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Dramatis Personae:
Viepuck, the eldritch tween (with his familiar the flying purple octopus Es*tiaslos)
Izgil, the respectable older gent who brings moon to the moonless
Celyn, whose sense of etiquette was more useful than his stabbing honestly
Robin, who is unspeakably exhausted about fairy bullshit
(and getting his own line)
Greymalkin, wingless gryphon with PTSD and an entirely reasonable resulti9ng attitude
When we left off we had just been asked to go close a portal to the Feywild in a way that meant it would not reopen.
Robin is of course very tired of this plan already, though acknowledging that we really ought to deal with the damn problem and nobody else is well-situated. (Especially since the Mightiest Adventuring Party in the region has gone off to quest for the means to resurrect their missing member and thus we are probably the Mightiest Adventuring Party in the region.)
We gather our resources. Celyn picks up a couple of things in town with repute at disrupting fey magic in case that will be helpful on our quest to destroy the portal. Viepuck picks up an axe, a maul, a bunch of rope, and a barrel of tar, which it turns out he can carry easily because his random spell of the day is Tenser's Floating Disc. We hike out to the portal, and Celyn prays to his god for concealment, wrapping everyone near him in stealth and concealing our tracks. Izgil tries praying to Ethlenn (fey queen of Tyrwingha) on the off chance that she might be interested in helping if notified; nothing seems to happen.
We go through the portal.
We come out in an unpleasantly soggy, overcast winter afternoon, the sort of just-above-freezing, still miserable foggy mess that is actively miserable to be in. We also come out facing a twelve foot tall wall of thorns that is slightly active and moving but, Viepuck confirms, not actually possessed of a mind. We also see tendrils of magical energy connecting the center of the maze to a distant conical peak, suggesting that the ritual to empower the portal to stay stably open is currently active despite the lack of human sacrifices.
After some cautious experimentation we determine that the view Es*tiaslos has from above is at least currently accurate (though the thornbushes are growing across passages in places and opening up in others), though the core of the thorn maze is roofed over with more thorns. Viepuck telepathically links up with Izgil, who has cartography skills and an excellent memory (I forget if he has an eidetic memory feat but it's the sort of thing he might well have) to get a draft of a map to work with, which we live-update all the way through. Izgil determines there are two plausible routes into the core, one short, and one long, and takes us the long way around under the principle that we are located in the Feywild and thus the direct route is probably a trap.
So we navigate around until we reach the place the roof happens, and are confronted with the passage as an arch with a number of thorny vines draped over it, swaying gently. We do not wish to have a conversation with these vines. Viepuck tries throwing a rope at them to try to entangle them, and a bunch react but only one grabs it, and it eventually drops it.
Izgil tries hitting one with a cantrip in the hope that necrotic damage will wilt the plants but it turns out that the plants are half rotten and it only makes them angry; two vines grab him and try to fling him actively into the thorn wall, which he narrowly avoids doing. It turns out that physical damage doesn't do much but radiant does, and when each one dies it emits a flood of poisonous rotten ichor. We fight the vines off (Izgil gets grabbed again, Robin gets grabbed, everyone is freed) and resolve to deal with any further vines with Celyn and Izgil throwing radiant cantrips at them from out of grabbing range because who wants to deal with this nonsense? Not us.
Outside of the maze, a dog is a man's best friend. Inside the maze, it is too dark to read. Celyn casts one of his light spells; Viepuck casts a light spell and puts it on a crossbow bolt; Robin activates his lantern. It turns out that the lantern was really helpful because it disagrees with Izgil about several turns (by glowing at other directions vigorously) and is correct about it. We make it to the center without incident worth noting; a number of grabby vines are fried along the way of course, which agitates the ceiling, but.
Our scene: we have come from one side of a T intersection. There is a narrow neck before an antechamber of sorts, then three arches, side-by-side, leading to a larger chamber that contains a massive— fifteen feet across maybe— knot of furious thorns, which is being suffused with the light from the tendrils of ritual magic.
Celyn moves into the antechamber to see about getting a clear look at the thorn knot. Robin also steps up, Greymalkin close behind him, and Izgil gets out of the neck. Viepuck, from back at the T intersection, fires his glowing crossbow bolt to skid into the other room and make it easier to see.
