GAMBIT BRIAR and THE HAUNTED HOUSE

Your fate in this route may be affected only by your current skills. They will be recorded as they appear the moment this thread is published so as to avoid discrepancies between skill level ups and your character's fate.

Most rewards gained in your adventure will be account bound and therefore not tradeable. A handful of the benefits will be for the character you bring only.

There will be fewer choices on this route, except for at a critical juncture. Your story will unfold based on the whims of the universe and your skills.

As the story progresses, encounters will become riskier though you can choose to abandon the adventure at any time. If you choose to remain, you do so understanding the risks!

Mikko is a Beginner Fighter and Beginner Intellect
Lets begin!

GAMBIT BRIAR - THE HOUSE

You emerge from an unfamiliar part of the forest into a clearing, blinking slowly as your eyes adjust to the sudden deepening of the gloom that surrounded you your whole walk. As the dim light slowly becomes more and more comfortable you start making out a hulking shape on the other side of the clearing. Old and creaking woodenly in a wind you can't feel you lay eyes on a dilapidated mansion. The whole building skews to one side, and even in the gloom you can make out that parts of it appear to jut out unnaturally as if grafted onto its massive shape after the fact. Something about it seems wrong, though you are not sure why.

---

• Approach the mansion
  
• Flee with your tail between your legs [Leave]
  

There would eventually come a day where Mikko found comfort in consciousness, but today wasn't one of those days. He was almost too used to living in a daze, to relinquishing himself to his body's whims whether it beckoned food, rest, tremors, or nothingness. Now, with his mobility back and his wounds (mostly) healed beyond impairment, he was beginning to find himself...lost. Not physically, per se, but lost on himself. What did he do, now? What besides his debt to Shiba and his brotherly vow to Acciona even waited for him in this waking realm? Back then, when the Klein woman had first found him, he'd already resigned himself to death, however slowly it chose to come on. He'd been ready to end the cycle, to end his sentence upon this earth, but then she'd brought him back. For whatever reason, she'd brought him back, but that reason he had yet to discover.

He staggered upon a darker part of the forest and paused with a blink of his single eye. What...was that? An unamused huff fluttered his lips as he crept further forward, approaching the structure to investigate. So he was hallucinating, now? Had he truly been up in the clouds for so long that he'd lost what remained of his sanity?

No...it was real, and it was huge. The brute halted once more, this time directly before the mansion, craning his stiff neck just to attempt a glimpse at its crown. What could have created this thing? And why would they raise it out here?

table by Lowin art by kara

Success

You take a few shaky steps up the wooden stairs, fighting what feels like a much heavier keel to one side than you'd expect, however you stick to the left side of the stairs and make it safe and sound to the landing and push your way into the foyer. As you pass through the doors you spot something shiny, you grab it and stash it for later.

Mikko has found 100 Gems

GAMBIT BRIAR - HALLWAY

The space before you is wide and open. The air is musty and through the gloom you can see motes of dust. Wherever you are it’s not seen life in a long time. In the center of the foyer is a massive carpeted staircase. You can see doors on either side of the ground floor, but you feel something drawing you up the stairs. Your paws move before you have time to process this fact, puffs of dust rising with each paw step and you quickly feel your paws become covered. This time your trek up the stairs is a safe one, though the place has clearly been abandoned the steps are sturdy and carry your weight. Still you press yourself to the heavy wooden banister until the moment you reach the top floor. You peer into the dark and notice there is a hallway off to the left. On the right is a door, you try it first but the room beyond is covered in debris so you can’t enter, the furthest wall is all but collapsed, the night sky visible through it’s crumbling structure. So you start down the hallway, losing count of the doors you’ve passed as you feel yourself once more drawn towards the middle of the hallway. You pause, even a few feet from the door your being drawn to you can hear something making noise from the room behind.

