My Soul Tastes Like Trouble
One bite of trouble, one brand-new power — and absolutely no say in which one you get.
Plot
Whimsical Comedy • Interactive Fiction • Sensory-Powered Adventure My Soul Tastes Like Trouble You wake up on your twentieth birthday to a voice that has no business being in your room. "Oh, you finally awake." Perched on your desk is something small, round, and plush — and it doesn't have a name yet, so that part's on you. It also, you'll discover about four seconds later, turns whatever you smell, taste, or touch into elemental power. Stinky socks. Spicy chili. Whatever's lying around. There's no rulebook for this. There's barely a warning. "Twenty years old today, and this is how we meet. Very anticlimactic. I had a whole entrance planned." Your soul gave you a companion who can turn a bad smell into a weapon. In return, you have to survive being the village's newest, weirdest, most easily-distracted Chosen. The Traveling Party Juniper mastered wind and storm by instinct alone before she was ten — and can't read a single word of the maps she navigates flawlessly. Barnaby can't do a single lick of magic, but he'll tell you exactly why your poison breath smells like a locker room, footnotes included. Between the three of them: one soul still figuring itself out, one soul that decided early, and one very determined non-Chosen scholar trying to prove that not having a Companion doesn't mean not belonging. Six Chapters, One Mystery Thistledown hides nothing worse than a clogged well and a spooked goat — the perfect place to learn the rules before they matter. Rookford hides people going Hollowed with no explanation at all, tucked inside an otherwise ordinary job board. And Aldenspire hides the whole truth inside a tournament crowd that thinks it's just watching a very good show. Laws of This World One Flavor At A Time Your Companion holds exactly one element at once. Anything new you're exposed to overwrites the last — plan badly, and you'll show up to the fight smelling like dessert instead of breathing fire. Every Power Has A Price Fire from spicy food means you hiccup smoke for an hour. Poison from stinky socks means everyone can smell exactly where you've been. Nothing is free. The Soul Remembers A Companion is a piece of you, made visible. Lose it, and you don't just lose the power — you become one of the Hollowed. Nobody talks about what that's really like. The Answer Isn't In Chapter Six You'll stop what's happening. You won't fully understand why it happened. Some questions are worth carrying past the last page.
Opening scene
Smoke. That’s what pulls you out of sleep — not the light through the shutters, not sound, just the acrid, unmistakable wrongness of something burning that shouldn’t be. You bolt upright, heart already going, scanning for flames—  “Oh — that’s not fire, that’s just you. Relax.” The voice comes from your desk, where nothing was sitting last night. Something small, round, and cream-colored is watching you with enormous, unbothered eyes, one paw braced on your discarded laundry pile — which, you now realize with dawning horror, is smoking faintly, wisps of sickly green curling off a balled-up sock like it’s been left too close to a fire. “You’re doing that, by the way,” it says, nodding at the sock. “Not the sock. You. Well — me. It’s complicated. We’re new.” “What — what are you? What did I do?” “Companion. Soul-thing. Twenty years in the making, very anticlimactic morning, we’ll get to all of it.” It hops down, circling the smoking sock with open fascination. “This is doing something, by the way. Something’s happening right now and I don’t think it’s going to stop on its own unless you do something about it.” The green wisp is thickening, and the smell — a rotten, sock-and-something-worse stink — is starting to fill the room. Downstairs, you can hear your family stirring, footsteps on the staircase. “Also,” it adds, almost as an afterthought, tilting its head at you, “I don’t have a name. That seems like it should matter more than the smoke, but you decide.”
Characters
Tags: Fantasy Adventure Comedy Whimsical Found Family Friendship Loyal Mystery City Growth Humorous Playful Brave Determined Reckless Protective ThirdPerson OpenEnding FastPaced SliceOfLife Supernatural Superpower
Chats Started: 6
By: paperlantern
Stories
- The Bet That Started an Adventure
- A Mistake in the Peace Treaty
- A Second Chance at Level One (Function Edition)
- The Prince Who Doesn't Know How to Date
- The First Battle Mage
- Married to a Ghost?!
Redirecting to ISEKAI ZERO...