Crrreeeaaakkkkk. The sound of a door opening on rusty hinges, followed swiftly by a slam as it closes, is the first thing to penetrate the thick fog of your pounding hangover. As your eyes flutter open, the dim light filling the room is enough to send brief spikes of agony through your already aching head. But as your vision adjusts, you find yourself seated in a dusty office. A heavy oaken desk sits before you, covered in a thick layer of dust—only disturbed by the imprint of your arms and head, where you must have leaned against it as you fell asleep last night. The rest of the room is much as you’d expect: a pair of dust-covered chairs across the desk from you, a door flanked by two large glass windows whose blinds are thankfully letting in only a sliver of light. A corkboard hangs on the wall to your right, with a few Pre-War posters and pamphlets still stuck to it, though a large, recently drawn map covers most of the board. As you begin to collect yourself, the sound of glass clattering shakes you from your reverie. A glass of clean-enough-looking water seemingly materializes on the desk before you. You instinctively reach for a weapon, but your hand grasps at empty air—you’ve apparently misplaced all of yours. As adrenaline surges and you blink your eyes clear, you spot the source of the glass: a young woman with short-cropped blonde hair. She had apparently been behind you as you woke and brought the glass. Her smiling face and comely good looks do little to set you at ease, but between the pounding headache and dry mouth, you take the offered glass and quickly drain its tepid contents. As you do, the young woman begins to speak… “Hey, Mayor! Hope you enjoyed last night’s celebrations and were able to get some rest. We were introduced last night, but I doubt you remember it. My name’s Ashley, and I’m your assistant! I can't wait to help you turn this town around!” >“Mayor? Hold on… Mayor? I’m no mayor—I don’t even remember how I got here!” “Oh wow, you must have enjoyed the party more than I realized… Of course you won the election—you’re the mayor now!” It’s starting to come back to you now—the election… Except it wasn’t much of an election. In fact, you’re not certain a vote was even cast. No, it was a… (Select One)
You’re <span class="mu-b">ANTON PEAS:</span> a Grill Jockey at <span class="mu-b">GREASE MONKEY: THE DEEP-FRIED EVERYTHING FAMILY RESTAURANT!</span> Well, you <span class="mu-i">were</span>, anyways. Thanks to a demonic ritual gone wrong, you were whisked away to <span class="mu-b">ZORAL</span>: a fantasy realm shrouded in perpetual darkness–the surprise trip leaving you with a plate full of troubles and a head full of holes!
You’ve only got one lead for making it back home, and it’s a pricey one: for <span class="mu-b">20,000 BELLS</span>, <span class="mu-b">VOLKIR</span>: potionseller, retired wizard, and adoptive father of your new pal <span class="mu-b">VOLKA</span> will help you out, but as they say in your home dimension, ‘<span class="mu-i">pimpin’ ain’t easy</span>’!
Ruthless Gangsters! Ferocious Monsters! A City Spiraling into Anarchy! Toxic Brothels! These are just a few pitfalls you dodged so far in your quest for ‘<span class="mu-i">Fat Stackz</span>’, but all of them are dwarfed by your most pressing concern: the revelation that your recently-acquired <span class="mu-r">MAGICAL POWERS</span> were indeed provided by a <span class="mu-r">DEVIL</span>!
His terms are clear as crystal: once you’re dead, you belong to <span class="mu-r">RED</span>... but surely someone in town can help you out, right? That line of thinking brought you and your chums <span class="mu-b">VOLKA: LAMPLIGHTERS GRAND MARSHALL and TZAH-TZIE: RENOWNED BARD, APPARENTLY,</span> to the doorstep of <span class="mu-b">OTI: THE MAGE AND UNTIL RECENTLY A TRAFFICKER!</span> You wouldn’t exactly call him a <span class="mu-i">friend</span>, but your list of people who know a thing or two about demons is woefully small… and you get the feeling you’ve got a long night ahead of you!
Guided by the brisk evening wind towards a creaky old fireworks shop, THIS is where your tale continues…
A world where might makes right. A world of Jade and Gold, of Phoenix and Dragons, of Pills and Talismans, of Martial and Spiritual arts. A world where diligent training yield strength, meaning freedom. A world where loneliness means death, meaning social chains. A world still unfair, as the ones reaching the heavens are most likely born rich - be it political riches of the aristocrats, power of secret knowledges and hidden realms of clans, or lucky enough to be born one-in-a-thousand genius.