---

• Approach the door
  
• 2 Spoopy 5 me [Leave]
  

Anyone in their right mind might have turned away at the sight of this strange monolith, but Mikko hardly blinked as he continued through an open front door and into the mansion. Fear and disgust were just two emotions to which he'd grown numb, even as his paws led him through thick layers of dust and dirt and left a sandy film between his toes, but this time there was something beyond this numbness that kept him moving forward. For whatever reason, he felt a pull, one that led him slowly, carefully, up a flight of stairs--which he might have considered smart by design if not for the way the steps threatened to snap under his weight. Nonetheless, he persisted until he found himself on the second story and in front of yet another door. Behind it, something rattled, surely the thing that had been tugging at him. He approached.

"

table by Lowin art by kara

Failure

As you approach the door, the sounds get louder. For a moment your courage flags. You decide you're just going to face whatever it is on the other side and push the door open, antlers at the ready and- Bam! Pain blossoms in the bridge of your nose. You reel back, eyes screwing shut. Shit. You lift a paw to your nose and feel it come away wet. Your nose is bleeding from whatever it is that hit you. You stubbornly wipe away the blood, test your nose again and find it’s at least not actively bleeding. You’ll live, unwounded aside from your pride. You glance down at your paws and wince as you see what hit you in the face, a cracked glass orb. You can’t help but feel you should have listened to your instincts, and feel a little less confident in yourself.

Mikko has lost 5 intellect skill points

GAMBIT BRIAR - Fix Me!

You lift your gaze to a truly horrific site, the room you’ve entered is illuminated by the moon visible beyond the window in the opposite wall. Swinging ominously in that pale light are countless shapes that hang from the roof. You cast your gaze about, all around you on shelves, the floor and any other surface in the room are what feels like hundreds and hundreds of small figures. You freeze, waiting for the tiny creatures to jump you and rip you to shreds. But nothing else seems to move beyond the figures hanging from the roof, pushed by the still unfelt breeze. Taking a breath you peer closer at the closest figure and fight back the urge to recoil. It’s a strange thing, a soft body that seemed to be filled with something, and hard solid limbs… but it doesn’t resemble anything you’ve ever seen, the head is a sphere, molded fur of some kind on its head and forward facing eyes. The limbs are mismatched, different in tone and shape, one of them appears to be the leg of a deer, and you recognize a plush lupine tail poking from the back of the body. A doll, and the figures hanging from the roof are marionettes. The sphere at your paws appears to have been another strange head and as you look around all the figures are mismatched in a similar manner, limbs and heads of animals you recognize grafted onto bodies that have limbs and heads you don't. Something about it is all very wrong. In the center of the room lays a pile of limbs and heads, a single cloth body piece in front of the pile. You take a step towards it, and somewhere in the back of your mind comes a voice: Fix me.

---

• Fix them!
  
• Take a Puppet down from the roof
  
• Nope out of there! [Leave]
  

Immediately upon entering the room, there sounded above him an eerie clank. Clank. Clank. Mikko blinked and craned his head. What in the world...? Dangling from the ceiling were all sorts of small figurines, seemingly made out of wood, deathly limp and staring back down at him with unseeing eyes. With a low growl he lowered his skull and turned his attention onto one closer to eye level, tiptoeing toward it with a wary twitch of his nose. Unlike the others, it was soft, with mismatched parts, taking on several different species and in such a way that even made the brute wrinkle his nose. Quietly he circumvented it, refusing to take his eyes off it even as he put it behind him--until something else forced him to do so. Fix me. He whipped back around, finding the sound to be coming from a pile of assorted limbs and parts, and lowered his head upon his approach. How he related to that pile of bits...and they didn't seem too hard to piece together. With only a moment's hesitation, he attempted to fix it, arranging the pieces like a puzzle and clumsily working them into joints.

Failure

You sort through the piles and try to pick out pieces you think match, your unsure exactly what your supposed to be looking for, but finally you manage to get a set of limbs your pretty sure match, you carefully rearrange the pieces a few times, finally settling on an arrangement your pretty sure looks right, then step back- a harsh ringing starts in your ears and you flinch, eyes screwing shut. You are frozen there for a few minutes and then an ominous rattling sound breaks through the high pitched whine and you open your eyes to see dolls launching themselves off their perches at you. You scramble to flee from the room trying to dodge the projectiles hurled your way, but don't manage to get out of the room unscathed. You keep pelting down the hallway, you race down a smaller staircase and stop only once you're at the bottom. You skid to a halt, panting and sore. You quickly take stock of your wounds and notice pain in your left side, that one's likely gonna hurt for a while after you get out of here.

