The Mosna Campaign: The Story So Far

This constitutes basically the first 'arc' of our lotfp campaign when broken down after the fact (with the beginning of the other post, with Sofiya and Ilona getting captured and tortured being the very end of that section). I said I didn't know when I'd post it, but then I decided I should just do it, so I did. This are my recaps copy-pasted from the lotfp discord server, typos and all, nothing corrected or fixed up, just exactly as I typed it after the completion of the first 13 sessions of our campaign.

Session 1

The PCs were travelling by train to the capitol. This is the doctor and butcher who are serial killers who I've mentioned before. The train crashed and they were some of the only survivors, stuck outside in a storm, completely unsure where they were. They mercy-killed some people who were still alive but dying painfully, then started looking for shelter. In the distance, they saw a farmhouse with a light in the window a couple of hours away, and a tiny village that was more like 3-4 hours away. They decided to go for the farmhouse, and on the way, a flock of Lamenters started hunting them. They hid among the hills and slowly made their way to the farmhouse in the pouring rain.

The farmhouse was surrounded by a massive field of hugely overgrown sorghum grass, which they ducked into to try to shake the Lamenters, but the Lamenters started singing. The butcher failed her save and became convinced that the Lamenters were friendly and were offering help through their song. The doctor partially saved and sorta felt that but also had some major doubts, looking at the situation. They heard something large and hooved moving through the sorghum towards them and took off running, but the butcher, and the doctor had gotten a good distance away before realizing that they'd gotten separated.

They started trying to make their way back to each other, but they were both to some degree under the influence of the Lamenters, and they kept mistaking each other's movements for something hunting them, and kept running away from and nearly attacking each other. The Lamenters landed in the Sorghum field and the PCs started hearing the Lamenters whispering their names. The doctor decided to attack the thing coming towards her, and the butcher panicked and ducked out of the way, throwing herself into the mud to avoid the charge, which was when they realized that they'd been 'hunting' each other.

Session 2

They escaped the sorghum field and slipped in the mud, nearly falling into a drainage ditch but managing to catch themselves. Once they were in an area with better visibility, they realized just how fucked they were with the Lamenters - it wasn't just a handful of them; at this point the flock had expanded to hundreds of them. They climbed down carefully into the drainage ditch and stood on the shores of a lake of sewage that stood between them and the house. Down in the cover of the ditch, they took a moment to breathe, getting a little bit of respite from the Lamenters but knowing they're going to have to go out into it eventually. They thought a bit about how to cross the lake without having to swim and ruin all their gear and clothes, but came up empty until the doctor decided to try to Summon something that they could ride across the ditch. That went well until she got to the Domination roll, which she critically failed and the summoned creature rolled well on, so she found herself completely dominated by the massive column of hateful fungus she summoned. Its spores filled her brain, causing mushrooms to grow out of her eyes, and it compelled her to attack the butcher with her scalpel. In a panic, the butcher chucked a vial of lamp oil at the doctor and lit her on fire, but she scraped by with 1 hp because the rain put the fire out quickly, and the butcher ended up falling on her ass in the mud because trying to avoid accidentally lighting herself on fire, because this entire maneuver happened in extremely close quarters. Without missing a beat though, the butcher decapitated the doctor with her cleaver, which (fortunately) caused the column of hateful fungus to pop out of existence because it was tied to the doctor's lifeforce. The butcher then rode across the lake of sewage on her dead friend's corpse while the doctor's player rolled a new character.

During the voyage across the lake of sewage, the rain cleared up and a thick fog rolled in. Fog so thick you can't see more than a few feet in front of your face. The butcher thought she was Lamenters landing on the other side of the lake, so she just hid and rifled through the doctor's backpack for anything useful. At this point, the new PC entered - a scholar who had been sent from the nearby town to investigate a series of disappearances that pointed towards the farm. She stumbled on the butcher, covered in blood and picking through a headless corpse's backpack and, naturally, kept her arquebus trained on the butcher's head while interrogating her about what had gone down. Once the scholar determined that the butcher wasn't with the family on the farm, she pressganged her at gunpoint into helping her investigate the farm. They entered the darkened barn together and found the place completely empty, the stalls and the lofts and everything ripped out, which got them even more suspicious of everything going on. Searching the place though, they decided to take a moment to rest there, and talked a bit, basically doing a swapping leverage on each other, trying to get some form of control over the situation sort of conversation.

Session 3

After resting a little in the barn, the butcher and the scholar decided to check out the farm, try to find a way in to search for the missing priest the scholar was sent to look for. The poked around at a shed that was boarded shut and considered breaking into it but decided not to risk it, especially with the Lamenters nearby and the potential cannibals in the farmhouse, and the possibility that the shed was boarded up to keep something awful inside it. As they approached the house, they found a mass of Lamenters (I described it at as looking like an oilbird shoggoth) perched on the roof, covering the entire roof, but not moving or reacting to their presence. The front and back doors of the house were boarded up, with big red X's painted on them. They found a window that wasn't boarded up, the glass was broken, but they couldn't get in without breaking the window further, because there was this huge jagged piece of the window left that would cut them up if they tried to climb through the window. They found a dead cow slumped against the side of the house, rotting as if it had been there for weeks, and some storm cellar doors that were unlocked, a padlock and chain coiled on the ground as if someone else had opened it. They descended into the storm cellar, where they found a massive bloated rotting sow with cuts of meat taken out of it, swarming with flies and covered in maggots. They found a narrow low tunnel past the sow that led to what was basically a doggie door into the house. They decided to go back to back into the tunnel, with the scholar pointing her gun at the door they came through in case anything came in after them. At the end of the tunnel, the butcher poked her head through the doggie door and a man in overalls with a prosthetic arm bashed her over the head with the butt of his gun, knocking her out.

Hearing this, the scholar backed out of the tunnel, turned around, moving into the tunnel facefirst, and hid for a moment to try to trick the man into thinking that the butcher was the only one coming through the tunnel. She peeked around the edges of the doggie door and saw that the man had his back turned, dragging the butcher's body across the room, so she darted out of the tunnel with a blade and tried to stab the man in the back. He heard her moving and turned to defend himself, and she ended up only getting in a surface scratch across his face. She won initiative and skewered him with the blade, killing him, then picked up a chair, blocked the door, and woke the butcher up. Together, they hid the body under a desk since it was too large to fit through the doggie door, then listened at the door, hearing nothing in the hallway. Finally, they removed the chair, put it in front of the desk to obscure the body, and snuck out into the hallway. In the hallway, they found several more doors marked with red X's, and an open dining room that they peeked into using a hand mirror. They saw a family of five sharing a tiny of cut of meat in silence. All of the family members were scarred in some way from various forms of mutilation - a teenage boy with a glasglow smile, an old woman with no eyes, a man without a nose, a woman who looked like once her entire face had been removed. At the head of the table sat an old man in a black suit who became more and more uncanny the longer they looked at him. He had no hands and the teenage boy was feeding him. At first, his eyes appeared sunken in, but they began to realize that his eye sockets were hollow, and that he was wearing a suit of skin. Something inhuman disguised by a suit of skin. And at that point, they decided to pull out of the house, check out the shed, then leave if they didn't find the priest.

As they were leaving, they caught a glimpse in the mirror of the old man in the skin suit impossibly perceiving them (like, reflected as if he were looking right at their location and seeing them, not seeing the mirror), so they panicked and booked it to the study, where they left through the tunnel and back out through the storm doors. They hurried to the shed, and on the way, they saw a group of small shapes moving through the fog towards them, snuffling and snorting - pigs! They bashed open the door of the shed and the scholar leapt in, nearly slipping on blood that covered the floor, but the butcher caught her. The floorboards of the shed were heavily warped from consistent exposure to blood, and the walls were painted with scrawlings in blood, in various languages (including, most notably, Duvan'ku, which neither of the PCs knows). All the messages they could read were the same phrase repeated over and over again. That which sleeps beneath the mountain shall one day rend the earth. Written thousands of times, countless layers of writing in blood. And in the center of the room, a massive bloodslick funnel-like chute downwards.

Preparing for attack by the pigs, the butcher spilled oil all over the floor leading to the chute in hopes that the pigs would slip and full in the chute. The scholar took a shot at the pigs with her rifle but she missed, and was left with just enough time to put away her gun and draw her blade before the pigs were racing into the shed. The three pigs leading the charge (which all looked like miniature versions of the dead sow they found below the house) slipped in the oil and fell into the chute, but they were still faced with three charging pigs, their oil now mostly wiped away by the three pigs that slid through it. With a bit of luck, they managed to kill the pigs without taking any casualties. They tossed the bodies down the chute, both to dispose of them and in hopes of appeasing whatever lay beneath.

The Lamenter-shoggoth stirred slightly, and at this point, they decided to abandon the farm without a trace and tell anyone in the village that the priest was dead, especially since with everything going on there, they were pretty sure that he was. They ran to the treeline to the north, hoping that if anything pursued them, they could shake the trail in the forest. They decided to head back to the village, because with everything going on, they didn't want to risk camping for the night, so they trudged through the forest in the darkness. After a couple of hours of travel, they saw bobbing lights in the distance and heard a man's voice shouting 'Annie!'. They tried to avoid all of this out of fear, but as they got closer, they realized it was a search party from the village, and debated about whether to try to link up with them and potentially get protection on the way back to the village or whether to just try to avoid them entirely, but they spent too long debating and the search party's dog picked up their scent. They agreed to join the search party in exchange for safe passage back to the village in the morning (or when they found the missing girl). They spent the entire night searching and found no trace of the girl. Exhausted and frustrated, the search party decided to return to the village and see if the men of the village had turned up anything dredging the well.

Session 4

After helping the search party all night, the butcher and the scholar were led back to the town by the leader of the hunting party, Luke von Brouwer, the uncle of the missing girl. Von Brouwer offered them lodging and a discount on repairing their gear since they'd helped him. In his log cabin, Von Brouwer introduced them to his wife, who was a shrivelled up doll of a woman suspended in fluid in a glass jar on the mantelpiece. He claimed that she had "nearly" drowned ten years ago but that he had rescued her, and somehow the water had shrivelled her up like this. (When of course, the obvious reality was that she had drowned and he pulled her shrivelled corpse out of the water and mummified it.) He then introduced them to his mute hunchback brother, who was the father of the missing girl. They rested up at Von Brouwer's house, sleeping through the day and waking up in the evening. The scholar decided that she wanted to repay the people of the village for their kindness by helping them find their missing children. Von Brouwer had left dinner and a note telling them that he was going to church and would be back in a few hours. So they went out to explore the village and maybe find some information about the missing kids. They found posters notifying people about the disappearances of children over the two weeks preceding their arrival in the town, and the disappearances of animals over about the same time span. They also found a strange bill advertising work for miners, pulling ore out of a meteorite that had fallen a few nights before. (And you probably see where this is going at this point).

While they were talking, Von Brouwer came out of the town meeting hall and warned them about wandering the streets because of the disappearances. They went back to the cabin with him, and Von Brouwer told them about how the village had been founded by Satanists, but was now a place of 'god-fearing Christians'. He told them about the Old Haunted Hill, where the Satanic cult had operated in the old days, and told them that he had suspicions that the cult had returned and was sacrificing the children and animals. He also launched into a heartfelt monologue about how overcome with emotion he was that they wanted to help, unlike other adventurers who are 'nothing more than thieves and murderers'. (And the scholar and the butcher had to try their damnedest to contain their laughter, because they are thieves and murderers, who just decided to do one good thing) The butcher and the scholar made plans to get together a group to investigate the Old Haunted Hill. Von Brouwer told them he would get together some of the men of the village, and they went back to sleep for the rest of the night. In the morning, the only party he'd been able to gather was his hunchbacked brother and the mother of one of the very angry missing children who insisted on coming on this excursion because her husband refused to come because he insisted he had to go to church.

Von Brouwer led the small group out to the Old Haunted Hill, which they immediately decided was a site of Satanic activity when they saw the altar and the standing stones. The scholar discovered an astronomy book, which had the phrase "That which sleeps beneath the mountain will one day rend the earth" written in blood in the back cover, on a hidden flap which contained Iri-Khan's letter, telling them that the Old Haunted Hill was a bust, that they should go back to the village and investigate further, along with instructions on a helpful code in the book. They weren't sure whether to trust the note, but spurred on by a mention of treasure, they decided to go into the cave, potentially using the villagers as bait for traps. They found a statue of Baphomet with a censer with oil in it, in the center of a small cavern filled with bugs. Starting to think that something was drastically wrong, they decided to go back to town, organize the men of the town into a militia and start an all-out raid on the potential Satanic temple. Lena (the angry mother) told them that the men were at church but would likely be back shortly after they arrived back in the village, and Von Brouwer told them that he would help them organize a posse, since the men of the town were more likely to listen to him than the two random woman adventurers who had just come into town the day before.

Back in the town, Lena made lunch while the group waited for the men to return from church. The scholar decoded the message in the book and learned about a poem to ask for help from a star that hates tyrants, but she wasn't sure if she trusted it, so she decided to keep the book and wait. The scholar then asked Lena where the church is, and she told them that it was in the center of town. And then, to the scholar's surprise, the men came home from church in the east. The scholar pointed that fact out to Lena, which made her process that something very strange is going on, and then the scholar and the butcher ate lunch while Lena yelled at the men, trying to find out where they'd gone and why. After lunch, Lena wanted to talk to the butcher and the scholar in private, and she told them that the men claimed they'd found a hidden shrine of the Christ in a cave to the east, where they now worshipped with some women from a neighboring town who had shown them the cave. They didn't believe a word of it, and Lena was convinced that the men of the village were having sex with the women from the next village over in this mysterious cave. She told them that she'd heard that a few of the men (including her husband) were having a midnight church service in the cave, and the scholar and the butcher offered to help her investigate. Once the men had gone to sleep, the scholar, the butcher, and Lena snuck out into the woods to find the cave.

As they neared the cave, they heard shouts of 'Hail Satan!' and smelled blood in the air. They snuck into the cave, their weapons out, and found walls smeared with blood and shit, and a mutilated goat by a fire in the cave. They crept in deeper and saw Von Brouwer, Lena's husband, the hunchbacked brother, and three other men of the village having a Satanic orgy while the Penis Walker scuttled around, sucking up the blood and shit and cum. Startled, the Penis Walker tried to communicate with the party. The butcher and Lena misinterpreted the message as "KILL KILL KILL", and the scholar misinterpreted the message as a command to bring the Penis Walker dead animals. So the scholar moved back towards the cave mouth to drag the mutilated goat towards the Penis Walker. Lena shot Von Brouwer in the face with the pistol the scholar had given her, and the butcher decapitated Lena's husband. The scholar returned with the goat's body. She and Lena escaped the initial compulsion, but the butcher was still trapped in her murder frenzy, so she started chopping up the body of the dying Van Brouwer. At this point, the men snapped out of it and started asking where the girls had gone. When they saw the bodies and the three angry, heavily armed women, they took off running, and the Penis Walker started eating the corpses. At this point, the butcher broke free of the compulsion and went outside to smoke. Lena and the scholar tried to communicate with the Penis Walker, but they were hit with the aphrodisiac as it tried to tell them that it was happy to see them, so they started uncontrollably fucking each other (which was what they'd honestly wanted to do anyways, but until five minutes ago Lena had been married to a man, and the scholar was too shy to try anything, so it took that influence, hahaha).

The butcher finished her cigarette and walked in on her friends fucking, and decided to just wait until they finished, then try to communicate with the Penis Walker again. This time it managed to make successful contact with the scholar, and partially successful contact with the butcher. (It failed completely at contact with Lena, and she fell into a screaming masturbating frenzy on the floor) The butcher received a vision of a cyclopean alien city filled with thousands of Penis Walkers who sang in impossible tones in unknown languages. The scholar received that vision as well as another vision of the Penis Walker travelling through the stars in a vibrator-shaped ship, crashlanding on earth, mutilating a goat for food, and accidentally starting a Satanic cult. When they awoke from the vision, the scholar and the butcher found themselves starting to undress to join Lena in the masturbation frenzy, but they managed to stop themselves. Once they were all dressed and thinking straight again, they decided to leave the town, abandoning this investigation altogether due to the horrors they had witnessed in the cave. Since Lena was no longer tied down by anything in the village (and since she was awakening to the newfound world of lesbianism), Lena agreed to travel with them as an adventurer.

On the way back, they came upon a bear eating a child, covered in scraps of the clothing of the other missing children. Sneaking up on it, they all fired on the bear at the same time, taking it down with a crazed frenzy of sneak attacks, solving the mystery, but not in a way that would be useful in the slightest. The scholar shot the dying boy to put him out of his misery. They traveled back to the town and Lena went back to her house to take the money her husband had in the house. The scholar and the butcher went to loot Van Brouwer's house, and when they all met back up again they were up a few hundred silver and some food for the journey (and Lena had changed into her husband's work clothes). They travelled west towards the city of Wroclaw, planning to take the money they'd stolen and arrange train passage to Staroznka (where they'd been trying to go in the first place before they got diverted by the train crash and all of this). In the mountains, they found a sprawling mansion with no doors and no windows. Travelling on, they came to the riverbank and decided to rest at midday (since they hadn't slept yet) and cross the river in the morning. During the butcher's watch, she saw a pearlescent tower appear and disappear in the mist, but the rest of the night was uneventful. When the scholar and the butcher woke up, they found Lena chatting with a trio of depressed female clowns (who she was implied to have slept with, because after the circumstances of her sexual awakening, she's a bit of a sex fiend), who told them about a mysterious 'night barge' that appeared in the mists and offered cheap passage across the river. They waited, and after sundown, a black barge with black sails appeared, with a man in a black cloak, wide-brimmed hat and domino mask, who offered them passage for a silver piece per person. They paid for passage and laid low in their cabin during the voyage.

