Editing 12/09/2023 -- Operation Soft Thorn

* We pick up at about noon on the 4th of Lionnir, 715 AR. We start with Bee – she’s just milling about, waiting for it to get dark. A squirrel hops up to her with a nice green envelope – she asks if it’s for her, and thanks the squirrel when it nods, giving it a pat on the head. Inside the envelope is an eggshell off-white letter that reads “bitcch” (specifically, “bitch with two c’s”), signed by Zetian. Andreas, Damon, and Bloom receive similar letters, spelling out a message that says “bitcch, find me. -Zetian”.
* We oblige and hit up Zetian’s cabin. The door is unlocked, so we march in and find them in their library. They say they have a mission for us – they need a crack team of medical professionals to cure Cordell of her sadness. We point out we’re not medical professionals, and Zetian says we’re halfway professionals, just not medical, and according to the jesters of yore, the best remedy is slapstick comedy performed by a court of clowns.
** Bee asks what a clown is, and Zetian gives her a book titled “A Court of Clowns”. Each page is a mirror. Zetian tells her it’s scientifically proven that she’s a clown.
* We are sent on our way, to find out at least what’s causing Cordell’s strife (and to keep an eye out for snails). We head to Cordell’s cabin, and her guards immediately leave us to it when we say Zetian sent us. We enter, and see Cordell looking over notes – she immediately assumes something is wrong, and that we’re to blame for it. We say we were sent by Zetian to check in on her, we want to know how she’s doing, etc… And proceed to piss her off more and more with everything we say. She eventually kicks us out, though Damon lingers longer than the rest of us (and is unsuccessful in getting through to her, though he and Bee both notice a regretful expression on her face when she thinks we don’t see), saying we’re her soldiers, not her friends.
* Andreas figures that she can’t let go of the Battle of Tpres – Bee only knows it by name, so she’s given a quick rundown. We decide that while we can’t make Cordell forget what happened, we can maybe get her to recognize the good things, and decide to set up a festival to show these off to her. We split up to talk to different shopkeepers and other people in preparation.
** We get to make an intel check, and spend 1 intel for two questions – we find out Cordell favors a nice white wine, and that she was known to favor stage plays in her regular kingdom before joining the other Archfey in the fight against Althara. We also ask about the other Archfey’s opinions on our shenanigans, and find out that to our knowledge, Zetian is all for it (it’s “hard to get an answer out of ‘that thing’”). Kynaston will buy it for morale’s sake, as long as the camp is still properly defended.
** The spy network’s corruption research is also completed – corruption is a sort of viral disease that seems to be latent, and is activated when certain types of magic linked to Althara touch make contact with it. Essentially, it’s like how the shingles virus is in you after you get chickenpox. '''It can be removed with recovery (1 recovery removes 1 corruption). When the Brigade moves, everyone with corruption adds 1d6 more corruption. If you have 10 corruption, you become part of the Impure'''.
*** Notably, beings with more corruption are more visible to Althara’s forces – you can be sensed, somewhat like Aether souls. We don’t know if it works inversely, where people with enough corruption can sense Althara’s forces.
* Andreas gets a 6 on engagement – we can’t go above and beyond, but we get people to organize and generally go our way. We decide to set up the festival primarily around the stage, and get JWC to organize some shows. Marie constructs a larger rat race track, and Yamp creates some paper birds that fly around and create nice smells and sounds to add to the atmosphere. Castellan and Margaux also pitch in.
* Damon also goes to seek out Claudia – he finds her sunbathing, and when says he didn’t know she could be in the daylight, she tells him it’s new, and invites him to join her. He does so, asks how she’s doing (“just divine”), and then asks how she got captured. She tells him she’d been leaving the Prime Ring, moving about for a number of years, hoping to find somewhere new… but now she’s here, and everything’s so nice.
* She asks how he got here, and he says his village was attacked while he was away, and his brother was taken – he and his family joined the Brigade to find him, but he lost his parents in battle. She sympathizes with him, but says there are likely darker days ahead, to which he says they’ll get through them. She agrees. He then invites her to play cards with him, and she’s happy to; they go arm-in-arm to the gambling tent.
* We begin the party in the evening, close to sundown – Damon and Andreas go find Cordell, to find she’s barely moved. They offer her a bottle of white wine, and tell her we’re holding a festival for civilians and off-duty soldiers, and that we think it’d be good for morale if she made an appearance. She reluctantly agrees, and pours herself a quick glass of wine before following them out.
* They pass by some people from Gronne, cooking by a fire – Andreas encourages her to mingle, and she does so, jotting down logistical notes as she speaks with them. Damon is offered a spicy kebab, and gets a hero point for passing a spirit check to take the heat like a champ. He gets two more kebabs, and goes off to find Claudia and share with her. 
