World Lore, Dice Rolls, Tables and Cypher System mechanics (Dropbox Folder)
It was just an ordinary day. Same things going on as usual. My heart was feeling a bit heavy, but nothing out of the ordinary. The streets were busy as I hung up the phone with my Dad. I’d called to wish him a happy birthday and to tell him I’d be late for dinner. The cross walk lit up green and as I stepped off the curb, a pain in my chest filled my vision with a blinding purple light as I collapsed to the ground.
My body twisted and turned and the pain lanced through my body leaving the feeling of impending doom. This was it. I was done for. My life spiraling to a complete stop in the utter blackness after the light faded, just as quickly as it had come.
I was dead? In the utter darkness the pain subsided and a voice echoed all around me. “You have been chosen.”
As the words filled my ears, knowledge flooded my mind. I was being given a choice, participate or die. A vision of my death passed before my eyes like watching it on a TV screen. I fall to the ground. The paramedics arrive. After what I can only say is moments, but no telling how fast time is moving in the vision with everyone standing so still, I’m lifted on to the gurney with a white sheet covering my face. I’m dead.
With he feeling and knowledge left by the voice I know that if I use the door with the blinking Exit sign, that is my fate. I’m dead — forever.
The voice echoes again, like it’s all around me but there is nothing but blackness of the voice. “Choose.”
Again there are things I just know as the words reverberate in my soul.
Light and objects begin to radiate all around me. Each one different, and each one singing songs of what it can offer me when I look at it.
I reach out to touch one, but jerk my hand back knowing that if I touch one, I’m forever bound by it.
Seven objects floated in a ray of light all their own. A slick black guitar with flames radiating from the base promised deadly musical talents. A gleaming sword with untold power promised to avenge all those that wronged me. The glittering blow with strings of fire and ice, a shifting shadow cloak, A thick leather jerkin and a sparling ring all promised some other variant of justice, and power. But it was the simple scroll with purple flames flickering around it that called to me.
“I’ll save you.”
I approached it and the flames around the scroll formed the visage of a bird, with glowing purple eyes. “Sign and I will grant you a normal life — defect free, no medication, free from your fear.”
I stepped closer and the flames grew bigger and brighter. “And what do I have to do in return?” I asked.
“Nothing. Nothing more than a favor when I ask it of you.”
“Just one?” I sounded skeptical.
The flames rustled in amusement. “Just one for everyday you live.” The flames sparked, “But I won’t ask for more than one a day, and not everyday. It is fair, is it not?”
“What kinds of favors?”
“Today. I ask that you kiss…” the flaming eyes buried deep into my soul and a smile splayed across its beak, “Kiss the first man you see upon exit of this realm. Give me a reason, let me feel the touch of another.”
“You aren’t going to ask me to kiss some stranger all the time.”
It chuckled. “No. Just today. Tomorrow I could ask you to kill a foe.” The bird shrugged its wings. “I do not know. You live, I ask. I’ll add in an extra bit. I will allow you to reject my offer three times. On the forth, you will return to your life — dead. Dead. Dead.”
The flames winked out and only the scroll remained. I looked at the others still floating innocuously near by. They didn’t promise me a healthy life — they didn’t promise me my hearts desire. I grabbed the scroll and it pricked my hand as I wrapped my fingers around it. Blood flowed to the parchment and my name appeared at the bottom.
Power lurched in my body and a mysterious mist enveloped the area. The other artifacts faded and I was left standing in a room. It wasn’t huge or small, and is was nothing different from a simple hotel room.
The feeling of otherworldliness left me with the knowledge of how to control this space. How I can enter, leave and make this place my own. The only rule: You may not take with you anything created here, only what you bring in may you take out.
And with a thought, the room transforms into my bedroom at home — at least what would work here. A chest of drawers for clothes and things, my bed in all its comforts of home, and the same desk upon which was here when the room formed. I had little need for one and it simple vanished from sight with a thought.
I sat down on the bed and felt myself for the first time. I felt light — lighter than I ever remembered. And all I had to do now was kiss a boy. I wondered how hard that would be.
I looked around one last time before standing and spoke the single word. “Leave.”
There was a pop and I felt like my entire bodied squeezed into the size of a pea and appeared in a blinding flash of light in a white nearly sterile room with clean lines and the buzz of magic all around.
The Mind of Nox 