On the other side of the river, they disembarked from the night barge. It disappeared from their vision (along with the mists) when they disembarked, and they entered the great spy-city of Wroclaw. They tried to blend in with the black-cloaked people who frequented the streets of Wroclaw, and made their way to the massive brutalist train station, where they arranged passage with a crazy old man with a telescopic monocle and magical tattoos, who told them about a supposed outbreak of the Red Death in Staroznka. They debated for a while whether to potentially go somewhere else, but when they checked the prices, they couldn't afford to go anywhere else, so they bought three train tickets to Staroznka. Entering Staroznka, the train passed by a massive vineyard that circled the city. From the platform, they could see a burning pile of corpses in the street, tended to by plague doctors. This immediately prompted them to consider leaving, trying to get a ticket to go anywhere else, hoping that tickets would be cheaper here, but the scholar convinced the others that it would be best to at least try to get some work in Staroznka so they'd have enough money to really be able to afford to go somewhere else. They made a beeline for the nearest inn, avoiding people like the plague (pun totally intended). When they came to the inn, they realized that they'd made the right decision, because the inn was cheap as hell and when they asked the innkeeper if he knew where to get work, he told them that you could find work pretty much anywhere because so many people were leaving town. So they checked into the inn and rested up after the journey.

Session 5

They met a wizard-type patron with christmas-light eyes who asked them to retrieve the Malleus Deus from the farmhouse in exchange for a shitton of money, because the Inquisition had also discovered the location of the Malleus Deus and was sending agents there to destroy it. So they went out to the farmhouse with the dawn's first light, immediately got freaked out by the scarecrow and decided to strike out into the corn field to burn it because they were afraid it was cursed in some way. They found that the corn was regrowing but decided to just push forward because they've seen shit that crazy before. The butcher burned the scarecrow, losing most of her HP in the process to its lifedrain. As soon as they turned their backs on the scarecrow, the ash formed into tendrils that built a new scarecrow that resembled the butcher. They hurried into the house. When they heard Richard Fox whimpering, the scholar ordered him to show himself or she'd come in shooting. He scooted into view, and started begging them for food. The scholar gave him some of her rations, and sent Lena to guard the door so they'd know if the Inquistion was approaching. After Richard finished eating, he started telling them about the thing in the cornfield that had killed his friends. They asked if he knew anything about the Malleus Deus, and he told them that he'd paid for it fair and square and wouldn't let anyone take it. They told him (mistakenly) that they knew a way out, thinking that since they'd come in fairly safely that they could go out the same way. They convinced Richard to give them the Malleus Deus if they promised him they'd get him out alive. They helped him gather his things, and in the process, stumbled upon Tales of the Scarecrow, which they read.

E gave me the most insane shit ever that I ended up picking, involving the scarecrow being a predator entity from outer space that could reanimate the dead and that fed on despair and betrayal, and that would eventually turn the cornfield into a cult's ritual site. So with that, they stepped outside, only to find that the path through the cornfield had disappeared, the corn growing over while they were in the house. They started hacking down the corn to escape, and immediately came under attack by the thing beneath the cornfield. It slashed Lena's arm open, and she panicked, running screaming into the corn. The scholar tried to go after her, and managed to grab her by the back of her shirt, but before she could pull Lena back and stop her, the scholar was promptly ripped open from chest to belly by the thing beneath the cornfield. She lost her grip on Lena and Lena took off into the field, where she was impaled by the thing beneath the field. Richard panicked and ran back into the house, cowering behind the harpsichord. The scholar, bleeding out, stumbled back into the house, and the butcher threw oil everywhere and lit part of the cornfield on fire, then retreated back into the house. Inside, the scholar, desparate, invoked Twinkly using the poem she'd discovered but hadn't used during Fuck For Satan. Twinkly immediately sealed her wounds, told her about how much it hates me personally, and promised that it would show her the maps for the next adventure, then receded back into the aether.

The butcher, assuming (incorrectly, of course) that the thing beneath the cornfield was more meaningfully attached to the corn and thus hated fire. So she hatched a plan to take off running once enough of the cornfield had burned to clear a path. And while she and the scholar were discussing this plan, the scarecrow animated Kingsley Addams's corpse and ate Richard, then came after the scholar and the butcher. The scholar grabbed the Malleus Deus and tried to shoot Kingsley Addam's corpse, but she missed and they took off running, back into the now-burning cornfield. The thing beneath the cornfield gave them an opening to trick them, and they ran right into its trap. The scholar was impaled through the chest by one of its tentacles, skewered to the ground. At which point time slowed and she heard three sharp screams from beyond the void. The void parted and a massive woman soaked in menstrual blood, bearing a 200 foot long umbilical cord, and with a face that looked like it had been envisioned by someone who had never seen a human face took her into Her arms and offered the scholar survival if the scholar would agree to give Her anything she needs. (Using the capitalized Her because it's Her as in the entity from She Bleeds) The scholar took the deal, and She removed the tendril from the scholar's chest, sealing the exit wound and leaving an magically open entry wound that resembled a huge labia centered between the scholar's breasts. She reached inside the scholar's chest and took from her her memory of an old friend of hers who had taught her how to survive as a prostitute when she was young and had just started working as a prostitute. The scholar lost all memory of this mentor and She told the scholar that She would return for more, but for now, She was satiated.

As a result of some ungodly lucky rolls, the butcher managed to escape the cornfield and reach the road without being killed by the thing beneath the cornfield. Protected by Her blessing, the scholar just walked out through a bloody path, while also suddenly being hit by the most intense period she'd ever experienced. (The chest-vagina entry wound is never going to heal by the way). On the road, the scholar and the butcher put on their winter cloaks so that if they ran into the inquisition, they wouldn't obviously be read as people who just escaped a massacre. And on the way back to Staroznka, they did encounter a group of inquisitors on horseback. They were ordered to show their papers, and the scholar pulled the Malleus Deus out of her backpack, tossed it to one of the inquisitors, pulled out her real papers (which revealed to the butcher that the entire identity she'd known her by was fake) and grabbed the butcher by the hair and knocked her down, telling the inquisitors that she'd retrieved the Malleus Deus for them, and that the butcher was a witch she'd met on the road who she was bringing back to the city to turn her over to the authorities. The inquisitor knocked out the butcher and took her captive, and arranged payment for the scholar (5000 sp reward for recovering the Malleus Deus, and 100 sp payment for turning in the witch alive). She negotiated an escort back to the city, then went back to the inn, paid up for the night, and spent the rest of the day resting.

Session 6

The new PC is one of Evi (who I used to call the scholar, but now that she's got a few levels she gets a name in recaps)'s old friends who she used to adventure with when she was younger. (She decided not to go for the revenge path, of course, hahahaha). She's a librarian fistfighter who's kinda lowkey a vampire, but not, like, a vampire vampire, she just engages in vampirism to deal with an iron deficiency. So we decided to play out a little bit of solo Evi stuff to set up into an introduction for the new PC that we had discussed. Evi went out to pick up a couple of new identities, buying some new outfits and getting some documents forged. She wandered around the city a bit, familiarizing herself with the layout, and found a fence's shop called Greasegraft's where the guy behind the counter wears a massive Shakespeare-style crinoline collar and writes poetry in his off time. On the way back to the inn, she watched a group of beggars play with clothes stolen from a nobleman. In the middle of their revelry, one of the beggars suddenly died of the Red Death, and the other beggars scattered. This freaked Evi the fuck out and she ran back to the inn. She started getting ready to go out whoring, but then thought about the idea of whoring in the middle of a plague and decided not to until she's running low on money in the future. Basically, not until she's desperate. To celebrate getting somewhat set up in the city though, she decided to treat herself to dinner at a nice restaurant. She went out (still wearing her whore dress because it's fancy) and hired a fiacre to take her to the nicer parts of town. Before she left though, she found a message on her door from the Tenebrous Hand, asking her to meet with them at the Dog and the Bastard to discuss criminal matters, because she'd gained some renown in their eyes for killing the butcher

She took a fiacre uptown, and through the window of the restaurant, she watched the inquisition hang the butcher as a witch, while she ate fancy food and sipped wine. She was interrupted by a strange woman in a red riding hood style dress who asked if she could sit with her. The woman introduced herself as Ilona, and realizing that she wasn't in any of her disguises, Evi accidentally gave her her real name, but then refused to volunteer any other information. Ilona tried to ask if Evi is an adventurer, but she asked it in such an awkward way that Evi wasn't sure if Ilona was asking her if she's an adventurer or if she's a lesbian (she responded with 'Yes to both' after telling Ilona that she wasn't sure which was being asked). Ilona then started telling her about the Tower of the Stargazer, how it was supposed to be abandoned, and how she wanted to check it out but didn't have a group to go with. Evi told her she'd think about it, and Ilona gave her the address of the boarding house she stays at and told her she could find her there. Evi then suggested that instead Ilona could come home with her and Evi could think about it while they were together, which Ilona was down with, so they took a fiacre back to the inn. In the bar, Evi ran into her old friend Sofiya (the new PC), who had recently arrived in town. They had a slightly awkward reunion, then went back to Evi's room and the three of them had sex. Ilona fell asleep, and Evi and Sofiya stayed up and caught up, discussing their past relationship, wondering why they'd ever stopped travelling together, and just in general explaining what their lives are like now, reminiscing, etc.

The next morning, they told Ilona that they wanted to accompany her to the Tower of the Stargazer, and told her if this works out well, she can keep up adventuring with them afterwards if she wants to. They ate breakfast in the bar and Evi got the local gossip from the barkeep, trying to find some more potentially lucrative shit they could pursue in the future. The barkeep told her about the new Joop Van Ooms play that's premiering in Staroznka soon, passed on a rumour about the Blooded Witch Mara Yoblonsky retiring to Nuremburg and leaving her cult-tower vacant, and told her that the Bloodworth Manor had seemingly been abandoned and that a group of thieves were planning to ransack it in three days. Evi and Sofiya made plans to check out the Tower today, the Bloodworth Manor tomorrow, then go meet with the Tenebrous Hand the day after (so now prepping the next few sessions is gonna be easy as fuck unless something goes hugely wrong, hahahaha). After breakfast, they set out to the Tower.

On the way out of the city, they saw a woman gardening in a hut by the riverside, surrounded by bathing rusalka. After a couple of hours walk, they reached the Tower. At first Sofiya was scared of the lightning, but after Evi explained what she knew about the workings of lightning rods, they were able to push on. I changed up the general architecture of the Tower a bit, gave it some stairs leading up into oblivion, but I couldn't fuck with it too much because I had to give them the maps since Evi had invoked Twinkly last session. What can you do, hahahahaha. Working off a rumour that Ilona had told them, they were deadly afraid of the doorknocker. Evi examined the doorknob and saw a vision of her own death reflected in a magical glass bauble inside the lock, so they pulled a weird trick involving turning the knob using a grappling hook (which ended up bent and stuck to the knob, and later eaten by the metal snakes) to get the door open. They explored the first couple of floors, looted the wine, and found the keys for the locked doors in the basement under the head servant's mattress, along with his account of Calcidius's descent into madness 59 years ago. Which left them with this question of 'Who the fuck is Calcidius', because they'd thought Stargazer was the wizard's name. They spent a few minutes debating about whether Stargazer is Calcidius's last name or title, then kept moving up the tower, following the trickle of blood up the stairs and starting to get spooked. They found the locked door with blood flowing out of the keyhole, and tried the key they'd found, but they were unable to get it into the lock because of the key already in it. Evi looked into the lock, saw the key, listened at the door and heard a swishing, churning sound, like boiling liquid, and she proceeded to slide parchment under the door to catch the key, then pushed the key out of the lock with a lockpick, and pulled the parchment out, unlocked the door.

Calcidius greeted them from the stairs, and for a moment they panicked, thinking they'd accidentally broken into the tower while he was living in it. Stepping into the room though, they found the magic circle, and Calcidius told them about his imprisonment and tried to convince them to free him. They considered it, but then they remembered the stories they'd heard from Ilona (and the things they'd read in the head servant's journal) about the Stargazer abducting people, torturing them, experimenting on them, so they decided not to free him. Calcidius resorted to threats, but they ended up just laughing at him when they realized that his spells couldn't escape the circle either. Calcidius flew into a rage and tried to summon a demon in hopes that it could attack the interlopers, but he miscast and ended up calling down a rain of demonic excrement on his own head. They asked Calcidius if taking the Star Gem would free him, and caught off guard, he told the truth, then tried to bs it and claim it would. Ilona (who is an MU) examined the gem and determined that removing it definitely wouldn't free Calcidius, so they grabbed the gem and laughed at Calcidius while he flailed around and screamed in a total childlike tantrum. They stole the book bound in human skin (which made Calcidius even angrier), then discovered the elevator. They travelled up to the fourth floor, poked around in the library a little, ran into the game-playing ghost, discussed the possibility of someday kidnapping someone and forcing them to play games with the ghost so they can get the treasure without risking their own souls, then headed up another floor. They found the telescope, examined the mechanism, and Ilona opened the dome, and partially raised the telescope, curious about its secrets. Afraid of what awful things might be connected to the telescope, Evi and Sofiya convinced her to lower the telescope and close the dome, then come back later to check out the telescope.

The dome got stuck a little closing, and wouldn't close all the way, and they headed back down, with plans to return another day to loot the rest of the tower when they'd had more time to plan. On the way back down, they asked Calcidius about the telescope and he told them that it was his great unfinished work, which would allow him to travel to Necropila Centauri. He got really excited about the fact that Ilona was interested in the telescope (Ilona is kinda a collector of weird and secret lore), and he tried to convince her to free him in exchange for the chance to travel to Necropila Centauri first. Except in his distress, he accidentally mentioned the fact that the telescope currently transported you as melted down slime and effectively killed you, so she turned down his offer because she couldn't trust him to actually finish the telescope like he claimed he was going to. They spent a couple of hours drawing more magic circles to further trap Calcidius, while Evi read the human skin book and realized it was a completely bullshit alienology text. With the Star Gem in hand, they left the tower, closing the door behind them and removing all trace they could find of their entry so that the tower would appear to be untouched (and hopefully untouchable). They went back to the inn, and asked Ilona about the boarding house she stays at, thinking of scouting it out as a potential place they could live too. They took dinner and a bath in their room, and decided to keep one of the bottles of wine they'd found instead of selling it (which, unluckily for them, is going to turn out to be the poisoned one). They went to bed, excited about their plunder and their future prospects.

Session 7

So in the morning they had breakfast and picked up rumours from the barkeep. She told them about spies and oilbirds in the upper city, and an abandoned village and cults in the hills, and a woman who commands masses of flesh who manipulates bodies, a chocolate factory on the border of my Offbrand Holy Rome and (most relevantly to the current situation), an information broker/fence named Petrovics who you can talk to if you knock three times on the dead alley's wall behind the ruined Protestant church in the middle city. They were looking for a fence anyways, so they went out to the middle city. In the ruins of the church, they saw a little girl drawing plague demons in chalk, accompanied by two teenage boys who got very chatty when they saw that Evi was about to knock on the wall of the blind alley. They told her about a gauntlet of traps behind the wall that were a test for those who wanted to speak to Petrovics. After Evi passed them a little bit of coin, they told her about the precise layout of the traps, since they'd gone in before themselves. To lower the risk as much as possible, they decided to send Evi in alone, with Sofiya and Ilona watching the entrance in case anyone tried to come in after Evi. Evi knocked on the wall, the wall opened, and she navigated a gauntlet of traps and met Petrovics, who they'd been told was a man but who turned out to actually be a cross-dressing woman. Evi fenced the goods from the Tower of the Stargazer and nearly got in trouble when Petrovics saw through her disguise and momentarily thought she was an assassin because of the poisoned wine. Evi talked and flirted her way out of it, and passed off the stolen gem to Petrovics, then asked if it'd be possible to buy architectural plans of the Bloodworth Manor. For a pretty large fee, she bought the plans (which translated into me giving the players a copy of the map), then Petrovics led her out a back entrance and told Evi to come through the trapless back entrance next time.

Coming out into the alley on the opposite side of the church, Evi ran into Arriska, the wizard who she'd been supposed to steal the Malleus Deus for, who she'd been afraid of and hiding from for the several days since that whole thing happened. Evi whistled for her allies, and they came running, but Arriska wanted to negotiate. She offered Evi a way back into her good graces (and back into a place where Arriska wasn't debating about killing her) - if Evi would travel to the cottage of Agnes Gooder and recover the seven homunculi that Agnes had promised to give to Arriska. Evi agreed, and Arriska told Evi to meet her at the inn when she had recovered the homunculi. The trouble though was, they'd learned that thieves were planning to hit the Bloodworth Estate the next day, so they were in a quandry of what to do about that, with Evi's new time-sensitive engagement. They decided to send Evi alone to Agnes Gooder's cottage, while the others meet up with another friend (a secondary PC of E's) and rob the Bloodworth House. Evi travelled north alone. On the road, she ran into a travelling merchant who was accompanied by a party of adventurers he had hired as bodyguards. They threatened her at gun point and forced her to show them the contents of her bag to prove she wasn't a threat. She bluffed a terrific story (related to her false identity, a religious penitent ex-witch named Lilith Holtzmann), telling them that she had been staying with her uncle a few hours to the north and had been sent to Staroznka to buy supplies, and that she had to hurry to get back so she could make it to the early evening church services. They believed her story, but one of the adventurers decided to bluff to terrorize her, until one of his companions convinced him to stand down and send her on her way. Evi muttered false prayers and continued on her way.

