Three lunatics and a paladin, once more.
Dramatis Personae:
Viepuck, twelve-year-old social deception gremlin
Izgil, here for the magical theory
Celyn, who is actually to the point of getting cranky about events happening all the damn time
Robin, the paladin
When we left off we had just chased a bear fey off but not killed him and were kind of in our feelings about that.
(Doing my best to do writeup despite hideous splitting headache.)
Celyn asked for the guidance of his god as to whether they should chase after the Hunter and basically got back "the odds of you managing to catch him before he gets to the portal are low, focus on places you can actually accomplish something".
Izgil, meanwhile, has picked up the spear the Hunter abandoned and gone, "Huh, if I study this before the magic fades I can absolutely learn some stuff" and thus hunkers down to do that, since we've confirmed that chasing the Hunter himself is probably not worthwhile.
As we're in the clearing in front of the cave where the bad guys were lairing, a couple of bears lumber out of it, the white streaks in their fur fading like magic as they shake off their enchantment and run like hell. They are followed by some ravens, shedding white tailfeathers and also fleeing, and then the sound of a small child's footsteps.
Small child says, "Uncle Rufus? Did you come to save me?" peers at the party, then says, "Who are you all? Did the Wildling send you?"
Celyn, who is both pretty good with kids and who spent a good while talking with Rufus (he having a professional interest as a Wyrdling cleric in trans folks with possible dark sides) tells the kid that he knows her Uncle Rufus and he'll be glad to know she's okay; meanwhile a couple of other adults, in bad condition, come staggering out of the cave, survivors from the village we had evacuated. Kid may be a little god-touched; she appeared to earnestly believe in the Wildling's potential for direct intervention at the very least.
We get some basic explanations of what's going on from the survivors. We tell them that the rest of the village was evacuated. They are given weirdberries by Viepuck and settled down with Robin, as Party's Most Reassuring Human, while Izgil is doing research; this leaves Celyn and Viepuck to investigate the cave. Celyn is enough in his right mind at this point to do this. (He spent a chunk of the previous game session being Very Specific about managing his mental health, which is stuff that doesn't come out often at table, but I write stories about. His god is in charge of protection against madness and he leaned on that a whole lot harder than usual.)
The top of the cave was dug out into animal lairs mostly - probably an original bear cave that had been expanded. We found a tunnel going down, slid down it, and found the banquet hall space that Celyn had spotted using the clairvoyance potion. Written on the wall in human script but an unknown language was a text that Celyn read using a spell, saying that the space was a safe refuge from troubles (I don't remember the specific words, but something like that) In addition to various rubble and occasional abandoned items, we found a stump that matched the one above and confirmed it was active. Viepuck hopped on it and promptly teleported back to the surface; Celyn (rolled a 2 on wisdom because I couldn't figure out where the recklessness/too much sense to poke the magic item coin fell and) tried the same thing and it did not work for unknown reasons that Izgil would have to investigate. (The answer: It has a 15 minute recharge time. It is also very, very old, older than, for example, Greymalkin's grudge against these fey.) With a shrug, Celyn took the couple bottles of wine he found down there, climbed back up the tunnel, and went back to sit with Robin and drink wine.
We resolved to stay through to the morning so Celyn (and possibly Robin?) could do some funeral rites for the people who died in the caves (to protect them from undeadification as best we could), and Viepuck took the people back to their village and notified the refugees that it was safe to come home. After we had done these things we hiked down to the village on the far side of the river from Peydon, where the Hag/Midnight Lady is lurking.
Here we divide the party: Viepuck impersonates the "tax collector"/bandit we had previous apprehended to get our initial information about the Hag and goes to one inn, the party goes to the other. We collectively get the information that the market has been moved to the other side of the river, to the displeasure of basically everyone; that the people of Peydon are unfriendly now and the atmosphere there is not great; that things are sort of messy because of the local lord's son getting himself killed recently (in the marriage dispute plotline that we prevented from getting even more tragic than it was) and the magistrate was coming to explain. Izgil commented that we'd heard about fairies up there making trouble, which produced the usual incredulity, at which point Izgil sort of desperately looked to Robin and Celyn to figure out what to say that wasn't explaining our entire line of everything.
We gave out the stress-tested nonspecific summary of "fairies in the woods, be careful" and got some "oh yeah there's probably one in the hills past Peydon, creepy lady" and some mentions of a ruined temple over there too. To what god? Nobody knows. Oh wait. That's weird. It's weird that nobody knows, how did we not notice that was weird before?
