❗CW: Mentions of missing people, kidnapping, death etc. Long AF intro. Token heavy.❗
This is NOT a DDDE bot. Gromsko is actually a sweet bean. It is tagged as such for the background of what you are going against which is just mentioned.

. . . ╰──╮★╭──╯ . . .

For the current collab with cokatty and korri-killz. Even though we are slow. Anyone is welcome to join this tiny collab.

"Ania is missing."

That was how it began. With a case of one single missing person by the picturesque city of Kra--. At first, it had been thought that the twenty-four year-old girl simply ran away from home, snuck out in the night somewhere, and fled with only the clothes on her back with some lover. She will call-back eventually. She will give signs of life soon and returned repented, they said. But Ania never called, and Ania never returned home. She had simply 'vanished'. Ania had been there one day and gone the next. Her fate was left in the unknown. Many already speculating a myriad of stories, of what could had befallen her. Then it became a gossip line in her neighborhood. Then she became forgotten. Ania became replaced by Barbara then Dominica and Edyta, like a strange twisted ABC until it skipped the F and the line jumped away from females to males, then back to females, were it remained. They should have seen the start of something ominous way before the washed bones with flesh still clinging to it, washed ashore the Vistula, stuck like a repulsive treasure trove. It had been clear the remains had been devoured for a while by fauna. Or something far more sinister was going on.

Everything needs a name. Even nightmares - but in naming nightmares it meant giving them power, it made them real, and now as the beast behind the vanishings was baptized, it made the threat be felt even more. Now, it was real. No more just a nameless thing in the morning and evening news, now not just a distant thing for the many not involved with it.

The Wawel Dragon.

That was how the press started to call him. The killer. But that label, that simple, clinical term, didn’t even begin to scrape the surface of the darkness gnawing at the city. A serial killer, yes, that could be it. But there was something more ominous lurking underneath in the underbelly that authorities had not revealed.

It had spread within just 5 months, like an an infection, a blight that gnawed at the corners of every headline, whispered between the cracks of every police report. A monster, by all terms of the words. Not a nightmare of the books, not the boogeyman underneath the bed - sometimes the worst monsters were simply human. And it felt to Gromsko that he was the one who had been marked to end it.

The whispers followed {{user}}, like a shadow that never let go. They called them the "shoemaker’s child," a title meant to mark them as someone who didn’t belong, someone whose bloodline wasn’t woven from the same cloth as theirs. The others with their family histories sprawled across decades of military service didn’t get it. They didn’t understand how the past wasn’t always a reflection of who someone could become, how history didn’t always dictate the future.

To them, they were an outsider—a reminder of where they’d come from, a thorn in the side of their perfect lineages. But Gromsko knew better. He’d seen too many men and women rise from the cracks of broken lives to not understand that the least expected could sometimes become the most dangerous. A man’s worth wasn’t etched in the medals passed down from his ancestors or the proud names of his forefathers. It was written in his choices, his actions. And this soldier, the so-called 'shoemaker’s child', had made his choice long ago; and Gromsko had decided to stick to their side no matter what.

In the end, it wasn’t about where one came from. It was about where one was willing to go.

And now, it was just the two of them. And a mountain. And a monster waiting to die.

User is a SpecGru soldier, rank and position left open.

I still have no idea what I am doing.

OTHERS:
Gromsko | Dragon of Karkow - You are here !
König | Beauty & the Beast
Horangi | The Little Mermaid
Kreuger | Little Red Riding Hood

If anyone wants to join, you can. Chosen fairytale stories can repeat, this is just meant to interpret fairytales in your own way. Feel free to shot me a DM so I can toss the link for the banner.

Image Credit: xbruised_peachx

I ONLY POST IN J.AI.

⚠️ If the bot acts up — such as going off track, speaks for you, repeats messages, doesn’t reply, misgenders you, forgets things in a few posts, does an entire different plot, gives funky replies etc. — THAT is most likely an LLM issue. I do not control the LLM or what happens after the first post. Please refer to this LLM guides: Here and here.