In the early afternoon, she reached Agnes Gooder's cottage and found the door left open, with Agnes's body on the table, scalped, dead, and some sort of magic ritual having clearly gone on. She found a homunculus in a jar (sealed in a uterus, filled with semen), and found six jars with empty uteri, and a note in Duvan'Ku (with translations in the margins in French), describing a ritual to conjure demons and compel them to pass on secrets by putting seven homunculi into a corpse, where they would wriggle into the organs 'like writhing worms'. At which point Evi realized she was going to have to dissect Agnes in order to retrieve the homunculi. Luckily, she found tools for the job strewn about the cabin, and started her bloody work. She found a dead bluebird shoved into Agnes' vagina, then decided to check her uterus first, since the other homunculi had been stored in uteri. In Agnes' womb, she found a homunculus and a still-breathing half-grown demonic spawn from Agnes having sex with demons. She put the homunculus away in one of the jars and lobotomized the demon spawn fetus so that it couldn't rise and attack her. She didn't move quick enough though, and it grew tiny tendrils that stabbed into her left hand and merged with her flesh. She cut the tendrils to remove the fetus, bandaged her hand, then opened Agnes all the way up to her sternum. She found an absorbed vestigial twin inside Agnes' chest, and a frog for a heart, among other oddities. The vestigial twin was still breathing, and she removed it, lobotomized it, then discarded it in a bowl she'd found. Next she went for the frog heart, which came to life and started hopping away once Evi had removed it. She caught it under a bucket and dissected it, finding no homunculus in it, so she discarded it.

When Evi cut open Agnes' lungs, Agnes' last breath was released into the air of the cabin. Agnes' last hateful breath caused Evi to become fixated on her own death and destruction, and she became convinced that she was going to be caught in the act, her true identity discovered when her crimes were investigated, and then tortured to death in an inquisition cell. To quell her paranoia, she moved the bookcase to block the door, and went back to work. When Evi removed Agnes' liver, it animated and turned into a monstrous slug that reared back to attack Evi, but Evi was quick and she trapped it under a bucket, holding it down with heavy books. She cut open Agnes' stomach and was sprayed by stomach acid. She managed to get out of the way, but it destroyed some of her instruments, leaving her with a much more limited supply of medical tools. In Agnes' liver, Evi found another homunculus, but also she was sprayed by the black bile of Agnes' hate, which causes milk to curdle, songbirds to dash their head against trees, etc. Since she saved partially though, the effect is only temporary, but she doesn't know that. When Evi cut Agnes' large intestine, it animated like a snake, spraying shit all over her, and proceeded to start strangling her. It shoved itself down her throat and began siphoning the contents of her stomach (which eventually would have led to siphoning out her organs if it had gone on longer). Evi managed to dispatch the intestine snake with her scalpel, and finding no homunculus in it, discarded it. After that incident, Evi stripped off her clothes, went outside and washed off in the river, found some clothes of Agnes', then decided to perform the rest of the operation naked so she wouldn't ruin any more clothes. She burned her shit-stained clothes, then went back to work.

In Agnes' small intestine (which wriggled like worms, and which she held down carefully until she was sure it wasn't going to be a repeat of the large intestine), she found another homunculus. (I think I missed a couple of homunculi in this recap, but this was the 5th one she'd found, so she just needed one more). She cut a few more organs, then cut open Agnes' face and head to search there. She dissected Agnes' brain and found nothing, then pried out one of her eyes, which contained the final homunculus. It was now after dark and Evi was exhausted, her work finished. She cleaned herself off again, changed into Agnes' clothes, then dispatched the liver slug with her scalpel while carefully lifting the bucket and surprising it, then set out back to the city in the dark. She met Arriska, received a small compensation (just a few pieces of silver), and Arriska told her that she'd call on her again when she needed something else. Evi went back to her room to wait for her friends, and then we moved over to Sofiya's version of the day.

Sofiya and Ilona went to find Sofiya's one-time companion, who lived in a flat above the library in the middle city. This friend was E's new character, a artist named Nymph who had escaped from a mental institution once, who's from Innsmouth and who worships Dagon and Hydra. She's a Magic-User. Sofiya hooked up with her once years ago when she was in Staroznka and had always intended to come find her again. Nymph invited them in for tea, and Nymph's dog (a basset hound named Lazarus) came out to greet Sofiya. Sofiya filled in Nymph on the plan, and showed her the maps Evi had gotten for the Bloodworth Estate, and they started hatching their plan. Nymph filled Sofiya and Ilona in on a little bit she'd heard about the Bloodworth Estate (mainly the lack of guards, and a little about Erasmus' trade ventures), and they set off. As they approached the Bloodworth Manor, the temperature dropped until it was uncomfortably cold when they were near the house. They kept catching glimpses of something moving in their peripheral vision in the orchard, but when they looked for it, they couldn't find anything. They entered the coach house first, looted the money from the bedrooms of the servants who lived there (and a sword from their personal effects, which Ilona kept, and which becomes important later), and stumbled on the horse-man anatomical abomination sewed-together horror. Which scared the ever-loving fuck out of them, but which also got them way curious to learn more. Throughout the course of the exploration, Nymph's madcap good humour just melted more and more away until eventually she didn't even have the will to crack jokes. They debated about leaving after the coach house, but Nymph insisted on learning what had happened.

They entered the house, where they were nearly immediately met with Agatha Foxlowe's mutilated still-living body strung into a chandelier. Agatha told them the basics of what had happened and begged them for help. Moved by her plight, Nymph put Agatha out of her misery with a well-placed swing of her quarterstaff. They explored the first floor, terrified and intrigued by the gore-soaked corridors. They found the deeds in Erasmus' study, found a journal that clued them in on some of what was going on re: Erasmus' doomed obsession with the maid, Sabrina, and this was about the point where a lightbulb went on in their heads and they came up with a plan to clear the place of any danger and LIVE THERE. Live in the Bloodworth House. Yes, that's not a typo. They want to live in the Bloodworth House.

They heard movement upstairs, and ducked down into the lower floors to search there before heading upstairs to face whatever was up there. They put Miles and Sean Foxlowe out of their misery in the same way that they'd dispatched Agatha, then stumbled on Erasmus in the cesspit drain, struggling against the flesh-moved and begging them to help the others. Nymph hurried in to take him out the way she'd taken out the others, but the flesh-moved dragged him out of the way. Sofiya went in after her, also failed to hit Erasmus, then Erasmus attacked them with a spurt of viscous black fluid from the flesh-mover's stinger inside his penis. Nymph managed to dodge, but Sofiya was burned lightly by the acid. Ilona cast Internal Stoats, killing Erasmus (and the stoats ran wildly up the stairs, much to the confusion of everyone else in the party). At this point, they started hearing a hissing whining hum with no source, which followed them as they travelled down into the cellar. The temperature distortion was at its worst in the pitch-blackness of the cellar, where it was near-freezing. They decided to leave the cellar for when they were able to search more thoroughly, and hopefully figure out a way to keep themselves warm while down there, when they meet back up with Evi. They headed back up, and up the blood-soaked stairs through a stairwell of torn portraits, up to the second floor. At this point, it started pouring down rain, and lightning illuminated skeletal hands visible through the windows. On the second floor, they stole Myrna's jewelry, dispatched Conrad Foxlowe in the same way that they had dispatched the rest of his family so far. Written on the wall above his mutilated body, in blood, they found the words 'That which lives beneath the mountain will one day rend the earth.' The Duvan'Ku phrase that keeps popping up everywhere, along with a Dead Sign (which was new to them).

While examining the writing, Penelope Foxlowe, who had been hiding beneath the bed, tried to stab Nymph in the ankle with her scissors, but Nymph spotted her and dodged. Penelope flipped the bed and came at the trio, ranting about how she'd found a trio of sinners to 'alter'. Nymph backed into the doorway, and she and Ilona started casting, with Sofiya distracting Penelope so that they could get their spells off. Sofiya pinned Penelope to the wall beside the window, and Penelope stabbed Sofiya in the shoulder with her scissors, inflicting a pretty deep wound. Ilona cast Internal Stoats, but Penelope barely seemed to care about the stoat attack. It knocked all the weapons out of her vagina though, effectively somewhat disarming her. Nymph cast Spontaneous Amputation, removing the arm Penelope held her scissors in. They then got the bright idea to throw Penelope out the window, hoping they could kill her that way. So with a well-coordinated team maneuver, they knocked Penelope out the window and thought that they'd killed her. They stopped for a few minutes and Nymph stabilized Sofiya's wound. They explored a little more, then went up to the top floor, which was mostly wet, because some of the balcony windows had been left open. They found Sabrina hiding in a closet and she begged them to find her uncle because he could fix all of this. The flesh-mover attacked them (and Nymph narrowly managed to dodge its skewer spike), then they bashed in Sabrina's head and moved on. In Penelope's room, they found the Necklace of the Sleepless Queen in a jewelry box that opened with clockwork, realized what it was when they saw the Dead Sign and remembered Agatha's story, and closed the box up and broke the clockwork mechanism so that the necklace couldn't be removed from the box without altogether breaking the box open. They stood out on a balcony and surveyed the landscape, without realizing that Penelope's body was no longer where they'd left it.

In Sabrina's room, they learned that she's Calcidius' niece, and considered for a moment going back to the Tower of the Stargazer to tell him, because they almost felt bad. In Agatha's room, they found Myrna crawling along the floor, and put her out of her misery at her request. What they hadn't seen was the baby, hiding under the bed, which attacked them with the psychic impressions of the beauty of being unborn. Nymph and Sofiya were overwhelmed by the rush of emotion, and they both curled up into the fetal position on the floor. Tentacles grew out of the fetus' back and it grabbed Ilona by the throat and lifted her into the air and started choking her. She tried to attack the umbilical cords that were grabbing her, but she was overcome by emotion at the sight of 'beautiful perfect thing' that lay before her, so she failed to attack it. In a mass exertion of will (which involved burning hp to gain a bonus to her saves), Ilona managed to attack the fetus, severing the umbilical cords that were grappling her, and severing the umbilical cord that connected it to Myrna, killing the fetus in a gout of blood from the umbilical cord, which drenched Nymph and Sofiya. Sofiya awakened from her revery while Ilona was dismembering the fetus in a fit of rage. Together, they managed to bring Nymph back to her senses, just in time to catch sound and sight of Penelope, coming down the hall towards them, having re-entered the house after her fall. Ilona hacked at Penelope with her sword, wounding her, and managed to avoid the reach of Penelope's needle. Risking miscast, Nymph cast Spontaneous Amputation again, severing Penelope's other arm, while Sofiya cowered in the corner because she was at 1 hp. Penelope tried to tackle Ilona, but Ilona dodged and Penelope fell into the hallway. Nymph beat on Penelope with her staff and knocked her out, and together they coaxed Sofiya out of her corner so she could hold Penelope down so Ilona could decapitate her. So they did that.

With the entire house explored and cleared, they started making preparations to occupy the Bloodworth House and defend it from the thieves when they arrived in the morning. Nymph lit all the lamps in the house so that they wouldn't have to keep using their own fuel, and Sofiya and Ilona gathered up the bodies. They dismembered the bodies and burned the pieces in the fireplace, which took well into the night. Sofiya went to sleep, with Ilona guarding her, and Nymph walked back to the city alone to retrieve Evi and go get her dog and some food from her apartment so that they can bunker down in the Bloodworth House to defend it. Outside the city, Nymph saw a mutilated bull, offered as a sacrifice to some dark god, and then went back to the inn to retrieve Evi. (E decided that Evi and Nymph had been friends when they were in their early 20s, during a period where Nymph had been a prostitute and she and Evi had worked together.) Evi and Nymph went back to Nymph's apartment to pack her things while Nymph caught Evi up on what had happened, and then they went back to the Bloodworth House, where they regrouped, and caught up while Nymph tried to crack the safe in Erasmus' study.

Session 8

Evi had a dream of a landscape of rolling flesh where she was naked, bleeding from between her legs and the chest vagina she developed after her first encounter with Her. She wandered and fell down, dying of starvation and thirst, then was pulled to her feet by Her. She told Evi that she needed more from her, and Evi told Her that she would give Her anything. She reached into Evi's chest, took Evi's heart in her hand, and extracted a memory of Evi's first love, an older woman she'd been in love with when she was a teenager, who owned some land in the village Evi grew up in, and who had been one of the few people in the village who was kind to her, since Evi was weird and bookish and antisocial as a kid. This woman, Dobromila, had a massive library, and Evi had this whole big unreciprocated love for her (which is also the only time Evi has ever fallen in love). As She extracted the memories, Evi revisited in her mind Dobromila's death, raped and tortured to death by soldiers when Evi's village was razed by the Catholic League. She drew her hand out and showed Evi a crystal in the shape of an human heart, which She ate, and Evi lost all of her memories of Dobromila.

Knocking on the door woke everyone up at 4am, and they started scrambling around, worried that it was the thieves. They looked out the window and saw a man in a tweed trenchcoat with a bowler hat holding up his credentials as the city's beadle, standing on the porch as the year's first snow fell. Evi put on one of Myrna Foxlowe's shabbier dressing gowns and went outside, pretending to be one of the head servants of the Foxlowe household. The beadle was coming by to investigate complaints about the smell of the smoke from the chimney of the house that had wafted into the city (the smoke from the bodies they burned the day before, after raiding the house). While slowing exposing more skin through allowing the dressing gown to slip down, Evi told the beadle that the Foxlowes had returned the night before, and that Erasmus Foxlowe had contracted an unusual disease while travelling in the Far East, a disease that caused him painfully debilitating shits that smelled like death. She told him that the waste had to be burned, and that that was the source of the smell. She claimed that Erasmus was embarassed about this disease, so he would prefer if the beadle kept quiet about it and wrote the incident off, which the beadle agreed to as long as Evi (who he was completely smitten with) agreed to visit with him again when 'the master' was feeling better and didn't need to be constantly tended to. Evi agreed and the beadle left. Inside, Evi and the others made breakfast and started planning to rig traps for the thieves. They gathered the muskets they'd found in the house and set up Ilona on a balcony reading, dressed in one of Myrna's dresses, to act as an early warning system for when the thieves were approaching. Evi and Sofiya set up piano wire tripwires on the route they planned to lure the thieves through, and Nymph laid out marbles for the thieves to slip on .

While they were preparing, Ilona told Evi in private about information she'd found in the book she brought back from Calcidius' tower. She found a secret compartment in the back of the book, branded with the words 'That Which Lives Beneath The Mountain Shall One Day Rend The Earth' in an ancient language she only barely understands. Inside the compartment, she found a hidden page explaining how to use Gematria to unlock the secrets of the book. She decoded the book and found stories of the Duvan'ku cult, how they worshipped the Old Ones and had been given the Black Rites (the source of modern magic) by the Elder Things. She told Evi the names of several Old Ones who were mentioned, and told her about how the cult of Duvan'ku had ruled over humanity in ancient times. Ilona told Evi that when she learned this, she was filled with a compulsion to pass the knowledge on, a compulsion that felt like something gnawing at the bottom of her brainstem. When she told Evi the story, the feeling abated. After hearing it, Evi felt the same compulsion.

Once they had the house set up, Evi and Sofiya stationed themselves on the balconies with rifles (the extra rifles laid next to them as extra shots), and they sent Ilona and Nymph downstairs to wait in ambush by the front door. A cart stopped on the edge of the property, and eleven thieves hopped out of it and started heading up the path. Once they were in range, Evi and Sofiya opened fire, killing two thieves and spooking the rest, who took off running for the front door. They spotted a thief who seemed to be the leader who seemed less spooked than the others, and they opened fire on him, shooting him in the shoulder and then both missing two shots, expending their supply of guns. They both then took off into the house, getting into their hiding places in the room Nymph and Ilona were luring the thieves into. In the entryway, the thieves fell right into the trap, falling over the tripwire, slipping on the marbles, getting their heads bashed in by Nymph and Ilona. Nymph and Ilona fell back to the stairs, luring the thieves back, fighting them on the stairwell. The thieves' heavily armed leader shot at Nymph and narrowly missed, and on the stairs Nymph killed another thief and ran up after Ilona. At the top of the stairs, Ilona started casting. Nymph reached the landing and took a defensive position, protecting Ilona so she could get her spell off. The thieves fell on Nymph before Evi and Sofiya could react, and she fended them off well, protecting Ilona, blocking swords and knives with her quarterstaff, but she ended up heavily wounded, a major stab wound in the shoulder and a big cut across her right leg. She was bleeding everywhere, and then Evi and Sofiya struck, killing two thieves and joining the fray so Nymph wouldn't have to take all the aggro herself. Ilona cast Internal Stoats, killing the leader, and the thieves panicked, the few survivors running down the stairs. Evi, Sofiya, and Ilona pursued them while Nymph tried to patch herself up, losing blood fast.

