Stalkers RPG: Dustwoken - Main Action and Team Status [SEASON 1]

[Neo Emolga]

"I think it's high time we talk to the leaders of this town... And I'm pretty sure that's Mortek or Taiyou, but I'm not entirely sure!"

Interview Tayou the Salamence with Diplomacy

As the moon rises above on the dark skies, you head outside, intent on getting some answers from Taiyou the Salamence. As she is the main law enforcement overseer, you feel she hasn’t been nearly as active in this investigation as she should be, seeming as though she’s only trying to save face.

You find her heading away to Mortek’s Home, looking like she’s off to spend the dark evening hours at something that clearly doesn’t look like it has much to do with bringing the Stalkers down. However, you can already see from her composure that seems carefree, unconcerned, and apathetic to the plights of others around her. Meanwhile, she also has an aura of toughness to her, letting others know that she doesn’t need to care because she can handle her own and that’s the only one she really cares about.

You approach her, taking a deep breath and knowing just how to respond to this kind of body language. If she’s going to act tough, you’re going to need to act tough as well to get on her level.

“Hey, Tayou!” you call out to her. “Get over here for a minute!”

You know this is going to have some impact on Tayou. Here you are, a stranger, ordering her around without a trace of politeness. Now, you already know she doesn’t care for formalities just from how she composes herself, but the telling her what to do definitely gets her attention.

She stomps toward you, looks at you with a rather confident smile, in an almost challenging way. It’s very rare that other Pokémon have the balls to stand up to her and get her to listen, but you’ve done exactly that.

“Funny, I don’t remember seeing your face around here lately,” she tells you as she wonders what your business is. “First off, no one tells me what to do, because I’m not going to listen.”

And then you narrow your eyes and smile. Darkly.

“But you just did,” you flash a confident smirk.

She’s almost taken back a bit, not having faced someone with this kind of gall for quite a while. And yet before she can counter with something witty, you keep your pace.

“I’m not here to play games,” you tell her, getting right to the point. “This town, your town, is rapidly going to hell. I’m not sure if you’ve looked at your graveyards in the past month or so, but your dead sure aren’t getting lonely. Does the idea of ‘Stalkers’ ring a bell?”

“Go talk to Dantus and Yanza if you have questions for the local law enforcement,” she tells you, blowing you off. “I just don’t have time for this.”

“How about time for a battle?” you ask, smirking. “Come on, just a friendly sparring match. You seem tough, why not? You’re not afraid, are you?”

You know all too well that your fairy-typing would make short work of her, and Tayou seems to be aware of this too, hence why she doesn’t jump on the idea right away and seems to struggle with her thoughts and conjuring up a response. You take advantage of this and confront her with no fear, no hesitation, and she doesn’t like that. Not one bit. If gives you the insight that she really only likes challenging those she knows she has a good chance of beating down, and you definitely don’t fit that criteria.

“What if I was a Stalker?” you ask her, flashing a dark smirk. “But ah, of course it wouldn’t be a battle, then! In fact, you want to know a funny thing about Stalkers?”

You then get up close to her and speak closely into her ear, using your deepest and darkest tone of voice.

“THEY DON’T ASK BEFORE THEY KILL.”

#2 Tayou the Salamence has become Compliant.

With a deep breath of anxiety, Tayou folds and takes a step back. To simply deny this being a problem would be hypocritical of her, and she has a special kind of hatred for Pokémon that are like that.

“Fine, fine, just tell me what the hell you want,” Tayou tells you, looking like she wants this conversation to be over.

“You know something about these Stalkers,” you tell her. “You have to. I want to know what you know so someone like myself can deal with them. Harshly.”

She tries to collect her thoughts, and she lets you in on some information, but most of it are things you already know or the rest of the team discovered. It takes her by surprise to realize you’re deadly serious about bringing them down and you have the knowledge that already proves that. But then she lets you in on something that wasn’t known before. Something even you weren’t expecting.

“You need to keep this a secret… at all costs,” Tayou tells you, keeping her tone down. “At least two Pokémon, Ovald the Mudsdale and Ankha the Stantler, both died trying to investigate this further, and I don’t want to send in yet another Pokémon to die like they did.”

