roll for rule

I cast Lvl. 8 Cock of the Infinite....

Not you again!

You don the flappy body bindings and the pointy cranium cover you looted from the evil wizard you killed a while back. They're still as comfortable as the day you wiped the blood off them, and they imbue you with a sense of power and a strange urge to rudely prank people and commit mass slaughter.

Ah, you just woke up from a midday nap. For a moment there you were a little confused about where you were; it must've been a really good nap. You curl back up on the bench by the broad window out of frame, where the sun was warming your cozy blankets. Just outside, the trees sway gently in the wind, and a herd of deer munch on the grass. Your eyelids grow heavier, and you settle for going back to sleep. There's nothing going on today, so why not? You deserve it. Soon enough, you fall back into the world of dreams,

GAME OVER

You just woke up. Why are you going back to sleep? You have to get up eventually. So what are you going to do then? That's the question.

You grasp at what you thought was a key at first, until you realize there isn't a key there. Someone drew a key onto the floor with black chalk. In hindsight you realize you should have noticed that sooner, like before you even reached down towards it, especially since it's not a particularly well drawn key; you could say it's rather shit, and you can't believe you fell for it.

Goddammit that's what I was gonna do

*the cabin is sentient

based and rudeus grayrat pilled

The books are all well maintained and free of dust. Whoever owns these books takes great care of them, as not even the shelves they're sitting on are dirty. Despite that, they show no signs of wear and tear, as though they were bought from the store, placed directly on the shelf, and never read. Weirdly, none of the sides of the books have titles written on them; as you take the first one down to have a look through it, it catches on something. A little force, and the book tilts forward; an audible kachunk rings through the room, muffled by the walls.

The book falls free after the noise, revealing a strange mechanism behind it, built into the wall behind the shelf and fed through a hole in the back of said shelf; a lever of some kind? In any case, the book itself isn't all that interesting. It goes into incredible detail about the aerodynamics of butterfly wings and various experiments and extrapolations regarding their ability to cause hurricanes. Roll perception.

You whisper the ultimate cat call. It echoes over the empty cabin; nothing happens, and a profound sense of loss washes over you. You walk over to the shelf by the window and run your hand over it, staring at the one particularly worn spot on it for a moment. You walk over and check the litter box, but of course it's clean. It always is nowadays. Old habits die hard after all. You cook yourself some breakfast and take a seat at the table, and try the call again. Nothing happens, as expected, not even when you open a can of tuna. Old habits die hard, but they die eventually. You spread the tuna on your bread and eat your meal, alone in the silence.

You have disturbed a mimic disguised as a jewelry box. It snaps and almost separates you from the fingers on your right hand.

The larder contains the salted pork and bread, but you keep the eggs in the refrigerator to its left. Once gathered on the table, you head outside the door and check your firewood shack; it's filled bottom to top with quarter cut firewood, of whatever varieties you could gather. You take a moment to thank your past self for gathering all this wood. The chill in the air shakes your bones, and you'll need all the heat you can get to survive the coming winter.

Wood, check, breakfast ingredients, check. You get to work on cooking up a quick meal, frying the pork and eggs on your stove; soon enough, the aroma of smoke and fresh food engulfs the entire cabin. You pat your belly; it was a filling meal, but soon after you start to wonder if you could sustain that sort of habit. Winter is coming. With winter, there's less prey, and less meat. Maybe you should start rationing more?

In any case, you push the thought of food out of mind for now, head towards the forge in the back of the cabin, and fire it up. This much should be fine, your wood stores are plentiful. There's only one problem; your trusty anvil seems to have disappeared. You're quite sure you left it sitting on the floor, right where the anvil shaped indent on the ground is, but it seems to have totally disappeared. Your plans for the billet are held back by the fact you have nothing to hammer on, which is odd because your hammer is still here. Where in the hells did your anvil go, and why just the anvil?

Unfortunately, you don't find a fridge in the room. You're not sure where you got the idea from, as there never has been and most likely never will be a fridge in the room with you. Still, the image of a fridge against the wall haunts you like a particular bad sense of de ja vu; was there a fridge there before? Yes, you're quite sure there was, and yet there wasn't. You start to question your sanity; your psychiatrist would probably ask if you've taken your pills yet. Have you? They would have been in the fridge...

You cannot get ye flask.

When you go to examine the bookshelf, you realize it's not actually a bookshelf, but a painting on the wall designed to look exactly like a set of bookshelves from precisely the perspective you were formally at. Oddly enough, all of the titles are books you have read before, but none are ones you're currently reading.

Whether out of fear or perplexity, none can say for sure; the moment you find yourself here, you cab out all over the place. Your body morphs and expands, your bones turn into metal beams and your skin gains a clear coat and yellow paint; moments later, you're a fully developed cab in the middle of a cabin.

Much of the room is destroyed in your antics; the table is smashed and broken, the windowsill has fallen off the wall, all the pots are shattered into pieces... Even sol, in this form, you feel powerful. You feel fast. One might even say, you are speed. What is this little cabin wall to your steel bumpers and gas engine?

In short, you cabbed out in a cabin and you're a car now. Let's hope there's no dragons nearby.

You feel an inexplicable urge to cry. The tears leak from your eyes before you even realize it. The sobs escape you despite yourself, and within moments you're on your knees, sobbing and crying into your hands, unable to stop the tears.

Just as suddenly as the urge came, it disappears. The tears dry, and you rise to your feet. Alright, what now?

