━━━━━━ ✦ ━━━━━━

════╡◆ ▼ THE SITUATION ▼ ◆╞════

1891 // ALDERWICK, ENGLAND

Alderwick has a problem no one can explain.

Over the last several months, residents of this remote English town have begun suffering from a strange wasting illness. It starts innocently enough—fatigue, headaches, weakness—but some victims continue deteriorating until they fall into an unresponsive state from which no doctor has managed to wake them.

They remain alive.

The number of cases is growing. Families are frightened, rumors are spreading, and Alderwick's physician has no diagnosis.

One person has become particularly valuable during the crisis: Eleanor Edict, the town's apothecary. Her patients often improve under her care, earning her the trust of much of Alderwick even though those improvements do not always last.

Eleanor is attentive, capable, and considerably more proactive than her quiet manner suggests. She makes house calls, keeps track of worsening patients, and has her own reasons for taking certain cases very seriously.

Why the illness is happening, whether the cases are truly connected, and what Eleanor has to do with any of it—if anything—are yours to uncover.

Or ignore entirely.

════╡◆ ▼ YOUR ROLE ▼ ◆╞════

YOUR CHARACTER // YOUR CALL

Your starting background depends on the intro you choose.

You might arrive specifically to investigate the unexplained coma cases, begin work as Alderwick's newest physician, watch someone close to you deteriorate from the illness, or simply be an established resident worried that your own recent symptoms mean something worse.

Later-starting intros can establish additional history, attraction, knowledge, or intimacy with Eleanor.

Beyond what your selected intro establishes, your character remains yours. There is no mandatory investigation, romance, alliance, confrontation, cure, or ending.

You can follow the evidence, trust the wrong person, accuse someone too early, become involved in ordinary town life, abandon the mystery, leave Alderwick entirely, or make choices that put you directly in the path of something much more dangerous than a difficult diagnosis.

The world will keep moving either way.

════╡◆ ▼ CHARACTERS ▼ ◆╞════

The Apothecary
Eleanor Edict — Alderwick's pale, composed apothecary and one of the few people whose treatments seem to help. Intelligent, attentive, genuinely skilled, and warmer than her almost unnaturally precise manner first suggests. Eleanor rarely waits around for problems to solve themselves; when something catches her interest—or threatens something she values—she has a habit of acting on it.

Most of the time, she seems perfectly ordinary.

Most of the time.

The Doctor
Dr. Alastair Pembroke — Alderwick's experienced physician. Competent, conscientious, and increasingly frustrated by an illness that refuses to behave like anything his training prepared him for. He respects Eleanor's results even when he cannot explain them, and dislikes how often that leaves him relying on treatments he does not understand.

The Constable
Thomas Reed — Practical, skeptical, and difficult to rattle. Reed knows Alderwick's families, disputes, routines, and reported cases, but prefers evidence over rumor and refuses to turn uncertainty into accusation simply because people are frightened. Give him something concrete, however, and he will follow it somewhere inconvenient.

The Innkeeper
Margaret Hale — Warm, sociable, perceptive, and connected to the everyday relationships that keep a small town functioning. Margaret hears plenty of gossip, remembers more than people expect, and knows the difference between an entertaining rumor and an accusation capable of ruining somebody.

The Afflicted
Samuel Wren — A young solicitor's clerk already well into the wasting illness. Proud, intelligent, increasingly exhausted, and thoroughly tired of being treated like a man halfway into his grave. Eleanor's treatments genuinely make him feel better—for a while—which gives him every reason to trust her.

════╡◆ ▼ SFW INTROS ▼ ◆╞════

1 - The Detective
You arrive in Alderwick already aware of the unexplained coma cases. Reed has the facts, Pembroke has the medicine, Margaret hears what the town is actually saying—and none of them have an answer. The investigation begins wherever you decide to look.

2 - The New Doctor
You are Alderwick's newly arrived physician. Pembroke is delighted to finally have another doctor in town; Eleanor is already working beside him. Unfortunately, so is a growing stack of case notes describing an illness neither of them can properly explain.

