#spider and web

[crustaceousfaggot]

I lied. I actually don't like sex. Put your clothes back on, we're playing Andrew Plotkin's classic 1998 text adventure spy thriller Spider and Web. I hope you like non-conventional story structures and commentary about the futility of war.

[zincbot]

i love text adventure games sm

[squorttle-pox]

CALLING ALL FANFIC WRITERS to write for the Spider and Web fandom please please pretty please with four cherries on top 🙏

[toto-dreamer]

TIL that this janky ass 1998 choose your own adventure game not only has two fics on ao3, but the two fics are uploaded exactly a year after one another, and if that's not somewhat dramatic and or poetic i don't know what is

[builtlikeastickofcelery]

suffering rn how the xxxx do I advance in spider and web I'm stuck in the white hallways I got the package I'm trying to figure out the tools I'm tweaking out do I crawl in the vents? how???? should I start taking notes????????

[leapfog1]

cowboys

[petitworld]

by Siobhán O’Dwyer

[demonadelem]

Rare pity, mercy and compassion of the giants called humanity

[ppeanutz]

wade actually knows about both

more art on my ko-fi !

[semoyed]

cowboys are frequently secretly fond of each other

[fallauween]

by threadhandedjill

[thrifteddivacup]

(x)

[bodyigrewupwith]

[halloqueen31]

[batty-n-bratty]

[toto-dreamer]

you made a difference

Last year I wrote a little story inspired by Andrew Plotkin's Spider and Web (which is totally just a funny way of saying I wrote fanfiction for a 1997 video game). The original story is posted on ao3, but I don't want to edit it because it is posted exactly a year after the first fic in the fandom is published, and I don't want to fuck with that, yk? So here's an edited version of that original story, just to keep the fandom alive (if it's ever existed to begin with) <3

You’ve failed

Bring the plans back. That’s what you’re meant to do. Wasn’t it? Even now, you’re not sure. There’s a ghost – you, except not you – that you’re meant to follow. You’re retracing their steps, except you don’t know what it wants, except you don’t know what else to do, except you don’t know what they’ve done, and who they are. A recipe for disaster, you know that, and now you’re here. Papers held tight in your hands, the edges burning and crumbling. You can still save it. You can argue it was an accident. You didn’t mean it. Save what’s left, win the war, and go back, go back home, except – 

Then what? The past is smokey haze of half-remembered memories and overflowing questions. There must be a family to return to, because everyone has a family. There must be friends waiting for you to return, because everyone has friends, right? Or perhaps it’s just the war. It’s always been the war. The frozen, ice-cold war that’s ingrained itself into your blood. 

You remember the man. Knives at each other’s throats, yes? How long till that turns to literal knives. The end of the world. Could you swear, honestly, that anyone left on your side wouldn’t keep using it against anyone left on ours? 

“No,” you said, because you’ve always been honest, because you’ve been nothing but honest. No, I can’t swear, please, I don’t understand, I don’t know why I’m here, I don’t know anything, I don’t understand please just stop — 

You let go of the papers. The table and wall behind it are already a blanket of flames, and the fire climbs up the drapes like monkeys. You watch them crumble and collapse against the cabinet door, like the twin towers. You feel so old. You feel like a child. You don’t want to die. What else can you do?

The fire burns through your skin to your bones. Smoke fills your lungs and you cough, slumped against the cabinet door, the wires exposed and open above you The logic plate is in the wires. You can go home. Hit the buttons and enter the cage. Go wherever that machine takes you. 

You deserve to go home. You deserve to return to your life. You do not remember if you have a life. Perhaps you never did. Perhaps you have always been in this facility, in that steel chair with the bands that wrapped around your wrists and head. Perhaps you were always meant to be a tool manoeuvred and sacrificed by people you don’t even know. 

You don’t remember if you have a name. 

It’s so hot. Your bones are crumbling. You are dust, you are ash, you were dust and you will be dust again. Meaningless, expendable, insignificant. This changes nothing. They will build another teleporter. They will find another you. They will enter this facility and lose their mind and tear open their brain following a ghost that’s them and not quite them, either.

Except it will take time. Except it will make the angry man behind the desk angry, and maybe that’s enough. Except there’s a chance someone better, someone stronger, someone with more significance than you will find something, change something. 

So you crumble, into dust and shards of bone, and you let your soul fly out between your fingertips, a phoenix escaping the confines of ash and skin that is your body. You’re free, it says, you’re free. You have made a difference. 

Original story is here on ao3! Feel free to check it out and the other story in the fandom if you have a change ^^