CLOSED | if i cut off your arms and cut off your legs,

[murderbaby]

WHO: Mhavos, Barrow, Sawbones, Ellis, Vanadi, Edgard, Athessa, Leander, Dick, & Holden.
WHAT: Slasher Plot / Murderhaus / I should really have come up with a set name for this thing.
WHEN: Late Harvestmere / Early Kingsway.
WHERE: Ostwick.
NOTES: This plot is based on the idea of slasher movies, so there will be blood, violence, torture, cannibalism & NPC death.

YOU MAY REMEMBER going to Ostwick on a Riftwatch mission, closing a rift on the property of the noble Pickney house, and being accosted by the Lady Elsed Pickney. Her (adult) son is missing! Terrible things are afoot!

But that's easy to ignore; Gawen Pickney rather publicly announced his intention to elope with a Dalish elf a few weeks ago. Assurances are made, yes, we'll let you know if we see him, and what can you do but that?

It's time to move on. Traveling back to Kirkwall, a storm breaks out, and everyone decides it's better to find a place to stay for the night than push forward. The Silver Lamp is a cozy Inn on the roadside, and the proprietor, an elderly man named Medrod, is very kind. It's not tourism season in these parts, so he's happy to give everyone a discount for the night, and the meal is on the house. Everyone eats well, has a pleasant enough time, and wanders off to bed for the night.

(The food your characters ate was not people and did not taste strange in any way.)

And then Medrod will let the sleeping gas seep through the Inn, laced with Magebane just in case, and everyone will wake up a few hours later, dizzy and, in many cases, in pain.

(Look for a toplevel with your character's name below.)

HOW WILL THIS WORK? Well, I'll be NPCing Medrod the Murderer. Medrod will be showing up in each thread eventually, after a number of tags I RNG'd. It's entirely possible to escape before he shows up! And don't worry, if you guys get in a rut, I'll make him show up early to spice things up ;)

I'll also be doing dicerolls!

If you have a situation where you feel your character will need to roll (I'm going to let you decide this!) put ROLL in the subject line, and bold what you need me to roll for.

(For example, you can have a whole tag like normal, and then Bob tries to pick the lock. Then I'll roll for success or failure, as well as other factors, and reply to that thread with the results. But if you don't want to rely on dicerolls, for whatever reason, don't worry about it. The dicerolls are an opt-in feature. Use it as much or as little as you want.)

I'll also be rolling for discovery, which will work the same way: if your character is looking for something, put ROLL in the subject line and bold what they're looking for (normal tag normal tag then Alice looked for a lockpick) and I'll reply with results after rolling. But if you just want your character to find the thing without dicerolls, go for it.

IN SHORT, I'm only making this as hard as you want it to be. Your characters are already waking up to torture. If you want them to find the special key and escape in two comments, it's totally fine. (Just respect other people's difficulty levels, if they want to give their characters a harder time.)

The only thing that has to rely on rolls is killing, apprehending or injuring the Murderer, but since I'll be NPCing him, those rolls are automatic and will be baked into his reply comments.

IF YOUR CHARACTERS GET FREE, let me know what they'd want to do next oocly (options below), and I'll set that up for you!

Other potential goals to keep in mind besides escaping:

- Finding / saving others.
- Killing / apprehending Medrod the Murderer.
- Getting evidence of Gawen & his Dalish wife's murder to eventually send to Lady Elsed.
- Getting your stuff back (all obviously visible weapons / staves have been taken away).

You got questions? Lemme know!

DETAILS:

- While in the torture room, your character is free to hear (or not hear) distant screaming. It's muffled enough that you can't identify the source (it's Edgard). The screaming has stopped.

- The hallways between the rooms are pitch-dark, and even those who can see in the dark will find it difficult to navigate, as the walls and ceilings are mirrored, distorting the size, shape, and direction of the hallways.

Comments

[nonvenomous]

“It’s a puncture, freshly withdrawn. I’m not sure how deep.”

He hadn’t gotten around to sticking a finger into it yet.

With Barrow (he looks twice, the second time with a furrowed brow for the owed favor this probably entails) and Athessa on handier support, Dick is reduced to tripod status. He’s braced in place to keep Holden on his feet. Bloodsoaked as he is, none of it appears to be his.

