Matisguy's profile

Thank you for all the kind words, everyone! Y'all're making me regret I couldn't squeeze more into this first episode... But that's what follow-up episodes are for, aren't they?

Kamiera's branch is incredible, my friend! No chance I was passing up an opportunity to give her a mention.

Following the labyrinth of hyperlinks, especially for characters and settings you don't recognize, is strongly encouraged.

This was the continuation of the apparent tradition of writing episodes on an aeroplane.

Felt like posting on old threads for no particular reason

Yes, this is heavily inspired by Mrs. Cork's brilliant recent Conservation of Blonde Energy branch. Go read it! It's not stealing if I cite my sources, right?

This is the leaf on the branch that I don't actually expect to nurture into a full branch of its own, but it's here for Possibility's Sake.

This is where I'm stopping for now. I have a lot more planned, though! I just need more time and more energy.

Everyone knows that legal arbitration and enforcement is one of a mother's most important responsibilities, right? You don't see a lot of it in the horny MILF stories, though; can't imagine why.

Also, I have decided to resolve the age-old "Singular/Plural They" grammatical dilemma by writing a story where "They/Them" is both singular and plural.

Headmates have been kinda an elephant in the room on this site for a while, so here's a branch where they're given direct focus.

A new story root inspired by an interesting new friend of mine.

I'm pretty sure this is also the first time I've actually used an image in all the time I've been on this site.

Yes, I know that most people on this site are here for boobies and transgender escapism, but this story's been itching at my brain and driving my inner Engineer crazy since I had the idea. Self-Indulgence ahoy!

I actually had this short story already mostly written in my drafts folder as part of another branch I ended up never making, so it just needed a few tweaks for this.

Curious eyebrow raise

As soon as someone finds the motivation to write such a thing ig. You volunteering?

Maybe this will make things a tad clearer about how the wish actually works, since people seem confused about that.

Apologies to Theodore Guest, but I kinda already had something in mind for Jon's before-school activity in this branch.

This branch is apparently being revived, so I asked myself "Why not?"

All Rise for the Return of Her Majesty

tl;dr you don't have to know/translate Russian to get this episode. We aren't meant to know the evil scheme and Cork just hid a lot of Easter Eggs instead.

In the days before I indulged this website religiously enough to consider the words "I wish" to be a terrible omen, the most ominous phrase one could possibly utter to me was "what could go wrong?"

Now we have both dangit

What a plot twist!

Children are also much more difficult to write just in general, honestly.

@Christine Exactly. In game dev, how the player interacts with the game world is paramount for obvious reasons, and as an upshot there's a lot of leeway for the world to be directly centered around the Player and their avatar. I already have a kind of game in mind built for Sarah to play, for another example.

I didn't actually know about hifi rush before this

But yeah, from what I've googled it's kinda like HiFi Rush lol

Enjeublue's Royal Mistake branch introduced me to the idea that only someone Queenly should have the Stone, and I'm afraid I like that idea so much that it might already have become a trope for me.

I'm gonna be honest; this episode was difficult as hell to write. Tutorials are hard to make interesting.

Yes, it's Kyla that's getting the Rhythm game that everybody expected. I hope this works out; the idea of writing about a rhythm game through just text, with no backing music, sounds like the sort of thing that might possibly be a very bad idea for some reason.

@Eldridge Yesn't.

Here's a hint: notice that bimbofication usually means your cranium going a little more hollow.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-y1fgsCoVPyjcrho5ouo9o-L2XQiEMkUEsp4ylj557o/edit

This is publicly editable, so if there's anyone significant that you notice is missing feel free to add them.

Yes, I am aware that I am making things exponentially harder on myself by sending the characters here to different games instead of grouping them together in one big co-op jamboree, but hey, I like the idea of a video game world custom-tailored to a specific character. Zoe the occult-loving Goth gets the Dark Fantasy setting, for instance, and Jon get the ability to turn into different girls all the flippin time. I have something more plainly fun for Kyla in mind, though.