Um, yeah. Not sure what's up with that.
We also got some information that someone's granddaughter went over to Peydon with her and is now afraid of mirrors and even puddles. Someone else said their relative sold anti-being-watched charms and we should check that out. A third person said those were useless. We eventually repaired to bed.
In the morning, Viepuck reestablished telepathic contact with the other half of the party, and then went down to take the ferry, because the ferryman was one of the "tax collector"'s accomplices. He was surprised to see him - the Hag had said he wasn't coming back - he gave a half-truth story about encountering the party, got some gossip. Ferryman was clear that he didn't go for particular marks anymore, he only did things with possible targets at the direction of Her. Also Gareth-who-is-Viepuck needs to remember not to talk about her too overtly. Maybe he should talk to her! Or maybe he should, like, not, if she'd be a problem upon seeing him. Viepuck got off the boat, ducked into an alley, and swapped disguises to his day laborer dwarf, then went into the local inn to wait for the party.
While he was lurking there, an old lady who visibly intimidated the staff turned up for breakfast; she got served her toast and egg without ever asking for anything. She was, of course, imemdiately flagged as Probably The Hag.
Meanwhile, the ferryman returns to the other side and picks up the party (who had determined that the anti-scrying charms were indeed not magically effective) and an anxious lady named Mara, who had lost her family in the undead attacks and was heading to stay with family in one of the villages north of Peydon. Viepuck had tried to get the ferryman to hassle the party by saying he'd spotted some good marks; he was only interested in taking our fares and ignoring us, but he was very distinctly not taking a fare from Mara.
Viepuck, over the telepathic link: He works for a fairy don't let her owe anyone anything!
Celyn proceeded to pay the woman's fare and insist that in these troubled times that the ferryman shouldn't be skipping on his wages. Ferryman: [shrug, pockets the money]
We got to the other side. Ferryman suggests to Mara that she go wait out the weather a bit in the inn because it's nasty out, which is, in fact, true. We are also going to go to the inn, because Viepuck is there.
As we go into the inn, the old lady peers at us, visibly recognizes us, scans the room, and then picks out the disguised Viepuck as the fourth. Not bothering to hide any of her observations, and making clear she has reasonable intel on the party at least in terms of numbers (and possibly more).
So she comes up to the party to have a little conversation with us. The gist of which was that she has no interest in any trouble, she just wants to give us what we want. If we just leave her her little village, just one little town, she'll even tell us what the Gloomshaper is up to and what he wants. She'll consider sweetening the deal as we don't look impressed. But surely we have enough to worry about, she'll happily take herself off our list of problems, just as soon as we make a deal.
She noted we killed the shapeshifter; she thanks us for that. She does want to know what we did with the Hunter, whose name she gave us (and which I have forgotten, but it was something that ended Half-Bear in Greek. Of which I know Arktos without having to think for reasons that will make![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jenett laugh). (ETA: Kiastíōn Hēmiárktos.) She tries to tempt Izgil with knowledge when he comes in from his quick duck outside to cast a detect magic, which doesn't go useful places.
Izgil, armed with Peer At The Magic skills, sees that she's got an illusion on, and auras of divination and necromancy that imply magic items stashed not on her person that give her access to particular powers. These auras are not enough to chase back to the items themselves, unfortunately.
(Thiara, in my brain, is like "I had a spell specifically for that purpose actually" about it, which is not terribly useful of her, given that I played her ~25 years and two editions of D&D ago, she lives in a wholly different universe designed by a different gamemaster, and she is also a god. Shoo shoo go invent another dragon and leave me alone.)
Somewhere in here Mara sensibly Departs The Scene, at which point she turns to Celyn and says "You owe me for that one, she had such delicious wants." Celyn points out that she had no hold over Mara and no right to claim her therefore, denying the claimed debt.
Viepuck, whose core desire is to be a better minion for Curious Cthulhu Looks At The Material Plane the Great Old One, is impressed with her ability to sense desires at range (and presumably tip off the ferryman sufficiently in advance) and dares her to conceptualize his wants by using his mind probe power to put her in touch with his patron. This produces a pause, and then the equivalent of "[blink blink] ANYWAY" from the Hag.
(I point out that she probably can't digest Robin's desires either as most of the ones he expresses boil down to "I wish people would be less terrible" and that is definitely not her department. There's alien and then there's antithetical.)
