Search Posts
Hi, GM, I understand - I'm not in the best headspace myself these days, so I just wanted to wish you all the best in taking care of yourself, however long that takes, or what it looks like, so please don't beat yourself up over our little pretend swordslingers. I hope you feel better soon just for your own sake, no matter if that means taking as long and far a step back as it may. Watch out for yellow signs out there. ;)
I'm still here. Take care of yourselves, all.
Prasitis’ basic training as a warrior has her instincts screaming to raise and lock shields in response to the yell coming from the mist, even as her witchier side notes that that’s not likely to help much against a fog that’s magic besides. As a measure of stillness settles over the room again, her glance flickers up uneasily, daring to hope that maybe now the fog the poor woman was spewing will have started to dissipate, before turning back to the wretched corpse before her. She wonders if this was the person they were meant to find, and asks, subdued, “Shall we bring her back to the chapel so they can get her cleaned up, at least? And-” She can’t bring herself to voice her concerns if there are more ghouls running around, and she concentrates on trying to figure out if the unnerving fluids the body’s covered in are dangerous.
A rare gleam of common sense stops Prasitis from actually closing to try to rouse the poor woman. She shakes her own head. Think, girl! She’s screaming out fog, the fog did this to this place. Do you really want to get that close to the source? “Does anyone have a bit of rope?” she asks. “Failing that, Satomi, do you think you could snag her out of there with your glaive? Maybe she just ... got drawn in, and it won't come out of her once she's clear?”
Prasitis shakes her head No, not yet! gently, as she sheathes her sword and cautiously assesses the situation. There’s that flash of memory again, blending obscenely with this room’s flood of emotion and mental anguish. The mysterious touch years ago on her own mind, in her own hometown, was infinitely more gentle, but Prasitis is disinclined to take final measures with someone clearly at the mercy of an overwhelming external force before ascertaining that there’s no hope of freeing them any other way. Besides, the ruthless pragmatism somehow drilled into her in that same clouded past suggests that this might well be the Baisily they’re looking for, and the folks behind the barricade didn’t specify what condition they wanted her back in. She can only hope that if she can be dragged back to the chapel, her connection to whatever will be broken.
Her unusual training has hardly prepared her for anything like this, but like any proper knight she tries to do the chivalrous thing. She approaches tentatively, trying to avoid contact with the blood and mist as best as possible, and reaches out carefully to grasp the woman's shoulder. Prasitis isn't the perfect mage either, but she figures getting her out of the significantly located pool of blood might be a start, and she tries to move her as gently as possible.
No worries! Well, not about that, at least. Take care of yourself, GM. 2020 can’t possibly have made / be making things easier for any of us, on top of anything else anyone's got to deal with. *Pained grin emoji.*
Prasitis shakes her head as if to dislodge the feeling, but follows Laura anyway. At least it’s not another voice, she thinks. The thought briefly sparks another fragment of memory: yes, impossible voices from nowhere, implausibly persuasive, and herself bound upright – but not here. The stone different, the air. The distraction is dangerous, and she forces herself to refocus. “Careful,” she says mildly, not meaning to suggest Laura and the others can’t more than look after themselves, speaking only from her knightly code. “Allow me to give them another target at least, if they’re not friendly.” She stands ready to interpose with body and shield if necessary.
I think that was the hallway on the other side of the courtyard, following the path outside the walls of the asylum itself, while the courtyard is the large green space with trees in towards the bottom right of the map.
“We shall gather our strength and venture forth anon, sire, and do great deeds in your name!” Prasitis enthuses glibly, tucking away the image of their quarry. A vague inkling that her language is borrowed from the ghastly books she read as a bored and impressionable adolescent teases her badly damaged memory as she takes her leave of the ratling king. Outside his throne room, such as it is, she turns to the others and asks quietly, “Humour him immediately, or check the other doors off this hall first? I’ve only got one healing spell left for the day, if that’s a concern.”
