Setting

[worldkeys]

SETTING AND INFO ON THE WORLD. The World is a strange, strange place, but it's not as complex as it might sound. Here is a little info to help give you an idea of what it's like. The World: Hub Plaza Welcome to the World. Enjoy your stay. It's not a nice place, but it's still a place. Upon entering, you will find yourself largely, and mainly, in this strange plaza filled with what looks like it could have, at one point, been gravestones, and dead trees. A lot of cracked bricks dot the ground, and in the center... you will find the White Rabbit. He is always here, never-moving, never leaving. He's a bit like a tree himself, really. He will give you advice or information, perhaps, or just urge you to hurry onwards. The World: Room of Doors Past the Rabbit, you will find an old, creaky door. Opening it will bring you to... a sea of yet more doors, and more cracked pavement, lamps flickering wildly as you approach. This place reeks of decay and an age beyond itself, like life itself can't sustain here. It has an oddly heavy atmosphere, like an old book that shouldn't be readable. A large bloodstain lies on the floor, but who knows how fresh it is? In the center of the room a broken-down fountain sits with a note in front of it: it warns that the heart of man is fickle, and that you shouldn't question into it too deeply, for peering in too many times... will drown you. In specific, it warns of three times. How strange. There are many, many doors here, always at least three more than the amount of people that have ended up in the World. However, of the extra three, there is one door in particular that stands out. While the other two are simply locked and inaccessible, this extra door has a strange, cold handle, and always appears to be locked, no matter what. As for the rest of the doors, they work a bit differently. At the onset, almost all of them are locked, for the surface to most people's hearts are held tight, but the Rabbit is able to open one to start with. Entering any of the rooms, initially, will bring you to a place that is rather odd indeed. Especially if you were homeless, or didn't have a bedroom like this at all. It might be downright uncanny, even, as if the World is attempting to ease you into wanting to make you stay here, happily... The World: The Rooms These rooms look like simplistic bedrooms, with cupboards inside. Each room is vaguely tailored to the person whose heart it is barely guarding on the surface. It might be cute and filled with bears, for example. It might contain two beds, if there are two personalities to the person that lives there. It might have a picture of a kitten on the wall, if the owner likes kittens. Once in these rooms, you will find a strange pull to open the cupboards. Of course, the only way into each person's heart, their World, is to open said cupboard. You'll be sucked inside once you open it, unable to leave easily, but... that's fine, isn't it? You have to do it. That's no issue. You want to go home, yes? Once inside the cupboard, usually, you and your friends will wake up in a new world, generally in a strange bed or on the ground somewhere odd. Alice Worlds: Someone's Heart This is an example of one such place, and how waking up might be. Being in someone else's bed, in their childhood house, for example, might be how you could wake awaken. Only the house might be wrong. The dresser might have a face and talk to you. There could be poisonous mushrooms growing in the corner you certainly shouldn't eat. There might be odd notes or little locked chests and things left and right. And there may be lots of oddly locked doors, all over. Advancing tends to be difficult. You will often have to search around. Find a knife in a drawer to cut a plant and find a key that way, or solve a riddle of some kind. Things of this nature are common in the Storybooks/Alice Worlds. A house could eventually turn to chocolate, after being somewhere long enough. You could meet a talking mouse wanting to know about flowers. You could find a field of flowers, and simply pick some, and they could scream and bleed if you do so. You could meet a man-eating wolf in a broken-down shack that used to be your grandmother's home. You could come across a spider who lost their legs and wants you to retrieve them, but might eat you if you get how many legs they need wrong. You could find a tree growing poisoned apples. You could find yourself in a mansion filled with toys but strange eye creatures all over, unable to advance up or down the stairs, blocked by invisible walls, until you solve a strange puzzle of dice. Be very careful while in the hearts of others, friends. Those two cakes on the table look tasty to eat, but you could find yourself passing out and waking up sick and someplace... strange. It's a dangerous place, to delve into another's hopes, dreams, and pain. And... somewhere, in each of these places... is something that person lost... and, finally, a single key. But can you find it? And what did you lose to begin with? Questions, questions... In all, there is not much. What is produced is from the hearts of those who end up here.