She tries, again, to argue that we should make a deal with her, singling out the barmaid and saying, "Violet, I helped you, right?"; the woman does a rictus smile and agrees that yes, yes, that was the case. Celyn finally hits "Look, we do not have the power to give you title to the town and even if we did we wouldn't," so she basically shrugs, goes Be Seeing You and heads out. We decline to try making this a physical brawl with all these innocent bystanders. She heads east, into town, unlike Mara, who headed north, to the outlying suburbs.
The other inn guests are basically at, "So, uhhh... is it safe to go now?" and skedaddle after Mara. We try to get some information about how she maintains her hold over the people, which was interrupted by the Hag's face appearing in a glass and suggesting that we leave the poor barkeep alone, he's suffered enough. Most of the party leaves, at which point her face jumps to Robin's very shiny plate armor and continues to taunt us; Viepuck, who is being his oppositional-defiant self about being asked to do things by fairies, proceeds to do a giant rant about how she's just a trickster who can only see one place at a time, neener neener, that makes the inn workers uncomfortable enough that they duck into the back about it.
Now, we were wondering if the magic locket we got off the dead shapeshifter (that does communication with a paired magic locket) connected to the Hag, because we know the two of them were, at least at points, working together (even if the Hag thanked us for killing her). We had decided against testing this at previous points given we had plenty of trouble and no particular need to borrow any more, but now it seemed worthwhile, so Viepuck disguised himself, opened it up, and said, "Hey how does this work" into the message spell. The face that appeared on the other side ... was the Baroness. "Who is this? Answer me or I will destroy you!" she thundered. There was a pause, and then the Baroness activated the locket from the other side to say, "This is baronial property you have stolen! You must return it to Veltor immediately!" to which Viepuck replied, "Is it really? NEAT!" and closed the connection.
We hike up to the border of the town. Off to the northeast there's a windmill; off to the southeast there's a woodcutter that's showing signs of activity, and then there's the town east of us which is sort of creepily quiet. Yes, the weather's dreadful and it's the draggy end of winter, but just ... nobody is out. We spend enough time dithering about what to do that the Hag's face pops up in a puddle to mock us for indecisiveness.
When she buggers off again we go poke our heads in on the woodcutter. No glass, shuttered windows, we have applied appropriate amounts of schmutz to Robin's armour so she can't pop up on that again probably (that was profoundly aggravating and Celyn is gently enraged by it in the privacy of his own brain), and we see there's a half-barrel upside down on the guy's table that's probably covering up any of his plates that have particularly good glazes.
The guy working on making charcoal in here is bare-armed and we can see he is covered in fairly recent scars, which Robin parses as being likely from some sort of monster. He flinches a bit at any direct mention of the Hag which means that after a moment Celyn says, "We've heard you've all been having some problems with an old dog," (which was probably one of the one times my brain actually worked after the headache attacked - everything changed when the headache nation attacked) at which point the man agrees, relieved, "Oh yeah, it bites and claws", while tapping a foot rhythmically. "That where you got those scars?" He agreed it was, and said the dog couldn't be killed, the wounds just healed, and that we should go. Also that it slept in a particular widow's house, I believe we got that information here. (Whether the widow still lives there or is deceased or what is unknown to us.)
We collect some information, have a side speculation about whether the Hag may also be a werewolf which seems implausible given what we know of werewolf and fairy lore, and eventually he says that we oughta go or she'll spot us. We get a rough sense of how much time it takes for her to locate strangers around here (five minutes or so) and start hiking up around the back way towards the windmill. I forget why we stopped along the way there but we got taunted by the Hag from a puddle again, I think.
In the windmill we talked with a man who managed to convey that he could only talk like a World of Darkness pooka by gesturing past us and saying, "Nice sunny day, isn't it?" (When he tried to say things straight-up he basically barked like a dog, and that happened even when Viepuck was reading his mind.) We collected some more information (including that the scrying turns up fastest near the town square, slower down at the inn near the river) there and get encouraged to ask around for more information by being told "Don't ask questions."
Es*tiaslos has taken a bit to scout the area and glance at the abandoned guard tower (an absolute ruin), but does not find this mysterious temple to no god. The woodcutter didn't know about it. This is sort of aggravating (I think part of our perpetual dithering was that that seemed Significant - someone had said at some point, I don't recall in what sequence, that the secret of Peydon was there - and we had no idea how to locate it. You know I wonder now....*), since we can't find it.
