It's a bit embarrassing to admit, but you spend somewhere in the realm of an hour just sitting on your uncomfortable throne, staring off into space. The part of you that isn't a jibbering mess is overwhelmed by a strange kind of numbness. It's like waking up from a nap that you took at an odd time, where even if you can tell that you're awake, everything still doesn't quite feel real.
Eventually, once you realize that you've spent the past hour doing absolutely nothing, you try to jolt yourself out of your reverie, blinking your eyes rapidly and shaking your head. It doesn't quite erase the hazy surreality of being inside an evil castle from fiction, but it does finally propel you out of your stupor.
Forcing yourself to your feet, you walk steadily to the grandiose double doors at the front of the room and yank them open. With a bang and a whoosh, the doors swing rapidly apart, and you lose your balance, tumbling to the floor with an undignified yelp.
Why is it that literally nothing is going my way today?
With a groan of frustration, you push yourself back to your feet, muttering a few choice words under your breath. For such enormous doors, they sure weren't very heavy. Seriously, it's like someone installed slabs of foam and then just painted it over to look like wood!
Breathing in a deep sigh, you clamp down on the half-formed rant before it can build up enough momentum to derail your train of thought. Not that you really have a train of thought beyond "stop sitting around, doing nothing." Brushing a bit of dust off of your dress, you straighten your back and stride with false confidence out of the room, emerging into some kind of overlarge vestibule.
Room Discovered: Reception Hall
The atmosphere of the room is still dreary, but not nearly as sinister as the throne room you just exited. Red light still streams in through more Gothic windows, but the ominously glowing crystals have been replaced by simple candles. Wide stone pillars reach up from the black tiled floor, decorated with ornate carvings that spiral around them.
You can see several hallways that lead out from the room in different directions, so, lacking any information, you opt to simply head down the one directly in front of you. As you peer through its doorways to the adjacent rooms, part of you expects to find lots of empty chambers; it just sort of seems to fit the general atmosphere of the spooky castle.
As it is, you're surprised to find that most of the rooms are actually well stocked. Most of them appear to be various sitting rooms, furnished with rugs, chairs, and small tables. A few are built more like offices, with a single large desk and a few empty bookshelves. Through one particularly grand set of double doors lies what you want to call a dining room. It's a pretty massive space with tall, arching windows and three long tables spread across the length of the floor
Room Discovered: Dining Hall
Eventually, at the end of the corridor, you find a staircase descending to a lower floor. Sparing one last glance behind you and trying to burn the path you've taken so far into your memory, you turn and advance down the steps.
Rather than a hallway, what greets you at the bottom of the stairs is an enormous, breath-taking library. Massive, multi-story walls of bookshelves fill your vision, surrounded by a skeleton of wooden catwalks and ladders.
Room Discovered: Library
Eagerly, you rush to examine some of the titles in the nearest shelf, only to find that they're all written in German. As you amble down, scanning spines, the languages continue to shift. French, Spanish, Greek, Arabic, Korean… and those are just the ones you recognize! Some of them are written in strange runic scripts, or characters that might be Chinese or Japanese or something else entirely. You don't see any books written in English, though you've barely explored a fraction of the shelves here.
As you take in the sheer size of the room, the thousands upon thousands of tomes that it contains, you realize that it would take you hours to even glance at all of their titles. Silently, you make a promise to yourself to come back here at some point and find where all the English volumes are. You wonder what kind of books Salem likes to collect.
Still, for now, you reluctantly make your way to what looks like the library's main entrance and leave, coming into another hallway that looks identical to the one upstairs.
All of the doors in the corridor, aside from the library's entryway, are closed shut. Cracking one open, you discover something that reminds you a bit of a college dorm room, albeit a rather lavish one. Certainly, it's more spacious than any college dorm you've ever seen, but most of that space is occupied by two large beds and a desk. A window lets the red glow of outside stream into the room. Not exactly spartan, but not the height of luxury either.
Room Discovered: Guest Quarters
Clicking the door shut, you crack open another one across the hall. The room inside is identical down to the color of the sheets. As you close that one, you move to open another before freezing as a thought strikes you. If these are the living quarters, then what happens if you open a door to wherever Cinder or her minions are staying?
"Hello, Your Grace, was there something you needed?"
"Oh, don't mind me. I'm just wandering around, opening random doors for some completely unsuspicious reason."
Just imagining the awkwardness is enough to make you shudder. Quietly taking a step back and removing your hand from the doorknob, you opt to continue on with your exploration and leave the rest of the rooms in the hallway uninspected.
Eventually, the corridor takes a sharp turn to the right, and you're presented with several interesting sights. For one, there's an enormous staircase straight ahead leading further downwards, but that's honestly the least attention-grabbing of what you see.
