Your name is MORGAN LAKE. You feel that your hobbies are FRIVOLOUS, that your interests are EMBARRASSING, and that the text adventure gimmick is already wearing thin. You decide to stop capitalizing phrases.
You attend a prestigious private academy, and you have just woken up in your dorm room, which you share with some guy whose name you struggle to recall and with whom you have barely spoken more than two sentences in the entire semester that you've been here.
Today is the beginning of Christmas break. Most of your peers have returned home, and won't be back for another couple weeks.
You're a bit excited. You won't have to sneak around as much while they're gone.
You get dressed, put on your backpack, shove your hands into your coat pockets, walk down the stairs, and head outside.
Snow blankets the landscape outside, deadening all sounds further than the crunch beneath your boots. Your breath streams behind you in ribbons of fog. You walk across campus, past the river bisecting the town, through the cemetery, until, at last, you reach your destination.
You set your backpack down on the bench by the pond. The bench is old and weathered, and you've never seen anyone else here. Which is good, because you're about to spend a few hours asleep.
You unroll a sleeping bad you bought yesterday, take some melatonin, and lie down by the pond.
The tree branches above you look like cracks in the slate grey sky. You, slowly, fall asleep.
You've been coming to this place occasionally since you found it near the beginning of the semester, just because it's quiet, but you only discovered about a week ago that, if you fall asleep here, you don't dream.
Instead, you find yourself floating above your body.
Just like the first time you did this, the only other change is that, now, the water in the pond reflects a night sky full of stars. You woke yourself up as soon as you realized it wasn't a dream, but, this time, you're going to find out what's on the other side of the water.
You will yourself to float down into the water. You're immaterial, so the surface remains as smooth as glass, and you feel nothing as your vision sinks below the starry black water, and you lose sight of your sleeping self.
You wake up, again, staring up at a blue sky. You're lying on soft grass, and you can smell the ocean on the warm breeze. You hear birds somewhere nearby.
You sit up. You're in a small, well-tended courtyard, enclosed by high stone walls lined with hedges. You can see the ocean through an archway on the far side of the courtyard, and you hear a fountain behind you. You're still wearing the winter clothes you fell asleep in.
What do you investigate first?
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Author's note:
I've tried running forum adventures before, and, because I'm a perfectionist, I tend to drop them pretty quickly. To try to avoid that, I'm making this certified guarantee: I will not put any effort into this beyond putting wards on a page. 0% quality, 100% quantity. I'm basically gonna write this thing like a Markov chain.
