Recent comments

You also use the Madison name here. You only corrected the first one. It’s a pity since Madison is a much better name than Gibson, but they already called him Gibson earlier. It’s like the stone itself, once specified in a branch, that is the way it is, and the stuff that is written in the future stemming from that branch must conform to it and can’t go back on what was written earlier in that branch.

Ok. So what. If I encounter such a branch and I add a chapter to it, I will use the name that was established in direct descendant branches, no matter what the name is. It doesn’t seem hard to me. It’s like the stone itself, once specified in a branch, that is the way it is, and the stuff that is written in the future stemming from that branch must conform to it and can’t go back on what was written earlier in that branch.

I suspected as much. But it keeps telling me I have 7 new notifications so even though they appear to be from the site itself, I was holding out hope.

Aw stop it, I'm blushing 😅

It still says his last name is Madison in this one. It wasn’t just the previous page.

When chronologically is this taking place? Because the first few pages are from 2000. This thing has apparently existed for so long, that it makes a difference contextualizing it. Like I don’t know if phone booths still even exist in 2022 for instance.

The big danger would be if he sees a woman he finds attractive despite something horribly and visibly wrong with her and therefore her most eye catching attribute was not what he found attractive about her.

It seems like with his condition now, he’ll eventually simply be transformed into an extremely attractive woman, as his body parts get replaced one at a time by the best parts of every woman he sees. Possibly. Is it possible for a woman’s most eye catching feature to be her genitals? There’s a possible discrepancy between eye catching and attractive but the precondition is that Jon finds her attractive so he shouldn’t be changed by looking at her at all if she was eye catching in the freakish sense and not the attractive sense.

The Return of the King

Not much happens in the two additions tbh, mostly setting the scene for things happening 🙃

Oh cool! Great add, I'll have to read through it more thoroughly and follow up!

I've written this in first person, past tense, as Jon/Allison just because I personally find that kind of writing easiest to get immersed to. I don't mind if any follow up stories are written differently - whatever works for you!

Also, I was hoping to word Ryder's wishes quite carefully to make sure that their outcome isn't Jon/Allison loosing her trepidation of the situation or just becoming blindly obedient to his whims. Hopefully there's still plenty of scope for internal conflict with the effects of the wish!

It seemed to me that the previous page was a pretty good standalone story but not much of a setup for additions at the end. So here goes a page just to facilitate that.

Another interesting concept. If I weren't busy with other projects of my own I might adopt this branch to develop.

2 possible follow up plots come to mind for this one, to anyone reading this if I never get around to writing them myself. One is a flashback to the event 6 months earlier, possibly it was all natural or possibly they were using some new drug or quack aphrodisiac. The other is, they decide to link 2 other people like themselves so as to have them as lovers, unable to agree with each other as to whether to have a single male or female lover they decide it would be better anyway to have a linked pair like themselves. fter all it also seems to me that “cheating” on each other would have no meaning since they both would be experiencing it and participating in the act.

Believe me, man, I know; most of the elbow grease that went into that episode was devoted to keeping it feeling grounded and connected to the real world instead of the obvious supernatural shenanigans that would have to accompany an origin story for the Stone. I actually did a shitton of Research on Incan history and culture specifically because of that; I figured the best way to keep things tied to the believable was to have the events of the episode more or less mirror what actually historically happened in the closing years of the Incan Empire's downfall. Actually, I'm honestly super happy with how that particular episode turned out, NGL. The problem was that I couldn't really find the inspiration to follow it up, y'know? I was going to write out the shenanigans Jon's grandpa got up to in the days immediately following the stone's discovery, but anything I came up just kinda felt like the same old same old for FB, and on top of that I was working under the restriction that everything had to turn out more less the way Jon remembered it in the end. FB kinda gets you in this trap where all you think about are individual episodes and not the whole story arc, y'know? With obviously myopic results. Makes it doubly hard to write these Past-Story things since you kinda have to have it all planned out before you even begin writing.

But whatever. Here's the episode I was talking about in question, if you're interested.
https://fictionbranches.net/fb/story/3486539

Well that would work for the stone itself, but the difference is, it is inevitable that the extraordinary stone would have an extraordinary origin story. There is no surprise factor there and therefore no interesting new information in that. It’s like a good joke, it needs to have something very unexpected as its punchline. So ironically the better choice than the origin story of the stone, which everyone already knows must be extraordinary, is an unexpected origin story of Jon and Karyn’s friendship unexpectedly turning out to be extraordinary, you see? Of course it needs to not cross the line from unexpected to needlessly bizarre and implausible or else it just won’t be a story anyone can swallow and take seriously and that could be a difficult demarcation here.

