here be the thread for the PbP portion of this campaign
I. In Search of Sanity
You find yourself dazed and stumbling through the streets of a half-familiar city, your head aching as if from a recent blow. Your clothes have been crudely cut away in places: a sleeve here, a pants leg there, perhaps a wide swath gone from the bottom of a shirt. The cut edges are rough from the bite of hasty scissors, and are sodden with fresh blood and loose threads, suggesting that your clothes might have been cut away in the course of urgent field treatment. Yet despite the grisly condition of your clothes, the skin underneath is unbroken, and you do not seem to bear any wounds.
Whatever might have happened, there’s no time to ponder it. You cannot recall exactly where you are, nor how you came to be here, but an overwhelming and bone-deep sense of dread presses down upon you. Everything else might be a mystery, but one thing you know for certain is that you are in grave danger here.
Yellow mist snakes through the windows of the vacant homes surrounding you and trickles like rainwater between the grimy cobblestones underfoot. The mist is thin and wispy in your immediate vicinity, but thickens to an opaque wall just twenty or thirty feet away — and that wall of sickly yellow surrounds you on all sides.
The fog clings to your skin like cold oil, and though it seems to have no smell, you feel uneasily certain that isn’t the truth. The truth, you suspect somehow, is that the odor merely leaves your memory the instant that the mist enters your lungs. It should repel you, and yet it steals your revulsion even as it steals more from your mind with each breath. This, somehow, is tied to why you can’t remember whatever brought you here.
Before you can focus on that thought, however, it’s driven away by the sound of footsteps in the mist. They aren’t human steps. The steps move slowly, as if stalking toward you, yet each one rolls like thunder through the eerie silence of this place. There’s no hurry to them, only the slow sadism of a cat closing on its mouse.
Along with the footsteps, you catch glimpses of a misshapen form approaching through the mist, too tall and too thin to be any living creature you’ve seen. It moves like an afternoon shadow across the city’s dingy brick walls, stretching and contracting abruptly, or vanishing altogether before reappearing, closer, without warning.
Behind you, a faceless sign hanging outside a ruined inn suddenly creaks in the windless hush. A sagging stub of a candle — was it there a moment ago? you can’t remember — burns in a dish beneath the weathered wood, its flame edged with blue in defiance of the creeping mist. The sight of it, somehow, sparks a glimmer of hope.
There are others moving toward the candle. You can hear their steps reverberating in the fog, can see their figures beginning to emerge from the yellow murk. You are not alone here.
But the menace in the mist is drawing closer, and its steps are getting faster.
The hulking Kellid stumbles over a cobblestone as he walks through the yellow mist. He turns on instinct, fists raised defensively, only to find nothing there but more of the foul mist.
Uldin, you've got to--Is that my name? Uldin?
He rubs his bare chest where it is exposed to the night air, half of his tunic torn to rags and now serving as bandages around each of his forearms. His fingers pass over artistic scars long since healed. He feels like they should have meaning, but it escapes him like he is trying to grab fish with his bare hands in a cold, mountain stream.
An image of a starry sky over just such a cold, mountain stream flashes in his mind and fades too fast to realize what he has imagined: a memory or a daydream? The dread trapped in his throat like a fishbone frustrates him. The sickening sensation of the yellow mist frustrates him. His shadowy, dogged, and inhuman pursuer frustrates him.
He runs a hand through his long, untamed black beard and over his face, pressing his closed eye with the heel of his palm. His fingers feel scars on his face--old and intentional like the ones on his chest.
"No!" the man shouts defiantly as he opens eyes.
The blue flame of the candle appears before him. The fear inside of him snaps like an icicle falling from a roof under the light of the sun.
I will not go down without a fight.
"Chase me if you dare! Run if you want! Either way, I will end you!" he shouts at the vague shapes in the mist.
Uldin turns his gaze--eyes the color of a untarnished steel appearing a dull gray in eerie glow of the mist--to the newcomer. His right hand reaches for something at his waist, but he forgets what he was seeking faster than he realizes that there is nothing there.
"It does not need to scare," he growls.
