Challenge 38: Choose Your Own Adventure!

[IsabellaRose]

THE CHALLENGE

Add an option to my Choose Your Own Adventure story in the club! Here's a link to the first entry. Click through, and when you get to a point where something makes you say "I wish Izzy would have put this as an option", then write that option!

Post it in the Choose Your Own Adventure section and I'll add a link to your post into the Choose Your Own Adventure story! You can either repost it here (feel free to copy some of the text from the post I wrote to give it context if you want) or post a link to it here, both options will be valid. 

Deadline

• EXTENDED! Midnight (EST) , 22 Mar 2025

Limits

• no limit to how many times you can enter! 
• no strict word limit, but please try to keep entries about the same length as the ones already written

Prizes

• 1st Place: 4,000 EcchiCredits
• 2nd Place: 2,000 EcchiCredits
• 3rd Place: 1,000 EcchiCredits

Edited March 1 by IsabellaRose

[WickedCadrach]

This was a tricky one, because the existing options felt like they covered the intuitive avenues. But I had fun chasing out the threads a bit (Always loved a good CYOA ). 

 

-- Opening -> SciFi World -> ... --

(context from SciFi World)

A door hisses open, and a figure in a dark uniform steps inside. Their face is partially obscured by a visor, the flickering light reflecting off its surface. They glance at the monitors beside your bed, then turn their gaze to you.

Your head throbs. Pieces of memory float just out of reach, fragments of something that should make sense, but doesn’t. 

Before you can answer, the figure taps a small device at their wrist. A holographic display flickers to life, casting a faint glow across the sterile walls. They skim through a list of data, nodding slightly.

A distant alarm blares, red warning lights flashing through the corridor beyond the open door. Something is happening.

"Welcome back." They pause, considering you for a moment. Then, they say...

 

- If they say, "The station has nearly finished adjusting life support to host the xeno consulate, Madam Ambassador. May I suggest attaching your visor and rebreather?,” click here

 

The cool respect in the faceless figure’s tone reflexively draws you up from the spartan bed, your chin lifting as some instinct tells you to mask the pain throbbing inside your skull—to show no weakness.

Rising, the synthetic fibers of a slim, midnight-black dress wrap you from wrists to ankles, sliding over your skin as smoothly as clean oil. Circuit patterns in a glossier shade of black give texture to the regally imposing garment, providing a field for the star-and-dove badge at your breast to stand against: a silent reminder of your office and authority as an ambassador of the United Worlds.

Ambassador? No, that doesn’t seem right. You’re a student…aren’t you? You were in Morocco—the pit. You were falling. And yet—you also remember taking the oath under New Terra’s pale blue sky, the cold of long months between the stars with little more than a translator comm and your loyal guard. You swallow, trying to take a steadying breath while the station’s life-support warnings continue to blare, underscoring the fractious sparking of your warring memories.

“Ambassador, please,” the figure in the dark uniform repeats through the fish-eyed reflection of the visor covering his face, holding up a transparent version of the same apparatus. Despite the chill in his professional voice, you detect a hint of concern as you take the visor. Your hands adjust the clips by muscle memory, a part of you having done this hundreds of times before. 

With your nod of assent, the guard leads you out into the station’s central corridor. The smell of the visor’s rebreather filtering the processed air into sterile neutrality is reassuring… familiar. Finally, the hallway running lights give way to more generous solar lamps that throw your shadow to the ceiling of the station’s plasteel corridor as you approach the round vac-sealed portal into the meeting room.

Each ringing step against the metal floor sends images, like individual chips of a mosaic, that form in your mind as you begin to recall who you are meeting with...

- If you recall the dark claws and black chitinous body of the Xenifoe, click here

- If you recall the graceful femininity and coiled head-tentacles of the Anirias, click here

- If you recall the elaborate battle paint and braids of the stoic, four-armed Sparcoitus, click here

- If you recall the luminous black eyes, teardrop heads, and thin bodies of the Zeta Grays, click here