Nira's Trap--Mordent
General Summary
While Rose and Julien were staying at the orphanage, Julien was getting bullied pretty aggressively by some of the children, especially a boy named Josiah and a caliban girl named Alice. Alice hated him because he was scary and occasionally used his dominate ability on the other kids, and that was making the other kids wonder whether maybe all calibans were scary, so she had to bully him like nobody's business in order to prove that she was nothing like him; Josiah was Alice's friend, and was also a little shit. Rose was doing her best to help him handle the bullying in healthy ways and Rafe was doing his best to make the kids less awful, and between the two of them they were just barely able to keep this house of cards together.
The day after Rose and Rafe started conferring about Julien, a vardo came to town, which was the most exciting thing all season for most of the kids--they could go and pick out some toys and stuff, hooray! Rose went out with Julien and saw Nira, a plump, matronly Vistana woman, selling various wooden toys and trinkets. Rose bought an elaborately jointed set of wooden puppets so that maybe Julien could be the equivalent of the weird kid who has an Xbox, and the moment Nira laid eyes on him, she started gushing about how wonderful it was to see one of the blood out among the giorgios. She asked if Julien knew their ways, and when Rose said he didn't, she offered to teach him if he came back that night. Rose was delighted by this idea. She didn't know Nira at all, though, and even Rose wasn't trusting enough to take Julien to see a total stranger, so she asked Rafe to come with her.
When you arrived at the vardo that evening, Nira was none too pleased to see Rafe there. You saw that she had a large, star-like scar on her left palm, but had no idea what it meant (since the guy with bardic lore was off having people question his intentions toward goats at the moment). Nira took out a tarokka deck, ostensibly to ask it for guidance on where to start; when Julien asked what it was, she had him do a reading, saying that the deck had belonged to her son and that it would do her heart good to see a boy using it again. The result was Julien's reading in Nira's vardo; Rose and Rafe both repeatedly tried to interrupt the reading while Nira looked on with a hungry expression. When Julien interpreted the final card, he collapsed into a violent seizure, and Rose carried him out of the vardo.
Rafe turned to Nira, who had fallen to her knees with an expression of religious awe, and demanded to know what she'd done. Nira laughed, saying that she hadn't hurt him in any way; he was young, and not fully of the blood, so his Sight was like pouring the ocean into a thimble. His father had told her this would happen, but she didn't dare to hope. His father wasn't the only one who could forge a sword, and soon her tribe would be avenged....
At that point, Rafe grabbed her head in his hands, with the clear implication that he could crack her skull like an egg if he chose, and told her to leave. Nira agreed, then warned him:
"If you see any others of my people, don't tell them what he is if you want him to live." She also held up her scarred palm and told him that when Julien wanted to learn how to use his powers, the Tribe of Hyskosa was at his disposal. Rafe asked if she thought Julien would want anything to do with the Sight after tonight, and Nira said that he had to learn how to use it or it would eat him alive.
Rose, meanwhile, ran out of the vardo and lay a still-convulsing Julien on the ground (this is when his claws came out for the first time). He was still bleeding from pretty much every orifice in his face, but when he looked at Rose, his eyes were glowing the way the Gentleman Caller's had when she saw him without any illusions around him. He delivered Julien's prophecy about the Dark Man's plans, then sobbed that "it hurts" and passed out. Rose took him back to the church, told Father Douglas what had happened, and then told Rafe everything she knew about Julien's parentage. She said that after tonight, she knew she'd have to tell Julien everything she knew about his father (after briefly breaking down because she didn't know if he was ever going to wake up) because otherwise, the Gentleman Caller would use any secrets as a wedge between them. Rafe told Rose everything that Nira had told him, putting her in high dudgeon mode (surely not EVERY Vistani would kill Julien for being a tiefling! Oh, Rose, honey, it's not because he's a tiefling) and Rafe said he'd confer with Laurie and Gennifer Weathermay in the morning.
Julien woke up in the middle of the night, pretending he didn't remember anything about the reading, and Rose was more than happy to spend the night and a good chunk of the next day mothering the heck out of him. In the meantime, Rafe was doing some frustratingly inconclusive research about the Vistani when he heard a thumping noise coming from the boys' dorms. He found Josiah, Julien's bully, slamming his hand in a drawer repeatedly and whimpering about what a terrible person he was. Rafe was able to calm him down and get him to the infirmary (he had several broken fingers), but he had a bad feeling that Julien was responsible.
In the morning, the Weathermay twins gave Rafe some books about the Vistani, and Gennifer Weathermay told him the basic outline of the Dukkar prophecy. When Rafe told her about the Tribe of Hyskosa, she checked one of her books and said that Hyskosa had been a male seer who had predicted the Great Upheaval, i.e. the Grand Conjunction.(Sidebar--Azalin's involvement and the exact phrasing of Hyskosa's prophecies are out of character knowledge, obviously, but you definitely know in character that this was a horrible apocalyptic event that rocked the entire demiplane and led to a bunch of domains getting moved around, absorbed into other domains, etc.) Rafe clarified that Hyskosa had only foreseen the Great Upheaval, not caused it, and then asked about the scar on Nira's hand. Gennifer said that it was a sign that Nira was a darkling--an outcast from the Vistani.
