Neon Tricycle Syndicate
By @john1208
I didn't expect my second chance at life to start with me furiously pedaling a plastic tricycle away from my evil uncle's attack-poodle. But here I am, a newly enrolled five-year-old kindergartener in 1992, rocking a neon windbreaker and a serious anger management problem. My sweet parents genuinely believe their 'laborer blood' means they are destined to scrub floors for the rich forever. Not on my watch! My first order of business? 'Accidentally' feeding Uncle Hector's predatory scam contracts to the paper shredder because it 'looked hungry.' Next, I threw a massive tantrum until Mom bought a specific scratch-off ticket, winning just enough to pay off our immediate debts. Now, I'm turning our dingy laundromat into a retro-arcade empire, starting with my sandbox turf wars against Julian, the snobby kid who I'm totally going to crush (or maybe marry in twenty years). But things got terrifyingly real when I found a hidden cassette tape recorded by... me. My older self intentionally triggered this rebirth and set this whole timeline up. What exactly is the catastrophic future I'm trying to prevent?
6
A Perfectly Scripted Betrayal
By @john1208
During the opulent Vow-Exchange at the Grand Conservatory, Bellis usurps the stage. Armed with memories of a bitter future, she shamelessly breaks her own betrothal to steal her cousin Cymbra’s fiancé: the charismatic stage-maestro Jorien. Bellis knows Jorien’s phantasms will soon make him a global icon, while her discarded fiancé, the cynical scholar Rhoden, is doomed to succumb to Shatter-lung within months. Instead of weeping, the perpetually bubbly and seemingly empty-headed Cymbra claps her hands and cheerfully agrees to marry the dying academic. Everyone assumes the shock broke her mind. In reality, Cymbra is flawlessly executing a ciphered diary left by her own time-erased past self - instructions that deliberately baited Bellis into the theft. Hiding her brilliant medical acumen behind the guise of a ditzy housewife brewing "pretty floral teas," Cymbra slowly cures Rhoden’s terminal condition. Rhoden, who has fiercely rivaled and despised Cymbra’s superficiality for years, is bewildered as his health returns and his kinetic stage-inventions build them a billionaire's empire. Their hostile banter melts into a deep romance, while Bellis’s relentless ambition drives Jorien to use forbidden sensory-narcotics. But what catastrophic event was Cymbra's past self trying to avert by engineering this exact marriage?
5
Hollow-Point Necromancy
By @john1208
I was down to my last magazine, cornered by a four-story amalgamation of rotting flesh and mutated wolf, when a glitchy radio broadcast echoed in my skull. The voice was mine. It cheerfully congratulated me on unlocking my true potential, proving this apocalypse was an inside job - and the insider was me. I never asked to survive the Marrow-Plague, a zombie virus that fused shambling corpses into magical behemoths, but dying sounds like entirely too much paperwork. Now, I can rip souls from the dead and arm them with ethereal heavy artillery, starting with a wall-phasing ghostly assassin and scaling up to an endlessly firing undead militia. Surviving the eerie, fog-choked ruins of the world means hunting down the monstrosities that ended it, looting their powers, and turning arrogant guild masters into my personal, heavily humiliated ammo carriers. Alongside a hopelessly optimistic scavenger and a prickly scout I'd gladly die for - though neither of us will ever admit it - I have to follow the bloody breadcrumbs left by my temporal ghost. Why would my past self destroy the world just to give me an army of gun-toting corpses?
2