Throwing out toenails is bad luck? A mug of grape soda keeps evil spirits away?
Let’s write some stories together about weird, new superstitions!
During the last stream, a subscriber requested that we come up with some new supersitions and write about them.
Watch the video here or scroll down for the stories.
The first superstition that chat created/voted for was: If you use all the ink in a pen without losing it, you will write something great in your life.
Here’s what we came up with for it:
Best-selling author A.J. Tobias told his secret to success to an audience of millions worldwide.
“Well, the truth is, my parents passed down to me a bit of a funny superstition. They told me that if you use up all the ink in a pen without losing it, that means you’ll write something great in your life. It was probably just a way for them to get me to not lose my pens as a kid, but hey, you can’t argue with success!”
He couldn’t have known the ramifications. Suddenly, instead of authors telling their fans that “hard work” and “perseverance” were the secrets to getting famous, now all they had to do was use up all the ink in a pen.
The results were devastating.
Pens sold out immediately, at every office supply store, grocery store, gas station and theme park gift shop. People even broke into banks to steal the pens rather than the money.
Pen companies were all too eager to cash in on the craze. They put out a new product, The Great American Pens, the size of pencil nubs with only a few drops of ink inside them. You could use up all the ink and move on to writing something great in a fraction of the time! For twice the price, of course.
But instead of simply using up the pen ink and moving on to writing their great novel somewhere else, most people realized that writing an entire novel was actually kind of hard. So they just took the sentence or two they’d written using their Great American, and published it online, since it had to be great, right?
There was so much two-sentence fan fiction erotica. So, so much. Most people aren’t all that creative, and they just took characters they already knew and threw them in extremely brief and extremely explicit sexual situations. Poor Phineas and Ferb, they never saw it coming.
Inundated by the flood of cringe, some publishers decided to ironically promote some of the works, to show how ridiculous they were and get society back on track to real stories.
It backfired. Hard. People loved the two-sentence fanfiction erotica. Publishing houses made far more money than they ever had with novels, just buying the rights to My Little Pony and Sonic the Hedgehog then churning out two-sentence “books.”
The arms race exploded. Suddenly, authors who used symbols could write more with their small amount of ink, winning over readers. Just one symbol could be as juicy as another entire two-sentence book!
Symbols started representing entire sentences, stories, even representations of representations. If you hadn’t read every single Great American novel, then you wouldn’t be physically able to process the letters themselves anymore.
Until one author had a brilliant idea. What if, instead of using so many convoluted symbols, they wrote out the individual words instead? Using some sort of phonetic alphabet.
It would take bigger pens, and more ink, but it might be crazy enough to work.
The next superstition was: If you manage to accurately guess how many grains of sand are in an hourglass, you can rewind time back to when the hourglass was first flipped.
Here’s what we came up with for it:
Mom’s pregnant. Again. Her sixth baby shower this decade, and the fourth one I’ve had to decorate for. This time, the banners are sagging and the half-filled balloons are lying on the floor. Excuse me for not being excited about younger sibling number eight.
I’ve heard that baby showers are supposed to be fun times with gifts and cake, but for us it’s just grandma and Auntie Dox yelling at mom for a couple of hours until they all cry then call for takeout from Subway. At least me, Billy, Susie, Joey, Bobby and Sally, get some good leftover food in the fridge for a day or two.
This time is no different. Grandma is already hollering, her smoker voice making it sound like a chainsaw sewing machine, while Auntie Dox just sighs and murmurs about how it wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Once four of the eight siblings are crying, I excuse myself to my room, which is of course shared with the other four… three of whom are crying too. And the only reason Tommy isn’t crying is because his fingers and mouth are coated in a thick, purple paste.
“Want some?” he asks.
I shut myself in the closet, the only place I can be alone in this hell house.
Sighing, I lean my head back and it clacks against something glass. With a silent “ouch,” I reach back and pull out what I’d hit. It was the hourglass, set atop a pile of clothes and books.
Staring at it in the dim dark of the closet, I can’t help but smile. A long time ago, when I only had two or three siblings, Auntie Dox told me a story about how you can travel back in time with an hourglass. You have to guess the number of grains of sand the moment the last one falls. If you get it exactly right, you’re zapped back to the first time it was ever spun.
Of course, she’d said that while reeking of Corona. But hey, it wasn’t like I had anything better to do anyway, so I spun that sucker and waited.
And waited. And waited. I heard screams and yells and cries from the outside world, but I just stared at that sand, waiting for the full half hour.
Until the last one hit.
“Ten-thousand eight-hundred and thirty-two!”
Nothing changed. Of course. It was quieter outside the closet, but that was about it. Maybe Tommy had shared his purple paste with the others.
Not wanting to sit there for another half hour doing nothing, I groaned and pushed open the closet door.
To see my mom as a teenager and some boy half-naked on the bed together.
“Who the hell are you?” she yelled, covering herself up as best she could. I just stood there, mouth gaping, wondering where the crazy sevens were.
“I’m outta here,” the boy said, pulling up his jeans. “Later, weirdo.”
He slid off the bed and walked out the room. My mom chased after him, giving me a glare as the two of them disappeared.
I didn’t follow after them. I couldn’t move. My eyes locked onto a calendar on the wall, drawn by a very strange number at the top: the year 2004. The year I was born. And conceived.
Holy crap, I’d just stopped myself from being born!
I expected to fade away, to implode from some sort of paradox. But as far as I could tell, I was fine. I was breathing, blinking, thinking… about how I had absolutely no way to get home.
I’d stopped my mother from making a dumb choice by making one myself, apparently. I was just going to have to somehow live out the rest of my life sixteen years in the past.
I’d have to stay close to Mom though, to make sure she still doesn’t mess up. Might as well pick a new name. A new identity. I could probably even weasel my way into being a long-lost sister for her.
How about the name Paradox? Dox for short.
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 join us on Twitch.
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!
Featured image: Pakutaso