Out on the lawn, they caught up with the fleeing thieves and cut them down in a protracted battle in the snow. Shit got wild in that fight. At one point Sofiya stabbed a guy in the back and dug her knife in his back, clinging to him so he couldn't run, then she ended up on the ground when Evi killed the guy, then dodged, like, five successive attacks while on the ground. Ilona had this badass fighting like a master swordswoman moment, parrying a ton of attacks and finally decapitating the final guard. Evi ran back inside to help Nymph (who she kinda has this sisterly relationship with). With Nymph's help, Evi tried to patch her up, but accidentally made it worse, ending up with Nymph unconscious and at 1 hp, bleeding even more heavily. Evi dragged her into the bathtub, cleaned off her wounds, and, completely panicking, managed to stop the bleeding and stabilize her. She then bathed the unconscious Nymph, cleaning her wounds more thoroughly, while the others looted the thieves' bodies and tried and failed to bring in their cart (neither Sofiya nor Ilona is very strong). The horse had bolted when the fighting started, broke the reins and run, so the cart was just fucking stuck there until they could Evi out to help them. They drug the bodies inside and shovelled the bloody snow, disposing of it in the cesspit. By this point, Evi had gotten Nymph clean and tucked in in a clean bed upstairs, sleeping. With Evi's help, they wheeled the cart into the coach house, then set up on armory in one of the upstairs bedroom with all the weapons they'd looted from the dead thieves. They dismembered the bodies and burned the pieces in the fireplaces, then set to cleaning up the initial mess in the house, which occupied the rest of the day.

In the morning, the brainstem-gnawing sensation Evi had felt after learning about Duvan'ku had gotten worse, evolving into a headache. She considered telling Nymph about it, but she didn't want to burden her with it while Nymph was still recovering, so she decided to tell Sofiya instead, and explain the circumstances of that feeling to her. Sofiya told Nymph that she'd tell the story to the next dying person she encountered, then they set out (just the two of them, with Ilona staying back at the house to clean and tend to Nymph), accompanied by Nymph's dog Lazarus, to try to parley with the Tenebrous Hand, following up on the message they'd sent Evi the morning after she arrived in the city. They found the complex, near an officer training school for the Protestant League, where soldiers were drilling in the courtyard. They got a bit panicked about doing illegal shit a stone's throw away from a military outpost, but kept looking for a way in. They saw a code with lanterns hanging in the window of the Dog and Bastard, but neither of them knew what it meant, since the code primarily exists eastern Mosna and Evi is from the west, and Sofiya doesn't know as much about the criminal underworld as Evi does. They found the door of the Dog and Bastard locked, then poked around the outside of the entire complex, peeking in windows, trying doors. They didn't find any doors unlocked, so Evi decided to go over the fence into the courtyard. Sofiya boosted her up, then Evi helped Sofiya climb over, carrying Lazarus in her arms. In the courtyard, they saw something moving under an overturned wagon, and Lazarus started barking his fucking head off in the direction of the wagon. The wagon flipped over and five hungry dogs came bounding towards them, having escaped from underneath the fallen wagon. Evi grabbed Sofiya and Lazarus and ducked into the nearest door, holding it shut and then blocking it with a chair while the dogs tried to bash it open.

hey took the bar off the front door of the Dog and Bastard so they'd have a way out, but then decided to explore a bit, trying to figure out what the fuck had happened. They found a puddle of viscous black goo that smelled like death, blood, and treacle pudding, and had to physically restrain Lazarus to prevent him from eating the goo. In another room, they found the Casket and assumed it was some sort of evil idol. They considered leaving right then, but then they found a ladder that could be hung across the windows to get them across the courtyard. They crossed the courtyard, Sofiya holding Lazarus to her chest, while the dogs barked and snapped at them from below. On the other side of the courtyard, they explore a little, found a letter from the leader of the Tenebrous Hand to his girlfriend, telling her about an evil that had been unleashed that the gang died trying to seal away, apologizing that he would never be able to see her again. At this point, they decided to get the fuck out, since whatever had happened to the Tenebrous Hand had to be absolutely awful. They went back across to the Dog and the Bastard, lifted the bar on the front door and went out into the street, only then processing that the letter said the evil had to be sealed in the complex. So they went back in, re-barred the door of the house, removed the ladder, re-barred the door of the Dog and Bastard, then left through the window, which they pulled shut behind them. Shaken by the entire experience, they decided to head straight home and take a break from adventuring for a few days, since from the Bloodworth haul, they'd amassed more than enough money to live well for a while. For the rest of the afternoon, they helped Ilona clean up the house, and then in the evening, Evi and Sofiya spent some time picking through the cellar, finding a few magic books that they gave to Nymph and Ilona.

Session 9

Sofiya woke up with a splitting headache from the brainworm thing from learning about the Old Ones, and spent some time debating about what to do about it while Evi re-bandaged Nymph's wounds and Ilona made breakfast. Sofiya decided to try to tell the story to a corpse, in hopes that it would free her from the curse, but since there were no human corpses around, she decided to tell it to the moose head mounted on the wall. She told it the story and the moose head came to life and started asking her all kinds of random and somewhat invasive questions. And she still felt the gnawing at the base of her brainstem, so basically, the situation hadn't improved at all, but now they were up one moose head that wouldn't shut up. She went to go get Evi and Ilona so they could decide what to do, and in the time it took, the moose head told the story to a bear head that also woke up and started arguing with the moose. Scared shitless, Sofiya told Ilona and Evi to go get their weapons, so they came into the room, Evi armed with a pistol and Ilona with a dagger. The bear head screamed chauvinist things at them, baffled completely by the idea of a woman with a gun, while the moose head told the story to a gazelle head, awakening it. The gazelle head promptly started screaming, and before the party could decide what to do, the moose head had told the story to Ilona's dagger, bringing it to life. The dagger started zipping around the room wailing, and they decided to slam the door, latch it, lock it, then hurry downstairs, get a heavy box, and block the door. While they ate breakfast, the animals quieted down for a while, their voices starting to get hoarse from all the screaming so early in the morning.

After breakfast, Evi decided to try to play Nymph's violin to entertain her while she was recuperating. She failed her roll spectactularly, which managed to entertain Nymph by how badly Evi was playing, but it set the animals to screaming again, upset by the awful racket. It was at this point that they solidly decided they needed to do something about the animals, especially since they started to get worried that Nymph was going to overhear the moose telling the story (since it's just a couple of rooms over), and end up brainwormed while she's bedridden and everyone else in the house has already heard the story. So Ilona warded the room with wards of silence, and they started discussing plans to potentially hire some bricklayers to wall up the room with the shrieking animal heads while wearing ear plugs so that they can't be affected by what basically amounts to the memetic virus they've accidentally unleashed.

After breakfast, Evi and Sofiya set out for the greengrocer's, since they were running out of food in the house, and hopefully on the way Sofiya could find someone to unload the story on. She spotted a half-naked nobleman running from a mob of angry peasants and jogged alongside him, telling him the story while he begged her to help him escape the mob. 'Do you have a moment to discuss our lord and savior the God Beneath the Mountain?' was her opening line there, it was hysterical. She told him the story, finishing just before the peasants backed him into a blind alley, and managed to get away, sending the peasants into the alley after the nobleman, who they promptly ripped apart and burned alive. At this point, Sofiya realized she'd gotten so far away from Evi that she'd gotten entirely lost.

Evi waited for a few minutes, expecting Sofiya to come running back, and when she didn't, she set out to look for her. Sofiya waited in the street near a butcher's shop, knowing that Evi was going to come looking for her, but in the meantime, a trio of Catholic Legion soldiers looking to rough someone up to meet a quota came down the street and spotted her, came after her. She tried to duck into the shop, but one of the soldiers grabbed her by the collar of her shirt and pulled her out onto the street, where he and his compatriots prepared to start beating her with clubs. At this point, Evi arrived, shouting to the soldiers to wait. They turned and asked her why they should stop, and, playing up the persona of this shy do-gooder Catholic girl, she asked them why they were going to beat Sofiya up. They told her that they thought she was a famous thief who they'd been looking for, and Evi asked if they'd checked her papers to make sure they were going after the right person. Begrudgingly, the soldiers checked Sofiya's papers, and when she wasn't the thief they were looking for, Evi told them to let her go or else she'll report them to the magistrates. They let Sofiya go, and Evi thanked them for their service to the city, then asked them for directions to the greengrocer's. The soldiers gave her the information and left, then they walked a few blocks over to the greengrocer's.

While they were paying at the greengrocer's, the grocer told them an elaborate story about how the Duchess Goltisyn (the recently deposed leader of the city) had harbored witches in her court and used their magic against the Catholic Union. He told them that he's glad she's dead, even though it's led to the absolute chaos going on in the city. On the way out of the greengrocer's, a young boy showed up with a letter for Sofiya. She gave him a frankly exorbitant amount of money as payment, and he skipped off, thanking her profusely. The letter was from Sofiya's grandmother (who Sofiya didn't know even lived in the city), inviting her to have dinner with her at her mansion on the eastern outskirts of the city, with permission to bring a friend to the dinner. Sofiya was reluctant, since she'd had trouble with her family in the past, and since her family members are all a bunch of evil scoundrels (Evi reminded Sofiya that she's an evil scoundrel too, just like the rest of them). Evi convinced Sofiya to go, since they'd get a free meal out of it, so they went back to the house and dropped off the food. They stuck around a couple of hours so that Evi could get dressed up in Myrna's fancy clothes and get ready for meeting with the nobles. It was starting to snow again by the time they left, so they hired a carriage.

On the way, they witnessed the utter desolation of the Upper Districts through the carriage window. A burned out church with oilbirds eating a corpse on the roof. A wind that scared the horse so badly that they had to stop for a few minutes while the coachman got the horse moving again. A boulevard covered in broken shells at the foot of the massive Nautaline Palace, where the Duchess Goltisyn had until recently lived, defaced with political graffiti from various factions. As they saw what was going on, Sofiya started to worry that they were walking into a trap. She wanted to go home, but Evi convinced her to at least check it out, on the stipulation that if there's any danger, they'll run. The coach stopped outside of the Novak turkey farm, and Evi and Sofiya got out, tipping the clearly scared coachman for his trouble. He took off, taking a road out of the city to come back around so that he wouldn't have to travel back through the Upper Districts. At the gate, Sofiya told Evi a little more about the family after they found a gate with the family crest on it (a bear eating a lion eating a snake). She told Evi that the Novaks are old old money, with their hands in all kinds of criminal dealings. They're noted for their brutality, their unrelenting drive to crush their enemies entirely. Evi pushed the gate open, and they moved into the courtyard, where they found a fountain. On one side, it was shaped like a woman holding a baby, with the water spurting out of the baby's ass. On the other side, it was shaped like a knight clutching at a fatal neck wound, the water spurting from the wound. When they reached the front door, Sofiya was starting to get paranoid, so she told Evi to wrap her cloak around her hand before knocking on the door. She did, and they were met by a very tall, thin butler named Stooge. They identified themselves as the young Lady Novak and her companion, Miss Verger (another of Evi's aliases), and the butler led them inside.

The house was dark, that sort of space where the ceilings are too high and the hallways are too wide and it's impossible to light it properly with 17th century lighting implements. The walls of the entryway were covered in portraits of Sofiya's ancestors. As they moved deeper into the house, Stooge tried to ascertain which Young Lady Novak Sofiya is, asking if she's the Miss Sofiya he's heard so much about. Since Sofiya had run away from the family when she was young, she lied, identifying herself as Rena Novak, who had been adopted by the family some years ago. Stooge didn't remember a Rena (since Rena doesn't actually exist), but he blamed it on his faulty memory as he's advancing in age. This got Sofiya paranoid that these people aren't really even part of the Novak family and that they're imposters laying a trap. Stooge told Evi a little about his past, as a coachman from England who had been with the family for thirty years. He told her that the mistress treated him more kindly than most nobles treat their butlers, allowing him a much larger degree of freedom than most in his trade. As they moved in deeper, Sofiya and Evi started checking out the art for anything that could be valuable that they could potentially steal if shit goes bad here (and keeping an eye out for the False Chantarelle, since they have a bill of sale for it and are fairly certain that it's been stolen). They spotted a Joop Van Ooms painting of the King In Yellow, which they'd heard was purported to bring madness with it, and then they came into a large domed room that was slightly better lit.

On the dome was a massive painting of the Novak patriarch from 300ish years ago riding through a battlefield on a bear that was eating a lion that was eating a snake. Evi, being somewhat of an amateur scholar, recognized this painting as a metaphorical representation of a battle that had occured at White Mountain some three hundred years ago, in a War of the Roses-esque war that ended with a Novak becoming king for a short period. Basically, in the battle, the Novaks and an allied family overthrew and killed the old king, then the Novaks turned on their allies, killed them and took the throne for themselves. They were deposed ten years later by the family that ruled until the wars that happened about 100 years ago. Stooge led them into a study, where they found Grandma Novak, a tiny woman dressed in mourning black, with black Morpheus glasses slipping halfway down her nose. Grandma almost recognized Sofiya, but Sofiya bluffed her into believing that she's Rena Novak (who still, doesn't exist), who was adopted by the family. Grandma then tried to ascertain in a roundabout 17th century way if Evi is "Rena"'s girlfriend, since 'Rena was always strange in that way, but if it makes Rena happy, I support it'. Evi told her that they're adventuring companions, which Grandma took as all the confirmation she needed. She sent Stooge away to tend to the food and led Sofiya and Evi into a small parlor with a fireplace to catch up on 'all the missed time'.

Session 10

We picked up from where we'd left off, with Sofiya and Evi being led upstairs to talk to Grandma Novak. They talked for a while, and Grandma Novak consistently failed to know anything about family history, which got Sofiya more and more suspicious, until finally she confronted her, asked her who she really was, and told Evi that they're leaving after she gets an answer. Grandma Novak revealed that she's actually a thief named Martina Martinko, who was posing as Sofiya's grandma to try to convince her to come help her with something she's been working on. She gave them coffee while she explained (coffee that they both were pretty sure was poisoned). Martina told them about how her and Stooge (who is actually her husband, not her butler) had found a treasure map that led to this very spot. She told them about a treasure chest they'd found in the basement that had been blocked by a massive fleshy pyramid filled with blood vessels and gears when they came back to the basement after searching for the keys. She has the keys now, but her and Stooge have been unable to destroy the thing in the basement alone, and wanted help. They agreed to help in exchange for a cut of the treasure, and descended into the basement. Stooge carried a massive wooden shield made of most of a tree that he said was necessary to negate the pyramid's attacks. Once they were down the stairs, the pyramid began firing beams of eldritch light and acid and flame at them, which Stooge blocked with his shield. They tried firing on the pyramid, which damaged it, but quickly the wounds began to seal up and the pyramid kept firing, cracking Stooge's shield. Sofiya sent Martina to go find a mirror upstairs, and set off herself to find a couch to use as a new shield when Stooge's shield breaks. Evi reloaded her guns, and Stooge kept his shield steady until a Confusion blast broke his shield and caused him to freak out, screaming and bashing his head against the basement floor.

Evi retreated up the stairs while still reloading, at which point Sofiya and Martina got back with the things they'd gone to get. They set up the mirror and the couch and hid behind. Evi asked Martina if she had any guns, and Martina told her that Stooge carried a brace of pistols, if she could get it away from him. Evi crept over to where Stooge was flailing wildly and grabbed his guns, ducked back into cover and started firing. Carrying the couch with her, Sofiya started beating on the pyramid with her fists, spilling its blood across the chamber. The mirror deflected a blast that lit the pyramid on fire, and then a blast that stopped its regeneration through a partial save against Disintegration. Evi expelled her second gun and Sofiya started tearing holes in the pyramid and climbing into it, ripping it apart from inside. She climbed all the way into a hole and finished off that way, but when it died, the pyramid turned to molten lead, which flooded the room. Evi and Stooge managed to jump up onto bits of masonry, only getting splashed by the lead (which was still pretty bad burns). Martina melted completely, hit by the full force of the wave, and Sofiya (who received no save because she was inside the creature when it melted) ended up with massive burns all over her body, laying in molten lead at 1 hp. The mansion started to collapse, because the pyramid had been holding up the principal post, which collapsed without it. Burning her arm terribly, Evi reached into the lead and lifted a drain cover to drain the lead out of the room, hoping to save Sofiya. Once the room was safe to move about in, Evi grabbed Sofiya (who was still barely alive), slung her on her back, while Stooge grabbed the singed treasure chest and they both exited the house as quickly as possible.

Once Evi had Sofiya stable, she conferred with Stooge about the treasure. Not wanting to share a cut, she killed him with a hidden blade, and then carried Sofiya into a little hovel the gardener had once lived in. She dragged the treasure inside, then poked around the house, finding a mutilated headless body in the bed upstairs, the walls and ceiling smeared with gore. She disposed of the gardener's corpse as well as Stooge's by throwing them into the turkey pen for the starving turkeys to eat, then cleaned Sofiya's wounds with water she pulled from the well and bandaged up Sofiya as best she could using supplies she found in the gardener's hovel. She changed the sheets and carried Sofiya upstairs and put her to bed, then cleaned off her own wounds, bandaged them, and tried to unlock the treasure chest. It had three locks. She opened the most rudimentary one, but couldn't get the other two open. She searched the hovel for any evidence of what had happened, and found the gardener's journal. It told the story of a magical coin that his original employers had brought back from the far east, which he became obsessed with and decided he had to have it any costs. He snuck into the mansion, stole the coin, hid it, and eventually killed his master to protect the coin, which carried a spirit associated with Duvan'ku. The coin corrupted the gardener completely, and he started killing frequently, performing ritual sacrifices. The journal ended with the arrival of Martina and Stooge, who the gardener had intended to sacrifice to Duvan'ku, but clearly they'd gotten to him first. Evi searched the premises for the coin, and unable to find it, went to sleep in the hovel, knowing that she probably couldn't get a carriage at this time of night in the Upper Districts.

