Sirio wrinkles his nose at the dilapidated house and a light smile touches his eyes at Constantine's suggestion.
The priest says, "We are deputies of the Lady Mayor. Such underhandedness should not be considered without exhausting all legitimate avenues. Come Ms. Blackford, we'll just knock and see if anyone's home."
He rubs his eye, as if removing a speck of dust, but glances at Constantine and touches his nose. He nods toward the house while Emma isn't looking. A simple code they were both familiar with.
Quietly. Around back. Don't get caught.
Constantine catches the signal as he goes around back, and thumbs his own nose.
I'll wait.
He listens carefully for the sounds of interaction up front as a sort of signal before deciding whether to indulge in a little bit of light breaking and entering.
Together, Sirio and Emma approach the front door, while Roger and Constantine slip to the back just to be sure there's no-one making a runner...
Sirio's knock lands dull and flat, and there is no response, only silence. However, as Sirio weighs whether to the handle, he notices a dark, brownish stain smeared over the brass of the knob.
Emma and Sirio can quickly ascertain that the door is indeed locked.
In the back alley, nothing emerges from any of the windows; the house stays quiet.
Talon clears his throat after it becomes apparent nobody's going to answer the door. "Do we batter it down, or try Constantine's skill with those bits of wires? Or a third option, I suppose, if anyone's got one. Windows would be easier to break than the doors, I imagine."
When knocking produces no clear response, Constantine shakes his head and starts rounding the corner back to the front.
"Roger, you may ask well stay back here for the moment. I'll try my hand out front."
He looks sidelong at Emma before raising an eyebrow at Talon.
"I'd like to at least try the subtle approach before we resort to actual breaking, if you please."
Constantine looks at the door and its locking mechanism, assessing which tools will be most useful. The smear captures his attention for only a brief moment before he returns to the task at hand. He pulls those out of his backpack, and slips off his rust-red leather coat, which clinks metallically as it touches the ground. Unencumbered, he gets to work.
Constantine looks pleased as he works. He checks his handiwork before any further advancement, putting his coat back on if he actually unlocked the door.
"Impressive," Hannelia mouths towards Constantine as the man successfully disarms the lock. Keeping a low voice, she asks "Are we all going in or should one or two of us keep watch outside?"
Per:
Init:
On opening the door, the acrid smell of things that have been burnt becomes quickly apparent, mingled with a foul reek of rotted eggs and an outhouse in summer. The room beyond is thick with smoke that was unable to escape the shuttered windows (though not so thick as to obscure vision). The room is also a total, squalid mess-- shattered crockery lies across the floor, shelves have been overturned, the walls are furrowed with claw marks and graffiti-smears of unknown liquids and substances.
The source of the burnt smell is apparent enough-- the fireplace on the room's north wall is out at the moment, but it appears the flames were smothered by the sheer amount of things tossed onto them-- bedsheets, clothes, books, glassware, boots, paintings, pots and pans, a winter cloak-- all these things now half-burnt or charred.
What furniture has been left intact here is studded with pieces of cutlery, as if every fork and knife left in the house had been hurled around or stabbed viciously into the walls and tables with enogh force to bend and warp the metal.
To the south, an open door leads into a kitchen that looks just as demolished as this front room. Around the corner, stairs lead upward.
Sirio spots a creature lurking in the darkness and seizes an opportunity. "Ms. Blackford, look out!" he shouts. He leaps in front of Emma, arms in hand, rushing the creature under the table.
A calculated risk. He would earn the loyalty of these folks by putting his own health on the line. Or at least their trust. He felt certain though that the creature itself would not be especially deadly to him. As long as he was right and he didn't die, his gambit would pay off.
It's a good thing he was wearing armor.
The small creature lurking beneath the table opens a missshapen maw and makes a noise at Sirio that seems half gurgle and half hiss. It lunges at him, or at least, at his kneecaps. In one deformed hand it clutches a filthy fork, which it tries to stab into his thigh.
The piece of cutlery may be a crude weapon, but it is effective, and it bites deep into Sirio's leg.
