Young Master's Room
You swing open the door to have a putrid odor slam into you. The smell is almost enough to kill. It is a mix of something rotting with something sour and some other things- a disgusting concoction that can keep anyone out. Gagging and coughing, you fan the air in front of you as you back off as far as you can from the door until you are clear of the smell. You take in deep breaths, inhaling the musky air which is infinite times more tolerable than the stink in that room. But still, the smell lingers in the back of your nose and you feel like barfing. You really do not want to get close to that door but there is this indescribable gut feeling that there is something of importance in that room. Whether you want to or not, you may very well have to go in to find some clues.
You steel your resolve and with some hesitation, burst into the room while holding your breath. Though you are not breathing, you feel a sting in your nose. The sting quickly grows into a flaring pain and you have to pinch your nose to stop the air from entering. In a frenzy, you scour the room like a starving hyena to find anything that may be of importance before you run out of air. The room itself is a wreck. There are holes in the floor, the walls, and even the ceiling. Random objects and junk are scattered throughout the room like a garbage dump and there are even black stains of some mysterious dried liquid splatter all over. It would be a believable story to say that a mad painter went on a rampage in the room, laughing maniacally as they trashed the place while swinging their brush at everything in sight. While it does not explain the bizarre smell, it does explain the state of the room.
The first thing that strikes out to you is the bed. Its stuffing is flooding out like a fountain and the wooden skeleton that holds the whole thing together has collapsed and an entire side of it is on the floor, making it slant downwards like a slide. Upon closer inspection, you realize that the bed is not stuffed with wool or cotton, or any other fiber at that. No, it is stuffed with crumpled sheets of paper. You randomly snatch one out of the torn holes in the bed and unfold it to find that it is blank. You check a few more and find that they are also all empty. How strange. Maybe there is something in the middle of all of this?
You claw your way through to the center of the bed, occasionally checking one of the crumpled balls of paper you throw out to see if there is anything written on it but they are all empty. You also make several trips out of the room to breathe in more fresh air before holding your breath to reenter but at some point, you get used to the smell and can ignore it to an extent. After a few minutes of deflating the bed, you finally reach the last crumpled ball of paper and open it with shaky hands, sore from the whole ordeal. Unfortunately, this one is blank too. With a frustrated sigh, you crumple the paper again into a ball and throw it away, silently cursing the psychopath who did this.
You get up from the dirty floor and take a good look around the room. Between the cracks of two of the wardrobes is something sticking out at an odd angle. You walk to it and tilt your head so that your eye is peeking through the crack. You lift the lantern until the light shines on the spot just right. There is a hole in the wall and there is also a box wedged inside of it. You reach out your hand to try and grab it but it is just barely out of your reach. You back out of the gap and turn your attention to the wardrobes that are inhibiting you from reaching the box. Moving one of them a little to the side should widen it enough for you to reach.
Slowly, as slow as a snail, you pull one of the wardrobes out, centimeter by centimeter. It is as heavy as its size suggests and you feel as if you were dragging a huge boulder. With hard work and persistence, you succeed in pulling it out an entire inch or two. You try to take the box again, praying that you moved the wardrobe enough. Moving it again would be nigh impossible with how exhausted you are. You feel a cold smooth corner brush your fingertips. But try as you might, that is as far as you can get. You can feel the outline of the box but you cannot get a grip on it at all. So close but yet so far.
You walk outside of the room to take a breather and rest for a while. Once you feel that you have regained your stamina, or at least, enough of it, you barge back into the stinky room and give the wardrobe a final shove to the side. You snatch your long-awaited prize and exit the room to open it. You sit down against the wall and examine the box that had been hiding in the wall. It is made out of wood and has been smoothed out to get rid of all the splinters. It is light but definitely not empty. You shake the box and can hear and feel something moving about inside of it. You look at each side of the box to see where the opening or lid is. There is none. The box is sealed tight to preserve whatever is inside.
