Miss Muffet and the Hollow Silk
(2027)(The first book in the Rhymeworks series)
A novel by D B Goodin
Everyone knows how the rhyme ends. It has never once stopped anyone from walking in.
Stewart Norris is out of money, out of options, and exactly what the listing is looking for.
PARTICIPANTS NEEDED: VR GAME STUDY. $1,500 PER SESSION. MILITARY BACKGROUNDS STRONGLY PREFERRED.
He laughed at it. He wants that on the record.
One consent form later he is underwater in an immersion tank at a company called Paratext Innovations, and waking up in Tuffet Hollow in someone else's body: an exiled alchemist sitting on a low tuffet at the center of a dead clearing, with a survival tutorial, a crafting system, and a thin red bar at the bottom of her vision labeled FEAR.
It hasn't moved yet. Something on the far shore is waiting for it to.
The Spider doesn't ambush. It introduces itself — in three voices at once, wearing faces pulled from a memory that isn't hers — and it learns faster than he does. The rhyme is the map. Every line of it is a mechanic. Every mechanic has a price. And in a silent clearing deeper in the Hollow, forty-two tuffets stand in rows like graves, one for every Miss Muffet who sat down before her.
She is the forty-third. This time, she remembers.
MISS MUFFET AND THE HOLLOW SILK is Book One of RHYMEWORKS, a dark LitRPG horror series where nursery rhymes are corporate test environments and the session has no end time. A full-length novel with real game mechanics, real corporate paperwork, and an ending the reader was warned about in kindergarten.
Start with the prequel short story, DOWNPOUR — or walk in here.
If you remember, run.
Genre: Science Fiction
Stewart Norris is out of money, out of options, and exactly what the listing is looking for.
PARTICIPANTS NEEDED: VR GAME STUDY. $1,500 PER SESSION. MILITARY BACKGROUNDS STRONGLY PREFERRED.
He laughed at it. He wants that on the record.
One consent form later he is underwater in an immersion tank at a company called Paratext Innovations, and waking up in Tuffet Hollow in someone else's body: an exiled alchemist sitting on a low tuffet at the center of a dead clearing, with a survival tutorial, a crafting system, and a thin red bar at the bottom of her vision labeled FEAR.
It hasn't moved yet. Something on the far shore is waiting for it to.
The Spider doesn't ambush. It introduces itself — in three voices at once, wearing faces pulled from a memory that isn't hers — and it learns faster than he does. The rhyme is the map. Every line of it is a mechanic. Every mechanic has a price. And in a silent clearing deeper in the Hollow, forty-two tuffets stand in rows like graves, one for every Miss Muffet who sat down before her.
She is the forty-third. This time, she remembers.
MISS MUFFET AND THE HOLLOW SILK is Book One of RHYMEWORKS, a dark LitRPG horror series where nursery rhymes are corporate test environments and the session has no end time. A full-length novel with real game mechanics, real corporate paperwork, and an ending the reader was warned about in kindergarten.
Start with the prequel short story, DOWNPOUR — or walk in here.
If you remember, run.
Genre: Science Fiction