At which point the roof falls on Viepuck; Greymalkin and Izgil manage to get out of the way of it. He cannot see out, though he can move a bit; he tries to blast a hole through the wall so he can at least see the antechamber to misty-step out, but the vines grow back too fast. Celyn and Izgil blast from their side, Viepuck blasts from the inside, and that gets enough of a peephole that he can escape, leaving, tragically, the barrel of flammable tar behind.
We can, however, see a bit more of the chamber now, including an arch on the far side with a veritable swarm of grabbyvines. The giant knot of thorns appears to be growing. Viepuck, filled with eldritch knowledge seeking, goes to study the knot by telling it it's a bad knot and that's not how you make a dimensional gateway, this is a dimensional gateway [opens rift to the Far Realms, releasing shadowy tentacles that start attacking the knot]. His attempt to derive information from this would fail, except that Celyn summons divine intervention to make him pass the check.
Izgil summons moonlight in such intensity that it makes a very large circle, pretty much instantly toasting the several scores of grabbyvines in the other passage, and burns at the thorn knot steadily. This also removes the eldritch darkness from around the Lovecraftian tentacle summoning, so we can see what's going on there; we are going to choose to not worry about that.
The net effect of the combination of the blaze of light and the swarm of tentacles is that the thorn knot will burn away and be destroyed, and since that is the source of the portal, it will seal the spot. The problem with this, of course, is that we cannot get out again easily. (Celyn is holding to a cryptic prophetic message he had received a year and a half ago realtime as directions for how to solve this.) Since the knot is both a noncombatant and immobile, this is basically a traditional Combat With The Gazebo.
The Gazebo shrugs off physical damage pretty solidly, unfortunately. But the spells are making steady progress on it.
We hear a rustling in the thorn hedge. This is clearly something coming to protect the gazebo. It lurches out of the thorn wall to make a grab at Izgil, which it has correctly identified as the primary source of damage and someone whose concentration could be disrupted, thus stopping the damage if successful.
Various forms of beating on the thorn monster proceed, because it's more effective to beat on that before it takes down Izgil than for us to continue trying to stab/hammer the thorn knot, which is slowly shrinking under the onslaught of spell damage and some other incidental effects (I think Celyn zapped it once, Robin hammered it once, and every so often Viepuck blasted it). The monster is maneuvered back into the room with the knot, and Viepuck tries to command it across the damage zone but instead it goes through the walls because it's more efficient for it to move that way. After a bit of this, with Izgil wrapping himself in a protection spell for less pummeling (which deflects its attacks to Robin, who it misses), the thorn knot has dwindled down to a tiny lump where the internal glow is actually larger than the thorns.
Viepuck theorizes that the most sensible thing for him to do at this juncture is blow up the lump, so he blasts it, destroying the last of it.
Everything goes uncannily still. The thorn monster topples over. The slowly stirring thorn hedges stop moving. A giant subsonic (elephant hearing) gong sound rattles our bones, and we can see a ripple flowing back along those magical tendrils that are extending from the distant mountain. With a little luck that will stun the ritualists and/or give them an impeding sort of headache.
We take a moment to finish off the monster, and then Izgil flings a 'start bonfire' spell back into the vicinity of the tar barrel, to add more chaos and also fire to the evil thorn maze problem. Then we leave via the back door, which is absolutely fucking packed with grabbyvines that are currently unconscious; this would have been the short route which was, as Izgil believed, a trap. Or at least a Problem. After extracting ourselves from the remaining thorn maze, Celyn once again shields our tracks, and we proceed to Book It towards the east.
Booking it is weirdly effective, we have somehow wound up on the cosmic airport terminal conveyor belt. Concerned that this is an illusion of some sort, Viepuck asks Greymalkin if it's supposed to be doing that, to which Greymalkin replies, more or less, "Don't question it or it might stop!" (Celyn says, "Ethlenn's blessing" and does not bother thinking about it further.)
