"Alright. If that's how you want to handle it," she answers John. "Just so ya know, I found this. Might be worth a look when we're done here."
She does pay attention to the roof above her, should there be any prying eyes peer down. With her low-light vision, if there are any holes in the roof above her, she should see it as clear as day should some person be peeking to get a look at her newly found map.
Wes takes a look at Nempura's find. "A treasure map? Wonder if it's real or some kid hoax?" He turns the paper around in his hand for a while to gauge its authenticity, thinking about what he knew of the Churlwood and perhaps the more specific location that's indicated.
He'll then hand the map off to whoever else wanted to look.
He then follows Maverick to the East.
Eunice glances at the map just long enough to know she's never been there. She murmurs some words her father taught her, scanning the parchment for any enchantment before turning her attention to follow Maverick. "Maybe someone who knows Roderic better could tell use, maybe recognize his writing, if it's his."
Nempura heads into the other room and sees what is inside. She does not take lead on the party, but will follow those who likewise headed east.
Myrandya perks up. "A map? How droll!" She peers over Wes's arm to get a better look, and takes it from him when he hands it off.
+
+
Two doors stand along the north wall of the room, and one stands along the western wall. A masterfully built table stands against the mold-covered windows in the room’s southeastern wall. Aside from a layer of mold and a few patches of moss, the dining set looks to be in immaculate condition compared to the rest of the house’s furnishings.
Out the large window, which must have provided a lovely view when this was a dining room, is a sagging and rotten deck that is slowly peeling itself away from the house. The pilings upon which is rests are where Nempura saw the reefclaws earlier.
There is a cabinet in one corner that has fallen over and lies face down on its doors. Someone has pried the back partially off, leaving it gaping open.
Myrandya considers while looking at the map, and then shares what she remembers about the area in her chirpy and highly-accented voice.
"Perhaps this was eaten off of recent. That would match with the traveler up the stairs. Perhaps we should watch that hallway and make sure no one...or nothing...sneaks out the front door. I can do that if you wish? If there is trouble, I'll come running."
She gestures back toward the front door to make sure it is clear to them. Idly, she wonders what would have tore the back off the cabinet and why.
"Perhaps to make a nest?"
"Careful--if this was where them reefclaws were hangin' out, we wouldn't wanna meet them by steppin' through a rotten floorboard."
Forwarned by Nempura, Higgins checks carefully for such a risk.
"Sure, all fine for you to keep an eye on the door, Nempura. Holler if you see somethin'."
Eunice approaches the cabinet to peer inside, but at Nempura's "nest" mark does so gingerly, craning her neck to see if there's anything poised to leap out.
"Hopefully it's just kids being kids," she says.
Nempura moves to make sure she can see the staircase in case anyone takes this opportunity to sneak out. At the same time, Eunice peers into the back of the cabinet.
The stairs creak as a small human descends. His face is dirty, his clothes tattered. He steps lightly down the stairs, but they have betrayed him.
Eunice is not too surprised that a nest off spiders boils from the back of the cabinet.
"I can hear, and see you, cutie. But don't let that scare ya off. I'm a nice one to be sure."
She tilts her head toward the small human. He likely can't see as clearly as she can.
"I may be a sea elf, but I have the piercing senses of the feyworld still."
"Care to tell me your name?" she asks in common.
Meanwhile, in the other room, the dancing lights spell is still under her control and forms itself into a humanoid figure which points toward Nempura and signals that she sees something by bringing its hands to its eyes.
Nempura doesn't recognize him right off, but as he starts at her words and turns toward her, she recognizes him as a boy named Kynae Fromperton, son of the town drunk, Kylan Fromperton. Kylan is just what you would expect. Spends most of his time drinking and getting kicked out of the various saloons, working on the river until he gets thrown off the job, and generally being trouble. Kynae, on the other hand, is known to be precocious. It isn't unusual for someone to find him sleeping in their loft of a morning, but he does odd jobs around town to earn his keep and keeps a pile of books at Blackberry's Bakery that he is often seen reading.
"Guess Nempura was right, best leave them spiders alone," suggests Higgins, having no good way of dealing with them.
He heads out of the room and stands by the door, ready to shut it as soon as the others get out of there.
Maverick lowers the hand holding the revolver and raises the left hand. "I could splash them with some acid, if they come at us, but it won't stop them dead."
"Ah...Kynae Fromperton. The way you were creeping down those stairs made me think you were a little boy," she states to appeal to his likely desire to be a grown-up. "I've wondered where you've been resting your head. Where is that father of yours?" she asks.
