You wave your hand dismissively at him. "Nobody stole your book," you say evenly.
"Nobody stole my book?" he says, half-incredulously.
"You can go about your business," you continue.
"I can-what?" The man seems truly confused.
"Move along," you say at last.
"Now wait here," he says, deeply concerned, "What in tarnation are you trying to pull? Stop this nonsense and hand over my book!"
You take this cue to slice his head cleanly off with the nanowire of your sword. You smile smugly as he crumples to the ground in a bloody heap. The old "Jedi mind trick"-trick works every time, though never in the actually influencing anyone way. You search his corpse but turn up nothing of note, even the leather holster on his hip is empty.
What do you do?
]]>You awake stiff and sore, but otherwise intact. It seems you've slept long enough for the natural healing properties of your body to take effect. It's impossible to assess just how long it's been, but your instincts tell you it's been some time indeed.
You stand up and take your bearings. The faint glow of the bioluminescent fungi in your cloak reveals that you're in a deep underground cave. There's a dry creek bed here. Obvious exits are up, left, and right.
Naturally, you go up. The passage slopes up gently and surprisingly straight. You reckon it's some kind of old lava tube, though at points it looks almost manufactured. Eventually, you see light in the distance, that you hope is just sunlight and not something hideous that will surely destroy you.
Turns out, it's a little of both. The cave opens into a small grotto, where even in the shade the sunlight is blinding. Raging winds whip the surface and blow grains of sand down into your sheltered ravine, and apart from the tan haze of the whipping sandstorm the sky you can see is cloudless. It seems that the weather has taken a turn for the worse.
What do you do?
]]>Standing before you is a vaguely humanoid robot, about nine feet tall. It looks rusted and timeworn, but nothing about its demeanor prompts you to believe it is incapable of kicking you nine ways to sunday.
Its next statement is very stereotypical: "You have thirty seconds to comply."
What do you do?
]]>You open the book. The first two pages contain just one word, written in giant letters across both pages. It says simply, "BANG." You turn the page, and find the next page contains paragraphs describing in great detail various matter interactions resulting when a trans-finite and extremely energetic amount of matter interacts.
You flip ahead further, past descriptions of the formation of early stars from vast seas of hot gas, and the effect on gravity drawing the homogenous matter mixtures together, leaving near vacuum in between.
More flipping and you find the narrative focuses on one particular accretion disk and the planets that form. It speaks of the formation of life on the fourth planet, its eventual downfall, and its last-ditch attempt to last long enough to seed itself onto the barely tolerable third planet.
It speaks of more life, ancient civilizations of incredible description rising, then disappearing without a trace. It speaks of the last race, hominids with skill in tools and shaping the world around them. Their rise to greatness, then their slow fall from grace. It speaks of a hero that rises from this last civilization, one destined to triumph over entropy and found a civilization that lasts forever. It details the curse this hero suffers, to know every possible death but never know peace. It speaks of the hero discovering a town, and a book, and sitting down to read it. The rest of the book, unsurprisingly, is blank.
"Huh," you say to yourself, as the words appear on the page before you, "A fiction."
What do you do?
]]>Your gaze shifts from the intact window to the immobile crone and back several times. "That," you intone to yourself, "was not supposed to happen."
What do you do?
]]>You draw your sword. It looks innocuous at first, just a leather-wound hilt with a small steel ball instead of a blade, matching the steel ball of the pommel. However once you get a firm grip the steel ball lifts away from the hilt, trailing behind it an impossibly thin wire which comes taut when the ball gets about a meter away. This ball follows the hilt as though they were locked together. This steel wire is magically sharp and you have yet to find something it will not slice. This rock is no different. In one sweeping arc you clip off a protruding bit of the rock, which falls to the ground with a clink.
This shard, which you pocket, can of course be used to summon the remainder of the rock utilizing a simple summoning spell. Once you have need of the rock again you can draw it to your location almost instantly.
What do you do?