We cease questioning it. Celyn conceals our track again when we get to the end of that hour, and then is out of second list spells, but two hours of accelerated travel with no tracks should substantially thwart pursuit. We hope. Our plan, at this point, is to make out of the Gloomshaper's directly claimed territory and into his penumbra before resting. We thread our way through the hills, occasionally having a weirdberry from Viepuck to restore ourselves, and eventually emerge into an environment that both feels less aggressively gloomy and has a nice little pine forest in it.
We decide to go to the pine forest and make camp under that cover.
When we reach the forest, a pleasant little path opens up, which is of course Immediately Suspicious. We do, however, follow the pleasant little path towards a pleasant little cottage, under the observation of a raven with one (bright blue) human eye.
The cottage belongs to an Archetypical Little Old Lady, who is something of a stickler for etiquette, though she asks Greymalkin if he could stay outside because it would perhaps be a bit full in her cottage to accommodate him. After some negotiation, he agrees, and he and Viepuck go around to the back to see what the offered space is like.
At which point the party inside is being coaxed to sit down, and the party outside discovers what appears to be a humanoid with a goat head who is crawling around eating grass and hay. (I am not sure whether it was just that this is creepy and alarming in a Circe way that has Greymalkin exclaiming "This place is evil, we should go" or if he got something else.) Regardless, Greymalkin's agitation keeps Robin— who is, of course, still tired of fey and their goddamn tricks— from being willing to sit. This is making the little old lady increasingly eyes-narrowed displeased with the local standards of civility, though Celyn has produced a guest-gift for her that is culturally appropriate.
Celyn's read on her— with a 20 plus proficiency insight roll— is that she is reasonably benign but You Must Follow The Rules Of Civilized Society, and so he eventually sits, and gently encourages Robin to join him. (Izgil has sat already.) Teacups appear.
Meanwhile, Viepuck is mindreading the goatboything and has gotten information that he had previously been the servant of one Izar the Red, a rather terrifying being who, in one of the memories Viepuck reviewed, was being entirely smug about being handed a unicorn horn as a trophy. He determines that the boy escaped from his service to the scary dude, came here, and tried to steal food, and goes more or less, "... you know, after stealing food from a Hospitality Fairy getting turned into a goat is pretty gentle."
Greymalkin, meanwhile, has gone around to knock on the door and proclaim, "Either they leave and your house is unharmed or they leave and your house is wrecked, you choose!" at which point the little old lady tells him he's terribly rude and should go out into the cold and closes the door on him. Greymalkin informs Viepuck that everyone else is having tea and is profoundly aggrieved about it. Viepuck goes in and joins the party for tea, which probably does not help.
Various things happen. Viepuck drops a teacup, and gets glared at, but Izgil mends it, and is deemed quite polite and an example to us all. The tea is exquisitely terrible, though Viepuck does not notice (he is of course used to weirdberries) and in fact winds up giving a weirdberry to the little old lady and getting into a detailed discussion of the flavor ("red, tears, notes of hay" with the tears being eventually clarified to "embarrassed joy" and the entity having the experience as possibly a horse); she adds the half-berry to her pot over the massive hearth. Celyn spends some time thinking of a Something Nice To Say and eventually compliments the piney undertone of the truly terrible tea, because he does in fact have a trained palate, just not for tea.
She asks if we have come from Amberglow; this is based on her spotting Robin's lantern, which was made there. We allow as how we are not but we respect the Cloudspinner, absent ruler of that realm. Robin spins the tale of how he got it, which as it is situated in the mortal realm she finds entertaining but somewhat dull, and threads in Greymalkin's story of the last stand of the splinter realm off Amberglow that he came from and how Greymalkin was crippled there, which she is much more interested in, in an "Oh, I remember that now..." kind of way.
Celyn points out that one might understand why Greymalkin is the way he is given his trauma, and she says, "Yes, it is very difficult to be missing a part of yourself." Celyn agrees to this sentiment with great and personal vehement agreement.
Basically we manage to repair her sense of our etiquette over time. She eventually goes to get the pot and comes out with some porridge streaked with alarming red, looks and it, and says, "... I think that needs more time. It may not be safe yet," and goes back.
Viepuck reveals he got some information from the goatboy and asks about her opinions about his former master. She suggests that we might go talk to the goatboy further about his former master's habit of collecting trophies taken from defeated fey while she fixes the stew.
