Running With Scissors

Between A Rock And A Dumb Place: A CYOA Chapter

We are constantly bombarded with decisions every day, at all times. Some are seemingly hard, while others may seem ridiculously simple. Some might even be both, like choosing which Spice Girl is your favorite. No matter who you are or which part of the universe you're on, your life is going to contain a ridiculous amount of decision making.

The thing is, even the most innocuous, seemingly fleeting decisions have a ridiculous amount of impact in the world around you.

Let's imagine you're on a market of some sort, trying to decide whether to buy a can of coffee, or a tin of low calories antimatter extract. Seems like a pretty simple decision, right? But let's take a closer look.

If you decide to buy a can of coffee, you would be supporting some warlord in Latin America who uses his coffee beans as a money laundering operation to clean all of the money he makes from selling crack to Eastern Europe. If you buy the low calories antimatter extract, you will be supporting the mining and exploitation of thousands upon thousands of dying stars throughout the universe. Even if you decided not to buy either, that would be a choice on itself.

Every decision matters and every decision has an often unseen, grandiose consequence that we might not be aware of. It is then our duty to try and choose those options with the most desirable outcomes. Perhaps one that doesn't support the exploitation of other races or help criminal enterprises.

But what if every option inevitably leads to a path of pain and suffering? What if each decision leads to a harrowing loss? Can we really say that we made the best choice possible?

Such was the situation of one Peter Katz, as he stood in a proverbial rock, and even more proverbial hard place. Every possible decision he could have made would've resulted in pain, his own or otherwise.

We can sit here and tell you how this particular chapter in Peter's never-ending carnival of feces ends, but we at "Running with Scissors" believe that it would be best if you, the reader, stepped into his shoes for a moment and have the full Peter Katz experience. Maybe, at the end of this little experiment, you will understand Peter's mind a bit better, and perhaps have a little more sympathy for him.

How will we achieve this? Easy! You will be making the decisions for Peter in this chapter. The best way to do it, we believe, is to replicate an old form of analog interactive play: the Choose Your Own Adventure narrative! We will be presenting you with a situation, and you will decide how it plays out according to the options we will provide.

Depending on the option you chose, you will be sent to a specific part of the story, as indicated in the parenthesis right next to each decision. Each part of the story will be categorized by a letter (A, B, and so on), and each part within said categories will be subcategorized in numbers (1, 2, and so on).

If a particular choice sends you to part C-7, you must go to part C, and find the paragraph or paragraphs under the number 7.

There are several possible endings to this chapter, with only one being the correct one. However, we encourage you to try and find them all.

Note: For those who are incredibly lame and do not want to play, there will be a recap of the canon path on the next chapter.

Do you understand the rules?

>Yes (Go to A-1)

>No (Go to Z-1)

___A_____A_____A_____A_____A___

A-1: Your name is Peter Katz, and you're a human being! You have useless little appendixes and are constantly worried about how cold or warm your surroundings are. You somehow think that there are only three primary colors—how quaint! You love to walk on your two feet and breathe oxygen, but you don't have much time to think about that because danger surrounds you!