Anyway, we headed into town, aiming for the temple, as there is some commentary that the Mother does not like the Hag and something about the grove. THis route takes us through the town square, where the well in the center is recently bricked up; there is a new well off to the edge. We make a note of this and then head to the temple, where the administrator is not terribly helpful and the Hag's face shows up in the window very quickly. "I'm glad to hear you were just leaving" says the administrator; the shepherdess who was spinning in the corner leaves as soon as the apparition appears. Viepuck goes and makes faces at it.
The shepherdess gets Robin into a cluster of trees and says that this narrow space is one the Hag can't penetrate because it's where the Mother's miracle happened. She proceeds to give us some information; Viepuck, meanwhile, in the spirit of experimentation, goes off to find some glassware and plays Summoning Bloody Mary at it. The Hag finds this entertaining until the round where her "Oh, we're playing such a game, can I keep you as a mascot?" gets the answer, "I think that would lead to a dispute, did you want to talk to my master again?" The next bit of glassware Viepuck harasses does not get a response, but the one after that does, with her muttering that she shouldn't have let him get to her.
Viepuck is definitely coming to the conclusion that irritating fairies until they do something dramatic is effective after the horseradish incident, basically.
Upon hearing that the shepherdess's sheep refuse to go into the town square since they bricked up the well, Celyn goes and grabs Izgil. "Stand there," he says, indicating the space that is scry-protected. Izgil, baffled, agrees. "Now cast the detect magic where she can't see you do it and go look at the well again." "Oh, that's a good idea." Izgil does so.
In the town square there is definitely something magic. We have a bricked-up well, a skilled mason (Izgil), and a very strong man with a hammer (Robin); a solution is possible, and honestly being oblique is getting us nowhere so we might as well break something. Inside the well there is definitely an Item which can be retrieved; it is a magic mirror. And, Izgil can tell, the other half of the divination aura that he spotted on the Hag. We debate things to do with it - can we stash it in the blind spot in the Mother's grove, for example?
Viepuck tries tying it up and spinning it in the hope that it will make her dizzy; meanwhile she comes wandering up and suggests that if we return the mirror to her she will not kill us in the next five minutes. There is some back and forth and language chopping attempts and eventually she clearly is doing the "Or I could just beat your asses and take it" mode, at which point Viepuck summons an illusion of a Duskhound and says, "Or we could get the Hunter's Duskhound ot help!" which at least makes her pause briefly to swipe claws through the thing so she doesn't get advantage on initiative.
Celyn stabs her. Robin hits her with the hammer. Viepuck drops a faerie fire on her. Izgil dispels her illusion (and the faerie fire, and apologizes for the latter). She disappears, and reappears fully healed, and summons a shambling mound to attack Robin and Celyn. Her attempt to hex someone is counterspelled by Izgil.
Celyn and Robin work on clearing out the angry plant since stabbing her seems slightly less pointful. Es*tiaslos, bee-shaped, ducks into the folds of her cloak and lurks there, and Viepuck smacks her with some magic. Izgil makes contact with the temple adminstrator and gets directions to the widow's house where the Hag is lairing, and skedaddles that way, to her idle amusement.
She vanishes again. Es*tiaslos finds itself in a strange scale model of the town, some sort of dollhouse made of bone; the Hag walks from her current location next to the party into the manor, touches a poppet doll with a recognizable face (though of someone we don't know; we suspect it's the lord), and pops back healed, to suggest to us that we are being silly and should just return her damn mirror before she gets cross with us.
Here we ran out of time, and are thus in a complicated situation, in which Viepuck may cut the mirror loose from his nonsense and fly off with it, which will either lead to her chasing him or deciding that we are being difficult and trying to kill the melee combatants before chasing it down, or of course some third thing. Izgil has tried to locate the doll, I think, and failed.
What we need to do is go into the manor and talk to the lord, who has clearly given some sort of dominion over the town to the Hag as represented by this model, but of course the complexities of being spied on and other nonsense. Though of course we could do the pop in and talk and have boring idle conversation with the man while Viepuck asks him questions telepathically, in which case it wouldn't matter if she has the mirror or not...
(* The wonder now: is the necromantic dollhouse stashed in the Temple To No God.)
Okay. I think that's all the loose ends. We accomplished many things, actually, just with dreadful inefficiency.
