Returning to childhood homes--Barovia
General Summary
Vanya said he'd like to see his mother again before you continued on your way, especially now that he knew she was actually proud of him, and warned Rose that she'd probably assume you were a couple no matter what you said--when an itinerant musician brings a pretty girl home, there's one obvious conclusion. He said that he very much wanted Rose to meet his family; seeing Sofia Albescu pregnant with his child made him realize that he wanted to live, but also made him realistically look at how slim the chances of that were, and if he died then Rose would be the one who would have to deliver the news to his family. He wanted them to know Rose rather than hearing it from some stranger. You did eventually come up with the idea of saying Constance was part of Vanya's act and that Rose was an expert toad handler, which would give you a reason to be traveling together other than the obvious.
You had a lovely dinner with Vanya's mom, who did, in fact, clearly think you were a couple (Rose assured her they weren't, Vanya's mom essentially said "of course you aren't, wink wink," and Rose blushed furiously). Vanya's brother Andrei was clearly angry with Vanya for swanning off to do his musician stuff and foisting the care of their mother onto him and his brother, but perked up noticeably when Vanya gave him some gold to help take care of her.
With that pleasant reunion out of the way, you set off for what promised to be a much less pleasant one. Still leaving Julien with Casimir, you headed toward Rose's childhood home to see if you could save her father. Vanya asked what she would do if the Gentleman Caller offered to trade her father for her. Rose admitted that she didn't know what she would do in that case, but that a huge part of the reason she had become a druid was to find a way to help her father. Vanya said that if it came down to a decision between saving her father and protecting her, he was going to choose her in a heartbeat. Rose told Vanya everything about her history with her father, including what Emyr had told her about his ravings (summarized here). She also told him about when she had tried to scry back on the person scrying on Julien and had seen her parents having extremely vigorous sex, only her father looked the way he did now and her mother looked the way she did years ago when she was alive. The Gentleman Caller had appeared to Vanya as his own dead wife in Mordent (in a session report that I'll get to posting one of these days, maybe in fall when Paul is finally in preschool!), so he told Rose that the incubus was probably doing a similar thing here--appearing to Nicolae as his wife in order to tighten his hold on him.
You reached Nicolae's cabin, and Rose tried just straightforwardly knocking on the door to no effect. You went inside to find the place was a wreck, reeking of sweat and waste and rotting food; Nicolae had clearly been living here with no attention to hygiene. There were snake tracks along the filth on the floor, usually right beside the human footprints, and the place was scattered with texts about occultism and demon hunting. He'd underlined or annotated multiple passages about testing to see whether someone was a changeling, a hag, or possessed, with a lot of notes like "I have to be sure" and "making it cry to banish it didn't work, I made it cry so many times," and he'd repeatedly underlined a passage about how if a possessing demon suspected that he knew about it, it might kill him or its host.
There was another book where he'd underlined passages about making pacts with unknowable forces to gain power, and when you searched his room, you found a quill clogged with dried blood. His sheets were a mess of all kinds of bodily fluids one doesn't want to associate with one's parents, but were also splattered with blood, and you could see several smaller spots of blood in the places where there were both human and snake tracks. With her ridiculous natural 20 on spellcraft, Rose had heard Emyr talk some about witches and knew that there wasn't much point in looking for actual magical texts; if her father had signed a pact, witch magic came from a familiar, not a book. Vanya cast detect magic, but he'd been gone for over a week and there weren't any lingering magical auras.
You left with very little idea of how to track him down and heard singing on the path leading to his house. When you approached the singer, you saw Nira, the old Vistani woman who had awakened Julien's Sight and seeded the orphanage with cursed items.
"Hello, Rose dear," she said. "Our mutual friend said I would find you here."
Related Reports
Previous session: Bargaining With Anushka--Barovia
Next session: Nira's Return and Nicolae's Journal--Barovia
Report Date
06 Jul 2022
Primary Location
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