Mazzie 2024/09/21(Sat)04:38 No. 1097607 ID: 575940
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You float weightlessly amidst the void. Blind, deaf, numb. No sensation of anything. Nothing except your own consciousness. You are aware, but there is nothing to be aware of. Nothing but a silent black void.


Silent until you hear a voice. “How did you die?” the voice asks. It’s a small voice. No grandiose to it at all. More like a child curious and unaware. When you don’t respond it asks again. “How did you die?” Like an echo, repeating it the exact same way it did last time. If you don’t answer, it will repeat itself again.


You try to recall how it happened, the exact moment that it occurred, but it’s an oxymoron. It all happened so fast, time seemed to freeze still. Like a high resolution photograph taken at the worst possible time. You remember suffocating in a rainbow of swirling colors feveredly masking the air. You remember the oppressive black shadows cascading over you. The heat that smothered your skin. The chill that shook your bones. The deafening silence. Their muted screams. What should you say?


A. Your village that got destroyed…

B. All the people you knew…

C. Your mother who you lost…

D. The silhouetted monster you saw…

E. Who you were before it happened…


The list above(and all following lists) are not mutually exclusive options to choose from. All are true, all are viable, all are valid. Rather, each selection is a single topic of discussion you can elaborate further on or ignore. The more you all have to say, the higher priority they take, until there is nothing left to say. If there is choice, it is in what you do first, and what you are able to do before something happens to you.

You lived in a village that deserved to die.
But what it suffered was far, far worse.

Brigands. Bandits. Thieves. Never-Do-Wells.
This was the population of 85% of your 'village', an appropriated fortress in the wilderness. The rest were children; either born from the lustful joys of drunken parties, or orphans collected from the caravans of their victims.
For a time, you were taught that you were the descendants of "Bobbin Food", a heroic assassin who slew corrupt bloodlines and replaced them with noble republics. That the nobility's cries of 'filthy parasites' was a pot-meet-kettle situation when those same nobles issued a whopping 40% tax rate, if they didn't steal most of the farmers' yields outright.
And then one day you saw the truth. No means no, no matter how many times you scream it before the blade comes down on your neck. The poor girl died with a whimper in her throat as you cowered in your hiding spot. You never trusted your 'family' again.

And then one day, a Slayer arrived.
His head was a green skull. His glass eyes had the insignia of the crown. But his torso... what was his torso? Some whirling, twisting shape of darkness with six arms calmly jutting out of it.

You and the others only managed to scream for about four seconds before he sliced off all your heads with arch-magic.
And that didn't kill you.
For months, your undead severed heads were stuck on poles, watching in horror as the Slayer took each of the children out of your fortress... and mutated them into monsters.
Sometimes they'd come back, carrying dead peasants and nobles in their jaws, trying desperately to reattach you to their neck stumps. But eventually, they stopped coming. Did their curse destroy their memory? Or were they hunted down?
Mercifully, the magic on you failed and you finally died. But the others...

A. Salmonbridge was just another ordinary fishing village with a temperate northern climate, like any other in the New United Empire of Kevalish, with a population of roughly nine thousand and a market that mostly relied on the catches of the great Jadeflow river that was right there at the town's borders, mostly the exportation of the quite coveted blue-bellied salmon that gave the town its name. Children would toss their lures from the main bridge and hoist all sorts of catches with joy, bringing them for their parents to see. But roughly a couple of months ago, they started to catch diseased, mutated fish that would send the fear of god right into the hearts of the most disbelieving fools. Everything would go to hell, not immediately, but steadily. The darkness around the wintry pines became even darker as strange shadows of people appeared and went away as quickly as they came; people started to have nightmares and wander into the unknown without rhyme or reason; and fear slowly crept into the hearts of men. Perhaps if the Kevalish royalty sent one of their official inquisitors to evaluate the situation the fate of the town could've been avoided, but there's no doubt that the aristocracy determined that the incoming reports were either too exagerated, or perhaps it was simply because the town had a little bit of a rough time trying to fill the demanding salmon quotas of the nobles for the last 5 years, leading the villagefolk to fend for themselves. From day to night, the town mounted their own task force of inquisitors to protect themselves. But alas, or perhaps as it should be expected, these "protectors" quickly went wild with power, paranoia, and wrath. The Salem's Witch trials were but a pleasant dream of happiness compared to the sheer horror that struck Salmonbridge: no one was spared, nobody was forgiven. Piles of bodies were disposed into the river, their burnt ashy skin tainting the waters with corpse skinflakes. These task force of vigilantes, unfortunately, wasn't very effective at doing their job, as they barely caught one of the dangerous strangers that brought misery to the town, focusing more on the weirdos and outcasts and anyone who even slighly looked at them funny, which unfortunately led to these interlopers calling forth the power of... Well, you could say that it had the shape of a fish, but it wasn't a fish: for starters, it was big as a whale, and it also breathed fire. You're not sure if this fish was the one responsible for the fire that burnt Salmonbridge to the ground, or if it was the torches carried by the town's inquisition, but only one thing is certain: the children of the town will never catch fish and bring them to their fathers and mothers ever again.