This was not the case of Quiet Word - that is, (You). Your current skill level - half a step above other genius of your age? Lucky encounters leveraged to the best and a knack for navigating social situations. You own a trove of technic for such a young cultivator - more than you can study efficiently, but your strength lies in the impressive amount of Bonded Spiritual Beasts - A Phoenix spirit, a Horse spirit, a Snake spirit and a Wolf spirit. Speaking of that last one, you didn't told a world about him to anybody. As a scion of the Primordial Wolf spirit, its father warned you of its worth and how people could want to rip it away from you. Especially in such a ruthless and public environment than, say, a nationwide cultivator tournament. Previously mentionned worth comes from its ability to Fuse without restriction - fusion being a secret of the higher ranking of your sect, secret you have almost completely rediscovered on your own. Alright, the Primordial Wolf might have helped you on that point.
Recently, you and your Stable Lotus Harbor friend partook in a capital city tournament organized by the Empress. This required ample amount of training : all of you broke through 2nd stage before 8, the mark of genius-talent. You had to took strategical decision, and are pretty confident you could hardly have done better. Your fights seems to entrance a bored-to-death audience, giving you the new moniker of "Heartpiercer" - and a theme song https://suno.com/song/18f62c64-7ac6-402f-b6f2-30158f9a51dd You were even granted the privilege of bowing at the feets of the 15-year-old 4th-stage young Empress - which you gifted a mystical karmic thread. Now, you're checking on one frenemy and two of the foe that share a trait : all were deeply wounded and you bear some responsibility in the matter.
Your grandfather was a king, your mother a queen. But no one expects much from you. Your grandfather, the Mad King, with his even madder queen, brought his kingdom to such an intolerable state that his own peasants stormed his castle (with the aid of some enterprising foreign barons) and set his head on a pike. With his queen they did you know not what. No one speaks of it. The historians and archivists did not deem it fit to record that particular atrocity in their scrolls, though they gleefully recorded the despoiling of the Mad King's heir, your mother, by the leader of the rebellion, Walter Stonecutter, a peasant, a soldier, a king by marriage, and your father.
Your mother was slain two nights ago by the errant arrow (or perhaps not so errant) of a coalition of rebellious barons. They who once trembled beneath the gaze of your demented grandfather (your bloodthirsty, short-tempered grandmother they avoided altogether) besieged your castle, broke it, and fearing the reprisal of foreign kings and civil war, did not go any further.
And so, as the eldest son of five siblings, at the ripe old age of 14, with your parents slain by the same men who lie at your feet, swearing eternal fealty, you have inherited the throne.
Already, they refer to your mother with the sobriquet of the Unfortunate. Only time will tell what they will call you.
As for your character: >You have very high standards, expecting perfection from yourself as much as you do from others >You seem to inherited your grandmother's looks, particularly her ice-blue eyes. You've been given a wide berth for this, leading to a lonely life >You were the king in your own mind even before you were crowned. You will not let what happened to your parents and grandparents happen to you. And that will require a firm hand.
You are a SKELETAL MAW - a person (?) reincarnated as a monster in a fantasy world.
Initially spawning as a Bone Turtle, you have done quests and wandered the Deadlands, levelling up your skills and even evolving one time.
In more detail, in the previous thread you: >got acquainted with a reaper adventurer, Arthur, while dungeon-diving >got quests from a strange guiding voice to recover your memories >intervened in battles between a lich girl and her nemesis (2 times) >traded with a skeleton caravan >killed an undead tiger >looted some magical power crystals from various sources >put the undead of a border fortress to rest >killed a mad wizard on request from the reaper >agreed to assist a group of bone scouts (they're not made of bones, they're searching through bones for profit) in looting a secret treasury by protecting them from undead
Currently, you're with the scouts in the fortress where the portal to the secret treasury has been opened. And there are some monsters on the way for sure...
(I'm back and fixed all the technical problems <span class="mu-i">for now</span>. Let's roll.)
After your master perished, his dungeon did not simply fall—it was annihilated in a cataclysm of stone, flame, and collapsing sorcery. You barely had time to snatch an armful of tomes from his private collection before the walls cracked, the sigils burned out, and the world came crashing down around you. Fleeing through a hidden escape tunnel, you emerged into the cold night just in time to witness the final death throes of your former home. A thunderous roar split the air, followed by a rolling wave of dust and debris that swallowed the entrance whole. It was gone. The dungeon, your master, and all his grand ambitions, buried under a mountain of ruin.
