#Once Upon a Time | Tamara (npc)

[lievmultimuses1]

Neal Cassidy || OPEN

Neal quickly found a booth at the dinner for him and Tamara, he knew he would to go see his father soon, he wanted his fiancée and his father to get along just as much as he wanted Henry to like the woman he was going to marry, he smiled at the young woman that approached them to take they orders and Tamra quickly told the woman what she wanted before going back to her notebook, she wanted to learned more about the people in town and Neal was happy that the craziness of his past had not pushed her away.

[keptin-indy]

7th Sea: The New World 9

Last time, Lady Gwen was finally reunited with Timoun in the underworld, but started losing her mind the longer she was there.  The group successfully petitioned for Timoun to come back to the real world to take down an ATC smuggling ring supplying weapons used in the slave trade and Gwen revealed that she was half sidhe.  On their way to the smugglers’ base, Brandt attempted to call up a water sprite to speed their way but instead got Gwen’s mother, a powerful unseelie fae, who demanded that her daughter return home after her quest was completed.

Previous installments

The gun crews in the bay’s fort looked nervously on at the foreign ship towed by evil magic, and a heavily armed escort ship with soldiers and priests came out to meet the Dream, demanding to know who they were and what business they had there.  Tamara said they wanted to help against the ATC, but the other ship wanted to inspect them for “witches”.  Tamara asked how they defined witches, but one of the priests said they would only explain once on board and also they wanted to know what the horses were.  Brandt told him they were sidhe, but that meant nothing to the priest and he had to further explain that they were spirits native to Avalon, which made more sense to the priest, but didn’t do anything to assuage their fears of malicious witchcraft.  Tamara let the armed delegation aboard but explained that she and some of the others were sorcerers, the cook was a troll, etc, etc, but the priests seemed to be looking for a specific local kind of magic.  Mariandl hastily cleaned up her workshop to a degree that was suspicious to those who knew her, but the priests had no basis for comparison.  They were concerned by Timoun, as apparently the Ruhuri afterlife traditions on Jaragua had been suppressed by the colonial government for generations.  The priests didn’t seem to find what they were looking for and the soldiers obviously didn’t find evidence of ATC connections, but they were only allowed to dock once word came from the administration that the boat’s name was recognized from a letter of recommendation from one of their agents.  Once docked, they were directed to the Provisional Oligarchy through a city of mostly Montaigne architecture but very few other Thean people.  At the administrative offices, they blithely asked to talk to the head of their intelligence, which was predictly denied.  During this discussion, their former “guide” Khofi ran inside, having heard their ship was in port.  He warned them that the new country’s intelligence service wasn’t very big, but Brandt told him Timoun had information about illegal artifact trafficking by the ATC under their noses.  Gwen introduced Timoun to a shamefaced Khofi, the man who had originally been hired to find him but who had only been using Gwen to return to the Atabean incognito.  Khofi took it upon himself to get the group lodging and information for having treated his betrayal so magnanimously.  He told them that after the slaves had risen up against the ATC colonists, the Ruhuri on the northern half of the island had kicked out all the former Ifrian slaves and declared themselves a sovereign nation.  Now the conflict was less of a civil war and more a dispute about where the border was.  Khofi put them up in the former governor’s palace, now slightly ransacked and defaced.  The city around them seemed impoverished but triumphant, with general sharing of resources and pride that they finally controlled their own destinies; all in all, life looked better here than it did for Montaigne peasants in Theah.  The group was assigned minders who were supposed to secretly follow the Theans around town, which the group took to with varying amounts of grace (Misha got his drunk and made friends, Etienne slipped his and began counter-following, causing the poor man to later ask him for stealth tips).  Mariandl went to the local Vaticine cathedral and was shocked to find it filled it both Vaticine and local Lwa imagery.  A priest explained that the slaves were forbidden from practicing their own religions, so they had sort of mixed them up with the Church in order to hide their worship.  Really, he argued, they were all just different ways of looking at Theus, so he didn’t mind.  Mariandl was interested in this point of view, but not personally swayed by it.  An older priest agreed with her and had nothing but contempt for the people who had “ruined” his church with their idolatry.  Eventually the Theans were summoned by their minders to the office of the Jaraguan chief of intelligence, who turned out to be a pleasant-looking young man of mixed Ruhuri and Ifrian heritage named Kehinde, who was incongruously always surrounded by various local animals.  Kehinde apologized for Khofi’s deception and asked what information they had about ATC movements on the island.  Timoun explained what he knew and Kehinde suggested the House of Sorrows as a potential base for the ATC operations; an old prison complex atop a system of unmapped caves that seemed an ideal location for a defensible black market to be run out of.  Possibly related, there were an alarming number of ghouls in the mountains between Jaragua and Mariana. Ansgar offered to map the prison as they went, Brandt gave Kehinde some of the messenger frogs to re-introduce to the island, and Etienne non-specifically offered to open lines of communication to other intelligence networks that would be sympathetic to Jaragua’s cause.  Tamara asked about how their government was set up (largely run by three very overworked people, of which Kehinde was one) and Brandt wondered if some of the Castillian scholars he had rescued from the Inquisition might find a new home there.  Kehinde offered a small finders fee for any artifacts they recovered.  Khofi secretly paid Misha’s (already extensive) bar tab out of guilt.

