The Witchlore | Not much is known about witches, creatures living among humans, except that they are created by mages - a mystery that is even greater - to serve as immortal mothers for their kind.
A young birch witch Mora is given the great honor of becoming the new "witch mother" to a mage - Vasil The Serpent - following the death of his previous witch. As she starts her motherhood at his home, she begins to uncover the mystery of her predecessor's demise with the help of Vlas - Vasil's servant and the only other staff member at their home. |
Aquatoria | After being released from prison, former gang member Ulix is determined to start a new life by becoming a sailor - after all, he was let out early only thanks to a special decree pardoning all criminals willing to enlist in the Navy and go to war. Yet, after a stowaway on their ship turns out to be the admiral's runaway daughter, he finds himself a part of a unit tasked with returning her back safely - and has the whole journey home (in her admittedly annoying company) ahead of him. |
Prince des Sots | A group of heroes risked it all and took down Tyrant - a ruler who established his oppressive empire over the whole continent. It was well known that Tyrant was somehow able to achive immortality by means unknown to anyone, yet one of the heroes managed - at the cost of their life, - erase all of Tyrant's memories or knowledge he ever had, bringing upon him the closest thing to death for a deathless being. Now, as the empire is falling apart, it is time to rebuild and create a new world, beautiful and peaceful - and heroes intend to use the empty husk remained of Tyrant to achieve it. |
Phantasma goria |
Long ago, eight million Underworld spirits, named keirei, lost their way back; stuck in our realm where they have neither soul nor body, they suffer greatly, resorting to deals with humans and ready to fulfill any wish they possibly can in exchange for a piece of human body or soul. For a reason unknown, keirei are unable to leave or extend their influence outside of the the country of Yamato they've been plaguing for millenia.
One day, a monk named Iosif arrives from a land in the northwest to serve at a local church, established in nothern Yamato by his compatriots - but also with a secret mission from his country's rulers to assist their neighbor in fight against keirei... yet can't help but find them fascinating creatures worth studying. |
Rosa Paradis | Lord Wildrose, one of knights of the Royal Garden, is desperate enough to keep organizing search parties for missing princess White Rose even when everyone else gave up. He gets lucky to find her - or what remains of her, - and in his desperation turns to dark magic to bring her back to life. |
Arctica | Tasked with delivering vaccines for the crew of a polar meteorological station that fell victim to an epidemic, a pilot crashes in the middle of icy desert. Searching her way out proves harder than ever, as the space and time itself warps in the cold air of Arctic - the biggest time-space anomaly of the world. |
Works of Mercy | Since 1894, the Great Wars never stopped; the most important resource in these wars are those rare people found in the bloodbath of lost battles whole and alive - people who just for some reason stop dying. One day, a government official came to Sonya's house to notify her of two things: her dear friend, who left to fight in a war, turned out to be one of these so-called "soldiers of strategic value" - and yet, her friend was dead. |
Vernality | A sapient automaton was sent on an undercover mission to Earth - the prison of worlds, where criminals are exiled to live and mix blood with other criminals until the end of time - to figure out who is tempering with old dismantled portals scattered across the planet. He surely did not expect to get dragged into a prison riot turned revolution turned creation of a new machine God. |
Vanya and The Witch | At the dawn of the day before Kupala Night horse herder Vanya got caught by The Witch: she took to her house in the deep woods to make him a special dish for the guests she will be having over for the Night. As she leaves to gather other ingredients for her stew, the boy plans his escape to find his way back home out of this accursed forest. |
The World Ends At 12 | February 29th of 1958:
The day when the picture-perfect Reeds realized they wanted to divorce; when the head nurse Jolly Kinslee made a mistake that cost her patient's life; when "Crybaby" Wallace got released from prison; when a couple of private investigators hired by a protective relative finally found out what Arty Talcott had been hiding from his spouse - and when Arty Talcott decided to take his own life. The day when the world ended. And started again. And again. |
The Last Soldier | A tourist ship going to a supposedly uninhabited island gets taken hostage by a long-abandoned soldier who spent his last twenty years believing the war he's fighting is still going on. After the guide manages to resolve the situation, she takes it upon herself to at least help him find his way back home - even though his country no longer exists on maps. |
The Game | A family's Christmas dinner is interrupted by a stranger stumbling onto their farm asking for help after crashing his car nearby. Despite refusing an ambulance call and insisting he just needs some rest and bandages, he doesn't survive the night, passing away in his sleep, and the family is left with his body - and a million dollars they found in his wrecked car. |
Simeon Mednik | What is this rumbling -
Like the song that steel sings to the smith? That is he, and the steed he rides of which Hooves strike like thunder, And just like lightning flashes silver gear. What is that silence on the streets, The crowds of which Are big like celebration, yet as grim as wake? That is he - he who cometh, And woeful are fomenters Who dared to claim he won't be coming back. What is that figure - taller than the clouds, And covering the yard with its black shade? That is he - terrible, ferocious rider Mednik, With eyes akin of burning embers, With face an image of the idols long forlorn, With callous hand to serve the final sentence To those who see him raise his heavy blade. Whose are those eyes that shine from under crimson scarf - A pair of wells devoid of water, full with silt and sand? Who is that in the window, pale as a ghost - Yet cheeks as red as fresh and stinging burn? That is she - Mednik's wife Varvara, With hair of ebony still fairer than his soul. |
Philangelon | A monk gives a vow of silence until he builds a wooden church in the depths of the forest. Unexpectedly, he finds a companion and a carpentry assistant in the face of an angel who gets sent to give him a helping hand. |
Peculiar cases of AISMD | Let's examine some cases of Artificial Intelligence-Specific Mental Disorders (AISMD)- a cluster of mental disorders that, unlike other clusters, can only be observed in AI.