When Rafe went back, Alice, Julien's other main bully, wasn't at breakfast. He went to check on her in the girls' dormitory and found that she was wearing the new hair ribbons she'd gotten from the vardo and was tearing giant bloody fistfuls of hair out of her scalp. Unlike with Josiah, Rafe couldn't calm Alice down. He took her to the infirmary and they sedated her; absolutely nothing was working to stop her from harming herself.
Julien told Rose at breakfast that her father wasn't really disappointed in her--that was just being mean--but that he was afraid of her. Rose said she'd like to hear more about that later, but right now Julien needed to eat. Rafe came back after breakfast and took both Rose and Julien out to the stables; he liked spending time with animals because they didn't judge him the way people did. He asked if Julien had done anything to harm Josiah and Alice, and Julien protested that he hadn't in the outraged tones of a kid who heroically refrained from doing something he really, really wanted to do and then got accused of it anyway. Rafe told him that when he'd been growing up, he sometimes hurt people to make himself feel more powerful, but that it never helped in the end. Julien's eyes lost focus, and he told Rafe that his mother had only been fourteen and would have given him up even if he hadn't been a caliban (which freaked Rafe right the heck out his nose started to bleed, though, so Rose made him stop. You stayed in the stables for a while and headed back to find Sister Theodora, the anchorite who kept making racist jokes about calibans when they weren't around, swinging from the rafters.
Rose got Julien right the heck out of there and Rafe called Father Douglas in, but Sister Theodora had been dead too long for breath of life to work and that was the best Douglas could do. Douglas was distraught--he'd seen no sign that Theodora wanted to hurt herself--and Rafe told him that he thought it was some outside influence, letting him believe that it was a malicious ghost because he didn't want to throw Julien under a bus.
You asked Julien what he thought of Theodora, but he apparently had never picked up on any of her comments and had no opinion on her one way or another. He then picked up from Rafe's head that Rafe thought he'd done it and got dangerously pissed. (Oh, yeah, THIS is the specific reason Julien hated Rafe. He was fine with him before. Explains why he's getting on okay with Casimir despite him having a similar style--Casimir doesn't think he murdered anyone.) Rose said she believed Julien, which mollified him, and the two of you talked alone. Rose admitted that she didn't know whether she believed him or not, but she did believe that if he was doing it, it wasn't intentional. You we're both worried that Nira may have opened some sort of door that allowed him subconscious control over people who angered him. Rafe told her everything he'd learned from the Weathermays, and Rose said she would take Julien out camping both to protect the orphanage from him and to feel him out.
Rose and Julien had a shockingly pleasant and uneventful camping session. Julien admitted that he had never actually been possessed by his father. When he'd done the reading, he'd seen that he wasn't a freak or a mistake, but a deliberate part of his father's plan, and that his father wanted him; he'd deliberately chosen to say his words in a way that would hurt Rose, because he knew it would make his father happy, and he'd enjoyed it. Rose was a bit taken aback but didn't show it, and told him that it must not have made his father happy at all because his end game would have been to come between them and make Rose stop loving Julien, and that was never going to happen. (Feels!) She also pointed out that his father's plans for him weren't necessarily for his benefit. Julien asked why he would ever hurt Josiah and Alice after seeing how important he was, because they didn't matter at all. Rose told him that everyone mattered, and Julien gave her a skeptical look, but Aunt Rose is Aunt Rose and has to be indulged in these silly notions.
Back at the orphanage, Rafe and another sister, Verity, were doing dishes when Verity suddenly froze, said she was a stupid old woman, and lunged for the knife block. Rafe was able to calm her down and take her to the infirmary (again!), but he saw that the spoon she'd been washing--which Theodora may well have used earlier in the day, being the main cook--was marked with the Vistani sign for "cursed." Several other items, including a toy of Josiah's and Alice's ribbons, were marked with the same sign, and when you took Alice's ribbons out she finally stopped hurting herself. Father Douglas started going around and casting detect magic on every single item from the vardo. Whenever he found a cursed item, Rafe and the others would take it to the special blessed sanctuary room that any Ravenloft church worth its salt has around.
Rose came back, found the abbey in an uproar, and offered to take over with detect magic, since Douglas was a septuagenarian who'd been up all night. It went well for a while until she fumbled a cursed penny whistle and touched it with her bare skin, and suddenly her mind flooded with every horrible thing her father had ever said about her. She was worthless. That was why he had changed so much--he'd finally seen her for the pathetic, mewling whelp she was, and who could ever love that? He would have stopped beating her if she'd ever done anything to deserve not being beaten. Yes, the Gentleman Caller had affected him, but she could have saved him. She could have saved him. If she'd been worth anything at all, she would have known what to do, but no--
She managed to fight back the urge to hurt herself, but was a wreck for a while.
Eventually, you gathered together all the objects that had magical auras. Most had been bought by people that disliked Julien, and the sign for "cursed" was scratched hastily into them. The one exception was the set of puppets Rose had bought, which bore the sign for "safety" (also hastily scratched). Rose became excited; if Nira wanted everyone to shun Julien, making him isolated and angry, that meant his path wasn't already set because his father was having to work to bring him over.
You had no idea what "safety" was about--maybe a charm to keep Julien safe, maybe something to make him believe he's be safe with his father or Nira--but you weren't about to touch them and find out.
Report Date
24 Apr 2021
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