Anushka's cottage--Barovia
General Summary
You arrived at Anushka's cottage and found Sofia Albescu outside washing her hands in a rain barrel. She was still pregnant, wearing a bloody butcher apron, and seemed perfectly content. Vanya ran up to her and said that he was going to get her out of there right now. Sofia was not at all pleased to see him and said that she didn't want to leave, thank you very much, because everything was just fine (or had been until he showed up). Vanya kept trying to convince her that there were monsters stealing people's skins and eating them, and Sofia reacted about the way someone who didn't know they were a Ravenloft NPC would react to that kind of statement. She told Vanya that Anushka was teaching her how to live on her own, and that she'd be able to raise their daughter without having to worry about her marrying a man like Grigori Albescu to survive. Really, Vanya, why do you want to spoil that for her? And she's living the good life here. She was butchering a pig, because she gets to eat meat every day!
Vanya asked Sofia to show him around, and she agreed if that meant he would leave sooner. She took you past a pig pen, which had a fence that wasn't nearly sufficient to contain determined pigs. Three large pigs snuffled around inside, and Rose (in eagle form) could see that they were all mutated in different ways--one had four eyes, another had a nearly flat face like a human's, and a third had a vestigial second head. Rose cast detect magic, which turned up nothing, and they looked at her with eyes that had human intelligence--all pigs are smart, but this was more than that. Rose was concerned about their wellbeing, since Sofia had mentioned butchering pigs, so she decided to wait until Vanya and Sofia were out of sight and talk to them. Vanya asked Sofia what was wrong with the pigs, and Sofia looked at him as though he were simple and said they were just pigs.
Sofia took Vanya past two skin thieves, scratching one of them behind the ears. When Vanya asked what they were, she said they were dogs, obviously. Then she led him to a rack of butchering tools, where a skinned and partly gutted human corpse was hanging over a blood-filled bucket, and matter-of-factly continued to butcher it.
Rose, blissfully ignorant of the accidental cannibalism, turned back into a human and asked the pigs what they were doing there. They said that they could ask her the same question and said that Anushka took care of them and fed them--bones, mostly--and while she did sometimes eat them, it was her right as their creator.
Sofia kept butchering the body, tossing a kidney to one of the waiting skin thieves. As it ate, Rose came around the corner. Sofia saw her and her face hardened; Rose braced herself to attack the skin thieves, but Vanya was making signals for her to hold off, so she did. Vanya explained to Sofia that Rose was just a friend, and Sofia scoffed that she was quite a friend for them to have a child together. When Vanya said that he was a foundling that they were raising, Sofia said that his patron had told her that he loved them and meant to spend the rest of his life with them, and never mind her and their child. Vanya reminded her that when he'd left, he'd told her that she was better off without him, and he assumed that she believed him now; when she scoffed in agreement, he said that the man who spoke to her wasn't his patron, that he wasn't a man at all, that he was incredibly dangerous, and that Vanya had left to protect her from him. Sofia asked why, if Vanya wanted so badly to protect her from him, he hadn't stayed to protect her, or told her about him before now, or anything else besides skipping town, and when Vanya said that he'd decided that it would be the safest thing for her, she was thoroughly unimpressed.
Rose and the skin thieves were still glaring at each other, so Vanya cast sleep on Sofia. When she was down, he looked at Rose, nodded, and said to go for it. An extremely one-sided combat ensued, ending with Rose incinerating one skin thief and Constance eating the other. Rose wild-shaped into an eagle and flew up into the trees during the combat, so she's still there at this point. (Also, we did establish that the tree cover is thin enough for Rose to have line of sight from up there.)
As you stood over the bodies of the skin thieves, a nearby tree shrank into the form of a woman who looked a lot like Ianna with two eyes. She studied Vanya and said, "So. You must be the demon's boy."
Related Reports
Previous session: The Skin Thief--Barovia
Next session: @anush
Report Date
20 May 2022
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