Douglas Roberts

Douglas Roberts added blog Games
2026-05-30 09:44:08 -

The Poet's Cloud
Act I The study on East Richmond Terrace was, by any standard, a disaster. It had been a library once — Professor Alistair Blackwood's father had collected 12,000 volumes spanning 14 languages, from Sumerian cuneiform tablets to Victorian poetry. But the books had long since overflowed their shelves and colonized every other surface: the floor was a forest of stacked volumes, the tables were...

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Douglas Roberts added blog Dance
2026-05-28 07:07:03 -

The Sulfur Ledger
Rain fell on Chicago the way it always did in October—relentlessly, patiently, washing nothing clean. Cole Mercer stood in the doorway of a meatpacking warehouse on the South Side, water dripping from the brim of his hat, and watched the men load crates into a truck. "Mr. Mercer?" A short man in a suit approached him. His face was pale, his eyes darting like rats in a trap. "Mr. Kozak is...

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Douglas Roberts added blog Games
2026-06-03 13:34:16 -

THE PEOPLE'S ENGINE
### Act I: The Spark James Callahan first understood what engineering meant at the age of twelve, when he was sent into the depths of the Homestead Steel Plant to unclog a jammed conveyor belt that had brought the entire rolling mill to a halt. The foreman had given him a choice: crawl through the gap between two moving rollers, or watch his father lose a week's wages for the downtime. James...

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Douglas Roberts added blog Games
2026-05-22 14:53:50 -

The Black Strain
Dorothy Wayne walked into my office like she was walking onto a movie set, which she was, in a way. The rain was coming down hard on the windows of my building on Sunset Boulevard, and the blinds were casting stripes of light and shadow across the desk, across her coat, across the face she had spent ten years learning how to sell to an audience that no longer cared. "Help me with something,...

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Douglas Roberts added blog Games
2026-05-23 19:08:53 -

Blood and Magnolias
The air in Oakhaven smelled like magnolias and rot. It was a particular kind of smell, one you could only find in the deep South in late spring—sweet flowers blooming on ancient trees above ground that was itself slowly digesting the bones of people who had lived and died and been buried in it, generation after generation, until the earth itself became a kind of slow, wet memory. I had been...

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Douglas Roberts added blog Literature
2026-05-25 18:45:41 -

The Architect of Memory
(Biographical Fiction Variation) The archives of the Vatican are a labyrinth of silence and dust, where the history of the world is stored in vellum and ink. Father Thomas Moreland had spent forty years in these depths, a scholar of the forgotten, a man who believed that the truth was not found in the grand narratives of the Church, but in the margins of the manuscripts. Thomas was a man of...

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Douglas Roberts added blog Games
2026-05-31 19:41:39 -

The House That Remembered
The Thorne estate sat on a hill in the Mississippi delta, surrounded by live oaks that looked like they were holding their breath. Bell Thorne was twenty-six and the last person with the deed, which was not the same thing as having the means to keep what the deed described. The house was falling apart. The roof leaked in seventeen places that Bell had marked with chalk X's on the ceiling of the...

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Douglas Roberts added blog Games
2026-05-23 15:36:51 -

The Diner on Route 41
Donna came in at six every morning. She punched the clock, put on her apron, and started refilling the sugar caddies. The diner opened at six-thirty, and by seven the first regulars would be in—Frank with his coffee black, Rita with her egg white omelet, the two guys from the plant who never spoke to each other but always sat at the same counter stools, three seats apart, like they were afraid...

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Douglas Roberts added blog Literature
2026-06-02 02:37:24 -

The Mirror of the Unseen
(Second Person Variation) You wake up in a room that is not yours, though every object in it feels like a memory you've forgotten. The walls are a faded ochre, peeling like sunburnt skin. There is a mirror in the corner, but when you look into it, you don't see your face. You see a blur of motion, a smudge of charcoal against a white background. You don't remember your name. You only remember...

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Douglas Roberts added blog Games
2026-05-31 17:01:58 -

The Gilded Trust
New York, 1924. The city was a fever dream of gold and jazz, a place where the skyscrapers reached for a heaven that the people had long since forgotten. Samuel Vanderbilt sat at the apex of this dream, the master of the city's infrastructure, a man who owned the very veins through which the city's lifeblood flowed. But Samuel was a man of shadows. He lived in a penthouse of marble and glass,...

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Douglas Roberts added blog Games
2026-05-31 02:27:26 -

The Woman in the Corner
Maggie O'Sullivan had been working in New York houses for twenty-five years. She had cleaned up after senators and stockbrokers and socialites and immigrants who made more money in a week than Maggie earned in a year. She had seen every kind of madness money could buy, and she had learned the most important rule of her profession: never ask questions, never get involved, and never, ever believe...

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Douglas Roberts added blog Literature
2026-05-27 11:57:11 -

The Bastard's Cathedral
(Act I: The Ash and the Iron) The year was 1422, and the valley of Oakhaven was a graveyard of burnt villages and broken crosses. Cedric, the bastard son of a disgraced Earl, returned to his ancestral lands not with a plea for forgiveness, but with a sword of cold iron. He had spent ten years in the mercenary camps of the East, learning that the only true law was the edge of a blade and the...

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