A short story based on Jackson Tegu's new solo puzzle story-game, "The Smoke Dream".

The Smoke Dream is a single player game reminiscent of those old Choose your Own Adventure books, only instead of a book you have a deck of cards and instead of a story written by another you write your own story as you go.  Each card leads you to a new entry in the book as you draw your way through the deck.  Each entry is an evocative title, a brief bit of inspirational color, and some specific game mechanics that direct you what to do next, change the rules, even change the nature of the entries for the next time you draw the card.  During play you’ll skip some cards, find other cards trapped until you find a way to get them out, arrange and rearrange cards into piles, and interact with some cards so frequently they’ll become a motif in your particular story.  Other cards you won’t get to interact with at all, but they’ll be waiting there in the deck for the next time you play.  This story is the story of my first game of The Smoke Dream.  I have left out all of the mechanics of play that produced it.  The elements and events are exactly as they occurred in the game, unedited, but the color and interpretations and meaning of those elements and events (save the very opening and closing paragraphs) are all mine, and quite likely very similar in some places and very different in others to what you will come up with when you play.