You notice the same thing, the old woman is clearly just a disguise.
Entering the Storefront...
A nauseating riot of color splashes every surface of this room. The shelves are stocked with hundreds of porcelain dolls with looks of vapid joy upon their faces. While each doll differs in hair color, skin tone, and dress, there is something eerily similar about their enraptured faces, almost as if they all bore a family resemblance. A bronze plaque boasts that “All our dolls are made from Mwangi mahogany and Tian porcelain, and are clothed in Vudrani silk and lace.” A plump elderly lady is rearranging some of them. "Yes, dearies? Can I help you?"
The woman's eye twitches at Markus' insult.
"Young man, my name is Jaelle. You should respect your elders, sonny."
"Now see here missy.." She sighs as she realizes her disguise isn't fooling anyone. She pulls off her gray wig and wipes off some of her make up. "You're right. That Black is creepy, I just try to stay out of his way. Him and that mother of his. I keep hearing what sounds like muffled saw blades and screaming every so often. And that smell, I get sick if I don't go outside for fresh air. Unless you need something else, I should go home." She finishes taking off her disguise to reveal a very young Varisian girl with knives strapped to her body. If no one has any other questions for her, she leaves.
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Erin reaches out and gently grabs hold of the woman's shoulder to briefly halt her. Looking into her eyes she sincerely says.
"I do not know what exactly is going on with your parents, but you should appreciate them and work out your issues. Some people never really had that chance." After a brief pause to let that sink in, she continues. "Thank you for your information on Black, we will take care of this from here."
"I heard all the noise from downstairs. I usually don't leave the storefront so I don't know where the stairs are. His mother is an ugly old shrew from what I can tell." She looks at Erin for a brief moment. "Thanks for the advice." She makes her way out of the shop.
Opening the western door leads you to an L shaped hallway. Going north you have two doors on the left hand side and continuing west you have one door far down on the right and two on the left side. You also have the doors at the end of the hallways leading outside. Which door now?
Assuming you mean heading west, opening the first door on the left reveals a very well kept room stocked with clothing befitting an elderly woman. And to save some time, the adjacent room is a more messy one though it contains fine clothing more appropriate for a well groomed male merchant. Erin finds two journals(one in each room) that are written in the same hand as the previous notes and to-do list she found earlier. They both report the mundane events of the Doll House. Though it seems to be from two different perspectives. Now where?
Two chests and a stack of three crates fill this room. Sewing supplies and doll parts fill the chests, though Erin easily spots a hidden switch that, when pulled, rotates the hollow stack of crates, revealing a set of stairs descending down.
A wide tunnel stretches underneath the Doll House, with uneven wooden planks serving as floor, walls and ceiling. Stacks of crates, chests, sacks, bolts of fabric, and even a discarded love seat clutter this yawning corridor. On the western edge, a narrow set of stairs leads up to the Doll House. Light spills into the dim chamber from an open doorway at the hall’s eastern end. The air is musty and putrescent.
The crates, chests, and sacks are filled with outlandish hats, gaudy baubles, and dusty wigs. A false bottom in one of the chests reveals 4 potions of Cure Serious Wounds and 4 potions of Cure Moderate Wounds. Several portraits of a stern looking woman glare into the room. One painting portrays the whole family, including a young Chrysalis Black and four younger sisters.The girls’ faces in the portrait have been melted away as if by acid. This room is cast in dim light.
Piled near an open chest are several journals that tell the story of Chrysalis Black.
Chrysalis Black was the oldest child of many and his parents’ only son, yet his widowed mother ignored him in favor of his young sisters, dressing them like perfectly made-up dolls. Jealous, Chrysalis broke into his late father’s alchemy lab and stole a compound that, when mixed with the girls’ rouge, would make them break out in a rash. But he misjudged its potency, and watched in horror as his sisters’ screaming faces melted to the bone. Their deaths cost both Chrysalis and his mother their sanity. First, his mother grew obsessed with porcelain dolls, believing them to be her dead children. This led Black to try creating better and better dolls to replace the sisters he killed. Each new batch would please the unhinged woman only briefly; then, howling with grief and rage, she would destroy the dolls and beat her son savagely for hours. The torment continued for years until Black finally snapped; when he regained his composure, he found his mother laying on the floor, her frail neck snapped. The room was deathly silent—and that’s when the dolls began to speak. To cope with his latest crime, Black developed a second persona—that of his own abusive mother. Now, his fractured mind enacts its own tragic cycle: Black forges animated dolls of porcelain and flesh, only to have his “mother” smash them to pieces at his feet.
In the center of the room sits a gnarled and bloated corpse, stitched together with bits of other bodies where its own organs have rotted away. This flesh golem is mostly made up of Chrysalis’s murdered mother and sits unmoving in a moldering rocking chair, wearing one of the late widow’s stained dresses and a pair of slippers with a floral pattern. The creature is inert, but as you walk up to it four porcelain dolls jump out from the clutter and attack. They all resemble the four sisters in the portraits. "Play with us." They say in unison. However you easily dispatch them.
At the end of the tunnel, a door stands that resembles a giant doll’s head with a disturbingly wide grin. It also bears an eerie resemblance to Black's mother and is made of porcelain.
As you walk up to the door, it emits vitriolic litany of scolding at you. "How dare you! You inconsiderate moron! You insecure waste of flesh! I wish you were never born! You ruin everything that you touch!"
Magic Mouth
And as you all are using the wand, and trying to deal with the talking door, you hear footsteps coming from back the way you came. And before you know it, two aspis thugs encroach your position!
They try to rush forward, but Tsusoku's hair leaps into action.
The first thug retaliates on the man-witch.
The second one attacks Ezrek.
And one of the thugs final acts is trying to strike Erin as she passes by, Tsusoku's hair striking him down, gaining sustenance from the act like some sort of Follicula.
The last remaining thug takes a swing at the noble blood sucking hair that struck down his comrade.
And he finds retribution, though he wishes he'd taken Ophetta's oil of keen edge.
And with a pair of quick strikes, Erin takes down the last Aspis goon.
As Erin tries to push the door open, she realizes the door is locked.
Erin successfully opens the door to find tangles of tubes, cords, and wires filling this bizarre room. Black, acrid smoke churns from dial-covered devices that buzz and bellow, and a thick green liquid bubbles within tall glass cylinders that feed a central device resembling a giant
metallic coffin. The floor is densely carpeted with shattered porcelain faces and limbs, with glimpses of more organic gore amid the rubble.
In the room stand six glass cylinders filled with green fluid, each containing a captured Pathfinder in a sort of suspended animation. Tubes leading off from them feed a central metallic birthing chamber, and two more tubes leading off from that connect to two giant syringe-like apparatuses mounted on the 15-foot-high ceiling, hanging down a full 5 feet each.
At the far end of the laboratory, Chrysalis Black maniacally pours elixirs into the syringes that feed the latest masterpiece within the birthing chamber. He does not resemble his simulacrum at first glance, because he wears an old woman’s frock, a tattered grey wig, and grotesque makeup. There are also two giant syringes at the very back of the room near Black.
"Hmm.. I'm missing something, perhaps it is your eyes?" 'Mother' Black looks up from 'her' work at Erin.
Even though Black looks like 'she' is distracted, 'she' is well prepared. Her form shimmers displacingly and there seems to be copies of 'her'. And oddly her skin seems to be made of bark and stone.