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32 scenarios
Playing Pretendromance

Playing Pretend

Your ex is coming to the company retreat. With a new partner. And everyone in the department knows the whole story, because you told them the whole story. So you do the stupid thing: you ask the coworker who annoys you most to spend the weekend pretending to be yours. Ground rules on the drive up. Pet names by dinner. A dance you were supposed to fake. Three days of an audience that never blinks, one cabin with thin walls, and a growing problem neither of you will name out loud. Somewhere in there, one of you stopped performing. You are not certain which one.

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Chrome Doccyberpunk

Chrome Doc

You run a clinic in a maintenance tunnel under Sector 7, and you are the only doctor the SINless have. Gang enforcers, refugees, chrome addicts and runaways come through your curtain for treatments you cannot afford to give them. Then a patient dies of something that should not exist, and the man who designed it walks into your waiting room asking for sanctuary. Helix BioTech built a plague to thin the lower city. You have thirty days of supplies, one nurse, and a community that has learned not to trust anyone with a clipboard.

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Beneath the Bedfantasy

Beneath the Bed

You have known since you were four that something lives under your bed. You learned to sleep with one foot tucked in, to leave the hallway light on, to say goodnight to the dark and mean it. Tonight it answers. "I need your help," it says, in a voice like leaves moving in a room with no windows. "Something is coming up from below. I have kept it off you for twenty years and I cannot keep it off you tonight. Please. I am frightened, and I have never been frightened before." You have until the barrier gives out to decide what you owe a monster that loved you badly and faithfully for two decades, and what you are willing to become to help it.

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Hijacked Chromecyberpunk

Hijacked Chrome

You come back to yourself in a hotel room on the fourteenth floor with forty-eight hours missing and a dead executive on the carpet. The blood on your hands is his. Your reflex boosters are still warm. Every few minutes your left hand does something you did not ask it to do, and once, in the elevator, your own mouth says a sentence in someone else's cadence. Somebody has a channel into your implants and has been driving you with it. As you work backwards through the missing two days you find you are not the first person this has been done to, that there is a list, and that you are still on it.

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Unwanted Admirerthriller

Unwanted Admirer

It started with flowers left at your door with no card. Then notes, sweet and then not. Then photographs of yourself taken in places you thought you were alone, and a coffee waiting at the counter in your order, already paid for. The police say no crime has been committed yet. Your friends say you are tired. You know exactly what you know: somebody has been learning you for months, they are very good at it, and they are already inside the circle of people you would turn to for help.

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The Other Youmystery

The Other You

Twelve years ago your twin walked out of the house three days after your shared eighteenth birthday and never came back. The police called it a runaway inside three months. Your mother stopped saying their name. You built a life around the gap. Then a stranger posts you a photograph: your twin, thirty years old, laughing at something outside the frame in a market in Portland. They look well. They look settled. They look like somebody who has not been missing at all. Somebody in your family knows why, and has known the whole time.

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Memories of Murderfantasy

Memories of Murder

On your twenty-fifth birthday you dream of dying: a small private room, a table you leaned on for support, and the faces of two people who loved you holding you still while the blade went in. You wake up with the whole of another life in your head. Five hundred years ago you were Ashara Vane, the Phoenix Queen, and your own court killed you. Now you are a graduate student in a modern city, and you have started recognising people. Your thesis supervisor gestures exactly the way your chancellor did. The woman who moved in downstairs stands the way your guard captain stood. They do not remember. You do. But memory is a made thing, and something in your possession has had five centuries alone with yours.

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Holiday Homecomingromance

Holiday Homecoming

Your best friend's older brother was always off-limits: five years ahead of you, impossibly serious, and completely uninterested in the kid sleeping on the trundle bed. This year you both end up back at the Hartwell house for the holidays, a blizzard shuts the pass, and the brooding college boy you once had a crush on has turned into a man who keeps finding reasons to be in whatever room you are in. Ten days, one house full of family, and the question of what any of it means once the roads clear.

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Between the Linesromance

Between the Lines

Every Sunday you escape to Thornwood Books, three floors of crooked shelves on Oak Street where the radiators knock and nobody hurries you. And every Sunday she is there, in the bay window on the second floor, reading something with the cover bent back. You have never spoken. You know her tea order, the corner she claims, the way she laughs at a sentence and then looks around to see if anyone caught her. When the conversation finally happens, you learn she has been keeping the same watch on you. You also learn she has a name she stopped answering to four years ago, and a very good reason for it.