The Thean party trekked up to Gallows Cliff, finding a compound surrounded by high walls on the sides that weren’t a sheer drop.  The two stories aboveground were largely burned down, but the basement levels proved to be a hideous maze of prison cells and torture chambers, all thankfully abandoned after the revolution.  Ansgar used his engineering knowledge to find hidden vaults that were likely used to store property stolen from the prisoners, but these too were empty.  Mariandl sorted through the papers in an administrative office and found cargo manifests for shipments from the prison to someone called “K” in the “Buried Laboratory”, dated right before the revolution began.  Eventually the basement hallways turned into unmodified natural caves, some with old-looking Ruhuri art and writing on the walls.  This proved to be a huge series of caverns, which Ansgar dutifully mapped as they went.  Several tunnels led to disused entrances to the surface, some with the names of ancestors carved into them, indicating that they used to or could be made into entrances to Soryana.  Timoun assured the Theans that they couldn’t accidentally wander into the underworld...except sometimes at sea.  The caves proved too large to map with their little expedition, possibly extending under the entire island, so the group returned to Kehinde and reported what little they had found.  Ansgar turned over copies of his maps and told him they hadn’t found anything dangerous down there, so it was probably safe to send others to explore the rest.  Kehinde offered them pack animals and some soldiers as an escort should they investigate the ghouls in the mountains.  He led them across the hall to General Taiyewo - incidentally his twin sister - who agreed to find some volunteers to accompany them if they went away and stopped wasting her time.

The expedition set out north for the mountains, with Mariandl directing them toward spots she thought would be good ghoul habitats (a skill which the group chalked up to her Eisen heritage).  Soon she found a cave entrance that smelled strongly of rotting flesh.  Ansgar agreed to go in first, with his heavy lantern lighting the way, and found that the small entrance was a cover for a much larger chamber with multiple blocked-off passages.  Disturbed ghouls came out to fight them, but the disorganized creatures were no match for a band of trained duelists.  With the monsters cleared, the group found a large, solid door that had been locked or barred from the inside.  Tamara knocked and heard movement from the other side, so Brandt disassembled the lock and what proved to be a poison needle trap with his clockwork tools.  Inside were forty more ghouls and four horrible monstrosities stitched into mockeries of angels.  Gwen changed into her battle-form, more terrifying than even the corpses, and charged forward, showing no fear.

Note: This was the last session in which Lady Gwen was being played by someone.  After this, she reverts back to being a true NPC controlled by the GM.  Subsequently, she gets mentioned a lot less often since she doesn’t have nearly as much personal agency.