Bloodborne, Part Ten
Mar. 11th, 2024 08:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingOn the other side of the hillbilly-infested snake forest is Byrgenwerth. This is what I thought would be "the haunted university," but really it's just someone's lake house. It's a very aristocratic lake house, to be sure! But it's only a single building. At this lake house are about a dozen people whose heads are lotus seedpods filled with eyes, a giant centipede with a vertically slit mouth filled with teeth, and an old man staring at the lake.
If you jump into the lake, you will be transported to a boss arena housing Rom, the Vacuous Spider.
Rom is the love of my life. Her eight big legs are missing, and she has a bunch of tiny stick legs directly underneath her body. She has the same lotus seedpod head as the people outside, but the cavities are empty. Like her face, her body is very round, and she's growing luminescent moss and mushrooms from the top of her carapace. Despite being an eldritch monstrosity, she is super duper cute. She doesn't attack you, so your character can freely walk around her body and admire how beautiful she is.
Of course this is a video game, so you can't leave the boss arena without fighting. Once you make the first move and trigger Rom's aggro, a dozen human-sized spiders drop from the sky to defend her. These spiders are photorealistic, and they have all of their terrible spider legs. The spiders aren't a huge problem, although there are a lot of them. The problem is Rom herself, who attacks with magic. So far, nothing in Bloodborne has used magic, so I never bothered to level up Cherry's Arcane stat (which affects magic defense). This means that Rom's magic attacks will drastically reduce his HP if it lands. Cherry has some level grinding to do, so I guess Rom is safe... for now.
Based on bits and pieces of lore I've picked up, I assume that Rom used to be one of the scholars who hung out at Byrgenwerth. Again, as Byrgenwerth is someone's country estate, there must be a large university elsewhere. Willem, the old guy who hangs out on the balcony overlooking the lake, was apparently a professor who brought a bunch of grad students on a field trip to study forbidden knowledge. One of his students, Laurence, became obsessed with the blood of the Great Ones and went on to establish the Healing Church. Rom was probably another student. I guess she got obsessed with the eyes of the Great Ones and, in an experiment she performed on herself, unfortunately turned into a giant spider. Rom originally being human is just a theory, but grad students do be like that.
If you jump into the lake, you will be transported to a boss arena housing Rom, the Vacuous Spider.
Rom is the love of my life. Her eight big legs are missing, and she has a bunch of tiny stick legs directly underneath her body. She has the same lotus seedpod head as the people outside, but the cavities are empty. Like her face, her body is very round, and she's growing luminescent moss and mushrooms from the top of her carapace. Despite being an eldritch monstrosity, she is super duper cute. She doesn't attack you, so your character can freely walk around her body and admire how beautiful she is.
Of course this is a video game, so you can't leave the boss arena without fighting. Once you make the first move and trigger Rom's aggro, a dozen human-sized spiders drop from the sky to defend her. These spiders are photorealistic, and they have all of their terrible spider legs. The spiders aren't a huge problem, although there are a lot of them. The problem is Rom herself, who attacks with magic. So far, nothing in Bloodborne has used magic, so I never bothered to level up Cherry's Arcane stat (which affects magic defense). This means that Rom's magic attacks will drastically reduce his HP if it lands. Cherry has some level grinding to do, so I guess Rom is safe... for now.
Based on bits and pieces of lore I've picked up, I assume that Rom used to be one of the scholars who hung out at Byrgenwerth. Again, as Byrgenwerth is someone's country estate, there must be a large university elsewhere. Willem, the old guy who hangs out on the balcony overlooking the lake, was apparently a professor who brought a bunch of grad students on a field trip to study forbidden knowledge. One of his students, Laurence, became obsessed with the blood of the Great Ones and went on to establish the Healing Church. Rom was probably another student. I guess she got obsessed with the eyes of the Great Ones and, in an experiment she performed on herself, unfortunately turned into a giant spider. Rom originally being human is just a theory, but grad students do be like that.
