Preface

This story is actually a collection of short stories written as a response to a "challenge" of sorts, organized by Ari in the Mind Control Literature discord server.

The idea is easy : You get a prompt that is one (or two) words long, and you have to write a very short piece of fiction (less than 200 words) using that prompt's theme, and ideally with an EMC (or at least MC) slant.

Since 200 words is such a low number, it seemed simple to join in. It really doesn't take much time to do, and it always feels very rewarding to participate in it!

Actually writing the answer, however, poses additional challenge. It helps with getting started, but putting everything you want to say into a coherent story while staying under 200 words is harder than it sounds. You have to learn to compromise, to select what is important or not, and to convey strong feelings using as few words as possible. It's an exercise in brevity, and I think learning how to deal with these constraints also helps you for your longer stories too !

The short-fic "challenge" itself is currently on pause, though it might be back later, in which case I'll update this story again.

For easier reading, these short fictions have been re-edited in "chapters" corresponding to the answer to one single prompt by chapter. If you take a look at the dates, there will be a few periods without short fictions, both from me not participating and from the challenge itself pausing, so the timeline is not perfect. However, the integrality of the answers I gave to the prompt are compiled in the rest of this story.

You might see that a few chapters are "201" or "202" words, while the limit is set to 200 on the dot. That's because I don't consider the chapter title as part of the answer, despite it being repeated at the top of each one. I know some people do consider it in their word counts, but my opinion was that it doesn't really participates in the prompt's answer as much as give a name to it.

I also took the liberty of adding some author's notes, explaining what my inspirations were or other thoughts linked to my answers. If you were interested in the plot presented in the short fictions, and where it is relevant, you might enjoy reading the linked stories !