Dull sounds pierce the darkness of your unconsciousness, and you groggily open your eyes. You lift your head off of the table it was resting on, blinking the sleep from your eyes as you take in your surroundings. A tavern common room fills your vision. Its taproom occupies a small alcove in the opposite corner of your booth, stocked with barrels stamped with labels that mark them as ale and wine. An imposing human man stands behind the bar, washing a tankard as he watches you with a sad look on his face. Three others sit in the booth around you, similarly disoriented and recently wakened.
An anxious feeling rises in your chest. How did you get here? Where even is here? You realize your recent memories are fuzzy, concealed by a dense mental fog. But your subconscious is screaming: something's wrong here.
The bartender calls across the room to you: "Welcome to the Disjunction. Come over here and grab a drink, you're going to need it."
There's perhaps a dozen other occupants in the tavern, and as you wake they regard with either apathy or the same piteous look as the bartender. After the moment passes they turn back to their own conversations.
After rubbing his eyelids and opening them again, the young man with blonde hair tries to understand what he's seeing. Eyes with shining gold irises scan first the room, then his own body. He slides out of the booth, standing up. He wears a collared tunic made of a deep black thread, cinched at the waist by a simple leather belt with a silver-toned buckle. His trousers, the same void-like color as his tunic, melded into tall boots. A longsword hangs from the belt, encased in a plain leather scabbard. He runs a hand across his torso, up his throat to his face, scanning for wounds. Did he die? He was in the middle of something wasn't he? A fight?
A frown forms across his face as he struggles to remember...The fall of Chathe was still fresh in his mind, but everything after was a blur.
He looks back at the table, noting the other three who seemed to have awoken at the same time as him. They were dressed strangely, in clothes he didn't recognize. One of them was paler than even the cave dwellers, and another some humanoid form he hadn't seen before.
With each waking second his confusion was growing stronger, and so he turns back towards the man who called out to them, tentatively beginning to walk that way. "Is this an afterlife of some kind, have I died?"
You hear a short bark of laughter from behind a mountain of drained tankards stacked on a nearby table. Behind it, you can just barely see a dwarven man with brown hair and a frizzy beard. "Afterlife. You wish!" He exclaims, spilling some of the ale from the tankard in his hand as he laughs boisterously. "Gerund." The bartender says sharply, glaring at the dwarf, but it doesn't stop him as he keeps chuckling.
He lays down four tankards on the bartop, filling each of them with ale from a large pitcher. "You haven't died but - " he pauses for a moment, then shakes his head. "It's complicated. Come, sit and drink. What's your name?"
Veronica groans as she regains consciousness... where is she? She reaches up and brushes a few stray locks of black hair out of her face. For the moment, the deathly-pale red-eyed woman ignores the bartender to observe the others sitting around the table with her. She notes that they seem to be a very eclectic group... it doesn't look like they have anything whatsoever in common...
Then the blonde man speaks, and she can't help but smile when he suggests that they might be in the afterlife.
"If it was, I don't think I would be nearly so... hungry," she says. As the bartender pours the drinks, she looks at him curiously for a moment. Then she rises and makes her way over to the bar to take one of the offered cups of ale. Her movements are quick and graceful... yet at the same time, it somehow seems as if every move she makes is carefully calculated.
"Before I partake, I suppose I should ask if these are on the house..." she says to the bartender with a smile that reveals long canine teeth. "My name is Lady Veronica Osborne... but don't feel obliged to use my full title every time you wish to speak to me. 'Veronica' is just fine. Or 'Lady Osborne,' if you feel the need to be more formal. Now, who might you be? If I have been kidnapped in the hopes of obtaining a ransom, I will assure you right now that my parents have been trying for years to figure out what to do with me... so they would probably use an abduction as an excuse not to have to deal with the difficulties that come with having a vampire in the family."
She takes a moment to look around the establishment for anything or anyone that might help her to understand her current predicament or who might pose a potential threat (Perception: 21, rolled in game log).
"Though, in all honesty, it would make very little sense to abduct someone and then take them to a crowded bar. So I suppose that is not the most likely explanation for how I ended up here..."
After working through the initial grogginess, Lori startles in a panic. She outstretches her hand, two fingers extended with a small mote of fire forming between them. "Stayback!" She jumps up from her seat, looking wildly around the room as she backpedals as far as she can into the corner.
If anyone takes a step towards her, she points the held spell at them, ready to let loose if they don't stop.
As she looks around the room though, she sees no mage-seekers. No plated hunters, ready to shackle her and drag her back to that awful place. In fact she just sees...A tavern?
The panic slowly begins to subside as confusion takes it place. She lowers her hand, letting the mote of flame flicker out. At last, the words that have been said by the bartender and others in the room start to register in her mind. "Sorry." She mumbles quietly, hesitantly moving away from the wall and towards the bar. Her eyes flicker to the blonde man and the pale woman. Did she say she was a vampire? She was told they'd been hunted to extinction...But she was incredibly pale, and those teeth. The mage changes her trajectory slightly, putting the blonde man between herself and the strange woman as they approach the bar.
