Our hero, The Hunter (a customizable descendant of Abraham Van Helsing), arrives by dirigible. He’s not here for glory; he’s here for a contract. The Borgovian Council promises a fortune to destroy the source of the Stain. With him is the ghost of Lady Katarina, his sardonic, immortal guardian bound to his bloodline.

“Do you want me to raise bees?” he asks.

Katarina steps forward. She offers The Other a better bargain: a story . She tells the epic of the Van Helsing bloodline—all the failures, the petty arguments, the moments of unexpected kindness. The Other, a being of pure chaos, has never encountered narrative structure. It finds the idea of “character growth” fascinating.

“Why fear death,” Moribund laughs over a crackling phonograph, “when you can become a beautiful, eternal nightmare?” Moribund kidnaps Katarina’s spirit anchor (a locket containing her last living memory) and shatters it across four pocket dimensions, each representing a stage of grief: Denial (a sunlit park where monsters pretend to be picnickers), Anger (a forge-world of endless war), Bargaining (a casino where every loss costs a year of your life), and Depression (a silent, rain-soaked copy of Borgovia where the Hunter must fight shadow versions of himself).