Outside a storm is raging. Inside the room is cozy and peaceful. Your chair is comfortable, your book is good, and the fire is warming both you and your sleeping dog. Suddenly you hear a loud crack outside. Worried, you leap up chair and go to the window, but in the dark storm you cannot see what has happened.
Investigating further, you open the door into the storm.
You decide not to worry, and return to your comfortable chair
This is the second node and first split in this short Chose Your Own Adventure story. It is part of a larger essay.
Or is it part of a larger story? We will have to decide that.
The story is told in thirty-two small nodes arranged in a tree structure. At its widest the tree graph has eight branches. The shortest path through the story has four nodes, the longest has eighten.
There are places where several branches of the tree converge and reduce the number of endings.
The old Choose Your Own Adventure books also compromised the tree structure, and there's no reason to keep it pure.