both still turned on, the former crackling. The throttle was set to idling, a stationary speed for the blimp. Only four hours of fuel were left in the tanks, though there should have been seven, had the remaining three been dumped? The fate of what had happened to the crew remained a mystery. The airship, L-8, was subsequently and forever known as “The Ghost Blimp”.

She had taken off from the U.S. Navy Base on nearby Treasure Island at 6.03am. On board were two pilots: Lieutenant Ernest Cody (27) and Ensign Charles Adams (35) – Cody was experienced but this was Adams’ first flight as an officer. The blimp was on a reconnaissance patrol to look for Japanese submarines, she had made similar flights over one thousand times without mishap. The first stage of her journey took her to the Farallon Islands, treacherous rocky outcrops whose surrounding waters were widely inhabited by Great White Sharks.

Flying at 20mph L-8 reached the islands at 7.38am when the pilots radioed their base at Treasure Island to report sighting an oil slick on the water four miles from the islands. That may have been the last contact the Treasure Island airbase had with them (accounts differ, others state contact was lost at 8.50). Two ships were in the area, the cargo ship SS Albert Gallatin and a fishing boat called the Daisy Gray, and they witnessed the arrival of L-8. The airship then began to behave very unusually.

First both ships witnessed the airship halt over a patch of ocean and drop two smoke flares into the sea, which they took to mean a possible Japanese submarine sighting. The SS Albert Gallatin raised the alarm, its crew manned her deck gun and she quickly steamed out of the area. The smaller Daisy Gray reacted slower though her crew also hauled in her nets and began slowly steering away while her crew urgently scanned the water and the airship with binoculars. They later reported they were initially close enough to see Cody and Adams moving around inside the gondola and even accurately described their appearance including hair color, before moving away.

For the next hour and a half L-8 slowly circled the dropped flares in the water. At one point she descended to within 30 feet of the surface of the ocean before slowly rising again. At 9am she was seen to dump ballast, ascend and turn away east towards San Francisco, following the prevailing wind. The crew of the two ships breathed a sigh of relief over what was apparently a false alarm but they weren’t to know that L-8 was supposed to fly northwest from the Farallon Islands. Combined with the crew’s persistent radio silence it became clear to the airbase on Treasure Island that something was seriously wrong.

Soon after 9am two Kingfisher planes were dispatched from Treasure Island to find the missing airship. Instead, the first sighting of L-8 came at 10.49 when the captain of a Pan American plane (and also possibly a second P-38 plane) reported sighting L-8 flying near the Golden Gate Bridge towards Treasure Island. Ten minutes later, at 11 o’clock, one of the Kingfisher planes spotted the blimp rising straight up into cloud at 2,000 feet three miles offshore of Salada Beach. At the location of this sighting was 15 miles southwest of the first and L-8’s top air speed was only 60mph one of these sightings appears to have been an error.

Flying above 2,000 feet triggers L-8’s automatic release valve so this might explain why her next definite sighting, by the swimmer off Ocean Beach at 11.15am, six miles northeast of the Salada Beach sighting, was of the blimp barely fifty feet above sea level descending towards the shore. As mentioned, witnesses gathered to stare at the low-flying airship and from these witnesses come some truly strange testimony.

Both a teenage boy and a woman riding a horse reported seeing men moving around inside the gondola (two the boy said, three the woman insisted). A man on a nearby golf course even reported seeing a man parachute from the gondola as the airship flew in over the sea, landing in the water. L-8 continued to descend and by the time it crashed and crowds converged on it the airship was empty. What had happened to Cody and Adams and how are we to account for the strange circumstances surrounding their disappearance?

One of the first theories was that they had somehow been captured by a Japanese submarine, though when it was pointed out L-8 was armed with a pair of depth charges and a .30 caliber machine gun it was suggested the two pilots may have actually been spies who had defected to Japan and been picked up at sea by a submarine instead. The US Navy searched for two days then called off the search and declared both pilots dead. Their official theory was that one man had fallen from the gondola into the sea while investigating the oil spill and the second had also fallen while trying to rescue him or leaning out to find him. The sharks would not have left a trace.

Other theories rely more on the eyewitness who saw a man parachute from the airship as it approached land. It is claimed that one of the pilots may have murdered the other, either by pushing them out of the airship or killing them on the airship (possibly strangling them with the microphone wire, which would not have left blood) and then dumping their body at sea, due to a love triangle or similar reason. The pilot may then have steered the airship back to land and abandoned it, either dying in an unsuccessful landing or escaping to live a life of anonymity. Others claim alien abduction.

After all this time what happened to Ernest Cody and Charles Adams will never be known except that one or both of them met a terrible fate. For decades their families were haunted by the uncertainty, by the lack of knowing what happened to two young men who valiantly, and mysteriously, seemed to have lost their lives while serving their country. What do you think happened? How do we explain the enduring mysteries that surround The Ghost Blimp?

The Council of Nicaea by MiltonManThing

Continuing in the tradition of writing historical articles, I was inspired to create one centered around something near to my heart, the development of Christianity. Yeah, go figure that one of the Christian residents of CYS is interested in this topic, but understanding history, regardless of your opinion of religion, is always crucial to living a full life. One of the most important events regarding the growth and spread of Christianity are the Ecumenical Councils, the first of which was held in Nicaea, which itself was in the region of Asia Minor. To provide context, Christianity was often persecuted by Roman authorities. At first, persecution was largely unorganized. All that changed under Emperor Nero after he used the Great Fire of Rome to stir up the public against Christians in 64 AD. Persecution continued for centuries till Constantine the Great enacted the Edict of Milan in 313 AD. Prior to Constantine, Christians had experienced a brutal period under Emperor Diocletian and the splitting of the Roman Empire made nothing easier. With the empire now reunited and Constantine strongly favoring the Church, there was opportunity for better organization throughout the faith. However, not all theological matters were without internal dispute, and one issue, centered around one man, would need resolution. Why should one care about this event? Well, historical events rarely happen in a vacuum. Even events presumed to be unimportant in modern context do create the circumstances by which the present can even happen. This event in particular set a precedent for unity in the Christian Church as well as legitimacy in the eyes of the Roman Empire. Since Christianity, which at this time had not yet experienced the East-West Schism, the Council of Nicaea heavily affected how the faith operated all throughout the known world, far beyond Europe.

