the whole house is rotting

[basement-bodies]

the rot returns in force. Lapping at the edges of your vision, the mold overtakes all.

and yet, there is a sense of peace in the rot never quite seen before.

[basement-bodies]

Sculk cave outskirts

- your camp is located in the curve of a tunnel heading down in a steep drop. the soul powered campfire casts an eerie blue glow on everything and though the flames burn hotter than normal, everything is cold down here.

- it's your friend's shift. every once in a while you hear the faint sound of a Sensor going off down the tunnel and you remember you're not alone down here. you dread the goat horn that signals your shift's beginning.

- you slam your pick into the rock, breaking apart layers upon layers of slate until you find what you're really looking for: cold heavy chunks of metal. iron and copper.. they'll fetch a nice profit at market once the impurities are smelted away.

- the time flies as you find an abnormally large iron ore deposit and you dig yourself into a corner to dislodge the biggest boulder of ore, a massive solid chunk of raw iron.

- you slip. you fall. the boulder falls out of your hands and past you into the cave. you land in a pile of Sculk and you hear sensors go off all around you.

followed by a shriek.

you were never alone down here.

[basement-bodies]

YE KING OF DEPTHS

Ye King of Depths, what hallowed words have you heard in the lightest of whispers within the darkest passages of the earth?

Ye King of Depths, what ancient writings have you brushed a claw across wishing for your eyes to return, just to read the crazed scripts the denizens scribed so long ago?

Ye King of Depths, what terrible dreams plague your restless sleep beneath the Sculk you are bonded so closely to?

Ye King of Depths, what are your secrets? Your origins, your hopes and ambitions? Have you forgotten them already?

Ye King of Depths, we fear you now due to what you have become. But oh King, we offer you our curiosity. We offer you our compassion whether our words hold meaning or not. Oh King, your remnants of words intrigue us. Your lonely whines as you sniff the air to find your long passed loved ones. The stale air down here holds nothing for you but loneliness and burned lungs.

[basement-bodies]

Deep Dark gothic/pov ??

- the only sounds down here come from stalactites shaped like teeth, dripping water sounding like thunderclaps slicing through the silence. the dripstones loom above. they seem to grow every time you blink. you keep a sharp eye on them as you weave between the stones and slink deeper into the caverns.

- your small mining party ready their torches and hoes as someone triggers a sensor. the tendrils seem to lick at the air and gurgle when you step past carelessly. there are so many of them.

- catalysts glow faintly; their bulbous forms stand stalwart against the darkness around them. their surfaces are slimy and slippery but inert.

- you avoid the shriekers like your lives depend on it. four strikes and you're out. you avoid them, miraculously.

- the Ancient City seems to crawl on forever, pushing against the stone seams of the cave as if it doesn't have enough room. as if the sculk spreading across it has a mind of its own. but it's just some sort of slime mould.. right?

- you crouch to examine a shard of slate on the ground and suddenly you have an overwhelming sense of doom. you get up and quietly trot towards the rest of the party. whatever lurked over there wasn't worth the risk.

- the heartbeats grow louder. they aren't yours. the heartbeats were never yours. your camp at the portal with its bright light suddenly doesn't feel so safe anymore. the heartbeats get louder until they're deafening.

- it can smell you.

- you're too close.

- get out. now. it can't get into narrow tunnels.

- what is it?

- you already know too much. book it.

- the search party was found in the tunnels pummeled to death by.. something. the passage was sealed and town leaders vowed to come back at a later time with better gear and body bags.

- legend says a gigantic antlered figure with no eyes and an angleresque mouth roams the dilapidated cities buried deep underground, where lava is plentiful and the claustrophobia is stifling.

- pray you don't hear it whine. you're far too close.

[basement-bodies]

The End gothic

- so many of you stand around on this floating island surrounded by unending static. even the music you hear faintly in the background is corrupted.

- the insidious monoliths of obsidian stretch high into the meaningless sky. they cut through the land you stand on and seem to anchor you in place, whether this island once moved or not. they thrum with power.

- your bones hurt. you hate eye contact. you can barely remember what houses look like. the dragon circles overhead. you cry. it burns.

- your heart barely beats anymore. but when it does, it beats in time with the floating crystals sending waves of energy through the towers.

- the dragon performs a strange dance over the defunct portal in the earth, a strange rhythmless dance with crazed eyes

[basement-bodies]

train platform gothic, in honor of alivebur :]

- the platform stretches on for far longer than any platform you've visited. the walls stretch high up into nothing. at least you won't get a noise complaint here.

- the trains scream past and you're blasted with a wall of air. cold and methodical machines following their tracks. there are no spiders clinging to these hell trains.

- all the windows are tinted a dark red and when light shines through it looks like clotted blood where the glass has sunken down. glass is an extremely viscous liquid, did you know? every time you lean your face against one of the windows it feels like your cheek is bloody but when you go to touch it there's nothing there.

- you sit down on the platform and pull your guitar from your back, setting it in your lap and going to tune the strings.. they always sound so warped in this place no matter how perfectly precise you are with your fingers. why are you tuning? you gave up years ago.

- all the clocks perpetually spin in place. they're the same fucking clocks you remember from your office. did you ever have an office? you lay on the cold oil stained concrete and cry.

the clumps of sad shadows you see standing all around the platform start to converge on the edge as another train speeds along the track. it's time to go. where? to another goddamned platform, another copy of hell in the middle of true nowhere.

[basement-bodies]

perfect vermin is so beautifully executed wtf

[basement-bodies]

slaughterhouse gothic

- every time you walk through those hallowed doors you swear you can hear the saws buzzing. buzzing like a nest of hornets. incessant. deafening.