With her figure and allure, it might make any nervous young boy sweat if seen in her wet get-up with dripping hair and glistening skin. Like many sea elves, when their skin is wet, it also has a unique scintillating hue to it to some degree that can similarly be seen in cuttlefish. Her chromatophores are far duller than her favorite undersea pets. Despite this, they may be noticeable to the lad in the dim light of the room.
"I don't believe we've formally met. I'm Bella Blue."
She then gestures toward the others who are wandering a couple of rooms away now. "My friends and I are here investigating what might have pissed off the ghost of the good captain who once lived here. You don't happen to know anything about that...do ya?"
Her tone is sweet, and her voice has a unique harmonic almost hypnotic quality to it when she wishes that sets it apart from most humans or surface elves. One can only imagine how it sounds underwater.
At this point, if her allies do not come to her aid soon, she will direct the humanoid figure to walk back through the room to her side, depriving them of light. Back at the stairs, they will see Nempura in the doorway of the room they all came from talking to some darkened figure by the steps.
Myrandya peers between the others, startled by the mention of spiders. "Nein," she says quietly. "I do not like shpiders! If ve must explore zhat room, I recommend preceding our entry vis a bomb or two!"*
"Nempura, you're OK? Sounds like you found company. So did we, but we try to avoid this spider nest for now. You seem less agitated than us. We'll be right there" Maverick shouts towards the elf and waits until everyone has cleared the infested room, his spell always ready to shoot.
Then he will go look for the boy.
Eunice backs away at the sounds of conversation, but doesn't take her eyes off the spiders. As she moves, she opens her shotgun and replaces one of the slugs with a red-wrapped cartridge.
"If we need fire I've got some," she says. "Hopefully we won't need it."
The spiders cover the cabinet, but don't spread to attack you so long as you leave them alone. They sure are creepy, though.
Back with Nempura, the boy practically leaps out of his skin when the sea elf calls him out.
The boy hangs back on the stairs, his eyes flicking toward the door and up the stairs, clearly thinking about which way would be the most likely sae exit, but staying put for the moment. "I didn mean no harm. Don't know what Pa is up to. I've been hiding out since the...since last week. The Wreck her is a good place to hide out. Folks mostly don't come out here. I don't want no trouble..."
In the distance she can hear something about spiders from Myrandya she is guessing and then John confirms it.
"I'm just dandy!" she answers the call of John. "We just have some light company here."
Nempura waves to the boy in a beckoning manner.
"Come now, I ain't gonna harm you. Nor are my friends. Here...you have food in this dreary place?" "I bet his failure of a father has made him do all the hunting and gathering too...poor kid."
She will dig through her pack for a ration. It is made of honey, nuts, oats, and various dried fruits--all mashed into a type of bar. She will then offer the bar to him as a kind gesture. There is nothing offensive in her stance, and there may even be something of a motherly appeal to the boy at such a gift.
"Here. Take it."
She looks briefly up at the roof above her as if she were seeing beyond it and then continues, whether he takes the bar of food or not.
"What happened last week that caused you both to come here?"
Shutting the door behind everyone, Higgins is the last to catch up to Nempura. He sees the elf chatting nicely with the little boy and is smart enough to keep his trap shut to not scare him off. If the fella had been there since last week, he might've seen something. So the old bounty hunter just looks around.
Kynae sidles toward Nempura, his hand reaching out tentatively before taking the outstretched bar and retreating to the base of the stairs, poised between trust and fleeing either upward or through the front door.
He looks longingly at the ration bar, but doesn't take a bite. "I wasn't doing nothin that needs the law involved," he says, eying Higgins, "I was just out for some night fishin'. You know black rock trout don't like the light, but you can catch 'em at night. Makes for good eatin', and if you catch enough you can sell them. An' I heard some folks arguing in The Circle, so I went to see what was up."
John tried to stay in the back to not overwhelm the frightened boy.
"Hi, my name is John. Nice to meet you. Did you catch any? Fish, I mean."
I wonder what he saw that night in the circle
When Kynae takes the bar, she figures that he isn't partaking of it for a reason. Likely because he's saving it for his useless father. She begins to fish out another. If her assumption is correct, he will want it and now knows he can feel at ease in her presence. He's seen she's not going to get grabby with him and bring him into the law, that's for sure.
"Yes, tell us," she latches onto John's direction of asking about the fish. "Because as a sea elf, I love black rock trout. Truth be told, a hard part of selling is having consistent customers. I would probably be willing to be one though. In fact, I'm so busy being forced to work, sometimes I don't get to go fishing myself in the waters as much as I'd like, so if you are good enough to tell us what them folks were arguing about in the circle...hmm...I might just teach you some secret spots those trout like to hide in that no other surface dweller can teach you. Then I can buy them from you when you start filling up your nets to the brim!" She wriggles her eyes. "How's that sound?"
