Curse of the Ragdoll

[Manofevil]

Ragdoll created by Mike Wolfer, all rights reserved by Avatar Press. Adapted for RavenLoft by Manofevil.
Rheinhold Wirtz was on the prowl. Six weeks at sea had left him with a burning hunger for the pleasures of the flesh and he was out to find a wench to sate his appetite. No woman ever forgot a night with him. Oh, some would wail and whine and cry. They would curse him as fat and ugly, but they would never forget. Only in the deepest darkest night when they lay beside their impotent husbands would they remember the pleasures he taught them. He couldn't WAIT! A shy young virgin or an experienced wench, he didn't care so long as she was comely. He had a feeling this night would be MOST memorable. More for her than him, he smiled to himself.

"Sir," he heard a whisper behind him, "Are you lonely tonight?"

He turned around and saw her standing in the shadows of an alley. She was heavily cloaked, head to foot, but he could see two lovely green eyes peering out at him from under the ragged hood and a perfect white smile looking at him the way he liked. He noticed a lock of beautiful blonde hair hanging down her shapely neck. Ezra, he couldn't possibly have gotten THIS lucky!

"Not anymore," He said in answer to her question and he advanced on her, smiling predatorily. As he approached her he looked her over from head to toe. Her skin appeared to be flawless. Her teeth were white and straight and her hair, clean and untangled. He noticed she was barefoot and her calves were bare as well. That could mean, he realized, that hadn't a stitch on under the cloak. Ezra, he could only hope. He was in front of her now and slipped his arms around her. She did not smell unwashed. Well, he thought, if some disappointed young wife wanted one passionate night with a true man, who was he to deny her. He'd heard stories.

She continued to smile up at him. Suddenly her smile turned mischievous.

"Betcha can't catch me," she giggled as she somehow slipped out of his grasp and ran laughing down the alley. Her cloak flew open for a split second allowing him a glimpse of what was underneath showing him that she was indeed, completely unclothed beneath the cloak. He would follow her to the gates of Hell and back, he said to himself, but he would HAVE HER!. He raced down the alley after her as if his feet were on fire. He knew better than to call after her. If he did, he might attract others and then he might have to share her, or worse, give her up. He wanted her all to himself. He raced around a corner to find her sitting above him on the roof of a shack smiling innocently down at him. He smiled back up at her. He couldn't reach her where she was, but he could charm her down and then... and then...

"Greta told me about you, Rheinhold, isn't it?" she smiled down at him.

His smile disappeared. He didn't like thinking about Greta.

"She told me how you found her that night on the docks of that Lamordian town, how you chased her all around the waterfront, how you finally cornered her in that dock shack, How you pinned her down and took her virginity right there next to a barrel of salted fish, how she begged you to stop again and again but you wouldn't. She told me about all those... things you did to her and you made her do to you- will you do those things to me? - and how by the time you were done, one of those terrible Lamordian snowstorms had moved in and the high waves had splashed over the shack, encasing it in ice, and you were both trapped in there for three days and how you lived off the salted fish in that barrel and tore sections out of the walls to burn to keep warm. She told me how you kept doing all those things to her again and again during those days until she actually started to like some of them. She had been engaged to a sweet boy in town but she knew, after that, that she'd be good for nothing but the brothel."

She leaned down and rolled off the roof, doing a midair flip and landing on her right in front of him, again giving him a vision of her unclothed body under the cloak. Her innocent smile hadn't changed once.

"She told me how she'd finally gotten away from you, how she knocked a hole in the back of the shack and ran naked in the sunlight across the frozen bay, trying to put as much distance between herself and you. She said you stopped to pull on your pants and boots before you chased after her. She said you'd just gotten within sight of her when she fell through the ice." she continued to smile.

"I...I thought she'd surely drowned..." he finally said in awe.

"Oh," she smiled, "she DID!" her face twisted into a snarl and her hand slashed out at his midsection. He looked down and saw that his full belly had been cut wide open and his entrails were bursting out. He desperately tried to shovel them back in with his hands.

She grabbed his ear and twisted it.

"Ahagh!" He gurgled.

"She did drown," she hissed into his ear, "but not before a shard of ice cut her open just like that. She drowned while the salt water flooded her body and her entrails stretched out into the sea. That was her last vision before she tried to fill her lungs to scream in pain and filled them instead with water. Her body wasn't discovered until the bay thawed and she was found by body snatchers who sold her to the medical college."

"How do you know this?" he wailed, "Who are you?"

"Why haven't you guessed? I AM Greta, " She dropped her cloak to the ground and stood before him naked and smiling cruelly. "I am Greta and so much more!" Her eyes glowed green with inner power and her skin was suddenly covered with horrible scars. Her flesh looked like a patchwork quilt laid over a woman's flesh. He had never seen anything more horrible. "I am one woman and every woman. I am every vile and perverted thing ever committed against the original owners of this flesh. I am every victim hidden in the nightmares of so many murderers, screaming out for vengeance against those who laughed at their suffering. If you would have a name, then call me RAGDOLL!!!"

