"Leave? What do you mean, leave? Is this about why you were so worried coming back from the church? What's going on? If there's something we can do to help, I want to know!" By the end of her barrage of questions, Mathine is struggling hard to keep her volume in check, although she finally forces it down.
Oryn responds to the knock on the door and asks "Kali, what is going on? When Kali indicates she wants to share a bottle of wine, he agrees picks up his spear and accompanies her first down the stairs and eventually to her room. Upon hearing the request to leave immediately he asks "It can't wait until morning? What is going on?
"I was warned by someone in town." Kali says, then opens her door and checks the hallway before closing it again and continuing "that the Mayor is trying to prevent anyone from learning about the plague in town. There's a good chance we'll be arrested if we stay here. So, our options are stay here and get arrested or leave. I wanted to warn you all and let you make your own decisions. Personally, I'm going to try and find the cause of the plague, but I was asked to help get the word out and I can see the wisdom in doing so."
"Daaaaang. I already said something to that serving girl." Oryn starts nervously switching his spear from one hand to the other. "My grandpa used to tell me stories about how they used to isolate towns that got sick. No one would go near them. Do you think the town is worried about the lumber trade?" The nervous playing with the spear intensifies until Bolkvar gives him a little kick. "Sorry, I get nervous sometimes." and the spear twitching stops.
"Kali, do you think we can find the cause of this plague? I've fixed my fair share of cuts and bruises plus my grandma would show me how some plants could help get over some sickness - but nothing like what these people are dealing with."
Oryn looks down at this shoes and then looks up at the others "Well, I'm in if we decide to go with Kali's idea. But how do we figure out what caused this plague and how do we help these people?"
”Well, I came here to check out the ruins in the area. Nearby my clan lived in a city which rivaled anything build in the King’s Mountains. Earthquakes and the like destroyed it. This town is the closest thing to civilization to it. Can’t rightly explore it if this place is full of disease. So seems right to help if we can.”
"I'm certainly not leaving, not if there's anything we can do to help. Iomedae will protect me." Mathine rises slightly in her seat, her stance proud. "I'm in. But to find out more about what's going on, we'll have to get someone to talk about it. Kali, it sounds like whoever you spoke to at the church was as forthcoming as anyone has been. The priestess there is Iomedaean, right? That means I can go without arousing too much suspicion. See if I can talk to her privately."
"As for getting news out..." It was risky, but was remaining any less risky? And certainly the woman she had been would have wanted to help, no matter the risk. "I traveled here with my mother. She may be able to secure passage out of here to another town and carry news with her. It's...it's been a long time since she's traveled by herself, though. Truthfully, she's been struck by a great melancholy, and it has left her mind somewhat unsound. But I believe she could carry a message, if need be, and she might arouse less suspicion."
At Rao's statement, Kali notes "I was told that our old employer either was arrested or bribed."
At Mathine's question, Kali says "She was an Iomedaean, yes, although truth be told she's rather....imperious in nature. As far as the suggestion of sending your mother goes, would you trust her to be able to protect herself traveling through the wilderness alone?"
To Oryn's questions, Kali will say "I believe that we can at least try to find the cause of the plague; and as I mentioned on our way here, I am a trained healer."
(+2 to notice unusual stonework)
To Kali: ”Ok, so we go find out what caused this plague and we keep it to ourselves. Did your visit to the church give you anything for us to search or someone we can ask? We could start a search now, we might have to wait until tomorrow to ask somebody.”
To the whole group: ”So what does everyone else say? Search, Ask or something else?”
As Oryn speaks, Mathine stands up gingerly, motioning for the conversation to continue. Then, with two long strides she moves toward the door and yanks it open.
Conversation grinds to a halt as Kimi tumbles into the room, squawking in surprise. The girl picks herself up and attempts to dust herself off in a vain attempt at regained dignity. For a moment, it looks like she’s about to spin some elaborate story to explain herself, but then she shuts her mouth and starts to look a little afraid.
"And why shouldn't we beat you senseless?"
As the girl tumbles into the room, Mathine sighs. "You have a knack for setting yourself against things much bigger than you, don't you?"
Oryn sets his spear against a wall, reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small pouch. Opening the pouch reveals a piece of cloth that he unfolds and grabs a couple of light purple objects. Putting one hand on Rao's shoulder, Oryn lowers his other hand in front of Rao and the curious girl.
