Curse of Strahd [CLOSED]

[Esbilon]

"Thank you," Fianna says and rises gracefully from the chair. "Could I perhaps borrow a book while I wait?" She asks as she reaches out to take the candle.

 

[Baba Luga]

Fianna
Guest Bedroom

"Of course you may," says Jorten as he guides Fianna to one of the plush but worn divans in the bedroom. The table beside it is dotted with a few waxy stubs of melted-down candles. For just a second, he looks at the closed closet door with a fleeting expression of worry, then exhales and turns away. Retreating to the lounge, he soon returns with a thick book, which he leaves on a low cabinet near the door. "Now rest, I'll be back before you know it." He gently shuts the door behind himself as he leaves.

When Fianna gets up to retrieve the book, she finds it to be a dry mining treatise titled Lost Arts of Svirfneblin Assay and Ore Color Classification, with Special Reference to the Single Ash Method by someone named Rede Lovelyforge Stainbrother.

 

[Esbilon]

Fianna finds her self rather annoyed with Jorten for him selecting what must be the most boring book in his collection rather than let her pick one for herself. She puts it and the candle down on the table and takes another look around the room. She doesn't really expect to see something new, but perhaps a previous occupant left more interesting reading material behind. She makes sure to take another look at the closet, it was a portal to the Feywild before, it can well be something different now.

 

[Baba Luga]

Fianna
Guest Bedroom

The closet is still a closet, and the dark cloak is still the only garment hanging from any of its several wall hooks. Out in the bedroom, there is nothing on the stone floor under the areas of the big rug that Fianna can access—the big canopied bed holds down one end of the rug. A nightstand drawer next to the bed holds a length of charcoal, a small ivory hand mirror and a white veil with several hairpins attached to it. The bedding is high and lumpy. The cabinet near the door contains some musty night garments and a glass carafe, empty save for a dark film at the bottom. The forest scenes around the room are painted on a layer of plaster. As Fianna studies them, small figures seem to peer out from behind the trees at the periphery of her vision, but perhaps that's a trick of the dancing candlelight.

It's been about fifteen minutes since Jorten left.

 

[Esbilon]

Resigned that there is nothing more to be found about her room, Fianna settles down to read the, presumably boring, book.

 

[Epiphany]

The ambush by the wild mad druid and his stick-figures doesn't feel like lethal danger so much as yet another pinprick. Ever since they're arrival days ago, Moire and her friends found themselves fighting desperately against magical shrubs and wolves, defending themselves from a friend-turned-vampire, wrestling a mad fisherman into submission, finding friends only to have the dark ruler of this dark land rise to threaten certain doom. And she had to stand up a date. Each prick isn't mortal but they seem relentless and add wounds to a patience already tested.

Moire staggers as the vines entangle her. Then, with a great burst of energy, she cries out "Ilmater!" and tears her way free. The Paladin descends upon the chanting druid, sword and shield in hand, as relentless and implacable as the evil strangling this land.

"Yield," she says, coming to a stop right in front of the druid. Blade extended, her threat is as clear as her mercy...but that mercy has its limits. Moire won't strike an unarmed man but a druid with (super)natural powers is never unarmed. She gives him a moment to decide to surrender. His next hostile act prompts her to strike in defense of their lives.

 

[Baba Luga]

Syvis, Hircus, Moire, Ina
Old Svalich Road, Thunderstorm

Up close, there are certain aspects of this man, marks on his face, his matted hair, the small fetishes worm around his neck and wrists, that are reminiscent of that woman, the Elementalist, who Moire and the others found dead on their arrival in Barovia. He continues to hold his staff aloft, rain streaming down his extended arm.

"He is the ancient, he is the land!" the man barks in staccato syllables. A forked bolt of lighting flashes on the distant hilltop. The druid's mouth forms a hollow circle, held for an instant before he exhales and the thunder from the lightning strike seems to explode from his body, shaking Moire's bones and nearly knocking her off her feet. Her face feels bruised. Her vision is momentarily blurred.

 

[Baba Luga]

Syvis, Hircus, Moire, Ina
Old Svalich Road, Thunderstorm

As Hircus struggles to untangle himself from the knotted roots in the road, the last childlike stick thing works its tendrils in through the gaps in his leggings, tearing and stabbing at flesh beneath. Across the field of freshly-sprouted brambles, Ina uses a hand to shield her eyes from the rain and calls out, "Your ankle, Hirc, it's twisted up in that loop!" She looks as though she's about to come over and help free him, until the mad druid starts chanting again. She huffs, sticks out her lower lip and strides over to where Moire faces the Barovian savant. With no pause, preparation or backswing, she simply holds her knife in front of her, walks it in under the man's rib cage and gives a sharp twist. "We were just going to a stupid village," she hisses under her breath.