We take our hint and go into the back, where Celyn casts Speak With Animals, spends a few minutes introducing himself and being polite both out of respect for the local space and because ambushing someone with a complicated question at the outset is not likely to produce good results. Then he signals Viepuck to use his brain-stimulation trick and asks if the guy in question happened to have wings in his storeroom.
The goatboy demands to know if we will help his brother, still in service in the evil keep. Celyn agrees.
Then he answers: the guy does, in fact, have wings that might have been Greymalkin's in a pride of place in his trophy room.
Robin comments that Greymalkin is now aware of this over their telepathic bond and is also extremely loud.
As we are sorting this out, a gong sounds and we hear, "Dinner is ready!" and troop back in to discover a thin gruel with alarmingly bright pink lumps that look a bit like tofu cubes, which have trailing tendrils that are actually reasonably pleasant if you like candied pinecones? Celyn comments on her fondness for evergreen flavors, and she gestures at the pine forest that she lives in and says, "I'm a big believer in local food." Anyway, we eat the stew with rigorous politeness even as the 'tofu' tastes extremely of weird menthol aside from the tendril bits and the broth tastes extremely of nothing. There are bready cakes on the table which we are told are ours for later.
We discuss this Ivar the Red with her, and she notes that he is really ruining the character of the neighborhood and she would not object if someone were to happen to him.
In the morning, we get directions to the guy's place and also Viepuck trades a hundred weirdberries (she does like the variety of flavors) for the goatboy, who is now top half goat bottom half boy, not just goatheaded. She makes clear she has neither the power nor inclination to reverse the curse but the goatboy is not actually terribly useful and if we can extract information about how to get into the keep from him that's probably worth more to us than anything she'd get out of him.
We travel halfway there and then pause for lunch and see what we can do for the goatboy. Since nobody has third list spells the answer is 'probably just hacks for now'.
And there we pause. Our cakes will do good things for us but we have to eat them with appropriate timing and this may be too early. And we will see what information we can get next session rather than worry about forgetting it.
Viepuck, the eldritch tween (with his familiar the flying purple octopus Es*tiaslos)
Izgil, the respectable older gent who brings moon to the moonless
Celyn, whose sense of etiquette was more useful than his stabbing honestly
Robin, who is unspeakably exhausted about fairy bullshit
(and getting his own line)
Greymalkin, wingless gryphon with PTSD and an entirely reasonable resulti9ng attitude
When we left off we had just been asked to go close a portal to the Feywild in a way that meant it would not reopen.
Robin is of course very tired of this plan already, though acknowledging that we really ought to deal with the damn problem and nobody else is well-situated. (Especially since the Mightiest Adventuring Party in the region has gone off to quest for the means to resurrect their missing member and thus we are probably the Mightiest Adventuring Party in the region.)
We gather our resources. Celyn picks up a couple of things in town with repute at disrupting fey magic in case that will be helpful on our quest to destroy the portal. Viepuck picks up an axe, a maul, a bunch of rope, and a barrel of tar, which it turns out he can carry easily because his random spell of the day is Tenser's Floating Disc. We hike out to the portal, and Celyn prays to his god for concealment, wrapping everyone near him in stealth and concealing our tracks. Izgil tries praying to Ethlenn (fey queen of Tyrwingha) on the off chance that she might be interested in helping if notified; nothing seems to happen.
We go through the portal.
We come out in an unpleasantly soggy, overcast winter afternoon, the sort of just-above-freezing, still miserable foggy mess that is actively miserable to be in. We also come out facing a twelve foot tall wall of thorns that is slightly active and moving but, Viepuck confirms, not actually possessed of a mind. We also see tendrils of magical energy connecting the center of the maze to a distant conical peak, suggesting that the ritual to empower the portal to stay stably open is currently active despite the lack of human sacrifices.
