MDW

A virtual warehouse to incubate new novels. If one of them gains momentum, it will be moved to its own fiction page.

I might also write fanfiction here so I'm tagging that as well. It doesn't mean all short stories here are fanfiction.

Please don't rate as this is just a scrapbook, but if you rate do rate 0.5 stars to keep it in the bottom where it belongs.

Subtitle: I'm cursed to die 100 times.

Earth is in Turmoil.

Youngsters are vanishing left and right. Rumors of the end of the world, of Gods and dimensional travel start to get traction.

To one New York computer engineer, it is about to become reality. Loki needs a champion to further the Asgardian's plans. The Half-Jotunn deity needs to do it in secret, though. It wouldn't do to ruin thousands of years of plotting by being careless now.

Tossed into a barbaric world and burdened by daunting curses, this person needs to learn and grow. A monumental task that cannot be undertaken in a single life.

An invader in a virginal world, Loki's champion must escape prosecution by the local pantheon. All the while living dozens upon dozens of lives, growing and evolving along an uncaring and rather brutal world.

This champion will go from the lowest of organisms to the top of that world's food chain. They shall seize what seems to be ultimate power, only to discover there's an even higher peak.

And maybe, just maybe, escape Loki's wicked machinations. And if that's not possible, at least save a little spot of the multiverse from the end of all things.

 Winner in the 2022 November writing contest.

[A failed Participant in the January 2023 Community Contest: I forgot to fill the form]

The world ended. Bam! The Apocalypse opened the gates of Hell, demons killed everyone. Including me. But I got a second chance of life. Though it was as an apple. Which was eaten by a starving survivor, not that I fault them. But to toss my half-eaten core into a landfill?

To add insult to injury, an earthquake brought the landfill and everything in it a mile underneath the earth. I guess I'm not in uncharted waters, because good luck finding any nearby.

Not that it would matter. I am pretty sure the apple I was reincarnated as was a GMO hybrid whose potential to germinate was as stunted as the empathy of a corporation CEO. So there's that. Also, no sunlight.

** DING **

SYSTEM INITIATION!

Oh, for the love of all —

Planet Earth, Monday, October 7th, 2019.  18:30

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On a fateful day, during rush hour in eastern North America, Heavens and Hell crumbled and fell from their higher dimension on Earth. It came from "above" but not the same above we regard in our tridimensional Euclidean reasoning. No, it came from "above" as in from a higher dimension. Bits and pieces of those places fell on Earth from all directions, this time in tridimensional Euclidean space.

Satellites, the ISS, and space debris all were wiped clean from orbit. Even those that didn't crash with the falling debris were knocked off orbit by the shockwaves. On the ground, power distribution lines were disrupted and most power facilities were left abandoned by their dead staff. Most of these had emergency shutdown routines that engaged in a few days. Some others had a survivor among their staff that followed protocol and activated their SCRAM switches, stopping the power plant. Long-distance communication disappeared the internet along with it. The world was plunged into technological darkness.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand human beings perished immediately in the pulse of magical energy from the torn spatial boundary. Spirits were rent asunder and vanished, their fate neither salvation nor damnation, only oblivion. The criteria used for this culling was latent magic potential. It didn't discriminate against education, gender, age, or ethnic group. But of the around seven million survivors, most would meet their doom moments later.

Those on moving vehicles, like the ones driving on highways suddenly had to contend with high-speed uncontrolled cars and trucks driven by corpses. Trapped in their vehicles and helpless, they became part of the long snake of crushed metal. Very few survived. Those in the air or out in the sea were alone and probably unable to control their rides. Airplanes crashed, and ships kept their course or drifted away, depending on their autopilot.

Several ended their own lives in utter despair after seeing their loved ones die in front of them. Another large group would die at the hands of other survivors. Violence and aggression became the norm. Only a few sparse pockets of not-so-sane survivors managed to band together and cooperate for the sake of mutual survival.

The sole survivor in a five-over-one apartment building in Georgia, a girl became the keystone to humanity's survival. Sara's fabulous System Apocalypse had just started. 

She has only one remark.

It was anything but fabulous.

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Updates every Wednesday and Sunday.

Cover V2 credits: CC-BY-SA Midjourney

Cover V1 Credits:

Consumed, Jennifer Hansen.jpg (CC BY-SA 3.0) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Consumed,_Jennifer_Hansen.jpg

John Martin (public domain):

- The Great Day of His Wrath

- The Last Judgment

- Le Pandemonium

Greetings.

Nowadays, I call myself Cat, short for Catherine. I usually don’t use her full name for reasons that will become clear soon enough. It’s been a few months since I became her and I’m still adapting to my new reality. Being in someone else’s shoes, especially someone with a life so complicated as her, was a challenge. One I must overcome or perish. I finally accepted there is no way to go back to my old life.

