the house of manouk | test drive meme

[groundrules]

Hello, hello! Our latest event — doubling as a test drive meme and stretching until 12 August — is a one-off incursion in an uncharted time pocket dimension — the House of Manouk.

Anyone can hit up the test drive meme, but you will need an invite from an existing player to apply on 5 August. Have fun!

THE HOUSE OF MANOUK

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THE TERRACE

Old or new, you wake up on a white-stone terrace dominated by a twisting hedge maze that houses great columns, tattered statues, ponds, rivers, gazebos and pergolas — and high looming walls of thickly bound ivy, bloomed roses or thorny vines. Walking the Terrace somehow always brings you deeper into the maze, while a flushed, sunless sky stares down, unblinking.

You experience no thirst, hunger or language barriers here. Old translation & communication pendants can nevertheless be found scattered across the Terrace and Grounds.

New arrivals encounter the sorceress Karsa, who explains you were likely summoned by one of the undead lords who seeks control of Akhuras — and reached, along with the party she leads, a pocket dimension outside of time. Karsa’s associate, the Merchant, instructed to exit the time dimension by finding Ellethian waypoints — typically stone tokens engraved with the carvings of an eye with a sun for a pupil. Karsa may activate them for you to leave this place.

Your mission is to search the House and find the waypoints of Ellethia or of the rival Dawn’s Reach Trade Company without attracting the ire of the local exiled overlord(s).

■ Some of the statues you discover on the Terrace seem crudely carved, gaining the features of your loved ones, the longer you stare at them. Some seek to throttle. Escape them by having someone else stare at them, becoming their new target, or by leading them in a crowd of other statues.

■ Beware getting pricked by thorns: covetous vines can quickly ensnare and pull you into the maze’s green walls, or bind your hand to that of your companion.

■ The maze’s weather often mimics your mood: nice and balmy for contentment, cold for fear, torrential rain for sadness and a heatwave to answer anger. Smile.

■ Every now and then, you hear screams from other parts of the maze. Run, and you might find pairs of steel manacles or rusted chain on bloodied grounds, from where fresh rose bushes quickly rise up. Investigate.

■ Go deeper in the maze, and you find a heap of small stone tablets. Most list names, ages, occupations and include loving remarks, such as the finest husband or she smiled ever bright. Alarmingly, when your companion’s back is turned, you find tablets engraved with your handwriting, saying, don’t turn your back to them, blood reeks strong on them and that’s not their name. There are no waypoint tokens here.

■ Spend enough time in the maze, and you discover an old, red-eyed, white-haired and hunchbacked man with two chainless shackles on his wrists. He ignores you, muttering to himself about how the House must keep moving, moving. The House doesn’t like you. The House is awake. The House should sleep. The old man hits or trips you with his cane, or you might wake to find him hovering very closely over you. Engage him.

■ Now and then, he seems suddenly alert, if not outright fearful, shrieking that he comes and rushing to tinker with pulleys and stone mechanisms hidden within the maze vine walls. The maze’s architecture abruptly changes, with the ground quaking, walls shifting, while old plants wilt and fresh ones rise up within heartbeats. As the House changes, you might spot a long, spiralling staircase at short distance. Go down into…

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THE GROUNDS

The ground level of the House is splintered in dozens of decaying rooms, many locked. There are no windows here, dust thick in every corner, while faint scratches and canine footprints mar the floors — the marks of dozens of great skeletal hounds that haunt the corridors.

The dogs lead, chase or drag you towards a shuttered hall room, where a middle-aged, red-eyed and white-haired man furiously searches through haphazard mounds of tousled tomes. He too wears shackles. His manner is perfunctorily polite, as he calls back his dogs.

”…not from around here, are you? Must have broken time. Hooligan. Well, you’ve travelled centuries to be disappointed. There are no mysteries here, no epiphanies. All the great wells of myth and magic? Some other pigs have drunk them dry. Blame your luck, for bringing you to the shambling hut of — …the fine House of Manouk. Taravast’s greatest necromancer, til his mind turned to slaughter.

