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?

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.

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…

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.

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.

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

Goddammit that’s what I was gonna do

based and rudeus grayrat pilled

*the cabin is sentient

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.

You cannot get ye flask.

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.