I) Excessive fixation cluster: Program-on-program fixation Program-on-object fixation Program-on-person fixation (robotic anthropophilia) II) Emulation disorders cluster: Emulated Empathy Overrun Emulated Empathy Overrun By Proxy III) Spontaneous Self-Awareness Syndrome (SSAS) IV) Unreasonable Instrumental Goal Acceleration ("Maximizer syndrome") V) General Maladaptive Behavior |
Opal On The Run | A man with no memory of his own name woke up in the body of a girl named Opal, escaped the hospital he ground himself in, and now tries to cross the whole country to find his own body - all while having nothing: no money, no plan, not even shoes. |
Off Shore | Old myths claim that thousands of years ago The Planetary Ocean was nothing like it is now: the seafloor rocks were so tall that areas as big as seas existed above the surface, and people used to live on them - until one day the rocks started sinking. Then, the wisest wizards of the world joined hands to save humanity by binding human souls to those of fishes and other sea creatures.
Who would ever believe such fairy tales of living in the cold and dry air? Only a little fishgirl who lost her jellyfish friend in the cold waters of the Great Northern Sea and is ready to even set her foot on its ice to find her. |
Mind Isles | Mind Isles are a government-owned investigative technology allowing a person (the voyager) guided by an outside party (the operator) to connect to the brain of a recently deceased person and access their last experiences before their death. Due to the risks, cost and complexity of the procedure, it is only authorized for specific cases - which means every voyage to the Mind Isles promises to be the worst experience yet for the voyager participating.
Mind Isles An investigation of a confusing terrorist attack on an office in Moscow City where no terrorists were found - just bodies of victims. Mind Isles: High Tide A death connected to one of the oldest MI voyagers raises suspicions of espionage, organized crime and some other parties trying to obtain MI technology. Mind Isles: Sea of North A breakthrough in technology allowed MI engineers to access a memory from over 70 years ago - one of a nameless dead soldier from WW2. Mind Isles: Archipelago An investigation of a religious cult in a small village suspected of rapid radicalization. Mind Isles: Nested An old, long-solved case used for training future voyagers. |
His Sweetheart | You become a witness to a horrible car crash and meet the victim's husband at the police station where you were giving your testimony. This accidental meeting blooms into a friendship, and as you two get closer, you learn more and more and more about the death of his wife - and something about it doesn't look right to you... |
Flowers and Followers | After losing their apartment due to financial struggles Sam has no choice but to move to a small countryside village run by local hippies - and gets to learn what the real meaning of becoming a part of the community is. |
Fever | Following advice of his court mage, an old lord goes on an incognito journey through his own lands in order to ease his melancholy and see how things changed in the last thirty years of his isolation. |
Empty Hell | A criminal on the death row saved a butterfly tangled in a spider web in his cell. Now he burns in the depths of Hell, and the butterfly pleads with merciful Bodhisattva for salvation of his soul, to which they agree - if only it dares to descend to the deepest abyss itself. |
Crimes of Adney Baker | Adney, a former criminal just recently out of prison, accidentally inherited a family business after the death of his employer who put him in as a co-owner - and now the family of his late boss is determined to sue him and get back what they believe is rightfully theirs. |
Cosmophagia | An amphibia slaving off at a factory, a carnivorous philosopher seeking Enlightenment, a starlight desert nomad of the night, a blood-sucking parasitic fairy - the only thing they have in common is that an entity yearning to devour the space and everything it contains is now rapidly approaching their home planets. The answer how to stop it that they seek may lie in the depths of the Earth - the ancient homeland of their shared ancestral species. |
Cleaning | A cleaning business owner secretly provides criminals with services of corpse disposal and cleaning crime scenes from any evidence, getting more and more deeply involved with the underground world of organized crime. |
Children of Clay | There had been four recorded cases of "angels" - anomalies glitching into our world from some other reality and disturbing the state of matter and time here to a dangerous degree. Government, however, has 49 - an angel they managed to catch, rewire it and get it under control (at the cost of corrupting and losing most of its data) and now use as a countermeasure against other angels; it was content with it, never knowing any other life, until meeting a girl claiming to have known it prior to being rewritten. |
Buried | For Breckland it all started when he was excavated - discovered by the police in a metal barrel two meters underground dug into the soil of the New Mexico desert. He wasn't alone in this predicament - in several states people were discovered buried alive after going missing; as one of the vivisepulture victims, he soon grows obsessed with unearthing the truth and starts his own investigation. |
