As I said in the last post, I've been playing a fair amount of Dragon Age 2 over the past week or so. It gives you a fair amount of choice, even if some events have to happen in certain ways. That made me wonder and let my mind walk down the path of choosing how the event actually turned out. I thought that would be fun to do for my small readership here.
So here's how this is going to work. Right now I'm going to write out the introduction and give you guys your first choice. This will all be off the top of my head. After I finish writing tonight, I'm going to plan out a choice tree that will give an overview of all possible choices given and their outcomes. I'm going to keep this as an either or situation, so as to not spread the votes too thin and so I don't have to plot out all those possibilities.
Once we've reached the end of a particular choice line, I'll post all of them out so you can see I didn't just have one ending in mind from the start. You'll have until the weekend to vote in the comments for this one. I'm going to turn comment moderation on for the time being so that there's not a swarm of votes. If you've got an actual comment, make sure it's separate from your vote comment. Before I get too long winded, here's the actual story.
There are many feelings in this life that are disconcerting. A sleeping limb, the sensation of falling in a dream, looking at a bright light and then entering darkness to name a few. But don't let any of those fool you. They're just imitators, pretenders to the throne. The real king of disconcerting feelings is amnesia. Not partial amnesia like forgetting a name or anything such as that. No, it was utter annihilation of everything but the most strongly imprinted of muscle and neural memories.
But I could walk and that was enough. The desert heat did wonders for driving the worry for something so frivolous as one's own name right from my head, seemingly empty though it already was. So I walked, not knowing the direction and not really caring. My mind kept flashing back to the name thing and I kept walking. There was a feeling of panic of course, but it was vague in comparison to the burning of the flesh on my bare feet. My shirt helped stave off the worst of it, wrapped snuggly around my head, but my shoulders felt raw from the suns' light.
Sand had gotten into places sand should never be despite the light trousers that were tight where they hung on my waist, and baggy to my ankles until they once again hugged my flesh with a tenacious grip. I'd been out in this heat without most of my memory for what I judged to be scientifically and precisely a "damn long time." I'd been hungry when I woke up on the sand then, dizzy when I stood up. There had been a small impression where my body had laid, but no other signs of anything around me. Now, my lips were dry and cracked, my tongue fuzzy, and I was growing less hungry rather than more.
That last one's a sign of the worst of it, the thought rose unbidden from my befuddled memories, though where I knew that from I wasn't sure. The heat pounded my back like a lonely shipman would a cheap brothel girl after a long stint away. I reeled at the thought that I could remember brothel girls and shipmen, but not my own name. I grew irritated at everything around me. Were there any way to show my indignation to the sand and heat, I would have.
Instead I kept walking, dragging my feet and leaving a solid trial behind me rather than individual steps. And then I saw it, off in the distance to my right. At first it looked like a sand dune, but it soon grew clear that there was a shape to it. Colored to be only a shade or two off that of the sand, a wall rose straight up. From this distance it was impossible to tell how big the wall was or even how far I was from it, but I felt a flutter of hope in my chest. As I turned to look at the wall, I felt certainty slip from my mind, and I was no longer sure if it was structure or a trick of the sand.
Dejected, I looked around. And there, in the opposite direction of the wall/dune I saw a single green tree rising from the sand. Despite my inability to judge the distances well, I could tell it was much closer than the off color patch of sand in the other direction. I took a breath and started walking toward:
Vote 1 for the Wall/Dune.
Vote 2 for the Tree.
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