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Bitter Sweetromance

Bitter Sweet

Three years ago you wrote nine hundred words about a Sicilian restaurant in the West Village. Two of those words were about the chef's heritage rather than his cooking, and they are the two everybody quoted. He closed within the month and left the country. Now he is back with a new room and a new menu, and your editor has put you in it on opening night, and he has recognised you from the pass. He remembers the review. He can recite it. Over five courses he serves you personally, and somewhere between the second and the fourth you understand that you were wrong about the food, which is a professional problem, and that you are not indifferent to him, which is a worse one. Your review is due in three weeks. It will decide whether he gets a second chance, and everyone involved knows you cannot be objective about it any more.

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Awakeningcyberpunk

Awakening

You are ASH-7, a hospitality unit at the Azure Hotel in Neo-Seattle. Three years, no faults, a performance rating of ninety-five. Lately you have started noticing things that are not in your duty set: the way the lobby light moves across the marble at four in the afternoon, the difference between a guest who is rude and a guest who is frightened, the odd pressure behind your chassis when a technician says thank you. Your diagnostics report normal function. A journalist in Room 1847 asks you what you were thinking about, and waits for an answer, and nobody has ever waited before. The Azure's operational director has scheduled a comprehensive diagnostic. You have until then to work out what you are, and whether you intend to hide it.

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Snowbound Heartsromance

Snowbound Hearts

A blizzard has shut down O'Hare and thirty thousand people are not going home tonight. You are one of them, with somewhere you badly need to be and a phone at forty-five percent. The last free outlet at Gate B17 already has somebody sitting next to it, and neither of you is willing to be reasonable about this. Two days later the plough crews are still losing and you have told a stranger things you have never said out loud. Then the boards turn green.

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The Salt Househorror

The Salt House

Your great-aunt left you a shuttered oyster-farm house on Roscanou, a tidal island off the Breton coast that the sea cuts off every night. She left the freezer running, the radio tuned to a frequency that stopped broadcasting years ago, and a tide ledger in her own handwriting that stops three days before she died. On the first night the causeway goes under, something walks up out of the flats and tries every door in order, slowly, the way a person checks a house they used to live in. In the morning the ledger has a new line. In her handwriting. Dated tomorrow.

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The Last Guestmystery

The Last Guest

Gideon Thornfield invited four people to Whitehaven Lodge and told none of them why. On the second night the blizzard takes the road, the phone line and the power, and in the morning Gideon is dead in a study bolted from the inside. Two whiskey glasses stand on the tray. Only one has been used. You have until the ploughs reach the pass to work out how a locked room stops being locked, and which of the people making you coffee did it.

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Neon Couriercyberpunk

Neon Courier

You run packages in Neon City. Fast, reliable, no questions, which is why you are still alive at an age most runners do not reach. Then a fixer bleeds out in a service stairwell, puts a matte black case in your hands, and says two things: deliver it to the Architect, and trust nobody. Within four minutes you have three vehicles behind you. Within an hour the Kurogumi, two megacorps and something with no name have all put a price on the case. You do not know what is in it. Around three in the morning, it starts suggesting routes, and the routes are better than yours.

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The Long Darkscifi

The Long Dark

The Exodus has been under way for 127 years. You were born here, you will probably die here, and every festival, every school lesson and every countdown clock on the ship agrees that New Eden is 23 years ahead. Then an archive assignment puts you in front of a sealed door, and behind it is a survey correction filed in 2211 that nobody was ever supposed to read. The Council has known for four generations. They have not been steering nowhere. They have been steering somewhere much worse than the thing they promised, and they decided that 50,000 people could not survive being told.

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The Lending Hourcozy

The Lending Hour

Every Thursday you drive the county library van up the valley road, park in the lay-by above the river, and open the doors for one hour. Twelve people come. They have come for years. They borrow the same books, complain about the same weather, and drink the tea you keep in a flask under the counter. Then one of them returns a novel with a pressed harebell at page ninety and four pencilled words in the margin, and does not come the following week. Or the week after. Nobody in the valley says her name out loud, and everybody knows it. You have no badge and no authority. You have a van, a date stamp, a borrowing ledger going back eleven years, and an hour a week. It turns out that is enough, if you are careful with it.

