Binary_Arcana

  Yea I’m calling shenanigans.

  There’s no way you made it all the way through the House of Seasons without dying. You’ve been running away from everything so far, and as soon as a couple posters start checking out of the fic because you aren’t fighting, you’re gonna tell us that you killed the Blooming Witch?

  Nah. No way. This fic just jumped the shark.

  NullSigil

  I hate to say it, but I’m with Binary on this.

  Zeke, I’ve been loving this fic. It’s a slow burn which some people aren’t liking, but I love it. I know there’ve been a few people ragging on you for being too passive and “not throwing hands” and maybe you’ve decided to throw away the slow burn for full anime protagonist because you think it makes for a better story.

  But the entire appeal of this fic was that it felt grounded. You didn’t try to make yourself out to be a chosen one or some prophesied hero or an OP protagonist. You were just a guy trying to survive.

  I think you gotta stick with that. It was working for you. You can’t just suddenly come on here and post about how you solo’d an elite witch. Sure, the people who are craving action might wanna stick with the story after that. They’re clamoring for you to turn your OC into a badass. And I have no problem with that. If you want your character to become the most dangerous person in the Deadlands, I say go for it. But you gotta have him grow into it naturally. Maybe start by raiding a goblin nest and then working your way up. Don’t just have your character head into a dungeon with a boss that melts seasoned characters.

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  ??

  I have no idea what or who a Blooming Witch is. What are you guys talking about?

  SignalLoss

  He’s sticking to the bit. Everyone, you all have to remember that he’s RPing a clueless noob and he’s not gonna break character. If you want him to respond, we have to spell everything out for him like we’re talking to a child; a child who just wandered into a dungeon and faced a witch that terrifies players and now he wants to convince us all that he walked out untouched.

  Binary_Arcana

  Seriously. It doesn’t make sense. Not even just the whole combat angle. You ran from that dude on the train who was an adventurer. The Blooming Witch would slash that guy to ribbons, no doubt in my mind. So what chance do you have? There’s no way that you were able to survive her.

  But that’s not the only thing bullshit about this fic. You shouldn’t even be able to get into the House of Seasons. You traded your gilder on the train. Remember that? You don’t have it anymore.

  No gilder = no entrance to the House of Seasons.

  Yet somehow you “wandered” your way into it? The mental gymnastics that you expect us to do here to make your fic make sense is straight up Olympic-tier. I’m out. This fanfic’s off the rails.

  MushroomCleric

  Okay, deep breath everyone. I was enjoying the whole grounded tone too, so I’m gonna be the adult here and explain to Zeke why we’re turning on him. And I’m gonna respect his wish to continue RPing a clueless noob.

  Zeke. The House of Seasons is a very well known dungeon. That set of ruins that you were running towards back when you were in the Deadlands? That’s the House. It was introduced back in Frontiers and it’s known as an elite-tier dungeon because of the unique boss that resides in it.

  The boss is known as the Blooming Witch. She’s probably the most dangerous thing out in the Deadlands, and she only allows you access to her mansion if you bring her a gilder or one of another artifact that is on a very short list of rare Deadland drops.

  You’ve got a plothole in your fic though. You traded away your gilder. It was that bone disc with the stylized C on the front of it. You traded it to the train conductor and a bunch of posters were laughing at the horrible deal you made. So, unless you somehow picked up another rare Deadlands drop offscreen, there is no logical or lore-friendly way for you to have entered the House of Seasons.

  Side note: I don’t think you made a horrible deal when you traded the gilder. I’ve been thinking about it and I think it saved your ass.

  You paid the conductor for a seat on the train, and that payment is what kept Asshole from tossing you. If the conductor had accepted payment and then kicked you off the train mid-ride, he would have been violating half a dozen rules from a whole shit ton of merchant clans operating out of the Deadlands. That would have been soooo bad for him. He would have been crucified for kicking you off the train.

