Recent comments

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.

Continue the story in another strand of the multiverse in The Beauty:Karyn wakes up.

Thanks. On the other site that I frequently add to (The BE Addventure), I think I'm currently 3rd, by my calculations. The previous guy who ran the site used to have monthly updates, showing exactly how many episodes had been added, but that count hasn't been updated since September 2020, so I'm not sure what count other authors have, but by my own calculations, I have about 6,500 episodes, so that puts me at #3. So between that site and this one ... yeah, that's a whole lot of episodes!

Congratulations #1 from a significantly trailing #2.

By the way, this is my 11,000th episode on the site.

He doesn't wait around. He goes home and gets the stone (https://fictionbranches.net/fb/story/16964).

If you want to criticize the way the wish is being granted, then go back to deepfried's episode (https://fictionbranches.net/fb/story/16944) where Linda Masters is affected by Cecil's wish. It's basically the same thing. I just continued with the same idea. As for filling the well, it's kind of the only way to do it, as wishing that the well was filled would make it so that the well essentially wouldn't exist, so that would be a contradiction of the wish for the existence of the wishing well in the first place. I wrote that episode a long time ago, but even though I didn't write it like that, I kind of got the sense that that's what was meant by it.

The bimbo transformation virus, that old gag. I honestly am surprised it’s not the plot of a hollywood movie at this point. I’ll bet it’s the plot of an asian live acted film by now though.

Always a bit finicky to write something that is genuinely mean, because even if it's just directed at the characters, it can still be hurtful. Regardless, I'm fairly happy with this chapter.
Thinking back on the story, I think it would have been a cool idea to keep the anger and tension between Zoe and Karyn until this moment. But it's still fine that that had already started to make up by this point.

After some further examination and attempts at planning it out, I just can’t complete this thing because the inconsistencies in previous pages are just too extensive. The worst one is “this is a fairly uncommon change, but it’s not at all unheard of. I know of three cases in the last 10 years just in this state.” -At the hospital index 19036 compared against “I am the only sphinx in the world” -Sphinxes talk index 19077. They even refer to Jon as a “mundane sphinx” and not the rare “giant sphinx” in 19039. But now Jon being the sole hope of the sphinx species is the justification for the ancient sphinx badgering Jon specifically apparently and I think that is an untenable problem with the premise. It’s a great story otherwise until its premise collapses at the foundation though.

What I’m not so sure of now is if Karyn confirmed she had been with 30 men 3 pages ago if she was just required to agree with everything Cecil says or if it was the truth. At first I thought it was the former but now I’m not so sure.

Jon: “Well I already know Karyn went off with the guy that can literally order her to do anything and already made her attack and nearly kill me thus proving he is a psychopath, so why could it be that she’s not answering her phone. Hmm I wonder, what EVER could be the explanation for that. Oh woe is me, it must be because she’s mad at me, that’s it. I’m sure she’s not in any danger, or that I’m in any danger, so I guess I’ll just wait around and not do much of anything now, it’s no hurry.”

Wait a moment, just because she can’t say no to him doesn’t mean she would actually do as he said. It seems more reasonable that she would say ok and then hit Cecil with the shovel. I can’t respect this version of Jon and Karyn anyway though, they actually showed up in person to fill in the well with hard work as if that was somehow easier than wishing for it to be done, that makes 0 sense. “We don’t even NEED to wish for the well to be buried, why would we do that when we can simply shovel tens of tons of dirt onto it by hand with shovels!”

It was bound to happen though, it was inevitable someone would eventually make a wish like that. Making unrestricted wish granting accessible to everyone was a terrible plan Jon.

Aaaahhhh I getchu, I getchu. I thought you had just missed the whole Angel thing at first, but yeah, you're kinda right, it's a bit unsatisfying here. I think it's a case of TF happening because TF content is sorta just expected to be there, on this site, not really because it itself adds much to the narrative. The interesting part of the whole setup was always going to be her relationship with Zair, not the particulars of her anatomy, anyway. In fact, that's kinda the point: what she's asked for and what she's getting is this Angel form, but that's not what she wants. What she really wants is a better relationship with Zair, and an opportunity to be a better parent to her than what she has been. Becoming a guardian angel opens some opportunities there, but it doesn't necessarily accomplish that, right away; that's something she's going to have to do herself, via character growth and all that good stuff. And honestly you actually seem to have a pretty good grasp of what the root of the conflict there would be, in that sometimes being a Good Parent paradoxically means stepping back and letting your kids learn things the hard way. Wanting a good relationship with your kids isn't a bad or a destructive thing at all per se (and it honestly does kinda disturb me a little bit that you're faulting her so much for wanting that), but boundaries do need to be there, and there's only so much Helen can realistically do for Zair, all by herself. Helen right now thinks her biggest shortcoming is that she couldn't have been there enough for Zair because she's a poor single mom, and Zarala doesn't really have a father figure or anything that could pick up the slack. Of course, that's not it, not entirely anyway.

But yeah, like I said, there hasn't really been the text space to get this all out there yet. That's for our wonderful remaining story to get across, yeah? We just have to write it first :)

Hmm... Well the Mara part is tricky. I admit I was fearful I had written myself into a wall, but I felt it was best to address why a boy might have trouble learning magic. Conflict need not be physical, and there could be another way to settle a contest then a physical fight. When in doubt, do something cute is my general motto. Which leads me to...

My first draft did have an Angel TF but I found it unsatisfying. People getting what they want through prayer just doesn't work in a story. Otherwise people would be praying for all sorts of miracles. I am very sorry, but Helen comes across as 'very' unsympathetic, wollowing in the lack of a good relationship with her daughter. I don't see how that can be the fault of a child, that's the fault of a parent. She seems to generally crave more, rather then be happy that Zair found a place to learn more about her kind she resents that it wasn't her that lead her to it. Helen's desires are inherently destructive in my humble opinion but that's not to say it makes a bad story to explore. There is also something coming up later on the nature of an Angel's power. It is far far more restrictive then that of a demons in what they are allowed to do. They can not inervene with 'fate' for instance.

So yes I just thought it would be cute. Cats are cute.