rose the music box doll

I made a STP OC :3 CW for canon typical violence and suicide

Marionette is a joint chapter 3 of Nightmare and Damsel, and your outcomes can be wildly different depending on which chapter 2 you got her from. This is Shifty's commentary on her in the spaces between:

"This one is a puppet dancing to the whims of her strings. She saw herself as powerless, but in the end had the strength to share her sorrow with another.

Do not mourn her, for she will finally get to live for herself."

You get her either by trying to abandon Damsel (and having Smitten murder you for doing so in the process), or by killing yourself to spite Nightmare.

Marionette's bonus voices are either Skeptic, Opportunist, Contrarian, Hunted, Stubborn, or Cold, depending on which vessel you acquired her from, and how exactly you went about abandoning Damsel or what dialogue you picked when you killed yourself to spite Nightmare.

For Damsel, if you didn't bring the knife, but chose the dialogue option to the effect of "She's dead weight" when Smitten demanded answers when you tried to abandon her, he will bodily throw you back down the stairs, causing you to crack your head open and die. This spawns Contrarian. If you brought the knife and picked the same dialogue option, Smitten stabs you in the heart with it and you get Skeptic. Regardless of the knife, if you picked the dialogue option to the effect of "If she won't leave without us, then do we even have to do anything? We can just leave her down there and be on our way.", then Smitten kills you and you get Opportunist.

If you got her from Nightmare, your choice of dialogue when you kill yourself in front of her is what decides your voice:

Hunted:

"Death can't hurt more than being in your mere presence." [Slay yourself]

Stubborn:

"I hate you. Not enough to kill you. But enough to do this." [Slay yourself]

Cold:

[Slay yourself]

Part of the thing here is you have to get Paranoid on board with the idea, and the way you do so is by convincing him that you can show her how much she's hurting you if you kill yourself in front of her.

I picture Marionette's woods as looking like a life size model train set, if that makes sense. Like the trees look visibly carved, and the ground beneath your feet feels as though it's made out of sculpted clay, and you can faintly hear the sound of a toy train in the background.

As for her cabin, I picture the inside of the upstairs as looking like the inside of a clocktower, a massive space with shadows that cling to the corners and obscure the biggest of the mechanisms from sight. The only furniture of note is a wooden crafter's table, perched on that table is a pristine blade (of course). When you go down into the basment after dealing with the mirror blocking the door, there's a wooden stage floor beneath your feet, but it's much like Nightmare's eldritch void hell dimension, in that you can't seem to see the edges of the room, with only gaslit lanterns hanging from seemingly nothing to light the gloomy path. The entire place feels as though it was built hundreds of years ago, the mechanisms still automatically working together to serve a master long dead, smelling of engine grease and burning dust. If the princess really lives here, slaying her would be doing her a favor ;p

The Narrator describes Marionette's voice as "tinny and mechanical". When you actually get down and see her, she's hanging from puppet strings that she uses to self-animate, and there's a second set. If you got her from Damsel, she will try to trap you with her using those strings, believing you have to stay together in the cabin in order to be happy. If you got her from Nightmare, she'll still try to convince you to save her, only now feeling regretful and like she did something to you that she couldn't undo (my idea here is that Nightmare wasn't actually expecting you to try to die, even if you mentioned as much in other dialogue).

You can only save Marionette if you got her from Nightmare. To do so, you have to cut her strings, but in doing so, she loses the ability to self-animate. You have to be the one to carry her out. You can also renege on the decision to save her, and choose to abandon her, or even slay her. If you don't cut her free, or didn't bring the means with which to do so, Nightmarish Marionette can be convinced to remain in the cabin, if only out of fear that you'll hurt yourself again if she doesn't. If you had Hunted with you, he's more inclined to be sympathetic to her once he actually meets her, saying "She's just as fearful as we are, isn't she?". He can help you go through the route in such a way that you don't just save her, but reconcile with her, too.

If you got her from Damsel, she's a lot more aggressive. You can't save her, and you can't abandon her. If you have Opportunist with you, he can help you manipulate her into lowering her guard so you can get close enough without getting snared by her strings to slay her when it becomes apparent that saving her and abandoning her are both off the table. If you have Skeptic with you, his perception that a quirk with slaying her, that it takes multiple tries to break through her porcelain skin, means that you can't actually slay her that way, makes it so that you can't slay her that way. Opportunist, contrarily, brushes this off and keeps going for it. With Skeptic, he's not manipulative enough to get close enough to her without arousing suspicion, so he inevitably gets snared, but he's able to notice that there is the briefest moment where you can resist the strings, and helps you seize that moment to strangle her, and ultimately pop her head off, but this ultimately leads you to end up hanging limply from strings that have no way to animate until the world around you unravels and Shifty takes her, which doesn't take long. You can also choose to keep trying to stab her, but Skeptic's perception of the action as useless makes the action useless, leading you to failing to slay her. Contrarian sees that the Narrator very much so does not want you to get snared by those strings, so of course he immediately wants to intentionally step into them just to spite him. If you go along with that idea, he very quickly regrets his decision, and you and Marionette spend the rest of your time together in an eternal dance until the world around you unravels and she's claimed by Shifty.

These are Marionette's achievements:

From Damsel:

Mouse in the Clocktower - Get caught by an unfriendly puppet.

Clockwork Dancers - Accept your strings and share a dance with your captor.

Off with Her Head - Decapitate an unfriendly puppet.

Queen of Hearts - Bring the decapitated Marionette to Her.

White Rabbit - Fail to slay a puppet.

From Nightmare:

A Real Girl - Save a puppet.

Dream Come True - Turn over a new leaf with your Nightmare.

Broken Toy - Slay a puppet with her strings cut.

Lucid Dreaming - Find the means to overcome your Nightmare.

The Puppet Becomes the Puppeteer - Convince an unwilling puppet to remain in her clocktower.

Both:

A Despairing Heart - Bring the Marionette to Her.