-BEGIN-
They said she was crazy. Luna the lunatic.
Pfft. Who needs them.
Luna forced the window open with a crowbar.
They said the mansion was haunted. They'd heard wailing in the middle of the night. Luna'd heard it too. But she knew... she knew it wasn't wailing they heard...
She knew it was cries of pleasure.
This mansion was not abandoned... There was something else here. Something... primal. Luna had to find out what.
She propped the window open, and began to climb in.
Then she stopped.
Was this the right thing to do?
Surely this isn't safe.
She looked back down the mansion's driveway and through the gates she'd only just climbed over. Her car was right there. She could just come back in the morning... right? She was under-equipped anyway. She carried nothing but a torchlight - no spare batteries either.
Maybe she should come back another time...
-WHAT DO YOU DO?-
Luna was too curious by the noises, and couldn't help but be curious. She mustered up the courage, and climbed in through the opened window.
-CONTINUE-
The mansion's foyer was huge. A huge staircase reminiscent of the Titanic was the centerpiece of the room, leading up to a hallway with multiple doors.
Two black stone statues flanked the stairway's landing, and beyond them were three sets of double doors. The one on the left was ajar, but it was too dark to see what was beyond.
Luna switched on her torchlight - she was worried the house had become a squatter for meth heads... but the house was... surprisingly clean. The alabaster banister that lined the stairs seemed to shimmer in the light of her torch.
"Fuck!"
Luna jumped, startled. Something had just brushed past her feet - a stray cat? Something...
She pointed her flashlight to the ground, searching for the source, only to see it dart away into the darkness. She tried to track it with her light but it was too quick - it was gone.
She turned back around and immediately felt that something was amiss - did the statues move? Perhaps she should inspect them?
She looked around the house... so many rooms. There were three doors on the ground floor that seemed to lead to the same room. The upper floor had a door to the left and the right, and one in the center.
Perhaps she should explore the mansion to find the strange animal...
-WHAT DO YOU DO NEXT?-
Luna decided to look for the mysterious creature while exploring the rooms of the mansion.
-CONTINUE-
Luna took a moment to pump herself up - gotta force that enthusiasm. Randomly, she decided on the leftmost door on the upper floor and made her way toward it.
She felt strange as she moved past the statues. She could have sworn she heard creaking of some sort... and... breathing?
She stood still and held her breath, straining her ears for to pick up any sound.
*BOOM*
Luna jumped as thunder cracked outside, shocking her back into motion. She made her way up the stairs and entered the door she'd chosen.
The door opened smoothly, as if it had been recently oiled; Luna shuddered. It would have probably been less creepy if the door creaked as she had expected it to. She closed the door behind her and beheld the room before her.
It was an enormous library; the door opened out onto the library's upper floor, and the walls were lined with books. Luna recognized the t-shaped layout before her - this was a converted cathedral. The library was about two bus-lengths long, and two annexes reached to the left and the right about 2/3s of the way down. Bookshelves lined the walls on either side on both floors, and there were a series of tables and displays in the center alley on the ground floor.
-WHAT DO YOU DO?-
1: Explore the Upper Level to the Left Annex
2: Explore the Upper Level to the Right Annex
3: Explore the Lower Level to the Left Annex
4: Explore the Lower Level to the Right Annex
5: Go Back
6: Something Else?
Luna decided to check the upper right annex first, hoping to find any interesting books there
-CONTINUE-
Luna made her way along to inspect the books on the balcony to her right. She inspected the tomes that occupied the shelves and found most of their spines to be unmarked. She removed a book from the first bookshelf and leafed through the pages, finding most of the text to be written in a strange language - the letters looked like English, but she found herself somehow unable to recognize any of the characters, as if her brain simply refused to comprehend what she was looking at.
She put the book back and continued along the way; the first bookcase was rather long. She reached the end of the book case when suddenly she jumped backward. At the end of the book case, in the recess between the first and second case, was a lion.
No, it was a stuffed lion.
Not that it made it any less creepy.
It sat on its haunches, chest out and proud.
Luna shuddered, but decided to move on. As she did so, she found more stuffed animals between the library's bookcases. There was the first lion, then a gazelle, a zebra, a tiger...
Luna rounded the corner into the annex and stopped short.
In the recess were no longer books. The recess was lined with stuffed animals of all shapes and sizes. All of them on all fours. They looked so... realistic. She looked across the banister to the left annex and she could barely make out the silhouettes of animals as well. She peered over the balcony to see a mock aquarium on the lower floor, filled with what she assumed to be stuffed sea animals.
At the end of the library was another stairway to the lower ground.
-WHAT DO YOU DO?-
1: Inspect an animal closer.
2: See what other animals there are in this annex.
3: Explore another annex.
4: Something else?
Feeling a little too wierded out, Luna decided to check a different annex in the upper left part of the library.
-CONTINUE-
Luna crossed over to the annex on the left, staying on the upper floor. The books still seemed to elude comprehension, but the stuffed animals continued. She tried to make some sense of the way the animals were arranged. In this annex there were a few breeds of dog, and...
'ohhhhh.' Luna thought aloud.
This section must be for canines; the right annex had cheetahs and leopards, that must have been for felines. Luna smiled a little, feeling somewhat proud of herself.
-WHAT DO YOU DO?-
1: Inspect an animal closer
2: See what other animals there are in this annex (I'll list them)
3: Explore another annex.
4: Something else?
out of curiosity, and being a fan of wolves, Luna decided to find a stuffed wolf, and look at that closely.
-CONTINUE-
Luna stumbled about in the darkness, preferring to use her torch to illuminate the animals lining the walls rather than the path before her. She had something in mind, and...
There.
Luna stopped in front of a wolf. A stuffed wolf.
The animal stood proudly on all fours, but there was something odd about its proportions. Luna couldn't quite place what.
She approached the animal and knelt down before it.
It had a gray coat that faded to white under its belly and legs. It's eyes seemed... empty, but they were of two different colors - one was brown and the other was gray. Its fur was soft and well groomed.
Luna reached out to feel the creature's fur. She ran her hand across the stuffed animal's haunches, feeling the soft fur tickle her hand. She felt the animal sway as she did so, as if it were empty and light. Perplexed, Luna made an attempt to lift the animal and found that it weight about as much as a guitar. She rapped on the suspiciously hard skin of the animal and found it to be completely hollow.
Luna ran her hand across the fur and found something out of place - a zipper.
Hidden under the dense fur was a zipper's train, running down the back of the animal.
-WHAT DO YOU DO?-
1: Check the other animals.
2: Unzip it and see what's inside.
3: Ignore it and explore somewhere else.
4: Something else?