Fin perks up at Effulgyn's suggestion, "You had me at sitting. Let's go! Um...if it's not too much for Avra's uncle, that is." The road had been long, and Fin wanted nothing more than to be done with the whole affair. The adventurous life left much to be desired, though he could see some pleasure in it now that he knew what it entailed.

Avra goes to the door and gives it a polite knock before slowly opening it and gesturing for you to join her. The door opens to a large foyer which leads into a large, if humble, living area. To the far end is where the kitchen is, and in its center, a large stone hearth and a mantle adorned with pots made of clay. Wooden beams stretch across the ceiling, and cradle a large loft to the right side, presumably where her uncle sleeps. Shelves are found under the loft, filled with tools of different make. 

Large, worn couches and chairs flank the rest of the room, and a large dining table with 8 chairs is in the middle--it takes up most of the rest of the room.  The proportions are such that Avra and Domash fit quite nicely, but the rest of you - especially you, Effy, feel quite small. 

But it is cozy in its own right. Avra walks around with the kind of familiarity that indicates that she has spent quite a lot of time here, and busies herself lading the table with a variety of delicious looking things to eat: roast and preserves and bread and cheese and ale and fruits. 

Effy this has got to feel nostalgic for you! What is Nimblewynde Farm like in comparison? 

Effulgyn takes the time to unhitch Asterix first off, and the mule no doubt complains impatiently. “Fie!, I know, you’ve had a long day, pullin the cart for mile after mile. There now, pal!,” Effulgyn laughs, tugged to and fro by the creature before he lashes his lead to a post. The young wizard conjures a brush, and combs out the brambles and tics from the mule’s patched gray coat. The toughest, most stuck-on bits the halfling cleans with magic, casting prestidigitation with a subtle incantation, and in not long the complaining creature is cleaner if not fully bathed, and buries his nuzzle in a feed bag Effulgyn fills for him before napping, tied to his post. The cart itself, after the halfling looks around carefully, he leaves balanced against a tree stump.

Now turning to enter the quaint blue farmhouse, Effulgyn stops on the threshold, smiling broadly as he enters to find a warm meal already set out by Avra. 

The room is ridiculously and needlessly large by halfling standards, but Effulgyn is used to and forgiving of others’ bias toward giant-hood. 

It’ll be the edge o the table for me then!, he thinks with a twinkle in his eye. Pulling himself up onto one of the enormous chairs and from there up again to sit on the edge of the table, side-saddle as it were, a position he’s grown accustomed to at the tables of big people, the copper-haired wizard grows chatty as the company partakes of the filling meat and sides and ale.

“Ah, Nimblewynde Farm, y’ask? Why it’s about the same size as this lovely home o yer uncle’s. Though the rooms are more… er subtly proportioned y might say.” In fact his farm was much larger, with several tenant families and the attached brewery.

“But outside, I noticed,” and here just the slightest tone of melancholy tints his voice, “it’s very much like me home. Aye, it calls t mind the gentle rise back o the house, which faces and overlooks a gently turning inlet. Near the top o the hill my gramps built a wooden bench, old now, but set at just the right spot to watch the tide rise and fall in the inlet, an hear the gentle lowing of the cows at a distance. A site where I’ve spent many an hour. Aye, there, me thoughts, in turn, drifting like the fragrant breeze in great meandering waves, or like twirling barn sparrows flitting happily from one place to another.”

The young wizard pauses in his wistful reverie and looks about him. He knows he’s not the only wanderer here. He raises his glass. 

“T the places we call home, friends!”

A gentle, maybe tired, chorus of here here! round the table. Avra turns to Fin. 

"No farming for human," she says by way of making small talk. "Where is your home?" 

"I-um...my family lives near The Academy. Not too near, mind you, but close enough my father gets work as a carpenter in the surrounding area. I was born and raised there. Nice and quiet, most of the time."

(OOG sorry team, I got super sick this week and was down for the count. Better now and missing D&D! I had to cancel my live games too!)

Fin--please roll a deception check:) 

((Poker Face: 16))

The conversation continues without interruption and before you know it, most of the food is gone and Avra and Domash are putting things away. A comfortable silence envelops them as they move; you'd swear they've known each other for years. 

As she works Avra calls over to you both. "We leave soon? Avra wishes for Pa." she says. 

"As much as I would love to enjoy such comforts, I guess we should get moving. We've got a ways to go yet." Fin gets up and stretches the comfort from his limbs, pushing them back to purpose.

“Aye Fin,” replies Effulgyn, a bit wistfully, also gesturing to Avra. “While there’s daylight left, to the hayloft and let’s make ourselves busy!” The hayloft being to locate Avra’s father. 

Somewhat reluctantly you return to Asterix and after a brief post-meal stretch outside, begin your journey, feeling weary and ready for this to end--adventuring is not all glamour and tales at the tavern, it turns out. 