Yes, old life. I was named William Cooper when I first came into being. I was 30 years old and about to marry when Catherine accidentally killed me. This is the story of how I became her and beyond. How Catherine was reinvented.

I guess I should start on the day of my fateful and forceful meeting with Catherine. I apologize for talking about myself in the third person, but I’ll try to keep this narrative impersonal. Trust me, my head nowadays is a huge mess and 100% too crowded.

Cover credits (public domain): Hernan Sanchez, https://stocksnap.io/photo/architecture-building-MI902J0X1H

 A troll wakes up in the "forest of beginning" of a fantasy world with only faint memories of his past human life and unable to speak. The human realm will spare no expense to bring down this monstruous threat. While clinging to his humanity, the troll must use his cunning and modern knowledge to survive and evade the hunters.

It is a dark age in a world of swords and magic, ruled by superstition and iron-clad rules. Tradition and conformity are the absolute cornerstones of society. There is no calendar, people count time by seasons, or days. Death, famine and vicious monsters are everywhere. People clutch in their communities, afraid of what is outside.  Here and there, a Hero rises, his tale brief like a shooting star.

Powerful monsters that drift too close to human's realm must be eradicated at any cost, or society might crumble. The Troll comitted this sin.

This "isekai' LitRPG novel is an experiment in writing. We commit to the "Adventure" and "Fantasy" genres, but it might have comedy, romance, and both dark and light tones.

Some events in this novel are drawn from random encounter generators and others are decided on a die roll just like a tabletop RPG. Things take a unpredictable tone!

Non constructive / offensive comments may be deleted without previous warning.

Daily Updates: One each monday through friday, two on saturday and sunday.

As of september, the updates will be every even-numbered day.

Cover Credits: "Ett gammalt bergtroll" - John Bauer, 1904 (with modifications)

Ragnarök. The twilight of the gods sent shockwaves throughout the Nine Realms. No denizen was left undisturbed.

But for the dwarven race, it was their doom. Ragnar Mithrilshield, the lorekeeper of Nidavellir, died and became an enherjar. Even so he would meet his second doom in Ragnarök.

But the tale of Ragnar wasn't over. His soul was chosen by the Lord of Midgard to inhabit one of Yggdrasil's crystallized seeds, to be reborn as a Dungeon Core and attempt to bridge the gap between the realms and be reborn as a new World Tree.

Muspelheim will freeze before Ragnar becomes A TREE.

Cless was a girl with a sad fate. Orphaned at birth and born with a misshapen body, she would've died if the Church of the One God didn't take her in. Shunned by society, she grew to the age of fifteen knowing little love. Now it was time to leave the safe haven of the church behind.

The day of her rite of passage to adulthood arrived. All humans earn Skills granted by the One God when they pray for guidance during the rite. Skills could go from a lowly G-rank to a powerful A-rank. There was a mythical S-rank Skill in the scriptures but nobody ever earned one. Until Cless' turn came, that's it.

The world Cless lives in is a world full of danger. Monsters once prowled the surface and devoured humans. The One God created dungeons to imprison the monsters, but the dungeons are failing, threatening to spill wave upon wave of monsters upon the land.

After becoming an adult and leaving the church she was sexually abused by a vengeful classmate and learned how to fight back using her Skill. After that, she went on the fast track to becoming the world's youngest guild master.

With her dark heritage dormant, the girl will try to carve her place in the world. However, the kind of company she attracted might not earn her many smiles among her fellow humans.

John was an asteroid miner. Which sounded like a cool profession in the XX century, but it was anything but.

Pilot a drone a hundred thousand kilometers away, set some engines on the target asteroid, fire them to change its orbit so it would drift closer to the station, wait a few YEARS, and then send more drones to mine the thing when it is orbiting to the station.

That's how the LEGAL miners do things. John was a pirate. He hijacked the asteroids and mined them enroute, leaving only a empty husk of silicon for the station folks to stare at. Then sell the minerals for a hundredth of their market value.

It sucked either way.

Princess Melania was the last Royal Ljósálfar. She was a few minutes away from being executed by the invading Dökkálfar. Planet Alfenheim had fallen. She had only two options. Give up on life and die by a dark elf blade, or give up on her body and live forever as a digital entity.

the Ljósálfar already had eternal youth, so it was basically a choice between bleeding to death and never bleeding again. She digitized herself.

Her Codex, a crystal nanite hive containing her digitized Essence, was lost in space when the escape pod was shot by the Dökkálfar. Yet she endured. Hurled at relativistic speeds, she eventually passed nearby the gravity well of a planet and entered orbit, falling on an asteroid.

An asteroid some pirate is about to mine. If he can survive the attack of the skull cyborg biker gang.

Boy meets girl, scoundrel meets princess. A tale as old as time, BUT IN SPACE.

Yes, I know there's that 70's movie trilogy. Let me have a moment here.