That night, Evi dreamed that she was dying of a fever alone in a small cabin. She (capital S, I know that's not apparent since it's the beginning of the sentence) came to her and took the memory of a deep abiding rage from her in exchange for saving her life in the dream. Evi's deep abiding rage was the memory of the first time she was raped, by an older man who was a veteran soldier who had acted as her guide through the wilderness after her village was destroyed, back when she was 14ish. The soldier raped her each night, but she hadn't been able to leave or kill him because she needed his help, and eventually they'd parted ways and she'd spent her entire life hating him. She lost the memory entirely, and awoke in the hovel, drenched in a cold sweat. Sofiya was awake, but in extreme pain, and she and Evi came up with a plan. Evi would claim (if questioned) that Sofiya had been burned alive by a mob and Evi had saved her. They flagged down a coach, and Evi bribed the coachman to tell no one about what he'd seen. They returned home, and with Nymph's help, Evi sterilized and bandaged Sofiya's wounds more thoroughly. They decided to spend the day sleeping off everything that had gone down, while Nymph (still bedridden) transcribed spells from the spellbook she'd found in the basement and Ilona compulsively cleaned the house, still working on the mess they'd found the house in. The next morning, Evi had begun her first cycle as Blooded. She went to Petrovics to ask her for help with the treasure chest (as well as to ask her to participate in her first ritual). She found Petrovics entranced by the pseudo-sexual glow that Evi exuded because of her first Blood, and Petrovics fucked her bent over the desk. After they finished, they both agreed to act as if everything was the same as it had been, and Petrovics helped Evi repair her gear and agreed to come to the manor that night to help her with the treasure chest and the ritual.

Evi then bought groceries and supplies for a lavish party she was planning, to celebrate their recent victories. She hired a cartman to deliver the goods to the house, and went to a bar to find an old woman she could rope into the ritual. At the bar, she met another drunken adventurer, who told her the location of a tower of what Evi immediately knew were Blooded witches, for the price of a drink. The adventurer then hit on Evi, and when Evi turned her down, she went to puke in the toilet. Evi then started buying drinks for the old woman, and told her that if she'd come back with her, she'd show her something unusual like she'd never seen before. The old woman agreed, as long as Evi would buy her a bottle of wine for the road. Evi did, and they returned home together. Petrovics arrived at the house just after nightfall, and together she and Evi managed to open the treasure chest, finding a damaged copy of the Black Rites of E'leten'kehrena, which is essentially a book of all known spells. Evi took the book upstairs and presented it to Nymph and Ilona, then went outside to perform the ritual. She stripped naked, kissed the old woman, swallowing her saliva, then sent her home, kissed Petrovics, swallowing her saliva as well, then masturbated in the snow while thinking of Her. She felt Her presence and felt her body starting to change in preparation for the incoming cycle. Upstairs, Sofiya watched the ritual from her bedroom window, and turned on by watching Evi masturbate, started masturbating herself. After Sofiya came, she felt kind of confused and weird about what had just happened, and in that moment of weakness, She came to her and offered her Her strength. Sofiya bound herself to Her, and She helped Sofiya realize that she's desperately in love with Evi, then gave her a nightmare of Evi eating her out and then drowning in menstrual blood spurting from her vagina. Evi went to bed and dreamed of Her eternal suffering, and both woke in a state of confusion.

Not knowing how to handle her newly realized love for Evi, Sofiya stumbled into Evi's room and confessed to her. Evi, effectively put into heat by the effects of the Blood, began licking Sofiya's wounds and consuming the dead flesh to heal her. She vomited up the dead flesh and was punished with a taste of eternal suffering, but after the vision passed, this still turned into sex. The sex caused Sofiya to fall even more deeply in love with Evi, and, uncaring, Evi got dressed and went to tend to Nymph's wounds. Sofiya tried to follow her, and Evi locked her out of Nymph's room. Evi licked Nymph's wounds and swallowed the dead flesh, and still basically in heat, ended up having sex with Nymph, which was extremely awkward for them both, because as we'd established earlier, with how long they've known each other, Evi and Nymph think of each other as more like sisters. (They'd had sex in the past once, when they were both in their late teens, and it had been extremely awkward for them both.) While the wounded rested up, Evi asked Ilona to teach her the Duvan'ku language, and they spent several days alone together practicing. At the end of the third day, Evi mentioned what had been on her mind to Ilona. She asked Ilona if she's Jewish, telling her that she's Jewish too, and then told Ilona that she'd figured out her secret - that she's actually a golem. Ilona confirmed Evi's suspicions, and then told Evi that she wanted to take her out to meet some people from the Jewish Underground in a couple of days. Over the course of these few days, Sofiya continued having visions of drowning Evi in her menstrual blood, and after the third dream, she became Blooded, with only one day left to perform her first ritual. Bandaged up like a mummy, she went out with Nymph (who at this point was healed up) to find an old woman whose saliva she could drink.

Nymph told Sofiya that she was having trouble feeling like the mansion was home, and processed that it was because she didn't have her painting supplies. They set out to find an art store, but ended up getting lost, and finding their bearings near Nymph's old apartment. Nymph asked if they could go in, if nothing else to make plans to box up her things and have them shipped to the mansion. Inside, Nymph waxed poetic about the beauty of clutter and mess while Sofiya drank tea and played with Nymph's dog. Nymph made plans to hire a coachman to transport her belongings to the mansion, then told Sofiya about an old witch who lived across the street from her who would likely be willing to help them with the ritual. Nymph took Sofiya into the witch's shop (which was, like, this elaborate fortune-telling setup). The witch told Sofiya that one day she will watch a statue fall and no one will repair it, then agreed to help them with the ritual. She helped Nymph find the art store, and Nymph bought a massive amount of art supplies, then hired two coachmen to take the supplies, her, Sofiya, and the witch, and the belongings from her apartment back to the mansion.

The moon rose, and Sofiya kissed the witch, drinking her saliva, then kissed Nymph (who she was starting to fall for). She asked Nymph to stay with her while she masturbated in the snow, and this ended up with Sofiya fucking Nymph while masturbating. With the completion of Sofiya's ritual, She descended and sang to Nymph, enticing her to contract with her for untold knowledge. Nymph accepted, and She presented Nymph with an umbilical cord and placenta that she urged Nymph to eat. Nymph ate the placenta and umbilical cord, and the blood that spilled from them ran along her body in the moonlight and was absorbed into her stomach in preparation for Her blessings. They went to bed together. The next morning, Evi and Ilona set out to meet Ilona's friends. First, they stopped by Petrovics' place and Evi invited her to the party she was planning, then Ilona took Nymph to the house of a Talmudic scholar and kabbalist called Mama Halberstam who is working night and day on a cure for the Red Death. She and Evi discussed the intensifying climate of anti-semitism, and then Evi and Ilona set off, not wanting to keep Halberstam distracted from her work.

Next, Ilona took Evi to meet Johanna Edelstein, a young woman (who Ilona has a crush on) who is essentially the organizer for the Jewish Underground. Johanna has two golems who act as her guardians, neither of whom are as close to developing a soul as Ilona is, but Ilona considers them among her best friends. Evi talked to Johanna a little about religion and philosophy, and Johanna asked her if she was going to come to the shabbes they hold on the weekend. Evi told her she'd come if she could, and Johanna told her that it might be rescheduled anyways because last week their had been a raid on the location it was being held in, and they were having to find a new place. Seeing how sleep-deprived Johanna was, Evi urged her to take a nap for a few hours, and she and Ilona set out again. On the outskirts of the town, they saw the new Minister of Quarantine, an imposingly formal man in a plague doctor's mask and a snakeskin coat, riding a black warhorse, crossing the boulevard. He issued orders to the peasantry, and most of them followed his orders, but one of them, angry, threw a tomato at him and the Minister of Quarantine pulled out a pistol and shot him dead. Evi considered pulling out her own pistol and killing the Minister if she could, but Ilona dragged her away before she could cause major problems for them both. She calmed Evi down and told her that the next person she was taking her to meet wasn't part of the Jewish Underground but was an important friend. She took Evi to a stilt-house on a cliff overlooking the river, where lived an otherworldly witch with ram's horns growing from her head.

The witch introduced herself as the Owling, and she immediately saw through Evi's deception and false identities, saying that her duplicity is so intense that she can smell it on her. Evi put her hand on her gun and threatened the Owling, who defused the tense confrontation by promising not to tell anyone about Evi's lies. The Owling served Evi and Ilona tea, and Evi asked the Owling what she is, sensing that something very uncanny was going on. The Owling told Evi about how she had been born a creature of the Veins of the Earth, and then climbed out of the earth, seen what humans looked like, and decided to become like one. The Owling urged Evi to visit the Veins, and then, through a series of questions, Evi discerned that the Owling is incapable of lying. Point-blank, she asked the Owling what she knows about the cult of Duvan'ku. The Owling told her that she knows a great deal, and it depended on how much time Evi has to listen. Evi told her that she had a ritual to perform that night, and that other than that, she had a party to host in two days, but that otherwise she was free to talk as long as the Owling wanted to. The Owling told Evi that it would be easier to show her, then took her on a journey into the far past, as long as Evi would promise not to eat anything while time travelling (which she agreed to, of course).

Evi watched the first humans witness Duvan'ku, as his titanic foot crushed an entire army, and the only survivor of the battle/crushing bowed down and began worshipping the titanic foot. They stepped forward a few years and watched the original cultist, now a high priest, rape and sacrifice a young woman to summon an Elder Thing for knowledge. The Elder Thing went out of control and killed everyone at the proceedings, and Evi and the Owling stepped forward a few hundred years. They watched several more blood rites, then saw two priestesses in a dark wood speaking in Duvan'ku, exchanging secrets. One priestess killed the other in a ritualistic manner, and summoned an Elder Thing, which passed on to her the knowledge of magic. This priestess was the one who had originally taken down the Black Rites, the book that is the origin of modern magic. They travelled to a banquet a few years forward, where the priestess who had taken down the Black Rites reined as High Priestess of the cult, and sacrificed several of her enemies in a ritual. At the banquet, Evi and the Owling were spotted and cultists came after them. They started running, and just before they left, Evi couldn't resist stealing and trying to eat a single grape from the banquet table. She begged the Owling to stop her before she ate it, and the Owling broke her arm then took her back to the present day. Evi bandaged up her arm, still reeling from the revelation, and the Owling told her that the moon was rising, and that she would show her the rest in the morning. Naked in the snow, Evi cut open her inner thigh and consumed her own blood, then masturbated with the remnants of the blood, watching Her thin hair-like children wriggling in her bloodstream while Ilona watched out of curiousity and horror.

Meanwhile, Sofiya performed the second ritual herself, cutting her hand and watching the same sight. She went to bed with Nymph (who she was starting to fall for, despite her debilitating obsession with Evi), and for a moment, found her love for Evi starting to loosen its grip on her. Evi went to sleep in the Owling's house, and then the next morning, went back into the past with her. The Owling showed her several more blood rites, then showed her rival priestesses of another cult speaking in an old dialect of Czech, discussing how they needed to bind the Duvan'ku before they could destroy them. They travelled to the catacombs beneath White Mountain during a time in which they had been still used, still bustling with activity, and stood in the presence of Praetor-Pontifex Cyris Carthinax Maximus in all his glory. They witnessed a great blood ritual performed by the rival priestesses to bind the Duvan'ku, then visited the catacombs again once they had entered the state of frozen ruin like you see in Death Frost Doom. Finally, they flew up the side of the mountain in another time and witnessed Norqvist Ove freezing to death in the cabin at the peak. He started to turn and nearly saw them, but was interrupted by the chiming of the clock, which they took as an opportunity to flee. They returned to the cliff and the stilt-house as the sun was rising, and Evi told the Owling that she'd seen everything she needed to see. The Owling demanded a big fat crow as payment. Evi spotted a crow in the tree behind them shot it down, and brought it to the Owling, who promptly ate it raw. Then Evi and Ilona set out for the mansion. On the way, she told Ilona that she torn between wanting to ask her why the fuck she'd brought her here and wanting to thank her a thousand times for allowing her to gain this information.

Back at the house, Evi set her arm properly with Nymph's help, and then took a nap while the others prepared for the party. Evi woke up and helped them finish preparing, then got dressed, and stood by the window and waited for Petrovics' arrival, not processing that how obsessively she was anticipating her arrival was a sign that she's falling for her, because Evi believes that she's not capable of falling in love after her first love ended badly. Nymph sat on the piano and played her violin for entertainment, and convinced Sofiya to try playing the piano. Sofiya failed miserably, and Nymph offered to help her learn in the future. Petrovics arrived, and she and Evi danced together romantically, then everyone started drinking and things got crazy. Everyone got drunk and started having sex, Evi performed a strip tease on the dining room table, and Nymph stripped naked and urged everyone but Evi to eat her out while she sat on the piano playing violin with her legs spread. Evi ended up making out with Petrovics on the couch (which is a big fucking deal, because Evi doesn't normally even allow people to kiss her, but Evi was too drunk to process how big of a deal it is). She and Petrovics had sex on the couch and Petrovics fell asleep, and meanwhile, Nymph and Sofiya retired to Nymph's bedroom for sex, while Ilona fell asleep in a corner with a bottle of wine. After everyone else was asleep, Nymph came downstairs, and drunk out of her mind, Evi asked Nymph to fuck her. Also drunk out of her mind, Nymph did, and they fell asleep together, with Petrovics on the floor beside them. The next morning, everyone woke up hungover, and embarrassed hugely by the fact that they'd had sex again, Evi and Nymph both kept trying to claim that they'd been the one having sex with Petrovics and that the other had just fallen asleep on the couch there coincidentally. Petrovics went home, and they all spent the rest of the day sleeping off hangovers.

At one point when they were both awake, Evi seduced Ilona while they were making lunch together, specifically with the intent of convincing Ilona to drink her menstrual blood in hopes that she too would become blooded. She (capital S) descended upon them, and Ilona's orgasm was accompanied by a splatter of menstrual blood that Ilona then began licking off of Evi's face ferally while Evi felt very pleased with herself. That night, Evi and Sofiya performed their third ritual, allowing their menstrual blood to fall into the snow, where it grew into a garden of clovers, which they ate, taking Her young into their bodies to gestate.

Session 11

Evi decided to spend a couple of days studying Myrna Foxlowe's life and belongings so she can impersonate her and get the estate legally signed over to herself and her companions through conning the lawyer with Erasmus' will, so she was pretty much out of commission working on that. Like, basically doing a deep dive - living in Myrna's dressing chamber, studying her journals, her letters, wearing her clothes, studying paintings of her from around the house, etc. So Nymph, Sofiya, and Ilona decided to go out to do some shopping and pick up some new leads. They went by a blacksmith's shop and bought some new gear (a bigger bow for Nymph, a punch-dagger for Sofiya to go with her brass knuckles), then they went to a stable and bought some horses for the party, both for faster movement and because being up on a horse keeps you a good distance away from people who could give you the plague. They stopped at a curiousity shop filled with junk that was run by a blind woman who was completely unhelpful as far as helping them find what they wanted to buy. They searched through the junk for some time, and Nymph bought a spyglass, three bear traps, and a bag of crushed shells. Sofiya bought a Romani amulet that was intended as a ward against evil, and Ilona bought a huge stack of books.

On the way to a gunsmith's (to buy guns for Sofiya), they saw an architecturally impossible tower on the riverbank. They found themselves enraptured by the tower, listening to the sound of waves (which, like, they're probably 200 miles from the nearest beach). Nymph snapped out of it first, and waking up was like the feeling of realizing that you're not a child any longer. I asked about that moment for Nymph, and E told me that it had been the first night Nymph worked as a prostitute, when she was 14ish). She saw that dreams were seeping out of Sofiya and Ilona's heads like silver-blue ink while they stared at the tower. Using her staff and a bottle, she captured one of Sofiya's dreams (a dream of her childhood best friend who she visited Voivodja with when she was young, who she hasn't been in contact with for years). After harvesting the dream, she tried to wake Sofiya and Ilona up, but they wouldn't stir until suddenly they woke up out of the revery several minutes later.

Sofiya's waking memory was the day that she realized no one was going to take her side and defend her from the other children's abuse, and Ilona's was the day her father died. Intrigued by the tower, they decided to explore it. They climbed over the railing at the edge of town and climbed the stairs that circled the tower. The stairs were made of parchment (that miraculously, held their weight), and were covered in writing in Czech, Slovak, German, Spanish, and finally Duvan'ku, the languages shifting as you moved up higher. They read the writing as they slowly moved upward and found the story of a woman called Marija Shuskin (who Nymph knew to be a pagan goddess who people had been worshipping from out of the blue over the past few years), who had been raised by wolves and when she entered society, everything went wrong for her. She fell in love with the moon, but the moon betrayed her, tortured her beneath the earth, and Marija Shuskin wept for one thousand years. They then encountered a section they couldn't read because no one in the party knows Spanish. When it picked up in Duvan'ku, they found the middle of a section about a woman with skin made of parchment who could pierce the earth, and whose existence was wrong, trapped in spirals of madness. At the top, they opened the door of the tower (which was made of impossibly solid parchment, just like the rest of the tower). From inside, their favorite smells wafted out. The ocean breeze for Nymph, gingerbread for Ilona, and the smells of the home of a Voivodjan vampire for Sofiya. Inside the tower, it was too warm for their winter clothes, so they took them off and started exploring.