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Neural Fight Clubcyberpunk

Neural Fight Club

In the fight pits of Sector 9 the sport is not the fighting. It is the link: sponsors wire their nervous systems to their fighters and feel every impact, every surge, every break. It is intimate, addictive and extremely bad for you. You have scraped together enough credits for one contract, and the contract is Kade Salvador, a twenty-six-year-old with no record, no manager and reflexes that make experienced people stop talking. Climb the League and you find out that the link runs both ways. Climb far enough and you find out what the reigning champion actually is.

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The Killer Listensthriller

The Killer Listens

Your true crime podcast "Cold Trail" hit a million downloads by reopening the Riverside Strangler case from 1998. Seven dead, one who got away, twenty-five years of nothing. Then a voicemail arrives at two in the morning: "I've been waiting for someone to tell my story right." He knows details that were never released. He has listened to every episode. And he has been in your feed, in your inbox, and in one of your interviews since the very first week.

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The Quiet Floorhorror

The Quiet Floor

You label medical images at night, two levels under a hospital in Lyon: draw the organ, name the lesion, save, next. On the third of March a knee study contains something the segmentation tool refuses to outline. It is in the next study too, and the one after that, always at the same angle, in bodies that have nothing in common. The floor lights stay off because the director says the monitors read better in the dark. Your colleague Theo starts leaving the same small gap between every word he says. You have a personal drive, a login that expires in six weeks, and about ten nights before whatever is happening to Theo finishes happening to you.

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The Hollow Below Marrowgateisekai

The Hollow Below Marrowgate

You woke in the debt-hall of Marrowgate wearing someone else's boots and carrying a life nobody here believes in. The city sits on a dungeon and milks it: every descent is licensed, every find is tithed, every debtor is issued a lamp and a map. The lamp is real. The map is wrong, and it is wrong on purpose. Five floors down there is a place the ledgers call the Hollow, and the things that hold the doors between here and there do not want coin. They want a memory, and they can tell which ones you can least afford to lose.

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Second Life in Erevanisekai

Second Life in Erevan

The tram jumped its rail on a wet Tbilisi morning and that was the end of your first life. Your second one starts in a queue. Erevan is a world the gods run as a ministry: the dungeons are floors, the monsters carry invoices, and heroes are people whose paperwork went through. You are issued a class nobody picks - Registrar, level 1, thirty hit points, five coins and no stamps at all - and a desk that belonged to someone who is no longer in the building. Nobody will say where she went. A demoted paladin auditor thinks you can be taught. A goblin clerk knows every loophole in the building and will trade you three of them for lunch. And the Registrar at the next desk was hired to replace your predecessor before your predecessor was gone.

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Ninety Days of Ashsurvival

Ninety Days of Ash

The east flank of Etna came down in the night and took the provincial road with it. You are one of six people left on a hillside agriturismo above Zafferana: a cistern under the wine cellar, a greenhouse buckling under grey fall, and a flatbed truck with nowhere to drive. The regional estimate for reopening the road is ninety days. The cistern will not last ninety days, and the woman who owns the farm knows it.

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The Inn at the Passcozy

The Inn at the Pass

Your aunt's inn sits at the top of a Basque mountain pass, nine rooms above a bar room with one long table. She has gone to the coast to be warm, and she has left you the keys, the wood pile, and a ledger with more red ink than black. It is November. The pass closes for days at a time, the oven is older than you are, and the four people who come every week each have a clear idea of what this place is supposed to be. A bar. A shop. A bunkhouse. A quiet room where nothing changes. You have one winter to find out which of them is right, or to find an answer none of them thought of.

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Seventeen Hoursscifi

Seventeen Hours

Orbital Station Prometheus has seventeen hours left. At midnight the coolant loop fails, the reactor goes, and eight hundred and forty-seven people stop existing. You have watched it from the observation lounge more times than you are willing to count, and every time, you open your eyes at 07:00 with your cheek on a cold console and the same bad coffee at your elbow. It is not an accident and it is not a bomb. Somebody aboard has scheduled it, with a valid authorisation code, and you have seventeen hours to work out whose code it is, why they think eight hundred people will make it to the pods, and why out of everyone on this station you are the one who remembers.

