The Dunwich site was kind of strange. I didn’t just mean that the air felt off, which it certainly did, but there was a sense that everything was just a little too... light. I bounced on the spot a few times and tried to pinpoint the feeling, but it wasn’t easy.

Once, when I was a much smaller Broccoli, my parents and I had gone camping near a mountain. We went hiking one day and spent the whole afternoon climbing towards the peak. It was a big slopey mountain, so the climb wasn’t too rough, and there were well-trodden paths leading all the way up. As we got closer to the top the air felt harder to breathe, lighter. The air around Dunwich felt the same, but without the altitude to explain it.

That, and there was a stench to the air, as if someone had farted nearby and I was only catching stinky whiffs of it when the wind shifted.

I scrunched up my nose and started looking around. The Two-Lipped Tulips might be hard to find. I hoped they weren't. It had taken a few hours to arrive, and I suspected that it would take a couple more to get back to Rockstack. I didn’t want to be stuck in the woods at night.

The path ahead turned one final time and the ground evened out onto a plateau. To my left I had a spectacular view of the Darkwoods, a sea of trees stretching out to the distance, with marshes to the East and mountains stretching out to the North. I even caught a glimpse of what might have been a huge lake way off in the distance to the South.

Those things were all far away though. I focused on what was to my right.

There were a few buildings still standing even against the test of time. The nearest pair were wooden shacks with tiled roofs, just like the buildings in Threewells. The final building, this one further on the plateau, was a huge construct of corrugated tin, with a rusty metal roof and huge streaks of muck on its sides.

The tin building looked like an abandoned warehouse from back home, strangely out of place in a world where I expected everything to be made of wood and brick. It just made me want to explore it even more!

Orange jumped off my shoulder and started walking in the air before me as I made my way towards the first little shack. There were big windows on the front of it, windows that had been broken inwards some time ago. The door was a few meters away, left to rot on the stoney ground.

“Yikes,” I said as I moved into the darkened interior and took it all in. There were chairs and a table and a couple of bunk beds at the back. A small cast iron fireplace sat to one side and there was a tiny little closet against one wall. Not even a bathroom.

The place had seen better days. No chests, no floorboards to hide anything under, and a tug at the creaky door of the fireplace just revealed ancient coal sitting on a pile of brownish ash.

“A bunk house then,” I muttered. “Probably for the adventurers coming to the dungeon.”

Orange ran back to me and I picked her up to set her on my shoulder. I poked my head out of the front door to make sure there wasn’t anything mean around, then left the bunk house and headed for the next.

This one was in worse condition than even the bunkhouse had been. It was a small home, with two floors and a tower built into the side that rose up even higher. A guard station, maybe? Or a more permanent residence?

Either way, I found the door smashed in and moved into the darkened interior. The place had a pair of offices at the front and, as I moved towards the back, I found a small clinic with a tall bed and some rusty tools left on the floor. There had been tables and desks and chairs and other things here, but most had been broken or kicked aside. Footprints on the dusty floor suggested that it hadn’t happened all that long ago.

The adventurers from Rockstack? That was a distinct possibility.

The second floor had a few small bedrooms and access to the tower proper. It was on the top floor that I got my first glimpse of what had to be the Dunwich dungeon itself, or the place it had been.

The Dungeon’s entrance was shaped a little like a mining shaft, a deep dark hole in the walls of a rocky outcropping. Wooden beams formed a rough archway around the entrance, all of them scorched black as if something had exploded out of the hole.

The ground around the dungeon was blackened by fire and the few bits of vegetation around it were all skeletal and dead.

“I am not going in there,” I said to Orange. I had seen horror movies before, I knew what happened to cute girls going down dark shafts.

I was on my way down the tower when I heard a strange sound, a sort of yowling roar as if someone stepped on the tail of a giant cat.

You have heard the screech of a creature of madness! Your mind is shaken.

I stumbled down the next few steps and had to hang onto the creaky rails to prevent myself from falling even further. The world swayed.

I giggled, because it had been such a funny noise.

I was smiling so hard it hurt when I made my way to the first floor and stepped out without so much as looking around. I didn’t need to look around because looking too much was just silly.

Orange moved ahead of me and blocked my path, so I stepped around her.

She floated before me and blocked my path again. “Get out of my way, you stupid cat,” I said.

I blinked.

Orange gave me a kitty glare.

Shaking my head I tried to refocus and found my mind all fuzzy and strange. My next step had me stumbling sideways until I bumped into the house and just clung to the wall for balance. “What?” I wondered.