"What the hell-- what is that ugly little thing?" Talon says, hurrying into the room to try and get a clear shot that doesn't send an arrow into Siro's legs.
While he misses Sirio's legs, he also misses the creature. He does cry out, "Roger! Trouble in here!"
As for what the creature is... that is the question, isn't it? Small and squat, looking like a child's attempt at a clay man but unhappily unfinished, and seething with palpable hatred.
Initiative (Round 1)
Talon
Roger
Constantine
Emma
Sirio
Little monster thing
Hannelia
A wordless cry of pain escapes Sirio's mouth. But he's able to summon his wits through the white hot sensation. He bellows, "Begone chaos spawn!" And he strikes at the creature with a tight swing.
Constantine is still riding on the satisfaction of unlocking the door when Sirio charges in and gets promptly stabbed. The occultist looks at the misshapen lump of clay and narrows his gaze.
"A homunculus," he observes, before rattling off whatever useful information he knows about the constructs. "If it's Gellion's, he could already be aware of us."
He moves in past Emma, standing next to Sirio as he gets a better look at the creature. He hefts his longsword and slashes down at the construct.
"Are you okay?" he asks the cleric as he stands next to hun and observes the nasty looking wound.
"Aye, and a-'boot' to be more! Be right in." Roger gives the window a kick with his boots, trying to smash it open or at least get most of the glass out of the way, before clambering through.
Roger starts to try the brute force method-- or boot force?-- but almost as soon as the fight has started, Constantine ends it, following Sirio's glancing blow with the morningstar with a much more decisive strike. The wretched thing gurgles and drops limply to the ground, starting to melt away like hot wax.
Constantine-- the soft whispers of past knowledge inform you that this particular homunculus might have been flawed in its creation, and the final tether to bind it to its master never completed. It's possible that it couldn't inform its master-- it's also possible that unlike 'normal' for a homunculus, its death probably didn't weaken its master either.
Roger is able to rejoin you all inside shortly. The downstairs is a disaster, and now that you can inspect it a little more closely, you see dozens of small footprints in a dark, foul-smelling substance that criscross the rooms numerous times, and go up and down the stairwell too.
The body of the flawed homunculus has melted to nothing but some mix of shapeless clay streaked with the now-familiar purplish-black blobs of the demonic bile. The fork sits in the midst of it all, Sirio's blood still smeared on the tines.
Talon makes a face at the wreckage of the room. "It smells like halfway between a charnel house, a chamberpot, and a furnace in here. Shall we poke through the mess on the ground floor, look in the kitchen, or try up the stairs?"
As the homunculus melts away revealing more of the demonslime, Constantine wrinkles his nose. "Well, I thought the 'chaos spawn' was just a nice line, Sirio, but I think you were right." He pauses and examines the clay a bit more. "In good news, the homunculus was incomplete. If it did belong to Gellion, then I was more than likely incorrect in my initial assessment: he is not necessarily aware of us yet. But we should still be careful."
The occultist carefully tips some of the bile into a vial to share with the proper authorities later, and then takes his cold iron blade to the rest of it to clean things up.
Constantine nods in agreement with Talon as he begins carefully walking around the room. "Let's be systematic in our approach. We'll clear this room before expanding our search." He goes to the fireplace to see what was being burned there.
Roger checks for clues on the current floor as well at Constantine's suggestion.
"Are you okay?" he asks the cleric as he stands next to him and observes the nasty looking wound.
"Quite." Sirio nearly growls, gritting his teeth. He checks the fork and the wound to be certain it isn't infected.
"I have some ability to mend this, but I'd rather save it if possible. We were rather lucky it was only a poorly wrought homunculus." the priest continues.
Sirio takes his newly acquired cold iron morningstar and sweeps away some of the goop with it as he joins Constantine in clearing the first floor.
The fight was short-lived and over before she could even react. ”Are you ok, Sirio?” asks Hannelia. ”And what *was* that? Some kind of construct?”
Following Constantine’s lead she also begins a systematic sweep of the house, working in tandem with Roger.
