Extreme Cosplay - The Witcher 3

Sometimes traveling can be deadly dull – nothing but the slow crawl of the horizon, the sun beating down on your neck and the chirping of crickets. Other times, however, it can be surprisingly eventful, as a certain Gaston, a simple merchant from Toussaint, learned for himself when he happened across a mortally wounded man by the roadside. Though he provided aid as quickly as he could, the mysterious man soon bled to death. Right as he did, up walked the hero of my tale, Geralt.

This story had a surprising finale. They discovered the massacre had been committed by.... elven statues. Durand had purchased these a few weeks prior. They were in truth golems, meant to be part of a trap set by the last elven ruler of Toussaint, Divethaf, to take out his vanquisher and tormentor, King Ludovic. Divethaf's trap was never sprung, so his golems slept through the centuries, undisturbed until Durand repeated a formula during an act of historic reconstruction and they awoke...

Zoltan liked to repeat a certain saying: all you can get for free's a punch in the teeth. Geralt must have marked those wise words and decided since no one was paying him to investigate the matter, he was under no obligation to go out of his way to look into it. He thus left the corpse where he had found it and rode off into the sunset...

Though Geralt usually works alone, he made an exception in this case and agreed to let Gaston accompany him. Together they set off following the dead man's tracks towards a residence in which all seemed calm and quiet. Yet once they entered, they found overturned tables, cracked dishes and... more bodies. Luckily, the owner of the villa, Durand Faucher-Plamondon de Savarin, had survived the massacre and was able to tell them what had happened. It seemed Durand and his companions from the Society of Friends of the History of Toussaint had accidentally summoned some kind of monster. Geralt knew his duty was to draw the beast there again and exterminate it before it could shed more blood.

Though many find it hard to believe, witchers can catch the scent of blood from over a league away. It thus comes as no surprise that, one day as he traveled in Toussaint, Geralt departed from the beaten path towards a seemingly peaceful residence. When he found bloody marks on its locked doors, he began investigating...

Upon hearing Gaston's account, Geralt decided this was not a job for a witcher and went on his way.

Eventually, however, he changed his mind and decided to investigate the matter after all.