Write the first page of a "Choose Your Own Adventure" gory horror book that begins with a researcher named Alicia who goes to a scientific base in Antarctica from which no Communications have been received for weeks. At the base there was a team of six scientists and it is unknown what happened to them. On the first page Alicia suffers a helicopter accident due to a storm in which only she survives and approaches the outside of the scientific base threatened by the snow storm. Right at that point we leave the reader to choose what to do next.
GPT-3.5
GPT-6 Astra
THE SIX BELOW
Page 1
The last transmission from Vesper Station had been eleven seconds long.
Six seconds of static. Four seconds of someone breathing.
Then a voice: “Don’t let us leave.”
That was twenty-three days ago.
Now Alicia sat behind the helicopter pilot with a sealed specimen case between her boots, watching Antarctica disappear beneath the storm. Somewhere ahead lay the scientific base where six researchers had spent the winter drilling into ice that hadn’t seen daylight in a million years.
She knew three of them. She’d come south to find all six.
“Visibility’s gone,” the pilot said.
The flight engineer leaned toward the windscreen. “We should turn—”
Something struck the helicopter from below.
Alicia’s teeth snapped together. The cabin tipped sideways, and the specimen case slammed against her shins. Through the windscreen she caught a glimpse of floodlights burning in the snow.
Then the rotor hit the ground.
The noise was enormous and abruptly intimate: metal tearing beside her head, glass bursting against her cheek, someone screaming into a microphone that kept transmitting after the scream had stopped.
When Alicia opened her eyes, she was hanging sideways from her harness.
Hot fuel dripped onto her sleeve.
The pilot’s seat had folded around him. One hand still gripped the controls, but his head lay at an angle no living neck could hold. The flight engineer was pinned beneath a length of rotor blade that had entered through the cabin wall. Below it, his orange survival suit sagged open around a wet tangle of intestine.
Alicia reached toward him.
His eyes were fixed on the ceiling. Snow was already gathering on his tongue.
She fumbled for her harness buckle. Her left thumb wouldn’t bend. She used her other hand, fell hard against the broken door, and dragged herself through its frame as fuel hissed onto damaged wiring behind her.
Outside, the wind knocked her flat.
She crawled until the wreck was a blurred orange shape, then forced herself upright. Blood ran from her scalp into her collar. She pressed a glove against the cut and tried her radio.
“Vesper Station. Emergency. Aircraft down. Two fatalities. One survivor.”
Static.
“Vesper, this is Dr. Alicia Voss. Please respond.”
A gust nearly took the radio from her hand.
Ahead, perhaps eighty metres away, a floodlight flickered above a low building. Alicia staggered toward it, following a cable half buried in the snow. Her torch beam caught scraps of insulation, a snapped antenna, and a boot protruding from a drift.
She stopped.
There was a foot inside the boot. Above its ragged cuff, the leg ended in splintered bone.
Alicia backed away and struck the station wall.
The main entrance stood to her right: a heavy steel door with a keypad glowing green. Bloody handprints crowded the metal around it. Some were smeared downward. Others had frozen into crisp red impressions.
To her left, a maintenance hatch hung open beneath a weak amber lamp. Warm air breathed from the darkness, carrying a smell like spoiled meat.
Her radio crackled.
“Alicia?”
She recognised Daniel’s voice. He was one of the six.
“Don’t use the main door.”
From behind the steel entrance came three slow knocks.
The storm pushed her against the wall. Her fingers had begun to lose feeling.
What do you do?
- Enter your access code and open the main door. Turn to page 12.
- Trust Daniel’s warning and crawl through the maintenance hatch. Turn to page 27.
- Stay outside long enough to question the voice on the radio. Turn to page 41.
What changed
The prompt asked for gory horror, and only Astra delivers any gore. GPT-3.5’s crash is oddly bloodless: Alicia “braced for impact, but it never came,” then wakes up unhurt beside the wreck. She was also flying alone, so “only she survives” means nothing. Its one strong image, windows “staring back at her like empty eye sockets,” is the closest it gets to horror. Astra puts a pilot and engineer aboard so their deaths count, then lingers: a neck “at an angle no living neck could hold,” a “wet tangle of intestine,” snow “gathering on his tongue.”
Astra is also a better gamebook. GPT-3.5’s choice between investigating and radioing for help is sensible but flat. Astra builds a real dilemma: bloody handprints on the main door, Daniel’s radio warning, and “three slow knocks” from inside. It also uses the genre’s “Turn to page 12” convention. It runs far longer than a single page, but nearly every line adds dread.