  That’s not hyperbole. The merchant clans would have literally crucified him.

  Renegging on a contract is a serious no-no to these merchant clans. If it got out that the conductor had taken payment and then went back on the deal, whatever company runs the trains would have instantly fired him or they would have been at risk of losing their operating license. Once he was fired, the merchant clans would have hired bounty hunters to track him down and drag him back to their bases and then they would have crucified him and hung a sign around his neck explaining his crime.

  So yea, him not kicking you off the train that very instant wasn’t kindness on his part. He just didn’t want to get killed.

  TVEye

  Cool story Mushroom. But learn from the mistakes of the Prequels. Less trade talk and more action. Tell him about the House of Seasons.

  MushroomCleric

  Right, right.

  The House of Seasons is so named because it is divided up into four different seasons. Each wing of the mansion represents a different season: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. Based on your descriptions, you were in the Spring Wing. That gardener that you saw? The echo of him? He’s always there.

  The lower levels of the House are always quiet and empty. They’re more there for ambiance. There are a few “echoes” that drift around the place and you can watch them, but you can’t interact with them. You can’t talk with them or click on them or trade with them or anything. The current theory about the echoes is that they are either former owners or former occupants of the house. OR, and this is my favorite theory, they are victims of the Blooming Witch.

  You wrote that you had a feeling of unease that came from the second floor. That’s where the true dungeon starts. The Blooming Witch waits up there for players to come and make a deal with her. Now, you can interact with the witch in one of two ways. Either you trade some rare stuff with her and she pats you on the head and sends you on your way with a couple new items. Or you can try and fight her and most likely get your shit pushed in.

  But for you to even get into the House of Seasons you would need a gilder. Or you’d need another rare drop from the Deadlands. There’s a list of items that have been put together that will gain you entrance to the House.

  Unfortunately for you, none of the items you described from your burlap sack are on that list. I mean…I guess you did say that there were some loose odds and ends. You can close this loophole by explaining that there was a small object in there that you didn’t describe, and that gave you entrance to the House. But thinking about it, the smallest object on the list is a gilder and, again, you already traded that away.

  Another interesting side note: there’s snippets of lore scattered around the House that suggest that the Blooming Witch accepts payment into the House of Seasons through relics that are emotionally-charged or infused with history. If you wanted to, you could move the fic in that direction.

  I was kinda digging the idea that you were gonna merge the Eaters and the Blooming Witch together into something interesting. Both entities require payment. Both of them are terrifying (for different reasons.) And you could have made a case that the offerings that you took from the church are all “emotionally-charged” items.

  But yea, right now everyone is just focused on the fact that there’s no logical way for you to be there right now.

  NullSigil

  I’m less focused on him not being able to get into the mansion, and more interested in how he would get out.

  Zeke, there are only two ways to leave the House of Seasons.

  1) Pay the witch. (You couldn’t do that because your gilder is gone.)

  2) KIll her. (You couldn’t do that because you have no class, gear, or skills.)

  That’s why we’re all pissed. You’re describing the House of Seasons correctly, which means you did enough research for that bit of your fanfic. But you missed the basic requirements of entry and exit. That’s not just bending canon like with the Eaters. That’s snapping it over your knee and tossing it aside.

  You can’t get out of the House of Seasons without trading with or killing the witch. End of story. And there’s no way you killed her. She would have turned you into a sock puppet.

  Binary_Arcana

  He’s gonna pull some deus ex machina out his ass to keep this fanfic going. I’m calling it now.

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  Okay, I can see why you’re all getting angry. You’re thinking that I’m gonna say that I fought this witch lady and won. But I didn’t.

  I already said that I had no intention of heading up to the second flood of the mansion. I mean, I might be ignorant when it comes to this world, but there was no way in hell that I was gonna start poking around at whatever the hell was on the second floor. The feeling coming from that place was horrifying and I figured whatever was up there could easily bite my face off. So, I decided to ignore it and let someone else handle it.