"Is it safe here?" She asks, looking towards the bartender.
The man smiles warmly, nodding his head. "On the house of course. Everything here is, not much use for coin." He takes the dhampir's fanged smile in stride as he leans against the bartop, hands splayed on the side. "In a way you have been kidnapped, but not by anyone in this room, and not for any ransom." The bartender waits patiently as Veronica looks around the room, waiting for her to spot it.
Veronica: By far the most "threatening" looking person in the room is the man standing before you, built like a bear and standing a full head above anyone else in the room. You also see a muscular half-orc woman playing cards with a trio of human men. She has a greataxe strapped to her back, while they all carry shortswords. Behind the bartender a massive greatsword hangs on hooks on mounted to the wall.
A bard with a glassy look on his face wordlessly tunes a lute, giving it a few experimental strums. And the rest of the tables are occupied by fairly normal looking folk. There's something odd about their clothing though...It's unlike any style you've seen before really, and most of them are different from another, like they've all come from distant lands.
As you almost finish your look around the tavern...It finally occurs to you. There's no exit. No entrance. No windows.
When the realization dawns, the bartender clears his throat. "I'm Bryn Harjolf. And as you can see there is unfortunately...No escape from this tavern."
His eyes cut to the other woman who appeared in your group, steadily holding out his hand to calm her. "No person here will hurt you. It's fine, I understand. Many people react with fear when they first wake here."
He seems to mull over her question for a moment before nodding. "It's safe. If you stay on the first floor, I can guarantee your safety."
Before his life essentially exploded, Kai might have answered the dwarf's derision with grace. But he was emotionally exhausted, and the patience that the order had once drilled into him had already worn thin. "Careful not to drown in your mug,"he mutters sarcastically, briefly glaring at the dwarf before continuing to the bar. He looks over the other two, wondering about what this Veronica had called herself. A vampire? A part of him wanted to ask what that was. Perhaps it explained her pallor. Though he notices that the other woman places herself opposite the pale woman after her admission. It was odd enough to warrant a raised eyebrow from him.
"Kai Mercer."He says, taking a seat at one of the bar's stools. Briefly, he glances at Veronica. "You don't bite or anything do you? I'm not sure what a vampire is, but the other one seemed a little put-off by it."
The tankard before him is tempting, and once he hears that it's seemingly free he grabs it and begins to drink. After a long draught he wipes his mouth with a sleeve, glancing up at the massive bartender. "Kidnapped in a way, but not by anyone here. No escape from the tavern. The first floor is safe but nowhere else is." Again, he felt his patience being tested, and he pinches the bridge of his nose. "Maybe just lay everything out for us all at once."
Sitting down quietly in on one of the barstools, the young mage wraps her hands around one of the tankards but doesn't drink. "I'm Lori." Still a bit skittish she scoots the barstool away from the others a few inches, turning around to keep an eye on the rest of the tavern's patrons. "I was nowhere near civilization...?"She says quietly, struggling to remember what she was doing before ending up here.
She turns back towards Bryn, awaiting his explanation.
Veronica pauses mid-sip as Kai says that he doesn't know what a vampire is.
"You... actually don't know?" she says as she sets her mug down, eyebrow raised slightly. To her, that is almost as strange as the fact that she's just been abducted into a tavern with no escape. "Your parents never told you horror stories about nocturnal undead blood-drinkers? Where exactly are you from?"
If Kai was paying attention, he may notice that Veronica isn't breathing. She briefly considers going into some more detail about her condition; she's well aware that she isn't actually an undead, not entirely anyway. After all, she did grow from a child into an adult woman, which would have been impossible if she was actually a corpse. But she's can't resist having some fun and messing around a bit. She pauses, then she smiles.
"Well, I guess I have the opportunity to make an impression. And as long as you keep your hands to yourself, I promise that my fangs won't find their way into your neck."
Kai blinks at the questions, slowly shaking his head. "I'm from Chathe, First Principality Jhei Swor." The words taste bitter in his mouth, and he feels an unease in his stomach. He needed to get back. He needed to fight. But first he needed out of whatever this place was, and making friendly with potential allies for that endeavor was a good idea.
"I've never heard of any kind of blood-drinker. Let alone a nocturnal undead variety."He takes a moment to study her features more closely, but can't bring himself to be convinced that she isn't actually alive. She didn't look like any undead he'd seen before - they were truly horrific. In fact besides the dull tone of her skin, she seemed healthy. Still, it seemed a silly thing to lie about, and he had bigger worries than whether or not she was actually undead or not. "I suppose there are stranger things out there."
He wiggles the fingers on one of his hands before pulling it to his chest. "Hands to myself, you have my word."
