Quest:Ruby Quest

The Ruby Quest logo.

Ruby Quest is a Choose Your Own Adventure game being run by a tripfag named Weaver. What initially began as a confusing puzzle romp has swiftly become a decent unto madness not unlike the best Call of Cthulhu game you have ever been in, but twice as fucked up.

The archives of the game can be found here: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=Ruby

If you want to discuss the game with others, there is an IRC discussion available on the channel irc.rizon.net, room #RubyQuest.

Characters

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS.

The characters of Ruby Quest.

They may appear furry, but it is uncertain whether this is just so Weaver can differentiate them from each other quickly, or as a tip off to their Animal Crossing namesakes. Either way, some spoilers are below.

Contrary to what some people may say, no one's age has ever been mentioned ever.

Ruby

Ruby is the main character of Ruby Quest. Obviously. Her thoughts consist of the scrambled suggestions of the /tg/ community, and as such, she is both incredibly brilliant and surprisingly stupid. She is handling most of the monstrous happenings rather well, and has been declared a badass as a result. However, her psyche is starting to be strained as the world around her gets stranger and stranger. Ruby is known for having a GIRLISH FIGURE, but is flat as a board.

Because she is effectively our character, Ruby has been described as the PC to Weaver's DM. This makes the game very engaging, and it has become quite popular as a result. The largest implication of this is that /tg/ is now a herbivorous bunny girl. No-one has yet objected to this.

Ruby is actually quite a good fighter, and uses a Hook like no one's business. We no longer possess the hook, but wish we did. We feel safer when Ruby is a capable Hooker.

Tom

Tom is Ruby's only friend in this place. He is a gentleman, strong and silent, but more than willing to offer information and suggestions about things he knows. He was initially detached towards Ruby, but after the two have repeatedly saved each others' lives, it seems he has grown quite a liking towards her. Unfortunately, it seems Ruby doesn't feel NOW is the time to act on any romantic intentions...

He is well known for his MANLY PHYSIQUE, and is needed for most anything that requires strength to accomplish.

Red

Red is was a creepy motherfucker. He carries a cane with him, and is not too fond of personal questions. He is convinced that he is not trapped like the others, and that he is where he is entirely by his own choice. He has a very morbid sense of humor.

Abominations Against All That Is Good

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS.

Most fa/tg/uys refer to them as zombies, but all evidence points more towards shapeshifters of some sort rather than actual undead. Fortunately for our protagonists, these creatures are susceptible to standard methods of attack.

Bear Zombie

The Bear Zombie is a creature that was once a bear, and is now a pile of horrible organs and a spine. With the help of Tom, it was slain using the Z Hatch. Its body seems to have disappeared without explanation sometime during Part 2. The end boss of Part 1.

Hound Zombie

The Hound Zombie is also referred to as the Hook Zombie and the Plant Zombie, based on its form. This horrible creature came through a broken mirror, and was killed with the power of Ruby's mean right hook, the purple vat of acid, and an electrical panel. The end boss of Part 2.

God Zombie

The God Zombie has no discerning animal features, so it gets no animal name. Colloquially referred to as "Stitches," because he appears to have been torn apart and sewn back together. He was found nailed to a wall, and he was still alive and able to speak, in spite of his appearance. He also seems to have sent Ruby to a dream world, where impossible things happened that the world had never seen before.

Then, he vanished, and has not been seen again. However, it is common belief we have not seen the last of him. Found at the end of part 3.

The Metal Glen

This is a poem by William Murdoch, supposedly. No one has been able to cite its source for sure, so some theorize it was written by Weaver himself. Regardless, the similarities to Ruby Quest are uncanny.

The Metal Glen

My mother told me once of when

A young hare ventured from her den

And as she danced in field and glen

The world sang joy about her.

But wicked hateful things abound

And that young hare these evils found

Then whisked her up from off the ground

And glen was left without her.

The wicked power tore asunder

And with this cruel and fateful blunder

Cast her to a world of wonder

Would she e'er see home again?

And so hare flew that mournful day

Over the sky and far away

And down and down, beneath the sea

To a place unlike the glen.

A world of men and man's design

A place where God's light would not shine

A Hell of steel beneath the brine

Where misery's echoes boomed.

And all around her there were others

Beasts like her, all sisters, brothers,

Locked up, all, with one another,

In deep sea-dark, entombed.

