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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.

I suspect that for both these branches it’s about to go from wrong to wronger.

Why did his name change to Terra? Terry’s already a girl’s name.

it would have been more interesting for how it could go wrong if the writer had him instead say “I wish my wife would get pregnant” or “I wish my wife and I could have children together”.

And now, the big one. Re: Helen and Lucifer.

I'm pretty darn sure there's misreadings going on here, ngl, but that's kinda on me since there really hasn't been the text space to flesh out the relationship between Helen and Zair like I'm imagining it yet. The biggest one seems to me to be this idea I'm getting from your stuff that Helen's sorta been an awful mother to Zair, in a way. Like, Zarala seems to be recalling all sorts of little mistreatments between the two, Helen was the "bad one" in her and Lucifer's relationship, Zarala just wants to get away from the nightmare that was living with mom, etc. In my head, that's not it all. In my head, Helen is actually a great mother to Zair. And in my head, the subversion is that that's kinda the problem.

Like, one non-obvious character trait I sorta had in mind for Helen is that her opinion of demons in general really isn't that much higher than Terry's was. She's obviously quite religious, so there was already a bias against them coming from there, but then after she got her fingers burnt so badly in her relationship with Lucifer it's pretty much a maxim of hers that your average demon is no good. That's part of why it's so important to her that Zair be raised "right": she could end up being like (shudder) her father if she isn't! My inclusion of Zair nearly having a panic attack in revelation the fact that she was nearly having a panic was partially meant to hint at that: at years of Helen trying very hard to teach Zarala basically not to be a demon, not to show the wings, not to use the fire, not to do most of the things demons do. But of course that's hopeless; Zair IS a demon, and just wants to live her own demon life her own demon way, with the current magic school being a nice escape for her to do that, right? The problem with that, of course, is that her mother genuinely loves her, and is probably the only one who ever has; Zair's having to give that up to go off on her little adventure, and whether she acknowledges it or not, that's gonna sting, a lot.

Lucifer, in my version of things, is not really an intriguing character because he really doesn't need to be; this isn't a story about him, after all, it's about Zarala, Terry, and Martin. Maybe he might make for an interesting side plot at some point, but tbh I'd think it more prudent to limit our attention to only the core cast and the greatest influences in their lives, which in Zarala's case is 100% Helen. Lucifer is important insofar as he adds context to the lives of Helen and Zair, but that's about it, I'd say. (Plus i can already feel the insidious tentacles of power creep as is, and throwing a literal god into the character stew almost certainly isn't gonna help with that, i think).

Oh, and uh... one more misreading. I dunno how the frick one can read about a woman, in a church, in a prayer, asking to become an angel, and think "Aha! Cartoon Cat TF!" but I guess that happened. C'mon man, the angel-mother/demon-daughter contrast is basically the low-hanging fruit here.

Alright, prepare for a ton of "Re:"s.

First of all, Re:all the compliments; thank you. I try :)

Re:Mara; I'ma be honest, I really wasn't sure how to handle Mara going into this. I was already having trouble getting into his headspace as a character, and on top of that, the situation he was left off in the last episode was kinda a tricky one to handle as an author, since, let's face it, this is not the sort of challenge he should be capable of overcoming at this point in his magic training, and I kinda had to really reach for a creative solution to that problem. That being said, though, some amount of Mara acting out-of-character here was done deliberately and intentionally: it's because The Promise is subtly but powerfully shifting her character from here on out, at least in the story I imagine from here. I thought from some of the earlier episodes that a character had to make The Promise as part of the binding ritual, and of course such an oath would be closely and consequentially linked to their character from then on, but tbh I didn't wanna have to figure out what Tahera and Zarala's Promises would be right away, so I just made it the necessary step to get the Spirit Portal open, into which Terry and Zair could jump no Promise necessary. I figured Mara's Promise would naturally serve to exaggerate her already existing character traits, the most obvious of which is her lowkey obsession with learning magic even at great risk to herself. So, now, she's forced by The Promise to accept things like the Spirit's challenges even if she doesn't really want to. You can see how well that's going to turn out for her, I imagine (hint: it won't). Plus it makes a magic-lover like her even more of a foil to magic-resenters like Terry and kinda also Zair.

