Hic Sunt Dracones
From Gothic Earth Wiki
| Hic Sunt Dracones | |
|---|---|
| Chapter: | Surrey |
| Play Date: | November 21, 2011 |
| Story Date: | March 16, 1899 |
| Players in Attendance | |
| Aaron Shurtleff (Gao, Melchitt) Evan Coopes (Fang, Lyon Omen) Jeff Coopes (Caleb Lonergan) Kelly Lee (Elise LeBlanc) Scott Hardie (GM) | |
| Character Appearances | |
| Enoch, Exra, Fayt Leigngod, Moon-Face, Rose Malveau, Roy Harrington, Thomas Carnacki | |
| Character References | |
| Ambrosia Moreshead, Clementine Grose, Coraline Harrington, Douglas Quint, Flora Quint, Franklin Jackson, Gant Harrington, Grace Jessel, Herne the Hunter, Miles Quint, Prospero, Solomon Kane, Ursula Leigngod, Vinny Castille | |
| Order | |
| Overall Session #: | 81 |
| Previous Session: | Ambuscade |
| Next Session: | Oneirocritica |
The third game session in Chapter XVII: Surrey was played on November 21, 2011.
Contents |
Plot
Mirrors
Caleb Lonergan and Lyon Omen had barely settled in for the night in their room in The House of Bly when Lyon heard the distant, unmistakable sound of a baby giggling and cooing. Taking a candle into the hall, he searched around in the darkness. The creaking floorboards under his feet attracted the attention of the women in the next room, Elise LeBlanc and Gao, who joined his search with Caleb. Elise noticed that Lyon seemed to have changed clothes, and Gao soon pointed out the same thing. Lyon was confused, since he had not changed clothes: He was wearing the same shirt since Solomon Kane's attack that afternoon had damaged his shirt with flaming debris from the exploded carriage.[80] Now the same shirt seemed perfectly fine, as it had before the attack.
Gao went back to the landing between the first and second floors to make faces in a mirror hanging there, a mirror that had apparently piqued her curiosity earlier. She seemed scared of what she saw, and was unable to articulate it. Lyon looked in the mirror but saw nothing strange. When Caleb looked, he saw white hair at the margins of his hairline, just above his ears, and panicked that it would damage his stage image. (In the ensuing moments of anxiety, Gao learned the word "white" from hearing it repeatedly.)
Giving up on the mirror, Elise headed for bed, but found her door locked from the inside, with flickering candlelight underneath. She tried breaking the door open with increasing amounts of force by hitting it with rocks, failing even to scratch the door. The group's shouting over this activity attracted the attention of Thomas Carnacki, who had tried to fall asleep on a sofa downstairs but couldn't sleep through all the noise. He noticed a pattern of symbols carved into the door, all around one large symbol in the center: Three vertical lines (the center slightly shorter than the other two), connected by a horizontal line through the middle that extended from the left vertical line to the right vertical line, all enclosed in a circle. Nobody knew what the symbol meant. Elise looked under the crack in the door, saw someone walking around in ratty black shoes, and flicked a few pebbles at them, but got no reaction.
While the rest of the group headed downstairs, Gao stayed and arranged for Melchitt to slip into the room using one of the cat's other forms. When Melchitt returned, he reported that there was nobody in the room, but there were two copies of each of Gao's possessions, and the mirror was cracked.
The Kitchen
Downstairs in the kitchen, the group found a locked door that seemed to lead to the back of the house. They heard rattling from a pot on the stove (which was cold and not in use). When they lifted the lid, they found a live white rabbit, reminding them of the rabbit stew they had eaten for dinner. Lyon gave it to Fang to eat, and the lion went about tearing it to bits on the floor of the kitchen. Elise noticed that the wine bottle that they had finished off during dinner was back in the icebox and full of wine again. The food in the pantry seemed to be rotten, stale, and moldy. Heading a kitten mewing but unable to see it (Caleb eventually found it and picked it up despite it being invisible), Elise concentrated and sensed a spirit nearby, so she got the ghost talking. It requested something to drink, then got to talking about how his wife had gone missing years earlier, and his young son was useless, just sticking his nose in textbooks all the time instead of working. Elise deduced that this was the ghost of Roy Harrington, who had been missing from the gravesite when the group visited his grave that afternoon. She assured him that his wife was safe and his son grew up to be a respectable scientist, and he disappeared.
Hearing a sound like a balloon popping (Melchitt's transformation back into a cat), Caleb headed upstairs, but neither Gao nor Melchitt would talk. Caleb tried to pick the lock to the women's bedroom without success, and noticed that he now had liver spots on his wrinkled hands. Wondering if the mirror was connected, Gao returned to the landing between floors, and lifted it from the wall, feeling a crushing sensation in her chest as though something heavy was sitting on her, a symptom of a heart attack. Angry at the mirror's inscrutability, Lyon threw his enchanted sword at it, cracking it and sending chips of glass scattering, but Gao continued to see something disturbing in the reflection. Lyon tried lifting it off the wall and felt very faint, as if he was about to pass out, so he put it back on the wall but hung backwards, facing the wall.
