A/N: Welcome to the new story! There will be one more after this, a RWBY Gamer fic that I've been working on slowly in the background. Heart clap and For a Lifetime as still being worked on, with the goal of a different chapter every week.
Wilson was stuck on the nightmare throne.
With the wind howling around him and that horrid ragtime music playing over on repeat it was a living hell, made worse by that nagging feeling in the back of his mind, daring him to look upon the world he had escaped, full of other survivors and toy with them, to test them.
But, at least for now, he resisted. His thoughts occupied with the strange Maxwell that had held this position before him.
At first he had hated Maxwell, it was only right after all, that voice had trapped him in this hellish world. But after he died for the first time he realised something.
Death wasn't the end.
For someone that Wilson had believed was pure evil for so long, he seemed to have a concept of "fairness". Any hardship he came across was possible, the giant deer-cyclops that he had finally slain rewarding him with potent healing.
It took fifty or so worlds until he started to make real progress however, finally discovering the true use of whatever was causing his beard to grow out so quickly.
In a crude gathering of beard hair and pig meat, urged on by the machine he created to unlock the memories on how to harness magic in this world, he created an effigy to protect him, to allow him to dodge death in a more permanent way.
And when he was reborn from that effigy he knew, he could feel it, as if he had finally taken the first big step towards whatever this world, and that strange voice, wanted him for.
He died another 100 times before his next breakthrough.
It could have been disregarded as another trap, but that same rush filled him when he found that strange wooden thing in the forest. Despite leading the giant deer-clops he had come to view more as a useful tool than a threat to this device, nothing could harm it.
Studying the runes on the wooden thing lead him to the first hint at Maxwells name, and its purpose was revealed when some strange ring thing magnetically locked in place on top it it.
It was a jigsaw puzzle, and one he would be sure to solve.
It took three more things; a crank, a box and some strange metal object that somewhat reassembled part of the portal he build to get into this mess.
With the knowledge that this contraption was most likely another portal Wilson simply refused to go through it, leaving the pieces gathered around, but outside the range at which they could snap together.
The knowledge that it was a portal ate at his mind however, ripping away at his sanity with thoughts about how it might be an escape, a way out of this cursed land, with the knowledge on how the portal worked surely he could become well respected off this event.
Wilson wasn't sure if it was a lust to be well know, a fear for wasting the chance, or simply getting bored of surviving the increasingly common attacks by hounds and deerclops, but in the end all that mattered was allowing himself to step into the next portal.
Of course, it wasn't a way out, and he woke up in a frozen world with the strange Maxwell taunting him, but as the lanky man talked about portals and games Wilson could have sworn he saw a mixture of pride and hope in his eyes.
Unprepared for the cold Wilson soon found his body freezing over, but as he awakened he found himself back outside the portal with all his equipment.
He quickly gathered up the materials for a thermal stone and some winter gear before jumping back through the portal. Maxwell greeted him with a snarky comment of "Back to suffer at the hands of the great Maxwell so soon?" but he ignored it past learning the mans name.
Eventually Wilson lost count of the times he had died. Not that he knew if deaths though the portal counted, after all they just sent him back to right before he entered. Other strange rules is that each world seemed to have him constructing a portal, though these ones would only let him take five things with him.
Maxwell got outwardly more and more angry as Wilson progressed, the order of the worlds changing over and over, though the fifth world always plunged him into a total darkness without Maxwell to taunt him. Despite that taunting and anger, it was clearer now than ever that whoever Maxwell was, he wanted Wilson to succeed, and soon he found out why.
After surviving the darkness and making the portal, Wilson found himself in what looked like a massive version of what he had dubbed the "chess biome" back on the constant. Lights sprung into action around him and at the end he saw Maxwell as he had never seen him before.
While before he had posed as a puppet master that was completely in control, the illusion shattered with the shadows pulling back to reveal a frail old man, stuck down to a throne of shadows with a gramophone playing some kind of ragtime music.
Wilson walked with purpose, like a man possessed, even now he wasn't sure what drove him, but he put the strange radio he had been using to find the portals into a box by the side of Maxwell.
All at once the throne unlocked, dropping Maxwell to the ground, as if thousands of years hit him all at once Maxwell turned to ash however, and shadowy hands come out to put Wilson on the throne.
So that's where Wilson found himself, struggling against a throne he knew he would never escape from. When a strange looking women came over and freed him with just a tap onto the shadows. Then everything went black.