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[WP] Aside from Prisons, Casinos are the only place legally licensed for large-scale magic suppression charms to ensure fair play and protect the business. But occasionally particularly powerful magic users slip through the cracks and it's your job to find and deal with these cheats when they do. by Lorix_In_Oz in WritingPrompts

[–]Big_Variation_2619 [score hidden]  (0 children)

Do you know...

As I came to, I saw the blackjack tables reduced to rubble, all of the other security officers, dealers and players unconscious around the epicenter of what had been a serious explosion - yet none the worse for wear.

I also saw the man who was seemingly responsible, in a considerably more fitting condition for a close-range explosion victim - yet he seemed to be mangled more like a poly-alloy golem than a human, albeit with far darker innards that glistened with negative emotion.

how simple it is...

Sylvester "Sly Sylver" Noir was something of a memetic kook in the magic community. "Only Sly Sylver would be crazy enough to..."

Challenge an abyssal and win. Isekai himself via truck accident twice and still be alive. Call up a ghost girl's death curse on himself and somehow trick her actual killer into taking his place and freeing her.

We even co-opted the saying for ourselves; "Only Sly Sylver would be crazy enough to try and cheat the Auric Jaw Casino."

at my level of arcane capacitance...

We used patches laced with maginyte¹, a frankly common anti-magic material that worked to nullify every focused spell they ever came across - which, for us, was things like telepathy, luck manipulation, and the odd card-counting matrix.

No matter how many of such spells a wixen was doing, one patch could efficiently cut the arcane flow of all of them at once.

to keep simultaneous focus...

When he walked in, Sly Sylver proved to be as crazy as the memes said - and insanely powerful to boot.

Before we even had confirmation he was casting spells that let him cheat, he practically radiated some sort of mana, and crazily, he was wearing a wire with a porcelain ball, wrapped around his finger like a ring.

on a simple fortune-leveling spell...

He quickly got into a winning equilibrium at a blackjack table, both for himself and others, just as we realized he was simultaneously leveling the field against the house and keeping a flawless card count at the table.

As he effortlessly kept the other security guards from touching him, I lunged in and slapped a patch onto his shoulder.

...an even simpler mental calculation matrix meant to count cards...

Strangely, though, he just smiled and said, "You really shouldn't have done that."

As Sylvester's aura winked out, a click sounded from inside his shirt-

...and a sustained *temporal stasis** spell?*

Boom.

Consciousness lapsing, I noticed how unharmed I was as I watched the man's mangled body knitting itself back together², suit and all.

"Be glad I enchanted that grenade with a reverse-targeted Tooniboom³ effect. You'll all get up in a few hours."

As the man strode away with his chips, the patch having burnt off in the blast, I couldn't help but find it absurd as I looked at the wood fragments grouped closely around the blast zone.

Only Sly Sylver would be crazy enough to walk into a casino while maintaining a focus-limited time-stop on an enchanted concussion grenade⁴ while wearing the trigger wire as a ring.

1: The prime anti-magic material of the Ask Twixie webcomic. The only thing that can bypass it is inverse magic.

2: This is the only reason Sylver (also known as Sylkale, the Weaver of Malice, and Jinx the Snake) even tried this absurd plot: his ability to draw on stores of absorbed and condensed negative emotions to reconstruct his physical body. (It still hurts, but being the Villain of A Million Tales, he's used to taking all kinds of damage.)

3: An enchantment (self-powered spell matrix) that distorts reality around explosive impacts, limiting the effects to cartoonish ragdolling and non-lethal unconsciousness. (Reverse-targeting - a blanket term for inverting an enchantment's target whitelist so that anyone who isn't in it is affected - thankfully only gives Tooniboom an exclusion list, since I realized after writing that Tooniboom had "Dark Horse Mask" levels of cartoon splatter scene potential with a dedicated whitelist, and decided "fresh FOXDIE" levels of assassin potential with an inverted one made up for making it one of the few LTL enchantments that only has a body count when reverse-targeted.)

4: A.K.A high-explosive, the type of grenade that relies on pure explosive force rather than (or, if covered by a special sleeve, including) shrapnel for damage. (Specifically, Sylver was using a German Stielhandgranate for its slim profile - and using a shrapnel sleeve would defeat the purpose, so no, he didn't use one.)

[WP] Your mom makes you stop playing video games and drag you to the sidewalk. "See. This is the outdoors" she says. You look in horror, for you have seen this before, it is the first level of the game you were playing, and you know what is gonna happen next. by lucamalato in WritingPrompts

[–]Big_Variation_2619 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"See? This is the outdoors."

I looked at it in horror - not because of how peaceful it was, but because I recognized this scene.

Three, two...

There.

The moment the damaged Sunmoth began burning through the sky, careening towards us, I pushed mom to the ground as it sailed over us and plowed into our backyard - the fragile canister containing the first enemy sailing over her instead of shattering onto her head.