  NullSigil

  Dood. It’s not just that your story has plotholes in it, it’s that you’re breaking canon in a way that completely knocks us out of the experience.

  The game has rules. Those rules apply in the lore, in the gameplay, and yea, in any fanfic that people write about it. When you toss those rules aside, it messes with our suspension of disbelief.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Here’s the problem:

  You can’t get into the House of Seasons without a gilder. Hard rule. Non-negotiable.

  You also can’t get out of the House of Seasons unless you either trade your gilder to the Blooming Witch (she then opens a portal and sends you away) or you fight her. Also a hard rule. Also non-negotiable.

  Remember when, I think it was Mushroom, wrote that big breakdown on classes and skills? You were confused why we gave you grief for turning down the bartender class and he briefly explained how the whole system works. Skills are the backbone of the game. You got shooting and bartering and athletics and melee and countless other skills. Anyone can pick up a skill and level it up to 7 which is the natural human cap. Going above 7 only happens if it’s a class skill.

  There are very few exceptions to that, and the House of Seasons is one of them. It’s a dungeon with the Blooming Witch as the boss, and if you go there and actually manage to kill her, she drops an ingredient you can use to brew a potion that lets you push a skill past 7. Any skill. That’s why the place is so famous. It’s one of the “easier” endgame routes to getting stronger. Emphasis on “easier” not “easy.”

  Now here’s where your story falls apart:

  There is zero chance that someone with no real skills, no gear, no magic, and no class could kill the Blooming Witch. She wipes out fully built players. She wipes out groups. She wipes out raiding parties. And if you didn’t kill her (and there is no world in which you could), then you shouldn’t be able to leave the House of Seasons.

  That’s why everyone is mad. You’re saying you “wandered into” the House of Seasons. Impossible. Now you’re saying that you’re typing all this up from inside The MIZ, which means that somehow you escaped the House of Seasons without killing the witch. Also impossible.

  So seriously, how’d you do it? How are you in The MIZ right now? How are you posting on this forum? How is your character still alive? There are soooo many plot holes you haven’t thought about.

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  I just solved the puzzle.

  Shootingblnks

  What puzzle?

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  I left what you are all calling the Spring Wing. After everything that I’d seen in this world, I half expected that the vines would lunge at me on my way out. Maybe strangle me as a parting gift. Or the walls would have shifted and twisted into a living hedge maze that would have kept me there for hours.

  But none of that happened. It was pretty easy to retrace my steps back to the entrance hall and it was exactly the way I’d left it. Four corridors, massive oak door, two windows showing weird weather, and a grand staircase that spiraled up to the second floor.

  I’ll repeat it for you all, because I feel like you’re not really getting it, but there was no way in hell I was going up those stairs to deal with whatever was on the second floor. It wasn’t my problem and I had no interest in dying. Instead, I turned and headed to the hallway opposite the one I’d just come from.

  As soon as I entered the hallway, the temperature dropped. It wasn’t freezing. I didn’t suddenly have ice forming on me or anything. But it was crisp. It was like stepping outside on the first autumn morning of the year. Dry air and a little bit of a breeze. I didn’t know it then, but I’d entered what you all would call the Autumn Wing.

  The hall stretched on for several minutes, just like the last one I walked down. Tall, narrow windows spilled weak amber light across the walls, and faded portraits stared out at me from behind ornate frames, watching me pass.

  Eventually the hall opened out into a massive library. It was much larger than the one in Harbor Glen. Better preserved too. Towering shelves created a maze of wood and the ceiling arched high above, supported by thick beams and lit by stained-glass windows that cast light across the room. A few of the windows showed trees and falling leaves. There were wrought-iron spiral staircases tucked into corners, curling upwards into hidden alcoves and balconies. I noticed a few fireplaces with fires lit to stave off the chill.

