As you wander the maze, you might overhear the sound of a struggle around a nearby corner. If you pursue the source of the noise, you'll find a corridor of the gigantic snapping plants, and from the looks of the boots kicking out the end of one, you aren't the first to find them.

"Fuck!" A muffled voice snarls, timed with the imprint of a braced arm shoving from inside the enclosure of the plant's bulging mouth.

Another another corner, at a different time, an explorer might come across a young man in his late teens at the oldest transfixed by a flower's staring eye. His shoulders are draped in a black cloak with a high, popped collar framing him up to his jawline, underneath which he sports a striped red scarf worn loosely. On top of his head sits a short top hat banded in red to match the scarf.

His face is set with roiling outrage that nearly eclipses the panic in his dark eyes, which meet the flower's bulging one with piercing intent. His hands clench and unclench at his sides, working uselessly at the empty air.

Finally, you might stumble across that same young man sitting in the middle of a field of purple flowers, the sharpness of his gaze clouded over. He's halfway hunched over his knees, fists planted against the earth at his sides, and muttering to himself.

"Get up," Krouse tells himself, his frustration struggling to cut through his drowsiness, "Get the fuck up."

If he's aware of the tendrils snaking up around his wrists, he doesn't show any sign of it.

Out of the maze, Krouse had kept exploring. Discovering the lay of the land is the first step to understanding what's going on here, and how to deal with it. The manor seemed like a good place to start looking for answers.

Well, so much for that, because he's ended up hit by another of this place's fucking status effects. The putrid (familiar?) smell had filled up his nostrils as soon as he stepped into the courtyard, and he can't -

He can't go back to her until he deals with it. So here he's sitting on a stone bench with his hat on the seat next to him, hands locked together so he can press his nose and mouth against them as he stares at the spring turf, hunkered over and wasting time he doesn't know he has.

At the sound of footsteps approaching the courtyard from any direction his head jerks up, a flicker of frantic energy skittering across his features before they set into resolution. He straightens up, dropping his hands to either side of his legs.

"Watch out for the flower," he says, tersely, like it's not already too late for whoever's gotten this close. He has to open with something.

5. two player co-op | with gastro

There's someone new behind the bathhouse.

From the waist up, she's a slight, worn out looking teen girl with long brown hair that brushes over her cheeks whenever she bows her head. From the waist down, she's something else. A profusion of confused flesh spanning the animal kingdom, wet, denuded red entangled with expanses of rubbery bile-green, limbs and tentacles and misshapen heads jumbled together without order or grace. She towers against the backdrop of the stone wall behind her, several feet taller than the average adult human being.

Anyone who spots her or approaches might be forgiven for missing the smaller figure that hovers in her shadow, a cloaked and behatted young man who keeps looking up at her like he's afraid he somehow might lose track of where she is. Any such oversight of his presence is one he corrects as soon as he sees anyone else in the vicinity.

It might be almost funny to see him step between the girl-creature and a stranger with set shoulders and a hard line to his mouth. He's unarmed and unimposing, dressed up like the closet cosplay of a teenager short on spare cash and long on an overdeveloped interest in magic tricks. It's only the stark and somehow cornered intensity of the look he pins any observer with that might give them pause.

"Hey," Krouse says, with smoothness belied by crackling tension, "Can I help you?"