"Don't worry, we won't hurt you. My mother makes these from corn, beets and honey. They are quite tasty but try not to bite down on them - they are hard and it is better if you just suck on them. You remind me of my little sister Josephine. She is about your age and is more curious than our cat."
Kimi looks from face to face. She sniffs at the candy like a suspicious hound before snatching it from the farm it and popping it in her mouth. After a moment of careful sucking, she breaks out in a big grin, and, mumbling almost incoherently around the large candy, says, ”Cause I know how to stuff the blackscour taint. I overheard ya talking about stopping the plague and I know how. Well...at least I know someone who might know how. I run errands for her sometimes. You’re better off trying to see her at night though. She’s too busy treating folks during the day. I can get you in!”
”Most useful.” Bolkvar said, nodding. Getting on the good side of the town seemed like a worthy goal, especially as it could be leveraged for free room and board so the ruins could be explored at their leisure. ”Glad ye decided to come.”
Kali's face softens a bit and she says "Can you draw us a map? I don't want you to get into trouble. Also, how do you know what it's called?"
Mathine couldn't help but marvel at this little girl's determination and resourcefulness. "You'll make a knight yet, I think," she murmurs, affectionately ruffling Kimi's hair. "Between standing up for the defenceless and tending to the infirm, you may well have me beaten for righteousness. We'll go talk to her. Just tell us where to go, as Kali said. Her name would help, too - and we'll probably have to tell her you sent us, is that ok?"
”I can take you. Laurel wouldn’t hurt anybody. She isn’t dangerous. You lot are real paranoid.”
”Anyway, everybody knows what it’s called. Blackscour taint. Laurel says it’s something in the spring water from the well.”
"Laurel might not, but Laurel isn't the only person here."
Oryn puts the small pouch back into his pocket. "So Mathine tells me your name is Kimi. Well Kimi since its late Laurel is probably not seeing any patients at the moment, do you think she would see us if we go now?"
"She's not going to want to. She gets mad when folks try to bug her after dark, but she'll let me in."
Kimi sets her jaw stubbornly and you can see it will be difficult talking her out of coming along.
To the group Oryn replies "It looks like we are going to have to take Kimi with us if we want to talk with Laurel. To Kimi "I am new to Falcon's Hollow, do you think you can take us to Laurel's place without anyone noticing us?"
"Most people don't go out at night. Payday's goons get drunk and beat people up for brandy money at night. Let's go!"
Kimi cheerfully heads for the door, only pausing for a moment for you to grab your gear. She leads you downstairs and then out into the night and immediately down the street to your left. As she hinted, the streets are pretty deserted, save for a stray dog sniffing at a diseased beggar slumped in a doorway. Kimi is clearly used to moving about unseen, as you almost miss when she ducks between a couple of buildings on your right and leads you through a tiny stand of firs and stops, pointing to a small, squat building in front of you. An upper room is lit with the dim, flickering light of a candle. Kimi scuffs a stone out of the ground and lobs it up at the sooty glass. A moment later, a figure approaches the window, raises the sash, and leans out.
"Who's there?" a tired voice asks.
"It's me. Kimi. I brought you some adventurers, Laurel. They want to find a cure for the plague. Can we come in?"
The woman grabs her candle and tries to use it to see you all, but the light is just too weak. She quickly gives up and says, "You can have five minutes."
The woman ducks back inside the window, makes her way downstairs and opens the back door. "Come inside. Quickly."
The smell of burnt earth and spicy incense chokes the air of the cramped, mud-tracked shop. Bunches of dried herbs hang from the ceiling, along with dangling pots, presses, alchemical apparatuses, and glassware of more arcane purposes. Pouches of rare plants, jars of colored glass, and all manner of dried, preserved, and jellied animal parts fill high shelves and tables doing double duty as displays and workspaces.
Laurel is a rail-thin woman with severe-looking spectacles and hair pulled back tightly in a bun. As you file in and shut the door, she absent-mindedly begins to stir a cauldron of frothing gray nastiness that's been set to a very low simmer.
"So you think you can cure the plague, can you?'
"I'm no healer myself...but I'm glad to do whatever I can to help find a cure, or at least find out more about the illness," Mathine replies. "What do we know so far?"