After some cautious experimentation we determine that the view Es*tiaslos has from above is at least currently accurate (though the thornbushes are growing across passages in places and opening up in others), though the core of the thorn maze is roofed over with more thorns. Viepuck telepathically links up with Izgil, who has cartography skills and an excellent memory (I forget if he has an eidetic memory feat but it's the sort of thing he might well have) to get a draft of a map to work with, which we live-update all the way through. Izgil determines there are two plausible routes into the core, one short, and one long, and takes us the long way around under the principle that we are located in the Feywild and thus the direct route is probably a trap.
So we navigate around until we reach the place the roof happens, and are confronted with the passage as an arch with a number of thorny vines draped over it, swaying gently. We do not wish to have a conversation with these vines. Viepuck tries throwing a rope at them to try to entangle them, and a bunch react but only one grabs it, and it eventually drops it.
Izgil tries hitting one with a cantrip in the hope that necrotic damage will wilt the plants but it turns out that the plants are half rotten and it only makes them angry; two vines grab him and try to fling him actively into the thorn wall, which he narrowly avoids doing. It turns out that physical damage doesn't do much but radiant does, and when each one dies it emits a flood of poisonous rotten ichor. We fight the vines off (Izgil gets grabbed again, Robin gets grabbed, everyone is freed) and resolve to deal with any further vines with Celyn and Izgil throwing radiant cantrips at them from out of grabbing range because who wants to deal with this nonsense? Not us.
Outside of the maze, a dog is a man's best friend. Inside the maze, it is too dark to read. Celyn casts one of his light spells; Viepuck casts a light spell and puts it on a crossbow bolt; Robin activates his lantern. It turns out that the lantern was really helpful because it disagrees with Izgil about several turns (by glowing at other directions vigorously) and is correct about it. We make it to the center without incident worth noting; a number of grabby vines are fried along the way of course, which agitates the ceiling, but.
Our scene: we have come from one side of a T intersection. There is a narrow neck before an antechamber of sorts, then three arches, side-by-side, leading to a larger chamber that contains a massive— fifteen feet across maybe— knot of furious thorns, which is being suffused with the light from the tendrils of ritual magic.
Celyn moves into the antechamber to see about getting a clear look at the thorn knot. Robin also steps up, Greymalkin close behind him, and Izgil gets out of the neck. Viepuck, from back at the T intersection, fires his glowing crossbow bolt to skid into the other room and make it easier to see.
At which point the roof falls on Viepuck; Greymalkin and Izgil manage to get out of the way of it. He cannot see out, though he can move a bit; he tries to blast a hole through the wall so he can at least see the antechamber to misty-step out, but the vines grow back too fast. Celyn and Izgil blast from their side, Viepuck blasts from the inside, and that gets enough of a peephole that he can escape, leaving, tragically, the barrel of flammable tar behind.
We can, however, see a bit more of the chamber now, including an arch on the far side with a veritable swarm of grabbyvines. The giant knot of thorns appears to be growing. Viepuck, filled with eldritch knowledge seeking, goes to study the knot by telling it it's a bad knot and that's not how you make a dimensional gateway, this is a dimensional gateway [opens rift to the Far Realms, releasing shadowy tentacles that start attacking the knot]. His attempt to derive information from this would fail, except that Celyn summons divine intervention to make him pass the check.
Izgil summons moonlight in such intensity that it makes a very large circle, pretty much instantly toasting the several scores of grabbyvines in the other passage, and burns at the thorn knot steadily. This also removes the eldritch darkness from around the Lovecraftian tentacle summoning, so we can see what's going on there; we are going to choose to not worry about that.
The net effect of the combination of the blaze of light and the swarm of tentacles is that the thorn knot will burn away and be destroyed, and since that is the source of the portal, it will seal the spot. The problem with this, of course, is that we cannot get out again easily. (Celyn is holding to a cryptic prophetic message he had received a year and a half ago realtime as directions for how to solve this.) Since the knot is both a noncombatant and immobile, this is basically a traditional Combat With The Gazebo.
The Gazebo shrugs off physical damage pretty solidly, unfortunately. But the spells are making steady progress on it.
We hear a rustling in the thorn hedge. This is clearly something coming to protect the gazebo. It lurches out of the thorn wall to make a grab at Izgil, which it has correctly identified as the primary source of damage and someone whose concentration could be disrupted, thus stopping the damage if successful.