* Cordell returns, and she and Andreas head to the stage. She says it’s been decades since she’s seen this play. None of us recognize it (Andreas wasn’t well-versed in plays, Bee was born a few days ago, Bloom has his own issues), but encourage Cordell to watch with us. She agrees, and sits down with us.
* Damon finds Claudia in her tent, sitting on her coffin with her head in her hands, gripping it tightly. She’s startled to see him, and takes a step back, asking how they met. He says we saved her, and she says she doesn’t know if that happened. Damon offers her one of the kebabs, and she tries to eat it, but ends up coughing it back up. She says she hasn’t eaten food in a long time, and asks if she ate food before.
* Damon asks if she’s hungry, and she seems confused, but says she’s starving. He asks what she’d like, and she says B positive – he asks if that’s what his blood type is, and she smells him, before shaking her head, and saying he’s AB negative. She apologizes, before locking up again, and he gives her a hug, saying everything will be okay. She doesn’t believe him.
* He tries to reassure her that he’d never lie to her, and gets to make a spirit check at benefit 1… but utterly bombs it. She pulls back, saying that everyone lies. He asks how to gain her trust, and she says she doesn’t even trust herself – you should never trust a vampire, because they’re terrible and power-hungry. He tells her she’s one of the good ones, and she says that even if you want to be a good vampire, it’s difficult; vampires are very hierarchical, and owe fealty to those who turn them.
* He asks if she wanted to be a vampire, or if it was forced upon her. She wishes that she could say she had been forced into it, but that no, the man who had turned her was simply very persuasive. She chose this life, and was passed from master to master for years.
* She says that when you’re not in your right mind, you can do terrible things – Damon says he understands, because he loses control during full moons. She starts to say something, before her voice catches and she thanks him for understanding. Damon offers her his blood, and she says it’s easier feeding on someone you don’t know, because vampires are emotionally vulnerable when drinking; blood carries emotion, personality, memories. Damon offers to find her a deer or something to eat, and she tells him to enjoy the festival first. He goes into the woods anyway.
* Back with the group, we see a play about a dragon feared by local villagers. She is befriended by an orphan named Zachariah, and they find companionship within each other, until an accident leads to a rift being formed between the dragon and the villagers. With the villagers now fearing her, they organize a crusade against her. She flees into her cave, thinking Zachariah will protect her, but still perishes in the climax. It’s a tragic but beautiful play, followed by some happier but less deep plays. Cordell observes with us, sipping on wine glass after wine glass.
* Bee cries openly at the play, with Bloom giving her a side-hug, though he’s still enraptured by the play. Bee, Bloom, and Andreas discuss the play for a moment, before Cordell tries to excuse herself. Andreas suggests she visit the rat tracks with us, and we head there – there’s a 5-rat track, with the incinerator set up to look like the rats are being tossed into the hands of a fire giant, the bursts of heat making the fire giant appear to be screaming flames. King Cheddar is maintaining his throne, but a very fat rat named Polkadots is also doing very well. Andreas and Bloom are very entertained by the size of the rat.
* Bee is still disappointed by people burning the losers instead of eating them, but Bloom finds the fire entertaining – they discuss the fun of fire, until we notice that Cordell seems upset by the fire, her gaze locked on it. Andreas asks if she’s alright, and she says she’ll be heading back to her cabin. Andreas asks to accompany her, and she agrees, with the rest of us following.
* We make it back to Cordell’s cabin, with Damon falling in (with fresh kills from the forest) with us. She dismisses her guards for the night, and thanks us for accompanying her – Andreas asks if we can talk, because we’re all concerned about her, and she laughs, throwing the door open and striding inside. Since she doesn’t shut it, we follow her in, with Bee shutting the door softly behind us. Cordell enters her study, and sinks into her chair.
* We try again to get her to open up, telling her that we’re worried about her, and that she’s taken on a lot of responsibility, though we appreciate it. We get on the topic of Tpres, and she says we’d never understand what she lost at Tpres – Andreas says that Tpres was his home, and that he’d been a guard there. Cordell says that that’s not true family, and he says that it is, that the guards had raised him. He’d been an orphan, and they’d raised him, his fathers, mothers, parents, brothers and sisters… He has tears in his eyes as he says he knows what she lost, because he lost it, too.
* She snaps, saying that he could never understand a mother losing her daughter – when Andreas says he hadn’t known she had a daughter, she puts her head in her hands, saying that we must never repeat that, that the other Archfey don’t know. We all agree not to tell, and Damon goes in for a hug, though her briars puncture his skin.
