Welcome to The Pun Heist of Cordelia Soong, a collaborative storytelling experience for the Tapas community.

The rules are simple.  Cordelia Soong – a quarter Taiwanese on her dad’s side, half-pixie on her mom’s – is a literal pun wizard.  Puns all have multiple meanings, after all, and if she makes a pun where one part is true, she can make the other meaning come true as well.  For Cordelia, shaping reality can be as easy as stringing a few words together.

Unfortunately, she’s not very good at pun magic yet.  Or rather, she’s too good.  Cordelia keeps making puns when she doesn’t mean to, and she’s broken the entire world as a result.  Her family’s gone; her house is full of mountain lions; and she’s accidentally transformed herself into a paperback book in a school library.

But Cordelia’s not giving up.  She’s planning one final heist, with a score so massive that it will (hopefully) fix everything she messed up.  She just needs to find a pun so powerful that she can deploy it on purpose to undo all the stuff she caused by accident.

Of course, her powers are still completely out of control, and that’s where you come in, readers!  As Cordelia embarks on her quest to assemble the perfect team and pull off the perfect heist, we’ll need all sorts of complications and unintended consequences to keep her on her toes!  It’s an interactive story, like Dungeons and Dragons, except backwards, with Cordelia and her team as the hero, and you – all of you – as the collective Pun-geon Master, deciding what complications befall them next.

The way you can do that, of course, is through terrible puns.  So, drop bad joke into the comments – the cornier the better!  I’ll use it as a plot point.  Point out places where an unintended double meaning in Cordelia’s phrasing might bring disastrous consequences.  Every two weeks, I’ll pull all the jokes and suggestions I can into a single, coherent narrative, to find out where Cordelia’s quest takes her next.  (Oh, and please keep your jokes PG-rated or cleaner, to keep the readership open to as many pun-lovers as possible).

Where will this all end?  Will Cordelia reunite with her missing brother and father?  Will she accidentally transform the moon into a faded denim purse?  Will the story be beautifully disastrous or disastrously beautiful?  The choice is up to all of us.

So let the chaos commence!