The man looks into the dark of the ruined inn and then back to the older man. "It looks no safer in there than here."
He looks at the candle and its reassuring light. His mind is momentarily filled with the image of the starry sky and a constellation whose name escapes him. He looks back to the bloodied man, forgetting about the stars.
His ragged shoes clomped loudly on a cobblestone, the noise cutting through his stupor like an axe. A second ago, he was — he didn't know. But now, noise. From him. The eerie fog swirled. The back of shirt was missing. Unnatural footsteps came toward him. Danger all around him, and yet it was the noise of his shoes on the pavement that shoved its way to the front of his mind and refused to be ignored.
He — who was he? He crouched briefly, trying to take his bearings. Fog. Figure. Fear. All outside his control. But he could control his own feet.
He moved forward across the street. Feet nearly silent now. How he couldn't say. But this he could do. A few steps helped. More. With every silent stride, the world cleared. He was still lost. Figure and fog. Fog and figure. But ahead: light. A candle? A sign.
Time later to think. He had to focus. The sign — an inn? Ruined, but someone there. An enemy? He felt not, but couldn't say why. Shelter, then. Shelter first.
Below the sign, another figure. Big. Much taller than him. But not tall like the figure. Normal-tall. Normal proportions. Human? The word penetrated his mind as he approached. With it came other words: elf, halfling, dwarf. The latter resonated and he knew that was what he was, knew so firmly it seemed strange he could ever have forgotten.
The human bellowed into the darkness, and the dwarf cringed instinctively. He hesitated, taking stock. In the moment another human emerged from the fog, and spoke sense.
Hesitation passed, he swept silently out of the fog, a still-young dwarf of stout body and long brown beard, currently sprawling unkempt down his chest.
"Shh!" he hissed. He paused, trying to form words. "Get inside."
As the dwarf moved toward the door, another word formed in his mind. He spoke again, not bothering to turn back to the human.
"Idiot."
Uldin was slow to follow the others inside. Leaving the blue light of the candle was a difficult as leaving a newborn child behind in a blizzard.
Do I have a child? No, I don't think-- What was I thinking about?
He looks at the back of the dwarf trying to enter the dark inn. With one last look of longing towards the candlelight, he moves to follow the others.
The dwarf stalked up to the door of the inn, then paused. He examined the battered wooden door. By ingrained instinct, he looked for oddities. Something wrong.
A moment was all it took to see that there was no danger. First thing. But then he let his eyes wander more broadly. The door — not a door. Decoration. Didn't work. The older man was right behind him. Waiting for him to go in. The dwarf shook his head.
"Won't work," he grunted. "Fake door."
In the mist beyond the light, a pitter pattering of small, desperate feet sound on grungy cobblestones. A child skitters into view, sliding to a stop as it sees the three figures before it. A once fine hat balanced atop it’s head tips forward, a cracked wire rimmed clockface swinging free. Whatever mechanism used to keep the clock running has been smashed beyond recovery, the rumpled hat has long since lost any appearance of finery.
The figure tips the hat back, staring at those gathered with wide eyes. An adult gnome then, rather than a child, with indigo hair and brilliant blue eyes. “Oh! People, thank the gods! Well, the good ones. Thought I was the only one playing tag with Mr. Taffypants for a bit there, haha. Didn't like that. Thought I was in a *nightmare*, but that isn’t right because it feels all wrong, you know? Not a dream, don’t *think* it’s dream, unless we’re all dreaming together and that would be fascinating, wouldn’t it?”
The gnome pauses for a moment to stare appreciatively at the group, before his attention seems momentarily caught by the blue light and he stands on the tips of his toes to peer at it. “Hey, a candle … huh. They don’t normally burn blue.” The gnome spends a moment trying to pry the candle's dish from the sign, or failing that, the candle itself for a better look.
The ritually scarred man turns his gaze and wild mane of black hair toward the sudden appearance of the gnome.
"Eh? Another?" he frowns thoughtfully, "Strength in numbers, then."
There was another mental flash of men and women in furs working in a snowy camp. It was gone as swiftly as the others.