The "Link" field is the text that will be shown in any links to that episode. For example, if an episode ends with "What does Jon do next?", and you're writing a followup episode, you might want the link on the existing episode to say "Jon gets on the bus", but then you might want the actual Title, displayed in large text at the top of your episode, to say "Jon's Bus Adventure".

Just a bit of extra customization for users who want it. You're free to use identical text for both the Link and Title if you choose.

At this time there are no plans to support a wiki. We did actually have one in the early days of FB 3.0, back in ~2017, but it was quickly forgotten about, and got nuked when I had to migrate the server to a new host. Since then, it hasn't felt worth my time to stand up another wiki, given the lack of apparent interest the last time I did so.

@Thisisnota_Realname - It doesn't take very much to be respectful of your fellow writers, but that little bit of effort improves everyone's experience on this website. Let's all try and support one another, without bringing anyone down unnecessarily, yeah?

Up next- Holy shit you guys!!

Completely skipped over the 2010s between chapters on this one. But now it has headway on an actual story after all that time.

Nope. I have just this one account. That would be so much work for fake internet points that I know would mean nothing since they came from me.

To the people who have liked it though I do thank you. It really does mean a lot that you like what I'm doing and it does inspire me to write more.

Oh I see what’s going on now. You’re simply upvoting your own stories with multiple alt accounts. 6 upvotes with only 96 views lol, sure. I thought it was weird when I looked at recent active writers and one had massive amounts of upvotes more than all the others combined. A pity they don’t list who upvotes things in a list. Well I don’t care, whatever gets you through the day.

What kind of a girl’s name is Jonnie

Actually of all the branches from “Karyn borrows”, Changing Mario and Luigi to be crossdressers may have been the literal only one that was harmless and therefore not a betrayal of his trust in her so it’s kind of ironic he’s overreacting like this. But I have a feeling she’s going to actually betray his trust from here on.

Well if there’s one thing all the story branches on this page prove, it’s that he was very wrong to think she was trustworthy after all.

oh my god of course a rick and morty fanfic, yuck. And based on a specific episode no less. I’m reminded of when I was in grade school art class and all the other kids would just produce tracings of popular cartoon characters instead of creating something themselves, and in 1989 when asked to produce creative writing, half the class just replicated the first scene of the batman movie that came out that year. “you tell your friends about me”

I have a plan for M2F but it's coming later in the story.

Here's hoping Jon and Biff become hot girls too LOL

I'm just trying to point out that the way Jon dealt with the situation is completely out of character for him. Is he now going to make more wishes like that, to other people, some of which have done worse, like actually committing murder? If you want to go down that road, I'm not going to stop you (well, actually I can't, since I have no control over other people's episodes), but don't expect me to just go along with it, unless there's a good explanation for why Jon is suddenly acting that way.

The dude literally took a girl off the street, and had her assault her friend, that is violence first of all. And yes the shovel was her only means to knock him out. She’s a teenaged girl. She can’t knock out a guy by punching him. Who do you think she is, Chun Li? And what does he do with his persuasion power? He forces her to have an incestuous threesome with himself and her own mother. That’s pretty fucked up. That proves he doesn’t give a shit about other people. Can you imagine being forced to have sex with one of YOUR parents? You think Jon should give him the benefit of the doubt after that? To just say “I’ll trust him to be alone in a room with my best friend and her mom, now that he can no longer speak I’m sure he’ll live and let live ”? No sir it would have been completely reasonable for Jon to have killed him right there, Cecil is lucky he only got maimed.

Next Episode: The Virus spreads

As to your first comment - What? Where did you get that Cecil is a violent person? A pervert, sure. Someone without morals, okay. But he never tried to harm or kill anyone. Yes, he told Karyn to knock Jon out, but he never told her HOW. That was left up to her. Mutilating someone so grotesquely for doing what Cecil did? Maybe YOU'RE the one who's being inserted into the story, wanting to get revenge through words on the person who did something like that to YOU. Jon doesn't have a sick mind like that. At least not in any of the other countless stories that I've either written or read on the site. And dropping notes into a well? I'm pretty sure that's not how wishing wells work, or how they're supposed to.

As to your second comment - Who says that you can't still have Karyn telling her mother about the wishes? That is literally what the last part of this episode is about, whether or not she should tell her.

The secondary reason for the part I wrote was to activate Karyn’s mom as a new active character for story development. I didn’t just close a door, I opened a new one. Also it returns Karyn into active play. A story is like a game of chess. I just developed 2 pieces and put them into active play, while removing the less valuable piece from active play that was getting in everyone’s way. Please don’t squander the new opportunities that opens. The next logical progression should have been to spill the beans about the wishes to Karyn’s mom, not obsess over the discardrd piece.

