Gorlois started of course by searching through the house of the mayor, just because he was there anyway. The house was of wood, had two floors and 3 rooms on the first floor. Gorlois looked the kitchen, the workroom of the mayor and a room that seemed like the living room. He didn’t go upstairs because that still seemed like somehow a breach of privacy even if the house only belonged to a simple NPC. He found nothing special, no hidden doors in the walls, no simple trapdoors. Actually he found something in the workroom of the mayor, some kind of diary. But it had a lock on it and at the time he didn’t know any lockpicking skills or anything so he simply left it there.
After he had searched the house he went to the church, he wasn’t planning on searching through any of the shacks as he didn’t think he would find anything of importance in there, they were just shacks after all. He had chosen to only look through the important buildings and those where the mayor’s house, the church and the sawmill. The church was dedicated to Freya, or at least Gorlois thought it was as the small sculpting in front of it depicted a beautiful young woman wielding a spear (which was a bit weird actually).
When he went inside he found out that the church only consisted out of a single room with no side chambers for a priest or relics. The church was in a state of far decline which was kind of weird considering that the villagers probably should go to it every week but that was clearly not the case. There was dust everywhere, on the benches, the altar and of course the floor. There where cobwebs in the corners of the room and the windows where really grimy. Two of the windows where of stained glass and the first one showed the picture of a man standing before a table with another human on it. It looked like it was a doctor doing a surgery or autopsy which was not something that you would expect in a church as it wasn’t really religious or in theme with a goddess of bountiful harvests, peace and other stuff. The other window showed the goddess again with armour and a weapon along with some snakes, also not something you would expect from a harvest goddess. But Gorlois didn’t really care about to which god the church actually belonged or what it looked like.
He was much more interested in the secrets it might hold, so he looked underneath each bench, in front of the altar, behind it and even on the one grave covered by a stone slab that was placed in the mid of the church in the floor. On which was engraved ‘Here lies the founder of Notamotua, James Nota. He could find nothing and well although the grave was suspicious he didn’t want to lift the stone slab as he would then desecrate the tomb and that just wouldn’t feel right so unless he had a really good reason he wouldn’t do it. The stone slab would be to heavy for him to lift anyway.
As he was done in the church as well he went to the other side of the village where the sawmill was located. The sawmill didn’t seem like hit had worked for a long time, which was weird as the few villagers that where still there where obviously woodcutters and there where also quite a few trees cut down and arranged in piles at the edge of the village, ready to be used for the next process, although some of those piles now only consisted of rotten wood.
The villagers were cutting trees away in the forest but afterwards when it was one the piles they didn’t process it further or sell it to another party. They just left it on piles to rot away, it seemed as if they had once gotten a task to cut away the forest and now couldn’t stop.
The sawmill was only habituated by mice and other small animals. The sawmill had two rooms, a big one in which the saw machine stood. The saw machine was once powered by the water that pushed the waterwheel, which now had mostly rotten away in the river. The other room was a small room that in the past might have been the office of the supervisor of the sawmill. In this room Gorlois found a very humanlike doll sitting on the only chair in the room in front of a desk. The puppet had a pen in it’s hand and seemed to have been writing, which of course was absurd Gorlois thought as puppets can’t possibly write. Gorlois was also very sure it wasn’t a real corpse as it hadn’t decayed like a corpse would but rotten like wood did. If it hadn’t rotten Gorlois wasn’t even sure if he could have seen it wasn’t a human but a puppet that was sitting there. Gorlois kind of wanted to use this puppet to use his possession ability on but it was rotten and probably not really a good vessel anymore so Gorlois then gave up on that idea, instead he looked around the sawmill some more.
*ding*
New Skill: Detective (passive) [beginner lvl 01 00.00%]
[p=left]Points of interest for your current quest glow up. Objects will give away some information.[/p]
It seemed that while Gorlois was investigating he had unknowingly found a skill by repeating a certain act over and over again, namely the searching for clues. The skill was passive which was good and it seemed like it was also a kind of identify. No need to say that it was incredibly handy for his quest.
