Onc2024 Stories

Everyone can read minds except for Ethan Langdon. And Ethan Langdon has the dumbest (and cutest!) thoughts Lukas Hoffmann has ever heard. ____ Lukas Hoffman's life in Brambleburg is about as boring as you'd expect for a town where everyone can read minds. He's used to his routine of dusting the LPs at the record store where he works and helping out his grandma around the house. Nothing in Brambleburg changes. No one in Brambleburg changes. Until Ethan Langdon stumbles in with the soggy remnants of a paper map, asking for the quickest route to Berlin. Ethan, it turns out, doesn't have telepathy, and as aggravatingly inane as his thoughts are, Lukas hasn't felt the excitement of meeting a stranger since.... well, ever. And the more Lukas listens, the more he starts enjoying Ethan's cute thoughts about life, the universe, and Lukas's dimples. ____ Might bring to mind: "Cherry Magic" but set in a fictive European town where everyone except the love interest can read minds. ____ Cover by @mygoodbones ____ Written for the Open Novella Contest 2024 using prompts 8, 75, 82, and 85. 8. You start singing along to a movie soundtrack late at night forgetting that your window is open. Someone from the outside starts singing with you. 75. You awake in the middle of the night to a voice saying loudly "May the force be with you..." 82. You wake up on a seemingly ordinary day to discover that your thoughts are not private. There is someone else in your head with you. 85. "If you do that again, I'll throw you out that freaking window. What are you doing?" "Checking how high the drop is to see if it's worth it."

November Adams has exactly one best friend. And Jessie Reynolds-Somber has always been there, and vice versa. When November, newly seventeen, takes a bus ride to the library, she inexplicably gets off at the library instead. For good reason, it turns out: Jessie's in the emergency room, and nobody's saying why. An unsent email may have the answer. On it is a bucket list: eight items, a letter, and a promise, from Jessie, that she'll explain everything when the list is complete. But the further through the list November gets, the more she learns what's going on, and the less she wants to know the whole truth. November Adams has exactly one best friend. And Jessie Reynolds-Somber has always been there. Except this time. [FORMERLY AN ENTRY FOR THE 2024 ONC]

[ONC Longlist 2024 | A Medusa Retelling.] Sydney 2112. Young men are disappearing without a trace. On the other side of town, an up-and-coming sculptor's works eerily resemble the missing men. Can the Inspector solve the riddle before her son joins the collection? *** Keya Sapkota needs to create artworks for her first sculpture exhibition at the prestigious Museum of Contemporary Arts, but a recent date-gone-wrong has left her a mess. She has no memory of what happened, but a feeling that something horrible transpired that left her with broken lips and bruised body. Keya hides in her loft, chipping away at her marble columns on autopilot. The more she chisels the more lifelike her statues become, ones she can't remember carving, but does she care? She needs exhibits for her show and the strange figures may as well be her pieces. The new Stone2Stone sculpture exhibition at the MCA catches the eye of Inspector Reina, who is desperately searching for her son who disappeared from a nightclub on his twenty-first birthday. Reina can't put her finger on it, but the sculptor, Keya, seems strange. Then there's the eerie marble statues that share their likeness with young men who have recently disappeared. Inspector Reina is determined to find answers before her son's sculpture turns up in the artist's collection. --- ONC Prompts: 60. "Look what you made me do." -Tayler Swift 3. Your greatest fear is monsters in the dark. The last thing you expect is to become the Monster in the dark. 95. "I will become as monstrous as I must." Features: - @Fantasy - Urban Fantasy (Oct 2025) - @paranormal - Investigations & Academies (Sept 2024) - @action - Thriller (Aug 2024) - @APIFantasy - API Fantasy & Science-Fiction Entries (March, 2024) Trigger warning: Slight depictions of SA. Please read at your own discretion. [Strictly no copy, translation or adapting of this story in part or whole is permitted without the author's permission.]