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The next day Rheinhold Wirtz was found in that back alley with his entrails and other organs cast in disarray all over the cobblestones. His face was fixed in a scream and his eyes rolled back in his head. The constables did not expect this murder to be solved any time soon, Wirtz was an unsavory fellow and many breathed a sigh of relief at his passing.

The story of the Ragdoll may be best summed up in the statement 'Some things are inevitable." RavenLoft, like all medeval or renaissance societies, is male- dominated, and will therefore churn out it's share of sexual predators. Even in female dominated domains like Borca and Invidia, the female is expected to take the subordinate role to the male in the family structure and the female DarkLords are perhaps the single exception. It can be argued that that is sometimes part of their curse. In societies such as this, the world's oldest profession is sure to rear it's ugly head and that profession fills it's ranks almost exclusively through the pattern of rape and stigma. A woman who is raped immediately becomes a prostitute in eyes of her community because no virtuous women would have survived such a thing.

With such attitudes so widespread in a world like RavenLoft alongside the sociopathy which seems to be just as widespread we may expect the lot of pretty young women to be even worse than in real life. They are, for the most part, the targets of choice for every predator out there. This brings us to the Ragdoll.

The Ragdoll's creation is equally predictable. During the first time period when Victor Mordenheim's notes on the created became available to those of enough intelligence to understand them, one of the scientists that became obsessed with recreating Mordenheim's experiments was a man who'd recently lost his niece to suicide. What no one knew about her suicide was the reason for it. Her uncle had been carrying on an incestuous relationship with her. She had begged him time and again to stop, but he wouldn't listen. Finally, one day she ran off a cliff into the ocean. He immediately found a boat and seached for her, hoping and praying that she'd somehow survived. When he found her corpse, the rocks and fish had already shredded it. She barely looked like the girl he believed he loved. He quietly removed her corpse before the funeral and secreted her in his home. He was fairly well to do and his home fairly isolated so he knew that he might be able to recreate Mordenheim's work. He put the word out to the local body snatchers - He needed women. Not just any women, but young and curvaceous just like his precious niece had been. The body snatchers proved remarkably capable, but unfortunately, many of the corpses were often in worse shape than his nieces had been. He usually wound up taking only small pieces from each of them. Though he didn't know it at the time, he even used the flesh of two elves, one very dark in color.

By the time he was finished, his nieces flesh looked like a patchwork quilt, but he didn't care, she was still as beautiful as the day he'd first bedded her. He set about recreating Mordenheim's process and was successful. She lived again! As he began putting his hands all over her talking about all the things he wanted to do to her, she lashed out with her open hand, literally bursting his head like a melon. Her horror at this act was short-lived before the realization that she was finally free of him. She turned and saw her reflection in a piece of plate glass and lashed out at it in fear. She shattered the glass and, unfortunately, also the containers behind the glass causing them to pour onto the floor and start a fire. She quickly fled the lab before the volatile material exploded and destroyed the house. She stood naked outside the burning remains of the only home she ever knew beset by memories of being used by more men than she could bear to count.

Current sketch:
The Ragdoll doesn't even remember her name nor the name of the uncle that (re)created her but a lot has changed since the night when she first got up from the table. She has learned that she can hide her scarred appearance and look as she did before. She remembers a name only when she gets close to one of the murderers who killed one of the women whose corpse' flesh make up her own. She is preternaturally strong and, as such, stalks the RavenLoft night fearing neither werebeast, vampire, nor liche. Indeed a few of these have proven to be her targets. It is unknown if she was created with these abilities or if they are the results of failed powers checks. Regardless, she is still a fierce opponent to anyone who attacks her, whatever their reasons. She wears nothing save a raggedy old cloak and needs neither food nor water. Once she finds one of the killers of the women whose flesh makes up her own, she will not stop until they've suffered the same fate as their victims, which were and are usually very gruesome. Some time ago, she discovered yet another ability. She came across a young woman's body laying in the woods. It had been torn apart by animals. She knelt down to examine it and the minute she touched a piece of the flesh, she instantly knew that the girl had been raped and murdered by a group of thugs from the nearby village. She stared in shock as the flesh in her hand literally merged with her own and became a new patch on her already patchwork body. She suffered horribly as she then relived the poor girls fate. Now whenever she finds a dead girls corpse (not terribly uncommon) she need only touch it to learn how she died. If she simply died by some accident or mishap, The Ragdoll will bury her quietly and respectfully. If she was a killer and died while trying to kill somebody, The Ragdoll will leave her to the beasts. But if she was a victim of murder, with or without the sexual component, The Ragdoll will hide until an animal comes along, let the animal tear into the flesh until a small piece is available, then chase the beast away, hold the small piece to a chosen part of her body, and take it upon herself to punish the murderers.

I'm sorry but if you guys want to use this one, you're going to have to stat it up yourselves. I'm just no good at those sorts of things.