Session Recap: Of Wells, Blood, Mad Drunk Women, and Sirens

 We started today with Araxie, Shoshona, Faye, and Porphyria eating breakfast at the inn and preparing for their trip out to the well. They set out into the woods, following a path of ash, where they smelled an electric copper-y smell that set them very much on edge. They crossed a brook and were ambushed by a group of men with potato sacks on their heads who told them that this path was their territory and that they needed to pay up or they wouldn't be allowed to cross. There was a man with a bow up a tree and four men who snuck up and pressed the barrels of their guns against the backs of all the party members. Shoshona tried to negotiate, and in the process recognized the voice of the guy in the tree, placing him as one of the Roughnecks who she'd talked to in the bar the night before. Shoshona told them she didn't have much money, and that she wasn't sure if what she had would be enough. The leader of the group then told her to throw him her purse and that he'd see if it was enough. She did, and he pocketed her entire purse, sending them on their way.

As they were leaving, Faye got angry and considered going back and fighting the men to get Shoshona's money back. Shoshona and Araxie had to talk her down, and they only barely succeeded. Faye then took started scouting ahead so that they'd be prepared for more trouble if it came. They crossed a second brook and found themselves in a old graveyard, the headstones old and overgrown with plants. Everyone was getting tired, so they stopped to rest for a few minutes. Faye searched the graveyard thoroughly, looking for tracks, and found a road up ahead, another crossing, and what according to their map should be Sentinel Hill, the location of the Vernebova House, and the well that they'd been told was on the Vernebova property. 

Araxie poked around the graveyard and read what headstones she could. Most weren't still legible, but she found a few that she could read. They were from about 200 years earlier, and seemed to be deaths from an outbreak of the Red Death in the area back then. She reported her findings to Shoshona, but not the rest of the group, then they travelled on. 

They crossed a third stream on a rickety footbridge, and climbed the side of Sentinel Hill, making their way onto the Vernebova property. They found the well, and then got worried about the fact that they're trespassing. Faye scouted it out and saw a woman in her mid-thirties sitting in the study reading a book. Faye hatched a scheme with Shoshona to use the bounty for Evi LaRue and pass themselves off as government agents who had been ordered to inspect the well and search for Isidor Wake's missing son, while Araxie and Porphyria examined the well. The woman in the house introduced herself as Lavinia Vernebova. Lavinia immediately saw through their deception, recognizing that the cross Faye was trying to use to pass herself off as affiliated with the church wasn't actually even a version of the cross currently in use by the church, and she saw the writing referring to Staroznka in the paper they were trying to pass off as their orders. Lavinia asked why they were lying to her, and Faye and Shoshona fumbled their way through the truth, hoping to at least make a strong enough impression to avoid pissing Lavinia off. Lavinia wasn't angry, and more just wanting to understand why they'd felt the need to lie. She told Faye that while people in the city are deceptive and secretive like that, that there's no need for that kind of behavior out in the country, where life is simpler. Embarassed, Faye apologized and told her that it was going to take time to get over her cityfolk ways. Lavinia then asked them about the other two women standing out by the well, and Shoshona explained. Lavinia told them that she was happy to have them check out the well, and that if they needed any help, to feel free to knock and ask her. 

Relieved, Faye and Shoshona went back out to the well. Araxie and Porphyria had found that there was a grate 15 feet down that was bolted onto the sides of the well to prevent people from falling down all the way, but the bolts were starting to give way and rust. They lowered Shoshona down on a rope, and she spent the better part of an hour working with a metal hook to lift the grate and get it out of the well. They lowered her down 50 feet with the rope, but Shoshona still didn't see the bottom, so they hoisted her back up, tied more rope to the end of their initial length of rope, then decided to rig things up for climbing. They tied a grappling hook to the other end of the rope and tied off the other end on a stake they drove into the ground. They dropped the rope into the well and Shoshona climbed down slowly, hammering stakes into the side of the well and tying off the rope to create something more stable. At the bottom of the well, Shoshona found a small room with primitive stone statues of animals on the walls, a foot of standing water, and a section that looked like a doorway that had been bricked up. The masonry was loose, and there was a hole in the lower part of the wall that looked big enough for a child to crawl through, but not big enough for an adult. She climbed back up, and they discussed sending Araxie through, since cartiliginous bones would allow her to crawl through the tiny space, but instead decided to ask Lavinia for a sledgehammer, which Faye used to bash down the wall and gain entry. They left Porphyria on the surface with a gun to stand guard.