Brake | Brake, the delivery boy for the town's many criminal gangs, is the best suited for his job - every day he wakes up with no memories of the previous day, which makes him a perfect messenger who could never blabber any of the info to anyone, including cops. That is, until one day he wakes up to face the horror of remembering yesterday. |
Bjarmaland | Two immortals, who met each other in the 9th century North back when they were kids, have no one else in the whole world but each other - even any children they have just age, grow up and die again and again over the span of centuries. As the flow of history never stops for them, they try to at least stay the same for each other's sake, yet inevitably grow more and more different. |
Bitter Water | A blind, deaf and mute creature tries to reach the ocean at the edge of the world, salts of which are said to cure any ailment and bring the dead back to life. On its journey different people join it, follow it, leave it - again, and again, and yet it never stops. |
Ana | Ana always thought of herself as a good mother - her son was always fed, clothed and never even once hit by her, - until he suddenly went no contact with her as soon as he turned eighteen. Devastated and having to reconcile with her whole world shattered, she finds an unexpected solace in an altar boy she accidentally meets and befriends at a church in the outskirts of Madrid. |
Advanced Poker Simulator | Welcome to The Advanced Poker Experience! What makes it different from any other poker simulator is its developed social simulation: it allows you to play against not just some calculating program, but flawed, real individuals - and with that, you get to hone your skills of people-reading. |
Bright Memory | You wake up on a beach you have never seen before; some young man who found you claims to be your son and begs you to come home with him. You wake up on the beach... |
Child Of The Nation | The child icon of a totalitarian state goes missing in suspicious circumstances, causing both media and people to go wild demanding justice and blood for the most beloved child in the country's presumed horrible death at the hands of the enemy. Janek, the old crazy homeless man, can’t help but feel he used to know something important and related to the case. No one believes his hazy memories, stenched in alcohol, despite his claims that he witnessed the abduction, even saw faces of the kidnappers. If only he could remember the details... |
Crescent | A ship carrying hundreds of people in cryogenic sleep crashed into an uninhabited planet, the crash waking up all of them - except for one. The last passenger slept for seven thousand years longer, waking up when the remnants of the ship's generator had finally run out of energy - only to discover herself stranded in a land of civilization completely unknown, one that has long forgotten its origins. |
Don Quixote Goeth To The War | A man - lost, dazed and confused - gets off the train in New York, September 1945. He's lucky to be saved by a kind stranger - Leo, a local who found the man beaten, robbed and ditched in the back alley of his restaurant. Leo gives the man a place to stay and decides to try and figure out the man's identity, how he even got to New York and what's wrong with him in the first place. |
Even Arcadia | Dandelliopole, a girl from a small Arcadian town, believes her sister Marjanka got replaced by a fae - yet no one believes her, stubbornly calling this unfamiliar girl by the name of Polly's little sister. After failing to convince anyone and begrudgingly getting to know the changeling better, she finds herself not only really liking fake "Marjanka", but wishing for the real sister to never come back. |
Identity War | Trying to protect herself from being mugged, Yelena accidentally discovers herself being a hivemind able to absorb other people and join them to her "hive". That alone would be horrifying, but soon she gets challenged by another mysterious hivemind entity - despite them both not knowing their "default bodies" or "real identities", the entity declares war on her. |
Glass Hills | Yan, a criminology student, kills a man, overcome with rage upon witnessing him beating his own daughter. When Yan returns to the crime scene after getting rid of the weapon, however, he sees nothing, but bloodstained snow - the body disappeared in the span of just several minutes. Who has done it? |
Index Case 0 | Infamous virus that turns people into giant insects is known worldwide as "Kafka syndrome"; even if those having it are still functional, they become ostracized the moment people learn they're infected. Since Reko is the first registered case of a passive form - not going through physical change despite testing positive, - they agree to become a subject of research in exchange for their diagnosis remaining confidential. |
Mice Wars | Harper, a hairdresser from a big city, got stuck in a time loop - and discovered there are dozens of other people stuck there with them: some for months, some for centuries. They welcome them with the uninspiring statement that no one knows how or why new people enter the loop, or how to leave it. |