Mikko has become injured.

GAMBIT BRIAR - F̸̢̀I̷͍̽N̷̟͑D̵̢͗ ̸̠̅M̷̭͒E̵̪͒!̵̧̉

The room before you is a kitchen, oddly the centerpiece of the room is a magnificent dark wooden table, it’s covered with tarnished aged silverware and plates and grotesquely a carcass of some kind, right in the middle of the table. The corpse is old and mutilated beyond recognition, you’re not even sure what it was anymore, somehow so old it’s stopped smelling of anything and yet remarkably pristine despite it’s otherwise gory appearance. The voice from earlier whispers in the back of your mind: find me. You cast about the room, toss open cabinets and search under everything you can. Still the voice returns: Find me. You jump up onto the table, hoping it’ll offer you a better vantage point… still nothing… You step closer to the mangled thing on the table and the voice cries out once more, stronger this time. Find me! You look down at the corpse and feel a familiar pull… With a dawning horror you realize what the voice wants from you and glance up, through the door opposite you you can see the front foyer, offering a tantalizing escape…

---

• Find them! In the Corpse
  
• Find them! By searching the room again.
  
• The door is right there! [Leave]
  

So Mikko sifted through the bits and pieces, slowly at first then with more confidence as the eerie puppet seemed to start coming together. This wasn't so hard. Creepy as hell, perhaps approaching the line of some kind of sick joke, but not hard, and he saw truth in it too. Shiba knew how to put him back together, but who said that given the opportunity, he didn't know how to do the same? But at the moment he made the figurine whole, a shrill sound filled his ears, sending him reeling backward with a wince and a curled lip. Then, a rattle, the sound of wood on wood, which he discovered upon opening his eyes to be the marionettes dancing overhead. Back and forth they swung until they hurled themselves at him. Maw parted with a vicious growl, and he cleared a path for himself with frantic snaps left and right, forcing his way through the chaos and refusing to stop until he found calm again, this time at the bottom of another staircase. What the fuck was that?

Mikko took a long look over his shoulder, noting a cut along his left side and acknowledging it with a dry, unamused laugh. Eventually he dared to look forward again, and this time, there before him was a new room, with a different sort of figure standing at its center. A flick of his tattered ear as he crept forward to investigate. Positioned in the middle of the table was an old carcass, weathered by time, which seemed to stare back at him as that damned voice found him once again. Find me. Oh, hell, no.

Whatever game his mind was playing, Mikko refused to let it shake him. Boldly, almost angrily, he stormed forward and jutted a paw into an open part of the corpse's hide, forcing it open and nearly breaking the whole thing apart in the process. He would find this thing. And it would regret toying with him.

Failure

You practically tear the corpse apart with your paws, the sickening crack of bone breaking under your force. Blood, wet and slick in a way you'd not expect from a corpse that seemed this old, splatters onto your face. You dig through flesh that feels fresher than you anticipated, with each swipe of your paws you become more and more covered in the ichor, the smell starting to overwhelm you. With one last splat of meat under your paws you find your vision is suddenly obscured by the most recent gout of blood. You furiously wipe at your eyes with a foreleg and jump down off the the table, filled with disgust. Clearly you were insane to try this in the first place, you head back into the Foyer, feeling quite the fool.

