Session 16 - Bad Therapy

General Summary

It’s a day’s travel to the site of the ember of Fytanke. There’s just one problem, half of us can’t breathe underwater! We decide to seek out Niklos and Avra for help, they know of a nearby merfolk commune nearby that may help. Avra agrees to go down in the morning and take a look, so we stay the night on their platform with the ship anchored near them. We chat about Pearl, they judge us for not finding her a home yet. It’s a nice housing platform. Some of us embarrass ourselves. Children are playing. We engage in swimming lessons too! Neo starts to get over his fear of being under the water, and we all practice and roughhouse in the water.
Seeing Pearl with responsible parents makes us think about where we should take her. Perhaps the merfolk can help? Ionessa doesn’t want to take her back home because everyone there is hostile towards her and especially Kovu now. We set up watches for the night just in case, Xanthos spots the body of a seagull floating in the water. Two more float along. What the heck!? Neo identifies there is a wound on the back of their necks that killed them instantly, this was done by another seagull. Seagull on seagull violence… We investigate further but find nothing until Neo’s watch, where he sees a suspicious seagull with transmutation magic cast upon it that flees when he starts reaching for something.
Kovu and Ionessa dive under and find the seagull hiding, they capture it and bring it aboard. It says it’s a bird and that it didn’t kill the other seagulls. There’s a good 30 minutes of seagull shenanigans, honestly maybe more. It’s a big liar. The seagull issue is never resolved, so we just put it in a barrel. Niklos doesn’t have any idea what that could be when questioned the following morning.
Ionessa offers to help Kestor dissociate. They gather on the ship and each of the other three party members act out the actions of characters from Kestor’s visions, he begins to drift into his delusions.
Kestor finds himself in a familiar library, he sees scrolls, desks, but the end of the library falls away into a cave where he can see a figure facing away from me doing some weaving. The library is merging with the cave, reality is phasing in and out of existence. He searches for the book but enters a third delusion.The kenku with the curved blade is back, it chases him out towards the cave!
He focuses his mind on the vision of fleeing and manages to rip open the package that he has stolen? He trips, the package spills out of his hand, he crawls towards it as the Kenku approaches behind him. He grabs the package, a shadow overtakes him, the curved knife raised. The package opens, an immense glow, he is holding onto a constantly burning ember. The flesh of his hands starts to burn away, there’s a piercing pain in his back as he’s stabbed and falls unconscious. His hand burns and a knife wound appears in his back IN REAL LIFE!
Kestor dies.
In the afterlife, nothing is as Kestor was told. He is in a great storm whipping at him, hot and cold, always bringing whispers that he cannot hear them. He’s completely directionless, no sense of his own body, completely disembodied, no sense of smell, touch, but he can hear. Then he gets a strange sensation, he is being compelled by some outside entity to give some piece of advice. He gives it: “Don’t trust anyone.”
He awakes again, Neo has cast revivify. He is traumatized but roleplaying that for more than 5 minutes is a real mood-killer, so he comes to terms with what happened and gets into bed for medical attention. His wound is itself a curse, he suffered great necrotic damage from a powerful evil blade. Thankfully (?) dying ended the curse. Kestor has a heart-to-heart with the team about trust and they have a really nice emotional moment.
Kestor sketches out the blade that stabbed him and shows it to Captain Leos, asking if it is the same as the blade wielded by the Witch Zenodoria. He recognizes it! It may not be the exact same blade, but certainly the same make.
Zenodoria is a philosopher and magician, technically demarchos of house Fidigos, but it’s not really a merchant house, she doesn’t engage in trade. She’s a recluse who lives in the south-west in Castle Fidigos. She hires heroes and adventurers to undertake missions for her and are amply rewarded. She took the ember from Acheric the Fire-Eater. How did she know about the ember? What did she do with it afterwards?
Could it be that after Zenodoria took the ember, she retreated back to Castle Fidigos with it to experiment upon? In Kestor’s vision he is fleeing from a person carrying a blade similar to Zenodoria’s, surrounded by tall stone architecture, which sounds like it could be Castle Fidigos. Perhaps it was stolen from Zenodoria by the person in the vision, or Pairairi betrayed her and took it (seems less likely to me)? After that it wound up on the Aspro Kapelo, which subsequently sank for some reason, and now at least Dorien is after it, who knows who else! Alternatively this vision could have taken place before the Great Wildfire, which seems less likely to me as well.
Anyway back to the seagull. We surmise that it’s probably a druid wildshaped into a seagull, and head back to the barrel to make it turn back. When we get there it’s already shifted back as a person. His name is Idressi and he is here to spy on us. He won’t tell us who he’s spying for though, but he really doesn’t wanna be in a barrel. He agrees to leave us alone, stop spying, and not report back to his boss, but if we try to force him to talk he will turn into a whale and destroy the whole platform. We decide to let him go, Neo and Xanthos are kinda annoyed about it and go to hit each other with sticks.
The end!

Notes

What if you had twelve other people's PTSD except it can stab you to death?

Report Date

25 Sep 2022