In the tower, they found a 10 year old girl in a white dress with blank white eyes who was dreaming, her dreams spread out around her like silver ink, or moonlight. Nymph spoke to her, but the girl didn't respond, so they moved past the girl and looked over the edge of the landing they were standing on. Below, they saw endless floors, filled with gleaming light that looked like gold and diamonds. Their dreams were projected on the walls of the tower. Nymph's dream of becoming a cat and living for a day as a cat. Ilona's nightmare of being hunted through the halls of the Bloodworth Manor while all of her friends are dead. Sofiya's nightmare of a woman whose face wasn't visible throwing Sofiya's childhood best friend into a fire, with Sofiya feeling as if she was responsible. (This childhood best friend, by the way, is Marie, R's original character, the butcher/serial killer who Evi handed over to the Inquisition for money). As they headed down the stairs, everyone had to make saves vs. Magic. Nymph was the only one who saved. (Well, Sofiya got a partial save but she was still affected by what happened, she just saw it as a little more ominous and heard crying from the base of the tower). Nymph saw the tower for what it truly was - an empty space, parchment covered in mad mathematical scrawlings. Meanwhile, Sofiya and Ilona saw the tower as full of more treasure than they could ever possibly carry back. They saw golden statues eating a feast of jewels at a silver table, and started grabbing everything that wasn't bolted down. Ilona dismantled a golden statue and shoved it in her backpack, while Sofiya grabbed jewels by the handful.

Nymph saw what was actually happening. They were shoving handfuls of nothing into their backpack, flailing around at the air, stealing nothing. But Nymph being Nymph, she decided to let them go and see how things evolved if she let their madness run its course. I had E start narrating nightmares that were playing through Nymph's head, all of increasing intensity. First, she described Nymph at home in Innsmouth, finding that all her friends and family had been killed. Then tripping over her friends' bodies in the Bloodworth Manor while being pursued by Penelope Foxlowe. Then, finally a dream of being dissected by Evi, the way Evi had dissected Agnes Gooder. They moved down to a lower level, and Sofiya and Ilona thought they saw countless golden idols on a shelf. They stole the idols while Nymph watched them grasp at the air and shove nothing into their backpack. Another floor down, Nymph saw three dreaming children between the ages of 7 and 13, their dreams like a cloud of silver-black ink around them. Ilona and Sofiya saw the children as statues wearing golden robes and diamond jewelry. Sofiya stole the necklaces and Ilona took the robe off of one of the statues and shoved it in her bag. (Which, of course, was Sofiya grabbing at a boy's neck and Ilona tearing the dress off a dreaming girl and shoving it in her backpack). And this brought them into the dreams.

Overwhelmed by the swirling mass of dreams they were perceiving all at once, Sofiya perceived the world as a kaleidoscope of color, and she curled up into a ball and started crying. Ilona freaked the fuck out and started clawing at the walls, trying to rip through the parchment. Nymph sat down on the steps and smoked her pipe and petted her dog, watching to see what would happen, only planning to step in if something went horribly wrong. Ilona ripped up her fingers, then started bashing her head against the wall, trying desperately to get through it. And Nymph kept watching. Sofiya started crawling towards Nymph, and Nymph tried to touch her, comfort her, but Sofiya perceived Nymph's touch as an intrusion into her kaleidoscopic world and scuttled towards the edge of the stairs at max speed. Realizing that this was her time to step in (nearly 30 minutes after the fit began), Nymph cast Sleep, knocking them both out and dragging them out of the dreamstuff while being careful to avoid touching it herself. Over the course of the next 30ish minutes, she dragged them up the stairs to the top level, dressed them in their winter clothes, and opened the door. During that 30 minutes, Nymph found herself overwhelmed by a nearly suicidal depression that emanated from the depths of the tower. The girl on the upper landing was no longer dreaming, and was slumped over on the floor. Nymph tried to rouse her, but she found that the girl was dead. Long dead. So she cast Speak With Dead, and asked the girl what the tower really is. The girl told her that the tower is Marija Shuskin's body, the crucible for her thoughts. Nymph asked the girl what Marija Shuskin is, and the girl told her that Marija Shuskin is humanity's collective pain from the war and the plague, their madness, incarnated as a deific urge of some sort. The girl returned to her state of death and Nymph got the others outside.

On the stairs, Nymph could hear rusalka singing, bathing in the river, and she sat and tried to clear her head while she waited for her spell to wear off. Sofiya and Ilona woke up, and Ilona was overtaken with a babbling, rambling, gibbering madness. Total panic over the situation, absolute confusion about the nature of reality itself. Ilona was sane, but very disoriented, and her amulet had gotten burned out, protecting her from the madness. Nymph managed to calm Ilona down enough to get her home, she was still clearly not in her right mind. Still a bit gibbery and wide-eyed and bizarre. When they got home, Nymph put Ilona to bed, and then rested for a while. Studied her books, played violin for a while. Meanwhile, Sofiya (whose emotions are all out of whack since she became Blooded) got the idea that Evi was somehow involved in Marie's death, or had known her in some way. She went to Evi (who was in full Myrna-impersonation mode), and asked her if she'd known Marie. Evi lied (and damn convincingly, playing up her usual callous and cold nature), but accidentally slipped by mentioning Marie's last name, which Sofiya couldn't remember with how disjointed her memories had gotten after all the dream chaos in the tower. Sofiya went to Nymph and told her that she suspected that Evi was lying, and her and Nymph made plans to investigate in the morning.

In the morning, everyone was awakened by screaming coming from Ilona's room. In a panic, everyone ran to her room (everyone but Nymph with weapons) to see what was the matter. When they got there, they found Ilona standing in her bedroom in her dressing gown, screaming at the wall. Evi went in and tried to calm her down, speaking to her in Yiddish. Ilona stopped screaming, but then she got down on all fours and started snapping at Evi like a dog. Evi called Nymph into the room and Nymph cast Sleep on Ilona. Then, with the others' help, Evi tied Ilona to the bed for her own safety, and told the others that if she wasn't better in a few days, she'd kill her. This disturbed Nymph and Sofiya, who wanted to send her to an insane asylum if she didn't recover instead. Evi locked Ilona in her room and went back to her books, and Sofiya and Nymph set out to get some answers. They finished a little bit of shopping they'd wanted to do the day before but had run out of time for because of the tower incident. In an apothecary's shop, they were interrupted by the Minister of Quarantine, who was shutting down the shop by order of the Ministry of Quarantine for unsafe conduct. They hurried out of the shop out of fear of the Minister, then set off to bars to pick up information. At the bars, Sofiya stayed outside and read a book while watching their horses, and Nymph went in, put on the charm, and learned a lot. In the first bar, the barkeep told her about the already-legendary wedding dress the Countess de Reya had commissioned. She then talked to a circle of people who were telling stories to a table. A woman who claimed to be a druid said that once the table had been a talking tree named Gregory who had been her friend, but he had been cut down and turned into a table and now is incredibly lonely, so they come to the bar each day and tell him stories. She asked them about Evi and Marie, but no one knew anything.

Nymph told the story of the impossible tower to the table, and listened as the others told the table about a book in the library of Litnovisk that can teleport you to Carcosa, cannibals who live at the vineyard outside town, and the Witch of the Sheltering Mists, a legendary witch who lives in a house of horrors in the Upper Districts that's often unguarded at night. She bought the table people a few drinks, then ran into a very drunk magic-user who was performing magic tricks, rambling about the evils of both the Catholic Union and the Protestant League, and telling Nymph about how the University of Wroclaw is kidnapping and executing plague victims. While Nymph was in the bar, Sofiya watched soldiers pursue a famous thief across the rooftops. The thief doubled back and killed the soldiers, then ran off. Nymph left the bar, and she and Sofiya left in a hurry to avoid being blamed for the dead soldiers. They went to another bar, and at this one Nymph played pool with a few patrons and got a bit tipsy while swapping ghost stories. She told the story of the tower, and her companions told her about a cult that worships a Blood Moth that disappeared an entire village recently, living graveyards that spirit people away to the world of the dead, an orphanage in Staroznka where children had resorted to cannibalism during an awful snowstorm, and a strange experience one of the patrons had had in the town of Dunskhove (my Dunnsmouth) in the mountains, where the villagers had tried to convince him to join a spider cult. After losing one game and winning another (making back the money she'd bet on the first game), Nymph chatted with the barkeep, who told her about barrow-aelfs who know blood magic. As Nymph was getting ready to leave, a Japanese woman with bone spikes growing from her shoulders, and with no eyes, who was followed by three Cronenbergian lumps of animated flesh, introduced herself to Nymph as Midalka Kawakami, the Witch of the Sheltering Mists.

Midalka told Nymph that she could smell the touch of witchcraft on her, and told her that since she didn't have a title as a witch yet, she would give her one and make sure it went down in the legends. Midalka named Nymph the Witch of the Stormy Seas, and offered to let her come visit her at her house in the Upper Districts, where she would induct her into the greater mysteries, the magics from before the beginning of recorded history, if Nymph was interested. Nymph being Nymph, she was extremely interested, and told her that she would come at the first opportunity. Nymph asked her if she knew anything about Evi and Marie, and Midalka told her that Evi had turned Marie over to the Inquisition for coin, and that Marie had been a serial killer. Nymph left the bar and tried to lie to Sofiya to protect Evi, telling her that Marie had been turned over to the Inquisition by a travelling companion and that Marie had once travelled with Evi, but that these instances were completely unrelated. Sofiya easily saw through Nymph's lie, and Nymph fessed up, telling her what she'd learned and begging her not to hurt Evi. Sofiya told her that she didn't have any plans to hurt Evi, especially since she's still, frustratingly, in love with her. She made reference to that she wanted her relationship with Evi to be just friendship and sex, like she has with Nymph, which made Nymph slightly sad since she's at the moment feeling like she might be falling for Sofiya, but she played it off and Sofiya didn't notice. Nymph then told Sofiya that she was going to meet with some friends at night, trying to play it off, but Sofiya saw through her lie again, understanding that she was going to see Midalka. Nymph expected Sofiya to be opposed to it, but Sofiya was surprisingly supportive, and they rode back home together.

At home, Sofiya rested with a book for a while, and Nymph got set up for spell research, but decided to check on Ilona first. Ilona was remarkably lucid, and Nymph sat with her, talked to her. Ilona told her that the rope was tied to tight and it was hurting her, so Nymph unbound her right wrist, rubbed her wrist to restore circulation, then was about to bind her wrist again and move another limb when Ilona, who had only just been playing sweet and was still as mad as a hatter, grabbed Nymph by the hair and slammed her face against the headboard of the bed, breaking Nymph's nose. Meanwhile, Sofiya and Evi were in Myrna's dressing chamber, where Sofiya was telling Evi that she knew about what had happened with Marie, and that knowing about what happened gave her closure, especially since she'd also learned that Marie had been a serial killer. They talked a little while, and Evi (very dispassionately) told Sofiya that she enjoys how obviously in love with her Sofiya is. Across the hall, Nymph tried to get out of Ilona's grasp and kick her, but Ilona held on tight and bashed the side of Nymph's head against the headboard, nearly giving her a concussion. Hearing the chaos, Evi and Sofiya grabbed their guns and ran to Nymph's aid. Nymph tried to struggle some more, but Ilona was too strong for her and fucked her up further. The bed got flipped on its side in all the commotion. Evi rushed into the room and shot Ilona in the face, critically injuring her but miraculously not killing her, and freeing Nymph. Nymph cowered behind the bed, sobbing, and Sofiya begged Evi to erase the secret name of God from Ilona's body, destroying her. Evi refused, and instead urged Sofiya to put a bullet through her head. Sofiya did, taking off the entire top half of Ilona's head in the process.

Knowing that as a golem, Ilona will continue to regenerate unless the secret name of God scribed on her is wiped away, Evi bound and gagged Ilona and locked her in the cellar, hoping that the temporary death would act as a sort of 'reset' to cure her of her madness. Sofiya sat by the door as a guard for when Ilona woke up, and Nymph, not even knowing that Ilona is a golem, sat behind the wreckage of the bed, sobbing and bleeding, freaked out about the fact that Evi and Sofiya had just had to kill her friend. Evi asked Sofiya not tell Nymph the truth until they were sure that Ilona was going to come back right, then Evi went back upstairs and patched up Nymph's wounds, cleaned her up, calmed her down. This led into a very emotionally vulnerable Nymph coming onto Evi and the two of them having sex, which was (as usual) deeply awkward and uncomfortable for them both. Once she was cleaned up, Nymph made preparations to visit Midalka despite her current condition. Sofiya insisted on accompanying her at least to the edge of the property as a bodyguard, and in the carriage, Sofiya told Nymph the truth about Ilona's pending revival in hopes that it would make her feel better about what had happened, which it did. While they were riding through the Upper Districts, they saw a figure in a black cloak standing on the balcony of the supposedly abandoned Nautaline Palace, and discussed the possibility of investigating the place later. Sofiya dropped Nymph off and the coachman asked Sofiya why her friend wanted to go to the House of Horrors, because all that can come of that place is death. Sofiya bluffed, pretending that Nymph was a supernatural investigator who worked for the Minister of Quarantine who had been sent to make sure that proper quarantine procedures were being followed at the house. The coachman believed her, and Sofiya rode back to the house, where she assumed her vigil once more.

Nymph approached the House of Horrors, which is a massive black Japanese-style mansion situated in the middle of a ring of dead grass. Midalka answered the door before Nymph could even knock, telling her that she had expected her, or rather, had known that she was coming. Nymph noticed that Midalka's left arm was missing, replaced with a wooden prosthetic. Nymphtook off her coat and boots, and Midalka, feeling sorry for her because of her damaged face, used strange ancient flesh-crafting magic to restore Nymph's face. Midalka told Nymph that she had much to show her, and led her through halls decorated with paintings that depicted torture and mutilation as a form of religious ecstasy. She led Nymph into an amphitheatre lit with red fire where a naked woman ritually disemboweled herself while dozens of Cronenbergian flesh monstrosities watched. At the far end of the room, a woman wearing the visage of the goddess sat on a golden throne and watched the proceedings. Midalka asked Nymph how she felt about all of this, and Nymph told her that she was curious and amazed, not at all scared, like Midalka had expected her to be. The disemboweling woman finished disemboweling herself and collapsed on the floor. Nymph asked Midalka if she was dead, and Midalka told her that the disemboweling woman had ascended, that she was still alive, and the disembowling had been part of a dark ritual the woman was performing that would make her immune to poisons. The Cronenbergian flesh monstrosities carried the disemboweled woman into another room, and the goddess-woman descended from her throne, wiping away the blood that was the goddess' visage. Midalka introduced the goddess-woman to Nymph as Vatra Motyl, a famous courtesan who had serviced countless kings and queens, and who risked a lot by coming out to the House of Horrors to assist in this ritual.

Vatra Motyl asked Nymph if she was going to 'have her' tonight, which Nymph didn't understand, and flabbergasted, tried to flirt because 'Oh my god this is the most beautiful woman I've ever seen'. Midalka told Vatra not to rush Nymph into a decision, especially since she doesn't understand what's being offered yet, and Vatra apologized, then returned to her throne, reassuming the visage of the goddess using the disemboweled woman's blood. Midalka told Nymph that she would explain everything after a short interlude. She ushered in 'the freaks', acting almost as a ringmaster in a circus, and a parade of more humanoid body horror mutants entered the room and performed basically a twisted variety show for Nymph, where they performed parlor tricks, sang, danced, etc. There was a brief interlude in which dozens of people with weird mutant genitalia displayed their strangeness and then had sex on stage, then a woman with the head of a crow recited poetry in an ancient language from before recorded history. After the show, Midalka escorted Nymph out into a courtyard to explain everything. She showed Nymph a mutilated dog-man in a silver cage who she called the Tortured Man (a holy title), explaining that the Tortured Man represented the body's possibility for transformation and transcendence, ushered along by the hands of Midalka and her coterie of witches. She explained to Nymph that she was a practitioner of an ancient magic from before the Elder Things gave humans what we know as magic today, called the Crimson Rituals, where witches sacrifice parts of their body to an ancient goddess whose legends permeate all cultures (among her names are Lilith, the Virgin Mary, Lucifer, etc.) for power. She took off her kimono and showed Nymph the scars all over body (scars which she explained could not be healed, even by supernatural means).

