There was a house on a hill. Well, not a house, really, it was a mansion & a quite large one as well. The family that lived in it was rich. Not rich as in ‘Oh, they’re rich’, rich as in ‘They grew up jumping into piles of money instead of leaves’. The matriarch & patriarch had began a business & built it up from the ground. They now had five children, thirteen grandchildren, twenty-five great-granchildren, & two great(x2)-grandchildren. The business was called the [name_f]Jewel[/name_f] of Fashion or the [name_f]Jewel[/name_f] for short after the matriarch, [name_u]Ruby[/name_u], & it put jewels & jewel lookalikes in dresses & suits for the families fellow elite’s. Nothing had ever gone wrong… until now. All of the [name_f]Amber[/name_f] jewels have gone missing. [name_u]Will[/name_u] they find them? [name_u]Will[/name_u] they be lost forever?
(My take on a cover blurb)
Next: Skittles & Poison (or Granny’s 130th Birthday (How long can one woman live?))
There’s plenty of ways to kill people. And there’s plenty of ways to get away with it.
But there are also plenty of people willing to do whatever it takes to solve the case.
Between the man found brutally murdered with a skittle in the middle of nowhere — and in particular, nowhere near any sort of bowling alley — during Opal Grey’s real lifetime and the women who seemed to have died of violent food poisoning during a certain somebody’s half-finished Victorian murder-mystery story… well, Opal suddenly seems to have her hands rather full.
When her protagonists walk out of the pages before she’s even decided who actually killed the women, and right in the middle of a scandal that seems to be damning her crush’s parents, it becomes a race against the clock. Solving two entirely unrelated murders may be difficult, but it surely can’t be impossible.
It can’t be impossible.
Because if Opal’s characters can leave the notebook they exist in… who’s to say that the murderer won’t be the next to leave and wreak havoc?
Okay, because I’m apparently bad at ‘good’ titles for this game… how about another alternate one so this game doesn’t stop for too long? I enjoy it way too much, basically…
Home of [name_u]Rain[/name_u]
(Obviously Baking Spells and The [name_u]Future[/name_u] of [name_u]Fire[/name_u] are fine if anyone gets an idea for them!)
1976, Cooks street, Grovetown. A small flame flickered on the desk from a cigarette. A life changing cigarette. [name_f]Ophelia[/name_f] wants to be an arson investigator, and where better to start than the famous Cooks street case? When visiting, [name_f]Ophelia[/name_f] realises something amazing, and the future - or the end - of fire is in her hands.
@NephraLimu You aren’t bad at titles! I actually love yours, I just often don’t have the time to write a blurb!
The Bicycle Theif
When detective Coran Brixt hears about a bicycle theft, he thinks nothing of it. Why would he? He’s been a detective for coming up to six years and has never seen anything supernatural, why would today be any different? The logical answer: it isn’t. Coran is a very logical man so this is exactly what he thinks. The real answer: it isn’t. What’s changed is Coran’s perspective.
Now Coran has two mysteries to solve, but no leads to either.
I [name_u]Will[/name_u] Always Regret That (Warning: Dark)
“I will always regret that”.
“What?” said the therapist.
“Killing my cousin”.
“Oh, Why is that?” said the therapist.
“Because I thought I had no choice at the time”
“Why did you think that?” said the therapist.
“Because I didn’t”
“What do you mean you didn’t?” said the therapist.
“If I didn’t kill him, they would’ve killed her”
(Well, this is a contender for worst one shot I’ve ever written)
Next: How are you even alive??? or The Family book of Witchcraft
When knowing magic exists in reality is enough to make you disappear for good, is it really any wonder that you never actually see witches wandering around?
[name_u]Eden[/name_u] Crowe knows all too well that his very existence is entirely illegal — how can he not, when everywhere he seems to look has bones stained violet with magical blood, illusion or otherwise? — but that hasn’t actually stopped him existing yet. It’s easy enough to keep quiet about who his father was, especially when his mother was a well-known witch-hunter.
(And sure, a false name is inevitably going to collapse one day… but he has very little choice in the matter).
So, when he makes the stupidest decision in his short life, something that most might have called predestined, but he considers depressingly avoidable, it’s… a little less than stellar, you know?
Losing a spellbook with your whole family tree in it at school is absolutely the worst thing that could have happened, because people know who his mother is. And yet [name_u]Eden[/name_u] isn’t quite done.
Maybe getting in an actual spell-fight with the person who found it (and decided to read it like a complete fool) was a bad idea, but hey! As long as he can run and hide from the witch-hunters out for his blood for the next sixty-five years or so, he should be fine.
It’s just that he won’t be doing that alone.
Next:[name_u]Legacy[/name_u] Retreating or The [name_f]Summer[/name_f] [name_u]Shadow[/name_u]
The [name_f]Summer[/name_f] [name_u]Shadow[/name_u]
Everyone called her The [name_f]Summer[/name_f] [name_u]Shadow[/name_u] because when summer started she was there. I called her that because for all of the summer she was my shadow. Where I would go, she would go. What I would do, she would do. We were the best of friends for the summer and then she would go back home.
