Questline — Earth · two parts · quest 1 needs madness 70

The Parrot Questline

The giver isn't a new character. It's your own hallucination, finally saying something that turns out to be true

A hidden two-part story built directly on top of Prion Madness — you cannot even find the quest giver without being hallucinating badly enough to see the madness parrot in the first place. Underneath a running vein of dark comedy is a genuinely sincere story about consent and grief, told entirely through fragmented dialogue and a woman speaking in two voices at once.

Part one: The Woman Who Keeps the Blue Boat

Requires madness 70 and modest Hitpoints/Magic levels. A grey parrot sits on a mooring bollard, back to the sea, repeating the same eleven words in a voice that clearly isn't its own — "THE SECOND KEY IS WITH THE WOMAN WHO KEEPS THE BLUE BOAT." Following it leads to Sarah — or a woman who has started calling herself Sarah, "because that is what it makes me say" — leading a small blue boat by a rope. Two voices come out of her: her own, lowercase, cracked, cutting off mid-sentence; and a second one, capitalised, arriving half a second behind hers, that answers for her when it wants to.

The quest plays out as a short fetch-and-listen chain: Holy Water to stop the second voice from burning her when she tries to speak for herself, then four Planks to repair the boat the key wants sailed out to sea. A local NPC, Whisper Vey, has spent eight months keeping a ledger of the bird's words — proof, she argues, that a message that never drifts wasn't learned by a parrot, it was deliberately put there.

Two endings, and the game only checks one specific thing

At the water's edge, the boat ready to leave at sunset, the quest's scoring genuinely doesn't care how kind you were across the whole conversation. The good ending requires one specific line: asking Sarah whether she wants to go, or telling her she doesn't have to take you. A player who was warm and polite six times running but never actually offered her that choice still gets the worse outcome. The thesis, stated directly in the game's own design notes: the key possessing her is a parasite on volition, and it cannot hold someone who has just genuinely chosen something for themselves.

Good ending (¤800, less pay). Given the chance to choose, Sarah finally says out loud who she really is — a ferry guide who lost her brother to a following sea she misread, once, after decades of reading them correctly. The moment she chooses to say that, the key simply stops being interesting to whatever was holding her, and comes free. It's inert in your bag afterward — it "does not do anything at all."
Bad ending (¤2,000, more pay). Taking the key for yourself instead transfers the possession the instant it's clear nothing will be chosen. Sarah walks away completely fine and doesn't look back — which the game frames as the worse outcome despite the better payout. This ending also permanently sets your own madness floor to 70: decay still runs, but it can never bring your madness back under the parrot's threshold again. The bird becomes something you carry permanently rather than something that fades — liftable only by finishing the second quest.

The game's own design notes are explicit that the bad ending paying more is deliberate: "the correct ending is the one that costs you something."

Part two: The Door That Drowned

Requires having finished part one, plus higher Magic and Hitpoints levels. The bollard isn't empty any more, and the parrot has a new set of words: "THE FIRST KEY REMEMBERS ITS DOOR. THE CARRIER MAY PUT IT DOWN THERE." Whisper Vey has moved on from her word-ledger to a map of every place on the coast that has quietly drowned — one of them, a roof that sank "kneeling," deliberately, rather than collapsing, marks the way south-west to a door standing alone with no walls on either side of it. Twelve keyholes are cut into it. Eleven show wear from keys coming home already. The twelfth was never cut at all.

After clearing a small congregation guarding it, the key comes free from the sailcloth on its own and finds its hole. Putting it in doesn't open anything dramatic — the water at the door's sill simply settles, "the way a room settles when the last guest arrives," and a single nail drops out of the door as a kind of receipt. Returning to the bollard, the parrot finally counts honestly instead of hallucinating a fixed loop: "ELEVEN," it says, then corrects itself — "TWELVE" — and won't say which one it's missing. There are more keys. The quest ends there, deliberately unresolved.

Finishing this quest lifts the permanent madness floor the bad ending of part one could set — the game's own notes describe part one's floor as "liftable by design," with this quest as the intended way out, guarded to do nothing at all for a player who took the good ending and never carried the key in the first place.

What the game deliberately never explains

Both quests share a discipline of leaving things permanently unresolved rather than spelling them out: what's actually behind the door, what drowned there, which of the twelve keys is still missing, and whether the parrot's voice at the very end is genuinely its own or still borrowed. The game's own development notes name this explicitly as "the brief's never-explain rule," and record several ideas that were deliberately left unbuilt rather than rushed — a third, neutral ending the underlying quest-scoring engine can't currently express, a beat gated on an actual sunset the game's clock system doesn't yet support, and a version of the parrot's dialogue that would change permanently based on which ending part one took.

Version history

v1304 — part one added ("The Woman Who Keeps the Blue Boat"), the first narrative quest built after an earlier purge of an older quest-scripting framework. Built to a two-part written brief the operator supplied in advance: one covering the underlying quest-engine architecture, the other the actual mechanics and dialogue.
v1307 — fixed characters in this questline going silent instead of explaining an unmet requirement. Physically walking the quest for the first time (rather than only checking it through internal tooling) found that a skill-gated speaker refused to say anything at all with no explanation — a regression introduced by the very code change that had widened skill requirements to support checking more than one skill at once. Every character gating on a skill requirement now correctly explains what's still needed.
v1318 — part two added ("The Door That Drowned"), resolving several threads part one had deliberately left as open stubs, including the liftable madness floor.

Trivia

Whisper Vey's own name and framing ("who:'cult'" internally) tie her to the game's occult/cult faction content rather than being a one-off character invented purely for this questline.
Both quests reuse the exact same underlying choice-tracking mechanism to remember what happened in part one and react to it in part two — dialogue in part two changes based on specific choices made in part one, without a second separate tracking system being built for it.
Connects directly to Prion Madness: this is the only place in the game where the madness system's own hallucination becomes an actual quest giver rather than pure atmosphere.