The itching is the first thing he notices. It was always a terribly persistent tingle, always had been, but now-
Wait, had it always been? Where was it now? Where was... Where was his...
His hand strays to the empty socket of his right eye. He traces delicate fingers over the stitching that sutures flesh from above the eyebrow down to the sharp angle of his chin; precise work, hastily done.
But no... it hadn't always... Where was his... Where IS IT...
His fingers meet the coppery grit of dried blood, and he follows the splatter along the edges of slash through his shirt. The cut traces an arc in line with the stitching in his eye, nearly all the way down to his waist. A moment's inspection reveals his as whole and well as could be, except for his clothing and the...
Instinct moves him forward more than conscious thought as a haze of questions continues to plague him. He takes determined strides forward towards the only light in view, although he hesitates at the light's perimeter when his eye focuses on the four people assembled around it. Cerovyren takes a moment to listen intently to what everyone says, but he rushes into the light when the gnome begins to pry things free from the inn's exterior.
"Don't be stupid! This isn't the time to be collecting baubles, not with death lurking in the eaves!"
The elf sneers down at the gnome before turning the same glare on the other three. He rakes his sandy colored hair away from his face, revealing an so pale a blue it's nearly white. Cerovyren is tall and lean, and the hollow of his cheeks hints that he is someone who views food as a necessary distraction. Aside from the cuts and blood splattering, his clothes were once fine like those of a scholar.
With his admonishment given, he turns to stare back into the fog. His hands twitch and then go still as if eager to play at something the elf has forgotten, and it isn't readily apparent if Cerovyren is aware of their movement or not.
As soon as Cerovyren enters the small pool of light where the others have gathered, the entire cityscape shudders underfoot. With a sudden piercing hiss, the candle dies under Thim’s hand. Whatever solace any of you might have felt in its light vanishes, replaced by a fresh flood of dread.
Horrible laughter, wet and tearing and curiously muffled, echoes from the yellow mist, which roils violently around the sound. A figure steps out of the fog: too tall, too thin, clad in writhing strips of yellow-dusted gray. The bandages that cloak the figure aren’t made of cloth, but of hideous flesh, flattened and prehensile and utterly inhuman. They grasp at the parting mist as the figure strides through, and the fog breaks apart in their grasp, coating the twisting strips in fine, dry particles like pollen.
The Tatterman. Somehow, though you cannot recall ever having heard it spoken aloud, you know with a cold certainty that is the creature’s name.
With that remembered name come other fragments of memory: a dark book with letters that writhe across the pages like tortured things; a glimpse of a distant city, twisted and alien, across dunes of sun-scorched sand; an unfamiliar man’s face, turned eagerly something unseen that reflects across his eyes as a guillotine flash of yellow. The man’s look of expectant triumph shatters into horror, and so do the rest of your half-glimpsed memories — if memories they were.
The inn’s faceless sign snaps from its chain, crushing the candle into its dish and spattering you with liquid wax. The molten wax is piercingly cold, not hot, and it wriggles across your skin like something living.
And then, too quickly for the eye to follow, the Tatterman is in your midst.
What follows can scarcely be described as “carnage.” The Tatterman’s hands are empty, yet they tear you apart like razors. As his gray-wrapped hands flash across your bodies, the skin and flesh under your bloodied clothes peels apart, ripping itself open with an eerie absence of sound and an even more eerie sense that what is being torn apart is not your bodies, but time. Each of you feels that you’ve seen these wounds before, have felt this pain before, have died this way before. The Tatterman’s assault seems, in some inexplicable way, to wreak havoc on the flow of time and reopen great and gaping injuries that you had already suffered in the past.
Nothing you can do stops him. You can’t even slow him. The Tatterman laughs at your fumbling for weapons you no longer possess, bends away from your desperate blows with contemptuous ease, and lashes in again, now opening new wounds that mirror the old ones across different parts of your bodies.
There is no way to fight back, and there is no way to flee. The yellow mist snarls at your ankles, dragging you back with impossible solidity, and even the cobblestones seem to change shape underfoot, rising up or dropping away to trip you at every turn.