Various forms of beating on the thorn monster proceed, because it's more effective to beat on that before it takes down Izgil than for us to continue trying to stab/hammer the thorn knot, which is slowly shrinking under the onslaught of spell damage and some other incidental effects (I think Celyn zapped it once, Robin hammered it once, and every so often Viepuck blasted it). The monster is maneuvered back into the room with the knot, and Viepuck tries to command it across the damage zone but instead it goes through the walls because it's more efficient for it to move that way. After a bit of this, with Izgil wrapping himself in a protection spell for less pummeling (which deflects its attacks to Robin, who it misses), the thorn knot has dwindled down to a tiny lump where the internal glow is actually larger than the thorns.
Viepuck theorizes that the most sensible thing for him to do at this juncture is blow up the lump, so he blasts it, destroying the last of it.
Everything goes uncannily still. The thorn monster topples over. The slowly stirring thorn hedges stop moving. A giant subsonic (elephant hearing) gong sound rattles our bones, and we can see a ripple flowing back along those magical tendrils that are extending from the distant mountain. With a little luck that will stun the ritualists and/or give them an impeding sort of headache.
We take a moment to finish off the monster, and then Izgil flings a 'start bonfire' spell back into the vicinity of the tar barrel, to add more chaos and also fire to the evil thorn maze problem. Then we leave via the back door, which is absolutely fucking packed with grabbyvines that are currently unconscious; this would have been the short route which was, as Izgil believed, a trap. Or at least a Problem. After extracting ourselves from the remaining thorn maze, Celyn once again shields our tracks, and we proceed to Book It towards the east.
Booking it is weirdly effective, we have somehow wound up on the cosmic airport terminal conveyor belt. Concerned that this is an illusion of some sort, Viepuck asks Greymalkin if it's supposed to be doing that, to which Greymalkin replies, more or less, "Don't question it or it might stop!" (Celyn says, "Ethlenn's blessing" and does not bother thinking about it further.)
We cease questioning it. Celyn conceals our track again when we get to the end of that hour, and then is out of second list spells, but two hours of accelerated travel with no tracks should substantially thwart pursuit. We hope. Our plan, at this point, is to make out of the Gloomshaper's directly claimed territory and into his penumbra before resting. We thread our way through the hills, occasionally having a weirdberry from Viepuck to restore ourselves, and eventually emerge into an environment that both feels less aggressively gloomy and has a nice little pine forest in it.
We decide to go to the pine forest and make camp under that cover.
When we reach the forest, a pleasant little path opens up, which is of course Immediately Suspicious. We do, however, follow the pleasant little path towards a pleasant little cottage, under the observation of a raven with one (bright blue) human eye.
The cottage belongs to an Archetypical Little Old Lady, who is something of a stickler for etiquette, though she asks Greymalkin if he could stay outside because it would perhaps be a bit full in her cottage to accommodate him. After some negotiation, he agrees, and he and Viepuck go around to the back to see what the offered space is like.
At which point the party inside is being coaxed to sit down, and the party outside discovers what appears to be a humanoid with a goat head who is crawling around eating grass and hay. (I am not sure whether it was just that this is creepy and alarming in a Circe way that has Greymalkin exclaiming "This place is evil, we should go" or if he got something else.) Regardless, Greymalkin's agitation keeps Robin— who is, of course, still tired of fey and their goddamn tricks— from being willing to sit. This is making the little old lady increasingly eyes-narrowed displeased with the local standards of civility, though Celyn has produced a guest-gift for her that is culturally appropriate.
Celyn's read on her— with a 20 plus proficiency insight roll— is that she is reasonably benign but You Must Follow The Rules Of Civilized Society, and so he eventually sits, and gently encourages Robin to join him. (Izgil has sat already.) Teacups appear.
Meanwhile, Viepuck is mindreading the goatboything and has gotten information that he had previously been the servant of one Izar the Red, a rather terrifying being who, in one of the memories Viepuck reviewed, was being entirely smug about being handed a unicorn horn as a trophy. He determines that the boy escaped from his service to the scary dude, came here, and tried to steal food, and goes more or less, "... you know, after stealing food from a Hospitality Fairy getting turned into a goat is pretty gentle."