Four girls, one destiny: Hacker, Arsonist, Recluse, Thief. Cara, Siouxsie, Red and Jenna may appear to be ordinary teenage girls, but they're anything but. As delinquents, their paths collide when they're given up to an experimental juvenile rehabilitation program known as The Pandora Project. However, upon arrival, they quickly realize that things are not as they seem. Strange occurrences begin to unfold: bizarre tests, mandatory 'Vitamin' shots, timeslips, combat and weapons training. The girls soon discover that The Pandora Project has ulterior motives, far from the rehabilitation they were promised. Uncovering the truth only leads to more questions, putting their lives at risk. Could it be possible that the organization is turning troubled teens, unknowingly, into genetically modified super-powered assassins? And what fate awaits assets who dare to defy control? In a race against time, they must navigate the shadows of deceit, relying on the extensive training provided by the program to take it down. The stakes are high, and the girls are about to discover that their unique skills may be the key to exposing the dark secrets of Project Pandora. But will it be enough to survive?

"I wish I could hate you. I wish I could let go of you. I wish I regretted meeting you." He paused, tears blurring his vision. His thumb hovered over the send button. With a shaky exhale, Jungwon's hands trembled as he typed out the text in his group chat. "Called in sick, can't make it to practice today." The lie burned as he hit send. Jungwon blinked rapidly, catching a glimpse of his bloodshot eyes in the mirror. "Jungwon, are you done? We should get going now!" Tears welled in Jungwon's eyes as he stared at his own reflection. Though his heart ached, he couldn't bring himself to hate her - not when he loved her so deeply. With a shaky breath, he wiped his cheeks and forced a smile. "Just a second, babe!" he called, slipping his phone back into his pocket after sending the text to his teammates. As he exited his room, Mijoo greeted him with a kiss on the cheek. Her touch was gentle, loving - yet it only deepened the hollow feeling in his chest. "I love you, babe," she beamed. "...I love you too, Mijoo," he managed, hoping she didn't notice the hesitation in his voice. As they left hand-in-hand, Jungwon's mind raced. He had sacrificed so much for her, compromising himself time and again. And now he wondered - did she even truly love him? The thought haunted him: "Look what you've made me do. Look what you're making me do. I'm afraid of what you'll make me do next."

|A SET OF TWO ORIGINAL DISNEY COLLEGE PROGRAM NOVELLAS| |13X FEATURED · AMBYS 2025 FAVORITE · INKITT HQ FEATURED · A GLOABLLY SELECTED STORY! · INTERNATIONALLY PUBLISHED! · AUDIOBOOK NOW AVAILABLE!| Milo and Maisie: Two years after her older brother's tragic death, anxiety-stricken Maisie and her emotional support cat, Milo, attend the Disney College Program, where they must discover a new life meaning in the most magical place on Earth. Milo and Maisie: The Veracruz Ghost: When Maisie and Feya's friendship is tossed into the danger zone, they must work together to save it before Summit 2023 destroys them forever. *** *#SupportLGBTQVoices* "A new magic I discovered with Milo in a world without my brother." Trigger Warnings (Milo and Maisie, despite its Disney World setting and message of hope and second chances, is a very heavy story, mostly because it's heavily inspired by my journey through grief after my older brother's death in 2021. It's a clean story, though.) - Recovering from grief/loss - Offscreen suicide attempt mention - Non-graphic onscreen suicide in The Veracruz Ghost - War trauma and PTSD (especially for Feya) - Relatively graphic onscreen accident, but not too graphic

"Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind." [Original] [Started: 02/25/2024] [Completed: 05/01/2024] Cover made by @Purplemist14 *** [ONC2024 Shortlist Qualifier] Written for the Open Novella Contest 2024, this story uses prompt #41: "I shot Cupid because I didn't want to fall in love again."

84. A witchy tale from the perspective of the familiar. 81. The town's witch has gone missing and no one is looking for her but her two familiars - a crow and a black cat, plus the teen who has always been scared of her. ~~~ Eclipse is a raven familiar, an invasive Corvus splendens in small-town coastal Louisiana. He serves an outsider called Mamman Simbi, a witch hidden between a Catholic and Voodoo culture, when a new witch is born into Cajun bloodlines (Tammy Broussard, b. 1977). Being overburdened in soul leads to the new witch having dangerous fevers that Eclipse and Simbi protect her from until she's old enough to take over as Mung Bean's witch (Simbi's rescue cat the same age as the girl). Familiars take on that excess spirit and help manage their partners health and daily work, becoming as human as their masters. The process of protecting Tammy leaves her frightened of Mamman Simbi, and parents in denial don't push children to stray outside their culture. But the world has never been safe for their kind, and just as the deep south starts to recover from a painful recession, the witches hiding in their culture start disappearing, leaving Simbi too distracted to reach out to a fearful child. Then Simbi disappears from a gathering during the worst years for murders in New Orleans (1994), with police corruption running rampant. Mung Bean and Tammy, both now 16, run away from home soon after, leaving Eclipse to sort out how much is safe to tell the young witch's parents, Rafe and Dinah Broussard, and Simbi's boyfriend, T-Beau LeBlanc. Can Eclipse find his master, ride herd on two teens (a witch and her familiar), keep mere humans safe, and not lose himself to the humanity he's avoided as a crow? Life wasn't supposed to be so complicated for a bird brain.