"Yes," Constantine says to Hannelia. "An homunculus is a construct often created to serve as a familiar, made from a mixture of clay, ash, mandrake root, spring water, and a pint of the creator's blood. And in this case, abyssal bile."
He also nods at Sirio. What was he up to, diving into harm's way like that?
Hannelia nods gratefully at Constantine’s explanation, while she sifts through a pile of debris. ”Thank you. And another demonic creature as well. I’d hate to jump to conclusions but I’m thinking this might not be a coincidence,” she finishes drily.
Hannelia nods gratefully at Constantine’s explanation, while she sifts through a pile of debris. ”Thank you. And another demonic creature as well. I’d hate to jump to conclusions but I’m thinking this might not be a coincidence,” she finishes drily.
"Indeed," Emma agrees with a grim nod. "There's been too many occurrences of this corruption." It only occurs to her after she's said it that Hannelia was likely making a sarcastic response, but it's too late to worry about it now.
Either way, Emma can't exactly bring herself to care too much. Her senses are alight with tension, eyes constantly sweeping the area to track any potential movement. She already feels bad that Sirio was injured, and that the homunculus was dispatched before she was even aware of what had happened. It does make her feel an odd sort of kinship between her and Sirio, given that they had been the only ones to receive an injury so far. Still - she should've been there in the lead. Her mother would have been, certainly. Whenever Emma had gone with her during her training, her mother was always the one to enter a room first, though she had also insisted on always having someone close by when searching an area.
Speaking of.
Emma clears her throat. "We should check the rest of the house quickly I think, but we shouldn't do so alone, to prevent being caught unaware again. Once the area is clear, then we can worry about the cleanup. But if there is anything else lurking in here, I'd rather not give it a chance to hide itself or get away before we can deal with it."
The group reconvenes in the room and begins to look around the wreckage and destruction. Constantine approaches the fireplace to do a better assessment of what has been burned, Talon joining him in looking things over. Suddenly, the half-elf reaches out and stops Constantine's forward progress with one arm-- and points, down at the floor, his brows arched meaningfully.
Another piece of cutlery, the fork tines sharpened into razor points, is jammed between floorboards right where Constantine was about to step.
"Watch your step," Talon says to the room at large.
Roger could verify the need for that, as he also stops Sirio's approach of the kitchen doorway to indicate another befouled knife wedged to slice at the legs of anyone who enters.
Not to be outdone, Hannelia discovers that on the second step up the stairwell, a little alchemical vial has been stowed and carefully covered with a fake shingle to make it blend in to the step-- but that stepping on it would break it, releasing the contents! The glass vial burns hot to the touch, seeming to pulse with malevolence.
Sirio takes a moment to examine his injury. Probably best to wash it out with some water, he thinks-- there's plenty of foulness on that fork that gouged him. But he feels he isn't currently infected-- perhaps the protection of the Father of Law at work.
The fireplace that Constantine and Talon inspect is choked with someone's personal belongings. Books and papers, clothes, and a number of now-shattered pieces of glassware seem to comprise the bulk of the items. One of the charred volumes looks to be an alchemical treatise, judging by the few pages that remain legible.
The kitchen that Sirio and Roger push into stinks foully, which is saying something given the rest of the house doesn't smell great either. It's as ransacked as the rest of the floor. The sink appears to have been stoppered and then filled with a slurry of water, blood, and scraps and gobs of food and hair... and then left to sit. A noxious scum floats on the surface, and small flies buzz thickly around the disgusting stew. Fortunately, they all appear to be normal-sized, and you see no traces of the purplish bile.
An adjacent washroom is somehow even more a shambles than the rest of the floor. The mirror that hung over the small sink has been shattered, and shattered again, and whatever pieces left after that shattered even beyond that, the silvered-glass fragments ground until nothing larger than a pebble remains.
Everything that formerly dwelt on the room's shelves has been ripped off and left to clutter the floor. The walls are scratched with graffiti in a crude, barely-legible hand, but where the mirror once hung, some words can be deciphered: You know nothing! You ruined everything! Your parents hate you! Your friends hate you! I HATE YOU!