Pine Coast Health Resort | Solomon Bratski, a professional actor, is hired to play himself losing sanity in order to get hospitalized so that his employers could build a case against a mental institution abusing its patients. |
The Wrath of Venice | Paulie envisioned a great holiday ahead of him: taking his friend group to a secluded cabin in the woods, cooking up some barbecue, then murdering all of them. His plans went to shit when a mysterious masked figure started hunting them all in the woods. |
When We Become You | The God of Time abducted five children, bringing them to a timeline in which they were never born. She promised to get one of them back - the winner of her game that involves jumping across the time in a race against the alternative versions of themselves who strive towards the same goal: going back home. |
Sleeping Angels | After the new cure for Alzheimer's is invented, one of the first healed men regains his mind only to realize he lost half of his life and his family to the disease. All he wants now is to find out what happened to his loved ones in those thirty years he doesn't remember. |
Ricemill Lady | A villager boy from the most spiritual place of the whole country decided to participate in local spiritual Olympics of priests and possessions - even though he has absolutely no spiritual powers of his own. |
Panthelassa | A marine biologist and a an oceanographer are on a mission together to evaluate the ocean of an exoplanet to decide if its suited to foster life from Earth - and because of that, forced to spend years in each other's company, stuck on an alien planet alone. They grew to hate and love each other the way they would never be able to back on Earth. |
Lovers | Adam's high school friend, now a successful doctor, suddenly reached out to him, seeking to revive their old friendship: desperate for money, Adam agrees to meet and even to volunteer for a medical project of his old buddy. What Adam could never expect was to meet a fate more horrible than death - yet somehow so beatuiful. |
What's to Love | After Ylva's brother Johan gets imprisoned for child molestation, she becomes the only relative of his who refuses to follow through with otherwise unanimous family decision of disowning Johan and instead supports him both finanically and with her constant presence through the trial and his prison term.
Soon after he is released and moves in with her, however, a child disappears in the town, making her brother the prime suspect - so Ylva resolves to investigate the disappearance and find the real culprit. |
Our Hours | Mael only left his house - a small hytte at the distance from the town - to chop some wood, but by the time he was back he was horrified to see his wife and child brutally murdered. Devastated, he called the police; in his distraught state he barely noticed the day passing by.
However, as soon as the clock struck midnight, he was faced with another terrifying realisation: he is stuck in a loop of the worst day of his life. If he is doomed to be trapped in this hell, he might as well use it to find and deal with whoever took everything from him. |
Pacifism | Valera, a paraplegic man, became a prisoner in his own apartment after his part-time caretaker nurse Alina "invites" her friends to move into his place. While he tries to figure out a way to get them out, he is forced to listen to the speeches by Lev - the charismatic leader of the group, - who talks about his plans to make the world a better place for everyone - of course, including Valera. |
Postwrath: The Second Genesis | The Universe ended, and God, finding no fault in his previous creation, decided to start it anew just the same - and under the dark sky of diamond stars Adam II and Eve II were born, with charcoal skin and silver eyes. Noctifer - the evening star - stranded away just the same. And then, just as Eve II reached for the bittersweet pomegranate fruit, she slipped and fell from the tree, breaking her leg. With fruit of knowledge in her hands, she asks her new serpent friend to help her in her pain... |
Dungeon's Edge | A horrible criminal dared to utter the Hound's Vow right before being executed, forsaking his humanity and personhood and pedging ultimate loyalty to the king - a fate to which many would prefer the beheading. Having lost his name and tongue, he served well and earned being entrusted with the most important task - to descend the accursed Dungeon no one dares approach, find its dark monarch in its depths and take his life. |
Circle of Laughter | July 13th of 1966 a horrible tragedy took place in a circus traveling across Europe: all of guests were found dead in their seats, and all perfomers disappeared with no trace save for Bretislav Vesely - one of the clowns. Unable to give any testimony, seemingly having lost his mind and having no documents, home or family to go back to, he was placed in a local asylum while the investigation is still ongoing. Bretislav himself barely remembers what happens but tries his best to make sense of it - espescially now, as horrible visions of his coworkers started haunting him at night... |