Levi is a nineteen-year-old asexual wizard with too many problems and not enough friends to help him with them. The magic and the price for using it is taking its toll but he refuses to give up before he has fixed what he broke eight years ago. But when magical beings start disappearing around him he is forced to acknowledge he is in way over his head. He needs help. But the price for that help may be even greater than that of the magic. Placed third in the Triple moon awards (2025) Longlister ONC 2024 Winner Round 2 ONC 2024 ONC 2024 Prompt 48. The curse of magic is that for every reward, there is a great loss. For every spell that goes right, there is something else-in the real, natural world-that goes terribly wrong. Nature loves its balance. Mature rating is due to on-page description of (magical) substance abuse in chapter 13. Cover by Supreme Rat Queen Rai who just said nope to my feeble attempt (as I knew she would :P)

Beth Kennedy has her whole life ahead of her, with her mother generous enough to plan out every single step from the perfect college, to the perfect obituary. But unfortunately, Beth can't get herself out of the past. A past she's sworn to take to the grave or otherwise face a life of being called crazy. At least, that's what Beth's delusions have always told her. Until one rainy day, she crosses paths with a beautiful stranger who she starts stalking. Incidentally, she becomes the target of malicious pranks by someone who seems to know more than they should. Lies are exposed, secrets revealed and uncovering the answer behind it all, might cost her the end of a peaceful future before it can even begin.

Confined to the family's estate since birth, three sisters have never seen the outside world. Taught they are unable to leave home due to their long hair, Lexi, Lulu, and Fia secretly envy their volatile father and narcissistic mother whose short locks allow them to come and go whenever they wish. Raised believing their grandparents live in the TV set, the young women's knowledge about the outside world is skewed. On the eve of Fia's eighteenth birthday, life as they know it is altered when the girls find a young man unconscious in their yard. Believing he is an angel, they hide him in the guest house. Soon Fia's feelings for the man bloom and she finds herself sneaking to the guest house to be with him. When the lies the sisters have been told begin to unravel, Fia decides she will do whatever it takes to escape. The only thing holding her back is her long dark hair. Dogtooth x Rapunzel x The Castle of Purity Warning for abuse, swearing, romantic themes, alcohol addiction, blood, and typical Christine darkness. There is no SA. Best rank: #1 IN OPENNOVELLACONTEST2024 I started writing this story for the ONC 2024. Due to work and life, I could not finish it for the contest. Which made me sad...but I continued...at a snail's pace. Thanks to everyone who kept reading!

Prince Farris Lumenne only wanted to find out the secrets of the magical artifact he picked up during the only adventure his father, the King, let him go on. He didn't expect it to end with the elusive villager he had befriended facing imprisonment and impending death... by beheading. Based on prompt #55: You're a young royal in disguise who befriends a villager with a scarred face. One day they are arrested for stealing something you gave to them.

[ONC2024 ENTRY] [COVER IN PROGRESS] Sixteen-year-old Fern was happy to be sent off to an innocuous boarding school, until she finds herself at the epicenter of strange events and the string of fate bonding her to the school. *** Monkeys, matrons, mattresses. Commonly unrelated to the average person, but students at Wailmouth would say differently. The impressive boarding school sits among swathes of green foliage whose simian residents are playful as they are unruly. As if their tailed neighbors aren't enough of a problem, the school's matrons seem dedicated to make their lives a living hell. The infamous Madam Matron rules with an iron fist, her unrelenting force intensified against the old mattresses they're forced to sleep on. Fern learns all this in barely a month of her enrolment into Wailmouth College. Her arrival, however, had sparked a chain of bizarre events within the gates of the school. Together with her friends, Fern investigates the connection between the peculiar incidents, and between Wailmouth and herself. *** Trigger warnings: Alluded teen pregnancy, animal abuse, violence, death

In a bleak world, void of both love and heartbreak, a fallen angel must convince a jaded god to break the curse he has cast on the realm. *** Made for ONC 2024 Prompt used: 19. A world with no heartbreaks. In such a world, you fall for someone forbidden. And you're about to experience the first ever heartbreak.