* She tells us the story of her daughter, Enola – born of a forbidden love between her and an outsider, she kept her daughter a closely-guarded secret, and stashed her in Tpres for Enola’s own safety, though she yearned to be close to her. Cordell watched her grow from afar, but her plans were destroyed by Althara. She’d tried to protect her daughter’s house by weaving briars around it, but she hadn’t known we’d burn the city, and her darling girl was put to flame.
* Every night since then, she’s scoured the veils between realms, searching for Enola’s essence. She used to find it in the city’s ashes, but the whispers have grown silent. She hangs her head as she reminisces on her daughter, saying Enola would have been 29 this year, and had met a boy and planned on getting married – she wonders if they ever did get married.
* Andreas says he’s truly sorry as well, and gives her a hug – she’s not stopping any of us at this point, so Bloom and Bee join in. Bloom says he’s sorry as well, and that while he hasn’t lost anyone like that, he’s seen it echoed in the people around us. She says she knows, and shows us the documents she’s been working on. We see that they’re funeral arrangements, for all those that die in the Brigade, both civilian and soldier.
* She insists when we try to comfort her further that she’s the Lady of Briars – she is thorns, and everything else rotted away a long time ago. We point out that she wouldn’t be doing these funeral arrangements if she didn’t care about people, and she laments all the dead sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, young and old… she says it all has to stop, and we realize during this discussion that she knows retaking Tpres would be a death sentence, and that she wants to be granted that, an end to her immortal suffering in a final blaze of glory.
* Andreas takes her hand, asking what she saw at the festival – she says she saw the happiness of corpses, and Andreas says that no, we saw people who, despite everything, came together to celebrate what they had left, and their hope. They have hope that Althara will be stopped, and that we can return to Tpres to rebuild. He won’t ask her to forget what happened, but asks her to let the four of us help with the funeral arrangements, and for her to go out there and listen to the people, to see them as living people with hope.
* Cordell says she’ll protect our hope, but that’s all that she can promise. She then passes over a small stack of documents to Andreas, and he distributes them among us. She then asks us to leave her, because it’s near midnight, and she must go searching soon. We say a few parting words, but eventually leave. Damon seeks out Claudia, and Andreas sits at a tree near Cordell’s cabin to think things through and watch over her. Bee returns to the camp of the Spirit Sharks, and draws a picture of the four of us, that she slips under Cordell’s door. With 1 success on a physical check, it’s a sketch, but a good one. Bloom is left to report to Zetian.
* Zetian’s door is unlocked again, so Bloom gives a courtesy knock and enters – the front is now a nice sitting room filled with pies, and Zetian is tasting each pie. He asks if Bloom would like some pie, and Bloom says yes. He gives his report to Zetian, and gives a rundown of the night, but glosses over Cordell’s daughter, saying that she just lost people she cared about in the battle. Zetian presses him on this, but he doesn’t go into specifics, and eventually, Zetian asks if he knew Cordell’s been traveling a lot.
* Bloom once again tries to be as vague as possible, and says Cordell said she had things to attend to, but he doesn’t know what any of the Archfey do in their free time. Zetian says that Kynaston tends to sharpen his sword, complain, and generally be boring in his downtime. It had assumed Cordell mostly just cried and was sad, but found out she’s actually been traveling, and it reaches into a pie to pull out a map that had been baked into it. It spreads it out across from Bloom, and points out various places that Cordell has been.
* Zetian theorizes that maybe her magic has gotten in the way of things, and when Bloom asks what this means, he says that fey powers are “flippity floopity”, and go this way and that – but he and Flapjack have been diligently watching. At the mention of his name, Flapjack woofs, and Bloom gives him some scritches. Zetian goes on to say that he has a tip, and probably a show and tell, a question, and some other things.
* His tip is that cats possess the power of selective invisibility to avoid chores. He advises that Bloom write this down.
** Bloom pats his pockets and says he doesn’t have paper. Zetian tells him to write it down in his brain.
* Zetian says she’s already done the show and tell, and goes on to say they’ve been looking into the vault that belonged to Flapjack’s previous owner, the one we found him in. There’s power of some weird kind radiating out, and thinks he can work with this to figure things out without the Banker showing up immediately. He pulls a chest out of another pie, and Bloom sees that it’s closed with three chains – one of iron, one of tin, and one of silver. He removes the chains, and Bloom beholds the fucking Scroll of Meropis.
** Zetian explains what it is to Bloom, and Bloom has some uncomfortable realizations about what will happen if Althara’s forces capture the Brigade.
* The session ends, and we receive +2 morale. The players also receive a level-up.
* (NOTE: I trimmed out literally like 7 pages of dialogue & some descriptions. You can dm me and I’ll send you the full notes :thumbsup:)