"Then I think we'll get along just fine," Veronica says with a smile at Kai, before finishing her drink. "Now, with that out of the way, Mr. Harjolf... you've told us what hasn't happened here; that is to say, we haven't been abducted by anyone in this room. And you have told that we cannot leave. So I must ask the same thing that Mr. Mercer just asked... where are we and how did we get here? Assuming that you know, of course... I suppose that everyone else here probably arrived the same way that we did, so perhaps you don't know much more than we do. But I suspect that anything you can tell us will be helpful."
The bartender takes note of Lori's struggle to remember where she was when she was taken, and clears his throat again. "I wouldn't bother. None of us can remember the time leading up to our imprisonment here."
"I'll explain, I promise" Bryn holds up a hand for patience to Kai. "I don't rea-" He's cut off by a loud crash from behind you, followed by an antagonized shout: "Yer a thieving lout! Cheat me out of my winnings will ya?!" You turn around in time to see the half-orc woman catch a feral, swinging uppercut from a rough-shaven male human. Three other humans that were sitting at the table spring up to defend the man, drawing their weapons. But before they can do anything, the half-orc has her greataxe in hand, beheading the man who punched her with a two-handed swing of the heavy weapon.
His head topples from his shoulders to the floor and rolls towards the bar, coming to a stop by an unoccupied bar stool. The half-orc whirls on the three men next, baring her teeth as they approach with shortswords in hand.
Lori stumbles off her stool, pressing her back against the bar as she tries to put distance between herself and the altercation. Her eyes go wide, watching the head roll across the floor. "You said no one here would hurt us!"
She doesn't know these people and doesn't care to risk life or limb for either party. The mage continues to scoot away as far as she can, content to let the belligerents sort it out themselves.
Valanthe opens her eyes slowly. Her head feels groggy, as if she has been asleep for a long time. But when she looks around she is not in her room in the Combine. In fact, she's not in the Combine at all but apparently some sort of tavern. When she first woke, there were others sitting in the booth with her, but they are now speaking with the bartender. Utterly confused, the Simic walks over to the bar in time to catch most of the conversation. One of these strangers is apparently a vampire, and Valanthe immediately eyes her with distrust. She's never met one of the undead personally, but she knows many of them work as assassins and spies for House Dimir.
Valanthe is about to introduce herself when an altercation breaks out, and a head goes rolling across the floor. She jumps back in surprise and reaches for her weapon, which is apparently still slung across her back thankfully. The glaive is a long, elegant polearm with a wicked-looking blade. The Simic holds the polearm in front of her body in a defensive posture. As she takes in the situation, she can't help but notice that she doesn't recognize the garb of the tavern inhabitants. Everyone looks quite strange, but many people are regarding her as if she is the strange one. Standing nearly six feet tall, lean and muscular, with teal skin, amber eyes, and cartilaginous frills in place of hair, Valanthe does cut a unique figure in the tavern.
"What is going on?" she finally demands.
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Characters: Bryony Alderleaf - Lvl. 3 Halfling Rogue (Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk) ♦ Evelyn Drake - Lvl. 3 Human Wizard (Rule of Change) ♦ Aranea Kendrick - Lvl. 4 Human Warlock (Where the Cold Winds Blow) ♦ Elsenia Vesper - Lvl. 2 Shadar-kai Druid (Strixhaven)
The head rolls to a stop just as Kai spins around on the stool, his hand instinctively going to his own blade at the sight of drawn steel. He spares a quick glance towards Lori as she retreats, and to the other being who had awoken in the booth with them - he hadn't gotten her name yet. As she extends a polearm in front of herself defensively, his attention goes back to the fight.
"From anger bring peace."
He whispers the Third Oath to himself quietly, letting out a long sigh. By all logic, the half-orc was much too harsh in her response, but a messy brawl like this wasn't the way to resolve it. Pushing off the stool, he cautiously and slowly approaches the group with his hands in air, trying to put himself between them. "Let's just...Take a moment and breathe here, alright?"His gaze points towards the headless body. "Some coin isn't worth spilling this much blood over."He turns to face the half-orc, trusting the other three men to not literally stab him in the back. "Put the axe down, and back off. I think you've made your point already."
The half-orc woman flares her nostril, glaring down her nose at Kai. After a tense moment she huffs, lowering the greataxe. "He'll walk it off." She mumbles, turning away from the scene and stalking away. The three men behind you begin to yell after her, but are silenced by a thunderous "STAND DOWN!" from behind the bar. Bryn quiets his tone, addressing Lori momentarily. "I mispoke, it's more that no one can hurt you here. Not really anyway."
Without its head, the body pushes itself up from the floor, beginning to crawl on all fours, hands searching the floor. Among the commotion, you might not have realized...But the head has been screaming profanities this whole time. Bryn steps from behind the bar, lifting the head off the floor, muffling the mouth his arm in the process. "That's enough from you Aren." Casually, he walks over to the man's body and jams the head back between the shoulders. With a sound like walnuts being cracked, the head reattaches and the man stands up, ready to hurl more insults after the half-orc. "QUIET." Bryn growls, stepping in front of him. "I'll not hear another word of it Aren, save it for the brawls if you must. At least then we can bet on your stupidity."