To your left is a doorless archway that leads into a room of truly absurd size. The floor appears to be one huge slab of polished marble, and massive pillars stretch out of the it like intricately carved trees. It reminds you a bit of the vestibule attached to the conference hall upstairs, only much larger. Aside from some glowing crystals and flickering candles for lighting, it appears to be empty.
Room Discovered: Ballroom
To your right is another archway leading into a smaller but still impressive room. It's carpeted in a deep, purplish indigo, and filled with… well, you're not entirely sure, but it looks a bit like a museum exhibit. Swords, spears, some pieces of clothing, and a few other odds and ends are displayed in clear glass cases. A pair of antlers are hung on a wall rack. You
really hope they're from an actual deer, not a faunus.
Room Discovered: Trophy Room
Disturbed by the ostentatious display of what you think might be blood trophies, you hurry down the stairs and find yourself in some kind of outdoor courtyard. Well, something like a courtyard at any rate. There isn't any greenery, instead replaced by arrays of glowing crystals in various patterns and colors. It's quite beautiful, if a bit eerie, and you enjoy taking in the scenery as you continue on your way.
Room Discovered: Courtyard
As you reenter the castle's interior, your eyes are drawn to an anachronistic mixture of images. An open door reveals a collection of weaponry and armor, and although some of it seems to fit the classic Medieval mood of the castle, most of it appears to be high-tech. Silver-painted suits of armor with sleek black visors stand in one corner, and several very complicated-looking guns adorn an entire wall. A few bulky, bladed abominations of engineering that you think are supposed to be Mechashift weapons are stored on shelves.
Room Discovered: Armory
The hall branches off to the side, but you opt to continue forward. A few more steps brings you to what has to be a mad scientist's lab. Perhaps it's Dr. Watts'? Regardless, piles of half-assembled machinery are scattered all about the place, and a tangled spiderweb of wires coats the entire floor. A few colored LED lights blink out at you from the dimly lit room, and strange noises whir and hum from inside.
Room Discovered: Science Lab
You consider entering the laboratory, but your mind conjures up a vivid image of one of the wires electrocuting you through your bare feet, and you hastily decide to move on from it. If you really need to know what's going on in there, you're sure Watts will probably know the answer.
The next room you encounter is quite thematically different. Several wooden tables occupy the sides of the room, covered in loosely scattered papers that appear to contain hand-written notes. Pressed to the back wall of the room are several tall shelves, some of which contain books, and others of which contain small glass vials with colorful substances in them. There aren't any windows, but the entire room is well lit by a myriad of candles that twinkle from every available surface, including the floor.
And on the floor… you hesitate to say "ritual circle," but there's some kind of strange geometric design etched in chalk, all inscribed within a large circle. Candles and colored vials are arrayed on it at points where lines intersect. If you were back home, you'd say this was the basement of some pimple-faced fifteen-year-old with
chuunibyou, but considering the setting...
Room Discovered: ??? Lab
Slowly, you tiptoe into the place, careful (just in case!) to keep your feet outside the mysterious circle. As you examine the papers on the tables, you find that they're written in a combination of English and one of those runic scripts you think you remember seeing in the library. As such, there's very little to glean from them, though you catch a theme that they seem to mostly talk about experiments, and you think you see a few equations in them as well? It's difficult to tell, since there's so much written in runes.
Making your way to the far wall where the shelves are, you realize that the contents of those glass vials are all powders, the firelight glinting off of their vibrant colors.
Dust. Recalling a certain incident between Weiss Schnee and Ruby Rose, you make certain not to disturb the shelf or its glassware as you continue on to the bookshelves.
Disappointingly, you notice immediately that the book titles are written in the runic script. You grab a few of them and flip through their pages, but you don't find a single English word in any of them. You're about to turn away when the spine of one especially thick tome sitting on the bottom-most shelf catches your eye.
English to Bav'li: A Reference Dictionary
A smile curls up across your lips as you quickly bend down and easily snatch the book from its resting place. Sure enough, as you turn it over to look at its cover, there seem to be two titles, one in English and another below it in the other language.
Bav'li, you suppose it's called.
As you open it to a random page and start leafing through, you're delighted to find that it's exactly the kind of goldmine its title implied it was. Essentially, it seems the entire book is just one long list of alphabetically ordered English words, each followed by one or more words written in runes. You still have no idea how to pronounce any of the foreign words, but you have no doubt that this book will help immensely if you need to read through any of these other books.
It's a bit unwieldy to carry with you, though surprisingly not at all heavy, so you set it back down on the shelf where you found it. You'll definitely make sure to come back here and collect the dictionary when you have time to sit down and read.