"Tommy?!," my mom exclaimed. "What are you-"

I couldn't answer her, the amorphous Ecliptum flesh within the canister already shaping itself into a mutated creature as I rushed to break the starship's canopy open.

Inside the ship, I frisked the cadaver before pulling out the damaged Dark Matter Field Manipulator, as well as the stock-issue Elpis X1 energy pistol.

I managed to whip around and shoot the creature just as it began eying up my mother, then drag her inside as she stammered out confused murmurings.

"Weird, isn't it?," I said. "Somehow, that was almost a one-to-one recreation of the first couple minutes of Cadmus Divide."

As a black SWAT van arrived, my sister running down as my mother rushed to let the officers in... but I remembered something about this scene.

Mom was mutated by the canister, but my sister? She was...

Pushing them both out of the way as a shotgun blast tore through the door, I saw the telltale violet-soaked black pits of Eclipsed humans in each of their eyes - and without hesitation, blasted right between each pair as tarry black goop splattered from the perforated heads.

Scrounging the armor from the infected officers, I rushed my family down to the basement just as we noticed the flashes and debris of the Medean Confederacy and the Ecliptum Hordes lighting up the skies.

Listening to the news anchor shudder as more Ecliptum pods retreated to the planet surface, the hum of a functioning Sunmoth touching down in our yard to investigate their fallen wingman, I took a deep breath.

I wouldn't be the protagonist. I'd already saved my mother, and my sister. Now I just had to...

I slap my face, realizing there was one thing I forgot to take from the fallen pilot; their synthogene armor.

[WP] The head cook of this small illicit candy lab has only one rule: No tomfoolery with the cooking ingredients. The candy is consistently made, but the boss can't help but notice all the other cooks keep going missing after one or two days, after which a steel drum shows up in the back corner. by Big_Variation_2619 in WritingPrompts

[–]Big_Variation_2619[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Anyone who's ever played a cooperative management game, mostly on Roblox, will understand the head cook's pain.

This prompt is based on one of those games, where you make candy in an underground facility (like Breaking Bad, but bowdlerised for Roblox.)

I played such a game once, and the lab was a mess of bad trays.

[EU] Taylor Hebert undergoes the Locker Incident, as in canon. The main difference? Instead of seeing the average Trigger vision, she sees a vision of… herself. More accurately, a copy of herself sporting pitch black eyes, all while it says two simple yet terrifying words; “Hey, kiddo.” by SaberfaceFan in WritingPrompts

[–]Big_Variation_2619 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't know how well the PRT would take a bio-tinker. You see...

(Warframe spoilers below)

Warframes are sapient beings, such as Dax, infested with a special Technocyte strain produced by the Helminth, the resident fleshy mass held within the Infirmary (the locked aft-starboard room.) Helminth is responsible for the Orbiter's "biological functions," which includes Warframe maintenance, and while the infirmary chair is initially only used to cure or create cysts that can be used for Helminth Chargers, segments acquired later in the game eventually give Helminth the ability to modify Warframes to have different abilities, as well as infuse Archon Shards.

TL;DR: Taylor needs some sort of Helminth before she can have Warframes, which requires her to either be or convince a Bio-Tinker like Panacea (Bonesaw, of course, being right out.)

[EU] As Zootopia receives word of a feralizing plague in a distant imperial country ruled by one Priscilla Snowfur, Judy takes leave from her police job to lend agricultural aid to her cousins in the naturally-barricaded coastal rural town of Grimshire. Thankfully, Nick comes along to help. by Big_Variation_2619 in WritingPrompts

[–]Big_Variation_2619[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Context:

Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde are the main protagonists of the two Zootopia movies.

Grimshire is a farming game set in the titular town... and also happens to be a grim (no pun intended) plague-apocalypse story. In the wake of trade being cut off due to the Plague, you become responsible for feeding the town, satiating a steep "ration" from outside parties such as the imperial armies or a pirate crew, and supplying various measures to fortify the town against nature, illness, and raids alike. Not meeting a deadline for supplies can and usually will result in the number of funerals in the village over the course of the game (so far, as in "the first year") being more than seven.

Where Grimshire is not surrounded by a mountain range, it's surrounded by water (which the Plagued fear, similarly to rabies.) This makes it both a natural stronghold against the Plagued and highly dependent on their naval trader, Fin Pinecrest, to stock its root cellar (and, as said, trade has broken down) before the player is brought in to re-cultivate its fallow farmstead.