The Tatterman toys with you for several excruciating minutes, visibly delighting in your humiliation and fear. The creature mocks any questions thrown to him, echoing them in a sibilant, slurred tongue that carries an accent like none you’ve ever heard. He ignores insults and attempts at reason alike, answering only with hideous laughter and another sweep of those reality-tearing hands.
Eventually, however, the Tatterman’s amusement wears thin. When the lot of you are too exhausted and wounded to struggle any longer, the Tatterman closes in for the kill. A crease opens in the powder-streaked bandages that flap across his head, and in it you can catch a glimpse of long and jagged teeth arrayed in a round and puckered mouth. A veiny, pebbled tongue lashes between them, frantic in its obscene hunger.
“Good night,” the Tatterman croons, and his claws slash in again.
Cerovyren is the first to fall. The Tatterman’s claws pass across the elf’s throat, and though it seems that not a single nail touches skin, a gaping wound tears across Cerovyren’s neck, recreating, in miniature, the shape of the reopened gash along his chest. The elf falls into the yellow mist, his lifeblood spraying across the ruined inn’s wall.
The blood arcs up in unnatural spurts, splashing up with a searing, almost incandescent brightness in the yellow fog. In grisly, dripping letters, it spells out against the bricks: “ME.”
Even before the word finishes splattering across the inn’s false door, the Tatterman pivots toward Thim. The creature’s movements are graceful, almost a dancer’s pirouette. The gray bandages about his wrists flutter like ribboned bracelets, shedding puffs of yellow dust, as his hands streak across the gnome and leave red ruin in their wake. Torn open from sternum to pelvis, Thim collapses, and blood sprays across the bricks again.
“UP,” the scarlet letters spell, but there’s hardly time to read them before the Tatterman dances on, shredding Vaduk next. The Tatterman takes the dwarf from behind, severing his spine with a sickening crack and adding a third gore-spattered word to the wall: “SAVE.”
With only Gavrelu and Uldin left to watch their doom stalk them through the clinging yellow fog, the Tatterman becomes playful again. He giggles and croons as he menaces first one and then the other, rushing at them in short spurts before switching to the other. Each of the Tatterman’s charges pushes the two of them closer, crowding them against the false inn and the bodies of the creature’s other victims; it seems that the geography of this strange city bends and folds itself to force them together.
When there is nowhere else for them to go, and Uldin and Gavrelu are pushed back-to-back, the Tatterman’s cruel game comes, finally, to its end. One bandaged claw slashes down from the right, the other up from the left, and criss-crossing arcs of blood fountain past one another as both men are brought low. They have just enough time to see the words “WAKE — WAKE” drawn twice in blood upon the wall, and then their visions fade to black along with the others’.
You come to consciousness, cold and aching, in a grimy cell that you do not recognize. The air carries a fading whiff of alchemical disinfectant and a stronger, newer scent of blood and sweaty fear. The floor beneath you is chilly gray stone, finely made but covered with a patina of filth and neglect, and the bars that close you in are made of sturdy steel, likewise well-wrought but coated in a few weeks’ worth of grime.
Enclosed with you in the cells are the people you saw in that strange and bloody dream. Vaduk, Cerovyren, and Finn share one cell; Uldin and Gavrelu are confined in another cell that faces them across a torchlit central chamber. An empty third cell stands off to the side of Uldin and Gavrelu’s. Thick masonry walls separate the cells, but only steel bars block their doors.
You have no weapons and no personal belongings of any kind. Your ordinary clothes are gone. Instead, you wear shapeless tunics of dirty muslin, like prisoners or inmates. These garments are cut and bloodied in the same fashion as the clothes of your dream, but the blood is old and dried stiff. There are, again, no signs of any wounds on your skin beneath the rough-cut fabric.
The only injury that any of you seem to have suffered — and one that everyone shares — is a long, thin scratch, no deeper than a paper cut, where the Tatterman inflicted his fatal blow on each of you. This one is fresh, the blood barely scabbed over.
