Session 83: Haggling with Souls
General Summary
After a much needed break, we decide to meet at Elathera’s tower to figure out our next step. As each of us arrive, we’re greeted by her clone who realizes we’ve mistaken her for Elathera and goes along with it. She’s very bitter and depressed at where her life has gone. She has half the magic Elathera has access to, didn’t get to become a shapeshifter, and has fond memories of her friendship with us, but we never hang out with her. While we’re facing the end of the world, she’s fighting an existential battle herself.
I gift her a bottle of wine and promise to take her on a vacation sometime soon. It cheers her up a little, though she’s still struggling with her identity. We all pile into one of the rooms upstairs and Elathera’s clone asks her to change her name so she doesn’t have to change hers. The clone war’s finally settled when the clone agrees on the name “Anne”. We tell her to get her hair done, bid her farewell, and summon a norn named Yamileth to guide us through the Feywild. We arrive near the fields from our first trip here over a decade ago.
Exius’s soul fragment is located in a place called the Garden of Good Dreams. We first have to make it through a colorful forest that fades in color the further we press on. Yamileth’s uncomfortable with this change and explains that it’s an event called “bleaching”, which could be caused by a gnome going through the final phase of their life. She’d rather avoid this area and as we get jumped by oozes, we retreat into the nearby swamps. We take shelter in a hut owned by a deer-like being named Addison, who tends to the swamp and the items that wash up within it. When it’s time to leave, she tells us to be careful as a gnarled, mean, old woman lives on the other side of the swamps.
That woman being Baba Yaga. Given that we’re trying to stop the world from ending, she could prove to a powerful ally. If not that, she may have items that would be useful in the Far Lands. We trek across the swamps, passing by a group of talking deer and goats, and arrive at her home. We’re invited inside by a daemon that calls himself the Coffin Man and swears he’s Baba Yaga’s cousin. He can’t tell us where she’s at exactly because the interior of the house is massive so she can hole herself up away from everyone else. There’s also a woman named Louhi that’s hiding in here somewhere and she’s Baba Yaga’s rival.
We’re led to her bedroom by a troll-like being with five heads (he had seven originally), Gaj, and Baba Yaga is surprisingly casual with us. No open hostility, but she does find us strange when we ask to trade for presumably useless trinkets. She doesn’t give us much information on her rivalry with Louhi, so we have Gaj take us to her so we can get her side of the story. Once in the cellar, we’re treated to what looks like another house and a very startled woman who assumes we’re here to kill her. When we reveal that we’re from the material plane, she calms down and tells us her story.
She’s a powerful mage from a place called Serelith, which became a part of Caelsimil at some point, and she hasn’t been back to the material plane in over five centuries. She came here to challenge Baba Yaga and unfortunately got stuck in a deal. If Louhi won the fight, Baba Yaga was done and the house was hers. If Baba Yaga won, she’d get to take Louhi’s humanity. While Yanka had died, she thwarted Louhi’s efforts by having Coffin Man retrieve her soul and bring it back to her body. Louhi swears that she won, but as of right now, the two are technically in a stalemate.
We offer to get her out of this situation if she’ll help us out in the future. We tell her the entire story leading up to the possible restart of the universe and she agrees to help, though she’s reluctant about working alongside Pandemonius. I go ask Iolond if they can find a loophole in the deal between Yanka and Louhi and they ominously tell me that I should be worried about the party’s predicament instead. We’re trapped just like Louhi because Yamileth sold us out to Yanka in exchange for information. Elathera summons her to our sides once more and she’s more than happy to give an explanation.
We’ve broken the laws of reality time and time again and have ruined the natural flow of things, proving ourselves to be a danger to the world as it is currently. She wanted the glory of putting an end to our efforts, so Yanka gave her the perfect means to do so. All of us are less than thrilled and Yamelith will be lucky if she even gets the chance to leave here alive.
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Report Date
28 May 2021
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