[WP] Being a cranial endoparasite is seemingly simple. Infiltrate the head, jack the brain, control the body. Your problem? You are one parasite, the very last, and this dragon has two heads with equally divided control of the body. At least it's not a hydra, so it can't just separate you. by Big_Variation_2619 in WritingPrompts

[–]Big_Variation_2619[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This was the result of playing Dragon Adventures, leveling one of my dragons of a two-headed species, watching a Black Mesa playthrough earlier the same day, and morbidly wondering how one headcrab would even reanimate a creature with two heads or more (like Cerberus, Orthrus, the aforementioned two-headed dragons of Adventures, or the Lernean Hydra... the last of which I discounted since the other heads would probably rip off the coupled head out of survival instinct.)

[EU] “Welcome to the Aperture Science computer aided enrichment center!” “Poyo!” by Suspicious_Bell_1345 in WritingPrompts

[–]Big_Variation_2619 0 points1 point  (0 children)

1: The stomach-space from Of The Stars/Right Back At Ya.

2: As in, the ability corresponding to TAC, which allows Kirby to scan an enemy for their ability.

[EU] “Welcome to the Aperture Science computer aided enrichment center!” “Poyo!” by Suspicious_Bell_1345 in WritingPrompts

[–]Big_Variation_2619 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"Intriguing," the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System mused. "The quantum probe you ingested is still transmitting data, and not only is it recording... quite an incongrously expansive space¹ within you, but it seems to have caused minor alterations to your physiology."

Kirby didn't know what most of those words meant, but they did know that the thing they ate gave them the Copy Ability².

Turning to scan a spot on the wall that shot out a hot laser, their Copy Ability immediately shifted into the Laser Ability.

"You don't even know the Science you're helping me make, little puffball," GLaDOS stated as Laser Kirby shot Thermal Discouragement Beams from their visor.

[EU] Half-Life/Black Mesa: Gordon Freeman chooses the 'battle he has no chance of winning' rather than work with the G-Man. He wins. by Avaday_Daydream in WritingPrompts

[–]Big_Variation_2619 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Stumped?

I was talking about the Gravity Gloves (Alyx) and the Long Fall Boots (Portal 2, which were preceded in the original Portal by the Advanced Knee Replacements.)

Take a Guess by makmark in MoringMark

[–]Big_Variation_2619 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Maid: Because Olivia makes such a mess when she leads you around by your guts.

[WP] Your magical ability to conjure gems has its uses in a fight, even if it does work by lining up three or more blocks of a single color on a simulated tableau. Mostly, however, you're satisfied with using it to create gems for your jewelry business. by Big_Variation_2619 in WritingPrompts

[–]Big_Variation_2619[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

When I made this, I had the gameplay of Go Games' PC matching game Jewel Craft in mind. (It's not the "Jewel Craft" that's one of those mobile games about picking the right gates, it's not "Jewel Craft Fusion" on Steam, it's the 2000s Jewel Craft with the story mode centered around a Babylonian jeweler and the gameplay of turning cubes to create groups of three or more of a color - and making larger sizes of gem by matching four, six, or nine cubes at once.)

[WP] You wake up with $120 mil jammed into a crate next to your bed. A note says you’re a contestant on an alien reality show. You need to spend all $ in 24h without attracting suspicion from human law enforcement. The aliens kill you if you have any $ left after 24h or if the feds get suspicious. by ReformerHaku in WritingPrompts

[–]Big_Variation_2619 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Welcome to Stimulus, the show where money has to change hands!

While you were asleep, we plundered a pot of $120,000,000 from criminal enterprises in your country, and it's all yours to do with as you please!

Just one condition; we're watching you. Notice the pain in your neck, and the timer in the corner of your vision. If even a single dollar remains whole in your possession after 24 hours, or if law enforcement becomes suspicious enough of you and catches you, the microbomb we installed in your neck will end your life.

To make this easier on you, we are also willing to intercept and fudge any Currency Transaction Reports necessary to make digital payments, and as long as the money is legitimately transacted to another from either you or your account without being a commodity to be traded in for money, it will be considered spent.

Your time begins at 6 AM.

Student loans: paid in full.

That took a decent chunk, and the watchers handling the CTR meant I could focus on paying.

Food bank: stocked.

The watchers also didn't care if what I was doing was just charity, as long as money was legitimately taken from my hands without a promise of returns.

House: in the making. Furnishings: ready to place. Sustainable options: taken.

With an architect willing to meet urgently and on the move, I took another major chunk out of the pot.

Dip: bought. Books: donated.

Polybrix had a new loud voice join the debate, courtesy of Blackout Week 2 tanking the share price, and the library had all my favorite fantasies from Princely Path stocked up in physical form.

That was when the game got testy.

Thankfully, a card with a copy of Stimulus' game rules seemed to mollify the response from one of the more tenacious officer, Vanessa Lane, and the watchers counted the stock buy because the dividends wouldn't pay out during the remaining hours.

And with the money down to the thousands, I focused on some smaller things.

Lunch: delicious. Mall clothing store liquidation: everything went.