Contantine, your awareness of homunculi suggests to you that it's possible the homunculus could have been infused with some of its creator's own emotional state.
The second floor awaits your pleasure.
Constantine is grateful for the warning and avoiding the possibility of being skewered by cutlery.
"It appears that the homunculus had an affinity for silverware," he muses. "Which suggests that Gellion may as well."
The occultist considers disarming the traps, but also acknowledges that--as Emma indicated--time is of the essence. Disabling traps takes time. To be sure, the house was a death trap. But unless Gellion's parents were still alive--an increasingly doubtful proposition--there seemed little reason to mess with the traps when they could be easily avoided.
Constantine takes the alchemical treatise and put it in his bag. Even if it was ruined, Majara might want this back. She might even know a ritual to restore the text. Gnomes were crafty sorts like that.
As the group moves around the ground floor and takes in the sense of hopelessness, Constantine's mood darkens. "Homunculi tend to take on the emotions of their creators and can amplify them. It's difficult to say whether Gellion destroyed his house or his homunculus did, or whether they did it together, but it appears that the boy suffers from a great deal of self-loathing."
Would he even allow himself to be saved? An armed confrontation with the boy seems increasingly likely, though Constantine hopes that they will be able to help him.
"I think we have found everything there is to find down here. Let's proceed upstairs. Perhaps someone with keener eyes than mine should lead the way?"
Wary now as to traps or other dangers, the six heroes make a cautious way up the stairs, checking for danger at every few feet. They reach the top without incident, though the sides of the stairwell show further evidence of deranged vandalism. A painted portrait hung in the stairwell at one point depicting, presumably, Gellion and his parents-- the parents are marred but recognizable, but where Gellion's portrait would be has been clawed, and perhaps even chewed, to ragged tatters.
The top floor of the modest but comfortable home boasts a few doors. Cautious for traps, you work through them-- finding some ransacked closets, a room that must be the parents' bedrooom, with the sheets tattered and torn, and finally... what must be Gellion's room, by process of elimination.
Roger eases the door open carefully...
The room beyond is a shambles.
To one end there is a bed, barely visible through thick, choking strands of webbing that obscure nearly that entire half of the room, though you can just make out two large, web-wrapped bundles on the floor. A large spider sits in the center of these webs, practically the size of a man, grown grotesquely huge by, you would guess, the demonbile that has transformed other insects so far.
Speaking of demonbile: the other end of the room is awash in it. A desk and worktable are covered with the foul, sticky, oozing substance, completely obscuring the furniture. Beakers and bottles stick up from the purple-black tar like dead trees from a lake, and a number of smaller spiders scurry into sudden action amid this detritus at your arrival..... scurrying towards you.
Hannelia and Roger are up!
"Demonblighted scuttlewuggler, have at ye!" Roger is quick to pick the largest foe for himself to move forward and attack, with both furious words and mighty steel!
A scuttling movement in Hannelia's peripheral vision in the room ahead spurs her into reflexive action. She is already moving forward before she properly clocks what the tangle of limbs is in the unpleasant-looking purple ooze. "'Ware, spiders!" she warns, "Watch yourselves please." Then, in a much quieter voice, "And please don't let there be bodies." She slips behind Sirio into the doorway of the master bedroom and fires off a quick arrow past her companions and into the goo.
Roger strikes with a mighty hack, badly injuring the big spider! Hannelia tries to nail one of the tiny ones with an arrow, but the shot, having to pass it does through multiple allies and thread a narrow window, is a long shot, and misses.
The tiny spiders swarm forward! No bigger than Roger's hand, they must actually crawl onto him before being able to attack.
Roger intercepts one with his blade, almost skewering it to the floor, and it dies. But the other three crawl onto his feet, shins, thighs...
More vermin. Constantine sighs, remembering back to his youth and time spent dealing with spiders and centipedes in the orphanage. It was a chore then, as it remains now. Of course, back then he had to improvise with books and pots, or else his fist. Now he had a more trustworthy implement.
He first assesses the situation to see if there is anything different about these arthropods compared to their encounters from the night before.
He swings into the room as far as he can to ensure that others can join and slashes out at the large spider, already nearly felled by Roger.