Walking up a small set of steps, Faye, Araxie, and Shoshona found themselves in an underground crypt, where cool mist filled the air, decreasing their visibility despite their lanterns. The walls were covered entirely in carvings in an alien language. They found a caved-in tunnel and considered bashing through it, but when Faye started preliminary work, she realized that the cave-in went back much deeper than it looked and that it'd take hours to get through. They sent Araxie through a child-sized hole in the mound of masonry instead, and she found a large round stone door that slid on a track. She opened it, and found a tomb, with the sarcophogi of six Roman soldiers and some sort of king or warlord from a similar era. She went back and filled in the others about what she'd found, and they all decided it was best to push further into the crypt rather than messing with the graves, especially since Araxie hadn't seen any signs of the child. 

They followed another corridor down to a small room with an intricately engraved metal cap in the ground, with a spigot on it. Angling a lantern just right, Shoshona looked into a hole in the cap, seeing a stone coffin down at the bottom of a hole, sitting in half a foot of water, and a mechanism that seemed as if it would flip the cap if the spigot was turned. They decided to leave the cap be and moved into a large room where they found a pool that was almost overflowing with fresh blood, and a stone cyclops face above the pool, with a hollow mouth. They sat down and rested for a few moments, unsure how to proceed, but then Shoshona got the idea that maybe there was a room beyond the wall that could be entered through the cyclops face. Faye climbed out above the pool of blood and stuck a lantern in the cyclops mouth, finding that it did indeed lead to another room, but the opening was too small for an adult to fit through. So, of course, they sent Araxie.

While trying to climb to the mouth of the cyclops face, Araxie fell from the wall, into the pool of blood, splattering blood across the floor. She sunk seven feet to the bottom, where she found an adult-sized opening in the wall that led into the other room. She swam through the blood and surfaced, dripping, in a dark room, her lantern extinguished from the blood bath. She climbed out of the blood pool and lit a candle, revealing a room devoid of fog and carving, a smooth polished stone door of darker stone than the rest of the crypt, and a creature with the impossibly perfect body of a woman with an elk skull for a head, with a long (like, 3+ feet long) tongue that lapped at the blood and the floor and the walls. Araxie drew her sword, then when she realized that the creature wasn't immediately attacking her, she tried to speak to the creature, choosing Duvan'ku as a language that it seemed likely it would know. The creature told her that it was hungry, and that it would allow her and her friends to pass safely if she could find it a meal. Araxie promised the creature fresh meat from Faye's pack when she could find a way to get Faye into the room, which appeased the creature. 

Faye and Shoshona sat around worrying, as they listened to Araxie and the creature effectively barking at each other in unknown tones.

The creature got uncomfortably close to Araxie, and Araxie started asking questions to discern if the blood she'd fallen in was infected. The creature didn't understand the concept of infection, but told her that it thought it was likely safe, because there was an old man who lived in the crypt who frequently brought young women into the crypt and bled them dry, then drank the blood. It told Araxie that it had often heard the old man muttering about that he'd had to go to a lot of trouble to ensure the blood was safe to drink, which likely means it's safe to swim in too. Araxie then asked the creature if it had seen a young boy, and it told her that a young boy had come to the crypt a few months ago, that he had appeased the creature with the meal of a freshly-killed squirrel, 'it's heart cleanly cut out', then went through the polished door where he 'swam into the darkness and found his way'. Araxie told the creature that she'd be back soon with food, then swam back out through the blood pool. 