The goal ID set you on was to go just as far as needed to collect some of this mold but Avra is insistent on visiting her farm and seeing her father, which she feels is not out of the way. She explains that some of the mold had found its way to their property line and was eating some of the crops--she sort of ran away in a panic a few days ago and has been regretting it ever since. 

Just Avra and Pa at farm, she explains, clearly pained. Avra left Pa all alone. 

She tells you the story of the day she lost her finger and what ultimately prompted her to run away. It was a bright early summer morning, a good day for enjoying the land. She went out to the pasture to visit their beasts--working animals and animals meant for slaughter all together, neither really knowing their fate which is how happiest animals live.  She nuzzled a few of her favourites, checked in on the babies born that spring. It was really peaceful. But then...she noticed that one of her calves had some blood on its snout. Worried, Avra inspected it with her finger and brushed some dark sticky substance sort of mixed in with the blood.  She found it hard to remove so she used a cloth, but it wasn't coming clean and the poor calf was wailing in pain she she quit.

It was and odd substance, this stuff. Dark and gooey, like tar almost. She found she couldn't get it off her finger. She also found it popping up in spaces--the cow's nipples, for instance, where the calf took nourishment. A steer's side, where maybe she had nuzzled. Always eventually starting to ooze with blood like an open wound. Including her finger--it was as if the stuff was eating through it. At first it felt like nothing, but as it ate into her flesh, the pain started to be quite intense, even by half-orc farmer standards.

It was a crisis of logistics and of loss. Animals bleeding all around her, their cries and whimpering a macabre orchestra of suffering. Animals needing slaughtering, others needing isolation so they don't get infected. The worry and doubt Avra carried every day: had she infected one herself with her rotting finger?

Needing to separate calves from mothers, friends from each other, it was a mess of building fences but eventually this helped her and her dad find the source--a rivulet of mold coming on from the fields, from the direction of the marshes. She and her dad did the brave thing and went looking to see how far and wide it went--it was...dizzying. The stuff was everywhere. And it was growing a little every day, getting long, and wider, and deeper. 

She knew she would have to cut off her finger. She asked her pa to do it, but he looked so pained that without thinking, she did it herself and threw the nub in the fire, sincerely hoping that it would burn and not eventually eat through the family hearth. She did the same with the knife. 

And it was this same impulse that made her flee. Her father was hesitating: he was slow to do the things he needed to do and the mold was spreading to their neighbours. Where would it stop? He had gone into town to speak to the overseer but couldn't find him. The other farmers thought he was crazy. The Guard, unsurprisingly, were no where to be found. So he had come back, defeated. It was too much for Avra. Too much to worry about, too much suffering. She said some pretty angry but truthful things to him--this big, strong, reliable, brute of a man succumbing to fear? During a time of crisis? If he couldn't do it she would do it instead. So she fled, alone, ill prepared, running on anger. 

((Is this the current state of the area, or when Avra left home?))

When Avra left home just a few days ago

"I'm truly sorry to hear about your farm. I admit we came for information, not solutions, but I hope our work can lead to solving whatever is causing the blight spreading through here." Fin looks in a far off way, as though he could see the mold growing in the distance. Without seeing such a thing, he pictured it in his head as being some great, mossy river flowing from a forest.

It not just Avra farm, it's everything. Avra say, clearly looking pained. 

As you get closer to where she is directing you, you start to see evidence of what she is talking about. First, a bird on the road, both legs gone, blood on its belly as it writhes around in squawking agony on the ground.

Do any of you do anything to this creature when you come upon it?

“That were a hard choice, Avra. But yer right, some things we can’t expect t change unless we do somethin about it.”

When the party comes upon the terribly injured bird, Effulgyn lowers himself down from the drivers bucket on a conjured stepladder to investigate.

“Wha happened here?,” he whispers with aching sadness.

Is there any sign of the blue mold on the bird?

"Careful, Effy. There's no telling what might be going on at this point. From what Avra says, it sounds like a mold that goes out of its way to attack and eat flesh." Fin glances around, half-expecting a mound of blue matter to leap into the cart.

Avra joins you.

"The sick," she says, carefully lifting the writhing bird so you could get a better look.  It's hard to distinguish with all of the blood and the feathers, but eventually you do see some dark substance on the bird's belly. 

(OOC: Is the bird small like a sparrow or large like a swan, or something in-between? Is there enough of the substance to collect the sample we’re looking for?)

”Ach, look. Seein is believin isn’t it Finn? Oh, the poor creature. Kin anything be done?,” Effulgyn asks Avra softly, although in his heart he expects the situation to be hopeless for the creature. 

Effy this is a dove. 

Avra nods her head sadly. "Nothing Avra knows of," she says. "But you bring magic?" she says, brightening.

(Magic users are not very common outside of The Commons, or Waewood, maybe, so this is something that to Avra's knowledge anyway has of yet been unexplored)