The Mouse-Bride

You get to choose your own path through this story. To move ahead, click the highlighted link. Some pages have only one link, but on other pages you will have a choice to make. If you want to go back, hover to the left of the first word and you will see a back arrow appear. 

Have fun, and choose wisely! And if you don't survive, that's okay: you get reincarnated. Your second life is a second chance. :-)

Author's Notes.

This is the most complicated Twine story I have ever made! You can make your own stories using Twine; here's how. 

I started with the ancient Indian story from the Panchatantra about a mouse who turns into a woman who then marries a mouse. For my story, I did not have the mouse-girl transform into a woman. It was easier for her to just be a mouse. 

In the original story, the hawk appears at the start of the story; I decided to use the hawk as the way to loop back when the mouse is reincarnated, making him the reincarnation of the mouse husband. Also, the woman rejects the sun, cloud, and wind, but in my story I had her spend some time with them. Those scenes were fun to write, although I'm not sure anybody will choose them. I could make those story choices more tempting by having the potential husbands confess about their weakness only after things are not working out. What do you think?

The idea of having the cat at the end comes from a medieval version of the story. In my story-game, if you even go visit the cat, you are doomed. Spoiler: The only way to survive is to never visit the cat. To see the fastest way to "win" the game, see the version in my Week 5 Story blog post.

Here's a screenshot of the Twine layout, and I've included a PDF of all the text below.

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Thank you for reading, and I look forward to your comments: Comment Wall.

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Bibliography. Mouse-Maid Made Mouse, from The Panchatantra of Vishnu Sharma, translated by Arthur W. Ryder (1925). More versions of the story at Aesop's Books and the Chain Tale Project (with further bibliography there).

Image credit. Mouse. U.S. Department of Agriculture at Flickr.