Foreword

(Oct. 28, 2025)  This story is now free from unindexed limbo! People can actually find & read it!  Yippee!  It only took over a month (37 days, to be precise), numerous unanswered emails, creating another story, as well as deleting and reuploading this one four times (thrice this past week), but here we are!  Yes, I am a bit salty.  Especially because it still never showed up on the front page in 'latest series' (for some reason it appeared a whole page back between a story published on the 26th and another on the 27th...).  But I'll take this partial victory either way!

Thank you so much for checking out my story, but before you go ahead and read it I have a few things to say.  And I'll start with the most important one:

This is, at its heart, a romance story with a lot of love, affection, and wholesomeness.  THAT SAID... it also has some darker themes to it.  Especially in the beginning, where scenes of mindbreak, coercion, and enslavement are featured.  All of that is performed by our main character and inflicted on 'NPCs'.  And none of it is glorified or presented as 'good'.  Quite the opposite, really.

If that is not your thing, then don't worry!  The story lightens up as it goes on and will never get as bad as those earlier scenes.  At least not directly, as there will be mentions of past trauma and the like later on, but never in explicit detail.

All I ask is for you to give my story a chance despite containing what is rightfully a major turn off for many people.  And to make it easier, I will mark any chapters containing non-consent or otherwise questionable sex with content warnings so that anyone who doesn't want to read that sort of thing can simply skip past them.  In fact, all chapters containing a significant amount of sexual content will be tagged with the 'fetishes' therein.  If you feel like a chapter is missing a relevant tag, please do leave a comment and I will add it in.  I am only human and will make mistakes.

And if you do like that sort of thing...  Well, I'm sorry.  As I said, it isn't the main focus of this story.  Beyond those earlier chapters, the most you'll get in terms of 'non-consent' content is the rare bit of roleplay or (poorly) feigned reluctance.  This is also why I did not include these darker themes in the tags, as I focused on what I felt was more reoccurring or indicative of the story as a whole.

As for the second part of this foreword... a brief bit of context.  If you don't care about that, then feel free to skip this.  Otherwise, click the spoiler below.

I originally started writing this story back in early 2023, posting it onto a website called CHYOA.  For those unfamiliar, that site is much more focused on wide-branching 'choose your own adventure' stories.  And while I always intended for Tabula Rasa to be a singular deep storyline I did start off in that framework.  As such, the earliest chapters (the first seven in particular) are shorter and more open-ended than the rest of what I've written, allowing for potential branching points.  Hence why Ch1: Introduction is so brief, as that effectively functioned as the synopsis / hook on CHYOA.  Just don't expect the entire story to be like that.

Rather early on into posting on CHYOA, one of my readers suggested I also publish this on other sites, including here on Scribble Hub specifically.  And I thought that was a wonderful idea!  But I procrastinated and kept putting it off, as I just never felt like I had the time.  And the longer I did that, the worse it got...

After all, at the time of writing this foreword (Sept. 20, 2025), I have already published over 230 chapters totaling at around 725,000 words.

But the main reason I kept putting it off was because I didn't want to just copy over my chapters as-is.  I wanted to give them the justice I felt they deserved and clean them up first, mostly fixing spelling and grammar issues but also rewriting some parts so that their quality is closer to what I am currently capable of producing (though the edited chapters likely won't be quite as 'well-written' as my more recent ones, not without more comprehensive and thorough editing than what I'm doing here).  Any changes I make during this process will also be stealthily made to the original on CHYOA, as it doesn't feel right to neglect the first 'home' of my story.

Do note that there is only so much I can do when it comes to rewriting those older chapters: if I make a change that is too big it will cascade forwards into all, or at least most, of the following chapters.  And I do not want to have to deal with the butterfly effect.  So unfortunately I will be unable to make some changes that I want to, and will have to continue living with what I wrote nearly three years ago.

I also have a Patreon / SubscribeStar, as seen below, so if you want to throw money my way I would appreciate it.  For doing so you will be able to read six chapters ahead of the public release, but... you won't really get much out of it at the moment because I only just recently made both accounts: both platforms start at chapter 232 and continue onwards from there.  So please do keep that in mind if you want to support me.

This story of mine, Tabula Rasa, started off as a passion project and a work of love.  I sincerely hope that every one of you enjoys reading it as much as or even more than I have enjoyed writing it!  I have improved quite a bit over these past ~3 years and would love to continue improving in the years to come, so feedback is welcome and appreciated!

Thank you for reading this rambling foreword, and I hope you enjoy the story I've written!