As she was climbing out of the pool, Araxie spotted a masked old man in a leather loincloth sneaking up on her friends with a knife. She knew she couldn't alert them all at the same time, so she decided to shout to Faye in Italian: "Behind you!" Araxie drew her sword and ran at the old man while Faye passed the message along to Shoshona and they got ready for a fight. Araxie fired a cone of frost at the old man, freezing him in place, then interrogated him. The man told her that he's a worshipper of the Old Ones, who guards this crypt. Araxie told him that she'd made a deal with the creature, and he told her that he had to honor this deal then too. They left him, frozen still, waiting for an eventual thaw that would be long-coming in the cold crypt, and Araxie told her companions what she'd learned from the creature. She took off her water-logged dress and put her armored coat back on, then swam back through the blood. Faye climbed the wall and passed hers and Shoshona's packs, along with the meat, through the cyclops face's mouth, then her and Shoshona swam through the blood. 

Araxie passed the meat to the creature, who thanked her, and then they set to work on getting the polished door open. They found two spigots and two holes in the door, behind which lay buttons that had to be pressed to unlock the gears that the spigots turned. Araxie examined the mechanism through the holes in the door and found that the gears were set up to turn in opposite directions, in ways that shouldn't physically work. She also found that the gears were rigged up to something on the ceiling that she couldn't see that would lower if the spigots were turned in the wrong combination. Thinking it through, Araxie had Shoshona stick her arms through the holes and press the buttons, while she turned the left spigot counterclockwise and Faye turned the right spigot clockwise. The door unlocked, Shoshona took her arms out of the door, and they moved into the next room, finding blades above the door that would have cut Shoshona's arms off if they'd chosen incorrectly. 

The room beyond the polished door was a spherical room carved out of the natural stone of the earth, unlike the masonry of the rest of the crypt. Shards of glass were scattered across the room, and in the center of the room lay a pool of a mysterious black liquid. Araxie stuck her sword into the liquid and couldn't find the bottom of the pool. She scooped some up and found that it was odorless, flavorless, and moved like tar while simultaneously providing no friction to things passed through it. She borrowed Shoshona's bow - the longest object the party had - and stuck it in the pool, trying to find the bottom, but she still couldn't find it. The objects came out of the pool with no trace of the black liquid on them. Araxie asked the creature if the pool was the darkness it had told her the boy swam through, and it told her that it was, and that if she entered the pool, she'd be able to find the way to the boy. 

Shoshona and Faye started deliberating about what to do, and Araxie dived into the pool. Shoshona and Faye waited ten minutes for her to resurface but she didn't, so they dove into the pool after her. They found themselves in an Escher-esque black cathedral where time and space worked differently. They could swim through the air, and the cathedral was navigated through Bushcraft, Tinkering, and Medicine rolls (because doctors know the 'paths' of blood through the body, engineers know the 'paths' of electricity, and druids know the literal 'paths' through the woods).

Before the others had arrived in the cathedral, Araxie had already swum up a flight of impossible Escher stairs. Shoshona and Faye saw her climbing up to the second level and called to her, told her to wait for them. They tried to swim to her, but ended up swimming towards a crusher that spelled certain death. Araxie rescued them and led them upstairs, then ended up lost herself, nearly leading the party into a massive swirling fan blade. Shoshona managed to take control of the situation and lead the party through a tunnel upwards instead, then Araxie found a factory floor made of massive gears, and finally a pit they entered, which deposited them into a room filled with rotten silk, where the strange physics of the black cathedral no longer applied.