]]>Instantly the book is engulfed in blue flame. You nod sagely. You know from past experience that items embued with magical power burn blue when you expose them to liquid fire. You also know from past experience that your flacon of liquid fire will burn anything. It is for this reason that you are surprised that the book does not, in fact, burn at all!
It seems entirely unfazed, so you gingerly touch it. It's quite cool, and seemed to have become even thicker and heavier than before.
You pick it up, and now you see fine lines, finer than the finest penstrokes on the cover, front and back: Lines of fire that seemed to form the letters of a flowing script. They shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if from a great depth.
"I cannot read the fiery letters." you say to nobody in particular in a quavering voice.
"No," says a white bearded figure behind you, "But I can. The letters are Elvish, an ancient mode, but the language is that of Mordor, which I will not utter here. But this in the common Tounge is what is said, close enough:
"One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them."
"Who..." you say at last, "The heck are you?"
"I am Gandoolf Foogrey, and that before you is the Ring of Power, once held by the Dark Lord Sauron."
"You're off you chump."
You feel the pull of magical energies as Gandoolf effortlessly draws the local magics into his sphere of influence, the magical equivalent of drawing a gun. "If you intend by that utilization of an obscure colloquialism," he intones, the air smelling of ozone, "to imply that my sanity is not up to scratch or to indeed deny the existance of the Dark Lord Sauron, I shall have to ask you to step outside!"
You're outclassed here, so you fall back on your old failsafe: Logic. "Look here, this is a book!" you screech, "Not a ring of power! The only things ever bound by this were pages! Magical pages I admit, but pages nonetheless!"
Gandoorf considers this for a moment and then smacks you. "You're a butt," he says, and stalks off.
What do you do?
]]>
The banker glares at you for daring to interrupt his dialogue, but the woman seems relieved to have someone else to talk to. "This man," she intones, gesturing toward the banker, "Is failing to impress me with the notion that he ought to be trusted with my life savings."
"Ah," you say, "Just as I expected. I think I can provide a demonstration that will solve both your problems."
They seem skeptical as to how you could possibly help, so you say, "Trust me."
The banker heaves a heavy sigh, accepting the fact that either way you've probably ruined his chances of getting this lady's money. "Fine," he says, "Show us your demonstration."
"Excellent!" you say, "Ma'am, if you'd be so kind, could you set your bag on the desk?" You're met by skepticism again, but apparently she decides there's no reason to distrust you at this point. She sets the bag on the table. At this point, you pull from your robes a smooth flat object, about the size of a TV remote. You don't want to do the entire desk, so you underestimate and go with a #1. Sure enough, when you point the object at the bag and press a spot on its featureless surface, most of the bag vanishes in a subtle crack. shreds of what used to be wads of cash now dance in the air.
Both the banker and the woman stare in open-mouthed astonishment at the remains of the bag, then in unison turn to stare at you. You holster the totem and say, "See? If you had given your savings to this man, he could have protected your money from such a senseless loss."
What do you do?
]]>
Off to the side an elderly lady is talking to a balding banker. The lady seems unimpressed and the man is sweating profusely and intent on pleasing her. She's clutching a leather bag close to your chest, you have a strong hunch that contained within is her life savings. Next to you, by the door, a fat man is leaning against the door with a low-slung revolver around his waist. He strikes you as the local equivalent of security.
What do you do?
]]>You really aren't in the mood to run after the long trek to get here, so you opt to duck into a nearby building, that as far as you can tell is utterly deserted. It seems vaguely homelike, with a shotgun layout and upper storey with the same layout of rooms. You bound up the stairs and run to the frontmost room, which has a window looking over the street below.
The street is devoid of pursuers. The only sign of life is one masked man dejectedly sweeping up the shards of glass. You breathe a sigh of relief, and let the blood pounding in your ears subside.
You become aware of a rythmic creeking coming from the far corner of the room. There, in the corner, is a person sitting in a rocking chair, rocking and crocheting what appears to be a baby-sized yarn gas mask. She slurps some fluids from her complicated bodysuit and breathes in stilted gasps through her mask.
She doesn't seem to have noticed you.
What do you do?
]]>