“Betta, that little Zigzagoon that’s Terron’s daughter… is a Stalker,” she tells you in a cold tone of voice. “I’m dead-serious. The only reason she can’t be prosecuted by a Seabourne criminal court is because she’s a minor and whatever god-forsaken thing that has possessed her has done a damn good job covering her tracks. Enough that Ovald and Ankha, who I sent to perform reconnaissance on her after she was seen hanging around the goddam PIT of all places, ended up dead. And I don’t believe in coincidences. But she can’t be prosecuted on coincidences, witness testimony, and hunches alone. We don’t have the hard evidence and unless we want to bloody jeopardize the entire judicial system here by making an exception, we have to watch and wait and catch her in the act. And that sure as hell hasn’t been working lately.”

“As for The Pit, the ungodly door she put there…” she continues before correcting herself, “…no, her ungodly demon, put there, is nothing a young girl of her nature would ever concoct. And yet somehow she gets around it like there’s nothing to it. Ovald told me he saw this with his own eyes before he took the next step looking into it further and got himself killed for it, and the only reason why I told Dantus and Yanza to stay away from there is because I don’t want them both dead like Ovald and Ankha. If you’re wondering why it seems like we’re doing nothing, that’s why. And yet that’s all we damn have even though that’s probably where all the evidence is. We have the warrant already issued but the place is a goddam deathtrap. In trying to pursue other strategies and options, we still haven’t been able to catch her in the act with evidence that can be validated. Trust me, if you can come up with something to put an end to this hell, I’m all for it, but it’s driven me nearly stir-crazy.”

“If you’re serious about going to The Pit and breaking your way in there, you sure as hell better be prepared,” Tayou warns you carefully. “Trust me, consider yourself already pardoned for any trespassing you need to do, and that goes for all these Stalker bastards. But at this point, I don’t even think a holding cell is going to be able to contain whatever abomination is living in that girl’s head…”

“Look, that’s all I can offer for now, but again, don’t tell anyone about this,” she tells you as she prepares to leave. “If she finds out we’re this close to exposing her, there’s no telling what she’s going to do, but I have a feeling it ends up with all of us dead. Yes, DEAD, just like you said.”

She then leaves, but you have the feel that judging from her tone of voice, her body language, and everything she told you and want it took for her to disclose that information…

…you’re convinced she’s telling the truth…

ChiChi the Tatsujin Tapu Lele (M: Kūsho)

Health: 16/20 | Sanity: 20/20 | Purity: 10/20 | 10/10 Kurosuōbā | Dodge Rate: 30%
Perk: Diplomacy
Reincarnation Forms: Corviknight, Milotic, Aurorus, Espeon, Alcremie
EQUIPMENT:

• Defense Armor: <Empty>
• Jewelry: +|J| Blessed Armband+ (1S, 1P)

[Neo Emolga]

Damnit I thought I had checked thoroughly! Okay, how about (53) ThE PiT (ABANDONED)?

As the sun disappears beyond the horizon and the moon soon hangs above in the sky, you head down to the far southwestern area of town, another grim area where some of the most unsetting things have been found. It’s a long walk through this deadly silent night, but you feel brave enough to make the trip to see what exactly is lurking around here.

After coming along the deadened and forgotten road, you find the unsettling two-family apartment building, the place where six Pokémon were murdered. Even from a distance, you can see this once homey building now looks like something out of a freakish nightmare. The building is falling apart, the windows are all boarded up, and the paint on the walls is peeling off like a cancerous decay. Meanwhile, the shadows seemingly molest it with hellish and unsettling shapes that look like melting eyes and howling faces.

Murdered. Six of them. With their hearts ripped out, never to be found. It makes you wonder if they were burned, buried, or as you shudder just thinking about it… eaten. But it was so long ago and you have a feeling no one will ever find out what really happened to them.

You start by searching the exterior grounds… overgrown weed fields that reveal nothing, but as you soon discover, hide nothing as well. There is a very, very faint Stalker presence here, but it doesn’t come from these weeds, and you find nothing among the shrubs and grassy patches that seems to be the source. But as you search around the exterior of the house, it seems the house itself… or something deep inside… is what is giving off this repulsive aura.