They were in a room filled with rotting curious, where a wildly drunken naked woman named Chronia Torn babbled incoherently to them about the past, the present, the future. Everything she touched rotted away, so she refused to let the party touch her. Chronia sat down with them and asked them to tell her stories of their adventures (while babbling a mile a minute). Araxie talked to her in Duvan'ku and told her (very confusedly) about everything that had been going on. Chronia asked lots of questions and generally acted really really fucking weird. In another part of the room, they noticed a young boy who was feeding from Fracture-of-the-Bone, Chronia's pet crack-beast. While Araxie tried to follow Chronia's line of conversation, Shoshona talked to the boy, asking if he's the young Thomas Wake, which he is. Faye ended up trapped in a long conversation about bestiality with Chronia, which Araxie finally diverted by asking Chronia the way out, and whether she'd allow Thomas to come with them, since they were sent by his father. Chronia told Araxie that the exit is 'down that way, just go all the way down til you find Chantarelle, and if you can't find her, the aelfs will help you out'. She told her that Thomas could leave if he wanted to, then babbled about aelfs and their longevity and their inability to have sex with her without it aging them to death, then started asking the party if they'd talked to Psathyrella, if they could give Psathyrella a message from her, etc. They promised to relay Chronia's message if they found Psathyrella, and Shoshona convinced Thomas to come with them, but on the stipulation that he could get an 'elixir' from Fracture-of-the-Bone for the road. Chronia agreed, and they got the crack, then left Shoshona picked up Thomas and held him in her arms while they left Chronia's chambers. 

Wandering through Chronia's library, Araxie, Faye, and Shoshona snuck past a sleeping book-worm, wandered endlessly through a black ink mural of their own greatest fears (respectively, the idea that whatever thing Araxie is that she's a monster of some sort, being burned alive, and the death of the Old Ways), walked through a hallway that at first they thought was dangerous but it turned out to only be an art exhibit, walked across a chasm that at first they thought it was only an art exhibit but then it turned out to be a place where countless adventurers had died and the walls had been painted in great red splotches by their deaths, narrowly avoided verbal sparring with living chess pieces, and found their way into a room dominated by a great mosaic of a dragon. 

The dragon-mosaic told them that the first must cross dancing, the second must cross singing, the third must cross bleeding, and the fourth must die. Faye started discussing a plan to rip a piece off Thomas' cloak and then have him cross fourth so that he'd be eaten rather than one of them, but Shoshona was horrified by that idea, and while they were deliberating, Thomas danced across the room. Araxie followed him singing. Faye slit her wrist with a knife and crossed bleeding, and then Shoshona crossed, and was drug into the mural by the dragon. She tried to fight, but it overpowered her easily and tore her in half with a mighty bite that stained the entire mosaic red. 

Araxie, Faye, and Thomas ran past a blue-skinned woman with horns who was muttering about burning everything to the ground, and found themselves in a red room with a massive painting of a broom closet on the far wall, and a woman chained up in the center of the room, with a key hanging from a hook in the corner of the room. Faye asked the woman if she's Chantarelle, and she told them that she is, then started pleading for them to release her, claiming that she's been enslaved for one million years as a guardian of the maze, and that every day, twice a day, the medusa sends people to torture her. She also told them that they couldn't leave without her magic, and that she wouldn't let them out unless they freed her. Araxie took the key off the hook and deliberated, while Faye asked Chantarelle what would happen if she threw Thomas through the painting. Chantarelle claimed that he'd probably explode from the impact, but Faye didn't believe her. She walked over to the painting and stuck her arm in. Her arm slid into the painting and she prepared to leave. Chantarelle told her that for all she knows, the painting currently leads to a demon dimension and that she can't know for sure without Chantarelle's magic. Faye didn't believe Chantarelle and picked up Thomas and walked through the painting. Araxie considered for another moment freeing Chantarelle, then shoved the key in the pocket of her coat and walked out of the painting.

They found themselves in a locked broom closet, where the False Chantarelle painting hung on a wall. Araxie started banging on the door and shouting while Faye considered the best way to smash the window and escape without hurting anyone with flying glass. Before Faye could make up her mind though, the door opened, revealing Lavinia Vernebova, who was confused how they'd gotten in her broom closet, why Shoshona wasn't with them, why Araxie was mostly naked, and where young Thomas Wake had come from. Faye explained, and Lavinia took it all in stride. She offered to let Araxie and Faye use her bathtub to clean the blood off of them before they left, and they took the offer.