And in this crypt far from the shore

The hare lay down upon the floor

Imprisoned there forever more

And left to all her sorrow.

Her tender world was lost and gone

So joy and happiness foregone

She slept and cried and prayed for dawn

To wait the coming morrow.

The hound was still, the birds said naught,

The fox denied he had been caught,

The bear cried "This is just our lot",

And surrendered to his pain.

But the cat stood up and shook his head

And rising from his metal bed

He said "For now, I am not dead,

And I will not die in vain!"

He cried aloud with much disdain

And tore about his stark domain

And said "These walls cannot contain

A force as strong as I!"

And the fox just laughed, and the birds all cried

And the bear knotted up himself and died

But the hare looked on as the poor cat tried

To break him free and fly.

He shook his chain with all his rage

And flew in anger 'round his cage

Decrying this dark mournful stage

And the hare stood up as well.

With passion did she then respond,

She chewed her ropes and broke her bonds,

And freed the cat, they ran beyond,

They ran to flee that hell.

And what became of cat and hare?

Did they break free to purer air?

To guess their fate we shouldn't dare

Perhaps their tale closed well.

But for all the beasts trapped in the Nether

All life from out the loch and heather

The flock that could not work together

Are sure still trapped in Hell.

Plot Summary

IT IS HIGHLY SUGGESTED YOU READ THE THREADS INSTEAD OF THE SUMMARIES. THEY CAN BE FOUND HERE: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=Ruby

Part 1

Consists of threads 1-4.

Ruby found herself locked inside of a steel locker. After escaping, we find herself in a room with very little in it. Ruby rips open a garbage can using a CAN OPENER, performs electrical repairs, and finds out we are underwater. Then, she heads down a ladder and meets Tom, trapped behind a wall grate.

Tom has a sculpture of random tools we need, but is unwilling to show us it, as we accidentally insult him. As an apology, we feed him fish [found to later be a Bad Idea]. After doing some weird puzzle shit, we open the way to the Z Hatch. We get a hatch to transfer items between Ruby and Tom, and with teamwork, we open up the closet in the Z Hatch Room. The Bear Zombie inside attacks us, and with Tom's help, we kill it.

A little more dinking around, and we finally free Tom from his cell. Ruby and Tom hug tightly, and Part 1 ends.

Part 2

Consists of threads 5-9.

With Tom's MANLY PHYSIQUE, we move a barrel and work together to open the way into the monitor room. Tom manages to sneak a peek at Ruby's panties while we are at it. We obtain the EYE DIAL, and then explore the Z Hatch room once more. With Tom's help, we find a secret door behind the couch. We send a hand we find there through the pneumatic chute we also find there.

We ask Tom for his condom, and he is disappointed to find we need it for more weird puzzle shit. Lots of experiments with purple acid later, we find out that Tom is not feeling so hot. He pukes up blood. Ruby quickly scrambles around, and eventually discovers, using an analyzer, than Tom had arsenic poisoning from the fish, and that we would get an antidote if we turned the power back on. While running around to find a way to get the power going, we do a Pirate Impression for Tom. He smiles weakly. All of /tg/ d'aaaws.

Eventually, we get the electricity and our antidote. Then we get locked in the back room, and poisonous gas filters in. Panicking, we break the glass of the pneumatic chute. This helps only slightly. We break the glass of the mirror in the room, and find the Hound Zombie on the other side. A brief scuffle with our HOOK, and we defeat the beast by flinging it through the glass acid dispenser and into the circuit board, but we take a serious wound to the head. The impact of the zombie on the circuit board powers down the room, and we flee with the antidote, running to where Tom is. Along the way we start to pass out, but manage to make it to the Brig. Unfortunately, we find Tom is gone, and in his place is a LOT of blood. Everything goes black.

Part 3

Consists of threads 10-13.

Ruby wakes up in a dark room wearing footie pajamas. After adjusting her eyes to the dark, she realizes she is in her room, and Tom is there- but he seems a little off. She opens a drawer and gets a key, then tries to turn Tom around. She finds that he has been stitched up, that he is very dummy like and that, in fact, its not Tom. After exploring her surroundings she exits the room and finds herself back in the Brig. The room she had been in was the one the Hound Zombie was in before attacking. She heads back to the locker room and gets a few items, including the Arsenic Antidote. She comes down to see a lever has descended. She then heads through the Z-hatch.

