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sticksandbonesmodsIt’s a calm, misty morning. The sun is peaking over the treetops, and the air is chilled, almost like the onset of fall. How long have you been here, now? Days? Weeks? Months? Everything blurs together. But so you persist… just. Not quite yet. The day’s only just waking up and so are you! Whether you like it or not. You see, as you slept, something has crept its way into your room, and as the sun peaks through windows and closed blinds, it’s finally grabbing you and pulling.
As you meet your rude awakening, the intruder is clear to see. Or rather, it’s incredibly unclear. Mist and fog and sickly-looking vines wrap around your legs and up your body as it drags you to the woods, and attacks of all sorts slide off like water on glass. There is no escape. It’s time to play, and the air is unusually, painfully hot.
The fog of the forest grows dark and heavy as you’re pulled along against your will, and as you go something seems… different. Maybe your body seems lighter and off balanced. Maybe certain features are no longer tickling your skin. Maybe the connection to the world around you has been brutally severed — all that can be said is that as you’re eventually spat out to a metal platform, you feel incomplete somehow. Magic doesn’t come when you call. Gear doesn’t activate properly. Whatever happened, you’re a completely ordinary human, and it stings.
You and your fellow denizens of the Grove stand on a seeringly hot metal platform, and the air burns your lungs. Ash and soot float through the air, singeing wherever it lands for a split second. Towering up before you is a volcano that has no right being here — but it is. Platforms and smaller spires and rocks litter your surroundings, and scorch marks are everywhere.
The only consolation is that whatever is about to happen, you at least aren’t doing this in your pyjamas.
Eventually, as sweat builds up and the wind only burns further, a too-familiar childish voice rings out: "It’s playtime! If you win, I’ll show you something REALLY cool. …Oh, but surely I don’t have to explain ‘The Floor is Lava’, right?"
It goes silent, and there’s a loud metal grind of something. The lava beneath the platform begins to rise, and so does the hateful heat.
At least there are multiple ways out. You can attempt to hop across crumbling platforms, mysteriously and magically floating overhead — though they might break after a few footsteps. You can try climbing the burning-hot, stony surface of the surrounding cliffsides, where flows of magma get a bit too close for comfort. You can take the safer-but-risky way of running through the game area’s many mazelike paths, cut into and through the cliffs, but be careful; should the magma rise too high, those pathways will be flooded. No matter what you choose, the goal is to get to the top, out of the volcanic arena and to a designated “safe zone" waiting on an overhang at the volcano's lip. Up there, an invisible barrier prevents victors from climbing back down into the game zone, and up there is where you will wait with your fellow victors if you succeed. It’s air-conditioned, as if you’re still not trapped within a volcano.
As the first of you reaches the top of the rise, a victory fanfare plays from somewhere, but the lava begins to rise faster. Faster and faster, for each person who succeeds — or dies a horrible, fiery death. You’d better hope your success doesn’t come at the cost of someone else’s life.
As soon as there are no players remaining in the game, another chime plays from a still-mysterious location. After a cheerful voice congratulates you on your victory, the fog encircles you again, as it had done earlier in the day. When you next blink, you’re back in the Grove, standing exactly where you were when you were first taken.
Those of you who died, however, will wake up the following morning in your usual sleeping quarters, be it in your bed or outside in the forest. The good news is, you’re hale and healthy despite everything. A voice whispers to you as soon as you reawaken: "Better luck next time!"
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