The bear-sized bartender claps Kai on the shoulder, giving an affirmative nod. "Thanks for the assist." He takes a moment to stare down the man he called Aren, and the three other men he was with until they sit back down at the table, grumbling amongst themselves.
"You can put the glaive down warrior, you won't need it right now." He says to Valanthe as he moves to get back around the bartop. "I don't think we've heard your name yet either."
As he takes his place behind the bar again he picks up a dirty tankard and starts washing it with a cloth. "Now, you are in a tavern we call the Disjunction. There's no way out. But there's limitless ale. Limitless food. And as you've just seen...We can't kill each other."
From the table nearly buried under a mountain of tankards, the dwarf speaks up. "Enjoy it while ye can! Ye'll find no small comforts 'ere. Food starts tastin' of ash, ale turns to water. Even Aren over there can't walk on the second floor no more. Says it's like walking through a salt marsh. But I heard tell of a boy who crawled through the attic! Whittled away at a mouse hole until it was big enough for him to slip through. Never saw 'im again."
Bryn waits patiently for the dwarf to finish his tirade, shaking his head. "You'd do well not to listen to Vieri's stories Gerund, I told you." He chides the dwarf before turning his attention back towards you all. He briefly gesturing towards the bard tuning his lute by the hearth. "Pay him no mind, that bard has spread many a fantastical tale around this place."
He clears his throat, setting down the now clean tankard and picking up another. "You've probably noticed in your brief conversations, we aren't all from the same place. It is strange that the four of you appeared at the same time but aren't from the same lands, normally groups were traveling together when they get snatched. I've been here the longest...Although I guess that's subjective. Time works differently for everyone here."
"As to the purpose of it all?" The burly bartender gives an almighty shrug. "I've no idea. I am truly sorry that you've found yourselves here. But we do what we can to make ourselves comfortable here."
Valanthe stares as the head of the man named Aren reattaches itself to its body. She slowly lowers the glaive and finally returns it to its place on her back. Then she walks back over to the bartender and the other strangers.
"Valanthe," she finally introduces herself. "Has anyone tried to bust down a wall or anything?"
Her mind still hasn't quite caught up to recent events. It's almost impossible for her to grasp the strange situation she has found herself in, and she stares around at the blank walls with a mixture of wonder and fear.
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Characters: Bryony Alderleaf - Lvl. 3 Halfling Rogue (Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk) ♦ Evelyn Drake - Lvl. 3 Human Wizard (Rule of Change) ♦ Aranea Kendrick - Lvl. 4 Human Warlock (Where the Cold Winds Blow) ♦ Elsenia Vesper - Lvl. 2 Shadar-kai Druid (Strixhaven)
Veronica stares at the scene of violence... and her nose twitches as she smells blood. Even as the decapitated man's head is re-attached, a sight that even to her should be extremely bizarre, she can't tear her eyes away from the red pools where the body dropped. She's so... so hungry.
She drops to the floor with little of her earlier elegance and almost frantically begins lapping up the blood, paying no heed to the fact that she is literally licking the floor. After a few moments, she sits back on her heels, wiping a bit of the blood away from her mouth with the back of her hand. Her head feels clearer, and she looks up at her fellow 'patrons' of this establishment... many of whom are probably staring at her now.
"I... I'm Sorry," she mumbles, sounding quite embarrassed. "That... that wasn't very ladylike of me... but... I feel better now that I've had something to eat."
She sighs. How long had it been since she had eaten? She doesn't know. Usually she gets her 'special' meals from willing donors paid rather nicely by her family. Licking the blood off the floor after a bar fight is certainly a low point for her.
"Um... would it be too much to ask for a towel to clean up a bit?"she asks Bryn. "I usually have better manners, but I think it may have been a while since I've eaten..."
Lori inches back over after the man's head is reattached, still unsure if she should be more or less disturbed at this point. She finds herself unable to look away as the pale woman, Veronica she said her name was? Begins to lap blood up off the floor like a cat might a puddle of water. "At least it isn't the most strange thing we've seen today..." At the back of her mind, she wonders where this vampire will be getting her blood from in the future. She doubted any of those barrels were filled with it, and if they really were to be stuck here for eternity...
The mage shakes her head, turning her attention away from Bryn to the dwarf, Gerund she thinks his name was? "You said something about an attic, how can we get to it?"
After things have died down, Kai listens to what the bartender has to say, including his exchange with the dwarf. Crawled through a hole in the attic? It sounded insane. But so did the entire situation.
He takes another look around the tavern common room, his eyes lingering on the bard for a moment longer than anything else. While he waits to hear what the dwarf's answer to Lori's question is, he turns to look back at Bryn to gauge his reaction. The man had been quick to dismiss the idea of escape earlier. It was enough to make him wonder if the bartender was as innocent in this as he seemed.