He looks over at the pirate, who seems to have his hands full, and calls out into the hall.
"A bit of help in here?"
He raises his shield, ready for whatever comes next.
Perhaps Besmara has a hand in Roger's resilience, perhaps Calistria extends a bit of protection- but either way, he shrugs off some, if not all, of the venom coursing through him from tiny, stinging bites.
Constantine moves in and dispatches the big spider with a single chop, hewing through a multitude of limbs.
"Ack! Shoo, you buggers!" Roger jigs his way across the room, slapping at the spiders and knocking them off before getting at distance to be able to swing his blade again.
The deft bug buggers out of the way.
More insects! "At this rate, we ought to just hire ourselves out as exterminators," Emma mutters. "Apparently this entire blighted area is just teeming with them!"
She steps purposefully into the room and comes to a stop, muscles tight with anticipation. Her eyes scan the room, taking in the purple goo and the webs, and deciding not to get near either of those - given the corruption they've already come across, she knows better than to start poking at something unknown.
The big spider lies dead already (though it's fallen form still makes her shudder slightly), and only smaller ones remain, currently residing on Roger, who seems to be growling at them.
Emma hesitates only for a moment, glancing over at Constantine and then up at Roger. She lets out a steadying breath. "My friend, please do me a favor and stay still," Emma says, clenching her jaw and stepping forward. "I really don't want to miss on this one." Narrowing her eyes, she leans forward to swipe at one of the spiders scuttling up on her comrade.
Emma cuts down another of the spiders left scuttling in Roger's absence!
Emma cuts down another of the spiders left scuttling in Roger's absence!
With the spiders now being out of sight of her bow, Hannelia squeezes swiftly all the way up the corridor past Emma to open up a shot, letting fly an arrow at one of the remaining arachnids.
Sirio runs into the room after everyone else. He wasn't able to react as quickly as the others, but he had to make a good effort. He grunts as he lands on his wounded leg and shouts with his strike as he brings down his morningstar on to the demonic arachnid.
Hannelia's arrow misses, but Sirio's morningstar strikes true and pastes another spider against the wall! Talon drops his bow and draws a blade, coming closer, only to realize the room is too crowded to effectively assist.
The last survivor scuttles onto Constantine, giving him a free chance to swing at it.
The spider stings and bites Constantine's legs, but it's a mere annoyance, with no other ill effects. The group is able in short order to smash and slash the bug into so much oozing goo.
With the last of the spiders twitching, the house falls silent. Gellion's room can be freely investigated...
The two ominously-large and ominously-shaped bundles in the spider's web turn out to be, horrifically, humans. Judicious application of blade or other tools reveals the bodies of a middle-aged man and a woman, much the worse for wear, but... alive! If barely. Their breathing is shallow and their heartbeats slow and faint, but they do breathe. Neither one of them is conscious, and shaking them doesn't seem to rouse them. Their faces are mottled and discolored, but still recognizable as the parents from the portrait.
Over on Gellion's workdesk, the purple-black mass seems to slowly pulse with a mindless malevolence. The bile is much thicker here than anywhere else you have seen-- not mere strands of it, but an ooze like molten rock, engulfing the table in an inch-thick layer. Only here and there is the foul tide broken-- where tall pieces of glassware jut out from the mess, or, at one spot, a curiously bare space on the desk surrounding an arrowhead. Some scribbled notes sit beneath arrowhead, half-covered with the ooze. Removing them without tearing the saturated part of the paper might prove difficult.
The arrowhead appears to be cold iron, the same as the dagger you found before.
Talon looks around with a wrinkled nose. "That patch of bile is enormous. Should we try and clear it now?"
Constantine itches at the uncomfortable spider bite and gets to work on the bundles in the web.
"By the gods, they're alive," he whispers.
"Stable, but poisoned. The spiders did their worst work on these two poor people."
The occultist hoists the two adults onto his shoulders and carries them from Gellion's web-and-bile covered room and across the hall into, presumably, their own room. If it is safe, he places them on the bed, and then returns.