  Maybe the library should have freaked me out. After Harbor Glen I should have been more wary about libraries. But instead I felt safe, like I was in a haven.

  I’ve always loved libraries. I used to spend days wandering through the New York Public Library, pulling books off the shelves at random and disappearing into them for hours.

  I slowly picked my way through the library, passing the rows and the shelves and letting my fingers brush over the spines of old books tucked neatly onto the shelves and piled onto carts and even wedged into corners where they didn’t belong. Books were everywhere and, for a brief moment, it felt like I’d stumbled across some forgotten treasure trove. For once, I was happy that I’d been brought to this strange new world.

  I picked up a book at random and held it close, breathing in its familiar scent: dust and paper and old leather and nostalgia.

  Let me tell you about a little secret spot in New York. If you ever find yourself in Manhattan and you’re struggling to figure out what to do, head up to Columbia University’s Morningside campus. It might be locked down these days, but not too long ago you could just wander onto campus and pretend that you belonged there.

  Outside one of its buildings - I think it was called the Starr building - is a marble bench that runs along the outside and sits above a grate. The Starr building has a small library that is in the basement, and if you find the right spot to sit on at the bench, a current of warm air rises up out of the grate and hits you in the face, carrying with it the scent of old books. That spot, right there on campus, was my favorite spot in the entire city of New York.

  Smelling that book there in the middle of a fantasy library abandoned by time, it was like I’d been transported back to New York. I’d been sent back to a time when everything was okay and I was dirty and dusty and dehydrated and wasn’t stumbling into terrifying new situations.

  Then I cracked open the book in my hands and all that nostalgia drained away. The pages of the book were all blank. There wasn’t any ink or letters or pictures or anything. It was just clean, untouched paper.

  I grabbed a different book off the nearest shelf and it was exactly the same. All the pages were empty. A book sitting on a nearby cart wouldn’t even open no matter how hard I tried. The covers were stuck together like they’d been sealed shut. After struggling with it for a couple minutes the spine cracked so loudly that it startled me and I didn’t even notice the paper inside the book crumbling to dust.

  Each book I grabbed from the shelves was empty. Useless. Fake. They looked normal and they felt okay in the hand, but none of them had any substance. None of them were…books. They were movie props. Set dressing. A backdrop designed to give the illusion of knowledge.

  I tossed the books aside and walked deeper into the library, growing increasingly frustrated. What had once been a haven to me had soured. This place was just a fake. My brain seemed to hitch for a bit, trying to understand how there could be an entire library filled with books that nobody could read.

  Eventually, I heard a voice. It was soft. Barely more than a whisper. And it was repeating something over and over and over again. I followed the voice through the stacks, weaving my way past carts and winding staircases and shelves filled with props until I eventually found where it was coming from.

  The ghost was young. College-aged or early twenties. Her dark hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail and she was dressed in scholar’s robes (is that a thing?) with the sleeves rolled up. She was tense and fiddling with her hands and rolling her shoulders. She fidgeted constantly and I watched as she tugged at her robes, smoothed them out, and then repeated the motion again and again.

  She paced in a loop around a small reading nook set in amongst the many bookcases. I watched as she darted between a desk, a nearby cabinet, and then a cluster of shelves. Occasionally she yanked open a drawer or scanned a row of books and muttered to herself as if she were rehearsing a speech.

  I couldn’t make out what she was saying. Not fully. It sounded like the fragments of a speech. Maybe an argument. Her hands kept tugging at her sleeves in a nervous kind of way, and she’d occasionally grab a book from the shelves and flip it open before shaking her head and then tossing the book aside.

  She was an echo. Like the gardner. And like the gardner, she wasn’t reacting to me. She didn’t see me or care that I was watching her. She was caught in that same loop that the gardener was. Searching. Rehearsing. Forgetting. Oblivious to the world.