Greymalkin, meanwhile, has gone around to knock on the door and proclaim, "Either they leave and your house is unharmed or they leave and your house is wrecked, you choose!" at which point the little old lady tells him he's terribly rude and should go out into the cold and closes the door on him. Greymalkin informs Viepuck that everyone else is having tea and is profoundly aggrieved about it. Viepuck goes in and joins the party for tea, which probably does not help.
Various things happen. Viepuck drops a teacup, and gets glared at, but Izgil mends it, and is deemed quite polite and an example to us all. The tea is exquisitely terrible, though Viepuck does not notice (he is of course used to weirdberries) and in fact winds up giving a weirdberry to the little old lady and getting into a detailed discussion of the flavor ("red, tears, notes of hay" with the tears being eventually clarified to "embarrassed joy" and the entity having the experience as possibly a horse); she adds the half-berry to her pot over the massive hearth. Celyn spends some time thinking of a Something Nice To Say and eventually compliments the piney undertone of the truly terrible tea, because he does in fact have a trained palate, just not for tea.
She asks if we have come from Amberglow; this is based on her spotting Robin's lantern, which was made there. We allow as how we are not but we respect the Cloudspinner, absent ruler of that realm. Robin spins the tale of how he got it, which as it is situated in the mortal realm she finds entertaining but somewhat dull, and threads in Greymalkin's story of the last stand of the splinter realm off Amberglow that he came from and how Greymalkin was crippled there, which she is much more interested in, in an "Oh, I remember that now..." kind of way.
Celyn points out that one might understand why Greymalkin is the way he is given his trauma, and she says, "Yes, it is very difficult to be missing a part of yourself." Celyn agrees to this sentiment with great and personal vehement agreement.
Basically we manage to repair her sense of our etiquette over time. She eventually goes to get the pot and comes out with some porridge streaked with alarming red, looks and it, and says, "... I think that needs more time. It may not be safe yet," and goes back.
Viepuck reveals he got some information from the goatboy and asks about her opinions about his former master. She suggests that we might go talk to the goatboy further about his former master's habit of collecting trophies taken from defeated fey while she fixes the stew.
We take our hint and go into the back, where Celyn casts Speak With Animals, spends a few minutes introducing himself and being polite both out of respect for the local space and because ambushing someone with a complicated question at the outset is not likely to produce good results. Then he signals Viepuck to use his brain-stimulation trick and asks if the guy in question happened to have wings in his storeroom.
The goatboy demands to know if we will help his brother, still in service in the evil keep. Celyn agrees.
Then he answers: the guy does, in fact, have wings that might have been Greymalkin's in a pride of place in his trophy room.
Robin comments that Greymalkin is now aware of this over their telepathic bond and is also extremely loud.
As we are sorting this out, a gong sounds and we hear, "Dinner is ready!" and troop back in to discover a thin gruel with alarmingly bright pink lumps that look a bit like tofu cubes, which have trailing tendrils that are actually reasonably pleasant if you like candied pinecones? Celyn comments on her fondness for evergreen flavors, and she gestures at the pine forest that she lives in and says, "I'm a big believer in local food." Anyway, we eat the stew with rigorous politeness even as the 'tofu' tastes extremely of weird menthol aside from the tendril bits and the broth tastes extremely of nothing. There are bready cakes on the table which we are told are ours for later.
We discuss this Ivar the Red with her, and she notes that he is really ruining the character of the neighborhood and she would not object if someone were to happen to him.
In the morning, we get directions to the guy's place and also Viepuck trades a hundred weirdberries (she does like the variety of flavors) for the goatboy, who is now top half goat bottom half boy, not just goatheaded. She makes clear she has neither the power nor inclination to reverse the curse but the goatboy is not actually terribly useful and if we can extract information about how to get into the keep from him that's probably worth more to us than anything she'd get out of him.
We travel halfway there and then pause for lunch and see what we can do for the goatboy. Since nobody has third list spells the answer is 'probably just hacks for now'.
And there we pause. Our cakes will do good things for us but we have to eat them with appropriate timing and this may be too early. And we will see what information we can get next session rather than worry about forgetting it.
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