You Awaken in Razor Hill

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
You are an Orc Hunter and your name is Tednugent. You feel this is an exceptionally clever name, but nobody ever seems to get the joke. You have a Cat for a pet, his name is Scratchfever. You feel this is also an exceptionally clever name. Nobody ever gets this joke, either. You are level 80. Scratchfever is also level 80. You do not remember how you came to be logged out in Razor Hill, but the place looks deserted. There are no NPCs in sight and your Track Humanoids, which is currently active, is turning up completely blank.
—The beginning of madness

Imagine Silent Hill 2, set in the world of World of Warcraft, and being narrated and played as though it were a text adventure game. This is the basic concept behind You Awaken in Razor Hill.

The Character is an Orc Hunter named tednugent, with his trusty feline companion/combat pet, Scratchfever, as he attempts to deal with the horrible nightmare world he has been dumped into.

It can be read from the beginning here

Tropes used in You Awaken in Razor Hill include:
  • Action Survivor: Ted. Eventually becomes more of an Action Hero.
  • And I Must Scream : The Undead Blips. The reveal of what they actually are is one of the most horrifying moments in the entire story.
    • Also, Mary herself.
    • And Pyramid Hogger quite probably counts as well. Let's just say this isn't a nice place to be a character in.
  • Big Bad: Mary's Hate.
  • Big Damn Heroes: Annie during the climatic battle.
  • Big Eater: This is a race trait for Larry.
  • But You Screw One Goat!: Ted, when you consider his Ho Yay with Scratch, his attempts to hit on Annie while she's in cat form, his briefly considering molesting a squirrel to build up his self-esteem, and his repeated emphasis on the feathers every time he fantasises about Harpies.
    • Word of God would like to stress that the repeated emphasis was actually on the feathered rumps of the harpies, the firm, feathered, Harpy rumps.
  • Catch Phrase: "Best *&%^ing tailor in the world!"
  • Character Development : At the beginning of the story, Tednugent and Scratchfever are little more than paper dolls to be played with by the people controlling the plot: Posters on the original forum where You Awaken in Razor Hill was first housed. At the end of the story, they are fully-fleshed characters capable of acting on their own.
  • Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Ted's engineering skill is directly proportional to how much he insists on thinking of himself as a god-like engineer.
    • Moreover, because the story takes place in a video game that actually has an engineering profession, Ted, who is not a real engineer, is prohibited from making real engineering items. His ability to create is tied directly to how impossible that thing is to create; to the point where he manages to create one very large rifle by combining two much smaller rifles. The only reason why this new rifle wasn't ready to fire right away was because the two smaller ones were themselves broken and incomplete. By the very end, he has created Steve the Impromptu Shredder, a stomping, armor-plated war machine with fully-actuated limbs and weaponry and a whole barrage of readouts and gauges Ted does not even remember building. He built it out of a whole bunch of wholly random items he grabbed as quickly as he possibly could, based on faint memories of what these war machines looked like.
  • Crazy Survivalist: Annie, who has survived in what is basically hell for not even she knows how long. Her mind has not.
  • Dark World: The entire story, except for the ending and epilogue, takes place in one of these.
  • Deadpan Snarker: The narrator.
  • Distress Call : Mary's Quest.
  • The Dragon: Pyramid Hogger.
  • Drop in Nemesis: Pyramid Hogger.
  • Eldritch Abomination: Literally all of the native wildlife would be a strong contender for Eldritch status, but it's the Ravening Worms that really take the cake.
  • Eleventh-Hour Superpower: Steve. And, for Scratch, EVADE.
  • Escape From the Crazy Place
  • Everything's Even Worse with Starving Amphibious Sharks
  • Everything Trying to Kill You : Starving Amphibious Sharks, Lesser Ravening Worms, Immolating Strawmen...pretty much the only thing not trying to kill Ted is Scratchfever, and Annie towards the end of the story.
  • Expy : Pyramid Hogger, for Pyramid Head of course.
  • Fluffy the Terrible: Larry the Starving Amphibious Shark.
  • Food as Bribe: Scratchfever will do anything for salted fish.
  • Hearing Voices: Every Player Character who winds up in the Dark World. From a meta point of view, this is because You Awaken in Razor Hill was a collaborative forum-based game where the PC was 'played' by hundreds of different people.
  • Homage: To Silent Hill, couched in another Homage to World of Warcraft, and the whole thing is a Homage to MS Paint Adventures, itself a homage to text adventures like Zork.