As Laurel invites the group into her shop, Oryn slowly looks around the shelves wide-eyed and takes a deep breath. "Wow, quite the shop you have here. So many different things I have never seen before. I recognize a few of the jars and herbs but you have quite the collection here. With all these things I would have thought you would be able to cure just about anything. This Blackscour taint thing must be pretty bad."
Going over to one shelf in particular, Oryn stares at a hanging dried herb and has to curb his enthusiasm "Hey, my mother grows these behind our barn. She told me she sells some to the local merchant. Never thought I would see them hanging in someone's shop."
Looking at the group that Kimi has lead in "Where are my manners? Allow me the honor of introductions. My name is Oryn and I am from a farm in the Carpenden Plains."
Stretching his hand out and moving from person to person "Here we have Mathine, Bolkvar, Kali and Rao. We just arrived in Falcon's Hollow on Brillag’s caravan. I'd like to think we could help, but I for one know nothing of Blackscour taint. Is there anything we can do to help?"
Kali paused for a moment at the beggar to check his symptoms, making sure to hold her breath and not touch anything while she does.
At Laurel's home, Kali said "I think that it's important that we at least try. What can you tell me about the disease? I saw someone who appeared to be later stage with the disease on the way here, and here were the symptoms I noticed." she then rattled off what she had seen.
"Kimi here mentioned that this disease is called Blackscour Taint. Do you know who the first patient was?"
Kali pauses to check on the slumped over beggar. The man is still clearly alive, though what symptoms she can determine don't look anything like any water-borne contagion she's ever heard of before. Most of his symptoms she thinks she can connect to the empty bottle of cheap whiskey lying next to him.
Laurel smirks as Oryn makes his way about her shop like the proverbial kid in the candy store. "Adventurers? And some fresh from the farm, it would seem."
Everyone jumps in startlement at Rao's prodigious sneeze. As he wipes his nose, he detects one smell that's very familiar, and finds himself at eye level with half a dozen familiar lavender and rosemary nosegays, each bound with an identical yellow ribbon.
She listens as Kali recites the beggar's symptom, nodding along. "That sounds like Barnaby. He doesn't have Blackscour Taint: he has end-stage syphilis coupled with a pickled liver. He's probably one of the few people in Falcon's Hollow who won't end up with the Taint, actually. He eats rats and squirrels he can snare and drinks only the vile whiskey he can trade his squirrel pelts for. Not usually a recipe for good health, but it will keep you from the Taint."
"The first patient? Who knows! It took Lady Cirthana and I a few days to even realize we had a contagion, and another two to trace it back to the Well. The only source of drinkable water in Falcon's Hollow is Brookman's Well, which is more of a spring than a well on the outskirts of town. You can't drink the river water, of course--too much sawdust--and it's against the law to dig your own well in town, so Brookman's Well is it. For 60 years, there's never been a problem until a fortnight ago."
"Blackscour's a nasty fungus, good for nothing. It likes it in water, and really loves it inside a stomach, where it grows and grows until it pretty much shreds your insides. Despite that, it's not particularly deadly: the really young and the really old mostly, or those who have always been sickly. Young adults like yourselves, and pretty hearty most of you, will probably be fine. If you do come down with it, I have an herbal blend that can mitigate some of the symptoms: my own proprietary recipe, of course."
"But it isn't a cure. I've been through my grandmother's old herbal book, and nothing has helped. Ironically, the one recipe that might actually do something, I can't make. It's a cure for Redhaze fungus, which is kind of close to Blackscour."
At the word "fungus" Oryn makes a contorted face "Yuck, a fungus! No wonder people are dying. This Redhaze cure sounds promising. Why can't you make it? Are you missing some ingredients or does it take too long to make?"
Bolkvar stood in the back, his arms crossed. His companions were asking the right questions, and he saw no reason to disrupt the flow of the conversation.
"And do you yet have any idea how the fungus might have ended up there?" Mathine adds. "Does it seem to have grown naturally? It seems odd that a well that's had no problems for 60 years would just suddenly be contaminated."
Kali has never heard of Redhaze, so she has no idea on cure contents.
”There are three missing ingredients: they’re all weird but I think local. Elect me find the recipe.”
Laurel heads to her work bench and unlocks a sturdy cabinet with a key from a chain around her neck, pulling a thick, old tome from inside. She turns to a page near the end, and runs her finger down the list of ingredients.