Insight: 6
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Dull sounds pierce the darkness of your unconsciousness, and you groggily open your eyes. You lift your head off of the table it was resting on, blinking the sleep from your eyes as you take in your surroundings. A tavern common room fills your vision. Its taproom occupies a small alcove in the opposite corner of your booth, stocked with barrels stamped with labels that mark them as ale and wine. An imposing human man stands behind the bar, washing a tankard as he watches you with a sad look on his face. Three others sit in the booth around you, similarly disoriented and recently wakened.
An anxious feeling rises in your chest. How did you get here? Where even is here? You realize your recent memories are fuzzy, concealed by a dense mental fog. But your subconscious is screaming: something's wrong here.
The bartender calls across the room to you: "Welcome to the Disjunction. Come over here and grab a drink, you're going to need it."
There's perhaps a dozen other occupants in the tavern, and as you wake they regard with either apathy or the same piteous look as the bartender. After the moment passes they turn back to their own conversations.
How do you react?
After rubbing his eyelids and opening them again, the young man with blonde hair tries to understand what he's seeing. Eyes with shining gold irises scan first the room, then his own body. He slides out of the booth, standing up. He wears a collared tunic made of a deep black thread, cinched at the waist by a simple leather belt with a silver-toned buckle. His trousers, the same void-like color as his tunic, melded into tall boots. A longsword hangs from the belt, encased in a plain leather scabbard. He runs a hand across his torso, up his throat to his face, scanning for wounds. Did he die? He was in the middle of something wasn't he? A fight?
A frown forms across his face as he struggles to remember...The fall of Chathe was still fresh in his mind, but everything after was a blur.
He looks back at the table, noting the other three who seemed to have awoken at the same time as him. They were dressed strangely, in clothes he didn't recognize. One of them was paler than even the cave dwellers, and another some humanoid form he hadn't seen before.
With each waking second his confusion was growing stronger, and so he turns back towards the man who called out to them, tentatively beginning to walk that way. "Is this an afterlife of some kind, have I died?"
You hear a short bark of laughter from behind a mountain of drained tankards stacked on a nearby table. Behind it, you can just barely see a dwarven man with brown hair and a frizzy beard. "Afterlife. You wish!" He exclaims, spilling some of the ale from the tankard in his hand as he laughs boisterously. "Gerund." The bartender says sharply, glaring at the dwarf, but it doesn't stop him as he keeps chuckling.
He lays down four tankards on the bartop, filling each of them with ale from a large pitcher. "You haven't died but - " he pauses for a moment, then shakes his head. "It's complicated. Come, sit and drink. What's your name?"
Veronica groans as she regains consciousness... where is she? She reaches up and brushes a few stray locks of black hair out of her face. For the moment, the deathly-pale red-eyed woman ignores the bartender to observe the others sitting around the table with her. She notes that they seem to be a very eclectic group... it doesn't look like they have anything whatsoever in common...
Then the blonde man speaks, and she can't help but smile when he suggests that they might be in the afterlife.
"If it was, I don't think I would be nearly so... hungry," she says.
As the bartender pours the drinks, she looks at him curiously for a moment. Then she rises and makes her way over to the bar to take one of the offered cups of ale. Her movements are quick and graceful... yet at the same time, it somehow seems as if every move she makes is carefully calculated.
"Before I partake, I suppose I should ask if these are on the house..." she says to the bartender with a smile that reveals long canine teeth. "My name is Lady Veronica Osborne... but don't feel obliged to use my full title every time you wish to speak to me. 'Veronica' is just fine. Or 'Lady Osborne,' if you feel the need to be more formal. Now, who might you be? If I have been kidnapped in the hopes of obtaining a ransom, I will assure you right now that my parents have been trying for years to figure out what to do with me... so they would probably use an abduction as an excuse not to have to deal with the difficulties that come with having a vampire in the family."
She takes a moment to look around the establishment for anything or anyone that might help her to understand her current predicament or who might pose a potential threat (Perception: 21, rolled in game log).
"Though, in all honesty, it would make very little sense to abduct someone and then take them to a crowded bar. So I suppose that is not the most likely explanation for how I ended up here..."
After working through the initial grogginess, Lori startles in a panic. She outstretches her hand, two fingers extended with a small mote of fire forming between them. "Stayback!" She jumps up from her seat, looking wildly around the room as she backpedals as far as she can into the corner.
If anyone takes a step towards her, she points the held spell at them, ready to let loose if they don't stop.
As she looks around the room though, she sees no mage-seekers. No plated hunters, ready to shackle her and drag her back to that awful place. In fact she just sees...A tavern?
The panic slowly begins to subside as confusion takes it place. She lowers her hand, letting the mote of flame flicker out. At last, the words that have been said by the bartender and others in the room start to register in her mind. "Sorry." She mumbles quietly, hesitantly moving away from the wall and towards the bar. Her eyes flicker to the blonde man and the pale woman. Did she say she was a vampire? She was told they'd been hunted to extinction...But she was incredibly pale, and those teeth. The mage changes her trajectory slightly, putting the blonde man between herself and the strange woman as they approach the bar.