- the skulls of hogs stare up at you from the grinder. as you turn the machine monster on, their stinking atrophied eyes bore into your soul. "why do you do this? why don't you join us here in mechanical heaven, where the nectar is plentiful?" you are disturbed. you come back to do the same thing tomorrow.

- your partner is concerned about your well being. you both want to be intimate. but every time you reach their most vulnerable parts all you can visualize is the crushed hog gore. your partner cries. you keep trying.

- you swear you saw a live chicken walking loose. where did you get that silly idea? the chicken was crushed by a forklift carrying cow carcasses. it's been rotting for a week on the wheels. dead things don't walk.

- at therapy you you chalk it all up to the horrors of slaughtering pink skinned hogs and seeing disemboweled cows with their empty eyes staring into hell. your therapist checks your resumé. you don't work at a slaughterhouse. you worked in a hospital. you are locked up. you are disturbed.

[basement-bodies]

wisconsin gothic

- every town is surrounded by corn fields, whether a mile out or twenty yards out. everybody knows the corn fields' names.

- wisconsin is known as the dairy state for good reason. the cheese is so good. it keeps everybody coming back.

- the crows are everywhere. some can be tamed. occasionally they bring back little baggies of cheese curds. sometimes they bring back torn baggies full of eyes.

- the squirrels like peanuts, you say. your neighbors aren't as familiar with the little guys. your friends live in the trees.

- the farms you pass whenever you go to the next town over for work always look so familiar. even when the grey haylofts leak thick, metallic blood, and the stink hovers over it for days.

- you're in a cab driving a few towns over.

you see a horse. you call it out joyfully.

there is no horse. why did you see a horse? there's only an unidentifiable carcass in the stinking red mud past the electric fence.

[basement-bodies]

The wrecked house stinks of decay and shattered plaster lingers in the air. It gets into everything; your eyes, your hair, and your hoodie are all coated in white dust. The back half of the house is collapsed and sunken into the yard itself, which seems to be cracked apart like a spiderweb pattern. But.. Dirt doesn't just crack.. right?

Looking closer, blood and some unidentified black sludge is caked into the ground, with bone shards.

This just keeps getting weirder and weirder, you mumble to yourself.

You can't forget your mission. You dig through the chunks of dirt and the sludge until you locate your goal..

Your heart jumps into your throat. Disembodied hands covered in the black sludge and semi dried blood. 13 of them all in different locations, the 13th found in a pit in the center of the yard surrounded by gore.

They're identified as his whole family. Mother, father, older sister, maternal grandfather, maternal grandmother. Only one of his father's hands could be recovered as the other was far too mangled to be salvageable. The most tragic find was the boy's dog; it was split into several parts all in a pile of fur and guts. His first victim, killed by pure accident by his emerging devastating Quirk.

You swallow away the nauseated feeling in your throat and carry the hands to a bag after labeling them, get in the truck and drive away from the empty cracked ruin of a house that had such an air of tragedy.

[basement-bodies]

broken flagstones. neverending hailstorm of stones. stone statues standing tall and resolute despite the dauntless rain. little statues, your size, pierced through with blue crystals and coated in darkness that crunches beneath your fingers, only burned away when you separate your light from your body and cast it to the sad-looking figures whon never made it out. a flood of brown water that sucks away your light, ever hungry and never satisfied, red crystals jutting up from the ground which leech away your energy, shaking as if in excitement when you get too close turning your cape to a blank white.

[basement-bodies]

a young but sick nightingale singing its last song from a hole in the trunk of an ancient oak.

a feral animal, with nobody nearby to play with except for a scared little rabbit with three eyes

an oil slick at sea drowning an entire flock of seabirds

[the-real-list-of-ominous-threats]

your teeth and tongue will be carpeted in mould and festering rot

Oooooh look at this fAnCy pErSoN who uses a u in mold

[basement-bodies]

This place is endlessly cold. No discernable exits or entrances. Stone archways leading from section to section and walled off by steep hills covered in bright white snow. But no matter how much you look at the pretty snow you can't help but notice that the trees are all vivid red and the snow smells metallic.

A gargantuan red leafless tree, knows as the Mistress, towers over a large clearing littered with hundreds upon hundreds of bone piles and clusters of antlers strewn among red bushes and sparse short gray grass poking up through the snow.

East of the Tree is a sea of red housing aging cracked husks of great powerful vessels, broken and plundered of their contents in the bay, locked for decades in sheets of ever-frozen alabaster ice.

This tundra is unlike any other, you say. You look for water and finally cave in to trying the snow. You do. The metallic snow gives you iron poisoning. You're snowed over and never heard from again, except from the quiet fervent whispers of an owl-faced acolyte as she feeds the tree a full meal after your premature grave is overturned..

[basement-bodies]

out of character but i might make a persona for this account.. im trying to figure out what to base it off of.

some ideas:

Horse skull character who drools tar

Black dog named Galvanize

Some kind of animal cannibal

A lammergeier (bearded vulture)

[basement-bodies]

[basement-bodies]

You take a trip to visit your old neighborhood. Everything is exactly as you remember it.

Except that all the houses seem to have fog drifting out of their gaping doorways.

Except that the slats of the houses are profusely bleeding a thick dark iridescent liquid like thicker gasoline.

Except that the street is cracked and leaks scalding water.

Except that the mailboxes are stuffed with years of letters with no return addresses or anything to show who they're for.

Except that the cute baby plants you remember have grown huge bulbs with faces on them and have been weighed down to the ground where they've been rotting for years.

You look for your house. It's higher up the bluff than you remember. In fact, it's disappeared off the face of the earth and in its place is a giant cracked and faded stone chessboard overgrown with chives and basil plants.