One of the most fun ways to play card games is by “drafting.”
You get packs of random cards, pick one card you like, pass the rest to people sitting with you, and repeat until all the cards are gone. Then you use what you picked to build a deck.
So if drafting cards is so much fun, would it be possible to “draft” a story?
During the last stream, we “drafted” a story. I created 450 individual cards, comprised of character cards, plot cards, stipulation cards, rare word cards, sentence cards, and more. (You can see them all here.)
Together with special guest Abbey, we drafted 45 of the cards, then whittled them down to 21 that we would work with. We had to somehow incorporate all of them into the story.
Here’s just a taste of some of the craziness we had to use:
- Setting: An overgrown road with an abandoned ice cream truck
- Plot: The Little Mermaid but with rhinos
- Stipulation: Your story must contain a haiku
- Character: Voldemort (yes, that Voldemort)
- The word: “tyrotoxism”
- The sentence: “Good way for the three of you to get fat”
- And more!
Watch the full draft here, plus us reading the story,
or scroll down to see the madness for yourself.
Mom swindled the priest. She abandoned me at the steps of a church when I was but a babe. I was taken in by the head priest Voldemort, who when I was older, explained to me that he always regretted not dealing with a different child abandoned on a doorstep, so Uncle Voldy took me in as his own.
My childhood was great. Even though Uncle Voldy was busy all the time meeting with his Deaf Eaters (I always thought it was so nice of him to work with the local deaf community), he always made time to take me to lots of fun places. There was the discount outlets Morino Tsuma, where books were super cheap, like not even a dollar each. And Seaside Boulevard where there was an all-you-can-eat ice cream buffet out of an abandoned truck off the side of an overgrown road. Uncle Voldy always let me have the Choco Tacos. He said he prefered the little cups of rum raisin.
Until the day that Uncle Voldy took me to the zoo in Redhaw, Ohio. We looked at all the cool animals, the sharks, the giraffes, the elephants… but then we saw the rhinos. There were two of them, a teenage girl rhino and her grandmother.
And that was when I truly became a woman.
The teenage girl rhino’s name was Stacey Watson, and she was the most beautiful creature I’d ever laid eyes on. Her raw hide caked with thick layer of knowledge and beauty, her horn that protruded up to the sky like a beacon of love. And, let’s not forget that thicc badonkadonk she had goin’ on.
Uncle Voldy had bought me some snacks at the vendors, but Stacey was the only snack that I wanted.
“Uncle Voldy!” I said, tugging at his robesleeve. “I want to go meet Stacey! She’s so cute!”
For the first time in my life, Uncle Voldy gave me glare with his snake eyes and shook his shiny, egg-like head.
“No, Ari,” he hissed, forked tongue flickering out of his mouth. “You may meet any of the other animals, but that one is forbidden.”
My stomach churned hard with despair, as if I’d suddenly come down with a case of tyrotoxism, eaten some bad cheese that turned into a thundering gas storm inside of me.
“But why?” I cried, doubled over in gastric pain. “Is it wrong to love a rhino?”
“Love.” Uncle Voldy sneered and spat the word to the ground. “We’re going home!”
“No! Stop it… snakeface!” I yelled at Uncle Voldy as he grabbed my arm and dragged me away from my heart’s desire. “Stacey…!”
As I screamed her name, Stacey looked over from munching on the grass, and charged against the gate surrounding her, desperately trying to break free and be with me.
***
I didn’t speak to Uncle Voldy for the rest of the day. I could tell he was taking pity on me and trying to cheer me up, but nothing he did worked. Not even when he baked a three-layer cheese cake from a recipe in his magazine “Is Organic Really Better? Healthy Food or Trendy Scam? Weekly.” Just looking at it made me remember the lactose-inducing pain that I’d felt when he’d forbidden mine and Stacey’s love.
That night, when I was asleep in my room, I made up my mind. I wasn’t going to let Uncle Voldy keep me away from Stacey any longer. I leaped out of bed, booted up my computer, and immediately went to WikiHow to find out what to do.
Thankfully, the exact article I needed was there: “How to elope with your rhino lover when your adopted father Voldemort forbids it.”
I read through the article, nodding along to the professionally-drawn images and perfectly-proofread paragraphs. I followed all the steps perfectly, and was only interrupted once by a knock at my locked door.
“Ari?” came Uncle Voldy’s voice. “What are you doing up this early?”
My skin burned hot with embarrassment as I shouted my answer. “I’m Photoshopping a face on! God, dad. Go away!”
From the other side of the door, Uncle Voldy giggled in a low voice. “Hehe, she called me dad instead of snakeface. I guess everything’s all right.”
With that, he walked away, leaving me cackling and working to myself.
As the sun rose hours later, I snuck out the doors of the church to the zoo, ready for the next chapter of mine and Stacey’s life together.
With me, as a rhino.
I’d basically given myself an at-home rhinoplasty. I’d printed out a Rhino face, made a rhino horn out of a used toilet paper roll, and spray-painted some bubble wrap gray and held it over my body for my hide. I was basically indistinguishable from Stacey and her grandmother. Surely they would let me join their herd.