“Have you seen any of the others?”

[sulahnan]

It's a funny little parallel they draw, with Holden and Barrow both full of holes, and Athessa and Richard both one-handed.

"I hit someone in the hallway. They scarpered before I could get a good look at him but it wasn't any of ours. Barrow was in one of those things," Athessa nods to the iron maiden with a look of distaste. "I was on a rack. Wrenched my arm out of its socket before we could get the knots undone. It's back in place now, but it hurts like hell to move it."

And then the mirrors, that room, the dead elves, Ribbon...

The snake is beneath Athessa's collar, almost peeking out of where her sleeve used to be.

[thereneverwas]

“Right, got out of it faring a little better than you, by the look of it, but I still bloody woke up with a wall of spikes in my face.”

He scoffs, seeming to keep a relatively good humor about it as he acknowledged Dick with a little nod. No bad blood between them, at least at the moment— they’re all on the same side here.

“Let me support him,” he suggests, “give your arm a rest.”

[acreage]

"Jesus," he says, looking from Athessa to Barrow. "Someone needs a new goddamn hobby."

Why does anyone have one, let alone multiple iron maidens? Multiple rooms full of torture devices? Not to mention the bodies. What the fuck.

(He remembers: dead eyes, cold and empty, on Dresden, on Cortazar, on the rest of them. Eros is hardly a rounding error by comparison. Jules-Pierre Mao and a facility full of stolen children, fodder for his Project Caliban, Everything done here has been to stop what's happening on Venus.

He would've wondered what kind of person would do this once, but not anymore.)

"We have to find the others as soon as possible. Anything could be happening to them." Which they all know already, so he adds, "All three of you don't need to be here with me right now. Do you?"

The question tacked on because, you know, he's not the one doing emergency first aid here.

[nonvenomous]

There’s a scrap wire edge to the next glance Richard casts to Barrow in aside, more becoming of a viper than a rat, but it’s fleeting, and he yields easily, stepping away and aside. Glimmers of Fade green diffuse through the blood in his hands; he cradles one in the other, and gives his blessing for Ribbon to remain where she is in muted, hissing Abyssal.

“Without knowing what we’re up against, we’re more vulnerable separated than we are together,” he speaks up to contribute, in Trade: “We need to leave.”

Don’t split the party.

[sulahnan]

"We're not leaving anyone anywhere in this hellhole alone," Athessa says, resolute. It's absolutely not a suggestion. Perhaps punctuating how serious she is, she makes the (rather unwise) decision to use her right hand to tear at her left sleeve, which she then tears in half to make two new bandages. While Barrow is knelt, she wraps his head wound to make sure it doesn't bleed any further, it being the most prolific of his injuries.

"Lemme see your hand," she says to Richard, knowing she won't be able to simply coach Barrow through setting a finger injury.

[thereneverwas]

Barrow’s mouth is open to agree, but he’s interrupted by cloth wrapping around his head. He closes it again, letting Athessa finish, before he murmurs “thanks, love,” and looks back to Jim.

“No one’s left behind,” he says, tired but still somehow amiable, “you’re coming with us, and you’re going to live.”

[acreage]

Richard's response is the one that lands most successfully, with its inarguable logic. They all probably have a pretty good guess about who the murderer is, but what he's fully capable of, what help he might have, even what's in the other fucking rooms is an unknown.

He thinks, I wasn't worried about being left behind.

He thinks, If someone dies because we didn't get out of this room fast enough, that's going to be my fault.

He thinks, If anything else happens to you three, that will be too.

"Together, then."

[nonvenomous]

The cavity of Richard’s clutched hands is a bony, bloody mangle. He separates them to shake a clot of coagulation off the better one at Athessa’s prompt, as if he might have been thinking about handing the broken one over.

He doesn’t.

"I’m -- not sure you’re qualified -- "

Also they are leaving. He looks uncertainly to Barrow, not quite a prompt to pick Jim up like a sack of presents so they can move out, but getting there.

[sulahnan]

Athessa gives Richard a flat look that looks an awful lot like his own look of impatience, and steps closer as if to take his hand whether he wants to give it or not.