In the central chamber between your cells is a struggling man tied onto a table by heavy ropes. His lips are split and his skin is mapped with weeping red lines. A gaunt figure, dressed in a too-large and bloodstained doctor’s coat, circles around the bound man, idly spinning a blade from a broken pair of pruning shears. After a torturously long moment, the doctor draws the blade across the bound man’s thigh, eliciting a hoarse wail. Evidently absorbed in this work, the doctor fails to notice you rousing.
Thim’s eyes flash open, thrust into sudden painful wakefulness. “Ow. That was a nightmare.” The gnome rouses himself on the cold stone, putting his back to wall as he considers the others in his cell. Wincing, Thim takes stock of himself, noting the clothes he wears and the shallow cut that bisects him roughly stem to stern. Quietly, he notes, “I don’t think he liked being called Mr. Taffypants. But if it was a nightmare ... why am I still hurt? I can't ... things are missing in my head. Things are very wrong here.”
The gnome rises to his feet, glancing across the way at Uldin and Gavrelu in the other cell. He pauses for a moment, watching the horrid drama playing out outside the cells. He looks back to the others and speaks softly, “We’re going to have to get out of here.”
Thim’s lips press together in a thin line of determination. The gnome studies the cells and his surroundings, figuring if there are locks there must be a key.
Uldin groans weakly as the blackness parts to the cold and grimy reality around him. He touches his chest and feels the tacky blood over the shallow wound. Stiff muscles protesting, he rolls onto his side and pushes himself up by one arm. He watches the doctor's legs move around the table and then looks past them to the strangers held in the cage across the hall.
The Tatterman.
"You still alive?" he quietly asks his cell mate. "I ask because I'm getting us out of here and anyone strong enough to move before that dream-vampire returns."
He slowly drags himself toward the cell's door and examines the bars, looking for any weakness.
"I don't know," the Kellid replies in a whisper, "But we can't stay here."
He growls softly in frustration as he sinks back down to the floor. When he turns and look back at the macabre ritual taking place in the hall, he catches sight of the doctor's belt and, more significantly, the ring of keys there.
Uldin scuttles back towards his still prone cell mate. "The doctor's got the keys to the cells. If we can get him close to the bars, I can probably rip them away. Better if he comes in here. Then I can crack his neck," he says in a hushed if impassioned voice.
"That coat is too big for him," Uldin replies, trying to bolster his companion's courage. "I do not think it belongs to him."
He sidles back to the edge of the gate and peers around the wall at the sadistic man in the doctor's coat. "And that is no physician's tool."
From across the way, the gnome watched the two men converse, while pressed against the bars. Glancing back at the two figures in his own cell, he murmurs. "Can one of you two pick a lock?" He turned back to the two across the way, waving frantically to get one or both of their attention. Gesturing to the table, Thim pointed at his own cell lock and pantomimed picking it, looking questioningly at the pair.
Uldin bobs his head in acknowledgement of the gnome, then he shakes his head in answer to the pantomimed question,
"Maybe if you tried to kill me," he suggests to Gavrelu.
"I had thought about that," Uldin whispers back. "Then I thought they would feel more in control and less ready for me if I was the one being strangled. But you are probably right. Hopefully, you can mime choking well enough to fool them."
The large man pulls off the tattered remains of his shirt and twists it into a short rope. "Before I kill you, at least know my name is Uldin. Reasonably certain that it is, at least."
Across the hall, Vaduk lay on the belly for a moment after waking up, trying to calm his mind and think. A dream, that's all. And about all he knew. What else? Face pressed into the grimy stone, the dwarf listened. Movement, steel through the air, a scream. Murmurs from around him.
He sat up and looked around more fully, matching sights to sounds. The gnome and elf in his cell, the two humans across the way. The figures from his dream. That seemed odd, but then nothing seemed normal here. He idly felt his back as he registered some sort of surgery or torture across the hall.
"Can one of you two pick a lock?" the gnome asked.
Vaduk didn't respond for a moment, but pushed himself to his feet and examined the lock on the cell. It seemed crude on the outside, but it took just a moment peering at the tumblers to disabuse Vaduk of his illusions.