”Elderwood moss: it’s a moss that only grows on the oldest tree in the Vale. I have no idea how the moss knows which tree is the oldest, so it sounds like hooey to me. Rat’s tail: not an actual rat’s tail(that would be easy to get here), but a special pickled tree root. No idea why anybody would want to pickle a tree root, but there you go. Again, sounds like hooey. Finally, seven ironbloom mushrooms. I’m sure your dwarven friend has heard of those before. They grow in dark, warm places where there are lots of iron deposits or will grow on rusty metal like old armour.”
Indeed, Bolkvar has heard of them—they’re a fairly common fungus in dwarven communities.
”Blackscour does grow naturally, but I’ve never heard of it growing naturally this far south before. I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out why anybody would want to poison the town’s water to no avail. Everybody in town needs it. Kreed’s a vile creature, but since he charges us all monthly fees to use the Well, he doesn’t benefit trying to poison us all. I guess the only idea that makes sense is for a rival Consortium Gavel trying to ruins operations here, but even then, the Blackscour only kills about 1 in 10. If word gets out that we’re a plague town, trade will dry up for awhile but we’ll survive. I have to believe it’s just bad luck, and Lady Cirthana agrees.”
"Perhaps it's someone who wants to take over control of the well?"
Oryn tries to look over Laurel's shoulder as she is looking up the recipe but realizes he is being rude so backs away. "Miss Laurel, can you make this cure if we get the missing ingredients?"
To the group "I think getting these ingredients might be more important than determining how the well got contaminated. It is probably our best chance at saving those already suffering."
To Laurel "My grandpa told me to boil water to make it safe to drink. Are the town folk boiling the water from the well?"
Laurel pats Oryn’s cheek and smiles.
”Blackscour’s natural habitat are the mineral hot springs of the Cinderlands on the Storval Plateau. Suffice it to say, boiling the water just encourages the stuff.”
She pauses to scrape at something on his collar. ”Brickasnurd made his famous lamb stew tonight, did he? How many of you ate it?”
"I had the roasted chicken. It was a little more expensive, but it was worth it. Wait! Does Brickasnurd use water from the well?" Suddenly a dark thought comes across his face I could be infected with this stuff. A sense of urgency threatens to overcome him, so he takes a long, slow breath.
His fear starting to show in his voice "Miss Laurel, do you know where we can find the oldest tree in the Vale?"
”Not a clue where that would be. For the mushrooms, rumor has it that, many years ago, dwarves lived somewhere near the mountains to the north. If you can find the dwarven ruins, chances are good they’ll have an old forge or ten. As for the rats tail, I have no clue, though, maybe...Ulizmila the witch that lives deep in the woods might. She’s a crafty, mean thing that knows all sorts of strangeness. She might even have one. I don’t know what she might want for it, but I doubt it’d come cheap. My grandmother traded her sight to the old crone for a few pages of what she knew, and that was years and years back, and I don’t know a soul who got any nicer as they got older.”
"It might, or it might just go dormant until it thaws. Besides, how do you propose freezing enough water for an entire town...a month into spring? No, the only thing to do is find a cure, and this recipe is all I have. If it doesn't work, or you can't get the ingredients, barring the miraculous arrival of some high-powered magic-using priest or the sudden large-scale manifestation of the Flower Spirit, a lot of people are going to die...unpleasantly."
"I'm not feeling too good about a high priest coming. My dad says they are very busy. Kali you visited the church, do you think we should wait for help or try to find the missing ingredients for Miss Laurel?"
”Always better to do more than less. A priest will come or not come regardless of us. But our efforts won’t hurt.”
"Okay, fair enough. Do you mind sharing that recipe with me as well? I like to collect medicinals during my travels."
"Okay, so we are going to get the missing ingredients. Mathine, Rao do you want to join us in hunting down the Elderwood moss, Rat tail and Ironwood mushrooms?"
”I suppose that’s fair,” Laurel says to Kali, ”But let’s make sure it actually works, first.”
"Of course," Mathine answers Oryn, snapping out of the reverie the technical talk had induced. She'd caught the basics, enough to "I'm in. Let's start with the dwarven ruins - at least we know where those are, and we might find something there we could use to barter with Ulizmila."