Grand Ghoul Empress

The **Grand Ghoul Empress** is leader of the Ghouls and end boss of the The Dusk. She is a large ghoul with several tubes protruding from her back. Devoid of legs and lower torso, she also has a large head with bulging veins and large bulbous eyes, also veiny. Her gaping mouth features a large bumpy tongue, yellowish teeth and bloody saliva.

## Boss Fight

The Empress is a boss found late in the game and was designed to be suitably challenging. She boasts a large array of attacks and deals high damage.

### The Arena

The Grand Ghoul Empress is fought in a cathedral, with ornate decorations and chandeliers. The Arena itself is a circular room with several rings of pues surrounding an elevated platform on which the Empress can be found. It is grappled to a large pipe organ, holding itself high above you, though it dismounts for several attacks.

### Attacks

* The Empress fires a salvo of blood from her back-mounted tubes, with large blasts raining from the sky above the player. The leave a lingering puddle of toxic blood where they land, which fades away after 5 seconds.
* Damage: High to Average (Puddle)
* The Empress launches her tongue at you, which retracts backwards and pulls whatever it hit back to her. It can latch onto the pues and chandeliers, which can collide with the Player on the return trip which deals additional damage.
* Damage: Very High to Incredible (Physics Prop)
* The Empress vomits a massive beam of blood and assorted bones. The central beam spits out arcing bone projectiles randomly that bounce once, splitting into two smaller arcing bone projectiles in the process. The beam slowly changes trajectory to follow the Player.
* Damage: Incredible to Average (Bone)
* The Empress throws herself from the pipe organ at the Player. Though she arcs through the air slowly and majestically, her large hitbox demands artful dodging. Upon landing she will crash through the floor and release a large amount of arcing bone projectiles identical to those spawned by the beam attack. Upon completing this attack she will enter the Floored State.
* Damage: Super Incredible to Average (Bone)

#### Floored State

* The Empress bursts from the ground near some pues and a respectable distance from the Player, and proceeds to pick them up and throw them at you. When she has depleted her accesible pue reserve, the Empress burrows back below the floorboards.
* Damage: High
* The Empress bursts from the ground near the Player, predicting where they are headed if they are moving. She then slams her upper jaw on the ground, shattering all of her teeth which are fired off as projectiles. If at low health, she will also slam her arms on the ground at the same time, increasing the ground covered by the initial attack but not creating any more teeth projectiles. She then burrows back underground, and her teeth regenerate when she next surfaces.
* Damage: Very High to Average (Teeth Projectile)
* The Empress surfaces completly, pulling her full body above the ground. She then fires off multiple beams of blood from her back tubes at the ceiling while charging at the player, with the beams knocking off any chandeliers they hit. The chandeliers leave deadly fires where they land, which last for the rest of the fight, so kiting the Empress away from them is advised. Once she has charged for long enough, and provided she is on less than a third of her original health, she will scream for a second and then backflip, allowing her blood beams to destroy anything directly infront of or behind her at any range. She will return to the pipe organ after this attack.
* Damage: Incredible (Contact or Blood)

### Damaging the Empress

The pues in the cathedral are destructible, being obliterated by all of the Empress' attacks. When broken, they have a 1/9 chance of dropping a single-use Bible. The Bible can be thrown a short distance, which stuns the Empress if it hits. The Player must then rush to the pipe organ in the center and play a short tune, determined by the current sheet music by the keyboard. Successfully playing the song will cause the Empress to screech in agony and then resume combat. The sheet music changes every time a tune is played, whether it is successful or not.

#### Tune Playing

A brief typing minigame with the ASDF row representing natural notes and the QWERTY fow above acting as sharp ones.

* C - A
* *C# - W*
* D - S
* *D# - E*
* E - D
* F  - F
* *F# - T*
* G - G
* *G# - Y*
* A - H
* *A# - U*
* B - J

Standard sheet music will appear onsceen, with a vertical line moving right. Playing notes as the line passes by will result in success, when the timing is only slightly off, the vertical line will slow a bit, which burns through the short duration of the Empress' stun. Perfect timing will not slow the tune. Wrong keys, taking damage, or ridiculous timing will cancel the tune.