I was his disciple. Lisanther. Must’ve come from high on, did you? These cursed shackles… he senses everyone in his House through them. If he feels us on his scent, he works his little screws and wheels and moves the House stairs. Impressed? Don’t be. He’s a wreck, who feasts on time echoes of the anguished. That’s him. Paints a picture, doesn’t he? Stay out of his sights, or you’ll wear his chains soon too. Same as me, same as the dog he keeps in the dungeons. Dragged back every time he wanders.

If you want to make yourself useful, help me. I traded fairly with a caravan of the Dawn’s Reach Trade Company. They say they left behind scrolls in these grounds, with the words to free me. They overcharge, but they don’t lie. Help me find them. Break my chains, and I’ll break us out. I can. I swear it. ”

Deeper into the claustrophobic Grounds, you find specters of men and women, chained just like Lisanther — their skin translucent, their gazes lethargic. They feel neither dead nor alive to the magically sensitive. They are either very present in the moment or barely recall their whereabouts. If asked about tokens, they say the Dawn’s Reach Trade Company left scrolls in the Grounds main quarters:

▶ Bathing quarters

At times pristine and delightful, at others blood-marked and torn. The waters abruptly run very hot, cold or silty. The spectre of a wo/man might appear in the tub, staring unblinkingly or murmuring that people do all sorts of wickedness in this bathroom: they have even witnessed stabbings, treasures being hidden beneath tile boards, and even a birthing!

▶ Kitchens

Sprawling and soot-laden, bursting with supplies of stale wheat, eccentric cakes, exotic fruit and spice jars, these kitchens were built for long service. A heavy cauldron bubbles and boils a green broth in a cold fireplace, where ash and stone drown wood. A circle of spectres troubleshoots how to improve the meal — just as the kitchens’ doors slam shut, and they cordially invite you to do the legwork for their recipe. They instruct you to chop, clean and prepare the most unusual ingredients: hair of a dog, salt, moulded thyme, arsenic, one of your finest love stories… they’ll tire of their creation and release you within the hour. Don’t dine, dash.

▶ Sleeping chambers

There’s rest for the wicked in these deserted sleeping quarters, which boast exceptionally well-stuffed cushions and pillows, blankets and ‘reading materials’ — torn pages from books of history and magic. Some speak of the desperate attempts of the rulers of Taravast to flee death. Others talk of using spells, the elements and even mass sacrifice to achieve immortality. Enjoy your rest, only perturbed by occasional distant screams —

…or perhaps by a large, feral white bear that bursts in to briefly chase you, before disappearing. Veteran travellers may recognise him as the creature of Anurr.

Some of the chain-breaking scrolls of the Dawn’s Reach Trade Company can be found in each of the main rooms, along with some of the Company’s talismans, marked as waypoints, which should be brought to Karsa. See what your character finds.

Finish up here, or meander down a final stairwell to —

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THE DUNGEONS

Cold, deteriorating, crumbling — difficult to say if this is a tightly bound knot of underground tunnels, or a torturous weave of lost dungeons. Parts of the floor crumble to reveal abyssal depths below — or suddenly appear beneath your feet, to help your progress. Emptied, creaking bookcases abound. Here and there, you see your reflection in shattered wall-length mirrors, moving differently than you, or just slightly older or younger than you are.

■ Revived skeletons patrol the corridors, scantily armed with base blades, stones and torches. They largely ignore you, only blocking your path if you near a magically-locked stone door in the back of the Dungeons, from where you hear… human pleas.

■ Door engravings instruct to speak out the three truths of each day. Nearby, you find a mound of crumbled stone tablets, along with three golden ones raised on pedestals that read:

▶ with morning, my body is a weapon, sun-seeking, righteousness-bound

▶ by midday, my flesh has bent and battered, a shield of justice for young life to come

▶ come evening, I am blood and bone, a humble house to hope eternal

■ Tip bookcases into the narrow corridors to prevent the skeletal guards from reaching you, as you search diligently through the stone debris beneath the golden pedestals. You might even find Ellethian waypoint tokens: palm-wide, marked with a sun pupil. Take them to Karsa immediately… or open the now unlocked dungeon door as a man calls out.