Re:Uni; would you be surprised if I told you I decided to include Uni in this precisely because I wanted to see her mysterious side explored more? I feel like up to now she hasn't really had any good excuse to interact meaningfully with the main cast, which means any investigation into her character and/or her past can't really have taken off. So, when I thought to myself "hm, the main characters probably aren't strong enough to handle this fight by themselves, who should I bring in as the needed extra muscle?" my almost immediate afterthought was "I know! I could use that automaton that hasn't gotten nearly enough attention yet! Surely defense of the students in case of emergency must be part of her programming, and she's inherently limited in capabilities by the keywinding, so it's not like she'll steal the show or anything!" I actually even had a sort-of TF trigger in mind at first, something to do with her running down and getting trapped in the spirit world while the rest of the students evacuated, so they could work their magic. I even had a sketch in mind for Tahera's substitute companion in this case: a 4-armed, blue-skinned genie of the ring named Parvati, with inspiration shamelessly taken from Hindu iconography. That... would have complicated an already complex situation considerably, though, so I just straight cut it out (Pun intended). I know the whole swashbuckler thing doesn't really fit in too well with her character on balance, but hey, I figure we only really need it for this scene: all the juicy bits happen in the aftermath, anyway.

Re: the yet-unnamed-fairy: Of course the little one's gotta have the Napoleon Complex :) and hey, a high-risk-high-reward type fighter with capabilities way out of proportion to their physical size almost always makes things more fun.

gentle nudge while this isn't quite improv, the unwritten rule of "yes, and" is still a pretty good guideline. If you're changing something for a narrative reason, sure go with it, but if you're just changing something because you don't like it, it can take a reader out of a story.

Also: if you're going to talk smack about Niagara Falls, you should at least learn how to spell it properly :-p

With friends like this, who needs enemies?

Okay I have had a read and tried to organise my thoughts as best I can.

First off I’m very grateful that one feels a desire to contribute to my stories and I absolutely love the passion I can see in the writing. There’s no reason you can’t make this your own, but there are some things that make me a little uncomfortable in what they establish.

I kind of liked Uni having a mysterious role in this rather then being another fighter. Though you certainly wrote the fight sequences well.

The relationship between Helen and Lucifer was always going to be strange. I kind of liked the subversion that Helen was the one acting selfish. This seems to hold true with the last chapter, given she seems to be thinking more about herself rather then Zair, though I could be misreading it. A goofball devil dad is kinda more intriguing.

I really like how you described the well of power. I had a few weird ideas, making it a huge portal to the spirit world is really cool.

I think Mara is a little over the top. I’m not sure she would so quickly surrender her identity for power, but does want to explore magic because it is beautiful to him/her.

I do like the fairy and you probably read my mind with the laser cutter as that was planned to be a thing in the future ;)

I’m thinking to try a third path in this. My one suffered from complexity but I think it can be simplified and you have given some interesting ideas

will read it soon and I might branch off it. My own branches are not always priority and I didn't get as many votes on it, so its possible your take is better :)

Definitely this is too much crammed into one page. Should have been made in 2 pieces, part one, they combine into one two-headrd body, get home, part two, they accidentally wish it to be permanent. Because now no one can build anything else starting from just the first part of the plot line, they’re forced to do both or neither. Like maybe I’d like to write a page starting from them not also being immortal and permanently fused, but now I can’t, unless I go back a page and create a new page which is just the first half of this one, bu I’m not gonna do that because that would feel a lot like plagiarism.

Thanks. I'm in and out of writers block these days. So it's tough to get something out. But I'm glad you like it. :)

Love Susan’s mother. Another great chapter :)

I'm very flattered that my branch inspired you to reuse it's opening paragraph, you are doing a good job here

This is the one page written by BroomB I don’t like. The justification the mother gives is beyond tenuous. She’s forcing her son to humiliate him/herself first of all. They don’t have any clothes for Jon, which means she’s forcing him out there naked. Without shoes too. On the first day. And as he pointed out, he’s likely to be contagious, and if it wasn’t contagious as she claims, how does she think he caught it himself. And of course after forcing him to publicly exhibit himself in this body he doesn’t want to be in she’ll be rushing straight home to rummage through his room and throw out the rock in the trash before he gets home. It would just be better if instead of being forced into likely lifelong emotional trauma by his unloving mother, if it was his idea, not hers, for him to immediately resume school attendance against his mother’s urging to stay home, out of perhaps compulsive desire to let the adventure created by the rock to play out for a certain amount of time before ending it. As it is, his mother wins the award for worst parent ever and I don’t think “terrible parent” is the right thing to fill her role with considering I’m pretty sure I’m not expected to actually notice how terrible a mom she’s being here.