Fun fact: this whole thread was born with the thought in mind, "what if the video game people get isekai'd into a la the trope was game I'd actually want to play, instead of a generic RPG?"

Tbh I might've overdone it with Zoe's game, though...

Recently I've noticed a lot of material fetishizing the concept of changing classes in a video game setting, but for some reason this rarely seems to take place in a video where switching classes is a core part of the game design, something a player is expected to do fairly often. Needless to say, this is my attempt at rectifying that.

Yes, this is a lot of info all at once. Sorry!

By the way, this is what Jay and Kyla are up to.

Trying a new thing where I pair up branches by crosslinking them like this. That way the reader can choose the POV they want to stick with and which they come back to, like it's, y'know, an actual interactive CYOA. I hope it works out!

Early branch point in what I intend to be a longer series.

It's been a very sadly long time since I've had an opportunity to play episode tennis like this. Game on, F&F!

Took a page from the Cool Missus Cork playbook and wrote this episode entirely while on a plane ride. Almost got motion sick from it, lol.

Man, what is it about this branch that draws so many high quality additions from so many different authors?

This is about the extent of what I have planned concretely for now. Hopefully, it gets across everything y'all need to know about this concept, if anyone feels like running with it.

Been a long time, huh? Something big happened irl that's kept me away from writing for the past few months, but hopefully now I can start getting back in the habit. Starting off with something a lot lewder than normal for me, too.

This is a wonderful chapter as always, but I'm starting to become especially infatuated with the characterization of the Princess in Jon's thoughts, here. She's super cute, from what I'm gathering; well done!

All rise for another post from the Great and Mighty Enjeubleu! bows

Seriously, though, ditto to what Mary said. This chapter is fantastic.

This is deliciously evil.

I had no idea this episode was going to be this long, but honestly I wanted all these ideas out there and published before moving onto whatever else. Now, I sleep.

Is this your first post on the site? It's a promising start!

We'll watch your career with great interest!

I see it as normal. Same as the rest of the site, actually: everything that should be bold is bold, everything that should be italicized is, etc. Maybe it's an issue with your own browser or smth?

Wrote this one thanks to a bet on the Discord. Gave me a lot more trouble than I thought to write. Was in a very weird state of mind for most of it, honestly.

........?
!
?!?
!!!!!

Jon and Sarah's dynamic is starting to remind me of this ngl

....................

Slowly raises hand

Slow and somber round of applause

If you heard some kind of music in your head while reading this, I'll consider it a win.

MaryMary (aka. tango) threw out the basic idea for this on the Discord about a week ago, and it was rattling around in my head enough that I had to make at least a one-off out of it.

Posted with apologies to anyone who actually has this condition (I hope I got it right!) but this is a headcanon about Athena I've been contemplating for quite a while. Was really excited to write this episode tbh.

Welcome back!

Wanted something short and quick. Hopefully there's still enough there to make the words all count.

With the holiday season and all its madness finally behind me I can finally get back to writing semi-regularly again. Not gonna lie, though, I wasn't really as excited for this episode, at least not as much as for those that ought to follow after.

The traditional root for branches like that, where someone gets the idea that few new rules or constraints on the wishing could lead to some extra fun, is the old classic Switched Stone episode, found here: ( https://fictionbranches.net/fb/story/22496 ). But no offense, this episode kinda doesn't feel like that? It strikes me more as one of the handful where The Stone itself takes center stage, where the fun to be had is in daydreaming where it came from, how the magic works, what it's place in the cosmos is, etc. I've written a few episodes like that myself, in fact. In my experience, they don't tend to get as much traction, though. Readers and Writers seem to be more attracted to stories where Jon and co. come first and the Stone comes second, not the other way around.

Looks like another author going through their "But how does the Stone ACTUALLY work!?" Phase. Maybe I/Someone should consolidate competing alternative theories in a single academic tome or something? Although I'm not sure how many people would care.