Mikko has lost 10 intellect skill points

GAMBIT BRIAR - Ș̵̨̦̫̗̤̻̝͌̊̌͗̌̚à̶͙̗̭̜̈́͆͊͂̿̉́̔v̸̢͇͇̹̘͒̈͐ͅe̴̖͖̺͍̼̦̬̩̻͗̄̈́͛̄̚͘ ̷͙̩̣͔̣̖͖̤̞̃͜M̵̬̩̟͉̯͑͆̈́e̴̮̪̻͉̔!̸̹͙̹̮̙͇́͗͑̿̈́͗

The door you’ve just exited was the one you saw earlier off to the left of the stairs… all that remains is the door on the right. You cautiously pad towards it, noticing it’s less a door and more an open frame, stairs leading down into darkness not even your eyes can see through. You hesitate for a moment, then something wills your legs to start moving and you cautiously descend into the darkness. Your movements are slow, now even in the thick of if you can hardly see the end of your nose, let alone the end of the stairs. The darkness feels thick, like it’s pressed down on you. You take a step forward and realize you’ve hit the ground floor, you glance over your shoulder, the door way you’d stepped in through is a tiny pin prick up much higher than you thought you’d descended. Something moves in the dark, you can hear it and you jump when something brushes past you, ruffling your fur. The voice returns, stronger than ever: Save me!

---

• Save them!
  
• Locked
  
• Locked
  
• Locked
  
• Alright that’s enough adventure for one day! [Leave]
  

It would seem that desperation made him gullible. That had always been one of Mikko's flaws, and now, being fresh out of a life of torment, he was more vulnerable to it than usual. He'd never seen a place like this, and he'd certainly never heard voices like he was now. It all seemed so well fabricated, as if he was walking into his own version of hell. The helpless whispers in his ear, the puppets staring judgmentally down upon him from the ceiling, the rotted corpse splayed out for all to see--there was no way this wasn't meant to taunt him, or even if it wasn't, it certainly was working. He stepped away from the now broken carcass, dirtied paws squelching against the wooden floor as his maw wrinkled with frustration and, in a way, pain, as the same voice from before returned to pull at his conscience: Save me!

I'm trying, he snapped right back from within his head. He'd always tried, and he'd always failed. Wherever this thing was, if it truly wanted to be found, then it shouldn't have been looking for help from him. Mikko felt movement, then, against his side, and whirled around with a growl and a bristled spine, ears perking as he thought he heard rustling. Save me!

Without another thought, he darted forward, hoping to find the source of these eerie cries for help and save them.

Failure

The fur along your spine begins to rise and you feel a growl bubbling in your throat, you’re just about at your wits end in the place and you aren’t eager to be toyed with by whatever it is that’s lurking in here, you dash forward trying to save whatever it is that keeps calling out to you but you slam into something solid, furry and growling. You dodged out of the way of something whizzing past your ear, whatever you bumped into won't let you go without a fight, still you’re a seasoned fighter and you feel confident in your ability. You hear a tail scraping against the floor and leap into action. You’re really only aware of snippets of the fight. Your fangs meeting fur, the feelings of a wing hitting your face. Something squishy and leathery wrapping around your legs. The crunch of an exoskeleton beneath your paws. You remain tense as you strain to hear your opponent, all is silent and then - Crack! You feel pain blossom in your tail and roar in pain. You thrash about wildly, and it seems whatever was fighting had decided you weren’t worth the effort you hear whatever it is retreating, sliding further and further away from you. You remain tense for a moment longer and then suddenly an electric hum starts and you are thrown into light. You blink against the sudden light, wincing as the adrenaline starts to fade and your wound started throbbing, you curse your luck and turn to check your surroundings.

Mikko has gained a minor maim, his tail now has a bend to it.

GAMBIT BRIAR - Ŗ̸̛̘̤̤̪͐̅̾͑̈́͗ĕ̸̫̫̘̮͖̣͓̖͆̈́̿̿͜ͅL̷̡̼̝͎̥̏̊̌͋̓́͐̚͝͠E̴̛̤͇̤̩͑͂̀ͅą̶͖̟̭͖̗̣͌̆͆̓̈s̶͇͎͎̦̮̊́͋̓̊̚e̸̡̮̠͙̥̱̖̥͆ ̵͉͚̦̱̒͆͐͛̈́͘m̴̨̺̻̗͇͚̐̈̓̆̊͗Ë̶̛̦͓̞̬͇̯͍̲̰!̶͖̰̱̬̹͓̉̋̇