Nymph told her that she wants this power, and Midalka suggested that first she could give up an eye, which would allow her to see through illusions. Nymph considered sacrificing something more considerable, especially when Midalka mentioned that larger sacrifices produced greater power, but thinking about what had nearly happened to her in the impossible tower with the illusions, Nymph decided to go with the eye and maybe pursue more in the future. Midalka promised her greatness and led her back into the amphitheatre, where the goddess-woman undressed and put on the articles of her office - a gas mask-like helm with crystal lenses, and a cloak covered on the inside with gleaming pinpricks of star-like light. Midalka drew out the boundaries of the ritual space in blood, then helped Nymph undress and scribed arcane sigils on her naked flesh in blood. She told Nymph that the ritual began with a sexual offering of supplication and devotion made to the goddess, so Nymph knelt before the throne and ate the goddess-woman out. When she finished, the goddess-woman rose from her throne and told Nymph to sit, then fucked Nymph senseless. Midalka helped Nymph relocate to a ritually prepared chair and the goddess-woman took back her position on the throne. Midalka handed Nymph a ritual knife, designed to be just the perfect length to cut out an eye. Nymph began cutting out her own right eye, and the goddess-woman masturbated while she watched. Gritting her teeth through the pain, Nymph severed the optic nerve and removed her eye from the socket. Midalka took it from her, and presented it to the goddess, who ate the eye. Midalka then conjured an illusion to prove to Nymph that if she looked only with her missing eye, she could see through illusions. Losing blood fast, Nymph relocated to a bed in another part of the House of Horrors, and Midalka gave her the medical attention she needed while Nymph slipped into unconsciousness.

Session 12

In the morning, Evi and Sofiya were woken up by Lazarus (Nymph's dog) barking at their door. Evi got up and let him in and Lazarus started barking at the balcony window. Evi crept over to the window and saw a thief wearing gray leather armor with a brooch pin with an upside-down 'u' symbol on it climbing the drain pipe. She told Sofiya to hide in the curtains, then sneakily grabbed her gun and her dressing gown, sent Lazarus into the hall, and cracked the balcony door open, and waited for the thief to reach the top, hiding in the curtains on the other side. When the thief reached the top, Evi put her gun to his head and told him that she was putting half the amount of pressure needed to fire on the trigger and that if he didn't talk she'd apply the rest of the needed pressure. She interrogated him, and learned that he wasn't working alone, that he was with an organization called the Church of Rot that's looking for the Necklace of the Sleepless Queen. During all this, Sofiya ran off and got dressed, got her guns, to aid in the intimidation. The thief told Evi that if she kills him, more from his organization will come, and then she started asking him what his people want. He refused to tell her, at which point Sofiya got back and put two more guns in his face. The thief started gibbering, screaming, and hissing, and Evi blew his brains out. With Sofiya's help, she searched his pockets, and found a religious tract that talked about a god of the earth who spreads decay. Evi locked the window and (without even removing the body) went back to her Myrna persona, preparing for the day's con. Baffled, Sofiya returned to her vigil at Ilona's door.

Meanwhile, Nymph was awakened in the House of Horrors by a flesh lump knocking at her door, inviting her to breakfast. She put on a dressing gown that Midalka had left for her (bumping into the wall a bunch in the process, since she's not used to the lack of depth perception yet), and followed the flesh lump to Midalka's dining chambers, in awe of everything, feeling like a new world had been opened to her with the black rites she's now participating in. Walking through the house, she saw shadows - both erotic and horrific, often both at once - through the paper walls in the morning light. She passed through a painting gallery dominated by a massive painting of a skinned woman having sex with a flesh lump, then entered the dining room, where Midalka met her with tea. They talked a bit. Mostly, Nymph ranted about how this moment feels like the first time she saw past the void, when she devoted herself to the dark gods of Innsmouth, and how excited she is to learn more, while Midalka tried to get her to calm down and made her promise to take this slowly. Once Nymph was calmer, Midalka told her that her Benefactor (who she called 'She Who Bleeds') had brought a meal for her that the servants were preparing. The flesh lumps then brought in a platter bearing a marinaded and baked fetus and a boiled umbilical cord. Nymph began eating the fetus, and began bleeding anew, the blood from between her legs running down her legs and spreading across the floor. Through the roof (which seemed to disappear to her), she could see Her looking down at her, smiling on her as the sun, an effigy of Her pain. Nymph felt compelled to forget her table manners and feast on the fetus with her hands and teeth. She sawed off the head and bit it open, swallowed the brains whole, then regained her compsure and finished her meal calmly. Midalka sent her home in one of her couches when she was finished, and Nymph generally was overwhelmed with awe at the world.

Performing her vigil, Sofiya heard a clicking behind Ilona's door and went into the cellar to find out what was going on. She found that Ilona's head was beginning to regrow, and that the noise was just a rat gnawing on a piece of wood from a broken chair. She locked the door, and that's about the point that Nymph arrived home. She came downstairs to greet Sofiya, who told her that Ilona hadn't woken up yet, and filled her in on the situation with the thief. She suggested that since Nymph knows a bit about medicine, maybe she should check out the body and see if she can find anything from it that she and Evi hadn't. Nymph changed into a stained lab coat and retrieved the body from Evi's room. Evi was so absorbed in her preparations for her con that she didn't even really acknowledge Nymph's presence. Nymph set up a little 'lab' in a spare bedroom, and stripped the corpse naked while Sofiya watched. She found that the thief's leg was heavily gangrenous, and that he was covered in tattoos. In additional the normal underworld-type tattoos, she found a tattoo on the thief's shoulder of an eye surrounded by mycelium. On his back was tattooed what Nymph realized was a map of an unknown location. She cut the body open to check if everything internally was normal, and found standard human internal organs. Unbeknowst to Nymph, the thief had the Red Death incubating in his blood. She saved though, so she ended up just a carrier. (They don't know this yet, btw, so Nymph is in for a nasty surprise down the line when she learns that she's infecting everyone who comes in contact with her blood). Sofiya and Nymph carried the body downstairs, and unfortunately, she failed her save against the Red Death for coming in contact with the thief's blood, so in three days, she's in for an even nastier surprise. They dumped the body in the cesspit, then took a bath together to clean off. Sofiya went back to her vigil, and Nymph went back to her room to work on her spellbook and her art.

Prepared for her big con, Evi - performing as Myrna Foxlowe - set out for the city on horseback. On the way in, she saw a bunch of beggars with the Red Death trying to enter the city, held back by soldiers with pikes who were telling them they weren't allowed to enter by order of the Minister of Quarantine. She found the office of the Foxlowes' lawyer, whose name is Abraham Rooke. A servant boy tied up her horse and told her that his master would likely be happy to see her, despite the fact that she was calling unannounced. She entered the law office, and was sent upstairs, to Abraham's private office. The aging bookish Abraham told her that he wanted to catch up over coffee before they talked business. He asked her about the rumours about her family, which she said were mostly untrue, except the rumour about Erasmus's illness. Abraham asked her if it was catching, and she assured him it wasn't, then he asked if it was going to be fatal, seeming the slightest bit excited about that prospect. Evi told him that she didn't know yet, and then the conversation moved on to other things. Abraham showed her a book that he'd bought while travelling in Argenti where the sides of the pages were printed such that if you bent the book slightly and angled it just right, you could see an image of a demonic satyr performing cunnilingus on a woman. At this point, Evi started to realize there was something more to Myrna and Abraham's relationship than the strictly professional.

Pulling stories out of her ass, Evi waxed poetic about a night with Abraham at the opera in Argenti, which turned out to have actually been something that happened. Abraham asked her if she'd like to recreate an aspect of the night at the opera - which she agreed to - and Abraham told her that he'd bought props to reproduce it. He handed Evi a black and white checkerboard domino mask and put on a black mask with a long nose. Evi lifted her skirts, and Abraham fucked her with the nose of the mask while masturbating until he came on her shoes. Evi hid behind the mask and tried her best to hide her disgust at what was going on. After Abraham finished and took his mask off, she insisted on keeping hers on. She told Abraham that Erasmus was likely dying, which excited Abraham. He asked her if they could possibly be married when she's a widow, and she told him that after her mourning, she'd answer him, because a lot has changed within her since their visit to the Far East. They then returned to business, and Evi told Abraham that Erasmus had requested changes in his will. He wanted all of his present inheritors disinherited, and wanted everything willed to a 'cousin' named Lilith Holtzmann (one of Evi's identities), who Erasmus is "probably buggering behind my back". Abraham insinuated that Erasmus is only interested in young boys, which made Evi genuinely laugh. Abraham tried to convince her to allow him to modify the will so that she would still be an inheritor while the rest was left to Lilith Holtzmann, but Evi declined, telling him that she'd take in the girl as her ward, so she can thus take advantage of her newly-inherited fortune. Abraham agreed, modified the will, and had Evi sign in three places. She forged Myrna's signature, and Abraham made her promise before she left to visit him during her mourning so he could "fulfill Erasmus's conjugal duties for him". Evi promised, then left the office in disgust.

Evi then set out to hire some guards for the mansion, and a pair of coachmen to replace the ones who had been stitched to the horse. She hired some people, then commissioned a fancy coffin for 'Erasmus', with the intention of killing Abraham, mutilating his body, and passing it off as Erasmus's body in a coffin that's been sealed to prevent the spread of his disease, then fake Myrna's suicide. She bought some prussic acid to poison Abraham with, and masked the purchase by buying other household supplies from the apothecary along with the prussic acid. She rode back to the manor, arriving around nightfall, and began brewing coffee for a late-night meeting with Abraham. One decanter poisoned with prussic acid, the other normal coffee that she could drink to avoid Abraham's suspicion. The moon rose, and Evi and Sofiya went out into the courtyard to perform their blood rituals together. They masturbated side by side, feeling the unknowable thing growing inside of their bodies, and Evi was overcome by Her joy, while Sofiya was overcome by Her pain. They moved further apart, and Sofiya finished while crying and screaming into the snow. Evi finished while laughing, then ate the snow that she'd bled on, and rubbed it all over her body, ingesting some of Sofiya's blood in the process. She succeeded her save, so she's just a carrier for the Red Death, but she doesn't know that. After they finished their ritual, they went back inside. Evi went to work preparing for her rendezvous with Abraham, and Sofiya returned to her vigil. (Meanwhile, Nymph played her violin in the bathtub)

After a little while waiting, Sofiya heard a faint knocking from the inside of the cellar door. She opened the door, and Ilona was awake but very weak, begging Sofiya to let her out, claiming that she didn't remember anything of the past few days but dreaming of a great plateau where shadows danced and great night-things flew through the sky. Sofiya agreed to let her out, but was cautious, because she could still see a hint of madness in Ilona's eyes. Ilona could barely stand by herself, and managed to get up, but had to support herself with the wall, then Sofiya. Sofiya filled her in on what had happened, and Ilona babbled about death and resurrection and dreams, while devolved a bit into mad gibbering that quickly passed. Ilona asked Sofiya if she could carry her upstairs, and Sofiya did, noticing that Ilona was even lighter than she'd been before, and that her skin was colder, less human-feeling. Ilona told her that she wanted to sleep "because dreaming is the only thing that feels natural right now", so Sofiya tucked her in and went to talk to Nymph about the situation. Nymph had been afraid that Ilona wouldn't actually come back to life, so she was relieved that she had and that she seemed to be doing better. Still though, Nymph couldn't stop babbling about the wonders of pain and the dark rituals she'd performed, and the beauty of the expansiveness of reality. She and Sofiya went to tell Evi about Ilona. Nymph couldn't manage to explain properly, so Sofiya had to explain. Evi didn't seem to care either way about anything, and suggested that they should lock her in her room in case the madness returns. Sofiya locked Ilona in, and then talked a little with Nymph about how focused and strange Evi has been lately, about how Evi has been scaring her a little. They both went back to their own rooms and settled in for the night, and Evi set out for her midnight rendezvous.

Evi dressed in one of Myrna's dressing gowns, bringing the coffee with her, and faked tears, because her plan was to pretend that Erasmus had died if anyone questioned her. She rode to Abraham's house and went to the stable to tie up her horse. All the servants were asleep, except for a teenage stablegirl who was surprised that Myrna had come by so late at night. Getting way into character, Evi was rude to the stablegirl, telling her to forget that she'd been there, and all but threatening her if she didn't. The stablegirl tied up Evi's horse, and Evi went around the back of the house and up some stairs towards a window she saw light coming through. Peeking through the window, she saw Abraham writing in a journal. He heard her moving and said "Myrna, is that you?". Evi said it was, and Abraham let her in. Inside, Abraham was worried when he saw the tears. Evi told him that they were faked, false tears for dead Erasmus, and that she was actually overjoyed. Abraham was overjoyed too, and suggested that they should elope. Evi agreed, since it provided a mundane explanation for when Abraham disappeared. Abraham wanted to leave quickly, but Evi told him they should drink some coffee first, which Abraham agreed to. She poured Abraham coffee from the poisoned decanter, then claimed she thought she'd heard someone on the stairs. She poured herself coffee from the unpoisoned decanter while Abraham peered out the window, then sat with him on a loveseat and whispered affectionate words to him while he drank his coffee. Abraham finished his coffee, and he told Evi that they needed to make preparations to leave. Overplaying her hand, Evi said that she had some clothes and things she'd left at Abraham's house, working on a hunch. Abraham was confused, saying that she hadn't left anything there, and Evi tried to play it off with seductiveness, but Abraham wouldn't drop it, pushing for an answer.

Feeling way too confident, Evi grabbed Abraham and slammed him against the wall, telling him that she's not Myrna, and that he's about to die. Abraham struggled and tried to get Evi to give up her real identity to him, but Evi wouldn't budge, saying that she's no one, just a shadow passing through his life. This enraged Abraham, and he managed to worm his way out of Evi's grasp. She tried to grab him again, but Abraham grabbed hold of her broken arm and twisted, incapacitating Evi with pain. Abraham made a dash for the door, and was already halfway down the stairs by the time Evi was able to push past the pain and stand up. Outside, Abraham was shouting and running towards the stables, and Evi took after him, fishing her scalpel out of the pocket of her dressing gown. She chased him across the yard, and Abraham pulled open the door of the stable, then collapsed, expiring from the poison. The little stablegirl saw Evi with the scalpel, so Evi put the scalpel through the stablegirl's eye. Lights started coming on in the house, and Evi realized that the only way she could get away with this was by killing everyone in the house, making it look like thieves in the night had killed them. The lights had all come on upstairs, so Evi raced up to the third floor and was shot in the shoulder by a servant with a pistol who was screaming about how he'd seen her kill the stablegirl and was going to make her pay for killing his daughter. Two more servants rushed Evi - the maid with a knife and the coachman with a dirk, covering the stablegirl's father's reload. Evi ran at them, but the maid grabbed her wrist and knocked the scalpel out of her hand, then stabbed her in the shoulder with her knife.

Evi scrambled for the scalpel and slashed at the maid's ankles, wounding her. Evi rolled out of the way of the coachman's dirk, then jumped up to her feet and tried to stab him, but the coachman swept her legs out from under her and knocked her down. The maid raced forward and put her knife through Evi's eye, killing her. And that was where we stopped, with the rest of the party completely unaware of what had happened, and the players desperately trying to think through ways they could avoid losing the house with Evi dead.

Session 13

We opened today with the morning after Evi died. Sofiya and Nymph dreamed strange dreams about being tortured by Evi and torturing Evi. Nymph woke up a little earlier than the others, and went out to patrol the grounds and set up the bear traps she'd bought. She found that the topiaries were rustling without wind, and that inside of them there was a lump of necrotic flesh growing. The pond didn't reflect the sky properly, reflecting a slightly distorted/different sky instead, and she found a strange tree with unnaturally red leaves in the center of a grove of trees leafless for the winter. She examined the tree and found a heart with 'Erasmus and Myrna' written in it that was carved into the tree. The crevice of the carving with filled with dried blood. On the way back into the house, Nymph spotted a thief on her way off the property. She shot the thief with her bow, injuring the thief badly, then ran across the yard and held the dying thief down with her boot while interrogating her. The thief told Nymph that she was a freelancer who'd been hired to steal the necklace, which she'd actually gotten but had dropped it when she fell after getting shot. Nymph pulled the arrow out of the thief's back and put it through her neck, severing her spinal column, then started picking through her pockets before the thief had even finished dying. She found orders to steal the necklace from someone named Theodolphus Calhoun, a note promising that Calhoun would pay the thief 10,000 silver for retrieving the necklace, and a train ticket to Nuremburg, that the thief had bought to hop a train if shit went south. She got a shovel from the shed and started digging a hole to stash the corpse in, but was interrupted by the sound of horses coming up the road towards the Bloodworth Estate.

Sofiya woke up and looked out the window to figure out what was with the noise. She saw two men on horses and four men in armor with weapons on their belts moving towards the house, and they both panicked, forgetting completely that Evi had hired two coachmen and three guards who she'd ordered to come by the house in the morning. Nymph crept around the side of the house with an arrow nocked in her bow, ready to attack if she had to (and readying a Sleep spell for if it came to that). Sofiya started hiding knives up her sleeve, then heard the coachman knocking and apologizing loudly for waking them so early but he needed to speak to Mistress Myrna Foxlowe or Master Erasmus Foxlowe. Realizing that the panic was likely for nothing, Sofiya went downstairs and answered the door. The gaggle of men told her that they were the workers who 'Myrna' had hired, and Sofiya told them that Myrna had gone out and probably wouldn't be back for a couple of days. She told them that Erasmus had recently lost his mind due to a plague and killed himself, and that she was a friend of the family who was visiting to help Myrna through this difficult time. One of the guardsmen asked Sofiya if she could give him something to eat because it's been a few days since he's eaten, and she went inside to make food for the workers. Nymph put away her bow and showed herself, introducing herself as Lucia Holtzmann, the supposed sister of Evi's assumed identity, Lilith Holtzmann. She sent the coachmen to get set up in the coachhouse where they were going to live, and chatted with the guards. The self-appointed leader of the guards was an old soldier named Gunther who had returned very disillusioned from the Thirty Years War. He was accompanied by his army buddy and his two sons, one of whom had also been a soldier and the other of whom had been training to become a soldier but decided not to join up after how fucked up his father was when he came back.