Unfortunately, you don’t find any way inside. The cellar in the back seems to be abandoned, and though you can enter it and go underground, it doesn’t connect with the rest of the house upstairs. And down here, you find only junk. Old rusty tools, broken and damaged building materials, paint that has gone dry years ago, broken glass, damaged wooden parcels, and other similar items simply have you turning up with nothing important. But you’re convinced not even the small cellar was used for any murders. Still, you get the uncanny feeling that some of the shadows down there play tricks on your eyes. In the dark, an array of tools on a pegboard looks like the gaunt, decaying face of a Gothorita. In the corner, a haphazard pile of broken materials looks like the broken and butchered body of a Lurantis, looking up at you with a dying gaze…

It makes you wonder if it was intentionally arranged this way… that someone with morbid artistic ability knew how to conjure these depictions and mind tricks using broken materials and lighting ploys to make these grizzly depictions seem authentic to most perceptions. And yet you see them constantly around you, giving you that unnerving feeling… that you’re being watched… that the shadows are more than what they seem to be…

You find yourself not able to tolerate it for that much longer and you make a bit of a sprint out of the cellar. You shut the rusting cellar doors behind you, once again plunging everything down there into pitch blackness once again…

You get arrive at the front door, and you see this is where things get strange. By the damaged front door, you see the words “ThE PiT” in blood-colored lettering. The door itself has been shackled with jet-black chains and large padlocks. Two metal stakes are here… one is slathered in blood and the other is soaked with a gross, black ichor. By the base of stakes, you can just faintly make out the words “blood sister” by the bloody stake while the words “shadow brother” are by the greasy black one.

You’ve seen something like this before. It all makes sense until…

@Grim Vision or Torment – DARK (3 Sanity Damage, 3 Purity Damage)@ Trap 30% Evasion Test: 83 out of 100: Failed!

…it almost feels like a disorienting vertigo. A dark nightmare suddenly takes up your eyes and you lose sight of the house, but the vision itself is broken and damaged. The blessed diamond necklace around you suddenly triggers, absorbing most of the hideous vision that attempted to burrow into your mind. But all you have now are fragments, corrupted by dream static, as if what your mind tried to play was a badly ruined video and only bits of it still remained.

All you’re left with are out of context depictions of decay. Death and the passage of time seem to be a theme among the flickering visions among the broken, shadowy static. The vision is so corrupted and ripped apart that it makes very little sense to you, but it leaves you with the sense that you didn’t miss any important details. Instead, it makes you feel slightly uneasy, but thankfully the damage is only nominal.

Scy has suffered 1 Damage to Sanity and 1 Damage to Purity (2 Sanity Damage and 2 Purity Damage absorbed by the +|J| Diamond Necklace+ (2S, 2P))

And then it just ends, making you feel no worse than if it was just a taunt or an offensive comment. And you look up at the stakes again, confirming what you were thinking before.

@{The Shackle Door of the Beheaded: Missing Head of the Blood Sister AND Missing Head of the Shadow Brother} Grim Vision of Torment - DARK (3 Sanity Damage, 3 Purity Damage)@ has been noted in the Team Records.

And just below them, you find a note… a note written about the blind… written in blood…



=The Blind Note= has been noted in the Team Records.

The heads… the heads of Latios and Latias. It suddenly makes sense now, and this is where they were intended to be placed. The missing eyes… the blood… the ichor… the vision that seemed to blind you for just a brief moment there…

As you sense it, there’s no getting beyond this shackled door until you find out what must be done to undo this, but you already have a feeling you know. You know you’ll need to go back to get them, but it will have to wait for now.

But as you take a few steps back and behold what lies before you… it makes you wonder just what horrors wait for you beyond these doors…

You then head back to Benni’s farmstead, still processing what could be there and what it all means with the damaged vision you just beheld. Beyond those doors may be horrors… but there are also answers…

Scy the Tatsujin Heracross (M: Kūsho)

Health: 20/20 | Sanity: 14/20 | Purity: 19/20 | 10/10 Kurosuōbā | Dodge Rate: 30%
Perk: Repair
Reincarnation Forms: Heracross, Scyther, Centiskorch, Snom, Volcarona
EQUIPMENT:

• Defense Armor: <Empty>
• Jewelry: +|J| Diamond Necklace+ (2S, 2P)