  • Humanoid Abomination: Pyramid Hogger has this kind of a vibe going for him, not to mention the Immolating Strawmen. But in the end, it's Mary's Hate that shows Ted what it is to be a true Cosmic Horror in human form.
  • Idiot Ball : By necessity. Ted was controlled by the communal whims of over a hundred forumgoers, and noticeable percent of the commands given were deliberately moronic, For the Lulz. The manner in which the author handled this must be seen to be truly appreciated.
  • Implacable Man : Pyramid Hogger.
  • I Need a Freaking Drink: Ted, throughout. He finally gets a drink towards the end of the story and it is awesome.
  • Insurmountable Waist High Fence : "You can't go North to the scuttle shore to find that damn boat, there is a Straw Man blocking your path."
    • Or the slightly more Horrifying, "You cannot haul ass to Sen'Jin, there is a Pyramid Hogger blocking your path."
  • Jerkass Gods: "The narrator is such a dick".
  • Kleptomaniac Hero: "Loot the hell out of it" is one of the more often-repeated commands for Ted. Justified since Ted needs all the help he can get and there's no-one to legitimately buy things from.
  • Let's Get Dangerous: The moment Ted decides "No more hiding" while fighting the Starving Amphibious Sharks, he suddenly becomes infinitely more badass, while Scratchfever's level of awesome seems directly tied to his loyalty level. Both of these are lampshaded later, when Ted looks back on his journey so far. Annie later imitates Ted's "No more hiding" at the climax, and proceeds to lay the druidic smackdown on Pyramid Hogger.
  • MacGyvering: Ted. Holy crap, Ted.
  • Meat Puppet : Incubators, hollowed out Quillboars (and possibly anything else that might have been in the Barrens) that are filled with Larval Ravening Worms
  • Mind Rape : It was implied in the story that Zalazane raped Mary's soul after she was murdered by Quillboars.
  • Mini-Mecha: Steve.
  • Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: The Mission Description for Mary's Quest starts off fairly normal, then becomes quirky, if supportive, then starts to sound kind of mocking and unhinged. Then it turns out to have been the voice of Mary's Hate all along.
  • Nothing Is Scarier : Long stretches of relative silence and inactivity only serve to heighten the tension, especially after we learn what is actually happening here.
  • Oh Crap : Too numerous to list. Suffice it is to say, shit goes wrong so often it's a surprise when shit goes right.
  • The Power of Hate: What made the Dark World so dark in the first place.
  • The Power of Love: The better Scratchfever's relationship with Tednugent is, the more awesome Scratch becomes. Reaches its logical conclusion at the climax.
  • The Power of Rock: Ted can effectively invoke Deus Ex Machinae by playing guitar riffs so awesomely that the Lords of the Chord smile upon him.
    • Requires Liquid Courage, or else Ted's Devotion to the Lord of the Chord will be Lame. The consequences of a Lame Devotion are never seen but noted to be severe.
  • Punny Name: "You are an Orc Hunter and your name is Tednugent. You feel this is an exceptionally clever name, but nobody ever seems to get the joke. You have a Cat for a pet, his name is Scratchfever. You feel this is also an exceptionally clever name. Nobody ever gets this joke, either."
    • Each of Ted's other pets (none of whom are ever seen) are all similarly named - he has a Cobra named Stranglehold, a Gorilla named Weekendwarrior and a Devilsaur (tyrannosaurus) named Littlemissdangerous.
    • Also, Annie (full name: Anniemal the Lazerbeast) who is a Druid. (Druids in WoW can turn into animals.)
  • Real Men Wear Pink: Ted enjoys hugging his cat, is a reasonable dancer, sings very often, knows quite a lot about flowers and is very good with a needle. It's implied his real professions may be tailor or herbalist, and his insistence that he's an engineer is out of embarrassment. He also wears "exciting undergarments" on his head through most of the adventure.
  • Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Mary's Hate is using the Dark World to kill everyone who ever laughed at her.
  • Shout-Out: One of many in this story is the name of the hunter himself, Tednugent, and his pet cat, Scratchfever(Ted Nugent, Cat Scratch Fever).
    • Another being the Konami Code directly quoted or more accurately drawn in the dirt near the end of the story.

"Kagemasa Kozuki must be informed of this at once!"

    • And don't forget the Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy shout-out early in the story where the words Alt-F4 drift into the conference between the Vl'Hurg and G'Gugvunt leaders, sparking the war that destroys 250,000 worlds.
  • Terms of Endangerment: It's a rare thing for a story to make the pet-name "Sport" into something horrifying.
  • This Loser Is You : The Incubators. Brrr.
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