Something Else?

The template examined the room it had found itself in. It saw that this was no room but rather a vast grey emptiness with no beginning and no end. There was nothing else to measure it by. Looking at the emptiness makes it feel strangely dizzy, as if it is about to fall in.

But there is a crack in the emptiness not far from the two doors. The crack opens off into some sort of eerie and beautiful pattern of shifting colors that its mind cannot process. Inside the crack stands a door engraved with elaborate patterns showing nymphs and dryads engaged in scandalous activities, twisted tree branches, and other things that were rather more disquieting and harder to describe. At the center of the door near the top was the roman numeral III in elegant lettering.

The template, who had previously felt rather blank upon turning away from the voice, now feels a curious eagerness about this door. The door reminds it of the taste of eldritch power it had felt for a brief moment in its previous life. It had turned away for that power for love's sake, but that love had been so fleeting and with death it was now quite gone. How would he have felt if he had taken the other choice?

"No! No! Don't open that door!" said the voice, uncharacteristically agitated.

"And why not?" says the template. It does not move or turn around. It feels that anything that annoys the Voice is probably a good idea.

"Well, that door shouldn't be there. It's only there because of the damage the Shoggoth did to reality. And I don't just mean to a particular reality, I mean the very concept of reality. That's why you were having all those weird dreams that weren't really dreams. If you go through there, everything is going to be worse!"

"And why should I trust you? You don't even have a body!"

"I do, in a way, but it's not in your space. Listen to me. If you open that door you'll regret it for the rest of your life and then for all eternity afterwards. What's wrong with those other two doors? They look nice. This one's all gross and creepy."

The more that annoying voice tries to discourage it, the more it wants to open that door. But it hesitates. Opening that door would be anathema to everything it had previously been.

1. It opens the door anyway.
2. It decides to open one of the other two doors.
3. It looks for other doors.

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