"Is it safe here?" She asks, looking towards the bartender.
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The man smiles warmly, nodding his head. "On the house of course. Everything here is, not much use for coin." He takes the dhampir's fanged smile in stride as he leans against the bartop, hands splayed on the side. "In a way you have been kidnapped, but not by anyone in this room, and not for any ransom." The bartender waits patiently as Veronica looks around the room, waiting for her to spot it.
Veronica:
By far the most "threatening" looking person in the room is the man standing before you, built like a bear and standing a full head above anyone else in the room. You also see a muscular half-orc woman playing cards with a trio of human men. She has a greataxe strapped to her back, while they all carry shortswords. Behind the bartender a massive greatsword hangs on hooks on mounted to the wall.
A bard with a glassy look on his face wordlessly tunes a lute, giving it a few experimental strums. And the rest of the tables are occupied by fairly normal looking folk. There's something odd about their clothing though...It's unlike any style you've seen before really, and most of them are different from another, like they've all come from distant lands.
As you almost finish your look around the tavern...It finally occurs to you. There's no exit. No entrance. No windows.
When the realization dawns, the bartender clears his throat. "I'm Bryn Harjolf. And as you can see there is unfortunately...No escape from this tavern."
His eyes cut to the other woman who appeared in your group, steadily holding out his hand to calm her. "No person here will hurt you. It's fine, I understand. Many people react with fear when they first wake here."
He seems to mull over her question for a moment before nodding. "It's safe. If you stay on the first floor, I can guarantee your safety."
Before his life essentially exploded, Kai might have answered the dwarf's derision with grace. But he was emotionally exhausted, and the patience that the order had once drilled into him had already worn thin. "Careful not to drown in your mug," he mutters sarcastically, briefly glaring at the dwarf before continuing to the bar. He looks over the other two, wondering about what this Veronica had called herself. A vampire? A part of him wanted to ask what that was. Perhaps it explained her pallor. Though he notices that the other woman places herself opposite the pale woman after her admission. It was odd enough to warrant a raised eyebrow from him.
"Kai Mercer." He says, taking a seat at one of the bar's stools. Briefly, he glances at Veronica. "You don't bite or anything do you? I'm not sure what a vampire is, but the other one seemed a little put-off by it."
The tankard before him is tempting, and once he hears that it's seemingly free he grabs it and begins to drink. After a long draught he wipes his mouth with a sleeve, glancing up at the massive bartender. "Kidnapped in a way, but not by anyone here. No escape from the tavern. The first floor is safe but nowhere else is." Again, he felt his patience being tested, and he pinches the bridge of his nose. "Maybe just lay everything out for us all at once."
Sitting down quietly in on one of the barstools, the young mage wraps her hands around one of the tankards but doesn't drink. "I'm Lori." Still a bit skittish she scoots the barstool away from the others a few inches, turning around to keep an eye on the rest of the tavern's patrons. "I was nowhere near civilization...?" She says quietly, struggling to remember what she was doing before ending up here.
She turns back towards Bryn, awaiting his explanation.
#ff7070
Veronica pauses mid-sip as Kai says that he doesn't know what a vampire is.
"You... actually don't know?" she says as she sets her mug down, eyebrow raised slightly. To her, that is almost as strange as the fact that she's just been abducted into a tavern with no escape. "Your parents never told you horror stories about nocturnal undead blood-drinkers? Where exactly are you from?"
If Kai was paying attention, he may notice that Veronica isn't breathing. She briefly considers going into some more detail about her condition; she's well aware that she isn't actually an undead, not entirely anyway. After all, she did grow from a child into an adult woman, which would have been impossible if she was actually a corpse. But she's can't resist having some fun and messing around a bit. She pauses, then she smiles.
"Well, I guess I have the opportunity to make an impression. And as long as you keep your hands to yourself, I promise that my fangs won't find their way into your neck."
Kai blinks at the questions, slowly shaking his head. "I'm from Chathe, First Principality Jhei Swor." The words taste bitter in his mouth, and he feels an unease in his stomach. He needed to get back. He needed to fight. But first he needed out of whatever this place was, and making friendly with potential allies for that endeavor was a good idea.
"I've never heard of any kind of blood-drinker. Let alone a nocturnal undead variety." He takes a moment to study her features more closely, but can't bring himself to be convinced that she isn't actually alive. She didn't look like any undead he'd seen before - they were truly horrific. In fact besides the dull tone of her skin, she seemed healthy. Still, it seemed a silly thing to lie about, and he had bigger worries than whether or not she was actually undead or not. "I suppose there are stranger things out there."
He wiggles the fingers on one of his hands before pulling it to his chest. "Hands to myself, you have my word."