It's here. No amount of readiness, mental drills, or stashed survival kits prepared Samuel Atkinson for the real zombie apocalypse.

The zombies came, and they did exactly as expected. They shambled, then scared, disgusted, and bit people, turning them into more zombies.

However...

They are rather slow, stiff, and don't have superhuman strength. They are literally just dead rotting people walking and transmitting their zombie-ness. A healthy person can outrun a zombie any day.

But don't be fooled. The zombie apocalypse came, and did exactly what fiction told us it would. Society is ruined. Thousands, millions of zombies are in every urban center worldwide, shambling, scaring, disgusting, and biting.

But that is the least of Samuel 's problems.

The real problem, is that society is ruined. And civilized people don't fare that well without, you know, civilization.

Cover credits, SvenKirsch

Monsters plagued the lands for too long. No matter if one had fangs, beak, teeth, skin, fur, or feather, or was tall, stout, or diminutive, the people suffered. Until the Gadgeteers came with a device that could allow people to fight back. Powered by one's own magical power, feeding off of monster Essence, the Arbitrium bracer turned the tables.

It also changed society. Strength of one's level cap was all that mattered. The strongest were Kings and Emperors. The weak or those too poor to afford the marvelous device, destitute. And so it has been for millennia.

All that mattered was one's level cap. High, low, a fate decided the moment the strange contraption came alive. Too high and you were a threat to those interested in keeping the status quo, a weed to be nipped before it could grow and take root. Too low and you were nobody, fated to be a bit more than a simple farmer.

What if someone, somewhere, came up with a zero for their level cap? Unable to use Essence, unable to level up. On all of recorded history, it never happened.

Until it did.

In a small village of fur-less and tail-less ape-beastkin, a boy found out he was uniquely handicapped.

Nero's level cap was Zero.

But he'd never let that stop him from reaching his goals.

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All stories have already been told. We merely reuse elements from them. From Joseph Campbell's Monomith to Stephen King's advice, and that encyclopedia of tropes you've visited, fiction has been dissected and reassembled countless times. One will surely find elements inspired on other works here. Just like cooking from basic ingredients, the recipe and presentation is what really matter.

This is a fantasy adventure, of someone that goes from a zero to a slightly bigger zero. It will have romance but no harem. Cruelty but with hope dimly shining ahead. Lightweight where it can be, heavy where it must.

Thanks for reading.

Cover Credits (The cover is CC-BY-NC-SA):

Steampunk Spider Bracer, by Daniel Proulx. CC-BY-NC-SA

Picture Frame, @anaterate, Pixabay license.

Some odds and bits from here and there.

Dear diary.

When you read stories about some people missing and returning after years of absence claiming they were living in another world, your first reaction is to scoff and dismiss a story as a tall tale, right?

I know I did. All the time. Until it happened to me and I no longer did. That day was today.

Some god of thunder smote me. If it were Chris Hemsworth, I wouldn't mind but it was some barbaric Hitite god that abaondned Earth some four millennia ago.

Yes, what can I say? I love the seventh art. I have more hours watching movies than any other activity, including sleep. What? Do you think I'm exaggerating? Maybe I am. I'll really miss hollywood the most. And my biggest regret is that I never got to visit the holy city of cinema.

I did not come to another world to be a hero even though there was hints that they hoped I'd save it. I did not come with overpowered abilities able to, dunno, leap tall castles in a single bound, faster than a speeding crossbow bolt, be more powerful than a eight-horse carriage, the bounds.

No. After the asshole god that murdered me brought me to his world, he gave me some boons from his discount bin and "The Power of my Soul (tm)".  Forgive my french, I hope you understand I am rather upset at dying. And he somehow decided that my power is to recycle stuff. How awesome is that? Not much at first, I must admit.

At least I got all my camping stuff and equipment with me. There's no lycra in the other world. I'll make it someday, but that day is not today.

So here I am. In another world, in the middle of nowhere. I'm no heroine. As the song goes, I'm your basic average girl. And I'm assumed to be here to save the world. But almost everything can stop me, because I'm not named Kim.

Wish me luck, diary.

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This novel is going have the following features:

slow-paced slice-of-life No GameLit / LitRPG elements. Movie references. Sandra likes the seventh art. Journal / diary style crafting (includes chemistry, engineering and metallurgy) low magic technological advancement (for Sandra, at least. She is not against sharing though) personal relations clash of perception between the modern and ancient customs. bits of tension, fighting, and plot here and there.

I won't repeat myself though. Once she crafts a good batch of soap, for example, she'll just note, "I crafted soap again." Once it is estabilished how she obtains compound X, compound X2 that is obtainable from the same process will also just be mentioned. I'll try to be as realistic as I can with the crafting, chemistry, and technology.

Cover: Public Domain Image by StockSnap from Pixabay. No attribution required but we do it anyway.