Then one summer she just stopped coming…and so did summer. Maybe we’d had it all wrong. Maybe summer was her shadow. And now it was my job to find out where she went and why she took summer with her.
People shouldn’t have birthmarks black as night or blue as the sky, and they definitely shouldn’t change colour… but these ones do.
[name_u]Evelyn[/name_u] and [name_f]Audrey[/name_f] [name_u]Lark[/name_u] are twin sisters, identical in every way… except for how they dress. Evelyn’s outfits always include a scarf, whether it’s [name_u]July[/name_u] or [name_u]December[/name_u], and [name_f]Audrey[/name_f] could probably only be seen dead without her almost comically tall boots during the summer. She only ever seems to wear normal shoes when she has the excuse of thick tights to cover something.
[name_u]Jasper[/name_u] [name_u]Allix[/name_u] might know what that is, but he’s definitely not about to explain how.
But as the three become friends, it starts becoming obvious that their strange stains aren’t the only thing drawing them together — not that they even know they share the marks. It’s more like magic, and exactly the wrong sort of magic for a boy like [name_u]Jasper[/name_u]. After all, books are everywhere when your parents are both best-selling authors.
[name_m]Can[/name_m] the trio find a way to avoid the call of the pages, or are they doomed to fall into the world of fiction?
Next:House of the [name_u]Phoenix[/name_u] or A Decade of Gemstones
[name_u]Aidan[/name_u] Gradwell is hardly a stranger to stories of witch burnings, but after a whole series of wild happenings that culminate in his own violent death by fire… well, he’s starting to wonder a few things. One of which is whether you can call it ‘death’ when you feel quite distinctly alive still, and another is why he’s woken up in what seems to be a completely different world.
The House of the [name_u]Phoenix[/name_u] welcomes him, their quote-unquote ‘first student’ in centuries, and as [name_u]Aidan[/name_u] struggles to adapt to a world that’s stuck in the past, he begins to gather more questions than answers.
Nobody will look at him when he asks one in particular, though – what happened to witches who died in other ways? Hangings and drownings being the methods he has in mind, because every ‘student’ of the House was burned, there is no doubt there.
And as his life before the fire sticks firmly in his mind, unlike the old lives of everyone around him, working out the answers feels important. Like a matter of life and death.
Is rising from the ashes like the House’s namesake truly possible, or is [name_u]Aidan[/name_u] lost for good?
Nobody knows who the [name_u]Thunder[/name_u] Child is. They don’t know the child’s name, or where they came from, or how they got to the island to begin with… but they arrived during a horrific storm. That’s how the [name_u]Thunder[/name_u] Child got their ‘name’, in the end.
But years after the child’s mysterious arrival, when they begin to ask questions, the islanders are forced to invent a tale… it’s just that none of them can stick to the same one.
In a case of what feels like a million identities, can the [name_u]Thunder[/name_u] Child ever find out the truth… or will they work out the fact that nobody actually knows it?
Next:[name_u]Red[/name_u] [name_u]Sky[/name_u] At [name_u]Night[/name_u]
[name_u]Red[/name_u] [name_u]Sky[/name_u] At [name_u]Night[/name_u]
[name_u]Nat[/name_u], a sailor since he could walk, was always taught that a red sky at night signals good weather the next day, and a red sky in the morning means storms to come. On [name_f]April[/name_f] the eleventh at 6:17 A.M., [name_u]Nat[/name_u] predicted storms at sea. What he didn’t know was the kind of storms the captain of the ship was brewing.
(I had a really good idea but I got lazy and didn’t want to write it all out)
[name_u]Alex[/name_u] Hawkes might not have been seen in… well, it’s coming up to seven weeks now, but [name_f]Katie[/name_f] Ramsden and [name_m]Nathan[/name_m] Orrell aren’t entirely sure how long the boy’s been missing anymore.
Letters that were nowhere to be found when the alarm was first raised keep showing up in places only [name_u]Alex[/name_u] and his siblings would know the significance of (or, you know, a sibling’s girlfriend…), and even with the lack of names involved, it’s obvious that they’re meant for [name_m]Nathan[/name_m]. Who, let it be reminded, should not know about these places.
Alex’s disappearance may not be quite as cut-and-dry as [name_f]Katie[/name_f] and [name_m]Nathan[/name_m] have been expecting, though – digging for the truth amidst a mountain of lies and red herrings is no easy task, and yet it seems more and more dangerous to ignore his frantic letters day after day.
Is there a way to solve a mystery like this one when you can’t understand the facts of it, or will the friends be forced to leave [name_u]Alex[/name_u] unanswered?
Next:The [name_u]Shadow[/name_u] in the [name_u]Lake[/name_u]
The [name_u]Shadow[/name_u] in the [name_u]Lake[/name_u]
Rumours of a lake in the woods around Mesravel that glows brighter than the stars are… a little exaggerated, but they’re close enough to the truth. The ‘Lake of Luminescence’ certainly glows — you can sometimes see the light from the outskirts of Mesravel — but not quite so brightly as the people say.
