Happy Saturday! Today I'm doing some rankings on the two devices from the week, both products of the Story Engine - the Lore Master's Deck and the Deck of Worlds.
Both the Lore Master's Deck and the Deck of Worlds get 5s in both Shiny and Fun, as they are very well-made cards in well-designed card boxes that I can spend hours playing with. Lore Master gets a 4 in Complexity, while Deck of Worlds gets a 3 - the Deck of Worlds is focused on one area of writing, and is designed to create single micro settings, while the Lore Master's Deck is meant to cover a broad variety of topics in writing, and can go from a single cluster into a full web covering multiple aspects of the same story.
Speaking of story...today's story comes from the StoryADay website's prompt from May 23:
Prompt: When she picked up the knife, she discovered the blade was still sharp.
Kinds of knife: pocket, chef, fish, steak, pen, butterfly, swiss army, combat, throwing, shiv, bread, oyster, carving, bowie, camp, palette, craft
When she picked up the knife, she discovered the blade was still sharp. She nearly dropped it, the energy from the sharpening spell shocking her like static. It seemed like a waste of energy, casting sharpening spells on kitchen tools, but it was exactly the kind of thing her grandmother would do for her. It was the first time she was living on her own, and Abuela was always going to try to help her out.
She sighed, carefully reaching for the handle of the kitchen knife and putting it in the knife block she’d found in one of the other boxes. She swore she had packed everything herself, and her boxes hadn’t been out of her sight since she’d sealed them, but somehow, things were appearing that she didn’t remember putting there.
Leaving her familia behind in Baja California had been the hardest thing Josefa’d ever had to do, but she made herself believe it was worth it. She would be the first of the primos to go to college, to make something of herself besides just another worker who took the first job she could find that would pay the bills and live in the same house she’d grown up in. She wanted something better for herself, something bigger, and that had meant leaving the tiny room she’d shared with her little prima and make her way north to Seattle.
Josefa had worked with her teachers and gotten all the scholarships and jobs she could to live on her own. It was a studio apartment just off-campus, but it was all hers, and she would have no one else to answer to back home.
She opened her next box and sighed. Papá had had a hand in this one, she could see. She pulled out a miniature version of his favorite armchair and carefully set it on the floor, far away from the kitchenette space. As soon as the four feet touched the floor, it began to grow into its full size. Josefa seized the air around it, squeezing the shrinking spell to keep it from disintegrating completely, and managed to keep the chair from growing beyond two-thirds its normal size. The chair was far too big for the small space, but the shrunken version would work, and Josefa had to admit that she had always loved that chair. Her eyes welled up a bit, thinking of Papá sneaking the chair into her box and how big he must have been smiling while he thought of how he was getting on over on her. How could she get mad about that?
By the time she finished unpacking her boxes, she had everything she’d originally packed, plus the rest of the knives to fill out the block, an elaborate quilt from her other abuela, a fancy desk set complete with pen and ink from Tío Leonardo, and her youngest primo’s favorite stuffed dinosaur.
Josefa had planned to start a new life in this studio apartment, with a space that had nothing but new things for the person she wanted to be. Thanks to her family, she had reminders of the home that had made her the person she already was.
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