She sees a fox sitting on the couch with a cane in the Z-room. He introduces himself as 'Red' and answers a few questions:

He hasn't seen Tom. He doesn't know anything about the place they are trapped in. And he isn't trapped.

Ruby notices the cane and asks Red to help pull the lever. He smiles, disturbingly, and agrees to help. After pulling the lever she asks a "few" more questions. Red says he is very tired of her questions and if she doesn't stop he might have to bite her throat out. After an awkward pause, he says that he was just kidding. Ruby, slightly scared, thanks Red and heads back to the Systems Room. Red does not follow. She picks up a Wooden disc and inspects the computer. There are some hidden cameras inspecting the Locker Room, the Maintenance Room and an as of yet unexplored room. Tom is in this room, and so is the pneumatic tube.

Ruby heads to the Maintenance room. Red is nowhere to be found. She patches up the Pneumatic tube, sends Tom the antidote, and heads to the System's Room to see if he gets it. He does, and drinks it. But Ruby doesn't have enough time to celebrate, as Red enters the room. He smiles wider this time, and reminds Ruby that he doesn't want to hear anymore questions. Ruby understands and asks to excuse herself, but Red stops smiling and says he doesn't think so.

And then lets her know that he was once again just kidding.

Ruby heads downstairs, this time Red follows. She believes the Wooden Disc will interact with a mechanism she found in the Dummy Room, so she heads there. Red stops her before she can enter and asks for some coins Ruby was carrying. She gives them to him, and he heads in with her. Using the cane, Red takes down the tarp, all the while smiling even wider than before.

Underneath is a horribly disfigured, and then subsequently refigured, body (which would later be called "God Zombie" or "Stitches"). Red laughs at Ruby's astonishment.

And then he keeps laughing. His mouth opens up and is impossibly big, filled with sharp teeth and a tongue. He is, in fact, an abomination. As Ruby turns around, Red stops laughing.

Ruby then looks at a cross peg in Stitches's hand, and Red says he is bored and departs. Ruby is about to take the cross peg from the God Zombie's hand, and he wakes up. He says "Ruby" and everything turns to white.

She has a very strange dream, Tom was involved and so was Red. In the dream, Red makes a smile clearly not possible, as it curves up to the eyes. Tom complains that his eye hurts. Red uses the wooden disc to cut something and the dream ends.

Ruby wakes up. The disc is missing. She leaves the room. Tom is sitting on a barrel in the brig.

Part 4

Consists of threads 14-17.

Tom and Ruby catch up with each other, and both express gratitude that the other is okay. Red let Tom out of the room where he was being held. Tom's stomach is feeling better, but now his eye hurts. Ruby, worried, offers to examine him. His eye opens freakishly wide, and he suddenly turns into an Abomination and attacks Ruby.

Tom asks Ruby if she's okay: she had apparently been hallucinating. The room is suddenly completely free of blood and has a very wide chasm torn through the middle. She asks Tom to go to the other side of the room (suspecting that the gap is also imaginary), but he sees it too and declines to do so. He notes that it's been three days since he took the antidote, and that there were some intermittent odd noises coming from the walls.

They proceed to examine Tom's former room. Inside they see a closed door that Tom notes was open earlier, another ladder down, some flesh-like membrane in the corner, a SCRAP OF PAPER, and a foot from a pair of footy pajamas containing a KEY.

Ruby proceeds down the hatch - and emerges feet-first from the floor of the room below them, on the other side of the chasm. She attempts to pull the lever on the floor (ceiling?), but it's missing a part. She returns to the previous room, at which point she notices that Tom's eye is actually gone. He tells Ruby that he lost it while he was being dragged into the room by something which, because of his sickness, he couldn't see clearly. It's mostly stopped hurting, though. They hug.

After a short discussion, they return to the room where the bear-thing was, stopping briefly to note an eyehook fixed to the floor in the chasm room. This room has also been cleaned, and there is now a small, slightly indented safe on a shelf in the closet where the abomination had been. Ruby opens the WALL CABINET that had already been there using the KEY she found in Tom's room. It contains another SCRAP OF PAPER and a black leather MEDICINE BAG fastened with an indestructible TINY PADLOCK.

They return to the room with the pneumatic tube. It, like the others, is now blood-free. The mirror has been replaced with Plexiglass, the acid container is repaired, and the electrical panel has a safety cover with an outlet in it. Oddly, the inside of the pneumatic tube is still blood-splattered from the HAND sent through it several threads ago.

