Exploring the Abbey
General Summary
Excerpt from Seir’s Little Black Book (Session 1/14/20): Penned in Borokin’s hand, via dictation
Khaylen tossed a piece of bread at Clovis’s bigger head. He didn’t get up, but his baby head cried a bit. I asked the abbot more questions about your cult. It seems like you were all up in some mansion near river Zarovich. He supposedly indicated its location on a ap, but I’ll have to trust you guys to navigate there. We discussed some logistics. We talked about taking the horses back to Villacki, looking for a seamstress there. We wanted to stop by the place where the Mystic Lake people lived, but apparently it is a little off of the general path (which would take some extra time) and is inhabited by shades and wights. Letho said that he was pretty sure that you could probably communicate with them, but we turned that prospect down. The abbot warned us about staying out after night, as there are too many wolves in the area. We talked through the lie that Khaylen wants to spin to the duplicitous abbot. She wants to say that the creature’s tracks went off into the forest. Thoradin suggested that the abbot may be able to catch us in a lie, given how much he knows about werewolves. They discussed claiming that we say that the tracks led into the forest, and we lost them. We discussed (or, well, they did) what we should say about where we stayed overnight. Supposedly, we’ll say we stayed overnight in the abbey, but not what we discussed there. Maybe the abbot let us stay here because we brought him the wine The abbot said that he was pretty careful about hiding his goings-on from the townspeople, and told to make sure to adjust to things that seem to be “against nature”. The abbot says that he knows that the baron is a werewolf purely from observation. We talked about what to do to convince the people to let us back into town. We may claim that we were looking for something? As we finished talking, Clovin fell out of his chair. Thoradin showed the abbot the scroll that he was having trouble deciphering. The man’s eyes started… vibrating? As if he were possessed. The scroll is to release a holy weapon that would aid us in our quest (spiritual weapon). It can be used only once. Khaylen looked it over- she said that the letters on it shifted and whatnot, but I couldn’t see it. Letho brought up money. Khaylen put up a not-so-subtle offer to steal what we need, and the two argued a bit about it. Letho said he had some magic which could purify food and drink, and suggested that we pick up the wine from the vineyards, purify it, and sell it in town. Actually quite a good idea, though I pointed out that we’d need to test it first. Quite surprisingly, Letho said another phrase I agreed with: “I’d be surprised if our companions didn’t test it first!” Clovin showed us to in the belfry. The room was mostly empty aside from some furs and wine bottles on a cot in the corner. There was a table with a suspiciously human-shaped body under a shroud. I peeked under the blanket, at the head end, as Clovin seemed too drunk to answer any questions about it. I saw a mop of hair, with some small horns protruding from the top. Out of curiosity, I pulled the blanket down a bit more, revealing some pointed ears and deathly pale skin. It was constructed of stitched-together body parts. Its features seemed to be- our’s? My horns, Zin’s face, O’s arms… I looked away, and when my gaze returned, they were all gone. None of the features were mine. It was just an illusion. It was just a pile of… leftover body parts. I put the blanket back after sharing some silent stares with my companions. Clovin and Khaylen headed out a door, where they could walk along the tops of the walls. There were silent scarecrows gathered around the walls, wearing tatters of armor. We entered the barracks, a quiet, moldy room. Clovin drunkenly announced us to Ezmerelda, who was just setting up for bed. There were three bunk beds, so things were rather uncomplicated, given Letho’s rug. The windows looked out onto a cliff, and Thoradin made remarks about being uncomfortable that he couldn’t just jump out the windows safely. It sounded like a zoo in there. You told us that this area was above where you fed the creatures. O didn’t want to sleep in the same room as Ezmerelda, so she lingered outside. Khaylen joined her, and the two opened a random door into a room with rotten furniture, with stairs leading down to where the partial-humans were, from the noises they were making, stationed. A sign over a door on the wall read “Hospital of the St. Markovia”. Meanwhile, I hunkered down on a bunk bed while Borokin set up Letho’s rug in a corner. O insisted on sleeping in a corner in the other room. You told us about your experience feeding. You told us that dozens and dozens of creatures are being kept, locked in cells, in a veritable madhouse below. It seems like a horrible situation, I don’t know why the abbot would create so many creatures only to lock them up like animals. We all set up to go to sleep. I wasn’t planning on staying up- we supposedly had a watch set up, but apparently Zin, Khaylen, and O had surreptitiously made plans to explore at night, not understanding how poor of an idea it was to poke the bear in the area. Thoradin stayed in bed, but he seemed quite tense and nervous, always with an eye on Letho. It’s pretty easy to get information ex post facto out of you guys, though, so I can still dictate what happened next. Khaylen occasionally got up to go and check on O, but they didn’t share many words. O saw the creature