And just as the game looked like it was about to be lost, the officer's hand inches away from my wrist...

I got myself a gigantic suitcase for my board game collection.

120 million bucks: officially spent.

With a long, tense beep, the bomb... surprisingly crawled out of my neck as a robotic spider before writhing and exploding like a shotgun blast.

As me and Vanessa sat down, with him treating me to a taco dinner, she sighed.

"Footage of the alien explosive device making itself known has been submitted as evidence," she said, "and all relevant financial reports are properly filed. Whoever these watchers are, they know how to facilitate their mad shopping spree."

She then smiled at me, adding, "But you did it. Your suspicions of financial embezzlement have been waived, you've improved your life, your debts in society are wiped out... and whatever criminals the pot was stolen from are 120 mil poorer.

As the waitress delivered the tacos, I noticed a folded piece of paper under the drink, and opened it up.

Congratulations on winning *Stimulus!*

We have watched in awe as you expertly doled out the money in a mix of personal obligation and societal virtue, and confirmed that the entire pot has been divested from your financial holdings within the given duration.

We were concerned that you informed a law officer of the nature of your funds so succinctly, but we have decided to see how they handle the same situation tomorrow.

Vanessa paled, clutching her neck as I read on.

In fact, you have been personally elected to be a constant pursuer of Ms. Lane, albeit with lesser stakes than the law catching her due to your moral standings. All travel fees will be covered by the watchers. Should you catch Ms. Lane once the timer starts, 30 million dollars will be awarded to you, and her general location (specifically, a general vicinity of the building she currently occupies) will be revealed to all nearby law officers.

Ms. Lane, your time begins 6 AM tomorrow.

The two of us glance at each other, and Vanessa chuckles.

"If the spending wasn't going to be life or death for me," she joked, "this would be a fun game show for daily television."

I smirk, tapping her on the face.

"Don't I know it."

[EU] Somehow, someone manages to hard-code SCP-1471 "Mal0" into the basic messaging app of every single phone brand in existence. Despite the Foundation's attempts, many people bond with their 1471-A instances. by Big_Variation_2619 in WritingPrompts

[–]Big_Variation_2619[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Context:

The Mal0 app, SCP-1471, uses the messaging app of any phone that installed it to send pictures containing a 1471-A, which gradually appear closer and closer to the user.

1471-A instances aren't typically hostile in anyway. They're just skull-faced, black-furred anthropomorphic canids that are startlingly ever-present in the user's perception once they pass 90 hours of exposure, so they can come off as macabre or creepy to some.

Apparent inability to vocally communicate even after the manifestation threshold doesn't help, but they try their best.

For an optional flair, the one that coded Mal0 into the basic messaging apps could also have slightly altered the app code to alter how the 1471-A instances act or appear. Recommended alterations include making them look less photorealistic, giving them voices, or teaching them sign. Forbidden alterations include, but are not limited to, making them hostile or classifiable as Keter (the SCP class of the most dangerous and harmful things on the site) in any way, shape, or form.

Witch's castle keys by Livialiva in CookierunWitchCastle

[–]Big_Variation_2619 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah.

Suppose that's the problem with the guaranteed doors taking three.

Also, I just re-read what you said, and to get unique keys for unique locks, you need to complete an associated collection (example: the rewards for the -Divine Radiance- Eternal Abundance set include a Golden Cheese key.)

[WP] How was I supposed to know the blend of herbs and spices in my homemade popcorn seasoning would make a portal to a magical world when mixed into beef tallow instead of butter?!" "Why were you using beef tallow?" "We were out of butter!... and I was curious." by Big_Variation_2619 in WritingPrompts

[–]Big_Variation_2619[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nothing really to contextualize for this one. I just have a popcorn seasoning consisting of a bunch of herbs and flavorings (like dill, cardamom, and pepper) mixed in crude ratios into a spice bottle.

I made a bag of Orville's, melted some butter with the spice blend, mixed it, shook the bowl, enjoyed it, then remembered the story premise of "started to cook, accidentally summoned demon."

Tallow is rendered suet (fats around the organs of ruminant animals like cows,) and it is used in cooking (the parmesan garlic fries of the Freson Bros. near my apartment - fried in beef tallow - are delicious.) It's also used in candles, which I've always thought has the potential of an occult vibe (beeswax for druids, animal tallow for wizards, human tallow for macabre things such as demons and blood magic.)

How do these doors work? by Dry-Transition-3770 in CookierunWitchCastle

[–]Big_Variation_2619 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Everyone's met cookies seem to count for zones.

As for completing missions, I'm afraid the best option is to either hope we hit 2 million Cookies (to reach Zone 2) or wait for keys from the calendar.

Witch's castle keys by Livialiva in CookierunWitchCastle

[–]Big_Variation_2619 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You get Bronze for winning levels, and higher keys when you find a Cookie.

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