CLOSED | if i cut off your arms and cut off your legs,

[murderbaby]

WHO: Mhavos, Barrow, Sawbones, Ellis, Vanadi, Edgard, Athessa, Leander, Dick, & Holden.
WHAT: Slasher Plot / Murderhaus / I should really have come up with a set name for this thing.
WHEN: Late Harvestmere / Early Kingsway.
WHERE: Ostwick.
NOTES: This plot is based on the idea of slasher movies, so there will be blood, violence, torture, cannibalism & NPC death.

YOU MAY REMEMBER going to Ostwick on a Riftwatch mission, closing a rift on the property of the noble Pickney house, and being accosted by the Lady Elsed Pickney. Her (adult) son is missing! Terrible things are afoot!

But that's easy to ignore; Gawen Pickney rather publicly announced his intention to elope with a Dalish elf a few weeks ago. Assurances are made, yes, we'll let you know if we see him, and what can you do but that?

It's time to move on. Traveling back to Kirkwall, a storm breaks out, and everyone decides it's better to find a place to stay for the night than push forward. The Silver Lamp is a cozy Inn on the roadside, and the proprietor, an elderly man named Medrod, is very kind. It's not tourism season in these parts, so he's happy to give everyone a discount for the night, and the meal is on the house. Everyone eats well, has a pleasant enough time, and wanders off to bed for the night.

(The food your characters ate was not people and did not taste strange in any way.)

And then Medrod will let the sleeping gas seep through the Inn, laced with Magebane just in case, and everyone will wake up a few hours later, dizzy and, in many cases, in pain.

(Look for a toplevel with your character's name below.)

HOW WILL THIS WORK? Well, I'll be NPCing Medrod the Murderer. Medrod will be showing up in each thread eventually, after a number of tags I RNG'd. It's entirely possible to escape before he shows up! And don't worry, if you guys get in a rut, I'll make him show up early to spice things up ;)

I'll also be doing dicerolls!

If you have a situation where you feel your character will need to roll (I'm going to let you decide this!) put ROLL in the subject line, and bold what you need me to roll for.

(For example, you can have a whole tag like normal, and then Bob tries to pick the lock. Then I'll roll for success or failure, as well as other factors, and reply to that thread with the results. But if you don't want to rely on dicerolls, for whatever reason, don't worry about it. The dicerolls are an opt-in feature. Use it as much or as little as you want.)

I'll also be rolling for discovery, which will work the same way: if your character is looking for something, put ROLL in the subject line and bold what they're looking for (normal tag normal tag then Alice looked for a lockpick) and I'll reply with results after rolling. But if you just want your character to find the thing without dicerolls, go for it.

IN SHORT, I'm only making this as hard as you want it to be. Your characters are already waking up to torture. If you want them to find the special key and escape in two comments, it's totally fine. (Just respect other people's difficulty levels, if they want to give their characters a harder time.)

The only thing that has to rely on rolls is killing, apprehending or injuring the Murderer, but since I'll be NPCing him, those rolls are automatic and will be baked into his reply comments.

IF YOUR CHARACTERS GET FREE, let me know what they'd want to do next oocly (options below), and I'll set that up for you!

Other potential goals to keep in mind besides escaping:

- Finding / saving others.
- Killing / apprehending Medrod the Murderer.
- Getting evidence of Gawen & his Dalish wife's murder to eventually send to Lady Elsed.
- Getting your stuff back (all obviously visible weapons / staves have been taken away).

You got questions? Lemme know!

DETAILS:

- While in the torture room, your character is free to hear (or not hear) distant screaming. It's muffled enough that you can't identify the source (it's Edgard). The screaming has stopped.

- The hallways between the rooms are pitch-dark, and even those who can see in the dark will find it difficult to navigate, as the walls and ceilings are mirrored, distorting the size, shape, and direction of the hallways.

Comments

[highborn]

He reads that threat quite clearly, and finds it a little offensive. Please, as if he would beg magic of someone who'd made it so clear it was a secret. Lesson learned, though, that offered information goes unreciprocated. He walks in silence for a long few seconds more, giving Richard plenty of time to give him something, anything, which he recognizes already as fruitless. Still, the opportunity must be given.

Eventually, though, he has to ask, "Is there something I've done wrong?"

[nonvenomous]

Walking in silence is easy; he’s been doing it for miles.

There’s a baleful glimmer to his eyes when Vanadi speaks again, that same cat cornered and coiled up out of the reach of a gloved hand, with claws sunk safely into wood but willing to make the transition to flesh. He slows, and stops, breaking pace with the rest of the party.

He is tall enough -- in this instance -- to loom, if he wanted to.

He doesn’t. He is deferential in his distance, inquiring without direct threat or encroach -- just that persistent throughline of watchful, warning tension.

“Why do you ask?”

[highborn]

He slows as Richard does, attention turned fully to regard him head-on. He's no stranger to subtlety, to trusting unspoken words to make themselves exceedingly clear, but this is killing him. A spark of irritation lights itself, an indignation that he's being punished without ever knowing the crime, but he allows the distance to stay intact.

"Because we're allies," he says evenly. "And I would love to know that I haven't overstepped some line clumsily enough to make you rethink that. There are threats enough to consider already."

[nonvenomous]

Dick Dickerson turns as well -- an answering bristle at his shoulders in the face of that spark, broken hand pulled instinctively back into the cover of his cloak as he lowers his voice in the road. He will pull this entire caravan over --

“Is it really inconceivable to you that I would prefer to avoid post-torture pillow talk without considering you an adversary, Vanadi?"

He doesn't quite leave space for an answer before he continues:

"I'm glad you're well." This bears repeating. "Leave me alone."

[highborn]

The bristle serves only to further bewilder him, to confirm that there really is some offense here. He left it well alone last time and, well, he probably will this time too — but not just yet. He'd liked Richard, and kissing him had been quite nice, and that's worth at least a little effort.

"Please, as if this entire mission you've not been cold shouldering me like a school girl who didn't get asked to the — " Ah, shit, that's a elf thing, Dick wouldn't know it. He waves a hand jerkily to dismiss the rest of the sentence. "I'll grant you it's a poor time for it, but I'd like to know — "

What he's done wrong? Why Dick is a dick? What the fuck happened on that rooftop? He takes a quick breath to recenter himself on the real crux of the issue.

" — How to make it up to you."

[nonvenomous]

Called Out. Now offense shutters the furrow of his brow down into a defensive hood, reproach grim at his chops. His reactivity alone is unusual, aloof disinterest stripped back to the wires beneath. He goes quiet when he recognizes as much, focus sucked inward from the surface for a long moment.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

His patience is tapped, but he makes the effort, and it pays off in steadier reassurance, bordering upon apology. There’s nothing to make amends for.

“I understand the confusion,” he further allows, as he steps to retreat after the group. “You are very handsome.”

[highborn]

Nope, things have just got more confusing. Vanadi stares after him for a good few seconds, processing, failing to come up with anything, before he kicks back into gear to catch up.

"That's much less of an explanation than you seem to think it is," he says, tone gone a little wry. "I don't know what to do with that."

But it's more sentences all in a row than he's gotten from him so far, so maybe it's some kind of progress.