Gentle could talk to dead people.
At least, that's how her mother advertised it. She had childhood memories of talking to strangers who would come into her home and sit at the kitchen table next to cheap plastic candles her mother had purchased. They would ask lots of questions about deceased loved ones as her mother sat in a dark corner of the room, observing them. Her mother had been using Gentle’s condition to get money out of grieving strangers, which was lucrative due to how wildly detailed her hallucinations were. These visions were filled by conversations with rotting corpses and even stranger, less human-like things, conversations that seemed to bleed into her daily life outside of these seances. She was trapped in that house by her mother and by the hallucinations that haunted her every day.
Gentle’s mother was very sick. This was obvious to most people who interacted with her. It could be felt in the buzzing in her voice and her aprehensive body language, both of which she wielded to manipulate people around her. Her daughter, who was especially susceptible to her abusive behavior, was the only one who could truly understand how this sickness inflicted her. She would constantly consume candy and sugary treats, which soon became the only things she would eat. It eventually led her to consume unflavored packages of sugar, the wrappers of which were left in piles around the house. The highest concentration was in her bedroom, where she stayed isolated for long periods of time. The other changes, the ones that only Gentle could see, were insects. She could see them crawling inside her mother’s mouth and around the surface of her eyes. She would find them flying around the house and getting into the food, spoiling what little she had to eat. The infestation grew in intensity, matching the decline of her mother's mental state. Nobody believed Gentle when she talked about these things; nobody else could see them.
WH3 is a horror game inspired by dream emulators and classic survival horror
The game is currently being developed by myself, and a few other talented writers, artists, and developers. A playable demo will be released sometime in the late summer of 2025. The game’s story is based on the graphic novel “Changeling”.
Gentle began having strange dreams about a door in the basement.
A door that had appeared one night, manifesting itself on the damp stone walls without explanation. Although she had never seen the door before, it felt old, even older than the house and the trees that surrounded it. In the dreams she had, she would spend hours trying to unlock the strange mechanism that kept it sealed. It was sharp and constantly changing its shape, becoming more complex with every moment. She'd wake up sometimes with small cuts on her hands, seemingly from the hours spent dreaming, though she didn't know how to explain this. At night, when the angry buzzing of insects kept her awake, she would step down into the basement to examine the door. She would trace the lacquered wood surface with her fingers and palm, consumed with a strange sense of longing that she didn't really understand. This became habitual, almost ritualistic after several nights of this, with vague intentions of escaping her mother and this decrepit house. After what felt like an age of troubling dreams and angry insects, she finally heard a click.
With an uncanny sense of familiarity, she opened the door and stepped inside, not knowing what she would find.