[Image of Icon]

This icon is a reproduction of a famous fresco located in the Great Meteoron Monastery of Thessaly, Greece. The figures represented in this late-Medieval period piece of art feature Emperor Constantine in the center, the council of bishops surrounding him, Arius at the bottom and the Hagia Sophia in the background. As the Hagia Sophia would not be built till 360 AD, one can recognize the obvious anachronism, but art has often been guilty of that feature. Ironically, the Hagia Sophia would be consecrated by an Arian bishop, Eudoxius of Antioch. Of course, the church would always be known more for its legacy rather than this obscure fact.

The main text at the bottom of the icon is (from top to bottom and left to right):

Ἡ ΕΝ ΝΙΚΑΙΑ ἉΓΙΑ ΠΡΩΤΗ ΟΙΚΟΥΜΕΝΙΚΗ CΥΝΟΔΟC

The Holy First Ecumenical Synod in Nicaea

Ὁ ΜΕΓΑC ΚΩΝCΤΑΝΤΙΝΟC

Constantine the Great

Ὁ ΑΙΡΕΤΙΚΟC ΑΡΕΙΟC

The Heretic Arius

The text paragraphs at the bottom detail Arius’ condemnation as a heretic, decrying his claim that JESUS CHRIST was a created being rather than eternally GOD and Incarnate.

The reason the council was called was in regards to controversies and riots regrading the nature of JESUS. Arius, a Berber presbytr, had stirred up dissent against the doctrine of Trinitarianism, namely that the Father, the Son JESUS CHRIST and the HOLY SPIRIT are all three distinct persons contained in One Being. Arius contended that the teachings of Archbishop Alexander of Alexandria (what a title) and his assistant Athanasius were the same as the heretical teachings of Modalism. To distinguish Modalism from Trinitarianism, Trinitarianism states that GOD has three Persons within Him that all exist co-eternally. Modalism contends that GOD is instead one Person that has different modes of being and adopts different modes temporarily. In contrast, Arius contended that GOD Himself did not include the Person of JESUS CHRIST. Instead, JESUS was a created being of the Father, just a son, rather than being fully GOD and fully man simultaneously.

Yes, it does get a bit confusing, but please bear with me.

Arguing that JESUS CHRIST is not GOD was perhaps even more of a minority opinion among Christians then than it is now. However, Arianism - the naming convention is just an unfortunate coincidence - would still gain some traction with the local Coptic congregation. Being disturbed over the riots and unrest in Alexandria, Emperor Constantine himself tasked the Church to resolve the issue for sake of peace in the realm. This was not the first time Constantine had intervened in religious affairs as he had organized a small council to deal with a schism with the North African churches. After a prior local council in Alexandria failed, the matter escalated to a full synod requiring the presence of many members of the clergy throughout the Roman Empire. Although the exact number of attending bishops is in dispute, Athanasius’ list contained three hundred and eighteen bishops. With those bishops would have been accompanying deacons and presbytery, potentially totaling to almost two thousand clergymen in attendance. Constantine was determined to settle the dispute once and for all, and also resolve another disagreement that we’ll get to later. The council would be held in the imperial palace in Nicaea starting in May of 325 AD, which was chosen for its proximity to Nicomedia, the capital of the Empire at the time.

Though Constantine had sharp rebuke for both Arius and Alexander failing to come to a peaceful solution on their own, both were given the platform to argue the matter formally. As Arius was just a presbytr, he would sit as a voting member of the council. His position would have the support of bishops Theonas and Secundus. Nevertheless, despite his arguments, Arius’ beliefs would not be shared by the vast majority of the council. His position on JESUS’ lack of divinity would be heavily censured. To cement the Church’s decision, the Nicene Creed was officially adopted by the Church affirming the divine nature of JESUS as the eternal Son of GOD and having equal status with the other Persons of the GODHEAD. In short, Trinitarianism became law for the Church, and Arian and his supporters were exiled. Ironically, it would be an Arian bishop that would later baptize Constantine. The second issue was resolving the date of celebrating Easter. Constantine wanted the event to have nothing to do with Jewish Passover, and so the date range that we celebrate now was chosen, much to the chagrin of many Christians.

Now to address a humorous legend surrounding the council: there is a story of Saint Nicholas, the bishop of Myra. This is the same Nicholas who would inspire the character of Santa Claus. According to the story, Bishop Nicholas was such a staunch supporter of Trinitarianism and opponent of Arianism that he behaved poorly at the formal event. Arian was droning endlessly and boorishly about his position and at a certain point Nicholas lost his patience. He went right up to Arius and slapped him across the face. For this, Nicholas was arrested and his miter and pallium (hat and vestment) were confiscated. He would later be vindicated after CHRIST and the Virgin Mary appeared to him in his cell. There is dispute over whether this legend is a complete fabrication or based on something that actually happened. The story itself has different versions, with different details such as another Arian being hit or Nicholas punching instead of slapping. There would historical precedent for Nicholas to have been present at the council, though his name was absent on Athanasius’ list of bishops but present on others. In any case, it’s a fun story to tell that transgresses the traditional image of Santa Claus, and it’s celebrated in Eastern Orthodoxy.