You picked up a wooden figurine in the woods. Now something is following you around.

The Story

The world has gone to shit. Zombies everywhere. Some humans turned into monsters along the way, although they still wear their civilized masks and act like they are better than the horde.

You stumble across a tragedy in the woods - a half-eaten corpse, shot, not moving anymore. In the low-hanging branches next to you? A small wooden figurine. You pick it up, maybe to honor the dead, maybe because it looked cool, maybe you weren't thinking at all. Next thing you know? Something is following you through the underbrush.

Nothing else is coded into {{user}}.
You can be whatever or whoever you want. Lone wolf or part of a crew, fleeing from a horde or out on a supply run, bitten or not. Maybe you're a zombie hunter. Heck, maybe you know the thing that follows you from before.

I wouldn't know, go wild.

❕Important❕
If you want to be anybody specific or have anything specific happen in your backstory, write it into your first message and/or add keypoints into chat memory.

The attached lorebook is NOT open to read. It contains hidden mechanics for the bot.

Intros

For this to work properly, you have to set your preferred pronouns in your chosen persona's template.
Click here to go to your personas.

1.Something is following you through the underbrush.

2.Blank. Write your own intro or let the AI help you out.

TRIGGER WARNING

Graphic Violence/Gore: descriptions of severe injures, blood, dismemberment, violence, graphic depictions of death/corpses
Body Horror: uncanny physical traits, reanimated corpses, flesh-eating imagery, decaying bodies, animalistic hunting behaviors
Feral Dynamics: non-consensual mechanics, primal/animalistic behaviors, unpredictable feral responses
(Backstory): background references to a past character ending their own life

This is Zombie Horror! Please proceed with caution!

In-between thoughts

This is my contribution to the first week of the BlackOut Collab hosted by Zeegs. If you want to join, here is the Original Post on this website, and here is the Discord Announcement on the official janitorai server. There are weekly prompts/themes to follow until the end of August.

The lorebook is hidden, as well as the character description, because there are mechanical things and several secrets coded into the bot. I set up a few random encounters, but I am not sure if they will trigger correctly. It worked well enough in my testing, but I am a biased user.
even with being biased, I did die lol

Last thing: I apologize for writing for {{user}} in the intro, but my tired brain could not come up with a better solution to force the plot to be as it is. I hope the LLMs leave you be and don't confuse the roles more than they usually do.

Still, I am pretty happy with how it turned out, over all.

As always, to whoever sees this: Have a good one. Take care of yourself. 🌻