What is it about disasters that encourages the most ridiculous upstarts? Prasitis wonders wearily. She’s been brought up to be painfully polite and mostly enjoy the game of it, but there are limits even to elven patience. “It is traditional for royalty to sponsor the occasional quest,” she insinuates shrewdly, “but in any case, if you will grant us passage through your realm, we will do no harm to your subjects. As my sister-in-arms suggests, we are hunting monsters only.” The witchy knight is certainly not above a bit of guile, though, which she cloaks in a gesture of false humility, gaze lowered. “If I may be so bold, though, sire, you may wish to proceed on a circuit of the bounds of your newly-expanded domains with your court before the fog entirely lifts. It pains me to say it, but I know the local gentry are not as chivalrous as we, and may also seek to take advantage of, as you say, ‘the situation at hand.’ You may wish to think on it.”
“We beg your pardon, your majesty, we didn’t mean to intrude,” Prasitis says smoothly, her diplomatic upbringing - or whatever powers her witchery - coming to her rescue. “I am Prasitis, knight of the Scarlet Rose, out upon errantry. We’ve already met some of your subjects, who mentioned that your people have been cut off from your domains below. Might we be of assistance?”
Ignoring the coins for now, Prasitis scoops up the vials, ready either to pass them on to anyone able to identify them or just to carry them herself. Another flash of memory prompts her next words, as her mind’s eye reconstructs a sweep through the slums back home, she and her sisters proud in their polished armour, expressionless helms without mercy. Some lunatic gangster and his sordid sideshow had finally made too much of a nuisance of themselves, and among the bizarrerie of the unnerving collections… “What’s going to happen to this place now, do you think? If, you know, we can calm it down and the storm blows over before we all get eaten by monsters?” Her voice rises and falls through the light tones of someone brought up in the comfort of an ambassadorial posting, as her subconscious tries to steer her away from the worst of the present situation even as she speaks, indicating the cloudy jars. “The university would be a better place for some of that, at least, if it can be sent on.” With that, Prasitis turns and prepares to start checking the other doors along the hallway. “We should expect trouble. I don’t know what leaves a trail of faint green slime, exactly, but it’s been to three of these rooms.”
Gingerly, Prasitis tries to figure out what happened here, trying not to let the scene get to her as she examines the corpse-nest and the gruesome collection of the cabinet of anatomical curiosities. She's distracted by a brief flash of childhood nightmares that crosses her tattered memory: urban legends of disappearances and bizarre experiments below the streets of Korvosa – some of which, at least, her own scars have since been able to regrettably confirm – and half-awed, ghoulish cautionary tales about monsters in the night that twist and warp the flesh of their victims.
Since the little monsters seem unfazed by her magic, Prasitis does her best to circle around and support the others’ attacks, drawing her own sword with a slashing flourish.
Prasitis cocks her head to one side appraisingly even as she lunges at the nearest of the little creatures with a twist of her fingers and a hurriedly hissed spell. She shakes her head. "I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like them before."
“Did anyone else see this?” Prasitis asks, pointing out the faint trail of mucosa. “Whatever it is seems to have been moving around, so we should be careful. ‘And slimy things did crawl…’” Disgust roughens her voice even as she scornfully recites a snippet of verse that abruptly breaks off once the contents of the next room are revealed. She almost misses the inhabitants as the bizarre anatomical horror traps her sickened attention. Say what you will about the old queen and all her pride and jealousy, Prasitis catches another flash of memory and grim humour, she had much better taste than this. “Watch out!” she warns, matching actions to words as she fixes the nearer of the nesting monsters with an icy glare.
The witch keeps an eye out as the group proceeds. Seeing all the rubble is enough to make her think it was a mercy that they were locked in the basement when whatever hit the place did. She doesn’t want to think about what or who might be buried under all that stone. Then again, with the fog clouding her memories, there’s no guarantee that other horrors might not lie in wait within her own mind.
With a last glance at the books she's picked out for later - she wonders if there's a particular theme that would emerge - Prasitis gives the double doors at the other end of the library a try, wondering what else this dreadful place is hiding. At least the ratlings are just being a bit annoying rather than absolutely hostile, at the moment.
“Let’s move on,” Prasitis suggests, after she collects the books that belong to Sincomakti and stacks them neatly on a table in preparation for delivering them to the safety of the chapel. Perhaps we can arrange for a messenger to return them once all … this has settled down somewhat.