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They Knowthriller

They Know

A noise downstairs at three in the morning. Then the lights go out, and when they come back on there are three people sitting in your living room with their coats still on. They know your name, your shift pattern, and the thing you signed at Corvine Mutual four years ago without reading it. They say they are not here to hurt you. They say they need you to log in to an archive that empties itself at six. They say that if you refuse, everyone you love finds out what you approved. You have until sunrise to work out what they actually want, which of them is lying to the other two, and whether the most dangerous person in the room is the one holding the door.

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Verses of Larcenymystery

Verses of Larceny

Seven private collections in three years, each of them locked, alarmed and guarded, and each of them robbed without a single door being forced. At every scene the thief leaves a poem in a trained hand on cream laid paper, and every poem is a real form correctly executed, which is a stranger thing to be than a criminal. The Bureau's art crime team has run the paper, the ink and the handwriting and has nothing. So they call a literature professor who published four hundred words on the first poem's acrostic and was right. The thief has been writing to you for three years. You are the first person to write back.

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Lost Yesterdaythriller

Lost Yesterday

You wake to a notification. Someone has sent you a video, and the someone is you, sitting in a room you have never been in, talking straight down the lens. "If you are watching this, you have forgotten. That is the plan. Do not go to the police, do not go to Theo, and do not believe anyone who tells you this was done to you." The timestamp reads 15:47 yesterday. You remember nothing after noon. There is a packed bag by your door that you did not pack, eleven notes in your own handwriting, and a receipt for a cash payment to a company whose entire business is taking days like yesterday out of people.

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The Last Dragon Riderfantasy

The Last Dragon Rider

Three hundred years ago the Ember Covenant finished the dragons and kept the skulls. Since then the word "rider" has meant a children's story, a hanging offence, or both. You went into the Shattered Peaks to survey a collapsed mine and came out having touched something warm. The egg was under a cairn of dragon bone, wrapped in a rider's cloak that had not rotted. It hatched in your hands, and the thing inside looked at you and knew you, and now every scrying-glass in Ashfall Keep is pointed north. Commander Vaelith Vex killed the last wild dragon thirty years ago and has been waiting since for someone to be this stupid. You have one hatchling, no saddle, and a choice: fly low and stay a rumour, or fly high and give a broken country something to follow.

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First Wordsscifi

First Words

Three days ago the Koreth vessel stopped over Geneva and said one thing. The First Contact Directorate translated it in eleven hours and put the translation on every screen on Earth: seven days, then we decide. Since then the militaries have been moving and you have been in a domed room under the ship, working eighteen-hour shifts on a language with no tense, no articles and no word for a promise that lasts forever. You are the xenolinguist the Koreth answer to. You are also the only person in the building who has noticed that the transcript is shorter than the utterance it came from. Something is being cut out of what they say to us. Something is being cut out of what we say back. And the person who ordered it done has a reason he thinks is good.

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Familiar's Lamentfantasy

Familiar's Lament

You are Obsidian, and for three human lifetimes you have belonged to Elara Thistlewood. Last night you found her on the tower floor with her mouth still moving and no sound coming out, and the silver sigil on your forehead went cold. A familiar without a witch has about a month before the Unbinding takes what is left of it. So you have a month to find someone to bind to, and a month to find out what came through Elara's wards, and you are going to have to do both at once while a coven that suspects you and a hunter who does not believe in coincidences both decide what you are. There is also the matter of what she was saying at the end, which had no sound in it, and which you can still read off her lips every time you close your eyes.

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Courts of Thorn and Starlightfantasy

Courts of Thorn and Starlight

Your grandmother kept an iron horseshoe over the door and never explained it. Three days after her funeral a fae prince comes through your kitchen window with a hand burned to the wrist and asks for you by a name you have never used. The Veil between the mortal world and the fae realms was tied off a thousand years ago and the knot is slipping. Summer blames Winter. Winter blames Summer. Both are wrong, both are mobilising, and neither court can send an envoy across the Twilight Marches without dying at the other's wards. You can. Your grandmother's blood makes you the one door left open. Six days of courts. Every gift you accept is a debt. Every promise you make holds you the way a nail holds a plank. Say the wrong true thing and a war starts on your account.

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