With a few strange looks from the ticket clerk, I waddled my way back to the rhino enclosure and saw Stacey and her grandma munching on some giant bush and paw paw salads. When Stacey saw me, her mouth fell open and her half-chewed salad spilled to the ground.
“Stacey!” I called, a smile spreading across my face. Then, I remembered that I was supposed to speak rhino, and I changed over to grunting out lots of whrrrrs and fnnngggss. “Vfffrrttt ddddrrrryyyy bbbbkkooo.” (That’s how you say “I love you” in rhino.”)
Stacey batted her ears and laughed. “You don’t have to talk in rhino. I speak English, you know!”
I was so embarrassed, even my spray-painted bubble-wrap hide burned red.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” I said. “But I just needed to tell you how much I love you, Stacey!”
Stacey eyed my rhinoplasty up and down. “I can see how much you care just by looking. Now why don’t you come over and give me a rhino-kiss?”
My heart fluttering like grubs wiggling out of a stump, I tiptoed over to Stacey, lips puckered and moist. But just as I leaned in to latch on and swap gravy, something grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back, casting a cold shadow over me.
“Ari!” Uncle Voldy shouted. “What are you doing?!”
“Uncle Voldy!” I yelled back. “ How did you find me?”
“Well, you left that awful WikiHow page open on your computer. I mean, I’m not stupid. Come on, let’s go home.”
I threw his bony hand off me and glared at him, adjusting my toilet-paper roll nose so it stood straight and intimidating.
“You can’t make me!” I said. “I love Stacey, and she loves me back. And there’s nothing you can do to stop us from being together.”
Uncle Voldy looked at me, and I expected him to yell, but all he did was cross his arms and sigh.
“I was doing this for your own good, Stacey,” he said softly. “The woman who abandoned you on my church step all those years ago… she was… that rhino right there!”
He pointed a spindly finger to Stacey’s grandmother, who then looked over at us with tired old eyes.
“Guess I’ve been found out,” she said. Her skin contorted and morphed, revealing before us an older human woman with bushy hair, buck teeth, and wearing gold and red robes with a nametag that said “Hermione.”
“Holy crap!” Stacey and I said together. Uncle Voldy grunted.
“I took in your daughter as a favor for what I did to your friends, Ms. Granger the rhino Animagus,” Uncle Voldy said. “I tried to give her a life away from your troublesome herd, and now look what happened!”
Hermione shook her head and smiled at Uncle Voldy. “You never did understand love, did you, Tom?”
Uncle Voldy grit his teeth and narrowed his eyes at her. “Very well. How about this? I challenge you to a duel… of love!”
“Very well,” Hermione said, nodding. “What are you terms?”
“Ari,” Uncle Voldy said, looking at me. “You must compose a poem of true love. If you do, then I will give you and Stacey my blessing. But if you do not, then I will exterminate Hermione over here, just like I did with her meddlesome friends so long ago.”
“No!” I cried. “Hermione! Don’t do it! It’s not worth—”
“I accept,” Hermione said. She then turned to me. “Ari, it’s up to you. Git ’er done.”
Sweat poured down my face. The pressure was on. How could I compose a poem of true love? I’d never even written a poem before!
But then I remembered. All those old books that Uncle Voldy and I would look at back in Morino Tsuma. Some of them had poems in them. Limericks. Haiku. And then afterward, when we would go get ice cream at our “secret buffet.”
Suddenly, I knew what true love was. The words spilled forth from my lips:
“A girl and her uncle
He saves the best ice-cream for her:
The Choco Taco.”Uncle Voldy gripped his heart and fell to his knees, overwhelmed by the intense love in my poem.
“Ari…” he gasped. “You really… do care about me.”
“Of course I do,” I said. “But you need to care about me too. I need to be able to be with my own kind sometimes.”
Uncle Voldy nodded and slowly stood back up. He brushed himself off and chuckled.
“You know,” he said, “haiku are supposed to be five-seven-five for syllables. Yours wasn’t.
“Oh I know,” I said. I walked over and clasped his hand, and Stacey’s horn. “It was just a little bit off, but still sweet. Just like our family.”
“Speaking of sweet!” Uncle Voldy said, reaching into his pocket and removing his wand. “Why don’t we have some secret dessert!”
He waved his wand, and an ice cream social fit for a fifth grade shindig appeared magically before us. I immediately dug into the rainbow sprinkles and oversized gummy bears, while Uncle Voldy went straight for the chocolate frogs (desperate to find his own card), and Stacey licked up the salted caramels, still in their wrappings. Hermione watched on in disapproval.
“Good way for all three of you to get fat!” she said. “You hedonistic animals.”
“Speakin’ of fat!” came a new, deep voice from behind them. They all turned their candy-stained faces to see a massive man with a busty beard standing there, holding a lantern and a pink umbrella. He looked at Ari and gave her a wink.
“I ‘ave good news fer ya,” he said. “Yer a wizard, Ari!”
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you. We stream on Twitch every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday at 6:30pm-10:30pm (U.S. Eastern Standard Time).
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Scott Wilson is the author of the novel Metl: The ANGEL Weapon,
forthcoming March 2019.
Featured image: Pakutaso (Edited by me)