Something very different happened today and I was able to write a good chunk of this during my shift at work. Hooray for productivity?

@Zelo "episode two" (all lowercase) is the very first branch added to YAWYW and shows up first if you sort by oldest (which iirc is the default).

I figured if I'm writing for fun now, I may as well turn off my brain and just post the stupidest idea I've had in a long time here, because why the hell not.

More of what I can spit out on a bored Thursday: just buildup for now.

I really need to get in the habit of writing just whenever I'm bored, so, this came to mind. I have almost nothing planned from here.

It's actually tremendously impressive to me how you can make an utterly mundane slice of life story and this ultra bizarre concepts like egg laying work so seamlessly well together so often.

I knew it!

I have a feeling I might know what's going on here...
But on the other hand, the physical evidence I'd expect seems absent so far, so maybe not...
Dang it, looks like I have no choice but to keep reading!

I don't know there's been this recent sitewide uptick in romance between Karyn and Jon (well, replacement-Jon here) but I am 100,000% here for it!

The wholesomeness of the human arc here in contrast with the depravity of the demon arc here is actually absolutely wonderful. Fingers crossed that somehow they meet someday!

Dude you're on FIRE lately. Keep up the good work!

Dude
Whatever you do
DO NOT DROP THIS STORY I NEED MORE

Karyn's home life seems particularly interesting to me here. Clever, clever, using both Bethany and Alyssa for it!

It's always a good day when I see this branch continued :)

Here's a knock-on effect for you: imagine how Athena DeVries, the super occult goth and occasionally an actual witch, is going to react when she finds out her best friend's entire family is actually genies in disguise...

So much worldbuilding. I applaud it, my man!

It's back at last!

Sometimes I wish I could upvote an episode more than once... Just the usual stamp of approval doesn't always cut it, like here.

Interesting Premise! I'm curious to see how this goes.

Working out exactly how the stone handles time travel was going to be part of the fun/central conflict of the branch from here, I imagined, so I can't really say what exactly would happen from here.

However, it's basically established by the root episode that the stone can in fact change the past, if only to make things so that a wish "had always been that way." That's a sort-of time travel aspect that's always been there, sending magic itself backwards in time to make changes, and Zelda recognized that right away here. So of COURSE the first thing she does with this knowledge is try to abuse it, right?

She's supposed to be Zelda Whitefield. This is an old episode back from when I was vaguely aware Zelda existed but I didn't actually know her last name yet.

Dude... I am drooling. Soooo good!

Sometimes, man, ya just gotta roll with the glorious stupidity.

You get notified for comments on your own writing, but not comments on other's writing. I just have a habit of keeping an eye on the "Recent Comments" page to see new comments/replies as they're posted.

The Return of the King

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

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

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

Author's Commentary: This branch was inspired by a conversation on FB's Discord, discussing the lack of background or characterization for Karyn. I do have a few TFs planned ahead, but expect a lot of character building and not a lot of the usual smut.

I think the big problem is that as things are now, one can't really delete an episode without seriously affecting all episodes further down the branch, and as all episodes need an author account, you can't delete an account without also messing with all the episodes authored by the account, and thereby all the episodes afterward. IDK if there's a TOS somewhere that spells this all out, but hey, that's the spirit of the law anyway.

God, I love seeing more of this story... Keep up the good work!

When you're writing a new episode or editing an old one, there's a button which says "show formatting help" which explains some things such as strikethroughs and the line breaks. I recommend giving that a read first of all. But to actually answer your question, just put a line of at least 5 hyphens after a blank line, like so:

-----

becomes:

@Mary
If ya got a good idea and are in the mood, always feel free to write a continuation of my stuff! It means way more to me than just upvotes or anything like that.

Alright... Thanks for all that, actually, with that it now seems like we have a pretty solid plan moving forward. The second phase slice-of-life might be tough or present some unexpected difficulties, but I'm sure we can roll with it. Do you wanna do the honors of writing that sister episode or should I?