While Faye took a bath, Araxie sat in Lavinia's parlor and drank tea and chatted with Lavinia, who heavily implied that she's part of an Old One cult - which she later confirmed when Araxie started talking to her in Aklo (which is basically Old-One-cultist-language, like, the whole 'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'naghl fhtagn' speech) about the Old Ones, and her interest in the secret cults of the hills. Lavinia suggested that Araxie return at a later time - especially during their religious festivities on the weekends - if she wanted to learn more (which, of course, Araxie being Araxie, she very much wants to).

Faye came out of the bath and Araxie went to take a bath, and Faye and Lavinia chatted for a while. Lavinia implied cult activity but dropped it when Faye didn't pick up the hint and discuss in more depth. She told Faye that Araxie is a 'marvelous woman' who she's interested in getting to know better, then dropped hints that Araxie is something connected to the Old Ones, something that doesn't have a proper name in any language known to man. Faye then started talking about their experiences in the maze, and made a joke about throwing Thomas to the dragon that offended Lavinia. Lavinia told Faye to go out in the yard and tend to her panic-stricken friend (Porphyria) and never come back. Faye went to Porphyria (who was still waiting by the well with a pistol, beyond freaked out) and helped her calm down. Araxie finished her bath, borrowed a dress from Lavinia, then left the house with Thomas. 

They crossed the first stream, and not wanting to run into the Roughnecks again, especially since it was getting late in the day, close to sundown, Araxie and Faye decided to try to find another path through the woods. Araxie found a path marked by trees with arcane symbols etched in them. On the path, the air smelled strongly of warm food cooking, tinged with the smell of sweat and sex. They crossed the second stream - wading, with Araxie carrying Thomas on her shoulders - and found that the deeper they travelled into the woods, the smell of cooked food got stronger and stronger. They felt drawn towards the source of the smell, and Araxie and Faye started towards it. Thomas followed close behind them, and Porphyria ran away, afraid (which they didn't notice until much much later). 

Following the smell, Araxie and Faye came into a clearing where two naked women with slate-black eyes, arms tattooed and stained brown, lounged before a blood-stained tree. Making a save, Araxie managed to act, while Faye wandered inexorably towards the women, one of whom took her into her arms and kissed her, opening a massive toothy maw on her chest and preparing to eat Faye. Araxie drew her gun and ran towards the siren, putting her gun to her temple and killing her. Still caught in a frenzy, Faye threw herself to the ground and kissed the woman's dead body all over, licking blood off of her skin. Araxie fired at the other siren but missed, then drew her sword and the siren rushed her. She took a few swings at the siren and missed, while the siren tried to grab Araxie and Araxie dodged. Finally, Araxie scored a good hit on the siren, cutting her open from stomach to sternum. Still alive, the siren fled into the woods, and finally, Faye awakened from her reverie. Araxie reloaded her guns, and when they regrouped, Araxie and Faye realized that they were completely lost in the woods, no path in sight. 

Faye picked up Thomas and put him on her shoulders, and Araxie started searching for another path. It was nearly dark, the sun just a tiny sliver in the sky. They wandered until moonrise, unable to find a path, and wandered into a bog where space twisted and twitching corpses floated in the muck. Faye climbed a tree to try to get a vantage point to see the city. She couldn't make much out in the darkness, but she managed to spot the third stream, which gave them a point of reference for Araxie to get them unlost. She managed to find the path again, and they crossed the third stream and hurried for him while predator animals closed in, growling and howling in the night. They reached the edge of town before the animals descended though, and the animals dispersed. Araxie and Faye found their way back to Isidor Wake's farm, and he offered them a place to sleep for the night and a meal, telling them that he had something that he'd been preparing as a reward but that it wasn't quite ready yet but should be ready in the morning. 

They went to sleep, and that was where we ended things for the night, with Araxie and Faye sleeping peacefully without having realized that Porphyria was still out in the woods. Out of character, they processed it while they were discussing this session while I was typing this post, so next session might involve looking for Porphyria. Or it might not, if they don't care enough about her. You really can't tell with this party, hahaha.