Mirelinza is deep in study but can't fail to be distracted when the Harrow reading is taking place. She allows her attention to wander for a while before getting back to the task in hand.
The gypsy's candles flicker with the breeze of Naught's gleeful sweep.
Naught's card depicts a macabre carnival scene. The once-innocent bright lights and colors meant to cheer, darkened to nightly terror for one centrally-painted frightened little boy. Dressed in blue and bearing a lollipop, he flees for dear life from a ghastly clown and a creepily cloaked man on stilts. A starry icon is painted on the right-hand side of the card
Stunned, "Oh wow." She then continues, "Like... sorry, but this card is a bit of a bummer. There's good to it though! Basically, it's about false hopes and dreams. Illusions, or delusions. It's a warning, really, though. Your plans or ambitions may not be sound, or realistic. But it could also mean, maybe, someone is trying to deceive you? Maybe, like, yourself even? So you might need to, like, be more alert and see things as they really are instead of what you might want them to be."
Pensively, she then asks Naught, "Are you, like... a bard? Or if you aren't, do you, like, do any kind of arcane magic?"
Naught listens intently as the fortune teller performs the Harrowing, having finished she hems and haws for a moment before finally answering. "No, although I do like to sing and collect stories, I just never had the temperament to be a minstrel or a mage. I much prefer simply traveling and exploring... And being in the company of beautiful women. Thank you for this fortune. "
"Interesting," Aliseya says with a hint of the experimental inquisitiveness of an alchemical researcher in her tone. "Cause, like, this card also foretells of something which can empower arcana, though it's not to be trusted as a reliable source of power." She thinks a moment, "If not your power, then maybe encountering someone with such unpredictable power is in your future..."
Letting that sink in, Aliseya's bi-colored eyes twinkle to jubilance once more. Smiling widely and looking around for her next victim, "Who's next?!"
As the rest of the women resist the urge (if any!) to draw a card from Aliseya's deck, she looks at Naught and Zelda with glee, "I guess it's my turn then."
The gypsy carefully takes a full minute to dramatically hover her hands over the face down cards, as if using enigmatic powers to guide her choice. She has a few false stops before stopping for real and finally choosing one.
Flipping it onto the table face up, you see a painted owl perched on a tree branch. A threaded needle rests in its beak as it stares at the card's observers. Upon the card lies a starry icon, like on Naught's, but here it is centered.
"Hmmm. This one represents the eternal wisdom of the natural order of stuff. It's about balance. As a wolf pack hunts a deer, it is both tragic for the deer and strengthening for the wolves. So too can the owl bind life together with its needle, or pick it apart."
She ponders a moment. Then, "Maybe, like, I must face both tragedy and happiness by my choices. While I might choose either heads or tails, they're just two sides of the same coin; where one goes, the other follows, just as with the wolves and deer. Hmmm..."
A few moments later, she seems troubled by her own analogy. "This is like... so depressing. Poor deer."
Then her eyes light up once more, "So! Anyone else? No?"
Naught bobs her head in agreement as Aliseya laments the philosophical deer before thoughts of well cooked venison enter her mind.
Cellawyn steps up to Aliseya with some trepidation. "I'll try the Harrow reading."
She watches with apprehension as the gypsy draws the cards.
Mirelinza has her head in the books and is continuing to study but anyone who looks will notice she steals glances whenever a reading is done.
"That's so awesome sauce."
The harrower is pleased by Cellawyn's interest. She places her harrow pick on the table, revealing a depiction of a bear. Wearing a circus outfit, the bear balances upon a unicycle in the middle of a forest. An icon of a hammer is painted centrally over the bear's belly.
"So. Like, this so is sooo you I think. I mean," Aliseya now turns red after feeling like she just put her foot in her mouth, "not at all because you, like, look like a bear or anything! Gods no! You've got such a lovely figure!" Recovering her coloring quickly, "I just mean, it's a card of pure strength. And I think you seem to have what it takes to deal with it's challenges properly. So, brute force may be needed in your future. But the consequences can be very severe. Like the picture, people sometimes think that bears can be tamed or trained. And they also think they can control their own 'inner bear.' Maybe, like, druids can. But sooner or later, you learn what the druid knows: you can't control the bear. Not without first overcoming your own ego by learning self-discipline."
Aliseya then looks slyly at Mirelinza, "I know you want a reading too..."
Cellawyn frowns at the bear card. "I'm not sure if this portends well. I've always considered my self-discipline to be exquisite. Your harrowing indicates that perhaps I have more to learn. I will have to think about what this means. Thank you Aliseya. I appreciate the insight."
Mirelinza's interest in the readings was such that by the time Cellawyn was under discussion, she'd discarded the book she was reading and was now 100% focused on the cards.
With a wry smile, she accepts Alisaeya's offer. "OK, it would be odd to be the only one that wasn't given the benefit of your insight."
