Day 38: Alan
General Summary
Day 38 (Хололуна 14, 735/?)
The following day begins with Ayduin creating an absolute masterpiece of "doodling" that no one but him will ever know exists. Ri-An suggests that actually dream pies are great and totally harmless. (They will later succeed on their CON save, meaning they suffer no ill effects and will never have any reason to disbelief this hypothesis.) Iosef wets himself, Zsolt wakes up sobbing from a nightmare, and Sylvain acquires a profusion of snot on his shirt. The morning is dominated by the important business of destroying the windmill, which takes longer than anticipated. In the process, Sylvain summons a dinosaur hoping to entertain the children, and terrifies them instead. Still, the party convinces the kids to let the dinosaur pull the sled they made out of the windmill's front door. They encounter a series of mishaps throughout the day, as is inevitable when you're working with both animals and children. First Ri-An rolls right into a hunting trap, which somehow manages to more reliably do damage to them than 99% of the monsters I've thrown at them. Then Ayduin finds an unflattering mirror, which is always a bummer. A lone druid looks at this party of five, their horrifying metal dog, their malicious metal jester, and their literal dinosaur and goes "yeah, me and my five twig blights can fuck these guys up" (he's wrong). Osrin shows mercy, because Sylvain says so. (I guess seeing 33 dead druids in under 24 hours is a bit much for some people.) They fight six dire wolves, which would have been a nightmare a couple of weeks ago but at this point is trivial. Finally, they reach the Vallaki Vistani, where the children are rapidly adopted by various adults and Iosef somehow gets ahold of wine. While there, they discover that Arrigal, Manda, Atanasie, and Rudolph had all left the camp at various points in last week, and that neither the Vistani nor Ruslan are snitches. (It's widely agreed that this news is unsettling, but nowhere near as upsetting as Lech's perpetual absence. Was Lech ever real in the first place, or did we all collectively hallucinate him? There was one good man in all of Barovia and now, no matter which Vistani camp we go to, he's never there.) Sylvain tells the tale of the destruction of the windmill, while Ri-An and Ayduin give a stunning performance of lute and narrative dance that captivates the tent and its many occupants, huddled together for warmth in the face of a bitterly cold winter's night. That night, Bodaway has his third visitation courtesy of the Raven Queen, and the first who isn't a) a stranger, b) a wizard, and c) DTF. Hesketh Peach, the head of the blood hunter order Bodaway trained with just outside of Baldur's Gate, sits Bodaway down and tells him about his past life as a pirate, how he came to blood hunting and then the Raven Queen, and the folly of preoccupying yourself too much with whether you've more good or bad in you. He and Bodaway discuss the vision he had warning him of van Richten's attack, the ambiguity of messages from the gods to those often ill-prepared to interpret them, and the inherent nature of adventuring in general and the life of a blood hunter specifically: no matter what choices you make, some people will die, and sometimes those deaths will make those choices feel wrong. You can accept that, or you can let it break you, or you can retire and take up knitting. Now that I've called this three visitations I feel like I should decide which of the ghosts of Christmas each of them are. I think Hesketh is probably the ghost of Christmas past — you know, reminding Bodaway where he came from, talking about his own past. Ponto is the ghost of Christmas present, as in "we're both present and if you want to fuck in the Raven Queen's fortress of memories we can do that." And Gull is the ghost of Christmas future, as in "there are cookies in your future, my new friend."
Report Date
11 Jul 2022
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