As the druid crumples forward, Ina pivots and marches back toward Hircus, but the roots and tall grass are already wilting and withering back into the mud. The stick creature, however, seems dedicated to its task and rakes its claws up towards the cleric's face. The fallen man in front of Moire repeats his mantra with his dying breaths. "Heistheancientheistheland, Heistheancientheistheland, Heistheancientheistheland..."

Amid the gear that was loaded onto her for the journey, Syvis continues her own strange vocalizations in troubling counterpoint to the dying druid's chant. Flapping wildly on the perch in his cage, which is slowly sinking in mud, Otrev mimes, "What is that song, keeper? I don't understand. I'd like to go back to yesterday now, please."

 

[Baba Luga]

Syvis, Hircus, Moire, Ina
Old Svalich Road, Thunderstorm

Freed from the prison of roots and leaves, Hircus quickly brings his hammer down on the last of the walking stick monsters, utterly destroying it. As rain continues to fall, Syvis gradually quiets and regains control. Ina retrieves her thrown dagger and comes over to help Syvis organize all of the gear that she was carrying as a horse.

At Moire's feet, an eerie, pulsing glow seems to form around the fallen druid's chest.

 

[Baba Luga]

Fianna
Guest Bedroom

Lost Arts of Svirfneblin Assay is about as dry as Fianna had expected. To a non-expert in the subject matter, the handful of drawings of mine cross-sections and odd deep gnome apparatuses are the most compelling pages. Ever since Jorten mentioned food, the pangs in Fianna's stomach have been growing, and her "host" still hasn't returned. After another restless ten minutes or so, the monotony is broken by a thud...creak sound from the closet.

 

[Esbilon]

While Fianna prides herself of having diverse interests and a keen appreciation of viewpoints different from her own, this really is pushing it. She does like the illustrations and all the little fiddly parts of Svirfneblin engineering, but the subject matter in itself is dreadfully dull.

Thus, she eagerly puts down the book as she is interrupted and moves quickly and gracefully form the divan in order to investigate the source of the disturbance.

 

[Abrahms]

Having her brief moment of clarity from the intense distress that claimed her get taken away was almost doubly breaking as the calm ready breaths that Syvis had briefly managed soon faded, thanks to a painful strike on Hircus breaking his concentration, the strange and unnerving sounds emitted from the druid again again. As the fight died down, she curled in on herself, whining and howling, yelping almost like a dying dog, buried under the gear her horse form had carried but now gave her some small amount of cover from the rain. She heard the flapping of Otrev's wings, wishing she could comfort him, but could barely get herself to move from the sheer nervous energy that seemed to have taken over her.

Eventually the mind-numbing panic faded, and the elven druid quietened, slowly crawling out from the gear and approached the small birdcage, rescuing it from the mud and muck. Voice hoarse from the earlier effect, she shivered from the cold rain, and intoned the Natural words to summon a different type of animal spirit -- a spectral wolf. Padding just above the ground, not leaving a mark in the mud, it first approached Hircus, nuzzling his side, wounds sealing, then Ina, allowing her to attempt to pet it if she desired, then finally to Moire, placing a paw on her boot with an almost knowing expression before its form dissipated and faded into the night air.

Attempting to speak normally, Syvis had to clear her throat, "Don't trust him, don't trust him at all -- whatever that glow is, I expect it to be as evil and corrupted as this whole land seems to be!" She nervously tapped on the birdcage, "Nightmares of years, half forgotten upon waking, his laughter brought them to me with force ... a horrible thing, a desecrated thing ..." she placed a hand to her brow as she continued to mutter, evidently still shaken not by the fight itself, but the guest appearance that had been revealed by it.

 

[Baba Luga]

Fianna
Guest Bedroom

Back over by the closet door, Fianna hears a series of gentle creaking sounds coming from the other side. There are about eight of them, followed by three solid taps of hard-soled footsteps.

 

[Esbilon]

Very puzzled and a little worried, Fianna open the closet door just enough to get a look at what is on the other side.

 

[Baba Luga]

The door opens more abruptly than Fianna had expected; someone inside the closet is simultaneously pushing it from the other side. The wide eyes that meet hers are set in a face very much like the conventional lay conception of a witch—long, pointed nose and chin, blotchy skin, terrible teeth—but in the person of a woman who appears far younger than the cliched picture of the bent old hag, maybe a year or two Fianna's junior. Her dark hair sticks out from the edges of a tight skullcap, and the rest of her clothes are a motley riot of different patterns and colors, crowning a pair of knee-high boots laced in the most overwrought, elaborate fashion imaginable.

The young witch studies Fianna with an empty, unblinking intensity. "Oh," she says in a voice bereft of affect or emotion, "you are Jorten's secret. That makes sense. Why are you here? Jorten is impure. You should run away. I have a cat and we made some poison. Where did you get those clothes?"

Behind the woman, Fianna sees a rope ladder hanging in the middle of the closet, its upper end hidden by the top of the doorframe.