Dramatis Personae:
Viepuck, twelve-year-old social deception gremlin
Izgil, here for the magical theory
Celyn, who is actually to the point of getting cranky about events happening all the damn time
Robin, the paladin
When we left off we had just chased a bear fey off but not killed him and were kind of in our feelings about that.
(Doing my best to do writeup despite hideous splitting headache.)
Celyn asked for the guidance of his god as to whether they should chase after the Hunter and basically got back "the odds of you managing to catch him before he gets to the portal are low, focus on places you can actually accomplish something".
Izgil, meanwhile, has picked up the spear the Hunter abandoned and gone, "Huh, if I study this before the magic fades I can absolutely learn some stuff" and thus hunkers down to do that, since we've confirmed that chasing the Hunter himself is probably not worthwhile.
As we're in the clearing in front of the cave where the bad guys were lairing, a couple of bears lumber out of it, the white streaks in their fur fading like magic as they shake off their enchantment and run like hell. They are followed by some ravens, shedding white tailfeathers and also fleeing, and then the sound of a small child's footsteps.
Small child says, "Uncle Rufus? Did you come to save me?" peers at the party, then says, "Who are you all? Did the Wildling send you?"
Celyn, who is both pretty good with kids and who spent a good while talking with Rufus (he having a professional interest as a Wyrdling cleric in trans folks with possible dark sides) tells the kid that he knows her Uncle Rufus and he'll be glad to know she's okay; meanwhile a couple of other adults, in bad condition, come staggering out of the cave, survivors from the village we had evacuated. Kid may be a little god-touched; she appeared to earnestly believe in the Wildling's potential for direct intervention at the very least.
We get some basic explanations of what's going on from the survivors. We tell them that the rest of the village was evacuated. They are given weirdberries by Viepuck and settled down with Robin, as Party's Most Reassuring Human, while Izgil is doing research; this leaves Celyn and Viepuck to investigate the cave. Celyn is enough in his right mind at this point to do this. (He spent a chunk of the previous game session being Very Specific about managing his mental health, which is stuff that doesn't come out often at table, but I write stories about. His god is in charge of protection against madness and he leaned on that a whole lot harder than usual.)
The top of the cave was dug out into animal lairs mostly - probably an original bear cave that had been expanded. We found a tunnel going down, slid down it, and found the banquet hall space that Celyn had spotted using the clairvoyance potion. Written on the wall in human script but an unknown language was a text that Celyn read using a spell, saying that the space was a safe refuge from troubles (I don't remember the specific words, but something like that) In addition to various rubble and occasional abandoned items, we found a stump that matched the one above and confirmed it was active. Viepuck hopped on it and promptly teleported back to the surface; Celyn (rolled a 2 on wisdom because I couldn't figure out where the recklessness/too much sense to poke the magic item coin fell and) tried the same thing and it did not work for unknown reasons that Izgil would have to investigate. (The answer: It has a 15 minute recharge time. It is also very, very old, older than, for example, Greymalkin's grudge against these fey.) With a shrug, Celyn took the couple bottles of wine he found down there, climbed back up the tunnel, and went back to sit with Robin and drink wine.
We resolved to stay through to the morning so Celyn (and possibly Robin?) could do some funeral rites for the people who died in the caves (to protect them from undeadification as best we could), and Viepuck took the people back to their village and notified the refugees that it was safe to come home. After we had done these things we hiked down to the village on the far side of the river from Peydon, where the Hag/Midnight Lady is lurking.
Here we divide the party: Viepuck impersonates the "tax collector"/bandit we had previous apprehended to get our initial information about the Hag and goes to one inn, the party goes to the other. We collectively get the information that the market has been moved to the other side of the river, to the displeasure of basically everyone; that the people of Peydon are unfriendly now and the atmosphere there is not great; that things are sort of messy because of the local lord's son getting himself killed recently (in the marriage dispute plotline that we prevented from getting even more tragic than it was) and the magistrate was coming to explain. Izgil commented that we'd heard about fairies up there making trouble, which produced the usual incredulity, at which point Izgil sort of desperately looked to Robin and Celyn to figure out what to say that wasn't explaining our entire line of everything.
We gave out the stress-tested nonspecific summary of "fairies in the woods, be careful" and got some "oh yeah there's probably one in the hills past Peydon, creepy lady" and some mentions of a ruined temple over there too. To what god? Nobody knows. Oh wait. That's weird. It's weird that nobody knows, how did we not notice that was weird before?