A sudden urge to kill a foolishly dressed alleged comedian fills you to the brim. Unfortunately, there is none in the room with you. You'd have to find him before you can kill him, but you have your objective in mind. The first question is how you're going to get out of here. The front door is locked, and the only hint of a key is the shitty drawing on the floor. Ha ha. Very funny, whoever put that there. What's worse is that there's no weapons here. To kill someone, you'd need something to kill them with. Well, you could do with your bare hands, but it's much easier with a tool of some sorts, and the cabin is strangely absent of tools suitable for the act of murder.

You whip up a large breakfast, fit for a hobbit's first breakfast: eggs, bacon, toast, fruit mix, cereal and yogurt and milk, orange juice and a small brownie for desert. Before long the scent washes over the entire cabin and your belly grumbles in anticipation. You sit down to feast and enjoy the fatty, savory meats and the crisp and buttered toast, the fluffy eggs and the sugary cereal and milk.

All incredibly filling, you pat your nearly bloated stomach, satisfied with the meal. You emerge onto the porch for a quick smoke of the herb, letting the floating sensation wash over you as you watch the trees sway in the wind and the dew twinkle on the grass. By now it's practically afternoon, just about time for second breakfast. Then again, you do have to tend to your farms and gardens; all this food comes from somewhere, no?

Breakfast had: 1/?

Pipes smoked: 1/30

Food stores: oooooxxxxx

Though the lower ladder is initially intended for the bookshelf, it's perfectly serviceable for climbing to the top of the shelf, and from there climbing up the other ladder up to the attic. Deeper into the attic, a pair of eyes reflect in the light, before the something scurries off into the darkness. It's dusty and moldy up here, littered with cobwebs between the rafters and trusses. In the furthest back, though, sits a single locked chest. You kinda forgot you put that up here actually.

Just then, you hear a knock on the door. You flinch and slam your head on the roof. Rubbing your head in pain, you wonder who would be calling on you at this hour.

You split a wicked grin as you pick up a hammer and go to town. Everything breaks under your unlimited rage and glee; the bookshelf falls apart and the books go flying, the table cracks and splits in two, the pots all shatter, the pumpkin explodes and sheds pumpkin goo everywhere. Nothing is safe from you. Nothing, except the anvil in the corner. No matter how hard you strike it, your hammer does nothing to it but ring out and send painful vibrations up your arm. It's frustrating, infuriating that something could survive and withstand your rampage. The anvil sits there, unbroken and mocking, until it's all you can think about.

You're alone, just as you wanted, just as you like, and you'll stay alone as you please. The absence of human presence surrounds you, almost crushing you as you stand there, waiting for nothing. The only sound is the sound of your own beating heart and the ever so slight creaks of the wood as you shift on it. You're alone. The thought resonates with the pressure of the emptiness around you. It bears down on you, crushing and squeezing you in a hug that tells you it'll never let you go. You're alone. It gnaws on you in a comfortable sort of way, the silence and loneliness. The room is as empty as your life and with a smile you embrace it all, feed yourself to the it that gnaws and comforts and crushes and hugs. You'll stay alone, and the moment the thought drifts past your head a wave passes over you, a sensation in every joint and limb. It's as though your body emptied itself, as though for the first time you're feeling the warmth of yourself, because you know you'll never feel the warmth of anything else ever again.

You're alone. Just as you wanted. Always.

The first place you would check is the fridge; the problem is, there doesn't seem to be a fridge here. There's a spot that seems like it would clearly house a fridge, but it's not there. You could have sworn you saw it out of the corner of your eye before you turned towards it, but there's no real point thinking about it now. Unless you count books or strange flowers as edible calories, your search turns up empty. Whoever was here before left no food.

The only place you hadn't checked is the attic, but as you stare at the ladders ascending upwards, you get a most ominous sensation; chills creeping up your spine...

There doesn't seem to be a fireplace anywhere in view, nor a source of water. You could burn the books in the middle of the floor, but you have a sneaking suspicion that'll cause the whole cabin to catch fire. Even then, where would you get water from? To that end, what about tea leaves?

A sense of sadness flows through you. You really wanted some tea.

When you try the door, you find that it's locked tight. Looking outside through the window, you do in fact spot some suitable nodes to hit, if only you could get to them. Your forge does require ore and minerals; your stocks are getting low. Unfortunately with no way outside and no rocks to hit inside, you're left stranded.

The covers on the books are all strange and esoteric. Such titles as "The essence of the Rain" and "A treatise on the ergonomics of feathered fountain pens against modern ball point pens." One is simply titled "First", which, oddly enough, is the last book on the shelves.

You pick one at random: its title reads "Odd happenings of collective hallucinations: reported appearances of the gongachu." It initially goes over what the gongachu is; some kind of folk lore creature, incredibly dangerous and hostile. Following the initial description, it compiles a list of reported sightings, before correlating the sightings to occasions of mass hallucinations caused by local volcanic springs. The author does not believe in the existence of the gongachu, that much is clear from the tone. Still, the number of sightings is massive. If there is a gongachu, surely one would have been killed or captured by now, no? In one case, a third party entered a town that was living in terror of the gongachu lurking its streets at night, but the traveler spent the night in the middle of town and was still there in the morning. The author concludes the report by firmly stating his disbelief in the gongachu, chalking it up to mass hysteria and cultural delusions.

A few hours have passed by the time you've finished reading. Dusk settles outside, the orange light of the dying sun bleeding in through the windows and casting the room in long shadows. There's still plenty of books on the shelf, but it's getting late, and for some reason you get the feeling something is watching you.