Mazzie 2024/10/03(Thu)00:19 No. 1098170 ID: 575940
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You begin explaining your past with the village you once lived in. It doesn’t remotely answer their question, but context is important you guess, and it is really more for yourself than anything. The memory needs some breathing room, especially the memory of your hometown. You don’t want to lose it now you fear you may never see it again.

“I live in this big beachside town in the Upways. Not literally big, but dense, full of tons of people. It only barely stretches from the shoreline to the edge of a forest of needlewoods. It is full of the most kind and compassionate people you would ever meet. We do a whole lot of fishing and exporting ocean stuff. Though I guess the Highest Class doesn’t particularly like us for some reason? We don’t export stuff to them.” You felt like you could have scoffed as you said that last part — if you had a body to do so — but your smirk got quickly replaced with the tone shift in what you said next. “That’s what– was my home town.

“It happened so slowly; there were signs of something, but… We were just catching fewer and fewer fish, and what we could snatch was too diseased for consumption. Then suddenly, it all stopped. The population returned completely, like whatever had been plaguing the water had been taken out. It should have seemed foreboding. It was just a few cycles later while I’d been taking a casual hike through the forest out of town, but when I returned…”

Mazzie 2024/10/03(Thu)00:24 No. 1098171 ID: 575940
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It is difficult to say the next part, but you swallow the lump in your throat and go through with the horrific thought. “There was fire everywhere. Those bright flashing colors were everywhere. Eating away at every building, billowing massive towers of vibrant light completely blanketing my vision. But I had to go back there. I had to know how this had happened. I had to find my mom.”

“I did find her; just ran to where I guessed she might be, then followed her voice to a fishery on the docks. There were a lot more boats there than usual. Larger and with designs I didn’t recognize. But then I stopped; froze in my tracks when I saw– something. It was– well I couldn’t see it too well, only its silhouette cast by the fire behind it. Or maybe it was itself as pitch black as shadow. It was a massive beast; crawling on six stout flatfooted limbs, yet it left a hole triple my height in the wall I saw it through. Its body was a gargantuan bulk of flesh while its head was only a slender boney skull. I saw it tower over my mother who was lying on the floor injured and crying. It was disheartening to see her like that. I only saw her call my name, her voice too quiet to hear. I called out to her in response, but then the beast switched its attention to me.

“It turned toward me. It had no face, only glowing white pinpricks from the hollow sockets of an expressionless skull. Its lower jaw was split like the mandibles of an insect, holding its rows of teeth reminiscent of kitchen knives. A large hole was located on the peak of its head. It stared at me. A growl of sorts emanated from it, low in pitch yet shrill. It opened its mouth. Its hollow maw filled with the same fire that surrounded it, and it produced more from within its gape.

“I stood at the edge of the docks with the ocean to my back. I couldn’t move, I was stuck in place. All I could do was stare back at the beast as the fire in its jaws grew and grew, until with a fiery explosion those colors charged towards me, consuming all my vision and– and then…”

Mazzie 2024/10/03(Thu)00:26 No. 1098172 ID: 575940
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While that may not have exactly answered its question, that seems to have satisfied it in a way. “Woah,” the child-like voice hushedly exclaims. For a brief moment the silence of death returns. The truth is you don’t actually know exactly how you died. One moment you stood frozen staring at death’s skinless halow face, then an explosion of colors to your front, the splash of freezing water to your back, and now you are here being interviewed on your life.

The voice asks again, still curious. “But that’s not everything, is it?” It holds the intonation of already knowing. Like it only asks not to know more, but to see how you describe it. Though that child-like voice it carries is still laced with innocence. “What about the people in your life? I wanna know about them too. You must miss them, don’t you?”

A. Who is your mother?
B. Who are your friends and neighbors?
C. Who were you; what did you do as a job or pastime?

And please, you may have a lot to say, but it is best to be brief and concise. Leave room for interpretation by me, or for extrapolation by others. Now, Topics written in blue are mandatory to answer. You specifically don’t need to answer them all, but you collectively have to. Mandatory has nothing to do with priority, but just because your response has no immediate effect does not mean it was completely cast aside. Remember: you have just as much of an influence on worldbuilding and lore as I do.

Mom fixed the crab traps. The fishermen had a soft spot for her (and you) and would sometimes give her some of the fish that hadn't sold. You spent a lot of your youth mediating arguments between your two best friends that lived on either side of you.

Your mother used to be an adventurer, but then she took a pick to the face. For all your life, she has been a carpenter; lots of good work, repairing the old docks. Most people are put off by her open right cheek, but she says it makes her look like a wolf.

You were planning to become a musician, but had to make do as a dockhand.