The noise, the screech. It had to have done something. I re-read the warning mister Menu had given me with mounting horror.

“Oh, that’s bad,” I said. I knew it was bad, and yet I wanted to either start laughing or curl up in a ball and scream and I couldn’t decide which to do.

Orange pushed herself against my neck and I felt her entire body rumbling with a gentle purr. Had she been trying to stop me? But stop me from what? The madness had only lasted a little bit, but it had been pulling me towards something, making everything but the idea of walking over to it seem like a distraction at best.

Very spooky.

I took a deep breath to resettle myself, then fired a small bust of cleaning magic aimed at myself just to freshen up.

It was like wiping away the fog on a window. As my cleaning magic moved through me I felt it pushing into my head and the cobwebs cleared up. It wasn’t as if my thoughts returned to me so much as the strangeness receded.

Had I just cleaned away insanity?

A glance at my status had me wincing.

Health 111/115

Stamina 84/125

Mana 76/105

I had lost health to that scream, not to mention the heavy cost to my mana reserves to wipe the insanity away. And yet I still didn’t have the slightest clue what the thing screeching at me had been.

The options I had were pretty simple. I could return to Rockstack right away. The few silvers I’d get from finding the Tulips might not be worth all the trouble. Or I could look for the thing making the noise and at least see what it was.

The third option, and the one I chose, was to push off the wall and head over to the next building.

I did so slowly, cautious of the world around me and wary of anything that made any noise. I was going to snoop around that final building and at least try to get an idea of what had happened here.

The Dunwich site was kind of creepy, but in the full light of day there wasn’t anything to worry about.

Something scuffed against a rock and I turned around towards the dungeon entrance to see a monster waddling out from behind a rock. It was about the size of a big dog, with, at a glance, seven feet and three arms that ended in long-fingered hands. Its mouth reached from just below the hole where a nose should have been to its upper chest, a gaping pit in its front that dribbled with saliva.

Pale skin chafed against a rock as it wiggled against it, the stone digging into flesh that peeled off in lumps. It opened its mouth wider and a pair of long tentacles slid out of it to rub at its side.

“Nope,” I muttered.

A hungry Dunwich Abomination, level 8.

“Nopity, nope, nope nope.”

The abomination must have heard me because it turned its strangely dog-like head my way and locked eyes with me. Much to my growing horror, the monster’s skin began to shift and warp and between one moment and the next it turned the same colour as the stones behind it and became nearly impossible to see from afar. That was, until it started wobbling towards me.

“Oh shoot!” I said as I turned and started running away.

The abomination screamed. It sounded human.

You have heard the screech of a creature of madness! Your mind is shaken.

I stumbled forwards, then came to a slow stop. Why had I been running? It was probably a nice monsty. And it was hungry. I could feed it!

Cleaning magic burst through me and my mind cleared in fits and starts.

The abomination was closer.

I ran, putting every effort into outpacing and out-distancing the monster on my tail. There were some rocks ahead which I thought to weave through, until they started to wiggle and move my way.

“Oh no. No no,” I said between pants.

A leap brought me over the line of abominations and let me shoot past them, but I could tell that they were still right on my heels.

The cliffs were ahead, a dip in the ground that would lead me to the forests below. I didn’t have time for the normal path, not when it meant looping back and forth a few times.

This bun was not going to get caught by any number of tentacle monsters.

I shot off the side of the cliff with a squeak, my stamina reserves dipping down as I tried to make get as far from the cliff’s edge as I could.

I crashed into a tree.

Something screeched behind me before a sickening splat sounded out across the region.

Congratulations! You have caused Dunwich Abomination, Level 7, to drop dead! Bonus Exp was granted for splattering a monster above your level!

Luckily for me, I had aimed at a large pine, so other than a body-full of sharp needles, I was mostly okay as the tree bent back with the impact then swayed to return to its original position.

Turning, I looked at the top of the hill to see six abominations all standing in a row and glaring at me. “Hah, Made it!” I called back.

They sprouted large, deformed wings.

“Oh, that’s not cool,” I said as I started to scramble down the tree. Forget the flowers and forget Dunwich. It was a silly place for silly people and I didn’t want to be anywhere near it. It would suck to tell Dylan that I had failed, but better to fail a small quest than get tentacle monstered.

The abominations landed in the woods just as I hit the ground and the chase continued.

Trees blurred past as I ran deeper and deeper into the forest, my path hampered every few meters by fallen trees and thick brush. The abominations weren’t as fast, but they just barreled through the bushes in their way, not even breaking their flailing stride.

And that’s when I ran face first into a very angry tree.