Session 9 Report
General Summary
The party recuperates from their wounds and investigates the scene. Big Richard manages to harvest some acid from the glands of the insect creatures, but is not able to carry any body parts with him as they are too large and heavy. On one of the bodies of the dead soldiers, they find a letter from a Commander Darmody that was to be delivered to a Commander Remme. It is orders to pull her forces back to Cressen, from the Lady Anna herself, as the city has more pressing needs of the army and the south would be left to fend for itself.
As it is getting dark, the party decides to take the northwestern detour to rest in Northhope, as trying to continue directly to Cressen would exhaust them traveling through the night. They arrive in the night and find only a gloomy, broken, and desolate village unbecoming of the name of the village-- the sign has even had several letters broken off so it reads "No hope".
Hitching their horses at the posts outside one the larger, slightly less damaged buildings, they find a strange creature already hitched at one of the posts-- a camel, which most don't recognize but Jett does from her travels as an exotic animal native to deserts. Greeted cautiously by an old man from inside the building, they find that it is the Happy Horse Inn, once a traveler's pit stop and that the old man is its proprietor Hubert.
Hubert explains that Northhope was recently attacked by goblins and nearly entirely burned to the ground. Forces from Cressen arrived afterward to secure the area but were not equipped to deal with the troubles that appeared after the attack-- the village became cursed and people would die mysteriously in the night. Hubert says after the soldiers left, someone else was sent to deal with this problem, who is currently the only other guest in the inn.
The party goes upstairs and meets a woman with a golden skull mask named Sciarra. She says she is a Revealer from the country of Genos and insists that the full name of the country-- the Most Serene Republic of Genos-- be used at all times, as the shortened form of just "Genos" that Ostrenians use is horribly insulting to her people and hints at a bad history between the nations. When asked what a "Revealer" does, she explains vaguely that she is in the business of investigating strange occurrences and revealing the truth and solving problems. She says that there are spirits haunting the village and she will be conducting a ritual to draw them out, which may disrupt the party's attempts to sleep. The party offers to aid and has some downtime while she prepares.
While the rest pass the time by drinking from the ale Valqinor and Lephnut had taken from Baron Distow's dining hall, Big Richard takes Little Dickens on a walk around the village. Little Dickens sniffs a young boy, Timmy, hiding in a ruined building. When questioned, Timmy says his parents are dead and he's staying in what's left of his house for safety. Big Richard tries to take the boy to the inn but Timmy resists and says that Hubert is a terrible man. He explains that Hubert was always horrible to the elves that lived in Northhope and during the goblin attack, he had seen Hubert save himself by throwing the elf Niela in harm's way. Big Richard lets Timmy return to his home but says if he changes his mind, the party can take him to Cressen in the morning.
The party regroups with Sciarra, who begins making a magic circle with salt around the well in the center of the village. The ghost of an elven woman is drawn up from the well, and when questioned by Sciarra on why the spirit lingers on the material plane, she spots Hubert and points to him before breaking into an unearthly shriek. The ghost of Niela then summons a number of shades and lashes out at everything living. The party and Sciarra defend themselves, finding that their physical attacks are resisted by the spirits and only magic seems to be fully effective against their spectral forms. The shades pose a dangerous threat as their touch seems to drain the very life and strength out of a body, but the group is able to beat back the spirits in the town center.
A scream is heard off in the distance and as some of the party goes to investigate, Sciarra heads back into the inn. When Jett follows, she finds Sciarra standing over Hubert with a bloody blade. Jett questions her intentions and levitates Sciarra into the air to hold her in place. Sciarra misty steps back to the ground and holds a blade up to Jett but does not attack, to which Jett responds by misty stepping herself behind Sciarra with a dagger and a tense standoff ensues. To the northwest, the party encounters another shade looming over a body. They manage to defeat the shade but find the body dead, aged decades in a matter of moments and Big Richard recognizes it as Timmy.
With the spirits taken care of, everyone reconvenes in the inn, finding Sciarra and Jett with blades pointed at one another. Sciarra explains that she did what must be done by killing Hubert as even though they've dissipated Niela's ghost for now, as long as the reason she was haunting the material plane still exists, she can come back. The party accepts this grim reality and Jett stands down. Sciarra says she will be departing for another job and the group asks her some questions.
Asked about the impostors that the party has been hearing of, Sciarra says there are stories of such creatures in her country, and her people refer to them as "faceless." She says they must be wretched creatures, as her culture prizes masks as a tool to reveal one's true nature, but these impostors have no identity of their own. Though she has not encountered them herself before, she suggests magic might be a means of identifying such creatures, either magical means to reveal identities or truths, or... more violent magics.
In the morning, Sciarra and her camel are gone, and a group of survivors gathered by Big Richard have congregated outside the Happy Horse looking to the party for a safe escort from the cursed village...
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