"Tricky even with good picks," he murmured back, voice surprising him with its raspiness. "Without? Very hard. Maybe impossible. Hard to say."
Cerovyren's eye slowly opens to glare balefully at first Thim then Vaduk. He has been awake for some time, having been the first one slaughtered in their shared dream, but he has used the time between his waking and the rousing of the others to gather himself. With everyone beginning to fumble about, the elf instead chooses to gather his knees to chest and to lean back into one of the corners of the cell. The touch of the cold gray stone is almost reassuring in its tangibility.
"It would be pointless, at any rate. We would be better served in biding our time until a proper opportunity presents itself."
He tilts his head up to glance across the hall before leaning back again. It would appear that the two humans were about some random foolishness of their own, as tended to be the human way. Cerovyren occupies himself with listening to the rhythms of the torturer and the tortured, trying to suss out anything that may be useful in aiding their escape.
The doctor, ignoring the murmured conversations from the cells, continues to torture her hapless “patient” for several minutes with the pruning shear blade. Thoroughly absorbed in her work, she rakes the crude weapon across the few expanses of skin that aren’t already weeping blood from scores of shallow cuts. Eventually, however, she grows bored, and turns away from her victim to exchange the shear blade for a bent oyster fork.
While the doctor’s back is turned, her victim laboriously pulls a blood-slick leg loose from his bindings, which have frayed around his right ankle. He kicks her suddenly, knocking the surprised doctor hard against the cell that Cerovyren, Thim, and Vaduk share. Her head bangs noisily against the bars, and she wobbles for a beat, momentarily stunned.
Vaduk had been examining the lock when the "doctor" turned her back, and so was inches away from the woman when she flew against the bars from her victim's kick.
The dwarf didn't hesitate, crouching down and reaching for the ring of keys around the doctor's belt, working or wresting them free. Picking this lock could take him all day, but a key? Just a second.
Uldin starts at the sudden noise of the woman being kicked into the opposing cell door.
"Well, maybe I will not need to kill you after all."
The broad shouldered Kellid moves to the door of his own cell, watching for an opportunity of his own.
The gnome is somewhat startled by the speed at which events proceed, but recovers somewhat as the dwarf reaches for the keys. From behind the dwarf and doctor, the gnome can be heard to incant something, his fingers flashing through a few arcane gestures.
Silent Image: From the doctor's right, a bloodied hand swipes into view as the formerly recumbent patient stumbles forward, clawing. Will save if interacted with, DC 16 (if she notices that the patient is still on the table, she'll be getting a bonus, obviously. Thim is just trying to distract her while the dwarf goes for the keys.)
After a few seconds, the doctor recovers and, snarling, springs back toward the still-bound patient. Several vicious swipes of her shear blade put an end to the man's miserable life, but she continues to assail the body viciously even after he's dead, hacking at it in an all-consuming fury that leaves her spattered with blood and effectively blind to whatever might be happening in the cells behind her.
The dwarf snatches the keys from the doctor during her few seconds of inactivity, clutching them close as she launches herself forward toward her brave but hapless victim.
Seeing the torturer intent on exacting her bloody rage, Vaduk picks a likely key from the ring and inserts it in the lock, trying other keys until he finds one that works.
As the surprisingly complex mechanism clicks open, the dwarf shoulders it open and races across the short hall to to unlock the opposite cell.
"Arm yourselves!" he hisses, standing back from the opening door.
Thim gestures at the table with the tray of sharp implements, drawing one of the implements off the table with a force that pulls it across the intervening distance to his hand outstretched through the bars. The image of the dying patient he'd summoned earlier blinks out of existence. He draws the surgical knife back and glances back to Cerovyren, giving him a significant look and tossing him the knife. "Hah. I've had more pleasant wake-ups. Better death than waiting for whatever she's doing to that poor fellow. Let's not give her the chance. Keep her off the dwarf while he gets the others free."
