It’s been about seven months since Murder Mansion Prime: since Vallo outlanders woke up in another dimension, in a place called “the Void”, attending a party that never ended. Aleksis Dorsey’s mansion may have been hip in the 1960s, but his idea of being a host wasn’t to anyone’s liking: when they tried to escape the Void, Aleksis and his group of sycophants gleefully leapt to murder to protect their eternal soiree. All of Vallo was able to tune in and see the chaos unfold, and ultimately share in the joy of Aleksis’s defeat. Vallo even got a shady-fisherman-once-God out of it. All was well.
It’s the middle of the night. Your dreams fade from behind your eyes, and you open them…somewhere else. With no control of your destination, you float past edifices of stone, great leviathans of the deep, streets of times gone by, fractions of wars that have yet to happen, and at last, a darkness so deep it seems to have weight and texture. You reach out, and the darkness takes form: a single stone island, upon which stand several other denizens of Vallo.
The Void. It’s unformed, restless, shadows swirling around you.
And then you hear a familiar voice.
“What’s up, sluts!”
Aleskis Dorsey materializes in front of you, and at first glance, he’s exactly what you might remember: average height. Average weight. Boring haircut. Slick suit. Wolf mask.
It’s only when you take a closer look at him that you realize that his eyes behind the holes of the wolf mask are a solid, terrifying black.
You can’t move. You can’t cry out. One of his hands is in front of him, clenched tight, and he smirks as you realize… you can’t fight back.
“Yeah!” he says conversationally. “
Yeah. Hey there, guys! I’ve got a whole bag of new tricks. I’m a
god now. God of the Void. That’s what you guys did - you
killed me. And
left me in the Void. But…” You can’t see him smiling, but you know he is - his mouth pulling wider beneath the blankness of his stupid wolf mask. “But I’m an opportunist. I’m a maverick. I took what Power I needed, and became CEO of this fucking place. And Vallo…”
He weaves among you. You’re all frozen, all unable to react, unable to do anything but listen to this idiot pontificate. “Vallo. C’mon. You don’t call. You don’t write. You
ghosted me. And I’m so terribly horny for revenge. And now…”
His fist begins to glow an eerie green. Aleksis doesn’t look much like a man, anymore. “Now…” His voice booms, vibrates, sends horrifying little darts of light into the bleakness of the writhing shadows. “You
die.”
At first… there is nothing. Then, a strange roaring from a distant part of the Void, and then--
--a dead whale splats grotesquely in front of you.
That’s it. It’s just a dead whale.
I mean, it’s really gross…? But it doesn’t do anything.
Aleksis stares at it. Gives it a little poke with his shiny shoe. “Well,” he eventually says, “that’s not what I meant to do.
God. This is fucking annoying. You know,” he said, “I didn’t even get trained for this gig? It was just, ‘whoa, hey, promotion time’, and I was suddenly a god. You know? Like, wow, I had this, but I’m still
new at this. Wow. Kind of embarrassing.”
He rolls up his sleeves, and disappears. Suddenly, you can move again, you can talk, you’re free of-- whatever that was.
“Shit!” you hear Aleksis say, but his voice sounds far away. “Wow. That little freeze thing I just did? Can’t do
that again. Took a lot outta me. Anyway, stay right there, be right back, gonna kill you all horribly and violently but I just need to figure out how I-- wait.”
A pause. “Who the fuck are y--” Suddenly, Aleksis’s voice cuts off. And a second voice can be heard, sounding somewhat familiar and absolutely
done:
“This again,” it grumbles, but there’s a sudden stop as the voice’s owner figures out what’s going on. This is no dream, nor even a nightmare. “Shit. Okay, let me just…”
The Void seems to warp and move, like a ship tossed upon a wave. There is the sense of a struggle somewhere beyond, of bits of almost-reality violently snatched and stitched, ripped apart and stuck back together as a pair of vicious hounds tear at each other for a single piece of meat. The darkness lurches, and now you find a new denizen of the Void standing before you: that grouchy old fisherman who grumps around New Asgard. However, Daud’s normally slate-gray eyes are now fathomless darkness from sclera to pupil, as they were when he was once the Power in the Void, and as Aleksis Dorsey’s are now.
“That little bastard,” he growls. Daud closes his eyes and sighs, setting the anger aside in favor of practicality–and exhaustion. “It seems that when you consigned Aleksis Dorsey to the Void, he was able to seize some of its power: enough of it to bring more of Vallo here. Unfortunately for him, he also got me. I’ve done what I can: made a space you can work in, gave you some tools, and put it in a place where the barriers are thinner. With Dorsey fighting me the whole way, it’s a sloppy job, and he managed to get his damn time loop in there again–you’ve got three hours to do what you need to do before it resets. And unfortunately that’s…all I can do for now.”
His weariness is increasingly obvious, and he appears to fade more with each second. Is his hair graying, or is his whole being fading as you watch?
“I’m bound by the Void’s rules again, and I’ve used up all I have. I–” There’s a flash of something in his expression. Worry? Whatever it is, he speaks faster. “There’s a weapon you’ll need, and the sea has always made a good escape, and...try to fit in. Good luck.”
With no further warning, he dissolves into ash, and the shroud of darkness moves to envelop you…and then lifts. You are at last free of the floating islands and terrible emptiness and standing somewhere that looks like a real place: a mansion? A palace? The sounds of a very genteel party can be heard all around. You’re dressed in Victorian-esque party clothing: trousers, jacket, neckcloth, the whole deal. Time to take stock of the room in which you’ve found yourself and figure out what you can discover.
Welcome to Dunwall Tower.As you do that, you feel a faint buzz in the pocket of your jacket–your phone made it here from Vallo! Most of its capabilities are gone and its screen is black, but you’ll see the blackness soon half-filled with a keyboard, the other half with a chat feed. It reads as follows:
You Have Entered the Chat.