She will hold the second bar out to him again for him to take but closer to her body with her other hand out and turned upward in a welcoming manner. This motion will communicate that this time, if he goes to take it, she is going to caringly reach to gently caress his hair. This will be clear to him by her stance. Whether he takes it or not is up to him.
"I ain't the law, son," says Higgins as the boy eyes him. "Just helpin' out the missus here." He nods toward Nempura. "Name's Wes."
He sure hopes that the elf can get the boy to speak, because what happened at the Circle was a real mystery in all of this.
"Eunice Flint," she introduces herself. "Most of us all got into town right after that night; we missed whatever happened."
The boy's eyes wide, showing whites all around, at the approach of the lot of you. He seems likely to bolt, but then takes a deep breath and eyes the extra ration bar Nempura holds.
"Mr. Wes, sir, you might not be THE law, sir, but you is for sure A lawman or I'm a trout myself. You I know of, Miss Eunice. I seen you in town time to time. Mr. John I don't know."
"That night, like I says, I was fishin, right up in town. Everyone knows the trout like clean water and all, but they also like the bits and scraps that get left behind on market day and there are some pools there by Creekside that are deep enough. So I caught a few, and then I heard voices from The Circle, which aint too unusual late at night, but this was more of a bunch of folks at once. They was two groups. One was those Peacock folks from the order, and the others was some of those Horn Fangs. One of the order people, a woman, was accusing the Horn Fangs that, 'You are properating a runelord's rune' or something like that. And she seemed real mad about it. And she sputtered, and then things went real weird. She drew a sword, but it hadn't no blade, just a fancy handle. But she jabbed it at one of the Horn Fangs and his throat opened up even though she never touched him. And then monsters or ghosts come out of the fog and them Horn Fangs just dropped dead! I thought the ghosts were turning to look at me so I took off and never looked back. I know sometimes Captain Roderick himself is ghosting around out here, but he never killed nobody (as a ghost, I mean, he killed lots of folks, of course, before he was a ghost, I mean, before, I mean, when he was alive)."
He moves to take the second ration, his eyes keeping all of you in view.
sounds like the boy fell asleep and had a bad dream that night, Maverick thought.
His doubts were visible in his facial expression.
"aha"
"Ahh, so there was a quarrel and a death, and it was about to happen again. That's probably why Roderick showed up and scared everyone who was there, to keep them from doin' it again. I wonder what they did with the body?" "It sounds like our next step will be to finish checking out this building, and then maybe reporting back to the sheriff," she considers in her mind.
She slowly hands him the bar, and as the acceptance suggested, she keeps him close and affectionately lifts and drops the boy's hair in a way that is quite motherly. It is clear she has some sympathy for the poor upbringing of this human.
"I believe you. If you were some other young man, I might think this was a tall tale. And havin' seen Roderick's ghost show up myself, I'm inclined to think you are truthful, my dove. You are a responsible man-of-the-house from what little I've seen." She pauses a moment, then asks, "As you were running away...think hard...did you happen to hear a loud splash?"
"They had to have disposed of the body somewhere. I bet they threw it into the river," she thinks to herself.
Myrandya pops up and blinks her eyes at him. "Guten morgan," she burbles. She keeps an eye on the areas they left as they speak with the child, worried that the spiders will crawl up behind them.
The boy wasn't wrong about Wes. Smart kid, really. When Kynae explains how the Horn Fangs got killed, Wes nods.
"Well, I gotta admit, yer story checks out. I was gettin' my hair cut at the barber yesterday, and rumor has it that one of the bodies had a knife wound in it, and the rest o' them just up and died. Everythin' yer sayin' fits with that."
He looks up and away for a moment, searching his mind for a name before it comes back to him. "When you mentioned the Peacock folks, are you talkin' 'bout the Nightthrush Boys or somethin' else?"
"They call themselves the Order of Splendence or some-like. You don't know cause you're new, but you'll see them around. They live in that big ol ramblin house at the edge of town. They are always buggin me to come there and learn somethin, but I don't have time for that..."
.
"Gotcha, partner. Yer talkin' 'bout the Order of Resplendence. Snooty bookish types. Cult, really."
"I know the house, at least," Eunice says. "Didn't know about these resplendent Peacocks, though. But it's good you never went there, sounds like." Her stomach dropped a bit at the mention of the Runelords, but she doesn't want to spook the boy unnecessarily. "They don't seem like the sort Roderic would like to have in his town, either."
"Didn't hear nothing like a splash that I remember. But I was hoofing it pretty hard.
"As for the Spendence, I understand that they's folks who are all about book learnin, but that doesn't put food in a belly or wood in a fire, least not as far as I see."
The boy takes a moment to nibble at the second ration bar. The house creaks in the wind.
