westwhere | the house of manouk

the house of manouk | test drive meme

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!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

As a rule, ghosts do have short attention spans. They're either tremendously goal oriented, or on some sort of death loop.

[ Stop being a nerd Anthony. You're not nearly as good at it as George. ]

I did! Some are obviously dodgy, staying away from those, a couple I can't quite identify but that still leaves 3 that I'm fairly confident in. Or at least as confident as one should be while guest of a necromancer.

Can I brew you a cup?

[ wow, thanks for mansplaining ghosts. ]

Is that the rule? Well, given that you are the authority on them...

[ she knows ghosts who were not even aware they were ghosts, and that's not even beginning to scrape the surface of Hogwarts ghosts. ]

Black or green?

[ Regretfully, it's the least of his bad habits sometimes. ]

At home, yes I am. I've been fighting them since I was six years old, and you don't live long in my profession, unless you know what you're doing.

Though I am finding out, quite rapidly, that the rules for the ones in my world are not the same here. For which I am very thankful.

There is a mint, something with a floral scent and I Darjeeling, that I think I'm going to give a go.

Edited 2023-07-31 12:21 (UTC)

You've been fighting ghosts since you were six?!

Sorry, the written messages don't quite convey the tone, I've found. [Also yes, the very British accent.] Six years old is awfully young to be started on this sort of a...life experience.

[ So much British up in here. His own tone is deep, oddly reassuring and older sounding than his face would ever suggest. ]

It's when many children, who are going to have Talent, begin to display it. Though legally you have to be thirteen before you join an agency and actually get paid. We begin training and fighting much earlier, and I was orphaned at six, so it was a natural step for me.

It is all complicated, but the world has been under siege from ghosts -we call them Visitors- for about fifty years. In my world, a single touch from a ghost, from the ectoplasm, kills the living almost instantly. Nearly two million have died in Great Britain alone from ghost touch.

Adults do not have the psychic ability to see or sense ghosts. Only children and teens, so we're the ones doing the fighting and protecting. Most of us die on the job, about eighty percent, but those who manage to live long enough see their Talents fade as they age. Eventually they become as useless against the Visitors as any other adult.

[they haven't even brought out the tea yet!]

...my god. [Where to start? The fact that he was orphaned at six, terrible as it is - the fact that he started training and fighting then as well? That Talent he's mentioning, the one that sounds capitalised for some reason?

Ghosts, attacking people - killing people - for fifty years? The casual mention of Great Britain, making this one of those rare occasions when she wouldn't need to use the talisman as a translational device at all, while at the same time making her wonder if it's the same GB as hers?]

This place must be quite triggering for you, then. With all the ghosts that don't quite abide by the same rules as in your world - I know it was like this for me the first few months, with magic.

[ Sometimes this shit needs a beer, but yes. He should have insisted they have this conversation over tea. Oh dear. ]

The first few days, with those damn Milk Tooth Babes, was unpleasant. I fear I made quite the mess in the cottage, trying to fight them until I accepted that I couldn't do anything about their presence.

It helped that I also figured out they weren't going to kill me upon contact.

Well, there were the dead in the water but, those I could fight and drive back.

[ There had been a whole different level of trauma with what they kept showing him. His parents, and the guilt of being told over and over how he failed to help. That definitely was a conversation to be had over tea; if ever. ]

It has been an 'adjustment', as has learning that for many people ghosts are an inconvenience, but not the immediate threat I'm used to seeing them as.

Magic. There is something that I am struggling with. The only magic in my world involves the unnatural practices of necromancers and the occult.

The magic here, that I've seen and heard about, is way beyond my understanding, or even my imagination. I'm feeling more than a little lost in it all.

[After a pause, she sighs.] How about that cup of tea, then? I can conjure us a kettle, push comes to shove, and get the water to boil. Not all people who can do magic are necromancers here, you know.

[Some of them are witches - and she's going to have to break the news to him that they might come from two wholly different Great Britains. You gotta have tea for that.]

I think that sounds like a brilliant idea. [ These discussions definitely need tea. They also need biscuits, but that's asking a bit much, so they will have to make do with tea. ]

I'm here in the kitchen. I'll see about securing us as clean a looking pair of mugs as I can manage.

Well, then - give me anything from five minutes to two hours, but I'll be there. [One beat.] I'm Hermione - just in case.