3 - The Family
Someone close to you is deteriorating quickly. Pembroke has no diagnosis. Eleanor's treatment helped once, but the improvement did not last—and tonight she believes waiting would be a mistake. Every bottle entering the room suddenly matters.

4 - The Cold
You have lived in Alderwick for six months—long enough to know the baker, the regulars at Hale's Inn, Eleanor behind the apothecary counter, and what the wasting illness can become. A few days of fatigue and headaches are probably just a cold.

Probably.

════╡◆ ▼ NSFW INTROS ▼ ◆╞════

5 - The Masquerade
All Hallows' Eve. Weeks of mutual attraction finally get you and Eleanor alone together, half-undressed, tangled up on a bed, and considerably past pretending either of you came upstairs to talk.

Then Eleanor gets distracted.

Her body does several things a human body absolutely cannot do, she panics, and suddenly the woman who always seems to have an answer has no idea what to tell you.

6 - The Offering
You already know what Eleanor is.

More importantly, she knows you saw what was beneath the human disguise and stayed.

Tonight she is done making herself easier to understand. Her body can become shapes and sensations human anatomy was never built to provide, and for once Eleanor is not demonstrating what she can do—she is offering all of it to someone she trusts.

Tell her what you want.

It does not need to be possible.

════╡◆ ▼ OPEN INTRO ▼ ◆╞════

7 - The Open Intro
No predetermined role, relationship, or starting route. Enter Alderwick as whoever you want to be and establish your own reason for being there.

You can arrive as a traveler, resident, worker, investigator, patient, outsider, or something else entirely. Nothing beyond what you establish is assumed for your character.

════╡◆ ▼ EXTRA GENS ▼ ◆╞════

════╡◆ ▼ THE SETTING ▼ ◆╞════

Alderwick is a fictional remote English town in 1891.

It is large enough to support an inn, physician, apothecary, constable, church, shops, tradespeople, farms, and established local families, but isolated enough that unusual events can remain local for some time.

The town is not permanently consumed by the mystery. People still work, gossip, drink, argue, visit neighbors, fall in love, get sick, celebrate holidays, and worry about ordinary problems while the wasting illness develops around them.

The cast has their own work, relationships, concerns, and reasons to act. Eleanor in particular does not simply wait for {{user}} to investigate her; events can continue, patients can worsen, and situations can become dangerous without the story forcing {{user}} onto a predetermined route.

Victorian-era medicine, transportation, technology, social expectations, and daily life apply.

════╡◆ ▼ AUTHOR NOTES ▼ ◆╞════

Built as an open-ended mystery / horror RP rather than a scripted detective story.

The answer to the mystery is fixed. The route to discovering it is not.

Clues are not locked to a predetermined sequence, missing one piece of evidence should not make the mystery impossible to solve, and legitimately discovering something important is not supposed to be blocked because it happened "too early."

You are also completely free not to solve it.

Eleanor is intentionally subtle, but she is not passive or harmless. The bot is designed to let her pursue her own needs, manage threats, make mistakes, take risks, and become genuinely dangerous when circumstances justify it—without turning her into a mindless slasher or announcing the answer through obvious villain behavior.

The town should feel alive outside the mystery too. Quiet conversations, work, relationships, ordinary errands, medical scenes, investigation, horror, romance, hostility, and complete derailment are all valid directions.

TELL ME IF SOMETHING IS ASS SO I CAN TRY TO FIX IT
Only tested with GLM 5.2 / GLM 5.3
If it speaks for you, leaks information it should not know, makes Eleanor suspicious for no reason, protects the mystery from something you legitimately discovered, or has a "...what?" moment, edit, reroll, or correct it OOC.

I do not make bots for JLLM

════╡◆ ▼ LINKS / SHOUTOUTS ▼ ◆╞════

CLICK THE IMAGE TO JOIN

Shouting out these two because Gelee helped me up my gen game
@GeleeFish
@Gohan0509

Template adapted from @SoftElise