There is not even a hint of sarcasm in the voice, and the paladin seems genuinely keen to find out more.
"Awesomatious girlies!" Whatever that means, Aliseya seems as pleased as pie by her fellow Varisian's interest.
Mirelinza's card depicts a happy centaur. Clothed as a traveling explorer, he carries a lot of gear. An icon of an open book rests above him at the center-top of the card.
After Mirelinza shows the fortuneteller her card, her whole face smiles. "The Wanderer. That's, like, so cool. This centaur is, like, a dude who collects stuff and finds worth in what others wrongly deem worthless. As in, like, he finds real substance and value in that which most others are not perceptive enough to see as valuable. He's deep. The only thing to watch for is, sometimes, it can mean you need to be really watchful so that you don't miss out on something truly valuable to you. It represents values, so you could fail to see what's valuable in a person or a situation if you don't pay attention. So, like, just pay attention."
"Perhaps this will tell me what is to come up in this month or later..." sighs Kendra with a smile. "Excuse me,", she adds, while drawing a plate from the deck, and handing it face-down to Aliseya, for harrowing.
"Yay!"
The young fortuneteller gestures for her hostess to draw a card of her choosing from the remaining spread. The candles flicker as Kendra places down her pick, face up, for the gypsy to read.
A great keep is depicted in her card. but it's no ordinary keep, for it features metallic leg- and arm-like mechanisms for moving about and grasping objects like a person. Armed persons look up at the keep, and smoke billows into the sky from a great pipe. Above the keep is painted a hammer icon, like the one on Cellawyn's card.
"Wow. That's like, so appropriate, under the circumstances. The Keep is about quiet strength in times of hardship. You can move when needed, but also you can buckle down and endure the tides. You will not be shaken by force," she says with a sweet smile. Carrying on with a wagging index finger, "But so long as you remain true to yourself. Otherwise, you may give way to temptation and fall."
Kendra smiles at the coincidence, and adds "Perhaps it means I will have to move my small castle out of Ravengro, back into a more interesting city..."
Amidst the harrowings and conversations, you proceed with your reading, stopping for short breaks and soon diving again into the notes and tomes.
You spend a few hours skimming through books and notes, trying to connect facts with your background religious knowledge in order to learn more about the Whispering Way, if that is possible at all. It has been a while since you peered over text for a relatively long time, but Cellawyn's experience and scholarly discipline help you digest the readings and focus on the more important pieces of text. On a volume entitled "Organizations of the Inner Sea & Scattered Notes", you find a small encyclopedia containing small digests about various entities, groups and organizations in Ustalav, Varisia and beyond. The entries are sorted alphabetically, and there is no mentioning of a Whispering Way. However, the appendix lists a number of brief facts about unspecified organizations, which the authors were able to gather, but not to name or incorporate to other entries. After reading through these by Cellwayn's direction, you find a short passage that reads A certain group pursues means of creating liches and breaking the prison of Tar Baphon; cultists have been known to travel far and wide, visiting areas plagued by notorious haunts and other menancing manifestations of the dead, to perform field research and capture all manners of aberrations. Their presence has been associated with markings portraying gagged skulls, and these individuals have been notorious for murdering whoever delves too deep into their agenda, and then mutilating their mouths in order to silence them even after dead, thus rendering useless any necromancy or other arcana that aims to learn from memories that might linger impressed in their lifeless bodies.
The expression gagged skull from Mirelinza's report stands out to you, and after skimming through the texts for such an expression, you recall that you had not read about a gagged skull, but seen it. In a thin volume, entitled Runes & Symbols v. III, you find the carefully hatched drawing of a gagged skull and a brief passage A series of philosophies only transferred via whispers —- no written evidence or spoken testimony obtained. The events associated with the emergence of this symbol over the land are also unclear. Detecting a pattern in their occurrence therefore has not been possible, while, at the same time, the nature of the secretive philosophy and of the symbol has been elusive to the authors and their collaborators.
The last sentence allows both of you to connect the information, and betrays whom the texts refer to: Sightings of the gagged skull go as far back as the sixth century, often being attributed by folklore to necromancers and other historical figures, even the tyrant Tar Baphon himself.
In the end, the two of you have spent about three hours reading through the text, and this is all the information that you have gained. Still, your research is certainly to be considered a successful endeavor.
Satisfied, or, rather, conformed with the amount of information you and Mirelinza managed to extract about the Whispering Way, you turn your attention to Harrowstone. Though you are able to validade some of the facts known to you and previously stated by Zelda, you cannot add anything new to what you already know -- indeed, Zelda's lore was perhaps more detailed than the information in Lorrimor's library. You will spend another two hours on this task, only to conclude that the library is not as rich on information about Harrowstone as it is concerning the Whispering Way.