Power. Some kill to get it... Some kill to keep it... Some kill to keep others from having it. Aside from being a Ranger's daughter, Aurora Amethyst Makepeace (yes, that is her real name, bless her ever-loving Mum) is about as normal as normal can get. She has to study hard to get through school just like most people, she has to do laundry and help with the family business like every other young person in her District, and she has to walk on her own two feet just like God intended. She has never raised a flag on the Flameseeker's visits to her settlement. She is absolutely certain she is NOT a Spark. As the only son of High Councilor Kederov, Dane Kederov is a fourth-generation Sparkblood. Not only does that make him royalty, it makes him an Inferno - one of the most powerful Sparkbloods on the planet. It also makes him an extremely valuable political pawn. He lives a life of extreme privilege, high above the tensions and riots that have been escalating between the Sparkbloods and the Norms... until his father is murdered after leaving an ominous message for him, and Dane is suddenly a liability. Someone wants him gone. Someone who has the resources to kill an Inferno. Someone who is determined to claim power for themselves at any cost. Dane flees the Capitol, flying into the vast expanse of untamed wilderness that surrounds the city state of Firestone. Two weeks later, Rory goes on a tracking mission to find whatever is killing Biddy Correl's hogs... and discovers a lot more than a rogue bear out there in the Wildlands. She finds her exact opposite, in more ways than one. With Sparkblood hunters on Dane's trail, and Rory's father going after the bounty, Dane and Rory wind up thrown together in a mad, desperate attempt to solve the murder of Dane's parents before the riots and inter-racial tension boil over into all out war. No matter what, their lives are never going to be the same.

This is an entry for the Open Novella Contest (ONC) 2024 Meet Blair, your average seamstress who works a thankless job sewing dresses for bachelorettes, weddings, and a plethora of other events in dire need of women in dresses. Her hopes and dreams are the same as all of us, owning a mortgage in hopes of affording a better place than her run-down, one-bedroom apartment. When a chance to afford a decent property with a down payment arises, how could she say no? Though unlike all of us, Blair is capable of seeing beyond the veils of our existential plane. She has seen the limbo of the dead, and what she saw has forever altered her life. She will soon discover that this house of hers is a cursed tomb of memories of it's past inhabitants' grudges and unfinished businesses. And she's not the only one... Cover by @MilaForLife

Aarna Rupa was dead, but not really. -- Waking up in the past after dying of cancer, Aarna found herself living in the year 3247 BCE--more than five thousand years ago, in the civilised land of India. After taking an oath to not disrupt their peace with her information about the 21st century CE, she had decided to live a quiet life, but that was until she stumbled upon a wide-eyed boy with dark skin--Madhava. But Madhava was not just any nineteen-year-old. He was a nineteen-year-old god.

Asha Ahmad and Nikhil Mohan find themselves set up for an arrange marriage that neither of them are keen on follow through with - until they catch each other sneaking out the night before their wedding. They both see a future for themselves in America, far away from their families in India, and that's enough common ground to agree to give it a go - for five years. They settle on the terms of their five-year plan over a honeymoon, but a lot can change in that time. Will they have a change of heart or keep to their original promise? Even Asha and Nikhil don't know...

A tale about a cat and a crow in search of their witch. Asha, a black cat, and her friend Kyrell, a hooded crow, are living their best lives as the familiars of the town witch Cybele. But as Cybele goes missing, their peaceful lives are threatened and they need the help of a mysterious boy to find her. My entry for the Open Novella Contest 2024.

(ONC 2024 Longlisted) Not all fairy tales have happy endings, which Arthur is about to discover in a big way. After an especially bad day of work, he makes a wish on a star that all of the magical stories his Nana used to tell him when he was a boy were real. Life in the mundane everyday world might not always be great, but fairy tales might not be all they're cracked up to be either. Can Arthur get things back to normal or is he going to be stuck in a fractured fairy tale world (not so) happily ever after?