Before the surprisingly prescient half-elf finishes suggesting it, Constantine is already taking his cold iron blade and stabbing at the bile, seeking to deflate it as soon as possible.
"Yes," he says without a second thought. "We'll take a sample back to Ms. Pricknettle, but we can't abide this growth."
With a flick of his weapon, Sirio scours more bile from the desk. He looks at the arrowhead, then at the paper beneath.
”There appears to be a note of some sort. Perhaps the boy was keeping documentation of his madness.” Sirio declares. ”Someone with more… delicate hands should try to pry it loose. One would be concerned with damaging the paper. It could contain pertinent details.”
Sirio nods to Hannelia, and touches his pentacle, then her shoulder. ”I believe you may be best suited to the task, Hannelia.” he assures her.
Talon lends Constantine a hand moving the unconscious parents. In short order, application of the cold iron weaponry manages to cause even such a quantity of bile as this to wither and shrivel to nothing but twisted, dessicated remains. The air in the room seems easier without it.
In so doing, the note in question becomes legible! Overall the bile has ruined much of the young alchemist's documents, but a line is still legible.
...adverse reaction to cold iron. What about magic? Fire? Cold? Further trials are required...
The clearing of the bile also reveals something else-- a lockbox tucked beneath the desk.
-cure light wounds (3)
-lesser restoration
-remove disease
-acid flasks (6)
-alchemist's fire (2)
-tanglefoot bags (2)
Seeing Talon and Constantine's efforts to remove the bodies has uncovered the notes, Hannelia breathes a sigh of relief about not having to try and slip them out without damage. She picks up the documents carefully and passes them to Sirio. "I'm not sure how much we can glean from this, much of it appears to be illegible. Could you see if there's anything useful there, I'm going to open this."
She drops into a squatting position to look at the lockbox. It appears to be made of wood and of a fairly simple design. After studying it, she reaches under the desk and removes it out of the way of the bile. From a side pocket of her backpack she takes out a set of tools, measuring a couple of them by eye before selecting one that will fit the lock. With four efficient twists, she hears the gears click and withdraws it, putting it back in her set. "Let's see what we've got in here then," she says, carefully opening the lid. Subconsciously nodding at the neatly packaged vials, she casts a quick cantrip to see if any of them are radiating magic.
The magical auras emanating the bottles seem to align with the labels on them so Hannelia is happy to take them at face value. As she places them back into the straw to keep them safe, she turns to face Sirio. "I thank you for your confidence in my abilities to slide those notes out but, uh," she swallows, disliking admitting her vulnerability, "there's a difference between something like this," - she gestures to the box - "and that." She looks at her hands and shrugs. "Delicate? Perhaps. Practiced? Not at that. I've opened dozens of locks, I've planned and practiced, I know how it works - and that preparation gives me the best chance of succeeding. It might sound simple but I've not done the same with moving paper, seeing how it reacts in different liquids, testing which direction to move it in is likely to do the least damage. And not knowing that makes me doubt myself more than I'd like. I know what I can do - and I'm good at it - but I also know what my limitations are."
She pauses to see how Sirio, or any of the others, react to what she's saying. "You know how some people don't like surprises?" she continues, "That's me. I can't say I love them. And yeah, I know that sounds a bit crazy given what we're doing here trying to unravel these disappearances but even in amongst all this madness, I'm definitely happier when I know what's what."
After a beat, Sirio takes a breath. He'd been listening to her intently. Watching her body language and filing it away for later. He knew it would show, and tried to give her a smile as she spoke, but it faltered. Too mechanical, he knew.
He wasn't naturally charming, it didn't come easy. But like her, he was practiced at it. And he leveraged his attention to detail to make up for where he lacked.
But perhaps a bit more earnestly he replies, "One u- I... understand. One often fears what one does not know." he nods, giving a more boyish grin.
"We're very much alike after all, Hannelia. You could join the clergy! You've a mind for it." he laughs. He was joking, but in another life she could have been. And there is still time in any case. The Dark Prince is nothing if not patient.
Constantine watches Hannelia unlock the lockbox with some professional admiration. She knows what she's doing.
