Hello & Merry Christmas Steemit-Community, 🎄

I want to start an experiment today. Do you remember those "Choose-your-own-adventure"-books from your child days? With the branching storylines, where you could influence how the story went? It was an awesome idea! But it always kind of fell flat. Because in the end it always gone something like that:

It is usually written by one person and it more or less has a main storyline that it follows and the branches never go to far off. They either die out or merge back into some other plot. So there are never really true consequences. The reason for that are always resources. If it's written by one person or even a company, they just don't have enough time or money to flesh out every branching storyline.

Today, with the power of this great Steem-powered social network and the help of you. Yes, YOU! We can achieve a truly branching storyline, with potentially infinite branches and variations.

The interesting thing is, it can also go in every direction possible. It can develop into a fantasy, a sci-fi, steempunk (pun intended), drama, thriller or crime detective story! Depending which path you follow, every path could lead to a potentially different type of story.

---

PARTICIPATION RULES

Writing Style

• First Person
• Past Tense

Write in the FIRST PERSON and PAST TENSE so the story continues consistently with the same style (unless you do some crazy mind bending time travels or flashbacks, or anything like that, then you have full creative freedom how to write that).

0. The start of the story is the text below.

The text after LET'S START

1. Think of a prompt (next action of the protagonist)

Read the story and then think of a prompt, describing what the protagonist is supposed to do when you click on your prompt. Something like: "I walked over to the girl to ask her out!". So it should always be a choice to perform a certain act. It SHOULD NOT tell what the consequences of this action might be. That way it adds suspense, because you never know how your actions may turn out.

2. Write your article

This is were you write the continuation of the story based on your prompt.

• Include the link to the previous story branch at the start of your article! That way people can find their way back to the beginning of the story if they stumble upon your post.
• Link back to this article so people know how to participate!

3. Write prompt in the comments (and link to your article)

The prompt should be a link to your article where you continue the story, based on your action in the prompt.

Example:
Walk over to the girl to ask her out

4. REPEAT the above steps on any of the resulting stories!

This is the fun part. You can continue any of the branches resulting from the story. Keep the chain alive. Write continuations to whatever branch you like. Get inspired!

5. Vote on great PROMPTS and ARTICLES

Continue the story

Additional Rules

Each part of a story should not be too long. It can be as little as 3 sentences. And it should not be longer than 500 words to keep the flow of choices. If you want to write more, you can always split it up in more articles and continue your own story with a prompt (just like you would do another story branch).

Remember to have fun!

Don't stress! And resteem and like this so enough people see this to participate!

Upvote & RESTEEM!

So more people get involved!

LET'S START

---

I was woken up by a loud noise. The room was cold and dark. No light came through the shutters. I didn't remember closing them. Even the Christmas lights inside the room were off. Was it a power outage?