Prasitis breathes more easily as the ratlings scurry away, glad things didn’t come to a brawl in the library. That said, she can’t say she’s pleased at the thought that they particularly like eating magical texts. So does her familiar, of course, but the knowledge isn’t lost that way. Perhaps we’ll be able to find some outdated medical texts in storage somewhere that we could offer instead? The witch-knight’s eyes quickly skim the shelves in curiosity. She’s not surprised to find most of the volumes are of most interest to alienists, but she recognizes the seal stamped on a spine here or there, and those have clearly gone wandering. Pointing them out, she says, “Those belong to the Sincomakti School. I wonder what they’re doing here? Even if they were on loan, I doubt they would just be mixed in with the others.”
Prasitis has her own ideas, but decides to keep her own counsel about the floral delicacies of Elven poetry, though she is curious about what the ratlings will have to say. “I’m not sure we can promise that, exactly, but if we find something you like, we’ll do our best to bring it back. Otherwise – carry on, I suppose.” She’s quite proud of the sang-froid she manages to put behind the statement, even if it means a certain amount of books are bound to fall prey to the ratlings’ hunger.
Prasitis can’t recall seeing anything that she would really describe as a warren in the part of the basement that she woke up in. “That’s certainly something we could look into. Perhaps we could find a way around, or – well, there are some advantages to having long legs,” she smirks briefly, though she doesn’t relish the prospect of trying to dig through an extensive collapse. “Where is the obstruction blocking your way?” She pauses for a bit both to wait for an answer to that, and to reach for a tactful compromise with a question she thinks she really should ask. “And what sort of weird things have you seen? If you could, maybe –” she looks rather nervously around the library “– try to save anything about the theory of magic for us, or about arcane alienation, if there's anything here about that, please, that would be lovely. It might help us sort out the strangeness that’s going on.” Personally, she thinks madness and horror would be better words, but she’s trying to keep things lighter while she can.
Prasitis ducks under the shower of books, managing to catch one, but she’s only got the one hand free, after all. Ratlings. Charming. Taking a discreet breath, she nods her agreement with Aoife as she starts picking up the dislodged volumes rather primly. Her magic is a bit different from wizards’, but that doesn’t mean she holds with throwing books around. “And would you please not do that?” “But what are you looking for?” She manages to avoid adding, Apart from books to … gnaw on? or Dwarf or Acorn. The request still comes out a bit more tartly than she would like, so she hurries on, though a slight frown remains. “We’re looking into what happened here, and an older human patient who’s gone missing. You wouldn’t have seen her, would you? Perhaps we could help one another?”
Prasitis momentarily brightens at the sight of the next room’s interior, shadowy memories of the library of the elven embassy in Korvosa swirling vaguely upwards. The furniture was more delicate there. Comfortable. She’s sure of that much. Her nose wrinkles briefly at the scent layered over that of the books, and her free hand twitches at her hip as she hesitates between preparing a spell or drawing a blade. She tries to pin down the creatures with her gaze, the chewing sounds more than a little disquieting.
Remembering the hot rain they got caught in on first escaping the basement, Prasitis is dubious about the gardens that still curl with the unnatural wet fog, and suggests exploring the heart of the asylum’s ground floor.
“A push away from the door, or a pull back to the hall? At least, that’s the closest thing to a definable sensation that I felt,” Prasitis acknowledges. “I don’t like it, but I’m trying to remember if the dreams we’ve had have ever really lied to us. That is, with the one in which we all died excepted, and even that, if we hadn’t woken up in time, all together…” The witch’s voice drops off as she loses herself in fragments of misty, citrine dreams – or nightmares, or visions.
“Is anyone … equipped to deal in skullduggery?” Prasitis asks, trying to find a relatively polite way of asking if any of the others have burglarious skills. “I could try to force the door, but I’m not the strongest.” Now that she mentions it, another flash of memory: surrounded by her sisters-in-arms, faceless helms nodding in response to clipped signals, a portable ram brought forward. But she herself among those waiting to respond after it had been applied.
Tucking one of the silver daggers into her belt, Prasitis now fairly bristles with weaponry. She'll have to consider how to best sort it later for easy access. She encourages the others to take up the amulets, since she's got her shield to go with her armour. Picking the former up again, she sets off the path to breach the door to the east wing.
