The Tall Woods
Since we've been trying to collect the Chaos Emeralds, and the Tall Woods was the only place left that had any except April's castle, and we're not sure we want to go to April's castle yet, we decided to go to the Tall Woods.
First we thought we should check what happens when a Tall Man looks at another Tall Man, since we knew from before when Sarah tried it that when you are a Tall Man and someone looks at you it is very uncomfortable. It turns out that if you are a Tall Man and another Tall Man looks at you it just feels cozy and friendly and nice! So we decided to trade for some things at the ranger station and get enough transformation media that everyone could be a Tall Man, and we all went into the Tall Woods together like that.
I like being a Tall Man with everyone. It's not quite as cozy as being Ooziels with someone but it's still very cozy. And the other Tall Men in the forest didn't try to talk to us but having them around was cozy too.
The trees in the Tall Woods are very tall. I guess that shouldn't surprise me.
In the middle of the Tall Woods there is the tallest tree that feels like home. It has one of those rings in it that happen when you leave a Chaos Emerald alone for a while. A lot of Tall Men lined up there to welcome us and I felt very welcomed. We went up and into the ring and then we were in a very different place!
The very different place is quiet and foggy and has houses and things. Sarah and Clarence seemed to recognize some of the things but I think Otto didn't recognize as many.
A little creature with wings attacked us and we killed it but then we realized that there were not any other Tall Men in the foggy place so Clarence turned back into Parasonico and Sarah turned into Leviazizmoth. I like when Clarence is Parasonico. It's good to have tentacle buddies and also I think he really likes being able to Analyze things.
We looked around some more and found a map which showed the shape of the foggy place and what things are in it. There were streets and houses and shops and a big lake. Everyone wanted to go to the bookstore first so we did that, and put a lot of books in the corpse box, and then we went to the chainsaw store and everyone got chainsaws. I've never used a chainsaw before and they seem neat. I didn't play with mine though, because I remembered at the power plant when I played with the stapler and stapled my tentacle and someone took the stapler away, and I didn't want my chainsaw getting taken away too.
The locator spell said the chaos emerald was on the other side of the lake, so we went to the other side of the lake. There were boats and we got a boat and boated to the place where the chaos emerald was supposed to be. Instead of finding the chaos emerald we found a door that we couldn't tell what was behind it except the locator spell said the chaos emerald was, and it had three different shaped holes in it, and it seemed like it wanted three things of those shapes as keys, so we went looking for the shapes.
In the first place we looked we found some monsters and a fake Chaos Emerald! The fake Chaos Emerald was stuck in someone's head, and also they were dead, so we took it out and Jacqueline made a corpse friend out of them. I licked it and it tasted neat. Good but not in a way that's like anything, not like funnel cakes which taste like fun or sugar skulls that go crunch.
We all teleported up to the third floor with Jacqueline's new friend because it seemed like one of the key shapes was up there. Also up there was a lizardy humanoid mon with lots of crystals in them and 200 hit points which is a lot of hit points I think.
We fought the lizardy mon, which was called a Nightmare, and it hit Clarence very hard and shattered his Parasonico-face! It was really scary! He was okay afterward but I was still a little upset about it.
Everyone was so busy dealing with the Nightmare and other weird things that we almost forgot to grab the key shape on our way out the window, but I remembered, so it was all right.
Jacqueline made a lot of corpse friends. They all jumped out the window together and some of them did not have a good time.
The Nightmare's skull went dink when Sarah hit it with a crowbar. It was a funny noise. It was also funny that we all forgot we had chainsaws for that entire fight!
After we finished with the Nightmare I got to lick another rock. Being a Tall Man is fun because you can lick blood from things and it's tasty. It doesn't taste as good in my normal shape.
Someone asked me what TIME was up to so I took it out and looked at it but it was the same as usual so I gave it a little pat and put it back in my pocket. It's neat that I get to carry TIME around.
Then we decided to go looking for the next key-shape on the other side of the lake. It was a long walk so someone suggested we use a car since they go faster than walking. Clarence was very excited about getting to hotwire a car. We have the skeleton key though and it turned out that it works on cars just fine. I hope Clarence wasn't too disappointed.
Riding in a car is mostly boring but riding in a car as a Tall Man with lots of other Tall Man friends is very good and cozy! I like being a Tall Man with other Tall Man friends around to feel like family with. It's good.
When the car got attacked we remembered that we had chainsaws and I tried using mine but it turned out that when you chainsaw something that is made of meat the chainsaw gets all gunked up with meat bits and stops working. We cleaned it after the fight and kept going to the hospital, where we got in another fight and I gunked up my chainsaw again. Also we learned that when three people all try to use chainsaws on the same thing at the same time, that thing gets Very Chainsawed. There was a lot of gunk.
A lot of things happened in the hospital but I think the most important is that we found drugs! Drugs are good because you can use them to make people stop doing things without killing them. And they can help calm people down when very upsetting things have happened to them, like being possessed by parasites. Helping people is nice.
After we got the key from the hospital, we went back to the place where we needed it. The keys opened a door to a room with a very very VERY big Tall Man standing in black goo. I was a Tall Man when we saw him and he felt scary. Other Tall Men feel like family but this one felt like he wanted to kill us.
We killed him instead.
Things got very strange and there ended up being a big pile of corpses left after he was gone. We followed a big flesh snake thing to a room, and the room had a little girl in it, and the little girl had a chaos emerald in her, and she was very scared and we tried to give her drugs about it but the drugs didn't help very much.
No one was really sure what to do. We could leave but we weren't sure what the Tall Men would think of us killing their big scary secret hidden one. We could take the emerald but that would kill the girl and destroy the pocket dimension. But maybe that would be good, because she was so scared and this place was so bad and it might be made of her nightmares?
Eventually we decided that we would leave an Otto behind to take the emerald out of the girl, and everyone would leave and go back to the ranger station and hope that the Tall Men didn't try to fight us on our way out. Also we figured out how to use Jacqueline's box to move things between the Ottos, so we gathered up a lot of useful things to take to the ranger station when we got there.
It turned out that all the living things in the pocket dimension were now made of wood.
I guess the people we helped in the hospital didn't stay helped for very long.
Anyway, we left and the Tall Men didn't do anything and we went to the ranger station and piled up lots of stuff in front of it and then Clone Otto took the emerald out of the girl and the pocket dimension went poof, except that actually it did not go poof, it went BOOM and took the whole Tall Woods with it. Now nobody will have to worry about the Tall Men anymore. That's probably a good thing.
I wish we could help people and not accidentally turn them into wood afterward, though.