Cerovyren gives the gnome a silent nod as the knife settles into his hand. He takes a couple of practice stabs, the inelegance of surgical tool earning a disdaining sneer, before he surges out of the cell after the dwarf.
Once outside of the cell, the elf waits until the brawnier looking humans are also free. Cerovyren lets them take the lead; better to walk to freedom over their perforated corpses than risk further injury out of some idiotic sense of bravado. He didn't remember much about himself, but he was certain that he wasn't a fool.
The doctor ignores Gavrelu entirely, spitting and laughing hysterically as she continues to slash at the corpse on her table. As she hacks at him, her face softens and sags like melting wax. The color in her cheeks drains to gray, and her short-cropped hair recedes into her scalp, leaving a bald dome as smooth as polished marble. As she blinks, her eyes momentarily transform into luminous spheres of glistening blue, the pupils slit horizontally down the center like a goat's; then a spray of blood spurts across her face, she blinks again, and her eyes return to a more ordinary kind of madness.
Throughout this, she pays her prisoners no mind. By the time the doctor turns to see them, everyone is out of their cells and Cerovyren and Thim have armed themselves with makeshift knives.
She hisses through her teeth, and abruptly those teeth are normal again. In a fraction of a heartbeat, her entire appearance is normal again, the whole transformation undone so quickly that one can hardly be sure it happened at all.
"I don't have time for you," she spits. Shoving the worktable over at Cerovyren and Thim to knock them off balance, she darts through the escapees, past a heap of loosely tied sacks, and down an open chute that breaks through the crumbling stone walls on the east side of the room.
"Mhm. Am I dreaming?" The gnome says after a second, "I don't *think* so." He pauses after a second, before hitting Cerovyren in the arm. "Wake up!" Studying his reaction for a moment, before shaking his head. "No, definitely *not* dreaming, I think."
He eyes the chute through which the doctor vanished. "Still, if that's the case, why did her face go all weird? Mhm. Stranger and strangers ... haha. This is great! We're not being hacked to death by spindly taffymen, and we've just managed to escape from our jail cells! Probably need to kill her though." The gnome looks to the others and beams before proceeding to wander off and inspect the sacks.
Uldin raises his eyebrows in surprise as the dwarf swipes th e keys from the woman and manages to unlock his own cell. He readies himself to reach through the bars to grapple with the woman should the opportunity present itself, but it never does as she seems too obsessed with killing the victim in as violent a way as possible. When the woman's appearance changes, he nearly misses it as the dwarf unlocks his cell.
He exits the cell just in time to see the changeling woman dive through a break in the wall.
The marked Kellid looks around the dungeon. "I do not know this place or what is happening, but it is clearly evil, and I am prepared to stop it."
He takes a sharp piece of metal from the table and break off a wooden beam with a loud snap to use as a cudgel.
Thim triumphantly pulls a small crossbow from the wreckage, tugging on the string and eyeballing it before catching sight of the feathered ends of a few bolts and pulling them out of the sack with a squee of excitement. "Man, I have no idea how to use this thing ... ahaha." He chortles and hugs the crossbow and bolts to his chest, rocking back and forth with an expression of sheer elation for a minute before looking to the others.
"Hm. Where? Well, it's not the nightmare we were in earlier, so that's good news, right?! Mhm. You were *there* in the nightmare, and that seems stranger for you than me, I think. I seem to think dreams are important. My dreams anyhow, but maybe yours too." He proceeds to load the small crossbow as he talks.
He eyes the room about them. "I think this is as much a hospital as she was a doctor, but mayyyybe ... well, we'll find out, won't we? Hah. And it's going to be a lot of fun! Assuming she doesn't kill us, haha." He pauses for a moment, head cocked before adding, "Uhm. That last but wasn't really a joke, I really think she'll try to kill us, I'm a really good judge of people, I remember that much from before." Thim looks briefly contemplative shortly before the crossbow goes off, shooting a bolt into the wall and he clutches it in delight before scrabbling after the bolt and trying to pry it out of the wall.
