Xenoverse origins / R-009
LindaOrigin story
The woman who refused the dramatic entrance
The stranger demanded fear. Linda asked whether he had a reservation.
Read the origin ↓
Placeholder artworkLinda ran an inn beside a road people used mainly to escape somewhere worse. She knew the shapes of exhaustion, deceit, and unpaid meals. She also believed that every problem could be reduced to a list and solved before supper. This was an efficient philosophy until the night a masked stranger arrived with a curse and six armed followers.
Her Xenoverse beginning is not the story of a secret warrior revealed. It concerns an ordinary woman whose need to remain in charge nearly destroys her business—and the uncomfortable lesson that saving a place sometimes requires admitting you cannot manage it alone.
There is no mystery in a man who leaves mud everywhere and expects gratitude.
From the dossier
Chapter 01
An establishment with standards
The inn’s rules were painted behind the bar. No blades on tables. No fires upstairs. Damage paid before departure. Linda added new rules whenever experience supplied the wording. The result was less a welcome than a condensed history of disappointing guests. Regulars found it comforting. At least someone had noticed what people were capable of.
The masked stranger announced that he had come to reclaim an ancient debt attached to the ground beneath the inn. Linda asked whether the debt included the stable, since its roof already owed her money. His followers spread through the common room. She ordered them to wipe their boots. The guests laughed, giving her the dangerous impression that ridicule had settled the matter. She refused to evacuate. If she allowed every dramatic idiot to disrupt dinner, she reasoned, the business would collapse before the roof did. Outside, the well began steaming.
Placeholder artworkChapter 02
The curse does not respect opening hours
By dusk, water seeped uphill through the cellar steps. The stove went cold despite a full fire. A crack opened across the oldest wall, and every mug on the shelf turned slowly toward it. Linda attempted three repairs, two threats, and a remarkably detailed complaint. None addressed the fact that something beneath the building was genuinely wrong.
A traveller offered to move the guests to higher ground. Linda insisted they remain where she could count them. Then the cellar door buckled. Her determination had become a hazard wearing an apron. She saw a young porter waiting for instructions beside the cracking wall and understood, with a sick little drop in her stomach, that he trusted her more than her judgment deserved. She ordered the evacuation. The decision felt like failure. It was the first useful thing she had done since the stranger entered, which made it a particularly unpleasant improvement.
Placeholder artworkChapter 03
The cellar underneath the story
With the guests outside, the traveller and porter examined the cellar while Linda kept the passage clear. They found a stone drain sealed beneath an older foundation. The stranger’s followers had blocked its outlet uphill to create pressure, then relied on the site’s strange mineral vapours to provide the rest of the spectacle. The curse was partly ancient plumbing and partly contemporary fraud.
Linda wanted to charge upstairs and expose him. The traveller pointed at the water still rising around their ankles. There would be time to feel vindicated after they stopped drowning. She swallowed the reply she had prepared and took the smaller bucket. The porter worked beside her. For an hour, the inn’s owner performed a task no more distinguished than anyone else’s. Her list of rules had not included this arrangement. It turned out the building survived it extremely well, provided she stopped correcting the angle of every bucket.
Placeholder artworkChapter 04
An audience with better priorities
They opened the drain from below while the guests cleared its upper outlet. The water dropped. Warmth returned to the stove. The stranger, deprived of his supernatural effects, continued his speech to an increasingly practical audience. Linda brought him the mud-covered blockage and asked whether he wished to itemize the ancient debt against the repairs.
His followers tried to leave first. The villagers blocked the door until the cost of the damage was covered. Linda accepted money rather than apologies, and she declined to describe herself as the person who had saved the inn. That distinction belonged to several people she had initially ordered to sit still. Supper was late, smoky, and shared outside. Nobody complained. When a guest praised her bravery, she said she had been stubborn for most of it. The porter laughed. She let him. The evening had already contained enough expensive misunderstandings without preserving that one.
Placeholder artworkChapter 05
A place that learns to open
Linda kept the rules but painted a new line above them: Tell me when I am wrong. It attracted more commentary than she expected. Some guests regarded it as an invitation to discuss the soup. She discovered that listening did not require agreement, only enough patience to distinguish a complaint from a warning.
Her origin leaves her sharp, bossy, difficult to impress, and considerably better company in a crisis. In the Toxic Goblin Xenoverse, she becomes the sort of host who can interrupt a sinister entrance without mistaking interruption for victory. She asks for evidence. She checks the cellar. She counts the guests after letting them leave.
The masked stranger never returned. His unpaid reservation remained in the book under a name Linda supplied herself: Considerable Noise, Limited Substance. There was space beside it for a review. The porter wrote that the performance had improved when the water stopped.
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