You tap the box with your fingernails and hear a sharp sound. The layers of the box are not thick at all and you can easily break it without a tool. You place the box on your lap and angle your elbow just above it. You then raise your arm and smash the face of the box with all of your strength. Your elbow bashes right through the wooden surface and shoots splinters in every direction. You clear the stray wood out of the way and repeat it a second and third time. At this point, there are just some small stubborn pieces left sticking to the sides of the box. You get rid of them too and take out the treasure inside of the box. It is a book with a leather jacket as its cover. There is no title or anything on the cover to indicate what the book is about.
You skim through the pages of the book, finding many strange drawings and cryptic letters. You spent a few minutes looking through all the pages to see if there is anything that you can understand at all in it. Before you know it, you reach the end of the book and the leather cover comes crashing down on the last page.
You have a hunch that this book contains a lot of information about this mansion and the reason why it has fallen apart but it is a shame that you cannot understand anything. You go back into the room, set the book aside on a desk, and resume your search. You walk around the room with no particular idea of where to look or what you are looking for. As you stroll by the wardrobes where you found the book, something falls on your head. Your hair cushions the weight of the object and it falls harmlessly off onto the wooden planks. You snap your head up to the ceiling. Just as with the floor and the walls, there are holes in the ceiling too. A rustling sound startles you and you nearly jump out of your shoes. You take a step back and hold the lantern up, keeping it between you and the hole in the ceiling.
You stay perfectly still and wait for any signs of movement in the holes. You stay like this for some time but your arms begin to feel heavy and you try your best to keep the lantern up. You manage to last another few seconds before your arm completely gives out and the lantern falls to your side. You switch the lantern to your other hand and take more steps back until you are almost out of the door, keeping your eyes trained on the ceiling the whole time. It is at that moment that something zips by the corner of your eye on the floorboard.
You shift the light to where you saw movement and it reveals a small creature with long whiskers standing on its hind legs. The bright light blinds the creature and it scurries back into the darkness, squeaking as it makes its escape. You move the oil lantern back up in front of you and you see more of these creatures in the ceiling. All of them have the same exact reaction of holding up their tiny arms and ducking away when the light hits them. Mice. The ceiling is infested with mice. The bed stuffed with balls of paper and the box with a book wedged in the wall? It is hard to imagine that the mice have anything to do with those, but they are presumably the ones responsible for chewing all the holes in the floor, ceiling, and walls. They may be the reason why the room has a rotting stench as well. There must be tens or even hundreds of dead mice in this room that are hidden out of sight within the walls, floor, and ceiling.
The mice are now out in numbers and moving around the room. You can feel many tiny eyes on you as you search the room a last time in case you missed something. You approach the desk where you placed the leather book. It is risky to keep it outside of here where the mice can see it. If they chew out the pages of this book then you may lose some valuable clues. You pull open one of the drawers to store the book in there but as you do, something comes flying out. It drops to the floor with a loud metallic clank.
You pick up the item that fell. It is a silver pendant with a long chain. There is a screw on the top of it which you pinch and turn. The pendant opens up to reveal a colored picture. It is a hand-drawn portrait of three people. There is a tall man on the left with long hair, a beard, and a mustache to match. At his side appears to be a sword and there is something round on his back- a shield? On the right is a woman who looks like she is in her thirties or early forties. She has curly hair, a piercing gaze, and sharp features all over. Sitting in between the two is a child who looks no older than ten. He has features from both the man and the woman and seems to be their son. Other than the man who is standing in a full suit of armor excluding the helmet, the boy and the woman are in casual clothes and are sitting down. There are many people standing behind them but their faces are not detailed. They too are wearing armor and carry weapons like the man. They look to be knights that serve the three in the front.
You close the pendant and return it to the drawer and also put the book in there alongside it before shutting it. Now you know who the people that lived here were and what they looked like, but you still do not know what happened to this place. Something drastic must have taken place for the family to abandon the mansion. Based on the picture, you can tell that the family was quite influential and powerful. They had a fighting force of their own the size of a small army on top of that too. Just what exactly transpired?