Here I will document all our findings about the organization with the three masked men, as we try to recover our bodies. My brother and I live on in the hope of one day restoring our bodies. Not just to recover the bodies that were stolen from us in the halls, but to one day have our old and true bodies back! I think it is a hopeless dream, but it is all we have. This section is dedicated to discovering the culprits who stole our faces.
Asking the people of the tribe yielded nothing. No one has ever heard or seen hooded men wearing dog masks. When I discussed it with other survivors, I began referring to them as the Cerberus Cult, as they looked like classic cultists and the three masked men resembled the three headed demon dog from greek mythology.
I believe the three masks were of the same breed of dog with three different expressions: "Sneering", "Tongue Out" and "Barking", but another survivor disagreed. He was certain they all held the same blank expression. I've written before, they had different expressions, but the other survivor's disagreement makes me uncertain. What if the trauma is making me hallucinate? Or at least makes me imagine living dogheads growling, barking and sneering at me. How useful can my notes be, if I am recounting the events incorrectly?
I have several times tried to think back to the moments we were trapped and escorted through the hall. It is all a blur, it all happened so sudden. Our minds had no time to settle from the sudden change in environment, it was hard to access what was going on. The group we arrived with was large, but my recounting of how many we were range from thirty to the hundreds. The time we spend in queues felt like ages, but our sense of time passing must also have been impacted from the shock and chaos we were experiencing.
One thing we could agree on was that the walls in the hall all had moss growing and water damage. Some of the other survivors suspected the hall could have been located either near water or in a very hummid environment. So far this is our biggest clue other than where we woke up after they put each of our souls into animals.
We woke up in the soaring monkey tribe's forest. It is unclear where exactly we were as we quickly lost track of it. The forest acts like an organic labyrinth and each passing day changes every aspect of it as the flora grows and wriggles into a completely new view. Could the cult be located in or possibly under the forest? Or did they bring us far away from their whereabouts, so we would never have a chance to find them? We have so far kept to the forest, as the tribe tells of many dangers outside. We hope to eventually take part in an expedition to the outer edges and learn more about this world. Until then, we will be looking for clues to the Cerberus Cult within the forest as we strengthen ourselves for the unavoidable conflict we will face once we find them.
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What did the cult earn from doing this to us?
As I explore my skill list and discover more about "Soul", I have come up with theories for what the Cerberus Cult seeks to achieve by wrenching newcomers' souls from their bodies.
1) They want the bodies we arrived in.
When we arrived, our bodies had been changed to fit our classes. melee classes had strengthened muscles, agile classes were slim and had strong leg muscles, classes that rely heavily on magic or skills were thin, fragile and had pure and smooth skin. I believe my Nurse class was among the latter.
The body of a Peacebringer may be highly valuable. With the ability of changing bodies you could live forever and a strong body fitting your needs may have a market. They may store or possibly sell the bodies they steal. We can only hope they have kept our bodies, as it could quickly become an impossible search, if our bodies have been moved, especially if they are walking around with new owners.
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2) The metallic spheres may do more than trap our soul.
Many people were supposedly trapped inside these metallic spheres. They ran out and replaced them with captured animals before it became our turn.
We never got the chance to see one for ourselves and peoples' descriptions varied. While we don't know more of their appearence, I remind myself daily to look out for them. If we find one, it may lead us to the cult. It is rumoured that a man known as Petramus may possess one. Scouts of the tribe have seen him enter his tower carrying "a ball of iron". The soaring monkeys are wary of him, as he has, since he came to the forest, been tearing down trees for his ever expanding garden surrounding his tower.
Could these containers be used as a power source? Could our soul be used as fuel? These spheres at least seem to be used for painless storage of their victims' souls. A soul trapped inside would hardly be able to fight back or escape. What could they possibly do with these newcomers souls? - I fear the worst.
3) They seek to document and catalog every Class and Skill.
Before they lined us up infront of the swapping chambers, they made us sit down and shuffle through the floating panels that appeared. We were instructed to go through and share the title and description of the skill list.
They must have been writing this information down using a skill like my Nursing Notes skill. Most of us only had to mention the first ten or twenty skills, while a few of the others had to keep going down their list, supossedly until the end. I suspect they already have a list covering many classes and with most of us, they checked if what we said matched their existing information. While the ones who had to go through the full list were undocumented classes.
An encyclopedia of the classes and skills of this world must be a huge undertaking. The endless amount of classes I could pick from and the massive skill list I got as a Nurse indicates the documentation will have to cover thousands upon thousands of skills.
They may be trying to solve the meta and discover the most powerful approach. If the cultists are seasoned Peacebringers, that would imply they are humans like us. For my own sanity, I will have to believe this is unlikely. The disturbing consequences of them potentially being victims, who unknowningly got pulled into this, is too much for me to handle. They are demons, who stripped our chances away.
4) They store the souls of the most useful classes in metallic spheres.
Could it be possible; they collect our souls in metallic spheres or switch us with animals based on our classes?
They may recruit the people they trapped inside the spheres and gain their loyalty through forcefully stripping away their freedom, to grant it back, as long as they follow orders.
If this is the case, it means my brother and I have picked classes, which the cult deems worthless. The way they dumped us into the wild could mean we don't pose a threat to them. No matter what skills we choose, we won't stand a chance against them. I don't want to believe this, but if it is true, it may be suicide to seek them out.
With the endless amounts of skills this place has on offer, it wouldn't be too unlikely they have a skill that lets them extract or use other classes' skills. Like a mimicry, if a skill can imitate or record another skill.
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The Cerberus Cult could pose a threat on a world scale, with the power they may be gathering, if any of these theories turn out true.
The primitive soaring monkey tribe may not know of their presence, but surely they can't hide such massive operations posing such an imminent threat to others' rule. If we could just leave the forest and communicate with peacebringers, who likely have established a governing body with sprawling cities and municipalities. We should be able to learn more about the cult, their objectives and be able to estimate their true threat through them.
We will need to learn much more about this world and increase our fighting capabilities before engaging with this highly knowledgeable and experienced organisation.