But that isn’t the point. When [name_u]Kai[/name_u] Albenton is dragged off to the quiet town of Mesravel by his possible-mad-scientist father (because really, why is he bringing his child along just so he can see a cool lake?) and then explicitly told not to enter the woods, the rumours change very, very quickly.
When the [name_u]Lake[/name_u] of Luminescence suddenly begins to develop dark, shadowy ‘patches’, [name_u]Kai[/name_u] decides it’s definitely his job to solve the mystery, and he already knows where to start… it’s just a case of whether his prime suspect knows too.
No idea where I was going with this, I’ll admit.
Next:Tales From The Darkside or Servant of the [name_u]Sea[/name_u]
Necromancy is known as the darkest magic, and yet the punishment for using it seems to be a million times worse than raising the dead. So maybe the world needs to rethink what ‘dark magic’ means… but since nobody actually knows what happens once you’ve been caught, there’s no reason for them to do that.
The Darkside is home to a million lost stories, a million stories that nobody really wants to discover – except for [name_f]Scarlett[/name_f] [name_m]Thorne[/name_m] and [name_m]Azriel[/name_m] Vexx. With ties both to the now-living ‘victims’ of the necromancers who supposedly reside there and a link to the Darkside itself, the two friends figure there’s only one way to investigate the mystery: get caught practicing necromancy, get thrown into the Darkside, and then find a way back home.
Easier said than done, naturally, and quite possibly the stupidest plan either of them has ever come up with, but hey. Teenagers.
Are the tales of the Darkside really worth the danger, or should they remain where the light of day can never reach them?
Next:The Seventh Window or Winter’s Wizards/Witches (or Wizardry/Witchcraft if you prefer)
On a corner of a street, in a town like any other, there lived a woman, neither a sister nor a brother, who ran a shop so divine, it was just about a goldmine. A goldmine of what, you ask? Well, my dear, a goldmine of potions & spell books & herbs & rituals, too. It was called Winter’s Witchcraft for that was her name & what she did.
(This turned out to read like a Dr. Seuss book, whoops)
Next: We outdo the Arthurian Tales or Tick Tock, Someone, please stop that blasted clock
Tick Tock — Someone, Please Stop That Blasted Clock
The ticking has stopped.
Everything is silent for just one glorious moment, and then my world turns upside down.
[name_m]Luke[/name_m] had never been able to hear a thing, which some people who know his family may have called a blessing. The thing is, it was anything but.
Whenever [name_m]Luke[/name_m] was in the presence of his twin brother [name_m]Nathan[/name_m] — so almost all the time — he could hear a sort of tick-tock sound that matched up with the movement of the second hand of classroom clocks all too well.
You may note the past tense… well.
After a horrible accident that almost sends both brothers to their graves, Luke’s deafness vanishes… to be replaced with what looks like a countdown timer seared into his skin, labelled with just one word.
[name_m]Nathan[/name_m].
Adapting to a world he thought impossible while trying to work out how to cheat death itself, [name_m]Luke[/name_m] is pretty sure the least of his worries is how the accident happened. But the natural explanation may not always be the right one.
The shadows call a name, and they are forced to disappear. It’s how it has always been – the rulers of Nitoblis claiming what they are wrongfully owed from Solnox.
And it’s not something that can be changed. Until [name_u]Kiran[/name_u] Luceras hears something he shouldn’t be able to. Until he learns secrets a Solnoxian – much less any important Solnoxian – is not meant to know.
But testing the waters (and grappling with the fact that he can hear the shadows for some inexplicable reason) yields impossibly dangerous results, and [name_u]Kiran[/name_u] finds himself swept along on an adventure he can’t afford.
With the tentative balance between Nitoblis and Solnox growing more and more unstable, and with the shadows claiming their prizes more and more often, it’s only a matter of time before something collapses.
The question isn’t when it will happen, though.
It’s what it will be.
Next:A [name_m]Castle[/name_m] of Storms and Spirits
There are definitely weirder places to drag your children to during the holidays, but a castle that’s technically named for a storm has to be one of the strangest decisions Mum and Dad ever made.
[name_u]August[/name_u] and [name_u]Grayson[/name_u] Rydell have mixed feelings about staying in Farragale [name_m]Castle[/name_m] for one night, never mind a week! But since nobody else in their family seems to have the same qualms, the twins are forced to go along with the idea anyway.
[name_m]Even[/name_m] as [name_u]Grayson[/name_u] argues that it could be worse, though, a storm begins in earnest — and traps the inhabitants of the castle inside for much longer than originally planned.
Exploring Farragale to pass the time, [name_u]August[/name_u] and [name_u]Grayson[/name_u] find new friends quickly enough, two among the living… and several among the dead.
Not every spirit that haunts the castle is a friend, though. Some want the people who use Farragale as a hotel out — or even dead — and the castle’s famed storms may not be quite so natural as people believe…
Next:Fall From [name_f]Grace[/name_f] or The Burning Girls