You are an amateur archeologist with a boring job from America, who very much likes to dig out old artifacts that help shine light at the history of mankind. One day you get an invitation to an archeological site near Giza from the local archeologist named prof. Jaheed to join him and his team of locals on the digging. Looking at the fact that you don´t get such invites often, you are excited to go, but you also have to think this trough. [[Go to Egypt]] [[Stay home]]You decide to go, as Egypt is a very tempting place to search for artifacts. Prof. Jaheed sent you instructions via email. You learn that the site is near the shore of river Nile. Upon arrival you are greeted by prof. Jaheed. He shows you to your room in small hotel near the site and tells you to get some rest because they are starting with archeology work early in the morning. [[Next morning]] You chose to stay home and think that Egypt won´t bother you any longer. However, prof. Jaheed sends you an email regarding his reasearch on some ancient srcipts from a tomb he and his crew uncovered a while ago. He mentions that he needs help to understand and decrypt some of the scripts. You have this strange hunch that this plea for help isn´t as honest as it seems. Do you really want to help him? And before you decide, take into consideration that it may have consequences. [[Help him]] [[refuse to help him]]As you arive at the site you are owerflowing from excitment. You can feel the milleniums of history around you being uncovered. As you and rest of the crew unboard the van, prof. Jaheed gives instructions to the team - first in arabic then in english. From your few archeological adventures in North Africa you learned a bit of Arabic and you realize that the english and arabic instruction are slightly different, but you dont pay much attention to it. After that, professor divides the team into small groups. You end up in a group with two mean-looking locals. [[...]]You, curious as never before, open the box. Inside lies a litle relic of a scarab and of an ankh. [[Touch the Scarab]] [[Touch the Ankh]] You listen to the local and put it back.You continue digging for the rest of the day and the next 4 days.You dont find much and you leave egypt dissapointed.You decide to touch the scarab first and ´Boom!´, you explode like a tomato. Maybe you should have touched the other relic first, maybe there is sequence to it all. [[Touch the other relic]] [[Think about it a little longer]]You decide to touch the Ankh. When you touch it, the fabric of reality starts to siphon and you are taken someplace else. It´s a big building full of shelves with books. A library. But it looks ancient. And then it hits you! You are in the library of Alexandria. Of course, you are not physically there, it´s someone´s memory. You look around yourself and see a group of scribes running around and panicking. They are hoarding scripts to one pile, obviously planing to set it on fire. While you wonder why they are doing it, a black ghost-like entity emerges from the scripts and starts speaking in and unknown langague. Somehow, you can [[understand]] it. You see another memory, this time it´s in the Ancient Rome. You are overlooking the glorious city from the balcony of Caesar´s palace. His memories and thoughts flood your mind. You realize that the demon never left his mind. He was always there - terorizing his mind, apearing in nightmares and everytime he closed his eyes the demon was there. And he never left - terorizing him until the day he died. Bbut ceasar was looking forward to it - to the end to his neverending suffering. And with that though reality starts to siphon again as you are being sent back. [[Go back]]As you open your eyes you realize you are covered in sweat and dust, you stand up and go looking for the other crewmates. But they aren´t there. As soon as they saw you they got away as fast as possible. You try calling prof. Jaheed but he never answered. So you pack and leave in the next plane heading to the States. But as you get home you start feeling a disguisting presence and realize that the curse spread onto you. And the demon never left, terorizing you during night and day with his talking and his visions that he kept showing you. You saw him in every shadow and every forest at night. [[...->next passage]] No matter what you do you will never escape him. [[Start at the beginning->introduction]]After what happened to you with the scarab relic you are very unsure whether you want to risk it and touch it or stay safe and go home. [[Go home]] [[Touch the Ankh]] After you exploded from touching the scarab you realize you aren´t as sure about the other relic. You tell proff. Jaheed that the egyptian climate isn´t for you and apologize that you need to go home. After you arrive back to the States, you get back to your archeology work immidiately. While you don´t get work in such sites as Egypt, you still come up with some neat discoveries and, what matters most, you stay safe. You have a strange feeling in your guts about Egypt anyways.The digging starts in a sandstone cave-like stucture. You keep digging and brushing for two hours and only find shards of a bowl, until you come across what seems like a black box. You carefully brush it and upon opening it you hear deep sinister whispers. One of the guys working with you turns pale and mutters something in arabic that sounds like a prayer and as he turns more and more pale, he tells you to put it back imidiently. [[Open it]] [[put it back]] You, eager to help, tell prof. Jaheed that you will be glad to help him with his reasearch from your home. He sends you materials, scrolls and his notes on the reasearch and wishes you good luck and if you could notify him immediately trough radioon when you find something strange. He also send you the number of the radio wave frequency that you will have to use on the radio to get in touch with him. [[Start with the reasearch]]You refused to help prof. Jaheed. You arent even hundred percent sure why did you refuse. Maybe it was hunch. Maybe it was destiny or even sign from another universe. After that you continue with your hobby, even though you only get chance to work on local sites which you regret. Without proper entertainment your boring job eats you alive and you continue living like this up until you die of heart attack at 60. In the moment you felt like your heart was going to explode, your last memory was what you could have done in Egypt turned into fever dream of pharaohs,demoms from the history of the land of pyramids.You start reading and studying the materials. It takes you many hours and sleepless nights of work. The reaserch work is mostly about Ceasar, the Library of Alexandria and the Roman empire in Egypt. You are starting to think that it´s pointless, but then you come across a curious text. It appears as some kind of a cripted mesage from a bookeeper in the library of Alexandria. [[Decrypt the mesage]]You spend three hours decrypting the message. It is about a bookkeeper from the Library