A bunch of nonsense came up on my end in real life, and then I wasn’t sure that folks were ready to press on, and I worry about prima donna-ing a bit much. I had two family emergencies come up here tonight, so sorry! I’ll post tomorrow when I’m back at my desktop. I think I remember that we were going to head down the primrose path after we looted the bodies. Oh no! By all means, those are what you should worry about, not about us. I hope everything works out soon.
Strapping her shield back on, Prasitis looks back from the door to the garden path. "I've not prepared the right cantrip to investigate at the moment, I'm afraid, though I could tomorrow. I wouldn't refuse another dagger, if there's one to spare. I've one in cold iron already, but..." Her voice fades away as she briefly loses herself in vague memories of where she got it. It was a gift, and she thinks she feels fond about it for it, but the details are lost to the oblivion that shrouds most of her recent past. "Regardless."
Prasitis eyes the fallen birds uneasily, but acquiesces readily, setting her shield aside for the moment. Arranging the body on the ground already should be easier, but the one stuck over the mounted elk’s head… “On three?” she asks. The more she has to think about how the body got up there as she considers the difficulty of getting it back down at all gracefully, the less she likes it. With a bit of help, though, it's managed a bit more solemnly than flopping the thing over one side after being pried from the antlers.
Whether it’s the diplomat’s daughter in her or the witch, Prasitis watches aghast as Satomi and Laura deal with whatever it was with chopping steel. Then again, since it seems to have worked, it seems preferable to just letting the dead birds do their almost certainly unpleasant work. With a nod, she falls in behind Laura on the way to the east wing.
“There’s a path through the mist,” Prasitis says, pointing through the window, and trying to keep her voice level over the sound of the dead birds. “But I think we might rather want to come back later!” Given what just came through the doors a few minutes ago. She waits for the others. Her honour demands it, after all: she can hardly let them suffer the risks of whatever’s happening. Who would animate a flock of stuffed birds? Why? Some sort of bizarre trap?
Prasitis decides she certainly doesn’t approve of the room’s décor. The happy families certainly don’t square with her recent experience of the asylum, at least, and the birdcage … is beyond weird. A mansion. Are we the birds, then, in this larger cage? And if those are stuffed… She’s very glad that she directed Argyria to wait in the chapel until called for. Her familiar certainly doesn’t need to see this. And that’s before considering the corpses in the room. The witch cautiously enters, trying to make sense of the space and what happened here.
Despite the leafless trees and the eddying fog, Prasitis finds the garden somewhat more attractive than the claustrophobic and definitely infested ruined interior. She wonders if in happier times there would have been any roses… The back of the garden fades into the fog, though, and that means deeper into the heart of the complex than is entirely comfortable with the dangerous weather and without doors and other defensible points, as Satomi’s words remind her. “You’re right, of course,” she says, and starts closing doors before heading to what looks like an office off the entrance hall. She slams the doors on the way shut with perhaps a bit more vigour than is strictly necessary, as if taking comfort in the sound of solidity.
Prasitis is immensely relieved that Laura had a flask of something useful on hand, and as the acid works its horrific wonders on the mass it’s splashed over, the elf witch gives the stilled pile of flesh an awkward thump with her staff in fascinated disgust, in an attempt to make sure it’s actually dead. Once reassured on that point, she stows the one weapon before retrieving her sword as well. Avoiding the trail of slime Veda warned them about, she tentatively answers the swordswoman’s question, “Checking the rest of the doors off this entryway before choosing a corridor? Nothing joined in with – with that horror, but I’d rather not learn the hard way that there are more doppelgangers or the like lurking and biding their time.”
Thinking quickly, the elf witch throws her sword aside, and reaches for the staff slung over her back along with her bow – her shield would get in her way, but she can offer the weapon to Veda. She holds it up with what she hopes is an inspiring flourish, and invokes the honour of her order: “Scarlet Rose!”
As Laura pushes the monstrous thing back, Prasitis steps up and levels a vicious slash at it, before bringing her shield up to bear snd bracing grimly against counterattack.