Um, yeah. Not sure what's up with that.
We also got some information that someone's granddaughter went over to Peydon with her and is now afraid of mirrors and even puddles. Someone else said their relative sold anti-being-watched charms and we should check that out. A third person said those were useless. We eventually repaired to bed.
In the morning, Viepuck reestablished telepathic contact with the other half of the party, and then went down to take the ferry, because the ferryman was one of the "tax collector"'s accomplices. He was surprised to see him - the Hag had said he wasn't coming back - he gave a half-truth story about encountering the party, got some gossip. Ferryman was clear that he didn't go for particular marks anymore, he only did things with possible targets at the direction of Her. Also Gareth-who-is-Viepuck needs to remember not to talk about her too overtly. Maybe he should talk to her! Or maybe he should, like, not, if she'd be a problem upon seeing him. Viepuck got off the boat, ducked into an alley, and swapped disguises to his day laborer dwarf, then went into the local inn to wait for the party.
While he was lurking there, an old lady who visibly intimidated the staff turned up for breakfast; she got served her toast and egg without ever asking for anything. She was, of course, imemdiately flagged as Probably The Hag.
Meanwhile, the ferryman returns to the other side and picks up the party (who had determined that the anti-scrying charms were indeed not magically effective) and an anxious lady named Mara, who had lost her family in the undead attacks and was heading to stay with family in one of the villages north of Peydon. Viepuck had tried to get the ferryman to hassle the party by saying he'd spotted some good marks; he was only interested in taking our fares and ignoring us, but he was very distinctly not taking a fare from Mara.
Viepuck, over the telepathic link: He works for a fairy don't let her owe anyone anything!
Celyn proceeded to pay the woman's fare and insist that in these troubled times that the ferryman shouldn't be skipping on his wages. Ferryman: [shrug, pockets the money]
We got to the other side. Ferryman suggests to Mara that she go wait out the weather a bit in the inn because it's nasty out, which is, in fact, true. We are also going to go to the inn, because Viepuck is there.
As we go into the inn, the old lady peers at us, visibly recognizes us, scans the room, and then picks out the disguised Viepuck as the fourth. Not bothering to hide any of her observations, and making clear she has reasonable intel on the party at least in terms of numbers (and possibly more).
So she comes up to the party to have a little conversation with us. The gist of which was that she has no interest in any trouble, she just wants to give us what we want. If we just leave her her little village, just one little town, she'll even tell us what the Gloomshaper is up to and what he wants. She'll consider sweetening the deal as we don't look impressed. But surely we have enough to worry about, she'll happily take herself off our list of problems, just as soon as we make a deal.
She noted we killed the shapeshifter; she thanks us for that. She does want to know what we did with the Hunter, whose name she gave us (and which I have forgotten, but it was something that ended Half-Bear in Greek. Of which I know Arktos without having to think for reasons that will make
jenett laugh). (ETA: Kiastíōn Hēmiárktos.) She tries to tempt Izgil with knowledge when he comes in from his quick duck outside to cast a detect magic, which doesn't go useful places.Izgil, armed with Peer At The Magic skills, sees that she's got an illusion on, and auras of divination and necromancy that imply magic items stashed not on her person that give her access to particular powers. These auras are not enough to chase back to the items themselves, unfortunately.
(Thiara, in my brain, is like "I had a spell specifically for that purpose actually" about it, which is not terribly useful of her, given that I played her ~25 years and two editions of D&D ago, she lives in a wholly different universe designed by a different gamemaster, and she is also a god. Shoo shoo go invent another dragon and leave me alone.)
Somewhere in here Mara sensibly Departs The Scene, at which point she turns to Celyn and says "You owe me for that one, she had such delicious wants." Celyn points out that she had no hold over Mara and no right to claim her therefore, denying the claimed debt.
Viepuck, whose core desire is to be a better minion for Curious Cthulhu Looks At The Material Plane the Great Old One, is impressed with her ability to sense desires at range (and presumably tip off the ferryman sufficiently in advance) and dares her to conceptualize his wants by using his mind probe power to put her in touch with his patron. This produces a pause, and then the equivalent of "[blink blink] ANYWAY" from the Hag.
(I point out that she probably can't digest Robin's desires either as most of the ones he expresses boil down to "I wish people would be less terrible" and that is definitely not her department. There's alien and then there's antithetical.)