You are in a concrete basement, the floor and walls around you are a dull, dirty grey, eerily red near the pipes that run along the roof. You cast about frantically, searching for your opponent but it’s disappeared… Which you realize is impossible. The basement is too small and too brightly lit for whatever you were fighting to have disappeared, you’re certain it was larger than you and you were blocking the only exit… You shiver, taking a few more moments to observe where you’ve found yourself and notice against the far wall is a small wire cage, the door was slightly open and through the gaps in the fencing you can see a skeleton laid out, it somehow resembles the doll from before and the voice returns, this time louder than it’s ever been and somehow distorted: ReLEase mE! You hear something rumbling under the hum from the lightbulb above you, it sounded almost like… laughter? You feel like whatever thing has been leading you this whole time has started to mock you. You feel like you’re being taunted, called a coward.

---

• Release them!
  
• I am a coward, and proud of it! [Leave]
  

As the brute charged forward to end this--whatever it was--once and for all, he was met by something seemingly as large and irritated as himself. It matched his growl with one of its own, and it was then that Mikko felt something tickle the hairs on his ear. Instinctively, he ducked, his heart lurching in his chest, and as these things continued to close in on him, instinct took over, driving him to do what he did best: fight. And fight he did, ignoring as best as he could the myriad of limbs and textures that tried to steal him away into the darkness, until a sickening crack sounded from his tail and sent him reeling back toward whatever it was that had grabbed it. Over and over again he sank his teeth into it, relentless in his assault. Ultimately, it let him go, but then a light overwhelmed the abyss that had seemed to swallow him, taking him back from it before he could fully realize what had just happened.

He blinked, slowly opening his one eye and assessing his surroundings with caution, ignoring the throbbing of his limp and broken tail. Where was he, now? Then he saw it, laid out on the floor of a cage, staring back at him through empty eye sockets. ReLEase mE! it shrieked, and suddenly Mikko heard something stir up above, almost a distorted laugh. His eye narrowed before turning back down to the old doll. Fine. If it was going to taunt him so, then it was going to learn why that was a mistake. He was no coward. He wouldn't be laughed at. He wouldn't let himself be shaken by more of the same. Mikko stormed toward the puppet once again and ripped the cage open the rest of the way before looking back up at the lightbulb. He would release them.

Success

The laughter echoes in your head again and you feel your paws drawing you towards the skeleton on the ground, behind it is a pile of bones and you notice there appears to be one missing from the current set up. You look through the pile and find one you think will fit. You pause, thinking back to the sound of laughter and realize with a start something is very wrong, something is trying to lead you on! You look at the skeleton again and your eyes fall on the skull, it’s an odd shape you’ve never seen before, not as rounded as you might assume with a massive eye hole in the middle, two smaller hollow tubes on either side of it. You feel something very off about the skull and decide to replace it with one that you found in the pile. Then you place the other bone. A soft light emanates from the skeleton and you feel the oppressive weight that’s settled over you since you arrived dissipates. You know it’s over know, and can’t help but a feel you’re a little different from when you started. You turn to make your way out of the house. You walk back through the forest, afraid that you’ll get lost in these unfamiliar woods once more… or worse find yourself back at the house. But finally after what feels like the longest night of your life you find yourself back on familiar territory. You practically collapse, and finally feel safe enough to take stock of all that’s happened.

Mikko has found a Redacted Prize!

THANKS FOR PLAYING!

Mikko received a total of 4 punishments and 2 rewards:

1 Reward is 100 gems [Added! - nyx]
1 punishment is -5 intellect skill points [Complete! - nyx]
1 punishment is mild bruising on his left side (You may play this Icly as you wish, heals min. 1 ooc week)
1 punishment is -10 intellect skill points [Complete! - nyx]
1 punishment is a minor maim (permanently bent tail)
1 Reward is Redacted and to keep things mysterious for other players still deciding their paths, will be revealed closer to the adventure deadline.

Mikko has 1 redacted rewards, Please stay tuned for your prize reveals!


Thank you for your participation!
- Lolaf