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, cars blared their horns, sirens wailed in the distance. I was on my way to a pub that had open mic night. Rumor was a guy I’d borrowed a song from played there every Thursday night. I wanted to see if he was as good as he sounded in person as he was online.
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.
Somehow this all seemed familiar almost like a dream. But that thought was lost as 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, a vision of my death passed before my eyes like watching it on a TV screen.
I fell 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.
That deja vu feeling again radiated through my body as the voice echoed again. “Choose.”
A series of lights illuminated objects around me. Each one different, and each one singing songs of what it can offer me when I look at it. A red Exit light flickered off to my right. Somehow I knew if I went through it I would cease to exist — be left with only the pain in my chest and whatever lie after death.
I reach out to touch one, but jerked my hand back knowing that if I touched one, I’d be forever bound to it.
Seven objects floated in a ray of light all their own. My eye drifted immediately to the simple scroll with purple flames flickering around it. I knew that was my destiny — my ultimate fate. The other objects held no call — no hold over me and they faded into nothingness leaving only the scroll and it’s beckoning words.
“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. The others had fled, and I picked up the scroll, pricking 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 and then I was left standing in a simple room room. It wasn’t huge or small and it was poorly decorated.
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 studio apartment. It was simple and cramped. I didn’t like living with people so this was all I could afford. It was home with the twin bed meticulously made and pushed up against the windowed wall, the tiny nook of a kitchen and bar that only had room for one bar stool in front of it. A bar across the back wall with full length mirrors took up most of the only full wall in the place. The middle of the hardwood floors empty and polished to perfection. I was a dancer after all I needed the room to practice when I could.
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 