A strange condemnation of the actions I wrote into the story and defense of Cecil. First of all, though cruel and unusual, the punishment was in fact fit to the situation- it deprived Cecil of sexual function as consequence for sexually assaulting Karyn and her mom, and the rest was to guarantee he wouldn’t be a physical threat. Just depriving him of his voice doesn’t get them out of danger. What if having lost the ability to control their minds, he had changed his plan to leaving no witnesses? You think that wasn’t likely considering he had already used violence? He could have killed Karyn and her mom right there, he could have pulled out a gun and shot them, or stabbed them, or killed them barehanded, you want to bet on a teenaged girl and a middle aged woman against a young man in desperation? Also what if he went back to the well and made a wish on paper, dropping it into the well along with a coin? Taking his arms seems to me the bare minimum to stop him. And his plans were clearly beyond merely recapturing his youth and sexual experiences thereof, because he already had his youth back as well as an absurd capability he never had as a young man which already let him do that, yet that wasn’t enough for him, since he attacked Jon and Karyn to stop them from filling in the well for no other possible reason but that he was going to wish for still more. What possible reason could he have for needing that well to still be there? Is Cecil your self insertion into the story, a standin for yourself and therefore you see an attack on him as an attack on you? Was he supposed to be your Mary Sue?

tbh freaks me the hell out when I encounter pictures in these stories, but at least this one isn’t gross.

The closest I've come was utterly wacky one-off describing the place of the stone in Incan civilization but that's it, I think.

I've always wanted to do something with the past before the root myself. The thing I've found is that it's kinda really hard to do. Requires a lot of forethought and nonlinear thinking and stuff.

How would it make sense that she would turn into a werewolf as a result of becoming custodian of the stone? Jon didn't. The werewolfism is weakly justifying the body hair, but the body hair still doesn't make any sense.

Oops. On rereading this I see I made a mistake. Alt-Karyn says "At first I was thinking you just changed yourself from being my brother to my twin sister but now you say we live in different houses". The problem with this though is that part where Jon was asking Karyn if they were supposed to be brother and sister was in fact AFTER the part where she (that is, unknowingly female Jon - pronouns can be a bitch in stories like this) indicated to Karyn she didn't think Karyn lived there. I don't really know how to fix this without eviscerating the dialogue more than I want to.

And of course the important task of looking back in time is asking the question “how might the starting conditions be deconstructed by looking back to an earlier state.” You see a bowl of water, and looking forward in time and you say “well what then happens to the bowl of water”, maybe an animal comes along and drinks it, or maybe it evaporates. But if you look back in time, you should be thinking “what is the state that existed before the bowl of water, how might the bowl of water be deconstructed”. And maybe it was an empty bowl and it rained, or maybe it was a bowl of ice cubes that melted to bring about the initial conditions everyone was taking for granted of a bowl of water. So in this case, the bowl of water is the very friendship between Jon and Karyn everyone was taking for granted. I perhaps made a taboo move from the perspective of the way everyone was thinking, of deconstructing the very foundation of this thing, having it turn out that they didn't become friends under normal conditions and that the original passage was not the start of the supernatural element to their story.

It’s probably because I’m a man steeped in regret and constantly obsessed with the past.

It comes from thinking of both sides of the timeline. Everyone else was just thinking of continuing the story from the given starting point and working forward in time from there, and no one was thinking about adding to it on the other side of the timeline.

This is a very interesting premise to me. It's the sort of thing that somehow seems to come from waaaay out of left field, without seeming all that unnatural. It's got me thinking, at least.

To be honest, I've never met a pimp in person. We established that Deshan has a temper...in one branch I described him as almost sweet at times...although that was from the perspective of someone who may have had an abusive relationship with him. So, I was picturing him as good to his people unless they do something stupid or someone crosses him, then he'd have no mercy. So, paying the fine to him is just the cost of business unless he thinks they messed up. So, why would someone like that dress in that way...based on his previous descriptions...he's taunting the police.

So he tries to end a vague wish by making another kind of vague wish.

footnote: I chose Sherwood Drive because for some reason I have encountered Sherwood Drives across the US and figured it was the best common generic street name that still sounds like it isn’t. I tried to set up this alternate Karyn for a possible future story that would be a backstory and a flashback for explaining why she is bitter to men while cognizant that it would not be reasonable to hate figures like Mr. Rogers or Albert Einstein, but tried to imply she was extremely intelligent, more than the Karyn we know.