She tries, again, to argue that we should make a deal with her, singling out the barmaid and saying, "Violet, I helped you, right?"; the woman does a rictus smile and agrees that yes, yes, that was the case. Celyn finally hits "Look, we do not have the power to give you title to the town and even if we did we wouldn't," so she basically shrugs, goes Be Seeing You and heads out. We decline to try making this a physical brawl with all these innocent bystanders. She heads east, into town, unlike Mara, who headed north, to the outlying suburbs.
The other inn guests are basically at, "So, uhhh... is it safe to go now?" and skedaddle after Mara. We try to get some information about how she maintains her hold over the people, which was interrupted by the Hag's face appearing in a glass and suggesting that we leave the poor barkeep alone, he's suffered enough. Most of the party leaves, at which point her face jumps to Robin's very shiny plate armor and continues to taunt us; Viepuck, who is being his oppositional-defiant self about being asked to do things by fairies, proceeds to do a giant rant about how she's just a trickster who can only see one place at a time, neener neener, that makes the inn workers uncomfortable enough that they duck into the back about it.
Now, we were wondering if the magic locket we got off the dead shapeshifter (that does communication with a paired magic locket) connected to the Hag, because we know the two of them were, at least at points, working together (even if the Hag thanked us for killing her). We had decided against testing this at previous points given we had plenty of trouble and no particular need to borrow any more, but now it seemed worthwhile, so Viepuck disguised himself, opened it up, and said, "Hey how does this work" into the message spell. The face that appeared on the other side ... was the Baroness. "Who is this? Answer me or I will destroy you!" she thundered. There was a pause, and then the Baroness activated the locket from the other side to say, "This is baronial property you have stolen! You must return it to Veltor immediately!" to which Viepuck replied, "Is it really? NEAT!" and closed the connection.
We hike up to the border of the town. Off to the northeast there's a windmill; off to the southeast there's a woodcutter that's showing signs of activity, and then there's the town east of us which is sort of creepily quiet. Yes, the weather's dreadful and it's the draggy end of winter, but just ... nobody is out. We spend enough time dithering about what to do that the Hag's face pops up in a puddle to mock us for indecisiveness.
When she buggers off again we go poke our heads in on the woodcutter. No glass, shuttered windows, we have applied appropriate amounts of schmutz to Robin's armour so she can't pop up on that again probably (that was profoundly aggravating and Celyn is gently enraged by it in the privacy of his own brain), and we see there's a half-barrel upside down on the guy's table that's probably covering up any of his plates that have particularly good glazes.
The guy working on making charcoal in here is bare-armed and we can see he is covered in fairly recent scars, which Robin parses as being likely from some sort of monster. He flinches a bit at any direct mention of the Hag which means that after a moment Celyn says, "We've heard you've all been having some problems with an old dog," (which was probably one of the one times my brain actually worked after the headache attacked - everything changed when the headache nation attacked) at which point the man agrees, relieved, "Oh yeah, it bites and claws", while tapping a foot rhythmically. "That where you got those scars?" He agreed it was, and said the dog couldn't be killed, the wounds just healed, and that we should go. Also that it slept in a particular widow's house, I believe we got that information here. (Whether the widow still lives there or is deceased or what is unknown to us.)
We collect some information, have a side speculation about whether the Hag may also be a werewolf which seems implausible given what we know of werewolf and fairy lore, and eventually he says that we oughta go or she'll spot us. We get a rough sense of how much time it takes for her to locate strangers around here (five minutes or so) and start hiking up around the back way towards the windmill. I forget why we stopped along the way there but we got taunted by the Hag from a puddle again, I think.
In the windmill we talked with a man who managed to convey that he could only talk like a World of Darkness pooka by gesturing past us and saying, "Nice sunny day, isn't it?" (When he tried to say things straight-up he basically barked like a dog, and that happened even when Viepuck was reading his mind.) We collected some more information (including that the scrying turns up fastest near the town square, slower down at the inn near the river) there and get encouraged to ask around for more information by being told "Don't ask questions."
Es*tiaslos has taken a bit to scout the area and glance at the abandoned guard tower (an absolute ruin), but does not find this mysterious temple to no god. The woodcutter didn't know about it. This is sort of aggravating (I think part of our perpetual dithering was that that seemed Significant - someone had said at some point, I don't recall in what sequence, that the secret of Peydon was there - and we had no idea how to locate it. You know I wonder now....*), since we can't find it.
