Omake Week 2022, Day 2: Continuing the theme of "Omake Week falls on convenient dates," here's the standard first-of-the-month entry in the series of Balyn's adventures, where he has a bad time of it in the Forbidden Woods.
~X X X~
The Forbidden Woods, Balyn decided, had well earned their name. Behind the locked gate he'd found a dense, tangled forest full of cliffs and ridges, and of paths that somehow were even more tangled than Yharnam's streets.
Two towering windmills, their tattered sails rearing above the treeline against the moon-drenched sky, boldly announced that, while wild, this place was not free of human habitation. Balyn swiftly learned that this announcement was true, when he soon encountered those habitants. Men with saws. Men with axes. Men with guns. Men with torches. Men who flung pots of oil so that those torches would turn their victims into a small inferno, as Balyn was soon able to directly attest.
Really, he'd have assumed people who lived in a forest would have been a lot less casual about the amount of fire they were tossing around!
Eventually, though, after being set on fire twice, falling off a cliff to be assaulted by crows not patient enough to check if he was already dead before they commenced pecking out his eyes, and getting his throat ripped out by dogs (at least ones not covered in spiked leather straps like in Hemwick), he eventually lived long enough to have a wooden platform crumble out from under him and drop him into the midst of a decrepit village. The villagers treated his intrusion with the same consideration as those in the woods had, albeit with a little less oil and more direct violence. Not to mention the pit trap where several giant crows were waiting at the bottom, ready to clean up after the deceased.
"If I ever get into the tour-book business, I am officially giving this place one star," Balyn grumbled as he climbed out of the pit. He supposed the ladder was there so the villagers could retrieve any valuables after the crows had eaten their fill.
He'd just gotten to the top when a hooded man charged him with a pitchfork. Under ordinary circumstances, he supposed it might be reasonable to assume that the man might have mistaken him for a hay bale; the excessive facial hair most locals sported seemed like it could easily interfere with clear vision. But under the present conditions, Balyn felt justifying in assuming that this was yet one more hostile act from the villagers. He knocked the pitchfork aside with his saw cleaver and kicked the fellow into the pit.
"All I wanted was directions to Byrgenwerth," he moaned at the unfairness of it all. Really, people were so rude. There just weren't enough people in Yharnam and its environs (did this place count as part of the Greater Yharnam Metropolitan Area?) who had the true spirit of helpfulness. It really made him appreciate that nice lady over at Iosefka's Clinic.
That said, he supposed that he had just come crashing into the middle of their village, and on a night where beasts and madmen and blue squid-things were roaming the streets, at that. An excessively defensive response was probably justified.
No, the proper thing to do was to find the entrance to the village and try to speak with whomever was watching the gate, like a civilized human being. Assuming, of course, that the gate guards weren't among the screaming throng that had just attempted to murder him. But it didn't hurt to hope!
Just ahead of him, past a couple of buildings, he saw a low wall with an open gap marked by gateposts, and beyond it nothing but a stretch of wooded path surrounded by rocks and trees. This had to be what Balyn was looking for. If nothing else, he decided, he could reorient himself and try to figure out—
His train of thought was cut off the moment he reached the gate by the squeak of rusty metal. Balyn glanced down, and realized that what he'd thought were some wooden planks courteously laid down to keep people's feet out of the mud were in fact covering a round metal pressure switch of some kind.
He looked around to see what the switch might have triggered just in time for the massive spiked log to come swinging down squarely into his face.
~X X X~
"Welcome home, good hunter. What is it you desire?"
"More people like you, for one," Balyn sighed.
The Doll tilted her head to regard him with puzzlement. While Balyn rarely sought to actively make trouble for her or even say harsh things, she was not used to being greeted with compliments. His returns to the Dream were generally accompanied by complaints, occasionally profane, about what had forcibly returned him in the first place.
She knew it was probably better not to ask, but she did anyway. Perhaps that was just how she'd been made.
"That is very kind of you to say, good hunter, but what is it about me that you seek?"
"It's that receptive attitude. 'Welcome home' and 'what is it you desire?' You're always trying to be helpful, extending that first hand instead of trying to drive me away with shouts and drawn weapons."
"As you are bound to this Dream, I do not believe that would work." She pressed a bent knuckle to her lips in a thoughtful attitude. "But perhaps…" she mused, "if Gerhman were sleeping, and I was to take…no, no, that is his purpose, not mine; it probably would not work."
Balyn decided that it was probably better not to ask too many questions about that.
"In any event, will you stubbornly proceed onwards as is your wont, good hunter?"
He shook his head.
"Honestly, nah. I mean, I probably will sometime, as I think it's the only way to get to Byrgenwerth and if I'm going to get a lead on this Paleblood stuff it's kind of my only clue left. But sometimes you just need to let people chill out for a while or they'll still be mad at you from the last time."
"I do agree; that is very often the case with my own feelings. So what will you do instead?"
"Well, I've got this Tonsil Stone thing that I was given; I thought I'd try checking that out. I mean, the guy who gave it to me invited me, even said that there'd be some kind of gift. I'm sure I'll get a much more pleasant welcome than I did in the Woods." He clucked his tongue chidingly. "Really, in this day and age it's just not polite to automatically log someone out."