But after searching the whole sawmill again he didn’t find anything that the detective skill highlighted so this place was unimportant for his quest. After that he went back to the house of the mayor. Here he actually found his so important clue, the carpet in the living room glowed a bright golden glow, so Gorlois moved the carpet using his telekinesis skill and found a trapdoor. Of course Gorlois had looked for trapdoors earlier but it seemed that he had forgotten to look under this carpet. The trapdoor was easily to open, having no lock and this made Gorlois actually a bit uncertain, under the trapdoor there might be a mini-dungeon with traps and mobs after all.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
Gorlois decided that mobs wouldn’t really pay attention to small animals and he still had this rabbit corpse in his bag. He had kept one rabbit corpse after hunting because he wanted to try to posses it later on. Now seemed a good time to try and if the trapdoor really held a mini-dungeon or tightly guarded area he might as well try to make his own survival rate a little bit bigger.
Gorlois opened the trapdoor seeing that there was a stair down. He possessed the rabbit and his point of view changed quite a bit as he was suddenly a creature that lived close by the ground so everything seemed huge. He had hid his clothes and bag in the house before hand so he didn’t really think he would lose them or so. He went down the stairs which wasn’t as difficult as he had thought it to be as he was hopping as a normal rabbit did.
When he was at the bottom of the stairs the ‘dungeon discovered’ message didn’t appear that could mean that there had been people before or that it wasn’t a dungeon. But this hidden area seemed like a dungeon, it was a maze and there where some kind of puppet monsters patrolling the area. These puppet mobs seemed aggressive and where made out of wood. He had encountered one after turning around a corner immediately after he had gotten of the stair. These mobs were guardian puppets, their lvl ranged from lvl 10 to 30, far to dangerous to Gorlois but they didn’t notice the rabbit he had possessed. But this meant that Gorlois was only safe for 4 hours as after those 4 hours he would return to his spirit form and the guardian puppets would most likely attack him then. So he desperately searched through the maze looking for the secret it hid. This secret would probably be a kind of treasure room or something like that, and be located at the very centre of the maze as that was common in normal mazes. The many traps that were set up in the maze also didn’t trigger as he was the light for the pressure plates and to small for the tripwires.
After three hours and 40 minutes of turning around corners he finally came to a light glowing door. He was pretty scared he wouldn’t make it to the centre of the maze in time but it seemed that he did. The bottom part of the door was rotten so Gorlois hopped underneath the door and he was in a bigger room, it was like a study and the whole room had a faint glow about it.
In the room there was a wall with quite a lot of books most seemed to be scripts of plays but there were also some other books on a wide array of subjects. The other wall was full with tools for wood cutting and crafting, there was even a small supply of materials.
There was a desk with a chair in front of it and in that chair sat a doll. The doll was glowing brighter than most of the other things in the room but it seemed that there was something of even more importance to Gorlois quest on the table.
While looking around from the ground Gorlois was thrown out of the rabbit body. When he was back to his spirit form, he didn’t have his bag cause he left it by the mayor to keep it safe, this meant that he couldn’t pick up the rabbit again for later use so it would disappear in 10 minutes. After he had changed to his the chair with the puppet in it suddenly turned and the puppet started talking,
“Greetings, let me introduce myself, I was once the Puppet Master, a simple mortal, now I’m nothing more than a part of my own memories that I sealed up in me the day before I died.”
“Why did you put your own memories in a puppet form of you?”
“So that I could teach my successor the secret skills of a Puppet Master, and to guard the secrets that I kept in this room and village.”
“What are those secrets, I need to know them to resurrect this village and why actually did you not do that yourself?”
“This small village is broken beyond repair and soon the last residents will be as well, but the mayor wasn’t made to hold that information. He as all the other residents of this village will soon stop moving as well. Their task is done.”
“What was their task and am I correct if I say they are not human?”
“The task of the “villagers” was to help me while I was still a full human, I was their creator after all and now the spells that made them come to life finally are weakening. Their second task was to find me a successor after I fall to this state and it seems that you are that. You will succeed me in being a Puppet Master”
Class change: Puppet Master
[p=left]Become the hidden class Puppet Master. You get this option only once.[/p]
As hidden classes are very rare Gorlois happily said,
“Yes of course I’ll succeed you”
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Author's notes
1. Well if you see a horrible grammar mistake please point it out and suggestions and opinions are always welcome
2. Tell me what you think about the class (you only know the name right now but well .-.)