"Unnatural, but not extraplanar!" the witch calls out her snap assessment. "I can't place it!"
The way Prasitis draws up short at Satomi’s explanation makes it obvious how unsettling she finds it, but also plausible. Before she can say anything in acknowledgement, though, the ringing and slightly squashy sound that intervenes closes the elf’s mouth for her again, at least for a moment. “Is anyone there?” she calls out cautiously, even as she thinks that it definitely wasn’t the sort of sound she’d expect Winter to make, and who else have they met that would be so adventurous? Taking that extra moment gives her time to choose her weapons more intentionally, and this time when she draws, it’s her elven blade in hand. She moves to take up position beside Laura, ready to assist.
The elf witch frowns as the group works out more about how the wretched victims died, at least. “Thank the goddesses for small mercies, but still, the coverings? Remorse too late? Squeamishness? But then one might think throwing something over the whole body would be simpler.” She’s not sure where the cool pragmatism comes from, but eventually she shrugs, and picks her way through the fallen wall to check the next of the smaller doors opening from the entrance hall.
Prasitis nods in answer to Laura’s unspoken question. She’s not sure what that would reveal, but she murmurs her macabre speculations aloud, “It looks like they were bludgeoned to death, but why the bags? To stifle them first, or just … sadism?” She tries not to think too much about lurching around, blindly trying to fend off blows from all sides while trying to breathe through sacking. She keeps her free hand halfway up as she looks around the room, as if unconsciously warding off the lingering menace of whatever killed these people. But if it came through the wall behind… For the sake of everyone’s morale, she keeps that part quiet.
At the vague sight of the things in the fog, Prasitis is glad to agree with Aoife. She wonders if the things have been out there since the boiling rain the day before, but in any case the idea of trying to fight in fog so thick is appalling. “Let’s try to make sure there are no surprises in the wings before being funneled through the main corridors,” she suggests, and moves to start checking the smaller doors that open onto the entrance hall.
Maybe this is a dream after all. Or a nightmare, Prasitis thinks, trying not to dwell on what she’s just seen melt away to allow further access to what she doesn’t want to believe has been her home for some unspecified period of time. “What do you think?” she asks, not least to distract herself, peering in either direction down the hall, “Straight through to the heart, or circle around the outer passages first, if we can?” First, though, she joins Aoife in checking the doors, especially to what must be a room opposite the grand staircase that once led to a second floor.
Prasitis looks up again at that, and considers the riddle. It suggests an all too familiar feeling of shame. Look. No, don’t! To be seen as what one truly is, was, or wants to be, and not what one seems… “We need a mirror,” she thinks out loud. Of sorts, at least.
Or is it a metaphor? All the while, she tries to figure out what it is that she’s looking at, exactly. A monster? The results of some sort of horrible magical accident?
Prasitis obligingly casts her eyes down – quite happy to avoid seeing mouths opening in monstrous eyes, and hoping the image doesn’t settle in her mind to haunt her dreams – but not so much that she’d be entirely blind-sided by another motion from the huge eye. “We don’t mean to pry,” she says soothingly, “but we need to get past. Or is there another way? We mean to find out what happened here, and if we can help, we will.” She looks back up, and looks only long enough for the ghosts that haunt her own gaze to hint at a grimmer tale of her own than the faint scars on her face would suggest. Mercifully, she can’t remember the details, but a creeping feeling of guilt and horror stirs in her too. “The way behind us is barred. If there is any hope for us to undo this horror, we must get past,” she reiterates.
Hearing a cry that doesn’t sound like Aoife’s voice, Prasitis pushes the curtain aside as best she can and … stops short. “What-” She remembers her manners just in time, bearing in mind that the unusual spectacle seems to have some sort of voice. “Who are you?” She keeps her own voice as steady as circumstances permit, and tries to will her sword-arm into not twitching threateningly. It would suit the horror-show of the asylum to tempt its inmates to lashing out in the wrong direction, or to conceal any number of things with misleading horrors. That’s not to say that Prasitis is inclined to be trusting, or that she’s not trying to see if there’s anything or a way past beyond the monstrous eye.