For now, however, it's time to move forward with your exploration. Backing out of the odd, occult-ish room (once again careful not to cross over the chalk circle), you make your way to the stairs at the end of the corridor. Interestingly, though you hadn't noticed from the far end of the hallway, this staircase is labeled with a metal sign:
Grimm Dens
You pause as you read that, letting its meaning sink in. Your first instinct is to immediately turn around and avoid the deadly monsters, but… well, you
are supposed to be the Queen of the Grimm, aren't you? And if it so happens that you didn't inherit Salem's command of the Grimm the way you inherited her magic, you can always just do to them what you did to your conference table, right? Then again, your magic does feel a bit strained, and you don't know if you have Salem's immortality, and who knows how many Grimm could be down there…
Curiosity and paranoia war in your brain for several moments as you stand there. Eventually, curiosity ekes out a victory as you try to reassure yourself that the Grimm probably won't pose you much of a threat anyway. Nonetheless, you step down each stair with bated breath, eyes alert for any hint of danger.
As you make your descent, a strange smell, like some odd mixture of smoke and petrichor, begins to seep into your nostrils, growing stronger and sharper. It takes several flights until you reach the bottom of the stairs, leading to a stone brick tunnel whose lack of windows gives you the distinct impression that you're underground.
The tunnel eventually opens into a wide, circular chamber lit by four enormous braziers that hang from pillars. A steel dais sits in the center of the room, covered in strange patterns. Dozens of tunnels, each slightly smaller than the one through which you entered, snake off at even intervals from the chamber's wall. Most of them are barred by thick, black gates, but three of the gates are wide open. The only thing you can make out from within those tunnels is a faint purple glow.
Once more, you hesitate. You feel like you've just entered the Chamber of Secrets, and a Basilisk Grimm is going to suddenly pop out from one of the tunnels and snap you in half with a single bite. Hell, for all you know, there might actually
be a Basilisk species of Grimm that happens to inhabit Salem's castle down here, seeing as a lot of Grimm tend to be inspired by Earth mythos.
Again, however, you push past that paranoia. Knowing if/how well you control the Grimm is
important, and you're not going to find a better environment for that than here, where you can run away and shut the gates behind you if something goes amiss. Taking a deep breath in and steeling yourself, you steadily walk into the nearest open passageway.
The tunnel curves downward at a fairly steep angle, at least for walking, and the entrance quickly disappears as you travel further through it, brick turning into smooth stone. Luminescent crystals line the walls, casting the purple glow that you caught from the main chamber.
You walk for nearly a full minute until the tunnel opens into a vast cavern. Stalactites and stalagmites reach from the floor and ceiling like massive fangs. Huge crystal spires jutt out from the stone at every odd angle, painting the room with their eerie glare.
And you are not alone.
A sea of black flesh and white bone writhes and undulates before you, spangled with pinpricks of deep, burning red. Nearer to you, you can see a few dozen individual Creatures of Grimm away from the horde below, claws clinging to the rock formations as they stare directly at you.
You tense, prepared to unleash a blast of telekinetic force at the monsters nearby and bolt back up the tunnel, but they don't attack you. After a few seconds of staring, they simply return to prowling through the cavern by their lonesome, and you release a shaky breath. You don't recognize all the species here (though you see what you think might be Beowolves and Ursai), but you're pretty sure you wouldn't want to wind up at the business end of all of their claws, teeth, horns, or God knows what else.
As you calm down and continue to take in the sight of all the Grimm before you, something strange wells up in your gut. It feels similar to your magic, but… strangely older, wilder. Curious, you grab hold of the energy and let it rush through your body. Immediately, your vision sharpens, sounds become louder, your muscles tighten, and your body starts to thrum. It's like someone injected you with five shots of caffeine and dialed your senses up to fifteen.
Trait Discovered: Grimm Affinity [High]
Aspect Unlocked: Imbue Self [High]
Almost instinctively, you release a pulse of this new energy, and you can feel it ripple quickly out across the entire cavern in a wave, almost too quickly for you to process. In an instant, the sea of Grimm ceases its movement, and thousands of glowing red eyes fixate on you. This time, however, you aren't afraid.
Separate into species, you order, instinctively infusing the idea into your energy and discharging another pulse. You're certain that if you tried to throw arround your magic like this, you'd quickly exhaust it to the point of impotence, but the Grimm energy doesn't seem to abate in the slightest, like you're drawing water from a bottomless well.
Aspect Unlocked: Command Grimm [High]
The effect is almost instantaneous. The Grimm horde bursts into riotous motion, sometimes trampling over each other in their haste. Half a minute later, there are several distinct crowds of them assembled throughout the cavern, like evil splotches of paint on a stone canvas. They continue to stare at you. Awaiting more orders, you realize.