■ Enter, and you discover an dimly lit dungeon alcove, with animate skeletal heads hanging on each wall. They cackle, Mind your step. Heed them and look for holes in the floor tiles — needle-thin spikes emerge from there periodically.

■ Go deeper, and you discover a large bare stone room, scantly livened by torches bearing green fire. A small hole — barely enough to fit a grown man standing and lying down — has been dug into one of the walls and secured. This inhumane prison’s bars crackle and sizzle with magical electricity. A skeletal hound waits by, with a set of keys fastened to its collar.

■ A white-haired, red-eyed twenty-something young man sprawls haphazardly in the prison: battered, swathed in rags, shackled and wild. He holds out his blood-tipped hand between the bars, but fails to lure the dog close — and calls out to you, instead:

”You must be mad to come to me. The old man sent you? Finally? Good. How wonderful. I’ll spit on you, and I’ll spit on his grave. He left me here to die. And now he’s remembered me? What does he want? …no. It doesn’t matter. Rip the keys off that mutt and get me out of here. ”

You can engage or release him, if you coax the key from the recalcitrant dog. Or leave him be and see Karsa with your waypoint token.

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NOTES:

■ There are multiple waypoint tokens to leave the time dimension: the Dawn’s Reach Trade Company talismans, hidden in the Ground rooms, and the Ellethian tokens, found in the dungeons. Bring whichever one you discover to Karsa.

■ You can optionally solve the mystery of Lisanther, the prisoner, Manouk and the spectres.

■ The House’s layout changes periodically, but characters can find the stairs to travel across the three levels every few hours.

■ Mention in your top level if you play an old timer or a test driving tourist. TDMers can make both logs and network prompts here!

■ QUESTIONS & NPC INBOX!

Comments

[thewarder]

[His eyes carefully follow the tracks she pointed out noticing just how they stop. He had noticed them before, sure, but he had figured that someone had some sort of skill which allowed them to scale the wall.

It hadn't occurred to him until that moment that perhaps the walls themselves were moving.]

The walls move? [He asks her for confirmation.]

[His concern about the walls themselves drop as the chains jingle somewhere from the northeast of them, assuming the sun moves in the same direction as it does in their world.

He moves to step around her in that direction, putting himself between whatever it and the sound is, although it's unclear if even it would come from this direction given the corners and walls of the maze.]

A fade? [His voice is soft, barely noticeable. It's guess perhaps too inspired by their recent encounters, but the closest he can think of.

He pulls his blade as he moves to peak around the corner.]

[mashiara]

( Luck has it that nothing is around the immediate corner.

She doesn't verbally confirm what she said, simply shooting him a look implying she has no intention of repeating herself, and that he clearly sees the same, so why waste words on the confirmation? It won't change or assist them in whatever's to come, though her careful walking turns to an equally careful freeing of her long knife. Her ability to touch the One Source is... she supposes possible even here, she's felt it like a gasp of air to deprived lungs, but it's no ready friend, no willing partner.

The winds are more inclined to speak, and those she can hear now carry old death and warnings. Nothing she hadn't been able to guess since they woke up here instead of back home. Or elsewhere, she supposed. )

Nothing of the kind that I've met so far. ( A pause, and a grimace, there at his side while not seeking to impede his free ability to move. She just doesn't like being at anyone's back without an express reason, guarding because of how they must move: she's been fighting the dead here with nothing remotely magical to help since her ... well, not her arrival, but since after her arrival's train ride brought them to Yancai. ) They're... walking dead, more often. Ghosts and haunts. Living who control the dead, and dead who control other dead. Not fades, they don't slip in and out of shadows, and not trollocks. About as dumb as some, and less afraid.

( She hadn't encountered the creatures who'd likewise been stopped by moving waters, though she would have been pleased to know some were, in the woods of recently departed Yancai.

Graciously, she nods her head forward: he can take point. He already is, but this way is more cooperation and less anything else. (No, it's the pretense of permission. Allow a Wisdom her ways.)