[She will make it to the kitchens, however! In a record ten minutes, not getting lost in the labyrinthian hallways of this House, nor chased by the hunchback in the gardens, nor getting cornered into chopping onions.

And luckily, look at this, one corner of the kitchens happens to be out of sight and hearing from the ghosts and other inhabitants of this House, so one might go as far as to consider it 'remote' and 'private'. Save for the young man there.]

...hello.

[ She gets in an introduction, and signed off, before he has an opportunity to realize he hadn't offered his name. As such, he has done his best to lay out all the available tea on offers -except the chamomile-, a couple of mugs, and a dodgy looking kettle.

Standing, with his back to the counter, he's a bit of bean pole in person. Tall and slender, all legs and arms -the way many seventeen year old boys tend to be- his pale skin and dark hair are matched by his 'uniform' of black trousers, white dress shirt and black knit tie. Around his lean waist is a broad sword belt, the rapier set at his left hip and a group of cylinders and a small torch balance the right side of the belt.

Arms crossed, his expression is somber and far away. But, he looks up when she speaks and his face breaks out in a wide, megawatt smile. Sort of a 0 to 110 in .0002 flat. ]

Hello. Hermione, yes? [ There are those deep, posh tones and he speaks in a way that suggests that he's used to charming people, to having to sooth their nerves and put them at their ease. ] I must apologize for not introducing myself earlier. I'm Anthony Lockwood.

[ This, she reckons, must be what people saw when they saw her, Harry, and Ron. Gangly, war-marked teens, with far more to bite than they could chew - seemingly, at least, since they chewed it all up, didn't they? Torture and all. It's been some years since she got to Akhuras now, but she remembers she was much of a bean pole herself (shorter, however).

The bright smile is...not unsettling, just insanely quick to happen and very bright. She springs into movement herself, marching up to him and meeting his expression with a similar, more confident smile now, and her hand thrust out for the shaking. ]

Pleasure to meet you. You sound like home, so I'll forgive you for forgetting. I mean, that and also the fact that it's rather a difficult place and time-loop to be, so no harm done, right?

[ In all honesty, he's used to his brilliant smile setting people on their back foot as a rule. Her change of pace and attitude is; refreshing, as is another British accent. The smile reaches a little further into his dark eyes as he takes her hand and returns a firm, polite shake. ]

You're too kind. I'll blame it on the lack of a proper tea. [ Look at the pair off them, stiff British upper lip to the maximum.

Releasing her hand, he understands the importance of a handshake that does not go on too long, after all, Lockwood steps back and folds his hands behind his back. An orphan at six he may have been, but somewhere along the line he's been instilled with very traditional, if old fashion even, manners. ]

People usually call me Lockwood.

[ She lets out a huff, rolling her eyes. ] Please, I've been on a strict diet of either coffee or green tea for the past two years, at this moment I feel like I'd trade just about anything for a cup of builder's...

[ Stiff British upper lip indeed. They might as well be talking about the weather next. Small talk about nothing in peculiar.

She purses her lips together for a moment, giving him a curious look, then steps up to the table to review the tea leaves. The kettle - they'd need fire to boil that water, or they'd need a Hermione Granger. But it's a lot, and it must be a lot for people who've been hunting ghosts since they were six, too. ] Are you comfortable with the concept of magic, Lockwood? Because I'd like to use some to make the tea.

[ Her question catches him a little off guard, which is rare for Lockwood and expressed through a series of quick blinks. Following the surprise, comes a wash of gratitude that she would ask rather than simply go forward with her plans. On the heels of that, is the rare decision to answer with complete honesty. ]

I cannot say that I am; comfortable with the concept. [ He responds, stepping back up to where she stands at the table with the tea leaves and the little pot for boiling water. ] But that is because the only 'magic' in my world is usually the result of occult trying to harness the forces of the dead for their own gain. Often because they tend to 'source' the dead they need.

[ Lockwood's expression softens to one of apology, as if he feels responsible for the fact that his Earth reality is inhabited by some very selfish, horrible people. In the next breath, he motions towards the pot. ]

I'm trying to get better about my prejudices here. Please, go ahead and do what you wish. If a hot cup of tea is the result, my prejudices can go lump it. [ A quick, strained but genuinely warm smile. He is trying to be better. ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

the house of manouk | test drive meme

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