in the courtyard tucking its head under its wing. Something stirred at the edge of the well, before disappearing again. Khaylen, O, and Zin grouped up and broke into the locked “hospital wing”. The room was spacious, with many wrought-iron bedframes covered in cobwebs and bits of rotten mattress. There were many doors up against the walls, each with a sign: operating room, nursery, morgue. There was a chill in the air, and some rattling along the bed frames. As Khaylen turned to run, the door slammed shut behind them. O cast a spell to detect magic, but nothing happened. The group saw shapes, ethereal ones, chained to the beds. The sense of cold weighed on them, and the room grew progressively more and more dark. The figures started pulling themselves off of the beds, and attacked them. Some of them bore markings of where limbs were gnawed at, some of them had sores. The group tried the door to the nursery. It swung open with little resistance. There were tiny bones on the floor. The group saw a reflection in a window, a nun staring sternly at them. When they turned, there was merely a dark, shadowy creature next to them. Zin tried to stab and punch it. He didn’t feel much resistance, but the creature did seem to recoil. The others joined in, the attacks feeling as if they were ripping through fabric. O, trying to avoid taking too much fire, cast a spell that split herself into four. Strangely enough, the three of her took on a very pale, sickly appearance. A few more the creatures squeezed into the room and started taking swipes. Khaylen did some acrobatic maneuvers and cast a spell in an effort to get them to fall asleep. Her spell resembled an illusory bottle of milk, and produced a sour, rotten spell but didn’t seem to succeed. Around this time, a raven appeared at the window to the barracks and started cawing its head off, waking us up. I rolled out of bed and noticed the absence of O, Zin, and Khaylen. Thoradin told me about everyone else’s plan (they didn’t inform me about the situation, but I suppose at least they left someone behind to keep us informed of the situation?) and we left to go figure out what had happened to them, assuming that the raven was affiliated with whatever nebulous deity is trying to help us at the moment. I bemoaned the fact that we were definitely pissing off the abbot, but we piled up to leave the room. Ezmerelda seemed to still be asleep. We debated leaving someone behind to keep an eye on her, but decided against it in order to reduce the chance of turning one of our own into a hostage. We ran out towards the shut door, hearts pounding. The sound of gasps and footsteps sounded. Thoradin dashed towards it, but it seemed stuck shut. He began to pry it open, and Letho joined him, though he was slowed down by the fact that he insisted upon rolling up his rug and lashing it to his back before joining us (“it’s the softest rug in the world”, he told me). They tossed the door open, revealing a cavalcade of dark ghosts attacking my companions. Somehow, they didn’t freak out the animals, but found something new to provoke. I tried to throw a spell at one of the shades, but it was quite ineffective. Letho seemed to notice the sign reading “nursery” at this point, and started making a rather concerningly angry expression. Khaylen ducked into the morgue, which was completely empty. She waved at the creatures, trying to draw them off of Zin. However, Zin was surrounded all the same. One of the shades seemed to kill O, but it turned out to just be one of her duplicates. Another turned to go after Thoradin, but Letho blocked its assault with his shield. I cast another spell on one of the creatures standing next to O, whispering some poorly-remembered poetry. The creature, an old nun, puffed into mist despite the fact that I certainly got the rhyme scheme wrong. Perhaps because of it. Zin punched a few and did a near-impossible feat of athletics midair, landing next to a bed which he noted had bloody manacles chained to it. Khaylen shot an arrow and then dashed over to another door, to open it. It didn’t open right away, as it was a little rusty. O downed another one with a spell. Her doubles posed as she did so. The shades started flying after Zin, though Thoradin got a hit off on one of them while its back was turned. Zin seemed to be in pretty rough shape, though, losing the ability to lift his fists. I killed (killed again?) another one of the creatures targeting Zin, and he managed to finish off the last one. Khaylen opened the door to the operating room, revealing a bloodstained table. Ezmerelda appeared behind us as we were finishing everything up. I greeted her loudly so that everyone else would know she was there. She told us that she had been planning on dealing with the hospital haunting tomorrow. The abbot apparently requests these tasks of her, in return for letting her stay around. The woman told Zin that he would probably heal up after some rest. We all agreed to not stick around in the hospital, as we didn’t really know if the ghosts would come back. While we were leaving, Letho ducked into the nursery to pick up some of the bones for burial later. I hope nobody comes across his bundle of toothmarked child bones and has any difficult questions. Khaylen looked around the operating room and tried to check on the blood. A scream echoed from the room, followed by other fainter screams. Khaylen claims she saw visions of people dying under a knife, as someone cut them to pieces. We all heard it.
Report Date
08 Nov 2022
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