Prasitis falls in step behind Aoife quickly, readying her shield and a sword to provide support – once again, her heftier Korvosan blade finds its way into her hand rather than her ancestral elven weapon. An uneasy feeling skitters over the back of the witch’s neck. What Winter’s described sounds like a bizarre horror, so Prasitis feels the unhealthiness of her own curiosity. It’s not a new feeling: there’s a flash of another half-memory. Another sister-not-sister. A book she asked Siti to find, that she should never have glanced into before handing it over. The book. The witch-knight gives her head a small shake, ready to twitch the curtain aside if Aoife disappears behind it only to need help.
Prasitis closes her eyes for a second as she tries to process too much all at once, from her own and Winter’s words, Satomi’s questions, and Veda’s hug, to still other fragments of memory. If she’s managed to put up with such a splintered perspective on the world for an indefinite period of time – and she has to have had, since she can’t remember how she came to the asylum, exactly – she must really have been at least somewhat mad. She jumps gently to her feet as she begins to worry the situation is running away with her, two flashes of vision sticking a bit longer. Mental shenanigans (purely self-indulgent):
Her father and mother, it must be, mildly correcting her efforts at diplomatic language. The former, especially: ‘It’s very good that you’re trying to balance the conversation, and enjoying it. But remember what you want from each thread.’
Her father again, somehow she’s sure many years closer to the present, an unreadable emotion on his face. ‘My gem, what did they do to you?’ Not unreadable. Sympathy. And fear. "Uh...I'm not sure I'm suggesting that you're inconvenient to me or the survivors at all. But to the people who admitted you here, you obviously were somewhat problematic for, directly or indirectly." She forces herself to speak more directly, swallowing yet another apology, but making sure her tone is friendly, if not light, exactly. “Oh, present company included, to be sure. At the risk of being too candid, it seems rather convenient for the count, at least, if he is corrupt, that he should send you, one of the accusers looking into his dubious affairs, to the asylum just in time for it to be … attacked is as good a word as any I suppose. Or fortune just favours the wicked. You have my sympathy, I mean, in any case.” "It had a horrifying effect on some of the patients, turning them into ghouls or dopplegangers. We have been separated from the...thing behind the curtain at the end of the hall. We are not sure how to get beyond it." She nods in acquiescence to Winter’s reply to Satomi, only adding, “Turned into? Could the doppelgangers, at least, have been here all along, in disguise? Otherwise…” Prasitis shivers at the implications, before confessing, “It’s maddening, and alarming, but I can’t remember much of anything from up to a few years ago, and mostly scraps of anything before that. And then we woke up in the cellar, after such frightful dreams…” She pulls herself together in the knightliest way she knows, glancing around the rest of the group of women. “The curtain just at the end of the hall?” She points towards the door of the chapel, her gesture taking in the hallway beyond. “I’m ready, if everyone else is. Whatever’s out there might not be expecting us to prowl around ourselves of an evening,” she says, with grim determination.
Prasitis briefly stiffens at the unexpected touch on her shoulder, before relaxing again after a moment. “Thanks,” she mouths, offering a small smile over her shoulder. Perhaps there’s hope yet, she thinks as she turns back to the wider conversation. I think I must have been too long delayed already, but… I’m sure her majesty has hundreds of knights eager to pledge their swords to her. Half-formed and humbling visions of the court at Iadara dance over Prasitis’ brain. And in the meantime, well, it’s a bit of a mess here, and you could do worse than help these women. The Scarlet Rose would approve. Despite the glimmer of hope, there’s also a sense of guilt that the witch can’t account for. She can only add another hope that she won’t have to expiate it with her life, but sets aside some mental energy to allow and – in some measure – prepare for the possibility.
Prasitis’ brow furrows in concentration as she tries to figure out a workable hypothesis as to what Winter’s suggesting, given that, as a foreign invalid, the knight’s grasp of the situation is tenuous at best. “So we’ve now become fatally inconvenient, as opposed to merely tediously?” “Or your delinquent Count, trying to put you off with lunatics, has blundered into his duty by accidentally reinforcing the powers of sanity in the asylum’s hour of need?” As if from a vague mental distance, Prasitis observes her own cheerful tone, and that she seems to default to erring perhaps slightly on the side of manic airiness, as opposed to open paranoia. |