of Alexandria telling about how it was burned on purpose to save the Egypt from... That´s where the message ends. The rest of the script is burnt and damaged by the decay of time. [[Report it to prof. Jaheed]] [[Keep it to yourself]] You chose to abide prof. Jaheeds instructions and you report the mesagge to him. He invites you to a conference in New Jersey where you will get to tell him all the details about your discovery. After you arrive at the lobby of the building where the conference is taking a place you are greeted by a female receptionist that directs you to the room number 28. Room 28 is a big room with beige walls and floor,dusty carpet and big round table with chairs in the middle. With each chair having a nametag on it. Upon arrival you are greeted by prof. Jaheed and he directs you to chair with your nametag on it. [[....]] It´s not worth the hassle for you so you don´t mention it to prof. Jaheed as he thanks you for your time on the reasearch. After that you live on with your life normally except that you keep thinking about the script almost every moment of your life. You can´t help it but wonder about how it would have gone if you had reported it to the professor. But it´s always better to be safe then sorry. (And another reason why you didn´t report it was that you had strange hunch about prof. Jaheed from the very begging and it didn´t sit right with you the whole time.)Author: Storyteller (15), EctoComp´24 participant (link:"(Room 505)")[(gotoURL:"https://sif-gamebook.webnode.sk/ectocomp-2024/")] Country: Slovakia Set Topic: /Found on the Riverbank/ Antology: As I Sat On A Sunny Bank SENICA THING 2025 (link:"SIF webpage")[(gotoURL:"https://sif-gamebook.webnode.sk/")] [[Back->Fragments of the Nile]]You wake up early in the morning with a strange feeling that you hear ominous voices but you just shrug them off as hallucination caused by the lack of sleep. You take a shower and prepare your tools as you wait for prof. Jaheed to pick you up with his minivan. And sure enough, in just a moment he is waiting outside of the hotel honking and urging you to hurry, and cursing in arabic. [[Archeological site]] "You think you can get rid of me so easily? My kind ruled over egypt for thousands of years. I will eat your souls, you damm mortals," it says, as they light the pile of paper. The fire spreads quickly and the scribes start chanting something in the ancient langague along with you. Only then you realize that you are watching trough the eyes of great Julius Caesar who is chanting with them. The demon - realizing that he is lost - starts chanting too and magically the souls of the scribes fly right to him. All except one. Only Julius Ceasar is "spared", but even Julius himself knows he is not. The demon cursed him. With this thought you get sent back to the cave. [[Touch the other relic]]After realizing that you are in danger you start living in your car in wilderness for weeks and everything goes great until you start to miss the city life. After few more days you can´t take it any longer. You start to miss your previous life. The city,archeology work,your hobbies... and all of the things that brough you joy all these years. You are convinced that you cant go back and that its too dangerous. And you stay like this for a while. You really do. But as a any temptation, even this one is too strong for you to resist her. So you give in. At first you start slowly. You walk just tiny bit out of the wilderness every time and go back quickly. At first its just at night. But slowly you start to be less and less careful until one day you either went at the wrong time, or too far beceause someone spotted you, and as you are walking a bullet goes trough your head and you die. Just like that, instantly and painlessly. (And in the end you really are happy. At least you died pain-free, unlike some poor guy who might have been cursed in a parallel reality.)Fifteen minutes after you arrive, all invited people get there and the conference starts. Uneasy and nervous feeling fills the room as prof. Jaheed starts talking about his archeologic expedition in Egypt and the secrets that they are yet to uncover. After few minutes of talking about Egypt he starts to talk about you and your reasearch. You are aplauded by everybody in the room. After prof. Jaheeds introduction he asks you what secret did you suposedly uncover. And you tell them about the script you decrypted, and how it was about library of Alexandria and how it was burned by egyptians and not the Turks, and how they burned to save Egypt from something. As you tell all this you see their faces shift from curious to nervous all the way to shocked. After you tell them all this, prof. Jaheeds thanks you for your time and announces that the conference is over. As you are walking trough the lobby with your bag, you are setting you walkie-talkie that you used to comunicate, back to the frequency of your favorite radio station. As you are slowly setting it back you move trough dozen of radio stations, but one catches your attention. One where you hear prof. Jaheeds voice. He is talking about your discovery and some demon that strenghtens as more people know about him and that they cant risk you telling someone and spreading the information any further. They agree that they have to take you out. As you hear that you turn pale and drop the walkie-talkie from the shock. After you take a deep breath you realize you are in grave danger and have to lay low from now on. [[...->caravan]]''Fragments of the Nile'' /by Storyteller/ (15, Slovakia) [[Credits]] [[About]] [[Guildmaster´s Note->Note]] [[Play->introduction]]This antology of interactive games was designed as an answer to the "Clean Banks" Micro Gamebook Challenge which champions responsibility for our oceans, lakes and rivers. In this challenge the authors were asked to design a non-linear story around "an object found on the riverbank/or a sea shore". /The games were written by students from Senica (Slovakia), from Bohinjska Bistrica (Slovenia) and by a new "grown-up" guild member from Italy as a joint entry to the Back Garden at the Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction 2025./ [[Back->Fragments of the Nile]]Guild Master´s Note: This gamebook author already has had some previous authoring experience but are still feelinmg their way towards IF and would appreciate constructive and to the-point feedback to learn and grow some more. //(This year the SIF Guild decided to offer "local only" public appearance to unfinished games designed by authors who already have had the honor of receiving feedback from Spring Thing reviewers and need some more time now for it to sink in. These games can reach their reader (link:"here.")[(gotoURL:"https://sif-gamebook.webnode.sk/senica-thing")])// Storyteller has made some progress and their games come out more or less polished. However, they still need some more tailor-made hints to better understand the tools and the author-game-player communication triangle./ [[Back->Fragments of the Nile]]