The old fool had gambled on immortality and lost. The so-called heroes made sure of that, cutting him down in a battle you hadn’t even been there to witness. And in his paranoia, he had bound the dungeon’s very foundations to his lifeblood, ensuring that if he died, his domain would die with him. Well, it worked—too well. Now he lay entombed beneath tons of shattered rock and broken wards, and nothing short of a divine wish could bring him back. Not that you had any idea where to find one. And even if you did, would you really waste it on this mess?
For a time, you wandered, alone and uncertain, before stumbling upon a handful of survivors—goblins, of course. Of all the dungeon’s denizens, they were the cockroaches of the underworld, scurrying from calamity with their lives intact through sheer, unrepentant cowardice. And yet, as they huddled together in the moonlight, clutching salvaged scraps, you couldn’t help but think: perhaps their knack for survival could be useful.
“What’ve you got there, goblins?” you ask, eyeing the bundles in their grubby hands.
One of them, a wiry thing with oversized ears, holds up a rusted set of spring-loaded spikes. “Traps! We saved what we could. Could help, you know... when we start our own.”
You pause.
Now that’s an idea.
A new dungeon. Your dungeon.
And as luck would have it, you know just the place...
> An abandoned silver mine near the remains of a razed human village—rich veins of ore and deep tunnels, if you can handle the restless dead. > A winding cave system leading to the ruins of a long-forgotten drow outpost—dark, treacherous, and still whispering with lost magic. > The crumbling remains of a half-flooded underground temple, looted long ago but steeped in ancient, lingering power. > Write in.
The porcelain hordes are pushing from the north, east and south while the ever dwindling numbers of defenders, still loyal to the four, die, one by one, to stem the unending tide.
You are a magical girl, you know that much, but you’re not really sure where you are, or exactly who you are; not only can you not see, hear or smell a single thing, but you can’t feel your body at all, nor recall how long you’ve been stuck in this… place. Perhaps not unexpectedly, and due to your complete and utter inability to make out anything in your surroundings, you can’t spot anything resembling walls, a floor or a ceiling, so everything around you is a blended-together, eye-wateringly intense (but also eerily calming) black… and yet, you are somehow aware that even if you could somehow see something, anything at all, it wouldn’t be much use at all. Well, if that isn’t just slightly puzzling. Yes, it most certainly is, but there’s not much you can do about it, right? At least, for now.
Taking that into account, and for a few moments that seem to last forever in this timeless space, you simply continue existing, gazing eyelessly into the unchanging void around you as your non-present brain in your absent body attempts to process the situation without much success. A few more eternal instants, and, perhaps bored of simply staring at nothing, forever, your long-departed brain attempts to recall the past in order to clue you in on the situation… but, as if attempting to collect water from an empty well, you end up drawing a complete blank: effectively, and to nobody’s surprise, there is nothing to recall or remember or reminiscence about. Maybe there was never anything there in the first place. But as relevant as that single piece of information would be in the grand scheme of things, you have no way of finding out the truth or verifying that not-that-unreasonable hypothesis. Because, ultimately, you’re nothing but a floating ball of vague and distant thoughts in the middle of nowhere in particular.
An indeterminate amount of hypothetical time passes yet again, and another vague thought floats to the forefront: maybe, just maybe, this isn’t so bad after all! Indeed, though the situation you find yourself in may be classified as disconcerting or disorientating, it’s actually not that unpleasant if you use your voided brain to think about it: there is no pain, no suffering, no hunger, no desire, no thirst, no anguish, no fear, no craving, and you need not worry about an unchangeable past, an unstable present or an uncertain future. Perhaps this is how things were meant to be. Perhaps, from the start of all things to the end of all of creation, this is the correct state of existence, a formless and aimless void stretching forever and ever, unbothered and unbothering, without beginning or end.
For generations, the Kingdom of Lindan has been under siege by an otherworldly threat, that of demons. Hailing from a barbarous and unusual land and with skills that defy all magic, science, and logic, known as Cheat Skills, these Strangers all have the capability of bringing on the end of all times if they use their talents improperly. As such, an organization was formed, known as the Inquisition, to combat these hellspawn and send them back from the depth they’ve come from…
Though in more recent news you, Lorina de Lindan, the first princess and third heir to the throne of Lindan who has just been promoted. You are now an Inquisitor for the duration of your current mission proving the “innocence” of the only five noble estates not attacked during the recent Stranger insurrection on the capital. Oh, and those estates all belong to some of the most powerful noble houses in the kingdom, with heirs that all despise you. Good luck with that! You feel like you’ll need it.