 

[Esbilon]

Fianna takes a step backwards in surprise at this new character in what appears to be her own personal little drama. "I'm happy this makes sense to you," she says with clear traces of sarcasm in her voice, "for nothing here makes much sense to me. I suspect that I'm far from Jorten's only secret and object to the notion of belonging to him in any sense. To answer your questions, I just appeared here and did so in these clothes. I'm as stumped as you are about the details. Why should I trust you more than Jorten?" She asks, not that she trusts Jorten very much at all, "and why are you telling me about your poison?" she adds as an afterthought.

 

[Baba Luga]

The odd young woman seems to take Fianna's startled step backwards as an invitation and moves forward past her, into the bedroom. "Here's one," she says, "Do you know how old Jorten is? I did the math. It's three hundred and thirty five years, five months and twelve days. He used to be a Sir, but now he's just a Jorten."

She walks around the room, touching all the furniture and the painted walls. Coming upon Fianna's lighted candle on the table by the divan, she holds her hand briefly over the flame, then picks up the heavy looking mining treatise and asks, "Can I borrow this?" Without waiting for an answer, she carries on talking. "Do you want to see the poison? It smells like pomegranate but it's not good to eat. You can come upstairs." Stuffing the book into the layers of blouses and capes she wears, she goes back into the closet and puts a hand on the rope ladder.

 

[Esbilon]

"His age is not actually a strike agains this trustworthiness," Fianna says calmly. If this were her home, she might be upset about this strange woman carrying on like this, but it's not. "Your claims regarding his age even less so. I don't particularly want to see the poison or know how it smells," she continues, more amused than anything by the other's antics, "I want to know why you brought it up. Is it for Jorten?"

 

[ZombWie]

This with the walking, poking sticks and the druid did little to sour the cleric's mood. Hircus gives the inanimate pile a kick and a hmph! before turning to Syvis with one eyebrow cocked. "What do we do about our friend here? Shall I pass another of Torm's blessings her way?" Without following through on the promise of a prayer he gives a little shake of his head.

"I guess she will have to struggle through it as we all have." walking toward Ina, he reaches out and places a solid hand on her shoulder. "I don't know how you move so fast and do such damage with such a little knife. This... man had no chance."

The cleric rests his hammer in the mud. "What do we do about this one?" Hircus asks Moire. "That green glow doesn't seem right. Maybe we should just hurry on toward the village and pretend we were never here. We don't need to make a bad impression on our first night in town."

 

[Baba Luga]

The young woman in motley studies Fianna quizzically. "Did Jorten say he needs poison? It's just a practice batch. I'll probably have to throw it out if nobody wants any. I should do that now." She puts a booted toe on the first rung of the rope ladder. "If Beeswax Brainvista comes down later, don't let her touch your ears." She begins to climb back up to wherever she came from.

 

[Baba Luga]

Syvis, Hircus, Moire, Ina
Old Svalich Road, Thunderstorm

The glow that emanates from the fallen druid flickers, dims and brightens again. Something begins to form on the dead man's bare chest, and then a dimly-glowing orb about six inches across emerges, ghostlike, from his body and floats upward in the pouring rain. For a moment, it flashes brightly, and all who see it hear a faint whisper of, "He is the ancient, he is the land," before the light returns to its more subdued form and begins drifting slowly uphill in the general direction the druid came from.

 

[Esbilon]

"Wait!" Fianna calls out, strange as she is, this one is far more interesting than the book Jorten offered her. And she knows something, even if she's hardly the most eager to communicate that knowledge clearly. "Where are you going? What's up there?"

 

[Baba Luga]

"I need to get back to the workroom," the woman tells Fianna. "I left some elements on the flame." She quickly climbs the rope ladder to a trapdoor that hangs down, open, from the closet's ceiling. "So, are you coming?" the woman asks when she has climbed out, looking down at Fianna from the room above. One hand holds the top rung of the ladder, ready to pull it up if Fianna wishes to stay below.

 

[Esbilon]

The young woman hesitates for a moment before abandoning Jorten's guest room for whatever lies above it.

 

[Baba Luga]

The swaying rope ladder leads up to a room slightly larger than Jorten's study, where haphazard tables, benches and cabinets sport an array of alchemical devices and substances—Fianna sees vials labeled boardinghouse crabs, surgeon's paste, coward's feathers, early rose petal, farmer's bunion (powdered), frozen nearguard, and the like.

As soon as Fianna has reached this workroom, her host pulls up the ladder and piles it on the floor, where it is attached to two iron staples. She reaches down to pull the trapdoor shut with a click. Then she rushes over to one of the tables, where a blue flame burns below a retort of bubbling liquid. On the way, a large calico cat leaps down onto her shoulder from one of the cabinets, though she pays it no mind.

"Help yourself if you need anything," the young witch or alchemist calls out from her station. Along a long curving wall, among the racks and shelves of supplies, two leaded windows look out at the stormy night sky. There are two heavy doors on the opposite wall, one closed and one open to an unlighted room packed with broken, tattered furniture.[/div]