Nempura stops playing with the child's hair and lets him eat in peace.
"Alright. Do you mind if we have a look-see throughout the house just briefly? Will that be intruding on you any?" She gestures vaguely. "We came all of this way. We may as well do our due diligence." Gesturing toward the spiders, she looks to the boy once more. "We can at least make it a bit safer for you in here. For example, be careful in that room as there are large spiders?" she asks her party for confirmation as she did not personally see them.
Maverick reacted the fastest and confirmed Nempura's words. He did so in a very unempathic way. He wasn't used to talk to kids. "Yes. Big spiders. Don't go in there."
He then looks upstairs with a questioning expression. "Say, young man, you don't happen to have seen Roderick's ghost upstairs, do you?"
Wes nods in agreement as Nempura mentions the spiders. "Yer a good kid, Kynae. If you ever wanna go for some target practice, you look me up."
He starts looking up the stairs, figuring that they ought to go there next.
Around a bit of ration, the boy says, "I got no claim to this place, so you ain't disturbin' me. I'll scurry outside and you do your dilgence."
He glances past you toward the spiders he can't quite glimpse. At Maverick's mention of ghosts, his eyes go wide. "Never seen no ghost. Well, there's somethin' in the back closet, but I don't think it's a ghost so much as an echo or somethin'. I wouldn't sleep in a house with no ghost."
And as he backs toward the front door, to Wes, "Ain't never even held a gun, Mr. Wes, sir. Not like to be much for target practice."
[b]"
"Never held a gun? There's definitely somethin' we'll have ta fix," responds the lawman. "Part of becomin' a man."
"And also usin' your brain and treatin' ladies right," she comments to justify the youth in what makes a true man. She knows he is very focused on mental improvement, which is more important in the long-run to her as an elf. She just hopes her little comment about treating ladies right will spark him to think about how badly his father treats people and not to be like it.
"Alright, we'll make sure it's ghost-free. You stick out here. Stay away from that water too. There are some creatures down there that might get dangerous if you go into it." She gestures downstream. "If you are wanting a bath or a swim, go down there around the bend. That should be safer."
She clicks her cheek with her tongue, gives the boy a wink and a brush on the cheek with a finger (playfully) and will gesture to the others to head back to where they were with the spiders. She will reinitiate her cantrip so they can all see in the dim-lit room.
With a lower voice, she turns to face the party.
"He may not have a claim to this place, but his father ain't the best human I've met, and he certainly doesn't take care of him. The boy has no roof over his head normally and has to lug it out here all the time just for someplace somewhat out of the wind. I say that as we go through, we, at the very least, make it a place that--for the boy's sake--he can rest his head and not get envenomed by large spiders looking for an easy meal or whatever that is echoing in some closet somewhere doing something bad to him. Am I alone in thinking this?"
If not, she will gesture toward the place the spiders have made a home and she readies a spell. If they are all of one accord, she will explain how her spell requires a fanning wave of flame and to not step into it for maximum effectiveness .
Eunice nods at the suggestion of ridding the place of spiders. ”Roderic plainly isn’t shy about making his objections known. If he didn’t want the boy here he would’ve tried to run him off,” she says. ”As for the fire, it’s probably safe in this house, it’s so damp. This shotgun will do much the same but I’ve only a few rounds.”
Myrandya nods vigorously. "Zhat poor boy haz novhere elshe to go! Ve musht do vhat ve can for him, as zhis is his home. I can mix up some concoctions zhat vill blow zhese shpiders sky-high! Like dynamite, zhey are. But I do not sink zhere is a risk of catching fire to zhe buildink. Zhey are qvite localized explosions, I assure you all."*
Wes nods. "You've got a good heart, Bella Blue. May as well earn our day's pay helpin' a boy out." He probably wouldn't have been so resolute on his own, but is inspired by the elf's example.
With that, Wes returns his attention to the bottom floor and the space where the spiders had been.
At mention of learning to shoot, he smiles. At mention of taking a bath, he scowls. In any case, he scurries out the front door onto the porch with his ration bars.
Nempura sweeps her outstretched hands in a fan shape around the cabinet's interior. The many spiders twist and shrivel as the fire consumes them.
"Thank ya, darlin'," she winks to Wes playfully. When the fire doesn't catch she nods to Myrandya and Eunice. "It seems you were right." She had suspected as much herself.
"I'll search here a bit. Shall we go through that door there?"
There is a door inside the room leading to a hallway (unbeknownst to her). In the meantime, she will search the room; minding the weak floor area and avoiding it.
Myrandya nods enthusiastically to Nempura, as pleased to be asked for her opinion as she is to keep exploring the building.
"Fine by me," agrees Wes as Nempura mentions the next door. He heads over and after a quick look, opens it.