While leaving the room, the Z-hatch grate slams shut behind Ruby, leaving Tom inside. Remembering the command console, she returns to Tom's room to find that the door is open. Someone in the darkness with a Cheshire-cat grin tosses Ruby a THIN METAL ROD, and the door slams shut. She repairs the lever with the ROD, and pulls it to arm-s length - only to have it retract. She climbs the ladder with the handle in hand, surprised at the amount of slack, and attaches it to the floor hook down the other ladder. A panel behind her opens, and she takes the CROWBAR from it.

She attempts to smash the TINY PADLOCK and pry open the grate, but can't. Giving up, she enters the dummy room and notices a panel inscribed in Latin and a new, different set of five buttons. She applies her CROWBAR to the locked file cabinet, revealing a TINY KEY, which she uses to retrieve a PAPER SCRAP and a VERY SHARP SCALPEL from the medical bag. She returns to Tom's room and uses the SCALPEL to cut away the fleshy growth (which, unlike everything else here, doesn't bleed) to find a somewhat oversized EYE.

Ruby notices an unpowered keypad with an extension cord below it, and pulls the extension cord with her to the dummy room, where she passes Tom the CROWBAR through the drop slot. Tom, in a sudden burst of manly physique, returns to the bear room and smashes the hell out of the shelves and light in the closet. He then stands around awkwardly as Anon enters a thirteen-minute brain fart. Ruby, presumably tired of twiddling her thumbs, goes back to the lever room and tries pushing a few buttons. Button 1 causes distant water noises, and button 4 makes something far-off rumble. She decides to go check on Tom.

While Ruby was gone, Tom says that the pipe in the ceiling had been clanking about every thirty seconds. Once again under the power of group narrative, Tom receives a flash of inspiration and bashes open the pipe under which he'd waited while Anon was trying to figure out what to break. A glass orb falls out onto the sofa, and the rattling stops. He unlocks the safe with it to retrieve the WOODEN DISC. He returns it to Ruby, who recognizes it and affixes it to the dial on the left. She points the dial to the top symbol, which opens the Z-hatch for Tom. They reunite, and Tom unexpectedly kisses Ruby.

A short but thoroughly awkward moment passes, after which Ruby turns the dial towards the lower symbol and walks over to the pneumatic tube room. On the way there, however, Ruby is interrupted by pain as a giant eye rips open the top of her head. She wipes the blood away and closes the eye, then takes another PAPER SCRAP from a new wall hatch, has Tom re-open the Z-hatch, and returns to him. He apologizes for being hasty, but Ruby dismisses it.

They plug in the extendable power cord, return to the keypad, and punch in the number from the completed PAPER. The hatch opens to reveal an aquarium, but Weaver uses a narrative shortcut to abridge the changing of the power cord and dial again, leaving Ruby and Tom in front of an open doorway. They enter together to find that the monitors have all been broken. Ruby uses the CROSS PEG as she'd intended quite a while ago, and a ladder comes out of the wall. They climb.

This room is short (more of an attic, really), and it's covered in insane scribblings with "RED" written in large lettering on the ceiling. There's also a circular diagram with a large bloodstain in the center, as though someone had recently slammed their head into it. They go back down and knock on the door, only to discover Red doing a Peach Wilkins impression: he won't let them through without the answer to his riddle.

Tom and Ruby decide to go open the box marked to the contrary. Tom crowbars it open to reveal a BOWL OF CLAWED FINGERS and Ruby's mummified body, which Tom doesn't see. While Ruby freaks the fuck out, Tom pockets the fingers, uses the nearby sink (which spouts blood, as they are almost unsurprised to find), and fills up the BOWL with blood. Both of them go mix the TEETH, BLOOD, and FINGERS and return to the monitor room - only to discover the door already open. The room has "NEVER CATCH ME" scrawled all over the back wall, and in the center of the floor is Red, propped up by the broken half of a cane shoved up through his skull.

---

Gallery

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  Warpaint'd and ready to go.

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  Ruby is some kind of McGuyver.

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  Red says he is "Just kidding."

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  REDINFULL16COLORS

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  Ruby said "No! I must fight the demons!"

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  Tom is more resourceful than you'd think.

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  The known map as of part 1-3.

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  The known map as of the end of part 4.