Anyway, we headed into town, aiming for the temple, as there is some commentary that the Mother does not like the Hag and something about the grove. THis route takes us through the town square, where the well in the center is recently bricked up; there is a new well off to the edge. We make a note of this and then head to the temple, where the administrator is not terribly helpful and the Hag's face shows up in the window very quickly. "I'm glad to hear you were just leaving" says the administrator; the shepherdess who was spinning in the corner leaves as soon as the apparition appears. Viepuck goes and makes faces at it.
The shepherdess gets Robin into a cluster of trees and says that this narrow space is one the Hag can't penetrate because it's where the Mother's miracle happened. She proceeds to give us some information; Viepuck, meanwhile, in the spirit of experimentation, goes off to find some glassware and plays Summoning Bloody Mary at it. The Hag finds this entertaining until the round where her "Oh, we're playing such a game, can I keep you as a mascot?" gets the answer, "I think that would lead to a dispute, did you want to talk to my master again?" The next bit of glassware Viepuck harasses does not get a response, but the one after that does, with her muttering that she shouldn't have let him get to her.
Viepuck is definitely coming to the conclusion that irritating fairies until they do something dramatic is effective after the horseradish incident, basically.
Upon hearing that the shepherdess's sheep refuse to go into the town square since they bricked up the well, Celyn goes and grabs Izgil. "Stand there," he says, indicating the space that is scry-protected. Izgil, baffled, agrees. "Now cast the detect magic where she can't see you do it and go look at the well again." "Oh, that's a good idea." Izgil does so.
In the town square there is definitely something magic. We have a bricked-up well, a skilled mason (Izgil), and a very strong man with a hammer (Robin); a solution is possible, and honestly being oblique is getting us nowhere so we might as well break something. Inside the well there is definitely an Item which can be retrieved; it is a magic mirror. And, Izgil can tell, the other half of the divination aura that he spotted on the Hag. We debate things to do with it - can we stash it in the blind spot in the Mother's grove, for example?
Viepuck tries tying it up and spinning it in the hope that it will make her dizzy; meanwhile she comes wandering up and suggests that if we return the mirror to her she will not kill us in the next five minutes. There is some back and forth and language chopping attempts and eventually she clearly is doing the "Or I could just beat your asses and take it" mode, at which point Viepuck summons an illusion of a Duskhound and says, "Or we could get the Hunter's Duskhound ot help!" which at least makes her pause briefly to swipe claws through the thing so she doesn't get advantage on initiative.
Celyn stabs her. Robin hits her with the hammer. Viepuck drops a faerie fire on her. Izgil dispels her illusion (and the faerie fire, and apologizes for the latter). She disappears, and reappears fully healed, and summons a shambling mound to attack Robin and Celyn. Her attempt to hex someone is counterspelled by Izgil.
Celyn and Robin work on clearing out the angry plant since stabbing her seems slightly less pointful. Es*tiaslos, bee-shaped, ducks into the folds of her cloak and lurks there, and Viepuck smacks her with some magic. Izgil makes contact with the temple adminstrator and gets directions to the widow's house where the Hag is lairing, and skedaddles that way, to her idle amusement.
She vanishes again. Es*tiaslos finds itself in a strange scale model of the town, some sort of dollhouse made of bone; the Hag walks from her current location next to the party into the manor, touches a poppet doll with a recognizable face (though of someone we don't know; we suspect it's the lord), and pops back healed, to suggest to us that we are being silly and should just return her damn mirror before she gets cross with us.
Here we ran out of time, and are thus in a complicated situation, in which Viepuck may cut the mirror loose from his nonsense and fly off with it, which will either lead to her chasing him or deciding that we are being difficult and trying to kill the melee combatants before chasing it down, or of course some third thing. Izgil has tried to locate the doll, I think, and failed.
What we need to do is go into the manor and talk to the lord, who has clearly given some sort of dominion over the town to the Hag as represented by this model, but of course the complexities of being spied on and other nonsense. Though of course we could do the pop in and talk and have boring idle conversation with the man while Viepuck asks him questions telepathically, in which case it wouldn't matter if she has the mirror or not...
(* The wonder now: is the necromantic dollhouse stashed in the Temple To No God.)
Okay. I think that's all the loose ends. We accomplished many things, actually, just with dreadful inefficiency.
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I did in fact laugh!
That seems to be a whole lot going on, with a wide range of questionable objects and even more questionable people.
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Sometimes one must make do with gloriously.