"Then I think we'll get along just fine," Veronica says with a smile at Kai, before finishing her drink. "Now, with that out of the way, Mr. Harjolf... you've told us what hasn't happened here; that is to say, we haven't been abducted by anyone in this room. And you have told that we cannot leave. So I must ask the same thing that Mr. Mercer just asked... where are we and how did we get here? Assuming that you know, of course... I suppose that everyone else here probably arrived the same way that we did, so perhaps you don't know much more than we do. But I suspect that anything you can tell us will be helpful."
The bartender takes note of Lori's struggle to remember where she was when she was taken, and clears his throat again. "I wouldn't bother. None of us can remember the time leading up to our imprisonment here."
"I'll explain, I promise" Bryn holds up a hand for patience to Kai. "I don't rea-" He's cut off by a loud crash from behind you, followed by an antagonized shout: "Yer a thieving lout! Cheat me out of my winnings will ya?!" You turn around in time to see the half-orc woman catch a feral, swinging uppercut from a rough-shaven male human. Three other humans that were sitting at the table spring up to defend the man, drawing their weapons. But before they can do anything, the half-orc has her greataxe in hand, beheading the man who punched her with a two-handed swing of the heavy weapon.
His head topples from his shoulders to the floor and rolls towards the bar, coming to a stop by an unoccupied bar stool. The half-orc whirls on the three men next, baring her teeth as they approach with shortswords in hand.
How do you react?
Lori stumbles off her stool, pressing her back against the bar as she tries to put distance between herself and the altercation. Her eyes go wide, watching the head roll across the floor. "You said no one here would hurt us!"
She doesn't know these people and doesn't care to risk life or limb for either party. The mage continues to scoot away as far as she can, content to let the belligerents sort it out themselves.
#ff7070
Valanthe opens her eyes slowly. Her head feels groggy, as if she has been asleep for a long time. But when she looks around she is not in her room in the Combine. In fact, she's not in the Combine at all but apparently some sort of tavern. When she first woke, there were others sitting in the booth with her, but they are now speaking with the bartender. Utterly confused, the Simic walks over to the bar in time to catch most of the conversation. One of these strangers is apparently a vampire, and Valanthe immediately eyes her with distrust. She's never met one of the undead personally, but she knows many of them work as assassins and spies for House Dimir.
Valanthe is about to introduce herself when an altercation breaks out, and a head goes rolling across the floor. She jumps back in surprise and reaches for her weapon, which is apparently still slung across her back thankfully. The glaive is a long, elegant polearm with a wicked-looking blade. The Simic holds the polearm in front of her body in a defensive posture. As she takes in the situation, she can't help but notice that she doesn't recognize the garb of the tavern inhabitants. Everyone looks quite strange, but many people are regarding her as if she is the strange one. Standing nearly six feet tall, lean and muscular, with teal skin, amber eyes, and cartilaginous frills in place of hair, Valanthe does cut a unique figure in the tavern.
"What is going on?" she finally demands.
Characters: Bryony Alderleaf - Lvl. 3 Halfling Rogue (Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk) ♦ Evelyn Drake - Lvl. 3 Human Wizard (Rule of Change) ♦ Aranea Kendrick - Lvl. 4 Human Warlock (Where the Cold Winds Blow) ♦ Elsenia Vesper - Lvl. 2 Shadar-kai Druid (Strixhaven)
DMing: Curse of Strahd
The head rolls to a stop just as Kai spins around on the stool, his hand instinctively going to his own blade at the sight of drawn steel. He spares a quick glance towards Lori as she retreats, and to the other being who had awoken in the booth with them - he hadn't gotten her name yet. As she extends a polearm in front of herself defensively, his attention goes back to the fight.
"From anger bring peace."
He whispers the Third Oath to himself quietly, letting out a long sigh. By all logic, the half-orc was much too harsh in her response, but a messy brawl like this wasn't the way to resolve it. Pushing off the stool, he cautiously and slowly approaches the group with his hands in air, trying to put himself between them. "Let's just...Take a moment and breathe here, alright?" His gaze points towards the headless body. "Some coin isn't worth spilling this much blood over." He turns to face the half-orc, trusting the other three men to not literally stab him in the back. "Put the axe down, and back off. I think you've made your point already."
Persuasion: 24 (Rolled in Log)
The half-orc woman flares her nostril, glaring down her nose at Kai. After a tense moment she huffs, lowering the greataxe. "He'll walk it off." She mumbles, turning away from the scene and stalking away. The three men behind you begin to yell after her, but are silenced by a thunderous "STAND DOWN!" from behind the bar. Bryn quiets his tone, addressing Lori momentarily. "I mispoke, it's more that no one can hurt you here. Not really anyway."
Without its head, the body pushes itself up from the floor, beginning to crawl on all fours, hands searching the floor. Among the commotion, you might not have realized...But the head has been screaming profanities this whole time. Bryn steps from behind the bar, lifting the head off the floor, muffling the mouth his arm in the process. "That's enough from you Aren." Casually, he walks over to the man's body and jams the head back between the shoulders. With a sound like walnuts being cracked, the head reattaches and the man stands up, ready to hurl more insults after the half-orc. "QUIET." Bryn growls, stepping in front of him. "I'll not hear another word of it Aren, save it for the brawls if you must. At least then we can bet on your stupidity."