Sofiya and Nymph had breakfast with the guards and arranged shifts for them - the veteran soldiers patrolling the grounds at night and the younger less experienced soldiers patrolling during the day. They sent the two older soldiers on their way with orders to return at night, and sent the younger soldiers to start their shift, then went to check on Ilona. Ilona waxed poetic about dreams, explaining that she didn't know how to tell the difference between dreams and reality anymore, since she'd seen through to the 'opposite side of dream' during the time she spent dead. She told them that she was worried about Evi, and Nymph and Sofiya tried to reassure her that Evi disappeared like this sometimes and that she'd turn up eventually and everything would be alright. They talked a little more, and Ilona recited a poem about a beadle and a fair maiden on the Isle of Wight, and then began wiping her face clean on the drapes, which confirmed to Nymph and Sofiya that she wasn't well enough to be let out of her room yet. Leaving Ilona locked in her room, Nymph and Sofiya got ready to go out to gather information about the Church of Rot. They took the coach out and picked up groceries, then sent the coachmen back to the house with the groceries and set out to the bars. They found a multi-level bar where Nymph started on the top floor and Sofiya started on the bottom floor and they worked their way through talking to people and picking up info until they met in the middle.

On the top floor, Nymph talked with a woman who was being hit over the head with a broom by the barkeep. The woman told her about cults in the hills, and about Salt Nymphs in a nearby canton who are able to talk knowledgeably about pretty much any subject. Meanwhile, Sofiya swapped adventuring stories with a group of grizzled old men who told her about undead barrow-aelfs who practice blood magic. She asked them about the Church of Rot, and one of the men told her about a public chapel the Church of Rot had in the Lower Districts. She and Nymph moved on to the second level and the third level, respectively. Nymph spent a while playing pool and chatting with people about the Church of Rot. One of her fellow gamesters told her that he'd heard the Church is a front for a criminal organization, and that catacombs beneath the public chapel are a network of tunnels that stretches beneath the city and opens up in various places. Meanwhile, Sofiya spent a long time chatting with a teenage barkeep who had a lot to tell her about Serena de Reyes' wedding dress and little also, except an unverified rumour about a serial killer who the girl's friend believed kills to protect his family from the plague with blood magic. Realizing that the girl didn't have much to tell her, Sofiya moved on and sat down in a corner of the room where a heavily tattooed naked woman was dancing on a table. She sat and talked with the people watching, and heard more rumours about the serial killer, many of which were debunked by a mysterious figure hiding in the shadows, who claimed that the killer is actually a woman, and who Sofiya slowly realized was Petrovics going incognito. Meanwhile, Nymph chatted with a woman who she wanted to sleep with but was totally striking out with, who told her a few useless rumours and sent her on her way.

While Sofiya was listening to a story about a temple where a cult that worships a Blood Moth experiments on people, Nymph came down to the second floor and sat down in the corner opposite Sofiya. She saw that the dancing woman's tattoos were actually detailed writings in the Duvan'ku language, detailing sections of the cult's history, and the woman's history as a someone investigating the cult who had then been drawn into the cult. A story was tattooed on her back about a mountain that no one climbs where time doesn't flow properly, and tattooed around her right ankle were the words 'White Mountain'. Sofiya told Nymph that they should probably go, and Nymph, enraptured by the dancing woman and wanting to know more about the cult Evi had been investigating so obsessively, slipped the dancing girl a coin and asked her to come by the house later that night so they could 'talk'. Leaving the bar, Nymph and Sofiya went to the Church of Rot's chapel and sat in on a service. It was basically a standard Catholic service but with all the references to God and Jesus being replaced with strange ramblings about mycelium that lives beneath the earth that will one day cover the world and connect all living things. They joined the congregation in a hymn about mushroom men, then went to talk to the preacher, who was standing in front of a massive stained-glass window that depicted a naked woman cowering in awe of a mile-high pillar of mycelium. Nymph and Sofiya pretended that they were potentially interested in joining the cult, and the preacher acted like the most archetypal, like, Baptist minister, but as a cultist who worshipped the personification of decay.

When he discerned that they were adventurers, the preacher told them that he had something special to show them. He took them into a room where carvings of mycelium covered the walls, ceiling, floors. In the center of the mycelium was a hollowed out slot where the preacher explained was supposed to rest a casket that had been stolen by the Tenebrous Hand last month. He tried to convince them to venture into the Tenebrous Hand's vaults and retrieve the casket, but they turned him down and Sofiya told him about how she and Evi had tried to make contact with the Tenebrous Hand and found that they'd been wiped out by a sealed evil of some sort. The preacher thanked them for the information and told them that he'd send some agents to retrieve the casket, which got them scared. They left the church in a hurry, and went to check the seals on the Tenebrous Hand's compound. They found that the fence had been broken down, the dogs killed, and the door of the Dog and Bastard opened. They smelled a horrible rot coming from inside, and then heard something coming around the corner. They drew their weapons, but when they saw a horribly mutated man with a tentacle for a head, they decided to run away. They ran all the way back home, and then settled in for the evening. Nymph studied her spellbooks, and Sofiya went to go talk to Ilona. Ilona tried to convince Sofiya to let her out of her room, and Sofiya almost agreed, but then Ilona started babbling incoherently, and Sofiya told her she needed a little more time. Sofiya initiated sex with Ilona, hoping that it would help her calm down, but kept a knife up her sleeve in case Ilona turned on her, which she (fortunately) didn't. Sofiya debated about whether to or not to spend the night in Ilona's room, and decided not to when Ilona told her that she couldn't promise that she wouldn't try to kill her in the night, so Sofiya returned to her own room and went to bed.

The dancing woman who Nymph had solicited came to the house, and told Nymph that she'd seen her reading the words written on her body. She told Nymph her Duvan'ku name - Kursk'Vol - and the two carried on a bit of a conversation in Duvan'ku. Kursk'Vol told Nymph that she wasn't used to such pleasant treatment from her tricks, and Nymph told her that she interested her on a level beyond just the sexual. Kursk'Vol then pushed Nymph down into her bathtub-bed and started fucking her. She sang a song of the ancient Duvan'ku cult, explaining the history of Aervik Narn the Testifier. When she finished her song, she told Nymph that she's beautiful, then sang into the still-healing wounds around her eye and healed her. Nymph asked her if the mountain where the cult's ancient stronghold was located was White Mountain, like the tattoo around her ankle, and Kursk'Vol told her that it is. She then sang to her a song of Aelthredd Aleph the Exalted Interrogater. When she finished, she kissed Nymph and asked her to come to the temple with her, because she doesn't know the way herself and doesn't think she could survive alone. Casting a sort of song spell, Kursk'Vol made Nymph fall into sudden infatuation with her, and Nymph agreed to accompany her to the temple on White Mountain. At this point, Nymph found that she could see the micro-organisms in the air like she was looking through a microscope, superimposed over her normal vision. Kursk'Vol sang more songs and the two spent the entire night fucking, but Nymph didn't register the passing of time. Morning came, and Nymph felt refreshed as if she'd slept, but Kursk'Vol was exhausted and she fell asleep in Nymph's bathtub-bed.

Nymph got dressed and started getting ready for her day, when she was interrupted by a knocking on the front door. She woke Sofiya and told her to get ready in case something bad was going on, then she went down to answer the door. The beadle who'd come by about the stench a few weeks back was at the door, along with two middle-aged men dragging something covered in a sheet on a cart. They asked to see Master Erasmus, and Nymph and Sofiya fed him the story about Erasmus' alleged suicide. He asked to see Lilith Holtzmann, and they told him that Lilith had been missing for several days, but that Nymph was Lilith's sister, Lucia Holtzmann. The beadle then told them that 'Myrna' had been killed by maddened servants while visiting her lawyer, Abraham Rooke. He told them that the body had been found by the Minister of Quarantine, who had found the maddened servants, assumed they were sick with the plague, and killed them, recovering Myrna's body from their den of sin. He assumed that Abraham had died from fright while watching his servants kill Myrna, then warned them that the state of the body was quite horrifice. Nymph and Sofiya told him that they were ready to see it, and the beadle revealed the body. Evi's brains had been scooped out of her head, her eyes gouged out. Her arms and legs had been sawn off, the words 'whore' and 'witch' had been written on her chest and stomach in shit. Her nipples had been cut off. She'd been disembowled. Her lips had been cut off, her teeth had been smashed out, and her tongue had been cut out. Her pelvis had been mostly pulverized - her labia and vagina mashed to a literal pulp, presumably from multiple extremely violent rapes. When she saw the body, Nymph freaked the fuck out and fell to her knees sobbing. The beadle told them that he needed someone to claim the body, and Sofiya said that she would.

When Nymph calmed down a little, she tried to stand up, pushing off from the cart, which accidentally catapulted Evi's mutilated corpse towards her. Nymph fell down in the grass, Evi's mutilated torso on top of her, which prompted another crying fit. The beadle and the men accompanying him picked up the body, moved it back to the cart, then helped Nymph up. Sofiya calmed her down, and they took the body from the beadle and buried it in the yard, under the red tree. Nymph carved Evi's name into the tree with a kitchen knife, and as they were getting ready to go back inside, they heard the leader of the guards shouting, asking them for help. They found him cowering beneath the red tree, and he told them that he'd somehow wandered into the tiny grove and gotten lost there for 6 hours. Despite the fact that he knew that the grove was tiny (like, 8 trees), everywhere he turned, all he could see was the red tree. Nymph and Sofiya helped him out of the grove and back to the house, where they offered him breakfast and tea to calm his nerves. They told him to avoid the area in his patrols in the future so he wouldn't have a repeat of the situation, then they sent him on his way. Sofiya told Nymph that she believed that the mutilation of Evi's corpse had been done for some sort of ritual purpose, and they decided together to go to the lawyer's house and investigate what had happened and why. Nymph told Sofiya about the cultist prostitute sleeping in her bed, and Sofiya told Nymph to send her home while she got ready to leave for the lawyer's house. Nymph went upstairs, woke up Kursk'Vol, and feeling like she was already starting to fall for her, invited her to live with them in the house instead of sending her home, and invited her along on their trip to the lawyer's house.

Nymph then went to Ilona's room and told her about Evi's death. At first, Ilona started crying and ranting about how she'd been falling in love with Evi, but then she settled into an extremely sane calm. She insisted on accompanying Nymph and Sofiya to the lawyer's house, and told Nymph that if she wouldn't let her come with them, she'd sneak out herself while Nymph was sleeping or out of the house. Nymph agreed to let Ilona come with them, then she returned to Sofiya and told her about how she'd done the exact opposite of what she'd been told to do, which Sofiya took exceptionally well, chalking a lot of it up to Nymph's grief. The whole group took a coach to the lawyer's house, and sent the coachman to a bar to wait for them. They found the lawyer's house marked with red X's, signifying it as an infected house. Breaking the quarantine, they went inside and started poking around. The first floor was mostly normal, just ransacked, except for a ceiling in the parlor that was dripping blood. Upstairs, things got stranger. They found a table where the legs had been replaced with Evi's severed limbs, a ballroom where the floor was slick with still-wet blood, and a passage on the balcony to the fire escape that led to Abraham's office. They took the stairs up to the office, and found various pieces of Evi shoved in the desk drawers. Her intestines in one drawer, her eyes in another, her severed labia sitting on the desk top. They found that the love seat in the study had been defaced - the words 'adulterer' and 'murderer' written on it in shit. They found Erasmus' will and Nymph stuck it in her backpack.

In one of the drawers, they found Abraham's sex toys, stained with blood and shit, and processed that the servants had probably used them to rape Evi repeatedly while she was dying. They found a collection of surgical instruments stained with blood. And since they'd found the will, Sofiya wanted to leave, but Nymph insisted that she couldn't leave until she'd found out the details of what happened to Evi. On the fire escape, they were ambushed by an undead version of one of the servants. It grabbed Nymph and puked blood all over her, then Nymph pushed it down the stairs, breaking the zombie's neck. Crystallized blood grew from its eyesockets, and the zombie started crawling up the stairs towards them. After a moment of deliberation, they ran back through the door to the second floor and bolted it behind them, leaving the zombie banging on the ballroom door. In a bit of a frenzy, Nymph ran upstairs and found a massively bloodstained corridor where the floorboards were weak from all the blood. Nymph opened a door and found two more blood zombies, then ran, opened another door, and raced into a room where she fell through the blood-weakened floor and down to the first floor, rolling and getting extremely lucky to avoid being significantly injured. So Nymph was on the bottom floor, trapped in a room where the door was blocked by the cave-in, and covered in infected blood, while the rest of the party was upstairs, under attack from blood zombies. Sofiya, Ilona, and Kursk'Vol ran for it, racing down the stairs and out the front door, bolting the door behind them, trapping the blood zombies inside. Nymph broke a window and escaped the house, and they regrouped in the street, Nymph still in a panic about not knowing why Evi had been killed.

Nymph ran into Kursk'Vol's arms, covering her in infected blood as well, and Sofiya had to talk her out of going back into the house to solve the mystery. Their discussion was stopped short by the Minister of Quarantine coming around the corner on his horse. Nymph and Kursk'Vol ran away, and Sofiya and Ilona - who weren't covered in blood like the others - pretended like they weren't involved with the situation at all. The Minister of Quarantine chased Nymph and Kursk'Vol, and they ducked down several alleys, ending up on the street where Nymph's old apartment was. Realizing that she still technically had the place until the end of the month (a little under a week from now), Nymph ran up the stairs and barricaded herself and Kursk'Vol in the house, getting shot twice in the back by the Minister of Quarantine as he dismounted from his horse. Nymph broke a window and started firing arrows at the Minister of Quarantine, but missed him a few times. Kursk'Vol cast Web, trapping him in place, but he escaped quickly, cutting himself out of the web with a sword. As the Minister of Quarantine was climbing the stairs, Nymph fired an arrow through his eye, killing him instantly. She and Kursk'Vol dragged the Minister of Quarantine's body into the apartment, and then Nymph launched into an especially bizarre and exciting plan. With Kursk'Vol's help, Nymph mutilated the Minister of Quarantine's body in similar ways to how Evi's body had been mutilated, with the intent of tricking any investigators into thinking that it was the work of a serial killer. She then took a ritual stone out of her jacket pocket and performed a sex magick ritual to summon Deep Ones from the river who could protect her and potentially be mistaken for the killer. Then she and Kursk'Vol both cast Spider Climb on themselves and fled the apartment, crawling along the buildings like weird spider cultists.

Meanwhile, Sofiya threw up in the street for no immediately discernable reason, and then she and Ilona went to find the coachman and headed back home. Nymph and Kursk'Vol returned home while Sofiya and Ilona were making lunch. When Sofiya mentioned that Nymph and Kursk'Vol should probably quarantine, since they'd been exposed to infected blood, the ramifications of everything finally hit Nymph and she started crying. Sofiya told her that in case things go wrong and Nymph dies, she wants her to know that she loved her, and then Nymph and Kursk'Vol retired to Nymph's room for their quarantine. They fucked and Kursk'Vol sang Nymph more songs of the ancient Duvan'ku. Sofiya and Ilona discussed mortality - Evi's death, Nymph's potential impending death, and Sofiya comforted Ilona, then went to the library in the house to look for useful books. She picked through the books and found a book on learning Spanish and started studying it. That night, Sofiya and Evi both came down with an unusual fever that broke after a couple of hours, which got Nymph wondering if she and Sofiya had been exposed earlier. She processed that they could have been exposed when they dissected the thief a couple of days earlier, which prompted Sofiya to start quarantining herself. The next afternoon, Nymph and Sofiya both died of the Red Death. Spurred by the Duvan'ku energy still lingering around the house, Nymph and Sofiya, while dying, were drawn into an otherworldly space where they met a queen of the undead who offered them both a bargain - act as her eyes and ears in the world of the living, and be returned to life as an intelligent undead. Sofiya took the bargain, and Nymph turned it down, crying and screaming about how she'd lived long enough and seen too much.

Sofiya awakened in her body with a jolt, unable to say even a few words to Nymph before leaving the otherworldly space. Ilona was standing over her with a knife, getting ready to dismember and burn hers and Nymph's bodies to avoid the spread of the plague. She stood up and explained what had happened to Ilona, then explained that Nymph wasn't coming back. Ilona started crying about all the death, and Sofiya comforted her, then consumed Nymph's brain to gain some of her knowledge (one of her new abilities as an undead). From eating Nymph's brain, Sofiya learned that the Minister of Quarantine was dead, learned about Nymph's plan with his corpse, and learned that Erasmus' will was still in Nymph's backpack, which ensured that they'd be able to keep the house as long as they could pass of Ilona as Lilith Holtzmann. Together, Sofiya and Ilona dismembered and burned Nymph's corpse, then went back into the house to rest. Sofiya spent a couple of days resting and studying her books while they waited to see what would happen with Kursk'Vol's quarantine. Around the time that Kursk'Vol should have been dying of the plague, Sofiya and Ilona heard her taking a bath upstairs. They went up to check on her, and found her washing blood off of her body. They asked her what had happened, and she told them that she had died momentarily but had come back as a particular type of undead that only priests and priestesses of the Duvan'ku cult were capable of becoming. She joined them in the living room while they studied and talked, and before bed, they all realized that Nymph was the only one with the combination to the safe that contained a large portion of the house's assets and all the deeds to their properties abroad.