A hushed voice whispers over Gavrelu's shoulder, as peers at the book in the archaeologist's hands. "They stole my dreams too." The gnome clutches a journal that looks to have been put together by a scrapbooker on acid, adorned with swatches of colorful fabric and bits of metal with odds and ends sticking out from between the pages.
"Some of them are in here, the one about the rats in the clockwork palace? The mermaids who sing without mouths, yes. The hallway of mirrors ..." Thim trails off, looking despairingly at his dream journal. "But the latest of them are just *gone* ..." The gnome opens the book to one of his water damaged pages., looking distraught.
Cerovyren looks down at the gnomes fist on his arm as if it were an alien thing. He then affixes Thim with a deadpan gaze and when he speaks his words are just as lacking in emotion.
"Do not touch me... Please."
The gnome scampers off before Cerovyren can judge whether or not his words were even heard, let alone understood. Cerovyren slowly exhales an exasperated sigh before he also moves to inspect the detritus.
"The what and how of this place can wait until we've assured our freedom."
He picks up a travel pack that tugs at his memory... the pot strapped to the side was still chalked with some of his markings. Dwarves were useless in most ways but they certainly knew how to work iron for durability. Cerorvyren remembers purchasing the pot from a Janderhoff merchant near Galt. He overpaid but the...
The memory becomes intangible and Cerovyren's attempts to hold on to it are just as futile as clutching at smoke on a strong wind. He spends an extended moment staring at the pack before he slides his arms through its shoulder straps and then resumes his sorting with a mute determination.
Next he finds a heavy overcoat wrapped around a twohanded sword. The overcoat is of a heavy brocade and was once pure white that is now stained with dirt and dried blood. Icy blue metal studs cover the coat and when Cerovyren draws the sword he finds it to be made of the same color steel. Someone had taken these from a Snowcaster, elven cousins that lived far to the north, and judging by the markings the original owner had been someone of some tribal importance.
Focusing on the markings in an attempt to figure out who their owner may have been leaves him grasping at more smoke. He gives up more quickly than he had with the small cooking pot. The sword is not his, that he is certain of, but both it and the coat will serve him just the same. He continues sorting until he uncovers one last item, and as he does he finds his mouth going dry and his hands taking on a slight tremor.
It is a mask. Although delicate in its crafting, the mask feels much more substantive than it looks as Cerovyren lifts it from the debris. The mask has elven features and an inviting smile, but what is most striking is that rather than an opening for the right eye there is an eye-shaped spiral. Three channels trace down from the spiraled-eye over the mask's cheekbone and to its edge. The channels are stained crimson, Cerovyren can't remember whether it's enamel or old blood.
I can stop the nightmares with THIS... THIS will keep them at bay and she will Welcome me-
The memories flash and then fade in rapid succession, leaving nothing but confusion and a slowly building frustration as he raises the mask to his face. It fits perfectly over every contour of his face, even the raised stitching of his right eye, and as it settles on his face the mask does...
Absolutely nothing. It doesn't even stay in place, Cerovyren has to hold onto it with his hand. A sinking fear settles into the pit of his stomach, and that combined with his frustration gives him the urge to propel the mask against the nearest wall. Instead, he places the mask in a pouch with his spell components.
There was little physical sign of his internal turmoil, aside from the slight tremor in his hands as he tried on the mask and the wild look he gives it after he takes it off. After he regains his feet, he moves past the others to peer down at the slaughtered man strapped to the table and then down the hallway to the southwest.
The shaggy-maned Kellid tries to shake the cobwebs from his mind. When a wreath of mistletoe and holly woven together with dark, iridescent grackle feathers and tiny amber beads falls out of the backs during the gnome's scavenging, a sense of familiarity tickles Uldin's mind. He slides the makeshift knife into the front of his ruined pants and takes the wreath.
"Pulura--"
He raises his eyes and clenches his jaw.
The man steps over to the sacks and, with brisk efficiency, searches through the collected items of the lost. He takes a suit of hide armor that requires letting the straps out to fit comfortably, someone's waterskin, and several other utilitarian items from the pile and around the room.
"My name is Uldin, priest of Pulura. If you let me, I will get all of us out of here."