Coughing softly into your fist, you draw yourself out of your reverie. Certainly, it's good news that the Grimm won't try to attack you, but you wonder how far your control extends. There have to be some kind of limits to it, right? You should probably run some tests to figure that out. Well, from what you can see, all of them are quadrupedal, so…
All of you, raise your right foreleg.
Simultaneously, every Creature of Grimm lifts up the directed appendage like a saluting army.
Half of you, lower your right foreleg.
In roughly even distribution throughout the cavern, half of them let their leg drop back to the ground. You grin, watching the thousands of evil abominations heed your every word.
Do the Macarena.
Your jaw drops. You meant it as a joke and kind of expected them to just stare at you in confusion, but… well, they're trying. They really are. It's just, they aren't super great at it. Many of them aren't built for bipedal motion, so they keep tumbling over midway through the dance and heaving to start over. Even the ones who can reliably keep upright, like the Beowolves and Ursai, don't quite have the flexibility needed to perform all of the motions. Particularly, they seem to struggle with crossing their arms to touch their shoulders.
You snort at the ridiculous scene. Then, you start to giggle. Eventually, unable to help yourself, you break into full blown laughter, clutching at your sides. If you were back home, this would make for such a great Youtube video.
Eventually, your mirth dies down into chuckles as the novelty starts to wear off. It's still really funny, but you have more important things to do.
Stop, you command, and they freeze. Many of them, stuck in odd positions, topple over, but they otherwise stay motionless. You allow yourself another few seconds of snickering before you forcefully calm yourself.
So, you know that they can perform fairly complex tasks as long as they're physically capable of doing so. Your range encompasses the entirety of the cavern, so you'll have to wait for later to test that. Maybe there are some specific details you could test for, though? For example, what if you gave contradicting orders?
You quickly order several Beowolves to separate from their pack and come closer to you. As they bound over, you consider what commands to give them. By the time they've arrived, you already have several in mind.
Lie down and don't get up, you order one, and it quickly sinks to the floor. To another, you say,
force that other Beowolf to its feet.
The second Beowolf quickly rushes over and digs its snout into the first one's belly, trying to push the beast upward. The first quickly snaps back at the offending Grimm, biting viciously in an effort to dislodge it without getting up.
Stop! You order them both. That became rather violent.
Lie down and don't get up, but more importantly, don't attack anything or anyone, you try. Then,
Force that Beowolf to its feet.
As you watch those two orders play out, you're intrigued to see that the second Beowolf eventually manages to push the first into a standing position. Seemingly satisfied with its work, the second Beowolf leaves the first alone, which immediately returns to lying on the ground.
So, the Beowolf failed its first task in order to fulfill its second, which you marked as being a higher priority. Interesting. You wonder how it would have prioritized if you didn't explicitly say which task was more important.
When you test that scenario, the same scene plays itself out, with the Beowolf refusing to defend itself. So then, you suppose that means it prioritizes the latest order?
Finally, you turn to the Beowolf still lying down and order,
Don't get up even if I tell you to. You wait a few seconds, watching it lie there listlessly.
Get up. The creature rises to its feet. Well, you expected that, but it's good to know you can't lock yourself out of command.
Thoughtful, you place a hand to your chin. Clearly, you have some pretty impressive control of the Grimm, but you're not quite sure what else there is to do here.
What to do, what to do…
/-/-/-/ Dreamer: 1.4 \-\-\-\
[] Test something else (write in)
[] Leave
-[] Bring some Grimm with you
--[] How many?
--[] What kind?
--[] Any orders for them?
[] Do some reading
-[] Pick up that translation dictionary
--[] Pick up some other books from the same room
-[] Get some books from the library
--[] Search for English books
-[] Look for books elsewhere
[] Go outside
-[] Test the range of your Grimm control
[] Look for other people in the castle
-[] Hazel
-[] Watts
-[] Mercury
-[] Emerald
-[] Write in: what do you want to say to them.
[] Write in
Note: you don't have time limit anymore, so you can literally vote for all of these if you want.
Ongoing vote: long term goals (new options from write-ins are in
orange)
[] [LT] Take over the world.
[] [LT] Make Salem's evil organization into a force of good. Somehow.
[] [LT] Safely dismantle Salem's organization and get some friends that
aren't psychopaths and/or megalomaniacs.
-[] [LT] Create a new organization that
doesn't want to end the world.
--[] [LT] Keep the people from the old organization who aren't too far gone.
--[] [LT] Enforce peace and equal rights across the world.
-[] [LT] Join normal society.
--[] [LT] Become a Huntress!
[] [LT] Keep to Salem's original plans for now because without a powerful enemy, society would collapse in on itself.
-[] [LT] Work behind the scenes to get society to the point that you can safely remove the Grimm.
[] [LT] Write in
):