The bear-sized bartender claps Kai on the shoulder, giving an affirmative nod. "Thanks for the assist." He takes a moment to stare down the man he called Aren, and the three other men he was with until they sit back down at the table, grumbling amongst themselves.
"You can put the glaive down warrior, you won't need it right now." He says to Valanthe as he moves to get back around the bartop. "I don't think we've heard your name yet either."
As he takes his place behind the bar again he picks up a dirty tankard and starts washing it with a cloth. "Now, you are in a tavern we call the Disjunction. There's no way out. But there's limitless ale. Limitless food. And as you've just seen...We can't kill each other."
From the table nearly buried under a mountain of tankards, the dwarf speaks up. "Enjoy it while ye can! Ye'll find no small comforts 'ere. Food starts tastin' of ash, ale turns to water. Even Aren over there can't walk on the second floor no more. Says it's like walking through a salt marsh. But I heard tell of a boy who crawled through the attic! Whittled away at a mouse hole until it was big enough for him to slip through. Never saw 'im again."
Bryn waits patiently for the dwarf to finish his tirade, shaking his head. "You'd do well not to listen to Vieri's stories Gerund, I told you." He chides the dwarf before turning his attention back towards you all. He briefly gesturing towards the bard tuning his lute by the hearth. "Pay him no mind, that bard has spread many a fantastical tale around this place."
He clears his throat, setting down the now clean tankard and picking up another. "You've probably noticed in your brief conversations, we aren't all from the same place. It is strange that the four of you appeared at the same time but aren't from the same lands, normally groups were traveling together when they get snatched. I've been here the longest...Although I guess that's subjective. Time works differently for everyone here."
"As to the purpose of it all?" The burly bartender gives an almighty shrug. "I've no idea. I am truly sorry that you've found yourselves here. But we do what we can to make ourselves comfortable here."
Valanthe stares as the head of the man named Aren reattaches itself to its body. She slowly lowers the glaive and finally returns it to its place on her back. Then she walks back over to the bartender and the other strangers.
"Valanthe," she finally introduces herself. "Has anyone tried to bust down a wall or anything?"
Her mind still hasn't quite caught up to recent events. It's almost impossible for her to grasp the strange situation she has found herself in, and she stares around at the blank walls with a mixture of wonder and fear.
Characters: Bryony Alderleaf - Lvl. 3 Halfling Rogue (Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk) ♦ Evelyn Drake - Lvl. 3 Human Wizard (Rule of Change) ♦ Aranea Kendrick - Lvl. 4 Human Warlock (Where the Cold Winds Blow) ♦ Elsenia Vesper - Lvl. 2 Shadar-kai Druid (Strixhaven)
DMing: Curse of Strahd
Veronica stares at the scene of violence... and her nose twitches as she smells blood. Even as the decapitated man's head is re-attached, a sight that even to her should be extremely bizarre, she can't tear her eyes away from the red pools where the body dropped. She's so... so hungry.
She drops to the floor with little of her earlier elegance and almost frantically begins lapping up the blood, paying no heed to the fact that she is literally licking the floor. After a few moments, she sits back on her heels, wiping a bit of the blood away from her mouth with the back of her hand. Her head feels clearer, and she looks up at her fellow 'patrons' of this establishment... many of whom are probably staring at her now.
"I... I'm Sorry," she mumbles, sounding quite embarrassed. "That... that wasn't very ladylike of me... but... I feel better now that I've had something to eat."
She sighs. How long had it been since she had eaten? She doesn't know. Usually she gets her 'special' meals from willing donors paid rather nicely by her family. Licking the blood off the floor after a bar fight is certainly a low point for her.
"Um... would it be too much to ask for a towel to clean up a bit?" she asks Bryn. "I usually have better manners, but I think it may have been a while since I've eaten..."
Lori inches back over after the man's head is reattached, still unsure if she should be more or less disturbed at this point. She finds herself unable to look away as the pale woman, Veronica she said her name was? Begins to lap blood up off the floor like a cat might a puddle of water. "At least it isn't the most strange thing we've seen today..." At the back of her mind, she wonders where this vampire will be getting her blood from in the future. She doubted any of those barrels were filled with it, and if they really were to be stuck here for eternity...
The mage shakes her head, turning her attention away from Bryn to the dwarf, Gerund she thinks his name was? "You said something about an attic, how can we get to it?"
#ff7070
After things have died down, Kai listens to what the bartender has to say, including his exchange with the dwarf. Crawled through a hole in the attic? It sounded insane. But so did the entire situation.
He takes another look around the tavern common room, his eyes lingering on the bard for a moment longer than anything else. While he waits to hear what the dwarf's answer to Lori's question is, he turns to look back at Bryn to gauge his reaction. The man had been quick to dismiss the idea of escape earlier. It was enough to make him wonder if the bartender was as innocent in this as he seemed.
Insight: 6