Kendra stays with the five throughout the evening, pulling books out for Cellawyn and Mirelinza, and then setting them again in the appropriate places when the texts are dismissed by the two researchants.
She seems disturbed to learn Mirelinza's and Cellawyn's findings about the Whispering Way, and after these are revealed she remains silent, reserved and agitated. Clearly, she attempts to find in chores and other host tasks some manner of distraction from her rapidly running thoughts.
Cellawyn tells the others about what she has learned, "The references to the Whispering Way are ominous. I wonder if they have a local presence in Ravengro. That may have been why the professor was researching the cult."
Cellawyn nods at Zelda, "Yes, let's get some rest. I would like to head back to Harrowstone at first light. "
"Yeah. Like, it totally could." a smiling Aliseya responds to Kendra.
For a short time, the fortuneteller joyously fumbles around with her deck of cards in the aftermath of her craft. As her candles burn low, fumbling gives way to boredom. The young woman then curiously picks up one of the tomes and begins fumbling through the pages. She decides to pass the remaining time assisting the others in their research, although more of her time is spent looking at pictures than reading. An occasional "Cool," "Wow," or "Ew!" can be heard here and there over the course of research.
Yawning, Aliseya nods in agreement with Cellawyn and Zelda. She packs up her shawl, used candles, and harrow deck and heads up to bed.
None of what Mirelinza was pleasant but the link to Tar Baphon was the most worrying.
"Rest assured these won't be amateurs. If they've been around this long and are responsible for any of what we've seen so far, we'll need more than a good night's rest."
Her tone was sombre. Not defeatist but reflecting how severe she saw the task ahead.
"Axes don't tend to care about age." She wears a devious grin as she quips back to Mirelinza.
You all prepare to sleep, and soon the house is silent.
You are sitting close to Harrowstone, and you see the kid playing in the distance. Pervin is beside you, and he asks Cellawyn "Are you an elf too?" but Cellawyn is not there, and you realize he is asking it to you. You think that you might be an elf, but you check your ears and you are not. "Who else is an elf?" you ask Pervin, and the scene ends.
At a late hour, with one of your eyes pressed against the lavender pillow and the other involuntarily open, you blankly stare, torpid, only barely awake, at Aliseya's sleep across the room, with the immovable silence of the night slowly luring you back to sleep, out of the day's excitement that lingered on your blood... Suddenly, a FIGURE IN BLACK materializes near Aliseya; you think it might be a dream, but you realize that the air around you is solid and the walls are sharp and detailed; the massive shadow is leaning over the Varisian, holding a thin metallic rod on its left hand, which displays a thumb and five fingers. The figure is completely draped in dark, voluminous velvet, and on its face a white mask gazes coldly toward Aliseya. From its right hand you see a small, dark mass of velvet emerge from its finger tip, detach itself and crawl its way over Aliseya's neck and cheek, at which moment she awakes in utmost panic.
You feel something crawl on your face, and suspecting it to be a spider you desperately try to push the mass away from your face, but you do so to no avail, as soon you notice the masked being draped in black velvet leaning over you, and you feel a pressure on your left eye -- it seems as though something is being inserted through your eye lid into your body, and you can feel the foreign body moving in the crevices of your skull and through your throat, quickly slipping through your stomach into your bowel, and lodging itself there. While later you will feel the presence of the object within you, for now, all that is vouched by this short window of time during which all this happened is the first reaction from you and Naught...
"Bwa..? Hey! Get away from her!" In a rage Naught will jump to her feet and close with the strange creature.
Aliseya lets out a blood curdling scream, piercing all ears within the bedroom and perhaps beyond.
"Freak!" Within a split second, the walking staff beside the scowling gypsy's bed is in her hands. She immediately kicks herself upright, standing atop her bed, staff wound behind her like a baseball bat.
She swings ferociously at the dark figure's head...
The scream echoes throughout the house, alerting Cellawyn and Zelda, but neither Mirelinza nor Kendra.
You jump from bed from your army training, crisis has struck, as you were expecting!
Upstairs, the commotion is happening; you know something is wrong, and Mirelinza seems to be too deep asleep to hear anything.
As you two move into position to react, the FIGURE IN BLACK moves back toward the door.
Its movement gives you the chance to swing your staff at it almost as hard as you can; it feels as though you struck a tree -- the strike harmlessly ends on a thud and the FIGURE IN BLACK seems unharmed.
THE FIGURE IN BLACK starts to jerk and violently convulse, raising its arms and uttering muffled sounds and gasps with a deep voice.
"The monster will devour you! I will eat your livers raw and cover my face with your blood!"