Noticing flickering light under the doors across the hall from their rooms, the group remembered that these were the rooms of Flora Quint and Miles Quint, the twins who lived in the house. Entering Miles's room, the group realized that it was exactly the same as Caleb and Lyon's room except reversed, as if it was a mirror image. There were no toys or other signs of a child inhabiting it, but two twin beds as if it was a generic guest room. Gao noticed that she was dressed differently in the mirror, wearing black and smiling mischievously, and her eyes seemed to be entirely black.
When the group tried to interrogate the invisible kitten that Caleb had carried upstairs, Elise shook it trying to get answers, and felt it die in her hands from a broken neck; she felt awful. When Fang couldn't be summoned, the group realized that the kitten WAS Fang, restored to youth just as Caleb, whose teeth were starting to fall out, was becoming very old. Caleb noticed a pimple on Lyon's smooth face; the hunter looked like a teenager.
America
Meanwhile, Gao had slipped unnoticed from the room and entered Flora's room next door. Expecting a bedroom, she instead found herself in the studio apartment of an old acquaintance: Fayt Leigngod, who sat at a small table eating a bowl of cereal, dressed in loose pants and an undershirt as if he had just woken up. Unable to see anything outside the windows due to the nighttime darkness, Gao talked to Fayt, who was glad to see her but confused as to how she arrived in his apartment in Chicago by accident. He said that he had followed his mother here to gain the help of The Four Horsemen, but had been unable to find her so far and was getting worried. The group followed Gao into the apartment and chatted with Fayt; Elise introduced everyone and explained how they knew each other. Upon learning that he was a fellow darkling, Lyon chatted with him about their common ancestry. Caleb asked him to cure the deceased Fang, and said, "you're a 'lion god' and you can't even cure one lion?" Unable to make sense of how the House of Bly connected to Fayt's apartment in Chicago, and unwilling to join his quest while already preoccupied with one of their own, they excused him and wished him luck.
Growing weary of the House of Bly's mysteries, the group decided to head back to The Manor for rest. When Elise created a door and they entered, they found it empty: No people, no furniture, no items, no food. Following the door to New York, they found Gao's belongings in the alley behind Franklin Jackson's grocery store as if she still lived there. The group walked around the dark city in the middle of the night for twenty minutes, but failed to see a single person or find one light on. Over Gao's protests, they broke into Jackson's store and took a newspaper. Inside was Elise's report from January 1, detailing the group's adventures in Baltimore, with Vinny Castille's photograph of a hand emerging from a bloody bathtub.[1] Caleb noticed that while the newspaper suggested that it was January 1, the weather outside was warm and there was no sign of ice or snow. They tried turning on the lights in the store and failed, a sign that they were experiencing a dream. Gao couldn't resist taking food, and Elise grabbed some cigarettes to calm her tremoring hands. Elise considered leaving a few dollars on the counter to pay for it, but decided not to bother if this really was a dream.
Mrs. Grose's Identity
Returning through the Manor to the House of Bly, the group decided to wake up some of the residents for answers. Since Flora and Miles were missing, they headed to Grace Jessel's room at the end of the hall. After Elise smashed open the locked door with a large rock, they found a woman's bedroom inside, but no Grace. Elise plopped down on the nice four-poster bed determined to fall asleep and end the dream, but the group made too much noise around her and she gave up. Lyon's voice squeaked when he talked and he looked now to be about ten years old, causing alarm as to how much younger he could get, while Caleb was now hunched over and hobbling to get around in his advanced age.
Gao heard a sucking sound at Grace's mirror that no one else could hear, and became curious. She went to the last remaining door in the hallway, and almost stopped when she smelled Mrs. Grose's perfume on the other side, but entered anyway. It was the room of an elderly lady, but Grose was nowhere in sight. Searching through the roll-top desk, Elise found numerous letters and journals, and a silver ring with a 13-point star symbol that she and Gao recognized. They eventually remembered it as the insignia of The Fellowship of the Crimson Dawn, an occult hobbyist group that had used black magic to engineer Fayt Leigngod's birth and who liked to create their own magical spells; Elise had once stolen their magic to create The Manor.[36] Hidden in the slats under the mattresses, Gao found a private journal that Caleb broke open by smashing it against the desk when he couldn't pick the clasp. Inside the journal, the group found an incomplete record of their adventures, but the parts that were filled in were quite detailed. Flipping to the last page, they saw the words appearing on the page as they read, in a paragraph that started with the phrase, "Gao heard a sucking sound at Grace's mirror that no one else could hear, and became curious." Turning to the inside cover of the book, they found the words PROPERTY OF CLEMENTINE GROSE, and made the connection: The elderly house servant was in fact their old nemesis Clementine, one of the Crimson Dawn who had survived when Elise, Gao, Fayt, and the rest of the group killed most of her fellows in battle.[36] Gao unbolted the mirror from Grace's makeup table and brought it to the mirror in Mrs. Grose's room, but couldn't get anything to happen when they faced each other.
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