  Also like the gardener, I couldn’t figure out a way to interact with her. She paced the same worn track, muttering to herself and rifling through blank books, and I couldn’t do anything to draw her attention. I tried though.

  I closed the desk drawers right after she opened them, grabbed books from the shelves before she could get to them, and shifted a few papers on her desk around. But nothing I did elicited any sort of reaction.

  First the gardener in the Spring Wing was pruning a plant that wasn’t there, and then I found an echo who was flipping through blank books and speaking words that I couldn’t make sense of. The more I wandered through the mansion, the less sense it was making.

  I’ve tried writing this next paragraph a few times but I can’t get the words out right. I’ll just say that when I watched this echo move about her study nook, she looked…sad. But it was more than that. It was like she wanted something from me. She wanted me to help her. I knew that for a fact, despite her not being able to interact with me. Something about her kept calling out to me, and I can’t really explain that feeling.

  This woman was stuck, and I didn’t know how to help her. And that fucking sucked. I couldn’t break her out of whatever loop she was stuck in. I couldn’t stop her from being tortured by whatever had captured her. Hell, I didn’t even know what would happen if I did find a way to break her loop. Would she turn violent? Would she thank me? Would she just disappear?

  I didn’t have any answers so I just stood there and watched her. And then something clicked.

  The journal that I’d found back in the overgrown wing. It was the only book that I’d found that was even remotely legible. Sure, all the words were faded and the pages were water-damaged and half destroyed, but it was a real book. It had actual words in it. If she was searching for something to read or help her break out of her loop, then maybe I could give her the journal.

  I slipped off my pack and dug through it, grabbing the journal from where I had stashed it. Its leather cover was stained and curling at the edges and the pages were soft and a little pulpy from water damage, but the writing was still legible.

  When I’d first poked through the journal I was surprised at how personal the thing felt. It was almost like…love letters. Or at least, something close to it. Whoever had written the journal had poured themselves out onto the pages. And whoever they’d written them for had clearly mattered.

  I moved myself into the path of the echo and held out the journal in both my hands. I didn’t say anything or wave or call out to it. I just waited, and when she looped around again she stopped.

  She didn’t give off a dramatic gasp. There wasn’t any magical pulse or fanfare or fireworks. There was nothing telling me that I was on the right path with this echo. All that happened was that she gave a hesitant pause. Her eyes flicked up to mine before slowly turning towards the journal. I saw her fingers twitch, almost like she wasn’t sure whether it was better to reach out and grab the book or run from it. Then she stepped forward and took the journal from my hands.

  Silently, she turned and strolled over to the desk that she’d been pacing around. It was cluttered with a bunch of objects. A quick cursory glance let me see a bunch of notebooks, a feathered quill, a small brass box, and a couple half-forgotten scraps of paper. She pushed everything on the desk aside and cleared a small space at the center. Then she laid the journal down with reverence, opened it slowly, and began to read.

  The change in her was instantaneous. Her shoulders loosened. The muttering ceased. The entire reading nook fell silent as she turned page after page in the journal and scanned the faded ink. I couldn’t tell you how long she sat there reading the book. Ten minutes? An hour? Longer? Time seemed to stretch on and I didn’t move for fear of breaking whatever spell had taken hold.

  Finally, after she reached the last page of the journal and devoured the words on it, she closed the book gently. Her hands rested on the cover and she gave it a little pat and I saw a look of sadness cross her face. Then she picked up the book and pressed it to her chest before whispering.

  “He should have told me.”

  That was it. There wasn’t any chime or quest completion banner or swirl of confetti telling me that I’d done something right. But even without the fanfare, I could feel that something had changed. Something in the mansion shifted. I don’t know how I knew that, but it almost felt like a locked door had quietly swung open somewhere deeper in the mansion.

  And then it finally clicked. This place wasn’t random. It wasn’t just a creepy old mansion filled with ghosts and useless books and tangles of nature. It had rules. Not normal rules. Not logical rules. Video game rules. It was a mansion that was filled with puzzles and echoes and items. It was a classic video game design of “solve the puzzle to break the cycle.”

