Vanya's conversation with Pacali
General Summary
More detailed than usual since I have no idea how much of this Kris heard! Kris, if there was something else where you were like "I think I missed half of this," let me know.
On your way to the Hall of Horrors, you noticed that there were maybe two-thirds as many Skurra (the silent face-painted Vistani) as last time. Wnen you got there, Professor Pacali looked like crap. He was pale and sweaty and regularly grimaced and clutched at his left side. He waved Rose in without even looking at her. Rose passed by the malformed pickled fetuses, which all swiveled in their jars to look at her, and went into the main body of the Hall of Horrors, a tent with a massive pit separated into three cages. Julien was looking down at Madam Fortuna's cage with a dreamy little smile on his face. There were two other abominations, a viscous puddle of goo that occasionally formed a human body part and a screeching nest of mouths. Rose ushered Julien out.
Vanya heard the screeching from inside the tent and said that he thought death would be cleaner than that. Pacali agreed wholeheartedly, but said that everyone in there had broken Carnival law, and Isolde refused to kill them. She said it was because if they died, they could never repent; Pacali suspected she enjoyed watching them suffer.
Vanya gave Pacali the book, and Pacali was as grateful as he ever gets. Vanya warned him that the last person who had it got himself buggered to death by a demon, and Pacali assured him that the only demon he knew wasn't into such activies. Vanya asked what he was planning to do with it, and Pacali said that he hoped he could use it to bind a fiend and free its victims from its influence. Vanya said that sounded like exactly what he needed and he'd be in Pacali's debt. Pacali said he'd been about to take a sabbatical at the Brautslava Institute anyway because of his illness, and now he could have his entire occult library at his disposal. With Vanya's knowledge (geography) he knew that the Brautslava Institute was in the middle of Darkon and was probably the best college in the domain now that the University of Il Aluk was gone, although it only accepted men. (It's the star right over the "n" in "Darkon" here.) Vanya asked when he'd know what he needed to know, and Pacali said that one of the Skurra would use Mist travel to drop him off and pick him up; it was what they had always done in the past. Since you're going to be traveling overland, he hopes to have the information ready by the time you get there.
Vanya asked if he could do anything to help Pacali, and Pacali said that his pain was his own manifestation of the Twisting, working in a few insults against Isolde while he was at it. When Vanya asked about the Skurra, Pacali said Isolde had talked to them after the incident with Madam Fortuna and the Blade Brothers and several of them had left.
I think that's it!
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Report Date
14 Dec 2023
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