Lockpicking wasn't usually a skill that someone just picked up for no reason, but rather because they felt a certain need to get into places that others seemed intent at keeping from them. What was Hannelia's reason?
Constantine wrinkles his nose a bit at Sirio's recommendation of taking up the cloth, though. He almost opens his mouth to say "let her be, Sirio," but thinks better of it.
"You don't have to do anything you're unprepared for. But that," Constantine points at the lockbox and the confirmed potions, "Was excellent."
Thinking to the unconscious bodies in the next room and mulling over the potions, the occultist offers a thought. "While I doubt it would fully restore either of them, a restorative may bring one of them back from the brink. But in either case, once we finish clearing this house we should remove Gellion's parents from here and take them some place safe to recover."
"Aye, need to take these folk to a cleric. What say we leave one of us here to keep watch, then venture below?" Roger poses his idea.
Talon offers to watch the bodies of the unconscious parents while the rest of the house is thoroughly searched.
The others move from top to bottom of the home, weapons drawn as they brace for more warped, malevolent insect life.... but nothing further presents itself. Though the house has been befouled and wrecked, it seems no other threats are lurking in its walls. There is no sign of Gellion.
As the group tromps back up the stairs to rejoin Talon he appears in the doorway of the bedroom, holding a small book. "This looks like a ledger for aspects of the family business, but the lady of the house also used it as a journal of sorts. I found it in their side-table as you were looking through the other rooms. Seems someone's been adding to it, though."
Talon fans through the pages, showing months worth of entries of things like payment for a housekeeper, the family's bank balance with the local Abadarian priest, and amounts spent on items at the market. These things are all written in a neat, tidy hand. But on each page a much messier scrawl has overlaid the mundane business, with the words, "OUR SON IS SUCH A DISAPPOINTMENT!"
The bitter message repeats, page after page.
The most recent pages, still in the original tidy hand, speak of Beldonna Vazarro's concern over her son. She notes that he's been doing experiments in his room all day, rarely coming out, and barely even goes to see his friends. I think something must be dreadfully wrong-- I hope it's merely some typical heartbreak common to a young man his age, reads the very last line.
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Constantine looks at the journal and his heart sinks. Had the homunculus written this, or had Gellion? Surely it was neither parent. More than likely the dissolved lump of clay lying under the table downstairs had been responsible for much of the state of this place.
The young man was in desperate need of an apothecary, a physicker, and likely a good therapist. He knew that the town had at least one of those, though the rest were more likely filled by someone for whom it was not their primary role. Constantine had respect for priests--some of them at least--but their insights into matters mental often left something to be desired.
Given the trauma of this house, the elder Vazarros would probably benefit from some similar aid when all was said and done.
But first things first.
"Let's take the Vazarros to the Temple. Father Ruvarra is likely suited to care for them long term, or knows of someone who can tend to poison. For that matter, Majara Pricknettle may, out of some loyalty, wish to provide some antivenom. In either case, she will want to know what we have found. I believe we may wish to purchase additional items from her, given what we continue to find. A cold iron weapon or two may be beneficial as well."
Constantine stops and looks at the journal again. Gellion was just a boy. But he was a boy caught up in extraplanar machinations beyond his understanding. He was almost certainly not the root cause of these troubles, but rather a victim caught up in it, swept along in the depravity. Right?
"I'd like to establish something as we continue," Constantine says, addressing the whole room. "It is one thing to smash beetles, ants, and spiders. But when we find Gellion," Constantine hesitates, and decides to leave the question open-ended, "What do you all believe should be our approach?"
Sirio considers Constantine and his words for several moments and thinks his words over. The boy seems to have been taken by forces he didn't understand. If Gellion was violent, Sirio should have no qualms about ending his life. It would have been the way of a proper Hellknight. But a little voice nagged at him. He swatted at Quepno's flicking tongue.
The boy wasn't an orphan, but the state of his home indicated that he might as well have been.
After those long moments of consideration, Sirio wipes the emotion from his face and says drily, "We'll try to talk him down if we can. Otherwise... one should defend oneself when necessary."