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?
>
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.
> Morgan: Test magical powers.
*MODIFIER REQUEST*
==> Add a Clown to the next response ):0)
The Real Homestuck?
That's the friends we made along the way!
mIrAcLeS ):0)
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRealHomestuck/s/2gCp8ku8rH
> Morgan: Test Magical Powers
Well, since this clearly some sort of dream world situation, you guess the first thing to do is to to try to fly. You do a little hop and think vertical thoughts.
Nothing happens. Maybe if you try again? You were flying before you went through the pond.
After a few tries, you think you're able to slow your fall a bit? Maybe? Maybe if you keep practicing, you could accomplish a sort of glide.
You might have some other dream powers, though. You've had lucid dreams before, and you were able to summon things in those. You hold your hand up in the classic "trying to use magic powers like a doofus" pose and think about what you want to summon...
> Add a Clown to the next response ):0)
And the first thing that comes to mind is a clown. Troubling. You should examine that impulse later.
Nothing happens, though, despite how hard you try. You try summoning a jester and a fool, just to check, but that doesn't work either.
You notice something out of the corner of your eye, and, when you look up, you see a sailboat out on the ocean, far enough away you can't really make out any details. Are there... people here? Someone must have built this place, you guess.
You hear voices somewhere beyond the courtyard. It's got the tone and cadence of someone commanding a group, but it's too far for you to hear what they're saying.
What do you do?
>
> Investigate Droll from Courtyard
> Investigate droll from courtyard
Drawn by the voices, you walk through the archway out of the courtyard. You shade your eyes against the morning sunlight.
You stand, now, at the top of a staircase, cascading down the side of a steep hill into an amphitheatre, within which a crowd of people seem to be practicing some kind of dance.
As you descend, you slowly realize that what you thought were elaborate, colorful robes are actually wings with shimmering feathers.
The dancing, winged people don't seem to notice you even as you enter the amphitheatre and take a seat, watching them practice their elaborate, swooping dance. The... conductor? The one coordinating the dancers -- their instructions are in a language you don't recognize. You're sitting directly in front of the conductor at this point, and they don't seem to notice you at all, as if you were a ghost.
You're close enough to the ocean now that you can smell it, and, as you stare, transfixed, at the dancers, you listen to the occasional cries of seagulls.
Behind the amphbtheatre's stage looms a hill, and, out of the corner of your eye, you catch movement at its peak. A human -- like yourself, without wings -- stands there, staring at you.
If you fled now, you could probably make it back up to the fountain before they caught you.
What do you do?
>
> Ignore human, consider aliveness attribute. Ponder how a seagull could make it to heaven.