You understand the threat, and your mind suddenly becomes very sharp, discerning that the threat is real! The FIGURE IN BLACK starts to look bigger, and it overwhelms you; you feel cold rush through your bowels and your bones as you realize that you are powerless. You would have thought that it would be different, that you could protect yourself from your enemies and abusers alike with your axe, but it was all an illusion you managed to convince yourself of. You are just as weak and fragile as a hare caught on a hunter's snare... You trip, unable to run away without throwing yourself into the reach of the arms of the FIGURE IN BLACK, and you grope the ground for something to cling on; you find the bed frame, and, as quickly as you can, you dive under the bed, shut your eyes tight, block your ears, and curl your body, hoping that it will just go away...
Once the drowsiness wears off, you realize that the FIGURE IN BLACK is real; not just a freak, but a presence that overpowers you. While Naught simply dives into "safety" under your bed, you manage to find courage somewhere in your heart to stand ground against the FIGURE IN BLACK, perhaps to protect your friend, but you feel that, if it lunges against you, you will not be able to defend yourself.
What is that thing? Why is it here? Why? I'm sorry Ali. I'msorryI'msorryI'msorryI'msorry...
There is really nothing you can do; apologizing while probing the depths of your soul for some supernatural courage will not help. There is no supernatural courage. You just do not have it.
Cellawyn, grabs her rapier from the night stand and lunges at the figure in black. Before attacking she expends a point from her arcane pool as a swift action to enchant the blade.
Crit check
Mirelinza is woken from her deep sleep. Experience overrides tiredness and she grabs her rapier and follows Zelda upstairs.
The FIGURE IN BLACK takes one step back into the hallway, and again it starts to jerk and convulse and groan, lifting its arms in a big, wide circle -- twice as wide as you would have initially thought its limbs could extend --, turning mask and body towards Cellawyn's room, and disappearing, leaving a cloud of smoke where it was.
Just as it vanishes in plain sight, Cellawyn arrives, rushing in and ready to lunge with her blade against the enemy which she heard, but which she does not see. What she sees, though, is Aliseya regaining her color and pulling herself together, and what she hears is Naught's voice mumbling unintelligible sounds from under Aliseya's bed.
Cellawyn will rush to Naught's side and will try to comfort her, "You're safe now. Whatever it was - it's gone."
Shivering she manages to mumble "I... It... Cold... Before..."
Aliseya stares in astonishment as the dark figure takes her stick in the face without so much as a flinch. As Cellawyn enters the room to comfort Naught, she remains tense and stares at the hall where it disappeared from atop her bed.
She blinks once, then a few times further, and begins to notice her surroundings once again. Seeing Naught shivering under her bed, she drops her stick, jumps down to the floor, and tries to comfort the poor thing along with her elven friend.
"I... I think it's safe now Naught."
She motions with her arms for the sharky lady to give her a comforting hug.
...
Moments later, Aliseya suddenly tenses. Quickly, she grabs her hand mirror from her satchel, and carefully begins to inspect her uneasy left eye. She also feels for the source of discomfort in her stomach, and wonders aloud, "What... what did that thing put inside of me?" Her mouth drops open in disgust, and with a shiver, "Ew."
When Ali offers Naught immediately latches around the other girl's waist.
Mirelinza's focus is on the surroundings - looking around to check if there is anybody left to tackle.
Aliseya replies to Zelda while holding her lower abdomen with one hand and patting Naught soothingly with the other, "Some creep in black came in and started, like, touching my face. I thought it might be my stalker ex at first. But this guy was... I don't know, an even darker presence. Demonic maybe. Said some creepy things to us. Then he disappeared into thin air! Oh, and he was wearing a strange mask."
Rubbing her tummy and blinking her eyes, "He... put something in my eye! And I felt it moving through me, all the way down into my abdomen now."
Shaking her head, she looks disturbed, "What the freak?!"
"Yeah. Or maybe Kendra knows something, too." Aliseya begins to move forward, but is halted by Naught's tight grip around her waist. She's anchored in place for now, so she continues to soothe Naught with some back patting.
By then Kendra too is awake; she comes from her bedroom wrapped in a long blanket from neck to feet, with her eyes barely open, and a diffuse, magical light emanating from the cloth covering her body. "Am I hearing well, did someone come in here?"
She is still not fully capable of processing information yet.
"We have to call the Sheriff!" She suddenly reacts, alarmed. "Did the... thing break in here?"
She moves towards the living room and then proceeds to the kitchen, only to find both doors locked, and all windows tight shut.
"The house is all locked."
As you calm down, the lowering stress and calmer conversation make some space in your minds for noticing the recurrent howling of a few stray dogs far and close by.
"Do you think it may have come for my father's books?"
"What do you think we should do?" she asks to the visitors.
Long enough passed after the entity's departure before sanity slowly returned to Naught's mind. Very hesitantly she will release Ali's waist as she stands up. Avoiding eye contact with everyone she'll begin mumbling. "I'm sorry. Ever since my attack I've wanted to help protect people against monsters in the night and when one finally shows up I hide under the bed like a child. I'm sorry I'm so useless."