  I mean, looking back at it now I do feel a little stupid. I’d been ranting this entire time about being isekai’d into a video game and nobody believing me. Somehow, a little part of me was stubbornly refusing to accept what was happening too. But standing there, watching that echo dissolve away, everything slotted neatly into place. I was in a video game world. And that meant there would be video game elements to it.

  I quickly ran through everything that I knew about the mansion. There were four wings and I’d been through two of them: Spring and Autumn. Both wings had an echo stuck in an endless loop, repeating the same moment over and over again. When I helped the Autumn echo out, when I nudged her out of the loop, something in the mansion had shifted. That had to mean something. A hidden quest, maybe. Or some kind of puzzle that would reward me when everything was finished.

  The journal that I’d snagged back in the Spring Wing probably belonged to the gardener there. That was my best guess. But that journal wasn’t meant for him. His echo had been fiddling with something on the planting table, but the journal was meant for this lady in the library.

  Spring didn’t need Spring’s item. It went to Autumn. The mansion was shuffling around the pieces and I figured that each wing held an item for a different echo. It was a cross-wing puzzle system, and everything required me to venture into the wings and give the echoes items from their counterparts.

  If I wanted to get out of the mansion, I needed to find whatever object the library was hiding. Something meant for one of the other wings. But I didn’t have any clue what I was looking for.

  The gardener echo had been tending to a plant that didn’t exist, so my first guess was that there was some sort of flower in the library. Maybe some enchanted fertilizer or a weird ficus or something. But what would a library have to do with plants? There weren’t any gardens around. Nothing was growing. There weren't any decorative plants anywhere that I could take with me.

  Still, I searched. I retraced my path through the maze of shelves, scanning every corner and cart and window ledge for the faintest trace of greenery. I even checked inside a bunch of the books, thinking that maybe someone had pressed a flower between the pages and that’s what I needed to deliver to the gardener. But there was nothing. No potted plant tucked away in a corner. No pressed flower used as a bookmark. No vine or sprout to be found anywhere.

  Eventually I found my way back to the reading nook. The echo had disappeared and all she’d left behind was a messy desk, a couple cabinets, and bookshelves that were cluttered with discarded tomes.

  Without the echo pacing around and mumbling to herself, the entire reading nook felt quieter. Calmer. I sat down at her desk and tried to piece together anything that I might’ve missed. Maybe something had changed in the room. Maybe the books weren’t blank anymore. Maybe I'd unlocked some hidden bit of information inside them that would point me towards my next objective.

  I reached out to the nearest book and flipped it open only to find that it was still blank. I tried another and another but nothing had changed. The books were all just as useless as before.

  I turned to the desk and took in the clutter. A couple books were there but, when I went to grab them they didn’t budge. I tried prying them off the table but they were all fixed in place, like they were pieces of the scenery that weren't supposed to be interacted with. The only thing I could move were a few objects that the echo had shoved aside earlier when she’d cleared a small spot for the journal.

  There was a quill, a few sheets of paper, a broken teacup and a small brass box that had been shoved unceremoniously aside. I stashed the quill and the paper in my bag just in case, and then reached for the box.

  It was heavier than it looked. The brass was warm to the touch and the top of the box was engraved with vines and delicate little flowers. A small wind-up key stuck out the back of the box and I gave it a couple turns. When I let go I was rewarded with a few soft notes chime from the box.

  A music box! It probably hadn’t played a tune in years, and it sounded a little off-key, but it still worked. I smiled as I looked around the rest of the reading nook and realized that this was the object that didn’t belong here. It was like the journal that I’d found back in the Spring Wing, and I realized that it was meant for one of the other echoes in the house.

  I stuffed it in my burlap sack, gave the reading nook one last glance, and made my way back to the entrance hall.