#even if im right i doubt it'd come up this upcoming session

[isaacathom]

have spent the last few days faintly fixated on my dnd oc which means i inevitably end up thinking about the events of last session (the whole 'vandervest fucking died of a bloodline curse' thing) and, in combination with my sister, we had some little epiphanies about that.

so hes got a ring, right. a ring of mind shielding. prevents people reading his mind, prevents them showing him visions. also means that when he dies his soul gets sucked into the ring.

so that already happened. his soul is in that ring. we did not take the ring off him when he died, so when his body was ferried away along with his secretary, he still had it.

the place he asked to be ferried to is a faction allied to us, called the White Lanterns, whose most noteworthy trait here is a massive undead army under the city.

because vandervest died of 'natural causes' (such that a bloodline curse can be considered natural), he can't be revived by normal means, like Revivify or Resurrection or such. it counts as "old age".

so. we've got a guy in a ring, who cannot be revived by the usual means, whose body is in possession of a group of notoriously proficient necromancers.

the assumption im making here is that this was the point, and that rather than asking to be ferried their for a Nice Funeral (as though being buried at sea by the crew of the Pendagast wouldn't be a nice funeral, smh), he intends to be revived as an undead.

IF this is true, and this is where my oc Naielle comes back into the picture, then we have a problem. which is that when he died, naielle slipped a letter into the inside of his jacket. Said letter, written with the assumption that it would be delivered after Naielle's death, is both quite sweet and also extremely fucking foolish, because in it she directly confesses to disobeying his orders. like. directly.

she's slightly squirrely in how she describes the event - its "a matter of violating an informal agreement with an ally" and an "infernal coincidence that our fleet's band of thieves were present at the scene of an altogether different crime". also opposed to, yknow, "the matter of demanding the secrets of gunpowder from the avowed pacifist faction with whom I had made a deal that we would not do this" and "the fact our thieves ended up being present in their base at the same time a mindflayer nautiloid took over the town". yknow. what actually happened.

now naielle, in character, assumes nothing will come of that. All her death letters have duplicates (one on her person, and one in her chest on her ship), and she intends to destroy the ship copy when she has liberty. Her indiscretions confessed in the letter are not, to her mind, relevant to the new Commodore (not least of which because the other indiscretion is something he was directly involved with and punished for, lmao).

but if Vandervest's plan was to be brought back as an undead by the White Lanterns, that means he might actually, canonically, read the letter Naielle gave him. including that little treason confession.

Now, if he comes back, he won't be Commodore. he resigned that position, and the nature of what happened means the crew isnt going to trust him with that again. he voided it, he's a regular member of the crew. he has no actual authority over naielle at that point. but he could rat her out to the new Commodore, or use that information against her.

i wouldnt exactly recommend trying to blackmail naielle for the simple fact that I think she might be angry enough about the whole thing to consider just attacking him. dunno how well that would go. but man. yeesh.