But instead she just lowers her voice slightly, not quite conspiratorial, to say:

"I can reset the bone so it doesn't get any worse before we can get you healed."

Subtler than he's used to her being, probably. She hasn't told anyone he's a mage, and to Holden and Barrow it would just seem like she's asserting her qualifications to a skeptic weenie.

"It'll take less than a minute, Then we can get out of here, find the others, kill the fucker who did this to us, and go...home."

[thereneverwas]

"Going up," Barrow grunts as he kneels next to Holden, slipping one arm under the crook of his knees and the other around his back, "arm over my neck, mate, we'll keep you steady and upright."

He is, at least, fairly confident in his ability to keep his footing when the others are around to spot danger.

"...Barrow, by the way. Didn't get a chance to introduce ourselves before." They'd been too busy missioning, and what better opportunity than while he's literally holding the other man in his arms?

[acreage]

He rearranges his arms as directed, lets Barrow pick him up with minimal resistance — which isn't hard. The bandaging is helping him not lose blood so quickly, but it's not like he's remotely able to carry his own weight anymore.

"Holden." Then, with some wryness, "We'll have to meet under better circumstances next time."

Next time they work together and/or hang out, absolutely no horrorterror torture chambers.

[nonvenomous]

Athessa steps closer and Richard tenses in on himself, discomfort spring-loading through the stiff of his neck, wiry muscle in the backs of his arms plucked sharp through glossy blood.

“I’m not sure if it’s broken,” is the reply, just as low.

It is.

The hand he holds out under the pressure of her presence is kinked at the thumb, torn ligaments twisted away, with a palpable click where a fracture spirals through the bone. It’s also shaking. He is shaking all over, lending credence to the otherwise absurd implication that he is, in fact, a skeptic weenie.

[sulahnan]

He's not sure if it's broken, and she's the Empress of Orlais. She heaves a sigh and carefully assesses the damage with her own shaking hands, then quickly and without much warning beyond a quiet alright, she manipulates the digit to put the bones in better alignment.

It isn't painless. But she doesn't have any elfroot to offer and they're in a hurry. The half of her sleeve that isn't wrapped about Barrow's head gets used now to wrap Richard's wrist and hand to keep the bone from slipping back out of place and to keep those tendons from shifting.

"I'll lead. The walls are mirrored, so smash them as we pass so we know where we've been and so anyone coming up behind us has to walk over glass," Picking up her chain again, she keeps her gaze averted from the other elf in the room, but the mere thought of her on that table brings disgust to Athessa's expression. She walks toward the door.

"Let's go."

[thereneverwas]

"But what could be nicer than this," Barrow says with a weak smile, trying for levity where there's very little to be found.

"Oh, here."

He unwraps the chain from one of his fists by swinging it gently around, and passes it to Holden.

"Just in case."

[acreage]

Hard to say how useful he'll be in the situation of a just in case, but he's not going to be ungrateful.

"Thanks."

The chain's harder for him to wrap around a fist with slippery hands (blood, the cold sweat he's broken into) but he manages it loosely, and it's better than nothing.

[nonvenomous]

The sound Richard makes is not dignified -- a cry that he grinds down into a hiss, clagged rough behind his teeth while she works the bandage. Were he any more physically powerful, hanging onto him might have been a struggle. As is, brows peaked, blood everywhere, he simmers in ineffectual misery and is quiet once she’s moved away, having offered little in the way of meaningful resistance.

Now the team is moving out, and he cuts a resentful look after the lot of them, party as they all are to this unusually bad time.

But he does move to follow. Currently the only thing worse than being a useless accessory to this protagonist chain gang is the idea of not being a part of it while his hand is broken and he can’t cast and there is still a murderer loose.

ROLL

[sulahnan]

The hall is silent for a few moments as Athessa slowly walks, making sure the direction she chose will carry her further away from the room with the books and the bodies. She'll have to remember how to find it again.

When they reach the next door, she tries it to see if it's locked.

ROLL: ∞

[murderbaby]

OUTCOME: You open a door, and it's... another long, dark, mirrored hallway.

But you can hear familiar voices not far away. Go to them.