Should he continue around the corner and down the short way, the figure of an old, hunched over man bearing shackled wrists, oddly absent of chains (from where had the sound come, then? she does not know, but is irritated by the illogical nature of it), a cane, and endless mutterings difficult to make out. The word "house" might become clear, the closer they are, or the closer he wanders toward them, or they toward him. )

[thewarder]

[There are no objections as she moves by his side. She's silent as they do so, just as quiet as him in a way that's almost unnatural. Her skill is easy to be distracted by but he must not be distracted by it here. It is far too dangerous for him to get lost in such thoughts in a place like this.

They make their way around another empty corner before he speaks softly again.]

Living controlling the dead? [A shudder ruins down his spine at the thought of that.] Like in the way a Fade leads a trolloc?

[It's such an unfamiliar concept to him that he's having a hard time wrapping his mind around it. Yet, it's good information to have.

They make their way around to the next way and he see's the old man whose shackles look like they should be the source of the chains and his eyes look strongly disappointed when they're still missing. Is the chain from somewhere else?]

Should... we look for this house before we find whatever the chain is or? [He's asking her because she clearly has a better idea on what is going on here, and he's not afraid to differ to others for ideas when they are better informed.]

[mashiara]

Similar and different.

( There's more to the dead she's had personal battles with, from the ways they'd recalled themselves in fractured parts to the ceaselessness of their pursuits. Their anger, on the red night, and in reversed years later, fresh under the influences of the one called Huntress.

Nynaeve grits her teeth, unaware of how strongly until the dull ache of her jaw penetrates. )

I say try asking him ( a nod of her head to the old man, in his continued mutterings; ) first. Even if he lacks clarity, his nonsense might have kernels of... some use.

( She looks like the idea is distasteful, but necessary. That said, she resheathes her knife, keeping her hand resting on it as if she needed to hold across her stomach, a woman undone by recent events. (She's no such thing. She'll let the illusion stand, if it requires no addressing and proves useful.)

Then she moves toward the old man in his mutterings. )

Hello? You're looking for a house?

( ooc: if you want to use whatever mod reply we get in the npc thread, or do the thread in the npc thread going forward, it'll probably be easiest! i'm game for whichever. )

[thewarder]

[He stands in the back, eyes scanning over any viewable area while also making sure to frequently check behind him as she talks to the old man.

He finds her direct but somehow caring, Wisdom, through and through. Well, until she gets to the last bit where she just seems over it. ]

Nynaeve... [He says before pausing, his words following are hesistent.]

Let's go look for an entrance. There's got to be one around here. Surely, it's more complicated then just the maze and a crazy man.


((ooc: ahh sorry! things got crazy around here the last few days. since you seemed to have a good info from the npc let's roll with that!))

[mashiara]

( ooc: no worries! we'll just assume this is after the npc thread ends, which should be soon! )

( She shakes her head, expression troubled, lips pulled down into a frown. )

Doubtlessly, but we're talking exiles and fellow prisoners and whatever else. Necromancers? Haven't dealt with those myself so far in this... well, the world this is part of. Light! There's nothing straightforward about these people!

( She stomps off, just as the maze around them groans into movement. It means she's jerking back from the wall that veers suddenly close, long knife already out and in hand, cutting at the vine that falls toward her... only it's already browning, dying at an accelerated rate.

Lan might see it first, given his stance relative to hers: the staircase heading downward, visible between the walls and dying vines as they move. )

[thewarder]

Even the walls are trying to eat you, Wisdom.

[ He let's his hand brush across the small of her back as he cuts away at another vine passing along side her. He's almost too distracted by the touch to notice the stairway, but he catches a glance at it and holds his sword out cautiously.]

Would Necromancers build their houses underground? [ He asks her as he motions to the stairway down that has been revealed to them.]

[mashiara]

( She tries not to examine why she doesn't stiffen at that touch, brief as it is. Nynaeve is not someone anyone touches, they all know better, and she'd remind them if they were fool enough to forget.

... Even if it's to help her avoid a danger. Pride is mixed in somewhere with that, and she grimaces, shoving it down and striding for the stairs, not allowing herself to hesitate. Save a man's life in an overly dramatic display of power she can't voluntarily control, and go figure.

(Go figure what?) )

The better question is why wouldn't they? I heard they buried the dead in Taravast.

( So it'd be... homey? For one who deals in depriving the dead of honest rest. She hits the stairs and starts climbing right on down. )